by Rick Partlow
I felt like breathing a bit easier myself. True, Gregorian had the navigational data, and if I was right in my assumptions, then he had the location of the Predecessor outpost I’d visited a couple years ago, and that was definitely bad. But he hadn’t given it to Andre Damiani yet or we wouldn’t be here interrogating Molina. I wondered whether he’d given it to my mother, since he’d been in her pocket the last I’d heard. That possibility wasn’t too pleasant to contemplate either, but of the two Damiani siblings, Patrice was the lesser evil at the moment.
It took me a moment to notice the look on Calderon’s face. It was as close as he came to insightful, which veered more toward cunning.
“You didn’t delete the data after you sent it, did you?” He asked Molina, and I felt my stomach twist with the knowledge that he was right.
Molina’s face went white and he seemed too shocked to even resist the question.
“No, I didn’t.”
Shit.
“Where is it?” Calderon demanded, eyes flashing with an ambition that was almost hunger.
I realized that my hand was creeping inside my jacket towards my holstered pistol. It was an idea: I could kill them both in two seconds and make sure that Andre Damiani didn’t get the location of the Predecessor technology. I forced my hand back to my side. It wouldn’t do any good. Gregorian had the information already, and all I would accomplish by killing Calderon would be to boost the price he was going to ask for it. Not to mention, I’d be tipping my hand and putting Sophia and Cesar in danger.
I had to use my head.
“It’s in a dead-drop account on the public net,” Molina told him.
Jesus, I thought in disgust. What an amateur.
True, no one could tie it to him in a public access dead-drop, but there was no way to secure that kind of account beyond a password. If he’d left it in a secure data depository, like the one on Hermes’ moon, anyone who wanted it would need to take him there in person and he’d only be allowed to access it in private with no one else present. It would give him a chance to escape. But this…
“Tell me the account ID and the password,” Calderon instructed.
It took longer this time, and he had to repeat the question twice; I thought for a minute that Molina was going to stroke out before he revealed the password. But in the end, the technology proved stronger than the man and he blurted out the details with strings of drool hanging down his chin. Calderon made him say it twice more as he checked the account on the hand-held display of his ‘link. Finally, he seemed satisfied and he shut the machine down, pulling the headphones and eye cups off of Molina.
Calderon was whistling softly to himself as he began disassembling the hypnoprobe. I saw Bobbi staring at me, an unreadable look on her face, like maybe she was waiting for me to do something. I had no idea what that something might be, so I just stood there and watched Molina sag against the seat restraints, his chin resting against his chest now that the framework of the probe had been removed.
“Clean that up for me, will you, Munroe?” Calderon said absently, sealing the machinery back in its storage crate.
“You want me to drop him back off in Overtown?” I asked.
He turned and looked at me with something close to pity in his expression, as if he thought me an idiot to even have to ask.
“No, we can’t chance the police or anyone else finding him and extracting the same intelligence. Kill him and dispose of the body.”
I felt a flare of anger, and I wasn’t sure if I was angrier at the off-handed way he’d ordered me to murder the man or at the fact that he thought he could just order me to murder someone.
“I’m not your fucking janitor, Calderon,” I reminded him, a rumbling behind the words coming from the back of my throat. “You’ve got a gun; if you want him dead, do it yourself.”
He turned and squared off with me, his face a mask of stubborn pride. We’d had this sort of confrontation many times in the last couple years, and neither of us was of a mind to back down.
“You work for West, and so do I,” he shot back, face turning a shade darker. “He made it my job to relay his instructions, and it’s your job to carry those instructions out.”
“Fine!” I waved a hand demonstratively. “You get me instructions from Cowboy to kill this guy, and I’ll pull the trigger!”
“West is busy!” He snapped.
“So am I.” I stepped around to the other side of the chair that held Molina and came within half a meter of Calderon, my hands balling up into fists. “I seem to remember beating the shit out of you once, Alberto, while I was drugged and unarmed and you had a gun.”
