by David Ryker
I unzipped the bag and paused. There was a set of clothes and shoes, a stack of Credit notes bound by a rubber band, a jacket, Federation ID card with his picture, but a name that wasn’t Barva’s on it, and a pistol laid on top of a paper file. I reached for the pistol and lifted it out, feeling the weight of a full magazine. It was loaded and there was a round chambered. This was a go-bag. He was planning to leave, and in a hurry. And whoever he was planning to get away from he thought he might have to shoot. I pushed the gun into the jacket and went for the file instead, pulling it out and standing up. Everett was still looking at the gun and Fish was still in the dead guy’s pockets.
I flicked the front page open and froze. There, staring up at me, was a photo of the last person I expected to see. It was a printed photograph of a woman — she was young, blond, with half her hair tied back, some of it spilling over her face, obscuring one of her bright blue eyes and the smattering of shrapnel scarring that ran from her neck over her jaw and up her cheek. My blood ran cold as I stared at her. She was wearing Federation fatigues, standing among three other people who were blocked from view by black rectangles. She was holding a rifle up, leaning it against her shoulder, a smirk of victory painted on her lips. She was standing in what looked like a warzone. Buildings were smoking behind her. The photograph was a file photo from the Federation, that much I could see. Something clandestine — the identities of the others had been redacted by the look of it, but there was no mistaking her. This was taken after some battle, or some mission, somewhere very far away. She didn’t look like a fresh recruit, like she’d told me she had been for the Federation, back on Draven. She looked seasoned, older somehow, but just as youthful, reveling in a hard-earned victory with her unit.
My throat was dry. I’d let her go on Draven because I thought she was a nobody, but here she was again. The file was weighty in my hands, filled with whatever else Barva had found out, but I couldn’t stare at anything but her face. She was involved in this — in Iskcara skimming, but how? What the hell was going on? I knew the Free had a hand in this — they were the chief suspects in it — but her? A lowly Free grunt? Except she wasn’t just that — couldn’t be. But hell, she was just a few years older than me — and yet the date displayed on the photograph was almost a hundred years ago. My mind was spinning. It couldn’t be her — it had to be a doppelganger, or… Or something.
I tore my gaze from it and looked at Everett, her face grave.
“Everett,” I croaked, barely able to muster a sound.
She slowly looked at me. “Yeah?”
“This is… It’s, uh…” I shook my head, gathering my thoughts. “The Free are…”
“It’s worse than that,” she muttered. “This is a Federation standard issue Goze and Hanson — this is the pistol that the Federation supplies all Civic Guards with, right across the galaxy.”
Fish stood up, something in his hands, and confirming Everett’s observation held up a badge that had the words “Telmareen Civic Guard” inscribed underneath the Federation’s logo.
“This guy was a fucking Telmareen Guard,” Everett said, drawing a long breath, “which means that the Guard weren’t just getting bribed to look the other way. They’re in on whatever the hell’s going on here.”
I nodded, piecing together what I could. “And the Free are definitely pulling the strings.”
Everett swore. “Come on, we need to get back.”
Fish pocketed the badge and I dropped the file back into the duffle bag and zipped it up. We all took off at pace toward the door with Everett in front, leading the way.
Halfway there, she stopped, held her finger to her ear, and screwed her face up. “What?”
Someone was talking to her. Must have been Volchec.
“Jesus Christ,” Everett mumbled, taking her hand away and turning to us, eyes wide.
“What is it?” I asked, my voice tremoring against my beating heart.
She swallowed. “They’ve found Alice.”
19
When we got back to the hideout, everyone was abuzz. I say everyone — it was just Mac and Volchec — but they were moving around fast enough to make the room seem small.
Everett pushed through first, Fish after and me behind. She opened the door and slipped in out of the drizzle and into the musty interior of the warehouse. I’d wanted to catch her and pull her aside to tell her about the blonde, but she’d been motoring, and I’d not had the right words. I was still reeling from it. I swallowed and ducked into the room, still wondering how I was going to explain it all. I had to. It would come out of the woodwork if not, and if it did, then it’d look bad. I just had to find the right time.
