by MJ Blehart
The buildings on the ocean side were low, not more than one to three stories, until you got about halfway to the city center, where skyscrapers towered impressively high. Toward the hills and mountains, the height of the buildings again lowered down to four stories or less, although the hills altered how they were laid out.
There were two spaceports, one east and the other west, both on the outskirts of the city proper. Yael had landed them at the eastern port. The clone slum, Jace had learned, though not immediately visible, was somewhere to the west as well.
Mr. Bettani’s home was in the southeastern quarter of the city proper. Yael stayed with the shuttle while Onima, Jace, and Kara made their way to the house.
It was relatively early in the morning, so it only took fifteen minutes to reach Bettani’s neighborhood. Leaving the hovervan a block away, the trio casually walked toward Vladimir Bettani’s residence.
“Nice neighborhood,” Kara commented.
“The houses are quite impressive,” Onima said.
Jace looked around and found himself chuckling. “Funny. Houses and homes. I have lived in a lot of places over time, but none were ever all that permanent.”
“I’ve seen more than one clone slum,” Onima said.
“There’s that,” Jace agreed, “but even when I was active military, we slept in bunkers, on ships, in tents. Sometimes simply outdoors. This”—he gestured to a house they were passing— “is an alien idea to me.”
“Where were you living before joining Onima?” Kara asked.
“In Copy Slum, outside of Garden Mesa. My roommates and I claimed a derelict old transport as our home.”
“And that looked to be one of the nicer homes in the slum,” Onima remarked. “No offense, Jace.”
“None taken,” Jace said. “You have to understand, to my way of thinking, ‘home’ is simply where I rest and keep stuff like extra clothes, so it’s never mattered so much what form that takes. My cabin on the Aquila, for example, is larger than the space I called my own on the transport.”
They reached the residence and ascended the stairs to the front door. Onima tapped the pad on the jamb.
“Mr. Bettani?” she requested. They waited. After no response, she tapped at it again. “Mr. Vladimir Bettani?”
Still no response. Onima put on her wearable monocle device and withdrew her datacard, scanning around.
“No signs of life,” Onima said. She entered new info on her datacard to access the locking mechanism for the door.
After a moment, it slid upwards and open.
“Vladimir Bettani? This is Marshal Onima Gwok, Confederation Bureau of Investigation. Are you here?”
The trio walked in carefully. Jace was tempted to reach for his pistol but thought better of it. Cautiously, they made their way into the house.
Wordlessly, Onima signaled for Jace to search the ground floor and Kara the upstairs, while she would go to the basement.
Now Jace withdrew his pistol and slowly moved about, looking from room to room. There was a dining room with a decent-sized table at its center, a living room, enclosed porch area, bathroom, two closets, and a kitchen. Unlike the homes of Palmer Cadoret or Eslem Hansen, this one was clearly lived in recently and not scrubbed clean.
But it was not that large a place, and it wasn’t long before he determined it was devoid of Mr. Bettani or anyone else.
“Clear!” he called.
A second later, from upstairs, Kara called out, “Clear!”
“Clear!” Onima called from the basement. “Join me down here, you two.”
“Kara,” Jace called up, in case she’d not heard Onima, “Onima wants us in the basement.”
“Coming,” Kara replied.
Jace descended the stairs and found Onima at an open door, with a stairway descending beyond it. A moment later, Kara joined them.
“Another way out?” Kara questioned.
“So it appears,” Onima said. She drew her pistol. “Shall we?”
Onima in the lead, and Jace between her and Kara, they descended the stairs. Based on his innate sense of spatial orientation, Jace knew they were heading into the hill behind Bettani’s home.
At the bottom of the stairs they found themselves in a corridor wide enough for them to walk side by side by side. Still, Kara hung back a step. The corridor was tile-lined, and there were no apparent breaks where a door or passageway might be found.
When they reached the door at the end, it slid open on a motion sensor. Stepping through, they found themselves in a vast chamber with walls made of broad tiles of some sort and an asphalt floor. Parked along the walls were electric cars connected to docking/charging ports.
“Ah,” Kara said. “Car pool.”
Onima took a deep breath, then let it out. She was looking for something, which Jace realized must be the contract terminal.
As they went to the terminal, Jace recalled how they worked. Rather than own a hovercar for personal use, you either held a membership or otherwise contracted into a pool of available vehicles when you needed one.
Jace knew how to drive, and a few times during his military service he’d controlled a personnel carrier or other small hover transport. But since the war, most of the governments did not allow clones to rent vehicles for any reason.
Onima entered a code on the terminal’s screen.
