“I hate to ask, but I need one more simmed ID. I’ll use it to get to Namino.”
“Nika, you don’t need to ask. They were always yours. You’re in charge, remember?”
“Not any longer.” She stood in the doorway of the alcove and faced them. “You two can handle everything just fine. You don’t need me. Maybe you never did.”
“That’s not true!”
She gave Perrin a weak shrug. “Don’t be so sure. I mean, The Chalet blew up on my watch, right? Regardless, you’ve learned everything I have to teach you. Going forward, the less association you have with me, the better—for yourselves and for NOIR. I won’t let my personal baggage bring harm down on you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Let us help you—”
“No.” Joaquim stepped over to Perrin and placed a hand on her arm. “She’s right.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, could you for one second think about your friend instead of the cause?”
Nika froze, eyes wide in shock. In five years, she hadn’t once heard Perrin snap at him with such vitriol. “Perrin, it’s not his—”
“I am thinking about her.” He glanced her way, though his words were directed at Perrin. “Nika can move a lot faster and more safely without the weight of NOIR around her neck. She needs to do what she needs to do, and I have no doubt she’ll be looking out for our interests as well along the way. The best thing we can do for her right now is take care of our people and give her one less thing to worry about.”
A different, warmer flavor of surprise replaced the shock. “Thank you, Joaquim. I…really appreciate it. You will take excellent care of everyone.”
He cleared his throat roughly. “You built this group up from a ragtag bunch of misfits into a resistance movement to be feared. We’ve taken a blow, but I hope I’ve learned enough from you to make sure we rise above it.”
“Jo, you’re talking like we’re never going to see her again, and that’s not true.” Perrin glared at her. “That’s not true, is it?”
“Of course it’s not true. I’m sending the two of you a secure nex address code. I’ll post news there when I can, and you should do the same. We’ll stay in touch until we’re back together. And when I do return, I’ll still be NOIR.”
She situated the smaller bag on her shoulder and picked up the larger one. “Be on your guard. The Guides themselves are up to something…wrong, and some of the Advisors are doing their dirty work for them. I’d stake my next generation on the augment virutox not getting quelled by Justice, which means it’s going to keep spreading. Keep our people away from it, and be ready for the next one to hit. Stay sharp and watch your backs.”
Joaquim nodded. Perrin tried to nod, then rushed forward and threw her arms around Nika’s neck. “You be careful and watch your back. And get some righteous revenge.”
She couldn’t help but laugh as she pulled away. “Righteous revenge. Got it.”
Nika listened for the blasts of entry explosives ahead of the intrusion of paramilitary security squads as she descended the stairs, feeling the encroaching danger of every second she had lingered here.
The feared sounds failed to arrive—but it didn’t mean the next second wouldn’t bring them.
She’d intended to slip quietly out, as the scene with Perrin and Joaquim had emotionally exhausted her. But when she reached the entryway, her steps slowed. She gazed out at the busy activity on The Floor.
Despite the late hour, so many people were working—patching up the pillars and repairing damaged equipment, cleaning soot and debris out of everything, trying to develop a counter to the virutox, analyzing its structure in the hope of tracking it back to its designer, building new firewalls to block its installation.
Some were studying the Charter, searching for a combination of obscure provisions that could overturn Parc’s sentence. Still others worked on new and inventive ways to circumvent and subvert the labyrinth of the surveillance state that had gradually, bit by bit, enveloped every Asterion’s existence.
The first to screw around, prank their cohorts and delight in causing mischief, when things took a bad turn they were also the first to dig in and give their all to the cause and the protection of their comrades. On the heels of a devastating attack on their home, they had put aside physical and psychological wounds to come for her, willingly risking capture to steal her helpless and unconscious self from the waiting clutches of Justice. She owed them a proper goodbye.
She set her bags down, then leapt up on top of a nearby table and whistled loudly. “Hey, everyone. Sorry to interrupt some of the best, most devious work in the Dominion, but I need your attention for a minute.”
Scattered chatter fell silent, and at least forty faces trained their stares on her.
She gave them her best, most audacious smile. “First thing: thank you. Thank you all for saving my ass.” She twisted around and grabbed her left hip. “I’m happy to report that said ass is now patched up and good as new. Also, don’t ever do that again! You’re more important than me. Because of your crazy devotion to the cause and each other, plus your mad skills, you’re going to save so many people from untold horrors not of their own making. You’re awesome, and you will continue to elevate your awesomeness.
“I’m heading out, and I’ll be gone for a little while. I wish I could tell you how long, but you know how the hunt is. You start chasing the prize, and the next thing you know it’s next week. This is what I’ll be doing.
“I’m going to find out where this virutox that has taken Parc from us—taken Maggie and Carson and Cair from us—came from. I’m going to find out why it was released and what its creators want. Then I’m going to shut them down and ensure no one else falls prey to their crimes.”
“How the hells are you planning to do all that?” The shout came from near the rear, but she recognized the voice as belonging to Ava.
