“On a beach,” I said, thinking about how my life of leisure had become one of cold-blooded, ruthless service. Voluntary this time. Mostly.
“I was with my brother,” the blonde woman said, sighing. “We were vacationing in Florida when the world changed. It was like the apocalypse, wasn’t it? I wasn’t planning to vote for President Trust. He seemed so… goofy.”
“Yes,” I said, taking a deep breath. “He’s certainly changed the world.”
“I’m glad they’re letting him run again,” the blonde-haired woman said. “We don’t need a change in government right now, and term limits don’t make sense to me, anyway. Why shouldn’t I be able to vote for whoever I want?”
“Obviously,” I said, trying to hide my disdain. Not for her caring about the show elections where the results were pre-determined by the Emergency Government (my company was providing security for the ballot boxes being fixed) or the belief that the President was still in charge, but that I cared to discuss politics on a plane.
“Oh, look at me,” the woman said, chuckling. “I’ve been prattling on this entire time. I’ve not even asked your name. What do you do, Mister—”
The VLO started rocking, and I knew we were about to set down on the top of the Atlas Security Corps Building. Thank God. The building looked rather obnoxious with its glass spiral design that seemed designed to show off the artist’s deranged sensibilities. It was a Tower of Babel in the middle of a city that was still half leveled. Still, it was soon going to be number 166 of the Big 200 and was replacing the police forces of not only Chicago but also all the other super-cities.
The State of Emergency Government had devoted massive amounts of resources to the creation of arcologies, basically self-sufficient super-structures. They were meant to rescue the United States from its pit of destruction. Ten cities, curiously beginning with Las Vegas, had been designed to handle the massive population overflow while also having an industrial base to rebuild the rest of the country. There were mile-tall buildings now, and cities that had layers in the sky. The research done for building the International Space Elevator (which was probably not going to be built—at least in this century) provided the future metals strong enough to do it. It made for some breathtaking vistas, but the shining ziggurats of electricity and transparent steel cast long shadows over the poverty below. So at least some things hadn’t changed in the country.
“Case Gordon,” I said, simply. I didn’t expect her to recognize that I was Atlas’ Chief Security Officer even though she was apparently another refugee being allowed to work in our Chicago offices. “My friends call me G.”
“Oh.” The blonde woman blinked. “That’s an interesting nickname.”
“It’s from my childhood,” I said, glad the ride was almost over. “So, what made you decide to work for Atlas?”
“Oh, I don’t want to work for Atlas,” the woman admitted, not having bothered to give her name, or maybe I’d just forgotten it. “They’re a bunch of thugs and rent-a-cops playing soldier. However, you go where the work is.”
I smiled. My respect for her had gone up, at least a bit. “I totally agree.”
The VLO’s side opened, and the passengers began to disembark. I unbuckled my seatbelt and claimed my luggage, which included a katana hilt attached to a carry-on bag that also carried several other pieces of equipment used in assassination. The blonde woman’s eyes widened before I chuckled and headed to the door, stepping out onto the rooftop where the new employees were being sorted.
The Atlas Security logo of a hand wrapped around the world in a circle was sprayed on the ground instead of the traditional H. Soldiers in black and white plastisteel armor stood watch next to the uniformed officers scanning everyone’s identity cards. Standing off to one side was Colonel Lucita Biondi.
Lucita was a beautiful golden-tressed woman who had a single braid hairstyle and a black beret to go with her urban camouflage pants and gray shirt. She had a swimmer’s body even though her actual form was almost entirely cybernetic. She wasn’t dressed for combat and looked more like a model than a soldier, but she could throw a car, so who was I to tell her what was appropriate?
As I walked over to her, one of the soldiers saluted me, and I rolled my eyes. “Hello, Lucita.”
“Case,” Lucita said, walking up and giving me a passionate kiss on the lips. Her hands moved inappropriately down to my leg.
“Please, we’re in public,” I said, uncomfortable.
“Oh, no one cares,” Lucita said. “One of the few benefits of the end of the world is people are starting to mind their own business for once. Besides, it’s not like you’ve ever been shy. My harem misses you.”
“Do you really call them that?” I asked, shaking my head.
“They prefer it to slaves,” Lucita said, smirking. “Why, what do you call yours?”
I sighed and wondered for the millionth time if I knew anyone who wasn’t a sociopath. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too judgmental, though, as she was one of my few friends to stand the test of time. I’d never love Lucita, and I doubt she was capable of the emotion herself, but I could count on her to come to my aid when the chips were down and vice versa, despite the times we’d almost killed each other. The fact that our relationship was sexual was almost an afterthought—like a handshake between two people that life had chewed up and spit out.
“Funny,” I said.
“I’m not joking,” Lucita said. “In any case, I assume you’re here to confirm the Wicked Old Bitch, at last, is dead.”
Lucita wasn’t fond of Marissa.
“Assuming it’s her. A corpse isn’t quite what it used to be.”
Lucita, who had left the flesh and blood body she’d been born with behind long ago, nodded. “S has ordered the area cordoned off and garrisoned, but no one has gone in since the initial identification.”
