“And what did you do about it?”
“Nothing! What could I do about it? You had me in a crucifix!”
“Bullshit! You can always do something. You could have bitten me, taken a chunk out of my knob!” he said, his voice rising in emphasis.
“You . . . you wanted me to bite your dick?”
“No, I wanted you to try. I wanted to see where your spirit was. You weren’t gonna succeed, but I wanted to see you resort to what you could. But no, that would get you disqualified from an MMA match? And you’d never do that, am I right? Let me tell you, girl, that won’t cut it in a fight with a Marine. He’ll do everythin’ he can to win, and there are no rules. Even Saint Lysander, he’s resorted to some underhanded shit despite what the Marine propaganda machine would lead you to believe.”
“You mean that commander they talk about on the newsfeeds?”
“Yeah, that commander. Captain Ryck Lysander, hero of the Corps.”
“You know him?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, yes. We went to boot together and served in the fleet. I even broke his arm once. He’s an arrogant bastard, I can tell you.”
“You broke his arm? Why?” she asked, curiosity overtaking her anxiety for a moment.
“Call it payback. But forget him. Any Marine’s gonna fight dirty if that’s what it takes. You can’t play by no fuckin’ rules if you want to survive. And you, cousin dear, don’t have it in you.
“Look, I love MMA. It pulled me up and gave me my shot at a better life. It got me into the Marines, before I screwed that up. It pays my bills now. But it’s a freakin’ sport, not battle. And until you get that there are no rules in a fight, you are gonna get crushed.”
“What about you?” Michi asked excitedly. “Why don’t you join us?”
“Join you? Fat fuckin’ chance of that!” he said with a snort.
“Why not? You don’t like the Marines, I can tell. You can’t support the company. Who do you support?”
“I support me. I always have. I’m Clan, but not Clan. None of us MacPruitts matter squat to the rest of you. I joined the Marines, but I never fit in. The company doesn’t want much to do with me, neither. I’ll just make my own way like I always do.”
“But this is your chance to hit back. What about that commander? Get back at him. Get back at the Marines, at least,” she continued.
Seth leaned forward and grabbed her wrist, bending her arm back.
“The Marine Corps and me may have not parted on the best of terms, but that was my fault. The day I pinned on my sergeant’s chevrons was the second-best day of my life. I just couldn’t play by the rules until it was too late. And Captain Lysander? He’s an arrogant asshole, but he’s a good Marine, and I respect him. I don’t like him, but I would follow him into combat. No matter what, no matter what silly-arse games you play with the company, be sure of one thing—I will never lift my hand against another Marine.”
He let go of her arm, and she brought it back to her lap, rubbing it to restore the circulation he’d cut off.
“What about me? What are you going to do?”
“I ain’t gonna do nothing. I don’t care what you do, and I won’t stop you from getting yourself zeroed, ’cause that’s exactly what’s gonna happen iffen you try and play by the rules against the Marines.”
She sat there, looking at Seth. She didn’t understand him, but she could sense his conviction.
“Can I at least keep coming to your dojo?” she quietly asked.
“I don’t think so, Michiko. You need to forget about MMA as a sport.”
“But you can help me with that.”
“Yeah, I could. But I won’t. I won’t stand in your way, but I ain’t gonna help you, neither. And when you fail, I don’t want them to trace you back to me. I don’t got no dog in this fight.
“I think it’s time for you to leave.”
Michi sighed, then slowly stood up. She picked up her outer clothes on the counter, and with one look back at Seth sitting on the mat, she turned and opened the door.
“Go with God, cousin,” she heard him say without his usual sarcasm as the door closed behind her.
Chapter 22
Seth had been right about one thing, Michi conceded. Neither she nor anyone else was going to force the issue by getting into fistfights. This was not a refereed fight in a ring going three five-minute rounds. This was real life, and if Michi wanted to get the Marines off Kakurega, she had to use more than a roundhouse kick.
As she came home from Seth’s dojo, his words echoed in her mind. Maybe she was biting off more than she could chew, but she had never actually analyzed that. She had just acted willy-nilly on her emotions.
Despite the apparent success of their little mission to Kelli Mae’s home, Michi realized that they were amateurs, and that almost got the four of them arrested—or worse. If she was going to continue opposing the company and the Federation occupation, that had to be addressed. She decided to take the bull by the horns and called Doug, asking him to stop by on his way to work in the morning.
Tamara was still asleep when Doug showed up, eager to see what Michi wanted. Michi took Doug to the kitchen table, poured him a cup of coffee, and sat him down.
“What’s up,” he asked.
“Did you tell anyone you were coming?”
“No, I did as you asked. What’s with all the secrecy?” he asked, a puzzled look on his face.
“You know that our little mission the other day almost ended up as a disaster, right?”
“Yeah, I was monitoring it. Close call, huh?”
“Did you wonder why, how the jacks knew to come?”
“I guess someone spotted you on the way in?” he offered.
“No one spotted us. The jacks were tipped off by someone in the WRP. And you are going to help me flush him or her out.”
“I, uh, what? What am I going to do?”
