But it had not been Vladsen’s fault.
He cleared his throat to get Vladsen’s attention. “Working late, Keeper?” he said, and felt foolish. They were all working around the clock, and the dark circles beneath Vladsen’s eyes were evidence enough of his schedule. Still, Vladsen paused and gave him a ghost of a smile.
“Aren’t we all? How are negotiations proceeding?”
Biran grimaced, drawing a thin chuckle out of the other man. “As expected, I’m afraid. Olver should file an update brief soon.”
“Ah, well.” He had the pinched look of a man who’d run out of social niceties and was ready to move on from this conversation. “I’m glad it’s you negotiating, for what it’s worth.”
Vladsen blinked, as if he’d surprised himself by what he said, and hurried by, flashing Biran a smile and a short line about good-luck-and-good-night that Biran returned half-heartedly. Well. That went brilliantly. Biran repressed a sigh. He would have to smooth things over with the other Keeper, but right now the trouble with Icarion was his top priority.
Biran ran the problem through his mind as he walked the same old path back to his academy room, wondering how it could have been only a little over two years since he took the chip to become a Keeper. Each cohort was twelve hopefuls, and only six made it through to graduation. Ada Station was home to one hundred and forty-four Keepers in permanent residence, with many passing through on missions of some sort or another.
Most of them were scientists and academics. Few were the Keepers with political ambitions. His own world had narrowed to that sphere, but it was only a shallow slice of what it meant to be a Keeper. Civilians knew Keepers for the chips in their heads, which carried pieces of the schematics for the Casimir Gates. But a Keeper was more than that.
Outside of government and war, Keepers delved into research only they were allowed to conduct. Nanites, bioengineering, atmosphere management, weapons, and propulsion systems. These were some of the technologies Prime Inventive deemed too close to gate tech, and allotted the study of which to Keepers, and Keepers alone.
Biran had harbored more prosaic goals. He had wanted to study logistical algorithms for the shipping lanes that kept Prime’s supply lines running. How quickly one’s world can change when tragedy strikes.
He stood at the window overlooking the city below, hands in his pockets, chin raised to the false night. What one wanted to do, and the path one must walk, were not always the same. He hoped what had brought him to this point had prepared him well enough to fulfill his duties. Earnestness and instinct could get him only so far.
A cleaner bot trundled down the hall toward him, swerving to take a path around the solitary Keeper. Its trolley cart was half-sealed, journeying to find another room to clean, but in that mess of bedclothes and other junk, Biran glimpsed something electric, lime green.
“Stop.”
Two beeps for yes.
Biran nudged aside a tattered pillow with the back of his hand. A tube of glow-in-the-dark green lipstick hid beneath the cushion, its cap busted off so that it’d left a lightning streak of color against the shabby grey material. His heart clenched. These were the things from Anaia’s room, on their way to the incinerator. Six of his cohort had graduated. Five had survived to this day.
He sorted through the contents, not sure what he was looking for. There would be no answers here. Guardcore would have gone through everything already, taking out anything that might reveal the extent of the ex-Keeper’s traitorous ties with Icarion. Biran had not yet had time to sit with the betrayal, to reconcile the woman he saw deceiving the cameras tracking his sister’s kidnappers with the woman he used to get stupid-drunk with on their rare weekends away from the academy.
There was nothing in this bin that would tell him where the woman he admired ended, and the traitor began.
His hand brushed metal, and he dug out a thin tablet, palm-sized, the kind of thing used to keep personal pictures. Biran didn’t have many pictures of the times when they were happy, so he took it, sliding the cold metal into his pocket, and wondered how something so small could weigh so much.
CHAPTER 3
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THE WRONG FUGITIVE
Excuse me?” Graham asked.
“I don’t do my questioning in the hangar bay, Mr. Greeve. Come with me.”
A molten core of anger formed in Sanda’s chest, so hot it almost made her eyes water. She tried to push forward, but Tomas tightened his grip across her shoulders, pressing her in close against his side so Laguna couldn’t see her movements. Trying to get her to stay out of things. Jerk.
