by J M Thomas
Policies that treat people like numbers often find the human element coming back to bite them in the butt. I was all-fired ready to sink my acrylic incisors into some SynthCorp ass-flesh, and not in a sexy way, either.
I almost shushed the elevator ding before catching myself and returning to my “act natural” pose. This is why I sucked at going undercover. Blade would’ve been in and out already and have made six new friends in the warehouse, and here I was dodging shadows and keeping to the corners of the room.
Finally, I found what I was looking for. A crate the size of a treasure chest, appropriately enough. More importantly, it was a crate light enough I could heft it onto my shoulders without straining a servo.
I clicked the locket back on, stuffing it back up my sleeve so it wouldn’t snag on the box’s rough-hewn edges. Whether or not synthetic tissue got splinters, I’d be intimately acquainted with those edges by the end of this venture.
If everything worked the way Marsh told me it would, I’d have about ten minutes in which the security system on the edge of the shelf would still register the crate as present before the automatic refresh alerted the security desk. That meant I had ten minutes to steal it and turn it in for a reward before they turned on the tracking embedded in the crate itself.
At the wave of my magic trinket, the computer disengaged the lock preventing the box from sliding off the shelf. Counting seconds, I caught it and slid it onto my shoulder. Yup, splinters were still a thing, and they still smarted. I had precious few minutes to get back up the elevator before the lock re-engaged and recognized the theft, so I had to hoof it.
Heart-like organ pounding, I sprinted down two rows of warehouse, across a wide open floor with automated lift heists ready to mow me down at any second. With my free hand, I pressed the up button on the elevator door forty times for good measure, fingers slipping off the button with sweat. Synth sweat was even more slippery than human sweat, causing me to need to reposition the box on my shoulder far more often than necessary.
Finally, the doors slid apart and I dove inside the elevator. The second I entered, the lights went dark.
“Nonono, what happened? Why won’t it wor… oh. I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why.” Muttering and kicking myself, I turned the locket off. The lights came back on, then I hit the button for the top floor.
I figured I had about two minutes for this next phase of the operation. I pulled one of my sturdier knives from my boot and, after wiping more palm sweat onto my already sweaty pants, wedged the tip under the corner of the tacked-down box lid. It opened with a tiny squeak, revealing pay dirt. In this particular instance, pay dirt was the blue synth shit drug. Possession of one stolen vial would get you instantly converted to slag. Return of one stolen vial would get you rich beyond imagination. I had over two hundred in the box, two of those in my slick palms.
One was for evidence. It was pure and uncontaminated—better than Marsha could siphon out of a hundred compromised bloodstreams. The other was for Blade to take to one of his ten thousand “know a guy” network folks. I didn’t ask who or where. The look of confidence in his eyes that he could get this into the right hand and come back with a detox drug was all I needed. I could trust his connections better than I could trust him at this point.
I tapped the lid back down and pocketed the extra loot. Before the elevator doors could open, I had my best lackey blank look face pasted on and my crate hoisted onto my shoulder. Bold as a four-year-old in a superhero costume, I marched up to the counter.
The woman at the counter had the physique of a younger woman, but her eyes had that same aged, wizened look of an old woman. She swung around to face me with the smoothness only a synth body could muster and gave a slight frown.
“How can I help you, sir?”
I flashed my best disarming grin. “In the line of duty, I believe I’ve found something belonging to SynthCorp. The frogman holding it set it down and took off like a shot before I could catch up to him. Creaky bastards.” Lowering the crate, I let it drop onto the pristine counter with a slight thud and the clinking of glass vials inside.
She flinched. “Alright, I’ll log it as stolen. It’s a wonder we let them work here before they’re converted. Always trying to get a hand on a vial, the addicts.” Her slender fingers went to work, tapping out information on the screen. She scanned the box with a handheld device that looked like an overgrown piece of chalk.
“Card, please.”
I slid my Marsh-altered new card toward her, praying to high heaven that it didn’t get flagged. I couldn’t disable the computer for this part. It had to happen naturally. I had to look every bit the prejudiced mall cop returning an unknown crate that happened to be marked with SynthCorp’s logo on the side.
