“Blood flow is more like it,” he said, embarrassing himself even as he knew she was right.
They’d agreed to move as quickly as possible without looking like they were rushing, but Saffia made sure everything she did kept all eyes on her. In the kilometer and a half they walked from his room to the east gate concourse, Edison counted five times someone crashed into something because their attention was on Saf and far from the immediacy of their own trajectory. It would have been amusing, if not for the real danger all around them.
Following their plan, the women stopped in front of a small shop just before the entrance to the East Main Promenade. He walked past them toward the Colorado Café scanning the area and trying to look like a tourist as he made his way across the open space.
Once he reached the door, if he didn’t turn around before he went in, it meant that he’d spotted no threats and then they’d both make their way together to join him.
“Pa, ya got paper? I owe ya one and got some BVB I’d steal ya,” the one with the gauged cheek said. Today in place of the fishing lure, what looked like a small optic with a blue light that blinked randomly stuck out of the hole.
“Yah, I still got paper,” he said. He glanced at his chrono and shook his head. “No time today.”
“Is true beans, but I can make it scootable for you,” she said, tilting her head to the side and pointing to her eye. She then glanced at the corner and nodded at the table he’d occupied when he’d been there before. Two men sat there watching the traffic out the window. They were both dressed like loaders and wearing PSE under their clothes.
She lowered her voice and said, “Darkhats. Looking for skin. Same bags you snagged last here nojo?”
“Frag me,” he said, glancing back at the door and thinking about running.
“Sweat less pa,” she said. “Skins are tight no? Like quick?”
He nodded. “A minute or less.”
“Go sit close, and I can keep eyeballs off the door. Bring your joy to the table, scan?”
He peeled a couple 100C out of his pocket and dropped them over the counter to her as he spun and headed to the table next to the men, praying that his scrabble of a beard would keep them from making him. He was only marginally less recognizable than Tana Drake. One of them glanced up as he walked up to the next table over and took his seat.
“Go sit somewhere else old man,” he said. “Table’s reserved.”
“Is not,” he said, kicking his voice up a half octave and trying to sound older than he was. “Is my usual sit.”
“Not today,” the guy said, turning to face him. “I said go somewhere else.”
“Hey hat, leave the coger a sit. He’s a regular,” the barista said. “He slips it to me some, ya scan?”
“A slick like you into fragging a dustpile?” the security agent said, screwing his face into a grimace. “I never made it you was kinky.”
“Nah, he slips me a C and I let him scan the tattys when we got no eyeballs gawking,” she said, coming around the corner of the counter with the porcelain cup and her top opened below her navel. Her tattys were hanging nearly free, and both units twisted to get a better look.
A split second later a beige tornado lunged through the door and the security agents were flying around the room like they’d been caught in a blender. Pneumo-fluid from their exosuits sprayed the floor in equal measure with blood from their rapidly disintegrating bodies. Before Edison recognized what had happened, they were both lying on the floor, either unconscious or dead and Saffia was standing there grinning like a cat that had just stomped the shit out of an unsuspecting mouse.
“Nice moves,” the barista said, leaning against the wall and still holding the cup and saucer with an unnatural calm. “You’re a plusser, no? First one I’ve seen in the wild.”
“Shhh,” Saffia said. “You got a mulch box in back? I’ll stuff ‘em if you rinse out here.”
“It’s gonna need more than a C-note,” she said. “But that one’s still leaking.” She pointed at one of the two hats who was barely breathing.
“I’ll fix him, you just watch Tana,” Saf said. “Eddy, can you tip the nice woman? But we have to hurry, we’ve only got twenty-four minutes.”
“What dafuq is a plusser and what the hell happened?” he asked as his brain finally caught up with the reality of what he’d just seen.
“Edison,” Tana said quietly. “Come over here beside the door and just try to ignore them for now. I told you there was a lot more going on than was safe for you to know.”