“What’s this about?” she demanded. Tomas sighed wearily.
Laguna didn’t look up from her wristpad as she tapped out a few short commands. “Your father is wanted for questioning. This will be quick and painless, unless you dig your heels in.”
Your father. “You know who I am?”
Laguna looked up, met Sanda’s gaze. Her eyes were very dark, almost black, and Sanda couldn’t read anything in them. She’d spent too long dealing with Tomas and Bero to understand regular people this soon. A newborn artificial intelligence and a top-class spy didn’t make for normal company. “Yes I do, Major. Your exploits are not my concern, but this city is. Mr. Greeve, now, please.”
“I—uh—yes, of course.” Graham squeezed Sanda’s arm to let her know it was all right and stepped out of the false safety of the hauler. The toughs closed around him, not quite cuffing him, but keeping him from making any sudden movements.
“If you know who I am,” Sanda blurted, “then you should understand that I don’t want to be separated from my family right now.”
That stopped her. Laguna jabbed at a panel inset in the wall, then hit it with the side of her fist. Above, the hiss of gears and pneumatics heralded the arrival of a large metal locker that slid into place in the wall. The panel turned green and the locker clicked open.
Laguna pulled a folded wheelchair out of the locker and snapped it open, setting it on the ground between them. “Scan your ident into the screen here”—she pointed to the armrest—“and the chair will answer to your biometrics.” She pushed the chair forward, then stepped back. “You have my word your father will be unharmed. Hail an autocab, go here.” She tapped into her wristpad and flicked something toward Sanda. A green smiley face asking her to accept the coordinates popped up on Sanda’s wristpad. She accepted. “My people will let you in.”
“Why are you doing this?” Sanda asked.
“I told you. The city alone is my concern.”
She turned on her heel and marched off, the SecureSite toughs taking Graham ahead of her.
“Do you know anything about that woman?” Sanda asked as soon as Laguna was out of earshot.
Tomas shook his head. “Never heard of her, but I think we’d better do as she says.”
“I am so hungry.”
He raised a brow at her. “Graham first, I think.”
“Obviously.”
Without her fleet credentials on hand to grease the way, getting through the hangar with the crush of civs took ages. By the time Sanda hit the line for autocab pickup she was seeing red.
“They’ll have pulled all his toenails out by the time we get there.”
“Pretty sure SecureSite doesn’t operate that way,” Tomas said.
“Prove it.”
An autocab swished up to them. Tomas scanned his ident over the entry pad and it beeped a welcome. Sanda almost scanned hers, then thought better of it. Just because Laguna knew who she was and didn’t seem to care didn’t mean anyone else wouldn’t come knocking if she popped up on the grid.
Ident or no, the cab’s cameras took in her, and her chair, and paused a moment, rearranging its seats to make more room for her before opening the doors. A slim ramp extended, and she wheeled her way up and locked the brakes in to look forward, out the unobstructed picture window. Tomas crammed the bag with Grippy in the back and sidled next to her. The cab t
ook the coordinates from her wristpad and slid into traffic.
So normal, getting into a cab and going about her business. Nobody watched her. Nobody stared. She wasn’t recognizable here, not yet, and that anonymity felt all at once dwarfing and freeing. Sanda could disappear into this city, if she wanted to. Let Tomas craft her a new ident and fade away. Pretend the chip in her head didn’t exist. Pretend Bero wasn’t out there, somewhere, needing help. Pretend she could go without her family for the rest of her life.
She’d never been very good at pretending.
The forward viewscreen wiped away as Tomas projected his wristpad so they could both see. He had a collection of news articles up regarding SecureSite, relating to Laguna in particular: LAGUNA ASKS FOR AID, STREET CRIME WILL RISE UP-STATION, GROTTA DESERVES PEACE.
“Looks like she’s a champion-of-the-people type,” Tomas said.
“So her treatment of Graham depends on which side she thinks he’s on.”
Tomas grimaced. “Yeah, let’s hope she has his file and can see he came from the Grotta.”
“You have arrived at your destination,” the autocab announced.
