by Piers Platt
<*Special Remarks: in lieu of monetary bounty, all contractors assisting in the live capture of the target will be credited with five (5) kills toward their 50-kill obligation. Contractors assisting in the death of the target will be credited with three (3) kills>
After he read it through, Rath leaned back on the couch, chewing on the inside of his lip. The prospect of being three – or five – kills closer to release from his contract was nothing short of a miracle.
That’s a year or two closer to getting my memory wiped.
But he was inherently wary of something so enticing.
If there are several of us on this mission, that means the Group is giving up twenty or thirty million dollars in potential revenue we would be earning if we actually worked for those kills. How is she worth so much?
But something else was bothering him that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He picked the datascroll back up and accessed the Target Background Information tab.
Beyond a number of photos of the woman in her natural facial configuration and several standard cover identities, the file had no information at all about her record as a contractor, or her life before joining the Guild. She was a somewhat stern-looking woman – plain, but not ugly, her forehead creased with wrinkles from frowning.
She might have been pretty. Might still be, if she smiled more in her pictures.
Her blonde hair had a slight grey streak running back from her temple, and she had the hardened look of a long distance runner. The file told him her facial implants were still embedded, however, so her face could change as easily as his own. From the most recent photo of her natural face, she looked to be in her mid-thirties, Rath estimated.
He was about to put the scroll down when it came to him. Back at the end of his training, they had made him watch those videos: the contractor who had tried to run, who they had crippled remotely by accessing his hemobots, and the other that they had killed before he could give the police details of the Group. The gruesome images of the first man’s torture rose, unbidden, in his memory. The video had not been a threat, so much as a demonstration: the Group owns you now; we know where you are at all times, and we can kill you whenever we choose. Rath had been struck with the casual ease with which the Group had exerted that power in the videos.
Why would they give us all three credits to kill her, when they can do it themselves from Group headquarters?
Rath read through the brief one more time. Acquire target and maintain surveillance of her. Rath’s eyes went wide. He had assumed that Headquarters would be feeding him with information about her location and what she was doing as he tracked her, and that when he got close, he could merely tap a button to disable her.
But if they need to me to acquire her, they can’t access her audio-visual feed anymore … which means they probably can’t disable or kill her remotely, either.
He would have to track another contractor, with the same training, skills, and ruthless determination the Group had instilled in him. He wouldn’t even have the advantage of superior numbers, at least for the first few days. And she was expecting him.
* * *
As soon as he exited the secure area of Lakeworld’s main spaceport, Rath made straight for a bathroom. Normally he only armed himself for missions when he was ready to make the kill, but today he was taking no chances. It took the Forge nearly fifteen minutes to build his chosen arsenal: four multipurpose grenades, a fighting knife, and an auto-pistol with spare magazines. He concealed the pistol in the back of his waistband, tucked the knife into a boot sheath, and split the grenades and spare ammunition between his cargo pockets. Then he made his way to the rental center, where he picked a nondescript grey air car from the lot, tossed his Forge in the passenger seat, and buckled himself in.
Rath cleared his takeoff with the rental center controller, and then poured power into the engines, rocketing the car straight up. Lakeworld spread out below him as he gained altitude; lush forests of green filled the landscape, liberally dotted with the clear blue lakes that were the world’s namesake. The planet was known mainly as an agricultural center and, to a lesser extent, a tourist destination. But it was sparsely populated compared to city-planets like Rath’s own Tarkis.
Not a good place to hide.
He wondered if Contractor 339 was originally from Lakeworld, and if not, what had motivated her to come here.
He reached the coordinates in under an hour, and made a lazy circle around the spot as he confirmed the location on his heads-up display map. He was surprised to see not just the disabled police car, but also the car 339 had been driving as well.
Why did she leave her car here?
Rath made one more circle of the area, flipping on the car’s powerful sensor suite to scan across the visual spectrum. There was no one at the site, but he did see a tripod sensor guarding it, undoubtedly left by the police who had initially responded to the incident to ensure that no one tampered with the evidence. Rath headed for an open meadow several thousand feet away, descending smoothly and setting down in the field. He flipped on his Forge and sent it a command, then opened it up to let the tray begin building. While he waited, he opened the driver’s side door – it was a warm, breezy day, but the earthy smells of the meadow were foreign to him, and he could not help feeling exposed.
When the micro-drone was built, Rath carefully picked it up between thumb and forefinger and activated it. His eye displayed the drone’s camera view, and with his hand gripping an imaginary joystick, Rath was able to pilot the insect-sized machine out through the open door and across the field, headed back toward the site. He flew higher as the drone neared the sensor tripod, eventually taking the machine up above the treetops, and hovering directly over the tripod several hundred feet in the air. When he confirmed the tripod was lined up, he dropped the drone into freefall, making a final course correction just before it impacted on the tripod’s communications antenna. That done, he pulled his Forge on and jogged across the field, back toward the road.
