“No.”
“Okay,” Stein said, after a moment’s consideration. “Is that even legal? Isn’t that, like, abuse?”
“I think the laws prohibiting abusing you would be rapidly redefined if this ever went to court,” Hogg said. “You have pissed a lot of people off.”
“Oh.” Any despair she might have felt at her situation quickly turned to annoyance, that familiar feeling of self–righteousness coursing through her. “So, you’re just here to mock me, then?”
Hogg looked at her carefully for a moment before responding. “I’m here because I want to know where your friend went.”
Stein laughed. “Slippery isn’t he? I’ve honestly got no idea. Someplace stupid I imagine. Good luck bringing him down. Better men than you have tried.”
Hogg smiled, his lips tight on his teeth. “You weren’t that hard to find once. I think we’ll manage.”
Her shoulders sagged fractionally; he had a point. She tried to stand up, nailing it on her first try. She celebrated by sitting down heavily on the bunk. “We aren’t terrorists,” she said.
“Okay. Don’t care.”
Ah. She’d forgotten what it was like dealing with a security officer she wasn’t fucking on the side. “Why not?” she finally asked. “Seems the kind of thing you should care about.” She banged her head against the wall behind her. She’d had a speech prepared for this, her innocence speech. But the words were all scrambled now. “Everything that Captain Helot said about us was a lie.” She looked at Hogg, who was wearing an expression that implied he was daring her to make him care. “You probably don’t believe me right now,” she continued. “That’s okay. I wouldn’t either.”
“You and your friend incapacitated a half–dozen security officers in front of my eyes,” Hogg replied.
“I guess there’s that,” she allowed. “Wasn’t really me that did that though.”
“And then there’s the two men you killed last night.”
“We didn’t kill anyone last night.” She shook her head. “That’s part of the lie. What were their names? The people we killed?”
Hogg’s eyebrows furrowed. “And there’s Ron Gabelman.”
Stein shivered. She’d forgotten about Ron. “That wasn’t us, either.” She looked Hogg in the eyes. “Do you really believe I killed Ron?”
“I do now.” Stein looked away from him and his smug face. Then she realized something: he didn’t seem to be lying. Which meant he honestly wasn’t aware of the plot. Helot had kept it from him, too.
Twisting around, she struggled to prop herself up on the hard pillow, trying to face Hogg from a sitting position. “Okay, I get it. Time to lay all the cards on the table.” She hesitated, and looked at her feet for a while, ordering her words. “The captain is trying to divide this ship in two. I mean literally, physically, run it through a saw, divide the ship in two. The entire aft section of the ship, above the fourth level, the part with the engines and main fuel tanks — it’s designed to pop off like a cork. The massive shaking we felt wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was a botched attempt to split. The. God. Damned. Ship. In two.”
Hogg had been pretty stationary during this whole process but somehow became even more still, his only movement being a gradual widening of the eyes. Seconds passed. A smile thawed his face, and he began to chuckle softly. “I get to hear a great deal of bullshit in this job, but that? That’s the best one yet. That bullshit is classy.”
She continued, ignoring his sleight. “Everything since then has been an effort by the captain to conceal what he did. The announcement about the fake terrorist attack. The bulkhead doors and the barricades. The entire aft has been locked down while he tries again.”
“To saw the ship in half?”
“Yes!”
Hogg let out a short bark, the opening fraction of a laugh. “You people can always tie every damned thing into your conspiracies. Everything’s proof if you squint at it long enough.”
Stein swallowed, working to control her frustration. “So, you honestly didn’t know?”
“Know what?” Hogg asked, enunciating each word carefully. “Did I know the captain was slicing the ship in two? No. I didn’t know that.”
She stared at the ceiling, knowing it was hopeless, but feeling her old familiar stubbornness rearing its head. Slowly, she eased herself back to lean against the wall. “Okay, think about this. Yesterday morning, you remember being ordered to report to the aft? All the security officers rushing to the rear core? Why do you think that happened before the bulkhead doors closed? Which happened before this terrorist attack?”