“I figured it out last night. There’s a traitor in the organization, and we’re going to find out who it is. That’s why no one else can get wind of it. Look, who’s the leader of the NIP?” she asked.
“The National Independence Party? No one knows. It’s a secret. That’s how they keep going,” he said.
“Exactly, but with the big rally tomorrow, don’t you think they might want to have a hand in it? And wouldn’t they maybe reach out to the WRP?”
“Yes, but so what? How does that help you find this traitor you think is there?”
“I don’t think. I know!” she said with conviction. “Look, this is what I want you to do. Can you send out, say, eight different messages, all saying that the leader of the NIP wants to meet, but he wants to meet only one person in absolute secrecy?”
“Sure, that’s easy. But what will that get you?”
“I want each meeting place in a different spot, somewhere where we can monitor and see if the jacks show up,” she said.
“Ah, kilo-brills! I get it. So, if there really is a traitor, and if the jacks show up, that’s our man. Or woman, I mean.”
“So, can you set that up? I was thinking if we stagger the supposed meetings and put them close together, like at Morning Star, we could keep an eye on all of them,” Michi offered.
“Morning Star is compact, so if you wanted to physically stake out a place, sure, that apartment complex would work. But get with the times, Michiko! We don’t need to be there at all. Tennyson I and II are easy hacks, and we can sit right here and watch each meeting spot. There’s no way we can miss them,” Doug said with just a hint of condescension in his voice.
Michi let it slide. This was Doug’s arena, and she let him take charge. He muttered to himself for the next twenty minutes before asking Michi how many meeting sites she wanted.
“I’m not sure. We need enough to cover anyone who might have the information that the company wants, but they would have to be high enough for the NIP leader to want to meet.”
“Well, I can think of a few. Rosario, for sure. He’s in charge of
security, and he would a logical suspect. I never did like him, anyway. Gabriella, Su, and Rangle. They’re all on the board, but Su hasn’t been active lately, so maybe not her.”
“No, keep Su on the list,” Michi told him.
“I guess you want Hokkam, too?”
“Yep. He’s in position.”
“OK, that would be five so far,” Doug said.
“And Cheri,” Michi said with conviction.
“You think Cheri could be a traitor?” Doug asked surprised. “She hooked the three of us up.”
“No, I don’t think she is, but we need to be sure,” Michi said, ashamed for even doubting her.
But Seth said you had to be ruthless to succeed, and she’d be damned if the person who either ordered or allowed Franz to be killed got away with it.
“OK, that’s six. Any more?”
“Maybe Sven Tyler. He seems to be in everyone’s hair. Can you handle seven?”
“No problem. I could handle more than that,” he said confidently.
“No, if we don’t get a bite on this attempt, we might go down the list and try again. Let’s work on the wording of the message itself.”
They went back and forth on that for a good half an hour, trying to make it compelling, but not going overboard. They stressed that the meeting had to be extremely confidential, that the “leader” only wanted to meet one person. Michi didn’t want anyone to start comparing notes about the liaison. Finally, between the two of them, they had something they thought would work. Michi thought someone might suspect a trap, but Doug pointed out that a real traitor would have communications with the company, and he or she would know it wasn’t some company trick. If any of the others suspected something, then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
“OK, send it out,” she told him.
It only took a few minutes before he broke out into a broad smile and said, “Done and done!”
“Done and done what?” Tamara said, coming out of her bedroom and rubbing her eyes. “What are you doing here so early, Dougie?”
“Ah, we’ve been—”
“We’ve been working on some new ideas for the face-spoofer, you know, so it can change more of the body, too,” Michi said, stepping firmly on Doug’s foot under the table.
“And this had to be done now?” she asked as she reached over for Doug’s coffee, took a sip, and made a face.
“You need to freshen that up,” she said, tossing the cold coffee in the sink and getting a refill from the brewmaster. She took a sip. “There, that’s better,” she said before giving the cup back to him.
“OK, you two have fun. I need a shower,” she said with a yawn as she went to the bathroom.
“You think Tamara could be the traitor?” Doug asked incredulously.
“No, I don’t,” she said, even if she felt a touch of guilt because no, at the moment, she didn’t trust anyone 100%. If she hadn’t needed him, she would have done this without Doug, too. “But what she doesn’t know, she can’t be implicated in it.”
“I guess so, but it seems weird. We’re like the Three Musketeers, aren’t we?”
He seemed so earnest that she had to assure him that yes, they were a team. All three of them.
“OK, while she’s in the shower, give me a rundown on how to monitor these things,” she told him.
“No reason, to. I’ll be doing it, so there’ll be no screw-up,” he told her.
“We set this up for this afternoon. Don’t you have work?”
“Oh ye of little faith, my queen. As I sit here, I am at work. Little packets of information are going out: key strokes, messages, some unauthorized surfing. If anyone checks, I’m at my desk right now.”
“Really? Well what happens if someone tries to find you to talk?”
“Like in person? For real? No one does that, and if they did and saw me missing from my cubbyhole, they’d think I was in the lab or in the field. I do this all the time, and no one has ever caught on.”
“You do? What do you do when you’re playing hooky?”