Rath headed for the tripod first, which he simply folded up and tucked through the straps of his Forge. The road was gravel, and the police had staked both cars off behind yellow plastic tape marked POLICE in black letters – along with the tripod, that would have been enough to ward off curious citizens who happened upon the site, but Rath merely ducked under the tape and made his way over to the cars for a closer look. It was only a brief investigation – the police car was locked and looked to be empty, and 339’s air car had been torched, burned down to its frame.
Why did you destroy your best escape option?
Assuming she still had her Forge, Rath figured that 339 could easily have fashioned herself a new license plate and repainted the car to disguise it. Even without those tools on hand, his map had shown him a large resort complex a few minutes away by air – she could have flown there and bought what she needed to disguise the car, or simply ditched it and found another means of transportation.
Why go on foot from here?
Too much time had passed for Rath to pick up a scent trail, so he made a slow circuit of the cars, concentrating on the side of the road, where footprints might tell him where 339 had gone. When he found none, he stopped to think for a minute. A normal person in 339’s situation would have panicked and run straight into the woods, but a trained contractor like 339 would have taken steps to cover their trail. Rath decided he would have continued down the road for as lon
g as he dared before going off road – the gravel of the road would show no footprints, and if he went far enough, he would likely be outside the area where the police would search for footprints. Rath checked the nearest police station’s location on his map, and calculated that they could have arrived on the scene as early as four minutes after 339 attacked the first policeman.
Call it three minutes and thirty seconds, then.
He set a timer in his neural interface, cinched the straps on his pack tight, and took off at a sprint down the road, his newly-healed legs protesting at the sudden exertion.
He still had thirty seconds on the timer when he saw the arrow carved into one of the trees beside the road. He saw a set of footprints leading off the road toward the arrow, as well. Rath skidded to a halt, frowning.
There’s something familiar about that arrow.
It was divided in two lengthwise, the two halves separated by a thin margin of bark. Rath searched through his memory, sifting through the pictures and scenes. When he found what he was looking for, his eyes widened.
* * *
“What’s he doing?” the supervisor asked.
“Not sure, sir,” the tech replied. “Making something – hold on, let me check his interface. He just ordered the Forge to build an auto-rifle and grenades, and queued up three micro-drones when it finishes with the weapons.”
“Heartbeat and adrenaline are both elevated, too, sir. Happened a few seconds after he saw that arrow carved on the tree,” another tech chipped in.
“Is that an arrow?” the supervisor asked. “It looks odd to me.”
“I’m assuming you’re monitoring my feed and can hear me,” 621’s voice came in as a whisper, barely audible over the control room’s speakers. “The arrow carved on that tree is the same design as the arrows that guided us into the ship we flew on to Selection and Training, and the arrows that showed us how to get around inside the complex at the end of Selection Phase,” he continued. “Which means my target wants me to go that way.”
“It means she probably meant to get pulled over by that cop, too,” the supervisor noted.
“You want me to relay that to him, sir?” a tech asked.
“No,” the supervisor shook his head. “He already knows it’s a trap. ETA on the other contractors?”
“North of sixty hours still,” the tech replied. “Do we tell him to wait?”
* * *
Rath loaded the auto-rifle as soon as it was completed. Ten minutes later he had two of the micro-drones orbiting in circles several hundred feet over his position, one close in, the other farther out, constantly sending his cybernetic eyes imaging of the area around him. The third he sent forward, cautiously following the footprints through the woods. He stayed a full kilometer behind that scout drone, weapon at the ready, moving at a measured pace, stopping often to look, listen, and scan the drone feeds. Aside from the occasional small animal, he saw no one else around him.
The trail led him past two different lakes. He nearly lost the footprints along the first lake’s rocky shore, but he spied another split arrow, this one made of white pebbles arranged carefully amongst the darker grey rocks. An old, rusted chain-link fence stood near the second lake, with a section that had been slashed open. Rath scanned the section for booby-traps, but then decided to play it safe, testing his weak legs by climbing over the fence at a different spot and then rejoining the footprints well away from the fence.
Soon after, his scout drone sent him a query, and Rath took a knee next to a tree. The drone sent him an image of a rusted metal door mounted in a cement wall and followed up with a message on his heads up display.
Yes.
The drone landed on the concrete at the foot of the door, crawled through the gap between door and cement, and launched again. It was flying in pitch dark, so Rath switched the drone’s feed to thermal imaging. A set of cement stairs appeared in the viewscreen, descending.
* * *
“I want someone monitoring each drone’s feed exclusively,” the supervisor ordered. “Let’s be ready to push intel to him: he can’t monitor all three that effectively.”
“On it,” another supervisor replied. “Stations Six, Eight, and Ten, take the scout drone, the close-in orbiter, and the far orbiter, respectively.”
