by Lisa Wylie
“Listen, I don’t care what you do to that stuck-up bitch,” Jen heard herself declare before she could think about it too hard. Solinas had payback coming, and she’d take the opportunity any way it was offered. The longer she kept him talking, the better the chance someone would catch him out. “I’ll even help you if like, just let me loose. You’ve got Krieger’s skin.” She pushed down the chilling realization that Krieger and Koch were therefore likely dead. “You can get me out, and I can get you out of Modeus. They won’t have found the ship yet. It’s a win-win.”
Naraymis closed her eyes in defeat, tears leaking down her face, and Solinas grinned at her. “Aw, did you think Bronwen was going to help you? Lesson number one in dealing with real-life criminals—you can’t trust anyone.” He shoved her away and she dropped to the floor again. Whether the collapse was real or fake, Jen couldn’t tell.
“Please, Solinas, be reasonable,” she pleaded. “We’re both professionals, and I can help you.” C’mon, you bastard, take the bait.
He shook his head. “I wish it was that simple, Bronwen, I really do. But you’ve seen too much and you know too much, and I can’t afford to have you wandering around the galaxy in that rust-bucket you call a ship, blabbing to anyone who’ll listen. You were a smokescreen—you being human and having independent transport were the two things I needed to cover my entry into Modeus. And now you’ve outlived your usefulness.”
Jen glared at him, her ire only half-faked. “But why sell us out?” she asked. “It can’t have been for money. Nobody would pay you that much for me.”
“Oh, you’re right about that,” Solinas chuckled.
“So why? You could have walked when I told you to piss off, no harm, no foul.” Jen waved a hand at the prone Marauder diplomat on the floor. “And what’s so important about her?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Solinas replied curtly as he crossed the room to the control console. “For what it’s worth, Bronwen, I do regret that things worked out this way. You’re smart and resourceful, and you run a good, tight operation. Chances are I would have wanted to work with you again. But you picked the wrong job and I didn’t have a lot of time for finesse.”
“Oh, that’s supposed to make me feel better, is it?” Jen spat. “Thud getting killed for nothing was just unfortunate, and my being left to rot here is just collateral damage?”
“Not quite.” Solinas drew Krieger’s sidearm. “Jones got himself killed by being an idiot. If he’d listened to you, he wouldn’t have gotten his head blown off. As for you… well, I just can’t leave you alive as a witness, especially not now. You know my motto.”
“Dolos knows about you, and so does Honold,” Jen blustered, fear clamping an icy hand around her guts as the changeling lifted the weapon and aimed it. She glanced around desperately, but there was no cover and no way to attract attention from outside.
“Dolos is long gone,” Solinas sneered, “and she won’t care what happens to you. It’s not in her programming. As for Honold…” He snickered as he stretched out his free hand to deactivate the force field. “That moron isn’t bright enough to tie his shoelaces without instructions. Besides which, he isn’t going to voluntarily get within a light year of the authorities. No, they’re both irrelevant, and...”
Naraymis lashed out suddenly with one leg, her foot catching Solinas in the back of the knee. As he overbalanced and fell, the diplomat jumped up and scrambled for the control panel. She got her hand to it milliseconds before Solinas caught her, knocking her to the floor once more with a vicious backhand to the face.
“I’ve had enough of you, bitch,” he grated, turning away from Jen as he hauled the stunned woman up by the throat.
Jen didn’t hesitate. She’d seen the secure status light flick from green to red, seen the pale blue curtain of the force field vanish, and his inattention was the opening she needed. Rounding the table, she stepped up behind him and hooked her left arm around his neck. She grabbed her upper right arm with her left hand, slid her right hand behind his head and pushed forward, locking the chokehold.
Solinas released Naraymis immediately, thrashing violently to try and break Jen’s grip, but her close-quarters-combat training hadn’t deserted her and her hold was solid. She pushed her elbows together, inexorably increasing the pressure, ignoring the pain in her shoulder from the exertion. “This is for Thud, you two-faced mother-fucker,” she snarled. He scrabbled desperately at her arms, but he couldn’t get a good grip and slowly, his fingers fluttered weakly to a stop and his body sagged. Jen let herself fall backwards, dragging him down on top of her. She held the choke until she was sure he was dead, then rolled his body onto the floor, panting from the effort.
