by Hugo Huesca
His head already felt lighter. He forced himself to take long, unsatisfying breaths.
They reached the archway. Three guards covered the entrance. They were older than Sunny boy had been, and clearly armed, with rifles and flak armor. Their helmets’ visors were dull.
Sunny boy must’ve already told the guards Delagarza was coming, because they didn’t react to their presence. They only stood at attention, visors hiding the faces underneath.
“They aren’t going to search us?” said Krieger.
“No need to,” Delagarza said, and pointed at the archway. “There’s scanners there. If we carried a bomb or something like that, we’d be dead already. They don’t care about guns though. Everyone in Taiga is packing heat.”
“My kind of place, then,” said Krieger, letting sarcasm flow from her voice.
Besides cold, Taiga Town was humid and shaken by drafts of wind coming from the ventilators hundreds of meters toward the surface. It was illuminated by industrial lamplights atop long shafts embedded to the floor, connected to each other by cables and to generators at hidden spots. The smell of half-cooked stim juices and other drugs overwhelmed Delagarza’s nose, but he also recognized the aroma of greasy food, bleach, and burning incense.
The entire span of Taiga was about the same size as a football stadium. Most of it was empty space, although many people took permanent residence near the back, a number that grew with every passing day.
Delagarza guided Cooke and Krieger through ample sections, separated from each other by thin walls made out of rusty iron sheets. Every section had, without rhyme or reason, a selection of stands, stores, and pressure tents of all sizes and colors. People of all walks of life moved among these, avoiding eye contact, but wading through the small crowd with practiced ease.
Delagarza assumed the role of touristic guide for his companions:
“Taiga’s home to a thousand permanent residents,” he said as they passed near a weapons stand that would’ve put a colony barracks to shame, “and ten times that many customers at any given time. The place gets quite packed during holidays, and after a big shipment comes through Outlander.”
“How come I’ve never heard of it?” asked Cooke.
“Because people can tell at a glance you’re not from around here,” Delagarza said.
“Neither are you.”
“Well, don’t go around telling them that.”
As they moved toward the center of the startown, the stands and tents disappeared and were replaced by honest-to-god poly-plastic buildings, indistinguishable from the ones at the surface, except for the damp, copper-and-moss background that insinuated behind them. Unlike its surface counterpart, these storefronts cared little for regulation or legality.
“The city council knows about all this?” asked Cooke when a scantily clad lady gestured obscenely at him from behind a glass window in a neon-covered whorehouse.
“Taiga pays a lot of bribes,” said Delagarza, “and it's an integral part of Alwinter’s economy. Without it, the city would be at the mercy of Outlander.”
Delagarza shot Krieger a meaningful glance. The enforcer had either caught a case of selective blindness or knew the way the cookie crumbled.
“We’re here,” Delagarza said. They had arrived as far as ordinary civilians could go. Deeper inside was the exclusive hold of the mob. The store he stopped in front of was a graffiti-covered mess, decorated by tacky neon lights and overworked LEDs. A sign next to the automated door showed a woman making love to an old computer.
The place’s interior had more in common with a warehouse than a store. Rows upon rows of machinery (most of it broken and useless), circuit boards, ancient connectors, and long-ago discontinued storage systems.
Delagarza waded through the rows, like a man delving into a labyrinth. He warned his companions not to touch anything, and not to speak to anyone. Cooke almost knocked over a pile of some obsolete system called USB, which earned him the glares of the two or three customers around them.
He passed the labyrinth and reached a counter where a twenty-something ganger was watching a porno in his wristband. His face was lit by the orange halo of a reg-suit hood, and his piercings shone as if on fire. It was hard to tell if he was doing more than watching since the pile of fake fur covering his body hid his hands pretty well. The kid barely gave Delagarza a second glance before asking:
“Yeah?”
“Hey there, Cronos, it’s Delagarza. How ya’ doing?”
That got the kid to raise his eyes. Behind them, Krieger snorted at the mention of the ganger’s chosen nickname.