Hogg snorted. “I wasn’t ordered anywhere.”
Stein blinked. “I saw it happen. I saw security officers running south just before those bulkhead doors closed. You must have been.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, crazy lady,” Hogg said, smiling. “I was in bed. Went to the office around nine. This office. In the bow. Rest of my unit was here, too.”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. They would take all the security with them. Unless…” She looked at Hogg and started laughing. “Heh. Okay. Wow. You’re not going to like this.”
Hogg cocked an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“If you weren’t recalled to the aft before they tried to separate, that means they were going to leave you behind, too.”
Hogg laughed. “Oh, that’s cute. I love you guys. Everything’s always a neat little package.”
It did sound a little neat and tidy, Stein had to admit. But didn’t the truth always tend to do that? “Okay, fine,” she said. “I get that you don’t believe a word. I don’t care that you don’t care. I just thought you should know.” She looked him in the eye. “If you don’t believe me…”
“I don’t.”
“Fuck, I get it, okay? Look, try doing your own research. See if you can find out why every security officer except for you was ordered to the aft of the ship yesterday morning. At the very least, it might let you know where you stand.”
Hogg’s lip curled a bit, as if he was about to say something, before it slid back down. Then, without a word, he walked away, the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall. A door closed.
“Hit a nerve, did I?”
She rolled over onto her stomach, her arms sore behind her. She didn’t know why she had told him all that. A pointless endeavor. He obviously wouldn’t believe a word she had said. But lying there on her scratchy gray blanket, she had felt a burning need for him to believe her. She buried her face in the hard pillow.
Stein had spent a large chunk of her youth on the outside, looking in. With a bit of work, she had managed to convince herself that she liked it, that the life of a loner suited her. But lying to yourself was a kid’s game. She had grown up, gotten friends, a good job, a veneer of social respectability. For a decade, she had been on the inside, and it was awesome. People talked to her. Sought out her opinions. She mattered.
And Helot had taken all that away from her, condemning Bruce and her to a life as fugitives. That’s what really annoyed her. The scope of what he was really doing — the stupid goddamned Split Plot — that was too big. Too much to comprehend. But taking away her life? Her reputation? That was small enough to just piss her off. That’s why she had tried to convince Hogg. She wanted him to believe her. She remembered Ellen’s laughter upon hearing the same story. That bitch. Stein rolled over to her other side, trying to find a comfortable position to orient her constrained limbs. Hell, she would settle for anyone believing her.
§
For the fifth time, Kinsella read the news bulletin. He drummed his fingers on the desk, then checked it once more to see if it had changed.
UNDER INTERROGATION, TERRORIST LAURA STEIN CONFIRMS SHE WAS ACTING UNDER ORDERS OF MAYOR ERIC KINSELLA. ERIC KINSELLA IS CURRENTLY BEING SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING. CURRENT LEVELS OF SECURITY WILL REMAIN AT ELEVATED LEVELS UNTIL THE THREAT OF MORE TERROR ATTACKS SUBSIDES. — SECURITY CHIEF THORIAS.
�
��Well, that was only a matter of time.” He leaned back, the filthy chair beneath him creaking and groaning in protest. He hated that chair and lashed out at it, kicking wildly with his heels. “Arrrrrrrgh!” he yelled, connecting with it solidly with one of his bruised heels, bruised from a similar tantrum an hour earlier. “Stupid damned traitor chair!”
He stopped kicking and slumped down in the awful chair, his chin coming to rest on his chest. When he was thinking calmly, Kinsella knew he had done about as well as he could, given the circumstances. Unfortunately, calm thinking thing was a bit of a challenge. He worked on that now, impeded somewhat by his throbbing heel.
He didn’t recall how he had left the Captain’s office, he only had the headache to tell him it wasn’t a gentle trip. The shaking that had rattled the ship had roused him to consciousness, coming to in the middle of a small side street on the fourth level. He had spent the next hour wandering the crowded streets in a rage, hurling obscenities at closed bulkhead doors and any members of the electorate who dared look at him. Bletmann had eventually tracked him down, politely shepherding him back to his spacious home in the garden well where he could vent without further damaging his approval rating.
