The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Politics, naturally,” Gaul said coolly, attention drifting back to the library. “There is a scenario in which your husband could become a candidate for leadership for the Black Sun, you realize.”

  “That’s absurd!” Stefano objected, laughing nervously. “Forty or fifty relatives would have to die before I enter the conversation.”

  “That is exactly what our allies are thinking,” Gaul said, taking a book from the stack and paging negligently through it. “There is no need for such a scenario to unfold, however. As I said, I have come to ensure the safety of the Ricci family.”

  “That is very generous, Lord Thule. I am grateful,” Stefano said, with a small bow. “Surely we can petition the Hegemony for protection and save you the trouble, however? If the Hegemony is at war, and we are truly targets, then I would think…”

  Gaul frowned slightly, and Sara’s stomach twisted into a knot. Her parents exchanged a look of significance.

  “Matters are not so simple, unfortunately,” Gaul explained, quietly slotting the book back in its place. “The Hegemony is not – yet – at war. Only the Thule Cartel. A situation that must be quickly rectified, I might add, but not one in doubt. Even those of our colleagues most strongly disinclined toward conflict will be swayed by the violence of the Black Sun response, I am certain.”

  “Lord Thule, I must have misunderstood,” Stefano said, with a tone of friendly worry. “Did you say that you have undertaken to attack the Black Sun alone, without the approval or support of the Hegemony?”

  “You did not misunderstand.”

  Ghada put her face in her hands.

  “What you describe, Lord Thule, respectfully – it sounds a great deal like another violation of the Agreement.” Stefano was sweating heavily now. “Tell me truthfully, sir – what do you intend by all this?”

  “The same as any loyal member of the Hegemony,” Gaul said, looking surprised and perhaps a bit annoyed. “Victory over the Black Sun, and then the Outer Dark. Prosperity and security for all. The unification of the Hegemony.”

  “Ah, sir, there I think you are mistaken,” her father said. “The unification of the Hegemony is not a universal goal.”

  “Perhaps, at present,” Gaul allowed, with an air of indulgent weariness. “All things change, Lord Ricci.”

  There was more, descriptions of deployed Operators in Central and the real world, maneuvering and clashing, but Sara hardly heard it, her mind numb and recoiling. She half-listened to Lord Thule’s troubling hints and subtle threats, absorbed in the thought that her classmates from the Academy were presently trying to murder each other. Her father parried and countered Lord Thule’s offers without committing himself to one course or the other, as the Ricci family had done for decades. Sara sensed that this time would be different, and suspected that her father knew as much, arguing out of obligation and long habit more than hope. Lord Thule eyed her family’s library as if it belonged to him, oblivious to her mother’s tears, and Sara did not care one bit for how often his eyes strayed in her direction.

  He took his leave eventually, after whispering something in her father’s ear that took the color from his face. The sound of his footsteps in the tiled hall and descending the stairs echoed through the library, and both of her parents avoided her eyes.

  “What will we do, Stefano?” Ghada wondered, wiping her eyes. “You know what he meant.”

  “I do.”

  “What will we do?”

  “I am not certain,” her father said, staring moodily out the window. “We will have to see how events play out…”

  Sara felt the apport in her sinus cavity, her ears popping loudly. The room was suddenly crowded with new arrivals.

  “You have no such luxury, Lord Ricci,” Daniel Gao advised, flanked by a very tired looking apport technician. “Events are moving very fast, now, and those who sit idle will be devoured.”

  To her father’s credit, he took in the arrival of the Black Sun personnel – in defiance of the apport baffles that were meant to prevent such incursions – with complete aplomb, looking not the lease surprised or put out.

  “The young Lord Gao,” Lord Ricci said, with a companionable nod. “What brings you to our home?”

  “I come at the bidding of my Mistress, the Lady Martynova, on her personal orders,” the young man said gravely. “I come to secure the safety of the Ricci family, as a gesture of gratitude, for the kindness shared between the Ricci and Martynova families.”

