by Arthur Byrne
Zero-eight hundred, and Nash is packing his gear. Ten-day runs are unheard of because it’s tough to carry enough supplies. Nash doesn’t really care because of his secret hiding spot, but the length of the mission is telling.
Frank walked into the staging room and said, “Any questions about the mission, Nash?”
“Ten days is a long run. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to make me disappear.”
“It’s an important section; I need you to stay a little longer to get as much intel as possible.”
Nash made a mocking salute. “Aye aye, captain.”
Frank had a wry smile on his face when he left.
Holly came in and said, “How’s it going?”
“I’ve never packed this much gear. Having packs on both the front and back means if I run into anything tougher than a rabbit, I’m toast.”
“Have you ever seen a rabbit in the wild?”
“No, but I saw a cat once.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I thought I’d grab it and bring the little fellow back.”
“What happened?”
“He went through a hole and was gone. Quick little bastard, but I guess if you survive as long as he has, you don’t trust guys in suits.”
“Sounds like good advice. Heck, you do look pretty scary.”
“Help me get this second pack on.”
Holly got him set and whispered, “You remember the signal. Fristion if she’s listening, Nash is all clear.”
“And ‘static’ means someone just got on the line.”
Nash waddled to the briefing room. Fiel gave him his orders and strapped the wrist mapper on his left arm. Nash could just reach around his front pack and turn it on.
When she was done, he said, “Permission to waddle into the wild.”
Fiel didn’t appreciate Nash’s sense of humor and left without comment.
Holly walked Nash to the gate and said, “You be careful out there.”
“You be careful in here,” he said, winked, and walked through the door.
The first four hours were through well-traveled halls, all with normal air and no new signs of scavengers or aliens.
It was a ways out of his way, but he needed to look like he was following Frank’s orders. When Nash got to the first spot he suspected would have comm issues, he called Holly to check in. “Holly, you got me on the map?”
“Yes, Fristion, I’ve got you.”
So, Fiel’s listening, he thought. “I’m at the junction of the textile plant and the lighting maintenance warehouse. The path straight through looks like it’s been compromised. Please advise.”
“Go through textiles. The last report was the air was fine, and there haven’t been any reports of trouble in that section.”
“Roger that.”
“Anything else you need, Nash?”
Nash wasn’t sure if Holly was remembering their code. He said, “Come again, Holly, I didn’t get that last message.”
“Is there anything else you need...Nash,” she said, emphasizing his last name.”
“So we’re clear?”
“She’s gone.”
“Great. I need to go dark for about three to four hours. Any radio-free areas ahead?”
“The textiles main floor and a ways beyond is perfect.”
“Good. I’ll let you know when I’m back.”
Nash headed into the textiles section and took off the pack on his back. He stashed it behind a huge machine in the corner and put the wrist mapper inside.
He had to backtrack almost forty-five minutes to take the turn to his home away from home. It was another thirty to reach it. Nash took off the front pack and pulled the file with the photos he’d gotten from Stepan on the table.
He took five minutes to eat and then hustled back to textiles. When he came out the other side, he reported back to Holly. “Holly come in, can you read me?”
“Fristion, you’re coming in loud and clear. You’ve been off for a while. Any problems?”
“A few signs of someone camping here, so I had to take it slowly. It looks like a single person had spent a couple of days or nights. They moved around quite a bit. I went over the whole production floor, and it looks like they’re gone.”
“Good to hear. What’s your current status?”
“I’m to the other side of textile town now and am back on track. I’ll probably hump it for another hour and then look for a spot for the night.”
“Roger that. Be safe.”
Nash had to give Holly credit; she was pretty deft with their code. It made his job of stepping into a lie rather easy. It wasn’t truly a lie because he had been through textile town before, and two years ago there had been signs of someone camping about in different places, but today he’d seen none of that.
He made his way through the section the other runners referred to as the dark halls. The life support and gravity were at 100 percent, but not a single light worked. It was complete blackness.
Though the air was fine, Nash put on his helmet to make it through and used his HUD to project where the walls, floors, and ceilings were.
Just on the other side of the dark halls was a perfect area for setting up camp for the night. The platform for the red route 8 had a three-car train on the tracks. The station had stairs that went up or down five decks, and there were two sets: one on each side of the tracks.
Because of the compartmentalized design of the Magellan, if someone went up three decks on the right they wouldn’t necessarily be able to get to areas on the same deck to the left. It meant he could put sensors at the entrances to all four stairs, and if anything should come creeping along in the night, he would know from where and be able to escape.
Nash called in that he was stopping for the night and then went about preparing his toys. The sensors were just the beginning. He also had some sound blasters that he could control with his HUD. They were similar to the sensors, but they were tiny and served only one purpose: to mask his footsteps as he fled. He would put one on each set of stairs, and if he had to make a hasty retreat, he could blast a siren that would make it impossible for an attacker to tell if he was still climbing or had already gotten off.
