by Paul Collins
That night, exhausted by the committee’s grilling, Anneke dragged herself out of RIM headquarters, intent on heading straight for Enigma, when a voice stopped her.
‘Cadet Longshadow. Got a minute?’
She turned to find Arvakur coming down the lobby steps. She appraised him. He was tall, one-ninety probably, lithe, athletic, with a cat’s grace. But a big cat. There was something about his face that made her like him straightaway. It was open, and genuine. Maybe that was an advantage for a glorified cop.
‘Let’s get a kaf. We need to talk.’
Anneke did not know if it was a request or an order. But she was too tired to take offence. Besides, a kaf sounded good. Arvakur led her to a small holein-the wall café that was open twenty-six hours a day. He ordered Ruvian kaf. She decided to have the same, not like her at all.
The pungent aromatic odour of the kaf made her think of deserts baked beneath a fierce sun. From the first sip she felt her tiredness slip away.
‘Good?’ Arvakur asked, eyeing her.
‘Anything would be after today.’
‘You looked like you needed it. They gave you a pretty hard time in there.’
‘Worse than the usual low-life criminal who goes before them?’
Arvakur laughed. ‘Oh, much worse. They were talking about having you flogged in the back room.’
Anneke sniffed. ‘So what did you want to talk about?’
‘You.’
‘Is this social or professional?’
‘Both,’ he said.
Anneke realised with surprise she was slightly disappointed. She had wanted him to lie and say ‘social, that’s all’ so she could pretend for a while. ‘Is that fifty-fifty?’
Arvakur smiled. He had a nice smile, too. ‘No. More like eighty-twenty.’
‘Which way?’
‘Eighty percent social. I just needed an excuse.’
She suddenly felt much better, though maybe that was just the kaf. ‘So you’re not covertly trying to grill me or worm secrets out of me?’ Anneke asked.
He put his hand on his heart, an old-fashioned gesture her uncle used, which oddly touched her. ‘I promise.’
In the next hour Arvakur skilfully extracted her story. She had never told it to anyone in its entirety, yet here she was, pouring her heart out to a total stranger with nice eyes.
Later, as they strolled down the main street, Anneke asked Arvakur if he had learnt anything new about her.
He nodded. ‘Nothing certain. I believe you are innocent in this matter. Just a feeling. Still, my feelings usually turn out to be true. And I also learnt that I want to see you again.’
He left her his universal ID email code and promised to call, for a movie or a moon-buggy session.
In a whirl of emotions, Anneke headed straight to Enigma, where the head geek, Josh, gave her the hard facts about the e-pad encryption. The Oracle robot sat in the corner of the room. It was a super-humanoid model, with full sensors inbuilt, along with radar and emergency jetpack outlets. The Oracle model appeared stronger than most robots, which were designed to be weaker than humans, like their more machine-like cousins, the droids.
‘Not much joy on this, Anneke,’ Josh said, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes. ‘It had a built-in self-destruct program. We detected it, but there was no way to neutralise it. We got some fragments, though. You’ll have to scan them yourself, unless you want to give us a list of keywords to parse it with.’
‘No, I’ll do it. Just give me the main fragments.’
Oracle interrupted. ‘I have noted that among the words and fragments there are a number of specific relationships, words occurring in paired links. Recently I had a suspicious incident when my security was almost compromised, but before the hacker could escape I managed to infiltrate their files. The word “Cygnus” kept coming up in this context.’
Anneke sat up straight. ‘Cygnus?’ she said. That had been the last word her uncle had said before he died. ‘What else?’
Josh looked at robot and his fellow geeks. ‘It was just a fragment, I’m afraid. We managed to come up with twelve different possibilities of what it might be. “Ajo rpo”. And it looks like there might be an “a” at the end. You want to hear the conjectures?’
She shook her head. She didn’t need to. The ‘rp’ was a distinct and not common combination of consonants. Putting that together with the other information, Anneke’s highly trained brain shot out the answer almost immediately: Majoris Corporata.
My God. Was it possible?
