by J N Chaney
“The facility’s on lockdown, sir. Please proceed to the safe area.”
Sasha handled it, adopting the tone of patronizing arrogance I imagined most of the researchers here addressed the security guards and janitors with. “I have an important task to perform in Sector T.”
The security guard was unconvinced. “Sir, lockdown protocol states that…”
We just walked right past him, and Sasha’s clout in the company was enough to get us by without any serious challenge. I was thankful the man had obviously not been assigned to the death squad that had been sent to kill Sasha and his colleagues.
Andrea wrote again.
Thomas says that some of the building’s security has been tasked to break up the demonstration on the street.
I marveled that such a long sentence had come through perfectly. It was so hard to predict what the app would get right and what it wouldn’t.
Understood. Proceeding to the doors.
When we reached the front exit, I was impressed to see that the crowd had not been entirely scattered by the drones firing non-lethal munitions in their midst. The crowd outside the doors was much further back, and only about a quarter the size of what it was before. Still, the demonstrators who remained were the hardcore militants—dedicated followers of Bensouda Hafidi, faces covered by green masks and headscarves. From their new position further back in the square, the demonstrators were dodging out from behind makeshift barricades and bonfires to throw improvised firebombs at the StateSec guards in front of the doors. StateSec were responding by firing rubber bullets at the crowd. So far, at least, no one had decided to start killing anyone.
Sasha paused at the door. “How mindless! I cannot go out there.”
His voice was disgusted, and maybe fearful, but we couldn’t afford to wait. If anyone saw the man talking to himself, they might look too closely and notice that he wasn’t talking to himself at all.
Andrea’s voice from behind him was pure vitriol. “If we can’t bring you in alive, my orders are to terminate.”
“What?! But you—”
He started looking around in a panic. I opened the door, and Andrea pushed him out of it. He almost fell but managed to keep his footing somehow. The guards fighting the angry crowd didn’t even notice him, except for a single officer who wasn’t part of the front line. He came running over.
“Sir, please return inside and proceed to—”
“What?” Sasha puffed himself up. “You must be joking!”
He wasn’t an easy asset to work with, but most of them aren’t. At least he was rolling with the punches.
The StateSec officer dutifully recited his script. “Sir, lockdown protocol states that—”
“Yes, yes! The last one I spoke with said the exact same thing. Sasha Ivanovich did not graduate summa cum laude from Zurich so he could be ordered around by men who could be replaced with automata to dance in their security theater.”
He was referring to himself in the third person again.
The StateSec officer was not amused. He didn’t go for his gun, but he did pull a slip-tie from his belt to restrain the mouthy scientist. We couldn’t have that, so I cracked him across the jaw with the butt of my rifle and dropped him unconscious on the ground. Andrea had ordered me to kill anyone who tried to interfere with us, but this man could have had a family for all I knew.
Come on, she messaged me. We have to get out of here.
One of the other officers noticed his comrade hitting the ground, though he had no way of knowing why. He spun around, yelled “officer down!” and ran to help. The other StateSec officers, assuming the demonstrators had somehow felled the man, responded by forming a tight line and unleashing a relentless barrage of rubber bullets into the crowd.
One of the officers turned and yelled, “We need live ammo!”
Fuck’s sake, messaged Andrea. If these idiots go to live ammo this city will explode.
I took off running along the edge of the plaza, trying to get away without getting into the line of fire. StateSec was so busy trying to punish the crowd that they didn’t even notice Sasha, or maybe they just assumed he was running for safety and would be back to work as soon as he was able.
Shepherding the researcher was Andrea’s job, and it could not have been easy. The only thing she could do to guide him was to shove him from behind or grab him when he went the wrong way. Unfortunately, one of the green-masked protesters noticed the man running in such a strange and halting way, then she noticed that he was a scientist. She started yelling to her comrades and pointing at Sasha. A few seconds later, more heads turned our way and I heard the first shouts of “don’t let him get away!” echo through the plaza.
Andrea’s orders came through over text right after that.
Take him. I’ll hold them off.
I spun around, grabbed Ivanovich by the wrist, and yanked him after me. He followed, muttering something I couldn’t hear. Andrea turned, and I worried that she was about to make the same mistake she had just described as idiotic—firing live ammunition into the angry crowd. Instead, she unclipped a pair of smoke grenades from her belt and tossed them at the shrinking open ground between us and the mob. She ran to catch up with us as choking smoke billowed out from under the crowd.
We were running down the street by this point, if running is the word for it. Held back by Sasha’s nervousness, I was barely able to do better than a stumbling jog. Andrea reached us in just a few seconds, and then we heard it.
CRACK. CRACK.
Live ammunition. The StateSec officers were firing into the crowd.
“That does it,” said Andrea out loud. “We might be fucked.” She came out of camouflage. “Decloak, Barrett.”
I dropped out of camouflage and saw Andrea pushing her hair back out of her eyes. “We’ll need to move quickly to get to the dead drop, and the target will be safer if people see that he has an armed escort.”
“The target?” From the look on his face, Sasha didn’t much like the sound of that.