Advisory Committee Chamber: Galileo Station:
“I have taken your concerns to Director Tomlinson himself and he assures me he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Carmen Ambrose,” Lassiter said. He sat where Tomlinson would have normally been, but since he was running late, the responsibility for managing the meeting was his until the Director arrived.
“That’s supposed to make me feel better,” Cartwright challenged.
“He has access to information that proves he was not involved,” he said, refusing to allow his frustration to show.
“What kind of information?” Graison asked. “Surely he can’t expect us to take his word at face value.”
Lassiter sighed and drummed his fingers on the table. “Detailed computer records. Odysseus can access any surveillance system in Galileo and they’ve reviewed these records and determined that it was an unfortunate accident.”
“Who’s Odysseus?” Jahen Tanner asked, her eyes sparking. She was the scientist that would have followed Arun Markhas as the next chancellor of DevCartel.
“‘What is Odysseus?’ would be the correct question,” he said. “It is a collective Artificial Awareness that now runs the station’s computer infrastructure. It assumed control on the day the old Union collapsed.”
“A collective AA?” Dr. Tanner asked. “I’ve heard of it.”
“You have?” Paulson asked, leaning forward and studying her face.
Dr. Tanner cleared her throat and shook her head. Her skin faded past gray to white as she looked down at the back of her hands. “I was approached fifteen years ago by an independent group of scientists that called themselves Sentinel. They wanted me to participate in a development program they called Odysseus. It was an advanced non-hybrid AA, but it sounded too strange to be worth my time.”
“Whyso?” Graison asked.
“They were creating an intellectual proxy to handle a theoretical encounter with an Extrasolar Intelligence,” she said, glancing up at him and shrugging.
“You’re saying Tomlinson and his Sentinel Group have released a god-level AA on us to protect us from an ESI?” Cartwright asked, laughing. “I think I’d rather take my chances with an alien superpower, thank you.”
“I did not release it,” Tomlinson said, appearing at the door unexpectedly.
“If you didn’t, you expect us to believe this secret society did because we’ve encountered aliens?” Graison asked, turning his eyebrow up to full to cynic.
“You will believe what you want, but I can’t confirm that,” he said.
“You also aren’t denying it either,” Tanner said quietly.
“The Sentinel Group is a rumor and nothing more,” he said. “We have more important things to work on than chasing conspiracy theories.”
“If this is the same Odysseus, it has to be Sentinel,” she said. “And they are real.”
“I don’t know,” Tomlinson said. “The AA does call itself Odysseus, but to my knowledge, Sentinel is nothing more than a ghost story. You are a scientist Dr. Tanner. It would serve you better to stick to facts.” He shook his head dismissively.
He wasn’t in the room when she mentioned being contacted, so he doesn’t realize that she knows better, Paulson thought, observing the exchange carefully. I wonder if what she knows is more than she’s said.
Tsiolkovskiy Freeport East:
“You owe me some answers,” Edison said as he and Tana stood inside the now shut and locke
d front door of the Colorado Café. “You’ve made me party to at least two counts of murder on security types, and I don’t even know what the hell we’re fighting for.”
“How far down the rabbit-hole do you want to go?” she flipped her hood off her head and stared into his eyes. “That’s not a rhetorical question. There are layers of story here that I don’t think you’ve ever imagined.”
“Let’s start with what a plusser is and why a fragging barista in the armpit of the moon knows about it, but I’ve never heard the term before.”
“It’s a slango phrase for an augment,” she said. “All the cartels have special projects divisions where they do research and development work. Augments are one of WellCartel’s projects.”
“Augment?”
“As in genetically enhanced,” she said.
“So, Saffia is your bodyguard?” he asked.
“No, she’s actually my wife,” she said. “We’ve been married nine years. She just happens to be one of my crèche augments.”
“And why does cheek-girl here know about this?” he asked.
“My name Mr. Wentworth, is Kylla,” the barista said from across the room where she was running a cleaning bot through the process of sanitizing the floor.