  “Yes, well, that’s become a rather complicated issue, hasn’t it?” Her father said, with a hollow smile on his face. “We’ve just had a visit from the Lord Thule, and…”

  Stefano Ricci trailed off when he saw Daniel Gao shaking his head.

  “No, Lord, I’m afraid the issue is quite simple,” Daniel said reluctantly. “I have been instructed to give you terms, and they are final. It is time to make a decision, Lord Ricci.”

  Serafina held her breath as her father stroked his chin, the room charged with the potential energy of readied protocols.

  ***

  The delivery of the archive to Processing was an event presided over by the Director herself, along with a show of force from Academy security. The archive arrived in a caravan of several vehicles, and the handover was conducted by an Auditor, Min-jun Kim, while Ms. Levy stood close. Adel Al-Nadi took possession of the locked case with appropriate gravity. The staff at Processing watched him intently as he took the case into the secured lab, awed by the heavily armed guard and the Director. The archive was placed in an armored housing and plugged into Processing’s private network, magnetic pins locking the hard drive in place.

  Processing buzzed with curiosity all afternoon, and one staff member after another invented a reason to linger near the sealed door of the secure lab, hoping to get more details. Adel al-Nadi stayed inside the lab until the evening, however, emerging with a harried expression and wild hair. Only a few programmers were brave enough to approach him as he hurried across the main floor, and their efforts at conversation were curtly rebuffed.

  The departure of Adel al-Nadi from Processing was remarkable only in that he chose to leave slightly early, when he typically chose to remain late into the night. Certainly, no one paid enough attention to notice that he forsook his typical bus to his residence at the outskirts of town in favor of a waiting black car, the occupants within concealed by the deep tint of the windows.

  ***

  “Where is it?”

  “Not far,” Emily said. “But getting there…”

  “Can we just get on with this?” Alex growled. “I’m losing my patience.”

  “Well, we don’t want that,” Emily said, with a very slight smirk. “We have to wait for Marcus, though. He is very concerned with timing. In terms of your part in this, do you think you’ll need a few minutes, or…?”

  “No,” Alex said, shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Really? I thought the Absolute Protocol was kind of…slow?”

  “Yeah. So did I. So did everyone else.” Alex shrugged. “Maybe it was, or maybe that’s another thing that everyone was wrong about.”

  ***

  Collette Higgins had reservations for a midrange suite in the largest of the three available hotels in Central, but on arrival she discovered that she had been bumped by maintenance to another room on a lower floor. Citing the need for a view of the sunrise and objecting loudly to the Feng Shui of the replacement room had proved ineffective, so she resorted to feminine wiles, and then, when even that failed, copious tears, the spontaneous unpacking of her purse on the hotel counter, and loud pleading.

  The clerks hurried to accommodate her, eager to remove an eyesore from the marble and brass-accented lobby. A room cleaning was accelerated, reservations were altered, and the crying woman was appeased with her original reservation. The staff did not even wait until the elevator doors closed to begin sighing with relief and rolling their eyes. Collette would have liked to have said it did not matter to he
r, but the truth was that she blushed fiercely the whole way up to her room. Her mother had worked as a hotel maid for several years, before Collette was recruited, and she retained a subtle horror at putting working people out.

  The bell hop brought up her bags a moment later, earning a tip and a smile that confused him further.

  Collette waited until she heard the elevator ding before chaining the door and opening her bag.

  The bug detector looked like an old walkie-talkie, with twin stubby antenna extending from the top and a display packed with LED meters and dials. Collette had no affinity for machinery or electronics; fortunately, telepaths could implant automatic routines to make up for such deficiencies. Collette watched with amused detachment as her fingers flipped switches and adjusted dials, running the device through several scanning routines, each designed to locate a different kind of monitoring device. She glanced through the embedded infrared camera, taken by the swirl of cardinal and vermillion, knowing without knowing that the room was clear.

