Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  54

  The Minotaur had fallen away from Mittel Trevoyvox as silently as a meteorite, leaving no trace behind.

  Another Guardian ship burned into orbit and joined the search, scanning the volume around Mittel Trevoyvox for any faint smudge of heat that would betray the little ship’s trajectory. Dolph set the St. Clare’s sensors to perform a full-sky sweep, too. “This could take hours,” he told Sophia. “Might as well relax.”

  Not that he could relax, with his his heart racing and the maintenance bot still floating behind him like an angel of death. He lit a cigarette—to hell with no smoking on board.

  “Looks like Mike ditched you,” Sophia said.

  “Naw,” Dolph said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes we have to let go of old attachments to achieve a better understanding of self.” Sophia clicked her tongue. “You haven’t changed since we first met! You’re stuck in a rut. You and Mike enable each other … to never change.”

  Dolph did not respond. The sky stayed empty. The St. Clare orbited around the planet and began to orbit around it again. Dolph’s cigarette smoke collected around the two in a gray sphere. Sophia waved at it in annoyance.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You used to have ideals. You used to talk about helping human beings. Bringing bad guys to account. I never worked out how you squared that with taking money from bad guys, but—"

  “You’re right,” Dolph said. “I couldn’t square it, either. I gave up trying.”

  “That’s … sad.”

  Dolph shrugged.

  “You should try meditation.”

  “I prefer beer and cigarettes.”

  “And getting high.” Her contempt stung him. “Nothing blocks out the voice of the Divine like drugs. Guess that’s why you do it.”

  “The Divine? Which one would that be? Loki? Cthulthu?”

  “Actually, my personal spirit guide is Cipactli.” The face of Cipactli flickered on Sophia’s cheek, grinning and vanishing. “She’s always hungry, and she has an open mouth on every joint of her body so that she can eat more. She bit off the foot of the war god.”

  Dolph put out his cigarette. “You’re full of shit, Sophia,” he said. “You abandoned your own daughter. Nothing you say counts for a damn thing against that.”

  Sophia’s tone did not change, and yet a new, chilly menace imbued her voice. “How about you quit judging me?”

  “Facts are facts.”

  “The problem with that apparently inarguable statement,” Sophia said, “is that you don’t know the facts.”

  “I know you ditched Mike and Lucy to shack up with Zane Cole on a Traveller ship.”

  “Et voila. You don’t know anything. Zane was just a passing … thing.”

  “What was it about, then? The money? The camaraderie? The thrill of high-risk operations? Or it gave you an illusion of being on the right side of history?” Dolph listed all the things that had motivated him over the years, not necessarily in that order. He left out only one, in my opinion: doing the right thing.

  “Funny you should mention the right side of history,” Sophia said. “I know something about history. With that perspective, it’s possible to see that humanity is in crisis. We appear to be doing great—look how many colony planets we have! But the Eks are blocking our expansion beyond the Cluster. And at the same time, we’re stagnating technologically. When we met the Eks—the first alien species we couldn’t lick with one hand tied behind our backs—we stopped innovating, and circled our wagons. Fifty percent of all human investment in the Cluster now goes into entertainment.” She said it like a bad word. “Lifespans are declining. More colonies are failing than are being founded. Something’s got to give.”

  “So?”

  “So, I thought I was defending humanity against our ideological traitors within. The Temple, you know. That would be a cause worth fighting for.”

  Dolph shook his head and chuckled.

  “Yeah,” Sophia said. “I was wrong. But it was a stage I needed to go through.” She suddenly rocked forward. “What’s that?”

  Dolph glanced at the screen showing the full-sky scan. Sophia had sharp eyes. The sensors had picked up some faint smudges of heat beyond Mittel Trevoyvox’s lumpy little moon.

  “Assuming that’s not some unrelated outgassing event,” Dolph said, “they ran cold, using a sky-high exhaust multiplier, for about two hundred thousand kilometers. Then they switched to the plasma drive for a few minutes to boost their acceleration before entering the skip field.”

  “Why would they go that way? What’s out there?”

