Assassination Protocol: An Intergalactic Space Opera Adventure (Cerberus Book 1)

by Andy Peloquin

  As the sounds of Taia’s new song—a rhythmic and strangely calming blend of throbbing EDM beats mingled with strains of classical music that Nolan didn’t recognize—filtered into his earpiece, Nolan closed his eyes and forced himself to relax. He had too many questions about the woman that couldn’t be answered yet, so it did him no good to wonder or worry. She was safe from Wolfe, and she had a chance at survival with Taia’s help. Right now, that was all he could do for her.

  But the first chance he got, he’d be damned sure to find out everything about this strange former Silverguard who ended up on his doorstep.

  Chapter Eight

  Nolan snapped awake as the spike of electricity coursed through his skull. Taia was gentle as always—directing the energy to stimulate the pleasure centers of his brain, giving him a little surge of dopamine—but years in the IAF and Silverguard had made him a light sleeper.

  He bolted upright, pistol in hand and aimed at the door, before his eyes snapped fully open.

  Silence greeted him. The room was dark, lit only by a single light bulb in the kitchen, which cast just enough illumination for him to see that nothing had changed.

  “I didn’t want to wake you, Sleeping Beauty,” Taia purred in his ear, “but I just got the word from Agent Styver that your package is at the dead drop.”

  Nolan grunted and sat up straighter, rolling his neck to loosen up the twinge in the muscles. “Thanks, Taia.”

  He holstered his pistol and glanced at the woman on his couch. Taia’s IV tube remained in her arm and she hadn’t awoken—she wouldn’t for hours yet, not after the dose of Blitz that had left her unconscious on the staircase where he’d found her.

  “How’s she doing?” he asked.

  “IV nutrients and medications arrived half an hour ago,” Taia told him, “and she’s already had half a bag of fluids. On my last scan of her organs, I confirmed that the deterioration had been halted. Recovery will be slow, but she’s got a fighting chance.”

  “Good,” Nolan grunted.

  “Which means you can get out of here.” Taia’s voice was firm, insistent. “The sooner you get this job for Agent Styver over with, the sooner you can see Jared.”

  Mention of his brother set Nolan’s stomach twisting. The woman’s arrival had momentarily enabled him to forget the image of Jared floating in the Reformation tank.

  “Go.” Taia sent another spike of electricity through his brain—her way of putting her foot down emphatically. “I’ll keep an eye on her until you’re back. I can handle it, you know.”

  “I never doubted you, Taia.” With effort, Nolan forced himself to wheel away from the couch. He couldn’t help worrying for the woman. It didn’t matter that he’d never met her before; she was a former Silverguard, like him, and a Blitz junkie, like he’d been. He found a strange sense of camaraderie with this total stranger because of those two things.

  But Taia was right. Agent Styver had promised that he could pay a visit to the Vault and see Jared when he completed this next job. The Protection Bureau wanted someone dead, and if it meant they’d give him what he wanted, he would be their genie and grant their wish.

  He rolled into the kitchen, pausing only long enough to unsling the holster holding his NC7 blaster and drop it on the counter, then past the refrigerator toward a steel door. It dinged and slid open at his approach, revealing the service elevator car already waiting for him. Taia must have called it before he’d even moved. He pushed his wheelchair into the car, turned the chair around, and hit the button for the ground floor.

  The doors slid shut silently, but the elevator cable gave a loud, grating clank-thump as it began the descent. The mechanisms were beyond ancient, dating back to the earliest Exodus VI colonists, but Taia had made certain to order the repairs needed to keep it functioning. Without it, Nolan Garrett—the man beneath the combat suit—had no way to come and go from his building.

  As always, Nolan’s eyes went to the blaster hole scorched into the steel walls of the elevator car. He reached for it, ran his thumb along the now-smooth edges of the fissure. Never once had it occurred to him to repair it as he had the rest of the elevator car. It was his reminder of Tanis. Of what the combat medic-turned-bouncer had done for him in his darkest hour, how she’d helped him pull himself out of the mud, and the price she’d paid. Because of him…and his addiction.

  Tinny strains of what Taia called “muzak” drifted from the speaker built into the car, and Nolan was all too glad when the elevator finally jolted to a halt—with another loud clank-thump and a too-loud ding—and the doors slid open.

