“That’s just it.” Dalton sighed. “You don’t get it. Because we’ve got all those threats tripping over one another, it means this entire place is a giant knot in a way you’re not used to on Earth. You tug on one string without knowing where you’re going, and you can fuck up something else. We always have to keep that in mind when dealing with people here.”
Jia leaned forward, drilling into Dalton with her harsh glare. “I don’t have time to call Alina and ask for her to pretty please tell you to do your job. The people we’re going after are the single greatest threat to the UTC. They’ve proven they will kill anyone and everyone to get what they want, and they aren’t troubled in the slightest by such quaint ideas as morality or restraint. So, what we’re going to do here is our job, and that means investigating the conspiracy and recent shipments. If that ends in explosions and noise, so be it. We’re not walking away because it might make your job harder later. If we do, your job might not matter later.”
Dalton dropped his arms quickly.
Jia whipped her hand into her jacket and began to draw her stun pistol. The agent laughed and lifted his hands in front of him.
“Calm down, Lady Justice.” Dalton’s smile grew wider. “I don’t think the guy who takes either of you out is going to do it by shooting you in a bar. It’ll probably involve trapping you in a dome and blasting you from orbit. That’s what I’d do. Even if I was lucky enough to get my gun out and shoot one of you, the other one would put a bullet in my brain before I took a second shot.”
Jia pushed her gun back in but kept her hands above the table. Dirty cops, CID agents, and politicians existed. The ID had recently had a traitor. There was no reason to believe there wasn’t another one.
Dalton turned to Erik. “What about you, Blackwell? You ready to shoot me?”
“I’m always ready to shoot people.” Erik offered him a merry grin to match the agent’s smile. “So get the hell over yourself. I don’t care about the stick you have in your ass, and I agree with my partner. We’re not here to make trouble, but if trouble comes, we’re going to end it. If we don’t, a lot of people might die sooner than later. And it’s your job, ghost, just like it's ours, to work your ass off and risk your life so those other people don’t die. If you don’t like what I have to say, I suggest you quit and get a nice, safe, cushy corp job.”
Dalton snickered quietly as his gaze shifted between the two. He didn’t say anything else, just let out a long weary sigh. His stupid smile barely wavered.
“Three Daughters and New Lands,” Jia announced. “That’s where our investigation has led. You’re supposed to be one of the top agents here with a good lay of the land, so you should be able to tell us something about them. Everything’s a big, nasty knot of antisocials around here, right? So, enlighten us, wise Agent Dalton, about the truth. Trace the thread for us.”
Dalton muttered something before flagging down a waitress. “I need a drink before we go into anything.”
They waited patiently as the waitress approached. The pleasant quiet ended, the music and conversations assaulting the previously secured booth. Dalton placed his order, while Erik and Jia only asked for water. A minute later, the waitress returned with two glasses of water and a glass with the finest local bourbon and set in front of the agent. Once she’d left the booth, the blessed quiet returned.
Dalton raised the glass to his lips and took a sip. “Why do I have a feeling my job’s going to get very complicated and annoying soon?”
“It doesn’t have to.” Jia shrugged. “Unless those aren’t innocent, law-abiding corporations. Then, yes, it’ll get complicated.”
“No such thing as an innocent corp.” Dalton shook his head. “You’re still thinking about this the wrong way, Lady Justice. It’s not about innocent or guilty, it’s about what shades of gray we’ll find.”
Jia’s eyes narrowed. “The conspiracy is about as close to the darkness of hell as we’re going to get without demons being real. Now, can you help us or not? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your drinking.”
Dalton gulped down half the bourbon and let out a sigh of satisfaction. “Nothing like the anticipation of booze tickling your brain. That part’s better than being drunk.”
Jia’s hand clenched and unclenched on the table. “Stop. Wasting. Our. Time.”
Erik chuckled.
Dalton stared at her as he polished off the rest of his drink. He set the glass down and shook his head. “We’ve heard some things locally about those two companies, but the weird thing is they weren’t on our radar until real damned recently, starting in June. What you’ll want are local shipping records to give you more to work with since I don’t have much more than I told you. I don’t want our fingerprints on this because it will screw up our other ops. You can give me another big speech about how you’re fighting the ultimate evil, but you used to be a cop. You know if you add up enough little evils, they get dangerous.”
“Fine.” Jia took a deep breath. “Just point us at the records, and we’ll do the heavy lifting with our people. You can stay out of it, then you don’t have to worry about anything other than a little potential cleanup later.”
Dalton stared longingly at his empty glass. For the first time in his conversation, he frowned. “Sure. I’ll probably regret it later, but why not?”
“You and Malcolm do what you need to,” Erik ordered Emma after lifting off in the MX 60 and speeding away from the bar. “Contrary to what that asshole inside seems to think, I’d rather walk in slow and get it right. I’m not going to care about explosions at the end, but we’ll save those for the best part.”
“Very well,” Emma replied. “I’ll brief Mr. Constantine, and we’ll inspect the relevant records.”
