Cassandra's War: A Sci-Fi Corporate Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga Book 2)

by Pourteau, Chris

  Ming stepped into the hallway, ready for the second attacker. Ruben’s teacher had said there were two men.

  The door on the pod across from them opened. A young woman saw the prone assailant and quickly shut the door.

  Ming seized Ruben’s arm. “We’re leaving, now!”

  Ming jerked Ruben into the hallway. Xi, Earth authorities, the UN—whoever the hell had sent these men, they knew she was here. The Moon wasn’t safe anymore .

  Still holding on to Ruben, she hurtled to the back of the sim-parlor.

  A lifetime ago, when Ming had been an engineer on the LUNa City project, she’d approved the specs for every one of these buildings. They were cookie-cutter designs, with the power distribution center and the exits located in the same place.

  She found the panel and killed the power for the entire block. Main lights went out everywhere, drawing screams from the crowd. Then sparsely placed banks of emergency lights came on, casting a harsh white glare and ghostly shadows. Ruben’s face was a rigid mask of fear as he gripped Ming’s hand.

  The room behind them filled up as the sim-parlor patrons evacuated their pods. Ming waited for maximum confusion, then opened the maintenance level access door.

  “It’s okay,” she said. They were hidden behind the walls of LUNa City. She could feel him shaking, cold sweat on his palm. “I have a plan.”

  The boy worked at speaking a moment. “Angel…”

  Ming wiped strands of sticky hair from Ruben’s forehead. “She’ll be fine.”

  She hoped it wasn’t a lie. Whoever was after them, if they worked for Xi, they wouldn’t bat an eye at interrogating a teenaged girl. Even if Angel knew nothing of any real value, they wouldn’t stop questioning her until they were sure of that.

  “Her parents will look after her, don’t worry.” Ming urged him down the dimly lit hallway.

  “Where are we going?” Ruben asked.

  “Home.”

  • • •

  Though they maintained a steady pace, getting to their habitat level took longer than expected. The maintenance corridors were built for utility, not as convenient shortcuts between levels. And there were always the security cameras to be avoided, especially now.

  Finally, Ming knelt inside the access door looking out on their apartment door. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll get Lily and—”

  “I don’t want to stay here by myself, Ming,” Ruben said. He seemed ashamed to admit it.

  “It’ll just be for a few minutes, I promise. I’ll be right back.”

  Ming waited until a neighbor and his wife debating dinner choices turned the corner at the far end of the corridor, then slipped from behind the access door. She walked the few short steps to Lily’s front door and keyed in her passcode.

  The apartment was brightly lit but silent. The hackles on Ming’s neck rose.

  There was a black Chinese tiger crafted out of sintered Moon rock on an end table inside the door. A welcome-home gift from Lily. Ming picked it up.

  “Lil?” she whispered. It was like her voice was afraid to disturb the silence.

  Ming stepped into their quarters. A grinding sound erupted from the kitchen, making her jump. The sonic dishwasher had kicked into high gear, its whine loud in an otherwise soundless apartment.

  The sliding door to the small office off the living room was closed. The bedroom door was open, the light on.

  Ming cleared her throat, calling louder, “Lily?”

  In the bedroom, one lamp on the near side of the bed was on. The other lay broken between the bed and the wall. Ming stopped in her tracks. It looked like a windstorm had hit. The bedcovers lay tangled on the floor. The reading chair had been knocked askew. The mirror on the outside of the en suite bathroom door lay shattered in pieces on the floor.

  “Lily!”

  Ming ran to the bathroom, glass crunching beneath her work boots, the broken mirror pieces casting crazy reflections over the walls.

  Lily lay in the tub, her left leg splayed over one edge, her right twisted beneath her body at an odd angle. She was still as stone.

  A cold layer of gooseflesh prickled Ming’s skin. Her mind closed in on itself.

  Lily.

  A red stain was spreading slowly across the white of Lily’s blouse. Her vacant gaze pierced through Ming.

