by David Ryker
She rapped on the door a couple of times and stood to attention. I automatically did the same on reflex. It was like a swarm thing. If someone spotted an officer, they’d straighten and every other grunt in range would do the same.
I heard footsteps storming to the door, and then it was ripped open.
“It’s about goddamn time—” Volchec was almost yelling, but cut herself off when she saw Alice. If looks could have killed, I would have been dead — probably burst into flames, judging by the anger in her face. But the second she saw Alice, it was like I wasn’t even there. It evaporated like water on a hotplate and her brow crumpled. She swallowed hard, mouth opening but unable to form words.
“Major,” Alice said, nodding.
Volchec didn’t reply — she just did something I never expected and flung her arms around Alice, pulling her into a tight embrace. Alice raised hers and put them around Volchec too, languishing into her embrace. I didn’t even know they were close. Maybe they weren’t. I stood there watching, stupidly.
“Kepler,” Volchec finally said. “I didn’t even know you were here.” She didn’t let her go, though.
Alice laughed a little, awkwardly, arms back at her sides. Volchec released her finally, her smile wide and genuine.
“When we put you on that transport…” She shook her head in disbelief. “I didn’t think you were going to pull through.” She cocked her head to look at Alice’s jaw and she lifted her head for Volchec to see. “Not even a scar.”
Alice grinned. “Yeah, they’ve got a great Medical deck here, full reconstruction.”
“You look great. It’s really great to see you back on your feet.”
“Great to be back on them.”
“And the…” She pointed to her own head. “Are you, I mean—”
Alice nodded. “Yeah, all great — they had to drain some blood, but the swelling receded and everything’s fine now — I’m fighting fit.” She added the last bit, and though Volchec didn’t clock, I did.
“I’m sorry that they came at you — the investigation and all that,” Volchec sighed. “They’ve got no damn tact. I’ll tell you that much.”
Alice laughed, maybe a little too much. “It’s fine — there was a little memory loss, so there wasn’t that much to tell.” She took a breath and checked the balcony. “You want to head inside?”
Volchec nodded warmly. “Sure.” She stepped aside and Alice walked in. I went to follow but Volchec stopped me, her hand on my chest. She pulled it away and pointed at my face, dropping to nearly a whisper. “We’ve been waiting for you — nearly an hour.” Her voice was like molten lead. “You keep me waiting again, you’re out on your goddamn ass, you hear me, Maddox? This is still your fucking job.”
My blood ran cold. I didn’t think that telling her the reason would ease anything. I just nodded instead and tried to look sincere. “I’m sorry — I ran into Alice, and—”
“I don’t care. Just get in here.” She ushered me in and snapped the door shut before breezing past me. In comparison to my room, it was a palace.
When I stepped in, I clocked Everett first. She was staring at Alice, her face a mixture of emotions that I couldn’t discern — anger, sadness, resentment, happiness, jealousy — it was impossible to tell. She fixed Alice with an intense stare for a few seconds, and then turned to me and peeled back my skin with her eyes. I squirmed under her gaze and busied myself admiring the caliber of the apartment.
We were in a living room of sorts. There were two couches around a huge screen on the left, and a kitchen on the right with a breakfast bar jutting out. Mac was leaning on it when we came in, but had rushed over to greet Alice, pulling her into a hug before she could stop him. Fish was standing at the back of the room, staring out of a huge window that looked out into space. He turned and gave her a nod — about as brotherly as things got in Eshellite culture. I could see stars glittering faintly behind. I tried to place where we were on the station to take my mind of Everett’s eyes still burning into the side of my skull — but I couldn’t, it was too huge and we’d come in from the other side. All I knew was that despite being under this one, my room didn’t have any windows.
Volchec stepped into the center of the couches and folded her arms, scratching her head as she situated herself. Alice pried Mac off and plopped down on one of the sofas. Everett was sitting on the other one opposite. I met her eyes now. She was still looking at me, face expressionless, and then she turned to look at Alice. Her eyes flitted back to mine and narrowed a touch. Questioning? Accusing? Cold, either way.
