General Jackson “Longshot” Hunter has been in the intelligence game for decades. The head of Alliance SpecOps, he’s done everything in his power to prevent his operatives from suffering the personal tragedies he has–sometimes successfully, sometimes not. With war with the Imperium looming on the horizon, Hunter faces the greatest fight of his life: to protect a man he’s come to regard as the son he never had and to save humanity from itself–and a threat long dead.
The story in Longshot takes place largely during the events if Redeemer and was an experiment from several years ago in centering a story on Jack Hunter, the chief of Alliance SpecOps and the chief of military intelligence back on Epsilon. It’s part character study, part background, part thought and timeline organization. In Chapter 2, we get a glimpse of Hunter’s relationship with Aaron Taylor, the narrator in Broken Stars.
Two
Daniel Taylor was still an open file in his division. No one knew that, of course, no one except for Hunter, that was the way it was–and the way it would stay until Taylor’s only son was ready to know the truth.
There were a few that were close, knew pieces of the truth. Cyne knew, based on his experience with Lucas Ross, that Taylor wasn’t what he appeared to be, not really. Cornelius Traverse, one of Hunter’s field commanders, had pieced together part of the mystery on his own after debriefing Caren Flannery.
And then there was Flannery herself, who couldn’t remember what she’d begun to piece together about her lover’s father.
I’ve kept your secret, Madeline, and his. Like I promised.
“Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”
Hunter waved Cyne away. “I’m fine. Go on, get back to work. I’m sure I gave you work to do, didn’t I?”
“Analysis of Imperium movements on the fringes of the Borderworlds.”
“Then shouldn’t you be doing it?”
“You have a meeting with Admiral Wheeling in two hours.”
Hunter nodded, retreating into his inner office. “I haven’t forgotten, Allyn, than you.” He closed the office door behind him, muttering under his breath. “Who needs a secretary? I have a blind psychic Intelligence analyst for an aide. What was I thinking?”
He snapped on the lights and stepped deeper into his office, knuckling his eyes. Perhaps the sojourn to the cemetery this morning had been ill-advised.
Maida would have told me following your heart is never ill-advised.
He sighed. She’d been gone a long time, but he could still hear her voice without trying, smell the scent of her perfume even though she was a distant memory and the manufacturer of the stuff had gone out of business twenty years ago.
“It’s going to be a long day,” he murmured to himself. “Don’t try to convince yourself otherwise. It’s going to be a bleeding long day.”
He eyed the small pile of data chips waiting for his review that sat next to his reader and wondered, not for the first time, when he was going to finally be able to give this up and retire. At fifty, he was of an age when most officers drawn from the ranks of SpecOps were long out of the game. He was one of the very few exceptions to that rule. Even Cornelius Traverse, one of his most trusted commanders, was a decade and more younger than he was and probably nearing the end of his own career.
Sometimes, you don’t ask for what happens. It just happens.
That was the way it had been when Roger Marr stepped down and named Jackson “Longshot” Hunter his successor to the post of Chief of Intelligence and Special Operations for the Alliance military. It was a thankless job, but someone had to do it.
He sank down into the chair behind his desk, massaging his forehead and hoping to ward off the headache he could already feel forming. The admiral wanted to talk about his position with regards to intervention in the Borderworlds and he knew the conversation wasn’t going to be pleasant.
There’s millions of lives at stake–billions–but all half of them care about is the political apple cart that we might upset and the other half only care about the fact that we’d somehow be seen as the aggressors, not the heroes, which won’t matter as long as public opinion on the border and within the Alliance is with us and as long as we bloody well win.
Whether or not they would win a straight war against the Imperium, when it came to it, was an open question, one they wouldn’t know the answer to until war happened.
Hunter had no illusions. War was coming. It was just a matter of when, how, and whose terms it would, ultimately, be on. Given his background, Hunter was determined to make sure it was on theirs.
He stared forlornly at the stack of chips and turned away from them, snapping on the latest newsfeeds from both local and out-system sources on the widescreen display set along the northern wall of his office, to the right of his desk. About half of what he was about to read on those chips would be hitting the newsnets now and another chunk of that news would be reporting things he’d already read from last week’s set of updates. His eyes narrowed.
Either my people are getting sloppy, or I need to start hiring journalists to work for me.
The Alliance legislature was considering issuing a condemnation–finally–regarding the Imperium bombing of Castion. It only took them the better part of ten weeks to do it. He exhaled a quiet breath and shook his head. “If they actually pass it, anyhow,” he muttered. Odds were fairly good that it would never make it out of committee–someone would decide that it was treading too close to destroying their neutrality when it came to Imperium movements in the Borderworlds and the motion would be quashed.