“Oh, you know. All sorts of things. Sleeping in. Seeing a flick. Going to a game.”
“A game? What sports do you watch?” she said with a disbelieving laugh.
“Oh, I get it Miss MMA superfighter. Just because I like tech means I can’t like sports, right? For your information, I’m a Gryphons fan, always have been. I’ve had season tickets since I was 18,” he told her, a hint of anger in his voice.
Michi felt bad about that. There had been no reason for her attitude.
“Sorry,” she said, trying to fix things. “Of course, you like sports. It’s just you never talk about them, and most guys, you can’t shut them up about this team or that.”
“Umpf. Maybe,” he said, only slightly mollified.
“The Gryphons suck, by the way,” she added. “You need to root for a real team, like the Desecrators!”
“Desecrators? Oh, let me tell you about the Desecrators . . .”
That started at least 20 minutes of smack talk. Tamara came out, listened for a moment, then shook her head and left for work without a word. They ended up agreeing to disagree, as most sports arguments ended, and turned on the holo. They settled on watching an old Frank Garrison comedy, one both had seen before but still got them laughing. Frank G was so stupid that he shouldn’t be funny to anyone with an IQ over 60, but still, they both enjoyed the flick.
When it was over, Michi looked at Tamara’s cuckoo clock. The analog hands showed it was only 9:20. Michi groaned. They had almost five hours to go.
Time crawled while every possible thing that could go wrong was brought up and discussed. Maybe two of their targets started talking. Maybe they weren’t even checking their messages. Three of them worked for the company, and if they did access their private zips, they might not be able to get away. Michi and Doug realized that they should have made the meeting for the evening, instead.
Their brainstorming revealed one possible hole in their plan, though. If the jacks did react, and then when there was no NIB leader there, they would certainly contact their spy. They decided to block all messages to the traitor, then they ginned up a “success” message that Doug would send if the jacks did react. That should calm the traitor and keep him or her from bolting.
They made noodles for lunch, but after one bite, Michi couldn’t eat any more. She was too wound up. Finally, 2:30, the time of the first meeting was approaching. Doug put his PA on an easel and turned on the seven surveillance cams into which he’d hacked. Each one had the name of the target person to whom that apartment number had been given. There was some movement, and Michi jumped from where she was standing looking over Doug’s shoulder.
It was a woman with a small child on her arm. She made her way to the door, swiped it, then went inside. If the jacks broke into her apartment, she would be terrified.
“Just whose apartments did you pick?” she asked.
“Don’t know. I never looked at the occupant lists. I just wanted apartments where I had good coverage.”
Michi was the one who was supposed to be hardened by necessity, but she worried about a woman and child while it was Doug who focused on the mission. She shook her head and went back to watching the monitors.
Nothing was happening, and Michi thought that their traitor either wasn’t one of the seven or hadn’t taken the bait. She was about to give up when three of the feeds flickered.
“We’ve got something here,” Doug said, checking a fast scrolling file that appeared at the corner of his PA screen. “Someone else is onboard. This is building 2002.”
“Do they know you’re there, too?” she asked him.
“No reason they would. I’m passive here.”
They waited anxiously for several minutes, then just at the edge of cam range on one of the feeds, several sets of military-like boots could be seen. Slowly, the riot-equipped jacks edged along the wall until they flanked the target door. Another man in a StarEx uniform came up to the door, just a deliveryman
making his rounds. He even had a package under his arm. He tried the bell first, and when there was no answer, knocked.
He finally stepped back and shook his head. One of the jacks leaned forward, holding a master keypad to the door. The lock light flashed green, and the jacks rushed in.
Doug needlessly pointed at the name at the top of the feed, but Michi was already aware of who was the traitor.
“Send the success message, then block anything else except from me. I’ve got a few people I need to contact about this. Good job, Doug, we won this fight.”
The only thing was that it didn’t feel like a win.
Chapter 23
Michi tried to calm her expression. She was just there for a visit before the big rally, right? She gave herself a body shake, then opened the door to the WRP office spaces.
It was almost 6:00 PM, and those who had been at work all day were straggling in. There was an air of building excitement. WRP’s official mission statement was to monitor the treatment of workers, particularly Class 3s and 4s, but over the last year, rallies had become a big part of what they did, and the members hoped that tomorrow’s rally would be their biggest yet. It was reasonable that Michi, even if she was not officially a member of the organization, would stop by and see how things were going.
“Michiko, it’s good to see you,” Gabriella said, looking up. She came around some desks and gave Michi a kiss on the cheek.
Gabriella was the chapter quartermaster, in charge of accounting. That also placed her on the board. Michi hugged her back, returned the kiss, and tried to show nothing on her face as she slipped a small, printed note into Gabriella’s side pocket.
“Just coming by to say hi and see how things are going for tomorrow,” she said.
“You can imagine,” Gabriella told her. “Things are rather hectic. Let’s catch up after this is over, OK?”
Michi had to hold back a smile. Yes, they would be meeting sooner than perhaps Gabriella expected.
Michi made the rounds, stopping to chat with people she knew. There were many people she didn’t recognize. Evidently, the Federation’s latest actions had inspired a good number of people to join the cause.
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