by Jett Lang
“Certainly,” Five-Nine said.
She stood and emptied the water over Jack’s head. His tropical shirt and beige shorts became several shades darker, the unabsorbed runoff pooling on the floor between his sandals. He didn’t react, not even when the last cube of ice slid out. She returned the pitcher to Five-Nine’s care.
“Thank you,” Queen said.
“You are quite welcome,” it replied. “Do you feel better?”
“No, but it’s a start,” she said, retaking her seat. Then, to Mr. Chamber: “I’m still alive, which means you want me to kill someone.”
“That is correct, young lady,” he said.
“You want the person who inadvertently murdered your son to work for you. I’m missing dots, evidently.”
Mr. Chamber leaned back in his chair with practiced aplomb. “Well, allow me to create some for you. My daughters and sons have various uses to me. A few have the potential to run my operation, while the rest would not know how to print a monthly statement. It is an aggravating and precarious circumstance, to put it mildly. To put it realistically, it is enraging. But I have been a corporate man for a long time; I am aware that success and failure is a resource game.”
He sent Five-Nine for more water. The robot returned, filled Chamber’s glass, and stood aside. In the silence, they could only hear the water dripping from Jack’s clothing.
Mr. Chamber resumed. “When news comes that one of my most precious resources has been depleted, it is met with great chagrin. Not only was this son my favorite, he was also my protégée. Many years and many millions of credits were allocated to properly educate him for the business world. He had his mother’s looks and his old man’s mind – a powerful combination. He was the best option for my future, and then in one swipe that option was taken from me.”
He must have seen something on her face. He waved his hand dismissively. “Not by you, rest assured, but someone else. Someone who knew he would be in the jewelry store beside the medical parlor, knew he planned on buying his girlfriend something special for their anniversary, and that this special something was located on the side of the store where the bomb would cause the most damage.”
“Who hired the three assassins, then?” Queen said.
“The boy you left in the dumpster was in a sour mood when we found him, but he talked. Their contact was a middleman named Franko. Franko receives a down payment and a target name, and then hires the correct people through underground channels. It is all very organized but hard to trace, since the man who hired Franko was found dead in his villa yesterday.”
“And Franko?”
“I left him alive,” Five-Nine said.
Mr. Chamber threw the machine a look. “Barely.”
“He was excessively uncooperative. Three broken ribs and a shattered pelvis are less than he deserved.”
Mr. Chamber shrugged and spread his arm. “You see what I have to deal with? Franko is a dead end, unfortunately. My interrogators were thorough.”
“What about his villa?” she said.
“The villa showed promise.” Mr. Chamber gestured to the robot.
From its trench coat, Five-Nine extracted a small disk, unlabeled. “An encrypted conversation between the man who hired the middleman, and the man who hired the man who hired the middleman. Confused yet?”
“No, but it all seems convoluted. There are legitimate companies where you can hire certified Liquidationists. No name, no face, no personal information exchanged whatsoever.” Queen said.
“You do not need to justify your existence, my dear. I am versed in the advantages,” Mr. Chamber said. “But I didn’t have you shipped over here to discuss the fluctuating landscape of wetwork.”
Five-Nine continued: “After running this through an audio-dissector, we identified the other speaker as a one Philip C. King. Philip is the son of Wayne King, the head of an armament company in direct competition with Mr. Chamber.”
“Let’s bring out the flow chart,” Jack muttered.
Everyone ignored him.
Queen said, “I’ve heard the name. King Weapon Designs, KWD. Their headquarters is here in Angel Bay. No one has seen him leave it in, what, a decade?”
“You are not going after him; you are going after his spawn,” Mr. Chamber said. “This is strictly tit-for-tat. He thinks he is untouchable and that his legacy is safely hidden. You are going to show him that he is mistaken.”
He slid three paper-thin tablets over to Queen. A rendering of each twenty-something-year-old “spawn” projected in 3D, rotating. Blonde hair, black irises, olive skin, and dimple-inducing smiles on hologram busts spun. Red and orange infographics broke down every aspect of their measurements, diet, and sexual partners.
