She looked like a celebrity trying to avoid attention at a kava shop. The hat and glasses were too much, they only made her look more suspicious. She threw them away. She decided blind confidence would be her best disguise.
A service bot stopped Jayne on her way out of Cheap Charlie’s and quite directly asked why she wasn’t buying anything. Jayne wanted to say, “because I’m stealing it all instead, you dumb computer,” but instead told the service bot that she was only browsing, trying to get ideas for a birthday present for her mother.
The service bot began listing special deals on popular gift items, each price flashing across its screen. All service bots were this way. They lacked the empathy and humility of humans, who would have gotten the hint. Before the kinks had been worked out, some early service bots had been known to beat customers into a coma for not buying anything.
Jayne stepped away as graciously as possible. “You know, that magic frame pre-loaded with over one million classic works of art might be perfect. I’ll, uh… just go home and break open my piggy bank.” She had made it to the door and ducked out before the service bot could start recommending hair growth solutions.
In a way, the service bot had been the most intimidating foe Jayne had faced yet. But she was out on the street now, and only two levels to go before she could finally return to her friends.
Not permanently, of course. She hadn’t figured out her long game yet. But right now she only had one objective in mind: get to the ISA offices and take a shower.
Jayne walked right into another pedestrian, who scowled at her. “Watch it, punk!” Evidently that’s what her new haircut made her look like. Ordinarily Jayne would have told the guy off for standing in the middle of the sidewalk, but best to keep moving. The man, however, wasn’t the only one blocking the sidewalk. A barrier of bodies lined the sidewalk and spilled onto the street. And more ran past Jayne to join in on the crowd.
There was haste in everyone’s actions. People were desperate to get to the center of this crowd. Those who made it to the center fought their way back out, taking with them a small data drive the size of a fingernail.
Jayne didn’t know how, but she immediately understood that this was bad news. Bad news for her. She pushed her way through the crowd, shoving aside everyone in her way.
The entire crowd was gathered around a tall information module of some kind. Jayne had never seen one before. Rotating at the top of the tall, silver and red module was a hologram of the Crystal Guard Dog. Jayne couldn’t help but clench her fist and grit her teeth. “Geiger!”
An angry woman stepped out of the crowd and shoved past Jayne. “Take all day, why don’t you?”
She waved her credit chip across the panel in the information module, and one of the small data drives slid down a chute – like a vending machine. The woman took the chip and left, fighting her way out of the crowd.
The hologram atop the information module faded into the next stage of its cycle. It was a photo of Jayne. Text floated over head: WANTED. The hologram then faded into text: Jayne Austin – Digital Profile –Public Data Issue #1
Jayne broke free of the crowd. She hustled down the street, dismayed to discover there was an information module every four or five blocks. Every single one was surrounded by a mob of people who couldn’t wait to learn everything about her life.
Jayne stumbled upon an ele-grav at the corner of one of L43’s major intersections. Everyone was gathered around the information modules, and the ele-grav was empty. Jayne looked up, through the artificial sunlight, at the bottom of L44. “Just two more levels.”
She stepped into the ele-grav and mashed the panel to shut the doors. She knelt down at the panel and immediately exited from the passenger interface to the maintenance options. “Okay, Jayne. What would Merry do… There’s got to be manual override in here somewhere… It’s… Oh, hello!” She had found it. It was conveniently located under a tab called “Manual Override.” Jayne swiped across the screen to activate it.
It asked for a password. Shit. Jayne looked around the ele-grav for any clue. Above the door was an ad. A smiling ele-grav maintenance technician smiled, large wrench resting on his shoulder. “Let ele-grav do the heavy lifting!”
Jayne liked the way that wrench looked. Right next to her, built into the siding of the ele-grav, was a box holding a fire extinguisher and crowbar. In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.
Jayne considered this an emergency. She broke the glass with her elbow and grabbed the crowbar. She pried the panel free from the wall and started pulling wires free. She had always felt more comfortable with hardware than software. She tore two wires loose from the panel, and stripped the insulation down with her teeth.
