Four or five more reports echoed behind me, but I ran ducking low. Fearful trepidation propelled me forward expecting the burning pain of a bullet to pierce my skin at any instant. When no burning or pain came, I counted my lucky stars and kept moving, hoping that my preparation before the meeting was enough to get me out. These circumstances were a stark reminder of the disadvantage of my job: a lack of any large well-stocked support network to help me.
Several vehicles traveled through the nearby woods. The sound of nearby shouting caused me to shift my escape to a more perpendicular route from my previous direction and the meeting site. I hoped the change in direction would throw off my pursuers enough to find a nice discreet hiding place in the darker areas.
It disheartened me that I had reached this point: alone in the dark, running for my life, and now squeezed into a storm drain half my size. I sat quietly in the cold muddy water trying not to get killed, thinking about the events that had led me to this point.
I waited silently, listening to the sounds of men yelling and the echoes of their radios filtering through the still night air. The voices grew closer, then farther away. It was hard to know how many men I was evading, but I knew the odds were not in my favor.
A twig snapped near me, then a green laser light, just perceptible in the moonlight, swept back and forth through the trees. I could hear movement through the underbrush a few meters away. The source of the laser light came into view as I watched from my hole. Clad in black, the soldier stepped into the clearing. He was almost invisible, except for the small breaks of moonlight through the trees.
Focused on my breathing, I kept my calm while concentrating on altering his perception. With my talent, I could create passionate attraction in someone or make them turn on their best friend as easily as smiling at them. The simple effects that were a part of the body’s natural reaction were always much easier and less taxing to manipulate. Affecting someone’s mind to see or not see something right in front of their eyes, well, that was a trick that took time to master. The best I could figure out was that the effect played with the perceptive regions of the mind, creating or blocking visual cues. It was a trick I had learned about a year before. I couldn’t have imagined the genetic modifications they made would be so vital in such a life-threatening circumstance.
He approached the storm drain, stopping less than two meters from the opening. If he looked close, a shift of light between the metal of the drain and my body may have exposed me. He took two more steps, his rifle pointed at the ground, the green laser a less than a meter from me.
The soldier stood frozen. The tension in my body grew as I considered that I may not have affected him. I knew the range of my talent was limited in outdoor environments. The tension pulled at me more and more while he stood over me. Just as my hand raised the gun to the man point blank in front of me, mind working alternative escape plans, the soldier turned away, moving back out of the clearing and into the trees.
The burning in my chest grew uncomfortable, reminding me that I had been holding my breath. Slowly and steadily, I exhaled. My heart raced in my chest as the sound of my pulse pounded in my ears. I slipped out of the drain, hoping the soldiers had moved away. My heart began the slow steady descent back to acceptable levels, as adrenaline fed the tension in my muscles with energy. I kept myself low in the shadows, paying close attention to the noises around me as I moved.
I crept for what seemed like all night, cursing myself for thinking the park being less extensive than this. My original preparation for the meeting hadn’t taken into account vehicles and armed soldiers. Then again, the realities of plans never seem to work out the way you imagine them.
Exhilaration filled me as I reached a clearing, giving me hope that I might be out of the woods, literally and figuratively. The two shiny black transports sitting at an intersection along the edge of the park dashed much of that hope.
The difficult part of convincing someone I wasn’t there was often the ability to hide from their sight. Watching me run across a lit road in the middle of the night wasn't going to keep them from seeing me, no matter how much I wanted them not to.
Another unfortunate element of the ability was the toll it took on my body. With normal physical activity, my blood was somewhat normal and didn't require attention, aside from a daily dose of Promium to keep me clean. Using my ability in small chunks still required a daily dose of Promium, but it wore me out physically. To push my ability to the level needed to convince someone I'm not standing near them generally required an immediate dose of Promium. It also required at least eight hours of sleep before I could get back to my normal cheery self.
Considering what I had to do to escape, lurking in the woods in the middle of the night would not end well for someone with my condition. Hidden by shadows, I leaned against a tree and considered my options. Unfortunately, there weren't many. I could follow the edge of the trees until I was far enough out of sight to escape. Of course, that assumed there wasn't another group on the road.
To my utter dismay, my need for options evaporated as four black-clad soldiers exited the tree line not far from where I sat, then climbed into vehicles. Within a few minutes, they drove away. Being as paranoid as I was after all of this, I waited until I was sure they were truly gone and not a trick to lure me out of the woods..
The numbness in my mind, the burning blood in my veins, and the exhaustion in my body forced me to move. I stepped from the tree line and worked my way to the nearest public street. Thankfully, I didn't have to wait long for a ride.
"The Hendron House, please," I said as I laid back in the soft padded seat.
As the vehicle moved, I pulled a small auto-injector from my coat pocket. Applying medicine to the exposed skin in my neck, I sighed, feeling the liquid warm my blood. My eyes closed and my thoughts drifted back to the moments before the buyer’s chest exploded all over the merchandise. Why had he looked unhappy? What would have caused him to pull a gun on me? Had Kelvis set me up? As that last question hung in my mind, another realization crossed my mind: I never had a chance to have the crystal tested to verify that it was the genuine article.
