by Jayne Faith
Ty shifted, straightening in his seat and drawing Jake’s attention back to the here and now. With a twisting flick of his forearm, Ty undocked his wrist from the port in his chair’s armrest, and his eyelids sprang open.
“Z is going to strike within the hour,” Ty said. “And after analyzing New Deimos arrivals and permit requests, I’ve determined with ninety-one percent certainty that Agent Z is a man named Kahale Opono, an employee of Omni Biosciences, a mid-sized microbe engineering firm.”
Jake’s adrenaline spiked as he sat up. He followed Ty’s unblinking gaze to one of the cockpit monitors. The borg had already pulled up Opono’s holo and vitals.
“Hey, Spider,” Jake hollered over his shoulder. “Wake up! We’ve got a bounty to collect.”
*
New Deimos Marketplace
Seven.
The number kept repeating itself silently in Alice Morrisette’s mind as she made her way through the sea of people and vendor stands in the crowded bazaar. The sub-G gravity of this lumpy moon wasn’t the only thing causing a little bounce in her step.
Seven.
She didn’t have to worry about whether her clothing—loose linen-synth pants tucked into trekking boots and a matching slate blue sleeveless top—blended with local styles. New Deimos was a system hub, which meant millions of people from near and far passed through every day. Here, there were as many styles of dress as there were accents and shades of skin color.
The bag slung across her back looked innocuous enough, too—a worn, rough-woven sack like those many of the market-goers carried. Her sack didn’t contain any marketplace wares, though. It carried a case with three pill-shaped devices with mechanisms that when triggered would remove the barrier between two chemical compartments, setting off a reaction that would cause a foam-like substance to very quickly expand and then harden.
“Got the tour tickets in hand, boss,” came Kahale’s voice, or more precisely the audible rendering of his subvocalizations, in her ear implant. “Meet me under the red flag in the southeast quadrant.”
Hopping out of the way of a man whose attention was trained on a spice vendor, she narrowly avoided getting run over. At barely over five feet tall, Alice had to constantly fight to keep from getting stepped on and pushed around in crowds like this.
She angled toward the nearest stand, which happened to be selling cheap plastic lockets styled to look like antique metal jewelry. She picked up a sample piece, which had the image of a child’s face inside, and then casually glanced up to orient herself. There. She spotted the red flag a couple of roads over.
“I’ll be there in four minutes,” she subvocalized, silently forming the words with subtle muscle movements of her mouth and throat.
She placed the locket back on its tray and moved away just as the vendor turned to her with a hungry hawker’s gleam in his eye.
“How you feelin’ about this one?” Kahale Opono asked.
She allowed a grin as she threaded through the crowd, the red flag in her sights. “Lucky number seven.” Inside, she could barely contain her glee. Nothing matched the energy, the aliveness, that flowed through her just before a mission.
Kahale’s deep appreciative chuckle was his only response.
Her grin faltered a little when a heavyset woman in a purple tunic swayed into her, causing Alice to reach for a canopy pole to catch her balance.
She’d completed six missions, carefully planned acts designed to be a large nuisance to the targets, coupled with a message that Alice’s media contact, Marla, would make sure to spread widely through the news channels of all the inhabited systems.
The targets were always large corporations like NewGreen, which ran a giant facility that processed all the sewer waste on New Deimos, breaking the waste down into nutrient compounds. These were then sold to farmers who used the nutrients to amend the moon’s soil, which was gravelly and required heavy supplementation to support crops.
NewGreen. Alice snorted. The ones with names that implied environmentally sensitive philosophies irritated her the most.
The corporation claimed to package the sludge—the leftover raw material from the waste processing—into sealed containers that left the moon on waste barges and were ejected toward the system’s sun, where the containers would eventually incinerate. An extremely expensive method of disposal, and, as Alice had discovered, too much trouble for NewGreen.
Alice spotted Kahale near the flag, his head towering over most of the crowd moving around him.
“Isn’t this fun, mixin’ with the people?” Kahale said, his brown eyes glinting and his cheeks rounding with a grin.
