by Gem Jackson
“This job you were doing. Tell me about it.”
“I had this ambassador,” said Leon. “Or a diplomat. He was something like that. He was supposed to go from Earth to Titan but after everything happened with Lancaster Orbital, you know about that, right?” The Captain indicated he did and Leon continued. “Well, he wanted to get aboard a bigger ship. I don’t know why. We rendezvoused with an APSA ship called the Aggressive not far from Earth. The diplomat disembarked, and I was ordered to pilot the ship to Ceres, then on to Titan.”
“The diplomat. What was his name?”
“McVeigh, I think. Forest McVeigh.”
“And what did he look like?” asked the Captain. He was intrigued now.
“Tall. Slim. In his fifties. He swore a lot,” said Leon. “It made me very uncomfortable.”
“And he is now aboard the Aggressive, correct?”
“I think so,” responded Leon.
“Thank you, Mr Wood.” The Captain got swiftly to his feet and marched out of the room, leaving Leon to wonder what he had just said to make him so cheerful.
“I don’t like this,” he said to himself. “I need to get out. I need to get out.” Nobody replied, but the Captain’s pen stared at him. It was still on the table. Against every ounce of common sense and as subtly as he could manage, straining the handcuffs, Leon reached forward and took it. He slipped it into his trouser pocket and immediately regretted stealing it. What if he were caught? What if the Captain returned to get the pen? He tested the restraints again and fidgeted. The handcuffs clattered noisily against the chair. He wasn’t going anywhere until someone unlocked him. One of the security guards crashed through the door.
“Stop messing around with those cuffs. Do you want them tighter, piss-sticks? Just fucking settle down.” Leon sank back into the chair and looked around again to fend off the ever intrusive thoughts about his own torture and death.
“Mr Starflight,” the Captain strode back into the room and stood behind the empty chair on the other side of the table. “You have a visitor.”
Kicking and struggling the whole way, Murray was dragged into the room. Leon felt his cheeks turning red. He hadn’t struggled. He had been walked in without any commotion. Was he that much of a pushover?
It took three guards to wrestle Murray onto the chair and cuff him into place. He had been gagged again. Why did Murray always manage to get himself gagged? Was he a biter? Did he spit? Or was he just that obnoxious when restrained?
“I thought you might like to see this as the two of you are acquaintances.” The Captain took a fistful of Murray’s hair and idly twisted his head around as he cried out in pain. “There is a conflict approaching Mr Wood. A conflict that will split the Solar System down the middle. In this conflict, you are either with me or against me. You should know what it means to be on the wrong side.”
Leon tilted his head. He opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come.
“You’re confused, of course. All in good time. For now, consider this encouragement to remain on my good side.” The Captain turned to the guard nearest to the door. “Bag? And close that thing too.” The guard dutifully handed over a white bag and closed the door with a crash that bounced around the room. The bag looked organic; possibly cotton or silk. It was rectangular with a drawstring at one end. Without ceremony, the Captain yanked it over Murray’s head and pulled the drawstring tight across his throat. He bent down, close to Murray, and placed him in a firm headlock. Leon watched his friend thrash and twist in his restraints. “Hush, young man. Hush. This is an honour. An honour we reserve for our foes. No medical unit for you. As an enemy combatant, you deserve more than that.” Straightening back up, he glared at the guards. “You deserve much more. Like spies and traitors.” Leon felt like the temperature in the room had dropped below zero. Even Murray was still. One of the guards shifted awkwardly.
“Mr Wood, watch closely and learn. This is a game we call red bag. Six,” he shouted at one of the guards. Leon couldn’t tell which, he was too focused on Murray. Was he crying? “The feather, please?”
The feather, it turned out, was a hammer. A steel hammer. Quite ordinary. The kind that one of the sparkies in electrical might use to pry open a panel or knock a bit of metalwork back into place. The guard dropped it onto the table with a crash, sending both Leon and Murray into a paroxysm of flailing in their respective seats. The others laughed. The Captain picked up the hammer.
