Jan waited until the door closed and did not approach. He didn’t do anything Kinsley wouldn’t expect. Things she wouldn’t expect made her nervous, and he didn’t want her nervous, especially when she had two automated guns pointed at him.
“May I?” Jan asked, once the door finished rumbling.
Kinsley nodded gravely. “Proceed.”
“An Advanced woman named Senator Tarack recently visited Tantalus prison and purchased my freedom.” Jan trusted Kinsley to keep this quiet. “Tarack sent me back to Ceto, guarded by her trusted security chief, to recover a stolen item for her.”
“I see.” Kinsley blinked and frowned. “And now that you’re free, and back on Ceto, you’ve come to me because you’ve encountered a problem you can’t handle alone.”
“Correct.” Trust Kinsley to get straight to the point.
“Cool.” Kinsley retracted her ceiling-mounted guns with a thought and sat back down on her bed. She opened her book. “We’ll speak again in twenty-two minutes.”
After an acceptable silence, Jan added, “Ah, Kinsley?”
She kept reading.
“This matter is time sensitive.”
She set down her book. “Why?”
“Senator Tarack also implanted torture nanos in me, and the man she sent to guard me ... her security chief ... is missing. If I don’t have him reset those nanos in,” Jan estimated, “a little over nineteen hours, I will die in horrific agony.”
Kinsley set aside her book. “That was foolish of you.”
“It was the only way to avoid going out an airlock.”
“Fair.” Kinsley hopped off her bed and walked to the single seat on the far side of her bunker, where she settled in front of three mounted keyboards. “What’s the missing person’s name?”
“Bharat,” Jan said, and frowned as he realized he did not have a last name. “He is a muscular Advanced man with a mouth-enveloping beard, and I last saw him standing between me and Rafe, in front of the mini-mall where Emiko works.”
“That’s enough,” Kinsley said, tapping keys.
“This would have been between five and six hours ago.”
“I said I’ve got it.” Keys clattered as Kinsley went to work. There were no screens beyond the keyboards — Kinsley’s PBA projected the screens only to her — but she’d once told Jan she preferred the tactile feel of real keyboards over the floaty nothingness of augmented reality. She typed rapidly, rotating the chair between keyboards like a drummer playing a solo.
“Found him,” she said. “Tracking.” She had probably hacked the Luxury District’s drones years ago.
Kinsley typed away for all of ten seconds before she stopped, spun, and stared. “Truthers took him. They snatched him off Comet four hours and forty-two minutes ago.”
Her unconcerned words made Jan cold. He wanted to ask “You’re certain?” but with Kinsley, that was both rude and almost certainly “Yes.” He did not want to deal with Truthers today.
The Truthers — or the True Sons of Ceto, as no one but these assholes called themselves — were a group of Patriots who’d splintered off into their own cells after the Supremacy left. Angered by the fact that Ceto’s administrators (and even many former Patriot leaders) had made peace with the Advanced who’d oppressed and murdered them for years, the Truthers had made it their mission to convince all Advanced to stay the hell off Ceto. They did that by abducting Advanced citizens, beating the shit out of them, recording coerced statements about the crimes of the Supremacy, and then executing their captives by firing squad.
They were unpopular with practically everyone.
“Where’d they take him?” Jan asked instead.
Kinsley spun back to her keyboards. Typed. Spun around to face him. “They’re still in Star’s Landing. Prospector District. The abandoned warehouse at 111 Magnet Street.” Kinsley frowned. “You’re going to rescue him.”
Jan nodded. “May I borrow some guns?”
“You’ll die if you go up against that many Truthers alone. Shall I hire you mercenaries?”
Kinsley could — anyone in the Hole would jump at the chance to work for her, as favors for Kinsley could be exchanged for favors from Kinsley — but Jan didn’t want to involve anyone he hadn’t fully vetted. Word would get to Fatima.
“I have help,” he declared. “Pollen will join us, as will Rafe. I also believe I can enlist Emiko.” Ryke would probably be okay with that, given he was on a mission to get her a disc.
