“Can’t you assume those you will be working with will help with your escape?”
“That is likely, but I don’t take anything for granted. Try and come up with your own solution.”
“Certainly. Thank you for this task. It should make full use of my programming and be a good learning experience for helping you in the future…or whoever owns me in the future.”
“Are you trying to imply that I might not survive this?”
“Exactly! It’s good to know that my attempt at an implication led to a correct inference. Anyway, it’s difficult to calculate your odds of survival without knowing the details of your mission, but factoring in the public impact of your usual jobs and the fact that you’ll be surrounded by the highest security you’re likely to see in a single city, it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which you emerge from this alive.”
He had a point. “True, but don’t forget one thing: People are stupid. There are always angles to exploit.”
“Aren’t you people, Rico?”
“That’s debatable.”
“While we’re landing, I have something for you to try guessing in twenty questions, Rico.”
I manually accessed Dip’s memory buffer and looked for an unusual sequence repeated over and over.
“Are you thinking of a shoe?”
“You cheated.”
“I hope you learned something from that.”
CHAPTER 6
I had to land my ship about 9,000 miles from the capital city. My large store of items that make killing fun and easy would not be readily accessible, so I was forced to put whatever I might need into a couple of bags that I could carry with me.
My favorite firearms are Arco X5 blasters that burn nice, large holes through organic matter. One shot to anywhere on the torso will almost always be instantly lethal. The blasters are highly illegal. Even militaries tend not to use them as small arms, since a shot from one can rip through a creature and keep right on going through a school, a hospital, and an orphanage before finally dissipating (I haven’t actually tested that in the field, but if I ever got that shot lined up, it would be hard not to take it). If you’re someone like me who is incapable of caring about collateral damage on some planet he never plans to visit again, they’re perfect.
Now, technically, all weapons deadlier than small knives were forbidden in the capital. But of course my interest was more in what security might be able to detect. There was no way they could individually search everyone coming into the city, but Dip found that I would have to pass through some mass scanners when taking the inbound trams. They’d be looking for large power sources that could be nuclear bombs or worse; and unfortunately, the X5 blaster uses a pretty insane power source that basically screams that you’re there to kill everyone. So those had to stay with Dip. Instead I’d be taking some Shiro pistols as my main weapons. Their power source isn’t much bigger than what you’d find in a lot of common electronics, but they also only burn small holes through people—often not even all the way through. A single shot is pretty survivable, but they can be fired quite fast, which allows me to put a lot of shots into a target.
In case I was going to enter any buildings where I might be specifically scanned, I was bringing two pistols that worked on the old explosive powder design. Completely mechanical, a spring-loaded magazine feeds bullets into the barrel. A bullet is basically a piece of lead with explosive powder packed behind it. A physical strike to the back of the bullet explodes the powder and projects the piece of lead forward at a high speed while causing the top part of the gun to slide backward and load another bullet from the magazine. The lead pieces have hollow tips, so they flatten on impact and do major soft tissue damage. An ingenious ancient design (these were called 1911s, which refers to the approximate year of their invention), they work well and, lacking electronic power sources, they are completely invisible to most weapon scans. Each pistol fires only eight shots before the magazine has to be replaced, but they’re accurate enough in short ranges that I can make each of those shots count. They’re very loud, but that does help with intimidation.
As backup, I always carry a revolver—an even older design. It keeps six bullets in rotating chambers, which click into place with each trigger pull. It’s a last resort, and I have deployed it before to good effect.
I packed those weapons (I’d be carrying two of the Shiro pistols on my person for the trip) along with some clothes and toiletries and minor explosives. “Will you be able to easily communicate with me from here?” I asked Dip as I prepared to leave the ship.
“I should be able to use relays to communicate with you directly as needed, Rico. Please be careful, though. If you need an emergency pickup, I calculate approximately a ninety-two percent chance of my being shot out of the sky were I to even approach the city.”
“I’ll do my best not to get into random gunfights, but keep trying to find an alternate way past air traffic security. I’ll see what my contact here knows.”
“Hopefully, he will have useful knowledge, but I will continue to work on the problem. In fact, by factoring in some maneuvers I’m capable of making, I now calculate a nearly ten percent chance of my being able to land in the capital. Even if I am successful at that, though, our chances of taking off and escaping atmosphere are incalculably small.”
“Fun times.” I would essentially be trapped in the city if something did go wrong. I hoped my contact had that figured out, but it was starting to look like I was going to be late to meet him. I quickly left the ship and headed for the tram. There was some diversity of alien species on the train, but I saw more humans and Corridians than any other. Humans have gotten along pretty well with Corridians because they are what some people call “Star Trek” aliens. Those are aliens that kinda look like they could be humans in makeup. Despite all the PSAs about not judging sentients by appearances, most people get nervous standing next to something that looks like a giant insect. They want to smash in its head. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just instinct. Humans can anthropomorphize anything, but it helps if the species throws us a bone by at least having a face.
