Gina caught on to my idea. “I have a dagger,” she said. A cybernetic vibroblade shot out of her right wrist and hummed to life. “But the bitch figured that. She tied me up at an angle so I couldn’t cut my way out of it.” She gestured toward Alice. “Who’s she?”
I kept fumbling around with the knot, thankful that the little show-and-tell with her blade didn’t cut my fingers off. “Margo’s sister.”
She looked her over before making the connection. “Alice? The little brat you were always complaining about?”
“Yeah. That’s her.” I thought about it for a second. “I guess the two of you never actually—”
“She’s hot.”
I slipped as I tugged on part of the rope, then cleared my throat. “Yeah, she’s pretty cute, I guess...”
Gina closed her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, geeze, Alan. You haven’t...”
“Haven’t what?”
Gina opened her eyes and furrowed her brow to scrutinize my response. “You know what.”
I shrugged. “What?”
“Fucked your ex-wife’s sister.”
I stopped working on the knot and came around to face her. “Okay, first: In the phrase ‘ex-wife,’ the prefix ‘ex’ is paramount. Second, no, I certainly have not. And third... Third, how could you even think that?”
“But you’ve considered it.”
I threw my arms out. “What difference does it make what I’ve considered? She’s been coming on to me like a sailor on shore leave, how the hell could I not consider it?” I sighed, leaned over and began working on the knot, again.
“You’re old enough to be her—”
“Don’t say it,” I interrupted. “I feel old enough, already. Which is ridiculous, considering the average human doesn’t die of old age until they’re a hundred-and-twenty. Since when did reaching the first third of a person’s life count as over the hill?”
She started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ve always been an easy mark. I’m just giving you a hard time.”
“Hah hah.”
“Listen, your sleeping arrangements are your own business. Margo can go screw herself. Besides, I doubt she’d even be able to tell. You know I’ve always had a knack for picking up on these things.”
True. Gina had always possessed an uncanny ability to read people. Between her ability to spot a lie, and my ability to land a hunch, we made for a pretty good team. A great team. That was, until we made the mistake of going after Denreiker, the Leviathan Syndicate’s local mafia boss—moreover, the mistake of relying too heavily on our intuition and not enough on substantial evidence. It didn’t matter how certain you were if you couldn’t prove anything.
I only saw Gina a few times after that—after being kicked off the force. The last time we met was for lunch at Harry’s Diner on New Gaia. She said she was going offworld, had a job offer in Quartermast. I hadn’t seen her since.
Fresh out of the GalactiCop Academy she’d been a fairly petite woman. When they assigned her to me, I thought I’d spend the whole time protecting her ass. But anyone stupid enough to instigate a bout of fist-a-cuffs with her ended up on their own ass. Turned out what she lacked in size, she made up for in aggression. Now, she had the body to match.
“So, why the new decor?” I asked.
“What?” she asked, looking around the room.
I gestured to her womanly figure. “Your body. What the hell have you done to yourself since I last saw you?”
She grunted. “Cybernetic upgrade. Whole body makeover. I have the strength of three men, extraordinary dexterity, concealed vibroblades, cyberoptics, yadda, yadda, yadda. The whole shebang. They threw in the hourglass figure for free.”
I laughed. “Who’s ‘they?’”
“I... I work for CyberOps, now. I’m on the inside.”
CyberOps. The covert ops division of SpaceFleet. The most elite group of intel-fed, cybernetically enhanced, technologically equipped super-soldiers in the known galaxy. I paused a moment, then began working on the knot again. Almost there...
“I’m sorry, Alan.”
“It’s okay. I’m happy for you. We both get kicked off the force, you land work at CyberOps, I land work on a filthy whore planet... No really, that seems fair. I’m fine.”
“They wouldn’t let me tell you. That day we had lunch. If anyone knew... It was top secret. Hell, I’m top secret.” She paused for a moment. “When I saw you at the club...”
“The Boneyard.”