It never crossed my mind how quickly the soldiers had arrived in the office. As I thought about it, it seemed odd how long the airborne transport had been on approach even before they arrived. It didn't take me long to realize that the crystal was the problem, not the soldiers or the bad intelligence.
I didn't like the direction that my thoughts were going, but I'd always understood the problem with this business. The absence of logical answers to a problem tended to lend itself to the more illogical possibilities.
Had the Cypher been the bait? Had it been the trap that exposed our network? Was my capture supposed to clear the books? The plasma blast had seemed a bit extreme as a countermeasure at the time. Had I been captured by the soldiers, I would have been in the room with them when the blast went off, clean and simple. My mind started racing as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
Had the man outside the safehouse been a failsafe in the event that I escaped? The next piece of the puzzle that I couldn't explain was how they found both of the drop sites. The first was easy in that they had compromised our network, so once they understood our codes, they knew the drop. The second was more of a mystery, but I started to build a picture.
Merchandise of this nature would need verification. A man with the resources to buy merchandise like this would certainly use those resources to check the validity of the claim before agreeing to a buy. It was highly likely that the channels he used to verify the merchandise also reached back to whoever was directing the troops. These men were not likely Corp security, so the only option was private contractors. The thought didn't sit well in my mind as the car came to a slow stop in front of the hotel.
I decided not to waste any time. I found a banking terminal nearby. I wanted to ensure that my loss didn't turn into a wasted effort. I may not be able to get rid of the Cypher, but I wasn't going to give up the chance t
o get paid for my efforts. I slid my utilities crystal into the port and the program in the crystal took over, giving me access to backdoor systems that I could use to access the new credit chip. I popped the late Mr. Hood's chip into the port, and the software I implemented slowly worked the encryption on the crystal until it finally broke through.
All of this would have been simpler if I’d bothered to bring my skimmer, I could have simply scanned the credit chip and transferred the funds, but not being sure how the transaction would be made, I deemed it unnecessary at the time. I smiled as the program highlighted the number of credits loaded on the account. I discerned that the Cypher was valuable, but I hadn't expected anything that extensive.
I activated the software, and the credit count on the crystal began to count down as the program made hundreds of thousands of small transfers across the interweb. Credits spread to phantom accounts that would divide out the balances across my hidden accounts. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that the credits were marked, but spreading them out and moving them around would eventually wipe the marks and block any attempts to track them.
As the account ticked down to zero I waited for a few minutes as the software worked its magic, and finally confirmed the dispersal of credits. I wasn't usually one to steal someone's assets unless it was a mission. I liked to think I still kept some scruples. I also liked to think that what I'd done up to that point was for the right reasons. Not that it mattered much. The late Mr. Hood wouldn't need the money anymore, and if I was truly compromised, I'd need every single credit to survive, to find out what happened.
I cleared the software from the banking system and took a leisurely walk back to my hotel, keeping a wary eye on my surroundings. This had been an agonizing few weeks with surprises and unanticipated visitors, so the last thing I needed was another bombshell. On top of that, my meeting with Mr. Hood had been hideously unproductive, so I wasn’t looking forward to the final piece of my quest.
What were the chances they were watching my handler’s suspected location? It stood to figure that this would turn out to be a trap and a dead end … in every sense!
I ambled through the streets, cultivating the seeds of material I had at my disposal; the location, the system, the details of how I’d been set up from the word “go.” I knew there was every reason to believe that they would be waiting for me, but I also pondered the possibility that they were counting on me to never discover my handler’s identity.
Why couldn’t I just let this go, disappear into the rim worlds, use my skills for good or evil and simply cease to matter to whoever was involved? The possibility turned over and over in my mind. The one character trait that made me good for this line of work had also turned to be a decided weakness: my curiosity for unsolved mysteries and my need to solve them. This trait had served me well in the past, but this time, I feared it was going to get me killed.
The trip from the Freehold to Drellic would take two days, while a less obvious route would take five and have only limited exposure to local stations. The direct route would be more dangerous and go against my usual conservative nature, which seemed to be the one advantage I had against an enemy who knew my moves well, but I booked it anyway, using an identity I had made up a few years earlier during a side op that had no official sanction. Doing freelance work had seemed rather silly, seeing as we were freelance operatives to begin with, but the objective had been a noble cause I felt needed a champion. Ironically, this identity was now the champion I needed to survive this ordeal and find answers.
***
Much to my astonishment, I slept through a good deal of the trip. It never dawned on me how absolutely wrecked my body had become during the events of the past month.
No matter where on the transport I sat, the one nice thing about a window seat was the chance to see the planet come into view. There had always been something fresh and childishly curious about the expression on my face and the feeling in my heart whenever I entered a new system and saw the planets for the first time. This wasn’t the first time I’d been to the Shenshi system, but it was the first time I’d been to Drellic, the fifth planet in a system of twelve, circling a rare dual suns that weren’t binaries.
