by Piers Platt
Rath spasmed in agony, and fell to the floor. Moments later, he felt the auto-rifle wrenched from his grasp, and someone pulled him to his knees. The painful shocks stopped.
“Hands on your head,” a voice ordered. Rath took a deep breath and complied.
The two Senate Guards stood a safe distance away, covering him and Paisen with their auto-rifles. Dasi and Beauceron were kneeling as well.
“What have you done?” Senator Lizelle demanded. “I didn’t order this.”
The guard closest to Lizelle swung back his rifle and clubbed the senator once, brutally, in the stomach, knocking him to the floor. Rath watched as the two bodyguards shifted their faces and hair, slipping back into non-descript cover identities.
Contractors.
His stomach dropped. Then the third man, who had lain as if dead on the floor, shouldered his backpack and joined the other two. His face was a mass of burn scars, and his eyes glinted cruelly as he eyed his five prisoners. They lingered on Rath the longest.
16
“Hello, everyone,” 700 said, standing over his kneeling prisoners. “I’m 700, this is 816 and 902. Gentlemen, well done,” 700 congratulated them, then turned back to his prisoners. “They replaced Senator Lizelle’s security detail just before I launched my attack on the house.”
Lizelle groaned and sat up, coughing. “Nkosi sent you.”
“She did,” 700 affirmed. “And she predicted that you would betray her and the Group. For that, sir, you will die. But first let me thank you – all of you – for playing your parts so perfectly.”
He stooped and picked up the folded piece of paper that contained the two senator’s names. 700 glanced at it, then tucked it into his pocket.
“Senators Mastic and Blackwell. Fascinating. I have my doubts as to whether you really would have died before revealing their names,” 700 told Lizelle. “But compared to torturing you, this way was much easier.”
“Nkosi is going to have them killed,” Beauceron said. “That was the plan all along – get the senator to reveal their identities, then assassinate them, so the Group could operate without constraints.”
“Correct. For your part, Detective, you might have the luxury of dying now, and quickly.” He turned to Rath and Paisen. “But you two do not. You two go back on the tables. Do you remember the contractor they tortured? We talked about him before, 621 – the one from the video they showed us at the end of Training?”
“I remember,” Rath said.
“Do you know how long he lived?” 700 asked. “I asked them, because I was curious. One hundred and ninety-four days. They tortured him for six months straight. Every day. Wake up, torture. Stop after twelve hours, heal through the night, then do it all over again. A hundred and ninety-four times. Just think: every day when he woke up, there must have been a moment when he realized that it wasn’t a nightmare: it was real. It was going to happen, all over again.”
Rath glanced across at Paisen: like him, she had her hands interlocked behind her head. But he could just make out her finger resting near the button on her detonator bracelet. He caught her eye, and shook his head.
“That’s not going to happen to us,” Rath told 700.
“It will,” 700 assured him. “And you’ll know pain far worse than the pain you inflicted on me, 621. The only question is: how long will you last? Do you know why they stopped, why they decided to kill him on the last day?”
“No,” Rath said.
“Because he stopped reacting. On the hundred and ninety-fourth day, he didn’t make a sound. They cut him open, they broke his bones, they burned him, electrocuted him – he didn’t whimper, or beg, or cry … nothing. The theory is that he had a complete mental break. As a self-defense mechanism, his mind just stopped registering the pain. So they killed him. What’s the point of continuing to torture someone who doesn’t feel it?”
700 squatted in front of Rath, putting his fire-ravaged face just inches from Rath’s own. “But I have a different theory, 621. I watched the tape of that last day, and I saw him flinch. Just once, just for the briefest of instants. But I know: he could feel what was happening. I don’t think he had a mental break, I think he had a moment of complete clarity. When he woke up that morning, he realized that the only way to make them stop was to convince them that it no longer hurt. Can you imagine the discipline that took? But you, Rath Kaldirim? I don’t see that strength in you.”
“Let’s find out,” Rath proposed. “You and me, right now.”
700 laughed. “No.”
“Scared?” Rath asked.