Could there be an ancient and illegal combining of the Clans and Companies in a force that could rival RIM and the Sentinels put together? Such a force could destroy the balance of power in the galaxy.
But the cost!
Would the Clans and Companies really risk everything through such a move? Risk total annihilation? Risk the Old Empire dreadnoughts ascending into orbit about their worlds and utterly obliterating them?
Why? Why destroy the Pax Galactica? The Great Peace that had reigned for five hundred years?
Dumb question. When had conquest not seemed an expediently profitable and glorious path? When had megalomaniacs not shrugged off the downsides and pushed through dreams of conquest, forgetting that their prize was mastery over ruins?
Well, in some people’s minds the balance of power was no longer as balanced as it used to be.
‘There’s more.’ Josh’s voice broke into Anneke’s musings. He passed her a large e-pad containing what looked like engineering specs. ‘These items weren’t as heavily encrypted as the rest.’
‘What are they?’
‘At best guess, they’re refitting plans for M-Class Battle Cruisers.’
Anneke’s mind reeled. ‘Refitting plans for dreadnoughts? But why? No one has dreadnoughts except RIM. Why would anyone need these?’
Josh shrugged, clearly not that interested in the real-life applications of his results. ‘Maybe some have gone missing. Have you looked lately?’
Good question, Anneke thought. Only problem was nobody but the gods that ran RIM knew where the Old Empire weapon caches were hidden. Indeed, their location was one of the most tightly guarded secrets in the galaxy. Legions of adventurers, psychopaths, and would-be conquerors had searched for the caches for a thousand years. Whoever controlled the weapon caches of the Old Empire, controlled the galaxy. It was that simple.
If the stories were true, RIM controlled them. RIM, with its complex code of morality and militarism, with its lonely view of human development, and its glorification of self-denial.
So … looking was out of the question. Fine. Unable to look, Anneke would do the next best thing.
But before she left Enigma, Anneke received a private PhoneNet call from Oracle, as he stood silently beside her. She turned on her inbuilt audio receiver and heard the synthetic voice.
‘One more thing, Anneke. I believe the hacker, who may or may not also be your suspect, was located nearby when he entered my system. Possibly this person is one of our own. I will monitor the situation on an ongoing basis.’
The fact that the mole was so close made her feel more paranoid than anyone being attacked on a regular basis ought to feel. She said her farewells and went to see Fat Fraddo. He was the Godfather of Luria. If there was a section of the Draco Quarter that was nastier and more dangerous than any other, that was where Fat Fraddo had his lair. A crook, a cheat, a killer, and the boss of Luria’s organised black-crime syndicates, Fat Fraddo was also the most charming man Anneke had ever met.
And probably the most lethal.
Not that he was very nimble himself, weighing in at over two-hundred-and-twenty kilograms, but his word carried more weight in these parts than any voice from a firestorm.
When Anneke was eleven years old, Fat Fraddo had been a local gang-leader, rising fast and making plenty of enemies. Too many, as it happened. On the run from an ambush, he had raced into an alleyway and become caught in a bear trap – the kind local wannabes set out to see what they co
uld catch. The trap caught Fraddo, and his pursuers nearly did, too.
Anneke was on her way home from school. She didn’t know who Fat Fraddo was, but she screamed the name of a notorious hitman her uncle had mentioned as being important, and then ran. The gang assumed they were crowding some other gang’s mugging and fled. This gave Fraddo time to unspring the bear trap and limp away fast. For Anneke it was just screaming a man’s name. For Fraddo it was his life.
‘Hey, girl, how you been?’ Fat Fraddo embraced her in his own version of a bear hug. ‘Listen, everybody.’ He spoke to a room full of scumbags with low violence thresholds. ‘This here is Anneke. She’s got special protection. From me. She’s got more city privileges than all of you lot put together. Anybody ever lays a finger on her, you’re strung up by your own guts. You got me?’
No one was stupid enough to miss that.
