by Rick Partlow
I made a sour face. Of all the revolting and distasteful aspects of working for Andre Damiani these last several years, the worst of them was the series of go-betweens that I’d had to endure since Cowboy got too busy to oversee our missions personally. First had been Divya Reddy, who’d wound up betraying us for a better offer from my mother; she’d killed Kane, our pilot, and would have handed me over for my mom’s reward, but Kurt had put a bullet in her head. I hadn’t thought it could get worse than that, but then Cowboy had hired Calderon.
When I’d met Calderon, he’d been a company commander in the Savage/Slaughter LLC Security Contracting firm---a mercenary. He’d been fighting for one side of a turf war between a pair of Pirate World cabals on Peboan, and hadn’t been very discriminating about how many civilians his people killed in the process of doing their job. He’d lost that job shortly after, mostly due to the report I’d filed with the Commonwealth military. And then Cowboy had the brilliant idea to hire him to replace Divya, because nothing takes the place of one devious, murderous asshole like another one.
Three hundred hours, the message had said. Given the travel time in Transition Space from here to Hermes, that meant I’d have to leave almost immediately. I hissed out a sigh and reached over to nudge Sophia. She blinked awake immediately, glancing around worriedly.
“What?” She mumbled. “Is Cesar okay?”
“He’s fine,” I assured her. He was almost seven now, but sometimes he had bad dreams and knocked on the door, wanting to sleep with us. “I got a message from West.” Roger West was Cowboy’s real name, but I never thought of him like that, because the whole time we’d served together in the war, he’d just been “Cowboy.”
“When do you have to go?” The expression on her face didn’t change, but I’d known her long enough to see the pain and doubt and worry.
“Pretty much now,” I admitted, throwing off the covers and swinging my legs out of the bed. “I’ll have to pick up Victor and Kurt.” They were the only two members of the team who lived here on Demeter; this was their home, and they’d been part of the civilian resistance I’d organized against the Tahni occupation during the war. So had Sophia.
She was silent for a moment as I began pulling on my clothes. I could take care of personal hygiene on board ship; I’d have plenty of time for it.
“Are you going to tell your mother?” She asked me, finally, as I was fastening the straps of my boots.
I felt her eyes on me and couldn’t meet them.
“I guess I have to,” I said. “She’s my only way out of this.”
Sophia had been there when Mom had found me finally, a couple years ago, and shown up here. She’d said we had a mutual enemy in my “employer,” her brother, and we needed to start working together against him before he got his hands on the Predecessor technology he needed to take control of the Commonwealth government. Sophia didn’t trust her and neither did I, but I’d come to know Andre Damiani by the allies and enemies he kept, and I didn’t want to be part of making him the de facto dictator of the human race.
“If you keep playing both sides,” she warned me, her tone as flat and final as a judge’s gavel, “you’re going to get yourself killed. And maybe get Cesar and I killed, too.”
I winced at hearing the heart of my nightmare fears put to words.
“I’d offer to leave,” I said, “but I don’t think that would stop them.”
She rose from the bed, wrapping the comforter around her in the chill of the early morning, and walked over to me. She put a hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into a kiss.
“You’ll never leave me and I’ll never leave you,” she promised, her tone softening. “But Munroe, if we’re not going to fight, then we need to run.”
***
As I pressed my hand to the biometric lock-plate of the safe-house just outside Sanctuary, I realized that I was still not running and not really fighting yet, either. It had been more than two years since that night when I’d agreed to work with Mom to bring down Uncle Andre, and most of what I’d done had been feeding her intelligence from the missions Cowboy had sent me on. Once or twice, she’d tasked me with sabotaging one or another of his minor operations when it wouldn’t give me away, but I’d never gotten a sense of how much any of that had accomplished.
When I’d complained to her once about how little we were doing, her only response was that she didn’t want to burn my cover prematurely and she was waiting for the right time. I wondered when that time would come, and whether I’d recognize it when it did.
