A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy

by Alex White

  “Says you!” shouted the cultist, this time careful to take a step back. She rubbed the back of her neck where she’d hit the ground. “None of you know the truth! Those records were faked! Henrick Witts had big plans for us. Big Daddy Mandell would’ve saved Taitu!”

  The train sighed into the nearby platform, now far more audible with the sudden silence of the crowd. Boots looked to her crewmates, expecting them to do something, say something, but the horror on their faces told her they wanted to disengage.

  Boots thrust out a finger at the woman. “I saw the Harrow, you little piece of crap. I stood on his deck. It killed my planet before you were even born.”

  Then she turned away, not listening to any of the counterpoints, and strode down the ramp to their train. The lenses of imagers followed her the whole way, but the crowd stayed their distance, just the way Boots liked it.

  The entryway of the Taitutian Special Branch Archives was smaller than Nilah had expected: just a well-guarded elevator in the center of a glass lobby. Nilah scanned their surroundings out of curiosity—she’d never been inside a secret government facility as a racer, but she’d seen plenty in the debriefing after the Harrow. Each wall was made of thick, polychroic glass, with dispersers tastefully embedded in the accent lights. Surveillance imagers ringed the ceilings, all focused upon the elevator in the center of the room: a clear tube sunk into the floor like a well shaft.

  Two guards flanked the entrance to the elevator, slingers holstered and ready. The trio of women checked their weapons at the door.

  “All I’m saying is that you legally exposed yourself when you grabbed her,” whispered Nilah, but her voice echoed across the marble floors. She hadn’t wanted to lecture Boots, but the older woman wouldn’t stop complaining about the cultists.

  “So sue me,” sighed Boots.

  “Yes,” said Nilah. “That’s literally why you don’t want legal exposure. I’m glad that you’re back with the Capricious, but we need to teach you how to be famous.”

  “Ugh. Pass. How is it not legal, uh … exposure … to threaten us?” asked Boots.

  “She didn’t explicitly threaten us,” said Aisha. “That’s the awful part. She just called Nilah by name.”

  “‘Dull-finger’ is hate speech,” spat Boots, wrinkling her nose.

  “Not technically illegal,” said Aisha. “You can’t assault someone for that.”

  “So it’s bad if I scared her, but it’s okay for her to take Witts’s side and scare the hell out of us?” Boots spat. “Sounds like bunk to me.”

  Nilah sighed in exasperation, but she didn’t have time to explain any more. She’d had stalkers in her past, people who took racing just a little too seriously. Her lawyer’s advice had been simple: call the cops, don’t engage. It wasn’t fair, but Nilah couldn’t seem to get that across to her companion.

  The three women signed in with the guard, and Nilah traced her own sigil with a pang of pity as Boots rummaged in her bag for her paragon crystal—the small device that stored Boots’s identity. Nilah’s identity was linked to her magic and the tiny biometric variations in her glyph. Anyone with Boots’s crystal could impersonate her.

  “Must we do all of this? It’s just gold-level access,” Nilah complained to the nearest officer, but she shook her head, patting Boots down.

  They let Aisha and Nilah through without any issue, but Boots was subjected to a lot of questions and two different scans. Nilah gulped as the images of Boots’s arm spun out of the projectors above them, but the hidden slinger shell appeared opaque to basic scans. Wherever Boots had gotten the arm, the maker had done a damned fine job creating that compartment. Finally, the three women were allowed into the elevator, where they descended to the first sublevel—the least classified of all the areas in the installation.

  Nilah glanced at Boots, whose eyes were downcast. She knew what her friend was thinking: somewhere in those archives, near the bottom levels, Kinnard’s data cube lay dormant. Nilah chucked Boots’s good shoulder and smiled, trying to distract her.

  “Have you ever gotten into the Special Branch Archives before?” asked Nilah.

  It seemed to work. Boots tongued the inside of her lip and replied, “Back during the Finding Hana days, I had all kinds of contacts. I never got in here per se, but I definitely had some records from here. Most of that was because …”

  Aisha leaned in. “Your partner was an ex-cop, right? Stetson Giles?”