“That wouldn’t be a smart move for someone with so much to lose, Munroe.”
If he’d thought that threatening my family was a way to calm me down, I was about to show him how mistaken he was…
The crack-snap-hum of the laser discharging was loud and close and filled the air with enough static electricity to make the hair on my neck stand on end. I spun around, my gun jumping into my hand, but Thiong’o was already re-holstering the pulse pistol. He’d only been a few steps away from Molina when he’d fired, and there wasn’t much left of the DSI agent’s head. A blackened and scorched crater about a centimeter deep on the wall behind him marked where the laser pulse had burned itself out.
I stared at him in disbelief through the haze of smoke and steam, and he shrugged expressively.
“Someone was going to have to kill him,” he said by way of explanation. Then he walked away and flopped down in one of the chairs beside Victor and Kurt. They’d both come alert during the argument, and they watched the new trooper with narrow, suspicious expressions.
“Nemeroff, Renzor,” I said curtly. “Clean this up and get rid of the body.” My lip curled in distaste. “Dump it somewhere it won’t be found.”
Neither of them seemed happy about the job, but they moved forward to do it anyway.
“You know, Munroe,” Calderon said, looking at me with far too much satisfaction, “Gregorian used to work for your mother Patrice, for years. But he’s sensed the turning of the tide, and he’s making overtures to Monsieur Damiani, trying to get on the winning side.” He sneered with contempt. “He’s a fool. He’s trying to play both sides of this, and it’s going to bite him right in the ass. There’s a lesson there for all of us.”
I felt a cold sense of dread at the words that I had to concentrate to keep off my face.
How much does he know?
“Is that it?” I tried to sound annoyed and impatient, hoping it would conceal the fear.
He shook his head, as if he’d tried his best and was giving up.
“The operation is over once you get rid of him,” he confirmed, walking past me towards the front of the building. “The funds will be in your accounts by the morning. If there’s anything else, well…” He grinned coldly. “I know where to find you.”
He yanked open the front door and headed out to his vehicle without another word. Sanders had gotten up from his seat and he slammed the door shut, scowling.
“Fucking asshole,” he muttered.
“Thiong’o,” I said sharply and the ebon-skinned former Marine looked over at me, his face dispassionate. “I’d like to talk to you in private.”
He followed me past where Renzor and Nemeroff were pouring cleaning chemicals onto the floor around Molina’s body, and through a light, interior door into a small office off the main storage floor. I switched on the light over the desk and motioned for him to shut the unpainted, primer-grey door behind him. I didn’t sit down, just faced him there in the space in front of the desk, hoping to God I wasn’t making a big mistake.
“I’m sorry, Munroe…,” he began, but I interrupted, not wanting to give myself the time to change my mind.
“Shut up. I know you’re a plant,” I declared flatly. “I know you work for my mother.” I saw his eyes go wide, his mouth starting to open, but again I cut him off. “Don’t bother denying it. I’ve known
since you joined the team.”
He hissed out a breath, seeming to calm as he accepted it. His hands very carefully didn’t go near the pulse pistol at his waist.
“So now what?” He asked.
“You heard what went on out there,” I told him. “You know exactly what it means. I need to talk to Mom. I need you to take me to her.”
He nodded slowly.
“All right. When?”
“Now. We don’t have any more time to wait. I need to see her now.”
Chapter Three
Thiong’o drove in silence, operating the groundcar manually rather than letting the automated systems control it. Most places out in the colonies, new roads were constantly being built and the cities were constantly expanding, and the autodrive systems weren’t reliable enough to keep up with it. I was actually surprised there even was a road that went this far out from Sanctuary; we’d been driving for over two hours and I hadn’t seen any sign of habitation once we’d passed the city limits.
