Trustworthy

by Astrid Amara

  Mack scowled. “So who received the insurance pay out?”

  “Ivo’s father’s company, Andro Industries. It was the designated recipient upon your death.”

  I glanced at Mack. It didn’t make any sense. I itched for a chance to do some research on my osys, but I knew that Levi had more pressing needs.

  I swallowed back the sickness that crept up my throat and nodded at Levi. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I remember.”

  Levi fiddled with his osys, then nodded at me. “Go ahead, Ivo. Everything is being recorded.”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “Where you were kept, how you were treated. What Trust Insurance had you do.”

  I felt sick again.

  Mack whispered in my ear. “Say it once and let it go.” He squeezed my hand, hard. “You’ll never have to say it again.”

  So I took a deep breath, and began.

  * * * *

  If a person’s conscience is the accumulation of their retained memories, what does that mean for a person like me, whose memories hadn’t been lived with for a decade? I had them back now, but I still didn’t feel them. They played in my head like something I’d seen, not experienced, although my body recalled the pain, and my eyes played the despicable scenes before me.

  I answered Levi’s questions levelly, as emotionlessly as I could, though I often felt ill. And I thought: if one commits atrocities, and forgets them, do they hold the same kind of power? Had the distance of so many years between my deeds and my recollection of them diminish the horror? Because as terrible as I felt, retelling my awful past, it seemed like it should hurt more. I should have been hysterical, or at least, very pissed off.

  I felt only a distant repulsion to my own tale, whereas it was clear, from the way Levi, Tiergan, Mack, and the two other revolutionaries in the van stared at me, that I wasn’t the only one made sick by my memories.

  When Rosslyn pulled the van up to the doors of the Fishman Corporation’s Polanza headquarters, I felt relieved at the reprieve from my own story.

  Levi stopped recording and now shared a dark look with Tiergan. I turned instead to Mack. “What’s the plan now?”

  Mack was pale, his eyes wide. He swallowed, a look of grief on his face, and I wondered if this was what he’d looked like when I had died. I had been spared that sight before now.

  “Mack?” I asked again.

  He cleared his throat, then put his hand to my face, as if unable to stop himself. “Yeah.” His voice was rough. “Okay. Levi, Tiergan, and Rosslyn are going to the Trust Center to lead the press corps and witnesses from the security council. Tomas, Rhett, you, and I will be here, at the Fishman’s server banks.”

  “I told them your names,” I informed Rosslyn. “All three of you. And Mack. They will have created a planet-wide security alert for your IDs, which means even if you don’t show up when and where they expect you, you are still in danger.”

  “I have over twenty years’ practice avoiding Calypso Recon and Trust,” Rosslyn told me. “But thanks for the consideration.”

  I shrugged. In all honesty, I didn’t give a shit about Rosslyn. Or even the revs. The only one I worried about was Mack, and the other agents stuck in Trust’s Peak trap.

  I watched Rhett and Tomas open the weapons locker, helping themselves to high-powered energy rifles. I moved in behind them and took in the available weaponry. There were newer versions of thin polymesh armor, but there was also a larger, older model without the retractable helmet. I chose this, knowing how easy it was to force helmets to retract with a clever shot.

  Mack noted my choice but said nothing as he suited up. The sight of us both yanking on armor in the back of a vehicle brought back long-ago memories, from another life, and the sense of nostalgia and pleasure that came with it broke out a strange, poorly timed smile.

  “You think this is funny?” Rhett snapped at me.

  “No sir,” I said. There was nothing funny in this.

  I chose the large long-range energy rifle out of habit. They had several cartridge and energy pistols. I chose one of the cartridge pistols, then thought about it and put it back.

  Mack eyed me but still said nothing. He took the pistol I had rejected and slipped it into a vest pocket.

  Their choices for nonlethal weapons consisted of a smaller but more unpredictable darter and a heavier magnetic pistol. The darter had more shots, but the dosages were unpredictable. They packed them with the kind of drugs that would bring down the biggest soldier—so if your target happened to be a smaller woman, it would likely kill her as effectively as a bullet in the head.