“Not in the slightest. You wouldn’t be lucky enough to get the drop on me twice, and we both know it. That’s why I can hear your heartbeat pounding already. You just want me to kill you quickly and painlessly. And I won’t.”
700 spied Beauceron’s pencil on the floor – it had fallen out of the detective’s notebook when the contractors forced him to kneel. Absent-mindedly, the scarred contractor knelt and picked it up.
“You know they’ll kill you when you reach fifty kills,” Paisen told him.
Rath hung his head. “I told him the last time we met. He doesn’t care.”
Paisen shifted her attention to the other two contractors. “Did you know that?” she asked.
“Yes, I told them,” 700 answered. “They’re both getting fully paid out at the end of this mission, before they complete their fifty kills. A special exemption, approved by the director herself.” He twirled Beauceron’s pencil through his fingers, looping it back and forth.
“Nkosi won’t honor that deal,” Paisen told them. “Not with all that you know about Group operations and oversight. You’re too dangerous.”
The contractor on the right looked at Paisen. “What do you suggest we do instead?”
“Kill this psychopath and join us, and we’ll ensure you get your cut,” she said.
The contractor shook his head. “I’ll take my chances with Nkosi’s deal.”
Beauceron’s eyes were fixed on his pencil, twirling in 700’s hand.
I’ve seen that before …
“Colony A31!” he shouted.
700 fixed him with a surprised stare, an eyebrow cocked. “What?”
“The children at the carnival … Colony A31. You were the one that killed them! And Mehta, too.”
A slow smile spread across 700’s face. “I did. You investigated those missions? What an odd coincidence.” He tapped Dasi on the forehead with the pencil. “I’ll be killing you, and I killed your boyfriend, too. We’re just surrounded by coincidences.”
“700,” one of the other contractors grumbled. “Enough playing – we need to report in.”
“We do,” 700 agreed, standing back.
He drew an auto-pistol from a belt holster. Dasi whimpered.
Beauceron’s mind raced. “When we arrived here, you weren’t jamming our signals – you were jamming the airship’s security system. Preventing it from notifying Interstellar Police of the attack, so that you could lay your trap undisturbed.”
“And?” 700 asked.
“You’re still jamming now,” Beauceron said, pointing his chin at 700’s backpack. “It’s in there, isn’t it? So your Headquarters hasn’t seen or heard what’s happened here. The only people that know the names of those senators are here in this room.”
“Not for long,” 700 told him. He reached into the pack and switched the jammer off. “I’ll tell them in a second. But first, the director has asked to see the senator die.”
Rath shot Beauceron a look of alarm.
“Martin—”
But Beauceron had already pressed the button on his detonator bracelet. Behind the contractors, the metal disc he had dropped on the floor flashed white-hot, then exploded with massive force.
17
Paisen came to first, her hemobots automatically administering a dose of adrenaline and jolting her into consciousness. She pushed a pile of broken bannister off her leg, and rolled to one side, coughing. She realized
she had been knocked off the landing, and ended up on the lower floor. Rath lay next to her, and she spotted Beauceron and Dasi above them on the stairs. There was no sign of Lizelle or the other contractors.
God damn it, Beauceron!
She stood unsteadily and walked to the stairs, where she found an auto-rifle lying on a step. She dimly recognized it as Rath’s, but she picked it up, and checked that the weapon was still loaded. Then she started up the stairs. She stepped over Beauceron and Dasi’s inert bodies – they looked unhurt, but she had no time to stop and check.
The top of the stairs was a blood-soaked mess. Paisen panned her rifle across the landing, and noted that the two contractors had taken the brunt of the blast; little of them remained. Senator Lizelle’s body had been flung down the hall. A movement caught Paisen’s eye, and she switched aim, firing reflexively. But 700 dove out of the hallway in time, disappearing into one of the side rooms.
Shit. He must have been shielded by the other contractors, like we were.
She dashed after him, sprinting across the hall and into the room beyond. A pair of doors at the far end of the room stood empty, opening out onto a balcony. She looked around frantically, but the room appeared empty, too.