I didn’t bother asking him again where we were going. He’d declined to tell me earlier and he didn’t seem any more amenable now than he had then. All I could tell was that we were heading into the Edge Mountains, curving through switchbacks at maybe forty kilometers an hour, and I thought I saw the faint grey of false dawn behind us. The gravel and dirt thumped rhythmically beneath the tires and I rested my head against the seat and closed my eyes, trying to let it lull me to sleep.
I’d had maybe four hours of rest in the last fifty, and I felt exhausted, but I wasn’t sure I could shut my brain off long enough to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Calderon had said, about the risk I was taking with Sophia and Cesar’s lives by playing this game. She was right: we needed to run. I was going to tell my mother about Uncle Andre getting the location of the Predecessor outpost, then I was heading back to Demeter, getting Sophia and Cesar and getting the hell out of there.
“We’re here.”
I blinked awake to the glare of the rising sun and realized I’d fallen asleep after all. The car was stopped at the end of a long, winding driveway that stretched at least a kilometer back behind us. In front of us was a house built into the side of the mountain. I blinked one more time, thinking maybe I was still dreaming, but no, that was really what I saw.
The drive ended at the yawning opening of a garage dug into a wall of solid granite; above it, at least a dozen two-meter-tall windows winked reflections of the dawn back at us, stretching over nearly a hundred meters of cliff-face. I’d been to estates like this back on Earth, but I’d never seen the like out in the colonies, where this sort of engineering required tools and resources that were harder to get and much more expensive.
I almost didn’t notice the armed guards until one of them approached the car, eyeing us carefully, a pulse carbine slung over her shoulder. Thiong’o stepped out of the vehicle and nodded to the solid-looking woman. I cracked my door open cautiously and stood up, stifling a yawn.
“Is everything cool?” Thiong’o asked, keeping his hand away from his gun.
“We’ve been expecting you,” she replied, smiling that sort of professional, courteous smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “You can take him on up.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected when I’d got in the car with Thiong’o back at the safe-house, but this wasn’t it. I’d thought we’d be heading to a secure communications facility where I could send my mother an Instell ComSat message. What we were doing way out here, I had no idea. I shook my head and followed him up the polished stone walkway to the front door of the…well, to call it a house seemed to diminish it unfairly. The door was ancient, faded mahogany fitted with stained glass windows, and back on Earth it would have cost more than most working-class people made in their whole lives. It opened for us with a barely-audible hum of servomotors and we stepped inside.
The interior lights were off, but the windows and mirrors were lined up such that the burgeoning dawn bathed the entrance hall in a warm, golden glow. Marble floor tiles and granite walls carved right out of the heart of the mountain sparkled in the reflected light of Proxima Centauri like some old-time vision of a heavenly mansion. On the walls hung paintings of pastoral scenes; I didn’t recognize them, which meant they were likely originals rather than copies of ancient works from Earth artists, but they had the look of hand paintings rather than computer fabrications.
A marble-tiled staircase with handrails carved out of granite stretched upward at the end of the entrance hall and Thiong’o waved me ahead of him towards it. The soles of my combat boots scraped against the tile with a sound that made me wince, thinking of the scratches they were going to leave, but it wasn’t as if they’d asked me to take my shoes off. I shrugged. Someone who could afford this place could afford the robotic buffers to polish the steps nice and bright again.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs, I’d decided that Mom had some kind of liaison out here, a go-between for her and me the way Cowboy was for me and Uncle Andre. It had to be someone important to warrant this sort of security, but I didn’t know enough about her business to know who that might be.
There was a set of gleaming white double-doors at the top of the steps, with a pair of security guards flanking them like gargoyles. At our approach, one of them, a short, muscular man who might have grown up on a world with heavier-than-standard gravity, stepped up to us and held out a hand. Thiong’o slowly and carefully drew his pulse pistol and passed it over to the guard. The big man handed it back to the other guard, then turned to me expectantly. I pulled out my weapon, reversing it and handing it butt-first to the man. He took it, but continued to look at me expectantly. I sighed and retrieved the ceramic hold-out knife from my thigh pocket and passed that to him as well.
