Phoenix Feathers, Part II Chapter 6

Disclaimer: Joss is Boss, and…and…and all these ideas floating around in my head are mostly his doing. So it’s really just a lesser version of something that he could do much better. And I personally wouldn’t have any complaints if he did…

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From his vantage point atop the Stallion’s Mule, Douglas Clarke looked out over the hustle and bustle of the Dyton City Bazaar. He was perched on one of the crates lashed onto the hovercraft’s hull, and had to keep a hand on the heavy-duty ropes to avoid being thrown off by the Mule’s sometimes erratic movements.

It wasn’t the Mule’s pilot that was the problem; Monty had flown the hovercraft during the War for Independence, often pushing it past its limits during maneuvers. Of the dozens of battlefield roles that the hovertank was called on to fill by the somewhat overburdened and outgunned Independent Armored Corps, one of the most common roles involved providing close support to infantry on the line. This meant that the IAC was almost constantly locking horns with the Alliance’s front-line battle tanks, and at the same time eluding the deadly tank-hunting Peregrine combat skiffs.

In bitter fighting across a dozen worlds, Monty and men like him had to invent new approaches to combating the Alliance’s armor. The IAC tankers could not afford to emulate the Alliance’s straightforward methods of warfare, their armored phalanxes battering the fragile Browncoat lines into the mud of their foxholes; the IAC pilots did not drive, they flew. As a seasoned veteran, Monty could put the aged hovercraft through its paces better than most. However, even he couldn’t stop the old tank from acting up occasionally.

The Mule ran over a depression in the dusty road and lurched forward, almost spilling the seasoned tracker from his seat. A few passerby looked up at the ramshackle group and tittered as the Mule yawed widely, almost shutting down several street vendors’ displays prematurely. Clarke heard the Captain soothing the craft, and shook his head.

Clarke knew that Cody had looked the Mule over when he had first come on board, on Monty’s direction. The kid had offered up a long list of system malfunctions that could have caused the craft’s irregular behavior and had tinkered with it for a few weeks, but none of the strange symptoms went away after his tune-up.

Not that there was much to tune up- Independent Armories had designed their tanks to endure the worst possible conditions for extended periods of time, for it was clear from the outset of the war that there would be little respite for the IAC. While the heavy tanks of the Alliance juggernaut were as notorious for malfunctioning in combat as they were for their deadliness, the Independent forces were given a rugged, multipurpose vehicle that could survive to fight another day.

After his inspection, Cody had scratched his head and stated matter-of-factly that the old girl just wasn’t taking to retirement too well. As odd as it sounded, sometimes Clarke could swear that the former tank had a soul. Clarke supposed that, if he had been stripped of his armor plating and weapons systems and converted into a cargo hauler, he might take issue with it, too.

He frowned, reflecting darkly on the reality of that comparison. In a way, events had conspired to rob him of his future. He had been barred from professional game tracking on the Core worlds, and had fallen from the grace of the Alliance’s upper class. He had landed hard, and had turned to drink as a way to soften the blow. Clarke had wallowed in his condition for years, taking whatever jobs that came his way, no matter how disreputable. He had even been a bounty hunter for a time, preying on lowlifes like himself just to get himself to the next alehouse. When the Captain had taken him in at Beylix, Clarke had been saved from that dark world, but he had stayed in that life, always keeping his distance, always with one hand on his canteen.

That had changed after the job on Osiris, when they had taken that kid on board. Clarke had stopped drinking, and had vowed never to harm another person again.

Clarke looked down uncomfortably at the high-powered revolver in his holster. At one time, his pistol had been the most familiar thing to him. It had been his livelihood, his trademark, and his only real friend in the ‘Verse. Now it felt alien to him, distant and unfamiliar. After the fateful night on Osiris, Clarke had gone to the Captain and tried to turn in his gun. Monty had nodded solemnly, saying that “a real fighter doesn’t need a gun,” but had handed the weapon back, adding that he didn’t want to see Clarke “getting shot up by some lousy no-good street hoodlum who hasn’t got anything better to do.” So Clarke had kept the pistol in its usual spot around his waist, although he removed all the rounds from its chambers. To Clarke, the strangest thing about the whole affair was that the Captain hadn’t needed to ask why.

Clarke looked up as Monty guided the Mule off of the main road, into the midst of the Bazaar. The Captain expertly wove the hovercraft through the narrow alleyways between the tangle of shops and vendors. He turned a final bend and their destination came into view. It was a contrived cul-de-sac: a simple back door set in the wall of a nondescript building surrounded by generic tents. The setup was probably duplicated in hundreds of places in the crowded outskirts of Dyton City, so it was the perfect staging ground for illegal operations such as their contact’s.

Clarke caught a hint of movement under one of the surrounding canopies. He peered into the tent’s dark interior, making out half a dozen bulky shapes lounging in the shade. They stood up and walked closer to the Mule as it settled into the dusty clearing, and Clarke could see that each man carried an assortment of different weapons, all of which were not generally considered to be acceptable for public ownership. All of the men were dressed from head to toe in crimson body armor.

