by Jenn Lyons
explains certain elements of Shaniran’s behavior as well.”
“Too bad you don’t know anything about him more than his name,” Vanessa murmured sadly.
“I’m sure Zacharei Zaitsev isn’t his real name. People in occupations like ours change our names like other people change their clothes, and...” I stopped and sat there, blinking.
“What is it?”
“He was on a striketeam.”
“He was?” Vanessa paused. “Deep cover assignment?”
I nodded. “Before I was born. I doubt the Sarcodinay database would have any records of him, but the League might. Marduk. His call-sign was Marduk.”
ggg
“Who’s Marduk?”
Zach looks up from his computer screen at me. He reaches over and grabs the book out of my hands. “That’s not yours.”
“I was just looking at it!” I protest. “What was that?”
“It’s a book.”
I blink. “A bunch of paper stuck together at the ends?”
He sighs and turns towards me. “Yes, a book. That’s how books used to be made.”
“The writing looked like navakardos, but I can’t read it.”
“That’s because it was not written in navakardos, it was written in cuneiform. There are notable linguistic similarities.”
“What’s cuneiform?”
“A very old human kind of writing.”
“Wow.” I pause. “So who’s Marduk? That’s the only part I could read: ‘To Marduk, Love, Isis’.”
Zach is clearly exasperated, but I am too stubborn to stop pushing. “Marduk is me. It’s a name I used to go by a long time ago.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Really? Zacharei’s a much nicer name.”
“I’ve used a lot of names, Mallory. I’m sure you’ll do likewise one day. Names are quite flexible. You’ll change them more often than your clothes.”
I chew on my lip. “So who was Isis?” I look down at my feet. “Your wife?”
“None of your business,” he says. “Keepers, you’re nosy today. I should send you to Duncan and let you be his problem.”
“I’m just curious. What’s the book about?”
“It’s an old Terran poem about a god named Marduk. That’s why she gave it to me.”
“A god? You mean like the Keepers?”
“Something like that. Humans used to worship other gods—Jesus, Allah, Buddha. There have been many.”
“Isn’t it illegal to own a religious book? Other than the Tridates?”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “Plan on turning me in?”
I laugh. “No...”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I shrug. “Why call yourself Marduk? I mean, that’s a strange enough name, and it’s not your own, and the only people I’ve ever heard of who use names like that are—” I stop and swallow.
His stare is cold. “Are whom?”
I don’t answer. Rebels, I think, but I can’t bring myself to say it. Zach wears the Black. How can he have fought with the rebels?
We stare at each other, and I begin to feel frightened.
Finally, he turns away and stares back down at his book. He opens up the first page and looks at me. “Would you like me to read you a few pages? I doubt you’ll ever have much need to learn cuneiform, but some of the old mythologies are interesting.”
I nod and sit down next to him.
ggg
“Search for keywords: Zacharei Zaitsev, call-sign, Marduk. Additional keyword: Isis. He would have been listed as a member an older striketeam operating over fifteen years ago. When I knew him he had black hair and blue eyes but—” I gestured towards blond in the vid still, “—obviously that’s variable.”
“Have I mentioned just how much I love going through the League computer records? Nobody keeps track of anything. It’s like asking preschoolers for their notes on colonial councilmen during an election.”
“But did you find anything?”
“Several possibilities, but there are irregularities. Normal for League record-keeping. I have found mention of the name Marduk in 117 League files, 37 of which I can also correlate to the name Zacharei Zaitsev, 25 of which I can correlate to the name Isis. 24 of those records correspond to now-deceased members of the striketeam Les Dieux de Guerre, and 1 to a now-deceased member of the Crazy Ivans.”
“The Crazy Ivans?” And then I stopped, because I realized that Vanessa and I had made that proclamation simultaneously.
I looked at her questioningly, and she responded: “That’s the striketeam I was with. You?”
“The group that escorted me out of Kaimer. But I would have remembered if Zach was one of them.”
“According to this entry, he wasn’t. The match came up for a young man named Gabriel Zacharievich Zaitsev, first listed as team medic, then team sniper, for the Crazy Ivans, commanded by Black Ivan out of the St. Petersburg QZ. By Russian tradition, the name indicates that Zacharei Zaitsev was his father.”
