by KH LeMoyne
“That explains the hungry looks.”
His grin widened as his hands drifted down her body. His expression of levity and anticipation turned to stone with the beep of a communiqué on the far wall.
He swept up her pants and tossed them to the table before he strode away, business focus rigidly back in place. Esme eased into her clothes with a silent sigh. Each time something new popped up, she felt like she was racing to beat a deadline in their relationship. Where moments before they’d shared an incredible intimacy, from Clay’s movements and expression, now mistrust returned, locked back into place.
She waited a few minutes, her chin on her knees, watching him from her spot on the table. His actions and task executions were economical, no wasted time or movements. The more worried he became over this extraction, the more efficient he became—and the more closed off from her.
For all of her work and suggestions, the prospect of helping him make headway on his mission appeared futile.
***
Orcus: Shepherd?
Clay spun off a separate virtual screen for other incoming transmissions and responded. Active
Orcus: SS5 verified Central 3 Facility Below
Aaron’s team had surfaced. Central 3 was located in the belly beneath New Delphi’s grid, between the central point of the five-mile platform and the edge closest to the woods of the western foothills. Now all he needed was Aaron’s exact location within the barracks, some indication as to the reason for Sicaria Squad 5’s return to home base, and someone insane enough to provide a distraction on the inside. No fuckin’ problem. Copy SS5 #s?
Orcus: 3
Shit. The squad always left with seven. Wolf status
Orcus: Confirmed present—my designation on the team?
No. Team already established. No way in hell was he allowing Orcus, or Hena, as Aaron would remember her, to join the team. Whatever Aaron’s state once they extracted him, there’d be no holding him back if something happened to his one obsession. Then again, the transformation that Hena had endured during Aaron’s absence would be enough of a shock. Her infiltration into the darker side of Down Below’s sex clubs, to search for word on Aaron and Regent activity, made Clay and every other team member uneasy.
Orcus: Onyx designation on the team?
Confirmed
At least he could give her some reassurance. Aaron would have family on the extraction team. His stepfather, the Underground’s premier doctor at that.
Orcus: Copy
At least Hena/Orcus would be appeased for the time being even if she couldn’t have a place on the team.
Ratter: Shepherd?
Active
Ratter: Intel—SS5 last mission hit undefined presence @ 30°south
What the—thirty degrees south latitude? What the hell had the squads been doing around the equatorial perimeter? Those hot zones contained those hardest hit by the virus. Details?
Ratter: None—SS5 to redeploy in 72 hours
Shit. Baiting a trap. The squads were sending the survivors back in to ferret out the enemy, chumming the waters with the most expendable. Seventy-two hours didn’t give his team much time to extract Aaron before Sicaria Squad 5 redeployed.
Ratter: Target 52 hours for extraction?
With all the pieces requiring coordination, fifty-two hours was going to seem like minutes. But Ratter had a point. Twenty hours marked the squad lockdown before mission departure. Clay gave a quick glance over his shoulder. Esme sat surrounded by pieces she’d rummaged from his stash, deep in the construction of the detonation and control device. “I need you to have the keg ready in forty-eight hours.”
Her head lifted for the briefest second. Lips pursed, Esme paused in connecting a wire filament into the mechanism’s core. She glanced toward his screens, nodded once, and then went back to work. The determined flicker in her eyes made him swallow hard and shift uncomfortably in his seat. Touching her, feeling her response as she climaxed around his fingers and against his mouth, was an experience he was certain had been new for her and had done nothing to dampen his lust. Her response left him doomed personally and professionally, because the pivotal part of the plan now hinged on a woman he trusted from only his gut instinct—or perhaps lower.
Shit, focus. Confirm—Target 52 hours for extraction from SE Central 3—will relay delivery coordinates @ 50 hour mark
Ratter: Copy
Ghost: Shepherd?
Active
Ghost: Site volatile—Target classified hostile—will require excess force for extraction
He shook his head with harsh exhale. They’d expected problems and anticipated Aaron wouldn’t come out willingly, but a “hostile” designation wasn’t something he wanted to hear. Taking the young man out by excessive force would complicate an already tenuous situation. As Needed—52 hour extraction—confirmation @ 50 hour mark
Ghost: Copy—have medic
Understood
Dead air reigned as he initiated a visible count on the screen from fifty-two hours to zero—extraction time. At the two-hour mark—fifty hours from now—the distraction in Central 3 would execute, and he would initiate the “mission active” message. During the next hour, the extraction would proceed, coupled with launch of the detonation device, which would open the delivery point in the sewage intersection, ending with delivery of Aaron into the sewage line. Fifty-nine minutes until zero hour—Aaron’s retrieval. He would go, Onyx would be there, and… He glanced back at Esme. No, even if he trusted her, it was too dangerous.
He turned back to the screen. Should he mark the seventy-two-hour milestone for SS5’s liftoff to the Amazon? The truth was, if they reached that point, Aaron would be gone, and no amount of teamwork or good luck would bring him back from a one-way helo trip to the southern latitudes. Yet he keyed in the time and hesitated.