“Thank you,” Naraymis gasped, rising carefully to her knees. “You saved my life.”
“I saved my own,” Jen corrected, sitting up and sucking in a deep breath. “Call yours a serendipitous bonus.”
“Let’s not argue semantics. We’re both still alive. I thought for a moment…” Naraymis bit her lip apprehensively.
“That I was going to let him kill you?” Jen finished. “Nope. I have no problem with you—other than your snotty attitude—but that bastard had this coming. He got my friend killed, and I owed him that.” For a moment, she felt righteous, but she deflated just as quickly as reality reasserted itself. “But if I was in a shitstorm of trouble before, I can’t imagine there’s a word for what I’m neck deep in now. Those cops are gonna be dead, aren’t they?”
“Probably,” Naraymis agreed grimly, darting a glance toward the door.
“And I suppose you have that fancy diplomatic immunity thing to protect you,” Jen groaned. “Which leaves all of this on me. Fuckin’ perfect.”
Naraymis turned to reply, and as she did, Jen noticed that she had a cut on her cheek, just below her eye, doubtless from where Solinas had struck her. She was about to mention it when she saw that a few drops of blood had oozed out of the wound and dripped onto Naraymis’ shirt.
The blood was purple.
“Oh, fuck me,” Jen breathed, driving to her feet and backing off a few steps. “You’re one of them too?”
Naraymis stared at her, brow furrowed with confusion. “What?”
Jen pointed at her shirt, and she looked down. When she looked back up, her eyes were very wide, apprehension and no little fear roiling in her gaze.
“That’s why you were so interested in that fucker,” Jen realised. “You were tracking him. And you used me as bait. Mind telling me why?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Naraymis hissed.
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of time,” Jen corrected tartly as inspiration struck. Sitting down, she put her feet up on the table, legs crossed at the ankles. It was a risky bluff, but she figured she held the cards to make good on it. “Since the only place I’m going from here is the freezer, I’m in no rush. But hey, good news, it looks like you’ll be coming along to keep me company, because I’m sure the Marauders won’t be too happy when they find out you’ve been pretending to be one of their diplomats.”
Naraymis shot another nervous look at the door, and Jen smirked, satisfied that she’d read the situation right. Naraymis took a deep breath. “I did use you as bait, yes. Your friend here tried to kill me three days ago, and I wanted to know why.”
“He’s not my friend. So, he knew you were one of his own kind?”
“I don’t know that for sure,” Naraymis admitted. “All I know is that he wanted me dead.”
“Why?”
“I really don’t know. Look,” Naraymis was clearly starting to panic, “I can help get you out of the station, if you like, but I need to go.”
“What good will getting out of the station do me?” Jen shrugged. “Every cop from here to Kyzar knows my name. Even if I make it out of Berlin, I’m not real keen on making a break for free space with a cop-killer sign around my neck. And if I run and get caught again, I’ll spend even longer in the freezer than I will if I just stay put. A
nd if I give you up into the bargain, well, maybe that cuts a century or so off my sentence.”
Naraymis stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve got no idea how important what I’m doing is,” she half-pleaded.
“Don’t care.” Jen shrugged for emphasis. “Whatever you’re doing is in the best interests of your people, not mine. I may have been a shitty soldier, but I do have some residual cultural loyalties here and there.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Assuming of course that you’re not some kind of terrorist, like the Sentinels—you’ve heard of them, I assume?”
Naryamis closed her eyes for a moment, pinched the bridge of her nose, then looked out at Jen over her knuckles. “What do you want?” she asked in a resigned tone.
“You owe me one for saving your life.”
“I thought that was just serendipity?”