Jia fell into deep thought. Dalton reminded her of detectives from the 1-2-2 when she’d started, but it was a different sort of cynicism.
His attitude annoyed her, but he wasn’t using corruption as an excuse to do nothing. Instead, he was trying to focus on the tiny pockets of darkness and eliminate them as a way of feeling like he was accomplishing something.
It might not have been as flashy as going after the conspiracy, but she couldn’t say it was pointless.
“The farther we get from Earth, the more this is going to be a problem, isn’t it?” she asked.
Erik nodded. “Chiron’s practically next door, but the light-years and the frustrations start adding up. It’s hard for one planet and the people on it to understand what’s going on when they aren’t on it. I felt that way tons of times when we’d get clueless orders from on high.”
“It doesn’t change anything.” Jia ran a hand through her hair. Erik was pleasantly surprised when she didn’t yank a fistful out by the roots as she continued talking. “We need to keep following and flushing them out until the leaders have their backs to the wall.” She sighed. “It’d be poetic if they ended up trapped on Molino.”
Erik’s grin turned hungry. “It would, but I don’t think the Lady loves us that much. We’ll find out what’s going on here and knock heads together until we get answers. That crap in France proved that all we need to do is survive, and we’ll make progress.”
“Survive, huh?” Jia shook her head.
She would do more than survive. Dalton’s path wasn’t wrong, but neither was hers. Sometimes you stopped a beast by bleeding it out, but the easiest solution was to cut its head off.
Besides, she had plans that included the man beside her.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
August 6, 2230, Alpha Centauri, Chiron, the Galley of the Argo
Erik liked Malcolm, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to slap some sense into the man.
Sometimes the tech was like a yaoguai squirrel engineered with too much energy. He was all but skipping back and forth in the galley, the bright white and red flower pictures on his shirt assaulting Erik’s eyes.
“Take a seat, Malcolm,” Erik offered, his voice low. He tried to keep the implied threat from scar
ing the man without stripping it all out.
Malcolm froze in place and nodded quickly before settling into a chair. Emma appeared next to him, her hair up with the help of a long blue pin. She was wearing a kimono of all things, the exterior patterned after Malcolm's shirt. Given the mocking smile aimed at Erik, she was doing it on purpose.
Erik was used to Jia understanding what he was thinking. After a while, a man expected that from a woman he spent all his time with. Emma always managed to surprise him.
The distinction in his mind between woman and machine was blurred, but she all but lived in his head, having been with him from his first months on Earth. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she knew exactly how to annoy him.
Jia, Anne, and Kant were scattered around the table, bags under their eyes. Erik was the only one who had gotten a decent night’s rest. Jia and Anne had both pored over local records and news reports, and Kant had decided to spend a couple of hours checking out the sites at night. The man was goofy and friendly, but he was a hard worker.
Erik cleared his throat. “Let’s get to it. The clock’s still ticking. Even if they shipped out their toys, we might be able to follow the trail. I don’t care if we have to go into Zitark space if it means we can get our hands on some alien artifacts.”
Emma nodded at Malcolm and folded her hands neatly in her lap. She’d already informed Erik they’d found something an hour earlier, but he’d told her to wait until he could gather everyone. There was no point in wasting time by having her repeat herself.
“So.” Malcolm rubbed his hands together. “We’ve got two shipping companies that our mysterious Mr. Barbu’s records helped point us at, and they’ve done stuff recently. Emma and I hit city shipping records pretty deeply to check farther into it.”
Anne furrowed her brow. “How deeply? Did you leave a trail?”
“Us?” Malcolm threw his head back and tried a hearty laugh, but it came out strangled. His face red, he coughed into his hand to cover his mistake. “No, we covered our tracks. The thing is, this wasn’t a high-security system. This was just basic internal tracking, spaceport logistics, that kind of thing.”
“Mr. Constantine is correct,” Emma added. “The security here was in anonymity. It’d be highly unlikely anyone would know where to check and what to look for unless, like us, they already knew what they were looking for. When we were going through the records, we found that both of the target companies shipped through other companies until they started being handled by another local company. This was where things got a little more involved.”
“As if that’s not involved enough,” Malcom added.
Erik motioned for her to continue. “We know you two are ridiculously skilled at hacking and systems penetration. Let’s skip the details and get to the part we care about.”
Emma smirked. “Two additional local companies displayed related suspicious activity in the last week. One is ultimately a subsidiary of Stella Infinitas, but that ownership change didn’t occur until last month. Prior to that, it was independent. The other newly identified company is a subsidiary of Ceres Galactic.”
Jia sighed. “That’s consistent with what Alina found on Earth, but I wonder if there’s some special meaning to it.”
“Like what?” Kant asked, leaning forward, his face full of interest.
“It’s not good to accept that the conspiracy controls the main producer of HTPs in the UTC,” Jia explained, making a circle with her hand. “For all we know, those artifacts might have something to do with that, something dangerous. The scope of the problem keeps increasing.”
“Does it make a difference?” Anne asked, sounding dubious. “We know we have to take them out. If we do, their plans don’t matter.”
