Corporate Services Bundle

by JC Hay

  "You're not going to turn me over to him?" Netta's voice still carried a note of disbelief, despite his reassurances.

  He stopped and spun on one foot to glare at her. In the half-light of the Zone, she seemed more fragile somehow. Her eyes were wide beneath the unruly mess of dark curls that framed her face. Lips that would have been thin in harsh light looked timid and half-hidden in shadow. Like everything else, it was an illusion. The trick was to look past the imagery to see what lay on the other side of the curtain.

  It was why he'd never had his eyes done—there were lies enough in the world. He didn't need modded vision to add more.

  Joshi sighed. "I'm in no position to judge you on some moral ground. I abandoned my own morals a long time ago. Around the same time I stopped believing in talking animals and happy endings."

  "That makes even less sense then. Your survival is at risk protecting me. Why not just turn me over?"

  It was like she wanted to be punished for her transgressions. Now that she had revealed them, she expected him to be the scourge that gave her penance she felt she deserved. "Because I got rid of my moral compass and replaced it with pride." Her brow furrowed in confusion, the shadows darkening around her eyes. "I've never failed a job. That's why the Corporations ask for me, even though I won't do wetwork. I don't fail, and I don't abandon the job when a higher bidder comes along."

  "So you refuse to take a better option, just because I hired you first."

  He shrugged and walked down the alley. "Call it a twist of fate, if you like." A rat glared at him from a pile of garbage, refusing to back down from the interlopers in its domain.

  She caught up to him, her flats scuff-scuffing across the wet pavement. "Then why didn’t you capture me when you were hired to do that?"

  "That wasn’t what they hired me for." The smell of sea air began to cut into his nostrils, carried on the faint breeze. "My job was to destroy your data. Prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Given that you were working with BlueGene to kill me and anyone else with combat upgrades, that also happened to be an act of self-preservation."

  He rounded a narrow corner and found himself looking out at the ocean framed by ramshackle buildings. It was the choppy brown surf of the west coast, rather than the idealized blue of the Maldives, but it made his heart catch all the same. Part of the reason he had such a difficult time leaving the Zone, and why he always returned during his down times: nowhere else put him as close to the water. At least not unless he suddenly found himself part of the glitterati, a fact that grew more unlikely each day.

  The fingers of his left hand did a staccato dance against his thigh. Joshi willed himself to still the renegade limb and hoped Netta didn't notice. At least it was his off hand, and not the right that was going out first. Once he'd gotten her out of the city, she'd be—well, not safe, but at least harder to track. The seagoing anarcho-communes might even be able to protect her for a while.

  It surprised him how much the idea of letting her go hurt. It wasn't affection, whatever Yashilla had implied in their talk. More like a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome. Imagining a time without her felt as scary as imagining his own inevitable death by slow paralysis.

  Her fingers brushed his shoulder, and he could feel her warmth leach into him as she pressed against his side. She kept the words soft, pitched so not even the rat would hear her. "It's not a weapon."

  "You developed a vector that directly attacks a person's implants and renders them useless. I don't know what else you'd call it."

  "No you're right. That would be a weapon. And you're right in that it's exactly what BlueGene wanted me to make. But I couldn't do that to Jada's memory. To her sacrifice." Her voice cracked on the word, and Joshi had to resist the urge to comfort her. She needed to carry her own burdens. She allowed him to see her scars, but he couldn't heal them. "That's why I continued my own research right under their nose."

  He blinked as the words sank in. "Are you saying you were working on a cure this whole time?"

  "Using their funding and their facilities. Yes. It's amazing how much weapon and cure look the same on paper. How understanding the mechanisms of IRS is required for both." She nodded and took a deep breath.

  And he'd destroyed it. A cure to IRS, and he'd blown it apart before setting it on fire. Because Palashkulum Joshi never failed at a job. Not even when there was a higher bidder.

  Not even when the higher bidder would have been himself.

  He let out a slow breath. "I'm sorry. If I'd known, I would have tried to save your research." His fist clenched, and dug the nails into his palm. Let her think it a sign of his disappointment, instead of another spastic twitch of his dying nervous system.

  "It's a setback, certainly." She shoved her fingers between his, forced his hand to open. Her voice, when she spoke again, stayed low, a breath against his ear. "When Jada died, I had to go on the run. The American government called me a traitor. I spent the next eighteen months hiding. I didn't sleep in the same bed two nights in a row for weeks at a time. When I did feel safe, it was only a matter of time before something surfaced that put them back on my trail."

  Joshi gritted his teeth and let her warmth soak into his back. "They never quite caught you, though. Just kept you running. Kept you off balance, from sleeping normally, from forming relationships with anyone. Then a representative from BlueGene offered to make it all go away."

  "Right, but how did you—?"

