Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4)

by G. S. Jennsen

  A long time ago, their ancestors had settled Synra out of nothing more than necessity. After sailing across galaxies for almost two centuries without respite, their ships were running out of resources, something Synra offered in abundance. Endless rainforests brimming with diverse flora and savannahs of grasses nourished by rich soil. Rolling meadows of fruit-bearing flowers surrounding pristine lakes of fresh water. There were even healthy deposits of common minerals in the polar regions.

  So the ships had landed and the resources had been harvested. Then improved upon, genetically enhanced and replicated. Prosperity ensued. And they had stayed.

  Joaquim paused outside the doors and took a minute to acclimate to the scene spread out before him. Synra Two wasn’t as urbane as Mirai One or as trashy as Namino Two, not as serene as Kiyora One or as…wet as Ebisu One, Two, Three or Four. But for many years and multiple generations, it had simply been home.

  The Justice Center was far enough away from the transit hub to merit its own maglev stop, but he was early, so he decided to walk instead.

  Walking was a mistake.

  Every ten meters held another memory lying in wait to jump out and ambush his psyche.

  The stir-fry restaurant where he and his friends met for lunch once a week for years.

  The music club that let him, Nathan and Gabe pretend they were musicians and play for the afternoon crowd on weekends.

  The residential furnishings fab shop where he worked maintaining their equipment.

  The arboretum where he met Cassidy.

  By the time he arrived at the Justice Center, he felt like he’d gone twelve rounds with an industrial mecha. If he’d wanted to torture himself into a bloody pulp, he could have stayed on Mirai and loaded up some old memory files; the temperature would have been more bearable, if nothing else.

  But he hadn’t come to Synra to torture himself. He’d come to answer a question, and possibly to close a door that had nudged itself open.

  Joaquim slipped into the rear of the courtroom and took a seat on the next-to-last bench. A few people sat scattered among the rows, but the hearing was sparsely attended. Just a random court proceeding for a random low-level crime alleged to have been perpetrated by a random individual. Nothing to see here, move along.

  He felt a twinge of guilt at claiming one of the new simmed IDs straight off and using it for his own personal, non-NOIR reasons. But it was the only safe way for him to get to Synra and inside the courtroom, and he needed to be here.

  The presiding Justice officer entered from a door behind the dais and took his seat. Two security dynes escorted Nathan in from another door and guided him to the defendant’s box, where a woman Joaquim assumed was Nathan’s Rep waited.

  Nathan sat beside her without affect, without displaying any emotion whatsoever. His expression was impassive; dead eyes didn’t so much as glance around the courtroom. His demeanor made for a stark contrast to the last time Joaquim had seen him.

  The burnt odor of charred circuitry still clogged the air in the apartment ten hours after the raid.

  A breeze wafted through from an open window to move the air inside around a bit, and Joaquim tasted the more organic odor of singed hair on his tongue—abruptly he doubled over and dry heaved until his stomach eventually gave up on its reflexive spasms.

  He slid down to the floor, letting the wall hold him upright as he took in the wrecked scene with quiet dismay. He thought maybe he was still too shell-shocked to feel despair yet, though it would surely arrive to knock him on his ass soon enough.

  Almost nothing in the apartment was salvageable—a few visual sets, some of her clothes, some of his, the fucking food unit. A couch, but not the bed, as raiding dynes had ripped it to shreds searching for imagined contraband. Threads from the hand-woven Chizeru rug Cassidy had bought on vacation last year lay scattered around the left half of the room like worms crawling across desert sand.

  He stared at the floor for…a while. The threads never moved, but if he let his vision blur they almost seemed to.

  She’d loved that rug.

  A knock on the door frame barely penetrated his awareness, Nathan storming inside only a little more so. “Joaquim! There you are. I ran over here as soon as I heard—what the hells happened?”

  His gaze slowly, vaguely rose to pass across Nathan, then back down to fixate on one of the threads. “Justice says they possessed evidence she was manufacturing and selling malware out of the apartment.”

