Under Dark Sky Law

by Tamara Boyens

  “I’ll be directly supervising all the security details this evening, so you let me know if anything else happens, and I’ll take care of it. We were delayed getting here because of continuing incidents at the border,” Avery said with a look that led her to believe that he’d seen what had happened with the younger recruit earlier.

  She wanted to ask them more questions, but knew it wouldn’t be appropriate. She didn’t want to risk getting the men in trouble, and from the sounds of it, the tools she needed to get her answers were in the bag.

  “I’ll see to it that you’re not disturbed the remainder of the evening—as I understand it you were also gravely injured and could use some rest,” Stone said.

  She gave them a genuine smile. “Thank you both very much. Good luck dealing with these new recruits. They’re quite a handful,” she said.

  “You’re telling me,” Avery said and rolled his eyes. Stone kicked his foot lightly.

  Stone cleared his throat. “There have been challenging staff shortages recently, which I’m sure you’ll read more about this evening. We’ve got this hotel monitored—a lot of important business and political figures are taking asylum here, but keep your ears open,” he said, alluding to the point that he didn’t quite trust his own staff to carry out duties effectively.

  That explained why she was here and not in some dingy military bunker on the outskirts of the dome. She figured it was just their typical dome habit of holding on to protocols regardless of the situation—runners in Phoenix were treated well because they found that it reduced incidents of theft and misconduct when the runners were treated with respect and value. Imagine that. The fact that they were protecting her in the same area as key political figures also meant that someone felt she was an important political object herself. Curious.

  They both shook her hand again, restating their gratitude for saving Sanchez, knowing that she could have just as easily dumped his body out of the combat vehicle and left him to die while she escaped. The fact that she had raised their opinion of her enough to stop thinking of her as pit trash spoke volumes about their character, and she was glad to finally have a few people with some kind of sense around again.

  After wheeling in the suitcase and securing the door again, she stripped down to her underwear again. At least it was a comfortable temperature—that was one thing that she sometimes missed about the domes. The flats were always erratic in their temperature fluctuations, while the pits were typically either too hot or too cold. The tightly controlled environment in the domes were always just right. In fact, if you were in a dome that wasn’t doing a good job of keeping the temperature constant, it was a good bet that something was about to go catastrophically wrong. It was like the harbinger of a dying star, a good sign that the dome would fail and become another abandoned flat. Each of the domes had a vested interest in keeping the other domes in various cities running—if a dome failed the citizens would inevitably attempt to migrate to another dome city. This had of course led to widespread debates about border security and immigration policies. The ones that were excepted for immigration became a burden to the fragile closed systems—the ones that didn’t get accepted died in the pits, which would spark cavalcades of political unrest.

  This was one of the reasons why media had become so severely restricted in the past few years. It was much easier to advocate for stricter immigration policies if you didn’t have to deal with images of your friends and neighbors suffocating to death in the pits. In the early days Xero had opened a quarantined area for those who were not evolved enough to breath outside the domes. These days the air in the pits had gotten so bad that there really wasn’t a need for such halfway houses—most people were dead before they ever even made it to a pit colony.

  Now comfortably in her PJs, she tossed the suitcase onto the tall bed and jumped up there after it. She couldn’t help but take a moment to roll around in the soft morass of frothy white blankets and pillows. She scissored her arms and legs back and forth like she was a making a snow angel. Snow—that was something she hadn’t seen in awhile. Some northern domes used to simulate snow in the winter for the psychological comfort of those who weren’t used to living without it, but that had long ago become too expensive, and it had been a long time since she’d done a run far enough north into Canada to see any real snow in the pits.

  After enjoying the minute of frivolous indulgence, she stopped fucking around and opened the suitcase. Inside there was everything she could have hoped for—there were business casual clothes, the sort she would have gone somewhere and bought if she hadn’t been put on lockdown after the attack, and there were also some hardier selections, like a pair of military camo pants and other casual clothing items along with some useful toiletries. No additional wig was available, but she wouldn’t have expected them to think of something like that. She was just going to have to deal with reconciling her two personas. Sometimes it was good to have Xero readily accessible, even when they were in Anastasia’s territory.

  Underneath the clothes was the real important stuff, and she made sure to hold the lid of the suitcase at an angle so that any cameras wouldn’t have a good view of anything inside. There was a small computer that she recognized as one of the newer models she’d been shipping from dome to dome recently. There wasn’t a whole lot of use for them in the pits, so she typically just kept them stashed about various hiding places in the domes that she frequented the most. This was exactly what she needed.

  There was also a small toolkit that had the miniature screw drivers and wire cutters that she’d need to get some of her work done, along with various wires and connectors. The last piece of the puzzle was a communicator with a scrambling unit on it. Perfect. Avery and Stone won the prize for being her new best friends. She looked around the room and located the main camera and microphone surveying sleeping area. It was hidden amongst some of the glowing decorations, but she was well-practiced in locating and disabling surveillance equipment, and within a few minutes she had it rewired to show another nearby room. Hopefully with the help of Avery and Stone no one would charge in demanding to know what she’d done with the surveillance machines. From the sound of it, they had more important people to keep an eye on, and more pressing issues to deal with.