  Nilah grimaced, her dermaluxes flaring green. She’d been trying to distract Boots, not plunge her into depression. “Okay,” she said, grinning brightly. “I’m sure time is limited down here. What’s the game plan?”

  Boots shrugged. “Search for everything we can find on Maslin Durand, Izak Vraba, and the Children of the Singularity. Try to collate records and get a bead on what the hell we’re dealing with.”

  The elevator passed below the thick layer of rock, and Nilah spied millions of spell-dampening shards—the whole place was made of urmurex stone, designed to withstand the spells from battleship slingers. Then the first sublevel of the Special Branch Archives opened up around the elevator shaft. Tens of thousands of data cubes lay glowing in the recessed shelves, their crystalline structures refracting centuries of accumulated knowledge. Much farther below, the very origins of Taitutian government rested, ensconced by autoturrets and devious traps.

  Even at this weak level of classification, guns in the ceiling followed their progress until the elevator reached the base of the tube and the glass doors rotated aside.

  Aisha scratched her cheek. “I can’t help but feel like Armin would be better for this.”

  “He would,” said Boots, stepping out into the maze of shelves. “That’s why he’s not allowed.”

  Nilah followed, looking around for the terminal. “What?”

  “It’s a military thing.” Boots led them down the long corridor toward a nexus where several shelves came to meet, like the points of a compass. At her approach, a terminal rose out of the glossy floor. “Classification can be pretty stupid sometimes. Fact A is public knowledge, and fact B is public knowledge, but when you get fact A plus B, that’s suddenly classified information. Can’t bring Armin in here because his magic lets him instantly collate stuff.”

  Nilah nodded. “You’re right. That’s stupid.”

  “Bureaucrats will be bureaucrats,” said Boots. “You want to fan out and see what we can see?”

  Nilah did as she was asked, and they each took a research topic: Aisha was in charge of hunting down more information on Maslin Durand, Boots would handle Izak Vraba, and Nilah would take active cases on the Children of the Singularity.

  The first piece of information Nilah found was a tax record, of all things. The Taitutian government had granted nonprofit status to a group of the same name over thirty years ago. According to their forms, they were “dedicated to creating unity through transcendent thought.” There were a number of redacted records attached to the entry: a Special Branch agent requesting the government look into the group, but it went nowhere, and Nilah was quickly stymied by blocked-out information.

  A tittering spider drone clinked past her, hauling a set of cubes on its back, bound for a data sifter in the far corner. It paused before Nilah, looked her over, and continued along its merry way. She watched the drone’s path until it arrived before the agent crewing the data sifter. She waved, and the man nodded but went on about his business. He had to be one of the official government datamancers.

  Tired of reading bland, redacted records, she followed the drone.

  “Hello,” she greeted the man, smiling brightly.

  He had to be in his late forties, with droopy jowls and a bit of extra belly underneath a drab suit. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he had a few kids, the oldest of whom would be at university. He gave her a shy smile and returned the greeting. He blushed as recognition crossed his face.

  “It’s a pleasure, Miss Brio,” said the agent, extending a gloved hand. “Hawkworth. Wha
t brings you here?”

  “Research,” said Nilah. “Slow going, though.”

  He demurred. “Isn’t it always?”

  “That depends. Are you an aggregator?”

  “Aggregators are the devices we use to parse information. I’m a datamancer. Most government archivists are.”

  It was unsurprising that he’d get hung up on a technicality.

  “Agent Hawkworth, I’m having a spot of bother with one of your cubes.”

  “Oh? May I see it?”

  Nilah dutifully fetched him the cube. He inspected it, then slotted it into the sifter and traced his datamancer’s mark, placing his palms against the contacts. His eyes rolled back in his head for a brief moment, then he came back to reality.

  “It appears fine to me, Miss Brio. What seems to be the issue?”

  Nilah scooted closer with a sheepish expression and white dermaluxes. “All of the good bits are … you know … missing.”

  “Redacted.”