He reached for the first of the chips on his desk. Green. Field report from a deep assignment.
Probably from Ravenwood. He only had a few assets that were working deep cover assignments–Aaron Taylor, Elizabeth Moore, Travis Connery, and four others. Ravenwood–Moore–was deep cover at the heart of the Imperium, on Earth, trying to sort out their next military move before it was made. He’d sent Connery to Demar to investigate some rumors of old enemies reappearing and hadn’t heard from the man since. In another week, he would start worrying, but not yet. If he worried every time an operative dropped out of contact for more than eight days, he’d have ulcers on top of scar tissue from older ulcers.
And then there was Taylor, whose mother had asked him to take care of her son before she died.
He was trying his damnedest to keep that promise, even if the boy made it hard sometimes.
He slotted the green chip into the terminal that perched on his desk and leaned back while it loaded in. It was a text-only report from Ravenswood as he’d suspected, delivered through cut-outs and couriers rather than transmitted directly from Earth to Epsilon. It was too easy for electronic transmissions, no matter how encrypted, to be intercepted. Physical data could be destroyed more easily than a transmission, which could live on as a ghost for decades. With Moore working on Earth, it was too big of a risk to receive her reports via transmission, too many points where the communication could be intercepted. For Taylor, in the Borderworlds, it was less dangerous.
But not with her. Not there, not at the heart of the Imperium.
Text scrolled across his screen, mundane updates about activity in the Imperium’s legislature. He frowned. Where’s the troop data, Moore? I know you’ve got something for me there.
Half the reason she was there was to try to work her way into the varied echelons of the Imperium military, to get them data on what might be coming either their way or toward the Resistance in the Borderworlds. Any information that needed to be siphoned to the Resistance would be filtered through back channels until it reached the right ears–often, ears that never knew how the information had leaked to them.
The deniability was the only reason that Hunter was allowed to continue that particular operation.
Allowed. As if they allow me to do anything. They couldn’t stop me if they wanted to, though it’s easier when they’re not actively trying to interfere.
It was halfway through the file that a particular datapoint caught his eye.
New commander has been designated to lead Stormer Elites 1st Squadron designated Freedom Alpha. Maj. Corrine Ross, formerly in command of the military police division assigned to the frigate Tallahassee, has been assigned to the post.
Hunter stared at the screen for a long moment, then stood and walked to his office door. He jerked it open and peered at the back of his aide’s head.
“Cyne!”
The younger man jumped, apparently caught off guard by his commander’s sudden appearance–unusual for a psychic of Allyn’s caliber–and twisted toward the sound of his voice. “Sir?”
“Ross. What do you know about his family?”
Allyn blinked for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face him, leaning back slightly and frowning. “He had a fiancée–“
“Not about them.” Hunter was already familiar with Lucas Ross’s connections to one Korea Cooper and her younger sister, Samantha. “Do you know about anyone he had back on Earth? Did he mention anyone from back on Earth?”
“Oh.” His brows knit and his forehead wrinkled, apparently deep in thought for a few long moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “A sister, I think, and an uncle. His parents are dead.”
Hunter nodded slowly. “Sister’s named Corrine?”
“Yes,” Allyn said. “I think so.”
“Bloody hell,” Hunter murmured, glancing back over his shoulder at his desk, at the terminal.
“What’s wrong?”
Hunter shook his head. “Ravenwood sent a report,” he muttered, then turned and walked back into his office. Allyn followed him, brows knitting over blind eyes.
“Sir, if that’s supposed to mean more than you got a report from your deep cover agent on Earth, I’m afraid I’m not quite following the course you’re plotting.”
“Not reading my thoughts, Cyne?”
The psychic smiled lopsidedly. “You made me promise not to unless you gave me permission, sir.”
Or broadcasting, it seems. He snorted. In my experience, orders about when to read someone and when not to read someone have rarely stopped anyone in this line of work. “Ravenwood sent a report,” he repeated.
“You said that already.”
“I know,” Hunter said, sinking back into his chair. “Be patient and let me finish. There’s a datapoint in her report about a Corrine Ross being assigned to a new posting.”
Allyn’s brows knit. “I fail to quite see why Ravensood would include a datapoint like that in her report, since she doesn’t know that we’ve been dealing with Lucas Ross in the Resistance and likely doesn’t know about any connection between the two even if she did know that. You compartmentalized that. I remember talking about it.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Hunter said. “It’s up to us to make those connections and put together the analysis.” His eyes half lidded and he tilted his head back. “We need to sort out the connection between Ross and the Stormer Elites.”