SecureSite had set themselves up in the lee of one of the knife-blade skyscrapers, and the shadows of the surrounding giants made the building look squat. It clung to the city’s bedrock while everything around it reached for the simulated clouds.
Sanda found her arms weak from lack of food, rest, and just about everything else, so she let the chair wheel itself down the ramp and into the building. She didn’t get two meters through the door before one of the toughs peeled himself away from a chatty colleague and jabbed a finger at her.
“Took you long enough. This way.”
He led them to an elevator and swiped his wristpad over the lock, giving Sanda the unsettling impression that she couldn’t get out of this building unless someone escorted her out. She didn’t like feeling trapped. No one did, unless they were into a very particular kind of kink, but the suggestion she might be stuck in this place made her adrenaline surge. She’d had enough of being someone’s hostage.
“How do we get out of here?”
“I’ll escort you out when Laguna’s done.”
“We are not under arrest, though.”
He sighed heavily. “SecureSite maintains the power to detain any citizen suspected of breaking the law long enough to hand them over to the Prime fleet. We’re not jailers. We’re investigators.”
“Feels pretty jail-y to me.”
The elevator door swished open. She’d never even felt it move. “Here we are. Third door on the left. Laguna’s waiting for you.”
Sanda wheeled out, not wanting to leave her only path to the exit behind, but she figured that if it came down to it Tomas could crack his way into the elevator. That, or she’d be cracking windows.
She was halfway down the hall when the tough said, “Oh and, Major?”
“Yes?”
“Here, least I could do.”
He tossed her a small package of crinkly orange paper. She snapped it out of the air without a second thought. Smooth, bright. She didn’t recognize the brand name, but she recognized chocolate bars in all their forms.
“Holy shit. Thanks.”
“That’s for Dralee.” He snapped off a picture-perfect fleet salute as the elevator doors slid shut.
“The way our luck is running, that’s poisoned,” Tomas said.
“I so don’t care.”
She tore the package open and took a bite half the size of the bar, letting out a gurgle of appreciation as the chocolate melted on contact with her tongue and turned into a delicious, almond-and-cocoa flavored concoction.
“Are you… humming?”
She stopped. “No. Come on, stop wasting time.”
He grinned, but didn’t comment as he pushed the door open to let her through first. She folded the package over and tucked the candy into a pocket inset on the side of her wheelchair, then rolled into the room.
Sanda had expected a sparse room, crappy lighting, and a steel chair chained to the floor. Instead, it looked more like a dentist’s waiting room. The lighting was warm and cheery, the walls covered with tasteful, if boring, impressionist paintings. Laguna sat behind a SynthWood desk, her fingers poised over a tablet between herself and Graham.
This made Sanda more suspicious than chains and bloodstains would have. In Sanda’s experience, anyone trying this hard to look normal was hiding something sinister.
“Glad you could join us,” Laguna said.
“What is this? A therapy session?”
“We do things differently at SecureSite, and our results speak for themselves.”
“Who funds this?”
“What?”
Sanda wheeled around to sit across from Laguna and put on the hardest face she could muster. Graham wiped chocolate from the corner of her lips with his thumb. She closed her eyes and took a breath, then put the mean-face back on.
“Look, we don’t have your corollary on Ada, so maybe I’m misinformed, but in my experience, security shoves every last scrap of budget into databases and the AIs who assess them, not campy twenty-first-century waiting room decor. So what’s going on here?”
“We’re not military. We’re not affiliated with the Keepers. We are a security company and our only interest—my only interest—is in the protection and peace of this city.”
“You expect me to believe that that’s why you’re not interested in me? Seems like handing me over to the guardcore would do a world of good for your relations. I saw the news. Your organization is hurting for funding.”
“Do you want me to arrest you, Major?”
“Of course not.”
“Then please explain to me why you seem obsessed with the idea.”
“Because I’m tired of being used, Detective. If you’re not arresting me, there’s a reason for it, and I want to know what it is.”
“Very well.” She tapped at the screen between them. “You’ve seen this footage, yes?”