  A wave of artificial fog, heady floral perfumes, and driving beats slammed into him as he wheeled out of the elevator. Even in the back halls of the Spacer’s Paradise, the music playing for whoever was on stage was nearly deafening. Then again, given the deafness common among those who worked in the Shipyards or lived for years on board space-traveling craft, the volume would have to be high.

  “Locking down perimeter,” Taia chirped in his ear.

  Nolan only nodded—if he spoke aloud, he’d look like a crazy person talking to himself—and rolled out of the elevator, turning right down the hallway that led away from the front rooms and VIP lounges of the Spacer’s Paradise. He hadn’t come down for a night at the peeler bar. He had business to handle.

  “Hey, hey!” Clive, the bouncer standing outside the door to the girls’ dressing rooms, gave him his usual broad grin and held out a fist to Nolan. “Nolan, my man, good to see you!”

  Nolan bit back the feeling of guilt he got every time he saw Clive. The bouncer had been sweet on Tanis, and he had never found out the truth of why the woman simply “disappeared”—six feet under, not back to her home city of Phobury, as Nolan had said. He couldn’t change the past. All he could do now was try to fix his mistakes and atone for his sins.

  Forcing a grin, Nolan bumped the man’s fist. “Good to be seen, Clive. How’s the shoulder?”

  “Ugh.” Clive rolled his left arm, grimacing as he massaged the joint. “It’s seen better days. I’ll have enough for a proper doctor’s visit in a couple of weeks, but until then, just gotta keep keeping on, right?”

  “Right.”

  Nolan couldn’t help liking the bouncer. To anyone who tried to mess with the girls at the Spacer’s Paradise, Clive was two meters of muscle and punishment. The former IAF grunt-turned-underground-cage-fighter could handle anything the dockhands and shipjumpers could throw at him and return it with bone-shattering force. It was why he’d been given this post, the last line of defense to keep the wrong sort from sneaking into the girls’ dressing room. Jadis, Mimi, and the rest already had enough to deal with any time they took to the stage, and Clive made sure they got a few minutes of peace between shifts on the floor.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t our reclusive upstairs neighbor!” A voice drifted up the hallway behind Nolan, accompanied by the clack, clack of stiletto heels. “And here was me worried you’d moved out.”

  Nolan’s heart gave a little flutter, and his hands—unfaltering when gripping the barrel of a pistol or rifle—twitched as he turned his wheelchair toward Jadis. One look at her, and he had no doubt as to why she was the undisputed queen of the Spacer’s Paradise. She’d even taken to calling herself the Ice Queen, an allusion to some Old Terran book Nolan had never read.

  Right now, there was nothing icy about her. Flushed from her turn on the stage, with a thin sheen of sweat on her face, she radiated all the smoldering heat of a supernova. Her long, red-gold hair hung in a ponytail curled over one strong, bare shoulder. It took all of Nolan’s self-control not to follow it down over the diamond-sequined bikini that barely covered her marvelously proportioned figure. She’d had guys enough leering at her tonight. He refused to be one more.

  “Nope, still here.” Nolan felt a grin tugging at his lips. “I’ve just been quiet since I had to stop taking dance lessons.”

  Jadis laughed, a high, ringing sound with her head tilted back and a genuine
sparkle in her blue eyes. “Shame. I was going to invite you up on stage with me tomorrow night.”

  “Not sure the pole can handle my weight,” Nolan replied with a shrug, gesturing to his wheelchair.

  “Maybe it’s all that takeout you’ve been eating.” Mischief brightened her smile, setting Nolan’s pulse racing. “Might be time for a proper home-cooked meal.”

  “You offering?” Something—Nolan couldn’t be sure if it was her heady perfume, her smile of seemingly genuine delight, or the driving rhythm of the music—made him brazen.

  “Always.” She graced him with a little wink, then strode past him toward her dressing room. “Thank you, Clive.”

  “Of course, Queen Jadis.” The big bouncer chuckled, a sound like thunder rumbling deep in his barrel chest.

  Nolan couldn’t help glancing at her disappearing form in the heartbeat before Clive closed the door. Damn! His heart was doing strange things.