“Kylla is from one of the other projects we ran, where we modified the genetics of pre-existing organisms. We had some success with the program, but we made the decision about fifteen years ago to start from scratch, since we’d reached the upper limit of how far we could stretch re-engineering already viable subjects.”
“You’re saying that Kylla is engineered too?” he whispered, almost embarrassed to ask.
“Yes, I am,” she said, once again from across the room. She’d shoved the bot into its locker and was bringing the coffee cup over to where they stood. “I’m nowhere near as slick as pretty-girl though.”
“When we closed the alpha-level program, we couldn’t just terminate the subjects, so we turned them loose. In exchange for being our eyes and ears in the world, we helped get them situated.”
Tana took the cup and smelled it. “BVB. I think Kylla likes you.”
“Pa’s cute for a dustpile,” she said, winking in a way that made Edison blush.
“I think so too,” Saffia said, reappearing from the back where she’d gone to dispose of the bodies. She’d peeled her thinskin down to her waist and walked out topless and carrying her wig. “I messed up my thin playing with the hats, can you grab me another one out of the bag? Maybe the blue one this time.”
Tana wrinkled her nose as she pulled her wig off too. “Smells like a dead beaver,” she said, grabbing her bag and tossing Saf a new outfit.
Shimmying the rest of the way out of the thinskin she was wearing, Saf tossed it and both wigs into a cycler-bin. Edison spun toward the door, ostensibly to make sure nobody was walking by the windows and going to get an eyeful, but in reality to keep from being overwhelmed by the surreal turn his world was taking.
“A lack of modesty must be a trait engineered into these augments,” he said under his breath as he forced himself to turn back around.
“In a practical sense, modesty wastes time and resources,” Saf said, shocking him that she’d heard from fifteen meters.
“Truth. Edge is in shock value, scan?” Kylla said, shaking her tattys before slipping her neckline back to its more modest position. Edison’s eyes followed her hand before he realized she was right. Her breasts held his attention. What had happened to the hats told him that it could be dangerously unhealthy.
“It’s not your fault that you find Saf and Kylla distracting,” Tana said. “One of the unexpected byproducts of the genetic engineering was that almost every modification we did, regardless of intent, altered the pheromone production of the subjects. They’re broadcasting chemistry that makes sure you have no choice but to notice.”
“I don’t know if that makes me feel better or more like an idiot puppy,” Edison said.
“I like puppies,” Saf said as she settled herself into her new outfit. She slipped past Edison to stare out the door, brushing the only soft parts on her whole body against him as she did. He noticed. It didn’t help that he knew he couldn’t stop himself.
“I hate to remind everyone, but we’ve only got sixteen minutes before we’re late,” Saffia said. “What’s the topo?”
“Got four darkhats in uglies. Two parked by the newsie, and two looking at grass under the tree by the gate,” Kylla said. “All skinned in heavy PSE and carrying pop-shooters under their grubs. Expect they’re comlinked. The squished ones did a status every fifteen with somebody past my ears. So will be more.”
“How good are your ears?” Tana asked.
Kylla shrugged. “A whisper at 800 meters in the quiet.”
“So the boss is not in the commons,” Saffia said. “Means if we can get a jump, we can clear the gate before he can catch us.”
“Ya. Good idea you make feet soonest. They’ve not gone twitchy yet, but will get stale quicklike,” Kylla said.
Saffia pulled the door open and walked across the open like she owned the world. She angled toward the first two security units, approaching them from behind their field of view. It was two hundred meters away but as she approached Edison could tell she switched from purposeful, to seductive modes.
“Obviously she’s got a plan,” he said. He was determined to pay closer attention this time if for no other reason than the shock value had diminished. Slightly.
She slipped between the two men and the screen. She stopped, facing away from them and waited for them to ask her to move. It took almost a half minute before one of them decided that the news was more important than the view she provided. Spinning around to face them, she said something that Edison couldn’t hear, and then she squeezed onto the bench between them, putting her arms casually over the backrest.