Shaky, faraway footage of her battle with Lavaux filled the screen. She looked away.
“Yes. It’s doctored. I did not throw Lavaux out that airlock. He attacked me, and I defended myself.”
“I believe you.”
“Why?”
Laguna sighed heavily and pinch-zoomed the screen. Sanda made herself watch. Laguna had paused on a close-up of Sanda, lying at Lavaux’s feet. In the false recording, he reached down a hand to help her up, as if she had tripped. In reality, he’d grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved a blade against her skull.
“The fake is enough to fool casual viewers, but I spend a lot of time looking at footage as evidence, and this scene is all wrong. The lighting under the Hermes shuttle is broken up by shadows that look very much like a man kneeling over a woman with a weapon. Regardless of the shadows, someone who tripped as a ploy to attack a man moving to help her wouldn’t look like that. You’re beat to hell, Major Greeve, excuse my saying so, and in the moments before the fake takes over I can see… desperation in you. You’re fighting like your life depends upon it, and I believe you were right to think so, because Lavaux has the body language of a man who’s ready to kill.
“In my professional opinion, it’s a matter of time until this footage is revealed as fake. If I were to detain you, it would not only waste my time and resources, but make myself a powerful enemy. I wish to do neither.”
Sanda licked her lips, trying to hide the surge of hope in her chest. If this detective could see the footage was faked, surely it wouldn’t hold up much longer. Biran would get the truth out. He would.
“Then why detain my father?”
“That is a local matter.”
Laguna brushed the video away and brought up a case file, sorting through images. Sanda glimpsed the file name—GROTTA: ARSONS—before Laguna pulled up a single still image.
A man lay on a bed soaked in blood. He’d maybe made it into his eighties, if the wrinkles lining his face wer
e real, and Sanda would bet money they were. That wasn’t the face of a man who’d led an easy life, and men with easy lives hardly ever ended them with a crater of a wound in their chest, stuffed full of half a pillowcase that was far too little, too late.
“Harlan Vaish,” Graham said. He touched the image, turned it, zoomed in on the face. The color had gone out of Graham’s cheeks, his voice caught over the name.
“So you did know him. I wasn’t certain when I found your name on a list of known associates. A connected, honest man like yourself…”
Graham chuckled roughly. “You know better, Detective.”
Laguna brushed away Harlan’s image with a gentle flick and, in two taps, brought up Graham’s file.
“Graham Lucas Greeve. Sixty-eight years old, born to unregistered parents at Atrux General Hospital, and soon disappeared into the streets of the Grotta. You attended school, virtual, but you never stood for the examinations.”
“Didn’t see the point.” His voice caught. He cleared it. “What’s this got to do with Harlan? What happened to him?”
“We’re trying to find that out. Harlan—as you experienced—had a habit of taking on young apprentices. In piecing together the night of his death, we’ve established that the last person in the room with him was one Juliella Vicenza, alias Jules Valentine.”
Laguna brought up a shot of a wide-eyed, scared-looking girl with blood on her hands. To Sanda’s mind, she looked way too young to have anything to do with the murder of a man like Harlan, but you couldn’t fake that kind of fear—the kind mingled with anger. Whatever had been on Valentine’s mind in that photo, it’d been bloody.
“We can’t find her anywhere, and the rest of his crew have scattered. If we can get in touch with anyone who may have spoken with Valentine on the night of Harlan’s death, it would be invaluable. I believe you may have known some of his other associates and, if so, where they might go to ground.”
Graham licked his lips. “I don’t know that girl. Who else was Harlan crewing?”
“We suspect these three were in recent contact.”
She brought up three images, displayed in triptych. On the left, a tawny-haired girl even younger than Valentine, her hoodie yanked up to hide her eyes, and a fistful of cables sticking out of her pocket. In the center, a muscular man with a scraggly beard hiding his chin and an old scar near his collarbone that had the telltale striation of a blaster hit. On the right, an enby with a mass of wavy brown hair and the harried look the paranoid get etched into their faces—as if they expected to be ambushed at any moment.
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