Just looking at it brought her headache screaming back.
CHAPTER 53
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
IN A SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
Walking through the city center of Alexandria-Atrux was as difficult a mission for Jules as trying to fake being a world-famous opera singer. Prime City, as all the denizens of the Grotta called the heart of the city that made up their domed settlement on the planet of Atrux, was sleek. Clean. Wasn’t even a dumpster in sight, and all the alleyways were quaint little things with old-world style wrought-iron lampposts and walls coated in ivy. Places to brunch, not risk getting jacked.
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket—freshly washed in Nox’s half-rusted sink—and tried to look like her style was a choice. Like she was some counterculture maverick, eschewing the slim jumpsuits in vogue for a grungier aesthetic. Either the general populace bought her act and had accepted her as their own, or they were doing a real good job of pretending the shit stuck to their shoe didn’t exist.
Didn’t matter if the locals didn’t want her here, harshing their environment. Prime cities didn’t have off-limits zones, unless you counted the neighborhoods the Keepers lived in up-station. To Jules’s mind those spaces were more like prisons, or zoos, than anything else. She could hop a shuttle up to Atrux’s orbiting station and hang around on the borders of the Keeper neighborhoods, toeing the line under the stern eyes of their guardcore, and never get hassled.
She probably didn’t have the credits to afford a single cup of coffee on the station, and that’s where the divisions came into play. There weren’t any walls to keep the people of the city center and the station from mixing with those tooling around on minimum income in the Grotta—just higher price tags. But the cultural centers—the museums and the education parks—those, at least, were free to all.
The Elequatorial Center existed in every Alexandria in every system Prime inhabited. Each one varied by local customs and aesthetics, but they all had round about the same facade, a mosaic of brilliant tiles depicting the native vegetation of Ecuador, an explosion of vibrancy and color in remembrance of old Earth that the dome cities of Prime could only lust after. That little country, a peaceful place mostly known at the time for being hospitable to expats, had become one of the biggest nations on the world stage when Alexandra Halston had chosen a site on its western coast to build her first space elevator.
The decision had allied the Ecuadorians eternally with Prime Inventive and meant that most of the first spacefaring human settlers were of Ecuadorian stock. Seeing those bright colors, splashed across the otherwise sterile cityscape of greys and shades of Prime’s cyan blue always caused a swell of pride in Jules’s heart.
She didn’t have a lot to be proud of in the history of her family. Her father had fucked off to who-knows-where early on, and her mother had died choking on her own spit with a dirty needle in her arm—couldn’t even afford drugpatches, she went out old school. But somewhere in Jules’s veins flowed the rootstock of her line, the blood of Ecuadorians.
Human racial traits got blurry by old-world standards about a hundred years post outward expansion, once Prime had gotten the hang of building gates and setting up dome cities, so the bolder features had gotten filed off at the edges. But she had the dark skin, caramel eyes, and thick black-brown hair of the Ecuadorians. Seeing herself in the faces of those first few pioneers reminded her that not all of her family history was bullshit. She could be something, maybe. Her ancient ancestors had reached for the stars and taken them for their own. Maybe she could make something her own, too, someday. If she survived the next few hours.
She pulled up the hoodie layered under her jacket and stepped through the automatic doors of the center. She’d been in the building before, mostly as a tourist, but the public access was uniquely suited for these kinds of meetings. It meant that the entire place had been virtualized, made accessible to the public that couldn’t attend in person through elaborate VR sets, complete with virtualized docent tours, if you were into that kind of thing. Jules wasn’t. When she went to a museum, she wanted to be left alone to explore and absorb, not be spoon-fed bits of data by a middle-aged woman who’d taken the post as docent so she could brag about how cultural she was to her rich friends.
But Jules had forced herself to watch those docent tours, to memorize the way they moved through the building, and note just exactly where the quiet spots would be. She crossed the lobby, ignoring the house AI’s friendly welcome and offer to beam an interactive map of the center to her wristpad. She didn’t need it. She knew this place inside and out before she ever stepped through the doors.
