Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  8

  Getting lost in Eudaimonia was a hard thing to do. With every droid, doorway, and drone scouring the crowds and faces, not getting caught out was a tall order.

  Unless, of course, you’d been secretly working for the AIA for the last six years, undercover in the UMR Security Bureau, planning for the eventuality that one day you’d be made and would need to disappear quickly. And you had the wealth of knowledge and experience at doing exactly that, like Ward did.

  It seemed that day had come — though it was a lot sooner than Ward wanted, and doing it with an SB investigator in tow wasn’t exactly the ideal situation. Still, if he had a price on his head, then so did she.

  The AIA maintained who-knew-how-many safehouses in the capital. They were kept under false names of people who traveled off-world for work or used them as second homes, but really, they were safe havens that AIA agents who found themselves out on a limb in the city could use if they really needed to.

  Ward thought their situation called for it.

  He only knew of four, though he knew that Cootes had a lot more than that on the books. Luckily, one of the four was in Old-Town and the SB didn’t know a thing about it.

  The shower creaked off in the other room and a few minutes later, Erica walked out, dressed differently, the formal and drab suit discarded in favor of something less constricting. The clothes didn’t exactly fit, but they’d do — a pair of fitted black cargo pants, lightweight boots, a graphene-lined slate-gray jacket that would stop a small caliber bullet if it came to it. Ward looked up and nodded as she toweled off her hair, glaring at him. She hadn’t forgiven him for having a safe-house to go to. But he thought she’d bought the story about knowing about it from way back before he was with the SB, and that it was just luck it was still in use.

  They were safe for now. He was sure that they hadn’t been followed. They’d managed to slip through the net before the sentinels had headed them off and had gone to ground thereere. Still, they couldn’t just wait it out. They needed to find whoever was behind this, or else they’d be branded fugitives.

  He’d checked the bulletins on the Security Bureau’s public facing website — they weren’t topping the wanted list just yet so he hoped that the SB wasn’t corrupt all the way up the chain — maybe just a few sentinels who’d been bought off. Maybe they didn’t even know what for. Likely it would all be passed off as an accidental shooting. But whatever it was that was really going on, they couldn’t risk going back to the SB — not yet — which really irked Erica. Her faith wouldn’t be shaken in the integrity of the badge, but Ward couldn’t risk her calling Moozana, no matter how far up his ass her nose was. And that also presented him with another problem.

  He needed to see Cootes, but he couldn’t very well take Arza. He needed her out of his hair for a while. If he left her at the safe house, though, she’d ask where he was going. No, he needed to split them up for a legitimate reason — have her chase down a lead, maybe, give him an hour to speak to Cootes and see if he had any idea what the hell was going on.

  “Arza, come over here,” Ward said, beckoning her.

  She came over, still massaging her bright hair with the towel, and stood over his shoulder, looking at the notepad in front of him. He had the numbers from Sadler’s tattoo laid out there. One, seven, nine, three, one, two, one, eight. A few balls of crumpled paper lay around them, but on the pad, there were notes and numbers scrawled all around the sequence. The one that Ward was gesturing to was a date. August 21st.

  “Did you find something?” Arza asked, inspecting the page, her big blue eyes dancing across the paper.

  Ward sighed. “I don’t know.” He really didn’t, but it was the only solid lead they had to go on.

  “What’s significant about the 21st of August?”

  “It’s the last day that I saw Sadler — before yesterday, I mean. On Ganymede, when I got this.” He held up his arm, not looking up from the paper. “Could just be coincidence, but… I don’t know. Sadler being here. Having this tattoo? I’m the only one who would have recognized it? She’s not sloppy enough just to turn up dead like that. If her body dropped in the street, it was for a good reason. And I think that reason was that she knew I’d be here. She knew I’d be assigned to the case, or make sure I was. She knew I’d see the tattoo, she knew I’d recognize it, and she knew I’d find the numbers. So I don’t know — maybe coincidence… But… Sadler never liked that word, and in this line of work, there’s no such thing.”

