Enlisted

by Nathan Pedde

  “Only for an hour and I can do it any time I want.”

  “I’d love to, but I need to get this stuff done before tomorrow.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Then Ms. Lyon will probably drag me in front of the principal like she’s been threatening to.”

  “How are you getting all this flack for your grades?” Elsie asked.

  “I guess dropping from the top of the class to about three quarters from the bottom does it.”

  “You’re still doing better than I am.”

  “Not by much. I’m a couple spots higher in the rankings. That’s all.”

  “Still doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does,” Des said, glancing up from his work. “You forget they let me skip ahead a grade this September at my insistence. They made an exemption for me, and now I’m struggling. It doesn’t look good for the school.”

  “So politics.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Well,” Elsie said, “I best be off. Have fun with your math homework.”

  Elsie stopped halfway from getting out of the booth. Her eyes caught sight of the half ate cold burger sitting abandoned behind a couple of tablets.

  “Are you going to finish it?” Elsie asked.

  “Maybe later. Why?” Des said.

  “Oh, nothing,” Elsie said.

  “Is it your dad’s turn at making dinner?”

  Elsie blushed gazing at the table. “It is.”

  “Pangelli?” Des asked.

  “That’s all he knows how to cook.”

  “Go ahead. I can order another one if I get hungry.”

  “You sure?” Elsie asked.

  “Yes, but if you get caught eating it, you didn’t get it from me. I know about your parent's vegetarianism. Your mom hates me enough.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Elsie left the diner and strolled home. She had to take the train and still had to walk a short distance. She ambled into her three stories, very skinny townhouse. Elsie took her shoes and jacket off, hanging them in the closet.

  “Hi mom,” Elsie shouted from the doorway. “I don’t smell Pangelli. Is dad home yet?”

  “No, dear,” her Mom called from the kitchen. “He isn’t coming home until late tonight. He has to work on some technical problem.”

  “Oh,” Elsie said, trying to hide her sudden sense of joy.

  Elsie walked into the kitchen.

  Her mom, dressed in her yoga clothes, stood over the stove. Her medical ID badge shining her real name, was on her back and out of the way of her cooking. Elsie stared at the smiling picture while below in black bold letters announced: Rochelle Dagg.

  “That sucks he can’t make his special dinner,” Elsie said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Rochelle said. “I’m making my three-sauce casserole instead.”

  “Nice.”

  “Don’t act so happy about it,” Rochelle said. “Are you home for the night?”

  “No, I still have to go to my day job.”

  “What were you doing after school then?”

  “Helping Des with his math homework.”

  “Isn’t he in the top of the class?”

  “He flunked a couple tests bad due to a job change. He’s struggling with the added workload and the pressure.”

  “Poor kid.” She said, then quietly. “Serves him right.”

  Elsie kissed her mom on the cheek, ignoring her mom’s comment. She walked out of the kitchen to the stairs.

  “I’m going to try and get some of my homework done before I’ve to go to work,” Elsie said. “Will dinner be done before I leave for work?”

  “Yes.”

  Elsie exited the kitchen and walked up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom. Her younger brother and her parents got the middle floor, leaving the entire top for her. Her four older sisters already graduated and moved out. It made living in the three-bedroom house less squishy.

  If it weren’t for her eldest sister, who worked for Jovian Intelligence, she would never have been recruited. She would have been an innocent civilian and not a secret agent. It didn’t mean she could be lazy. Her day job was a cover for her intelligence work, and she hadn’t been forced to leave that.

  Elsie entered her bedroom and quickly dumped her bag onto the floor. She plopped onto the bed and looked at the badly speckled ceiling.

  What am I going to do? Elsie thought.

  She looked over and saw a red light flashing on a small speaker next to her computer monitor.

  “Sweet Jupiter,” Elsie muttered, scrambling from the bed.

  She walked over to her desk and sat on the chair. The red light was a communication device from Jovian Intelligence Agency. It flashed a small code telling Elsie where to call in from. After a few moments of watching the light, she rubbed the bridge of her nose for a second. There was a pain in between her eyes that didn’t exist a second ago.

  From her desk drawer, Elsie grabbed a small black signaling device. She left the room in her sock feet and walked to the end of the hall. She pulled on a short string, and a ladder unfolded from the ceiling. She marched up the small ladder and onto the roof.

  The roof of the townhouse was flat with a small railing spreading around the entirety. The roof had a small garden with vegetable's growing in the handmade garden beds. Off to one side, a little-shaded bench sat in the corner.

  Elsie strode over to the bench, sitting on the very right side. She squeezed the signaling device lightly until it made a clicking noise and a green light appeared.

  Beside either side of the bench was a flowerpot filled with sunflowers. Elsie reached into the flowerpot and pulled out a phone in a clear plastic bag. The phone sounded before she pulled it from the plastic.

  Elsie jumped and looked at the display. It said, ‘Unknown.’

  “Hello,” Elsie said.

  “This is Alpha Omega,” a woman’s voice said over the phone.

  It was her older sister. She was supposed to use code words in case someone was listening in. However, Elsie knew people were listening in, they always were. She thought of at least three agents from Jovian Intelligence who heard every word Elsie said on the phone.