Fraddo led Anneke to the Ready Room. What she saw took her breath away. There were banks and banks of holomonitors showing schematics of star systems, quadrants and ‘premium’ worlds. There were also computer screens, VR headsets and neural jacks, all crammed with data on shipping routes, port layouts, local stock exchanges and much more.
‘Welcome to Fraddo’s Empire, Angel. Now what can I do for you?’
Fraddo sat down in a vast cushioned chair, looking like a king in his throne room. The background noise sounded like a stock exchange just after a big bank had folded.
‘I need to confirm some rumours,’ said Anneke.
‘What kind of rumours?’
‘The Majoris Corporata kind.’
Fat Fraddo whistled. ‘Now you talkin’ dirty and heavy.’
‘You heard anything, Fraddo?’ Anneke asked.
Fraddo pursed his lips. ‘Now why you’d you wanna get mixed up in stuff like that, huh?’
‘It’s my job. You know that.’
He shrugged and a tsunami of fat rippled under his T-shirt. ‘I heard me some space talk. Not that I give it any mind.’
‘You don’t think it’s real?’
‘Hell, I don’t know, girlfriend. Space is big. Maybe them Clan and Company boys tired of being under the heel of RIM. Maybe they tired of lurkin’ in this shit can. Maybe they’s feelin’ all pumped up. What do I know?’
He held out his hands, palms out, in a gesture of helplessness. Anneke laughed and Fraddo suddenly laughed back, basso profundo.
‘Okay, I hear some stuff. I hear Quesada been nosin’ all over the place, putting together deals, calling in favours, old ones, too, some more’n a century old. They spearheading this. But not like normal. This thing, whatever it is, got a different style to it. Different signature, if you know what I mean.’
‘Somebody new, from outside maybe?’
‘Could be.’
‘You hear where any of this might be going on?’
‘I knows from your question that you already knows the answer, girlfriend. So I’m gonna tell you, whatever you do, stay away from the Cygnus Sector. That place ain’t healthy.’
‘You planning on staying away from it, too?’ Anneke asked.
Fraddo burst out laughing again. ‘Hell, no.’
‘If you were going to the Cygnus Sector and you needed information, where would you ask?’
‘Only one place. Reema’s End. High orbit station above Telugus.’
‘Telugus?’ She eyed him a moment. ‘You got any ships going that way, Fraddo?’
‘Girlfriend, you got a death wish or something?’
Anneke moved base three times during the next three days. Fraddo had offered to provide protection, but she declined. Even just visiting him would have sent the Committee members up the flue.
Then came some good news. The Committee declared its preliminary intent to clear her completely. She was ordered to appear before them the following day at noon.
That night news broke about her alleged past on Se’atma Minor. That was bad press. She sat watching the viewer in growing dismay as the local broadcaster told how, as a teenager, she had been a rebellious child who got hooked on drugs and started trafficking and how, not long afterwards, she had killed a man in a dealer argument. There were witnesses; police records were unearthed.
A local informant, his image carefully blurred, hinted that her uncle, a commander in RIM, had covered up the incident and helped her go straight.
‘What a work of art,’ she muttered.
As she packed her meagre belongings and headed out the rooftop hatch of her latest bolthole, she had to admit the mole was an artist as well as a murderer.
Now he had exactly what he wanted: she was discredited, and all ports and jump-gates would be closed to her. She was trapped, and the pack would be baying for her.
‘Hey mole, big mistake,’ she muttered as she walked. ‘I’m more dangerous as a criminal, and you just made me a criminal.’
MAXIMUS paced, disgruntled, as he waited for the Envoy to show. Once again he was in the sparsely furnished room behind the tailor’s workshop. The stench from the sewer filled his nostrils.
I shouldn’t be here, he thought. I’m exposing myself needlessly. And why? The whim of some nobody alien?
He checked his watch again. What was keeping the —? He almost used the word ‘man’. He took a deep breath, tried to get his emotions under control. He’d taken a call on his earphone from Kilroy just before he left for this handover.
‘This line safe?’ Kilroy asked.
‘What do you think?’ said Maximus. ‘What is it?’
