Garet walked him to the heavy wooden double doors and showed him out. The official scuttled away, mentally listing off the calls and meetings he now needed to set up… after he had read the rest of the document that they had discussed.
Garet watched him leave from the reception area, and looked down to take the messages that his assistant was handing him.
“Thank you, Darla.”
“You’re welcome, Senator Beaufort,” she said, blinking her enhanced eyelashes at him.
“Mr. Andus also called for you. I told him you were in with someone, but he would appreciate a call back as soon as you can. That’s the top message…” she pointed with a beautifully manicured finger at the notes she’d just handed him.
Garet noticed the little heart doodle she had scribbled on the top note.
He looked at it for a moment.
“You have a thing for Mr. Andus, eh?” he didn’t take his eyes from the notes, and continued flicking through the others. “Hmm, none of the others have quite the same penmanship…”
He waited for her reaction.
She giggled coyly.
“No. Not Mr. Andus.”
Satisfied he’d encouraged her just enough to keep her on the hook, he returned to his office, where he sat down at his desk. Pulling the holo up, he dialed the new number on the note.
The call connected.
“Good afternoon.” It was a female’s voice; she sounded bright and bouncy. “Equipt Real Estate Services, this is Mandy speaking.”
“Good afternoon, Mandy. I wonder if I might speak with Mr. Andus, please?”
“Of course, Mr. Beaufort. Just hold the line.”
Gaitune-67, Safe house, Conference Room
“Okay, so what’s up?” Molly stepped into the conference room.
“What did you do to Paige?” Joel asked, already half laughing.
Molly closed the door behind her, muffling the shouts of abuse from Paige making her way up from the basement. “I’m making her a more compassionate team member.”
He smirked. “You turned the lights off on her, didn’t you?”
“Boogie man training 101.” She smiled. “You can’t have all the fun initiating them.”
Joel shook his head, smiling. He opened up his holo and selected a couple of screens to enlarge.
“Okay, so, cadet-training aside, check this out.” He showed her what looked like potential cases on the conference room holo.
Molly looked a little wary of Joel’s enthusiasm as she pulled out a chair. “What am I looking at?” she asked.
Joel swiped through a few screens that were similar. “This is called CaseHUB. It’s basically a place where our potential clients can post their jobs, anything from security to science and tech. All project-based. Their aim is to find people who can solve their problems. In other words: Us!”
He paused, letting her read for a moment.
“You see, these ones here,” he pointed at the screen, “want someone to provide security for their new site. Something they’re building in the outer system.”
He waited a moment, and then moved to the next screen. “This one,” he pointed enthusiastically, “this one wants tests designed to prove the efficacy of their weapons systems.”
Molly’s expression was blank.
Joel changed tact. “And this one is a research project. They need someone to help them reverse engineer a chemical compound that could be used in a more efficient fuel cell.”
Molly’s eyes brightened, and she sat up in her chair.
Nice maneuver on Joel’s part there! Pulling out the research card. We all know what that does to your biology.
Oz. Please. I can make a business decision without getting lured in by the promise of hot and dirty research.
I’m starting to understand that the use of the words “hot” and “research” in the same breath is something unique to you. Nowhere in the yotta byte of data I have processed from the outside world, have I ever seen this reference. Excluding the use of the word when it refers to temperature, of course.
Oz, are you interrupting this conversation to tell me I’m odd?
Yes, Molly. I suppose I’m pointing out your idiosyncrasies.
Acknowledged. But I think this CaseHUB could also be a good source of business for us.
I actually agree.
Well thank fuck for that!
That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?
Yes, Oz.
She looked over at Joel. “How did you come across this, then?”
Joel swung a couple of screens closed and turned to talk to her. “Well, it was something I knew about when I was working freelance. I flirted with the idea of registering with it a few times, and you know how persistent those reps can be. But when it was just me, myself, and I, I couldn’t justify the cost. Plus, the cases needed more manpower than I could give them.”
Molly narrowed one eye. “Ah. I see. And now cuz I’m paying for it…”
Joel didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I thought with all this income you were shamelessly scalping off the markets, we could give it a try.”
He grinned cheekily.
“Seriously though,” he continued, “I think it would help us to find those clients that have the resources to pay us, and it would give us a chance at scaling up the kinds of operations we tackle.”
Molly scooted her chair closer to the table and leaned in to the holo screen that had initially captured her interest.
Joel saw his moment.
He pulled up another screen. “Look, they have a whole section on the research-based cases…”
She raised an eyebrow. “Imagine that…” she murmured. She reached out and resized the screen to read it more easily.
Her eyes scanned the information. “I think there are a bunch of these we could tackle.”
Joel bobbed his head in agreement. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Want me to pull up a few for us to pitch for?”
Molly sat back and continued staring at the screen. “Sure.”
Joel swiped at one of the screens, and then stopped. “Actually,” he turned back to her. “There’s something else we should probably discuss in conjunction with this.”