Where the hell did he go?
Paisen heard the whine of a hoverbike starting up and she realized with sudden clarity that the open balcony doors she was staring at were a mere hologram. She kicked aside the projector, disrupting the illusion. The real doors were locked shut. With a burst from her auto-rifle, she blasted away the door handle, then pushed out onto the balcony, but the hoverbike’s engine noise was already fading as 700 disappeared into Emerist’s thick clouds. She shouldered the rifle and fired a salvo after him, snarling.
Fuck!
Dasi and Beauceron were regaining consciousness when she returned. Paisen checked both quickly, finding shrapnel wounds, but nothing life-threatening. She realized she had several pieces of shrapnel of her own to deal with, but after a quick consult with her hemobots, chose to ignore them.
Rath was far worse off. She pushed debris off of him, and saw that the force of the explosion had broken several ribs. His Forge, still slung over one shoulder, leaked fluids out of three large shrapnel holes.
“Rath, get up,” she told him, shaking him lightly by the shoulder.
“Ouch,” he told her, his eyes fluttering open. He winced. “Quit shaking me, that’s not helping.”
She pulled him over to the stairs, then set his auto-rifle on his lap, spying her own weapon lying off to the side.
“700’s gone; the other two are dead,” she told him. “Dasi and Beauceron are right here, I’m going to check the senator.”
“Roger,” Rath said. He set his hand on the rifle. “Go find him.”
Lizelle lay face down on the floor; when Paisen turned him over, she knew at once that his injuries had been fatal. She checked for a pulse for ten seconds, just to be sure, then returned to the stairs. Beauceron was kneeling next to Dasi, applying a bandage to a cut on her hip.
“How’s Lizelle?” he asked.
“Dead,” Paisen informed him. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Rath spat grime and dust out of his mouth. “He was thinking that if we all died, Nkosi would never learn the identity of the other two senators.”
“True,” Beauceron commented. “I’m sorry it didn’t work how I planned.”
“Next time you decide to make a martyr of me, run it by me first, huh?” Paisen commented.
“Well, we’re too late now,” Dasi noted. “That man will have told the Group who the other senators are, and they’ll be going after them. They’ll kill them before we can warn them.”
“No,” Beauceron shook his head. “Not necessarily. The airship’s security system is back online – Interstellar Police are probably en route right now. When they get here, we can tell them what happened to Lizelle, and warn the other senators.”
“Oh, Christ,” Paisen swore. She keyed her radio. “Mikolos, this is Paisen, over. Requesting immediate pickup on the senator’s airship.”
“Martin,” Rath explained, “that won’t work. If we stay here, IP is just going to think we’re the ones that attacked and killed Lizelle.”
“Technically, Beauceron did kill Lizelle,” Paisen pointed out.
“That’s true,” Beauceron admitted. “But the evidence will exonerate us – our lives were at stake. And it’s our responsibility to make sure the other senators are warned.”
“You’re welcome to stay here and talk to the authorities,” Paisen told him. “But our only realistic shot of warning them is to get to Anchorpoint before the Group does.” She pulled Dasi to her feet, supporting the younger woman with an arm around her waist. They climbed down the stairs, past Rath and Beauceron, and started down the hall. “Come on,” Paisen said.
Beauceron helped Rath stand up. As the two men turned, Rath glanced out the window. Two armored air cars hovered outside the main entrance to the house – Rath was surprised that the Interstellar Police had arrived so soon. Then he saw a group of armed men climb out of the cars, and noted that none of the cars bore IP insignia.
“Oh, shit,” he commented.
Paisen and Dasi turned. “What?”
“The Group just dropped off about a dozen contractors on the front lawn, headed inside.”
The air cars rose up on their hoverjets and flew along the front of the house, scanning with their sensors.
“Get down!” Rath warned, as the nearest car’s cannon opened fire, rounds smashing through the window and chewing into the woodwork of the hall. Rath and Beauceron scrambled up the staircase, while Paisen and Dasi sprinted down the hall on the floor below. The cannon fire stopped.