“It’s nothing personal. If you want to live through this, you’d be wise to stay close.”
A few minutes later, we were back in the small entertainment district we’d passed on our way here. People were still eating their food and sipping glasses of wine at the outdoor tables, but the sound of gunfire a few blocks away was starting to make the more intelligent among them nervous.
“Should we settle our check and go home?” one woman asked.
The man at the table with her scoffed. “You know how these people are. They shoot at each other all the time.”
I didn’t know exactly how he defined “these people,” but I could guess easily enough. He meant the back-alley poor, the scum of the streets, the sort of people who would be followers of a fanatic like Bensouda Hafidi.
We reached the train station without incident, but it was swarming with StateSec officers. They seemed to be on their way to the front lines of the riot, reinforcements sent over to break the siege and put an end to the potential uprising.
Andrea veered off, calling out to me as she did. “We’ll go on foot. Come on!”
She ran down the street, and all I could do was follow. As we went along, I noticed that we were coming to the boundary between sections. Travel on foot between different sections was always possible, except in an emergency, but the boundaries between sections were always monitored by someone unless the same syndicate controlled both. Sure enough, the streets in front of the big bulkhead doors were guarded by syndicate gunmen, five on one side of the door and seven or eight on the other. It wasn’t a checkpoint in any real sense, but the young killers on either side of the doors would be just as effective. If you crossed from one syndicate’s territory into another’s, both syndicates would know about it.
This is just as bad, I messaged her.
She stopped in place then faded back into the shadows of an apartment entryway. I did the same, hoping none of the gang members had noticed us. Sasha tagged along, but
he didn’t seem to appreciate the need for caution.
“You people are paranoid. No one is going to shoot us here.”
“It’s not about that.” Andrea was watching the gunmen closely for any sign that we’d been seen. “Those people at the restaurant were one thing, but StateSec officers and syndicate gunmen are another. The more people who see us, the more people who remember, the less likely our chances of getting out of East Hellas alive.”
“Let me call up my own guards. They will come here and escort us out. That’s their job. It’s why I pay them.”
“No.”
Sasha seemed offended at the dismissal and was silent for a while after that. I checked the schematic and saw that our dead drop was located behind a restaurant in a section of the city called Fast Bend, the same neighborhood we were currently staring into from its rival neighborhood of Med Lab. Of the two neighborhoods, Med Lab had more company employees and was much more affluent. Paradoxically, this meant that the local syndicate was relatively weak, and they would exercise much less control over the streets than most neighborhood syndicates did. That probably explained why they had fewer fighters on their side of the bulkheads.
The problem solved itself when one of the Med Lab gunmen held a finger up and cocked his head to the side, a signal that he was getting a dataspike message. Then he suddenly stood, went over to the boundary, and met with a gunman from Fast Bend who had come over to confer with him. A moment later, he waved over the other members of the Fast Bend syndicate, and both groups of gunmen jogged off in the direction of the rioting.
I wonder which side they’ll pick, I messaged Andrea.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we can get to our dead drop.
In intelligence work, a dead drop is an inconspicuous spot where you can leave messages, money, or instructions for a covert agent. At some point in the lead-up to this mission, an agent had used an established dead drop in Fast Bend to set aside the things we would need to change our appearances and get out of East Hellas. It would have been a hell of a lot more convenient if the dead drop had been in the Med Lab section, but sometimes you just have to work with whatever you have.
As soon as the gunmen were gone, we ran through the bulkhead doors and into the Fast Bend section. The streets were narrow here, and faces stared out at us from windows and balconies above and below. In the warrens of East Hellas, everyone was someone else’s Other, and we were outsiders everywhere we went. A hundred eyes might have seen us on our way to the dead drop, and all we could do was hope that no one thought of us as important enough to remember or report.
We reached the restaurant, a run-down place with a sign out front that proclaimed Best Red Martians in glowing letters. We entered the alley between it and a dataspike shop, surprising a man and a local prostitute who were just in the process of concluding negotiations.
“Hey, fuck off,” the man started to say, but the size of the gun Andrea stuck in his face convinced him not to push the matter. They both ran off, and Andrea felt around on a wall until she found a crack. “Ah, here it is.”
She tugged on the crack, and a section of the wall just peeled away. There was a space behind it, from which she fished out a black tactical case. “Get changed,” she said, then pulled off her rifle and pushed it in the hole. I did the same, then I took off my thermoptic camouflage and the clothes underneath and swapped them for clothes from the case.
Whoever our sleeper agent was, he had a mean sense of humor. The clothes left for me weren’t just ten years out of style, they were more like fifty. I looked like I was trying to be my own grandfather. As I pulled up my pants, the only advantage I could see to this ridiculous outfit was that people would be much more likely to remember my clothes than me.
“I am not wearing this.” Sasha was scowling at a silk shirt, the sort of thing a man with too much cologne might wear to a nightclub.
“So, you’ve opted for termination?” asked Andrea casually, changing into the functional yet attractive outfit our agent had inexplicably decided to grace her with. Sasha grimaced and started changing.