She smirked and offered an overdramatic shrug. “You know me—I’ll improvise.”
“And make a damn fine show of it, too!” This was from Ryan, she thought.
“They’ll know I was there, I promise you that. And when I return, I hope to have Parc at my side. But if I don’t, I can guarantee you I will have made the guilty pay a thousand-fold.”
Cheers followed, but her expression grew serious. “Be careful out there. Every interaction is more dangerous than it has ever been, and I don’t want to lose anyone else—not a single solitary one of you. Watch your back, front and sides. Watch each other. Listen to Joaquim and Perrin, and go easy on them. Remember, they have the hardest job in the Dominion: wrangling all of you.
“Be kind to them and to each other. Keep what’s precious to you close. I’ll see you on the other side, where the party is.”
She climbed off the table to applause and shouted farewells too numerous to parse out, retrieved her bags and hurried through the #4 door before anyone could see the tears brightening her eyes.
49
* * *
“Oh, for the love of the gods cavorting in the starry heavens, will you climb down off your self-erected pedestal and give a centimeter of compromise?”
The jaw belonging to the CEO of Zanist Circuitry plummeted nearly to the surface of the conference table. “Advisor Rowan, I will not be spoken to in such a manner by anyone, no matter their position! I am five seconds away from walking out of this room and returning to Ebisu.”
Across the table, the Chizeru delegation launched into hysterics. Representatives of a splinter clan on the far side of the planet from the embassy, they were trying to edge their way into the kyoseil business. This was their first contract negotiation, and it had been a disaster from minute one.
Iona rolled her eyes and slouched lower in her chair. Let the primates on both sides of the table fight it out, because her brain wasn’t coughing up a solution that might bring the two parties closer together.
In a detached sort of way, she recognized that something inside her wasn’t working right, but she couldn’t conjure u
p the will to investigate it, much less check herself into a clinic for diagnostics and a tune-up.
The CEO stood, apparently to make good on his threat, and his two associates hurriedly followed suit.
The Chizeru clan leader squawked a protest and leapt onto the table. Oh, this was simply fantastic.
“Advisor, keep these creatures away from me!”
“What?” She looked up idly. “Bharut, sit down.”
The clan leader stomped on the table.
“That’s it. We’re leaving.” The CEO spun toward the door and began marching pompously toward it.
“Hold up a sec.” Iona slid her chair out and stood as well, then gave the attendees and their bedlam a wide berth as she approached the door ahead of the man.
She walked up to the security dyne standing guard and held out her hand. “Give me your Glaser.”
“Yes, Advisor.” The dyne removed the weapon from its built-in holster and presented it to her.
“Thank you.” It must have been a century or longer since she’d fired one, and she squinted at the various settings for a few seconds.
“Advisor Rowan? What is the meaning of this?”
“Oh! There it is.” She flicked the setting to maximum, stretched her arm out and shot the CEO in the head.
Screaming commenced. The laser bobbed and weaved around the room as it chased the running executives, but eventually it found its mark, and again.
Then it was only the Chizeru screaming—the dyne was merely emitting a sputtering noise, presumably locked in a paradox calculation as no programming had been loaded onto it for what to do when it was an Advisor doing the shooting.
The little aliens dove beneath the table to hide, which wasn’t really hiding at all. She went to the end of the table and bent over to peer underneath it.
“Boo!” She fired. One. Two. Three. Stood and stretched. Thank gods, it was finally quiet.
Bit of a mess, though. She should see about cleaning up, but it was going to be so much work. Better to just start fresh.
She pushed the muzzle of the Glaser against the skin where her chin and throat met and pressed the trigger.
50
* * *
The atmosphere on Namino had changed. Or perhaps, Nika admitted, her perspective on it had.
The street merchants yelled their wares in harsh tones and invaded her personal space to hock them. The cacophony of trade being conducted everywhere grated against her ears. The security patrol dynes focused their attention on her for too long, suspicion animating their emotionless visual scanners. The dry air made her new patches of skin itch.
So she was cranky. If only that were all she was, as then she could simply go get sloshed on alcohol, top it with a lightweight dose chaser, and sleep it off.
But she had a mission—a purpose—and it propelled her forward, through the transit hub crowds and the street crowds and the market crowds toward the maglev station.
She sensed the attack coming a nanosecond before it arrived. She dropped her bags and her right arm swung up as a wide body—a Taiyok?—lunged for her neck, needle blade at the ready.
The blade scraped across her forearm—the attacker grabbed her hand and twisted her arm back—she swung her other arm around, wrist blade extended, and slashed at their shoulder.
They jerked away an instant prior to breaking her arm, and she yanked out of their grasp.
The attacker was tall and bulky. Definitely a Taiyok. Male, judging from the breadth of their chest.
Pedestrians scattered as the alien darted forward. Before she could command her muscles to move, he had grabbed her and slammed her into the building abutting the sidewalk. Her head smashed painfully against the facade, rebounded, and her chin bounced off her chest.