She cut sideways, skirting around the big central display that hung out under a cupola in the grand entrance. The reproduced chunk of elevator cable—matte black carbon filament braided together in a method that keymarked Prime’s early rise from megacorp to megapower—sucking up all the light the building threw at it. A side passage led her up, wrapping in a slow spiral around the outside edges of the elevator display. Small rooms of focused interest curled off from the main path like twining vines.
“Hey, Jules,” Arden said in her ear. “Something’s weird.”
“Weird like you interrupting me on an op weird? Or weird like we’re all gonna die weird?”
“Don’t know. There’s the robo staff, right? The bots that scrape the building every hour to clean up spills and make sure no one’s knocked a frame out of alignment or whatever. They’re supposed to be coming in now, pop out of the walls and make their sweep during the docent handoff, but they’re not. Not so much as a tread has made an appearance, and the next docent hasn’t shown up, but the last one left.”
Jules pulled her jacket tighter as if afflicted by a sudden breeze. “Just like Udon-Voodun. Someone’s messing with the usual systems.”
“Looks like it.” The link went dead as Arden conferred with something.
Nox said over the line, “Want me to come in?”
“No. I got this. Wait for the exit.” Jules pressed her hand against the grip of the handblaster secreted away in her inside jacket pocket. Arden had gotten the security systems to look the other way when she walked in. If they could do that, then it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine this Silverfang person had made their own arrangements regarding the building. She knew this might be a trap. She hadn’t kidded herself about that. But it stank like that woman in the speakers. Like the lab, and the stealthed-out guardcore. Could be a coincidence. They were toying with heavy powers, here. It could be any faction.
“If things sour, I’m coming in,” Nox said.
“I’m touched by your concern.”
“Only thing I’m concerned about is you fucking the whole thing up,” Nox said, but she could feel his grin through the words, and the ribbing soothed her nerves.
“Who are you talking to?”
Jules spun around. A woman stood in the doorway to the leaflet room she’d wandered into. Silverfang, no doubt. She had the look of someone who’d gone to a lot of effort to not stand out, but hadn’t quite gotten the hang of blending in yet. Her clothes were remarkably boring, clean-cut charcoal slacks topped with a silk-like blouse in a similar shade of grey, all topped off with a black blazer. She might pass for a human-interface secretary, or some other low-level office worker, but beneath the cut of her pant legs the edge of black boots pushed out the sleek material. The kind of boots that those accustomed to space used because they could be flipped into mag boots.
Jules chuckled. “They always forget the shoes.”
“Excuse me?” The woman—Silverfang—stepped into the room and paused near an old, grainy photograph of the first spacescape seen through the original Casimir Gate, Charon.
“Your boots. I bet you bought that outfit to come planetside this morning, but that’s not how you look day-to-day, is it? Bet you run around in the usual jumpsuit affair. Should have just worn that. Then I wouldn’t have known that you don’t want me to know you’re
a space hopper.”
Her smile was slow, amused. “What if I felt like a new outfit?”
“Doubt it. Most people buying info off the net aren’t worried about their style choices for the day.”
“Meet a lot of those types of people, do you?”
“More than you. Obviously.”
“Then you know that these things should be kept brief.” She extended her hand, uncoiling her fingers slowly to reveal her open palm, expectant. The hint of a blue-inked tattoo peeked out from the hem of her sleeve, but Jules couldn’t make out the design. “The data, if you please.”
“Why?” she pressed.
“Your meaning?”
“Look, Silverfang. I do a lot of data selling, all right? People want specifics. They want layouts, lock schematics, door manufacturers, that kind of thing. What they don’t want is the sort of broad bullshit you’re looking for. ‘Anything on the Keepers’? Come on. That tells me you knew something was about to pop, that there were tensions already in play, and you were waiting to see who got tangled up in the mess. So you need to tell me first: What the fuck is all of this? What are they making in that lab?”
