by C. G. Hatton
Jameson was reeling as he let it go and brought them back to the rooftop.
“Jesus, this is for real?”
NG nodded, downed another mouthful of whisky, then rattled off the stats from the encounter, ships lost, personnel lost and injured, Earth and Wintran, what they knew about the aliens.
They sat in silence as he let it sink in.
“Hones was a bastard,” Jameson said eventually, staring at him. “But he was one of our bastards and one of the best. And if it means anything, I was sorry to hear about Devon. I drank a good bottle to her too.”
NG didn’t want to talk about Devon. He looked straight ahead across the dark skyline, raising the bottle again.
“Who else knows about this?” Jameson said.
He paused with the whisky half way to his lips. “Outside of the guild, no one. You’re the first.”
Jameson cursed. “How the hell did you survive that?”
“As far as the entire galaxy is concerned, I didn’t.”
“Even Evelyn?”
NG took a drink then nodded. That had been hard, but he’d made that decision as he was talking to her in the Man’s chambers. He’d told her everything then wiped her memory. It had been disturbingly easy to do.
“How did you defeat them?” Jameson asked. The guy was smart, battle-savvy from first hand experience, and he’d added up fast that it should have been an outright massacre.
“We were lucky.” He wasn’t about to reveal his secret to anyone else. Not yet. Only Martinez and LC had known about Sebastian. And anyway Sebastian was gone. He took a deep breath. “It was just an advance reconnaissance unit. We took them by surprise. Hones took out most of their ground force and we managed to get Hilyer on board their ship to set explosives. We were lucky.”
Jameson looked sceptical. “You said someone knew they were there?”
NG looked up and regarded Jameson for a long moment. “One of the corporations.”
That got a frown. An edge crept into the colonel’s voice. “Come on, be straight with me, NG.” He wanted to add, or I’m out of here, but he bit back his words. He was switched on enough to know that life had changed and it wasn’t for the first time, never before because of bloody aliens, but what the hell.
“Are you familiar with the Order?”
“The what?” Jameson said.
“They pull the strings. On both sides of the line. Earth, Winter, they control the corporations and they orchestrate half the rebellions in the Between.” He paused then added carefully, “I have reason to believe the Order know about the Bhenykhn. Matt, did you never wonder how Zang knew what was being researched in your lab, a top secret Imperial facility?”
“Jesus. You have it, don’t you? You son of a bitch, NG. You’ve had it all this time? What is it?”
“You want to know?”
“Of course I want to know. What the hell is it?”
NG was reading from the colonel’s deepest thoughts that there was no doubt here, Jameson wanted in.
“We’ve been calling it a virus,” he said, “but the truth is we don’t really know what it is. It spreads like a virus. Regenerative properties in the host you wouldn’t believe. That’s why Zang wants it. He’s dying. He thinks it will save him. He was desperate enough to screw over the Order to go after it.”
“That’s how you survived the knife wound.”
It wasn’t a question and NG didn’t acknowledge or deny it.
“We’re pretty sure the virus originates from the Bhenykhn,” he said instead. He offered across the bottle and added, “They’re telepathic.”
He watched the reaction in Jameson’s eyes, read it in his mind as the colonel thought, holy shit, an army with that kind of advantage would be unstoppable.
NG shook his head. “Not totally unstoppable. We beat them.”
Jameson did a double take. Old suspicions and snatches of memory clicked into place. ‘You bastard’, he was thinking, ‘you’re reading my mind.’
NG held out the bottle. He was trampling all over the guy’s mind, sitting as they were in the midst of this pure illusion, drinking imaginary whisky together in a frozen instant of time.
“The virus has a side effect,” he said calmly, no need to admit his personal circumstances.
Jameson almost broke into a grin. ‘What number am I thinking of, right now,’ he thought.
“Matt…”
‘Prove it,’ Jameson thought aggressively, snatching the bottle and taking a swig.
“Seventy four,” NG said out loud.
Jameson laughed. “Son of a bitch. I want in.”
“There’s a fifty-fifty chance it’ll kill you.”
“That’s better odds than you’re giving me here. I want in.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
He left Jameson with a squad of troops from the Alsatia and a handshake to secure his loyalty. It was enough. He made sure it would be enough. Two of the Man’s elite guard were waiting for him in the stairwell and they dropped into position on either side as he ran up the stairs. The gunfire was intensifying outside.
He called ahead. “How are we doing?”
“All clear if you pick up the pace there, 402. Good for pick up.”
He made it to the rooftop. He could feel Leigh standing there by the ramp of the drop ship before he saw her in the light from the flag that some of the rioters had torn down and set alight. She met them, relieved to see him in one piece but frowning as he limped on board. The knee had seized up. He could shut off the pain but it was a bitch when it stiffened and refused to move.
He stashed the rifle and dropped into a seat as the drop ship started to lift, struggling to fasten the harness with his left hand, the right arm throbbing right up to his shoulder.
Leigh sat next to him. “Their ship split as soon as it saw us. We’re getting its ID.”
