by C. Gockel
That was why she knew there was a disturbance between them and their destination. Traffic was slowing. She heard people’s feet slowing and the excited murmuring of voices, and smelled fuel, burned lubricant, and hot metal.
Rounding the corner proved her senses right. A chaotic accident involving a public transport and a traffic column was blocking the far lane on the next block. Emergency responders began arriving on foot, pushing through the offloading passengers and milling spectators. At least the injured were fortunate to be in a medical district. If she and Foxe could get to the parking structure quickly, they had a chance to get out before the street became impassible. Unfortunately, they’d have to push through the crowds to do it.
She looked at Foxe and was grateful to see that he’d regained most of his customary alertness. He apparently saw the same options she did. “Let’s take our chances with the horde.” Even as he spoke, a damaged lamppost toppled to the ground, adding to the chaos.
She nodded and fell into step beside but one step behind him, evaluating possible threats as they entered into her sphere of influence. Providing close-in personal security was an unaccustomed use of her skills.
They were about halfway to their goal, just coming up on a garish chems and alterants shop, when their already bad luck took a nosedive. Something was happening in the shop, something noisy and violent, something they needed to avoid. She grabbed Foxe’s coat sleeve to pull him to the side and around, but they were hemmed in by people and walls and the fallen lamppost. The sound of crashing glass told her they were out of time, so she turned to face the trouble and dropped into full-tracker mode.
Time slowed...
A halo of iridescent glass shards showered out from the shop window. A monstrously huge woman, the tallest and most muscular Mairwen had ever seen, burst through it in an explosion of forward motion.
Her clothes and skin art proclaimed her a hardcore merc, and her grotesquely overbuilt musculature screamed blackmarket ramper. Her face was a kabuki mask mix of berserk rage and gleeful insanity, the result of one too many bad drugs and backstreet bodyshop mods.
A few hundred milliseconds dragged by before two burly men from the shop came through the opening in pursuit. The berserker broke the first man’s neck as her feet hit the glascrete. She ripped the throat out of the second with her other hand. The unlucky pedestrian who’d been passing by died almost as easily when his head smashed like a melon into the wall. The bodies were still falling when a quicker-thinking woman to the left drew her projectile gun and shot, but the berserker didn’t even notice the shoulder wound as she bellowed and tore the shooter’s arm off with a terrifying laugh.
Mairwen knew none of her knives would penetrate berserker’s bulging muscle mass very far, so she scanned the crowd for visible weapons. Finally the universe deigned to favor her, because the man two paces from her, who clearly had more money than sense, was carrying a holstered, non-safetied Davydov plasbeamer, with only a thin strap to keep it in place.
After confirming that no one was noticing her, except maybe Foxe, which she couldn’t help, she glided low over to the rich man and relieved him of the Davydov, careful to keep her shirt cuff between her skin and the grip. She waited the dozen milliseconds it took to get a clear line of sight and for the berserker to finish turning toward her. She focused her aim on the woman’s head and shot twice, then focused on the woman’s loud, rapid-fire heartbeat and disintegrated it with a final shot.
Even though the berserker’s massive body was dead, it tried to follow through on the last orders it received, but the puppet strings had been cut, and she started to collapse. Mairwen dropped the Davydov on the ground, then pushed and tripped its owner on top of it, careful to thrust his body toward nearby spectators so they’d add to the distraction. She slid back to Foxe’s side, trying not to think about the fact that he might have registered her actions.
She breathed deeply and pushed her tracker senses back into a corner of her mind. Time sped up and approached reality. Ten seconds had passed.
She needed to get away, to get Foxe away, before the questions started. Now in realtime, she pulled his sleeve, and he followed behind her as she threaded them quickly through the crowd that was just now reacting to the stunning events.
To Mairwen’s relief, Foxe sat in the back seat of the vehicle and said nothing for the entire drive back to the office. She desperately needed the time to choose the answers she’d give him once his brilliant mind found the right questions to ask.
More immediately, she also needed to eat, and soon. Full-tracker mode, even the dozen actual seconds she’d indulged in, came with a price.
She’d reacted on instinct, and although her rational brain was blaring very bad idea, she knew she’d do it again to protect Foxe. She had no idea why he was different. He just… was.
The next two days Foxe worked at home, so that’s where she, Velasco, and Alhamsi covered the personal security shifts for Foxe’s waking hours.
Mairwen thought his open and airy townhouse suited him, though its abundance of pretty morphglass windows and the exposed back courtyard weren’t much good for security. There were also no flitter pads anywhere within five kilometers, which explained the assigned vehicles. He kept the townhouse warmer than she was used to, though it wasn’t uncomfortable. He’d converted one of its back rooms to a combination office and exercise room, and he spent most of his time there with the door closed.
She didn’t know what he did during the other shifts, but during hers, he ran in the late afternoons in a nearby park on a wide, well-designed trail, and she accompanied him. When he wasn’t running, he did a lot of reading, pacing and mumbling, and a few domestic chores. Mostly he ignored her.