“What’s this building complex the scout drone just entered?” the first supervisor asked.
“Abandoned hydro-electric facility, sir. He’s coming up on a major terrain feature, a large lake that empties out at one end over a cliff. There’s a number of waterfalls along the cliff edge, early colonists built it up into a dam and installed some energy harvesting technology. It’s no longer operational.”
“Can we get a map of the facility? Blueprints?”
“Give me a minute. Pulling it up on screen three.”
The supervisor grimaced. “It’s just a maze of tunnels.”
“Lots of choke points,” the second supervisor agreed. “Not good. We’ve got to have him hold here and wait for the other contractors.”
The first supervisor rubbed his temple. “I don’t know. Trap or not, I don’t want to lose her. I’m thinking we send him in anyway, maybe he gets lucky. Worst case he triggers whatever surprise she’s got waiting for him, and then we’re back to square one.”
“Scout drone has found two motion-sensor mines,” the tech at Station Six noted. “They’re both down side tunnels branching off the first intersection. Drone’s continuing straight.”
* * *
Rath knelt behind another tree, aiming the auto-rifle at the rusted metal door. The scout drone sent him another warning notification – at the next intersection, the side tunnels were again mined.
“Looks like she’s funneling me straight down the tunnel,” he whispered, for the control room’s benefit. As usual, they sent no reply. He took a sip of water from a bottle, tucked it back into his pack, and waited as the drone continued its reconnaissance.
It passed one more intersection – mined again – and then Rath saw a glimmer of light ahead on its viewscreen. He flipped the imaging over to natural light. The tunnel ended in a much larger tunnel running perpendicular to it, twenty feet across, with water flowing swiftly along the floor.
Some kind of overflow pipe, a spillway?
As the drone emerged into the bigger tunnel, it rotated left, and Rath saw that the light source was sunlight coming in the end of the tunnel, where the water was pouring out. Through the mouth of the spillway he saw a green valley interspersed with rivers and lakes, far below – the tunnel seemed to open out over the edge of a towering cliff. And leaning over a parked hoverbike at the mouth of the tunnel, the water swirling around her boots, was a woman.
She turned as soon as the drone entered the spillway, head jerking up. Rath saw her touch a control pad on her sleeve before the video feed went dead.
* * *
“Freeze that last image and confirm identity,” the supervisor ordered.
“It’s her,” the other supervisor opined. “Definitely her.”
“Confirmed, it’s 339,” a tech reported, seconds later. “Thermal signature and height/weight calculations match the visual we took off the police car security camera. She’s holding a torque wrench, sir, could be that hoverbike’s broken.”
“Could be,” the supervisor agreed, without much conviction. “Weapons?”
“I just see a knife in a hip sheath,” the tech replied, examining the frozen image on his screen.
The supervisor drummed his hand on the desk for a minute, frowning.
“Are you thinking she meant to lure him here, kill him, and then scoot out on the hoverbike?” the second supervisor asked, after a time.
“Mmm …,” the first supervisor said, noncommittal.
“If so, we send him in to destroy the bike for good, we can use his remaining drones to make sure she stays bottled up in the tunnels until the other contractors arrive,” the second supervisor noted.
“I don’t know. The whole thing feels off.” The first supervisor pursed his lips, and then appeared to reach a decision. “Fuck it. Send him in.”
* * *
The message arrived on his heads-up display.
“Fuck you,” Rath whispered to the control room. “This is a really bad idea.”
But he stood up and ran to the structure, putting his back flat against the cement wall next to the door. Rath flipped the door open and then peeked his rifle around the corner, scanning with its sight-mounted camera down the short staircase. The stairs were empty. Rath switched to thermal imaging as he descended, and once he reached the bottom of the stairs, he stayed in the center of the tunnel, keeping well away from the mined side passages. He moved slowly and quietly, rifle trained on the end of the tunnel. After two minutes, he switched to low-light enhanced vision, and saw the first glimmer of light ahead of him.
Rath stopped several yards short of the tunnel exit and slowly panned his rifle over the area of the spillway within his field of view. The water was flowing much faster now – it appeared to be several feet higher up the wall, as well.
Did she increase the flow on purpose, or is that just a coincidence?
Rath detached two of his grenades from his belt, set them both to High Explosive, and then lobbed them into the spillway, bouncing each off the far wall of the spillway, the first to the right of his access tunnel, and then one to the left. Their booming explosions echoed along the tunnel in close succession, and Rath heard shrapnel rattle off the cement walls of the spillway. He considered firing a sustained burst into the water as well, but decided against it – the roar of the water was deafening from where he stood, too strong for someone to stay underwater long. Had 339 been standing in the water when the flow increased, she would have been swept straight out the tunnel, and her broken body would now be several hundred feet below on the valley floor.