“You’re with Rafe now,” Kinsley said. “Why?”
“He was available.”
“Polina and Emiko won’t be enough, and Rafe is useless in situations requiring competence.” Kinsley walked to a locker in the corner and opened it. “You will need my help. Let me change.” Her fitted body armor waited inside.
Jan didn’t bother arguing. Once Kinsley made her mind up about something, arguing was just wasting breath. Yet the moment she unzipped her pajamas, Jan turned to the door.
Kinsley wouldn’t care if he saw her naked — she didn’t care if people got right down and fucked in front of her, let alone if they were wearing clothes — but Jan would never gawk unless explicitly invited to do so. Unlike most other people he knew, Kinsley was completely uninterested in sex.
The door started rumbling open, but Jan didn’t turn around. Kinsley was almost certainly still dressing. Her opening the door now was simply her being efficient.
Sure enough, the moment the rumble stopped, Kinsley walked past him, clad in formfitting black aerogel and graphene armor that hugged her tall, thin frame. The ridiculously expensive body armor was thin enough to fit through a vent shaft, yet strong enough to stop rifle rounds. Short and Skinny turned to gawk, and Kinsley waved at them.
“Sawed Off, Rocket,” Kinsley said, addressing Short and then Skinny, “watch my stuff.” She walked between them.
Jan followed, offering Short a nod, and followed Kinsley.
“Who’s on the door?” Kinsley asked over her shoulder.
“It’s Lancet, miss!” Skinny — now Rocket — yelled after her with entirely appropriate respect. “You need me to call her?”
“No,” Kinsley said. “Thank you.” She seemed not at all alarmed that she was about to go up against Truthers.
As Jan shadowed her and watched her move, he felt a warm surge of affection. He hadn’t seen Kinsley in five years, yet she had just dropped her whole day to help him. After his ball-kickingly depressing meeting with Emiko, the fact that Kinsley’s generosity and loyalty hadn’t faded felt great.
There was only one problem. Kinsley was absolutely devoted to Fatima, and even Fatima’s betrayal wouldn’t change that.
Kinsley and Fatima had grown up together. They’d saved each other’s lives more times than Jan could count. If Kinsley learned Jan planned to harm Fatima, she would stop him by any means necessary. And Jan couldn’t imagine hurting Kinsley.
Before today, involving Kinsley in his quest to find Fatima had been out of the question, but with Bharat taken by Truthers, Elena Ryke expecting a disc he didn’t have while holding Emiko hostage, and a little over nineteen hours before torture nanos burned him alive ... this was it. This was his only option.
Yet, Jan realized with a tinge of sadness, if he actually pulled off this job — found Fatima, found Tarack’s disc, killed Fatima for betraying him — Kinsley would never forgive him. She would find out, and she would hate him, forever.
Could he pay that price for revenge?
Jan thought again of Fatima’s hologram outside the library. Fatima had claimed she hadn’t betrayed him, despite obviously doing so, but why? Why would she gaslight him?
He’d just find her. He’d just ask her.
And then he would or would not shoot her in the head.
06: Truthers
The door slammed. Heavy footsteps retreated. And now that two very large men had finally stopped kicking the shit out of him, Bharat Dhillon opened his eyes and took a look around.
His ca
ptors had locked him in a gray biocrete cell about the size of a bathroom. The two masked natural-born had given him a tattered sleeping bag to rest on, which seemed an odd concession after the incessant violence. Other than the bag, the only other feature of his small cell was a bucket.
Bharat crawled over and puked his guts up into it.
Even through the significant pain-deadening provided by his Personal Brain Assistant, Bharat had felt horrible during the act and only marginally less horrible afterward. Suppressing his sense of pain didn’t do anything about the smell, and the sight of so much blood among the vomit and — was that a tooth? — was not encouraging. Still, at least the beating hadn’t hurt ... much.
Better yet, he still had all his fingers and toes. Those two men had beaten him bloody, but they hadn’t burned or cut him. Bharat suspected such things would come later, after they’d given him some time to think about the Commander’s offer.