Then the bulkhead doors had opened. The bastard messed it up. The images on the feeds of security officers setting up barricades made that clear enough. And when the feeds showed small groups of officers moving through angry crowds, Kinsella immediately realized where they were going. Helot would be scrambling to salvage his plot, and as perhaps the only other person who knew what had actually happened, the mayor was now a hunted man. Within a minute, Kinsella had abandoned his home, traveling belowdecks to this regrettable little hovel belonging to Bletmann’s cousin’s friend’s drug dealer. The place was appallingly ugly, stains upon stains upon green paint. Perfect for his purposes; no one would ever think he would spend a moment in such a place. He was uncomfortable even knowing it existed.
There, he tried not to sit on anything, and to think. Helot was going to try again. If what he had said was true, he had no choice but to leave half the ship to die. And Kinsella had to stop him.
Or more precisely, Kinsella had to swap places with him. If half the ship had to die, who was he to argue with that? He just wanted to pick the teams himself.
But if swapping places with Helot was the endgame, then he was currently still stuck setting up his pieces. Hell, he didn’t even really have any pieces yet. Right now Helot’s pawns and knights and queens were standing across the board from Kinsella’s forces, which consisted of two buttons and a grape. So, that would be his first order of business: find more buttons and grapes.
The sickly green door of the hovel opened, and Bletmann entered, closing and locking the door behind him. “Everything’s set, sir.”
“Good,” Kinsella replied. A big public speech, that’s what the situation called for. Like something from an old movie. Screaming crowds. A huge picture of his face in the background. Women fainting. He had directed Bletmann to make all the necessary arrangements. It evidently hadn’t proven too much of a challenge for him — a wide assortment of people owed his lackey a variety of favors, earned over a long and successful career of politicking and the light blackmail that that entailed.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Bletmann continued. “I know you wanted it sooner, but the fainting club has a thing tonight they couldn’t cancel. I tried,” he added, shrinking from the withering glare Kinsella was directing at him. He slunk across the room to a chair and sat down, carefully moving a wig out of the way. “Do you know what you’re going to say?” he said, trying to change the subject.
Kinsella blinked. He always knew what he was going to say. How else would I say it? That said, a big speech on a stage was a new thing for him; he usually did his speaking on feeds. But the concept was the same, surely. Nouns, verbs, slurs. Pounding his fist into his hand. More slurs. He even had the facts on his side this time. Helot’s plot was the most offensive crime the Argos had ever seen. As soon as the crowd heard it, they would be clamoring for their captain’s head. Kinsella would just tell them about that, then finish it off with more slurring. Simple.
“Yes, idiot,” Kinsella finally said. See? I knew I was going to slur him, and then it happened. Don’t overcomplicate things, son. His eyes flickered down to the announcement on the desk display. “How far in advance are you announcing it? I’m a wanted man you know.” He tapped the display.
Bletmann rubbed his fingers against his pants leg. “I talked to some guys about that. People are bored, sir. The whole ship’s primed to show up for anything. I figure if we give them five minutes, we’ll fill the square easy.” He jerked his head at the door. “Your bodyguards will provide cover to spot for security, and the place I picked out has a couple escape routes. It should work fine.”
“Should work fine,” Kinsella echoed. Of course, if it didn’t work fine; unlike the mayor, Bletmann would only be out a job, not his life. Kinsella briefly considered making a threat to bind their fates together a little more tightly. “You know I can still kill people from beyond the grave, right Bletmann?” Kinsella said. “You specifically, if necessary.”
Bletmann seemed almost bored by the threat. “Yes, sir. I remember my job interview quite well, sir.”
