Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “You can pick up the check,” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  I decided not to go back to work, mostly because I didn’t want to. I’d only had the one drink, and it seemed like a good opportunity to hit the gym on company time, so I crossed the street and caught a two-thirds-full transport. I really do hate public transportation—mostly the public part—but it wasn’t practical to have a car in the city, and the 150 percent tax on them was prohibitive, even if I wanted one.

  I kept my head down, as usual, but I still felt the eyes on me as I worked my way to a seat in the middle of the vehicle. At least nobody said anything. I pulled out my device and once again hid my face in it to dissuade people from bothering me. I’m not sure what personality flaw made some people want to talk to other people on buses. Maybe I was too judgmental. I reached my stop without incident and made my way to the door. A dark-skinned woman with short hair in the front seat glanced up from her reader and met my eyes for a split second.

  I froze.

  She had large pupils, too dilated for the well-lit vehicle, and they were oval.

  Like a Cappan’s.

  Sweat started to pour from my body, and my hands shook. I couldn’t take another step.

  “Excuse me,” said a man from behind me. “If you’re not going to get off, can you let me past?”

  “What?” I stood there another second, then got control of myself and started moving. The woman smiled at me, her eyes normal. My mind was playing tricks on me. I knew it, but even knowing, I couldn’t stop shaking.

  I nearly ran from the stop to my door, fumbled with the security system for a moment before I could make it work, and stumbled through into the entryway. I grabbed a half-full bottle of whiskey off the counter and slumped to the floor. I sat there on the tile. I should have gotten up to get myself a glass, but I couldn’t, so I made do without and drank straight from the bottle.

  Chapter Five

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me about the eyes,” said Dr. Baqri. It wasn’t my normal appointment, but I figured that a total panic attack made a good reason for an emergency session.

  “They weren’t human,” I said.

  “I understood that part, but I’m not sure what it signifies. Was there an alien with you on public transportation?”

  I sighed. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I debated the value of sharing the story about hybrid Cappan-human combinations and how their eyes looked. I could tell her, if I wanted to. As my doctor, she couldn’t repeat anything I said. But she could also legally have me committed to a facility, and it would sound insane if I tried to explain it. “It triggered a flashback.”

  “Hmm. Is this the first time you’ve had a flashback while you’ve been awake?”

  “Yeah. Is that bad?” I asked.

  “Not bad. But it’s a change, so I do want to make note of it. It’s not uncommon for triggers in everyday life to set something off. Loud noises, shiny objects . . . lots of things can remind somebody of their time in combat.”

  “You think that’s what this was?”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Under normal circumstances I hated it when she turned a question around on me like that, but this time I gave it real consideration. It had been a quick thing on the bus. When I thought about it after the fact, it seemed more real than not, but not so much that I would swear to what I saw. “It could have been a trick of the light. A glare could have caught her eyes, maybe.” As I said it, the explanation took hold and I started to convince myself. It couldn’t have been a Cappan hybrid. Why would a hybrid be riding random public transportation? The woman on the bus hadn’t given any indication of being aware of me, other than a quick look.

  “We do need to consider that this could be a worsening of your condition. I know you’re against medication, but if you continue to have hallucinations—”

  “I hear you, Doc.”

  When I reached my office, Jacques Dernier was waiting outside my door, sharply dressed, his mouth in a tight frown that he flattened into a neutral look when he saw me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I had a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t know you were waiting or I’d have called.”

  “Totally okay,” he lied. “We just hadn’t talked about the assignment since the initial meeting, and I wanted to make sure we were synched.”

  “I’ve been reading the stuff you sent me.” I entered the office, gesturing for him to follow. “I’ve picked up a few leads from that, but I’m still assessing things.”

  “What kinds of leads?” he asked.

  “Nothing solid,” I said. “A couple names.”

  “I’ve been instructed to give this my full attention.” And I have to tell my boss something, he didn’t add.

  “Yeah. Okay.” I sat. “One of your articles had a name I knew, Warren Gylika. We had lunch. He’s well positioned over at Omicron, so I thought maybe he might know something.”

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “So that’s it?” he asked.

  I hadn’t trusted him at first out of principle, but now I started to genuinely dislike him. I didn’t know why I felt that way, but I trusted my gut. “He’s going to look around. But yeah, that’s it. These things take time. You never know what might lead to something important.”

  “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  “Right now, nothing. We’ll see if this lead pans out, and meanwhile I’ll keep looking to see if I can come up with anything else. If you find anything, let me know.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You too?”

  “Sure.” I looked at him until he finally took the hint and left my office.

  I didn’t have a great explanation for being an asshole. Maybe the woman on the bus with the eyes had me spooked and that had me off my game. Either way, I didn’t feel the need to apologize.