The table that Volchec had been leaning on was now cleaned off, and on it was a laptop. In the middle of the table was one of the projectors that had shown us the hologram of Telmareen back on the ship. She was typing into it, and the projector was buzzing as she did, the image above it just a cluster of light, morphing and changing as she input the info. She sucked in a breath and hammered down on a key. The image spun and then transformed into a building. One that was unmistakable. It was the Telmareen Guard Tower. I swallowed and paused, looking at it.
Everett circled the table and pulled out the pistol and the badge we’d lifted off the dead guy and put them on the table for Volchec to look at.
I kept my fist closed around the duffle. Mac approached, seemingly having shaken off his catatonic slump, and reached out for it. I pulled it away instinctively and he stopped, looked at me like I had two heads and then grabbed it. I let it go, realizing that it wasn’t incriminating — it had a picture of someone in it that no one else had ever seen. I swallowed and forced myself to remember that. I could let this ride and just come out with the information — which was probably negligible — when the time was right.
Mac dumped the bag on the table and unzipped it. Everett had radioed ahead as we’d headed over, filled Volchec in on what had gone down, and had in turn been brought up to speed on the Alice situation.
She’d been processed and checked in at the Telmareen Guard Tower in our zone. And that meant that she was alive, and in holding. Though we didn’t know what state she was in. It’d taken a lot longer than we’d have thought, but there was conjecture as to why that was. The consensus was that they’d questioned her off the record as to what her intentions were, who she was working for, and why the hell she’d tried to steal an Iskcara shipment, but that they couldn’t not have her processed, or it would raise some flags. She was, after all, now a criminal in the Federation’s eyes. What we couldn’t work out, though, was how the Free fitted into it all. The Guard were a subsidiary of, and controlled by the Federation, so for them to be working with the Free made no sense. It meant the operation ran a hell of a lot deeper than we first thought, and that the corruption could run who knows how high in the Federation order. Parts of the puzzle were still missing, though. It wasn’t fitting all together yet. The Free were behind the skimming — that much was now certain. Some of the Guard were in on it too — that much we could pretty much guarantee. We guessed that they weren’t all in on it, though, as they were still keeping up appearances. They had processed Alice, after all. If they hadn’t — dead or alive — it could have meant the Free were in total control of the Telmareen Guard. There’d been a time delay between her arrest and processing, but what had happened during that time, we couldn’t say for sure.
And the second question — the one on everyone’s minds — was that if the Free were controlling the Guard, and they were, and were therefore behind the skimming of the Iskcara, then why the hell had we been hired to steal a shipment of the stuff they already had control over?
The file slapping on the top of the table jolted me back to reality and I stepped forward, next to Mac, across from Volchec and Everett, their features swimming beyond the hologram.
“Son of a bitch,” Mac mumbled, opening the file and staring at the photograph. He scoffed and then pushed the file toward Volchec.
“Jesus Christ,” Volchec said, rubbing her forehead. She spun the folder around and slid it over to Everett. She smirked at it and shook her head.
I was missing something. “What is it?”
Volchec dragged it back in front of her and lifted the photograph out, unclipping it from the top of the page. “This fucking bitch.” She laughed, shaking the image. “We thought she was dead. She’s been listed deceased for almost ten years.”
“Deceased?” I croaked, trying not to give anything away. “Who is she?” I asked, hoping that they’d say ‘just some Free rebel,’ but knowing they wouldn’t.
Volchec bit her lip for a second, collecting her thoughts, or maybe deciding whether or not she should tell me. “Her name is Kat Fox.”
“Cat-fox?” I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know if it was a moniker, or just a joke.