Within a second both men were looking down into their laps and she stood back up, turning to face the Café before pirouetting off toward the tree.
“She says the first two hats are down,” Kylla said. “She wants you both to make for the gate casual-style so you don’t get there before she whacks the next pair.”
“Ears?” Edison asked.
She nodded and winked. “Scram now. Pa make to look by me on your next swing. I do like dustpiles, true beans.”
Tana flipped her hood back up and tucked the edges behind her ears. She looped her arm around his and pulled him out the door, leaning her head close to his as they tried to look like a couple on a casual stroll across the commons. “Down boy,” she said. “She’d play a trifle rough for you.”
“She’s safe,” he said. “I don’t think I could get past a woman with an inspection port for her dental work.”
“You know she heard that don’t you?” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Kylla standing in the door waggling a finger in his direction.
They’d just passed midway when Tana tensed. “Trouble,” she whispered. “The second pair made Saf and one’s pulled his gun.”
He looked around. They weren’t line of sight on the trees.
“She’s trying to talk him down,” she said, hauling him forward with a new sense of urgency.
“How the hell do you … oh you’ve had an earjob too?”
“Yah, but nowhere near as much as Kylla and Saf,” she said. “I was a politician so enhanced hearing was not an asset I really wa—” The loud snap of a real gun going off stopped her in mid-thought. It rolled strangely across the commons and somewhere in the distance, screaming answered the echo.
“Shit,” she hissed. “Saf says we need to run for the gate.” She took off at a dead sprint, dragging him by the hand as she dashed toward the TFC security checkpoint.
As they rounded the far side of the viewscreens, he could see Saf running toward the gate. She was limping and he saw a dark smear on the leg of her thinskin.
A second later a swarm of guards appeared from inside the gate and fanned out across th
e lawn. Even in his headlong run he noticed the oddness in that none of the guards were taking aim at the three people charging toward them. One of them stood waving his arms like he was beating an invisible horse, urging them to faster action. Running past the armed ring, he heard the man with the imaginary animal holler, “We didn’t think you’d be bringing a firefight with you.”
“Wasn’t the plan,” Edison shouted back, not slowing until they were well past the massive doors to the base concourse.
Tana dropped his hand and bounded over to where Saffia stood breathing like she hadn’t just run a 500 meter dash across a battlefield, with a bullet hole in her leg. Dropping to her knees, Tana tore the blood soaked thinskin from Saf’s ankle to the top of her hip, pressing her hand against the wound. He could see Saf flinch, but otherwise she didn’t react. Spinning her around, she examined the exit wound. Apparently satisfied that it wasn’t as serious as it looked, Tana stood back up and crushed her wife into a tight embrace. “Why did you let them shoot you damn it?”
Nodding in Edison’s direction, she grinned. “Like he said, it wasn’t the plan.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Office of the Senior Advisor to the Director: Galileo Station:
“I am sorry sir but somehow Tana Drake has eluded custody,” Ralf Gaelsen said. He was looking down at the tabletop in front of him and not making eye contact with the screen.
“Excuse me?” Lassiter growled. “How did you let that happen?”
“We’re not sure what occurred yet,” he said. “We’re reviewing all the video we can get our hands on, but we don’t know what went wrong. What I do know is that I have four men dead and two that appear to have vanished entirely. As near as we can tell from the video we’ve collected, the woman traveling with Drake simply executed them slick and fast. She took all four out in under a minute.”
“Was she a bodyguard?” he asked.
“Actually, she might be Saffia Drake,” Gaelsen said, opening what appeared to be a body optic image of the woman as she approached one operative. Paulson recognized her from state affairs they had attended together, although he didn’t remember her appearing so, physically fit. “We don’t have any images of her actually attacking, but we know from civilian reports of gunfire and a blood trail at the scene, at least one of them tried to defend himself. He wounded her before she took him down.”
Fulcrum of Odysseus Page 10