Masada's Gate: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth Book 2)

by Bruns, David

  “Last chance,” Rabh said, regaining his attention. “Surrender now or—”

  Braxton made a slicing motion with his thumb. The forward screen went dark.

  “Take her back to the brig,” he said.

  “Wait!” Kwazi said. “There was to be a trial. She’s to be executed!” He sounded childlike in his frustration.

  Braxton stepped down from the center of the bridge and into Kwazi’s space. “We have a new priority. That bitch in the station. That attitude gets out over the ’net, and our lives get harder. We can kill Telemachus anytime.”

  “But you said—”

  “Jabari! That’s enough!” The captain turned to the guards: “Back to the brig!”

  They moved, jerking Helena along with them. The door closed behind them. Braxton leaned over Kwazi and Milani again.

  “Never … ever … question me publicly again. Or, by Cassandra, I’ll end you.”

  Kwazi said nothing, but his eyes held Braxton’s.

  Milani felt the air rush from her lungs as the captain resumed his seat. And all around her, from Soldier and SynCorp loyalist alike, she heard the same.

  Chapter 15

  Ruben Qinlao • Darkside, the Moon

  The wee hours in Darkside were pretty much like everywhere else Ruben had ever experienced them: a collection of random, subtle sounds that marked time’s passing.

  The beeping of Brackin’s medical equipment monitoring Tony’s vitals. The doctor’s own slow, rhythmic breathing, while Ruben took the watch. The random disturbances outside the clinic, which often involved someone screaming at someone else down the narrow street, usually about money. For Ruben, they’d melded into a comfortable white noise, a companionable non-silence.

  To avoid falling asleep, he stood up from the ratty chair and took in what passed for the defrocked physician’s office. A couple of straight-backed chairs stood near the door for patients. Behind him, a converted breakfast nook served as an exam area. A white privacy curtain sectioned it off. Tony lay in Brackin’s one and only treatment bed, that rhythmic beeping softly testifying to his tentative hold on life. The equipment was old, of course, thrown away from somewhere like everything else in the clinic. But it still functioned.

  Ruben continued to marvel at the role obsolete technology played in the story of their survival.

  A wallscreen near the front door offered up The Real Story on a constant feed. Brackin had turned down the volume so he could sleep, but the images onscreen told Ruben everything he needed to know. The viewer-driven content was obsessed with the manhunt for him and Tony. Snapcasts from all over Darkside showed bumpy footage of SSR teams knocking on doors. Personal, probing interviews with ragged, frightened residents. Ruben had watched the loop of breaking news from Point Bravo until he couldn’t watch it anymore—the blowing of the outer hatch, the “battle against half a dozen Company loyalists,” the dramatic escape of SynCorp’s CEO…

  He wondered how Richard Strunk would feel being described as “half a dozen Company loyalists.” Probably insulted.

  “I’m worth more than half a dozen,” he heard Strunk grumble in his head. “Twice that, even.”

  Really, their escape had been simple and straightforward. Brackin had guided their slow-moving scooter through the tunnels beneath Darkside. From LUNa City’s earliest days, they’d connected an underground network of black marketeers skimming UN goods for sale. The United Nations was long gone, but the black market still existed. Whenever they’d run across shadowy types, it was Isaac Brackin’s reputation and con man’s wit that got them through. He might be a doctor stripped of his license, but in Darkside Isaac Brackin was everyone’s friend.

  Ruben turned his back on the hype playing out for the hundredth time on the wallscreen. At the front door, he slid aside the small viewing window and took in the dark, narrow street beyond. More invisible voices, echoing in their disagreement somewhere distant. Someone demanding something. Someone else, upset at being rousted from bed.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  Brackin’s voice startled him. Ruben almost cursed out loud. He was tired of reacting to every little thing.

  “I know,” Ruben said, hoping that would end the discussion.

  “He’s one tough sonofabitch,” Brackin continued, swinging his legs off the couch. Ruben slid the tiny window shut. “But that strike team had nearly a dozen Soldiers. And all Strunk had was a couple of pistols and—”

  “Yeah,” Ruben said, his tone testy. He didn’t need Brackin to remind him Strunk was either dead or in custody and likely being tortured. That particular diagnosis didn’t require a medical degree.