“Get him in quick,” I told Victor and Kurt, pushing the door open. It resisted with a heavy, metal solidity and squeaked aside reluctantly, to reveal an inside as dark as the outside.
The brothers dragged the motionless form of the man in black out of the utility rover parked next to the entrance, beside Calderon’s personal vehicle that we’d left here several hours ago, and rushed him into the old, unadorned one-story building that had once served as a spare-parts storage facility for the algae farms out at the reservoir. It was unlikely there’d be any eyes, either natural or electronic, on us out here; but all it took was one satellite looking at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bobbi walked in behind the massive, muscular brothers, a short and stocky contrast to their towering height. Her face was as solid and unadorned as the exterior of the safe-house, and just as deceptive about what it hid on the inside. She was dressed in generic-looking civilian clothes like the rest of us, to avoid attracting attention, but it seemed strange seeing her in anything except Marine-pattern combat armor. She looked even more annoyed than usual, maybe because Calderon had ridden back with us in our vehicle.
He was walking behind her…well, more sauntering than walking, I thought. He seemed pretty pleased about his part in tonight’s operation, which had, no doubt, contributed to Bobbi’s lousy mood. The last one out of our rover was Sanders, who’d driven us here. He was a bit taller than me, and maybe a bit broader in the chest, with hair a shade blonder than mine and a short, well-managed beard, for the moment; he shaved the thing and regrew it every few months, it seemed. He glanced around behind us as he pulled the door most of the way shut, scanning the gravel road that had brought us here.
“They’re taking a while,” he muttered.
“They’re just making sure we weren’t followed,” I reassured him. I knew he was feeling more nervous than usual about this operation because he lived in Sanctuary.
Victor flipped on a light over in the far corner of the room and his brother dumped the prisoner in a metal chair that was fastened to the floor there with bolts sunk into the concrete. Sanders hastily pushed the front door shut against the light, walking over to a panel of monitors against the near wall and activating them with the touch of a control. They lit up with a 360-degree view of the place, including about a kilometer down the main road that led past it, and he fell into a seat there to keep a watch.
Calderon ignored all that and went straight to one of the storage bins scattered randomly around the mostly empty floor, throwing it open and pulling out the equipment to assemble a hypnoprobe.
“Give me a hand with this,” he snapped impatiently to no one in particular. I saw Bobbi’s facial expression and knew she was about to tell him where to stick the machinery, so I stepped in quickly to help him set it up. Not that I didn’t share Bobbi’s feelings on the matter, but that was something that could be dealt with after the mission.
“So,” I prompted as we set up the electrochemical interrogation device, “who the hell is this guy, and why do we care that he’s a suspect in a murder investigation?”
I spared a glance for the prisoner; he was beginning to wake up, but Victor and Kurt had strapped him into the chair before they’d pulled off the neural restraint web. He wasn’t much to look at: horse-faced and pale, with a long, thin nose and hair colored a dark shade of purple in the style of the criminal element in Overtown and other colonies. He might have been old or middle-aged
or young, depending on whether he’d been born into a family that could afford anti-agathic treatments and how much time he’d spent outdoors in the wind and sun. But I had developed a sense for things like that, partly due to hanging out with my mother’s crowd, who defied age and tried to look like twenty-somethings for all of their lives. I guessed he was in his forties and I was curious to see how close I’d come.
“His official record says,” Calderon told me in his oh-so-pleased-with-himself tone, “that he’s Tanner McClain, a refugee from Loki who came here early in the war and amassed quite the rap sheet in that time, from vandalism to assault-with-intent to grand theft. It says he’s spent three years of his miserable life in work camps and most of the rest on probation.
“But…”
Calderon’s grin was full of malice.
“His DNA profile says something different. It just happens to match exactly the profile on record for Ivan Molina, who was recruited out of Space Fleet by the Department of Security and Intelligence back during the war.” He adjusted the frame of the optical transducer and slapped McClain or Molina or whoever he was across the face when he tried to resist having his head strapped into place.
