by Paul Collins
Maximus moved to the door and turned. The doctor’s body was paralysed – odd how his eyes were still ‘alive’. Maximus expected to see pleading there, but it was clear that the doctor despised him. In a way the doctor had won the encounter, but Maximus had dodged the bullet.
He activated the automatic locking mechanism, stepped out into the corridor, and gently shut the door behind him, hearing the digitalised lock click into place. Whistling jauntily, he headed down the corridor. He was always most cheerful when he triumphed by accident. Well, as much as premeditated murder could be classified as ‘accidental’.
Back in his office Maximus had barely sat down when he received a priority signal from the field.
He noted that the signal had been routed to him. He was logged in at that moment and it was his task to support ‘active’ agents. But priority signals were not common.
Maximus activated the holoscreen. It remained blank. He shrugged. That was normal field agent behaviour. Agents were paranoid by nature and did not want their features transmitted digitally. Even to Home Office.
Following standard HQ protocol he identified himself by code only when he answered. The AI computer had already sent back a password, identifying itself so the agent could communicate in confidence.
Once Maximus was cleared, he said, ‘Start message.’
He had expected a voice message from the field agent but instead he received a pre-recorded transmission on his holoscreen, in large pulsing letters. He stared at the letters for a long time, feeling a cold chill course down his spine.
‘PRIORITY. REASON TO BELIEVE RIM HQ PENETRATED BY MOLE. IDENTITY OF MOLE SO FAR UNKNOWN. NEW EVIDENCE EXPECTED SHORTLY. SUGGEST HIGHEST SECURITY RESTRICTIONS BE PUT IN PLACE. CODE/-2435-12’.
The transmission ended.
Maximus entered his password and was transferred to the deciphering site. Within moments he had the agent’s name, then he sat pondering. Somewhere out there in the galaxy a field agent called Anneke Longshadow suspected a mole had infiltrated the organisation. Him, or another?
He had disposed of Luton, and obliterated any evidence of his Quesadan activities. The least he could do! Maximus did so much without RIM’s authority that he was hard put to think what she might have on him. He had vaguely heard of her. Genetic citizen of Normansk, heavy G world, from extended human stock. Exemplary RIM rating.
Even now she was trying to gather evidence that would identify him, that would destroy him. Again, there was a vague possibility there was someone else in HQ guiltier than himself, but how many moles with his level of expertise could there be in RIM? Maximus was sure there was only one. Now.
Maximus. Dedicated Special Agent. Dedicated to the other side. His side. If RIM was not on his side, there was going to be trouble.
It had to be Luton. It made sense. If one is at risk of being outed, why not leave a few revenge-bombs in the system? Maximus had had dealings with several dubious companies. Luton undoubtedly mentioned his suspicions to Anneke Longshadow – who like any good nosy agent, went looking for proof. He, Maximus, had been set up by Luton, but the set-up would not be as spectacularly successful as Maximus’s.
Well, damn her to hell. Where she could join Luton. She was a legitimate threat to Maximus, and therefore she was a valid target. There always had to be a reason. Maximus was an otherwise perfect psychopath. That was his single flaw.
Maximus took a deep breath and sat back in his chair, clearing his mind. He needed to think this through carefully. Every move he made at this point was critical. Timing was especially critical.
Several moments passed before he leaned forward and ran an ID diagnostic on the transmission. A message of this importance could turn RIM HQ into a hotbed of paranoia and accusations. It had to be handled carefully. Whatever he did, it needed to look normal. He must do things expected of an agent of his youth when faced with this kind of message.
So far so good. He allowed for what would later be seen as a moment of shock. Very good. He might be reprimanded for it, but even that would appear normal. A slap on the wrist. No more.
Maximus smiled. He wasn’t a cold, calculating sociopath for nothing.
While one part of his brain processed the implications of this new turn of events, he called up the relevant high security protocol on his optic implant. The latter was linked by a limited n-space transceiver to an external computer, augmented by a flake of artificial neurons hidden deep in his neocortex.
There it was: a checklist of things to do, people and machines to contact.