  “Is there a way to …” She let the question hang.

  Hawkworth’s expression flattened. “I can’t wait to tell Clara I met you today. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a lot of work to do.”

  Nilah sighed. “Thanks, mate.”

  So much for shortcuts. She delved deeper into the archives, but the farther she went, the less intuitive the system got. A lot of records were improperly tagged or fragmented. She’d go to the alcove where a data cube should be only to find it missing, or swapped with the one next to it. She wasn’t trained in this, and when she’d see Aisha, they exchanged pained looks. The only one in her element was Boots, who shuffled to and fro with real purpose.

  She had no choice but to return to the financial records.

  Most Children of the Singularity were spectacularly boring as far as Nilah could tell. They regularly filed their taxes, listing profits and losses as a wash. They had a few corporate holdings—small buildings here and there on backwater worlds, listed as their temples. Their expenses were so small as to lack itemization, so Nilah couldn’t get a good picture of what went on inside, and reading tax form after tax form hurt her brain. Before long, she’d set up shop in one of the sifter cubicles, a pile of data crystals growing before her with each search.

  She slotted another data cube and sighed, scrolling through the lists of articles containing the Children. She propped her chin up with one hand and glanced over in Boots’s direction to find her sorting through a pile of cubes. The older woman looked happy, if a little intense. Loafing around in a library simply wasn’t Nilah’s game.

  Until she saw an active case tag fly past out of the corner of her eye. She paused the projection.

  Every other record had been bureaucratic, but this was a government surveillance operation dated back almost a year. From what Nilah could tell, the investigating agent had been delving into darkened communities on the Link, interacting with the Children through an encoded alias. His conclusion: official membership in the organization was almost nonexistent, but those identifying as Children had skyrocketed. The agent described a vast network of self-organizing, digital cells, each competing for the attentions of the official group. They spread their message across the Link through their own bizarre mythology—cryptic tales of solitary heroes through drug-addled dreamscapes. The official organization was silent in response.

  So there were two factions: the secretive, tax-paying nonprofit, and the rabid communities of Witts lovers scattered across the Link.

  She glanced back at Boots again, unable to help a tiny tingle of pleasure; she’d found valuable intel, even though she wasn’t as versed in archives as the others. Judging from the frustration on Boots’s face, she hadn’t found anything yet. Nilah was about to share her coup with Boots when a picture of herself filled the cubicle.

  Nilah was so accustomed to seeing reproductions of her likeness that, at first, she wasn’t fazed. There were surely other images of her floating through the archives. This one, however, depicted her attacking Henrick Witts, while a strange arcane machine sputtered smoke in the background. It’d been made to look like the battle took place in a battleship, but it certainly wasn’t the Harrow. And she recognized the expression she’d made in the picture—it was from the “Fierce Warrior” set of images she’d taken for Glambot.

  Someone had drawn a blazing red ring around her and scratched the word “traitor” next to it. Her eyes flicked to the edge of the image, and she found a Special Branch serial number attached—when she touched it to see the rest of the images in the series, she found thousands. They’d twisted her defiant, cocksure smile into a malicious brand, depicting her attacking or harming the heroic members of Witts’s crew. She swiped over to the case file header and found the words: ACTIVE INVESTIGATION: PSYPROP RB-14—PRO-WITTS DISRUPT OPS.

  From the case header file, she had an easier time locating the agent’s aims: to prove that the expensive, widespread pro-Witts propaganda originated within the Children of the Singularity … which meant they were evading taxes—no mention of protecting Taitutian interests or galactic security. Nilah let out a sigh. If tax law resulted in arresting the manky bastards, perhaps it wasn’t so bad.

  She called for a cup of water, and the spider drone delivered it while she perused the financial records related to the case. They came in one of three flavors: redacted and interesting, redacted and boring, and redacted with a side of redaction. With just a little more clearance, she could probably get the answers she needed. Nilah sunk a few hours down this rabbit hole, trying to figure out what new information the agent and the case worker had learned. She almost didn’t notice when the overhead lights went out.

