Fade to Black

by Nyx Smith

  Submissive. Weak. An elementary stratagem, a common technique for interrogations. The leader kept assuring her she would be safe, while other members of the group threatened her with violence, and, in one case at least, made good on the threat. A neat little twist deliberately designed to add to her fears and her confusion.

  To her chagrin, it was all working very nicely, though only to a limited extent.

  Certain inescapable facts kept coming to mind. As a hostage held for ransom, she would be as good as dead. Fuchi did not pay ransom. That was the corp's stated official policy, and it held true for all but the highest corporate officials. The entire draconian apparatus in charge of Fuchi security worried little about humanitarian values or the sanctity of human life. For someone in her position, a fairly low-raking member of the corp's Special Administration, Fuchi would be more likely to send in a corporate assault team, kill everyone, sacrificing certain corporate assets rather than submit to extortion.

  That put her life in her own hands exclusively, and that frightened her. Pleading would do no good.

  Deceptions would get her only so far, and might get her killed before she was due.

  No, Farris realized, she wouldn't get out of this alive unless she offered the runners something, something substantial, something that she alone of all their contacts had to offer them.

  Deciding what that was did not take long.

  * * *

  The food Dok and Piper brought was not bad. It was mostly fish and rice, warm and easy to eat and quickly finished. Bandit liked his food that way.

  Once done, he picked up the flute, surveyed it astrally, ran his fingertips over the polished wood. It appeared to have been made by a highly skilled craftsman. It had no flaws that he could detect. As soon as he had the time, he would return to his special place, his place of long magic, and bind the instrument's energies to his own. He would enhance its power, too.

  Now, he lifted the flute to his mouth and played a few tentative notes. He did not know how to play a flute, but he would learn. He stopped when he noticed the others in the room-Rico, Shank, Dok, and Piper-all looking at him.

  "When did you get so musical?" Shank grumbled.

  Bandit thought about that, and said, "Ask me later."

  "Sure. Maybe next year."

  Bandit nodded. A year from now would be fine.

  "If we're still alive."

  "If we aren't, how would you ask?"

  Shank stared at him a few moments, frowning. Apparently, he had no answer. That was good. It assured Bandit that Shank had not suddenly become so "magical" that he could speak from beyond the grave.

  Orks should stick to weapons and combat and leave questions concerning magic to others.

  "What?" Piper said, looking confused.

  Rico stood, and said, looking at Bandit, "I'm gonna question our guest. I want you to watch her for lies."

  Of course.

  Reluctantly, Bandit followed Rico into the bedroom, where he had found the flute. The woman was in there now, the one with the unusual aura. Latent magical ability. Marena Farris.

  Rico closed the door.

  Marena Farris looked like she'd been crying: red eyes, shiny brow and cheeks. A few wet-looking curls of hair stuck to her cheeks. She looked at him with an expression that seemed to mix grief and fear into something intensely vulnerable.

  It would've been easy, too easy, to walk over, crouch down, talk to her soft and low and try to reassure her. Any woman in Farris' position probably deserved no less.. Just for being a woman caught in a bad situation. Yet Rico forced himself to plant his feet in front of the door, then crossed his arms and looked at Farris long and hard, like he'd be taking no drek from anybody. He had more to consider than just this woman's feelings. "Okay," he said, "you got my attention. What'd you know about all this?"

  "Did you talk-"

  "We talked," Rico said, interrupting. He had heard what Piper had to say about her talk with Farris.

  "Now I wanna hear it direct."

  Farris wiped at her eyes, then looked at him and said, "Where shall I start?"

  "How do you know about Prometheus?"

  "It was part of my job as a member of Special Administration-"

  "Of what?"

  Piper had mentioned this, but Rico wanted to hear more. Farris elaborated. She made the Fuchi

  "Special Administration" sound like a corp within a corp, a special network designed to monitor practically every phase of the corporation's business. Part of Farris' job, apparently, was to covertly stick her nose into different Fuchi departments' business.

  "Get back to Prometheus."