  After an hour or so in my office pretending to look for leads, I got up and walked around the building. I took a random path, checking behind me at regular intervals to make sure Dernier wasn’t watching. Silly, I know, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. After I assuaged my fear, I made my way down to the IT floor to see if Ganos had learned anything by asking around the hacker community. The elevator opened into a rat maze of cubicles that somehow seemed to suck the light out of the low-ceilinged room. Music played from somewhere, though not too loud, and I could swear that I smelled popcorn. I looked around for some sort of directory to tell me where to find Ganos but found nothing other than bare wall.

  “Can I help you?” A young man, maybe twenty, walked toward the elevator.

  “I’m looking for Ganos,” I said.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Smallish woman, spiky blue hair.”

  “Oh! You mean Maria. Right. She’s back toward that corner.” He gestured vaguely to the back and right of the room.

  “Thanks.” I headed in the direction he’d indicated.

  “No problem.” He raised his voice. “Suit on the floor!”

  The music cut off instantly, and it might have been my imagination, but it seemed to get a little brighter. Heads popped up from cubicles in a few places. I’d never been called a suit before, but it had a distinct “Officer on deck!” feel to it. After a minute I found Ganos standing at a raised desk that had three monitors on it, two of them open to confusing computer things that I didn’t understand. The other played a video of some sort of animal chasing its tail.

  “How’s it going, sir?”

  “Not bad. Should I call you Maria?” It felt wrong, but that’s what the other techie had called her.

  She scrunched her face up in a way that suggested she thought I might have lost my mind. “No, sir. That would be weird.”

  “I thought so too. Did you find anything on that thing we were talking about?” I asked.

  “It’s strange, sir. I didn’t find anything.”

  “How is that strange?”

  “Because I should have,” she sa
id. “At least something. When I say I found nothing, it’s like nobody knows it happened. Are you sure it did?”

  That brought me up short. I was pretty sure, but I didn’t have any actual facts other than what Javier had provided. Gylika hadn’t denied it, but he hadn’t really confirmed it, either. If he brought me in and had a different motive . . . I suppose Javier could have been planting a false flag to get me to look for vulnerabilities at Omicron, but I doubted that. “Pretty sure. Like eighty-five percent.”

  She shrugged. “I’d take a harder look at your sources. The other possibility seems unlikely.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. In my experience, unlikely never seemed to be quite as unlikely as I hoped.

  She paused. “No way does somebody in my world pull a miracle hack like that with zero noise. There’s too much credibility on the line. Even if the actual perpetrator didn’t claim it, somebody would. Which would be followed by a bunch of people telling them they’re full of shit. There’s an evolution with these things.”

  “Could they have covered it up? Or what if it wasn’t anybody from the community?”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s where it gets scary. The only people who could do this and keep it totally quiet . . . like I said, it seems unlikely.”

  “Go ahead. Finish that thought,” I prompted. “Who could do it?”

  “The government could,” she said.

  Ganos’s information weighed heavy on my mind and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. It had just passed two in the afternoon and I was debating knocking off for the day when my comm buzzed. I pressed the button. “Butler.”

  “Carl. This is Warren Gylika.”

  “Hey! I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “We should get together.” He paused. “I’ve got something interesting.”

  I didn’t need to check my calendar, which was empty. I’d have cleared it for this, regardless. Something in the tone of his voice triggered my instinct, and I suddenly found myself very alert. “Sure. Same place?”

  “That works. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. Three o’clock.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” I got up, grabbed my jacket and headed immediately for the elevator. It would take me twenty minutes to get there if I hit the transportation right, but I couldn’t tolerate sitting at my desk and waiting.

  I arrived at the restaurant twenty minutes early and made my way between the empty tables to the same place we’d sat the previous day. The same waiter took his time coming over, despite not having any other customers as it was the dead space between lunch and dinner.

  “What can I get you?” he asked.

  I debated a drink, but decided against it. “Coffee.” I glanced at my device, discovering that one minute had passed since the last time I’d checked. After three repetitions of that, I opened a news site and tried to skim the headlines. None of it registered. Finally three o’clock rolled around and the chime on the door sounded. I looked up to see a couple of university-age women, one with fair skin and pink hair, another who had darker skin and black hair shot through with purple highlights. I found myself looking at their eyes, but then forced myself to look past them for Gylika. He didn’t seem like the type to be late, though with city traffic and sometimes unpredictable transportation delays, it wasn’t anything to worry about.

  At fifteen past I started to worry. It began as almost a tickle in the back of my mind and grew from there. I called Gylika’s office, but it went straight to his message. It should have forwarded to his device if he was on the way. Maybe he was on the comm, and that was what was holding him up. Maybe his boss had called him in, and he hadn’t had time to send me a note.

  At three thirty I got up and started to pace around, and not just because I had to pee from drinking all that coffee. I tried his office again but got the same response. I went outside and walked a hundred meters or so in each direction, looking for something. Anything. I didn’t know what, but I couldn’t sit there. Finding nothing, I forced myself to go back inside. I drank another cup of coffee and waited until four before I finally gave up and left.

