by Paul Collins
‘It seems the individual that Agent Longshadow was seeking sabotaged the city in his effort to escape her.’
Henkle jumped to his feet. ‘That is the most preposterous interpretation I have ever heard in my life! Agent Longshadow is not responsible for the actions of a criminal she was rightfully authorised to pursue and attempt to apprehend.’
‘Perhaps not,’ continued the prosecutor, ‘but standard operating procedure for such situations requires, my dear counsellor, requires that suitable backup be called and put in place before any apprehension is attempted, unless there is an immediate threat to the public. And may I remind you that when Agent Longshadow arrived on Arcadia there was no threat until she cornered the suspect. By wilfully ignoring protocol, as she has many times in the past, Agent Longshadow placed Arcadia in jeopardy.’ The prosecutor’s voice rose.
‘Then, and only then, wracked by guilt at what she had brought about, did she attempt to undo her maverick behaviour by saving the city.’
The court erupted. When it eventually subsided the jury deliberated for only one hour before Anneke learned of her fate.
‘Special Agent Anneke Longshadow, please rise. You have been found guilty of grave charges. You are herewith dishonourably discharged from the Regis Mentatis Imperium, effective immediately. Furthermore, it is the judgement of this court that you be sentenced to ten years on the prison planet of Urkor. May whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul.’
FATE was at work again. It seemed not that long ago that Maximus Black had been on duty when the priority call came in from Anneke Longshadow, warning RIM it had been penetrated by a high level mole. And now the call came up from the lobby. Anneke Longshadow was here. In the building. And she wanted to see Black’s boss, Rench.
Black’s brain worked furiously. He was in charge of the Commander’s appointments and he could either let this happen or he could block it. He decided on the former.
‘Tell her to come up,’ he said, and gave instructions.
Black was aware Rench had a feud with Ferren and Viktus, and suspected it might extend to Viktus’s mece.
He quickly briefed Rench, who stared for a moment then smacked his lips with glee. ‘Well, well. What goes around comes round, after all.’ Black wasn’t sure what he meant, but ordered full spectrum monitoring of Conference Room A. He also suggested Rench wear an earphone by which Black could pass on further suggestions or updates.
‘Good idea, Captain.’
Black made sure he remained behind the scenes. It was possible, despite the renovations he had ‘worn’ whenever he met Anneke, that she might recognise him. RIM agents were trained to perceive fundamental biometric characteristics rather than just superficial ones.
In any case, it suited Black’s purposes to listen in on the conversation between his boss and Anneke. But when Rench rose to leave, Black whispered urgently into his mike. ‘Sir! There is definitely a case to be made against Agent Longshadow. I strongly suggest taking her into custody.’
There was a pause, and then Rench, visible through a one-way mirror, gave a sign of agreement. Immediately, Black ordered a security detail. On the double.
Ten years. Ten years. It wasn’t enough. High up in one of the towers of RIM headquarters, Black paced the length of his quarters - his captain’s quarters.
Anneke Longshadow was so close he could taste her.
The girl had frustrated his plans, gotten in the way more times than he could count, come close to exposing him, and had even wounded him. He could not let this opportunity elude him.
He would not.
But he couldn’t just waltz into the detention level in the bowels of RIM and eliminate her. Apart from the fact the entire floor was heavily and constantly monitored - which could be circumvented - the repercussions would be worse than the initial days of the great Mole Hunt.
Then again, perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing. It would certainly undermine RIM’s perceived omnipotence. What kind of organisation could not protect a prisoner in its own jail?
Black would have to give it some thought. But he would have to do it quickly. Anneke was due to be transferred to Urkor in just three days.
And Urkor was too far away for Black to get to her there. He had bigger fish to fry.
So. Three days. Three days in which to kill two birds with one stone?
Well, why not? What was the point of being a deviant criminal genius unless you were devious?
‘Solid idea,’ Black whispered. ‘Solid.’
They moved in tight two-by-two formation, probing forward into the darkness, silent as gliders. They could not be seen, except by electronic means, but they could see: infrared, quantum-enhanced night vision, radar-visual feedback, motion sensors, the works.
In all, twelve masked and armoured men and women padded along the tunnel: three units, four to each. Nor were these meres - soldiers of fortune available to anyone who paid their fee. No, these were highly trained professionals, like semi-mythical groups from the past, the Old Empire Guard or the commandos.
They were the top guns of Quesada’s highly secret Alpha Force, an elite squad used for special occasions. Only today they happened to be dressed in the livery of the Myoto Company.
Alpha One - the leader - signalled a halt. He did not speak or issue electronic signs. Instead, he flashed curt hand signals, passed down the line.
As one, the twelve came to a crouching stop.
Alpha One beckoned Hawkeye to his side, motioning him to take readings. Hawkeye hunkered down in the darkness, running a battery of tests, probing the tunnel ahead as well as the walls, floor and ceiling.
When he communicated, he used a technically evolved form of sign language, one of Quesada’s more brilliant notions, excavating from the distant past a ‘language’ no longer used.