  Farris nodded. "Fuchi has done extensive psycho-profiling of all its primary competitors. There's an entire department devoted to competition research. I participated peripherally in several studies, including a recent study of Prometheus."

  "Convenient."

  "It was essential. I served as liaison between the infiltrator program and competition research. We weren't about to choose the target for our infiltrator by random selection. We viewed our first insertion as a sort of beta test-model. We wanted to ensure that whoever we sent would enter an environment where he or she would have a high chance of success."

  "You said the meet with Prometheus wouldn't work out Why?"

  A wary, almost fearful look entered Farris' eyes. Rico wouldn't be surprised if she was aware that Surikov wasn't the only one who had died at the meet with Prometheus. She had to know that others had been wounded. Rico, for one, had a bandage on his left arm that couldn't be missed.

  Farris hesitated, then said, "When was the last time you heard of Prometheus accepting someone from a competing corporation?"

  "I'll ask the questions."

  Farris flushed. "Excuse me," she said. She spent a few moments regaining her composure, that or figuring out what to say next. Rico wondered how much of the wary, fearful act was real. Bandit offered no clue. Not yet anyway. "Well ... my point," Farris said, "is that Prometheus has a very strong intra-corporate program. They develop their personnel resources from within. They've taken a few special individuals who desired to change corporate affiliations, but those were exceptional people, primarily mages with very arcane specialties."

  Rico could accept that, as far as it went. Magicians were special. They weren't half as common as most people seemed to think. Ones with Bandit's ability were damn rare.

  "Typically," Farris continued, "the corporate mindset views a change of affiliation as a sort of betrayal.

  Would you trust someone who betrayed their corp? Trust them with proprietary data? Your edge against the competition? Corps guard their secrets very closely. They scrutinize personnel recruited from other corps scrupulously. Prometheus more than most."

  Rico nodded. Never trust a traitor. He'd heard that before. "Why'd they kill your husband?"

  "Because," Farris said, seeming stung, "they'd rather deprive a competitor of the value of an Ansell Surikov than risk recruiting a potential traitor. Another corp's loss is their gain. That's how Prometheus sees it."

  "And that's how you knew the meet wouldn't go right."

  "That was my assumption."

  "So why didn't you say something?"

  "Would you have believed me?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "Of course it matters. Everything I do influences what you think of me and that matters quite a lot."

  Abruptly, Farris seemed on the verge of tears. Her eyes got moist and her lower lip quivered. "If I had said they might try to kill you, and they didn't, if your meet had gone as planned, you'd see me as a schemer.

  You'd think I had some hidden agenda, that I had tried to deceive you." Her breath caught. "It may not seem very brave, but I want to get out of this alive. I'm horrified over what's happened, over Ansell's death, but nothing scares me more than the power you have over me. I'll do anything I have to do ... to get through this."

  Some slags would take a statement like that and run and never stop, espec
ially with it coming from someone who looked like Farris. Some slags would use any situation to take advantage of a woman. Not Rico's style. Not even on his worst day. "One of my people might still be alive if I'd known what you know about Prometheus."

  Farris' expression grew anguished. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's hard to know what to do. If I, had it to do over, I would take my chances and tell you. I was afraid. I'm still afraid."

  "You got reason."

  Farris seemed to shudder. "Yes, I know," she said quietly, almost in a whisper. "I know I have reason to fear you. That's why we must talk. I have something that you might want."

  "Like what?"

  "Ansell Surikov."

  30

  "Surikov is dead."

  "No. He's not."

  Farris looked scared, but she spoke in the dead-calm tone that people used when they know exactly what they're saying, and know that they're right.

  Rico looked at the stress analyzer on his wrist. If Farris was lying, she was damn good at it.

  A long silence followed. Farris' eyes never wavered, despite her fearful expression. Mentally, Rico ran down the short list of possible explanations. Farris could be lying. She could be nuts. Desperate enough to say anything or too far gone to notice. Even if Surikov had been revived, magically resuscitated, or his apparent death only some magician's illusion, Farris would have no way of knowing that.