I shook my head minutely, feeling sick all of a sudden. Shit, what had happened last night — and then I’d disappeared for hours, and suddenly turned up with Alice. Fuck. What would she think? What was she thinking?
She stared at me, her eyes making the hair on my arms stand up. She let her shoulders sink a little, and then looked away, eyes rolling. Shit. I needed to talk to her, but how could I?
I buried my head in my fists and pressed my eyeballs into my skull with the heels of my hands until they ached. I wanted to scream. Punch the wall. Punch myself in the face for being such a fucking idiot all the time. I could still taste vomit, my throat like razors.
“Volchec,” I said.
She looked up.
“You mind if I…” I trailed off, looking at the bathroom door next to the kitchen.
She scoffed. “Are you serious?”
I shrugged and watched as she shook her head in disbelief before flicking her hand at it. “Make it quick.”
When I got in there, I turned the tap on full blast, picked up an unused bath towel and crushed it against my face, half-screaming into it. When I had none left, I set it down and smoothed it out, took a bottle of mouthwash off the counter — it had to be Volchec’s — filled my mouth and then spat it out. I stared at myself in the mirror — the dark hair, the shock of white over my left ear from where I’d rested my head against the side of the incubation tank on Genesis, the bags under my eyes from the long morning — the long night — the long year. It had put years on me. I looked tired, my chin speckled with scraggly hairs. I sighed and threw water on my face before cupping my hands under the stream and drinking as much as my stomach could take.
When I got back out, everyone was sitting on the couches and Volchec had pulled up what looked like security footage on the screen between them. It was date and time stamped for two days before. “Can we start?” she asked.
I sat and nodded.
“Good,” she sighed, “because there’s a lot to go over.”
She cleared her throat and looked at Alice for a second, seeing whether she’d get up and leave. She didn’t, and too much time had been wasted already, so she pressed on. If she really wanted her gone, she would have said so. Maybe she liked having her back in the fold — or at least pretending it was that for a few minutes. Seeing her looking so good had definitely eased what I now knew to be a guilty conscience. And anyway, what she was saying wasn’t privileged information, so to speak.
She turned and tapped the screen with her fingers, stepping out of the way as she did. The image, a little grainy, was of two humanoid figures talking in what looked like a walkway between two buildings. Trash cans were stacked next to them, and both had their backs turned to the camera so it couldn’t pick out their faces. They were obviously aware of its presence. The image was zoomed in a fair amount, so the detail wasn’t as good as it could have been. Volchec touched the screen with two fingers and rotated them. The time stamp accelerated, and the two figures, after conversing for a few minutes, the audio giving us nothing but hustle and bustle from the cutout foreground, took off away from the camera down the alleyway.
The feed cut to a shot of what looked like a market square. Busy shop stalls, selling everything from spaceship parts to fruit, seethed and pulsed like a beating heart across the entire screen and it took Volchec pointing out the same to figures from before moving across the top edge of the screen, the time stamp indica
ting this was just after the alley-shot.
The display changed again and this time showed off a maintenance corridor lined with steaming pipes. The same two figures appeared at the bottom and walked briskly down it, not saying a word.
We all watched in silence as it cut to another camera of another walkway much the same. The two figures rounded a corner coming towards it, but as they did, the one on the left held up a small remote and pointed it at the camera. As they came into the sort of range we’d need to identify them, the feed started to go fuzzy. It never cut, but the display blurred and the camera pulled in and out of focus as it looked for the right depth of field. The two figures stuttered and then went a little staticky, and then they’d passed under it. The feed settled back to perfect clarity, and then disappeared.