  Arza stuck her bottom lip out, breathing gently. Ward was close enough to smell the moisture on her skin, the lingering scent of almonds from whatever body scrub she’d used that morning, doused in alley-stink and then washed off, but still there… lingering. “And what about the other numbers? Do they mean anything to you?”

  Ward shook his head. “They all mean things — but they all mean lots of things.”

  “Think about you and Sadler. If she left the sequence for you, then she’d know you could crack it, but only you.” She exhaled. “August 17th? January 3rd? Is it that simple?”

  Ward shrugged. “Chronologically, it doesn’t really make any sense… That op lasted for two months. Through from the middle of June to the 21st of August. On the 17th we would have been on Ganymede, but January 3rd? I was back on Earth, recovering. And Sadler was… who knows where. After Ganymede, she was reassigned. But that wouldn’t make sense, because surely the date our op finished should come first if it’s that?”

  “So where were you the year before?”

  “Uh…” Ward leaned back in the chair and laced his hands through his shaggy brown hair. “I was on Aeolus, working a corruption case. But I hadn’t even met Sadler by that point. And in January, I would have been back on Earth, I guess. I spent the holidays visiting my mom that year, I think.”

  Arza looked at him for a moment and Ward thought she was about to ask about his family. But then she thought better and didn’t.

  She let out a long sigh and went back to scrubbing the water out of her hair. “I know someone who can help. Someone who’s good with codes. She’ll have been working on it already — for the SB. I guarantee it. I can reach out and—”

  “No.” Ward was adamant, still looking at the paper. Something was niggling at him, in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t figure out what. He had the feeling they were looking in all the wrong places. “We can’t risk going back to the SB. Not when we don’t know who we can trust. If they’re watching your friends at the Bureau, they’ll—”

  “They won’t,” Arza said quickly. “Like you said, we’re not on any fugitives list, so this can’t go all the way up. I’ll reach out quietly, see what I can find out, and then meet you back here later.”

  Ward looked up at her, inspecting her face. She seemed to have shaken off the nerves from the clinic, but he still didn’t like the idea of her going back out there alone, at least not back to the SB. And yet, getting an hour or two alone was all he needed. “And you’re sure you can do it without raising any flags?”

  She nodded affirmatively. “Yeah. One hundred percent.”

  “How can you be sure?” Ward drilled.

  “Because our father made sure of it.”

  Ward arched an eyebrow. “Your father? What do you mean?”

  She clenched her jaw. “He… Working SB as an investigator can be… is dangerous. He said that if we ever got in trouble, or something happened, that we always needed some way to contact each other — only trust family, he used to say. He put in place plans to deal with this sort of thing, so we could communicate if anything went wrong, let each other know we were okay, ask for help, that sort of thing.”

  Ward pursed his lips. “Your father is SB?”

  “Was.”

  “So who’s your contact?”

  “My sister.”

  “And how’re you going to contact her?”

  “We’re all registered on a Swedish recipe-sharing forum. It’s because—”

  “Your
mother is Swedish. It’s a good cover.”

  “You read my file?”

  “Norwegian girlfriend in college,” Ward said lightly, gesturing to his face. “You have the same bone structure, sort of. I guessed Scandinavian.”

  She flushed just a little.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Ward said strangely. “I mean — it’s clever,” he added, driving the conversation back toward the point. “Guessing you’ve got alerts set? Someone posts about a certain topic, it’s code for whatever. That sort of thing? Keyword tags. Right?”

  “You know about this sort of thing?”

  Ward cracked a smile. “It’s an old Earth tactic. Ancient by now. Your mother’s idea?”

  “Yeah…” she said slowly, nodding, suddenly unsure of the safety of it.

  “She E-JIS?”

  “Ee-jiss?”

  “European Joint Intelligence Service. Swedish SB, basically. Or, I mean, she used to be before she married your dad and moved to Eudaimonia? Was he stationed on Earth, or was she—?”

  “My mother was the secretary to a Swedish diplomat at the Eudaimonia embassy,” Arza said almost defensively.