“No, not cat, like one of those four-legged furry things — Kat, as in Katherine. Second Lieutenant Katherine Fox. Or at least that’s what she was before she deserted, killed an entire battalion, and then made off with just about a quadrillion credits worth of steel and munitions.” Volchec spat the words, shaking her head. “She’s been a thorn in the Federation’s side for the last century, and ten years ago, we killed her.”
“I’m sorry, did you say century?” My brain stuttered. She looked barely older than me.
Volchec nodded. “Yeah.” She drew a long breath. “This fucking bitch,” she said, grimacing. She exhaled, leaned forward so her head was nearly in the hologram, and slapped the photograph down on the table, pinning it under her palm. “Katherine Fox enlisted in the Ground Corps a hundred years ago, sailed through basic, and showed such aptitude and skill that she was fast tracked into our special forces division. She was doing extremely well — one of the best we’d ever had — and even after being promoted, she stayed in the field. We wanted to get her into the training side of things. She had a way about her, a natural instinct. Speed, strength, cunning. She was one of the most ruthless Federation Special Corps Operatives we ever had. A true asset that racked up hundreds, if not thousands of kills while on active duty. Most of the missions were clandestine, redacted, never sanctioned — almost like this one,” she grunted, shaking her head. “This bitch was a cold-blooded killer, and she saved hundreds of thousands of Federation lives with the preventative work that she did, right up until she took them all back.”
I tried to stop myself from asking about the century thing, as I was guessing she’d come back to it — or at least I hoped she was going to. “Okay. And then what happened?”
“She was on a mission, about eight years into her service — a Federation transport convoy, top secret. An automated, propelled construction plant, a lot like the one we stopped off at — except that was the first one put into production. Before that, they were all manned. It was set to change the face of the war, which at that point, was raging. The Free were hacking us to pieces on every offensive and we couldn’t produce enough steel and ship it to them in time. But what if there was a plant that could produce thousands of units and ship itself to where it was needed most? It would have turned the tide of war.”
I could see where this was going, but Volchec was in story mode, so I didn’t interrupt. Mac, Fish, and Everett just waited patiently for me to catch up. They obviously knew this tale.
“So,” Volchec said, “as that whole section of the station was being moved — towed through space, with a Federation escort, that’s when she struck. She killed the entire crew of the fighter ship she was on, assumed control, got aboard the Class Two destroyer that was escorting the space station, killed more than thirty trained crew members as she made her way to the reactor, outfitted it with explosives, then got up to the bridge using her clearance, killed the command there, overrode the security protocols, targeted every ship in the convoy, blew them all out of the sky with a single synchronized shot, and then disabled the controls before hijacking the tow vessel. When the crew tried to regain the bridge, the reactors blew and set off a chain reaction that destroyed the entire ship, along with everyone on board. More than four thousand men and women lost their lives that day. And by the time we managed to scramble any sort of support, she was long gone, along with our production plant. She’d planned it all — long before she even enlisted. It’d always been her plan, right from the very start. Eight fucking years as a plant.”
I swallowed, and when I was sure she was finished, I spoke. “She did that all on her own?”
“Like I said, this is one special bitch.” She scoffed. “Fucking Tenshi.”
“Tenshi?” I asked, feeling that it was the next story I was going to hear. Volchec had a knack for this kind of thing, trailing from one narrative into the next, but Everett’s patience wasn’t quite as hardwearing.
“Tenshi,” Everett said, cutting in, “are a hybridized race of humans.”
“Hybridized?”
“It means mixed.”
“I know what it means,” I sighed. “I just meant hybridized with what?”
“The Tenshi are a result of years and years of experimentation. When humans went interstellar after the Federation made first contact with humans, in a bid to save them from a half-destroyed Earth—”
“The expansion,” I said, nodding. “Yeah, I know the histories.”
“Well, then you know about the Tenshi,” she said sharply, folding her arms.
“I— no. I don’t. Sorry.” I was just on edge. Now it was going to be bad when they found out I’d let a war-criminal who’d killed thousands of Federation soldiers go free… Twice. “Go on, please.”