“I was visiting Fillion on reconnaissance. Agent Stenson and I were following a lead, and it took us there.”
“Who’s Stenson?”
“John Smith. That hand that fell from the ceiling? That was his.”
“Well, that much, I’d figured.”
“I’d been on Fillion for a couple days, knew that you’d set up shop out there. I wanted to look you up, let you know I was okay. I really did. But doing so could have ruined the op. So I gave you space. Then I saw you at the club. I’d marked my face up like a sexdoll to flitter through, unnoticed. Needed to jack into the club’s main control unit to access their feed. I was trying to figure out which room one of our suspects had been in. Long story. Anyway, there’s no need for that particular cover, anymore.” The silver tattoo disappeared from her face, revealing it to have been a superficial hologram. She wriggled her arms around. “Seriously, are you going to untie me, or what?”
“Hold on.” Something gave. I began pulling the rope. “I think I’ve got it...”
“Alan, look out!” Gina yelled. I swung out of the shower nook and discovered the room’s door had been reopened. Someone had slid into the room with the apparent stealth of a ninja, and I hadn’t noticed on account of the partially closed shower curtain.
Our new guest was the last person I’d expected to see.
“What are you—” I glanced down at the game table and discovered my vibroknuckles were no longer there. “The hell—?”
Donna took a wide swing.
∙ • ∙
Rule #4 of being a private detective: Never leave your vibroknuckles on a gaming table.
Caught completely off guard, I managed a clean dodge with only a millisecond to spare. But a dodge is a dodge, and I’ll take it. The knuckles hummed by my face, blurring my vision as they swept past. It was like looking through a jet turbine. I could hear Gina swearing behind me as she struggled to tear herself free of the rope.
“Okay wise guy,” Donna sneered. The plain and mousy woman quickly recovered from her missed punch and took a traditional boxing stance. Her inexplicable shift in mannerisms gave me a sudden bout of cognitive dissonance. “I’ve had about enough of you. Don’t give a damn if he told me hands off, I’m putting an end to your amateur sleuthing right now.”
I still had no idea what was going on. I assessed that Donna was the nameless “bitch” that Gina had referred to, but who was Donna talking about? “Who told you hands off?”
She scoffed. “Like I said, amateur sleuthing. I can’t believe you don’t know.” She feinted a jab, realized I was ready to respond, recalibrated her stance.
“Put the knuckles down, Donna.” I really didn’t want to hit her. Taking down a woman, no matter how violent she’d suddenly become, felt like a dick move.
“Not gonna happen.”
I shook my head. “Listen, I don’t know why you’re doing this, but—”
Donna cranked back for another swing.
I dodged with time to spare, which gave me the opportunity to grab her arm and yank it up behind her. I’d been hit in the face one too many times already. Enough was enough. “Stop it, will ya? I don’t want to hit a woman.”
“Then allow me.” Gina shed the last of the rope, took one step toward Donna, and decked her with the steel force of a cybern
etic fist on overdrive. Donna slumped to the ground.
“Okay. Thanks. I think.”
“God, that felt good.” Gina crouched, removed the vibroknuckles from Donna’s hand, and tossed them to me. While she was down there, she fished something from Donna’s pocket—her own eye. She popped Listic out, replaced it for a matching green set, blinked a few times. “That’s better.”
“Something tells me you’re more aware of what’s going on here than I am,” I said.
“She’s an assassin.” Gina grabbed the bundle of rope that had bound her and went to work binding. “Went by the name ‘Silo.’ Took on jobs in the Edgeworlds, primarily for that branch of the Leviathan Syndicate. Stenson and I knew she may be on board, but we didn’t know who she was, or if she was elsewhere on the main cruiser. Didn’t know Silo was a ‘she,’ for that matter. She outed herself when she confronted me in here, earlier.”
“I remember Silo from the GalactiCop Most Wanted feed. She was always near the top. Her bounty was astronomical.” I looked back at the small pile on the ground. “I can’t believe this was the legendary Silo. I mean, she looks so... ordinary.”