Clarke hopped off the top of the Mule as Monty and Priscilla clambered out of the cockpit, wary of the nearby enforcers.

“Um, hi,” called Monty. His greeting elicited no response save a few surly glances at the Mule’s cargo.

Priscilla stepped forward. “We’re from the Stallion, just got dirtside. We’re here to negotiate with your boss about a certain shipment. We have an appointment, in case you’re wondering.”

One of the men pulled out a communicator and spoke into it. He listened for a moment, then nodded to his companions. They moved forward and began to offload the goods from the Mule.

“Now wait just a second,” growled Monty. “You don’t get our wares until we’ve got our hands on some coin. Gonna have to have a chat with your boss, too. Catch up on things. Go on, where’s he hiding?”

One of the enforcers darted a quick glance at the door, which Monty saw.

“Is he in there? Right!” Ignoring the startled guards, the huge man strode across the street.

“C’mere, Vitelli, you old dog!” Monty chuckled to himself. He jauntily threw open the door of the building. Monty was brought up short, greeted as he was by several dozen guns pointing unswervingly in his direction from all corners of the room.

Monty slowly moved back a pace and was careful to keep his hands away from his gunbelt. Then he requested, as politely as he could manage, that he be taken to their leader- at their convenience, of course.

***

For Antonio Vitelli, life was good. He had money, influence, and servants at his beck and call. But the most telling sign of his success was simply that he was still alive.

Vitelli had been born on Ita moon. He was raised as the youngest of a large family that had a hand in virtually every business venture within fifty miles of their estate. These enterprises were not exclusively legitimate in origin, and the methods used to keep them under the family’s control were not always forgiving in nature. When it was decided that Vitelli was old enough to enter into the family business, he was given small tasks to complete, such as bookkeeping and hand-delivering messages that could not be trusted to the Cortex.

It was the hope of his family that Vitelli would excel at these errands, proving himself to be capable of holding a position of more responsibility in the syndicate. However, while Vitelli was far from incompetent, he did not want to go through the arduous process of rising into the highest ranks of the family. Instead, Vitelli isolated himself to a degree, often slipping away from the large estate for days at a time. He did this not out of a desire for adventure, but because he felt increasingly tied to the needs of the family business.

To relieve this stress, Vitelli often indulged in rather wild escapades that could not be hidden altogether from his family. These undertakings severed the last links he had with his family, and they began to gently extricate him from the tangled workings of the family operation.

When the War for Independence broke out, Ita sided almost entirely with the Browncoats. The surge of revolutionary spirit across the moon drew hundreds of settlers from every walk of life to the recruitment camps every day. Merchants abandoned their businesses, farmers left their fields in the hands of their wives and children, and the Browncoat ranks swelled with able-bodied men willing to fight for their freedom.

Vitelli’s family saw that their organization was endangered from what they saw to be desertion, and quickly took action. They kept an iron grip on the businesses that financed their operation, ensuring that the war would not destroy their operation. To show their support for the Independent movement, they sent funds and those personnel who they deemed nonessential to the Browncoat assembly areas. Among those sent was Antonio Vitelli.

He was assigned to Independent Intelligence, a post that would keep him out of combat, probably as a parting gift from his previous associates. Since Ita was a Browncoat-friendly world, it was a relatively safe place for Intelligence to base itself. Vitelli became a specialist in the Communications Center, trained in transmitting and receiving special Independent Armed Forces communiqués.

Since the Alliance controlled and monitored the Cortex, the Independents could not ordinarily rely on it as a means of communication in wartime, when their broadwaves could easily be decoded and compromised. They were forced to use slower methods to exchange information, from tight-beaming messages though relay satellites to using noncombat spaceships as interplanetary couriers. This practice was extremely inefficient, and gave the Alliance military yet another advantage in the desperate conflict. If this had continued, then any attempt at organizing the fledgling Independent forces into a full-blown army would have been doomed.

Fortunately, the Independent Cause brought over some powerful men who did not agree with the Alliance’s heavy-handed methods of keeping order. In the first months of the War, before the frequent skirmishes had grown into the fully-blown campaigns of later years, an unnamed Independent slicer cracked the Cortex code wide open. The Independents could now send messages freely over the Cortex to each other, piggy-backing them through on existing Broadwaves, where the Alliance would never think to look.

This single achievement unified the Independent cause. It allowed them to gather in force to meet the Alliance war machine in open battle for the first time. In an ambitious strike, the Independent Space Forces captured the naval shipyards orbiting above Bellerophon, sending the Alliance’s fleet reeling in disarray from the Quadrant and furnishing the ISF with the cruisers Gorgon, Duke of York, and Zhoushan, all taken without a fight as they lay berthed in dry dock.

The Alliance, sensing that its free reign over the space lanes was at an end, launched a counteroffensive to smash Independent worlds that had been left under-defended by the ISF fleet. The first world they fell upon was Ita Moon.