“I’m surprised you aren’t employing one of Feroz’s hacks,” Jace commented.
“Not needed,” Onima said. “One of the best features of these car pools is that there is an access code for law enforcement to look at information to aid an investigation. Locals have it. CBI has it. Even the AECC military has it.”
“That’s useful,” Jace said.
“Got it,” Onima said. She activated her comm.
“How can I help you, boss?” Feroz asked on the other side of the connection.
“I need to run down the rental and whereabouts of a car pool vehicle,” Onima said. “Vehicle code echo-Charlie-oh-three-one-four-seven-seven.”
“One moment,” Feroz said. It wasn’t long before his voice across the comm returned, saying, “Got it. The car is docked at the Cornelius Consulting offices.”
“On the other side of town,” Onima growled. “Thanks, Feroz. Out.”
Onima looked to Jace. “Well, this was a complete waste of time.”
“We should probably go back through the house and get back to the van,” Jace said. “Unless there is an alternate way up to street level?”
“No,” Onima said, then looked around. “Where’s Kara?”
Jace hadn’t realized she was no longer just behind him. He turned around, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. “Kara?” he called out.
Onima caught Jace’s eye; she was angry. Via standard military hand signals, she gestured for him to go one way while she went the other.
Passing the various parked and docked vehicles slowly, Jace looked for Kara among them. After passing three, he found her in the passenger seat of the fourth having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. She saw Jace was looking at her and started speaking more rapidly, but he couldn’t hear a word of it.
“Onima!” Jace called. He pointed his pistol at the windshield, gesturing with the muzzle for Kara to get out.
She ended the conversation and carefully climbed out of the hovercar, keeping her hands above her head. Jace glanced out the corner of his eye as Onima came back to his side.
“What in the hell are you doing, Deputy Martinez?” Onima demanded.
“Give me a chance, Onima—I can explain,” Kara began.
But Onima wasn’t having any part of it. “Can you? You were given to my team without any warning by Director Rand, which in and of itself is unusual. Then you disappear, and Jace and I find you making contact with someone in the middle of a search operation—a search operation, mind you, where we’re looking for a person of interest after losing another just a few hours ago.”
Onima’s tone turned lethal. “Are you here t
o sabotage this investigation?”
“No.”
“Then who the hell were you talking to?”
Kara sighed, then said, “Director Rand.”
“That’s not helping your case,” Onima nearly growled, not lowering her pistol. Jace kept his pointed at Kara’s chest.
“You have every right to be suspicious,” Kara said. “Hell, in your shoes, I would be too. First, I need to explain that I received a contact from Director Rand just now and could not ignore it. It was a secure comm, so I had to take it.”
“How can you make a secure contact via your personal comm?” Onima asked. “Shouldn’t you need to go through Aquila comms for security?”
Kara sighed again, not lowering her hands. “There are several things I have not shared with you. For starters, I have tech that—”
Though her lips continued to move, Jace could not hear her. Beside him, Onima tilted her head ever so slightly.
Then Kara’s voice returned. “—and you can be right in front of me and not hear me.”
Onima raised an eyebrow. “You have implants?”
Kara didn’t lower her hands but twisted her left wrist to show off her forearm. “Embedded data system. I can access a screen with it, secure comms, and create the dampening field I just demonstrated.”
Jace was aware that some people had embedded and implanted tech on them, but this was new.
“Why do you have a dampening field?” Onima asked.
“I accepted it when I served the NEEA,” Kara said. “My superiors wanted me able to communicate with them securely.”
“Why were you assigned to my team?”
“All I was told was that you had no deputy marshals presently under you, and Director Rand wanted me to work directly with you and learn all I could from you. He emphasized that he wanted to know more about the priority case you were presently working on—but said nothing further until now.”
“What do you mean?” Onima asked.
“He just informed me that he’d heard you were looking into connections between Gray and Chuang, the NEEA, NECC, and clones,” Kara said. “He told me he wanted to know where we were now because he was unclear about that. He expressed concerns about just what it is we are investigating.”
“And what did you tell him?” questioned Onima.
“I told him that we were exploring some leads but provided him with no specifics. Because I knew he’d figure it out, I had to tell him what planet we are on. But I was not more specific than that.”
“Why?” Jace asked before Onima could say anything more.
Kara sighed yet again. “Something about this is not right. I’ve been assigned randomly to a marshal in the past, but not as abruptly as in this instance. I was pulled off another case I was working. What’s more, Director Rand has never sent me an unexpected private comm signal before, and the way he was demanding information is unusual.
