“Just say the word,” Taia replied.
With a grin, Nolan jumped off the catwalk. Thin black steel cable spooled out in total silence as he dropped the ten stories toward the two goons. His heart leaped into his throat and he tightened his grip on the Echoblade. He had to time it just right.
At the last moment, he gave a quiet grunt—barely audible, the sort of reactionary sound someone made when bumping into something.
Taia’s external speakers cast the sound twenty meters away, bouncing it off a nearby stack of pallets. Instantly, the goons spun toward the source of the noise, guns snapping around to aim at the spot where they expected to find their prey.
They never had a chance.
Just before hitting the goons, Nolan struck the tip of the Echoblade against his combat suit’s leg. The ting of metal hitting metal brought the two goons spinning around again.
Too slow. Nolan was already on top of them. He struck out with the Echoblade, driving it straight toward the first goon’s chest. The vibrating steel sliced through the IAF-grade combat suit like a cutting torch through pig iron, and Nolan drove it deeper to slice through ribs and puncture the man’s lung. With a vicious twist, he tore the blade up and to the side, carving heart muscle, and pulled the blade free.
Rifle fire brightened the darkness of the warehouse as the surviving goon fired blindly. One shot clipped Nolan’s cable, severing the metal filament. Too late. Nolan was already on the ground, darting around the slumping body of the first goon and leaping toward the last man standing. His Echosteel knife pinged again as he struck it on his suit, setting the blade vibrating, and he drove it straight into the man’s visor.
Echosteel cut through the thin permaglass and sliced cartilage, bone, and brain matter. In and out, quick and clean, dropping the goon where he stood. The body thumped heavily on the ultracrete floor, leaving Nolan alone in the silence of the warehouse.
He stared down at the bodies of the two goons. At the IAF armor they wore—armor they shouldn’t have, as with the weapons they’d used tonight.
“Warning,” his HUD displayed in bold letters. “Power levels critical. Shutdown in two minutes.”
Nolan knelt—or, his brain relayed electrical signals through Taia to control the suit’s legs—and gripped one of the dead goons. With a grunt, he turned the armored man over. Relief flooded him at the sight of the man’s undamaged energy pack.
Nolan ripped out both of the cells.
“See what you can do with these,” he told Taia. “They’re older-model IAF, but they should still be compatible.”
“Do I tell you how to do your job?” Taia said. Her tone was edged with just enough irritation to sound almost human.
A loud hiss sounded from behind him, accompanied by a clattering thump as Taia dropped one of his suit’s depleted energy cells. With effort, he inserted the new cell into the pack, and felt a surge of power coursing through his suit. Power levels spiked from two percent to fifteen percent instantly. A moment later, the second cell raised the suit’s power to twenty-nine percent—not enough for him to fly out of the warehouse or the Shipyards, but enough to get him where he needed to go.
He paused only long enough to gather up his depleted energy cells—better not to leave them where the IDF or the Shipyards’ security might find them—before marching over to the other dead goon. He stripped the man’s energy cells, but left the rest of the armor intact.
These should do the trick, he thought, slipping the cells into the carrying space built into his suit’s energy pack.
“Taia, tell me you recorded footage of all that.”
“Really?” Taia’s voice almost had a pouting tone. “You really think so little of me?”
“Of course not.” Nolan chuckled. “Just old Silverguard habits kicking in, that’s all. Double and triple check everything.”
In response, Taia brought up the video footage of the evening, starting the moment he settled into place in his perch overlooking German French’s penthouse.
“Taia, you’re a marvel,” Nolan said, grinning into the darkness. “What would I do without you?”
“Probably wind up dead in some garbage chute somewhere,” the AI replied.
“Most likely.” Nolan checked the rifle on his back and secured his Echoblade in its sheath. “Now, find me the cleanest route to the Protection Bureau. I think it’s time Agent Styver explains what the hell is going on.”
Chapter Three
No one who looked at the crumbling, derelict single-story warehouse building would have guessed it was anything more than it appeared. At first glance—and all glances thereafter—it had a truly decrepit character, the sort of vacant, graffiti-covered, hole-riddled structure that served as four walls and a leaking roof to shelter junkies looking to shoot up with Blitz, Gunk, or some other potent and illegal opiate.