  The mag pistol only had five shots, but the magnetic pulse caused immediate unconsciousness with fewer side effects. I chose this instead.

  To my disappointment, they only had two plasma shields, one of which went with Tiergan and Levi. That left one for Mack and I to share.

  Mack had chosen an array of smaller pistols, energy and comm bombs, and a small, portable programmer that he placed in another pocket.

  We hooked our osys signals for private communication, then Mack shook Tiergan’s, Levi’s, and Rosslyn’s hands. “Good luck,” he told them.

  They said the same. Tiergan reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Good luck to you too.”

  I nodded and wordlessly climbed out of the van behind the twins.

  Fishman Corporation was a conglomerate of multiple agricultural ventures and owned the majority of the farms in the Alspree biodome. Their corporate offices were showy and designed with the scale of interplanetary space trade in mind, and so the tall, glassy skyscraper looked completely out of place compared to the surrounding, smaller-scale farming suppliers, residences, and surrounding fields. It was as though Fishman wanted to be on the Beltway but couldn’t afford it, so they stuck their massive skyscraper in the middle of a wheat field instead.

  At six in the morning, there was little movement on the street other than service calls and commuters on their way to the shuttle station. The four of us approached the looming automatic doors in silence. I felt completely out of context. I didn’t look like a businessman, and I didn’t look like a farmer.

  But the automatic doors slid open for us, and a small, painfully thin, congenial-looking older woman greeted us in the showy glass lobby.

  “I’m Seli,” she told us, shaking our hands. “I’ve switched security off and sent the night guards home early. The closer we get to opening hours, the more likely it is that someone will start asking questions, so I suggest we hurry.”

  One of the twins took position outside the bank of elevators. The other took the elevators up to the roof to scout for incoming Trust gyropods.

  Mack and I followed Seli to the compact, hot room of the Fishman Corporation’s central server databank in the basement of the corporate offices. There were no amenities in the room since it was only visited by techs when equipment failed. Any actual connections to the systems inside the room were done by remote osys.

  There wasn’t even a desk, so Mack sat on the floor beside the closest of the main servers. He reached into his vest and pulled out the programmer and transmitter he’d built. Then he pulled up a viz screen from his osys. I assumed he did it so I could see what he looked at and be part of the exciting action of corporate espionage, but in truth, I had no fucking clue what he did.

  Seli returned to the lobby to keep watch for early morning office visits, and I took position by the closed door. I already started sweating, and Mack hadn’t even plugged anything in yet.

  “Seli is one of yours, I take it,” I commented.

  Mack made a noise. “Most of the actual farming communities don’t like Trust any more than us. Fishman may be a corporation, but they are Calypso-based and run by a local farming conglomerate.”

  I pulled up a camera feed of the lobby, shared on my osys by Rhett. I rested my artificial hand on the butt of my energy rifle and tested the plasma shield.

  Mack mumbled to himself as he connected wires and tappe
d his virtual screen. He cursed a few times.

  “Going all right?” I whispered.

  Mack sighed. “I’m not saying I underestimated the number of layers of security, but…” He shrugged. “There are a lot of fucking layers of security.”

  “They have to be good at this,” I said. “If they’ve kept their immortal indentured workforce a secret for so long.”

  Mack made the hand gesture for credits. “I think a lot of greased palms also helped.” His expression brightened once his programmer pinged. He bowed his head and went back to work.

  I watched him, feeling the smile spread across my face. I loved him. It was such a sweet, honest revelation, staring at him doing his thing, rocking as he sat cross-legged, tongue slightly protruding as he typed and stared at the screen, totally engrossed in his environment. It brought back so many memories—nights of him like this, enraptured by some new virchworld game or some new osys upgrade, waking up early in the morning with the enthusiasm of a child to get back to his games.

  My heart ached with the thought that I spent the last ten years not remembering the existence of one so sweet. I made a promise that we would both get out of this—alive—and that I wouldn’t spend another day without him.