  Ward laughed a little. “Sure she was.” He pushed back from the table and went across the tac-kit he’d pulled from one of the kitchen cupboards and put on the table.

  The apartment was small — a studio style with an open plan living room and kitchen and a small bedroom and bath at the back. But what looked like a bit of a shabby squat actually had bulletproof doors and enough firepower and tech stashed around to put up a hell of a fight against anything that came through the front door.

  Arza breezed over, her fists curled again, that inexperienced anger welling up in her. “My mother was not ee-jiss, or E-J-I-S, or whatever the hell it is. My father was SB, working the security detail on the diplomat. That’s how they met. She just… She’s just smart like that. Careful.”

  Ward flipped open the crate and pulled out two little devices the size of champagne corks, grinning to himself as he did. “Sure she was — and she just happened to be well versed in 21st-century spycraft?” He arched an eyebrow at her, watching as her cheeks reddened.

  She huffed and turned away. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. If I reach out, she’ll know what it means.”

  “Your sister — older or younger?” he asked airily, popping the top on one of the devices and pulling a gelatinized pad, like a clear coin, out of it, and balancing it on his finger.

  “What does that matter?”

  “Older, then. And she’s still an analyst? You join at the same time?” He approached her.

  “Yes. And no, she joined first.” She straightened, proudly. Competitive family, it seemed. Both parents in intelligence, pushing their kids into it. Family business. Ward wondered how hard she’d pushed to get out into the field — beat her sister to the punch. Very, he guessed. He wondered what her sister was like, if she was like Erica, and then let the thought slip away.

  “Here,” Ward said, lifting his finger toward her face.

  “What is it?” Arza said, snatching his hand out of the air.

  “They call it a spoofer.”

  “A… spoofer?”

  He smiled warmly. “Yeah, like to spoof something. To fake it.” He could tell she didn’t know the word. “Earth-tech,” he finished, simplifying it. “It’ll give you a better chance to slip past the drones and magic eyes.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “There’s probably a lot you’ve never heard of,” he said, smirking at her. “Come on, it won’t hurt.”

  She loosened her grip and he pressed the pad under her chin, invisible from the front. She looked him in the eye as he did, her jaw tight.

  “Here,” he said, giving her the device and pressing one under his own chin. He felt it melt through the hair and glue itself to the skin. “Just click and hold,” he said, demonstrating with his own device. “It emits a small interference signal — will jam the facial-rec for a few seconds. Use it sparingly, though. It doesn’t have a lot of juice, and if you’re walking all over the city with a fuzzy face, it’ll start raising eyebrows. The AI on the eyes is pretty slick. Keep your arms covered, too — the less skin it has to read, the slower it’ll get a read on your biometric—”

  “I got it,” she said brusquely. Maybe the thing about her mother had hit home. Maybe it was the quip about her sister.

  She walked past him toward the door, checking her watch. “Meet back here at two?”

  Ward nodded. “Sure. Be careful, don’t use any traceable—”

  “I got it.” She cut him off again. “I’ll stop someone in the street, ask to borrow their communicator. All right?” she finished off emphatically, her eyebrows up, eyes wide.

  Ward nodded. “All right.”

  The door snapped closed behind her and when Ward couldn’t hear her footsteps in the corridor anymore, he went back to the tac-kit and pulled out a new pre-loaded communicator of his own. He opened the interface and scrolled through a list of coupons for various restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses. Each had an assigned place and meaning. He selected one that was good for a free Martian-rooster skewer from Bluk’s One-Stop-Rooster-Shop, a little cart that slung Martian-poultry out near the salt-ring that circled the city. The guy who ran it, Bluk, one of the only fat Martians Ward had ever met, was a good guy, and he made the best Martian-rooster in the city.

  It was a weird bird, not unlike an Earth chicken, except a little longer and gamier. Their whole biome was different from the Humans’, but not by much. Though the Humans had no chance of pronouncing their words, so they just related the animals and plants to their own and stuck ‘Martian’ in front of them. It wasn’t an elegant system, but it worked.