Her eyebrows raised. “Oh my. This is… quite a sum.” She glanced at me, face brightening. I imagined her imagining me as a wealthy multi-billionaire. Apparently, the mental image didn’t quite take, since her eyebrow raise turned from appreciative to amused.
I had to unfocus my eyes to keep my poker face going. “Oh? You mean, like enough I can get a steak dinner on my Andromeda vacation next cycle?”
“Like, enough you could buy a palace on Andromeda.” She handed the card back to my trembling fingers.
My jaw dropped. I was rather thankful it could—the tension building had me wondering. I stepped back away from the crate as if I was just realizing what it was. “That’s… that’s…”
She nodded, giving me a warm smile. “Enjoy your vacation, sir!”
Pocketing my card, I grinned and made my exit. Now to steal a paddy wagon full of cryo-tubes, two of them inhabited. Those were kept on the ground floor, and I wouldn’t be returning them.
You’d think having the worst and hardest part over with would calm my nerves, but it only made things worse to have something that’d gone right. Now I had something to lose. The elevator brought me to the ground level, and I snaked around a few corridors along my memorized route.
Left, three doors down right, past the glassed-in offices, a right, another right, and I was right where I needed to be. They kept the doors unlabeled and non-descript because the cryo-tubes shouldn’t have been occupied. They should be just for people brought in to be converted into their synth bodies, never left with people in them. Unless there’s a queue, I thought with a snort.
A bored-looking synth guard strode past me without even looking up. My purposeful stride, guard uniform, and complete lack of a suspicious-looking mustache set me up for prime success there. It didn’t stop my breath from catching in my throat for a second as I slid my newly-loaded datacard into the door bolt to disengage the lock by hand.
My slick, sweaty fingers slipped on the handle, reminding me of why we hadn’t sent an Ehksmian to do this job. As the door opened with a tiny creak that sounded like a whole mountain shifting on its roots to my ears, I peeked into the dark room to get my bearings. It was pitch black, so no bearings presented themselves. I slipped into the room, closing the door behind me.
I hated my new night vision with a passion. Instead of just not seeing in the dark, or with cybernetically augmented eyes, seeing heat signatures in gradients of green once it got dark enough to engage the implants, these eyes made everything grainy and indistinct. I fumbled around for a light source to alleviate the visual white noise.
Suddenly, the snowy black and white dots coalesced into an Ehksmian figure ten centimeters from my face. “Is time him show up.”
“Ah!” I cried out, then shushed myself before Marsh could clamp his fingers over my mouth. “There you are! Where’s the light?”
“Marsh kill light. Not need.” The slightly less inky blackness seemed to nod as if I should understand.
I didn’t understand. “Yes, but I’m the only one who knows how to drive the heist lift… wait.”
We both fell silent as the bored guard strode past again, this time chattering on his radio. “But how could there be a theft of box seventy-four; it still registers as�
�� wait. The refresh shows it missing now. I’ll be right there.”
As his footsteps receded, we breathed a tandem sigh of relief. “Time’s up.” I said, reaching around in the dark for the nearest object that could threaten my shins. “We’ve gotta grab this and get out of here.”
“Have loading truck. Will get doors open. Jet drive lift.” Marsh headed off.
“I still can’t see!” I called in a half-whisper, catching myself as my shin banged something unyielding. Just then, the lights of the rear end of the SWAT-mobile flooded the room in an eerie red cast. I panicked for a tenth of a second before I realized it was Marsh giving me light to find the lift.
When I placed my palm over the control screen, the machine whirred to life, double-pincers in the front ready to grab and raise anything I needed. Marsh pulled back a wall-sized curtain, making space for me to drive the lift beyond into the cryo-tube storage.
I was not prepared for the sight that stretched out before my eyes. The pale light of the lift’s single central headlamp illumined rows upon rows of cryo-tubes. This wasn’t exactly like breaking into a casket factory to steal the pods, though it certainly looked that way.