  She set the bug detector aside, and picked up the encrypted, single-use phone that the Thule Cartel had provided, which looked bulky and almost absurdly out of date, along with her laptop. The phone was preprogrammed with a single number; hardware prevented the phone from making any other calls. The system was cumbersome, but it was also considered the most secure way to communicate directly when the telepaths were occupied.

  And just lately, boy, were they occupied.

  Collette lay down on the bed, and having no patience for the nerves she always felt on assignment, activated a telepathic implant and fell asleep instantly. She slept deeply for exactly two hours, and woke feeling refreshed and optimistic. She decided to shower in the hotel’s expansive facilities, standing in a shower cap for a long time underneath a downpour of warm rain, bemused by the sheer number of jets and outlets the shower cabinet provided. Collette briefly considered the possibility of washing her hair, but then remembered she had not brought her favored coconut-oil shampoo, and after eyeing the hotel-provided toiletries dubiously, decided to skip it.

  She toweled dry, then brushed and flossed her teeth. As she picked out clothes, she rubbed her skin with jasmine-scented lotion provided by the hotel.

  As Collette was finishing getting dressed in jeans and a loose cotton button-up, there was a patterned knock. She flinched and fumbled with a shirt button, but made no move to answer it. Collette stood, staring at herself in the mirror, and counted to one hundred.

  She went to the door, glanced briefly through the peephole, and then opened it, taking a quick look up and down the deserted hotel hallway before collecting the anonymous cardboard box that had been left there, sealed neatly with brown shipping tape, with no indication of a sender or an address.

  Collette sat on the edge of the bed with the package in her lap. She severed the packing tape with a tiny pair of scissors from her toiletry bag, and then examined the contents of the box.

  The package contained a single thumb drive wrapped in an excessively large anti-static bag.

  Collette plugged the thumb drive into her laptop. She ran an auditing application, confirming that audio was included in the data. She launched a video application, checking several times to confirm that the speakers were muted. The video cap was a blur; the file summary informed her the recording was fifty-two seconds long.

  Collette checked again to make sure the sound was off.

  She hit play on the video, finger hovering over the pause button.

  The screen displayed a mute scene of confusion. Well-dressed men scrambled over each other, while outside the windows, ragged men ran forward and then collapsed due to what must have gunfire. The camera spun wildly, and for several seconds nothing was decipherable. Then the camera steadied, focusing on one of the ragged men, who had now burst into the richly appointed chamber where the video was taken. The cell phone panned pointlessly across the ceiling, and Collette recognized the Hegemonic Council Hall at Central from the tiles inset in the cross beams, each representing a family that held membership in the Hegemony.

  The recording centered and refocused on a group of the invaders, led into the chamber by what appeared to Collette to be a dying man. He was wounded in the stomach, a gruesome gunshot wound that exposed intestinal pink, as he staggered into the Council Hall. The man was also missing his eyes, but judging by the dried blood and smeared pus, that loss occurred well before the filming. The better dressed men – she recognized several of them as cartel leaders and family despots within the Hegemony – tried to flee.

  The eyeless men moved their mouths, not in unison, but in sequence, and the speaking destroyed them. Collette gasped and looked away, not daring to look back until the video was done.

  She went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, and stayed there until her hands stopped shaking.

  Collette returned to her bag and picked up the phone. She keyed in memorized digits, and the phone rang once before it was answered. There was the brief hiss of a blank greeting, and then a beep that indicated recording.

  “Package in hand. The file is an extract, not the whole archive, as expected. A recording of the attack on the Hegemonic Council. Audio confirmed, but not reviewed. Initiate retrieval. Extraction site in five minutes.”

  She ended the call, and the phone made a sort of electronic purr as it erased itself.

  Collette tossed the dead phone to the carpet and took an encrypted hard drive from a cushioned pocket in her luggage. She messed about with cables for a few moments, and then set about duplicating and transferring the video. She made a careful check of the duplicated video on the tiny drive, and then, satisfied with the results, unplugged everything. The cords went on the floor. The miniature hard drive was dropped into a small plastic balloon, and the end tied off.