I nodded. “Thank you. This is personal.”
“You don’t still love her, do you?” Lucita asked, looking ready to gag.
“No,” I said softly. “I stopped loving her the moment she tried to kill me.”
Lucita snorted. “I tried to do that. Stop loving her for all the other stuff.”
She had a point there.
“Let’s get going,” I said, looking over at the other people offloading the VLO before shaking my head. “We can discuss places you’ve been and people you’ve killed once we’ve got confirmation.”
Then I could figure out who was responsible—or if this was another one of Marissa’s tricks. It said something about our relationship that the discovery of her corpse meant I was leaning toward the latter instead of the former.
Lucita gave a short grumble of assent, looking down over the rooftop’s edge to the neon-illuminated buildings below. Chinese translations accompanied English and Spanish advertisements for everything from legalized drugs to sexual performance enhancers. Huge holograms were projected into the air, and the night sky provided an insane tableau of sensory input. We’d recovered from the near-end of humanity to double down on commercialism.
Maybe I was being too hard, though, and maybe it was because we had survived so much that mankind wanted to forget the horror it had left behind. If so, they were willing to do it every which way technology allowed while catering to the lowest common denominator. I’d seen plenty of advertisements for lifetime service contracts in the same sort of job Heather worked, plus virtual reality experiences to replace your existing life. I didn’t judge desperation, but I also knew the predators were always lying in wait for those willing to throw away everything for the promise of anything to give their life meaning.
“Come this way,” Lucita said, gesturing to a nearby private elevator.
“How’s business?” I asked, stepping into the stark white elevator beside her. As we turned around, the elevator doors closed in our faces, and we descended into the depths of the building.
“Booming,” Lucita said. “The United States military is too bogged down in the Antarctica
Wars to handle the ninth arcology construction security. It doesn’t help that the Pentagon isn’t even trying to hide the fact it’s for sale.”
“Oh joy,” I said, smiling.
“You asked,” Lucita said.
“Sorry, just trying to take my mind off things,” I said.
“Try porn, it’s less depressing,” Lucita said, smiling. “You can do simulations in your mind with the latest uploads, and no one would be the wiser.”
I stared at her, surprised. “Do you?”
Lucita snorted. “Please. You actually believe I can’t do better than the hacks out there? They should sell my memories. Hmmm, there’s a thought.”
“Did you ever see her again after the Big Smokey eruption?” Lucita asked, showing even she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react.
“Who?” I pretended I didn’t know who she was talking about.
“You know,” Lucita said, frowning. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“A couple of times,” I said, lying. “Mostly she wanted my help for a few minor things. I refused, of course.”
“Jesus,” Lucita said, shaking her head. “The nerve of that woman.”
“I’m not in any position to throw stones,” I said.
I’d killed something like a thousand people in my life. Most had it coming, but there were others who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Small comfort as that might be to my conscience.
“You never betrayed anyone you loved,” Lucita said, her voice low. “That’s the difference between you and her.”
“So they say,” I said, knowing there wasn’t much difference in the end. Not after all I’d done for HOPE.
The doors opened seconds later, revealing a still-incomplete area of the office full of computers, cubicles, and a stark white decor that was vaguely unsettling. Plastic covered a lot of the machinery and devices, and I could smell the blood hanging in the air. About a dozen Atlas security officers were hanging around the location along with forensic scientists. They were all avoiding the actual crime scene, which meant they were following S’s instructions to the letter.
There was a strange body sitting in a chair, which told me this hadn’t just been an incident involving Marissa. Still, we should have had security footage of the area and Delphi monitoring the situation.
“We still haven’t gotten this building completely working, have we?” I asked, walking out.
“No,” Lucita said, shaking her head. “The price of trying to get this fucking smart building working. Delphi wants everything perfect, and I’m getting sick of listening to her demands.”
“We can’t do this without her.”
Lucita rolled her eyes. “That’s just because she mothers you.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t think she’s anyone’s mother. Though per the tabloids, someone should really tell her to dial down on the drugs and parties.”
Delphi was the heart of Atlas Security’s success and also one of the reasons why humanity had survived the Big Smokey eruption. She’d been preparing for months before it happened as a possible end-of-the-world scenario, and while it hadn’t been long enough to get much done, she’d done enough to save many lives. She was also based on my mother—or Daniel Gordon’s mother, to be precise—which made our relationship unique. That didn’t stop her from using drone bodies, male or female, to indulge all of humanity’s pleasures. Apparently, she considered her job finished and thought it was time to enjoy herself.
“You tell Delphi she needs to tone it down,” Lucita said, missing that I was contemplating deeper things than the fact that our AI was a party animal. “Dee doesn’t listen to me. She’s giving us a bad name, though. You might think there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but people don’t want their army’s general showing up at raves.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’d also be massively hypocritical,” I said, walking over to where the bodies were kept. “Have the Chicago police visited?”
“No,” Lucita said, taking a deep breath. “It happened on Atlas property, so it’s a corporate sovereignty matter. Besides, they’ll be out of a job in a few months, and most of them want to work for us rather than transfer.”