The deafening sound was enough to dissuade most scavengers or aliens from continuing their pursuit. It also distracted the hunters from noticing the tiny packs of ice gel. Ice gel packs when broken created a slick surface that could take out even the most agile and ill-tempered alien.
Nash set up his auto-cooker, chose a bag of noodles, and put it on low. It would take about thirty minutes on that setting for his dinner to heat up. He grabbed his weapon and put on his helmet to scout the stairs. He needed to know which doors led to areas that might have dangerous air quality.
With all twenty decks checked, he returned to the train car. The noodles were excellent. As he ate, Nash enjoyed the quiet of the platform. He could almost imagine a rush of people coming down to catch the train home after work. It was dark in the corner, but he noticed something on the wall.
It was a carving that looked like it had been made by a really big knife...or sword. The symbol reminded him of the Chinese character tattoos that some of the other pilots got back at the academy.
He laughed when he remembered the guy in his tactics class who had gotten two characters on his forearm and bragged that it said, “Great Warrior”. The professor, Dr. Chen, walked past and said, “Cute Tattoo.”
The guy asked, “Can you read it?”
“Of course, it says, ‘Happy Fish’.”
He was stuck with the nickname Fish from there on out.
Nash used the HUD to take a picture of the character. It was probably just a bored scavenger, but it was best to remember it just in case.
***
“How close is he?” Frank asked.
“He should reach the scavenger camp by mid-morning tomorrow.”
“That will be perfect.”
“What do you imagine is going to happen
?”
“I’m not imagining anything, dear sister. I’m planning.”
“Nash is smart. He’ll find the camp, just like the last runner, and avoid it before calling in the location.”
“The wrist map will tell you when he’s just outside of the camp, correct?”
“It will tell his tracker, but yes.”
“Then you will tell me.”
“Sure, but I don’t see...”
Frank pulled a small handheld device from his desk and a wrist mapper. He handed the wrist mapper to Fiel. “Go ahead, put it on.”
She did.
“Okay, now power it up.”
She did, and after a little beep, it came to life.
“Are you aware that it has a built-in alarm?”
“No.”
Frank tapped a key on his device and a ringing noise came from her arm, getting progressively louder with each second. Fiel hit a button, and it stopped. Frank hit a few more buttons, and it started again, but this time when his sister tried to turn it off, she couldn’t.
“So your plan is to set off the alarm? Won’t that be a little obvious?”
“I’m going to need you, when Nash is almost there, to announce to the trackers to tell all their runners to shut down their wrist mappers because of a problem we’ve found in research.”
“Plausible deniability and well thought out. I’m impressed.”
“He’s a liability, and this is for the good of all. He should have never been here in the first place.”
“I’ll let you know when he’s five minutes out.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The night passed without incident. Nash packed up his gear, retrieved the sensors, and headed out. He put in a call and said, “Holly, are you in my ear?”
“I’m here, Nash.”
“If I send you a picture, can you look into what it means and keep it quiet?”
“No problem.”
Nash sent the picture as he left the platform. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or two to make it to the coordinates he was supposed to map. His plan was to spend half a day working the general area, and then climb up three decks and head toward Jade City. He had learned from the photos that Jade City’s main level was on deck 282, and if that were the case, then it would make sense to try to find a route on that level. If nothing else, he knew the agriculture pod, or whatever it was, would be on the same level.
Nash heard something and stopped. He listened for a full minute and decided it was in his head. A certain amount of paranoia was a good thing. As he wound his way through the halls, everything seemed tame. Still, he was cautious and made sure not to get too complacent. Most of the doors were locked down, but he found a larger set of double doors with a sign overhead—The Satin Club—that looked like they didn’t have power.
Nash pulled the doors apart and was hit in the face with an awful stench. He put his helmet back on and called Holly, “You see me on the map?”
“Yes, Fristion, I’ve got you.”
“I’m standing outside a place called The Satin Club. It should be marked avoid.”
“Trouble?”
“No, it smells like being downwind from a hog farm.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s stinky.”
“I’ll note it on the map.”
“I’m moving on.”
“It looks like you’ve about reached the mission start point.”
“I’m almost there,” Nash said, as he moved down the hall away from the club.
The next ten minutes were without incident, and then he saw that same character carved into two walls of a four-way intersection. Now it seemed less like random graffiti.
Experience told him that somebody was using it as either a code for trouble or a code for safety. His wrist mapper said he needed to turn to the right. The characters were left and straight ahead.
Seven meters later the hall turned to the left. He peered around the corner and saw a doorway about fifteen meters ahead. The door was in the open position, and he could see through.
“Holly, I think I’ve reached the mark. It’s strange I think...”
“Hold on, Fristion. I have an announcement coming from Fiel.”
