STATE MACHINE
K.B. Spangler
Smashwords Edition License Notes
Copyright 2015, K.B. Spangler
State Machine is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com.
Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising (redmoonrising.org)
This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords, Inc. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit kbspangler.com or agirlandherfed.com to learn more.
for Fuz, Dante, and Rose
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Preview of Greek Key
About the Author
ONE
She was used to doing this sort of thing in the dark, alone, but this wasn’t so bad. The man walking beside her was on the young side of thirty and smart as a whip, and he had made it plain he was happy to escort her through the labyrinthine sub-basement.
Definitely not bad at all.
“You know what’s in that room?” he asked, pointing to a door halfway down the hall. “One of the largest vinyl record collections in the world.”
“Really? Here?”
“Yes, here,” he said with a chuckle. “Everything from Pat Boone to Jimi Hendrix. If you like classic LPs…”
“Love them.” She glanced down at her watch, pretending to check the time. “Can I see them? Or are they in one of those secure areas you told me about?”
He took a passcard from his pocket as he pressed a finger to his lips.
The room was sterile. They had decided to preserve the music, not the packaging, and each record had been wrapped in a white envelope before it was filed away in black boxes. Several thousand copies of America’s best albums, every single one pristine, and she might as well have been standing in a hospital’s medical records room for all that was worth.
“What do you think?” he asked, his fingers brushing against her arm.
She smiled warmly at him. “Amazing.”
They kissed in a corner of the room that was hidden from the sweep of the security cameras. He knew how they needed to stand and when they had to move; it was a game to him, she knew, flirting with strange women while he was at work. When they were finished, he led her around the room, holding up an album or two as he went. They all looked the same to her, the black plastic disks in their white paper sleeves, a gold eagle affixed to each label. He asked if she wanted to listen to anything in particular; she glanced at her watch again, and led him towards the door.
He didn’t want to end the tour. She dropped a word here, a hint there… It was easy to coax him into stalling their return trip, to nudge him away from the high-security areas.
Towards the storerooms.
“What’s in here?” she asked, as he took her down another hallway. The air was somewhat stale, as if it were rarely stirred by anything living.
He winked. “Treasure.”
The passcard came out again, but this time he followed it by tapping a code onto the nearby keypad.
“I really don’t think I should—”
He shushed her, and pulled her into the room.
Her sources had told her it would be full of clutter, but it was nearly as featureless as the record room. The white sleeves had been swapped out for white boxes of varying sizes, but the same gold eagle on its seal sat above rows of neatly printed text. She leaned towards the nearest shelf and read a label aloud. “Flag standard from Battle of Torgau, 1760… What is all of this?”
“Gifts of state,” he replied. “Some of them, anyway. They’re mainly the ones the archivists don’t think are worth the effort of moving to museums or libraries. We can’t get rid of them without causing an international incident, so they’re kept here.”
She gave a low whistle. “In this one room?”
“No,” he said, as he took down a white box barely large enough for a wedding ring. “This room is for gifts of state acquired before 1925. We didn’t get all that many until World War II, and the best ones are on display. Everything acquired after that is kept in other rooms down the hall. See?” He opened the box to reveal a tiny glass bottle, an outline of running horses pressed into its surface.
“Greek?”
“Roman,” he said. “Good guess.”
“How do you find anything in here?” she asked, gesturing to the shelves full of ubiquitous white.
“Easy!” he said. “Each item has a serial number. They’re shelved by date of acquisition, so you find the shelves with the corresponding year, and then start searching.”
“So, wait,” she said, shaking her head. “Say I wanted to find something from, oh, 1907? Where would I look?”
“Over here,” he said. He took her down an aisle, its shelves holding layer after layer of more white boxes. She followed him, and laughed and twisted sideways as he tried to catch her in another kiss.
“Oh!” She gasped as she stumbled sideways, as if her ankle had twisted on the slick linoleum floor. She clutched at the nearest shelf as she fell, and white boxes and their contents rained down around her. “Oh no,” she said, reaching towards a golden knife, its handle cut into the shape of an olive leaf. “Oh no. I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a forced smile, as he knelt carefully among the scattered objects. “Are you hurt?”
She pressed her fingers against her ankle, then shook her head. “No.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let me clean this up.”
“I’ll help—”
“No!” he said, too quickly. “There’s an order to it. It’ll just take a minute.”
She stood and pretended to test her ankle as she moved a few feet down the aisle.
1908… 1907… 1906… 1905…
She skimmed the labels in the section for 1904. There.
A lower shelf. One of the smallest boxes.
She glanced behind her to make sure he was still busy sorting the mess on the floor. A brush of her skirt as she sat down to rest concealed the motion of her hand. The little white box was easy to open, the object inside small enough to be covered by her palm.