She eased the ends toward each other. “Prepare… for… lift off.” She touched the wires, and the ele-grav rocketed upwards, disappearing into L44 and beyond.
+++
ISA Offices, Malicarsh Building, L45, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros
The lights were off when Jayne finally arrived at her old office. It also smelt like beer and day old pizza. Which made sense, because the office was littered with beer cans and empty pizza boxes.
She always told Merry she was the only one who ever took the trash out. Merry constantly argued about this, but now Jayne had proof. Maybe she should make a chore chart, she thought.
Wow. A chore chart. She’d been back in the office for less than a minute and she was already back to thoughts as mundane as chore charts. It felt nice.
Jayne was relieved no one was in the office. Not yet, anyway. It was easier this way.
Besides, she was ready for a three-hour long shower.
+++
When Jayne was a young girl, sometime around the age of six, she caught an old movie on TV that haunted her dreams for years. She couldn’t remember the name, but it was old. Black and white old. Nearly ancient. It was one of the few surviving artworks from Earth.
Jayne struggled to remember the plot, but there was a scene where a young woman showered. She scrubbed her chest, her arms, her back, her legs. She looked so peaceful, so happy, and so clean.
Then, a dark figure appeared behind the shower curtain. The young woman screamed. Jayne could still hear her scream, accompanied by the shrill shriek of the film’s music. And the dark figure stabbed the woman again and again and again.
It took Jayne years before she could take a shower without constantly looking out the curtain. It took years before the scream left her dreams.
Jayne had forgotten about the memory. She hadn’t thought about the film while showering in many years. Until she saw Fred’s clumsy silhouette approach the curtain. She immediately knew what was about to happen. She tried to stop him, “Fred! Stop! It’s me!” but it was too late.
Fred threw the curtain open, holding a hairbrush up like a weapon. “GET OUT OF OUR SHOWER YOU BUM! YOU BALD HEADED… Jayne!??”
Jayne gave a little wave. “Hey, Fred.”
Fred smacked his hands over his eyes, blocking Jayne’s nudeness from his vision. “It’s, uh… It’s great to see you again!”
+++
Cameron was at the station, and Vlad was actually teaching for once. Only Merry and Fred were at the office. It was almost like nothing had changed. Fred slumped in a chair, Merry sprawled out on the couch, and Jayne took her seat at the desk.
Almost like nothing had changed, except Jayne was wanted. Her very presence was putting Merry and Fred in danger.
Merry’s voice warbled as she pleaded to Jayne from the couch. “We can fix this from here. You don’t have to leave, Jayne. You’re safer here than anywhere else.”
Jayne shook her head. “But you’re not.”
Fred shrugged. “Since when have we ever been safe with you around, Jayne?” He made Jayne laugh, and that meant the world to him.
Jayne stood up from the desk. She had changed into her own clothes. It was good to feel something familiar. She grabbed a small backpack full of supplies, a few handy tools, and tossed it over he
r shoulder. “Geiger is too powerful right now. If I stay in one place too long, everything we’ve built is toast.”
Merry jumped up from the couch and blocked Jayne’s path to the door. “Why would Geiger go to this much trouble, Jayne? No offense, but why would he devote so much to you?”
Jayne couldn’t stand the look in Merry’s eyes. “I think I might be a pawn. I don’t know. That’s what I have to figure out. Don’t worry, we’ll solve—”
Jayne started to move, but Merry blocked her again. “We think it’s Burrett.”
The name hit Jayne like a freight train. Merry saw the fear in Jayne’s eyes. The guilt. “No, that’s impossible.”
Merry grabbed Jayne’s shoulders. “I’m sorry, Jayne. We fucked up.”
Jayne looked Merry in the eye. “Then it’s our job to fix it.” She pulled Merry in for a hug. They held each other in a tight embrace. They lingered in the moment.