He liked that she said ‘we’. She hadn’t hesitated when he’d asked her to join him. She’d raised her eyebrows when she’d learned they were Thieves’ Guild but she’d declared instantly that she had nowhere else to go. And nowhere else she wanted to be. Not after going through all that with them. What she hadn’t said, what he’d picked out of her thoughts, was that she wanted to know more about him. He’d died in front of her, more than once, and she wanted to know how he’d done it. Maybe at some point he’d tell her. She was easy company and he was missing Devon, and Evelyn and Martinez.
“Let me see your arm,” she said. She’d been monitoring him, live, every minute. Another medic standing by had injectors to hand, ready for him. He would have preferred a whisky but he wasn’t going to object.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. You need to keep the cast on.”
The casing immobilised his hand, that was why he kept taking it off. For some reason, healing the arm was taking more energy than he could manage. It hadn’t just broken, the bones had shattered under the stamping heel of the Bhenykhn that had killed him.
She was watching as the other medic picked up the black snug cast and manoeuvred his arm into it, pulling the straps tight. He didn’t object, feeling it realign, hard pushed to shut off the pain.
“Why are you struggling so much with this?” she said, blunt, as always. She’d seen him recover fully, quickly, from critical stab wounds to vital organs that had near as dammit killed him. She was thinking that the virus couldn’t be working.
He didn’t need to look deep into her mind. In everything he’d told her and let her in on, he hadn’t given away anything about himself. She knew all about the virus. She was reporting to him from the medical research teams on the Man’s ship and on the Alsatia. She’d watched LC recover, fully. And it had been close that time. Punctured lung, shattered ribs, blood loss and poison from the barbed bolt that had slammed into the kid’s chest. They’d almost lost him. It had been touch and go for a long time, the virus overloaded in dealing with it all, worse because he’d lain there bleeding in the cold and the mud for so lon
g. She was thinking about the way they’d got LC stabilised and fed the virus with glucose, watching, monitoring every second as it knitted the bones together, created new blood cells, mended his organs. They’d got him back on his feet and started straight away putting him through the absolute wringer as the closest source to the original virus that they had. She was fascinated by it.
NG looked at her. He needed the virus to work. At better odds than fifty-fifty. Problem was, she thought he had it, adding it up the same way Jameson had and reckoning that was the only way he could have survived the knife wound to the heart. And she didn’t understand why it wasn’t healing the fractures for him the way it had for LC.
“I don’t know,” he lied and sat back as they accelerated hard to make orbit.
Leigh was still watching him. “Alsatia Control are pissed that you left your post.”
He couldn’t help the half smile that slipped out. He’d been enjoying playing as 402 but it was starting to get tiresome. “I took out all my targets.”
“I know,” she said. She’d been watching his stats, watching him shoot, how he’d settled into a state of absolute calm on that rooftop before taking each shot. She was thinking she’d never seen anyone with such a level of focus and self control. She was looking him in the eye as if she was looking into his soul. And he’d known her for five minutes.
She said softly, “Tough being dead?”
It was tough not being in command anymore. He had the best of it and the worst of it. He had free rein, total control, over the Man’s entire vast empire. He was in effect the Man and he was still figuring out what he had access to, what every facet of that empire did. The private army he knew about, the Man had sent him to spend time with it. It had been a revelation to discover they had an underground research base on some deserted ice planet in the Between. And he was still working his way through the assets of all the corporations the Man controlled.
But as far as the Alsatia was concerned, he was dead. If he needed to call on the Alsatia’s resources directly, the only way he could involve himself with them was through the special projects team instigated by the Man before he left. Several times now, he’d used other personnel from different branches of the Man’s organisation, assigning them to tasks under guild control whilst retaining their anonymity, and that’s what he had to be, just another code-tagged operative to rag on. Like he’d told Jameson, he couldn’t risk anyone finding out he was alive. If it had been up to him, he would have come out here on his own, but he’d sent a tab in, supposedly from the Man, for the guild to find Jameson and this is what they’d come back with. A set up, a colony pushed to boiling point until it spilled over into outright rebellion as a cover for an even more subversive operation, the abduction of an Imperial JU colonel. An operation that they’d managed to infiltrate just in time to get Jameson out before the Order grabbed him.
NG shrugged and stretched out his leg. It was making his head hurt thinking about it too much so he stopped. There was one thing above all else that he needed to do and in order to do that he had to find a variation of the virus that worked. Before the Bhenykhn came back and before Sebastian came back and took control permanently. And that could be any day.
As they docked with the Man’s ship, he sensed there was something wrong. He scanned ahead and could feel the tension before the airlocks cycled. Morgan, captain of the Man’s ship, was waiting for them, as immaculate as ever in his crisp, smart uniform. At least there was no salute this time, the natural inclination to do just that consciously forced down as they approached.
NG stopped in front of him, couldn’t hide the fatigue and was hit with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. “What’s wrong?”
Morgan was standing almost to attention. “Anderton is missing. He was sent out on a tab the Alsatia is saying originated from here.” He hesitated then added, “We just got word. There’s a warrant out for his arrest. They’re saying he killed Olivia Ostraban.”
