“I don’t know any of them,” Graham said, shaking his head. “Must have come on board after my time.”
“Hold on,” Sanda said, pointing to the picture of the man. “There’s a time stamp on this, it was taken two years ago. Are you telling me you haven’t been able to find this man for two years?”
Laguna blanked the screen. “No. We haven’t.”
Graham chuckled. “Forgive me, Detective, but if you haven’t found Harlan’s crew in two years of trying, I doubt I’ll be of any help. I can tell you the types of places Harlan liked to haunt—Grotta bars and cheap VR dens, mostly—but the fleet would be better suited to assist you.”
“They won’t talk to us about anything relating to Ms. Valentine.”
A long pause as they all digested that. It was Tomas who finally asked, “Why?”
“Because Harlan Vaish wasn’t the only one she killed.”
Laguna selected a very different picture of Jules. She’d cleaned herself up, though her clothes were the same, and scraped her hair back so that her face seemed larger, eyes wider. She had a blaster in her hand, tech she shouldn’t have been able to acquire, and a dead woman at her feet.
The top of the dead woman’s head had been blown off, a dusting of blood and brain matter covering the sleek museum floor. Sanda knew an Elequatorial Cultural Center when she saw one. The dead woman’s clothes were plain enough, but they were sharp with newness, the creases distorting the shape of her body. The boots sticking out from beneath her slacks weren’t so new, though. Those mag boots were scuffed from regular use.
“Who was she?” Sanda leaned over the desk to spin the image around, trying to get a better look at her face. Something about the woman struck her as familiar. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Maybe the haircut—people who spent a lot of time in low-g tended to crop it like that—or the body shape. The woman had a small tattoo, pale blue ink across her wrist in the shape of two scythe blades with a circle above their crossing points. It meant nothing to Sanda.
“That,” Laguna said, “is Keeper Zina Rix Nakata.”
Sanda yanked her hand back from the screen. Tomas whistled low.
Graham said, “Harlan wouldn’t get tangled up with Keeper business.”
“I would have agreed with you, if I didn’t have video of one of his people blowing a Keeper’s head off.”
“This is the guardcore’s problem,” Sanda said. “Maybe you haven’t found her or her associates because the guardcore already took care of them.”
“Maybe,” Laguna admitted. “They have vanished from the grid. I’d be inclined to agree with you, if it weren’t for the fires.”
Graham had gone quiet, so Sanda asked, “Fires?”
“Every suspected location of Valentine after the death of Harlan Vaish has gone up in flames.”
She swiped the murder scene away and brought up a parade of burned-out buildings. “It stopped after she dropped off the grid.”
“But?” Tomas prompted.
She inclined her head to him. “It’s started again, last week. We don’t have evidence of her presence, but the places are all similar to the last fire in the series two years ago. Warehouses, rotted-out things that aren’t home to anything other than mice, going up like torches at random across the fringes of the Grotta. Three now. I’ve had the names of all of Vaish’s known associates flagged since the first one started burning last week. Yours was the first to pop.”
“Lucky me,” Graham said, “but I can’t help you. I don’t know those three, or Valentine. Whatever they got mixed up in has nothing to do with me.”
Laguna blanked the screen. “I understand it was a long shot. If any of Harlan’s acquaintances attempt to contact you, Mr. Greeve, please call me immediately. I’ve flashed my priority line to your wristpad.”
“I’ll do that.”
They stood, shook hands, and went through the process of getting out of the building and into an autocab in a thick silence. Sanda was so filled with questions she could feel them pushing against the base of her tongue, threatening to break free at any moment, but from the look on her dad’s face, he wasn’t willing to talk yet. She could wait. Give him a little time to process the dead friend he’d just seen.
“So.” Tomas turned in his seat to look Graham in the eye. “How long have you known Arden Wyke?”
CHAPTER 4
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
SPACE IS A HARSH MISTRESS
Jules fucking hated space. The low-g, or micro-g, or zero-g, or whatever the fuck you called it. The c-effect that made her stomach screw up and threaten to burst through her lips at the first sign of spin-grav. The promise that, if she stepped outside of her manufactured bubble, death, and only death, would meet her.
Maybe that wasn’t too different from Jules’s normal life, though. Things hadn’t exactly been hospitable to her outside of the Grotta.
Jules triggered another anti-nausea injection into the side of her neck and clutched her rifle tight to her chest. The harness strapping her to the inside of the drop pod bit deep, crushing her through layers of body armor. Her body jiggled as the pod ducked and weaved around the lasers trying to paint it up for gunfire, or railguns, or whatever this fringer settlement Rainier had picked out was running for defense.
The worst part was how calm the others were.
Three of them wore guardcore armor, standardizing their bodies and obscuring their faces so that Jules, technically, couldn’t tell what they were feeling. But the way they held their weapons, low and at ease, told her enough. Cool as a crater on Pluto, the guardcore were. Not being able to see their faces made it easier to hate them as a unit.