She always declined his offhand offers of meals, officially because she was on duty, but also because she wanted to avoid opportunities for him to ask her what happened with the berserker in front of the chems shop. He’d trusted her with a private piece of his past, and she didn’t want to repay him with evasions and lies.
As it was, she couldn’t resist opening her senses around him, indulging in the sounds and sight and unique scent of him. When she ran with him, she was careful to always stay two strides behind him and let him set the pace. He seemed to need running as much as she did.
After he went to bed, she checked in with the external night-shift security guard that La Plata had assigned, which only a week ago might well have been Mairwen. Each night before she left, she stood for a few minutes in the mostly dark living room and listened to him breathe, because it settled something nameless in her.
The night of the berserker incident, she had decided that Foxe deserved her taking her new job seriously, even if it meant exposing more of her unusual skills than was wise. She hadn’t expected to find a use for them in the normal, civilized world. She wasn’t sure why she experienced the increased sense of duty, but it was undeniable. It felt like a kind of justice to use the skills the CPS had shaped and sharpened to protect instead of destroy.
She’d found a martial arts studio with an open sparring session to test how badly out of practice her personal combat skills were. Running, plus her regular strength and stretch exercise regimen, had kept her fit, but it was exhausting to keep her reaction times normal and to take hits she could have easily avoided. She was sore and sweat-soaked by the time she left, but the workout felt good enough that she planned to add it to her routine. She knew she’d have to avoid the better schools or risk being noticed. Fortunately, nearly every weapons shop in Etonver had an associated studio of some sort, so there were hundreds to choose from.
She knew nothing about Foxe’s specialty, so she spent her downtime reading about crime scene reconstruction. His intuition was well suited for his profession, and she wondered how he’d discovered it. He was, surprisingly, the author of a dozen or so technical articles in his field, and was still a certified expert in the interplanetary High Court. He’d presented and testified in hundreds of proceedings.
&nb
sp; His last case had been horrific, involving a pair of pedophiles who had kidnapped, abused, and killed dozens of children over several years. The media had dubbed them “the Collectors” because they’d turned a converted commercial interstellar ship into their nightmare playhouse. Foxe’s crime scene reconstruction had led to the capture of the pair, but he’d been badly wounded when he’d cornered the one who was trying to escape.
Was she any better than the sadistic twists who collected and killed children? The CPS’s procedure and training had made her into a remorseless, deadly machine. In choosing to live, she’d done what they demanded, but she never liked the killing, even when it was deserved. To some, that might be a distinction without a difference, but since escaping the CPS, she hadn’t so much as bruised anyone until the berserker, and she’d only done that to protect Foxe.
She would always be a killer, but now it was her choice how, when, and why.
6 * Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.032 *
ON MONDAY, FOXE went to the office, so Mairwen began her afternoon shift at La Plata, taking over from Velasco, who complained about having to hang around the office all day instead of just being on call. He implied it was a waste of his considerable skills, but as far as she’d seen, his only skills were blathering on about nothing and staring at women. Fortunately, her small breasts weren’t worthy of his attention.
She went to Foxe’s office to check in, but he had commandeered the conference room again, where he was reading multiple files on a large display and referring to a holo of a data hypercube. He saw her and smiled, and her breath caught momentarily.
“Morganthur. Good, I was afraid this was your day off.”
He waved her toward a chair in the corner, but she declined. Why just a smile from him should affect her was a mystery. It took more effort than it should have to regain control of her awareness of him. She laid her overcoat on the table, then stood at ease near the wall, next to the door. He smiled at her again, as if amused by her presence. This time, she made sure her breathing stayed even.
She expanded her senses to immerse herself in the sounds and scents of the office to set a baseline, so she’d know when something changed. The conference room had a lot of human scents, most of them stale. Velasco’s smell clung to the chair in the corner.
She couldn’t help but indulge herself in the sounds of Foxe’s breathing and his steady heartbeat, and the smells of him. She’d realized just before dawn that morning, when normal people would have been sleeping, that sometime in the past few days, she’d imprinted his exotic, buttery pearwood scent in her memory and could track him anywhere. The CPS had trained her to use the imprint for hunting, so it worried her that her subconscious thought of Foxe as a target. But now the scent of him eased the empty ache in her chest that had never really gone away, so she ignored the voice in her brain that said very bad idea.
A few minutes later, he stood up and started pacing, deep in thought. She surreptitiously admired the interplay of his muscles visible beneath his well-tailored clothes as he moved. He stopped suddenly and looked at her.
“I need to check with Zheer first, but we might be going on a little field trip this afternoon on the way home. I’ll be right back.” He left the conference room, then poked his head back in. “If we’re done in time, are you up for a longer run tonight?”
“Yes.” She wondered if he’d been keeping the runs short out of consideration for her, but he was gone before she could ask.
She would need to get some food to keep in her apartment after she went off-shift that night. She’d become careless about remembering to eat properly while being just an anonymous night-shift guard with dull senses and a dull mind, and no one to protect but herself.