  Collette took a deep breath, and then swallowed the balloon, grimacing as it went down her throat.

  She took the original thumb drive and the laptop to the bathroom, and placed them both at the bottom of the bathtub. She went back to her bag, and then returned with an unmarked gallon-bottle of a thick, clear liquid, a smaller brown bottle with a complicated metal cap, along with a hooded respirator.

  She slipped the respirator on, and then Collette emptied the big bottle, covering both devices a few centimeters deep in an aromatic, viscous liquid not unlike mineral oil in composition. Even through the industry-rated filters, Collette could feel the insides of her nose prick and sizzle.

  It took three tries and a certain amount of banging against the bathroom sink before the metal cap on the smaller bottle gave way. Collette took a healthy step back before dropping the entire second bottle directly into the bathtub. There was a whoosh, followed by a dramatic hiss, and the room was immediately choked with a thick, milk-white fog. Collette fled the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, coughing as she pulled the mask off. She discarded it on the floor, ignoring her empty bag on her way to the hotel door. The fog was spilling underneath the bathroom door as she opened the door to the hallway.

  Collette shut the door behind her with relief, and then hurried to the elevator.

  She hit the call button inset in a chromed panel, smudged from a thousand oily fingers, and then waited, whistling quietly to herself.

  The door opened, and she stepped inside, mildly surprised by the crowded elevator.

  The man beside her shifted slightly. Collette’s eyes widened a millimeter.

  She tried to leap out of the elevator, through the closing doors, but hands clamped to her arms, shoulders, and hair, preventing her from doing so. Collette took a deep breath as the doors closed.

  There was little space to work with, but her legs were free.

  Collette dropped, letting her weight break the hold on her shoulders, twisting her left arm to break that grip. Bracing her feet against the back wall of the elevator, she dropped to the floor as the elevator begin to descend, yelping as a chunk of her hair was torn out of the back of her head. Rolling to her side, Collette slamme
d her thigh into the front of a knee, bending it ten degrees in opposition to nature’s design. She heard the crackle of a stun gun and rolled the other way, bashing into a shin and grinding her elbows into nearby feet.

  She was seized by her wrist, and lashed out with a kick, feeling a satisfying crack as ribs broke, but it did nothing to free her. Collette felt a sharp pain in her calf and then a radiating wetness, like ice water on her leg, and knew that she had been stabbed. She pulled her legs into a ball against her chest and tugged her arms down, pulling the woman who held her wrist on top of her. Collette kicked out with both legs, sending the woman flying, her head cracking against the elevator doors like an egg ready for frying.

  The flash of the stun gun was blinding, and the snap of the discharge made Collette recoil, but she felt nothing, so it must have missed. She lashed out blindly with hands and feet, striking flesh and wall with equal fervor. Someone tried to put a hand across her face, and Collette bit down on their fingers, shaking her head until she felt bone scrape between her teeth. She was kneed in the head, sending her sprawling to the ground with ringing ears. She dodged a stomp aimed for her throat, and tumbled free. Collette tried to stand and failed, rolled over, and absorbed a kick to the chest.

  She blocked the next kick with her arms, but another kick from the opposite side to the back of the head had her seeing stars. She rolled into a protective ball as she was beaten, and was surprised to discover a short knife still embedded in her bleeding calf. Collette tore the knife free, howling as the blade sliced through sinew and skin, the tooled aluminum of the handle slippery in her bloody grasp.

  The toe of one of her assailant’s trainers smashed into her lips, costing Collette one of her teeth. Collette snatched his heel and pushed up, slicing through his pants and deep across the back of the ankle. The knife was sharp, and the thick tissue of the Achilles’ posed little resistance, and that was one down, rolling around on the floor of the elevator and grabbing his leg.