Marya was another story. Rainier had kitted her in the same Prime armor Jules wore—slate-grey and cyan plates overlapping their bodies, tucking their soft and vulnerable bits away while their faces were shielded by armored helmets not meant to do much of anything outside of keeping their noggins intact, their pressure stable, and their air recycling.
Okay, maybe that was a lot, but Jules didn’t have a switch she could flip to hide her face and she really, really wanted to right now because Marya was looking at her like she was going to barf, again, and the reminder of that experience was not helping her control this one.
“Contact in three, two, one…” a computerized voice said.
The shuttle jerked. Jules slammed upward, the harness biting down so hard she half expected her armor to dent. It didn’t, because this wasn’t the cheap shit Jules was used to. It was Keeper tech, state-of-the-art, and she had to keep reminding herself that it was hers now.
While she wasn’t a Keeper, she had to play the part somewhat convincingly if she wanted to gather the scientists who could help bring Lolla out of her coma. Marya was better at it than her. Marya was better at most things.
“Incursion formation point alpha,” one of the guardcore said. A flash of text popped up in the corner of Jules’s HUD identifying the speaker as GC1T7. Their ident tags shuffled every time Jules worked with them. She didn’t know if they understood they were working with an agent of Rainier and not a real Keeper. She’d been too much of a coward to ask them, well, anything.
Sparks flew as the drop pod’s door scraped open, revealing a smoke-filled hallway. Jules was still unbuckling her harness by the time the guardcore detached, formed up, and secured the hallway.
“Clear,” GC1T7 said. The others spoke over open channel only if they absolutely had to.
Marya helped Jules get the harness off and gave her a hand to steady herself while she waited for her vision to stop swimming and her stomach to decide to stay down.
“Get me access,” she ordered, surprised at the strength in her voice.
“Advancing the line,” GC1T7 said.
The guardcore pushed into the smoky hallway until their secure perimeter included a hab diagnostic panel set into the wall. Jules slung her rifle over her shoulder and approached the panel. Every single time she did this, the thought stabbed
at her—Lolla would be better at this. But the girl was in a coma, and Jules was doing this to get her out. Get her safe.
This fringer settlement was nothing more than a city-hab shield planted in the unstable rock of an asteroid way out in the Ordinal system’s belt. They didn’t even trust their shield enough to live in the open. Endless hallways bit into the rock of the asteroid, sheltering their people beneath stone and steel. There were hundreds of settlements like it scattered across the systems of Prime, but this one housed a woman Rainier claimed could change everything.
But then, Rainier had claimed that about the last three scientists Jules had kidnapped.
Jules synced her wristpad with the station’s panel and let the suite of software Rainier provided go to work. Luckily, that woman’s bag of tricks didn’t require Jules to know what she was doing.
Alarms bleated down the hallway, red warning lights flashing to alert them to the damaged life-support systems. Jules rolled her eyes. That’s what the suits were for.
Her pad blinked the annoying happy-face emoji Rainier liked to sneak into every available opportunity. Jules swiped it away and pulled up the station’s resident directory. It was wrong, of course. Settlements like this didn’t exist because the people who founded them wanted to be honest members of society. But between the list and the schematic, Jules had a good idea of where the scientist would be.
“Third basement, lab A3.”
“Understood,” GC1T7 said. “Threat assessment?”
“That’s your job.”
The guardcore didn’t respond; they never did. Jules could poke and prod and march circles around them singing about the debauchery of their mothers and they’d never react.
“Smooth,” Marya said across their private comm line.
“But not wrong.”
“Maybe don’t insult the professional killers?”
“What the fuck do you think we are?”
Marya closed the channel and stalked ahead, but not too far ahead lest she break protocol and get too close to the guardcore while they were working their incursion procedures.
Jules chafed to say something, to needle Marya or GC1T7 or Rainier or—anyone. Not that she enjoyed being a jerk, not exactly. She needed that ruthless back-and-forth to keep her calm when she was working a job. Nox had understood the importance of that, and he barely understood how magnets worked.
But these people were professionals with a capital P, and although Jules was valuable to Rainier by the nature of her immune system accepting and blending with the ascension-agent, the others didn’t have the same sense of interest in her. Or her well-being.
So Jules brought her rifle out, held it barrel-down, and maintained the recommended following distance as they cleared room after room down the hallway.
Her skin began to crawl. Usually by now they’d encountered some resistance. Fringer settlements weren’t much for firepower, but a defense bot or a few locals with grand ideas of heroism should have engaged them by now. She considered switching over to the GC channel to ask them what they thought, but she didn’t want to be the jumpy one.
“Isn’t it a little quiet?” Marya asked over the GC channel.
Jules grinned at her back.
GC1T7 said, “We are detecting no attempt to secure the facility.”
“Isn’t that weird?” Jules asked.
“It is unusual,” the guardcore said, because apparently words like weird were beneath them.
While they rode the elevator down to the third basement level, Jules pulled up the resident data with a flick of her eyes and set it to scrolling by in the corner of her HUD. The usual collection of fake names and professions drifted by, annotated against the database Rainier had provided her—somehow skimmed from Prime intelligence—with their suspected real identities and jobs.