  "It's a modified acquisition tactic for unpredictable targets. It's highly effective. You've got nothing left, and they offer you just a taste. And then they own you."

  She slumped against him, and he couldn't fight his need to hold her anymore. He held her to his chest and hated himself for not telling her the whole truth. Knew she deserved it, but couldn't give up these few stolen moments of peace with her in his arms.

  "I always suspected they were behind it from the start," she said after a pause. "Too often it felt contrived. I could rest long enough to catch my breath, but not enough to get my feet under me. They always seemed to know where I was, but I somehow managed to spot them in time to start running again."

  "I'm sorry." Joshi was surprised that he meant it. Not just for what she'd been through, but for his contribution to the harvest of misery CorpServ had piled up in people's lives.

  "You shouldn't be. The lack of connection? The feeling that I couldn't trust anyone? That made me paranoid, and a paranoid person is going to do whatever she can to keep her knowledge safe. Even if a Corporate Services operative shows up and destroys her lab in broad daylight."

  She sounded almost smug in the revelation, and he had to keep his expression neutral as he pulled back enough to look at her. The pieces snapped into place, and he finally allowed himself a smile. "The scarf."

  "My mother tried to teach me knitting when I was a little girl, but I couldn't get it. For her it was art—this thing she did without thinking about it because she knew, intrinsically, how it should look. It wasn't until her father—my grandfather—pointed out that it was all basic math that knitting made sense. Once you understand the math, you can do anything with it."

  "It's the universal language after all." Joshi chuckled and shook his head.

  "Unfortunately, it also means you failed at your assignment. I hope you aren't too disappointed."

  "Letter of the law—I destroyed your computer. Not my fault that I didn't know about your..." he searched for the best word, "...analog backup system." He slipped his right hand into the unruly curls of her hair. "You are so full of surprises."

  Her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, and for a moment he hoped she would kiss him. When she didn't, he leaned forward slightly and gave her the excuse to close the distance. The smell of her skin surrounded him, as familiar as a favorite meal. It was so easy to get accustomed to her, he admitted to himself. So easy to lose himself in her, forget his past, and live out his remaining months with someone who knew what he had done and didn't care. Except she did
n't know. And she would absolutely care. Which is why he couldn't tell her.

  She broke the kiss and stared at him through half-lidded eyes. "We don't have time for this now, right?"

  He nodded, though the gesture killed him inside. "We do not. We have to get to someplace that can keep us safe."

  "Where's that exactly?"

  He let out another long sigh. There was no point in lying to her. "I'm not sure, but I've got a plan."

  Chapter Six

  "A

  re you sure this is safe?" Netta stayed as close as she could to him, close enough to touch him. Out of fear, she told herself. If he leaves me in this warren, I'll never get out. The endless rows of stacked shipping containers turned the dockside into a claustrophobic maze that made her long for the roominess of the alleyways and tunnels of the Blackout Zone. Despite his perfectly human eyes, Joshi had no problems negotiating his way between the crates in the near darkness.

  She didn't fare as well. The dark had forced her to rely on low-light augmentation, which flattened out distances and kept confusing her sense of depth. Worse, even with her filters cranked all the way up, she couldn't override the AR warning signs attached to every container they walked past. Swirling triangles in green, red, or yellow spun just in front of each container, topped with corporate logos and labeled with a number code she couldn't decipher.

  Joshi turned and looked at her; she watched the shadows of his face and could see his eyes trail down her. The appraisal sent a shiver of hunger along her spine and made her wish she could convince him of the need to rest overnight instead of continuing to run.

  "Safe is relative,” he said. Despite the likelihood that they were the only persons on the dock, he kept his voice quiet. “Bao is still coming to kill you. That's why we're leaving, or had you forgotten that?"

  In the distance, one of the enormous robot loaders strode across the maze of crates, the scanner on its lifting arm painting red bars across the narrow alleys and containers alike as it searched for the crate it wanted.

  "I haven't forgotten." She pushed away the image of the relentless, white-suited assassin striding across the lab for her. No need to let him invade her waking moments, his memory got enough air time when she slept.

  "Good. Then you understand why the safest place for you is aboard the Imru'al-Qais."

  "That's where your plan falls apart. How does that count as safe?" She'd heard horror stories about the floating anarchist communes that drifted through the world's oceans. Barely seaworthy, with no law except what they'd decided to impose on themselves, and no destination save what the group had agreed upon. They'd be helpless, assuming that they wouldn't just turn her and Joshi over to BlueGene at the earliest opportunity. "We're not part of their movement. There's no guarantee that they'll even help us."