  “Cassidy? Are they insane?”

  “I don’t….” The hollowness in his chest drained away the energy required to finish the sentence.

  Nathan paced frenetically, dodging the overturned furniture and spilled contents of drawers and cabinets. “So, what? They raided the apartment? Tore the place up and shot her into nonfunctionality when she protested?”

  “For starters. Then they wrecked her backup storage, claiming it held suspected contraband.”

  Nathan froze in the middle of the room, and Joaquim sensed his friend’s stare boring into him. “She kept a remote backup, though, right?”

  “Cassidy couldn’t afford storage at one of the fancy trusts. She kept a copy stashed at a friend’s place, but she had to bring it here to make the copy then return it. It was here when Justice raided.”

  “But that means….” Nathan crouched in front of him. “Fuck, man. I am so godsdamn sorry.”

  “Yeah.” Joaquim closed his eyes to block out the pity on his friend’s face. He could not bear the sight of it. Any of it.

  “Why don’t you crash at my place tonight—or as long as you need to.”

  He swallowed, but the acrid air provided no relief for his aching throat or his empty soul. “Thank you for the offer, but I want to be alone.”

  “Doesn’t mean you should be alone. Just come with me—”

  “I said I want to be alone.”

  Nathan studied him silently for several seconds, then stood and stepped away. “All right. I won’t force you. But you know where to find me. Any time.”

  Joaquim stared at the threads on the floor until he heard Nathan leave, and for many hours after.

  A week later, Justice had admitted that a faulty algorithm running in the Unregistered Transactions Task Force group made an erroneous connection between an innocent sale Cassidy had transacted and a known black market neural subroutine trade network. This false connection had led to the raid.

  Justice apologized and reimbursed their accounts for the property damage. They initialized a new body free of charge and gave it her name, but without so much as an intact kernel remaining, the new person they awoke bore no resemblance to her. If the creator of the faulty algorithm was punished, Justice never said.

  Joaquim had walked away from their life and their friends. He took his share of Justice’s financial reimbursement, moved from Synra to Mirai and got a minor Grade I up-gen to add metaphorical distance to the physical distance he’d put between himself and that life. In time, he found others who shared his festering animosity toward the government, if not his depth of motivation. He found Perrin, and they found Nika, and NOIR came to be.

  After that conversation at the apartment following the raid, he’d never seen Nathan again. Not until today.

  The hearing proceeded in a rote, perfunctory manner. Two witnesses testified that Nathan had assaulted a restaurant patron without provocation. The patron testified to the same. Nathan admitted to doing so and declined to provide a justification for his actions. He didn’t give his Rep anything to work with, and in the end she could only plead first offender leniency.

  But leniency didn’t count for much with Justice these days, and the presiding officer sentenced Nathan to eight years in Zaidam, followed by a Grade III up-gen—only a single step less severe than a full R&R.

  The security dynes led Nathan out through the door he’d entered from. Nathan hadn’t once looked back at the audience in the courtroom, and Joaquim was glad for it. His former friend wasn’t the man he remember
ed—because of an intervening up-gen, or it could simply be the shock from this unfortunate turn his life had taken, something Joaquim well understood.

  As soon as Nathan disappeared through the door, Joaquim stood and left as well. In spite of the emotional wrecking ball the afternoon had been, he was glad he’d come to the hearing, because it had confirmed what he’d long believed. This time in his life was long gone and best left buried.

  11

  * * *

  An officer escorted Dashiel up to Adlai’s office at the apex of the sprawling Justice Center. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the way, and as an Advisor it wasn’t as if he represented a threat, but Justice had procedures for every foreseeable event and interaction, and those procedures had to be followed.

  Adlai waved him inside while he passed off a stack of data weaves to one of his assistants. The woman joined another officer at a focus sphere across the room, and Adlai turned to him. “Thanks for taking the time to come by.”

  “Because you’re too swamped to come outside and enjoy a proper lunch, I expect.”