  Mack finished hooking up his device, then sighed loudly. “All right. Now we wait.”

  I glanced nervously at the door. “How long?”

  He shrugged. “Until I get the signal from Rosslyn. They have to have their witness team in position outside Trust Center, where there will be a dozen or so agents guarding the facility during the parade. She’ll send us a feed uplink once they’re in place.”

  The wait was interminable. In truth it probably took only fifteen minutes, but it felt like forever when you waited for an army to burst into the room and shoot you dead.

  At last both Mack and I were greeted with a feed from the parade grounds outside Trust Corporate offices. The image wavered and moved as Rosslyn’s glance darted around the large courtyard.

  There were hundreds of people lining both sides of the main boulevard down the heart of the Beltway. Sound was muted, but I could imagine the racket so many people must have made in that enclosed environment.

  Outside Trust headquarters, the dozen agents stood in position, looking like a highly militarized private security force. I wondered what regular citizens on Calypso thought when they saw them. What had I thought before I’d been forced to join their ranks? Did I disdain them like so many private security teams when I had been Recon? What did their faces look like? Did they look as blank as mine had? Would there be any clue to an outsider that these people were slaves, brought back to life over and over again to protect enormous profits?

  But Rosslyn didn’t focus on them; her gaze leveled at the crowd of spectators that Levi addressed. Levi looked nervous, and that made me nervous.

  “We’re ready when you are.” Rosslyn’s voice sounded tense.

  “All right,” Mack replied. He glanced up at me. I expected him to look worried. Instead he simply smiled. “Hey, cowboy.”

  I gave him an unconvincing smile back.

  Mack’s finger flitted over the air as he punched buttons. We both watched the footage.

  At once, all the Trust guards dropped to the ground. It was almost graceful, like a coordinated dance. There were shouts, and the video feeds of several other channels switched to the front of Trust.

  Some agents began to rise to their feet again, shaking their heads. Others stayed down. They looked stunned.

  “Unplug,” I demanded. “Let’s go.”

  Mack seemed entranced, watching the screen, eyes a little wet. “It worked. It fucking—”

  “Go, now!” I yelled at him.

  Mack yanked the cord connecting the transmitter to the osys and jumped up.

  I opened the door and scanned both ways down the hall, but no one waited to ambush us.

  I walked quickly, feeling Mack’s lurking presence behind me. We had no ride this time around. I called Rhett.

  “Any movement?” I asked.

  “No. Tomas?”

  “I…” Tomas’s voice sounded strained. “Incoming gyropods!”

  “Already?” Mack began to run. So did I. By the time we got to the single elevator that served the basement, the elevator gauge showed it came down from the top floor.

  We skipped the elevator and headed up the staircase, desperate to be free of the closed-off basement.

  We knew they had landed on the roof of the building, so it seemed our only chance of escape would be the lobby.

  My skin tingled as we pushed open the door and ran. No sign of Seli, no sound from Rhett. I swerved to the right and glanced down behind the front security desk on a hunch.

  Seli lay sprawled on the cream-colored marble, unconscious or dead, I couldn’t tell.

  I gripped Mack’s sleeve tightly and yanked him behind me, even though he was taller. I saw movement outside the front door, blurred by the light-tinted windows. I pulled Mack back toward the staircase.

  “Stop pulling me,” Mack grumbled. “I can walk perfectly fine.”

  “If you get shot, I’ll kill you,” I hissed at him. I yanked at the stairway access door, but it had locked behind us. “Shit!” I cried.

  Mack whipped out his keyboard as if to deprogram the lock.

  I shot the lock with the energy rifle. The noise reverberated through the cavernous marble lobby.

  “Now they all know where we are,” Mack snapped.

  “They do already.” I pulled at the small slit of opening between the electric door and the wall with my artificial hand. The door gave grudgingly, enough that I could slip in and Mack could after me. Right behind him I saw two armored soldiers heading toward us. They were not, I noticed, Trust agents. They were straight up Calypso Recon, doing Trust’s dirty business.

