by Alex Lamb
On the other side lay a room with black, deactivated walls and a large interactive table of the sort gamblers preferred. The fixer sat behind it dressed in a charcoal grey mocksuit, arms folded. A pair of men in black gym-wear with grotesquely augmented muscles flanked him on either side. The fixer’s huge brown eyes radiated contempt. He didn’t look so young any more.
‘My boys are almost dead,’ he said. ‘They showed up in the hospital about twenty minutes ago with some convenient memory problems. One of them also had motor-neurone damage. He’ll be on myelin support for about a year. We didn’t sign up for that, so I want money to cover their medical bills.’
While he talked, Ann’s shield scanned the room for the inevitable surveillance and quietly shut it down.
‘How much?’ said Ann.
‘Two million peace,’ said the fixer.
‘I don’t have that kind of cash,’ she said. ‘And neither does my dad.’
The fixer slammed the table with both hands. ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ he yelled. ‘Your fucking daddy is a Fleet operative, you little bitch, and so are you. And if you don’t fucking pay me what I’m due, I’m going to spill that SAP-dump on every public channel I can find.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Ann, feigning fear. ‘What’s all this got to do with an SAP-dump?’
‘Listen to me,’ said the fixer. He waved a finger at her. ‘You think I don’t know when I’ve been stitched up? Your fucking daddy is the man who gave me that blackout code in the first place. I traded with him in good faith. I thought he was Clan. Do you think I’d ever have passed him a trial-rigger if I’d known I was messing with the Fleet?’
Ann no longer had to feign confusion. Unscrupulous pharma corps used trial-riggers to fake the results of drug tests. At least she now knew what the software patches were for, but knowing raised more questions than it answered.
‘That blackout code was supposed to keep the whole privacy level locked while my boys were in there,’ said the fixer. He sounded hurt. ‘And it worked fine for months before you showed up. Then tonight, it almost shut down halfway through the job. Surprise surprise. When I tried to unhook it afterwards, it started spewing that shit I sent you all over my view. Fleet script, I note.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Ann. ‘A trial-rigger?’
‘Don’t,’ said the fixer, fighting down apoplexy. ‘Don’t play dumb with me. We’re way past that. If I’m on the hook to the Fleet I’ve got nothing to lose, do you understand? I might as well go public. I’m here because I’m a businessman, and I had this dim, dim hope that maybe we’d be able to sort this all out like grown-ups. I don’t care who you’re trying to bust. So long as it’s not me, you can do what the fuck you like, but I still need to cover my fucking costs. I don’t expect to be used like a fucking noob.’
Ann spread her hands as if in confusion. At the same time, she subvoked the safeties off the stun-wands embedded in her forearms. Darts flashed out, burying themselves in the bodies of the two huge bodyguards. The fixer had half a second to look surprised and dive sideways. Ann’s third dart sliced through the air behind him.
‘Wait!’ he yelled, but Ann was already in motion, vaulting around the side of the table in the low-gees, her heels lost somewhere in the air behind her. Her fourth dart caught him in the neck as he scrabbled for cover. He slumped face down on the floor.
Ann took a moment to catch her breath. She rubbed her arms and grimaced as she inspected the tiny wounds the weapons had left. She’d need a little surgical attention when she returned to the dorm, but that problem was for later. First, she had to figure out how to get out of the mess she’d landed in.
As soon as he woke up, the fixer was likely to follow through on his promise and go public with his data. Furthermore, he almost certainly had the package on a timer, so killing him would only guarantee the release of everything he knew. If he was a smart man, he’d have timed the package to need a check-in after their meeting, which meant she might have just minutes to figure this out. She needed leverage and couldn’t secure it with the tools she had on her. Time to ask for help.
The prospect of calling Sam still didn’t appeal. He’d take a dim view. Furthermore, he’d be likely to use a rather absolutist approach to clean-up. The fixer would probably suffer until he divulged the key to the package and then vanish for ever. Given the kind of stakes the League played for, she doubted that dispatching a few crooks would stack up as relevant for Sam. Her new first officer – Jaco Brinsen – would almost certainly favour the same approach.