  Tony murmured from the other side of the room, dreaming aloud again. Brackin’s eyelids flickered lazily, but he hauled himself to his feet. Before he’d crossed the short space to the bed, Tony was thrashing, pulling at the plastic tube feeding into his arm.

  “Help me here,” Brackin hissed, steadying the IV bag before it smashed to the floor.

  Ruben crossed the distance quickly.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Hold his arms down,” Brackin said, “before he rips the IV out.”

  “What are you doing here, Pop?” Tony demanded, looking upside down at Ruben. Sweat covered his sour skin. “You’re supposed to be dead! I killed you!”

  Ruben leaned in with his full weight, holding Tony’s arms against the bed frame.

  “Delusions,” Brackin reported, preparing a hypodermic needle.

  “Right,” Ruben said, though he knew differently. Tony wasn’t acting out the feverish visions of an addled mind. He’d risen to power the old-fashioned way—by filling the vacuum he’d created through patricide. The memory seemed to fuel Tony’s struggles, and Ruben had to fight to hold the older man down.

  “You’re not going to fuck up the business anymore!” Tony yelled.

  “If we don’t shut him up…” Brackin grabbed a small towel and stuffed it in Tony’s mouth. He injected the IV line as Tony’s struggles grew more frenzied and he shouted incoherent obscenities through the towel.

  “You’ll suffocate him!” Ruben said.

  Tony’s eyes fluttered, his limbs went limp. With a sigh, he became unconscious again.

  “If only it were that easy,” Brackin groused. “It’d be no more than he deserves.”

  “What did you give him?” Ruben demanded, removing the towel. “Sedatives never work that fast in real life.”

  “A propofol-diazepam cocktail works that fast in real life. I had to stop his yelling.”

  Brackin became pensive as the room calmed down.

  “What is it?” Ruben asked.

  The doctor’s eyes flashed uncertainty. “I’m just not sure about the diagnosis. I thought sepsis, but…”

  “But?”

  “His recovery should be further along,” Brackin said. “It could be encephalopathy.”

  The way he said it made Ruben loath to ask his next question. “What does that mean?”

  “Much more serious. Much longer recovery time.” Ruben could see the checklist ticking off in Brackin’s head. “Could explain the delusions though. But so could sepsis—”

  More shouting came from the street outside. Only this wasn’t a dispute over money. Holding a finger to his lips Ruben quick-stepped to the front door and its tiny window… He stopped short, doing a double take as he passed the wallscreen.

  “I know her,” Brackin said, coming up beside him.

  “I do, too.”

  Just up the street, Ionia was trading insults with a woman leading an SSR tactical team trying to gain entry into Eros Erotics. How long would it be until she mentioned the strange man in the hood who’d asked after Brackin’s practice?

  The leader of the TAC team turned to give one of her troopers an order. The Real Story camerabot floating nearby showed her in profile.

  “And I know her ,” Ruben said. “Elissa Kisaan.” The second of Elise Kisaan’s knife-wielding clone-assassins he’d
fought in hand-to-hand combat, this one while fleeing SynCorp HQ. She was the reason they were hiding on the Moon. And the lead dog in the hunt to track them down, apparently.

  “Jesus, I recognize her too. Goddamn, they’re almost on top of us, Qinlao. You guys have gotten me so deep in shit—”

  “Shut up!” Ruben said. “Let me think.”

  “Think?” Brackin paced nervously. “What’s there to think about? They’re a few doors down from—”

  “Shut up! Go check on Tony. I’ll think of something.”

  The voices outside drew nearer. A rapping came from the neighbor’s apartment.

  Brackin moved deeper into the room. Ruben could practically hear the con man in him rehearsing excuses: I hate Tony Taulke. He took my license! They said they’d kill me if I didn’t help …

  But Brackin was right. They were trapped. They couldn’t run, not with Tony in his current condition. And Kisaan and her TAC team were coming.

  Ruben grabbed his cloak.

  “What are you doing?” Brackin asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Leading them away from here,” Ruben said. He had the katara, but he needed something with longer range. Something louder. “Got any projectile weapons?”