Molly looked mildly intrigued, given it was a vanilla, non-research discussion. “Oh?”
Joel slid a few screens closed, and pushed the other holographic images away, so they could give their full attention to the conversation. “I think we need to look at how we scale. As in, we’re going to need more people to tackle some of these projects. And definitely more kit.”
He waited.
Molly’s eyes narrowed again. Joel could have sworn he saw a flicker of humor, but then her face was deadpan.
She waited a moment, watching his reaction.
Finally, she spoke. “You’re asking how much money am I actually making with my shit hot algorithms, aren’t you?!”
He started to reply. “No.” Then reconsidered his answer. “Well, kinda. It’s more that who we have on board will dictate which cases we can pitch for. And obviously we can bring more folks on, but we need to start somewhere; put a stake in the ground, as it were.”
Molly nodded, still with a half smile on her lips. “Well, I think we start with the kinds of cases we want to go after, and then skill up the team based on that. Then that will dictate the kit we need.”
She crossed her legs at the thighs, and then swiveled a little in her chair, as she contemplated their next move. Then she thought of something else. “Ha!” she chuckled, “The alternative would be we start with giving Crash and Brock a free rein on kit-buying. Doing that, we’d end up being able to do faster-than-light travel, antigrav camping, and not much else!”
Joel laughed. “You’re probably not wrong there… Yes. I agree on all counts. So how do we define the kinds of cases?”
“I think they have to have certain things in common, like they are all focused on helping make life better for people, a
nd defending the little guy. And if we can take out groups like The Syndicate, or at least cripple the fuck out of them as we go, then so much the better.”
Joel smiled at her bug bear - her unrelenting drive to defend the underdog. He knew where it came from, and how deep that wound went. He respected the hell out of the way she had come to treat it more as a driving force that spurred her on, and less of the vengeance kick that he thought it might turn into.
He approved of her criteria. “Yes. I think everyone will be down with that, too.”
“Great,” said Molly, swinging herself in her chair again with one foot still on the ground. “And we can start in the area of the pharma, since that’s where we have a lot of relevant intel right now, what with Garet and the last case. And then down the line we can always pivot into other areas, like security or transport or whatever.”
“Faster-than-light-travel!” yelled Brock through the open door, as he wafted past, his outdoor boots squeaking against the laminate flooring.
Molly and Joel exchanged surprised glances. “How the fuck does he do that?”
“Hell if I know,” exclaimed Joel. “Probably heard us on his way past a moment ago.”
Her eyes were skeptical again. “Did he go past before, though?”
Joel shook his head. “Dunno.” He turned his attention back to his screen. Neither the mystical, nor the mythical, was something he knew how to manage, mentally or otherwise.
Molly followed his lead and looked back up to the screen, shaking her head in amusement at Brock. “So, dare I ask how much this is costing?” she nodded at the new software toy he’d obviously already signed up for.
“Best not.”
“Okay.” She got up and walked out of the conference room, leaving him to his new toy.
Chapter 3
Ventus Research Facility, downtown Spire
The two colleagues hurried down the spartan corridor.
“Okay, let’s leave in both cars,” Ana Grossman, the lead scientist at Ventus Research, suggested to her colleague, David Rek. “Avoid suspicion,” she added.
Though she was trying her best to keep it together, the anxiety of the fraught situation played across her face.
David nodded his agreement, as he held one of the double doors open for her. They stepped out into the dimly lit car park, greeted by the familiar smell of fuel cells and engines.
David’s eyes darted around, making sure there was no one to see them. “Sure. Let’s rendezvous back at my place, though, and then we can call them on the secure line…”
Ana started moving away. “And get our fokking lives back,” she added grimly. The stress of the last several hours had taken its toll on both of them. Being leveraged to break company protocol and out and out steal lethal toxins was not something they thought they would be doing when they woke up that morning.
Ana, still in her lab coat, scrambled in her purse for her keys.
David watched her carefully. “I’m over that way,” he said, pointing off to the left, but still standing behind her.
Ignoring David, she looked up, orienting herself and trying to remember where she put the car when she got in. She’d been distracted. She scanned the parking lot; there was still quite a few cars there.
“I think I’m-”
She didn’t get to finish her sentence. A knife had come from behind and slit open her throat. David, carefully avoiding the arterial spray, allowed her to slump to the ground in front of him.
He dropped his gaze to his former supervisor and her shocked expression, as she tried to compute what he’d just done. She wasn’t able to breathe, and within seconds he saw the life slip away from behind her eyes.
He took a step backwards, avoiding the pooling blood. He seemed non-plussed by what he had done. A moment later, reality set in, and he found himself fighting the urge to vomit.
He looked around, checking that no one had seen him. Part of him was screaming inside; that same part was also hoping someone had seen. Hoping someone would come and make this go away.
Strange how he would want help, he thought. But he wasn’t doing this because he wanted to; he was as much a victim in all this as she.