  “Hello?” she called out without thinking, then immediately regretted it. She checked the terminal; they had an hour before the archives closed, which meant the extinguishing of the light was unscheduled.

  The muffled sounds of slinger fire rattled through the urmurex above, and her stomach flipped. Her slinger lay up there, as did Aisha’s and Boots’s. She didn’t know what had become of the litigious men and women who’d let her into the archives, but she could guess. There’d be bodies upstairs.

  Nilah dashed down the aisles, looking for Agent Hawkworth or the drone. She found the machine lying deactivated upon the ground, its legs curled under it like a dead bug. Hawkworth had disappeared, and she wasn’t sure if she was sad or thankful for that. He didn’t seem like the type to be prepared for an assault, but at least he was an authority figure.

  “Boots,” Nilah hissed. “Aisha!”

  The two women emerged from the shadows. Aisha clutched a data cube, her grip unwavering through the magic of the marksman’s mark. Nilah guessed that the pilot planned to throw the cube at anyone who attacked them—reasonable, since it was sharp and weighed half a kilo.

  “Shots fired upstairs,” muttered Boots.

  “Get ready,” said Aisha.

  Nilah’s dermaluxes radiated purple fear, but she suppressed them. “We’re in it, loves. Any plans?”

  The other two women shook their heads, and Nilah nodded.

  “All right. You two are best with slingers,” said Nilah. “Hang back.”

  The lamps in the shelving flickered and died. Emergency lights kicked on, painting the archives in bright whites and long shadows. Somehow, all the staff had disappeared. Nilah couldn’t be sure whether they were victims or participants in whatever was about to go down. Nilah’s enemies were resourceful, and someone in the Special Branch had planned to sell information to Aaron Forscythe. Sabotaging a small facility seemed well within their capabilities.

  Loud klaxons sounded out, and the elevator rose, plugging the only exit they knew. The trio rushed to the far end of the shelves, seeking any cover from the long clear elevator shaft that they could find. Any second, that elevator would drop like a stone, and soldiers with heavy autoslingers would rappel down the tube.

  “Where the hell are the cops?” Aisha whispered, her fingers tight around the data cube.

  “W
e’ve got to fight like they’re not coming,” said Boots. “I’ve got nothing, except this arm.”

  Nilah nodded. It would be stupid to think they stood a chance. The memory of Prime Minister Mandell’s strike team was still fresh in her mind. If the attackers upstairs were that good, the trio would be lucky to survive the first wave.

  “Listen, I can punch things,” said Nilah, forcing some of her racer swagger. She pointed to Boots. “You can stab things, and you”—to Aisha—“can throw things. We’re armed to the bloody teeth.”

  “That seems kind of arbitrary,” said Boots.

  Nilah flexed her jaw. “I have Flicker, she’s a sharpshooter, and you’ve got a knife that pops out of your finger. No more questions.”

  “Okay,” said Aisha, renewing the glyph and grasping it with her palm. “Okay.”

  Except the elevator never dropped. No more shots pierced the air. The klaxon sounded its repetitive, binary alarm—on, off, on, off, and in the silent gaps, Nilah strained to listen for the sounds of onrushing doom.

  What if the enemy had already breached the room, and she’d missed it somehow? Soldiers might be racing toward them that very second. After a minute, Nilah poked her head out, ready to duck backward if she saw even the slightest hint of fibron battle armor. A long, empty aisle filled her vision. The klaxons shut off, leaving only a ringing sound in their wake.

  Then the ringing became a voice—a distant song, sad and slow, wandering from note to note.

  “What in the name of—” Nilah began, but her heart started as something moved to her right. She ducked behind the shelving unit, expecting some blade to come at her head.

  No black-clad assassins came for her, no murderbots, nothing. Only the queer voice broke the silence.

  What had moved? She needed to look once more to be certain, and the shelves looked heavy enough to climb. Nilah removed a few data crystals and hoisted herself up, pausing before she crested the top; if she had been spotted, she didn’t want to peer from the same place twice. Knuckles tight upon the edge of the shelf, she pulled herself over.