If she could find one, Ann wanted a less fatal way to resolve the problem. The fixer’s business operation couldn’t be that big, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered meeting his clients in person. Furthermore, he’d been liberal enough with his information to look almost honest. Executing him didn’t feel right.
She brought up the Chiyome’s crew listing in her view – just six names including her own. Everyone on that ship’s roster was a League operative. They had to be, given what the Chiyome was there to do. Of the officers arrayed before her, one leapt out: Kuril Najoma, the ship’s engineer. She’d worked with Kuril before. He was a good man – a professional and definitely not a killer.
Ann routed a call through her security shield to Kuril at his dorm room with a League security seal attached. An icon in her view pulsed as she waited for the link to open. Twenty long seconds later, he answered. Ann exhaled with relief as Kuril’s broad, earnest face filled a window in her display, his forehead wrinkled in confusion. She could tell he’d been asleep from the scrambled thatch of brown hair on his head.
‘Captain?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
Ann subvoked a message and sent it as raw text. The sight or even the sound of her right now would only confuse him.
Need a favour. Go to the pharm counter downstairs and get me a dose of field-issue stun-gone, two doses of Redact, one vial standard-issue medical micromachines, and an on-site programmer. Then come to this address immediately. Tell no one, and keep your traffic tag visible only to me.
His eyes went wide. She watched him quickly check the security seal on the message, worry drawing creases in his features.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way. I can be there in ten.’
Make it five.
She brought up a local map for him and watched his traffic tag light up in red as it changed status. While she waited for Kuril to arrive, Ann carefully reached out into the bar’s security system via her contacts, acquiring the command code for the door and prepping some database requests for the task to come. As soon as Kuril’s tag showed him at the building, Ann sent him a follow up message.
Go straight through the bar. Take the passage at the back on the left-hand side. Walk as far as the end wall.
As Kuril reached the hidden door, Ann slid it open to admit him. He stepped inside.
Kuril was a huge bear of a man with a gentle, introverted temperament. How he’d ended up involved in the desperate business of the League, Ann had never asked. He took in the sight of the unconscious criminals and then stared at her like a stranger, his eyes flicking back and forth between her face and her cleavage.
‘Captain?’ he said incredulously.
‘Good to see you,’ she said. ‘Did you bring the things I asked for?’
Kuril nodded absently, still not quite sure what he’d walked in on.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to change my face or voice right now, it hurts like hell. If you need proof, try this: three years ago I beat you at Go in a guayusa shop on Harmony that had live locusts in the window display.’
Kuril’s mouth fell open and then shut again. ‘You look … different,’ he said, blushing slightly. ‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Give those two meatbots the Redact doses. The scrawny one gets the micromachines. We target the pain pathways in his central nervous syst
em.’
He regarded her anxiously. ‘We’re torturing someone?’
‘Not if we can help it,’ said Ann.
Kuril moved quickly from body to body, administering the drugs while Ann picked up the programmer box, tethering it to the processor in her contacts and setting up the configuration she wanted. As soon as she was ready, she had Kuril help her prop the fixer up in his chair.
‘Now get behind him,’ she said. ‘It’s best if he never sees your face.’
She sat the programmer-box unobtrusively on the floor under the fixer’s chair. From there, it had enough network range to reach the tiny devices they’d injected without being obvious. Then she applied a quarter dose of the stun-gone to the fixer’s neck.
His eyes fluttered as he drifted back into consciousness. As his eyes took her in, his mouth curled into a sneer.
‘You’re a fool,’ he slurred. ‘Data’s on a timer. Who doesn’t these days?’
‘I guessed that,’ she said. ‘So I put you on a timer, too.’
She opened up the link to the programmer in her display and sent him a short jolt of pure pain. The fixer bucked in his chair with surprising force for a man still doped to the eyes. He didn’t scream. He was too busy trying to suck air into his struggling lungs.