Gina nodded. “That’s exactly what allowed her to kill so many people.” She finished hogtying Donna, aka Silo, and slapped her face. “Wake up, bitch.”
Nothing.
“I think you punched her, too hard. You say she confronted you, earlier?”
“Yeah, she...” Gina looked embarrassed. “She took me down when I was... prone. Knew just how to shut me off. Plucked my eye out, reached into my socket, and switched off my neurotransmitters. Tied the knots differently, made it nearly impossible for me to escape. That’s how you found me earlier. She left me for dead, and I practically was. Trapped in my own head, but unable to transmit to my body. Like being in a coma. I think your ORB acted as a reboot.”
“Thank god,” I said. I could only imagine what that must have felt like. Then something she said fully registered. “What do you mean she ‘tied the knots differently?’ You were already tied up in here?”
She avoided a straight answer. “Let’s just say Agent Stenson and I found a way to pass the time.”
I swallowed hard. When I opened the door to this scene, I didn’t know whether I’d walked in on sex bondage or interrogation bondage. Turned out to be a little of both.
“But that’s not important, right now.” Gina cleared her throat. “Here’s the deal, Alan: The ship that didn’t make it to New Gaia...
“The Herculean Parrot.”
“Right. We have reason to believe—CyberOps has reason to believe—that it wasn’t a random capture. The Parrot was planted with a prototype net amplifier.”
“A ‘net amplifier?’”
“New tech. Other than the prototype, only one other unit was produced. A beta unit. They make it easier for a ship to be captured by a net. If an amplifier’s on board a ship in subspace, it increases the odds of a ship being yanked if it passes through one. Dramatically. Something like an eighty percent likelihood. CyberOps caught wind of it being developed in the Quartermast Cluster, but by the time we shut the operation down and wiped out the research facility’s data banks, it was too late. The prototype and the beta unit made their way into the hands of the Syndicate. In fact, we have reason to believe that the person who handed it to them was a member of CyberOps—an older agent with a chip on his shoulder. The theory is, the Syndicate’s using the amplifiers to feed cargo to space pirates.”
“To what end?”
“We’re not sure. Why anybody would want to deal with those freaks is beyond our intel. Beyond me, for that matter.”
I shook my head. That was incredible. Normally when pirates netted a ship, they were just plain lucky. They flourished in deadspace between clusters, the voids without terraformed planets, remaining forever on their captured starships, in a kind of habitable sprawl of flotsam. They fed exclusively off the spoils gleaned from the occasionally intercepted cruiser, incorporating both freight and passengers into their microcosm of hoarding and slavery. Their capture attempts were based on partially retrieved launch data and vector approximations—nets were placed in real space where they believed a ship would pass through by way of subspace. But the nets only worked about one percent of the time—they had to emit an identical corresponding subspace frequency at the exact moment the ship passed through, and a ship’s subspace frequency was always in flux. This tech was a game changer. If it went mainstream, clusters would be cut off from each other—ships would be too fearful of traveling through subspace. And not everything was readily available in each cluster. Trade was essential for survival.
“Which branch of the Syndicate?” I asked.
“Leviathan.”
Anger welled in my chest. Was Denreiker involved? Gina read my mind.
“We don’t think Denreiker’s involved. In fact, he seems to have fallen out of their favor.”
That was little consolation after the fact. When a crime lord sent your life out of whack, you’d like to return the favor directly. “I’d like to think that we at least had something to do with that.”
“Me too,” she said. “Point is, the Leviathan Syndicate wanted the Herculean Parrot to be captured by space pirates. We’re not sure why, but we think it had something to do with the cargo it was carrying: A shit load of arc conductors. And incidents like that don’t occur in a vacuum. We ran hypothetical diagnostics on freight manifests, flight patterns, known criminal connections... Stenson and I went to Fillion and followed through with gathering intel on the final unknowns. It amounts to this: We believe this ship is going to be netted, too.”