“Here’s how it works. First, I ask: red bag? We check whether we have a white bag or a red bag,” the Captain leaned in close to the bag and shook his head theatrically. “No, not red bag. White bag.”
Murray was breathing heavily now. He was panicking. Whether from claustrophobia or anticipation of what was to come Leon couldn’t tell, but it was upsetting to witness. Then then the Captain punched Murray hard on his forehead. The Captain and the guards laughed again.
Murray groaned. “Phun oh ah phitch!”
“Red bag?” The Captain checked again. “No, white bag.”
Leon saw Murray tense for the next blow, tucking his jaw into his chest, twisting randomly to try to protect himself. The Captain shook his head in pity. He flipped the hammer a quarter-turn in his hand to present its flat side and smashed Murray’s face square on where Leon imagined the bridge of Murray’s nose would be. Alongside the wet crack of the impact Leon heard himself scream. The guards roared in approval. Murray’s own cry was lost in the cacophony.
“Red bag?” The Captain’s eyes shone. Blotches of crimson blossomed across the front of the bag. “No, still white bag.”
Murray rattled his restraints helplessly, caught between heaving, fearful sobs and hyperventilating.
“Four, you’re next, take the feather and give him a tickle.” The Captain passed the hammer to a guard who took it and lashed out viciously across Murray’s lower jaw.
“Red bag?” asked Four.
“No,” replied the Captain, pointing to the expanse of white material remaining. “White bag.”
And so it continued. They each took turns, the Captain and the three guards, beating Murray around the head. Sometimes they used the hammer. Sometimes they punched or slapped him. At some point Murray stopped making noises. Not long after, he stopped moving altogether. Throughout, Leon cried and screamed hysterically. It was unreal.
Eventually a silence descended across the room. They stood motionless. Leon sat. Murray slumped unnaturally in the chair; misshapen and limp. Out of the quiet emerged a wet, rhythmic dripping from the bag onto the floor.
“Red bag?” asked one of the guards. It was Six. Leon knew them now. They were ghouls. Six, Four and Ten. He wouldn’t forget Six, Four and Ten. The Captain nodded to himself, like a craftsman inspecting his work. The hood around the remains of Murray’s head had long been soaked.
“Yes. Red bag.”
Chapter 16 – Anton
“Table for four please,” said Anton, “Under the name of McVeigh.” The maître d’ nodded and led them through the restaurant to a round table in the centre. It was a French restaurant named Pierre à Pierre. With Long and Abbas still due to arrive, it was just Anton and Ramis at this point. Anton asked the maître d’ to bring them straight over when they arrived, ordered two bottles of white and took his own seat.
The wine was expensive. Hell, everything was expensive. Whilst it was quite possibly the finest restaurant on Ceres, it certainly wasn’t Anton’s favourite. He was a simple man at heart, at least he felt that way. He preferred to eat in one of the Indo-Scotch curry houses in the streets around Scotch Corner. To anyone else, those places would be ordinary, but to Anton, they were a fixed compass point in his life. They served the food of his childhood, formative years and adulthood combined. They served nostalgia and familiarity. It was the only food Anton actively sought out. He loved the spices, the heat and the thickened sauces. When he ate at one he would relax into the reassuringly predictable routine of poppadums slick with oil and grilled neet-meat starters before t
he smorgasbord of curries, rices and breads. They were probably the only meals he really enjoyed.
There was too much pomp and ceremony in places like this. Why couldn’t the menu be in English? Or even Hindi? Who spoke French anymore all the way out here? It was pretentious, albeit consciously so. Everything about the place was angled towards conspicuous consumption. Nothing more so than the location. You didn’t go into Pierre à Pierre’s; you went up to it. The restaurant was located on the circular, open air roof of the Cadex building, bang in the middle of the Hollow. Thirty floors above the ground, diners were able to gaze through the glass barriers at the bustling city below, where stunted concrete towers bludgeoned upwards through the tangle of streets and raised overpasses, creeping outward for miles all around. It was a view that very few Cereleans ever got the chance to see. It had awed Anton when he first encountered it all those decades ago. He wondered if he had worn the same expression then as Ramis wore now as he gawped across the city, craning his neck this way and that.