Once the message was verified he went down the checklist systematically, following proper procedures, but that other part of his brain never stopped, not for one nanosecond.
Maximus sat back when he was finished. Calls would start coming in soon. He would be at the centre of a storm, but before long he would be sidelined as more senior agents stepped in, took over, ran the hunt for the mole.
He might be unlucky enough to get a senior officer who insisted the agent who got ‘first call’ ran it the whole way – advised of course by those more experienced. But was that unlucky? No, not at all. If sidelined, he could slip off, take some leave, and sort the matter out personally. On the other hand, he could achieve his own ends just as easily by staying at the centre of the storm.
He did not have to get his hands dirty to take care of every Luton that came along. There were other ways.
Quickly he called up the file on Anneke Long-shadow. Parts of it were beyond his access level, but what he read quelled internal alarm bells.
She was no mere Luton, but neither was she a formidable old-field agent, the kind they called ‘unkillable’.
She was not much older than him. What he could see of her record showed a pre-organisation history of rule breaking, insubordination, and ‘excessive initiative’. To her credit, she had one small success in the field. She had caught an assassin by the name of Bodin, who terminated the President of Zos in the Cygnus Sector. That was probably what kept her in the agency, given her ‘problem with authority’.
Maximus stared at her schematic image and the potted bio implanted in it: Anneke Longshadow. Born on Normansk, as he thought. Tall, athletic and dark-haired, she had the high cheekbones and flawless olive complexion that suggested Mediterranean ancestry (temperate zone, Old Earth). She was smart, beautiful and potentially lethal, like all graduates. She would still be burning with the cadet agent’s need to prove herself, which was easy to exploit. And only nineteen years old.
Not someone to get overly alarmed about, just someone to kill.
After all, he had a reason. She was a threat to him. Now all he had to do was prove that she was a potential hazard to RIM.
ANNEKE Longshadow ran for her life. Accelerated water slugs blew chunks out of the wall where she had been a split second earlier. She ducked, spun round a corner, dodged a hail of num-darts, and made for a narrow gap between ventilators. She was racing across a dark rooftop. Not far behind, Quesadan hunkies were in hot pursuit.
Jeez, some people lose their cool over nothing, she thought. Just because she had broken into their high-security complex and made off with a tightly encrypted and probably embarrassing datt wafer file. Had the alarm not sounded nobody would have cared. Did the file contain the identity of a mole within RIM who was trading sensitive information? If not, this was a lot of trouble for nothing.
Maybe the Quesadans just want to congratulate me on my resourcefulness.
A heat-seeking nerve-demyelinator spat towards her out of the darkness. Or maybe not, she added mentally.
Somebody had flanked her. Anneke leapt, spun in mid-air, twisting over backwards, and fired as she twisted. She got lucky. The nerve-demyelinator exploded four metres away. Too close.
She landed, rolled onto her feet and kept going. She could hear the heavy beat of air-subs. Any second now they would be cresting the rooftop, spotlights casting about, pinning her in their cone of illumination for num-darts, or worse. That depended on who was in charge
and whether they wanted her dead or alive.
‘There she is!’ The voice was too close for comfort. She forced a burst of speed. A quick look at the directional locator band told her she was approaching the edge of the building. The distance to the next building was ten metres.
‘Okay legs, over-boost or die.’ She leaned in and charged at the dark knife-edge of the rooftop. Somewhere ahead, in the grey fogginess that enshrouded this cloud-bound city, was another rooftop – unless the locator was wrong, which sometimes happened.
Anneke leapt.
She had a dizzying glimpse of an endless drop below her, legs cycling, arms pin-wheeling, then she thudded down, rolling back to her feet. She had made it. A centimetre less and … well, who knows? Either way, the hunkies were unlikely to follow her. What she had done couldn’t be replicated by anybody who had grown up in earth-standard gravity. Normansk, her birth world, had a surface gravity of 1.9 Gs, giving her muscles that ‘normals’ could only dream of.