The information Queen was concerned with most was the ‘known sightings’ tab, which, upon tapping, gave a detailed rundown of the locations they’d visited and a shaded radial describing a five mile area within three city-states. The last was as close as the data collection drones could get to their known residences. West Talon, Prosperity, and Angel Bay itself were the target locations. She knew Prosperity’s density made the five-mile radial useless.
The main city was a clogged, machine nightmare. The transit system was the single semblance of order, and the targets she had to deal with in the past rarely used it. Instead, they often fled into suffocating tunnels snaking through the city’s underbelly. She saw things in those tunnels that even now made her hesitant. It was not the festering rats, but the Outmoded, the androids and augmented workers that the city forgot. They inhabited the noxious depths, the sectors where no one but the desperate or the foolish ventured.
Or a woman with a job to do.
She gave the profiles a twice-over, then laid them on the desk. “You want me to start here.” Queen tapped the profile for the son, Philip King.
Mr. Chamber nodded. “Yes. The one I am particularly interested in will be the hardest to find, but I am hoping that, with a little persuasion, you can convince him to lead you to her.”
“This brother is indulgent. He’ll be easy to find,” Queen said. “My concern is the woman, Syntheia. Her profile has ‘wildcard’ written all over it, and her university grades, from the few classes she did attend, lead me to believe she’s smarter. It says that she was given a choice of where to live after she dropped out. Wayne wanted her in Angel Bay, close to him. But she wasn’t about to be locked in his skyscraper, learning the old ways. She had an adventurous streak in her. Wanted danger. Wanted Prosperity. That’s how the info reads.”
Mr. Chamber leaned forward, his features full of knowing. “Syntheia is like my boy was. Two peas in a pod. Her old man was livid when they started shacking-up.”
“Their relationship wasn’t listed on the profile.”
“It has no place there. That information does not leave this room. Do you understand?”
The intrigue made Queen nauseous. “Of course, but why do I need to know this?”
“Because she will be on high alert, which means you need to be on extra high alert,” Mr. Chamber said. “Unlike the other two, she is more than a corporate child suckling on daddy’s teat.”
And now it came to the ultimate question. “When she’s dead, what happens to me?”
“What else? You and Jack return to your former employer, with my blessing. You are repaying the debt you owe, dear.”
Mr. Chamber’s chair creaked as he stood and came around his desk. Queen rose and they shook hands. He did the same for the soaked Jack. Chamber produced a checkered kerchief, wiped his hand, and folded it back into his pocket. Examining their outfits, he said, “Five-Nine has every order you will need from here on. I recommend purchasing winter gear for your after-Angel-Bay activities, then seeing to the sibling. Things get colder from here.”
Shake Up
Five-Nine and Queen strolled down to Heaven’s Reach apartment unit ‘68-C.’ Crushed aluminum cans and used hypodermics festooned a carpeted floor. Queen was thankful she had switched her s
andals for black and white sneakers on the flight over. Jack was on the hoverpad four stories up, waiting.
Asshole.
She had shut down his attempts to speak with her after leaving the yacht club. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to hear him out; she just needed time to process things. He had wounded her trust, yes, but a part of her respected his ability to keep a secret. She had the distinct impression he, out of all the people she had met thus far, was as close to honest as she would get. So he had that going for him.
“This is the one,” Five-Nine said, its audio low and sonorous. It was holding a dark twelve millimeter, something it called a “Super Glock.”
The door was the victim of artistic warfare – graffiti scrawled over its every inch. It had no handle, only a CID reader inserted into the plaster beside the frame. Five-Nine waved a silver card in front of the reader, and the door split noiselessly into the wall. Darkness inside. Air-conditioning loud and rattling. Five-Nine entered; the apartment entry light automatically blinked on.