  “Where you off to?” Clive’s voice brought Nolan back to reality.

  “Oh, out for a late-night stroll.” Nolan grinned, and Clive’s broad face mirrored the smile. “Nah, just thought I’d get out while the sun’s shining. After last night’s storm, I figure the streets are as clean as they’ll ever be.”

  “True that.” Clive shrugged and stepped back into his place in front of the dressing room door. “Take care of yourself, Nolan. And come pay us a visit more than once a month, yeah?”

  “Will do, man.” Nolan bumped the big bouncer’s fist and wheeled off down the hallway. The corridor led past the dressing room, the storage rooms, and the manager’s office, ending in a back door that opened out onto an alleyway. On Nolan’s request—and a small fee—the manager of the Spacer’s Paradise had installed a wheelchair ramp on that back door. It was much easier to get in and out of his house if he didn’t always have to wheel through the peeler bar’s front entrance.

  The stink of the alleyway hit him the moment he shoved the door open. A unique cocktail of years-old garbage, stagnant puddles of rainwater mingled with urine, and something else not even Taia could identify, it was a stench that never seemed to go away. It made Nolan long for the safety of his helmet, where he could switch off the external sensors to block out the smell.

  Rolling down the ramp, Nolan pushed his chair through the alleyway, navigating between the massive, rusting metal dumpsters and around the bottles, cans, and other debris littering the sodden street. He was surprised to find the sun near-setting—had he slept that long?—and the shadows cast by the tenement buildings around him casting deeper shadows. The air was cool, bordering on chilly, but the exertion of wheeling his chair kept him warm.

  Out of the alley he rolled, onto the broad street that cut through Shimmertown. No one remembered what the street had originally been called—now, it was simply known as “Glitter Trail,” a name it had earned for all the peeler bars, peep shows, and bordellos squatting along its five-kilometer length.

  Glitter Trail was a place of utter chaos. Vehicles zoomed up and down the streets, filling the air with the stink and deafening hum of their engines. Men and women looking for a good time—or drunk and stoned after their good time—thronged along the sidewalk in various stages of undress and inebriation. Shouting, laughing, jostling each other, in some cases even starting fights, the people moving through Shimmertown seemed not to care about anything beyond satisfying whatever immediate desire gripped them.

  At night, every building along Glitter Trail would come alive with neon lights, flashing signs, and the light-up clothing worn by the men and women on the balconies and in the windows overlooking the street. It was an overwhelming array of dazzling illumination, far too garish and glitzy for Nolan’s taste. The last glow of the setting sun helped to dim the glow, at least a little.

  Nolan’s path led west, away from deep Shimmertown, back toward the broad street that separated it from the quieter, lower-income, tenement-cluttered Grove District. He felt only too glad to leave the dazzling lights, myriad smells, and tumult of thumping music and fast-moving crowds behind.

  “Hey, Bastien!” Nolan called out as he rolled toward the intersection. “How’s things?”

  Bastien, a shabbily clad man with a too-long, too-scruffy beard and grey hair long ago gone wild, looked up at him from the pile of blankets, rags, and boxes that served as his usual panhandling post. “Could be better,” he muttered. “People be mighty stingy these days, so they be. Lacking respect for our sort, they be.” He scratched his arm, where a festering sore nearly obscured the faded tattoo of the IAF’s shield insignia.

  “I hear you, brother.” Nolan dropped a handful of credits into the old man’s copper pot. “This’ll keep you going until the I.O.V.A. finally cuts you that check.”

  “That’ll be the day!” Bastien’s lip curled upward, revealing nearly an entire row of missing teeth. “The high-and-mighty pricks at the Imperial Office of Veteran Affairs can kiss my hairy ass, way they treat us.”

  Nolan couldn’t argue with the sentiment. He’d gotten lucky—as a Silverguard, his disability benefits had been processed with the full force of Master Sergeant Kane scowling behind it—but too many others, especially former IAF grunts, could go for years without the Empire ever paying what was owed for their service. It didn’t matter that Bastien had been an Ironhand, serving on the front lines of the Nyzarian Empire’s war to push the Terran League out of Imperial space and back into the Milky Way Galaxy. Men like Sergeant Bastien Colandine wound up sitting on street corners because too many of the bureaucrats that served Emperor Allezander didn’t care about seeing their veterans properly looked after.