But that was entirely the point of the sham. Anyone passing by the building would continue on their way, never suspecting what lay behind the façade. Or, more accurately, beneath.
Nolan glanced around, cautious as ever despite the fact Taia’s scan hadn’t picked up anything moving or breathing within a two-block radius. Nothing moved, at least nothing he could see in the soft, reddish-gold glow of morning over New Avalon. Satisfied the street was empty, he stepped up to the graffiti-smeared metal door guarding the entrance.
That was the first sign that the building was more than it appeared. A door of spaceship-grade durasteel would never have been found in an area like the Bolt Hole, the vast warren of slums along New Avalon’s western edge. A door like that was valuable enough to keep even the most gluttonous Blitz addict supplied for more than a year.
Another glance around, and Nolan slid aside the faded poster barely clinging to the wall beside the door. Beneath the once-colorful image—displaying the words, “An Exodus for Exodus!”, the Liberationalist slogan of the underground anti-Imperial movement—a digital handprint pad hummed quietly to life.
Without removing his glove, Nolan placed his hand against the scanner. Taia shifted the tiny metal cells integrated into the fingertips and palm of the glove, morphing it into the shape of a handprint the scanner would recognize.
Bright green words flashed across his HUD. “Welcome, Cerberus.” A low whirring echoed through the mechanisms barring the door, and it slid open with little more than a hiss of escaping air.
As always, Nolan drew in a deep breath as he stepped into the building. The impenetrable durasteel door was just the first of many layers of defenses keeping the wrong sort out of the Protection Bureau. Once inside, he still had to find his way through the maze of garbage that littered the building’s interior. The façade of “derelict building” ran far beyond skin deep.
Glass clinked and crunched beneath Nolan’s heavy boots, and the sound echoed through the empty warehouse. He tried not to look down, but couldn’t help himself. Just a glance, just to check if any Blitz remained in the glass bottles and empty needles. Even a drop—
No. He steeled himself, gritted his teeth, and forced himself to take calm, controlled breaths. To ignore that eerie drip, drip, drip in the distance, the quiet whistling of the wind seeping through holes in the walls and roof, and the gentle pattering of rodent feet that had always felt like home whenever he’d awoken in abandoned places like this. Everything, down to the trash-covered floors and the windows boarded up with corrugated metal roof flashing, flooded him with a sense of familiarity, a bone-deep longing, and more than a little self-loathing. You’re stronger than who you were.
“Want me to play your binaural playlist?” Taia chirped in his ear. “That always helps calm you down.”
“Thanks, Taia, but I’m fine.” Nolan kicked himself mentally. She must have sensed the sudden spike of his heart rate—even now, after all this time, he still hadn’t gotten fully in control of his physiological reactions. At least his mouth no longer watered and that gnawing, aching hunger in his gut was easier to ignore.
“You let me know, boss,”
Taia replied. “I’ve been studying the EDM rhythms currently popular among the youth of New Avalon, as well as the classical masters of Old Terra, and I think I’ve got a new sound you might like.”
“Later,” Nolan told her as he strode through the trash-covered rooms, deeper into the warehouse.
“Saving for later.” Taia’s voice was bright, cheery, tinged with just a hint of the accent common among the New Avalon upper-crust. “I know how much you enjoy these meetings with Agent Styver.”
Nolan couldn’t help smiling. “You’re getting the hang of sarcasm quite nicely, Taia.”
“Thank you, Nolan,” the AI responded. “Let’s just say I’ve spent enough time in your head to get a feel for it. Pun intended.”
Nolan’s smile widened. “Feel for it? Not bad, Taia.”
The AI remained silent, but Nolan felt a little spike of neurochemicals that he’d come to associate with Taia being happy—or as close as her computer-programmed chip could come to the human emotion.
But in that moment, happiness was the farthest thing from Nolan’s mind. Being here in the Protection Bureau’s building always left him feeling uncomfortable. And more than a bit ashamed. He’d spent far too much time in places like this in his first year out of the Silverguard.