  Glass crunched under her boots, and Ming felt the bite of glass in her knee as she knelt next to the tub.

  “No. No, no, no…” Ming held her lover’s hand. The flesh was cooling quickly. “Oh, Lily … I’m so sorry.”

  A sound met her ears. A grinding noise, the sound of a sliding door in need of oil…

  Ming was not alone.

  Soft footfalls in the bedroom. Cautious noises.

  You’re wasting time, Little Tiger, Ito’s voice told her. Take the initiative … before it takes you.

  She stood and spun, the glass under her feet screeching in protest. The tiger statue felt heavier than it should in the lower gee of the Moon .

  A screech came from the kitchen as the dishwasher switched cycles. And she knew exactly how long the sound would last.

  One … two … three.

  On four , as the dishwasher resumed its low drone of sonic scouring, Ming stepped into the bedroom.

  A thin man stood in the doorway, waiting for her. He was lean and wiry, and he held a knife with the ease of someone who knew how to use it.

  The blade was dull. No, not dull. Stained with blood.

  Lily’s blood .

  “She tole me you’d left LUNa City,” the man said in a reedy voice. His lips stretched, revealing sharp yellow incisors. “Didn’t believe her, me.”

  Ming clutched the sculpture in her right hand. The thin man noted it.

  “Don’t matter how this ends,” he said. “Come on two feet or we ship your body. Get paid either way, we.”

  We. The man in the sim-parlor was his partner.

  Take the initiative, before it takes you.

  His eyes taunted her, told her she was trapped. But Ming had worked hard to keep her muscles from going moonsoft. He didn’t know that.

  Ten feet between them. She crossed the distance in two bounds.

  Ming raised the tiger with her right hand as a feint, then slammed her feet into the thin man’s right knee. She felt the joint pop as they tumbled together into the living room. He grunted at the pain, slashing at her. Ming avoided the blade and rolled to the opposite wall. She sprang to her feet .

  He took longer to get upright and favored his knee when he did. His back was to the main door. If Ming was going to get away, she needed to go through him.

  “Last chance, you,” he said. “My partner gets here, it’s carryout only. No delivery deal.”

  The dishwasher screeched for several long moments.

  “You killed Lily,” Ming said, closing by inches the distance separating them. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Beggar, she,” the thin man said, turning the knife over in his grip. “Pathetic. Pretty, too. Shame no time for nothing but the knife.”

  The chime on the front door rang. The partner.

  The thin man lunged. Ming turned in profile. Small target, big miss, said Ito from a thousand years ago.

  The thin man wasn’t used to the lower demands of the Moon’s lesser gravity and his momentum carried him too far forward. Ming brought the tiger statue, Lily’s gift, crashing onto the back of his skull. A thick sound like a hammer on a board, and the thin man dropped.

  The door chime sounded a second time.

  She brought the tiger down again, and the wet, crunching sound of his skull fracturing made her lip curl. The fingers of his knife hand twitched.

  He was still breathing, Ming saw. She could run—should run—and get to Ruben.

  Fury settled into her stomach, the hard center of a dark sun.

  The thin man stirred. He held up a hand to ward her off.

  “Please,” he said, levering himself up on one elbow.

  “Don�
�t beg,” Ming said. “It’s pathetic.” She lifted the stone tiger a third time and finished him.

  The beeping at the door meant someone was overriding the lock.

  The door opened. Ming readied her legs to launch herself at the doorway, then saw it was Ruben standing there.

  “I got tired of waiting,” the teen said. His eyes descended to find the dead man on the floor.

  “Get in here,” Ming cried.

  Ruben’s gaze stayed locked on the thin man and the gore staining the carpet, but he did as he was told. The door shut behind him.

  “Lock the door, Ruben.” He complied mechanically. “Now, don’t move!”

  Ming reentered the bedroom for the go-bag she hoped was still there. She paused in the doorway of the bathroom. She wanted to stop and talk to Lily, to arrange her body so her leg wasn’t so painfully bent behind her, to say how sorry she was, to cover Lily’s face with a bath towel—something .