Volchec was studying the photograph, seemingly okay with Everett explaining. But she looked pissed off — she really did bleed blue and white. This was a hundred years ago, but I could tell how angry she was with Fox. Everett’s jaw flexed as she tried to see what was going on in my head before she continued. “The expansion — right — well, the Federation offered up a long list of colony planets that we could head off to, all across the universe. Some went here, some went there — some mixed with other species, others, not so much. Some nations and powers maintained, and still do, their autonomy, preserving their races and bloodlines, beliefs, values — that sort of thing. Hell, you ever eaten Chinese food? It’s the best—”
“Everett, get back on point,” Volchec said out of the corner of her mouth. She’d resigned herself to looking through the file more thoroughly.
“Right,” Everett said. “Yeah — so by the time the Federation rocked up and tossed us a lifeline, there was one nation called Japan, who were actually pretty close to getting the issue solved—”
“And fixing the Earth?” This was the first I’d heard of that. As far as I was aware, the Federation had been watching us for millennia, waiting for us to evolve out of our own system, and then they’d scoop us up — only we decided we wanted to fuck the planet before we managed to do it, so they moved their timetable up, and good thing too. We’d have been a dead race otherwise.
“Fixing us,” Everett said. “The Earth was too hot, volatile — the oxygen levels too low, the carbon levels too high — residual radiation and pollution levels through the roof…”
“So what was their plan?”
“To modify humans to be able to withstand it. To improve us — let us breathe off less air, survive off less food, be stronger, faster, smarter, more longevity. To drive evolution on a timescale that nature just didn’t have.”
“So they managed it, with these... Tenshi, I’m guessing?”
“Not quite, but once we got off-planet, they retained that goal. They wanted to chase perfection, and with the onset of the Federation’s technology, as well as the availability of just about a thousand compatible humanoid races, it became a real possibility for them. Fox is one such descendant of the resulting experiments.” She took a breath and let it sink in. “They wanted to retain our humanity, so it was a little of this, and a little of that, and some natural breeding here and a little bit of geneti
c fiddling there, getting everything perfect. The Federation caught wind of it a while into their ‘Breeding Program,’ and considering it wasn’t consensual on the part of all those involved, they tried to shut it down.”
Mac piped up, making a finger gun. “Cue the underground genetics rings.”
“Right.” Everett nodded. “Even after the Federation shut it down — because hell, they probably just didn’t want a genetically superior race challenging their authority—”
“Watch it,” Volchec growled, the Federation logo on her arm bright in the glow of the hologram.
“Sorry.” Everett held her hand up. “Anyway, there were rumors it was ongoing, and that it was just happening more in secret. Of course, hating the Federation, they then sought allies elsewhere—”
“The Free,” I muttered, folding my arms.
“Got it in one. The Free, who are all a bit more ‘do what you like so long as you’re not hurting anyone,’ approved of it — anything to get a leg up on the Federation.” She paused and glanced at Volchec to see if there was any reaction coming. She either ignored it or had nothing to say. Everett went on. “So they opened up the process, invited along as many races and minds as they could, got it all working well, and then—” She clapped. “That was it. Perfection.”
“Fox?”
Everett shrugged. “Guess so — the Tenshi. Means ‘angel’ in ancient Japanese. They look like humans, but they live for centuries, are faster and stronger than us, smarter, heal better. They’re immune to disease and everything else. If you ever came across one, you’d know.” She laughed. “But the Federation didn’t back then — they thought they’d crushed the experiments, put it all to rest — they weren’t able to scan for something they weren’t looking for, and with the Free’s support, they re-jigged the way their biometric profiles read, showing them as human to the standard Federation scanners at the time. That was the Free’s offer, I guess — carry on your experiments, but when you get it right, we use them to fuck with the Federation — and, boy, didn’t they just. Fox got in — undercover, of course, for the Free — worked her way up, gained our trust, and then…” She made a stabbing motion toward Volchec’s back.