by Paul Collins
She had already gone when moments later a police vehicle slammed to a stop nearby, disgorging armed hunkies. They were in for a truckload of trouble.
Black got back to HQ late. His unease was increasing, and he disliked the feeling intensely. Anneke Long-shadow had humiliated one of the most dangerous killers in the galaxy. This told him something that he had not wanted to hear.
His unease was about to get considerably worse.
He made his way to the maintenance cockpit by a different route. As usual he checked that no one had been there. He had a number of sensors that could even measure halitosis and perspiration, not to mention gases, radiation, proximity, voices, breathing and the human heartbeat itself. All was clear, but that only made him wonder if he had missed something.
He realised he was getting paranoid. Activating his communications monitoring system, he went first to the filtering cache. This was where anything incriminating about him was removed from the comm system, but recorded for his inspection. Only once had he found a message there, and it had only been an error of syntax.
Thus as he activated the system he didn’t expect to hear anything. The shock of what he did hear made him sit down very quickly.
‘Hi, Mister Mole.’ It was Anneke Longshadow’s voice. ‘I’m betting you’ve got your tentacles into the comm system at HQ and that you have filters listening out for keywords. I bet one of those words is “mole”, so this message is for you.’
Black’s face tightened with hatred.
He sat and listened, the rictus of his facial muscles slowly unclenching until there was no expression, other than the deepening shadow where his eyes were. At the end he leant forward and switched the recording off. He sat back, and for a long time his only movement was the rise and fall of his chest.
Finally, from the shadows beneath his eyebrows, his eyes gleamed with purpose, then he moved.
For the next few hours he worked furiously, sponging away every trace that he had ever been in the cockpit. He had expected to have to do this one day, and even had a back-up control base set up. It just needed to be activated.
He double-checked every feed, and even more importantly, the links where these feeds hooked into the station’s comm system. These were the weak points, but he had designed them to operate remotely. There were no physical connections. His sensors eavesdropped on the supposedly secure lines by a process exploiting quantum tunnelling in quantum wires, the ability of sub-atomic particles to tunnel through physical objects and appear elsewhere.
Thus his quantum eavesdroppers were safe. No diagnostic run on the main lines could detect them, unless a highly trained engineer actually eyeballed the devices. They were, of course, booby-trapped. No fragment would ever be found, nor would the engineer. And, simultaneously, every other device would self-destruct. It would be quite a show.
It was the middle of the night before Maximus finished. He returned to his apartment, tired, annoyed, but oddly elated. He had been forced to take the first step into a game, rather than lurking in the shadows. Well, so be it.
Anneke Longshadow had started it. He would now finish it.
Fortunately, he had hours to weigh the different gambits. She was proving difficult to kill. So there was only one choice for his next move. He must discredit Anneke and make it impossible for her to act against him until such time she could be terminated.
Clearly, to do this, he would have to kill Colonel Viktus.
ANNEKE stayed close-by. She needed to know what would happen with Kilroy. The hunkies arrived, read him his rights, which were very few, and after freeing him from the mesh, bundled him into a skimmer. Moments later most of the hunkies were dead or dying and Kilroy was sauntering away down the street.
She couldn’t tell how he had done it. Most likely he had activated a subcutaneous viral gas to which he had made himself immune by antibodies generated by ‘viral shells’. Then again he might have used a neural whip, scrambling the brains of the unshielded. Neural whips were illegal, but then so was killing people.
Anneke was well guarded against both, but she now began to wonder whether she had beaten Kilroy by luck rather than superiority. She made a mental note: Don’t trust him unless he’s dead.
She tracked Kilroy for a while but he wasn’t leading her anywhere. The secret weapon that any veteran always had over a newbie was patience.
At two in the morning Anneke went back to her hotel and again came close to death.
She had used one of the hotel’s dozen entry points. By the time she got to her apartment she was sweating. She had been walking on pins and needles, listening, smelling, and expecting death to come at her from any direction, especially the one she was not expecting. She was young, immensely strong and fast, and her reflexes were little short of magical, but there was always something or someone faster. RIM drummed that into you during training. Don’t get cocky. You get cocky, you get dead. Real quick.
When death came for her it was, of course, from an unexpected direction. And it was beautifully simple, even primitive.
Anneke stepped into her apartment, flicked on the light, and crossed the room.
Ta-shick!
She froze, looking down. She had stepped on something. Without lifting her foot or shifting her weight by a nanogram, she hunkered down, and peered at the slick plastic flooring material. It didn’t take long to spot the slight bulge. Something had been slipped beneath the floor covering. And she had depressed it.
Primitive.
But a primitive bomb can blow you up just as thoroughly as a quantum entangled mine. Either way you’re dead, and looking very messy.
Anneke slowly straightened, her gaze travelling around the room. Nothing had been moved. But she had no doubt there would be a ‘secondary level of kill’.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out.
‘Good evening, Ms Longshadow.’ The voice came from the corner of the room. It had a filtered quality and the unmistakeable tone of a voice camouflager.
It was the mole.
‘I got your message. Clever. Seems I underestimated you.’