Too easy.
And it all went to hell when he looked over and saw her slip it down the front of her blouse.
She closed her eyes. He had been so nice…
“What did you do?” he asked, shuffling towards her on his knees.
She slipped her fingernail under the dial on her watch. It came loose from its housing with a faint click.
“I wish you hadn’t seen that,” she said.
TWO
Rachel Peng was sure the party planner would be fired at the end of the night. Not that the function wasn’t spectacular. The entire evening had been magical, even by Washington’s high standards, with a six-course meal, a jazz band flown in from New Orleans, and the heady scent of heirloom roses invading from all sides. But Senator Richard H
anlon had been seated at the table to her immediate left. The two of them were separated by sixteen feet, a couple of delicate floral centerpieces, and a baker’s dozen of politicians and lobbyists, and they could not stop smiling at each other.
Those smiles were all teeth.
“He’s baiting you,” a woman’s voice whispered in Rachel’s mind, uncertainty woven into the emotion behind the words.
“I know,” Rachel replied, pushing calm and composure back across their link. The lingering anxiety eased as Mary Murphy realized Rachel wasn’t about to leap across two tables to reach Hanlon and crush his throat with her bare hands.
“Then stop smiling,” Mary said, as she turned to speak with a passing congressman. “People are staring.”
“I know,” Rachel said again. “That’s why I’m smiling.”
Everybody who was anybody in Washington knew there was a quiet war between Hanlon and the Agents of the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies. Hanlon’s star was setting, and OACET’s was… Well. If it wasn’t exactly rising, it certainly wasn’t in danger of exploding and turning everyone within a billion miles to ash, like it had been less than a year ago.
She had spent the entire evening smiling at Hanlon, a living reminder to anyone watching that OACET was closing in on him.
We know what you did, her smile said, her teeth as bright as knives. We know what you’re trying to do. And we’re going to make sure you pay, and pay, and pay...
Hanlon’s smile was constant but casual, tossed off in her direction as if she were a smitten teenager intruding on his time. That’s nice, his smile said. Be sure to tell me how that works out.
He finished the last of his white chocolate cake, dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin, and stood to work the crowd before the speakers took to the podium.
Rachel let herself relax. Across the room, the tight reds of Mary’s conversational colors dissolved into blues.
A waiter came by and offered Rachel a fresh glass of champagne. She declined in favor of hot tea: she was working, and wine went straight to her head. A second waiter arrived moments later with jasmine tea steeping in a cast iron pot. He placed the pot on the table, along with a porcelain cup so thin that light burned through it, then laid a fresh-cut gardenia blossom beside the cup before disappearing in a puff of professional competence.
She ran a fingernail along the blush of the gardenia before dropping it into her water glass, where it joined six others. Each course had come with its own flower; one of the gardenias had blood-red blotches from resting on the filet mignon.
Everything was flowers. Or linen, or crystal, or silver and gold, all of it lit by candles and the muted glow of floodlights draped in nonflammable white cloth. You had to be in Congress to book the U.S. Botanic Garden for events, and there was no such thing as a politician’s discount. Rachel was sure the cost of her meal would show up as a headline in tomorrow’s news trawl, a stupidly large number followed by at least two zeros and an exclamation point. She was glad she hadn’t been the one to buy the tickets.
A woman with a braided spill of knee-length red hair and a core the color of ripe butternut squash fell into the chair beside her. Mary Murphy—“Mare” to anyone not involved in politics—was so frail as to seem breakable, and had knotted her raw silk shawl tight around her bare shoulders to keep away the evening chill. She grabbed her own glass of champagne, and took a short but deep drink before she shoved it out of easy reach. “Morons,” she muttered though their link.
“Who?” Rachel asked.
“Everybody. When can you try again?”
Rachel checked her internal timer. “Couple of minutes. I’m going to take one last walk before the speeches start,” she replied. “If he doesn’t contact me this time, we’ll ditch.”
“Hurry, please,” Mare told her, as a woman in a dress worth more than Rachel’s pension paused beside the Agents and pretended to notice Mare for the first time. Mare stood and greeted the other woman like a long-lost sister. “I’m about to go on a homicidal rampage.”
Rachel broke their link before Mare could feel her laughing: the image of waiflike Mary Murphy laying waste to a roomful of politicians with nothing but a salad fork was straight out of a cartoon.
They weren’t supposed to be here. That dubious privilege had been reserved for Josh Glassman, Deputy Director of the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies, plus guest. Josh loved affairs like this, the slow dance-and-grind of agendas coming together in the night. If he had been the representative Agent at this function, it wouldn’t have mattered if Hanlon had been placed near OACET or not: Josh would have draped an arm across the Senator’s shoulders, and the two of them would have been best friends for the night.