  Rico could think of only one other explanation and it wasn't a good one. Possibly, just possibly, he and his team had been not only double-crossed, but reamed right from the start. Tricked somehow. He didn't see how. "Surikov's not dead?"

  "No." Farris shook her head.

  "Then who was the slag we busted out of Maas Intertech?"

  "Michael Travis. One of Ansell's research assistants." It didn't seem likely.

  "No way," Rico growled. "No fragging way. We had retina scans. We had fragging DNA scans."

  "Yes, but how did you confirm those scans?" Farris asked softly. "Based on data obtained from Fuchi?"

  "I'll ask the questions."

  Farris just watched him a moment. The fear in her expression seemed to mix with sadness, maybe regret "Not even Fuchi datafiles are immutable," she said. "The infiltrator program anticipated the possibility that certain relevant datafiles such as personnel files might be surreptitiously accessed. These files were altered. Datasets were exchanged. Michael Travis' retinal and DNA patterns were inserted into Ansell's files. The real Ansell Surikov, his codes and patterns, are now part of the datafiles that originally belonged to Michael Travis."

  Rico said nothing. He guessed that what Farris was saying was possible, but she made it sound too easy. There was more to changing identities than just a swap of data in computer files. "Surikov's face is all over the datanets. He's been at conferences. He's been on trideo. People know what he looks like."

  "Yes, that's true," Farris agreed, as softly as before. "And that is one reason why Michael Travis was chosen. He and Ansell have similar physical parameters. Similar physiques. Only a modest amount of cosmed surgery was necessary to complete the likeness."

  Rico shook his head, tempted to sneer. "You can't cut a slag into a disguise like that. You can't make him a duplicate of somebody else. It's been tried. Surgery leaves scars. You can't cover up the traces. Not all of them."

  "You're correct," Farris said. "Ordinarily, any surgery would be detected by a close medical examination. Precluding an attempt at deception. In this Case, however, it was possible to disguise the cosmetic alterations as necessary surgical reconstructions." Farris hesitated a moment, then said, quieter than before, "Ansell has always been something of a bacchanalian. And rather discriminate. It was a simple matter to modify his files to show an episode with Gray's Syndrome."

  Rico grimaced. "That's real convenient."

  "Efficacious. And therefore essential."

  Gray's Syndrome was one of several virulent, sexually transmitted diseases that had arisen over the last five or ten years. People said it had come with the Awakening. Elves seemed to be particularly prone, but no one was immune. Gray's was nasty, though usually not fatal, given the right medical care. It corrupted a person's appearance. Made him or her look old and sick and deformed. And it happened fast, in just days. By the time a person realized he had it, his hair could be falling out and his teeth turning black and jutting out of his mouth like the fangs of an ork. The pain was said to be horrendous. Some people were transformed practically overnight. Some people, those who couldn't afford surgical corrections, killed themselves rather than go through life looking like some simsense-inspired horror. Some people just went insane. Rico supposed it would take a lot of surgery to restore a man from an episode with Gray's. That much cutting might well be used to cover the surgery needed to turn some slag into a near-duplicate of Ansell Surikov.

  Clever.

  "Okay," Rico said. "Say you made this slag Travis look like Surikov. He passes the scans. That doesn't make him Surikov."

  "That is where headware comes in."

  "Yeah?"

  Farris nodded. "The base implantation involved some highly advanced bionetics to boost the cerebral functions. This provided a framework for implanting a new form of semi-organic skillsoft, the bionetic equivalent of personafix BTL, encoded with Ansell Surikov's persona matrix."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that Michael Travis not only looked and acted like Ansell Surikov, he believed that he was Ansell Surikov."

  "And nobody at Maas Intertech noticed that this slag Travis had all this drek inside his head."

  "Ansell Surikov has numerous cerebral implants. Most scientists do. Michael Travis' implants were simply designed to conceal their personafix functions." A look like surprise passed over Farris' features.

  "Even I couldn't tell them apart. And I've had more experience with Ansell than merely as a psychologist."