“We’re leaving our weapons?” I asked.
“Keep only what you can conceal. We’re leaving Hellas immediately. The others are meeting us on the train.”
“Jones came through on the ID?”
“He always exaggerates how hard things are going to be. He thinks it will give him a reputation as a miracle worker.”
“Makes sense.”
“It would, if he wasn’t so transparent about it. You ready, Tycho?”
“I’m ready.” I kept a sidearm and a knife, both of which I’d taken from the case along with an unlimited-rides train pass for each of us. It was an odd feeling to be so lightly armed, and I found myself anxious leaving behind real stopping power. It was one of the advantages of being an Arbiter; your weapons and armor were always almost always better than anything the other side could throw at you.
In Section 9, I sometimes had access to the most powerful weapons and tech I’d ever used. Other times it was like this, crossing a hostile city virtually unarmed and dressed in the stupidest clothes I’d ever worn.
5
On the train at last, heading for the border with our peculiar new companion, I found myself trying to make sense of him. For a man who risked being assassinated at any moment, Sasha Ivanovich didn’t seem all that concerned. He reclined in his seat with his arms draped along the back and stretched his legs out into the aisle as if he wanted to take up as much space as possible. I sat just behind him, giving me a clear line of sight to anyone who tried to approach. Andrea stood a few feet ahead, holding on to a hanging strap.
I didn’t see any sign at first of the violence spreading out from the Med Lab section. Most of the passengers looked like working-class Martians heading home from jobs in other sections. Like train passengers anywhere, they huddled up against the windows, crossed their arms in front of them, or just stared off vacantly as the streets rolled by outside. It was silent except for the deep thrum of the train’s maglev pulse.
You can get from any section in East Hellas to any other section by public transit, and the transit stations are some of the only areas StateSec makes a point of controlling. Still, the sections are designed to be mainly self-sufficient. Most people live and work in the same neighborhood. Syndicate infighting often made traveling out of your own neighborhood a risk ordinary people tried to avoid anyway, so for most East Hellans, it was simply easier and safer to stay close to home.
Not that it’s always possible. Many of the people on the train were probably coming back from some unavoidable entanglement with the East Hellas bureaucracy, such as filling out the endless series of forms needed to notify the company of a new member of your household or a change to average electrical consumption. Under the circumstances, the safest thing to do for most people was to avoid interacting with other passengers, but there were exceptions to the rule when it came to religion.
In the first few minutes of the ride, I saw a prayer group from some Martian temple board the train and gather up every adherent of the same temple, regardless of their section, for an impromptu song session around a young boy wearing a long and flowing robe. He closed his eyes and raised both hands in acknowledgement as they quietly sang.
The temple members finished their singing at Blind Stop 4, at which point most of them got off the train. The boy remained on the train and sat with his eyes closed, mumbling prayers. Sasha sighed contentedly. “This is good. Fanatics ruin everything with their awful singing.”
I wouldn’t have considered collective song to be the biggest problem with religious fanatics, but he did have a point. Those hymns were monotonous, repetitive, and so catchy one of them got stuck in my head, no matter how many times I begged my brain to stop.
Before the train pulled away from Blind Stop 4, Vincenzo Veraldi and Andrew Jones got on. Jones was chuckling to himself about my outfit before he even sat down. “Nice jacket, grandpa.”
“It’s coming back in style.”
“That jacket was never in style. Listen, I have what we need, although I did have to rush it a little. Bray and Young are in the next car up from us. We’re good to go.”
“And not a moment too soon.” Andrea leaned in, speaking as quietly as she could manage. “StateSec was using live ammo on the demonstrators. Not sure if they were firing over their heads or into the crowd, but we saw syndicate guys heading toward the fighting.”
Andrew’s brow furrowed. “I doubt they were going in to help the protesters. Hafidi made a big deal about his anti-syndicate campaign.”
“Religion has a big pull here,” she pointed out.
“I can verify that.” I put my hand up to my ear. “That damn song is still stuck in my head.”
“Mine too,” grumbled Sasha.
Andrew glanced at the scientist as if he was going to say something, but apparently decided against it. He turned back to Andrea. “Are you saying the gang members might go against their bosses to protect the crowd? I think it’s more likely the company hired them to go shoot some protesters, that way it couldn’t be blamed on them. Hard to say for sure, though. The East Hellans are a strange bunch.”
Right after he said that, we got a message from Jonathan on the shared channel.
Bensouda Hafidi and a contingent of activists are in the car. Advise we disembark at the next stop and take a later train.
Andrea shot a message back right away. Why?
Him being here is trouble. Too much attention. Got a bad feeling.
Andrew shook his head, muttering. “That’s not a reason.”
Andrea replied again. Negative. We’d be waiting at the station in a potentially hostile area. Safer here.
Veraldi looked at Andrea. “Bray’s going to be irritated with you. He thinks you don’t take his opinions seriously.”
She clicked her tongue in irritation. “Well, he’s not the field commander, is he?”
“If Hafidi is on here with us, it’s in our own best interests to try to prevent any trouble.”