Nightfall_at_Algemron

Gabriel snorted softly at that. Kharls's advisers might be anyone, even cashiered exiled Marines when the occasion demanded it. But at the moment, he had his feeling that Kharls and DeVrona had their heads together, working out a strategy for handling the upcoming close approach of Galvin and Alitar.
Meanwhile, both planets' news was otherwise about very little else, though the Galvinite and Alitarin news services were filled with a great deal of contradictory content.
The respectable services, especially on the Alitarin side, talked about "restraint," "not repeating the mistakes of the past," and "measured response." Gabriel took this to mean that the military was broke. The government was trying try to avert the whole campaign this year by convincing the Galvinites that while they had plenty of money, they had better things to spend it on. The "respectable" levels of the Galvinite media were shouting about "honor," "patriotism," and "righteous anger." The tabloid levels were yelling about "revenge" and "we'll get our own back" and "protecting our husbands, wives, and children from the ravages of a mindless, valueless enemy." Gabriel took these stories and announcements, all concocted at one level or another by the FSA, to mean that the Galvinites were well-budgeted, restive, annoyed at the presence of the Concord, and eager for a push that would leave them with more of their enemies' territory.
The Galvinite side bothered Gabriel rather more than the Alitarin, possibly because of the monotone quality of it—one voice, one hymnal, all voices singing on one note and scaling slowly up to a shriek. While the Supreme Commander was an excellent speaker, her rallies that Gabriel repeatedly watched were getting very good at that particular sound: more than a cheer, not quite a shriek but getting there, with a sort of rumble or growl on the edge of it.
One of Gabriel's instructors in Group Psychology had once said, "There are lots of noises mobs make—confused, angry, cheerful, annoyed—but there's one in particular, and when you hear it, you'll know it. When you hear it, leave. You'll want to anyway. It gets right down under your skin. If you're going to stick around, be in armor, and don't let that sound spoil your aim."
Gabriel was convinced that the sound of the crowds in these clips was a close match to what his instructor had meant. The other side was doing at least as much haranguing, but it felt weaker. They knew they were losing, but no one was going to breathe a word, lest the Galvinites find out. The problem was that the Galvinites knew it already and were preparing for what they thought would be the first of several pushes that would end it all in their favor.
They may not have time, Gabriel thought. Nonetheless, he kept wading through the news, everything that Schmetterling had downloaded until she left Algemron for Coulomb. He had nothing better to do with his time, and it was the kind of activity that Delvecchio would have described as "character building."
Sometimes he paused to consider the source of the information that had sent Schmetterling to Coulomb in the first place. Gabriel had long suspected that Concord Intel, Star Force Intel, Marine Intel, and VoidCorp Intel were all digging holes in one another's security. He had also suspected that all of them, or almost all of them, had planted agents inside all the others. Gabriel was equally sure that some of the players in the game knew where their opponents' pieces were placed and were intent on leaving the pieces exactly where they were for the purpose of feeding them bad data, which would come out at the other end and betray its origin. The whole business made his head hurt, but somehow Concord Intel had come up with the goods this time. Either they have a mole in VoidCorp Intel, he thought, or they extracted a mole in their own system and squeezed it until it bled.
Either way, if I ever find out who it was, I owe him a favor.
Meantime there was still plenty of news to work with. The tension in Algemron had dissuaded most infotraders from establishing regular hauls—one of the reasons why Gabriel and Enda had had so little trouble running in there to start with. The local governments knew that those to whom such things mattered—specifically the Concord—would read some of their news. They were trying to make it look as if this upcoming Close Approach was going to be nothing special, and that meant that one way or another, it was going to be.
Gabriel, lying there on the bed and staring at the display hanging from the wall, went back to one scrap that had caught his attention in passing. Later he found himself coming back to the story repeatedly—a sure sign, as the ambassador would have said, that it meant something that Gabriel hadn't yet understood. Now the little piece was beginning to obsess him.
"Display," Gabriel said. "Run 'weirdbit.' "
It ran it again for him.
The clip proceeded. It was a tailoff of some kind of advertising for the war effort, the martial music that the Galvinite Grid used for transitions between pieces, and then the image.
Outside at the military port of Fort Drum, craft were taking off and landing, but the shot had been taken from outside the port walls so that anything really interesting was hidden.
"A major step forward today for the forces of truth and justice," the voice said matter of factly, "the capture and return to the FSA of the wanted terrorist, Erik Mahon."
The view shifted to a close angle of a man in forearm and leg shackles being bundled out of a Galvinite Army shuttle and onto the tarmac. He was short, red-haired, and stocky, with a broad open face—an expressionless face at the moment, one apparently determined to show nothing to the slightly smiling men with the very big guns that surrounded him. Gabriel could see the slightly bigger smiles in the background, the gloating looks, the side-wise glances that suggested that, while no one might be hitting this guy now, they would be later. The man found his footing and started to walk, closely surrounded by the soldiers and the officers from the Galvinite Intelligence Directorate.
"This notorious assassin and bomber had eluded capture for nineteen months after the atrocities at Wayrene and Duithurt, where more than four hundred FSA citizens died. Mahon, thought to be a disciple of the rogue Churgalt insurrectionist Bender Davis, was captured on Alitar and turned over to FSA forces with the aid of an independent diplomatic initiative backed by the ISA."
That was all.
Gabriel stopped the image of the man's retreating back as the soldiers hurried him into one of the port buildings. He stared at it. The Churgalt Insurgency was based down in the jungles of the equatorial region of Galvin, an inaccessible area that might have been designed for the successful concealment of a rebel operation. The Churgalt Insurgents were a nasty little secret that the FSA tried to keep quiet, but word about them had leaked out while Gabriel was still serving on Falada. At the time, he had found slightly amusing their claim that the FSA government was in league with some kind of unknown alien. Now, having met Major Norrik, he wasn't laughing any more.
Even though the premise had sounded amusing at the time, Gabriel hadn't had any doubt that there were a good number of people on Galvin who found the government desperately oppressive and would have liked to overthrow it. Unfortunately, the Churgalt people were in no condition, operationally or in terms of popularity, to do any such thing. Nevertheless, the Insurgents remained a thorn in the Galvinite Army's side, an uncomfortable indication that not all Galvinites loved the war or the government.
This story by itself, therefore, was no great surprise. Whenever Churgalt agents came out into the cities or exposed themselves in any other way, the government hunted them down mercilessly, but this particular terrorist had been caught and turned over to them by the ISA.