  But there was not time for that now. They were coming for her.

  Chapter 8

  Luca Vasquez • Minneapolis, Minnesota

  Christmas is just around the corner, Luca realized, stepping off the tube. Ho-ho-holy shit.

  She ignored the festive decorations hanging from the lampposts along University Avenue as she rushed to Foyle Hall. She was late for work. Again. The people on the slushy sidewalks all seemed joyful, embracing the holiday and its infectious optimism. She ignored them, too.

  There was little cheer in Luca. Doctor Markov had been curt with her after the demonstration for Hannah Jansen. Luca had put his grant in jeopardy, he said, by interfering with the experiment. Once the semester was over, he’d be requesting another lab assistant. To top it all off, she’d called in sick two days in a row.

  Donna, suffering some virulent forty-eight-hour flu, had needed her at home. The urgent care on campus prescribed bed rest, liquids, and a shotgun dose of antivirals for both of them. But two days away from the lab meant two days without pay. If strained finances had made the holidays look glum before, a short paycheck and losing her campus job made it ten times worse. And then there was the real problem: this was their first Christmas without their parents. They were strangers in a strange land with little hope and less money.

  Her shoe slipped on a patch of ice, and Luca windmilled her arms to keep her balance.

  A perfect metaphor for her existence. One patch of ice away from a broken arm and total insolvency.

  She wrenched the door open and hurried down the stairs to the dungeon, thinking about all she had to get done before her ten o’clock class. Feed the animals, download the data from the previous day’s work, prep the tank for the…

  Luca paused in the foyer. A stocky man in a university security uniform stepped out to meet her.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” His beady eyes narrowed under a broad brow and his uniform appeared a size too small for his beefy frame. He reminded Luca of a gorilla with a badge. Broad shoulders, hairy arms that hung like thick parentheses over stumpy, powerful legs.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I—I work here. Who are you?”

  “She’s okay, Matt.” Jules appeared in the doorway, her blonde spikes catching the light. She wore her usual tight tank top, but instead of the normal snarky bite to her tone, she spoke in a professional voice. “Leave your purse and data glasses here and follow me, please.”

  The security gorilla stepped aside, his eyes tracking her as she followed Jules inside. Luca caught a glimpse of a Neo tattoo on his nape .

  “What’s going on?” Luca whispered.

  “Markov’s project is being shut down,” Jules replied. Her voice was flat. She might have been talking about the weather. “He’s on sabbatical. Licking his wounds, I guess, after his funding got pulled. I’m supposed to take care of everything here.”

  “His funding got pulled?” Luca reached out and turned Jules around. Her pupils were enlarged—near-black pools framed in bone-white sclera. Was she high?

  “What about the animals?” Luca asked.

  Jules cocked her head, thinking. “Destroying them would likely elicit unwanted attention,” she said in that same creepy, flat voice. “Kidding.”

  She didn’t sound like she was kidding.

  Jules said, “Protocol is that post-experimentation, all animals, failing other arrangements, are to be turned over to the College of Veterinary Medicine. Can you call them today? Before they’re closed for the weekend?”

  “Sure. Have the animals been fed yet today?”

  “No, I’ve been too busy. Can you take care of it? And tonight too? I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “Sure. But Jules—what’s going on? Why’s the project being shut down? We were supposed to be funded for two years.”

  Jules looked past her. “Markov broke protocol. He must’ve been talking online with other researchers or something. Some of his data leaked on the WorldNet, and that made the people who write the checks really unhappy.”

  Luca swallowed hard, suddenly wishing she hadn’t brought up the subject. “He leaked his own data? ”

  “Yeah. He tried to cover his tracks online, but they know it was him.”

  “Who’s they?”

  Jules hesitated a fraction of second too long for Luca to believe her. “The university, of course.”

  Luca gave her a half smile, uneasy. “I’ll feed the animals.”

  “And call Vet Med.”

  Luca backed away. “I’ll take care of it.”

