Free Merkiaari Wars: 01 - Hard Duty by Mark E. Cooper

leave one on the comm in his room if he wanted, or preferably on Eric’s own wand. Checking at the desk was a sign of his impatience, nothing more. He wanted to be done with this, and go home, that was all.
    He took the elevator up to his floor and quickly entered his room. As soon as he entered he froze, hyper alert, and the nano-sized remote he had left to guard the door reported in. Two intrusions within the last five hours. Why two? His sensors swept ahead, but found no one in the suite now, but someone had been here. Perhaps the hotel staff had stopped in to clean... no, he couldn’t detect any aromas of cleaning products. Excellent. If not hotel staff, then it was likely a team sent to search his room. It was the kind of response he had been waiting for.
    Well it took them long enough, Eric mused as he checked out each of his rooms. Someone had finally gotten around to searching his suite and installing listening devices. He wondered if it had been Major Stein’s paranoia or whether the Freedom Movement had finally gotten with the program. Eric sighed. If there was one thing he hated more than terrorists, it was incompetent terrorists. Professionals could be expected to do certain things and were therefore predictable within certain parameters. With two hundred years experience, he had those parameters pretty well mapped now, but amateurs... he shuddered. They were a bloody menace.
    The search of his suite wasn’t a surprise; bound to happen eventually. What did surprise, and annoy, was how long it had taken for a reaction. His meeting with Zhang was nine days ago, and no money or other contact had been forthcoming. That was why Eric wondered if the search had been a marine operation. Stein had to be jittery now that the Freedom Movement had completed the op his data crystal had outlined. Stein had not been happy when Eric informed him of the operation, and the expected results. It went against the grain to allow a terrorist group to successfully jack a government armoury that way, but in the end Stein had gone along hoping that casualties would be low and that getting a man inside the movement would compensate.
    The Freedom Movement had gone in hard, neutralised the security net as instructed in Eric’s plan, killed everyone in the building—five guards that late at night—and withdrew in a pair of armoury trucks carrying pallets of ammunition and dino hunting rifles. They were completely unopposed and unseen thanks to the network shunts he had included the specs for in his plan. Eric had ensured there were no pulsers, AARs, or RPGs stored at that particular facility when he chose it, and as soon as the op went down Stein had beefed up security at the places where such things actually were stored. That was fine. The Freedom Movement would have expected no less.
    Bringing Major Stein into the loop had been a calculated risk. Eric knew he would need backup eventually, but he could have waited until later to make contact, but Stein was one of those forward thinking officers the marine corp. liked so much—an effective one. Eric preferred that sort too, but in Stein’s case it could have short-circuited the evolving plan. Eric had needed to hustle when he realised Stein was going to make a move that would have made the data on the crystal he’d given Zhang obsolete. That would have ruined everything.
    Getting Stein alone had been hard, but Eric had managed it, and the marine had taken it in stride when he realised what Eric was. Getting him to agree to delay his plans though, especially when doing so would almost certainly risk lives, had been a struggle. Eric never liked pulling rank. It didn’t seem right to give orders to a major when his own official rank was lesser, but the truth of the matter was that Stein could have been the Commandant of Marines—unlikely in the extreme as it was an administrative position not a battlefield command—and he would still have complied... probably. Eric grimaced at the