by B. V. Larson
That was just fine with me.
-2-
As a newly minted officer, my first duty didn’t come from my legion superiors. It came from higher up. From Equestrian Nagata, in fact. He was my three-star patron inside Central, and he was the one who’d promoted me—which meant I owed him one. He’d made it clear to me a month ago that I was to keep tabs on his arch-rival, Imperator Turov.
Both Nagata and Turov were Hegemony brass, which should have meant a spacer from Legion Varus couldn’t care less. But I had a history with Turov back to the days when she was part of my legion.
Spying on Turov didn’t qualify as hardship duty under normal circumstances. I’d come to get along with the woman, in my own way. We’d had a semi-inappropriate relationship, in fact, which afforded me a good excuse to check up on her.
Unfortunately, Turov was at least as smart as Nagata. She knew full well that Nagata wanted me to spy on her. I’d sent her multiple texts on my tapper, and even phoned her a few times, but she’d never bothered to respond.
Frustrated, I prowled around in Central City, uncertain what I should do. I could just go on home. I’d only seen my folks briefly before getting involved in all the cloak-and-dagger politics at the capital. That’s what I really wanted to do—but I knew Nagata would be calling on me soon, expecting some kind of report. With nothing to give him, I wasn’t ready yet to take a vacation.
Legion life wasn’t so bad when you weren’t out plundering planets or protecting cargos. In-between missions, due to the long and intensive nature of our work, we were allowed to demobilize and wander the Earth as we chose. We were on call, naturally, expected to report in our full kits within twenty-four hours of a summons. Other than that, we were free men, one and all.
But today, I didn’t feel relaxed and free. Instead, I felt like a leashed tiger who hadn’t been fed dinner yet.
On a hunch, I headed out to Turov’s residence. I’d only been there once before—and things hadn’t been entirely cordial between us on that occasion.
After spending a full quarter-hour leaning on her door buzzer, identifying myself repeatedly to the dumb-ass house AI and generally making a pest out of myself, I gave up. I summoned a cab with my tapper and waited irritably for it to show up.
Arms crossed, watching the sparse traffic gliding in the sky over the posh neighborhood Turov lived in, I felt like a failure. Turov wasn’t going to let me into her house when she didn’t even want to meet me at her office.
Nagata wasn’t going to like this turn of events. I was supposed to be his wonder-boy. The man who’d stormed Central, erased the data core, and gotten away with it. How could a few locks and tapper auto-responders get in the way of such a technological dynamo?
The truth was, of course, that I hadn’t really done much of the nerd-work when I’d pulled off that stunt. Claver had done the tricky stuff. I’d been dragged along as the muscle, not the brains, of the team.
Finally, after several more minutes, a dark shadow drifted down to settle on the street in front of me. I had to hop back onto the curb because it almost squashed me.
Ready to curse out the air car driver, I popped open the hatch and leaned inside.
My glare melted away. Instead of a pushy driver, I found a young woman at the wheel. She was a hot one, too.
Even more surprising, I knew her very well. It was none other than Imperator Galina Turov.
She was out of uniform—way out. She had one of those skin-tight smart-outfits the college girls all seemed to be wearing this year. The garment was programmed to crawl over her body, revealing various ovals of fine skin at random intervals. As I stared at her, open-mouthed, her navel appeared and vanished again, like a winking eye. It was a very distracting effect.
“Uh…” I said, “Imperator? Are you just arriving home?”
“No, you big idiot. I finally got tired of having you buzz my tapper all damned day long. Don’t you know I’m on leave?”
“Yes, of course. I am too.”
“So why are you bothering the hell out of me?”
My eyes weren’t on hers. Her clothing had shifted from a midnight blue to an acidic greenish-black. Two holes had opened up in the costume, one over each thigh. These spots of bare flesh winked at me like eyes.
“Sorry about that,” I said, “I just thought you’d like to see my new bars.”
I fingered the gold bars on my shoulders. She eyed them without seeming overly impressed.
“Finally made the officer ranks, did you? What did you have to do for Nagata to get those?”
Frowning, I shrugged. “Nothing much. I just died about a thousand times.”
She smiled for the first time.
“No,” she said. “That’s not it. No one gets rank for dying. You earned it for killing the enemy.”
“That too.”
She looked me over frankly, running her eyes up and down my person.
“Get in,” she said at last. “I’ll give you a ride back to Central.”
As my cab ride had showed no sign of arriving anytime soon, I did as she asked and the hatch clicked closed.
“How’d you know I was going back to Central?”
She shrugged. “You’re gathering information for Nagata, right? Well, now you have at least made contact with the mark.”
“Hmmm,” I said thoughtfully. “You don’t seem too worked up about this situation.”
“Why should I be? You’re my agent too, remember?”
That did spark an unpleasant reminder in my brain. I’d made a deal with her, months back. I’d said that if she stopped to investigate L-374, I’d work for her instead of Nagata. I was regretting that promise already.
“But I was right,” I said, “I led you right to the enemy you were seeking. That’s not a favor. You should be happy that I convinced you to stop at that K-class system.”
“Going back on your word?” she asked. “I don’t like that.”