Foxe came back a few minutes later. “Grab your coat. We’re on.” He folded the display and made a hasty attempt to reorder the conference room. “The data analysts have been deep-diving in Leo’s files. He was working with an informant, all right, but not from the transport company, someone from Loyduk Pharma.” He looked at her expectantly.
“The vaccine distributor,” she said, and he grinned as if he thought her clever to remember. She regretted she couldn’t tell him what she’d overheard at the spaceport.
“Producer and distributor, in fact.” His intuition was lighting up, making him as energized as she’d seen him. She followed him down the hall and waited in the doorway of his office as he grabbed his bag and shrugged into his coat. “The analysts found an interesting address here in Etonver. The leaseholder of record doesn’t have ties to anything in this case.”
“But you think otherwise?”
“Leo did, and so do I. He was a damn good finder, and it’s the only untagged data in his files. Hidden in plain sight.” That meant nothing to her, but it was clearly significant to Luka.
She exited the building first and scanned their surroundings as she held the door open for him.
The wind was bitingly frigid, making the drafty underground parking area colder than usual. Mairwen opened the vehicle with her palmprint, then pulled on her gloves as she got in. La Plata’s vehicles, while armored and secure, were more utilitarian than luxurious, and didn’t have heated operating controls. Foxe sat in the front seat next to her and wired the address to the vehicle’s navcomp. As she pulled out onto the street and turned north, as the navcomp indicated, she asked, “Do you have an appointment?”
“No. A hunch.” He was calling something up on his percomp, but she couldn’t see what. She nodded, but he didn’t notice.
Even though she’d only known him for a few days, she already knew that when his mind was blazing, he was lost to the outside world. There was no point asking why he felt the need to go now, in person, or what he expected to find.
For once, there were no obstructions to clog traffic, so it only took fifteen minutes to get to their destination, which turned out to be a huge apartment complex with multiple buildings and floors, plus a large vehicle lift and flitter hangar on top. Mairwen thought it looked rather like conjoined university dormitories. Since Etonver had no zoning regulations to speak of, and real estate changed usage and ownership often, the buildings may once have been exactly that.
With guidance from a battered lobby kiosk, she and Foxe rode a lift to the third floor, crossed a bridge to another building, then took a lift up two more floors. The apartment in question, leased to one Vadra Amhur, was all the way to the back of the building at the end of a dead-end hallway.
When they finally found the right hallway, she knew there was trouble. It reeked of day-old death. Even normal senses would have caught it by now if the hallways hadn’t been so cold.
She stepped in front of Foxe to stop him. “Security first.”
He hesitated, then nodded.
She walked toward the apartment, listening for sounds from any of the other apartments but hearing none. She hoped she was wrong and that the reek came from somewhere else, but it didn’t. Beyond the innocuous door that matched all the others were fluids and blood and a corpse. She doubted Foxe would like it.
She walked back to where he stood.
“It smells,” she said in a low voice. “Like the warehouse. Should I look?”
“Fökk,” he said grimly, running his fingers through his unruly hair once, then again, a resigned look settling on his face. “Do it.”
The electronic lock was old and cheap, and someone had already breached it. She slowly nudged the door open a bit, took a second to dial back her olfactory sense so the increased stench that wafted out wouldn’t overload her, then opened the door just enough to slip inside. She waited a moment for her vision to compensate for the shadows in the apartment, then found the lighting controls.
Three meters from the entrance, a woman’s naked body was zip-tied to an overturned chair. There was blood splatter everywhere. It hadn’t been a pleasant death.
Mairwen backed out of the apartment and returned to Foxe.
“It’s bad,” she said. “Bloody.”
He closed his eyes a moment and muttered a curse. He took a deep breath and looked at her. “I have to see.”
She let him go in, then closed the apartment door behind them and stepped aside, her eyes on Foxe.
He held himself rigidly still, as if fighting something, but soon the despairing, haunted look she’d seen before started creeping into his expression. After first examining the floor in front of him, he took one careful step closer. He crouched down, maybe to get a better angle to examine the woman’s body, then swept his gaze side to side. He lingered over several spots, angling his head at a couple of them, but his gaze drifted back to the body and stalled. He stared as if mesmerized.
Mairwen waited quietly for a minute, watching him closely. He wasn’t moving any more, but his breathing was shallow, and she could hear his heartbeat racing. The haunted look had completely overtaken his features. After another minute, she gave into the growing conviction that she needed to do something.
“Foxe?” she asked softly.
He didn’t respond.
She said his name again, but he still didn’t react. She crouched down in front of him. His eyes were dilated, and tears were streaming down his face. Possibly it was like the old, bad memories, but it reminded her more of a tracker’s sensory overload trance, the first step on the road to oblivion. Not knowing what else to do, she gave his shoulder a slight push. He felt stiff.
“Foxe,” she said. Nothing.
She took off her glove and put her fingertips on his wet cheek. He didn’t react.
She narrowed her focus to just him and flattened her palm on the side of his face. “Foxe… Luka, look at me.” She willed him to respond.