The next time stamp on the next display showed that it was almost ten minutes later. This one was a night-vision feed of a hangar filled with junk. It looked disused for transit, and appeared to be more oriented toward storage. A few ancient ships and vehicles were piled up, but for the most part, it was just junk. The camera was about as old as everything else in there, and showed the sharp green outlines of equipment that had been piled up for years. Two shapes were moving about under a hanging lamp suspended off the wing of an old ship. The white pool was blinding against the dark background, but we could still make them out. The larger one — the one who’d had the remote — pulled a storage crate out from under the ship with the light and slid it into the small space between the two of them.
The second guy reached forward and the larger put his boot on it, stopping him from opening it. There was no audio, but it was clear they were talking, and it wasn’t friendly. We could sense the tension, all of us leaning forward and watching. Fish and Alice were on one couch, and Mac and Everett were on the other. I was standing at the far side of the coffee table looking right at the screen, arms folded, eyes glued to the big guy.
The smaller of the two opened his hands — what the hell? he was saying.
The bigger guy pointed his finger at him and shook it. The smaller guy shook his head, looked like he was griping, and then unzipped his jacket and fumbled in his coat. He pulled out what looked like a communicator. He tapped something into it and then held it up to show the big guy. He reached for it quickly and the smaller one pulled it out of reach. There was a terse exchange of words and then the big guy pulled his boot off the crate. The smaller one offered him the communicator and the bigger guy took it and shoved it into his jacket as the other bent down and went for the lid of the box.
The rest happened really quickly. The big guy turned away for a maybe just a second, and then a flash lit the camera screen. When it faded, the smaller guy was slumped backward on a heap of trash and the big guy was jamming a pistol back into a rib holster inside his coat.
He kicked the lid of the crate closed and shunted it back under the ship with his heel. He moved forward without care and grabbed the dead guy’s arm, heaving him into the air and then over his shoulder. He walked out of the room, flicking off the lamp as he did. They slumped out of view, bathed in darkness, and then they were gone.
The screen changed again, and the timestamp said it was an hour later. It was a wide shot of a shitty part of a shittier space station — a network of pipes criss crossing through the air and catwalks reminiscent of Settlement-93 on Genesis. A neon-bathed bar set high up on the right-hand side of the screen overlooked a canyon between stacked habs set against towering walls. A guy was leaning on a rail, smoking a cigarette. The image was pretty distant, again, but it was clear who he was — the big guy. He took a drag on the cigarette and then flicked it over the edge. It hung in the air for a second and then plunged into darkness. Volchec moved suddenly and we all jumped, totally engrossed in what we were looking at. She tapped the screen and the image paused, the guy half pushed off the rail, frozen in time.
Volchec raised her eyebrows. “So — anyone want to take a guess?”
We all looked at each other, but as usual, Mac spoke up first.
“At what?” he asked, holding his hands. “Who that is?” He pointed at the screen. “Or where that is? Or maybe what the hell we’re expected to do with either of those things?”
Volchec laughed but ignored the snideness of his remarks. “It was rhetorical — you’d know exactly who he was, if he’d have been in the Telmareen Guard Tower, like he was supposed to be.”
“The informant?” I said quickly.
Volchec nodded. “It’s not confirmed, but as far as we can guess — he’s clever, knows where the cameras are, knows to avoid them. He’s stayed under the radar for a long time, pulling this scam, but we’ve positively ID’d him now. At least, the Federation have. The investigation into the Free on Telmareen was ongoing, and while we were on probation, we were excluded from it. But, now that we’re not…” She shrugged. “They’ve turned up a lot of stuff. This guy,” she said, pointing to the screen, “is a known associate of those mercs that, uh, turned up dead on Telmareen.” She fired a quick look at Alice, who didn’t notice, and then went on. “Kera — was it? They touched down on Telmareen all within a week of each other — that’s been confirmed. But after what happened, there was no sign of this guy. Until a few months ago. Reports were coming in of people going missing on this station, some technical issues with cameras — lost footage and that sort of thing. This guy’s smart, but not that smart. You saw that scrambler he had? Well, he’s got a few other toys, too. Namely, one that can hack the closed circuit network and wipe out footage — a couple seconds here and there, replaced with static, so no one noticed, but it made him a ghost. Someone had the bright idea to start transmitting the footage at live capture, in case the issue was with the recording software. They didn’t mean to uncover what they did, but hey, a break’s a break.” She tapped the screen and an ID card popped up next to the figure on the catwalk. The guy’s face was round and hairy. A chinstrap of bristled beard hung off his round face, but his mustache was thin and wiry. His puffy cheeks and pulled-back hair did nothing for his appearance either, and his eyes looked sunken and gaunt, one of which was sporting a nice bruise. This was a mugshot if I’d ever seen one. The guy had a record, I could see it under his name. He was a human, called Brick Smith.