‘We’re in the bubble,’ gestured Hawkeye. ‘In the bubble’ meant they were moving within an artificially created electronic blind spot, undetected by the vast array of RIM ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’.
Of course, having someone on the inside helped.
‘Run point with Ice Queen,’ Alpha One said. ‘I want constant monitoring from here on in. Let me know the moment somebody picks up our footprint.’
‘You got it.’
Alpha One signed for the squad to move on. Ice Queen and Hawkeye took the lead, the former guiding Hawkeye while he closely monitored the available spectrum of surveillance frequencies and fields. Ice Queen’s job was to watch where Hawkeye put his big feet.
Just as well she did.
Hawkeye, intent on a ghost signal he had picked up, was about to take a step when Ice Queen’s hand clamped hard on his shoulder. He froze.
‘Something on the ground,’ she signed.
Hawkeye frowned, shuffiing carefully backwards. He trained his instruments on the ground ahead. Sure enough he started picking up a weak signal. A hair-thin trip wire connected to a pinhead battery. Damn.
‘How’d you spot it?’ he asked Ice Queen. ‘And don’t tell me female intuition.’
‘Got an external tomography scanner. Analyses cross sections, shows anomalies.’
‘Got to get me one,’ signed Hawkeye, impressed. Alpha One came up from behind. ‘We got a problem?’
‘Dealing with it, sir,’ signed Ice Queen.
‘Then deal with it. You ‘re holding us up.’
Ice Queen gritted her teeth in the dark. Hawkeye tapped into the circuitry of the tripwire using a quantum-tunnelling device to hijack and replace the current, blocking the feedback signals to the alarms. Hawkeye signalled for everybody to continue.
As he moved on, he resolved to study ancient methods of surveillance and detection. Some stuff they once used was so old it was new.
He wouldn’t be caught out again.
The squad proceeded for another twenty minutes then Hawkeye signalled a stop.
Alpha One was beside him in an eye blink.
‘This it?’
‘Target Zero,’ said Hawkeye.
Alpha One ran his own scans, pinning down their location within a three-dimensional stereo-tank that appeared in the air before him, the image projected onto his retina by his facemask.
He confirmed they were at Target Zero.
‘Entry Team - set up and start prepping.’
The middle two-by-two team hurried forward to the section of tunnel ceiling Alpha One had indicated and started opening packs and removing equipment. Meanwhile, Alpha One monitored the time. Above them was a metre of solid rock and reinforced ferroconcrete, impregnated with an array of sensors. It was topped by a gas-filled space swept at random intervals by surveillance fields.
That was just for starters.
Damn impressive, thought Alpha One, but every system has its weakness. Sabotage from within would win the day every time.
While the entry team worked and the clock counted down, Hawkeye maintained his continuous monitoring. But he was frowning behind his mask.
Alpha One hunkered down beside him. He had come to trust Hawkeye’s instincts.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, tell me what it isn’t.’
‘It isn’t RIM.’
‘And?’
‘I’m not sure, sir. It’s a ghost signal, like the echo of an echo. It comes and goes and it’s weak.’
‘Could RIM be running a new scan? One we haven’t registered?’
Hawkeye shook his head. ‘It’s not a detection field as far as I can tell, and even if it were, it’s not looking for us.’
‘An artefact?’ He thought that Hawkeye’s sensor device was picking up or manufacturing a false signal.
‘That’s what it looks like, sir.’
‘But you’re not happy about it?’
‘No, sir, I’m not. It bothers me. I got a funny feeling.’
‘Okay. Keep an eye on it. But if it’s not looking for us, then we have to assume it’s benign.’
‘Yes, sir.’
As Alpha One moved away, Ice Queen signed,
‘You and your funny feelings.’
‘Kiss my butt,’ Hawkeye responded, good naturedly, but tense, he kept his eye on the ghost signal.
Fifteen minutes later, the entry team was ready and prepped and Alpha One, eyeing the time on his sleeve display, gave the signal to proceed.
Immediately, the entry team deployed a specialised dampening field, an extension of the ‘bubble’ the squad had been moving within since they had entered the disused tunnel system deep beneath Lykis, which dated back to early settlement times.
The field passed unhindered through the roof of the tunnel, isolating the sensors in a segment of ferroconcrete. Another field piggybacking on the first generated dummy signals - replicating in real time the signals from the sensors and basically indicating,
‘Everything’s fine down here!’
With these fields in place, the entry team quickly vaporised a doorway in the ceiling. Before they penetrated into the gas-filled chamber above, however, a laser-tipped mobile probe chewed its way through the remaining rock and concrete and slid into the chamber, releasing a catalytic agent that neutralised the corrosive and poisonous gas within.
The catalyst effect took only seconds.
A tiny ping from the probe confirmed it was safe to continue. The remaining rock and concrete were vaporised, a self-clamping ultrathin unfolding ladder put in place, and the squad- body armour activated and mask filters working - swarmed up into the chamber. Here, two members of Alpha Force dug in, setting up a fallback position, protecting their escape route in case anything went wrong.
They also constituted a backup. Not that it would be needed.
The entire process was repeated beside the first, creating another doorway through the ceiling, and the rest of Alpha Force climbed up and into the lowest levels of RIM headquarters.