  The Minotaur had burned towards the edge of the Cluster. Dolph shrugged.

  “Guess we’ll find out. Plot a course based on those points, and program our FTL burn.”

  Dolph didn’t move. Sophia got impatient.

  “Mike’s probably expecting us. Well, he won’t be expecting me. But I’m sure I can talk him around.” She stashed the gun down the side of her couch, loosened her straps, and floated over to put her arm around Dolph. “I hate to see you hurting like this. I want to see you better. I want to set you free.”

  Dolph realized it didn’t matter if I was on that ship or not. He had to do the right thing, anyway. He caressed Sophia’s arm, and murmured into her hair, “You know me. I’m up for anything, if there’s money in it.”

  She didn’t really know him at all. She didn’t know how the pull of money had weakened over the years, until it repulsed him rather than the opposite, and the promise of fuck-you money felt like an actual threat.

  With a satisfied laugh, she said, “If we succeed, you’ll be able to have anything you want. What do you want most in the universe? You’ll get it.”

  “Hmm,” Dolph said. “That’s a toughie.” He dropped a kiss on her cheek. Then he loaded the Minotaur’s trajectory data into the flight computer and began to program an identical course.

  *

  The Marines made us all get into spacesuits. Even Robbie had to wear one. They said the compression would be good for his wound, which wasn’t serious, anyway, according to them. The Marines do not consider a wound to be serious unless you’re bleeding out. When we stepped on board the Rogozhin, we had stepped into a different universe: the hardcore universe I remembered from basic training. In the private sector, it is not uncommon to launch to orbit wearing a wifebeater and jeans. (Guilty.) In the Fleet, you’ll put on the pressure garment with retractable helmet, which feels like being shrink-wrapped, and the life-support backpack that weighs fifteen kilos, and you’ll like it, soldier.

  We didn’t have to wear the separate flexible armor, because after all, we weren’t soldiers. But we weren’t exactly prisoners, either. The Marines looked at us the same way they looked at Smith and Burden, with a combination of distrust, fear, and contempt. That tipped me off. I realized that we wore the same invisible aura as Smith and Burden, the sheen of squirrelly business. The Rogozhin’s hive mind had pegged us for spooks.

  I’d have laughed, if not for the TrZam 008 in my stomach.

  My whole being was now focused on that little knife-shaped device, and possible strategies to hide it.

  Yet worries kept intruding into my mind. What had happened to Dolph? Where was the St. Clare?

  We took couches at the back of the bridge. Couches—they were bare-bones jumpseats. The Rogozhin, a Century-class troopship, carrying two platoons of Marines plus all their warfighting kit, was mostly bridge. If you have a dozen staff officers and non-coms collaborating on operations, it makes sense to seat them all in the same space, and by that time you’ve already designed your ship as a sandwich, with crew quarters above the spine and storage and magazines below, so you may as well take out the rest of the non-structural partitions upstairs and have everyone in one big room: eating, resting, talking, manning the instruments. Good for unit cohesion. The guys flying the ship are immersed in their AR environments, anyway, so they’re immune to distraction.

  Th
e commander of the ship—Smith—did have an office of his own, all the way forward, behind the ship’s snout-like sensor blister. He summoned me in there as soon as we got into orbit.

  I navigated forward from handhold to handhold, staying out of the Marines’ way, feeling as sick as a dog, praying to God that I wouldn’t puke the TrZam 008 up right in front of him.

  *

  Sophia pushed forward in her straps. “What’s that? Looks like someone else just launched.”

  Dolph didn’t look up for a moment. While programming his FTL burn, he had been covertly programming another set of commands into the computer. He pushed the last keys and swept the display out of his AR view. Expressionless, he switched over to the radar. “Yup, that’s a ship.”

  The spark on the radar rose at a steep angle. Dolph ran calculations. The other ship would reach orbit before the St. Clare achieved optimal FTL burn positioning. He felt a glimmer of hope, although he didn’t know what ship this might be; probably just more Eks.

  Sophia bent over the comms. “Unknown ship, identify yourself.”