“Delagarza? Long time no see, bad hombre, you. You here to see Nanny Kayoko?”
“Not today,” Delagarza said, making a vague gesture to Krieger and Cooke. “We’re here on business. Gonna need to use one of your backstage rooms.”
“Shit,” Cronos said with a grin, “that’s some heavy business right there. Are your buddies on the level?”
“Yes, but they’ll be waiting right here,” Delagarza said. Then, he turned to Krieger and said, “I’m gonna need that Shota-M now. Be back in a bit.”
“Just one second,” Krieger said, her voice low and dangerous. “I’m not to be away from the device at any time. What’re you planning to do with it?”
“Um, something that’ll get the job done, and will get the Shota-M open for you,” Delagarza said, “but is also kinda illegal.”
“More illegal than this?” asked Krieger with an expansive gesture.
“Yup.”
She caught Delagarza’s implied meaning from his innocent expression. “Ah,” she said, “I see. Well then, I’m still going in with you.”
“You okay with it?” Delagarza asked. Cooke looked at them both like they had suddenly sprouted horns.
“I’m not going to arrest you for doing the job we hired you to do,” said Krieger, the very image of rationality.
Delagarza nodded. It was a simple risk-reward equation, and he was glad to have judged it correctly. Whatever was inside the Shota-M, the enforcers cared about it enough to skip the law (to be honest, they did that a lot). Since Krieger agreed to get into Taiga Town, it was an implicit agreement for Delagarza to…do what he had to do. Even breaking this law.
“That settles it, then,” said Delagarza. He had no doubts the woman would keep her word. After all, being complicit to company-patented code tampering and not stopping it midway made her as guilty as he would be.
Cronos added Delagarza and Krieger’s wristband codes to his own and cleared them to security. When they stepped backstage, the automated sentry gun scanned them with its laser and let them pass without turning them to slag.
“Seems like it’s you and me, bad hombre,” Cronos told Cooke behind Delagarza. “You into balloon poppin’ videos?”
“What?” Cooke asked with a tremor in his voice.
Delagarza chuckled.
He entered a tiny workroom, cooled by a pair of nitrogen tanks in a corner. There was a workbench surrounded by mag-proofed tools and old-school monitors, along with several power sources. The walls didn’t show it, but Delagarza knew they were loaded with anti-listening devices. It was as private as it got without being SA personnel.
“Krieger, hand me the Shota-M,” Delagarza told the enforcer the second she stepped inside.
This was a critical part of the process. Once she handed him the computer, she’d be complicit.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Krieger asked. “If you break it, it’s my ass on the line.”
“I’ve done this before,” Delagarza told her with an impish smile.
“You’re shameless,” Krieger told him. She returned a tentative grin and handed him the computer.
Delagarza set to work immediately. He used the tools to dismantle the black shell of the computer and connected its entrails to the monitors and other diagnostic tools. After that, he identified the miniature mag-bombs installed near the CPU and rerouted them away. This took him an hour.
Another hour went by as he deactivated sub-systems and tricked others into thinking it was all going well. Several times, he had to swipe pearls of sweat away from his forehead. The extra moisture evaporated and froze on his gloves.
After all was said and done, he sent a sliver of energy to the naked Shota-M and turned it on. The CPU loaded its data to a virtual machine (brand software of Kayoko Inc) and from there, Delagarza slowly introduced command lines to the OS.
“What are you doing?” Krieger asked over his shoulder.
“Taking a look,” he told her. “Through this virtual machine, we can risk a glance inside the computer and see any data not encrypted without risking a hard drive wipe by corporate protocols.”
Breaking encryption would be harder, and it would take Delagarza weeks, if not months, of constant work with custom tools and hardware. But if they were lucky, whatever was inside wasn’t encrypted, and Delagarza would save himself all that arduous and expensive headache.
Krieger sighed and went to sit in a corner.
It took Delagarza four hours before he reached the single non-encrypted file that wasn’t part of the Shota-M original software.