“Mr. McClain is wanted for questioning,” Calderon went on, “because a few months ago, several of his known associates killed a man from a Corporate Council mineral scout crew before the other crewmember killed all four of them in self-defense.” He shrugged. “McClain wasn’t there, but the fact that he knew all four of the decedent assassins is too much of a coincidence for the local authorities. And the fact that Mr. McClain used to be Agent Molina is too big of a coincidence for us.”
At the mention of the mineral scouts, I felt my blood run cold and I tried my best not to let the fear and trepidation show on my face. The reason I’d been ready to work with my mother to bring down Andre Damiani was the discovery just a couple years ago by a mineral scout of an invaluable cache of Predecessor technology on a remote, worthless rock of a planet. I’d barely been able to keep the knowledge a secret, and I’d known at the time that it wouldn’t stay a secret forever.
“They’re here!” Sanders’ announcement broke through my sudden fugue and shocked me back to the present.
I looked over to the security monitors and saw the groundcar pulling up next to the rover. Mũkoma wa Thiong’o slid out from the driver’s side, his dark eyes darting back and forth carefully, his hand resting on the butt of the gun holstered at his hip beneath his open jacket. His head was depilated and shined like polished ebony in the moonlight. He seemed the best of the new recruits, always keeping his cool and not running his mouth.
The man getting out from the passenger side of the car not so much. Baby-faced and perpetually wide-eyed, Alexi Nemeroff was younger than me, barely old enough to have served in the tail end of the war; but he had been with the Recon Marines during the invasion of the Tahni homeworld and I’d thought that would be qualification enough. I was beginning to wonder about that; he always seemed to need his hand held, even in the middle of an operation. That might not be a deal-breaker in a line unit, when you had a lot of support and layers of command; we had one squad and not much support and I needed independent thinkers.
DiStephano and Renzor, I was less certain about. Of the two, Adriana DiStephano seemed the more competent; she certainly looked dangerous, with a hard edge to her face and a hard set to her grey eyes, and I certainly trusted her more than Nemeroff, but she also seemed like a follower. Peyton Renzor was a cipher, quiet and unsociable and big enough to be intimidating, but he did his job well enough to keep it. Neither had screwed up or given me cause to get rid of them, but they felt…off. I didn’t have the same confidence in them that I’d had in Prouty or Waugh or O’Neill…or Kane.
The door banged open and the four of them filed in quickly before Thiong’o slammed it shut and nodded to me.
“We’re clear,” he told me. “Ran a full scan, no drones following us.”
“Relax,” I told them, waving to the couches arrayed against the far wall, where Victor and Kurt were already stretched out. “We’re gonna’ be here a while.”
By the time I’d turned back, Calderon already had the rest of the interrogation module set up around Molina like half a cage, the medical scanners surrounding him, their injectors pressed against his neck. Bobbi was leaning against the wall nearby, arms folded, watching intently as our liaison touched the control to begin the process.
I saw Molina tense against his restraints, his horsey face screwing up in futile resistance to the drugs that coursed through his system. If he was actually DSI deep cover, he’d have technological defenses against the drugs, but you had to start somewhere. The hypnoprobe was built to tear down defenses, one layer at a time. Finally, Molina seemed to sag into the rests of the optical transducer array, the tranquilizers taking hold. Calderon propped the man’s eyelids open with a pair of electrodes that froze the muscles in place, then began to align the cups over his eyes. Once they were in place, he settled the system’s headphones over Molina’s ears, then checked a readout on the front of the device.
“Okay, that should do it,” Calderon muttered, mostly to himself, I thought.
“That quick?” I wondered, trying to make the question sound casual. “If he is DSI…”
“He is DSI,” Calderon interrupted me confidently. “But he’s also assigned to Overtown. I’m sure their biggest worry for him here was the local cops. I doubt he’s had his anti-interrogation wetware upgraded since the war ended. Times change, and this,” he indicated our hypnoprobe, “is state of the art.”