  Dolph couldn’t hear the response. But he saw Sophia’s expression of shocked recognition. “Yes, it’s me. What? No.”

  The person on the other end talked for a minute. Sophia’s face grew tight and angry.

  “No,” she said. “In fact, screw you.” She cut the connection. “It’s the Fleet. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Can’t outrun that,” Dolph said, suppressing a smile. He remembered how the Williencourt had overhauled the St. Clare in the Yesanyase Skont system. The Rogozhin, three times the Williencourt’s size, had an even more powerful drive. “In FTL mode, this is the fastest ship in the Cluster. STL, she’s just a heavy old freighter. They’ll either catch us … or follow us all the way there.” He thought for a minute. “Or blow us to shit.”

  “Yeah. Put that burn on hold.”

  Dolph touched the keys. He left his secret contingency plan in place.

  “Go higher and burn retrograde.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Dolph knew exactly what this maneuver portended. Sophia wanted to loiter in a higher orbit until the Fleet ship rose into the St. Clare’s crosshairs. “You can’t shoot them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not gonna authorize you to use the weapons systems.”

  Sophia’s smile didn’t change. “Oh, I think you will,” she said. “Or I’ll get the robot to give you a fatal dose. The burn’s already programmed; all I have to do is press your finger on the go button. I’ll have the rest of the journey to break your encryption. But I’m going to blow these fuckers to shit first, either way.”

  55

  When I entered Smith’s office, I was expecting to be yelled at, though I didn’t think he would risk torturing me on a ship full of Marines. However, he seemed oddly conciliatory. The fire-breathing fury had passed. He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and ran a hand through his bristly hair. It’s hard to maintain military formality in freefall. Smith floated on one side of the desk that stuck out from a wall full of screens, using the toe-straps. I floated as far away from him as possible, tonguing the gap where I was missing a tooth. The shoebox-sized space reeked of mint, with undernotes of ozone and barracks funk.

  “We need to discuss your wife,” Smith said.

  “Ex-wife,” I said.

  “Right,” Smith said. “Just how ex is she?”

  “I saw her back there,” I said. “She shot at me. That’s how we relate these days.”

  “Hate can be an aphrodisiac,” Smith suggested.

  “Not for me.” I realized that he thought Sophia and I might be in cahoots. I was angry, frightened, and feeling sick. “What are you trying to imply?”

  Burden squeezed into the office, defusing the confrontation. He was sucking on a beverage foilpack. He lobbed identical packs to me and Smith, and lounged near the ceiling. “We talking about Sophs? She lost her virginity to me when we were post-grads at Montemayor University. Maybe she never told you about that.” He chuckled. “She was a late bloomer.”

  “So were you,” Smith said, smiling indulgently at him.

  “Sure. I had no time for relationships back then. I was all about the philosophy of science. We used to talk all night in the coffee shops, or walking down by the Don. We were gonna fix the Cluster together. We were gonna fix humanity. Talk about youthful fatuity. The three of us—me, Aki, and Sophs—we had it all worked out.”

  My mouth hung open. I remembered my own words to Lucy, when I told her about her mother’s privileged past: the top universities in the Cluster graduate Travellers and politicians in equal numbers … and I remembered those booze-fuelled philosophical conversations on board our ship, when Dolph, Sophia, and I would try to convince each other that we weren’t going to hell. She must have found those sessions pitifully shallow, compared to the erudite conversation of her past philosophical sparring partners.

  Burden and Smith.

  “We were the Fearsome Threesome,” Smith said with a reminiscent smile. “We hit a speed bump when Jon and Sophs started screwing. But then they invited me to join in, so all was good again.” I caught a tiny twist in Burden’s lips. I would bet that hadn’t been his idea. One would go along with a lot of things in order not to lose Sophia … as I knew too well. But in that moment, I felt like I was the only person in the room who had really broken free of her. These revelations only increased my incredulity that she had had it all, twice over, and thrown it all away.