  She went about the rest of the suite and used the scrambling unit on the communicator as a makeshift scanner for anything she might have missed. There was actually one left, and she was especially happy disabling a sneaky camera hidden inside shower. Perverts. When everything looked clear, she took one of the screwdrivers and partially dismantled the television. After a little digging she removed a monitoring device from the back of the unit and unceremoniously dumped it into the trash. Not that anyone using the suite after her would likely care if their television watching habits were being monitored, but just the principle of the thing bothered Xero, and she might decide to wire the computer to the bigger screen for better intel if she managed to tap into any valuable underground news networks.

  While replacing the back panel of the television she thought of Evan, and she was silently grateful for all of the engineering know-how that he’d taught her over the years. Neptune was an amazing engineer, maybe one of the best she’d ever seen, but she couldn’t even begin to hold a candle to Evan. Her face went blank. She had long ago stopped mourning for all the people she had lost and continued to lose on a daily basis, but she didn’t think she’d ever totally stop missing Evan. She shook off the thought and finished making her rounds of the hotel.

  During the course of her security inspection, she found that the fancy curtains were actually affixed to the window, making it impossible for her to see out and vice versa. She probably could have pried them free, but it would have been at significant cost and damage to the facilities. As much as she would have liked to see out and watch what was going on downtown, it was probably better that no one could see up through her window either. At least she had access to a clock to keep track of the relative time. It was 6pm, and
it would be getting dark outside soon. Someone would probably be coming to retrieve her early in the morning, but there should still be plenty of time to try and gather intel and also get some sleep. She knew from experience that not taking care of yourself after a rapid healing treatment could have some unpleasant side effects.

  Once she was satisfied with the setup of the room, she slipped on a pair of jeans and a black tank top that were among the clothing selections in the suitcase. With any hope she would be undisturbed, but it was probably better to remain clothed in case any of the military folk got nosy and decided to come bother the exotic pit runner. An unsettling trend of fighting naked or half naked was shaping up that week, and it wasn’t a tradition that she particularly wanted to continue.

  The big executive desk would serve as a great workbench, and she set up all of the technical equipment in a meticulous fashion. It cemented her feelings that Stone and Avery were no fools, and were likely actually on special ops teams. They had included everything that she could have possibly wanted for security and intelligence hacking. This was going to be a breeze. With a few minutes she had connected to the internet and bypassed all the monitoring protocols. It was so much faster and easier with the powerful laptop than it had been trying to patch things together on the fly with the tablet a few days ago at the hospital.

  Now she was able to access the reputable underground news agencies, and she immediately understood why there had been so many personnel shortages. There were riots breaking out all across the flats, and there had been a near breach on the western side of the Phoenix dome. It wasn’t totally clear from the patch reports, but looked like skeletons had been involved with all or most of the attacks. Calavera had some real explaining to do. Although honestly, she didn’t think Calavera had the resources or the smarts to pull something like this off. There was something very suspicious about the whole thing. The attacks seemed incredibly well-planned, but in the end the rioters were just retreating and giving up after causing a sufficient amount of mayhem. Calavera wouldn’t be able to come up with anything so sophisticated. At best she was a charismatic two bit criminal with a cult-like following, which is why in the end she had decided to ally with Xero. She had a much more developed network of underground activities, and the whole Southern Arizona territory basically belonged to her. Calavera’s thugs were dangerous to tangle with, as Argon had learned the hard way back in the flats, but in the end they were really just an annoyance. Xero had agreed to a truce primarily as a way to avoid inconvenience. Burying bodies in the hot desert sand was hard work.

  She flexed her fingers and got ready to poke around at some seriously questionable sites. Since hacking really wasn’t her primary business, she didn’t usually go messing with some of the higher security clearance sites because there was always a decent risk that she might get caught, but she was pretty desperate and impatient for information. During debriefing she may or may not get any kind of reasonable update. She would try getting ahold of one of the Grease Weasels via communicator, but even with all the known bugs removed from the room she didn’t want to take unnecessary risk by talking about sensitive information over them. There was no way she would even attempt reaching Calavera directly, as much as she wanted to tear her a new one. Communicators essentially worked on modified radio waves, and even one encrypted with a scrambler didn’t have the most airtight security. Out in the pits there typically weren’t enough people with the type of equipment to pick up those kinds of signals even if they wanted to, but they had fairly strict rules against using communicators while in the dome for a reason.