I should have figured they had scanners here.
Satisfied, the big man pulled open one of the doors and nodded for us to go inside. It turned out to be an office, as opulent and well-appointed as the rest of the house, with a desk and conference table of real wood and chairs upholstered with real leather. Standing beside the table was my mother.
“Good morning, Tyler,” she said.
It was the crack of dawn, but she was already dressed in an immaculately-tailored business suit, her dark hair was already perfectly coifed and she seemed like she’d been up for hours.
I was so surprised to see her here in person that I didn’t even bother to remind her not to call me Tyler. I’d been born Tyler Callas, but I’d changed my name to Randall Munroe at the same time that I’d changed my face and had run as fast and as far away from her and her plans for me as I could, and joined the Marines.
“You didn’t just happen to be here right now by coincidence,” I surmised.
“Mateo Gregorian contacted me a couple weeks ago.” She pushed a chair aside and sat on the edge of the table. The part of me that had grown used to living as a working-class colonist the last several years winced at treating something that valuable with such casual contempt. “He wanted to put the location of the Predecessor cache up for auction between Andre and me. When Thiong’o,” she nodded towards the man, “notified me of this mission, I put two and two together and jumped on my private transport.”
She put a hand to her temple, massaging it as if she could rub away the ache.
“It’s a risk, us being here together,” I warned her, my hands clutching at the back of one of the chairs. The leather was cold and supple. “I think Calderon is starting to get suspicious.”
“It was necessary,” she insisted in that way she had of dismissing anyone else’s opinion. “We’re shielding you from any surveillance for the time being. Gregorian is a loose cannon, and it seems as if he’s given Andre the final piece to complete his puzzle.” She scowled. “I’d been working behind the scenes, sowing discontent among the other members of the Executive Board, with the help of Cameron.”
I nodded at that. Cameron Weber was Andre’s biggest rival on the Corporate Council Executive Bo
ard, and formerly a sworn enemy of my mother, Patrice, as well. But recently, she’d been making overtures to him to try to curb Andre’s ambitions.
“Now, I’ve heard that Andre has called a board meeting at our family estate outside Calgary.” She looked up, shooting me a significant glance. “A realtime meeting, in person.”
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. I could hear the leather creaking as I leaned into the chair. “He’s going to tell them. He’s going to call for a vote.”
“And then there’ll be no turning back,” she confirmed.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them and looked up at her.
“Mom,” I said, and I saw her eyes flicker in surprise; I hadn’t called her that in a long time. “You’ve talked about the two of us fighting Andre for two and a half years; but on my end, I haven’t done shit. If we’re going to fight, we have to start now and we have to get serious.” I shook my head. “I’m not talking about board-room machinations and behind-the-scenes deals. I mean my kind of fight. Because if we aren’t going to do that, then I’m going to grab my wife and my son and I’m going to run as far away from this as I can.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded slowly. She wasn’t fooling me for a second; she would never have brought me here if she hadn’t already decided on a course of action.
“I need you to go to 82 Eridani,” she said. “I’m going to set up a meeting for you there---I’ll send you the coordinates over the ComSat when you arrive in-system.”
“A meeting with who?” I wanted to know.
She didn’t make a move, didn’t push a control, but a full-body hologram sprang to life over the table from a concealed projector in the ceiling. Another little thing that she took for granted that cost a fortune: projecting a hologram outside a tank was complicate and fiendishly expensive.
I looked at the man in the picture. He was dressed in a black Fleet Intelligence uniform, with a general’s rank on his collar. The uniform was sharp enough to be a computer simulation, but that was the only thing that stood out about the man. If there was one word to describe him, it would have been “average.” He wasn’t particularly tall, or particularly muscular, or particularly handsome or particularly anything. He had brown hair that was cut short enough to meet military standards but not buzzed, and a rounded, slightly soft-looking face with almost liquid brown eyes.