Her eyes widened, and she stepped toward Jules, who instinctively took a step back, putting a podium display of a miniature model of the first Casimir Gate between them. “You’ve seen it? The lab? Where is it?”
“Holy shit, she doesn’t know,” Arden said in Jules’s ear. She scowled, ignoring them, but she couldn’t help echoing their response in her own head. Jules licked her lips and glanced at the Casimir Gate model. She was really, really in over her head.
“Who are you?” Jules demanded.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and in a flash Jules saw where she took her name—her grey-blue eyes gleamed with rage. “You didn’t ask such questions before. You have data to sell me, grottagirl. Hand it over and get paid, or not. I will pay you extra to know where the lab is, and anything else you can tell me about what went on there.”
Her mind flashed back to snippets she’d seen on the news—the war with Icarion, the rebel factions pushing back against total Keeper control. A weight settled in her chest. Maybe this woman was just a broker of information, maybe she was connected to the lab and this was a ruse to figure out what Jules knew before the people running the lab decided how to react. Or maybe this was some sort of Icarion agent, or insurgent. Either way, it didn’t matter. Her bad feeling grew until every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run.
“You know what? This was a bad idea. I don’t trust you, lady, and the info I have is probably bullshit, anyway. Unless you can tell me who you are, the deal is off.”
“That,” the woman said, “won’t work for me.”
She was suddenly beside Jules, her iron-hard fingers digging into Jules’s shoulder. The scent of carbon wafted from her clothes, the metallic aroma most people who lived in smaller habitats for long periods of time picked up on their hair and skin from the constant cycling of the air filters.
Fuck, she had misjudged the situation so hard. She was supposed to be the one ambushing Silverfang, not the other way around. As her knees cracked against the ground and the side of Silverfang’s palm slammed into her throat, she cried out, her vision going fuzzy as her head jerked back. Harlan had been right. She wasn’t ready to take point on op. Doing so had fucked everything. She had no idea what was going on—no idea even of the names of the factions she tangled with.
Who the hell was she to think she could strong-arm someone into telling her the truth? She was just a Grotta kid. Scum. The forgotten offspring of a junkie who played with petty criminals to feel like she had some power, some relevance, but she never did—it was people like Silverfang who pulled real strings. Maybe she could get a low-rent hacker like Arden to help her get a gun inside, but she didn’t stand a chance messing with people who could shut whole security systems down. Hell, she couldn’t even afford the throwaway outfit Silverfang had picked up for this outing.
“Jules!” Nox screamed over her earpiece, nearly shattering her eardrums or—wait, no, that was the cuff to the ear Silverfang had given her.
“I’m coming in!”
“Don’t,” she rasped out. Silverfang cocked an eyebrow at her. Somehow Jules had crumpled to the floor and curled up around herself like a damned baby.
“Going to tell me?” Silverfang asked. Ah, right. Reality clarified around her again. The woman had been demanding the location of the lab with every blow she’d landed. Well, fuck her.
Jules pushed herself up to her elbows and wiped blood off her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yeah. Sure. It’s in the basement of your mother’s FleshHouse.”
Silverfang’s eyes narrowed and that telltale boot snapped out for Jules’s chin, but Nox’s voice had shaken something loose in her. She could take the beating—had taken one all her life—but she’d be damned if she would let her crew get hurt again because she couldn’t get her shit together.
Jules grabbed the boot in both hands and twisted, hard. Silverfang swore as she lurched sideways and hit the ground. The woman lashed out with her other foot, tripping Jules up before she could get to her feet. She rolled, stopped hard as Silverfang, back on her feet—she was too fucking fast—kicked her hard in the gut, and doubled up, gasping, gripping her middle.
Silverfang chuckled. “So you can fight. Thought all that Grotta tough shit was just talk.”
It struck Jules that this woman had probably never stepped foot in the Grotta, had only ever seen staged glimpses in sad documentaries or hard-edged CamCasts. To her, Jules’s whole life was a joke. Worse, it was the punch line to a joke someone smarter had set up.