“Confess your crimes. Implicate your corrupt leaders. Apologize for your part in the atrocities, and die with dignity.” It was an easy offer to remember, given the Commander had repeated it after every portion of Bharat’s mock trial.
“The Commander” was the gray-haired, brown-skinned old man with a bushy moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He’d spent the last four hours interrogating Bharat. Two guards had taken turns thwacking the back of Bharat’s head every time he failed to answer one of the Commander’s questions, which, to be fair, had been pretty much all of them.
If there was one thing Bharat had taken away from his interrogation training, it was that not talking was better than talking, even if two dickheads kept thwacking you in the back of the head. The longer he held out before giving them anything, the longer he had where an opportunity might arise to escape.
In the preceding four hours — four hours that had followed at least two in solitary confinement — Bharat had discovered himself personally responsible for the following during the Supremacy’s ten-year occupation of Ceto:
Creating five secret detention bases the Supremacy maintained while they occupied Ceto, and the deaths of six hundred forty-two prisoners who never made it home ...
The assassination of five different Ceto politicians opposed to partnering with the Supremacy, as well as full involvement in the efforts to scapegoat innocent people who were falsely charged with those assassinations ...
The deaths of at least twelve different leaders of the Patriots of Ceto on various raids, ambushes, or patrols, as well as the death of five hundred twenty-four “freedom fighters” in battles to free the planet ...
And finally, shooting the pet parrot of the daughter of Pioneer Point’s mayor in front of her. Because, really, what kind of asshole shot a child’s parrot in front of her?
That Bharat had participated in none of these acts did not matter to the Commander, and if Bharat was being honest with himself, it didn’t matter at all. No rescue was coming, and it seemed likely he would now die on a planet he didn’t like with people he didn’t know. Worse yet ... it was his own damn fault.
Alone in the only city on Ceto that felt vaguely like home, Bharat had let his guard down. He had assumed he would be faster, stronger, and more alert than any natural-born who might want to take him. He had assumed any natural-born who might want to take him wouldn’t be in the Luxury District at all. So now here he was, in a cell, covered in bruises and puking blood and teeth into a bucket.
Teeth. In a bucket.
Shit, that could actually work.
Bharat reached into the slop and dug around until he had something small and sharp to clasp in one hand. Judging from its size and shape, it had likely been one of his canines.
Bharat wasn’t going to die on this overgrown dust ball if he could avoid it. He had a wife and child waiting for him back on Phorcys. He wasn’t going to give up on either of them without a rather impressive fight.
“Psst!” A raspy voice whispered through the palm-sized air vent embedded in the wall to his right. “Anyone in there?”
As far as a plan of escape, figuring out who was stuck in the cell beside him would be a good place to start. Bharat wiped his vomit-stained hand, now clenched around the tooth, on his equally disgusting prospector pants. How should he broach this?
“You awake?” the same quiet, raspy voice asked. “If you are, you could at least say hello. Not much else to do in here.”
This could be a trick from his captors to get him talking. It could also be another man like him, beaten bloody and left to think about confession in a biocrete cell. This man could be an ally. Bharat would simply handle first contact carefully.
“Yes,” Bharat said. “I’m here.”
“Wait.” The voice paused. “Chief Dhillon?”
Every hair on Bharat’s arms stood on end. He hadn’t given his captors his name. He hadn’t given them anything, but if the man in the next cell was Advanced, like he suspected, and had been here as long as he suspected ...
“Jax?” he whispered back.
Almost hysterical laughter flooded the grate. “I can’t believe it. That’s fucking perfect. You came down here to rescue me, and they got you too?”
Jaxon Cole going missing was the reason Senator Tarack had lost her data disc. Cole had been the man Bharat entrusted to deliver Senator Tarack’s information disc to the courier chosen by Elena Ryke. That courier, they all now knew after the disc’s theft, was actually the Golden Widow. As to how she’d pulled that little sleight of identity off, fooling both a secure Supremacy database and its companion database on Ceto, that was what Bharat had hoped Jan Sabato would figure out.