“It gets better you know,” said Anton. “Look up.”
Ramis did as he was told. “Fuck a duck, sir. And I thought I’d seen the lot.”
Anton smirked and gazed upwards himself. The Hollow, it was called. A pocket of around 200 cubic miles carved out of the Cerelean crust in the shape of a wide flattened cigar. The first settlers of Ceres had occupied the space like a swarm of hungry termites. At the same time that buildings rose from the base of the cavern, more dropped from the ceiling, filling every available patch of icy substrate. The impression it gave was of one city hanging precariously over another, looming, always teetering on the edge of collapse. And between the two cities buzzed the artefacts of commerce. Since the gravity fields produced by the T-circuits layered into every flat surface of every street and building only extended a few short metres upwards, the voluminous space between the floor and ceiling of the Hollow remained a place of extremely low gravity. This being the case, alongside the multitude of drones flitting around one another moved hulking automated containers, or ‘Buffalo’ as the locals called them, taking goods from factories deep with the Cerelean crust up towards the surface for export. Passenger hoppers did the same for their human occupants, jerking into the air on their grasshopper-like legs before hanging precariously in the micro-gravity and gently floating upward towards one of the stalactite buildings above.
Bringing the agents down from the station seemed like a sensible move. It was all very last minute, but then that was why he always took on big jobs like this himself. Flexibility. Agility. An absolute determination to get the job done no matter what. Those were the qualities you needed in this line of work.
Anton took a breath of cold air and felt the chill on the back of his throat. A waiter appeared and filled his glass with pale, crisp wine. It was an Earth wine made with genuine, soil-grown grapes. Nothing of the liquid he rolled around his glass had ever seen a hydroponics tank. It was the same with the tables; genuine wood. Probably not Earth-grown, but it was organic. He ran his fingers along the grain, tracing round the whorls and imperfections across the surface. Was it oak? Beech? Whatever it was, it was thick and heavy and it felt expensive.
“Bloody hell, sir, this is good stuff.” Ramis smacked his lips and inspected the contents of his glass.
“It should be for the price.” Anton looked towards the entrance again. Nobody important.
“I’ve never been down here. I only ever stayed over on the station,” said Ramis.
“You said.”
“There’s more money down here. I can see that. It’s worth knowing something like that.”
Anton smiled at that. It was true. There was a lot of money on Ceres if you knew where to look. It was the hub of the asteroid belt. Everything passed through Ceres—at least that’s what Cereleans liked to think. He’d lectured Long about the economics of it once. Cost per kilo.
“That business at the pub,” said Ramis. “What was it about?” His tone suggested he was circling around to something he already suspected. The young man couldn’t be more than twenty-five, yet in the right light he could pass for double that.
“Diplomatic stuff. That’s all,” Anton said. He tapped the chair and sipped more of the wine. The boy laughed nervously.
“It’s just I thought I heard something. While I was waiting.”
“What do you think you heard?”
Ramis squirmed.
“I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it sounded a lot like gun shots. I could have been wrong. And then all those people bolted down the stairs. I just wondered—what happened?”
“Did you see any guns being fired?” asked Anton. Ramis shook his head. “Then as I say, it was merely some diplomatic stuff. Satisfied?”
“I suppose.”
“Good man, Mr Ramis. Good man. A person can go a long way if they know when to stop asking questions.”
He checked the entrance again. The two agents had arrived and were being guided across to join them. There was someone else with them; it was the scientist, Ramachandran. That was unexpected. Why was she tagging along?