Allyn stood in the doorway for a moment, then spun and plunged back toward his console, slamming his headset back onto his head even as his fingers began to fly across the keys.
Hunter arched a brow, glancing toward the report on his screen for a moment before he stood again and drifted toward his office’s doorway. “Tripped a synapse?”
“Yes, sir,” Allyn said. “When I was on Caldin, I remember catching edges of stories–newsfeeds, documentaries, that kind of thing. I remember the Stormer Elites.”
“In what context?”
Allyn paused, his long fingers stilling in the midst of their dance across the keys. “Every war except for the Secession War,” he said. “And this one.”
“Of course,” Hunter murmured, then nodded to him. “Keep going. Keep talking.”
If they didn’t see action in the Secession Wars, that’s significant on its own. He cast his mind back to all the histories he’d read over the years.
“It doesn’t look like anyone quite knows what they were doing during the Secession War,” Allyn said as his fingers resumed their key-pounding symphony. “But they reappeared a few years after it ended in one of the celebrations commemorating the victory over the Preytax in the Second War.”
Hunter frowned slightly. “They were heroes of those wars.” It was starting to filter back. A small division, one of the few that happened to be assigned off-world when the Preytax–the only hostile non-human race they’d encountered over the course of three hundred years of space exploration–had landed on Earth and occupied the planet.
“Yes, sir,” Allyn agreed. “I’m looking at the old historical rosters. We’ve named bases and ships after them for decades. The Andros-Raymond. Collins-Ross on Varice.”
“Collins-Ross.” Hunter straightened from his cross-armed lean against the doorframe and prowled toward his aide’s desk. “Where did that name come from?”
Allyn stopped, half turning toward him. “According to the official records from the War Archive, or historian speculation based on official records?”
“Whichever you can give me in the next ten seconds.”
“Official records show that the original 19th Stormers were assigned to Beta Centauri under the command of one Major Irin Collins at the time of the Invasion. There were three squadrons in the original 19th, the Jaguars, Freedom Alpha, and the Aces Beta.”
There’s one half of the Collins-Ross. What’s the other half? Hunter stared at his aide for a moment. “Well?”
“Well what, sir?”
“Not reading my thoughts?”
“You ordered me not to unless you told me otherwise,” he said again, a bare hint of censure in the reminder. “I assume you want the reason for Ross, though.”
“Bingo.” Hunter crossed his arms, looming over his aide. It was useless to peer at the man’s computer screen; it was inactive. Allyn’s unique circumstances made him the perfect aide–the specially designed headset fed rapid-fire data into the trained intelligence agent’s brain, making the need for a monitor all but moot. They kept it for appearance’s sake. There was no reason to unduly unnerve anyone.
“That’s taken a little bit more digging,” Allyn said. “But I’ve got it now. There was a medic that got attached to the unit after the 15th Support Detachment escaped Io in the wake of the Preytax assault. His name was Lucas Ross.” Allyn paused, then said softly, “They got married on Varice after the First War was over.”
“Well,” Hunter said dryly. “That explains a lot.” That doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me at all. Lucas Ross, a medic from Earth attached to the Stormer Elites, by all accounts heroes of humanity, and then another Lucas Ross, also a medic from Earth, two centuries later playing the freedom fighter in the Borderworlds? No. This can’t be a coincidence. It’s connected. They’re connected—which means that Corrine Ross just stepped into her ancestor’s shoes and I’ll be damned if the Imperium didn’t put her in that position for a reason.
That reason probably had more to do with her brother than with Corrine Ross herself.
“You don’t think–”
“I strongly suspect it.” Hunter smiled slightly. “Compile it into a report–everything you can put together for me on the Stormers–and have it ready for me when I get back from that damned meeting with Wheeler.”
“That’s not a lot of time, sir.”
“I know it’s not,” Hunter said. “Preliminary findings will be sufficient for now. Anything that you’re sure on, flag it for me.” He shook his head slowly, staring at his aide. “Someone’s tugging at Lucas Ross’s strings and I doubt he’s realized it yet. Someone’s doing some clumsy manipulation and I want to figure out who and why.”
“Are you sure that’s what it is?” Allyn asked softly.
“I go with my gut as often as I go with hard data, Allyn,” the general said softly. “Get me the data I need and we’ll see what happens after that.”
Ross is a key to all of this. I’m just not sure what lock he fits into yet, but I’m sure as hell going to figure it out.
With that, he turned and vanished back into his office.