And neither would have left their food unattended, on the off-chance of cyanide.
As of this time yesterday, Rachel hadn’t even known about this party. She certainly didn’t expect an early-morning call from Josh, telling her that she and Mare would be standing in for him at a black tie event and no, this wasn’t optional because The Game Was Afoot. Rachel had spent the afternoon at a seamstress’s shop getting the hem let out of a borrowed dress, and assuring her boss’s wife that she wouldn’t lose its matching necklace.
The dress fit perfectly; the matching shoes didn’t. She had crammed toilet paper into the toes, but it was a half-assed attempt at a fix. Rachel hoped that whatever she had been sent here to do, it wouldn’t involve running.
Tapping me for spycraft duty, she grumbled to herself. Josh must have lost his mind.
There were dozens of Agents who would have been better suited for this task than herself. Rachel knew she was subtle in the way of a bull setting fire to a china shop. She was more than five years gone from the Army but she was still military through and through: she knew when to keep silent and she knew when to act, and there was very little wiggle room between these. Asking her to meet an unknown contact at a formal affair was outside her usual set of skills. The sum of what Rachel knew about spycraft was that a gin martini should never be shaken, and that the Walther PPK was one of the worst guns ever made.
Which is what she kept telling herself to keep from getting cocky. She had made her target within five seconds of walking through the door.
Rachel ran another scan through her target to take in his details. He was a tall man, maybe ten years older than herself, with a core of steady denim blue. She hadn’t needed to ping his badge to identify him as federal law enforcement, probably with the Secret Service: the FN Five-seven in its concealed holster did that for her. He was pretending to work security, but his conversational colors were saturated with her own core of Southwestern turquoise. He hadn’t so much as tried to make eye contact with her, but she was the only thing on his mind.
Spying for fun and profit, or national security, or…or whatever I’m here to do, she thought. Chalk one up for Team Cyborg.
Rachel hadn’t been surprised to learn her implant was applicable to intelligence work. A major reason Congress had decided to invest in the tiny quantum organic computer chip stuck deep in her brain was its usefulness in undetectable mobile communications. Put an advanced version of a smartphone and a camera in an undercover operative’s head, and hello! Unbeatable geopolitical dominance!
(At least, until every country on earth got its hands on the technology, and then it’d just be roaring mice all over the damned place.)
There was one wrinkle that Congress hadn’t counted on: phones piggybacked on a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum; the implant tapped into the whole of it. After the Agents had activated their implants, they learned that chatting back and forth across the link was the least of their new abilities. The EM spectrum encompassed everything from radio waves to visible light to gamma radiation. Once activated, the Agents had spent all of five seconds poking around the universe before they threw away the useless training manuals and set out to discover what they could do on their own.
In Rachel’s case, s
he had taught herself to use the implant as a substitute for her sense of sight. The implant’s developers hadn’t known that was an option.
Then again, they hadn’t planned to stick the implant in the head of a blind woman.
Technically, they hadn’t. Rachel’s eyes had worked just fine when she had her skull cracked open and a tiny device implanted in her noggin, but shit made a career out of happening. Adapt or don’t—adapt or die—and Rachel was not one to give up and let life roll on without her. After several weeks of bumping around in the dark, she had discovered the electromagnetic frequencies used in eyesight still ended up in her brain, albeit via different input channels. The result was…different.
It wasn’t normal vision. It was sight entangled with touch, along with other sensations she still couldn’t put a name to, and it was so superior to normal vision that if anyone ever offered to give Rachel a pair of working eyes, she would punch them in their well-intentioned nose.
Blind.
Rachel shrugged off the sudden cold shiver between her shoulders, and reached for her tea.
Blind.
It was a word she was trying to accept. She only thought of herself as blind when she was feeling lower than low, or when the implant was off and she was lying alone in the clinging dark, or when she wasn’t really thinking about it at all. And, once she had finally realized that, it was pretty much all she needed as proof that the word actually did fit her.
Blind, she thought again. As if she wasn’t in a sour mood already.
The teacup was warm in her hands. Rachel sent a light scan through it to take in the details: fine bone china, its rim gilded in stripes and a subtle floral pattern. She wanted to stand and stretch her legs, but that would have meant walking, and at an event like this, walking meant talking.
An owl appeared in the middle of the table. It was as long as Rachel’s forearm and looked as if a talented woodworker had sculpted it from an electric green log. The owl blinked at her and hooted once, softly, then spread its carved wings and took flight. It dipped into a low swoop, skimming the heads of the tallest members of the crowd, and then pumped its wings twice for altitude. At the edge of the pavilion, it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
State Machine Page 1