  “Zero-three-eight-Delta-Gamma,” Elsie said her check in code. “Confirm.”

  “Eight-niner-Kilo-Charlie,” Alpha Omega replied.

  “What do you want?” Elsie said.

  “I want a status report, Agent.”

  “My status is, I’m no longer in service. Remember?”

  “Negative on the non-status. You’ve been re-confirmed as active and in service,” Alpha Omega replied.

  “Active?”

  “Information sources say the target, while not the suspected one, is from your school. You may know him personally. You’re to use your current position in Station Intelligence to your advantage to find him. Don’t blow cover again.”

  Elsie rolled her eyes.

  “Confirm acceptance,” Alpha Omega said.

  Elsie hated it all made her sound like she had a choice.

  “Confirm?” she repeated.

  “Confirm,” Elsie said.

  “A confirm has been entered, and you’re to burn all used phones. New ones will be sent to you by normal means.”

  Her sister, Alpha Omega, hung up without another word.

  “I guess I wasn’t fired after all,” Elsie muttered.

  The next day after finishing his regular high school for the day, Des been ordered to go to the safehouse. Nothing changed in it besides some of the clutter in the apartment.

  Des was amazed most people didn’t even know the neighborhood existed. It was squirreled away seemingly in plain sight underneath the elevated roadway which snaked its way around the station. Most people drove over the community without realizing people lived there. If they did know it existed, most didn't enter the neighborhood to explore it.

  He sat at a collapsible fold-up chair next to the card table. Des wasn’t wearing any disguises or uniforms again. He was
merely Des, wearing boredom on his face.

  Cooley sat across from him. A couple of tablets lay on the table, their screens open to different pages.

  Sitting in the middle of the table was a large handheld devise made from altered pieces of remote controls. The gadget looked like a homemade toy. Dials with handwritten numbers, and mismatched buttons, which seemed to Des they were in no foreseeable pattern.

  “Are you understanding?” Cooley asked for the umpteenth time.

  “Not really,” Des said. “This is very advanced stuff.”

  “Can you please try and repeat what I’ve been saying to you?” Cooley asked, frustration lacing his voice.

  Des sighed. “The scanner monitors communications between different points of the station, and we’re trying to use it to find out who made those communications when they were trying to blow up the station with missiles.”

  “Yes, but not only that, the scanner monitors all the communications of the entire station, at once.”

  “Then shouldn’t we be looking at more data?” Des asked.

  “No. It sorts through the data like how an intel-artificial intelligence will sort through information on the web, but more basic. It’ll only sort through the information we’ll need for the project at hand.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Sheemo did some amazing work,” Cooley said. “I can set a few parameters and then it’ll alter the data collected.”

  “Can we change the settings, so it’ll tell us what we need to know about the missile attack? Like who and where the other worker is?”

  “It can’t find what was never there or never stored,” Cooley said. “It can’t go back into the past or into the future.”

  Des picked the scanner up off the table. “It’s very heavy.”

  “It’s something I don’t understand. I have opened it up, and there are some weights in it to make it heavier. I don’t know enough about it to fiddle with the thing too much, or I’d remove the unnecessary pieces.”

  “Unnecessary?”

  “Yes, they’re pieces of metal at the bottom of the stupid thing.”

  “Could it be important?” Des asked.

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of time with the thing, and I keep figuring out how to do more things with it.”

  “You don’t know everything there is to know about the scanner yet?”

  Cooley hesitated, “Well…”

  “Cryslis did ask you become an expert on it.”

  “I know…” Cooley said. “How long did Sheemo work on this thing?”

  “Sheemo had a team of six, and they’ve been working on it all year.”

  “Exactly. I’ve been looking at for a total of six hours.”

  “Haven’t you had this all week?”

  “I also have a large list of other things you three want and need, as well as a daily cover life I must make appearances in, like you do.”

  “Sorry for the criticism,” Des said. “I didn’t mean it like that…”

  “Of course you didn’t, but I’m one guy. Give a man a break.”

  “What about the signaling device?” Des asked. “Any leads?”

  Cooley slid over a tablet. “Jovian Intelligence sent over a list of all those people who could be behind that list. I managed to go through it. You’re on the list.”

  “What? They still think I’m a suspect?”

  “I’m also on the list,” Cooley said, rolling his eyes. “Cryslis and Elsie aren’t on the list though.”

  “Do you trust it?” Des asked, glossing over the names.

  “Not one bit of it.”

  “Why?” Des asked.

  “How was it compiled? Who compiled it? Could it be missing some information?”

  “We can start to go through the list. Use the device to cross-reference the names. If we know someone wasn’t near any of the problem signals, then we can cross them off? Right?”

  “That’s a tall order on top of all of the other tasks I currently have.”

  “Why don’t we bring in Sheemo?” Des asked. “He knows the devise more than anyone. He can do that sort of thing in a fraction of the time it’ll take you or me.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Why not,” Des said. “Give me two good reasons why not and I won’t go to Cryslis with the requests.”

  The door to the safehouse closed with a click.

  “You two aren’t very observant,” Cryslis said. “I managed to get in here while you two were arguing.”