  The coupon zoomed off into the ether and a little delivery notice popped up.

  Ward checked his own watch and then headed for the door. Cootes would get the message and head over soon enough, and when he got there, Ward would be waiting.

  His solar cycle was parked a little way away, but he could get there without being seen, he thought.

  He reached the door, checked his M2.0 was loaded, and then left, melting into the streets of Old-Town.

  The smell of grilled chicken, thick in the salty air, wafted on the breeze.

  Ward killed the bike and stepped off, thumbing the button on his spoofer as a drone hovered by overhead, circling the salt-ring, checking for anyone who’d passed out from dehydration, and zipped off through the heat haze.

  The gravel crunched under his feet as he strode toward the bank that ran down to the flats, the blank white canvas stretching out in front of him.

  Hundreds of little black specks, Humans and Martians, hunched over with water bottles strapped to their backs and breathing masks strapped to their faces. Their leather gloves groaned under their working hands as they scraped salt crystals off the flat and shoveled them into their satchels before they took it to the repository. It was a hellish way to make a living, but it was all some people could do, and if they weren’t doing anything else…

  Ward cast his eyes around, seeing Bluk’s chicken-trolley, complete with the classic red and white parasol, paper hat, and grease-soaked apron. Chunks of Martian-rooster rotated slowly over his burners, the scrubbers lining up to get their fill.

  There was no sign of Cootes yet, and it’d been nearly an hour since he’d sent the alert.

  Beyond Bluk’s trolley one of the bridges that connected the city to the plains beyond stretched over the flats, casting a line of much-needed shade. Overheated scrubbers perched under it, sucking hot water out of their sun-baked bottles, chatting and griping about how hot and difficult the work was. Ward couldn’t relate, but he could feel the waves of heat washing off the surface. Even from his perch on the bank, he could see the sweat glistening on Bluk’s stout Martian neck.

  He made his way down and circled toward the bridge, perching on a rock, roving the faces of the scrubbers in front of him. He stayed quiet, hidden from
above by the sides of the bridge and waited, feeling the grip of his M2.0 hot in the small of his back. A bead of sweat ran down his spine under his shirt. The scrubbers were right about one thing, it was hotter than all hell down there, and just as miserable.

  It was nearly thirty minutes after Ward sat down that the gentle whine of an electric motor cut the air. Tires crackled on gravel and then a car door opened somewhere above him. Someone had pulled off the road leading out of the city and onto the stony verge that let down to the flats.

  Shoes hit the ground and the door shut.

  Ward’s hand found the grip of the M2.0 and he rose, tilting his head to squint out from under the lip of the bridge at the figure coming down.

  Cootes came to the edge of the embankment and looked over the scrubbers at work. He pulled out his communicator and held it up, sweeping gently from side to side as he snapped some photographs. He held it to his mouth just after and spoke into the microphone nestled at the base of it.

  When Ward was sure there was no one else with him, he emerged into the sunlight and walked up the hill. Cootes let his memorandum trail off and stowed his communicator, giving Ward the slightest of nods, his features showing off some indignation for being summoned like this. Though he didn’t say anything — he knew Ward wouldn’t risk it if the situation didn’t require it.

  “Your memoirs?” Ward asked, nodding to the panel disappearing into Cootes’ tailored trouser pocket.

  Cootes huffed. “There are a lot of humans working down here — it’s part of my job description, believe it or not, to check in with them, from time to time, make sure that the working conditions are up to par, if you catch my drift. Couple of fresh photographs, a few notes, all goes in a file, if anyone looks, I was here for a good reason.”

  “Plus the rooster skewers are pretty good.”

  “Plus the rooster skewers are pretty good,” Cootes parroted, sighing. “What is it, Ward? I don’t have anything for you. If I did, I’d have reached out.” He sucked his teeth for a second. “But I’m guessing you dug something up — something that had you scrabbling for a safe house judging by the way you got in touch. So what is it? Lay it on me.”