Shenshi had been the first system colonized by the Trokan Republic, and its magnitude was tremendous. With two non-binary suns and twelve planets of varying sizes and compositions, Shenshi represented a new prosperous start to many Trokan colonists who sought to explore the universe. Although only seven of the planets could sustain some level of life, the numerous mining and space stations over the uninhabitable worlds provided a great deal of variety to the bold explorer. Shenshi’s key attraction was being on the border with the Androckan Federation, which over the years had provided a steady flow of integration between the feline Androckans and the Trokan Republic population.
The large greyish blue planet hung bright against the deep black curtain of space. A number of dark metal stations and an assortment of large ships hanging from them slowly circled the large gray-blue planet. One massive vessel, larger than three or four stations combined, hung over the cool bluish white of Drellic’s northern pole. The flat rectangular ship bristled with cannons and antennas along its seemingly endless spine, while smaller ships hung in its proximity. A Republic Navy dreadnought was there to let any would-be raiders know that Drellic was the headquarters of the Navy’s expeditionary fleet.
Immense clusters of billowy white clouds draped over the planet’s visible oceans and landmasses. Grey rocky continents sprinkled with distant patches of green lush land made up about half of the planet’s landmass, while the rest seemed more hospitable and green. Expansive cities, visible even from orbit, dotted the continents’ shorelines.
The cruiser slowed as it approached the planet, then turned softly toward a station with multiple flat round sections connected by small necks in between. Docking in space allowed the planetary governments to better control access and to save the transport companies money in fuel. Much to my surprise, docking and moving through customs happened rather quickly. It wasn’t long before I was on a space elevator headed to the surface. I’d heard of these contraptions, but had never experienced one until now. To the best of my knowledge, some portion of the station is tethered to the planet, while a series of long powerful cables move people and equipment up and down to low planetary atmosphere in large shielded boxes.
The information Kelvis had given me told me that my handler was in the capital city of Drellic. The rest of the data had been fragmented and cryptic, but not useless. There were keywords and codewords that my handler had used to provide what I could only conclude was a status report. His last message read like an update on our latest mission. The key was the part where he had coded his current operations point, used for logistics and support, as well as my target location.
As I sat quietly in the back of the hired car, watching the ferrosteel structures and large modern buildings with glistening windows pass by, I wondered if his last report had actually exposed us to the assassin. It had always stood to reason that someone had compromised our communications nodes, and thus our operation. However, this level of mission detail could have been an inside job. The prospect disturbed me more than I was willing to accept. Also, if the silence across our usual support structure was any indication, the whole system was gone.
“Stop here, please.”
The driver pulled to the shoulder just a few blocks away from the location Kelvis gave me. It was apparent things hadn’t been working in my favor as of late, and the last thing I wanted was to expose myself to more trouble. Paying the driver, I casually walked along the sidewalk while I carefully searched for anything out of the ordinary.
I neared the building I was looking for, which was across the street to my left. Certain that nothing unusual stood out, I darted across the street through traffic, then bounded up the building’s stairs two at a time. The hairs on the back of my head stood up immediately as I tried the door and it opened. I wasn’t sure
if it was some feeling of impending danger, or the feeling of death coming from the apartment that made my hair stand on end; but I was sure the overpowering stench of death drove it home. Pulling my handkerchief over my face, I pushed into the dark musty apartment. It was drab, spartan décor. I found it curious that no one had been through to clean up the apartment, especially with the stench of decaying flesh filling the small space.
It didn’t take long for me to find the source of the rank stench. The darkened back bedroom seemed more like a cave than a room. The air was thick; the room frozen in what I suspected was the same state the occupant had left it before his untimely demise. By the look of things, the assassin had struck in the middle of preparation for the op.
My handler’s body sat slumped over a desk, face down on the keyboard with a black ferrocomposite dagger embedded in his back. Judging by the positioning of the dagger, the strike didn’t kill him. As I looked over the scene, the large red stain under the chair and the deep red slice along his neck spoke to the true manner of death. The dagger in the back was a sign, not a killing blow.
Aside from the missing drive crystal and the destroyed computer terminal, the contents of the room were undisturbed. Doubting an interruption would arrive anytime soon, I began rummaging through the room, looking for anything that might point me in a useful direction.
Standing in the middle of the room, I noticed I was starting to grow accustomed to the stench of death, which was not a good thing. Having searched all of the obvious locations in the room for hidden information, my secretive mind sought places that most would not think to look. The problem I realized being how unlikely it was that my handler had any idea he had been compromised prior to the assassin’s attack.
After a long moment of standing in the middle of the room staring at the contents, my eyes finally rested on the dagger embedded in my handler’s back. Was he the key? Chances were he was a professional assassin, a professional who had a reputation. A reputation like that and a calling card like this could turn into a dangerous road.
Cypher: Chronicles of Rah Page 4