God's Dogs Book 2

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

A.P.J. Abudul Kalam

The trial, of course, was delayed. The wounded judge lived, as did all the wounded in the courtroom. The press painted the Coyotes as heroes, except for the press in the Cass allied worlds, of which there were about ten. They focused on the fact that the Coyotes went armed into the courtroom.

That was problematic, if not actually embarrassing, and the nano-whips were removed from the dress uniforms. In their place, the old standby of hardened plastic knives was resurrected and located in the inside hem of the pant legs.

The ambassador was meeting with her counterpart in the Congress bureaucracy. He was a Silvertonae, which the ASI Tau-14 determined was a good fit for humans.

The elf-like male in a pale green robe rose from his chair to greet Ambassador Maria Suh. The meeting was in his sparsely furnished office in the Congress headquarters. That building was located at the center of the diplomatic village where embassies surrounded the headquarters in concentric rings. The closer an embassy was to the center, the longer that world was a member of the Congress.

“Ambassador Suh, it’s good to see you, and I’m grateful none of your people was injured seriously in the attack.”

“Thank you, Director, and I appreciate your concern for our people. The attack, however, will not go unanswered. I’m here to discuss our options.”

The elf showed Maria to a comfortable chair and pulled another up to sit next to her.

“Letting the trial proceed to its obvious conclusion is what we are hoping for,” he stated.

“With these interruptions,” she countered, “it could take months or years.”

The elf, Director Shen-liang, considered whether or not to verbally spar with Maria and chose to be blunt instead. “What do you want?”

“Director,” she said with a faint smile, “we won the honor match before the Cass forfeited it. We even left their people alive. We uncovered a plot to frame us as drug dealers and handed the constables an airtight case against the Cass allies. We rescued kidnapped and tortured children, returned them to their home world, and brought a new world into peaceful relations with the Congress. What I want is vindication for our Coyotes, or we will deal with our enemies ourselves.”

The director folded his hands and sat back in his chair. “The Cass are leaving their home world, retreating toward the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. Some of their allies here are under indictment. The final piece to this is the trial, and we want it to be the final vindication – a legal and fair one.”

“You’re sure of the verdict?”

“It’s not a rigged trial, if that’s what you’re asking. Our legal department sees it as a pro forma proceeding to eliminate any ambiguity about your, and by extension, the League’s integrity.”

“River could be convicted, though.”

“Unlikely but yes, it’s possible.”

“Penglai has cleared her.”

“We know, and that will be presented as evidence.”

“Director, there are still very powerful members of Congress opposed to our status in the Congress.”

The director squirmed a bit before saying, “The majority continues to approve.”

“And if River is convicted? Which of those in the majority join the minority?”

Back at the embassy, the ambassador met with the team in her office. Unlike the Spartan office of the director, hers was a sedate taste of home, with landscape paintings, tooled wood furniture, familiar flowering plants in various sized pots, and hand woven carpets over a wood floor.

They sat around a table to one side of her work desk, and she began, “We need to shut down the group organizing these attacks.”

“Isn’t that a police matter now?” Pax asked.

“It is, and I’m sure they are competent, but certain political considerations may be hampering their efforts.”

“We’ll need intel,” Quinn said in response, as they knew what the ambassador was saying in her diplomatic code.

Maria grimaced. “Our intelligence service is still organizing itself here. We have some information but not a lot of confidence in it.”

“We can try our sources,” Quinn offered, thinking of Barry and Ruski and their comments about unnamed powerful people that supported the League’s membership in the Galactic Congress.

“Do so,” Maria ordered, “but the further consideration is long-term. The charter we have with the Congress is provisional membership. We are full members, to be sure, but we also are starting a hundred year probationary period.”

“I didn’t know that,” Moss commented.

“It wasn’t publicized, and normally it’s no big deal. In our case, it invites our enemies to a long game of chipping away at us.”

“Create enough smoke,” Quinn said, “and people would assume there must be a fire.”

Maria nodded. “We need their soldiers taken out, obviously, but we also need a way to backtrack to those funding them.”

“Solomon told me not to take those people out,” Quinn relayed. “The situation was different, but I think he must be thinking along the same lines as you are.”

“I didn’t think of Solomon,” Maria admitted. “Perhaps I need a conversation with him.”

“I’ll lean on our contacts,” Quinn nodded and went on, “and let you know when we have a plan.”

They got to work on that immediately and scheduled a meeting with Barry for the following day.

They met him on the space station in a warehouse. The team used anti-surveillance protocols, including splitting up so that only Quinn actually met with Barry.

He slouched against the containers in the warehouse and observed Quinn as he slipped in. Barry was outfitted with a harness that Sentic ship security personnel normally wore. On the harness hung the tools of that trade, including stunner, plastic handcuffs, first aid gear, and so on. He looked like a typical security guard like many others on the station.

He stood tall as Quinn approached and said, “You’re going after them, I take it.”

“Our orders are to take down the soldiers and identify those who are funding them,” Quinn replied. He trusted Barry but his objectives were, understandably, different from Quinn’s. The common ground, where their objectives overlapped, would need to be established.

“We know who funds them. Taking them down would compromise ongoing operations.”

“There’s a bigger game, then,” Quinn said. “Do our interests intersect at all?”

“The soldiers can go.”

“They’ll just get more.”