A single executable, tiny in size. Judging by the hard drive editing history, there was a group of files hidden by expensive, third-party encryption that he couldn’t access. The tiny .exe was all he’d get today.
It could be a trap, he thought. A virus to dissuade prying eyes. Well, that was what the virtual machine was there for, and why he’d gone to all the trouble of coming to Taiga Town. He double-checked that all connections to the CPU were secure and then ran the program.
Half a second later, the monitor showed him a single image.
What? Delagarza thought. It made no sense. He was seeing a fractal, one of those geometric shapes generated by computers, a cluster of colors and figures generated by an algorithm. It was shaped in the vague form of a bird mid-flight.
He blinked. Had the image moved? Yeah, tiny parts of it changed and shifted. So, a video.
Perhaps it’s encrypted, one of those new methods—
He tried to reach for the keyboard and close the program, but his hand didn’t move. In fact, he couldn’t avert his eyes from the screen.
Something was wrong. His head burned, a sudden fever more powerful than anything he ever felt. Stars blared around his vision.
Delagarza screamed, a raspy, involuntary whine that splattered the glass with foamy saliva. His legs buckled from underneath him, his arms swiped the monitor against the floor.
The last image he saw was Krieger standing above him, surprise and recognition mixed in her eyes in equal parts. She kicked the monitor without looking at it, breaking the screen.
“Shit,” Krieger said, a faint echo that Delagarza barely heard. “That’s a memetic virus the asshole just stumbled upon.”
Then the convulsions started.
10
Chapter Ten
Clarke
Only two men remained in the conference room, the others long gone after round upon unending round of questions and declarations of loyalty and service. To Clarke, it seemed like Julia, Pascari, hell, even the Captain, believed Antonov’s promises of justice and revenge.
Had the world gone insane?
“You’ll start a war,” Clarke warned Antonov, as he floated up to the EIF leader. “And get millions killed. First of all, the EIF.”
“That’s your professional assessment?” Antonov asked.
“Just common sense!” Clarke said. “You’ll race an SA fleet? And fight a planetary garrison? Even if you don’t get the EIF all killed by then, even if you somehow rescue Reiner’s kid, what then?”
“Justice,” Antonov said.
“No. Civil war, that’s what. And last time I checked, the EIF is not on the winning side.”
“Last time you checked, there wasn’t any evidence of Tal-Kader’s involvement with Isaac Reiner’s assassination,” Antonov said. The man was calm, collected, a leader who had rehearsed this conversation many times over. “Now we have a symbol. The people will rally with us. Not all corporations are friends with Tal-Kader, and even the SA may turn against them. After all, there’s still a government in the Edge, and they claim to uphold Reiner’s values and legacy.”
“You’ll bet innocent blood on it,” Clarke said. He shook his head. It was clear he wasn’t getting through to Antonov. The man’s mind was already watching the parades held in his honor.
Clarke tried another angle. “What if she’s dead? Travel to Jagal from Dione takes six months. That’s another seven or so more until the EIF reaches Dione. That’s an entire year the enforcers have to find her, and they’re on her trail already.”
“Revolutions come with risks, friend Clarke,” said Antonov. He smiled, like he was privy to a particular joke. “But in this case, we have assurance. Remember the agent the enforcers captured?”
“The one that erased her mind to avoid being tortured? Yeah, I remember.”
“There’s a second one. Name’s Daneel Hirsen. The last known survivor of the Newgen agent batch. A living legend. He tipped us off about the Reiners before the enforcers sent the message. That’s how we knew when to look for the laser.”
Clarke almost didn’t believe his ears. “I had no idea the EIF employed Newgen’s agents.”
“These were an independent group. See for yourself. I have the message with me.”
Antonov opened a new holographic window. A man very unlike Strauze was staring at Clarke with a focused, uncaring frown that encompassed the entire feed. Hirsen’s eyes had the color of static.