  “What? No, of course not!” A short debate broiled behind Brackin’s eyes. “Well…” He opened a drawer and withdrew a handgun.

  More old-fashioned tech to the rescue. Ruben almost laughed out loud.

  “I thought so. Burner bands?”

  Brackin gave him another knee-jerk defensive look, then, grumbling, pulled a syncer from a drawer full of them. “This has a thousand SCDs on it.”

  “Untraceable?” Ruben asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Okay. A thousand should be enough.” Brackin’s black-market syncer should be just the thing to divert the dogs.

  There was more pounding, more yelling from the next-door neighbor.

  “Take it.” Brackin handed him the illegal syncer. “If you make it back, I might have something else for you. But it needs repair. If they don’t arrest me,” he said with sarcasm, “I’ll try and get it working.”

  “Okay.” Ruben snapped the syncer around his wrist. “Suggestions for how to get out of here?”

  Brackin jerked his head. “Go out the back. Make three right turns in the alleys and you’ll end up across from Ionia’s place. You can hit them from there.”

  Ruben took the 11-millimeter pistol. He ejected the clip, found it full, and snapped it back in.

  “Thanks.”

  “Just get the fuck gone,” Brackin said.

  Ruben opened the back door to the clinic, surveying the alley beyond. He might be signing Tony’s death warrant by leaving. Brackin was an opportunist, especially when it came to saving his own hide—a motivation Ruben understood all too well in that moment.

  But he’d have to trust Brackin. This was their only play.

  He slipped into the alleyway, leaving his doubts and Tony Taulke behind him.

  • • •

  Three right turns. Brackin had been straight about that, at least.

  Elissa Kisaan’s TAC team had finished with the neighbor. Turned the small apartment upside down, Ruben assumed, given the man’s animated attitude. He aimed the pistol at Kisaan from the dark alleyway, bracing the butt in his left palm. The shot was at least two hundred feet.

  Ruben thumbed the hammer back. His sister Ming had always emphasized hand-to-hand combat when training young Ruben to defend himself. Shooting had never been his talent.

  One of Kisaan’s Soldiers made for Brackin’s door, pointing at the upside-down caduceus and laughing.

  Ruben fired.

  A sharp crack was followed by a spark, shattering the relative quiet of the Darkside street.

  Kisaan dropped to the ground, but the ricochet told Ruben he’d missed. The Soldiers spun toward the alleyway, seeking a target. Infrared beams painted the wet stone near him. Ruben fired twice more, and one of the Soldiers went down.

  Someone screamed.

  “There!” a woman cried, pointing in his direction. “It came from there!”

  Ruben ran.

  Boots slipping on the floor of the alley, Ruben rounded a corner and halted. He couldn’t outdistance the pursuit. Not if he was to lead them away from Tony.

  Two Soldiers appeared at the far end of the alley, silhouetted by the painted neon of Eros Erotics. One of them bent over and picked up a shell casing. Ruben cupped the pistol again, aiming carefully.

  Crack!

  The casing dropped to the alley floor, followed by the Soldier who’d picked it up.

  The second Soldier fired. Stunner tech. He’d missed because Ruben was still alive. Without MESH clothing, one hit by a stunner set to kill would electrocute him with his own EM field.

  He darted down the corridor and came out in the grand expanse of the barrio. The massive, multistoried ring of tenements was quiet, its residents sleeping. The refuse pile that was Challenger Park flickered in shadow. Sprinting for the skyway, Ruben noticed a second TAC team enter the barrio from the other side.

  He felt the target painting his back and dived into the massive refuse pile that had once been the green grass of picnic grounds. The hooded cloak made the shoulder roll awkward, but he found his balance and regained his feet. Red targeting beams scoured the garbage below from the apex of the skyway overhead.

  Ruben exited the dump, kept moving. A jaunt down a long, poorly lit corridor delivered him to Darkside’s busiest red-light district.

  Oh, you lovely, flesh-packed Fleshway .

  The doublewide corridor was thicker with people than it had been during the day. Martian bars and brothels closed in the middle of the night by law. Not so in Darkside.