Fred hopped out of his chair and rushed over. “Okay, come on!” He threw his arms around them both. It was a group hug among the original members of the Intergalactic Spy Agency. They all laughed, caught up in the goofy embrace.
At last, Fred and Merry let go.
Jayne swiped the panel to open the door. “We got this, guys.” And she left.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ISA Offices, Malicarsh Building, L48, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros
Merry tossed another empty cup from Kava King into the trashcan. She needed another one, maybe another two or three, but Kava King closed at midnight and it was...
Merry looked at the clock. “Ah, shit.” It was 12:01 am.
Ever since Jayne disappeared, Merry had been living at the office. She split her time between developing ultra-secure traditional radio frequencies in the hopes of talking to Jayne without blowing her location, researching gang tattoos, and making trips to Kava King.
Merry was fixated on utilizing traditional radio frequencies to communicate with Jayne. She knew that radio waves didn’t die. Radio waves thousands of years old continued to vibrate across the expanse of the universe, and they would vibrate outward for infinity.
Merry’s idea was to lock onto the approaching waves, transmitted long ago from worlds light years away, and hijack the frequencies with messages to Jayne.
Merry discovered there were two problems with this idea. The first being that Merry and Jayne’s messages to each other would be insulated between hundred year old radio calls among meteor truckers. The messages would be unintelligible gobbledygook combining road conditions with Jayne’s top secret locations. Clear communication was important, and nothing would be more confusing than a now-dead trucker’s coordinates on an ice-planet in the Delemar System.
The second problem was an avid community of hobbyists who sat in their basements all day listening to and recording dead messages. Merry discovered them during her initial research on the idea. There were thousands of them in Theron Techcropolis alone. They even met once a month to share recordings of interest. The last thing Merry and Jayne needed was a bunch of nerds discovering public enemy number one was getting in the way of their niche interests. Nothing was worse than disgruntled nerds.
So, Merry shifted the communication conundrum to the back burner and hoped that Jayne was figuring out a solution on her own end.
Now, Merry was neck deep in the history of gang tattoos. She had catalogued every gang tattoo she could find online. She began with the basics.
Senior captains, as they were called, of the Cerulean Hill Mob gave newly made members tattoos of a fish skewered with a long sword. The tattoo was traditionally placed on the inside of the right bicep. The tattoo was not only a sign of loyalty, but a warning. The punishment for crossing the Cerulean Hill Mob was losing the tattoo, and your entire arm with it.
Other mobs, like the Wind Brothers Gang and the Amaros Kamikazes opted for more practical ID numbers or a simple crossed-circle shaped branding iron administered on the bottom of the foot.
Still others, like an underground gang of anarchic hackers called [+^^+], received a single straight line down the index finger, only visible under infrared light.
The variety and inventiveness of gang tattoos impressed Merry as much as they daunted her. There was no guarantee this mysterious man in black was attached to a Techcropolis gang, or even an Amaros-affiliate. They could be from anywhere in the universe, if they even were in a gang. Plenty of people just have tattoos. The gang association was merely a lead that Jayne, and now Merry, were clinging to in the desperate hope for some kind of clue.
Sometimes delirium brought upon by sleep deprivation or substance abuse, in this case caffeine, was the perfect recipe for a revelation. Merry had hers as she spun around in the office chair thinking about what kind of tattoos she would make her gang get if she had a gang.
On the fourth or fifth rotation, the idea sprouted at the base of her prefrontal cortex and by the time the chair slowed to a halt it had blossomed into a full-blown hunch.
Perhaps the missing piece was right in front of her. Merry picked up her tablet as she stood from the chair, still dizzy, and nervously paced the room. She closed out the secure deep-deep-web browsers, unscrambled her digital trace, and opted for a good old fashioned web search: best tattoo parlors for lightning bolts. Instead of “search,” Merry smirked and mashed “I’m Feeling Lucky.”
The web search immediately zapped her across the infinite web to a website for “Zodiac Zelda’s Tattoo & Body Modifications.”
Merry had a good feeling about this. Beneath the title, a banner elaborated on the shop’s specialties.