Only he had to live with what he had done.
There was movement behind him.
A voice brought him back to the present. It was deep and commanding. “Good work. Now go back to your house, pack a bag, and wait for contact there.” There was no discernible accent, not that David could detect. It was the same voice that had given him instructions that morning, after he had left his wife and children at the house.
David took another step backwards from the blood, the image of the carnage branded onto his retinas. He dropped the knife, and was vaguely aware of the figure of a man behind him, in the direction of the voice.
He knew the drill. He was told someone would meet him here to take care of the body. He just had to keep it together and follow the rest of the instructions.
Stepping around the body, he headed off toward his car, looking for his keys in his jacket pocket, and then his pants.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” the voice called after him.
Without turning around, David stopped and tried to think. Then he started patting down his pockets for something else. Locating the vial in his pants pocket, he pulled it out, took a few paces backwards to the figure, carefully avoiding eye contact he reached back, and placed it into the man’s outstretched hand.
With the package relinquished, he scurried away to fulfill his next lot of instructions.
The man started cleaning up the mess, quickly and adeptly lifting the body into a body bag for transport. Less than ten seconds later, he heard a car speed away from the garage, as if someone’s life were in danger. He looked up, pausing in his zipping up of the bag, recognizing it was David getting the hell out of Dodge.
This is going to haunt him, thought the man. If he survives a long and healthy life after the next few days, that is. That was beyond his control. They were all just following orders.
Gaitune-67, Common area
It had been a long day. Joel was vegetating in the common area, watching the downloaded news on the shared holo. Neechie, the pet sphinx (or Feline Overlord, depending on who you asked), was stretched across his lap, basking in a tummy rub.
It was a rare occurrence for the cat-like creature to actually spend time with anyone other than Molly when she was still in the building. Joel just assumed that the sphinx needed some attention and Molly was engrossed in something that not even the cutest creature on the asteroid could distract her from. Sometimes he wondered if the girl was made of stone.
Brock had also come to join him, hoping for news of what was going on in the world.
“I like to keep my finger on the Estarian pulse,” he told Paige when she’d walked through, vocally wondering why they were wasting their evening watching old news.
“Oh, I thought you were lining up for a tummy rub,” retorted Paige playfully; noticing how the boys had commandeered the couch, and the sphinx had commandeered the boys’ laps.
Crash was downstairs working out in their new gym, just next to the main basement area that had become Brock’s workshop for the glorious things that he was waiting to both invent and assemble… if only the supplies would arrive already.
All was peaceful in the safe house. That was until there were shrieks of panic, which seemed to originate in the common area.
It was Brock’s voice. “Molly! Molly! You’re on the news!” He called through to Molly, who was working in the conference room just down the corridor from the main area.
Joel leapt up and swiped at the screen to pause it. It had just gone full screen on the video footage from Dewitt’s residence cameras, from their rescue mission several weeks ago.
Paige came hurrying back first, her heels clipping on the concrete painted floor.
“Where’s Molly?” Joel asked her, as she came around to see
the screen.
Paige answered, “In the conference room. She heard you.”
Molly’s footsteps could be heard next. She emerged a moment later. “What do you mean I’m on the news?” Her frown made her eyes look darker. She’d been working for hours without a break, and she had what Joel jokingly called “book-face”, after the old way that the ancients had used paper stacked and bound into ‘books’ to review information.
Brock read out the headlines on the bottom of the screen. “’Seen entering the Dewitt residence less than an hour before William Dewitt was found dead’.”
“But we spoke to the police?” protested Molly, looking at Joel.
“Yeah. And they said they told us about this footage then. They can’t be after you now.”
“Us,” she corrected, pointing out that they were both on the footage.
“Yeah, strange they don’t seem to mention me,” he admitted.
“Let it run, and let’s hear the whole report,” she suggested.
Joel backed up the player, and set it to run again. Molly sat down on the arm of the sofa where Joel had been sitting. Joel sat down again, the location of the sphinx now forgotten. The bald, purple creature narrowly escaped being crushed under Joel’s mass of muscle. Paige perched on a footstool off to the side in front of the screen, confusion now written over her delicate features.
She went to say something, reconsidered, and then spoke. “This was from when you rescued me.” Her face was now that of a vulnerable little girl.
Molly looked over to her.
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “You okay? You don't need to watch this.”
“I’m okay.” Paige had already turned her attention back to the screen, listening to the voiceover of the reporter.
“… police are now looking for the woman in this video footage in conjunction with Senate Official Dewitt’s murder. She is considered armed and dangerous. If you see this woman, police are urging, not to approach her, but to get in touch…”
Molly sighed, and shrugged, almost comically. “Well, this would have been more concerning if we were actually based on the planet.”
Her manner was somewhat more flippant than Joel would have expected. “True. But it begs the question - why are police suddenly looking for you?”
The Ascension Myth Box Set Page 29