“There is a finite supply of Cass, and when that supply is exhausted, the financial backers will move onto phase two of the plan.”

Quinn wondered why Barry was giving him an operational, rather than specific, overview of the bad guys’ agenda. As long as he was willing, though, Quinn would go along. “I take it pushing the League out of the Congress is one of those goals.”

“It’s a prerequisite for what they are really after.”

“Which is?”

“A little pocket of unbridled greed in this region, with the cover of Congress membership to make them seem like upstanding citizens.”

Quinn shook his head in disgust. “Same problem, different species. One of our psychologists centuries ago said there were four major ego drives: sex, money, power, and status. Are those universal to sentient beings?”

“It would seem so. How one satisfies those drives is the difference between barbarism and civilization.”

“The League outlawed force and fraud.”

“The Congress outlawed monopolies and protected the free traders.”

“You did more than that,” Quinn countered.

Barry coughed out a rasping laugh. “True, but I can’t talk about it.”

“Well, tell me what you want us to do with our current situation.”

“Take out the soldiers, but leave the higher-ups alone.”

“I can’t promise that, Barry. If the Cass-backers enter my line of fire, I will shoot them. I can promise we won’t go looking for them.”

“Fair enough,” Barry conceded, but then went onto say, “We may ask for your help at some point. When their phase two begins, we will need to move quickly. Will you follow my orders without question?”

“If you guarantee it would serve the League’s interests, I don’t see a problem.”

“Good. I’m sending you locations for the mercenary operation. Deal with them as you see fit.”

Information came through to Quinn’s implant and Shiva received and processed it.

[This is a substantial intelligence brief,] Shiva said.

“Thanks, Barry,” Quinn bowed slightly and left the warehouse.

The team met back at their shuttle and returned to the embassy. Once there, they met in a dedicated planning room in the basement. It contained computer stations, a holo-video station, a central table, and chairs. They began the laborious process of reviewing the intelligence from Barry and converting it into a battle plan.

There were two locations supporting the Cass mercenaries in the enclave on Jomeca IV. One housed the delegations from the planets near the Cass home world. Their embassies were near the regional headquarters, but where they lived and did business was in the small city halfway around the planet. It was the second location they focused on.

The six, and on certain issues four more, and rarely in agreement two other planets were members of their own confederacy that, as a group, gained membership in the Galactic Congress over a century before. As such, it was a younger twelve-member confederacy with sponsor oversight. The sponsors, however, were among those opposed to the League’s unique status. Apparently, then, the sponsors looked the other way when the confederacy acted out against the League. In doing so, and this was stated in the intelligence packet, the sponsors missed or ignored the confederacy’s long-term project of establishing a ‘legal’ piracy operation in their space.

Their agenda was magical thinking, as far as the team could see: short-term plunder didn’t translate into long-term stability. In fact, long-term, those who were plundered would, in the end, wreak havoc on the ‘legal’ pirates. In point-of-fact, the Coyotes saw it as short-sighted to the brink of stupidity.

Quinn, especially, was curious to see how the Congress would deal with the problem. In its long history, the Congress would have dealt with this problem numerous times, given that greed was a universal constant that fed the drive for more sex, money, power, and status.

The immediate goal was to deny this conglomerate their soldiers. The soldiers were housed in three buildings in the second location on the other side of the planet. The plan they put together was simple: blow the three buildings up with as many soldiers inside as possible.

With the building diagrams, which they downloaded from the planetary grid, they determined how to implode each building, assuming they could set the explosives in the right locations. The timing, though, would be the tricky piece, as they didn’t want any casualties that were not soldiers.

The mercenaries were all from Clan Odic, the briefing told them, as the other clans were content to leave the system and find new homes outside Congress space. There was some regret that they spared those lives in the honor battle, just to face them here. That was short-lived as they recalled it was Clan Odic alone that kidnapped and tortured the children of the People.

River commented at the end of the discussion, “They need another name. People is too generic.”

“Lots of tribal communities,” Pax offered, “called themselves that and demonized their neighbors as not-people.”

“I know,” River replied. “It’s a societal developmental stage. Didn’t they mostly accept each other by using the different language name for ‘people’ as a designation?”

“My word for ‘people’ defines us, and your word for ‘people’ defines you,” Pax clarified. “I think that was one way. What’s the word for ‘people,’ in bright lights, translate to?”

Moss chuckled. “Christmas tree?”

“Not our concern,” Quinn said. “I’ll pass on the concern, though. For now, we have our plan and a list of necessary supplies. Time to brief the ambassador.”

The plan was approved. The supplies, primarily explosives, were ordered, and a date was set for the operation to begin.

At the end of the briefing, though, Maria told them, “Your friend, Tulku Raina, is field testing a replacement weapon for the nano-whip, and she requested that your team gets it first for operational testing.”

River smiled at her friends ingenuity. “What did she come up with this time?”

Maria smirked. “A dimensional pocket where you can store melee weapons. The silver piping on the uniform sleeves will contain the mechanism for activating access to this pocket.”

“Clever,” Pax said. “That dimension must not support anything complicated.”

Maria nodded. “Yes. Something about that dimension only being able to store inert, non-mechanical, non-energy weapons.”

“Even so,” River added, “it is clever.”

“Well, leave your dress uniforms with the armor master,” Maria directed.

The team rose and left to do just that, River grinning all the way.