"Zodiac Zelda’s Guarantees Over Two-Hundred Years of Experience and Quality Behind Every Tattoo & Piercing. We specialize in traditional, monochromatic tattoos that can be traced to mythical origins as old as the universe itself.”
A little new age-y for Merry’s taste. If she was going to get a tattoo or a piercing, she wanted pain, not enlightenment.
At that she lost faith in her hunch, until she scrolled down a little further to a gallery of their work. Moons, suns, planets, symbols of the Zodiac, and elaborate streaks of lightning.
The more tattoos Merry looked at, the more lightning bolts she noticed. Every single tattoo featured a lightning bolt somewhere in the design. Tiny lightning bolts at the corners of suns or hidden in the face of the man in the moon.
Merry’s heart pounded. “Holy shit.” She couldn’t help but say it out loud.
According to the website, Zodiac Zelda’s parlor had one location, the original location, seventeen-hundred miles outside of Theron Techcropolis in the wastelands of Amaros on the main street of a former frontier town called Headless Hope.
Merry opened a new tab and searched Headless Hope gang activity.
Hundreds of thousands of results popped up, older results going back a few decades. Evidently, the Headless Hope PD led a series of massive busts on a gang simply called “The Bitch.”
Merry pulled up an old press photo of four police officers loading two of The Bitch’s leaders, Jazmyne Scar and Vanika Venom according to the caption, into the back of an armored car. Merry highlighted the photo and transferred it to a hologram projection. Hanging in the air before her, Merry zoomed in on the photo. Closer, closer, closer… “Bingo.” Merry smiled. It was barely discernible in the old photo, yet left no room for doubt. Inside Jazmyne Scar’s wrist, a lightning bolt.
But something didn’t check out. “This gang… is all women…” Three clipped knocks on the door accelerated Merry’s heart rate further. She looked at the clock embedded in the hologram. It was 12:47 in the morning, traditionally a horrible time for visitors. She quickly closed out of her research and cleared her history.
The quick knocks came again. Merry’s voice quivered. “Y-yes?”
She pulled out her comm and opened the link to the camera in the hallway. Two serious men waited in the hallway. One of them spoke, his voice muffled by the door. “Agents Danvers and Hickenlooper. Federation Bureau of Security and Data. P
lease allow us in.”
That’s a weird way to word that, Merry thought. What, are they vampires or something? But Merry understood the delicate situation. If she acted suspicious, Jayne was even worse off. Cooperation had to be part of the scheme.
Merry cleared her throat, cleared her head and allowed confidence back into her spirit. “One moment!”
She positioned herself standing before the desk. She pulled out her comm and activated the door to slide open.
Danvers and Hickenlooper would have been indistinguishable if it weren’t for Danvers’ impeccably trimmed mustache. “Miss Winterborn?”
Merry smiled. For an ominous, governmental presence at one in the morning, he was cute. “Please, call me Merry.”
Danvers unbuttoned his coat. “Mind if I sit down?”
Merry shrugged. “Help yourself.”
Danvers made himself comfortable on the couch, legs crossed, one arm stretched across the back. “How’s Jayne doing?”
Damn, Merry thought. This guy’s not fucking around. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t heard from her since… I mean come on, you know. The kid, the information. For all I know, she’s dead.”
“She’s not dead.” At this point it was evident that Danvers would do all the talking. Hickenlooper’s job, it seemed, was to keep Merry on edge by walking around the perimeter of the room.
Merry shrugged. “That doesn’t surprise me. She’s hard to nail down.” She crossed her arms. Should I have crossed my arms just now? She thought in a flash of panicked nervousness. Do I look tougher or do I look defensive?
“Do you know a man named Fred…” Danvers looked at the note on his comm and said the last name with disdain, “Baggins?”
Merry nodded. “He worked with us. With Jayne. But none of us are working right now.”
Danvers tilted his head. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
Exposed (Interplanetary Spy for Hire Book 2) Page 8