This was way worse. There weren’t just two cryo-pods on full freeze. There were easily a hundred of ‘em. Shock drove my foot onto the brake, screeching the heist to a halt. My heart pounded over the hum of my engine, my oily blood pressure rising.
It took several precious minutes of my borrowed time for me to locate the ones I needed. I couldn’t be wrong; this was too crucial a task. These were witnesses of a horrific crime who had to be sprung so they could testify. Credible witnesses, ones Galactic Patrol would immediately believe.
Finally, my fingers brushed over the correct nameplates. I marked their location so I could make my way back to the lift and load those first. That job out of the way, I grabbed as many empty pods as I could fit in the van Marsh had procured.
As we shut the back door to the levvan, a knock sounded at the warehouse door. “Hey, you in there? There’s been a robbery! Open up, we gotta do a sweep of the place.”
Marsh and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. “Get in,” I hissed, shoving him around to the floorboard of the driver’s cab. I slammed the door after him, then sprinted back to the lift heist. He curled up on the floor, dutifully covering himself with the floormat.
I drove the lift right up to the door, then parked it where it would bar their entrance for a couple minutes. They’d have to un-pin the hinges, and that would buy us an exit. I hopped into my seat then punched in my destination code, overriding the velocity parameters.
We roared away, rocketing into the sky. In the rearview mirror, I spotted the door being thrown open and guards, looking like ants in the distance as they radioed for backup.
“I shoulda tied you up and left you back there for them to find. You could’ve directed them the wrong way and gotten us a nice lead.”
“Jet not want Marsh undergo audit. Not good for health,” he mumbled from under his rug. “Is speed chase next?”
Though I doubted anyone would be able to follow us, I decided to mess with him a little bit. Adrenaline spike and all that. “Yes. We’ll make several loops and crash at least once.”
“Marsh drop off in water now. Not like fast.”
“You can do that?” I gave him an incredulous stare.
“Is Ehksmian hatchling fun to jump into river from moving levcar. Make good high dive, then swim home faster than levcar can arrive.” He smiled, peeking his head out to blink at me.
“Alright, we’re over water now. Show me what’cha got.”
With a grin, Marsh rolled the window down on the levvan. He stuck his head out, then his torso and butt. Finally, he flipped gracefully out the window and executed a perfect olympic-class spin dive, arching his back as he pierced the surface of the river before slicing into the water.
“I have got to try that sometime,” I said to myself. I was surprised no one had followed us. That was easy, I thought. Far, far too easy.
Chapter 25 – Offworld
“You’re under arrest for treason and petty thievery. Anything you say…”
“Is going to sound stupid as soon as it leaves my mouth, I know.” I grinned at Blade, proffering the two glowing blue vials. “Wanna be an accessory?”
Blade harrumphed, holding the tubes to the light and letting the pale aura illuminate the dilapidated warehouse, his bright idea of a stereotypical meeting place for thieves. “Like I’m not already.”
I scuffed the toe of my boot in the dust coating the concrete floor. “Well, the keys to the paddy wagon are in the seat. I’ve got eighteen cryo tubes to unload by hand. Then you gotta get going before folks start putting two and two together.”
“Don’t rush art.” Blade shooed me with a wave of his hand. “They’ll have to rebuild the footage, and that takes sweet hours.”
The nondescript black briefcase might not have qualified as art, but his recording, testimony, evidence pieces, and labeling of every pocket full of damnation created a picturesque cornucopia of woe. Galactic Patrol was about to get an eyeful that would make their stomachs churn.
“You know, somebody’s going to see to it this case gets buried. Not just the physical case, the whole thing. It’ll sit in intake hell forever, collecting dust at the bottom of a pile.”
Blade snapped the lid shut and brushed off his hands. “You of little faith. That’s why I made copies. GP can try to bury all they want, but I’m staggering release over the course of a couple months, sending bits and pieces to news sources all over the galaxy. There’ll be a frenzy of who-knows-what, who is investigating, what the ol’ Patrol is doing about it…”
“So you really have thought of everything.” I shook my head, grinning.