  The Justice Advisor dropped his voice a notch. “You have no idea. I’m drowning under the NOIR investigation, and meanwhile crime rates everywhere are skyrocketing. It’s…I don’t know. Frustrating.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that if you hadn’t decided to start making everything a crime, you wouldn’t find yourself awash in criminals?”

  “Very funny—you know perfectly well that the recent adjustments to the criminal code came at the behest of the Guides. I’m just keeping my head down and working the cases as they come.” He gave Dashiel a pained look. “Which is why you’re here, of course.”

  Dashiel shrugged mildly. “I would like my augment stock back. Failing that, I would like to see the perpetrators punished. But I can be altruistic. It’s not all about me. Nobody wants the kind of criminals who can pull off such an outrageous heist roaming free on our streets, do they?”

  “How very diplomatic of you—” Adlai’s face reddened, and he cut himself off. “Sorry.”

  Alarms tripped and triggers sprung into action across Dashiel’s mental processes to short-circuit the chain reaction that was already poised to spiral out of control. Their work was completed in a nanosecond, but it still took him the span of a long blink to bury the smarting wound the comment inflicted. Then he smiled. “No apology needed. I’m not a delicate flower, so don’t feel as though you need to watch your every word around me.”

  “I’m a Justice Advisor—I should always watch my every word. And yes. In a perfect world, none of us want skilled, well-equipped thieves on the streets. I eagerly await the arrival of this perfect world. Until it does, we do what we can with our imperfect one.

  “As to your first request, I’m afraid your augment stock is already spread around a minimum of four planets’ worth of black markets. We’ve come across a couple of the units in unrelated raids. Whoever stole the shipments moved fast to dump the supply.”

  Dashiel exhaled heavily. So much for the financials this quarter. “Was it NOIR?”

  Adlai hesitated, then shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it. I wish it was, as then I could combine investigations. But to the extent we’ve been able to walk the trail in reverse on the units we’ve confiscated, they traveled through standard black market channels used by skimmers, spoofers and knockoff fabbers. Also, so far as we’re aware of, NOIR’s never engaged in mass theft of a commercial product.”

  “Maybe they’re upping their game?”

  “Oh, they’re definitely doing that…but this hit doesn’t feel like them. They enjoy announcing their handiwork with dramatic flair even when they don’t need to do so, and in your case there’s no graffiti, no manifesto, no calling card. Your thieves moved in, struck and disappeared.”

  “So you’re telling me you have nothing? What about that supply trail? Past the standard black market channels, it leads somewhere.”

  “To anonymous and untraceable identities layered on top of anonymous and untraceable identities.”

  “Show me.” Adlai arched an eyebrow, and Dashiel shrugged. “Humor me?”

  “Suit yourself.” Adlai instantiated a pane above the table. It populated with a series of complex diagrams busy with labels, notes and arrows pointing in every direction. Then arrows manifested between the diagrams. In seconds, the entire presentation had become spaghetti. Yet it was the gaps in the diagrams—the arrows that led nowhere and the orphaned nodes—which rendered the puzzle mathematically unsolvable.

  He exhaled through his nose and dropped his shoulders. “Carry on.”

  “Thank you. I admit, the post-theft activities show a level of sophistication we don’t often run up against, even more than the theft itself. It could suggest the involvement of someone inside one of the Divisions.”

  A set of different, if related, alarms tripped in Dashiel’s mind, and he chose his response carefully. “You’re not suggesting an Advisor has gone rogue?”

  “Of course not. But possibly a high-level staffer, or several acting in concert. I’m going to ask for a surveil order and see what it turns up.”

  “I’ll cosign the request. That ought to get it approved faster, at least for Industry. If this is the work of someone under me, well…they’ll find they’ve never actually seen me displeased before.”

  “You should sell tickets to the beat down. Listen, I appreciate the fervor, and I understand where it’s coming from, but this sort of investigation is usually a slow burn. Don’t expect results soon.”