Black was sweating.
In moments like these he wished he had a twin, or somebody he could utterly trust, but that was a contradiction in terms. ‘Somebody’ and ‘trust’ didn’t go together: who would look out for you except yourself? The moment you brought another person into the picture, you created the grounds for treachery.
‘Create property and you create theft’, it was said. Well, Black had his own saying: ‘Create trust and you create betrayal’. Of course, there was the Envoy. Despite his misgivings, he trusted the alien in ways he had never trusted anyone, but doing so made him feel vulnerable. He woke sometimes at night with panic attacks.
In some ways, he understood, the Envoy was beyond trust. But did he have his own agenda? If he’d been human, Black would have had no doubt that he did, but how did one measure - or even comprehend - an alien psychology?
And where the hell was the Envoy right now, when Black could have used him?
Black wiped the sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his tunic, and made a mental note to have the tunic washed. Fear sweat was different from normal sweat, a fact forensic analysis could reveal.
Black was taking a huge risk, aware of the irony.
If he was caught now, his Grand Plan would take a serious hit, setting it back three years, and it would be Anneke Longshadow’s fault. Even incarcerated, about to be consigned to the software factories of Urkor, she was still threatening his existence, goading him to take unnecessary risks.
How sweet for her if she brought about his exposure after all!
Black had hidden overnight in a cramped robotics maintenance closet, squeezed between an inert droid and the automatic door, having sneaked down to the floor above the detention level using a far-from perfect cloaking field. From here, he had made his way to the closet, hidden himself with a chameleon cloak, and waited till the skeleton night shift had come on duty below him.
Then he’d cut a hole in the back of the closet and tapped into the main conduit carrying electronics to and from the detention level. Using a quantum tunnelling device similar to Hawkeye’s, only larger and more sophisticated, he tapped into protected surveillance systems, and uploaded a nano-virus concealed in his repaired fingernail.
The virus was designed to wait patiently until the AI on the detention level ran a routine diagnostic, when it would insinuate itself, dumbing down the AI and venturing into a diagnostic sub-routine. From there it would make its way to the main surveillance hub and the techies.
At the hub, the virus would wait for the surveillance system to effectively ‘look the other way’ then quickly create several virtual realities, each nestled within the other, and then embed the entire system inside these multiple realities.
Once this was done, the surveillance system would no longer be reading the ‘real world’, but a replicated copy of the last snapshot it had taken of the real world, down to the last photon and vibration. And in that world, it would find nothing to worry itself about.
Unfortunately for Black, the ghost system was inherently unstable, and needed constant monitoring. By him. From close by.
That’s why he was sweating.
Meanwhile, Alpha One studied the readout in front of him. The mole inside RIM had done its job well. He could see what the surveillance hub ‘saw’ - nothing special. All RIM personnel were represented on the readout by clear pulsing dots and not a single member of Alpha Force was showing.
Alpha One’s squad was now down to eight. Another two had deployed like the first two, protecting their escape route and providing backup if needed.
He stationed two more at the ‘bottleneck’ in the system.
That left him six in all. The perfect number for an export - or execution - mission.
He signed everyone to be ready. Timing was everything.
When his sleeve display hit zero seconds, they surg
ed out of their hidey-hole and sprinted silently through the corridors, moving towards the control room that led to the detention cells.
The squad encountered no resistance till they approached the control room. A young man stepped from a restroom, his zip still self-sealing as he adjusted his trousers. He blinked at the squad of silent men and women and died silently with his throat burned out.
Then they vaporised the door and burst into the control room.
It was child’s play. Apart from being three in the morning, when a human being’s biorhythms are at their lowest ebb, the detention crew were fatally complacent.
They had never expected an attack here, in the centre of RIM headquarters.
That complacency killed them as easily as it immobilised their AI system. Quickly and quietly. Before any alarm could be raised.
Suddenly, Hawkeye signed, ‘The ghost image is back.’
Alpha One studied the readout, but could not interpret it. He left two of his squad at the vaporised doorway and signalled the others to follow.
The detention cell complex was large and maze like, a final confounding trap to any who got this far. But it was no challenge to Hawkeye’s electromagnetic decoders and the informant’s area readouts.
Within minutes they were on the right tier in the right section.
Alpha One counted off the unnumbered, soundproofed cells - another attempt at baffiement and stopped before the one containing Anneke Longshadow.
He readied himself outside the door while a grunt placed a vaporising charge on it and flicked the tiny countdown button.
Further back, Ice Queen checked all directions before peering over Hawkeye’s shoulder at his readout screen. Hawkeye was watching the cell door, tense with anticipation, everything else in the clear.
Suddenly, the cell door melted into a cloud of hot particles. There was a soft whoosh as air rushed in to fill the space the door had occupied, then Alpha One and the grunt rushed into Anneke’s cell, guns blazing with energy.
A NNEKE paced her cell while muttering a series of profanities under her breath. It was incon ceivable to her that she could have been treated so badly by RIM. It was a heavier blow than she had let on when she’d seen Jake. It cut her to the core, the worst rejection of her life.