‘I put something inside you,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying what, but you know how it feels now. Your agonising death is keyed to your own data release. The moment you go public, my crawlers will notice and post a signal to your spine. If we lose, you lose.’
He stared at her with a mix of panic and outright loathing.
‘In case it wasn’t already obvious, you’re in over your head,’ she said. ‘But you strike me as a decent enough guy, so instead of killing you, I’m going to save you. When you leave here, you’re heading straight to the shuttle port. When you get there, you’ll find a ticket waiting for you on the next nestship out to Nazca under the name of Sundar Kim, courtesy of ISPO undercover ops. You’re going to start a new life on that colony. A good one. You get one network call out, and that’s to shut down the timer on that data packet. Don’t bother trying to call anyone else. We’ll be listening. Do as you’re told and you’ll be safely in coma within the hour, otherwise you’ll be dead. And believe me, you’ll be a hell of a lot safer out there than you are here.’
‘You wouldn’t do that,’ he wheezed. ‘You’re Fleet.’
Ann smiled like a shark. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. You need another jolt to convince you?’
‘No!’
‘Good. And now you get to walk out of the room a free man. Congratulations, you win.’
She applied the rest of the dose to his neck and stood back to give him room. She gestured at the exit.
‘I’m Made Platinum,’ he said. ‘You’ll be hearing about this.’
‘No, you’re not,’ she replied. ‘You’re Sundar Kim, an unaffiliated project manager with a modest bank account and good prospects. Enjoy it. It’s more fun out there than this dump, I can assure you.’
The fixer shot her a look of pure spite, staggered to his feet and walked silently to the door. As soon as he was gone, Kuril exhaled noisily.
‘Sooner or later that man’s going to figure out he’s not on a timer,’ he said. ‘Without a stabilising framework, those micromachines will drain out of his body within hours.’
‘He’ll be far away before that happens,’ said Ann. ‘And by tomorrow morning, so will we. We’re looking at the end of civilisation, Kuril. We can afford to play a little fast and loose.’
On paranoid instinct, she quickly checked the fixer’s movements in her security shield, but he was headed out of the bar as ordered, having made a single call to a nondescript secure address. The tail she’d put on him was operating perfectly. It’d warn her if anything weird happened.
Kuril sagged against the wall. ‘Why me, if you don’t mind me asking? Why not Jaco?’
‘Jaco would have insisted we mind-clamp the guy for his data key and then dump his body out of an airlock. He doesn’t like loose ends. I was prepared to bet you felt differently.’
‘You bet right,’ he said.
‘But I’m going to need you to keep quiet about all this,’ she said. ‘The League won’t like it. It’s not their style. Can I count on you? You know how they feel about mistakes – they burn them out before they spread, no matter who makes them.’
‘Of course.’
She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Then thank you,’ she said. ‘And sorry for involving you. The way I see it, everything we’re doing is an attempt to minimise the loss of life in the big picture. Which means that every life counts – even a scumbag like our Mr Kim.’
‘Don’t worry. I’d have done the same thing. Or tried to, at any rate.’
‘Now get out of here,’ said Ann with a companionable smile. ‘My security will cover your exit from the building. I’ll follow in ten minutes. That should give us a solid hour before these two guys wake up with a bad case of memory-blur.’
Thankfully, the problem had resolved itself with plenty of time left over to remove her status report from the network. Presuming there wasn’t further fallout from the event, she and the League were in the clear. Still, Ann knew she’d be counting the hours till she left port the next morning, checking the tail she’d set every time her anxiety bubbled up.
She wasn’t kidding herself about why all this had happened. She’d agreed to follow through on the favour for Sam without having the first clue as to how his operation at Triton worked or who was involved. She should have made him explain more. Not understanding had nearly ruined everything.
With Ruiz involved, the game was changing too fast for her to rely on simply following orders. In the IPSO Fleet, officers were expected to ask questions and act independently to achieve their commander’s intent. The same applied in the League. Ann knew she needed to step up to that plate. If she didn’t understand the role she’d been asked to play, they might not get through the next few months alive.