“I didn’t say that. I just think—”
“Tell me something about Nagata. What are his plans?”
I hesitated. The truth was I didn’t have much insight into what he was up to. But admitting that wasn’t going to put her into a forgiving mood.
“You have to know something,” she insisted. “If you tell me something useful, I’ll give you a gem to take back to him. That way, everyone will be happy.”
“Okay…” I said. “I know he’s planning something big. A full gathering of Earth’s fleet. I think we’ll be shipping out toward the Cephalopod Kingdom.”
She made a careless, flipping motion with her hand. “I know about that. Everyone knows about that. Tell me something that involves him personally.”
I wracked my brain, but I didn’t come up with much.
“He knows I was in on the hit at Central.”
“How?”
“He managed to get camera stills from various body-cams. We wiped the data core, but the individual devices still had a small amount of video they hadn’t streamed up to the servers yet.”
“Ah…” she said, nodding. “So he knows you were in on it. How the hell did you get out of prison, in that case?”
I shrugged. “Plausible deniability.”
“Meaning?”
“I showed him Claver’s illusion-box. I changed my face into his, and he freaked out.”
She frowned. “Too bad he knows about that. Harder to trick him again. But I suppose you had no choice. Continue.”
My mind was a blank. Nagata hadn’t told me much more than that. But as was often the case in such situations, my fertile imagination began to fill in the details.
“I think he knows we’re in trouble—with the Squids, I mean.”
She looked at me, her eyes widening. “They might strike first?”
“They might.”
“Damn! Why don’t the staff officers trust me? I haven’t been briefed on enemy strength or intentions. All they’ve been going over is some grandiose plan to strike deep into enemy territory a
s soon as they have enough ships to carry all our legions.”
I kept quiet. My hint of Squid preemptive talks was logical, of course, but it was just a rumor. Nagata hadn’t said any such thing. Already, I regretted relaying the story to Turov. It had really come from the streets, rather than Central. Who knew? It could be true, or it could be total bullshit.
“All right,” she said. “You’ve been open with me, so I’ll give you something to take back to him. He’ll be expecting that.”
“Okay.”
“Tell him that I’ve been buying expensive things. Very expensive things. He knows how much an Imperator makes—and it’s less than he does. I’ve been spending way beyond my means as a Hegemony officer.”
Now that she mentioned it, I realized she was right. The air car, the posh residence, the smart-cloth suit... This stuff hadn’t come cheap.
“Where’d you get the money?”
“It’s a mystery,” she said. “You have no idea. But, you felt you should report it. You’ll also need a cover story concerning how you got close to me. How did you trick me into revealing myself to you?”
“Uh…I don’t know.”
It was about then that I realized we were landing. Confused, I looked outside the canopy in order to figure out where we were. It looked like some kind of wooded area outside the Capital.
While we drifted down like a leaf on the winds, she talked steadily about her displays of wealth. Apparently, she now owned a boat and several vacation homes.
Listening closely so I could report on all this later, I couldn’t help but notice that a new teardrop-shaped opening had appeared in her clothes. The opening crept from somewhere—under her arm, I think—then moved across her belly diagonally. It inched along like a caterpillar, and it got bigger as it went, revealing more. By the time it reached her hip and vanished on the far side of her, I’d seen quite a bit of nice territory. My eyes were drawn into an unblinking stare.
“But,” I said, “you haven’t mentioned the cover story.”
She laughed, and the rest of her suit crawled away from her body to reveal her bare flesh. She slithered across the seat into my lap.
Putting my hands on her, I finally caught on. She was the cover story. I was supposed to tell Nagata she’d ravaged me in the woods somewhere.
The funny thing was…it would be the God’s-honest truth.
-3-
Hours later, I finally made it to Nagata’s office on the three hundred and thirteenth floor of Central. When there was no answer at the door, I put my hand on the plate, which I knew would identify me to the occupant.
The door stayed cool and frozen for several seconds—then it opened at last.
Inside, I was treated to a sight I hadn’t expected.
Nagata was slumped forward over his desk. He was stone dead. The desktop was a computer screen, and it was glowing all around him in a pool of wavering light. I had no doubt it was trying to figure out what the hell kind of command-gesture its master’s dead body was performing.
There was someone else in the room as well. He was standing at the bookshelves, calmly thumbing through the books one at a time. At first, I didn’t recognize the intruder.
He wore a weird suit. The texture was oddly iridescent, as if the fibers it was woven from were hair-thin wires, rather than cloth. The fabric of it whispered like ripping Velcro when he moved.
“Claver?” I boomed, recognizing the face when he glanced at me.
Three rapid strides brought me close enough to grab him. He lifted arms sheathed in that strange, dark fabric and our hands met. We struggled for a few seconds.
“Nagata wouldn’t listen to me,” Claver said, grunting with effort. “Maybe you will.”
I shoved him bodily against a wall. He fingered a dial on the chest of his strange garment. I slapped his hand away from it.
“Careful boy,” he said, “or I’ll take you straight to Hell with me.”
“Why’d you kill Nagata?”
“I told you. He wouldn’t listen. He kept going for weapons and trying to signal his security boys.”