Jules ripped the blaster from her jacket pocket and fired.
The top of the woman’s head exploded in a fine red mist. Her body jerked, limbs twitching as the nervous system struggled to make sense of what was happening. Momentum carried her over, and she hit the ground—flat on her back, dead from the second her brain matter painted a fresh exhibit across the museum’s walls.
In the CamCasts Silverfang had watched, this was the point when Jules would make some hard-edged quip. Instead, she leaned over and puked on the pretty floor.
“What the fuck?” Nox crouched above the body with the blown-off head and shoved his blaster into his torso holster.
“She was unwilling to deal.”
Nox was at her side in the next breath, helping her sit upright. He pushed the hair back from her face and squinted down at her like she was a gun he was assessing for damage.
“I’m glad you’re safe. But we’ve gotta go. Get up.”
He shoved his hands under her armpits and hauled her upright. She dropped the blaster, ducked down to scoop it up, and shoved it back in her jacket, pulling the flaps closed tight and zipping it up as if the thin layer of denim could hide what she’d done.
“Wait,” she said, shaking off Nox’s insistent hands dragging her toward the door. She crouched alongside the body and pulled the woman’s sleeve back, inspecting the tattoo she’d glimpsed from beneath the blazer. Dusty blue lines traced the arc of what looked like scythe blades, swooping toward each other and crossing at the tip. Hovering above the crossed points of the blades was a simple circle—a planet, or something? She had no idea, had seen nothing like it before. If it indicated a gang, it wasn’t one she’d heard of. But then, they were dealing with people who operated on a level way above her pay grade.
“Probably just a vanity tat,” Nox said, poking his head around the door to check the hallway. He didn’t sound like he believed that.
Jules tried to swipe up the woman’s wristpad, but it was biometrically locked and vibrated a warning the second her fingers touched it. Probably needed a retina scan and a passkey to get in. She jerked back, realizing she’d been an idiot by leaving her prints on the screen, and hastily tried to wipe them away but that wasn’t any good—she’d probably left her DNA all over the damned place already. She thought about taking the pad, but that’d make her trackable and
Jules had the sinking feeling that the authorities would have no problem identifying this woman.
Gingerly, Jules gripped the back of the woman’s head and shoulder and rolled her over, pushing her hair up to reveal the back of her neck. Her heart skipped a beat. She’d vomit again, if she had anything left to give up to the ground.
A shaved patch of skin covered by the woman’s shaggy bob revealed the thin, but intentional, scar of a Keeper implant chip.
“Tell me that’s a tattoo.” Nox’s voice shook a little.
“Don’t think so.”
“Fuck, oh fuck.”
“What’s going on in there?” Arden asked, their voice high and strained.
“We got a dead Keeper on our hands.”
“What?!”
“Silverfang,” Jules said, though she was pretty sure they’d be finding out her real name soon enough.
Nox grabbed her shoulder and yanked her to her feet. She stumbled after him the first few steps, then fell into a sprint alongside him. They burst through the front doors, alarming a couple of passers-by ambling down the street. The random man’s eyes bulged—shit, did she have blood on her?—but they sprinted by before the pair could get a good look at them and piled into the autocab Arden had waiting.
“What the hell happened in there?” Arden demanded.
Nox dialed in a location on the edge of the Grotta and the car slid into traffic. They’d have to ditch the cab the second they were back on familiar territory. She let the bench seat take all of her weight and closed her eyes, trying to calm the tremor that’d taken up residence in her hands.
She’d killed a Keeper. Even if she’d planned it—even if she’d been the slickest assassin there ever was—there was no way to avoid detection. They’d know who she was within hours of discovering that body. Know every little sad detail about her life. A manhunt was coming. One she couldn’t fight, couldn’t beat. It didn’t matter that she’d killed Silverfang in self-defense. Keepers were the guardians of all humanity.
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