“Rath, where are you?” Paisen radioed.
“Back upstairs,” he responded. He and Beauceron had paused to catch their breath in what looked like a living room off of the main hallway.
“We’re a floor below you,” Paisen told him. “Dasi says there’s another set of stairs in the rear, meet us there.”
“Roger,” Rath said. “On our way.”
Rath saw an auto-pistol on the floor next to a dead Senate Guard, and handed his rifle to Beauceron. “It’s loaded, safety off. My ribs are killing me, so I’m going to be better off with a pistol,” he told the detective.
“Okay,” Beauceron said.
The two men hurried out into a second hallway; when they reached the end of it, they found a wall with a window, but no stairs.
“Shit,” Rath said. “Stairs must be in the first hallway.” He heard a burst of gunfire from below, followed by a muffled explosion.
“Contractors are inside the building,” Paisen warned over the radio. “I took down two, but we had to break contact. Dasi and I are descending to sub-basement levels.”
“Roger,” Rath called.
“This is Mikolos,” the captain radioed. “I’m standing off two miles west of the airship. That airspace is looking a bit unfriendly right now.”
“You’re armed, too,” Rath pointed out.
“I am, but those air cars are far more maneuverable than the Hurasu in atmospheric flight,” he pointed out. “And they outnumber me.”
Rath and Beauceron found their way back to the first hallway, but one of the air cars was hovering with its cannon pointed straight down the hall, and the instant they emerged from the side passage, a hail of bullets forced them back into cover.
“Rath, we’re in the senator’s garage,” Paisen told him. “If Mikolos won’t come to us, we can try something else. Where are you?”
Rath leaned against the wall, wincing as the cannon rounds sent splinters of wood flying. “We’re pinned down up here, still haven’t made it to the back stairs. And the rest of those contractors are between us and you … I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“Stand by,” Paisen said. “We’re getting in an air car, we’re going to try and pick you up.”
“No,” Rath told her. “You ca
n’t risk it. Get airborne and head for the Hurasu. We’ll try to give you some cover from up here.”
“That’s a shitty plan, Rath,” she replied.
“It’s a shitty situation. Get to the senators before the Group does, warn them, and get our money. We’ll figure out another way out of here.”
“Paisen, I backed up all of the evidence we’ve collected so far on the Group to Hurasu’s hard drives,” Beauceron said, keying his throat-mic. “Make sure it gets in the right hands.”
“I will if I can,” she replied.
Abruptly, the cannon stopped firing, and Rath saw two grenades land on the floor of the hallway. He and Beauceron jumped back into the living room, and slammed the door shut.
“Contractors are coming up,” Rath said, unnecessarily.
The grenades exploded in quick succession. Rath pulled the door back open and steadied his pistol on the door frame. He watched as the barrel of a rifle poked past the edge of the stairs, then swung around the corner toward him.
He’s using the rifle’s optics to see around the corner without exposing himself. Just like they taught us in Training.
Rath fired twice, and saw one bullet connect with the weapon’s magazine, detonating several of the rounds within. Rath heard a cry of pain and saw the weapon fall to the floor.
“Martin, switch out with me,” Rath ordered.
Beauceron took Rath’s place at the door, his auto-rifle trained on the top of the stairs. “What are you going to do?”
“There’s another room on the far side of the hall – I’m going to cross over and get that air car’s attention.”
Another rifle poked around the corner in their direction, this time opening fire immediately. Beauceron returned fire.
“You okay?” Rath asked.
“Yeah,” Beauceron replied. “They didn’t hit me.”
“Shoot at him again,” Rath told him, and then ran across the hall, smashing through a closed door with his full weight. A white-hot jolt of pain seared through his ribs. The air car was hovering just outside the windows, and Rath saw it spin on its axis as the pilot saw him, lining up the car’s cannon. Rath slid across the floor, flattening himself against the outer wall as bullets crashed through the window above him. Then the car shifted left, searching for a better angle, blasting out the room’s other window as it opened fire again.