  It was a pleasant day, so I slung my jacket over my shoulder and walked the four kilometers home to avoid transportation. People still recognized me on the street, but usually I passed them before they had time to react. There hadn’t been any demonstrations against the destruction of Cappa in more than a year, so that didn’t worry me. At least not on this planet. I walked briskly, dodging in and out of the light afternoon crowd, some of whom had their faces hidden behind devices. I passed a shop that sold high-tech toys, and I paused for a moment to look at the merchandise in the window. I didn’t buy a lot of things, but I liked to see the coolest new gadgets.

  As I stopped, something caught my attention from the corner of my eye, back from the direction I’d come. Somebody else stopped at the exact same time, two stores back. It probably wasn’t anything, but Gylika not showing had me on alert. I risked a glance back for a split second. The person wore a light beige jacket with the hood up, which seemed out of place on a warm, sunny day. The jacket fit loosely enough where I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and while I thought I saw dark skin, I couldn’t be sure. My pulse started to pick up, but I took three deep breaths to calm myself. I couldn’t risk another episode like the previous day.

  I pretended to go back to looking at the merchandise in the display, then, without warning, I started walking. A light turned, and I darted across the six lanes of traffic just before the vehicles started moving, drawing a blaring horn from a private car. I stood on the far side of the road, scanning for the tan jacket. He—or she—had disappeared. They couldn’t have followed me across the road, and there weren’t so many people that I should have lost sight of Beige Coat. I stood there for a moment, unsure what to make of it, then I started for home again, paying too much attention to people behind me and almost bumping into someone twice. I took some random turns and walked a few blocks in the wrong direction to be safe. I pretended I could use the extra exercise, but it’s hard to lie to yourself.

  I waited several moments in the lobby of my building, watching the door. When nobody showed, I went upstairs, deactivated my security, and went inside.

  Chapter Six

  The buzzer at my door sounded, waking me from a restless sleep. Light streamed through the rectangular windows and my side of the building faced east, so I knew it was morning. I checked my device beside my bed: 7:30. Maybe I’d imagined it. I levered myself up out of my puddle of drool to a sitting position and stayed there a minute. The buzzer rang again.

  “Hold on,” I shouted and instantly regretted it, my hangover just bad enough to hurt. I didn’t expect anybody. I never expected anybody, and damn sure not at seven thirty in the morning. As far as I knew, nobody actually knew where I lived. I’d even lied to my employer about that, which is a necessary precaution for the infamous. On the way to the door I checked my desk drawer for the pistol I kept there. I didn’t take it out. Talca 4 law made guns illegal for private citizens, but I considered myself an unusual circumstance as half the galaxy hated me. That probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but I liked having it there. Not like someone could shoot me through the door. Not unless they brought a cannon. The door was bulletproof, pulse proof, and pretty much any other kind of proof money could buy. I’d even had the wall to the hallway reinforced. You can’t ever be too safe.

  “Video,” I said, activating the screen by the door so I could see my visitor in the hall. Two professional-looking people in cheap suits stood there, a dark-skinned, slightly overweight male standing about two paces behind a blonde woman with her hair up in a bun. “Yes?”

  “Colonel Butler?”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who is Butler?”

  “Colonel Butler, I’m Lieutenant Mallory. This is Sergeant Burke. We’d like to have a few words with you.”

  “Could you identify, please.”

  Mallory held her ID up to the scanner, then pr
essed her thumb on the pad. The screen on my side of the door gave me two green circles. “That good?”

  My system boasted voice-pattern recognition advertised to be able to detect a lie and state-of-the-art identification programming. It claimed a 100-percent accuracy rate. But I’d been seeing things I didn’t trust, so I hesitated. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Mallory looked around, as if checking for anybody in the hallway. “Can we come in? It’s rather important.”

  I paused a moment longer, then hit the authenticate button that deactivated the system. Mallory came in first, trailed by Burke.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I recognize you from the news, but for clerical purposes, please put your thumb here.” She held out a slim device, and I obliged. Half a second later it flashed green.

  “What’s this about?” I asked. Burke meandered a little bit, looking around, checking out my apartment while trying not to be too obvious. “Do you mind?” He shrugged—I decided I didn’t like him.

  “Colonel Butler, where were you yesterday?”

  “I was at work. I left between two and two thirty for a late lunch.”

  “What restaurant?” she asked.

  “A place called Gerard’s.”

  She glanced at her partner, who nodded as if he knew the restaurant, then looked back to me. “Do you know Warren Gylika?”

  My heart sped up until I could feel it in my neck. “Yes. He was supposed to meet me yesterday afternoon. Is he okay?”

  “At your late lunch?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “That wasn’t on his calendar,” added Burke.

  “No,” said Mallory. “Did you also meet with him the day before yesterday?”

  I glanced at Burke, then back at Mallory. “Yes. We had lunch. What’s this about?”

  “Was it a planned meeting or something spur of the moment?”

  “Why?”

  She fixed me with a stare for a few seconds. “It’s a simple question.”