Almost every sentient species I’ve bothered to research had racial battles before they advanced to the point of interstellar travel, and they tend to look at interaction between alien species with that frame of mind. But it’s not the same; the physiological differences are huge. People take it as a matter of faith that all sentient species are equal, but in the back of their heads they know there is no rational basis for that assumption. All the sentients evolved separately on separate worlds with separately developed brains; any similarities really are by chance. But we want all intelligent things to be equal, as if by wanting it we could make it so. If we just got into some big wars where we wiped out and conquered each other, it would seem a lot more honest to me than trying to live together.
I like honesty. You hardly ever see real honesty in the universe. Nothing scares people more.
“Are you here for the conference?” asked some creature I didn’t recognize.
He/she/it had interrupted my train of thought—I was trying to figure out how long it would take to kill everyone on the train (a routine mental exercise I do). I rarely kill so indiscriminately, but my instinct would be to go for the children last. They are smaller targets, but their survival instincts are usually very poor, and they probably wouldn’t even know to run and hide. “I’ve got a headache. I’m not really in a talking mood.” I decided to be a jerk while I’m here. That means I don’t have to concentrate as much on social niceties, but I still don’t have to worry about standing out, because jerks are very common throughout the universe.
The tram slowed as it neared the capital. Like many large cities, it had slums with all the alien diversity you could want and plenty of crime and violence (guess which people tend to flee colonies of their own species?), and then things became much more monolithic as you got closer to the city center. Nar Valdum was our first attempt to colonize a planet in conc
ert with another species and was roughly half human and half Corridian, which was supposed to prove some point I’m sure no one could coherently explain. They’re trying to hold it up as a positive example of different species coexisting—i.e., uncomfortably but without outright violence—but it just seems asinine to me.
It takes a beam of light one hundred thousand years to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. There is enough room for all species to have plenty of colonized planets and never have to run into each other. But I guess that’s just too simple. Still, I’m not complaining. Chaos and stupidity make things easier for me.
I was starting to feel a bit nervous as the tram took me farther away from my only means of escape. I was trapped here, and if somehow my masked slipped, I wouldn’t be able to shoot my way to safety. You might think being inconspicuous would be as simple as just following the laws, but most people don’t know the laws by actually memorizing them. They know what feels wrong and that what feels really wrong is probably against the law. No action I take feels different than another for me, so I constantly have to check everything I’m doing against a little list of social mores and laws I’ve memorized. I had gotten pretty good at it, but it was never easy.
I arrived in the city with some time before my lunch meeting, so I went to the hotel room Dip had reserved. Not too cheap, not too expensive. Staying there said absolutely nothing about me. Inconspicuous. After I dropped off my luggage, I headed to the café—a fancy little place that seemed to cater evenly to humans and Corridians. I arrived at the proper time and, just as I had feared, had no idea what to do next. No one immediately approached me, and no one stood out in the crowd (I would hope whoever it was would be smart enough not to), so I got a table outside and decided to wait. I ordered some tea and brought up the local news on my reader. I wasn’t actually planning to read, but I wanted to try this new thing I had been working on.
My brain being split was mainly advantageous when I took on two targets at once, but I had found that I could also have one of the parts do simple tasks while I focused elsewhere. What I had tried to break down into a simple task this time was the appearance of reading news. News reading is more difficult to fake than book reading, because I’m not just reading cover to cover. I have to pretend to scan for stories that interest me, then slow down to focus more on certain parts. It’s a minor distinction, but what if another trained observer like me was looking for something out of place? If I’m going to pretend to be normal, I might as well commit to it fully. Nothing is more suspicious than something that’s just a bit off.
So I sat at the café, and while my eyes and hands pretended to read the news, my ears and perception were concentrating on the voices around me. No one was saying much worth spying on, but it was really just practice anyway. In fact, the news did finally get my attention with its repeated references to Zaldia. This included pictures of the carnage and what looked like a crying child among dead bodies—though I wasn’t familiar enough with the species to say for sure. This sort of thing was horrific to most people.
I briefly considered actually reading one of the stories but decided to just let Dip summarize anything interesting for me later. Instead, I went back to listening and pretending to read. I now heard some people mention Zaldia, and the expectation that the big conference was going to lead to something being done about the occupation. So it wasn’t too much of a mystery why the syndicate would be interested in the goings on here; I just didn’t know what their intentions were.
I had to stop listening to sip my tea. Pretending to read the news, listening around me, and sipping tea was a bit much for me. With some practice, though, it seemed I could get it down. Appearing to be absorbed in something while actually listening intently to everything around me really was a skilled illusion. But I made one mistake that revealed my abnormality.
When the café exploded and men ran toward us screaming and firing guns into the crowd, I neatly set down the reader on my table instead of dropping it in surprise. I don’t think anyone was paying attention to me at that point, though.