“His code name?”
“Ded Moroz, at first,” Vanessa said, then explained: “He made sure all the bad boys and girls got lumps of coal for Christmas. Of course, he did have to explain to me what a lump of coal had to do with a diamond-ceramic bullet, and what Christmas was. It’s like a Keeper’s Holy Day. Really popular before the Plague.”
“Still is in a lot of Wilder communities. At first though? They changed his call-sign?”
Vanessa nodded. “About two months after I met him, Prisoner started calling him Riskovat because he was always coming up with these crazy plans that somehow worked out. After a while, the team just started to assume that Riskovat knew what he was talking about, no matter how crazy the idea sounded. Medusa? What happened to him?”
“The entire striketeam was killed in an ambush, six years ago.”
Vanessa’s face darkened, and she frowned at her lap.
“The other 24 hits?”
“All members of a striketeam called Les Dieux de Guerre, 23 of whom died in an ambush over a quarter century ago, including their medic, Isis. The only member who did not die in the ambush was the team sniper, Marduk.”
“He was a sniper too, huh? Like father, like son, I suppose.”
“Not entirely. Zacharei Zaitsev is listed as being the sole survivor of the ambush because he is listed as being the cause of it. He killed his own team.”
“Any vid images on file? Can we be sure it’s the same man?”
“Let me try—ah. Here we go. There was a vid-file logged with the son.” She showed a projection of a tall, dark haired man in black standing next to a young boy of perhaps eight or nine. The boy had pale white hair and the tan skin of many years spent out of doors, and his face could have done justice to any statue or painting of an angel that ever graced the inside of cathedral. The boy either had been crying or was about to cry, although he was fighting it. He was holding a sniper rifle awkwardly, and he looked unhappy. Zach, standing next to him, looked determined and no little bit angry, probably because he was being photographed. He wasn’t armed that I could see: I realized the boy was probably holding his father’s rifle. Zach didn’t look appreciably older than when I’d last seen him at the Kaimer School, and certainly no younger than in Medusa’s vid footage from North Point Station.
“It’s not dated, is it?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“He’s leaving.” Vanessa pointed to the holograph. “Look at their body posture, at the way your Zacharei’s looking off to the side, how uncomfortable they both look. He’s leaving that boy. This is a ‘something to remember me by’ photo. He left that kid with that photo and the gun, probably with whoever was forcing him to stand still for long enough to take the picture.”
“Zach never mentioned a son,” I said. “Is that the boy you remember from the Crazy Ivans?”
“Absolutely. I’d never forget that face, even if he’s just a baby in this shot. Poor thing.”
“So what happened? Why did Zach kill his own team?”
“It appears he was a double-agent whose true loyalty was always to the Sarcodinay.”
“I could have told you that. Who ran the analysis? There should have been a League analysis of the striketeam’s destruction. It’s standard operating procedure. That was Merlin’s job when the Fallen Angels went down. It’s how we met.”
“What I think is interesting is the way they were killed,” Medusa said. “They walked into an abandoned Sarcodinay research facility that was wired to explode when the computer systems were successfully brought back online.”
I felt a chill.
“The MO is identical to the destruction of the Crazy Ivans.”
“As well as the Fallen Angels,” I whispered. “Except I survived.”
“What the hell is going on here?” Vanessa said.
“I don’t know.” I started chewing on a nail. “Is there any striketeam associated with the raid on Kaimer that is still active?”
“No, but their deaths have been slightly more prosaic and attributable to normal attrition. Ten years is a long time for a striketeam.”
“So why these teams? Why kill them? Was it because of Kaimer somehow? Because of Zach?” I started to pace. “Do we have a more recent photo of Gabriel Zaitsev?”
“No, we do not. We can age this one if we need to.”
“Are you certain you don’t remember him from the trip out from Kaimer?”
“I was a scared fourteen-year-old girl and it was my first trip out at escape velocity, Vanessa. I was doing everything I could not to throw up on top of everyone and half that team was covered with face paint. He could have sat next to me the entire trip out and I wouldn’t remember him.”
Vanessa started to say something, then she blinked and did an almost visible