‘I get that a lot,’ said Anneke, expecting no answer. The message was pre-recorded.
‘Of course, right now you might be thinking that you underestimated me.’
He has that right, she thought. Caught like a tyro. Like a first-year cadet. Uncle Viktus would give her such a scolding.
‘I knew Kilroy wouldn’t succeed. He isn’t RIM trained, like us. He has too much faith in his toys. The moment something is invented, someone works out a way around it. Is that a law? It should be.’
‘Get to the point,’ muttered Anneke. She was itching to move, but didn’t.
‘You probably want me to get to the point. It’s simple. You have over-stepped yourself, Ms Long-shadow. And to prove it I’m going to make this more exciting. You take care now.’
The message gave way to a soft tick-tick-tick. ‘Spiffle,’ she said to herself. Wasn’t it enough that she was standing on a pressure pad linked to some kind of explosive. No, that wasn’t enough for the mole. Not exciting enough. He had added a countdown. That way, she couldn’t wait till somebody came along and rescued her. Because by then, Anneke, and the entire room, would just be free-floating atoms.
Cute!
And of course he had neglected to say how long the countdown would last. An hour, a minute, or somewhere in between? She recalled this situation, long ago, being described as a classic example of suspense.
Someone said suspense could kill you, and they were right.
Anneke took a deep breath and considered her options. She couldn’t move. She dare not shift her weight – not by a fraction, no reaching, stretching and certainly no jumping. On the other hand, she couldn’t not move.
Nice one.
Uncle Viktus had once told her that when you’re in a pretty pickle (whatever that was) and don’t know what to do, go through your pockets. See what you’ve got. Find resources.
She checked her
left pocket: folded e-ink notes, a ticket holo for the subway, cosmetic pack and a spool of molecular thread – incredibly strong and so thin you needed a microscope to see it. Her right pocket held similar useless objects. Her back pocket contained her zip gun, but she guessed the mole had keyed the explosive to respond to distinct sound frequencies, like the sound of a gun being fired to attract attention.
Hopeless!
The voice of Uncle Viktus came back again: when things are hopeless, check your surroundings. Often you’re overlooking something that could keep you alive.
She looked around. It was a generic upmarket hotel suite. Three rooms surrounding a central entertainment area. She had not adjusted the configuration of the growable rooms – they could reconfigure in an hour or two when a resident was out. Anyway, there was a charge for that. She could see into the kitchen and bathroom from where she stood. The room she was in had the usual entertainment devices: viewer plate, music player … a large ornamental aquarium containing species of fish from twelve different planets.
Her gaze flicked past the aquarium, then back to it. It probably held 500 litres of water. That was a lot of water.
Anneke looked down at her feet, imagining the pressure pad. A primitive device. One that needed a power source.
She switched her zip gun to low yield; a level she hoped was below the activation level of the bomb. She took aim at the aquarium and pressed the tab of her zip gun. A soft hiss told her that a beam was boring into the side of the aquarium. A spot on the plasglass started to glow. She kept her beam centred there.
The soft tick-tick-tick seemed to grow.
Suddenly the side of the aquarium burst spilling its contents. In moments the whole floor was flooded. There was a soft pop and sizzle noise under her feet and the ticking stopped.
Anneke swallowed.
‘Guess now I find out if I’m right or dead wrong.’ She stepped off the pressure pad. And noticed that she was still breathing. But she couldn’t stick around and congratulate herself.
She got out fast, using the stairs to reach the lobby. On her way out she activated the hotel’s fire alarm. No point letting anyone else get hurt.
Outside she melted into the crowd, putting distance between herself and the hotel, heading for the Draco Quarter and a safe house. She moved quickly, but took enough time to keep her tracks clean and make sure no one followed her.
She had only found Kilroy’s worm after she booked into the hotel, and then she had made one big mistake: she had gone back there. Well, never again. That was how it was in this business: if it didn’t kill you, you learned a bit more about staying alive. It was a very unforgiving business, because your first mistake was generally the big one.
Still, she was still alive. And she had learnt something.
The mole was spooked. No matter how embedded he was in RIM Command, he did not feel totally secure. Good. She could exploit that weakness.
She also learnt that the mole didn’t trust Kilroy, but then who would? He had known Kilroy’s worm wouldn’t work; yet he had let Kilroy walk into a trap. Of course, Kilroy would figure this out too and wouldn’t be too happy with his employer. Maybe he would do something about it.
Kilroy was a professional assassin and a merc – it was written all over him. He would have professional pride and a reputation to maintain. The mole had trashed all that. Was the mole rapping him over the knuckles, reminding him who was boss?
Interesting dynamics, Anneke thought, as she moved through the darkening streets of the city’s sleaze quarter.
The next morning she contacted Uncle Viktus.
‘Anneke? Where are you? We sent a priority transport to bring you to Lykis, but you were gone.’ He sounded rattled. ‘I thought –’
‘You worry too much.’
‘That’s what you do when you have kids. That’s all you do. Worry.’
‘I need to see you, Uncle.’
‘Anytime, Anneke. Why not now?’
‘Can’t.’