  “When we graduated,” Burden said, “Akira and I joined the Fleet.” So Smith’s first name was Akira. “Not like you did, Starrunner. No PTs and dawn patrols for Montemayor University graduates. We were on the fast track, straight to the top. It wasn’t long before the Iron Triangle recruited us both. Meanwhile, Sophs went off on a Wanderjahr that turned into an extended criminal jaunt through the Cluster. The amazing thing is that she stayed off the Travellers’ radar as long as she did. When they recruited her, did they try to recruit you, as well?”

  I caught the implication of the deceptively casual question. “Yes.” Honesty was the best policy here. “They did.” I remembered that argument with Zane in a Mag-Ingat parking lot. “I told them to go to hell, and if she was so dead set on it, she could go with them.”

  “Uh huh, guess she didn’t tell you,” Smith said. “She wavered for a long time. She was interested in the Traveller lifestyle and ideology, but she couldn’t find a sound philosophical basis for taking the oath.”

  I smiled bleakly. Guess Lucy and I didn’t figure into her decision at all.

  “She contacted me to discuss it. By that time I was the top HUMINT specialist in the Fleet Clandestine Service. Jon was already working undercover in the Traveller organization. I looped him into the discussion, and we worked out a plan for Sophia to join the Travellers on the same basis.”

  “As an undercover agent?!” I said.

  “She became my best agent ever.” Smith nudged Burden. “She always did have you outclassed!”

  My head was spinning. “Sophia works for the Iron Triangle?!”

  “She did,” Burden said.

  I did not pick up on the tense. “She was working for you all along?!” I sounded like an idiot. I felt like an idiot. Had I ever known anything about the woman? Had she shared anything with me apart from her body? I needed a drink. I looked at the foil pack in my hand. It said Alcoholic Beverage. Turned out to be a premixed gin and tonic. It tasted like crap, but it kickstarted my brain. “Was she still working for you,” I said, “when she tried to infect every man, woman, and child in Mag-Ingat with IVK?”

  “No,” Smith said. “By that time, she had gone rogue.”

  “I actually don’t see it that way,” Burden said. “I think she thought she was still following orders.”

  “I would never have given orders to launch bio-weapons on Ponce de Leon!”

  “I know that. But she didn’t know it. She thought she was doing what yo
u wanted, or …” Burden shrugged.

  “It wouldn’t have been that hard for her to check,” Smith snapped. “In my opinion, she wanted to see what it would feel like to murder millions of people.”

  “The original plan was only to murder thousands, yeah?” I said. “Every man, woman, and child on Gvm Uye Sachttra.”

  Smith did not pick up on my sarcasm. “Correct,” he said curtly. Burden did.

  “If you ask me, that’s what broke her,” he said. “Deliberately infecting an entire population with IVK? Undercover work starts to look less glamorous and fulfilling when that’s the kind of thing being asked of you.”

  “It was approved at the highest level,” Smith said. “The Transcendence has to be eliminated. It’s the most serious threat we’ve ever encountered. You know that.”

  I marvelled at the onion-like layers of intrigue and malice. “You used Rafael Ijiuto’s grudge against his cousins. You gave him enough antimatter to pay mercenaries, and provided the mercenaries, too.” That explained the choice of IVK as a weapon. Nothing could have less suggested Fleet involvement. The whole plot had been designed to maximize deniability. “And I guess, once Pippa was eliminated, it would be Ijiuto’s turn. Right?”

  “We still need him for now,” Smith grunted. “He says he knows where they’ve gone.”

  “Commander,” a voice said on the intercom. “Ship at our two o’clock high.”

  Smith’s heads-up screen flashed. I snuck a glance at it as he shoved me out of the office.

  The sight winded me. It was the St. Clare.

  *

  Sophia bent over the weapons console, finessing the targeting controls. She was using the optical telescope to target the Rogozhin, not the targeting laser, so that we wouldn’t know we were being targeted. The tradeoff was a less stable targeting solution. That’s why she was taking it slow, drifting closer and closer to us in a nearly matched orbit, and that’s why I, on the Rogozhin, had been able to clearly see the unique plesiosaur silhouette on Smith’s heads-up screen.