They came without warning, smashing aside the paltry space defenses that remained and bombing strategic areas with EMP torpedoes fired from orbit in order to knock out the planetary communications network. The Independent Intelligence base was one of the Alliance force’s prime targets.

Vitelli had remained at his post as technicians attempted to restore the Browncoats’ severed communications. He was there when an entire division of Alliance troopers made planetfall and stormed the base, catching its defenders unprepared and uncoordinated. The first Vitelli knew of the attack was when the reinforced door of the Communications Center fell into the room, closely followed by a pair of concussion grenades.

The next thing Vitelli remembered was waking up in the brig of the I.A.V. Xerxes, along with several dozen other prisoners. He knew that, under Parliamentary decree, any and all members of the Browncoat insurgency could be executed by military tribunal. The Alliance did not accept the Independents as legitimate combatants until close to the end of the war, as a means of pushing the Independent High Command towards surrender.

Vitelli had not been willing to give his life for a cause that he had not believed in, so he had told the Alliance interrogators everything that he knew. He was rewarded for his loyalty to the “true” government, and was treated very well by his captors. It was not long before he found out why.

The Xerxes, along with the rest of the Alliance task force, was en route to enforce the peace on Boros, a world teeming with dissent and riots. In transit, Vitelli was approached by the ship’s Captain with a special assignment- Vitelli would return to the Independent ranks, infiltrate one of their combat units, and redirect important information to Alliance forces. He would become an Alliance spy.

Vitelli didn’t like the plan too much, chiefly because his neck would be on two cutting blocks instead of one, but the Alliance badly needed “volunteers” such as himself, so he didn’t have much choice in the matter. The Captain suggested that Vitelli’s decision would go a long way towards proving his true feelings towards the Alliance, so Vitelli signed on.

In the chaos of the task force’s attack on Boros, Vitelli was shuttled down to the planet with forged papers, his hodgepodge Browncoat uniform, and an innocuous ring- a special piece of hardware that the Alliance Intelligence boys cooked up for undercover work. Its purpose was twofold- to transmit low-powered messages by Morse Code, which slipped right past the Independents’ jamming fields; and to keep track of the wearer, frequently without their knowledge.

The Independent Armed Forces were still largely disorganized, partly due to the volume of recruits it was drawing, and partly due to the Alliance’s short space raid, so Vitelli didn’t have any problem returning to duty. Thanks to his Intelligence training, he was put to work as a communications attaché, and was assigned to an experienced infantry unit, the 57th Overlanders,

This unit nearly got him killed on numerous occasions. The Balls and Bayonets Brigade, as they called themselves, always seemed to be where the fighting was thickest. There was no safe place to be on a 26th century battlefield, so it was not long before Vitelli wanted out.

During the treacherous urban fighting in the cities of the Du-Khang peninsula on Beaumonde, the Alliance forces received a detailed description of the Overlanders’ disposition and routine. That intelligence allowed them to mount an assault on that area of the enemy line, which they quickly broke through. While the Alliance pushed troops through the gap in the Independents’ battle line, the men and women of the 57th soon found themselves cut off and surrounded by elite Alliance soldiers. Vitelli chose the confusion of that moment to flee across the lines, back into the waiting arms of Alliance Intelligence.

Vitelli had been extracted from that campaign, and had refused any overtures by Alliance Intelligence to do it again. Having killed men on both sides of the conflict through his actions or his spycraft, Vitelli was through with war. The Alliance brass wanted to give him a medal for his service, but he declined. Instead, Vitelli requested a large sum of money and a faked Independent Army service record. After sitting out the rest of the War, he started up a business in Dyton City that traded in black market goods.

The Alliance knew this, of course, and they kept an eye on Vitelli. But the Parliament tolerated the former spy’s misdemeanors because they knew that he could be pushed into assisting them again, if he was ever needed.

For his part, Vitelli tried to push his involvement with the Alliance to the back of his mind. On a backwater planet like Dyton Colony, people with ties to the Alliance were dealt with quickly and quietly, and the local authorities were either puppets of the major crime syndicates or they were too weak to stop them.

Vitelli looked up from his cluttered desk as Ellen DeJulio, his lieutenant, entered his office.

“Excuse me, sir, but there’s a client here to see you, name of Montgomery.”

Vitelli frowned. “Who?”

DeJulio took a look at her clipboard. “Captains a Goliath-class freighter.”

“Ah, yes. Big guy. Built like a bear, not to smart?”

DeJulio smiled thinly. “That’s right, sir. His ship, the Stallion, was due to get in twenty two hours ago.”

“Sure hope he didn’t get lost around here for a day- someone might have stolen what I’m going to sell for a fortune. Didn’t want to tell me what the goods were, though, but they’d better be good or I’m going to get tetchy.” Vitelli looked at his wristwatch, a genuine antique from Earth-That-Was, and sighed, unfolding himself from his chair.

“All right. Let’s go see what he’s got for me.”

DeJulio stepped aside to let her boss leave the room first, then tucked the clipboard under her arm and closed the door behind them.

Yes, life was very good for Antonio Vitelli.

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