  Ruben put the gun in his belt and thrust his wrist wearing the burner band into his pocket to avoid the sticky hands of thieves—he’d learned that lesson—and waded into the crowd. It parted and filled in around him. The combined sounds and smells and flashing lights dazed his exhausted senses. With any luck, they’d have a similar effect on his pursuers.

  Ruben pressed through the throng, stepping over the hackheads and drunks lying along the gutter, ignoring the insults and challenges of passersby. Behind him, voices rose in protest. He didn’t dare look back. In his mind’s eye he pictured Kisaan and her teams searching frantically for the man in the hooded cloak.

  “How much for a hopper?” he asked, pressing into a booth. Over it, the sign Shuttles Los! blazed in sunburnt orange.

  The vendor didn’t glance up as The Real Story ’s theme music died down, allowing a commentator’s voice to rise. Ruben leaned in to listen, prompting a grunt of displeasure from the vendor. Had Brackin sold them out after all?

  “—in pursuit of one of them now,” the reporter reported. “His capture is imminent. Stay tuned!”

  Ruben relaxed. Testing the limits of his own willpower, he resisted looking over his shoulder.

  “Mind the personal space, buddy,” the vendor said.

  “Sorry. How much for a one-way to Earth? Next available. Priority.”

  Smirking, the man said, “For you? Five hundred.”

  Ruben didn’t argue and offered the burner band on his wrist for scanning. “Ticket’s e-tagged to your syncer, bub. Happy trails.” The man resumed his fascination with The Real Story .

  Returning to the crowd of the Fleshway, Ruben spotted a drunk lying unconscious along one wall. The vomit around him acted like a shield, keeping the teeming crowd at bay. A quick glance over his shoulder found Kisaan’s TAC teams spreading out among the vendor booths.

  Ruben removed his cloak. Kneeling down, he draped it around the sleeper’s shoulders. The man grunted, rousing a little when Ruben snapped the illegal syncer to his wrist.

  His sister Ming had once told him she was placing the Qinlao Faction into his hands because Ruben, she said, was a moral man—not the heartless battle-queen she’d become to win their family’s place in SynCorp’s hierarchy. His
moral leadership was what the Company needed now, she’d said—a preserver, not a builder.

  Scenting the dogs onto a helpless drunk didn’t feel like the actions of a moral man.

  He stood and edged away, averting his face from the crowd. Ruben watched from a distance as the Soldiers methodically worked their way along the Fleshway. When they reached Shuttles Los!, the vendor would tell them of a cloaked man who’d bought a ticket to Earth and wanted to get out of Darkside fast. He’d hand over the syncer ID without a second thought. It was supposed to be untraceable, but Ruben suspected Cassandra’s people would easily pierce that veil. It would lead them right to the drunkard.

  They’ll let him go , Ruben, the practical man, told himself. I didn’t even plant the gun on him . They’ll let him go.

  Sure they will , Ruben, the moral man, responded. Sure they will .

  Chapter 16

  Rebekah Franklin • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

  “It’s ’round the clock now,” Carrin Bohannon reported.

  She glanced from one to the other of Masada Station’s skeleton crew. They were in the War Room, what they’d come to call the station’s nerve center. Bekah’s tech team was taking shifts monitoring Cassandra’s constant, relentless cyberattacks against Titan. Only four—Bekah, Carrin, Daniel, and Maya Breides—were awake. Aisha Alvi and Noa Comar were asleep in their quarters.

  “They’re actually tightbeaming worms over CorpNet,” Carrin said, her voice open with admiration. “They’re propagating across the Labyrinth… I mean, I can’t even keep up.”

  She also sounded frightened.

  The corner of Bekah’s mouth ticked up anyway. Every time she heard the name of Titan’s decoy database—Gregor Erkennen’s morbid sense of humor at work—it made her want to laugh: the Labyrinth! Opa Simon would have approved. A callback to Greek mythology and the maze built by King Minos to trap the Minotaur in a perpetual loop of confusing pathways. Loops and pathways , she thought, smiling at how appropriate those terms were for the cyber snipe hunt they’d set Cassandra on. Billions of worms tunneling through the Labyrinth, delivering their exfiltration payloads and snatching yottabytes of corporate data. Information gold, mined from the veins of the Erkennen Faction’s genius.