As frustrating and embarrassing as losing the disc was, Bharat could not help but appreciate the beauty of the Widow’s plan. Senator Tarack had kept her quantum crux drive locked in the most secure vault in the most secure mansion on the most remote area of Phorcys, sheltered by anti-aircraft guns and a full spectrum defense system. No thief could have stolen it, yet somehow the Widow had arranged for them to just ... hand it to her. One day later, Senator Tarack had purchased Jan Sabato from prison ... on Bharat’s recommendation.
“How long have you been here?” Bharat asked, even though he already knew the answer. Three days.
“About three—” Cole caught himself. “Ah, good one.”
Bharat nodded in approval. “You can’t know it’s really me in here, can you?”
“Right,” Cole said. “They might be simming your voice to get me to talk, even though I never mentioned who I worked with. They could have found out about you some other way, captured someone else who mentioned your name.”
Bharat waited.
“And they’re probably listening to us talk right now,” Cole continued, “since neither of us has been talking to them. They put us next to each other, hoping we’ll reveal what we weren’t saying when they interrogated us earlier, like I just did when I admitted I know Chief Dhillon. Dammit.”
“You’ve been in here three days,” Bharat said. “One small slipup is acceptable.” This really was Jaxon Cole, a good man he considered a true friend. Sadly, he couldn’t ask any of the questions he desperately needed to ask Cole right now.
Had Cole seen the Widow’s face? Had the Widow captured Cole when she took the disc? Were these people working for her? Those questions could wait. What he could ask now were the questions his captors already knew the answers to, but he didn’t.
“Have they beaten you?”
“Yes,” Cole said. “Cut my toes off too, all of ’em, one by one. That fucking hurt, Chief. Everything fucking hurts.”
Cole was lying, of course. Not about his toes — these people likely had amputated them, which made Bharat furious — but about the pain. Bharat didn’t send any operative into the field without pain-deadening, especially to a theater as dangerous as Ceto. It seemed their captors hadn’t caught on to that yet.
Before they left Senator Tarack’s mansion, Bharat had ordered Tarack’s PBA technicians to implement a full-body pain-nullification protocol
for both him and Cole. Such actions ensured that, if captured, they could not be tortured for information, since they couldn’t actually feel pain. Cole had apparently done a good enough job of faking it — as he’d been taught — that his captors assumed they were getting somewhere. Most importantly, they hadn’t killed him yet.
“Where did they pick you up?” Bharat asked, though he was fairly certain he knew already.
“Just outside the starport, about an hour after I handed off the disc,” Cole confirmed. “They must have shadowed me after the exchange, or during.” He meant delivering Senator Tarack’s data disc to Elena Ryke’s courier, who wasn’t, actually.
“How many?” Bharat asked.
“Six ambushed me. I’ve seen at least eight more since.”
That was more armed bodies than he and Cole could handle. “Anyone besides the Commander interrogate you?”
“Nope, just that gray-haired asshole.”
So the Commander was working alone. Truthers usually worked in cells, so while this cell was larger than average, it still implied the conspirators were limited to those Cole had seen. That suggested these Truthers had no backup.
Bharat had had a bag on his head when he arrived. “Any idea where we are?”
“Abandoned warehouse,” Cole said, “probably in the Old Prospector district. In three days I’ve heard no flyovers and only occasional traffic, and it’s a reasonable distance from the Star’s Landing starport.” Where they’d picked Cole up.
That made sense. The Prospector District was one of the oldest portions of Star’s Landing. Empty warehouses were as common as stones down here, with their original owners bankrupt or dead, and Ceto Security Division didn’t actively patrol in this area. The status of these warehouses made them prime real estate for criminals of all stripes.
It also made them the perfect places to beat uncooperative captives to death, which was the way Bharat would likely go out unless he figured something out soon. He clenched the canine in his fist hard enough to prick his skin. He’d had all his teeth replaced years ago, after losing a vicious fistfight with a particularly tenacious Supremacy assassin. The manufactured canine in his hand was almost as hard as a steel shiv.
Supremacy's Outlaw: A Space Opera Thriller Series (Insurgency Saga Book 3) Page 9