“Well, now it’s an opportunity. You’re some kind of secret agent, right? You must have contacts and an escape route. I want you to get me off Earth, to Ganymede, so I can pick up my ship and get the fuck out of Dodge. Do that for me and we’re all square. Leave me here and I sing like a canary, then we find out just how important what you’re doing is to the Marauders.” She dropped her feet to the floor, sat forward, and placed her left hand over the call button at about six inches clearance. “Or I could just end this discussion, right here, right now.”
Naraymis stared at her, indecision in her eyes, and Jen drummed a slow beat on the table. “Tick tock, secret agent. The longer you wait, the more likely you’ll get caught.”
“All right!” Naraymis surrendered, glaring. “Yes, I can get you to Ganymede. But I want to go with you after that. I need you to get me out of Modeus. I’m no more keen to spend time in Lord’s Assembly than you are.”
“Well, that’s a separate business transaction, Madam Secretary. That’ll cost you twenty thousand credits.”
“Done.” Naraymis’ eyes were sparking with fury, but the agreement came without hesitation.
Jen whistled. “Christ, you must be fuckin’ desperate.”
“I’m getting there,” Naraymis replied curtly. “Do we have a deal?”
“We do.”
“Good. Help me with this body then, would you?”
Together, they dragged the dead changeling across to the prisoner’s side of the room. The changeling agent knelt beside him, relieving him of Krieger’s ID card. Then she unpinned his badge and used the sharp point of the pin to score a couple of deep, even scratches along his cheek. The wounds slowly began to ooze blood, the tell-tale bright purple of a changeling. “That should keep them confused,” Naraymis muttered as she pinned his badge back. “OK, now we reactivate the field.”
Jen walked over to the console to do so as Naraymis opened the door and stepped out. She reappeared a moment later dragging Officer Koch’s lifeless body. “Get her uniform on,” she instructed, dropping the body at Jen’s feet. “If we’re quick, we should be able to just walk out the back door.”
Jen nodded, stripping off her jumpsuit and making a start on Koch’s clothing as the agent dragged the real Krieger in as well. While she changed, Naraymis opened her briefcase and retrieved a comm tool, interfacing it with the control console and typing in a series of commands. By the time Jen was dressed—Koch was more heavily built than she was, so the uniform was a bit loose but not obviously so once the gear was belted over the top—Naraymis was done with her hack.
“All right. That’ll set off a data mine in three minutes and completely fry their systems and all stored information. I can’t hack the central records from here—I’ll do that later.” She raised her eyebrows enquiringly as she donned her jacket. “Let’s get going, shall we?”
KEERA
999 ATA – Ganymede Approach Vector, Modeus System, Assembly Space
It didn’t take long to get off Earth.
As soon as they’d cleared the police station, Keera had risked a quick stop in a nearby department store to buy a combat-style jacket and some cosmetics for Bronwen, then they’d headed back to her hotel. Her unwanted new associate had concealed her tattoo, braided her hair into a tight, tidy plait, and donned the jacket over her purloined uniform, turning her into a respectable facsimile of a personal security officer. Meanwhile, Keera treated the cut on her face, sealing it with dermal regeneration gel and masking the wound with make-up to hide the tell-tale colour of her blood.
Disguises and personal appearance attended to, Keera had turned her attention to their escape route. Accessing the Marauder government network, she’d pulled Bronwen’s military record, using the biometrics to fake a new identity for the human, setting her up as a member of the Exterior Department’s security service, assigned to Keera as her personal detail. Then she’d used her expense account to book two tickets on the next sub-orbital express from Berlin to Hong Kong and reserve a private shuttle from the Marauder enclave to the commercial docks on Ganymede. It was an abuse of her position that would flag up in the accounting systems within a few hours, but by that point she had to hope that Bronwen would have made good on her promise of a ship and an independent route out of Terran space.
She’d collected everything she thought she might need, then they’d left the hotel, making a quick detour to a cheaper establishment in the eastern part of the city to pick up Bronwen’s gear. The Marauder woman had been bright enough to rent the room under an assumed name, and her kit was untouched. She’d gathered it up in silence, pausing to run one hand gently over the heavy leather bomber jacket hanging from the desk chair, then they’d locked the room and left to catch their flight.