  As she made her way to the kennel, she passed a team of workmen disassembling Markov’s observation tank. One man was on his hands and knees with a cutting tool. She noticed a Neo tattoo on the back of his neck. Just like Jules had. Just like the security guard.

  Just like Donna.

  Luca practically ran to the cages on the far wall. Had her exchanges with Magdalena in the Portal been discovered?

  Filling the rats’ food dishes, she shook her head. She was overthinking things. Jules was right: Markov got sloppy. Probably bragged to some colleague after a few drinks.

  She dropped kibble into Leroy’s bowl and the beagle buried his head in the food. His tail wagged as he ate. Luis didn’t seem hungry, so Luca pulled him out of his cage and held him, stroking his fur. The cat purred against her rib cage while she fingered the silver disk implanted under his collar.

  No, Markov was a professional and very protective of his work. There was no way he would have talked about his results before he published. He had too much riding on the outcome. She stared through the doorway, watching the workmen beyond. Jules was packing boxes. When she caught Luca’s eyes lingering on her, Luca glanced away .

  She stroked the cat’s fur faster. This was her doing. Magdalena had betrayed her. That was the only logical explanation. Magdalena had shown up a month earlier in the Portal, asking about the wild theories the members tossed around about the Neos using implants for mind control.

  And Luca had responded. She’d shared some of Markov’s data. Only a few observations, nothing really.

  Magdalena hadn’t seemed like so many of the others in the Portal. She wasn’t a raving nutjob. She was reasonable, a thoughtful person … a friend. Luca had trusted her so much she’d shared her concerns about Jules and the weird transmissions that day during the demonstration.

  “Did you call Vet Med yet?”

  Luca jumped at the sound of Jules’s voice in her ear. Luis meowed his displeasure at being clutched so closely and dug his claws into her stomach.

  Jules was staring at her hard. “Nervous much?”

  “Sorry,” Luca breathed. She tried to soothe Luis. “The lab closing—it’s got me freaked, I guess. It’s my job. I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the spring.” Luca hoped Jules might give her some idea of how long she still had a paycheck.

  Jules shrugged, her expression cold. “Well, for now, I need you to take care of these animals. Before the end of the day, remember?”

  Luis hissed at Jules’s retreating back as sh
e walked away, the Neo tat almost lost in the rest of her body art. She put Luis back in his cage and booted up her terminal.

  Since she’d shared the data with Magdalena, she’d gone back to her analysis a hundred times, and the simplest explanation was the most plausible: the transmission wave was not from an unauthorized data device or an EM field failure.

  The transmission had been on the same wavelength as Markov’s animal implants, but it hadn’t come from either of the animals.

  The transmission had come from Jules.

  • • •

  After classes, Luca stopped in a coffee shop for a cup of hot chocolate. She ignored the pang of guilt she felt about spending money on the luxury. She needed something to turn her mood around before going home to Donna.

  The drink was creamy and rich with a pile of snowy whipped cream on top. The close, gray sky was finally yielding snow, fat flakes clumping together in the gathering twilight. The winter gloom did nothing to quell her nervousness.

  In her shirt pocket, her data glasses blinked once. Donna was probably wondering where she was. She shouldn’t have stopped for the cocoa. Luca slipped on the glasses, prepared for her little sister’s wrath.

  The message was from Magdalena. Luca felt the warmth drain out of her face. The only time she’d ever communicated with Magdalena was in the Portal, anonymously. How had she broken two levels of encryption to access Luca’s personal email?

  She hesitated, afraid to open the message. The incoming address was from a verified account with Magdalena’s name on it. This was not spam, this was a real person with a real message. She opened the message with a blink.

  “You are in danger. This is what they did to Markov . Your friend, Magdalena. ”

  Below the single line of text was a link to a Canadian newsfeed. Clicking it played footage of a smoking wreck on a snowy hillside. An announcer’s voice droned in the background: “Authorities have identified the driver of this aircar killed in a crash early this morning as Doctor Anton Markov of the University…”