A winged arm braced against her neck, and the needle blade came up once more—but to use it properly, he had to adjust his grip on one of her arms. When she felt the pressure lessen, she threw everything into swinging that arm up.
Her blade met flesh. She dragged the blade across the attacker’s chest toward the vulnerable area where wing met torso—
He stumbled back with a growl of pain, stared at her for half a second, then spun and took off running down a side street. After three strides, his wings expanded and he took to the air.
But not high or swiftly. His right wing teetered unsteadily as he struggled to gain and keep altitude.
She retrieved her Glaser from beneath her cloak, aimed it and fired.
The Taiyok tumbled out of the sky, landed hard on the street, skidded several meters and came to a stop.
She was already sprinting toward him when he scrambled to his feet. The Glaser didn’t come with a setting high enough to kill a Taiyok, so the most she was able to do was stun him for a few seconds. Which she did.
He was rousing himself again when she stopped two meters away and pointed the Glaser at his chest. “Who sent you?”
If the attacker was surprised by her effortless use of his language, he didn’t show it. “People far more powerful than you—”
The next instant a wing slammed into her from the side. She flew through the air and crashed into the facade of another building, but tucked her head in this time to avoid the worst of the blow.
The Taiyok was on her before she hit the ground. Godsdamn he was fast!
A fist connected with her cheek; her head snapped sideways and her consciousness stuttered from the shock. But this was what combat routines were for, and hers quickly jolted her functions back into action.
She fired into his chest at point-blank range. The odor of singed feathers assaulted her nostrils as he stumbled backward. She fired again. Again. The Taiyok crumpled to the street. Again.
She leapt onto his chest to straddle him and fired one last time. Then she brought her blade up and dragged it across his neck, making sure to apply enough pressure to cut all the way through the thick skin.
Mottled brown blood oozed out from the blade’s path to flow into the street.
Retract the blade. Activate your kamero filter. Activate your mask. Get your bags. Depart the scene. The focused commands guided her through the next moments, when otherwise shock might have rendered her frozen and, shortly thereafter, incarcerated.
A few onlookers had appeared at the intersection to gasp and point; she activated her kamero filter as instructed and vanished from their vision. Then she picked her way carefully through the growing crowd to the main street. No one had moved her bags yet, but a squad of security dynes came into view as they hurried toward the scene.
She waited until a group of people were passing to nonchalantly pick up the bags. She lessened the kamero cloak’s strength and matched their stride for the next block before breaking off and taking a circuitous route to the maglev station.
Morphs and similar visual alteration routines didn’t work on Taiyoks. The aliens’ eyes simply rejected the signals and saw what they saw. The Guides knew she would be using disguises and had hired an assassin for whom the disguises wouldn’t matter.
Had the Guides somehow known she would be traveling to Namino? Or had they stationed an assassin at every d-gate hub connected to Mirai One? They controlled the considerable resources needed to implement such a dragnet.
The realization strengthened her resolve that she was choosing the best course of action. If nothing else, running would buy her time to figure out how the hells to disguise herself from Taiyok assassins.
She crept onto the maglev and slipped into a seat in the back corner, where shadows obscured her presence and she could see an attack coming.
There she found a few treacherous minutes of solitude. The adrenaline from the attack abandoned her, leaving behind dark thoughts to haunt her mind in the span of quiet.
Before she would be able to arrive at a mental or physical place where she might do anything about them, however, she first had to keep moving forward. So she exited the maglev at the familiar stop and suppressed all the aches and pains from the attack to adopt
a rapid pace for the kilometer walk to Mesahle Flight.
But at the entry gate, she hesitated. Not because she worried she had been followed, as she was quite certain she had not.
No, her hesitation stemmed from a far more vulnerable source—her conscience. She hated asking friends for favors, but what she hated even more was disappointing friends.
She was about to do both.
Nika watched as Grant wound photal fibers from the back of a user-facing interface into the complex wiring of a large module, possibly a lighting system. It was the type of detail work a true craftsman like him would never leave to the machines.
He finished one stage of the process and shifted around to retrieve a new tool, then caught sight of her. With a growing smile he leaned against the frame holding the module in place. “Nika Tescarav, come to visit again so soon. Are you here to buy a ship?”
Her throat worked, and she failed miserably at matching his smile. “Yes.”
He stared at her oddly for several seconds. “Yes?”
She nodded.
“Um…okay. I don’t know quite how to respond to that. What happened?”
“Can we go inside and talk? These bags are getting heavy.”
“Sure.” He threw a tarp over the module frame and packed away his tools in their case, then she followed him up the ramp and inside.
He closed the door and propped on the edge of his desk. “So what’s this about? Are you in trouble—wait, are you bleeding?”
She frowned; she’d already minimally cleaned up the cut on her arm. But Grant was motioning to her face, so she touched her fingertips to her forehead. Sure enough, they came away bloody.
She sighed and stepped into the lavatory to grab a rag and hold it against the cut for a few seconds. “I had a little altercation on the way here.”
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