“Ruben Antonov. My name is Daneel Hirsen. We’ve never met before, but I have information of value to your group. I’ve attached proof to this file, but I can’t say as much as I know in case the courier gets intercepted. You understand, I’m sure. Examine the risk-reward equation of trusting me at your own leisure.”
“You trust this guy?” Clarke asked.
“He’s solid, as far as I’m aware,” Antonov said. “His information checks out, and the enforcers’ message confirmed it. If it’s a trap, it’s far beyond anything Tal-Kader has ever managed before.”
Hirsen went on to repeat what Major Strauze had told the Tal-Kader Board. Reiner’s wife and daughter had been protected by Newgen after his assassination. At least the daughter was still alive, and Hirsen’s group was in the process of finding her.
“We believe she’s hiding on planet Dione,” Hirsen said. “I’m in contact with local resistance. We’ll find her. But the same information that pointed us to her is in the hands of the enforcers orbiting Outlander. They’ll draw the same conclusions we did, and if words reaches Jagal…well, you understand, of course. My group lacks the firepower to extract Isabella Reiner from Dione. That’s where your group comes in. To get you time to reach us, my team will infiltrate the enforcer’s HQ and try to delete their data. If you don’t hear from me again, I’m either dead, or in hiding. Upon your arrival, transmit a message to the following coordinates and local resistance will coordinate the extraction—”
At no time did Hirsen’s expression change. It was like his mind had already finished telling the message. Antonov cut the feed.
“See, Clarke? The EIF has more allies than what the SA propaganda tells you. And with Isabella by our side, we can win this revolution. Create a free Edge, just like Reiner himself wanted. Will you help? No one in the Independent fleet knows the Defense Fleet as much as you do. Help us fight them, Clarke. Help us save that woman.”
It was a monumental decision. The exact kind of decision that Clarke had hoped he’d never have to make again. No matter what he chose, people would die.
There was only one thing he needed to know before he made his choice:
“What about Earth?”
Antonov shifted, clearly uncomfortable. None of the others had talked about Earth before leaving.
It’s easy to forget about the Mississippi orbiting Jagal when we’re not in range of
its cannons.
“This is the Edge’s matter,” said Antonov, “with nothing to do with Earth. We’ll replace SA’s administrator with one loyal to the people, not to its corporate interest. Then, we’ll renegotiate with Earth. Maybe we’ll do so with a new Admiral at the head of the Defense Fleet. Maybe a hero of Broken Sky, the man who saved the lives of an entire orbital, and who helped save Reiner’s daughter.”
By “loyal to the people,” Antonov meant “loyal to the EIF,” hell, probably the EIF itself. Clarke wondered which corporation, exactly, was the one bankrolling Antonov’s lavish bottles and Free Traders.
Clarke had little doubt that, in the unlikely case the EIF got what it wanted, it would substitute a dictator for another one. The Officer Training School taught all its students that history was cyclical, and Clarke had no doubt that Antonov’s dreams of revolution were but another turn in a never-ending cog of war.
And yet…
“I’ll help you get her back,” Clarke told the man, making an effort to keep his voice steady. Even as he spoke, the weight of his decision threatened to overwhelm him. He knew he’d probably die before the year was over. “I’ll tell you all you need to know about fighting the Defense Fleet garrison. Hell, I’ll give the order to fire. I’ll carry that weight in my conscience. But, we save Isabelle Reiner, and that’s it. After, if we’re still alive, I’m out. Leave me in the first Backwater Planet we reach and forget about me. Say I died during the battle, that I ran away, whatever you want. We never speak again, Antonov.”
Antonov didn’t even wait a second before answering. “We have a deal,” he said. He offered Clarke a handshake which he accepted.
It was all that Clarke could stomach, at least today. The weight of his commitment poured over his shoulders, like an invisible waterfall. He kicked lightly against the floor, almost a caress, and vaulted toward the exit.
“Clarke!” Antonov called after him. “Why? We could make you the most powerful officer in the Edge. Why won’t you stay?”