Everett scoffed. “Brick? That has to be an alias.”
Volchec sighed. “Maybe — but it’s what the scan said. Either his parents had really shitty taste in names, or he had his tag re-coded. It costs a stack, but it’s not impossible. Probably to hide, you know, skip out on a warrant, get away from something.”
“Or someone,” Alice chimed in coolly.
“Hard to tell — but it doesn’t really matter,” Volchec said. “The important thing is that he’s there, he’s ID’d, and he’s within reach.”
“So if the Federation know he’s killing people,” Alice said, drumming on her knees, “and pulling whatever shit that was in the garage, then why haven’t they snatched him?”
“Because he’s not the target,” I said.
Volchec almost smiled, but remembered how pissed she was with me, and held it back. “That’s right.”
“So what’s his racket?” Mac asked, leading the conversation exactly where Volchec wanted it to go.
“He’s dealing Iskcara.”
Mac laughed. “Of course he is.”
“Except he’s not — not really. He hasn’t got a lick of the stuff. Our guys have been all over the station with geigers and scanners. There’s not a whiff of Iskcara anywhere.”
“So he’s offering it up, getting people to pay him, and then popping them?” Alice turned her bottom lip out. “That’s cold.”
I looked at her. She’d lost all her tightly wound sternness. She seemed a lot more relaxed now, a lot less highly strung. Maybe her brush with death had put things in perspective. Maybe her father just didn’t let her act like such a princess. I chuckled to myself at the thought and everyone glanced at me. I hid it by clearing my throat. “And that thing he
got handed — a communicator?”
“Credit slab,” Everett answered. “They’re not hard to come by — usually given as gifts for birthdays, that sort of thing. You can draw down however much you want into them from your account and then do whatever you want with it. The slab’s worthless on its own, and stolen is no good either, but get it enabled for recoding by the owner, you can put your own print on there, and boom, the credit’s yours whenever you want to cash it in.”
I nodded. “So that’s why he has to get them down there, get them to the box, get them to hand it over.”
“And then he shoots them before they know what’s happened.” It was Mac again. “That is cold.”
“So what’s he do with the bodies?” I asked.
Volchec sighed. “Trash chute. We had a few drones head out to check out the flotsam patches. Found two bodies already. They’re still looking for the others. No IDs yet, though. Brick’s smart, like I said.”
I smirked. “What’s he doing? Cutting their arms and heads off?”
Volchec stared blankly back at me but didn’t respond. “Moving on—”
“Wait,” I cut in, “is he actually cutting their heads off?”
“Moving on.” Volchec said it more sternly this time and I shut up. “If Smith got off Telmareen with Fox — if she was there at all — then somewhere along the lines he split from them. Escaped maybe, if he was being held captive, but more than likely he’s just biding his time until he’s got enough credits to make a real break for it. But, either way, if he’s saying he’s got Iskcara to sell, and people are buying into that then he must be pretty well connected somewhere along the line. You don’t just put an ad out, and have people come flooding in looking for it. He’s just a middleman, most likely. But anyone looking to buy Iskcara is packing some serious credit—”