Alice shot him a withering look, knowing he was aware of her hatred of crowds. “Oh yeah, this is spectacular. The jostling. The noise. The smells.”
Actually, she didn’t really mind the noise and smells so much. Collecting exotic microbes for her father’s biotech firm frequently took her into situations that were less than pleasant for the senses. But her small stature meant she often had to fight to maintain her footing in the middle of a throng of people.
She touched a tooth with her tongue, scrolling through her available subvoc communication channels until she reached the one that connected her with her pilot.
“Yuki, you there?” Alice subvocalized.
“Yes, sir,” came Yuki’s reflexive response.
Alice had told Yuki a hundred times that it wasn’t necessary to call her sir, but it seemed to be an unbreakable habit from her military days.
“We’re about to join the tour group. Should be an easy drop, and then we’re out of here.”
“An easy drop?” Yuki snorted. “Was that a bit of potty humor? Puns aren’t really your style, Alice.”
“Ha, ha.” Alice rolled her eyes, but grinned. Nothing was going to ruin her mood today. “What’s my sister doing?”
There was a pause. “Wendy’s putting the new samples onto microscope plates. I think. She could be culturing cheese for all I know. In any case, she seems absorbed in her work.”
“And what does she think Kahale and I are doing?”
“She thinks the two of you went to speak to someone about upgrading the ship’s air exchange system, just like we talked about.”
Alice moved forward with the line and let Kahale take care of presenting their tour tickets on his tablet to the man who was scanning admissions to the NewGreen visitor center. “Good. If she asks, tell her we’re stuck in a long line. I’ll let you know as soon as we’re out.”
Alice’s younger sister Wendy, recently graduated from a top microbiology program, had joined Alice’s team at their father’s insistence. He wanted Wendy to have first-hand experience with the microbe collection process. Not that it worked out that way. Alice was the one who did the dirty work—crawling into dank caves, diving into acid seas, or getting suspended over molten lava pots to scrape up samples of bacteria—while Wendy usually stayed on the Omni Explorer.
It wasn’t really Wendy’s fault. She didn’t have the constitution for risky, physical work. She took after their mother, who’d been frail and quiet. The only thing Alice had inherited from their mother was her golden-blond hair.
Alice wouldn’t have minded Wendy’s presence if not for these extracurricular missions that weren’t part of Alice’s official Omni Biosciences work assignments. Wendy wouldn’t understand. And worse, she’d probably tattle to their father, which would bring a swift end to Alice’s freedom. And likely a prison sentence, too, if the authorities ever found out what she’d been doing.
“Look at this place.” Kahale shook his head as he twisted around, taking in the NewGreen visitors’ lobby.
Alice’s mouth tightened into a thin line as she examined the polished smoky emerald floors, gleaming crystal windows, kiosks playing upbeat holo films about the company, and huge pots filled with lush, exotic plants that were almost blindingly green. Holos near the pots proclaimed that the plants were raised on NewGreen’s own fertilizers. The lobby smelled like a fore
st after a thunderstorm, a piped-in fragrance that was no doubt a carefully considered component of the lobby’s engineered ambiance.
She touched Kahale’s arm and tipped her head toward the sign for the ladies’ restroom. He gave a tiny nod, and she went toward the door, which was made of some sort of very expensive-looking polished tropical wood.
Once inside a stall, she reached into her bag, pulled out the case that was made to look like a large makeup compact, and gently pried out one of the three pill-shaped objects from its foam casing. She dropped it into the toilet, then moved to the door and waited for the automatic flush before leaving the stall.
Bombs away.
It would have been safer to completely steer clear of the NewGreen facility, of course. But dropping the three little packages into public restrooms in the marketplace was too risky—those heavy-use pipelines sometimes clogged and had to be augered out, which would risk the devices ending up in a waste container or even a landfill. The whole point was to make sure the devices traveled all the way through NewGreen’s processing.
Then, when the capsules finally made it to the pipelines that carried the sludge to a sinkhole far from the busy marketplace and sparkling NewGreen facility, the devices would activate and cause a backup of the entire system. That’s when Alice’s media contact would push the articles, exposing NewGreen’s dumping of the sludge in New Deimos’s volcanic region, where it contaminated the surrounding water table.