  Just then, the traffic on the broad avenue slowed and the light beeped, indicating it was safe to cross.

  “Keep the faith, brother!” Nolan called out as he wheeled out onto the street.

  Bastien offered something in reply, but it was too garbled by his missing teeth and thick beard for Nolan to understand.

  Across the street, Nolan took a left, then turned down the first alley he reached. He’d chosen the dead drop because of its proximity to his place—he couldn’t wheel across New Avalon, and there would be times when he’d have to move around outside the combat suit.

  Nolan scowled as he rolled into the back one-way street where Agent Styver had set up the dead drop. Even half-competent Ironhands knew to avoid alleys and anything else that could be turned into choke points and kill zones. Unfortunately, Agent Styver hadn’t given him much choice.

  Muscles tense and senses on full alert, Nolan rolled down the alleyway. He couldn’t help noticing the abundance of posters proclaiming “An Exodus for Exodus!” here, too. Not surprising, given that the low-income indigent neighborhoods of New Avalon—areas like Grove District and the Bolt Hole where people barely earned enough to put food on their table—tended to be hotbeds for anti-Imperial sentiments. Men and women struggling to afford to live were always easiest to drag into causes that decried inequality and injustices.

  During his IAF and Silverguard days, Nolan might have taken offense at the thought of Imperial citizens trying to “throw off the yoke of its overlords”—the same overlords he’d followed into battle against the Terran League. Now, he just thought of them as the same sort of conspiracy-spouting rabble rousers that had existed in every empire and nation since the beginning of human history.

  He’d heard their message over the pirate radio stations Taia monitored in her incessant intel-gathering. The Liberationists, as they had taken to calling themselves, advocated freedom from the Nyzarian Empire and self-governance instead of the Imperial Consul who answered to Emperor Allezander. Liberty, equality, and prosperity was a nice dream, lacking in both substance and reality. After all, New Avalon’s economy relied entirely on commerce from the natural resources harvested for, and delivered to, Genesis and the other Imperial worlds.

  He rolled his eyes as he wheeled past the posters. At least they’re better than the SST. Then again, anything was better than the terrorists that went b
y the nom-de-idiots “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The Old Terran phrase—“thus always to tyrants” in the same long-dead language as the Silverguard and Terran League maxims—was the watchword for the violent ideologues that believed bombing schools, passenger aircraft, and civilian targets was the right way to win a war against an empire that spanned more than fifty planets across eight solar systems. Including, as of three years ago, the Milky Way Galaxy that had signed a treaty to cease hostilities and begin the process of being incorporated into the Imperial demesne.

  The problem of the SST had grown as the message of the Liberationists took root in the hearts and minds of quixotic Exodians. According to the information Taia had managed to pull from IDF and Imperial records, the Nyzarian Empire believed that there was a good deal of crossover between the two movements. The few captured SST terrorists that had been publicly broadcast had all spouted the Liberationist motto, which led the powers that be to suspect the SST of recruiting from Liberationist sympathizers and the more passionate members.

  Thankfully, the SST appeared to have gone mostly dormant on Exodus VI—after a Protection Bureau-led raid on a terrorist cell outside Phobury, which Nolan had been drafted into by Agent Styver. And, as long as the Liberationists didn’t turn violent, there was no reason why they couldn’t continue spouting their credos and kumbaya chants. The rest of the planet would get on with their lives the best they could. Including one Nolan Garrett, wheelchair-riding assassin and sufferer of the stench filling the reeking alley.

  The dead drop was hidden behind the foulest smelling of the dumpsters. Nolan grimaced at the thick coating of slime that dripped down the dumpster’s exterior, but he had no choice but to brush up against it as he reached for the slim metal case Agent Styver—or one of the flunkies Nolan had never seen—had left for him.

  The case was barely wider than his hand and a few centimeters thick, made of plain black metal that had been purposely coated with rust and a layer of dust. To anyone else, it looked like some random piece of junk discarded in the alleyway. But when Nolan pressed his hand to the underside of the case, a tiny light sprang into existence in the metallic surface. A few seconds later, the palm scan complete, the top of the metal case slid open.