Those bad days are behind me, he told himself. Four years, ten months, three weeks, and two days behind me.
His arrival at the elevator to the Protection Bureau gave him an escape from his thoughts. The blank ultracrete wall bore another mass of those garish “An Exodus for Exodus!” posters, and Nolan reached up for the least-scuffed of the lot, pushing it aside to reveal another handprint scanner. No sooner had he pressed his gloved hand to the pad than another durasteel door hissed open. Beyond was a metal-and-glass cylindrical tube three meters tall and two meters across, lit from within by sterile blue-white neon lights.
Nolan stepped in and grabbed the metal railing, holding on tight as the door slid silently closed. The moment the lock thunked into place within the wall, the lights snapped off and the floor seemed to bottom out beneath him. He felt as he had the previous night when leaping off the Diamond Pinnacle. Falling, falling for an eternity that passed in the space of three seconds. Then, with a quiet clank of springs and a whisper of engaging air brakes, the elevator slowed and came to a halt.
Damn. Nolan swallowed the acid that had surged into his throat. That never gets easier to stomach.
The door to the cylindrical elevator slid open, and Nolan stepped out into the bare white offices of the Protection Bureau.
He still couldn’t help marveling that anyone could work in a place so utterly devoid of life and character as the room around him. Four white walls with an equally white ceiling and floor tiles, with nothing but a single desk with two chairs—also pristine white metal—to break the monotony. The only thing close to color in the room was the man sitting behind the desk.
Agent Styver was the human equivalent of this sterile room. His features were the most unremarkable Nolan had ever seen: a nose neither too large nor too small, hair of just the right shade of mousy brown to be boring, a jaw midway between narrow and square, eyes so dull brown no one would ever look twice, and a build that reeked of bureaucratic efficiency far more than physical prowess. He wore a black suit that could have been ordered from any store in New Avalon—either in the posh Upper Heights district or the barely livable Bolt Hole. Even his name—Agent Styver, no first name that Nolan knew—was perfectly dull.
The only thing that came close to being interesting about him was the fact that he wore a necktie clipped neatly to his shirt with a white gold tie bar. That affectation had faded from fashion shortly after the first Old Terran colonists stepped off their spaceships onto the terraformed soil of Exodus VI more than three hundred and fifty years ago.
Agent Styver gave Nolan a bland smile. “Cerberus.” He didn’t bother to stand. “I hear congratulations are in order. Or, if you’re someone who gave two wet farts about German French, condolences.”
Nolan’s jaw muscles worked, and he was glad his helmet hid his irritation. Agent Styver was irritatingly well-informed; then again, that was his job.
After a moment, Agent Styver leaned forward and pressed a finger into the barren white surface of his empty desk. A single light binged and a flatscreen computer monitor slid up from the desk.
“Call up the dossier on French, German,” Agent Styver instructed the screen.
A rotund, puffy-cheeked face popped up onto the screen. German French before the Balefire had planted its fiery kiss in his skull.
“German French!” Agent Styver snorted, shaking his head in derision. “An extraordinarily stupid name.”
Nolan couldn’t argue. Exodians weren’t exactly creative with their names, but that particular nom-de-idiot took the cake. He remained silent as Agent Styver flashed through the dossier.
“Close off the case and mark it as Status Resolved,” Agent Styver finally said, and the words flashed across the screen in bright red letters. A wave of his hand closed the dossier, and the flatscreen winked off and slid back down into the desk’s surface.
Agent Styver looked up, but Nolan was already moving even as the man’s mouth opened. He dropped the two looted energy cells onto the desk.
“What’s that?” Agent Styver raised an eyebrow, half disdainfully, half curious.
“You tell me,” Nolan growled.
Agent Styver poked at the energy cells with a finger, then quickly pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his digit with an almost offended look flashing across his face. “They look like energy cells.”
Nolan stifled the urge to snarl a remark about Agent Styver’s astute powers of deduction. Instead, he said, “And they are.” He leaned over the desk, looming slightly. “I pulled them off old IAF combat suits.”