Nash continued on, and when he got to the door, it led to a small balcony that overlooked a massive space. The moment he stepped through the door, his comm crackled. It looked like he had found a dead spot.
He went to the rail and couldn’t believe what he saw below. He was looking over a massive pod, and on the floor were two encampments, the Navereen on the left and proper Magellan military on the right.
It was impossible to tell exactly, but he estimated that there was probably a half-mile between them. The open ground had ten huge rocks that looked like they were twenty to thirty meters high. Nash was looking at a mining pod turned battlefield.
He started taking pictures and zoomed in on both camps. The Navereen had watchtowers and a defensive wall. The Magellan side was similar.
Nash took a step back from the edge of the balcony and noticed for the first time there was a set of stairs off to the right. It looked like there might be balconies all the way down to the ground.
Nash stepped back out and said, “Holly, I’m just past the starting point, and you won’t believe...”
“Nash, you need to turn off your wrist mapper. Apparently there’s a problem with the alarm going off at random.”
“Okay, so just power down?”
“Yes.”
Nash hit the power button and the mapper went straight into alarm mode, sending out a piercing scream. “Fuck, I set the damn thing off. How do I stop it?”
“Power down!”
“That’s what I did, and the damn thing...screw it,” he said and smashed his wrist against the wall. The screaming stopped.”
A female voice behind him said, “You’re going to want to run. They have flight suits and drones.”
Nash turned around just as a woman in an all black suit like his was bolting around the corner. He noticed the sword slung around her back and thought he might like to talk to her.
Nash began walking back down the hall when he heard a high-pitched whirr coming toward him. It took a moment to process what she had said, and finally the word drone made it to his conscious. He started to run just as the first drone rose over the balcony. Nash made the corner as a blast of fire ripped into the wall.
The woman in black was waiting at the next intersection and waved for him to follow. Though Nash was not one who liked most people, it seemed a good time to make a friend. He hustled and turned the corner as best he could. His gear was heavy, even though he had left half of it back at his secret lair. The woman had a suit like his, but instead of two standard tanks, she had one lightweight half-tank. He noticed a plasma pistol on her belt.
The next move she made surprised him. The woman darted into The Satin Club. Nash made it through the club doors before the drones rounded the corner. The woman in black slid the doors closed, and with her voice comm on low said, “Follow me.”
The club was mostly dark. A few tables were overturned, but for the most part it looked like it could be open for business later that day, except for the shelves behind the bar: all the bottles were gone. The woman, with catlike reflexes, sprung up onto the bar and said, “Come on, we need to keep moving.” And, with a spin, she hopped off and disappeared. It seemed to Nash like she might be showing off a little. He chose to walk around to the end of the bar. She wasn’t there.
The drones had flown past, but now Nash could hear the heavy jet pack sounds of men in flight suits approaching. It sounded like they had already made the first turn. Nash ran to where the woman had jumped off. There was a set of stairs going down into the floor. Nash followed.
When he got to the bottom, the woman hit a button, and the stairs swung back up into their closed position.
“Stay quiet until they’ve passed.”
Nash did as he was told.
&nbs
p; The sound of the flyers was greatly muffled in the basement of the bar, but it was obvious when they flew past.
“It will be at least ten minutes before they come back this way, and they never search the bar.”
“Because of the smell?”
“I doubt they can smell it in their suits. I just think they’ve forgotten the doors are unlocked.”
“I’m Fristion Nash. Thanks for the heads-up back there.”
“Sasha.”
I’d likely still be running madly down the hall. It would have been a short battle after that.”
“What was that making all the racket?”
“It was something my boss cooked up to track us when we’re out here mapping.”
“You’re from 37 then?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“You’ve got a nice little setup there: secure, and the people you send out don’t take too many chances.”
Nash said, “Is it safe to take the helmet off?”
“Sure,” she said and undid hers.
Nash wasn’t sure, but it seemed like her red hair flowed out of the helmet in super slow motion, and then she gave her head a toss. He was surprised when she didn’t mention a hair care product’s tagline.
His helmet removal was much less impressive.
Sasha said, “You want a drink?”
“If you’re buying, sure. You come here often?”
Sasha grinned. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a cheesy pickup line,” she said and continued, “Will 24-year-old Scotch, do?”
“Okay, seriously, do you come here often? Because The Satin Club has just become my new favorite night spot.”
“I move around a lot, but I’ve been here for almost three months.”
“What about the smell?”
“You can smell it down here?”
“Well, no, but upstairs.”
“Oh, that. I have a skunkworks system attached to the door. It sprays when people open it, but the odor only lasts five minutes or so.”
Nash nodded and then took a sip of his drink. It was, if he were giving a review, delicious on a scale that only the heavenly divine could truly appreciate.
Sasha hit a button on the wall. The room lit up in neon bar lights.