The slums at the edges of the volcanic zone had already suffered disease outbreaks that had killed hundreds, and the surrounding soil had become so contaminated it was nearly unfarmable. NewGreen had been covering it up for a decade, acting as the region’s benefactor by offering relief aid and building medical clinics in the slums as part of their program of obscuring their own responsibility in the crisis. The aid and clinics were far cheaper than shipping the waste off New Deimos.
As if all of that weren’t bad enough, NewGreen’s CEO Declan Reavis had recently received some kind of humanitarian award. He’d mostly likely bought the award, but the general public didn’t know that. Environmental organizations were aware of his atrocities—New Deimos wasn’t the only place he’d ruined natural habitats or poisoned local residents—but he had so much money he kept ahead of the exposés, simply paying off the media to keep any negative stories away from the public.
Several years ago, there were rumors that he and another even more powerful tycoon, Vincent Broussard III, were connected to the deaths of three especially vocal activists, who died within months of each other in suspicious accidents. Ever since then, no one in the activist communities had dared go up against Reavis or Broussard head-on.
Alice made two more drops while she and Kahale suffered through the tour, and then they beelined for the New Deimos Space Port, where the Omni Explorer was waiting.
Back on the ship, Alice nestled into a reclining passenger chair and basked in the afterglow of the mission.
Even better than sex.
She sipped a concoction made from fermented galaxy fruit, tart hazel water, and a twist of sweet lime. A victory drink of sorts.
“Strap in, we’re two minutes from liftoff,” Yuki said over the ship’s intercom.
Two minutes and Alice and her team could get gone, jump to another system long before the devices in NewGreen’s pipelines activated days from now.
It was all she could do to refrain from rubbing her hands together like a cartoon villain. Planning sabotage was fun, but actually seeing a CEO squirm in public—well, there was nothing that would give her more pleasure.
The galaxy’s most powerful tycoons behaved as if they were untouchable, and in most ways they were. They could buy off the media, politicians, and law enforcement at a whim, and it seemed as if they could act without consequence. It had continued for much too long.
Across the aisle, Wendy was already paling in anticipation of the liftoff.
“Hey, Wen,” Alice called softly. “Want me to get you a cup of ice?”
Her sister got motion sick so easily Alice used to joke that Wendy couldn’t turn her head too quickly or she’d dry heave. And the poor girl was allergic to both of the available anti-motion sickness drugs.
Wendy set her face in determination and shook her head. “No, I’ll be okay. I need to get used to space travel.”
Alice quickly hid her doubtful look behind a sympathetic smile when Wendy’s wide brown eyes met hers. The ship tipped gently as it lifted from the ground, and Wendy swallowed hard.
“We’re away,” Yuki said over the intercom, just as the force of the ship’s motion pressed Alice back into the cushions of her seat. “Twenty-three minutes until we escape atmosphere, and then—” The pilot broke off, emitting a stream of curses as the ship shimmied and tipped violently to the left before leveling.
Alice’s pale pink drink sloshed across her lap and a few ice chips skittered away, disappearing under a vacant seat. Next to her, Wendy unbuckled and ran for the nearest lavatory.
“What’s going on up there, Yuki?” Alice called up at the cockpit, which was only half a dozen feet away. She plopped her dripping tumbler into a cup holder and shook liquid from her hand.
“Uhh . . . hold for status, sir,” Yuki said, reverting into military-speak. A moment later, she said, “We’re going to have to set down. Kahale’s working on securing a landing spot at the maintenance center.”
Alice’s heart did a funny little dance in her chest. Even though the devices wouldn’t detonate for a week, she couldn’t help feeling antsy about getting as far away from New Deimos as possible.
There was a metallic clank that shook the floor under Alice’s boots, and then an angry-sounding chug-chug-chug.
“Scratch that,” came Yuki’s tight voice. “We’re putting down right now.”
The ship began to drop so rapidly Alice’s stomach threatened to crowd up her throat. She gripped the armrests just as the ship nosed sharply downward.
* * *
The Laws of Attraction is available on Amazon!