Jia put a finger in the air. “Ceres Galactic is so integrated into the economy of the UTC that there’s no way people won’t suffer if they go down. They make practically everything either directly or through subsidiaries, meaning the conspiracy can always get the parts and equipment they need.”
Erik shrugged. “Parts and equipment aren’t everything.”
Jia put up another finger. “Hermes. Their influence there means the conspiracy could potentially send hidden messages to anywhere in the galaxy, not only without low-level corporate oversight but also without CID or ID oversight. That means they have a tremendous advantage, even with our jump drive. We might be able to get places faster, but short of jumping there, we don’t necessarily get comm faster.”
“The more we know about it, the better we can take advantage of it when the time comes,” Malcolm exclaimed, excited. He didn’t look away when Jia stared at him. “I’m not an expert on war like Erik, but I know if you know how the enemy is communicating, you can figure out how to spy on that and take advantage of it.”
Erik nodded slowly. “Malcolm’s right. We might not be ready for the ID and CID to rain down fire, but the more we learn about where they are, the more we can start to account for that.”
Jia put up a third finger. “Which leaves us with Stella Infinitas. We do have an advantage right now in that if for some bizarre reason the conspiracy shut down every HTP in the UTC, we could still go to them.”
Kant shuddered. “You think they’d do something like that?”
“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know what they were planning for that Hunter ship either, and I know they don’t mind killing a lot of people to get their way.” Jia shook her head. “There are far too many scenarios I can think of where it’d be advantageous to them to collect a force and then cut off reinforcements. For all we know, they’re planning some new Conspiracy Kingdom on the frontier.”
“It’s all supposition.” Anne’s face twitched. “You don’t have a clear insight into their motives.”
“I agree.” Jia shrugged. “Which makes them that much more dangerous to deal with. I do know they keep trying to build up dangerous armies without any sort of moral or ethical restraint. We need to keep hitting them and leaving them on defense because I have a feeling that if we let up, we won’t like the end result.”
“Then we should check out the new companies,” Erik declared. “It’s obvious to me from what you two found that they’ve already moved the goods. If we go busting into Three Daughters or New Lands, we might find something, but not what we’re looking for. We’ll need to penetrate the systems of the two new companies, and if you focus solely on messing with them, it’ll lower the chance of detection.” He nodded at Malcolm. “You check out the Ceres subsidiary. Emma should check out the other. Walk it slow, keep it subtle. Focus on finding the shipments from Earth. If we can take some artifacts from the conspiracy, that’ll be a nice kick in the balls.”
Kant grinned.
Boys. Jia sighed.
Chapter Forty
August 7, 2230, Alpha Centauri, Chiron, Lumiere, Landing Day Monument
The MX 60 sped along with ease.
Erik let Emma control things as they passed through a thicket of flitters flowing through the towers that circled the heart of downtown Lumiere.
Now that they’d spent some time in the city, Jia could clearly see that the average tower didn’t reach the commanding heights of those in Neo SoCal, despite the dense packing giving that illusion.
She supposed it didn’t matter much. A person standing at the base would crane their necks upward at the sight of something more worthy of being called a skyscraper than the buildings of the past.
It was odd when she thought about it.
The vast majority of colonies lacked any buildings of significant height. In that sense, one could argue they weren’t representative of humanity, but the greatest concentrations of the species, which included many colonies of the core worlds and Earth itself, were defined by places where humanity reached into the sky like gods.
Curiously, at the center of Lumiere, the towers gave way to a noticeable hole. The forest of towers surrounded a perfectly square area where the tallest contributors were trees.
Flit
ter lanes filled the air above the large hole, but the MX 60 needed to descend hundreds of meters until those on board could make out the garden full of marble statues.
They formed the Landing Monument.
There were five hundred statues, one for each of the original five hundred colonists. A ring of trees surrounded the statues, and colorful patches of carefully tended flowerbeds added touches of color. Given their height, the sheer number of plants must have been staggering. The only practical way to handle that many would be with bots or drones.
Jia and Erik weren’t there to sightsee. They’d been flying around town to get a better feel for the layout. Having maps and Emma helped, but depending too much on any one team member, even an advanced AI, carried risks.
A woman never knew when she might end up chasing an alien-worshipping terrorist or a crazy Tin Man through town.
It was hard not to think about the meaning of what she was seeing. She peered at the large area in the camera feed, soaking in the implications.
“I could never do it.” Jia motioned at a statue in a camera feed.
“You couldn’t handle someone making a statue of you?” Erik asked, looking confused. “I’d want to make sure the guy didn’t make me look an idiot, but I wouldn’t mind a statue.”
She shook her head. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what they represent. I couldn’t leave everything behind and start over on a new world. When I was younger, I liked to tell myself most people couldn’t. I liked to believe the colonies were mostly filled with transported criminals and a small number of dedicated public servants, but that’s not true. I thought about it on the way here. Some people are just wired to move forward and explore different places.” She smiled. “I think you’re that way.”
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