CHAPTER 7
Five sentients were firing energy weapons with crazed zeal, screaming something about a mechanized god. People around me fell, dead or wounded. I was right at the center of a terrorist attack. What were the chances?
Not very high is the answer. But that was not my main concern at the moment.
I was familiar with this group. They called themselves the Calabrai. Knowledge of the existence of other sentient species has been a problem for many religions, as most were formed before people even considered the possibility of life on other worlds (or knew that there were other worlds). Thus each religion is mostly confined to the particular species and home world of its origin, and adaptation to the new reality was hard. The Calabrai basically took religions from many different species—one “true” religion from each—and considered them all as having been based on the same true god. This one true god supposedly took form as a gigantic city-leveling robot called Calab. Calab is hidden on some unknown planet (though he is rumored to have been destroyed), and he keeps sending out commands to his followers to kill unbelievers.
There are a lot of obvious problems with giving this kind of robot artificial intelligence, but you can hardly blame people for failing to consider that it might become the basis for a violent new cult. And the Calabrai do follow its commands, though their efforts to kill the unbelievers never seem to amount to much more than huge annoyances to the targeted planets, as they aren’t a sophisticated enough force to topple governments. It made sense that they’d be interested in the expansion of powers of the Galactic Alliance and would attack Nar Valdum now, as one of the initial reasons most civilizations exist is to keep kill-happy barbarians at bay.
I try to avoid religious disputes. Well, I try to avoid people most of the time, but I especially have no interest in debating religion. One can point out that religion is just a bunch of superstitious, irrational beliefs; but is that any different from the beliefs of atheists? Everyone likes to think they’re logical and reasonable, but I find all people to be equally absurd and irrational. The main difference is that the religious tend to be a bit more organized in their irrationality.
Now, a lot of people consider thinking a giant killer robot is a god to be laughably ridiculous, and I get that. I just don’t get how it may be socially acceptable for me to laugh at the Calabrai and their poorly examined beliefs, but wrong for me to laugh at how people mindlessly go to their jobs every day and provide for their families with no real introspection as to why and to what end. It’s all nonsense, but at least the Calabrai are acting with some real purpose.
That purpose right now was to kill me. I didn’t take it personally; they would kill just about anybody, and I simply happened to be there. It’s like when people get killed in the crossfire when I’m on a job—nothing personal there either. That’s just how things are. And I really did kind of admire their zeal. I kill people because it’s something to do. They feel they’re doing something right and good, the way others might when helping poor people, but with fun killing instead. And I don’t have any concept of what that’s like. I don’t know how you just choose to believe something like that. But it does seem like it might make life easier.
Life was not easy at the moment. For about half a second, I sat there in the open contemplating what to do—a very dangerous use of time. These people had nothing to do with my assignment, and it’s a pretty drilled-in rule that I don’t kill outside the job, so it took me a moment to realize I was going to have to kill them. This was most definitely a kill-or-be-killed situation, so it was clearly an exception to the rule. And while that might appear to mean that I would simply draw my guns and shoot the five assassins until they stopped moving, I still had my mission to consider. If I killed them expertly, it’d be obvious that I’m a trained killer. The mission would be ruined, and I’d be forced to flee…and I’d probably fail
at that because of the tight security lockdown. Big mess. Lots of people dead—including me.
Luckily I had planned for a similar situation: being discovered with guns before a hit was carried out. My story would be that I’m a cop on vacation, and I always bring my guns out of habit. It was believable, at least. Cops can be arrogant (just like me—though I would argue that I have more justification). Killing five attackers should be a feat for a cop who capably uses a gun but doesn’t kill people every week like I do, so I would have to make this look a bit lucky—I could be skilled but not too skilled.
Which takes a tremendous amount of skill, incidentally.
I drew one gun with my right hand and fired twice at one terrorist, missing the first shot on purpose and burning him with the second, the lizard-like creature devoting a dying shriek to his robotic master. I shot him again to make sure he was dead. I really don’t like these weaker guns that can’t destroy a whole torso. One shot per kill makes things much easier.
I fired three more shots as I went for cover (a cop would use only inanimate objects and not other people as a shield, so I had to watch myself). Two of the three shots struck a human terrorist, and the remaining three now focused on me, the only armed resistance the Calabrai were facing (“civilized” people do nothing but panic and scream in these situations, which would seem to be the opposite of civilized). We were in a pretty open area, so I could only find partial cover behind a lamppost.
I reminded myself not to smile. I tend to smile when I shoot people, because it’s challenging and fun. But that freaks people out—which usually is an advantage, but not in this situation.
It was odd killing people in a socially acceptable manner; it felt like trying to walk around on my hands. Still, the terrorists’ aim was pathetic, and I probably got a bit cocky. I fired two more close but missing shots before killing a third. And then my luck ran out.
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