  “My optical implant lets me see things, remember?” Cooley said. “I saw you approach. The same guy in the red hat walked down the street after you.”

  Cryslis walked into the room. She was wearing a light dress and top which went down to her knees. She wouldn’t look out of place at the mall with the girls. Des couldn’t help but look, for a brief moment.

  “You sure it was the same guy?”

  “Eighty percent positive,” Cooley said. “He only walks by the moments after you arrive at the safehouse.”

  “Jupiter save us,” Cryslis said. “start a standard wipe of the safehouse and initiate a move. Let's not take any chances. But first, what were you two talking about?”

  Des gave her a shortened version of the discussion.

  “We have a complicated scanner we don’t fully understand yet, and Des wants to bring in an expert?” Cryslis asked.

  “Yes. Except the expert is a non-agent who’s also his brother. The agency frowns upon family bringing in other family members into the organization.”

  “Bring him in as an informant.” Cryslis said. “Any communication with him is to be done using a holo-suit disguise with an altered voice. And rent a small warehouse space. Something small.”

  “Okay,” Cooley said. “Consider it done.”

  Cryslis turned to Des. “While I’m wiping and moving the safehouse, I need you to go to work and cover for me for a bit. It’s a light day anyway.”

  “Sounds good,” Des said, getting up. “Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The trip to work was uneventful, not that he expected anything to happen, but part of him expected things to happen. When he arrived at work, he changed into his work uniform. Des headed toward the bag room, where parcels waited for him.

  Waiting in the hallway was Diplin. He had a sneer on his face.

  “Lovely to see you,” Diplin said. “I see you’re working instead of Cryslis today.”

  Des didn’t say anything. He wanted to but couldn’t trust he could keep his mouth shut.

  “Oh, by the way,” Diplin said. “My dad wants to see you.”

  Des pressed on. There was no way he was going to fall for that trick. He had deliveries to make. He entered the bag room where a hundred bags were filled with parcels for around the station. It was usually a busy place, but all the deliveries already left for the day. He would be the last one out.

  Des walked up and grabbed his bag. It was light, like Cryslis told him it would.

  A moment later, his phone buzzed. It was a message from Mr. Anderson.

  Get up here now, the message said.

  Des hung up his bag back on the hook and headed back up to the third floor.

  He marched along the hallway to Mr. Anderson’s office.

  “Sit,” Mr. Anderson growled.

  Des did.

  “This feud has gone on long enough,” Mr. Anderson said.

  “What feud?” Des said.

  “Between you and Diplin.”

  “I have no feud with him,” Des replied.

  “You don’t?”

  “Not at all. I have no interest in fighting with him. If he does nothing else to me, then that’ll be the end of it.”

  “And the disciplinary committee?”

  “Has nothing to do with me,” Des said. “That’s Cryslis. She feels Diplin hitting a kid is against a law of the station and needs to be looked at.”

&n
bsp; “And what do you think?”

  “I think she’s correct,” Des said.

  “You’re putting me in a hard place,” Mr. Anderson said. “Do you know that?”

  “I do,” Des said. “But it’s nothing I started, but you can finish it.”

  “How do you think I can finish it?” Mr. Anderson asked, his eyes narrowed on Des.

  “Fire Diplin,” Des said. “You have just cause. I’m sure Station Administration will love giving him a job in sanitation.”

  “Now I know why Diplin hates you so much.”

  Des was silent for a moment, unsure what to say. “Can I go now? Those parcels won’t deliver themselves.”

  Mr. Anderson waved him away. Des made a hasty retreat. He didn’t want to exchange words with him anymore. Des was worried but knew Mr. Anderson couldn’t fire him. He would need to go to Station Administration, which would refer to Captain Kusheeno, who would put his foot down and Des would stay.

  Des returned to the bag room. A single packer was in the room, and Des’s bag was stuffed full.

  “Who touched my bag?” Des asked.

  The packer shook his head and quickly left the room.

  Des knew Diplin was setting him up. He pulled out his tablet and scanned the barcode on the bag. All the parcels in the bag were supposed to be there.

  He rubbed his forehead and grabbed the bag. It was going to be a long day.

  Hours later, Des wandered down the sidewalk in the middle of the Grey Sector in an attempt to deliver all the packages and get back home to do his homework. He hated the red uniform. It made him stand out in the middle of a crowd like a beacon.

  The sectors electrically powered factories and processing plants ran all day and night. The multiple buildings were built close to each other to save space. The windowless concrete and metal buildings gave the area an enclosed, claustrophobic feeling that made Des uneasy.

  The sidewalk was reasonably sparse with people. At the time of the day, most people would be busy working. Only a small handful walked along the pavement, making it easy to spot anyone following him, but harder to lose them. His bright uniform made losing anyone difficult.

  Des stared at a small tablet in his hands. The tablet had a red Courier One protective case protecting it from breaking if he dropped the device or threw it against the nearest wall. Des was still having troubles with the tablet. He was hunting for an address to deliver a small letter-sized package. He’d been searching for at least fifteen minutes. He was sure it was a fake package which was meant to either get Des to waste time or worse.