Anneke kept going, darting into a maze of ventilators, solar chimneys and field housings. Eerie green pulse beams drifted overhead, moving in slow motion, vaporising whatever they hit.
The pulses meant they were getting anxious.
Desperate hunkies did desperate things. Time to change space/time coordinates. As it turned out, she didn’t have a choice. This rooftop was smaller than the previous one, the gap coming up to the next bigger. Eighteen metres. Even she couldn’t pull that off. She’d need wings … or the next best thing.
Speaking of which, she had always wanted to try a Naproxan Drop. Arial Naproxa was a mythical RIM agent, and Anneke’s hero all through her training. She had read everything she could about Arial and her daring escapes.
Once, on Procyon Twelve, Arial had been in a similar situation. Her attractor field generator had been hit and was working at half capacity, so she couldn’t scale walls or descend them safely. Not enough adhesion. Trapped on a high rooftop like Anneke, she did what the field generator manual said you should never do. She used the overlapping fields as a brake. And she lived to tell the tale.
Of course, some vindictive person could have made the whole thing up so that someone like Anneke would try it and get herself killed. Maybe there wasn’t even an Arial Naproxa, and never had been.
An air-sub appeared right in front of her, its side gun swivelling for a shot. Anneke had less than two seconds to get out of there. She hit the edge of the rooftop at full speed, leapt up and over the air-sub towards the next building, and started to fall.
She switched the field generator on mid-air and a second later slammed into the wall of the other building about three metres below the roofline. The sticky attractor field sank into the surface of the wall, holding her there as she slid down the facade.
It worked! Maybe Arial Naproxa did exist after all.
The overlapping fields acted like a gravity brake. Now, as long as there was an uninterrupted stretch of wall to slide down, and as long as nobody shot at her while she was pinned helplessly to the wall, she was still in with a chance.
The air sizzled centimetres from her head.
A whole section of wall above her blew out, showering her with dust and rubble. For a second she thought the miniature shock wave from the blast would unseat the overlapping attractor field, causing her to peel off backwards into empty space. But the field jolted and held.
Anneke slid further, picking up speed till she reached the terminal velocity allowed by intersecting fields. Her speed was high, but nothing her 1.9 G reinforced leg muscles couldn’t handle. She hoped. Then again, she was three kilometres above the planet.
As she fell, Anneke had a momentary flashback at the events that had landed her in this mess.
It started when, at age twelve, her parents were killed in a space liner disaster. Her Uncle Viktus had adopted her, but he was a middle-aged bachelor who knew nothing about raising children, let alone pre-pubescent girls. He did the only sensible thing he could.
He found her another family.
Since Uncle Viktus was a colonel at RIM, it seemed to him only sensible that this wild, inconsolable child should be enrolled in the RIM agent-training program. Her classmates were all roughly the same age, and her teachers would become her surrogate family. She would get discipline and direction and, hopefully, shoulders to cry on. Not that Uncle Viktus was abdicating responsibility. He remained as loving and as supportive an uncle as one could wish for, someone who was always there for her, and who always had time for her. But he knew she needed familial structure, siblings and petty hierarchies to rebel against, so RIM copped all the grief and Uncle Viktus had a quiet life.
RIM responded to her rebellion with more discipline, more direction and unconditional patience that finally won out and brought the wild child to heel. Kind of.
She graduated to become a field agent. Uncle Viktus wasn’t terribly happy about that, feeling it was too dangerous and that his sister and brother-in-law would have paled at the idea.
But Anneke had found her destiny, her calling, her goal. And, in her opinion, she was good at it. Of course, she had advantages. Stories soon started to spread on Se’atma Minor, Anneke’s favoured home world, where the last stronghold of forces that defeated the Old Empire a thousand years earlier had been. Se’atma Minor also happened to be a major training facility for RIM. The cadet grapevine soon reported that Anneke was faster and stronger than any other agent in history, except maybe Arial. They said she was smart, with near-cybernetic reflexes, and that she had nine lives.
They also said she was going to use them up real fast.