Queen had her machine pistol dialed to single-shot. She followed Five-Nine in, sections of sickly yellow light activating with every step they took. The unit was small, but many-roomed: a disordered kitchenette, bathroom, recreation room, and numerous closets. They opened each, found no sign of the target.
At the end of the hall, the entrance to the bedroom was ajar. Slats of afternoon light lay on a stained, blue rug. Cheap, machine-woven. An interior welcome mat. Five-Nine went ahead and pushed the door. It creaked inward. The target slumbered peacefully in his twin-sized bed, a chrome tray on a pseudo-oak nightstand next to him. One of the needles on the tray was half-filled with golden-purple liquid, a small pool forming beneath the tip of the syringe. The target was on his back, his muscled chest rising and falling.
No overdose, then. Good.
She walked over to the nightstand and picked up the tray, then dropped it and the needles into the trash bin near the doorway. The metal-on-metal clatter woke him with a start.
Five-Nine leaned languidly over the rail guard at the foot of the bed. “Morning, dreamer.”
The target didn’t look happy to see them. His black eyes glittered with a dull hatred. “Who the fuck’re you two?”
“Language, Philip. Your father raised you better than that. And I am a very delicate creature.”
Philip sat up, propped his head against curling wallpaper. The veins in his arms were unaffected by his habit. Circulatory augmentation. There were beads of sweat on his neck and forehead, his disheveled blonde hair dyed black at the ends. Whatever he had taken was still lingering in his system, and he ground his knuckles against his scalp, trying to rub it out. His jaw went through an episode of tensing and relaxing.
“Problems, Philip?” Five-Nine said.
Philip kept scratching. “Yeah. I got a ghost and a machine in my unit. What do you want? Did Gary send you? I told him the debts been paid.”
Five-Nine looked thoughtfully askance. Queen moved towards Philip. Her voice was gentle.
“This isn’t about money. We need to locate your sister. She’s in a lot of trouble with the wrong people.”
He laid off on the vigorous scratching. Gaze leveled at her, he said, “We haven’t exactly been buddy-buddy. Dad’s Little Princess doesn’t tell the family shit, least of all me.”
“Not even after her boyfriend was killed?” Queen said. She considered the blinds, bars of light tattooed on her face. “That would cause me some alarm. I might reach out to someone for a few supportive words.”
“Take a look around you. Do I seem like the kind of person who has a spare shoulder to cry on?” His laugh quickly turned into a hacking cough. He wiped his mouth. “And why would I tell you, even if she did? Because you broke in here and tried your good cop, bad cop routine? Eat a dick, poltergeist.”
Queen turned her head and stared her red stare at Philip.
“Philip,” Five-Nine said, “I do not believe you comprehend the severity of events unfolding. Surprising, considering what a perceptive young man you are. The pinnacle of the future. Truly.”
“Fuck you.”
“Granted, your vocabulary has room to grow, but think about this,” Five-Nine said, and ripped the metal rail guard from the bedframe – one fluid motion, no sign of strain on the machine’s part – then slammed it against the wall. Cheap plaster powder and chips rained down. It tossed the bar against the opposite wall, and the metal reverberated loudly. Philip rolled out of bed, but the robot grabbed his foot and yanked him up and across the sheets as he thrashed. Its free hand latched onto the junkie’s neck, and squeezed. Philip stopped moving, wide-eyed, on his back.
It bent over the target. “Listen now. I have killed men more important than you, Philip. I have killed them without the courtesy of explanation. I have killed them while their loved ones slept beside them, unaware. Undisturbed. And most of them I killed for free. You are in a precarious spot right now, unlike them. Do you know why?”
Philip tried to breath. Five-Nine’s eyes tinted his face green.
“You are not dead, that is why. The dead are the safest among your kind; it is the living that struggle. Like you, here in this bed, pumping your veins full of Pharaoh to keep your depression at bay. To keep your father’s disappointed voice out of your brain, night after night. But it will not be silenced, because you sit here wallowing and fueling it further. You are a sad being, hungry for validation. And I am here to give you that.”