‘No such word.’ There was puzzlement in his voice.
‘I don’t know who to trust.’
There was a silence at the other end as, it seemed, and Viktus digested this. ‘Someone’s after you?’
‘Not someone.’
‘The mole?’
‘Everything’s compromised, Uncle. Don’t trust anyone.’
‘You’ve spoken to him?’ There was a sharp note in Viktus’s voice.
‘Well, not exactly. More like he spoke to me. As he was trying to kill me.’
‘I’ll give you immediate clearance to …’
‘Calm down, Uncle. It was actually his third attempt.’
‘My God, child, you must come in immediately. I’ll send a protection squad.’
‘And then he’ll get his wish. Look, we don’t know who he is. He could be your best friend, Jake. He could be anybody. You’re the only one I can trust. I’m not coming into RIM headquarters.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you are?’
She said nothing, just smiled, visualising his scowl.
‘I can hear your cheeky smile a klick off, young lady. Okay. You always did like this cloak and dagger stuff. So where do we meet?’
‘You know where Mother and Father kissed the first time?’
‘How could I forget? I was there. As I recall, I strongly warned her against it, but she ignored me.’
‘Lucky me.’
‘What time?’
‘Same time they kissed.’
‘I suppose your mother told you all this?’
‘Of course.’ Something caught in her throat. She missed her mother terribly; not a day went by that she didn’t think of her.
Anneke hung up and got as far away from the public phone as she could. The mole would have picked up the call instantly, employing voice recognition filters faster than her uncle could, and would have her location already. But she knew that he would know that she knew, so he would probably do nothing.
Which probably meant that in the weird and deadly universe of galactic spying, a public phone was the safest place for her to call from.
Night fell suddenly on Lykis Integer. A salt-laden breeze drifted in off the ocean and that brought with it a faint smell of ozone. But Anneke’s work was not done for the day.
She had spent the day setting up ‘eyes’, tiny devices the size of pinheads that could pick up a multitude of useful imagery wavelengths as well as sound, and relay it all to a unit the size of her hand. She had placed the eyes up and down the street, in back alleys, on rooftops, on the floors above the café where her parents met, and everywhere else that seemed useful. Her brain augmentations managed the software that filtered out significant activity and alerted her.
The only weak link in this network was Uncle Viktus. He would be followed, but she knew he was too experienced not to be cautious. This comforted Anneke, but did not calm her fears.
Viktus had not been a field agent for over thirty years, so he would be rusty. Worse, he might overrate his own abilities, not wanting to admit his operational days were past.
Anneke wondered if she would ever get to be that old, and if she did, if she would be realistic about her survival skills. After nearly getting murdered every other day, it seemed she was unlikely to reach the expected age of 260.
She took a booth at the rear of the café, near the back exit. From here she could watch the entrance and the street outside. Her surveillance eyes had been recording and analysing the various approaches to the café for most of the day, but had not detected anything significant. Her head began to thump with the early signs of a headache, because it was like continually viewing split-screen movie shots.
‘You kids watch too much junk.’
Anneke jumped. ‘Uncle Viktus, don’t do that! You nearly gave me a heart attack.’
‘At your age? Nonsense.’ He sat down.
She eyed him. He looked older than he had six months ago. Older or more haggard? Hard to tell. She frow
ned. ‘How’d you get past my eyes?’
‘Ah, the conceit of the young,’ he said, signalling the auto-waiter for a kaf. ‘Let me see. You were thinking how poor old Uncle Viktus, drooling imbecile that he is, was bound to lead the mole directly to you. Am I right?’
Anneke’s jaw tightened. ‘Uncle, I never –’
‘Not that I was an imbecile. But I’m right about the rest, aren’t I? I know because forty years ago I sat at a table much like this and waited for my retired handler to show up. I was convinced that an army of villains would track him right to my table.’ Viktus leaned closer, grinning. ‘Perhaps we old dogs know a few tricks you young pups don’t.’
That had not occurred to Anneke. She decided to pay more attention to Uncle Viktus’s stories in future, though they sounded so boring.
‘Am I boring you?’
That made her twitch like a puppet having its strings jerked. ‘I was thinking.’
‘You were off with the pixies.’
‘Off with the what?’
‘Never mind, not many pixies about these days. So, you’re jumpy as hell but still breathing. And you don’t trust anyone at RIM.’
‘That’s a good executive summary.’.
‘Give me the details.’
She told him everything that had happened, including the message she had sent the mole.
Viktus frowned. ‘Not sure that was wise, Anneke.’
‘Why?’
‘You made it personal.’
‘Uncle, with this guy everything is personal.’
‘We have to get you to a safe house then move you off Lykis.’
Anneke shook her head. ‘He’ll be expecting that. And you can’t be sure he doesn’t know all your safe houses.’
Viktus sighed, looking suddenly tired. ‘I hate these cases,’ he said. ‘Many a secret service has been destroyed by them, ripped apart by distrust and paranoia. The accusations have already started.’
He told her about the Task Force, how his new protégé had already identified dozens of recruits who had lied on their applications or had not accounted for ‘missing time’.