“It’d be more positive to delete your last entry.” Esme didn’t meet his gaze but kept working.
“Positive makes it sound like a choice, some sliding scale. Failure isn’t an option.” She had a point, though, about not assigning failure a position on the list. He deleted the seventy-two-hour mark. “One hundred percent—must make this happen.”
“Okay, one hundred percent.” She gave a small chuckle. Low and throaty, the sound froze him in his tracks. “So why did you pick Shepherd?”
“Radar picked it for me, long time ago, after I’d been here a few months.” He refreshed the two screens at the edge of the Down Below market.
“You sound like you don’t know why.”
He glanced back briefly and then continued typing his messages. “He mistakenly thinks he has a sense of humor.”
New relays transmitted in on a separate screen. Two code names requested backup and help removing guards on their tails. Clay tapped a series of commands. Noises and movement initiated in the requestor’s quadrant to provide distraction for the Regent guard squad after the two individuals.
He frowned at the next request—help in searching for a missing child. He moved the request to a separate screen. If a child disappeared, he would assign other resources. Unfortunately, “child missing” messages were also a favorite Regent lure. He skipped to the last message, an alert of scouts on the perimeter of the Down Below marketplace. Shit, the guards were muscling into homes again.
“That one inscription isn’t like the other ones.”
Not pausing in his maneuvers, he slid the screen with the search request for the child her way. “Why?”
“Hmm. No code name. My guess is the code names are confirmed against data records dispersed around your groups. Also no entry acknowledgement. I also gather you have a feel for who’s out there and which calls are legitimate?”
“The Regents know of us and try to pull us out. It’s pretty routine. If that request was valid, I would never see a message. The activity on the screens would have already confirmed a child abduction situation.” He nodded toward the several live feeds of Down Below cycling on other screens. “They would al
ert me. We’d have people already looking.”
“Alert you?” Her laugh was more full force this time. “You’ve got to be kidding that you don’t know why he named you Shepherd?”
“He was being fucking cute, giving me a name to live up to.”
“What, you’d rather have Ratter? I don’t even want to know how they got their code name.” She waved back to his screens with a scowl. “Radar didn’t give you something to live up to. I bet you watched over all these people the minute you set foot in Down Below.”
“Don’t confuse penance for sainthood.”
“You sell yourself short.”
“What, five days and you’re an expert on my life and motivations?”
She shrugged and turned away. The regret he felt at lashing out lingered, and once again he experienced a tight squeeze in his throat and fought it down. He’d lived here for the last five years; she hadn’t. This wasn’t her world. Yet she caught on quickly.
He shook his head and turned back to work. His ease around her wasn’t an attachment he could afford. Especially since he would have to give her up. This was no place for a beautiful woman, and he was no catch either.
Chapter 6
Images shifted from one camera’s view to the next, cycling a new virtual screen to the foreground with each refresh. Esme frowned at the hypnotizing lack of variety in the sequence. “Nothing ever changes. How can you tell if something’s wrong?”
Clay glanced up. His brows furrowed as he scrutinized the screens through one cycle. Then he pulled up a new screen, his fingers widening the rectangle of the market and sweeping the visual angle back and forth across the empty marketplace.
She detected nothing, yet his motions grew faster and more intense. Surely she hadn’t missed something. “What’s wrong?”
“The market runs like clockwork. Vendors should have unpacked an hour ago with customers crowding to get the bargains before the squads arrive to catalog their faces.”
“Not today.”
“No.” He shifted the view to a large mound of concrete rubble. A faint stream of sunlight escaped beyond New Delphi’s city platform near the ruins. The foreign illumination in Down Below indicated the ruins were close to the city’s perimeter.
Esme squinted at the oddly symmetrical lines buried beneath the cracks and debris. No doorway showed, but there was definitely an outline of a boarded-up window partially visible behind uneven wooden planks.
He gave her a quick look over his shoulder, and her annoyance deepened. Clearly, he couldn’t decide whether to leave her alone, in his fortress, with his network. “Haven’t I earned at least one or two credits of trust yet?”
A small twitch jerked the corner of his mouth. His metallic patch whirred open and shut so fast she couldn’t tell the color of his eye. Without a response, he keyed in several sequences on his keypad, turned, and grabbed an ion laser cannon from the shelf at the edge of his console. “Don’t leave. Don’t touch anything.” He reached the end of the hallway near the exit, weapon lashed to his forearm beneath his black fiber weave coat, before she had a chance to question him. The heavy clang of the outer door vibrated beneath her feet as a red signal flashed in the corner of the security grid. The door lock registered active.
“Aye aye, Captain,” she muttered as she took his cockpit seat at the console, the recycled plastic still warm from his body. She tucked her bare feet beneath her and scanned through the images now spread in an arc around her.
In spite of his last-minute security commands, she could hack her way through his system, disable the locks to the front door, and be gone before he returned. However, if she had wanted to leave, she would have bailed after he let her out of the containment room. Pulling a mesh of wires from beneath her shirt, she carefully slid her fingers into the matrix. Tiny thermo-sensitive pads graced each finger. A slight pressure adhered them tight enough to register her pulse. The additional circuitry aligned to mimic Clay’s specific heat register and pressure. With a tentative touch on his console, she flexed her fingers, allowing the open-weave glove of fibers and signals to adjust to her body’s rhythm. Then she increased their range to transmit Clay’s speed at the console and his electronic security signature. Each person’s was as distinctive to a knowledgeable tracker as his target’s fingerprint.
