OPERATION KURGAN - Fiction #3 - "Honey Trap"

ZEUS clapped his palms together and strode through the cloud of chalk dust that blossomed from the impact as he approached the bar, squatted with expert poise and took a medium grip, ready to lift. Although the three month journey to Earth had included acclimatization to the increased gravity from Mars, the shift from a 0.375G to 1.0G environment was hard on everyone for their first year or so. Showing weakness, though, was unacceptable and he had been weight training in his every spare moment. It showed. Already a big man, his athletic frame had filled out further and his muscle mass, constantly tested just by the simple act of getting up in the morning, was growing rapidly. Today was leg day.

‘We’re leaking,’ he told Major Cortez, who was working on his bench press next to him. ‘A story popped up on a board back home about Namib Base.’

‘Detailed?’ asked Leon, pausing in his lift.

‘Enough to be a violation of the media agreements,’ ZEUS confirmed, dropping the deadlift. ‘But not enough to jeopardize operational security. The board was on a watch-list already. Olympus is pretty sure they have it contained.’

‘But we’re leaking,’ sighed Leon, before pushing out another couple of reps. ‘I told you we would.’

‘I’m less worried about that than I am about the nature of the board where we leaked,’ replied ZEUS, stretching his shoulders, ready for a second lift. ‘It’s known to have AphrOrd associations.'

Leon groaned. The Aphroditic Order was a relic of the Colonial War that they just didn’t seem able to stamp out: Venusians, sent to Mars to infiltrate their communities and effect sabotage and discontent, and to promote Venusian social philosophies. Most of them had been rounded up pretty quickly, and the others had, for the most part, discovered that Martian society more or less suited them and had quietly disconnected from their distant masters.

But there always seemed to be a few die-hards kicking around. In the last few decades the survivors had started to recruit followers in the Martian universities and on the fringes of Martian society. And now they had home-grown fanatics, determined to overthrow the caste system by violence and impose by force a Venusian-style meritocracy.

They were all idiots, but they were certainly a pain in the neck. Breaching one of the city domes could kill dozens and cost weeks of lost productivity and although none of them had managed it yet, everyone knew it was just a matter of time.

‘What do you want to do about it?’ he asked. ‘I assume shutting down media access to the operation isn’t on the table?’

There was a pause as ZEUS finished another lift, quads and hamstrings tensing.

‘Definitely not,’ he agreed. ‘But we need to flush them out. We need to seed some juicy nuggets of intel in the network and see who takes the bait.’

‘What kind of intel?’

‘I thought something like the SLAP drive blueprints.’

Leon dumped his lift and sat up.

‘We have SLAP drive blueprints?’

He knew about the SLAP drive in principle. It was one of the new technologies discovered in the facility, so he had been given the outline briefing. But the team studying it was off-site, compartmentalized and codeword classified. He didn’t need to know, and knew better than to ask. The SLAP drive would, if they could make it work, cut the travel time from Earth to Mars dramatically. Exactly how much was a tightly-controlled secret, but Leon had heard it could be as little as two weeks.

‘Of course we don’t have SLAP drive blueprints,’ replied ZEUS.

‘Create a dummy, then?’

‘It would take too long to be convincing,’ growled ZEUS. ‘No, I think we’re going to have to steal them.’