If Anneke were to fall right now, she would drop like a rock. Not a pleasant idea and one she tried not to think about. As she slid onwards, she knew that she had gone through a number of lives already.
She had just penetrated the Block, a high security complex. It took up an entire city block and belonged to the Quesada Corporation, one of the five great Companies that ran the galaxy. The Block was built in a post-modern feudal style but relied on Arcadia’s First City being a cloud habitat. It rode on the apex of a repulsor field, three kilometres above ground. Many buildings had no foundation but were interlocked to neighbouring buildings by powerful fields as well as more primitive beams and lattices of hyper-tough neutronium. Swarms of nanoclouds flittered around them, absorbing and reconverting stray pollution.
Despite these unnatural defences, Anneke had found a way in.
According to the makers of the field technology, no ship could enter the hemi-ovoid repulsor field beneath the floating city. Field turbulences as well as titanic static discharges would quickly annihilate any kind of craft.
Actually, any kind of craft bar one.
The feudal nature of the Quesada Corporation had given Anneke the idea; an irony she hoped was not lost on her pursuers. Like any artist, Anneke wanted to be appreciated. She also hoped to be the next Arial Naproxa.
Quesada had originated as a feudal political body on an outlying world. ‘Feudal’ not only referred to the kind of political structure adopted by that world, but also to its pre-field technology. Not to mention pre-hyperdrive and pre-starblaze. And, amazingly as it seemed, they actually had air travel and aerial ships in such times.
And one of these aerial ships was called a glider.
It had no engine, not even a primitive combustion one. It floated on air currents, exploited thermals, and sought any kind of lift its pilot could find. Even field turbulence lift. What’s more, it could be made of anything, such as lightweight anti-static composite plastics.
What a stroke of genius, she thought, as she kept sliding down the side of the building.
Launched from her own space yacht, which she kept at a safe distance outside the repulsor field, she had glided in under the city, unaffected by field turbulence or static discharges. She had then prowled the lift ridges created by regular patterns of field turbulence.
Using simple grappling claws she had hooked her craft to the underside of the Bloc
k and entered through a maintenance hatch. Here she removed her anti-static suit. More than a few seconds inside the repulsor field without her suit and the static pressure inside every cell of her body would have overloaded – and exploded like popcorn. It would have been ugly.
Of course, getting back to her glider without the anti-static suit was going to be interesting. Once inside the craft she would be okay, but those few seconds while she scrambled aboard could be a killer.
The Block hadn’t been designed to repel penetration from below. Nobody had conceived of anyone using pre-field technology, especially something without an engine! Thus she had made her way unopposed into the building’s sub-levels. From then on, she used a number of standard methods of bypassing quantum locks, molecular tripwires, and the whole repertoire of booby traps and antipersonnel technology employed by one of the richest and most powerful companies in the galaxy.
Within an hour of docking her glider underneath the Block she had accessed the standalone computer she was seeking. It also had contained a variety of alarm systems, one of which she had accidentally set off, but by then she had downloaded the file she was after.
Anneke had also planted a number of tiny devices almost impossible to detect or deactivate, the kind of devices that would come in handy if she ever had to come back.
As the alarm sounded she knew she had only seconds to get out of the room. Indeed, the door behind her began closing immediately. Anneke leapt up, planted her feet against the standalone, and using her mighty leg muscles, catapulted herself backwards through the door, which brushed her ankles as it clunked shut a split second later. She hit the floor rolling and kept rolling, staying low, guessing that microwave stiletto beams were slicing and dicing the air above her. She was right.
A corner of her cape flipped up as she tumbled and she heard the unmistakable sizzle of a stiletto beam doing some unwanted tailoring.
Coming out of her roll, she crawled into the ventilation shaft she had prised open earlier, just in case, and scrambled away on hands and knees as fast as she could. Fifty metres in, the ceiling rose a little and she crab-crawled along, using her locator to find her way. Wherever possible, she climbed. She knew she wouldn’t make it out the way she had come in; evidence of her entry would now be obvious. Nor did she want to lead them to her glider. That was her only way out of this hornet’s nest.