“This one. The Orion Express. Netted by space pirates.” And here, my original role was to make sure Alice got safely back to New Gaia. Margo was going to kill me. Assuming the pirates didn’t first.
“That’s what we’ve assessed. Somewhere on board this thing is the other net amplifier. The beta unit. Call it a metadata probability, call it pattern recognition, call it psychohistory—call it whatever you want, but the intel keeps leading to the same result: This ship’s going to be captured.”
I stood up and threw my hands out. “Then why not cancel the entire flight? You could have informed Interlock, shared your intel.”
“And allow every gung-ho science lab, mob lord, space pirate, cargo smuggler, and son of a bitch get the idea to further research and manufacture net amplifiers? Not to mention the general panic that would ensue, despite our attempts to reassure the public we’re certain there were only two of these things before we were able to put a stop to it? No way. We’ve got to do this under the radar. Plan A: locate the beta unit, destroy it.”
I grunted. That did make sense. You didn’t need secret intel or statistical data to imagine the mass hysteria that would result from such a threat. We had to find this thing.
Still, I didn’t like our odds. “I assume there’s a Plan B?”
“Plan B has become rather... iffy.” Gina shook Silo. No response. “This is ridiculous. She’s not going to wake up, in time. Even if she did, there’s no way she’d talk.” She took a quick, deep breath in an effort to clean the slate. “Listen, you just have to trust me, on this, okay? I’ll fix it.”
“Okay.” I took a deeper, slower breath than her, and rubbed my forehead. “Okay, we’ll fix it. And I do mean ‘we,’ not just you.”
Gina nodded, looking almost relieved to have my help. Like old times. “Fair enough.”
“So what’s our next move?”
“I need to find out if Stenson’s still alive, and I don’t have time to wait for Silo to regain consciousness so I can interrogate her about him. We need his briefcase. Silo snuck into our room while he and I were... occupied. She had a Saturn grenade on her and used it to slice Stenson’s hand off. She tried to snag the briefcase, but he managed to grab it with his other hand and get out of the room. Silo took me out of commission
before following suit. I have no idea if she caught up with him and nabbed the briefcase, or what.”
“What’s in the brief—”
“Um, excuse me?” Alice raised her hand. She looked studious, as if she was interrupting a class lecture.
I was so involved in conversation with Gina, I hadn’t even noticed her sit up. “How long have you been awake?”
“Like, awhile. So, yeah, I just want to get all this straight—kind of a recap, you know?”
Gina and I nodded.
“Okay, so someone killed Dave. Someone also killed this ship’s pilot. A secret agent’s dead hand fell on me. The sexdoll is actually your ex-partner. The bad actress turned out to be a master assassin. And we’re probably gonna be captured by space pirates. Am I up to speed, now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that about covers it.”
“Right. We need to get the fuck off this ship.”
11
Room Hopping
We made our way down a corridor we hadn’t explored yet, toward Donna and Bertle’s room, hoping that if Donna—I couldn’t find it in myself to refer to her as Silo—had gotten Stenson’s briefcase, she may have stashed it there. The corridor opened into a large, empty portion of the cargo hold that harbored a giant grey airlock hatch on the floor—the airlock that connected the Century Pigeon to the Orion Express.
It suddenly occurred to me that Stenson may not even be on the Pigeon anymore—he could have boarded the cruise ship. I instinctively felt for the access card I’d pulled off Dave, then remembered it wouldn’t work on that particular hatch. Access from ship to ship could only be granted by the crew from controls in the cockpit.
I was about to bring this up, when Gina turned around and put her pale finger to her candy-apple lips. We were at Donna’s door. Alice and I replied with a quiet nod.
Before heading out of Gina’s room, we’d posited that Bertle was in on this whole thing. If Donna was Silo, the infamous assassin, it was unlikely she would have traveled with Bertle’s acting troupe and performed Romeo and Juliette on backwater planets. Which meant Bertle was making up his background alongside hers.
Murder on the Orion Express Page 11