There wasn’t much in the way of explanation from the trio after they sat down. There wasn’t much in the way of talk full stop. Long asked how his meeting had gone and Anton gave a vague non-committal response. The knowing look Ramis gave him as he did so would have said a thousand words if any of the others had picked up on it, though thankfully they were too busy staring out into the Hollow. Anton asked Long about progress on the investigation. She gave her own non-committal response. It was the same when he enquired about Ramachandran. Anton didn’t press it. They could ask her whatever they wanted. From his understanding she was a drug-addled inept, on the books to satisfy the insurers and falsify ‘independent’ test results whenever the Cerelean authorities needed her to. If she was the best they could do, then they were damn well plucking at straws.
Anton tuned into the conversation long enough to hear Ramis and Abbas talking about the architectural wonder of the Hollow. Long watched him. Ramachandran watched her. He went back to watching the restaurant entrance.
“Are you expecting someone?” asked Long.
“I’m expecting everyone. I’m here for a few short hours and we’re in the best restaurant on Ceres. If anyone important comes up those stairs whilst I’m here, I could do some useful networking.” He turned back towards the entrance. She couldn’t suspect what was about to happen, could she? Of course not. There was no way they would have come if they thought they were about to be subject to an assassination attempt. It was the perfect location, one way in, one way out. No local gang affiliations to upset the balance of things. It was just a matter of not getting shot to death in the crossfire.
“And I thought we were the important ones,” said Long. Anton snorted. He saw the hitmen seconds after they had spoken to the maître d’. He hadn’t noticed as they arrived. They were just two young men in suits, but as they were directed to their table they had hesitated, looking around left and right. They hesitated as they missed instructions from the maître d’. They were confused and uncomfortable. They were too young. They wore too much jewellery. The more you looked at them, the more out of place they appeared. It had to be them.
Suddenly more confident, the two hitmen pulled handguns from their trousers and aimed towards Anton. He heard the first shots split the air with a lightning bolt crack as he threw himself to the ground. He fell awkwardly, landing with his elbow beneath him, knocking the air out of his lungs. Rolling onto his back, he stared upward at the looming city above and felt a strange sensation—of hanging upside down thousands of feet in the air about to fall to the ground below. Shaking his head to re-orientate himself he heard Long shouting above the racket of gunshots and splintering wood.
“Hang in there Tariq, hang in there!” From his prone position he could see Abbas was down on the floor too. Ramis was kneeling beside him, pressing down on his shoulder with the scientist hunched behind him. Long had flipped the table onto its
side and was down on one knee, holding it forth with one hand as an impromptu shield. Fuck, she was strong. It was not a small table.
Recovered, Anton pushed himself back over onto all fours and slid away from the group. It didn’t take long to realise the cacophony of ricochets and splintering wood was following him as he moved.
“McVeigh,” Long shouted, “I think it’s you they’re after. Get behind me. Quick!”
He winced and cried out as fragments of something grazed his leg. He did as she instructed, scrabbling between fallen furniture to get closer to Long.
“Stay here,” she said. Dumbfounded, Anton could only watch as Long got to her feet and stormed towards the assailants on the other side of the restaurant, hurling the table forward like a battering ram. It smashed into one of them, knocking him backwards. Long lunged at the other, foot raised high to her chest, and kicked out. The poor bastard on the receiving end flew like a rag doll into the throng of petrified diners streaming to the staircase. Then she was back with them, hauling Anton to his feet as she passed.
“We’ve got to go. There are two more of them coming up,” said Long. Leaning down, she hauled Abbas over one shoulder and yanked the scientist alongside herself with her free arm. “Follow me.”
“Hey!” The shout came from one of the hit men, now standing again and limply aiming his gun once more at Anton. “Lester sends his regards, fucker.” He fired haphazardly towards Anton, stumbling forwards as he did so.
Lester? Fucking Lester? The whole thing had been a setup. Lester must have planned it advance. The charade with Syke had been an act. What was Lester afraid of? He must have screwed up somewhere and when Anton arrived, thought he was on the chopping block. He’d had been a marked man from the moment he had stepped into the city. It was going to happen sometime, but why did it have to be now? It was just so damn inconvenient.