That smile again, the one I would have loved to never see again, that I wished I’d shot off his face two years ago. “Here, we’ll see what happens.”
Calderon twisted a flexible microphone toward him from the control console. “Is your real name Molina?”
Molina seemed to want to jerk away from the headphones and from the cups that held his eyes unwillingly in place. His throat muscles tightened against each other and for a long moment I thought he might not respond to the question at all, even to lie.
“Yes…” The word could have been drilled out of solid uranium with a laser for the effort it took. “Ivan Molina.”
“Where are you from, Ivan?”
“Novya Moscva,” he insisted. It was the one stronghold of the Russian bratva off Earth, more an idea than a physical location. It was also a place where being second best was nearly as dangerous as being first, and it didn’t make any sense that someone from there would have wound up in the Marines.
“Where are you really from, Molina?” Calderon pressed, just as skeptical about the answer as I was.
Molina groaned, either with pain or frustration, lips quivering.
“Capital City,” he admitted with a hoarse, reluctant rasp. “Earth.”
“That’s better,” Calderon said, chuckling softly. The glow from the readouts at the rear of the hypnoprobe threw his face into a sharp relief, making his handsome features seem as diabolical as his character. “Tell me, Ivan, who do you report to? Who’s your immediate superior in the DSI?”
Molina tried to squeeze his eyes shut, I could tell from the way his brows wrinkled and his cheeks twitched, but the electrodes wouldn’t let him, and the optical probe continued to do its work, too much for his counterprogramming to handle.
“Direct…,” he ground out. “Director Gregorian.”
My eyebrow went up and so did Calderon’s. He nodded to me with an air of satisfaction. That was unexpected. I’d met Mateo Gregorian back when he’d just been the DSI’s military liaison on Inferno, and working for my mother. She’d said he’d go far, even back then, and he obviously had. Why would a field agent out in Overtown report directly to the Director of the DSI?
“Why,” Calderon demanded, “would Gregorian want Edgar Martinez and Kara McIntire dead?”
My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t heard the names before; Calderon hadn’t shared the police report with us. I wondered which one had got
killed and which one was the badass. Molina didn’t answer the question though, his face seeming to relax as if he was relieved that he didn’t have to.
“He doesn’t know,” I told Calderon, recognizing the reaction. “Ask him what his mission was.”
The former mercenary officer frowned at me in annoyance; he didn’t like being told how to do his job, particularly by me. But he leaned over the microphone and repeated the question to the prisoner.
“I was told,” Molina answered through grinding teeth, the muscles of his neck spasming with a futile effort to resist, “to board their ship while the others attacked. I used a cracking module to retrieve navigational data from the ship’s computer, then I erased the memory.” He paused, sucking in a breath, panting in exhaustion. Sweat was pouring off his forehead and matting his dark hair. I had the sense that he’d be lolling without the framework holding his head in place. “McIntire, the ship’s captain…she was jacked, she killed the others, but I got the data. I sent it to Gregorian in a secure burst transmission.”
“A Corporate Council mineral scout can afford physical augments?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of my trepidation. I was “jacked” myself, some of it thanks to Cowboy and some on my own dime, and I knew it was really freaking expensive. The nanite repair suite Cowboy had gifted me after my first mission for him had cost more than most military cruisers and was about as hard to obtain.
“I don’t know who she is or where she got it,” he admitted readily after Calderon relayed the question into his headphones. “I just did what I was told and then kept my head down and waited for the heat to blow over.”
“Where is she now?” I wanted to know. Calderon looked irritated at me again, probably because he’d been about to ask that himself anyway.
“Don’t know,” Molina said, his breathing close to normal now that we were back to questions he couldn’t answer. “She left just as quick as the local cops would let her.”