  “The roof,” I said, taking two steps at a time. Red emergency halogens lit the stairwell and cast the steel stairs and concrete walls in an ominous glow. Our footfalls echoed through the cavernous space.

  “They landed on the roof,” Mack said, breathing heavily.

  “So they won’t expect us to come to them.”

  “That’s stupid,” Mack complained.

  “You have a better idea?” I snapped.

  “Uh…hide?”

  I glanced at Mack. He smirked, so I knew he wasn’t serious.

  My nonartificial leg began to burn, so I transferred more weight to my cybernetic one.

  I heard Mack’s heavy breathing behind me but didn’t turn around. The fucking building was at least twenty stories tall, and I cursed my stupid plan with each floor.

  The stairway access door below us opened and shots came from the soldiers. I clenched my fist to activate the shield and turned to block the energy blast.

  Almost at the same time, a door on the landing a few floors above us opened and more masked soldiers peered down. “Positive identification—they’re in the stairwell,” one of the soldiers shouted, his voice tinny and artificial through the helmet speaker. He raised his weapon and shot.

  “Shit!” Mack yelled. He activated his helmet and fired back.

  “Now,” I said. I dropped the shield, and he turned to fire at the soldiers below us. I raised the shield again, but we were surrounded.

  I glanced around frantically. We were only three floors from the roof. There was a large metal vent near the ceiling that made up part of the building ventilation system. It hung directly over the doorway where Recon fired at us.

  I turned my back and lowered my head as I unbuckled the shield from my am. Immediately energy blasts hit me in the spine. I struggled to stay upright under the blow.

  “What are you doing!” Mack yelled at me, doubled over to protect himself.

  I thrust the shield at him. “Here!” I waited until he had it strapped on. I stepped clear of its range so I could fire back. Blasts hit my exposed torso and helmet. I extended the laser in my middle finger and aimed at the ventilation shaft. “Get ready to
run,” I told him.

  The vent groaned. A large piece of metal turned red, then fell. The soldiers underneath scrambled out of the way.

  “Shield back!” I shouted, then charged forward. Mack took the steps behind me, facing the other way, holding the shield against the onslaught from below.

  One of the soldiers in front of the door shot me in the chest. I roared and threw myself at him, closing the distance. I shot him in the thigh with the energy pistol, point blank, and he stumbled. I swiveled and shot the other two, but they all opened fire.

  They were Recon, I reminded myself. They weren’t Trust agents. They were technically here fully informed, with clear intent.

  But Mack and I had also been Recon soldiers, and there hadn’t been much choice for two scruffy orphans. Ginger, Cloris, Billy—they hadn’t been given a list of options for their futures and chose a life of soldiering as the best of all possible choices.

  And I was sick of being an assassin. That said, it was hard to not shoot back when people fired round after round into my body. I began to sweat from the heat of the energy absorption of my polymesh layer.

  “Ivo!” Mack shouted, blocking the fire from below with the shield. “For fuck’s sake.”

  I could shoot them all, kill them. Or I could be cleverer about it.

  I managed to flip the helmet retraction on his armor as we struggled and shot the first soldier point blank with the mag pistol. I launched myself upward and kicked at the second soldier as he fired back at me. His helmet was un-retractable, like mine, so I had no choice but to shoot him in the legs with the energy rifle.

  One of them shot me in the helmet so hard and close I fell backward. I looked up as Mack opened fire on the second and third soldiers, expelling all of his energy rifle in one massive explosion.

  As soon as the two others collapsed, he reached down and hauled me onto my feet. “Go, go!”

  We ran for the roof. The door was unlocked. Hovering above the roof were three gyropods and Tomas’s limp body beneath them.

  Recon forces usually formed units of ten, so I assumed there’d only be one remaining soldier guarding the pods. I spotted her as soon as she stepped from behind a cooling unit and shot me in my mechanical knee.