4.2: MARK
After several hours of tedious Fleet upgrades, medical checks and legal paperwork, Mark floated out of a transit pod into the lounge of the most spacious and well-appointed shuttle he’d ever seen. The entire interior had been lined with reactive biopolymers. Curving padded walls with a mother-of-pearl sheen swept down to meet at a discussion area with bio-nouveau couches, luminous clamber-web and projector bubbles. It was like visiting the inside of a designer pumpkin. A cluster of people dressed in shipwear floated down near the central meeting area, chatting like old friends – his fellow explorers, apparently. He felt a stab of awkwardness just looking at them.
Nelson drifted up to meet him, dressed in Fleet blue today rather than his usual slick duds, but no less immaculate for it.
‘Hi, Mark. Good to see you,’ he said, extending a warm hand. ‘I’m glad this all worked out so well.’
Mark accepted the gesture and tried for a smile. If Nelson had any idea what happened the night before, he showed no sign.
‘I trust you slept well?’ said Nelson.
Mark had not. The Fleet dorm had been as blandly acceptable as always. But between the blood-scrubbing, the adrenalin come-down from the fight and too much thinking about Will’s words, Mark had struggled to relax.
‘Well enough.’
‘Great,’ said Nelson. ‘Let me introduce you to some of your shipmates.’ He pushed off the wall, back towards the conversation below. ‘Ladies and gents,’ he said, ‘may I introduce Mark Ruiz, our captain aboard the Gulliver?’
On entering the secure shuttle, Mark had deliberately chosen not to take the memory download of mission personnel the security SAP had offered him. He always found that meeting people with total foreknowledge made him behave too much like a classic roboteer – overfamiliar, mechanical and creepy. There wasn’t much he could do about who was coming, he reason
ed, so he might as well meet them first-hand and treat them like equals. That strategy had worked well for him in New York.
The first person to turn around was Ash Corrigan-Five – formerly his Omega dorm buddy and childhood friend, and subsequently someone he never wanted to see again. Ash was all blond hair and apple-pie looks, as ever. He greeted Mark with easy good humour.
‘Mark! Great to see you!’ He grabbed Mark’s hand and pumped it.
Mark tried not to show just how unwelcome the surprise was. In the back of his head, he scrabbled to turn on introduction-assist. Ash, apparently, would be his subcaptain. It’d be their first opportunity to work together since Ash had given evidence against him at the trial.
‘So you’re back,’ said Ash. ‘Just like old times, eh?’
‘I guess so,’ said Mark.
Great, he thought. Let’s pretend you never sold me out, you pushy Drexlerite fuckhead. He kicked himself for not coming in as prepared as possible. That was the Fleet way of doing things and he’d just end up paying for it if he didn’t get with the programme, particularly as his role was so central.
The Gulliver was a ro-ship – geared for roboteer pilot and command. Ro-ships were the fulfilment of Will Monet’s childhood dream that one day roboteers would captain and control their own vessels. That had probably sounded like a grand and fitting dream for a generation of pre-war roboteers trapped in terraforming work. What that vision had created for the Fleet, though, was a giant headache.
Roboteers were subject to digital infection risk, attention overload and numerous other personal limitations, not to mention attacks of good old-fashioned autistic behaviour. To compensate, ro-ships had their own pattern of command. Each captain was required to fly with a sub on board, at least one non-roboteer passenger-witness and an extensive battery of backup software. Where possible, two subs were preferred.
While ro-ships were capable of fast and delicate flying that ordinary pilots couldn’t match, they generally weren’t allowed to take on high-pressure missions. Most roboteer captains ended up as glorified ferrymen, running modified nestships packed with supplies and colonists to the Frontier. Mark should have guessed that someone he knew would be in the number-two seat on his ship. A mission this significant called for someone Omega-rated, and there weren’t that many of them to choose from.