  After noodling around she managed to get access to a network of army communications. The transmissions weren’t clear, but at least from a lower level, no one seemed to have any clue why these attacks were happening or who was behind them. She played around on a few more sites and struck out, either failing to gain access or to find any new information that shed additional light onto the situation. After getting frustrated and realizing that she was in danger of getting caught hacking through some high level security, she gave up. Damn. Evan would have been able to cut through the security nets like butter, but she was nothing but a cheap imitation of his skills. She would have to try the communicator and hope that she was able to reach someone Grease Weasels.

  After verifying that the scrambler was installed and working properly she made an attempt to reach Argon’s communicator. A sick feeling rumbled in her stomach—she’d been deliberately avoiding thinking about what might have become of him, but it was impossible not to. From the news and military reports that she’d gotten access to, it looked like the skeleton riots had spread to an area that was directly adjacent to their shack in the flats, and who knew whether or not the skeletons coming to inspect the dead body they’d found were rogues or not? In retrospect splitting up seemed like a really foolish idea, but at the time she hadn’t known that any skeletons were directly involved in the larger fights.

  The communicator crackled and hissed and she cranked the volume down as low as it could go to avoid any accidental attention from neighboring suites or soldiers that might be guarding outside. Nothing. She fiddled with the knobs and tried adjacent frequencies, but all she ever got in return was more static. No Argon. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. She was in one of the worst possible places for reception. His transmitter could have been lost or damaged in a fight, but he could be just fine. Still. Shit. Not the result she was hoping for. Resisting the urge to throw the transmitter against the wall she took a deep breath and started trying to make contact with some of the Grease Weasels way back in the pits, starting with Milo. Milo would know exactly what to do.

  For several minutes she got nothing but more annoying static and screeching, but then she heard a faint voice.

  “Milo, is that you? This is Xero,” she said quietly but as clearly as she could in a codified version of Tohono O’odham. Following the code talkers who used the Navajo language for secret transmissions during WWII, they had adopted a standard of communicating in a modified form of the Tohono O’odham language. Native speakers of the language might recognize chunks of the language, but would still not be able to understand the message. All of the Grease Weasels were required to speak it, but not even their periphery and support teams could understand it. That, plus the scrambled encryption would make decoding the message by anyone other than another Grease Weasel quite challenging.

  “Xero! It’s you, you’re alive!” he said and whooped.

  He got quieter as he yelled in a different direction from the communicator. “Hey Neptune, it’s the boss!” he said and Xero wasn’t able to hear what Neptune said in reply, but knowing that at least the two of them were safe made her breathe an internal sigh of relief. At least home base was secure still. Not that she didn’t trust the rest of the Grease Weasels, but with Trina sick and Argon and her out of the picture it certainly left room for accidents and attacks.

  “You’re alive!” Milo said again into the transmitter. He cleared his voice and continued, “Um, not that I expected anything less of you or anything boss, but I don’t know if you’ve noticed—it’s getting crazy out here.”

  Xero laughed. “Don’t worry about it—I have in fact noticed that shit is going down,” she said and gave him a quick update of what had happened.

  “We’ve had no word from Argon either,” Milo said, and she could hear the sadness in his voice.

  “Any word from Calavera?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know about the attacks on you and Argon, but after seeing news about the skeleton riots popping up all over the place, we got one solid convo with her, but it was cut short over the communicator. She said that the riots weren’t her and that she was looking into the incidences. She sounded majorly stressed out, so I’m not sure what you want to make of that. Personally I don’t think she’s behind it,” he said.

  “I’m with you on that one—I think we both know she’s not clever enough to do something like this on her own. You think so
meone’s got the screws to her?” she asked. Milo always had a good sense about these types of things.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. The whole situation is strange. We haven’t gone down to Nogales to rough her up in person yet—wanted to see if you turned up and had any thoughts about it first. If she were down in South Tucson we probably would have already gone to shake her up a bit, but you know the last time we had to barge into Nogales it wasn’t pretty,” he said.

  “We’re in a compromised position—I would stay away from there until we really have our shit together, or there’s some good reason to do so, let’s stay out of Nogales for the time being. If we go to Nogales, I need to be there,” she said. “I assume you’ve sent out recon teams?”

  “Yeah, soon as we got news that things had gone south I put out recon teams to figure out what was happening. I’ve given them all orders to stay undercover and out of any conflicts until we give them the word. Couldn’t get anything out of the feds—things are locked down super tight out there in dome town. No sign of Argon, and all we knew was that you’d been involved in some incident between the Casa Grande flats and the Phoenix dome,” he said.

  “Damn. At least you didn’t find a body, but this is not good,” she said. “Good work though—I knew I could count on you to keep things running Milo.”

  “Thanks, you know I got this,” he said lightly, but she could tell he was happy to hear the praise. It had probably been one hell of a week trying to keep the system from falling apart. Southern Arizona was a volatile area even without active conflict situations going on.

  “How’s Trina doing?” she said. One of the other unintended consequences of this snag was the delay in getting the Ketocillin for Trina.