The past several screens flew past. Yeah, she was still good.
She squinted at the rubble and pressed her thumb to the security pad. The mesh would reinforce the last access—being Clay’s. Fortunately, he hadn’t bothered with a retinal lock. Several reverse navigation commands and a few strategic guesses later, the security access to the network turned green, and his remote camera administration panel blinked at her from a new angle.
Not quite the full assortment of options she would have chosen, but hackers couldn’t be choosy.
Vibrations of Clay’s signature in the network cloud echoed along the nerves in her hand. The intensity and heat thrummed along her skin, like memories of his earlier touches. She shivered and gritted her teeth. Focusing on the new sensations he’d elicited wasn’t going to help her or him.
Following his echo along the network, she moved her virtual signal forward and back, scoping each pathway. She paused at the intersection of the New Delphi transmission networks, where the physical relay towers and signal amplifiers resided. Finally, resources she could use. She assessed this hour’s mapping of Clay’s cyber pathways—his messages surfed in encrypted layers beneath the New Delphi public-broadcast-system bandwidth. Those pathways would most likely change several times before the day’s end, acknowledging access and updates only to those who Clay designated.
Her target wasn’t his list, only the physical touch points of the pathway. Chewing at her lower lip, she downloaded drivers and versions for each bit of hardware. Then, selecting the ones she wanted, she rerouted services and node interfaces, constructing a covert virtual agent to work with the cameras.
A tool for now, to watch Clay, and later, to service the mission. The virtual agent construct with the sewer map and cameras’ signal would drive the keg in the sewer system and initiate the explosion at the connection point. While he would be pissed she had hacked his system, she doubted Clay would have time later to test and rework her schema to ensure the remote detonation worked seamlessly. This was her chance to prototype in relative safety. He was good; she was better—at least when it came to her designs.
Satisfied with her construction, she shoved away the admin screen and sat back with a smile. Three radiant images beamed in scarlet overlay on the rubble screen. Clay also showed up in the bottom corner of the screen as a fourth image. A sub screen reflected the visual before him from what must be another receiver on his clothes, or perhaps on his body?
One minute he was visible on the large screen, and then he was a phantom.
With a snort, Esme turned back to the other screens, not prepared to waste time waiting for him. Her fingers sped over the console as she assigned temporary security access to her virtual servers for each one of the cameras sweeping Down Below. The process allowed her more options than just visibility. Her breath caught as two of the screens displayed large clusters of heat signatures. Several people filled each screen; the additional orange signature of their ion weapons flagged them as Regent military squads, not inoculation teams.
Damn. He probably suspected their approach and was sticking his shiny white ass out in the breeze to get somebody out of harm’s way. Whether he would receive help from others remained to be seen. He hadn’t launched any messages. Esme glanced toward the shelf from which he’d retrieved his weapon. His hand communicator was still there.
Then again, maybe he had another way to send and receive information.
A third group of heat signatures flickered to life on a fourth screen—Clay, his rescue targets, and three screens of Regent squads.
Esme leaned closer, brought up a message screen, her fingers hovering over the keypad.
“Countdown, 49.5 hours.”
She frowned at the synthesized feminine voice, wondering briefly who he’d patterned it after. She gave a quick shake of her head. It didn’t matter. Right now all that mattered was for Clay to make it back, or the mission would fail and so would she.
***
Clay’s run brought him to the collapsed apartment buildings that constituted Badger’s temporary home.
Rasmond’s stall was the first to open each morning in the Down Below market. For over fifty years, the surrounding homesteaders had taken their cues from the quick, snapping calculation of the old woman and her monster-size son. Clay had witnessed only five of those years, but each day ran with the same dependable efficiency as the one before. If Rasmond opened for business, so did everyone else. If she signaled a threat, the marketplace vacated in seconds. Today she hadn’t even shown up. Neither had her son.
The most likely reason for Badger’s absence was the birth of his newest child. As virile as he was huge, Badge had managed to give his wife eight children. The Regent scouts had seized three; two of his baby girls had been recovered alive and returned home. Stalwart and stoic, the family never gave up. Not on profit, deals, or growing their small herd.
Birth and death didn’t stop Rasmond’s business. Only the squads on the move would produce that result. Meaning Rasmond was in hiding, and Badger’s family was at risk for detection and abduction of their newest addition. Each rumor, or betrayal, of a new birth resulted in response from the Regent squads. The never-ending search for new fodder for the Regent transplant harvests would explain the two squads he’d already seen.
Ratter?
Clay initiated the message commands from a frequency generated by his cyber units. It wasn’t ideal to communicate this way because it stole resources from surveillance, but he hadn’t bothered with his comm device.
Ratter: Active
Movement Down Below—need action
Ratter: Understood—give me 20 count