“Given the oddities of this investigation, which keep getting even more convoluted, I didn’t think it was in our best interest to let him know what exactly we are doing. So, I misdirected him a little. I told him we were still aboard the Aquila and following leads—but not looking for anything specific yet. Then Jace found me, and I told him I had to go.”
Jace looked to Onima, who was staring unpleasantly at Kara. Her gun was still pointed unwaveringly at the Deputy Marshal’s chest.
Another uncomfortable moment passed before Onima said, “You couldn’t have let Jace or me know what you were doing before taking his comm?”
“You had just started toward the terminal,” Kara said. “It was easier to go somewhere a moment and take it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a direct line to Rand?” asked Onima.
“Director Rand is my governor,” Kara stated defensively. “If you had a direct comm like mine, you would immediately make contact if Samarin reached out to you, would you not? Even if you were working for another deputy director or director?”
Onima took a deep, noisy breath through her nose, as if to reclaim her calm.
“I know that this investigation is rattling certain people,” Onima said. Gesturing to Jace, she added, “And I know his involvement is not making many of those same people, and others, very happy either. Give me one good reason not to arrest you and leave you in Yael’s care aboard the shuttle.”
“Time,” Kara said. “We’ve already lost time toward finding Mr. Bettani, and if you suspect someone is trying to sabotage this investigation, you can’t waste any further time. Everything that happened yesterday with Ms. Hansen is probably tied to this as well, and things are coming to a head. I know this looks bad, but the implications of this investigation are too important to ignore. But I want you to know that I am with you, Marshal Gwok.”
To his surprise, Kara looked to Jace and added, “I am with you, too, Jace Rojas. I want to get to the truth of whatever is going on here just as much as both of you do.”
Jace considered her words for a moment, then lowered his pistol. He looked to Onima. “She’s right. Arresting her, getting her to the shuttle, and going to the office Bettani is at will take too much time.”
“For all we know,” Kara put in, “he’s aware you entered the house. If you suspect me of being a mole, then you suspect there is one. Thus, our security may be compromised, and time is not on our side.”
Onima shook her head, then lowered her pistol. “You’re right. But don’t think I’m not watching you, Deputy Martinez. I know you claim you’re not here to sabotage this, and I want to believe you, but I remain skeptical.”
“That’s fair,” Kara said. “I would be, too.”
Jace holstered his sidearm, as did Onima. Looking to the Marshal, he asked, “Is there a faster way than going back through the house to the street and the van?”
“No,” Onima said, but then she turned to the nearest hovercar. “Screw that. Get in. We’re going to take this and go to the office. Now.”
15
Onima was displeased.
As she drove the chartered electric car across town, she considered Deputy Marshal Kara Martinez.
That she had been assigned to Onima’s team by Director Jiro Rand was the first problem. Conversations with her governor had indirectly implicated Rand in obstruction of investigations and possible ties to Gray and Chuang.
That Kara was equipped with embedded tech was not the issue. Onima knew many people who had various implants, including Feroz. But the dampening field Kara had was spy tech.
Onima had risen through the ranks to become a marshal. Marshals commanded a lot of respect and had access to information and tech normal agents and special agents did not. In as much as the CBI had a rank hierarchy, only deputy directors and directors were higher up than marshals.
Still, Onima knew that, in addition to the usual, well-known aspects of the Bureau, there were “shadow” aspects. These were marshals and deputy marshals who, for the most part, operated independently rather than as a part of a team.
Some handled internal affairs and kept tabs on the rest of the marshals and, to a lesser degree, the directorate. Onima and her fellow marshals had ships and crews and access to lots of information, and over time, that kind of power had gone to some marshals’ heads.
The deputy marshal and marshal shadow agents, however, were another matter. For the most part, they were unknown. She only knew that they existed and operated somewhere out there.
What was more, outside of the CBI, probably only the highest echelons of leadership—and maybe certain officers of the AECC—were aware of them.
Onima also knew that Kara was not part of the internal affairs officers. And even though she had a record of service, Onima was aware that it could easily be a forgery, giving Kara the credentials needed to infiltrate a team like Onima’s.
She had been starting to accept Kara, partially because the rest of the team seemed comfortable with her. Even Jace and Kara had appeared to have developed a friendly working relationship. But now, after
learning that Kara had withheld information from Onima, she didn’t know what to make of the deputy marshal. She was displeased.
They arrived at the offices of Cornelius Consulting. They were in the northwestern quadrant of the city, closer to the open lands to the west than to the ocean in the north. As such, the building was five stories high.
Onima had debated finding a surreptitious route into the office. Instead, she’d determined that the direct approach was the best approach.