Keera then spent most of the flight to Jupiter’s moon painstakingly erasing any reference to Bronwen she could find in official communications and records, as well as deleting her own name from the police visitor’s log. There was no way to completely expunge the information with the case being in the public domain through numerous news reports and the associated media chatter, but the longer it took the Terran authorities to reconstruct the formal data, the better their odds of a clean getaway.
Now, with the shuttle on final approach to Ganymede and nothing left to do, Keera studied the human slouched in the seat across from her. Although the oversized uniform hid much of her body shape, Bronwen was clearly in good physical condition. Her hair was a rich, dark shade of red, and with her fair skin, straight nose, and high cheekbones, she was rather attractive by human standards. Her dark blue eyes were lidded, half-closed, but Keera was certain that very little had escaped Bronwen’s notice over the course of the short trip.
Not least, she reflected, her own simmering agitation, blatantly telegraphed by her inability to sit still. Her anxiety was increasing with every minute that passed, every moment that took her further and further from everything she knew, and being trapped in the confines of the shuttle meant that all she could do was fidget, constantly shifting her weight and drumming an arrhythmic tattoo on her thighs with her fingers. What in the name of God and all the Creators am I doing?
For the first time she could remember, she had absolutely no idea.
Throughout her training, throughout her career, the lesson that had been driven home again and again by her instructors and by experience was that careful planning engendered success. Luck, as the saying went, favoured the prepared. Impulse and instinct were reaction, not action, to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. And if they did become necessary, it was because you hadn’t prepared correctly, a truth she’d just unequivocally proven. She’d lost focus, shaken by Mahmoud’s death and then by the attack in the hotel; made sloppy mistakes by reacting emotionally to the situation. Then, she’d deliberately broken tradecraft, and worse, done so to secure the freedom of a wanted criminal whose motives and involvement in this whole mess were still abundantly unclear. She’d put herself into a position where Bronwen had been able to blackmail her into this course of action, and she could hardly blame the human for making the most of the opportunity.
She wanted to, though. It was more palatable t
han acknowledging she’d panicked, and in so doing had set a diplomatic catastrophe in motion.
Well, what were you supposed to do, let yourself get killed?
Isn’t that what was expected of you? a cynical little voice in her mind demanded. The individual is expendable for the good of the mission, remember? Aren’t you prepared to die for the cause?
It would seem that she wasn’t, when it really came down to it. She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long, slow breath, trying to control the slosh of worry, shame, and fear in her guts.
“Secretary Naraymis,” the pilot’s voice sounded over the comms, disrupting her fretting, “we’re beginning our approach. Will you and your colleague please secure your restraints and remain seated until we land? We’ll be entering atmosphere, so there will be some bumps.”
“Of course,” Keera replied. “Thank you.”
“No problem, ma’am. We’ll have you on the ground in a few moments.”
It was no use second-guessing the situation now, she decided as she tightened her belt. The only way out was to follow through with this escape. Then, she could figure out what had gone so spectacularly wrong, and, if possible, how to fix it.
The atmospheric entry proved to be a boneshaker; Keera only avoided biting her tongue by dint of clenching her jaw so tightly it almost cramped. The landing was even worse, the shuttle hitting the ground with such a jolt that Keera barely avoided hitting her head as she bounced in her seat. A grunt of pain from across the cabin informed her that the significantly taller Captain Bronwen hadn’t been as lucky.
Eventually, mercifully, the shuttle settled on the runway and rolled to a halt. As soon as they stopped, Bronwen flicked off her restraints and got out of her seat, opening the refreshment cupboard, retrieving all of the liquor bottles, and dumping them into her bag. “Waste not, want not,” she remarked with a grin.
Keera cocked her head, conceding the point. She had no idea what supplies the human’s ship had. Quickly, she stuffed the remaining snacks and drinks into her own holdall, and looked around for anything else that might be handy, but nothing obvious presented itself. “All right, let’s go.”