Chapter 3
Many sitting there were uncomfortable to hear the minutiae of human dramas. The chamber was quiet. They were still. There was no soft flickering of a candle, no dance of firelight to bring life to this austere setting. They wanted to know facts, patterns. She was the only one concerned to hear of the troubles affecting the few he talked about, the ones who played out their roles across the board as the stakes rose ever higher.
“Would events have been different had you remained?” she asked. More to the question than there seemed. Would Nikolai have acted differently? Could they have taken better care of Luka, is what she was really asking.
He pondered the possibilities. “These creatures are fickle. They are drawn to the flame. Nikolai and Luka especially. That’s why these two are so vital to our plans. They do not conform. They exceed and excel, and that sets them at odds with the rest of their race. Could I have prevented what happened? The fact that I was unable to rein either of them in when I was there suggests not. Events conspire. Human life has a momentum to it that we struggle to comprehend. They live fast. They die fast. What they do in between? The special ones cannot be caged.”
•
“He’s supposed to be in rehab on the Alsatia,” NG said.
Under observation. Their little lab rat. He hadn’t given an explicit order that the kid be kept there but for Christ’s sake, it shouldn’t have been necessary.
“He was,” Morgan said bluntly. “They had no reason to question the tab. They thought it had come from the Man.”
He managed to not say ‘sir’, that was something.
NG stood there, leg aching despite the painkillers, pulling the information directly from the guy’s mind. Morgan was good. Different. Totally different way of running things but slick and effective. He wouldn’t have expected any less from the Man and his close crew. To hear that LC was missing, again, wasn’t good.
“Who sent in the tab?” he said quietly.
“We don’t know. You need to see it.”
They went to the Man’s chambers, Morgan stepping aside as they reached the anteroom, letting NG enter first.
He went in, sparking up flames for each candle as he entered. It was a neat trick but he still didn’t have total control over the amount of energy it took, charring the bulkhead slightly with a couple as the wicks flared.
He limped round to sit at the desk, even now not completely comfortable with all this. He’d never be the Man. He didn’t want to be.
There was a stack of reports sitting on one end, neat, the rest clear, nothing like his old desk. He’d packed away the chessboard, couldn’t bear the accusing stare of the queen, and it still didn’t feel right to clutter it with any of the crap he usually accumulated while he worked.
Morgan sat in what had always been his seat. It had been something of a revelation to realise that he had an opposite in each of the Man’s operations, the Alsatia and the Thieves’ Guild only one entity in dozens. He’d always known the Man had other stuff going on. It had never crossed his mind that other heads of operations would sit in that same chair to report.
And now it was him they reported to.
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. He hadn’t showered or changed and he could still smell the smoke, still had dried blood on his hands. “What have we got?”
Morgan held out a folder. “It looks legitimate.”
It was a perfect imitation of the type of tab that used to come directly from the Man, even down to the paper and the scrawled signature.
NG flicked through its contents. It specified LC but that wasn’t unusual. The Man had often handpicked the operatives he wanted for his private work.
“Did this come from here?” he said.
“No.” Morgan was certain, that was clear. If it had, the guy would have known. “It was delivered to the Alsatia by one of our special couriers, the AI Carpathian, just after we left.”
“The timing was convenient.”
“Very. We’ve interrogated her and her memory modules back her up. She ge
nuinely believes the tab originated from here.”
NG looked back at the signature. Wherever it had come from, it was good. He wouldn’t have guessed it wasn’t genuine. “Are you telling me someone has managed to intercept one of our most secure means of communication?”
“It would seem so.” Morgan managed to stop himself from adding a ‘sir’.
According to the file, LC had been sent out on the tab with two extraction teams. There’d been an incident and he’d split, vanished. Knowing LC, that wasn’t surprising if he’d heard about Olivia.
“What about the warrant?” he said.
Morgan placed a board on the desk and pushed it forward. “It’s all in here.”
NG scanned through it quickly. It was legitimate, first degree murder, war crimes and espionage, listed both sides of the line. LC wouldn’t be able to set foot on an orbital or planet anywhere, whatever ID he was using. The bounty was bad enough, a legal warrant like this was watertight.
It was a clever move. There was no way LC could have killed Olivia.
“The Alsatia has people recovering the evidence Ostraban is claiming he has,” Morgan said. “It must be good. He’s got Ballack to second the warrant.”
They had it all wrapped up. Clever to use the Merchants’ Guild as a neutral third party. Ballack would be revelling in it. A chance to get one over on the Thieves’ Guild and lord it over Earth and Winter.
NG pushed the board away. He’d come very close to declaring LC dead after Erica. Hilyer as well, for that matter. Maybe he should have. Zang had obviously not given up chasing them.
“They have no idea what’s coming,” he said. “I take it the Alsatia has sent people out after LC?”
Morgan nodded.
He scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “Where’s Hil?”
“Here,” Morgan said. “The headaches were too bad for him on the Alsatia. We had to bring him back. He seems fine here.”