§
Hogg sat at his desk in the back of the Community Outreach and Policing Center, wishing it didn’t feel so quiet. Although large enough for fifty full–time security officers, less than a dozen now occupied the space. Outside Hogg’s office, he could see his team of high achievers moping around in the bullpen. A depressed — and depressing — group at the best of times, getting their asses handed to them by a pair of civilians had had a predictable effect on their morale. The officers he had sent out searching for Redenbach had returned empty handed, although all still thankfully conscious. Tired of looking at the sorry bunch, a sizable minority of which were massaging their bruised groins, Hogg stalked to his office door and pounded the control to close it.
He returned to his desk, sat down, and re–read the terse message from Thorias. Deliver prisoner to barricade at Africa–1 and 9th Ave. He stared at the words, willing them to say something more. He had captured the most wanted person on the Argos. The chief should have been ecstatic. And yet, he hadn’t given Hogg so much as a scratch behind the ear. He didn’t even ask about the one that got away.
The news bulletins only added to his confusion. Every word of them was a lie. There had been no interrogation of Stein — he wouldn’t even call what they had a conversation. Her talking and him ducking her slippery words. The woman made him uncomfortable. Too many things were happening that he didn’t understand, and she had an eerie ability to pick at the doubts already fermenting in his mind. The central premise of her story, that the captain had gone insane and was going to destroy half the ship, was nonsense, but like all good conspiracy theories, there was enough genuine facts lingering at the fringes to lend the mess an air of plausibility.
A beep on his desk. Linze, letting him know the van was ready. Hogg stood up, picked the pistol from his desk, and slotted it into his pocket. He would handle the transfer himself, not wanting to expose his men to Stein’s lies. They probably weren’t stupid enough to buy her story, but there was just a bit too much wiggle room in that ‘probably’ for him to feel totally comfortable with the idea.
§
Bruce licked his lips, took a deep breath, then rounded the corner across the street from the Community Outreach and Policing Centre. On 40th Avenue, flush with the northern end of the garden well, the northern security outpost had a smaller and friendlier public facade than the monolithic security base in the aft. This was where security’s “Say Later to Drugs” campaign and other soft programs were organized. But it housed regular police operations as well, including holding cells. It was also the closest security base to their hideout, and according to a couple of Fauxmless who had seen her get moved inside, where Stein was apparently being held.
With his shoulder–
length blonde wig, Bruce was disguised as either an extremely unattractive woman or an unremarkably unattractive man. Just a reconnaissance trip; otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered with the subterfuge. It was really a role for Ellen or Griese, but he hadn’t told them what had happened yet. They would just warn him to stay hidden. And, fabulous new disguise aside, he had no interest in remaining hidden.
At a measured pace, he walked along the street, across from the front door of the security office. He held his terminal in front of him, tilted slightly towards the door of the security office with his head firmly fixed forward, pointedly not looking across the street. He rotated the terminal around as he walked, keeping the sensor pointed at the front door. Rounding the corner at the end of the street, he continued a few more steps until he was out of sight, then stopped and replayed the recording he had just made.
The doors were transparent, and he paused the playback at the point where he was directly across the street from them. Here, he had gotten a clear shot inside the office and could see a short entry hallway and a large central room just beyond. Inside, two or three officers could be seen. From the ship’s drawings, he knew the holding cells would be on the far side of that room. The layout was problematic — with only one way in, they would see him coming. A frontal assault would be both ballsy and stupid, though Bruce was reasonably well–stocked with both of those commodities.
He resumed the playback, watching as the image panned past the entryway to less useful angles. Just as he was about to stop the replay, the front doors opened, three officers stepping outside. Bruce nearly choked when he saw they were leading Stein out the door, her hands behind her back. He dashed back around the corner, catching a glimpse of them entering the escalator at the other end of the block. He walked as quickly as he dared towards the escalator, not wanting to prematurely draw any attention to himself. When he reached the escalator, he took the steps two at a time, stopping on the third floor, dashing into the street, spinning around. Not seeing them, he circled around to the escalator down to the second floor, panicking slightly as he finally guessed at their destination. They were taking her to the first floor. Where a security van would be waiting. He withdrew his pistol and sprinted down the escalator.
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