  "Which one are you married to?"

  "Ansell. The original Ansell."

  "So if Surikov was really Travis, why'd you try to kill 'im?"

  Farris' expression turned sad, hurt. "I've already explained that. Everything I told you about Ansell applied to Michael Travis. Almost everything. Michael volunteered for the infiltrator program. He did it to spite me. We'd been having an affair. It didn't work out I only referred to him as Ansell Surikov because, in effect, he was Ansell, functioning as Ansell. I believed that he had hired you to kill me. Ansell is quite capable of that, given adequate motivation, and Michael Travis' implanted persona overrides made him just as capable. I thought that my only chance for surviving would be to kill him first."

  Rico almost didn't give a damn. He could see he wasn't going to catch Farris in any kind of lie. She had all the angles of her story worked out, whether this was chiptruth or pure fantasy. What worried him was the chance that her story was actually true, what that implied about all he had done, and what he ought to do next. "So if it's this slag Travis who got iced, where's the real Surikov?"

  "That's what you and I must talk about."

  "We're talking about it right now."

  Farris dropped her eyes and shook her head. "We're talking about the past. I want to talk about the future."

  "What future?"

  "Ansell's future," Farris said. "And your future. And mine."

  "I ain't got no future."

  "Perhaps you do." she said quietly. "It's conceivable that I could give it back to you."

  Rico watched Marena Farris intently. She looked about as uncertain and uneasy as ever, but now he didn't trust it, not nearly as much as before. A minute ago she'd been just a frightened woman telling a story he could either believe or dismiss. Now she talked like a person with a plan and Rico didn't like it. Farris was too smart-and too damn good-looking. She looked too much like the conniving blonde biff in every action-adventure flick he'd ever-seen. Biffs like that always had something up their sleeve to match what they had inside their shirts or pants. The words that came out of their mouths always made things
perfectly logical, even if those words were sure to get you killed.

  Farris' lower lip quivered. "I can help you," she said. "I'm not just a psychologist."

  Hadn't she already said something like that to Piper? I'm more than I seem ... Rico accepted that without question. "I know what you are," he said. "Get to the point."

  "Of course," Farris said quietly. "The point is this. Ansell isn't happy where he is. Fuchi Multitronics has put very tight limits on his work. He would like to go somewhere else, to another corp. If you were to help him get there, this other corp would reward you generously."

  Rico sneered. "You're dreaming, chica."

  "No," Farris said, shaking her head. "No, I'd already begun negotiating on Ansell's behalf before you carried me away. Only a few days have elapsed. I could finish the deal by telecom. You could come away from this with a lot more money than you've got now, and I could probably arrange to get at least one group of people off your back. I could make that a condition of the deal."

  "You're talking about Maas Intertech."

  "I believe you've had some experience with Daisaka Security? The Asian woman mentioned that.

  Daisaka is linked to Maas Intertech through the parent entity, Kuze Ninon. I could arrange for them to be turned off."

  "I slotted off Fuchi once this month by busting you out. I figure that's enough of a problem to live with."

  "Yes," Farris said, nodding. "You've struck a blow against Fuchi corporate pride. They want you, but they can only hunt for you in so many ways, and the SIN-less are hard to find. But it isn't just Fuchi. Daisaka wants you, too. Isn't that so? And the more people looking for you, the greater the chance that someone will find you. I'm offering you the opportunity to drastically reduce the numbers of your opponents and to make some money that you might very well need in the days and weeks ahead."

  "I should trust you to cut a deal?"

  "Yes, you should," Farris said. "I have the most compelling reasons possible for dealing in good faith. I want to live."

  "You know people at Maas Intertech?"

  Farris didn't answer. She just stared at him. A couple of moments of that and suddenly Rico felt like he was facing the blank stare of a fixer, revealing nothing. It was almost scary. Who the hell was this biff really? Why did it seem like she knew more about things than any one person had a right to know? Surikov, Travis, the infiltrator program, details about Fuchi competitors... It made Rico wonder if she knew even more than she was saying.