Agent Styver’s face did a little dance, surprise flitting across his carefully schooled expression for the briefest of instants. “IAF?” His tone held a note of suspicion—even just that hint of response meant the news had caught him off guard. “You’re sure?”
Nolan didn’t bother responding; Agent Styver knew everything about his history, both during his years as an IAF grunt and in the Silverguard, as well as his life post-military. That was too stupid a question for the man who’d proven otherwise incredibly capable.
“Of course you’re sure,” Agent Styver answered his own question. “What I should have said is ‘Where did you get them?’”
This, Nolan was happy to answer. “Off German French’s goons.”
Agent Styver’s eyebrows shot up and he leaped to his feet. “What?”
Nolan grinned within his helmet. Not so well-informed as you’d like to think, are you? The thought came as a surprising comfort. Even the Protection Bureau, with all its bleeding-edge surveillance, counterintelligence, and monitoring technology—far beyond anything the Empire would come close to admitting it possessed—had its limits. That boded well for men like Nolan Garrett, who tended to operate on the wrong side of the law. Then again, it also gave men like German French room to flourish as well.
“Taia, play him the footage,” Nolan said aloud. “Just the relevant stuff,” he instructed the AI chip with a silent command.
He pressed his gloved hand to the surface of Agent Styver’s white desk—eliciting a grimace from the agent, he noticed—and Taia’s tiny smart filaments connected with those built into the desk. Instantly, the wall to Agent Styver’s right winked to life, displaying the video footage Taia had captured during the previous night’s job.
“Those IAF suits were mothballed the better part of six years ago,” Nolan said as Agent Styver watched the footage. “And they should be under tight lock and key, not in the hands of a man like German French.” He thrust the finger of his free hand toward the screen just as an explosion blossomed in the darkness. “No way they should have access to REMPs. Or Spotters, either. And the way they moved, no chance they’re Rücksichtslos. Ex-IAF, almost certainly, armed with IAF we
apons they shouldn’t have.”
He said nothing about the counter-hacking algorithms that had sliced through his digital façade—that would expose the full extent of Taia’s capabilities, and he wasn’t ready to give Agent Styver that kind of knowledge. The man knew too much about him already.
“Indeed.” Agent Styver’s lips drew into a tight frown, one utterly free of wrinkles, as if his skin simply refused to age and show any sort of personality in keeping with the rest of his appearance. “Once more?” he asked when the footage was finished. He watched again in silence, then turned to Nolan. “That’s a problem.”
“No kidding.” Nolan snorted. “And not the sort of problem we can leave alone.” He loomed over Agent Styver again. “If someone’s stealing from the IAF, I’m damned well—“
“Let me stop you there.” Agent Styver cut him off with an upraised hand. “This matter—the missing IAF weapons and the identities of the men that worked for French—is one I and the Protection Bureau will handle.”
“Not if I’ve got anything to say about it!”
“Which you don’t.” There was no menace to Agent Styver’s words—no tone at all—simply a firm finality that in itself held an unspoken threat. “This is a matter to be dealt with through official channels, not the sort to require the specific skills of one Cerberus, assassin extraordinaire.”
Though the words were said without mockery, Nolan knew the man well enough to recognize it for what it was: Agent Styver putting him in his place.
“This is a matter for the Bureau, Cerberus.” Agent Styver stood, looking Nolan in the eyes—or the helmet visor—unfazed. “For now, your services are needed for another task.” The agent turned to his computer. “Call up the dossier on—“
“No!” Nolan’s voice cut through Agent Styver’s words with a cold, hard edge. “No more jobs. No more targets. Not until I’ve seen him.”
Agent Styver’s expressionless mask cracked, his eyes narrowing just a fraction. Long moments of silence passed as he studied Nolan’s helmet. “So be it.” He inclined his head. “Computer,” he said without taking his eyes from Nolan, “bring up the video feed of Imperial inmate X82700MS, Jared Evan Garrett.”
Assassination Protocol: An Intergalactic Space Opera Adventure (Cerberus Book 1) Page 3