Philip swallowed. The sound was very loud in the stillness of the bedroom. “I might know something.”
The robot inclined its head. “Something could keep you alive.”
“It’s on my computer.” The machine allowed him to stand. He was about Queen’s height, around six foot. He was wearing teal boxer shorts. She noticed a perfectly circular thumbprint on Philip’s neck. He led them out of his room and into the hallway. He paused at a door, open from their earlier inspection, and asked if he could go inside. Five-Nine prodded the man on. The automatic lights flashed to life as soon as he set foot on the stained tiles. Four sad, windowless walls. Off-white. There was a grey-white plastic desk in the center: an assortment of papers, electronics, and wiring haphazardly organized around a holographic monitor and keyboard. Queen wondered when Philip had cleaned it last.
She noticed many of the cables connected to a desktop no larger than a shoebox. The desktop fit snugly into a bottom shelf. The shelf above held an external storage drive, but it wasn’t plugged into the main computer. Philip seated himself on a memory foam chair and booted up the computer.
The screen and keyboard projection flickered. It was a top-of-the-line setup, but Philip was doing his best not to treat it as such. The icons on the monitor arranged themselves like hydrogen atoms, rotating and unwinding. After a series of jaunty acrobatics, the icons settled into standard rows and columns. Philip must have customized his computer’s boot-up process. He had a bit of humor in him, along with the tech-smarts described in his profile. His digits hovered over the phosphorescent keys.
“One moment, please,” Five-Nine said, and pushed the keyboard’s holo-projector away from Philip and toward Queen. The robot had picked up on the nonstandard boot-up, too. “Tell her where to go.”
There was a small twitch at the edge of Philip’s left eye. “Fine,” he said. “It’s the unmarked folder ten down and eleven over from the top left of the screen – yeah, that one. Password: Utah502451. Go all the way to the bottom right. Folder there, unmarked. Password: VICTORIA47603213650.”
Queen entered the last code and accessed the folder. It was packed with dozens of audio logs, dated and titled. The newest entry was at the top left, labeled “Syntheia Call #5.” The runtime was one minute, twenty-one seconds. She selected it, hit play.
“Hello, little brother.” A woman’s voice. Elegant, soft-spoken.
The voice that replied was Philip’s, off guard and hung over. “Syn? Why are you calling me so late?”
“It is evening tim
e. And you know why I am calling. He is dead, Philip.”
“Who’s dead?”
“My love is dead. Did father do this?” There was coldness now. Coldness and poison.
A heavy sigh. Nervousness crept in. “I don’t know what dad does on a day-to-day basis. Honestly, I’m kinda on his shit list.”
“Then why does he still pay for that rat’s nest you call an apartment? What does he have you do for him, Philip?”
“Listen, I’m not taking you through my daily routine over the phone. I’ve done the same thing for dad since I was thirteen: make adjustments to the company’s system and answer technical problems. When I feel like it.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, it is. What the fuck are you driving at?”
“I am not driving at anything. I am aware that my love had no enemies except father. Father detested him, and you know what happens to someone father does not like. So I want to know, Philip: Did he order the liquidation?”
There was a pause on Philip’s line. He inhaled, exhaled, very slowly.
“Ah, I see,” the sister said. “And what was your part in it?”
Philip’s voice was low and sober. “If I didn’t do it, he’d have cut me off. That can’t happen. You’re not the only one with needs, Syn.”
“You are a pathetic junky. A worthy heir to a dead enterprise.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
She hung up.
Queen glanced sidelong at Philip. “Did you trace this call?”
He shook his head.
“Careful with your lies, Philip,” Five-Nine said.
“It’s not a lie,” he snapped. “I did trace it, but the number was registered to a public terminal. All her calls come from public terminals, and they’re random. “
Queen said, “Which public terminals? What city-state? We need physical locations.”
“Jerrel-Keene station, terminal twenty-seven. Prosperity. Terra firma,” he mocked. “You’re not going to find her. Dad’s agents couldn’t track her even before she met her squeeze.”