Janitors became physicists, poets became biotech engineers. These places drew the disaffected scientists of Prime. They promised safe havens to do research in quiet, without Keepers and the fleet limiting their ability to dive deep on the premise of species-wide security.
Nothing unusual, until she noticed the ages of those gathered here. Children. A good 50 percent of this population was under the age of thirteen.
Jules swallowed, rolled the data back, and ran through those numbers again. And again. Parents disillusioned by Prime’s private research restrictions and narrow education were likely to come to these settlements. She’d encountered plenty. But this was something else—a school, or academy—founded behind the back of Prime.
She pushed the data through to Marya and flagged the important bits. “You seeing this?”
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
“So?” Marya asked. “We’re not here for any of them.”
“But—” Jules cut herself off and pressed her lips together as she strangled a tirade.
“Mass heat signatures detected in second forward room,” GC1T7 said. “Securing.”
Jules’s heart leapt into her throat as the guardcore pushed the heat map through to her HUD. A mass of orange-yellow bodies clustered toward the back corner of the room. She knew how this went, knew how thoroughly the guardcore covered their tracks.
“Authorized for stun weapons only.” Jules snapped off the order the second GC1T7’s hand touched the entry pad.
“Heard and understood,” GC1T7 said.
The units reached down, synchronized, and switched their rifles over to stun protocols. Jules’s weapon wasn’t that fancy, so she had to sling it across her back and pull out a stunner.
“So much for killers,” Marya said.
Jules ignored her. Marya could play tough-girl all she wanted, but ultimately she’d grown up in the middle class of Ordinal, where death was something handed out to those on CamCasts. Not real people whose blood could soak straight through your sleeves as you tried and failed to fill the gaping hole in their chest cavity and—
Breathe. Breathe.
The door opened, the stunners lit the air with pale, crackling light. They shut the door and moved on. She would not look. She would not. Focus had been her savior, her lance through the miasma of breakdown. Do what she had to do to save Lolla. Then get out. Get out, and never look back.
It only got hard when the past reached out and dug its claws into her.
Rust gathered in the joined corners of the hallways. Prime didn’t sell their best shit to seditious fringers. If you wanted to live in a hab that could take the rigors of hard vacuum long term, you lived in a Prime settlement. Full-fucking-stop. Even the Icarions lived under the capricious wiles of a dome that Prime sold to them, generations back. A dome patched together with hope and ingenuity that Prime would never allow to grow inside of its own rigid walls.
If you wanted to do science, you did it for the Keepers.
Jules had never questioned it before meeting Rainier. It made sense to her that anyone who wanted to do science would want to do it for them. They had the best tech, the deepest pockets, they had legal authority—which meant the biggest guns, because of the previous two advantages.
Every fringer scientist Jules had plucked up for Rainier had complained of the same thing: They were hamstrung by Prime, their funding cut anytime they so much as glanced at disciplines the Keepers could tie into gate and chip tech. Many of their colleagues had vanished, never to be heard from again. According to those scientists, the hammer could fall at any time, for any reason.
Jules flicked up her dossier on Dr. Min Liao. The photo attached to the file looked a lot like Jules, if Jules had nicer hair and fewer wrinkles around her lips. Ecuadorian ancestry mixed in with Chinese, she guessed. Jules had no doubt she could scroll back up the woman’s family tree until she found the first of her spacefaring relatives. They’d be scientists, in the employ of Prime. Bright-eyed hopefuls launching themselves into the stars to fulfill Alexandra Halston’s dream of an interstellar meritocracy.
Hadn’t lasted long, that dream.
The lab waited at the end of the hall. Jules
checked her infrared scanners. There was one body inside that lab, huddled up under a desk off to the right. Jules put a fist up to call a halt, and the guardcore stopped in unison. She still reveled in that power. If she’d called a halt on her old crew, they would have blown through thirty seconds bitching about why she wanted them to stop.
“I got this,” Jules said.
“The target is likely to be hostile,” GC1T7 said, their polite way of telling Jules to back off.
“That’s what my armor’s for, isn’t it?”
The GC didn’t comment, because any response probably would have been insulting enough to get them in trouble.
Jules readied her stunner to let them know she meant to take this seriously. She got three steps inside before a shock wave slammed into her chest, making the circuitry on her armor freak a little, but then the flashing settled back down. Jules sighed.
Sticking over the top of a desk was the tiny mouth of a personal defense stunner. Jules had been hit with plenty of those in her day when she wasn’t wearing armor.
“Ow,” she said, then waited a beat. The doctor fumbled with the stunner, going for another shock. “Dr. Liao, I am not here to do you or your settlement any harm.”
“The—the children—” Her voice trembled, but showed remarkable clarity under the circumstances.
“All our weapons have been set to nonlethal stun ranges. The children are fine.”
A giddy laugh. “What do you want?”
“To offer you a job, Dr. Liao.” This was going better than expected. Usually, by now, the scientist in question had attempted some sort of all-or-nothing attack. Maybe Liao could be talked out of here. That’d make for a nice change of pace.
Chaos Vector Page 4