  Dashiel tossed a hand in the air in resigned acceptance. “I’ve doubled security measures at all facilities and on every shipment, so it shouldn’t happen again—not to me.” He could tell Adlai was itching to get back to work by the way the man’s gaze kept darting over to the officers across the room, so he stood. “Will I see you at Maris’ art gala?”

  “I have to make an appearance, don’t I? It’s my expected duty as an Advisor and my sacred responsibility as a poor friend. I’ll stop by for a few minutes, after which I will return to the office and try to make up for the lost time.”

  Dashiel chuckled. “Don’t be so maudlin. Simply catch NOIR, and everything else will sort itself out.”

  “You know you’re an asshole, right?”

  Dashiel was halfway to sitting down in his focus sphere chaise and readying himself to put in some serious work hours for the first time in days when the door to his office signaled Vance’s presence outside.

  So much for distraction-free, sober work. He stood back up, pulled on the jacket he’d just hung up, and instructed the door to open.

  Vance nodded a greeting as he stepped inside. “Sorry for showing up out of the blue. I was down the hall when I received a message from a representative of the Chizeru governor we commonly deal with.”

  “That’s Shoset, isn't it?”

  “Yes, sir. The message says they wish to negotiate a new supply contract for kyoseil.”

  Dashiel looked over in surprise. “The current contract term isn’t up for another five months.”

  “The translator might have muddled the wording, but I believe they mean an additional contract.”

  “They want to sell us more kyoseil? After a string of bad news, I will not refuse a little good.” His schedule for the rest of the week was packed, and squeezing in a trip to Chosek was going to throw it into utter disarray, and he was running on fumes from too many late nights as it was…but he wasn’t about to refuse more kyoseil.

  “I can handle the negotiations for you if you prefer. My understanding is that Advisor Rowan does most of the talking.”

  “True, though the meetings tend to go better when you don’t let her talk. No, I should go. Not that I don’t think you would strike an excellent deal, but the Chizeru get very excited when someone they view as important makes a visit. Allegedly, I qualify. Being excited makes them more agreeable to advantageous contract terms—for us. Maybe I can coax a few additional kilos out of them.”


  “I look forward to putting the increased supply to good use.”

  Dashiel chuckled wryly. “I bet you have a list—and if you don’t, now’s an excellent time to make one.”

  “I’ll give it a once over this afternoon.”

  He followed Vance out the door. He needed to go see Larahle, because he needed to reschedule everything. Then he needed to stop off for a gift on the way to the transit hub.

  12

  * * *

  The discovery of Chosek had been like manna falling from the heavens. A planet run through with veins of kyoseil from crust to mantle, with active planetary geology and tectonics that ensured its regular renewal? They could not have crafted a more perfect source.

  Well, yes, they could have. They could have crafted one that didn’t have an indigenous species living atop it. A pristine and quiet world. Then they could have simply sent in an army of mecha to strip-mine the planet. Instead, when they found the kyoseil, they also found the Chizeru.

  The diminutive aliens displayed a level of intelligence higher than primates, but not by too wide of a margin. They spoke a complex enough language, memorialized it in writing, and crafted tools suited to their requirements, but their technology remained pre-industrial.

  Learning to communicate then work with the Chizeru had been a frustrating endeavor at a time when the Dominion needed the kyoseil. But because the Asterions were a peaceful people who respected all life, they didn’t carpet-bomb the aliens out of existence and take over their planet. Instead they watched the Chizeru, learned the idiosyncrasies of their culture and language, and generally indulged them until the aliens happily provided what the Asterions sought.

  Chosek was saturated with a healthy variety of minerals, not just kyoseil. It was a hard, brittle world, and as a result the Chizeru coveted soft, cushioned luxuries above all else. Once the Asterion envoys figured this out, negotiations went considerably more smoothly. The Chizeru economy was barter-based; they didn’t comprehend the concept of money, but they did comprehend the value of goods. Soft, plush goods like pillows, blankets, cushioned seating and beds held immense value to their way of thinking. Fleeced material for clothing, bags and decorative items were popular as well.