I wasn’t sure about that. “Did Delphi see anything? Anything at all?”
“No,” a soft female voice spoke via my cyberlink. “Marissa got inside the building using a series of blind spots and chose this floor because it’s off my grid. Still, I spotted her twice and informed security the moment I noticed her. It’s also perhaps why she was killed.”
It was Delphi, all right. No one else could get past my defenses. Mostly because she’d created them all. “If she was killed. Let’s not forget how many times she’s escaped death before.”
“The Grim Reaper gets everyone eventually,” Lucita said, walking beside me. “We’ve just made him wait more than most people.”
The first body on the ground was an Atlas security officer with a white beard, metal arms without synthskin, and a chest that looked like it had been blown apart by grenade bullets. The interior was completely artificial, which made me think he was a Shell or a drone. Drones were the cheap knock-offs of Letters that had appeared on the market lately. Mostly, no one used them because they were too expensive and the legal rights they possessed were murky. It was one of the reasons why the other Letters and I hadn’t come forward with our inhuman nature.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at Marissa’s corpse yet.
“Who is this guy?” I asked. “I don’t recognize him, and one of the advantages of a computer brain is I know everybody in our army. All two million.”
“Charles Porter,” Delphi said. “That’s what his identity card reads, at least. However, it’s a forgery and was entered into my system by a slicer. He has no identity in any existing database, which means his body is almost certainly newly acquired or he has no identity.”
“Shell or drone?” I asked.
“I’m inclined to say drone,” Lucita said. “There’s organic material in his brain, but it looks harvested. My guess is some assholes grew a brain in a vat, slapped it in there, and attached electrodes to keep it alive while the real business took place in his RealBrain implant.”
I frowned. “Well, that eliminates the usual suspects. Most rival corporations know regular humans are cheaper and more expendable.”
“Government?” Lucita suggested.
“Even more inclined to use cheap and expendable labor,” I said. “Is he the one who killed her?”
“No,” Delphi said. “Examination of the crime scene indicates it was done by a second subject.” Taking a deep breath, I turned to look at Marissa’s body. It slumped in a chair where both had repeatedly been struck by armor-piercing bullets. The damage done was considerable, but not quite as bad as it could have been if she’d been completely human. Instead, it looked almost like a Hollywood reproduction of a crime scene with her glassy, artificial eyes staring back at me while the holes leaked rather than bled.
Marissa was a beautiful Mexican-American woman with long dark hair and perpetually youthful features. Her skin was light brown, tanner than usual, with eyes the deepest shade of blue. She was thinner than I remembered and wore a beige business dress rather than her usual Goth attire. In her right hand was an infodisc.
“I’m sorry, Case,” Lucita said.
I put on a pair of black plastic gloves, designed to cover up DNA and fingerprints, before reaching over to touch Marissa’s cheek. The feel of it was undiminished by the gloves and moved with a greater buoyancy than regular human flesh. It was synthflesh, professional grade quality but also upgraded for military use. Not entirely unlike the kind Letters had.
“It’s not her,” I said.
Lucita did a double take. “Are you sure?”
“There’s no seams,” I said, using the slang term for synth-skin graft edges. “This is a full body transplant, and that takes six months to recover from. I’ve talked to Marissa more recently, and she
was working with an older model body.”
Lucita frowned put her hands on her hips. “A couple of times, huh?”
I shrugged. “I was visiting my other partner.”
Lucita blinked.
That was when one of the security team shouted, checking the janitor’s closet only to have a short redheaded woman in jeans and a red jacket run out. Apparently, somehow, they’d missed someone hiding for the entire three hours. Goddammit! I thought we were employing people who weren’t Keystone Cops!
The security guard raised his gun to shoot her.
“No!” I shouted, chasing after her.
I recognized her as the partner I’d mentioned.
Claire.
She was the bait Marissa had lured me in with to become her slave. One of the few people I’d ever cared for.
Goddammit.
Chapter Four
There were some advantages to being an inhumanly fast cyborg. Those seconds had passed, and I’d managed to cross the entirety of the office to wrap my arms around Claire Morris. Thankfully, that was before the security staff gunned her down in a fit of trigger-happy idiocy. Hopefully, they wouldn’t shoot after I was in their line of fire and fulfill the American dream of killing their boss.
Panicked, Claire struggled in my arms and kicked the air before elbowing me in the face. The blow was far stronger than any woman (or man) punching the equivalent of a skin-wearing metal statue should be. For a second, I believed she might be another imposter like the “Marissa” I’d found shot up nearby. However, as my hands accidentally moved underneath her shirt across her stomach, I found a scar that told me no, this was her.
As she spun around and made a move to knee me in the groin, I caught it and stepped back. “It’s me, dammit!”
Claire, who had been reaching into my jacket for my hidden Red Desert-20, stopped in mid-motion. “Case?”
“Yes,” I said, staring at her. “It’s my building. Sort of.”
Agent G: Assassin Page 4