‘Longshadow’s gone.’
‘Gone? How? Everything’s closed to her. Ports, space towers, jump-gates. Her picture’s on every channel.’
‘Still, she’s gone.’
Maximus snarled. Anneke Longshadow was like a stone in his shoe, but he didn’t have time to deal with her. Yet. Once the Envoy was happy and on its way, he would give her his full attention.
‘Rumour has it she’s left for the Cygnus Sector.’
‘WHAT?’
‘Rumour has it she —’
‘I heard you!’
‘Your orders?’ asked Kilroy.
‘Find out whatever you can. Confirm the rumours, one way or the other. I can’t talk right now.’
‘Meetin’ the lizard?’
Grunting, Maximus said, ‘We’ll talk again tonight. Meet me at the usual place.’
He cut the connection. So. Longshadow was going to the Cygnus Sector. No prizes for guessing where in the sector she would be going. There was only one place to get the kind of information she would be wanting.
Reema’s End.
It would soon be Anneke’s end, too.
But first he must attend to ‘the lizard’. Cute name. There was definitely something reptilian about that alien. Maximus shuddered. The Envoy still had not shown. Maximus checked his watch for the tenth time. His scalp prickled. Something was wrong. Was this a set up?
He hurried to the back door; flung it open, and dredged up a show of nonchalance. The Envoy stood there, backlit by filthy street lamps.
Pulse racing, Maximus nevertheless managed to sound calm. ‘Well, it’s about time you —’
The Envoy toppled forward into his arms. Maximus caught it instinctively, and then regretted it. A thick ichor was seeping from beneath the Envoy’s habit, and it smelled like ripe garbage.
‘Who cut you?’
The Envoy’s cowl fell back and Maximus stared. Lizard wasn’t the right word for it. Cockroach fitted better. Maximus let go of the Envoy as if it were red hot, dropping it to the floor.
‘Assassin,’ hissed the Envoy from between its mandibles. Its lidless eyes seemed to glare at Maximus.
‘You led an exporter here?’ Maximus’s tone was clinical.
‘I killed him, but I think I am dying.’
‘That’s too bad.’
The Envoy made an odd noise deep in its thorax that might have been laughter. ‘No matter. I have already reproduced.’ It coughed up purplish phlegm. Maximus took another step away. ‘You hav
e the package?’
Maximus marvelled that the alien could think about business when it knew that it would soon be dead. He nodded. The Envoy made a rattling sound. It was speaking hurriedly, as if it didn’t have much time left. ‘You must take it to my employer. In person. Anything less is – unacceptable.’
‘Taking it to your employer is what is unacceptable,’ said Maximus. ‘That was never part of the agreement.’
‘Too bad. For you.’
Maximus fidgeted. He still couldn’t risk a talima being sworn against him and, technically, under the arcane and ancient rules of engagement, his employer was within his rights. On the other hand, Anneke was quite possibly on her way to that very place. Reema’s End.
Well, so be it. He would surrender to the galactic fate that kept throwing him and Anneke against each other.
‘You will go?’ asked the Envoy.
‘I will. It suits me.’
‘Of course. It is Kadros. Fate.’
The creature laughed again, then died suddenly, a final burst of air hissing from its collapsing lungs. Maximus stood for a moment, thinking.
What to do with the body? A sewer job?
There was a whistling sound and the Envoy’s body suddenly glowed white hot as an endogenous thermal chain reaction was triggered. Maximus shielded his eyes from the magnesium-bright light. It was over quickly. All that was left was a slight charring of the floorboards.
Charming, thought Maximus. But efficient.
Maximus opened the door of the tailor’s workshop carefully, scanning the alleyway outside with eyes, ears and devices. It was clear. He exited quickly, crossing the alleyway, and diving into a maze of similar lanes and back streets. Soon he was blocks away, and angry.
Things were getting messy. There were too many dangerous loose ends. He needed to get everything back under his tight control. And the only way to do that was to move his agenda forward. He’d have to go to the next level.