“Wouldn’t listen to what?”
“They’re coming. The squids. Really soon now—but not in the way that anyone thinks.”
I frowned. We were both breathing hard, clinched up with our muscles tight. His suit seemed to be too big for him. In fact, he was slipping around inside this loose skin so much I was having a hard time restraining him.
Glancing down, I was surprised to notice his outfit had several extra hanging tubes that flopped on the floor behind the bulbous central body. Two of these tubes were full of human leg—but what were the others for?
With a sudden burst of power, Claver shoved me away from him. He shook his head.
“I give up,” he said. “Here I am, playing the good Samaritan to a shit-crowd yet again. You’re as big an idiot as you ever were. When the squids come, make sure you remember who tried to warn you.”
“You can’t get out of here,” I told him, “this is Central Command. There are cameras and guards everywhere.”
He laughed. “That won’t matter. It won’t stop me—or the squids, either. Goodbye, dummy.”
Before I could grapple him again, he touched the star-shaped dial on his chest, and…that’s when things got weird.
The room seemed to shiver somehow. It was as if the walls were momentarily blurred, moving very rapidly for several seconds in random tiny jerks. I didn’t feel this vibration, but I saw it—at least, I thought I did.
Some of the effect must have been real, because alarms were set off all over the floor. The sirens in the corridor outside began whooping, and yellow flashers began flashing.
The clamor made me glance out the open office door. I only turned away from Claver for a split second—but when I turned back again, he was gone.
There was nothing where Claver had been standing a moment before. Not even a wisp of smoke. His strange suit had gone with him as well.
Nagata wasn’t missing, however. The man’s corpse still lay draped over the glimmering desk in a pool of blood.
As Claver enjoyed pointing out, I’ve never been accused of being a genius. But it didn’t take whole lot of brains to realize that I was now in a very compromising position.
I popped back out into the corridor and headed for the nearest elevator. I made it inside and rode the car to the air deck, halfway down the building’s incredible height.
Stepping calmly onto the puff-crete landing zone, I walked out into a light blustery rain. There were sirens going off out here, too. Nervous-looking guards approached me.
“Who are you, Legionnaire?” a veteran-ranked hog named Weber demanded. Raindrops ran from his face, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just scowled at me.
“I’m an adjunct, that’s who I am. I’m headed back to the city after reporting to Equestrian Nagata. Is that good enough for you?”
Weber blinked, but he didn’t back down.
“Sorry sir,” he said. “We’ve got a lock-down in progress. You’ll have to wait until the all-clear has been sounded.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll just hail an air car and—”
“Aren’t you listening, sir?” he demanded. “Lock-down! No traffic in or out.”
“Got it,” I said. Doing a U-turn, I headed back toward the towering main building.
“Sorry sir,” Veteran Weber called after me. “I still haven’t seen any kind of ID. Is the friend-or-foe transponder on your tapper working?”
I’d disabled it temporarily to make it harder for anyone looking for me to pinpoint my location. I knew, however, it wouldn’t do to tell this hog about that.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “There was some kind of electrical discharge up on the three hundred and fifteenth floor. Maybe it took out my tapper.”
Weber frowned, looking me over. I gave him my best stern, no-nonsense stare in return. He bought it.
“All right,” he said at last, “go on back inside and wait the
re. We might want to question you later, if you were close to whatever caused—”
The rest of his words I didn’t catch as I’d already taken several steps away from him. I gave him a nod over my shoulder and a disinterested wave of the hand.
I could feel eyes on my back, however. They were suspicious, and they had good reason to be. I was lucky no one had recognized me. Not more than a few months earlier I’d been involved in a series of unfortunate events right here at Central. It was the memory of those events, such as the erasure of the data core and several related deaths, that had these hogs so edgy.
I knew full well he was probably working his tapper, doing a data scan on my facial patterns. It was only a matter of time before he found out who I was and that my file was marked on some kind of watch list. Every time I went through security here, even when there was nothing unusual going on, they frisked me and treated me like a fugitive.
To my credit, my smooth exit almost worked. I had time, in fact, to put together a back-up plan. I’d take the stairway down to the garage sub-levels rather than the elevators. That would take time and remove me from most of the security grid. They only had a few drone and AI cameras monitoring that route. In comparison, the elevators were minefields of surveillance equipment.
Once at street level, with any luck this alert would be over, and I’d be able to slip away. If not… well, there were always more drastic options available.
Thundering boots behind me made my heart sink. The veteran was on to me. Heaving a sigh, I turned around with my hand on my weapon.
Weber’s eyes were as big around as saucers. He was breathing hard, and he glanced down at my hand on my pistol.
“You must have gotten the message too,” he said.
“What message?”
“About floor three-fifteen!”
This was it. They must have discovered Nagata’s body. It had been a long shot that I’d be allowed to escape before they found him. I cursed inside, annoyed that I’d been taken so easily.
I realized I was facing a grim choice. I could gun this man down and try to escape, taking comfort in the knowledge they’d revive him soon thereafter. But that would leave me as a fugitive. I would have to be very lucky to stay out of prison.