“Nobody thinks of everything. That’s why we have a team—somebody to cover our asses and see in our blind spots.”
I wasn’t having any of his perkiness. I’d sold my body, willingly or not, and I felt like I’d sold my soul to this damned cause as well. “You know what the difference is between you and me, Blade? It’s that you’re over here, Mister I Wanna Make the Worlds as Ideal as my Book Learnin’, and you really believe in this shit. You straight up think if you and me and enough people bust our asses for the Greater Good, we’ll make a difference that really matters.”
“And what’s so wrong with that?” Blade’s voice boomed, echoing through the cracks between planks, unsettling years of dust from disuse.
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. “Because, this time, you’re goddamn right.”
Blade blinked a few extra times. “Excuse me?”
“I wanna know, if I screw this shit up, that it ain’t a big deal in the grand scheme. Only this time, if I don’t get this timing down just right, get this mess tidied up just so, it’s not just me who’s fucked. It’s worlds and people and…”
“Yes.” Blade nodded. “It’s an incredible responsibility. Think you’re up to the task?”
I couldn’t be more emphatic. “No.”
“And why not?” He gestured wildly with both hands. “Who’s going to figure this out and save these people, if not me and you? Who’s coming after us to finish what we done started?”
I was silent on that point. “You know, you’re real good at getting us into some deep shit.”
“And you’re real good at getting us out of it.” He clapped me on the shoulder with a strong hand.
I wasn’t so sure, not this time. We’d been in way over our heads since a little operation we called Project Flamenco between ourselves. We called it that because an Ehksmian synth had jabbed me in the arm with the same drug that was ruining Ehksmian lives one-by-one.
Among the stupid things I said while high as a kite, my smarmy ass was sing-shouting “Flamenco” at the top of my lungs as the team came in hot. It’s always the stupid stuff that gets immortalized with me. As I spent the next half hour unloading the heavy cryo-tubes, I wondered what I’d done wrong that would
find a way to bite me in the ass later.
I had a feeling I was being unbearably stupid, like the answer to this whole business was staring me in the face. I just couldn’t see it. I felt like I was staring at one of those impressive fancy rugs with a zillion threads. For the life of me, I couldn’t see which thread to pull to unravel the whole tapestry. We had evidence of plenty of misdeeds, and we finally had a way offworld, but I got the distinct impression we’d only scratched the surface.
“I’ll be off, then.” Blade swung his frame into the driver’s seat of our borrowed SWAT-mobile. “Do me a favor, will ya? Ask Marsha why she decided to join up. She should be here any minute now.”
I glared, making no promises. “Got your credits to upload? If you show up to the rocket with a debt, I swear to the pines of Forest II I will disown your ass.”
“Yes, ma.” Blade grinned as the paddy truck door hissed shut between us. The vehicle rose to hovering, then whirred off toward the docking station, leaving me and a pile of empty cryo-tubes for Marsha to pick up whenever she got here.
I waited around for the better part of an hour, with nothing to do but fiddle with the cryo-tubes. The buttons were all labeled in Standard, so it was easy enough to open and shut the lid. I had half a mind to lay down in one of them and take a nap, but I didn’t want to provide Marsha an opportunity to close me into one as a prank. She’d do it, too.
A distant whirring told me Marsha was on her way, so I scuttled my way around the room to make some tracks leading everywhere, then slid behind a support pillar. She could talk about Ehksmians not being like frogs all she wanted, until she jumped three feet in the air.
Marsha’s rented truck looked like a parcel delivery reject, dented and abused. It was just banged up enough to blend in with the other low-level lev-lorries. No one would suspect the high-value cargo behind those creaky doors.
When her own door squawked its protest to her opening it, she nearly stumbled out, catching herself as her feet slipped on the dusty floor. Muttering what was likely an epithet in her own language, she brushed off the hand she’d caught herself with and made her way to the cryo-tubes.