  His pace slowed to a stop, and his shoulders slumped. It wasn't much, but the light amplification in her eyes made the gesture as plain as if it had been noon on a well-lit street. "They're neo-Kharijites. No masters but God. They may not agree with each other or other anarchists, but I can guarantee they're not going to sell someone out to the corporations. It would lose them standing among the other communes and cost them a lot of their freedom if they even appeared to align with BlueGene or Corporate Services." He turned and started toward the mouth of the narrow corridor. "They're safe enough."

  "I'm saying that it's not the only option, that's all." She shouldn't want him, but she did. Couldn't keep herself from touching him. He knew about her sister and didn't judge her as any more horrible than himself.

  Which only means he's got plenty of blood on his hands too.

  She moved behind him and let her hand trail up his back, rest on the tense iron of his shoulders. He arched into her hand like a cat, as though he couldn't resist her touch, and she smiled. Might as well go for broke. "Just hear me out."

  "You hired me to keep you safe, now you think you have a better idea than I do?" He turned to face her, his expression skeptical in her low-light vision.

  "Actually, I do." She placed a finger against his lips before he could interrupt. "Why does BlueGene want me dead?"

  Joshi waited until she'd lifted her finger. "Because you wasted their time and resources to create a drug that doesn't work?"

  "I created a different drug that interferes with what they were doing." The robot crane silhouetted in the distance collected its target and trundled back to load it. Netta leaned back against the side of the container and turned Joshi to face her. "Look at it a different way. Why don't you take drugs to control your IRS?"

  His laugh was as quick as it was bitter. "Clearly the vid-streams have deluded you with romantic ideas of how much money operatives actually make."

  "Which answers my question. Those drugs are expensive. The price creates a new disparity, effectively preventing implants from being the equalizer that they could be." She put her hands on his shoulders to avoid waving them about in the dark. He wouldn't be able to see them anyway. "The corporations, collectively, have no interest in actually curing Rejection Syndrome. Just as holds true with cancer and every other virulent disease that ravages mankind, there's no money in curing it, and the corporations are all about making money. If you cure it, it goes away. One sale and poof. But if you only treat it..."

  "They come back again and again." He nodded. "So by making the drugs expensive, only the right people can afford to treat the issue. Meaning other members of the corporate elite."

  "And at the same time, they aren't cured. Like any drug pusher, they've created an addict of a different sort, and set the price just low enough that their preferred client will choose to buy comfort rather than go without."

  "That's basic economics, but I don't see how that stops them from killing you." He walked to the corner and peered between the stacks. "Best-case scenario, they kill you to keep their secrets safe"

  She took a deep breath. Leading him this far felt guilty, but she needed him to understand. Needed him to see a future where they could both be right. "They're trying to silence me, but not for the reasons you think. All we have to do is prove that I've created a cure that works."

  "We." No emotion framed the word when he spoke. In the black and white she could see him stiffen and turn, like an automaton. "You haven't tested it."

  The pain was enough to drive the air from Joshi's lungs. He'd almost convinced himself that she'd stayed by his side because she trusted him. Had almost convinced himself to board the flotilla with her and try hiding for a change.

  "It's not like you think," she said. Her voice barely cut through the ringing in his ears. "It should work."

  "Is that what you told your sister too?" She winced away from his words, but he couldn't stop. "You figured I was so far gone? So untreatable that I'd grab whatever chance you could offer me?" The realization of Bao's warning crashed back in on him. Too late, he understood what the other operative had been talking about.

  "You're not that bad off! I told you, your doctor's not diagnosing you properly." Her voice had raised slightly, still careful not to shout but loud enough for him to hear the hurt in it.

  He'd been a fool to think he mattered as a person to her. As a man. He destroyed things: people, happiness, hope. All she'd seen this entire time was a test subject she could use. A tool to prove her cleverness.

  "Even more reason for me to not want to be your guinea pig." He spat the words.

  The silhouette of her shoulders slumped. "I can't run anymore, Joshi. Not again. The last time sapped all my strength, looking over my shoulder all the time. Feeling like any second they'd find me and I'd have to start running again."

  He scoffed. "The next operative won't be as good. I made my bones as one of the best harriers in the business."

  It took her time to put it together. To realize all the things he'd done to keep her off balance. To understand that it had been him from the start. But he couldn't mistake the moment she figured it out.

  "You son of a bitch." She stormed across
the space between them and slapped him.

  "I deserved that."

  "And you fucked me why? To finish the game? Make me think I was safe in a foreign city with no friends and no allies? Were they paying you for that too?"

  He spun on her, hands slamming into the crate on either side of her, pinning her in. And damn him for the thrill it sparked in his gut. She liked his strength. "Not once. I volunteered to help you settle here because I knew the city. And because I hated what I'd done to get you there."

  She shoved him back, shoved him again hard enough to make him stumble. "Why do it in the first place?"

  "Because it was the contract. Just like taking you to the flotilla. I finish jobs."

  She reached into her knitting bag, grabbed the package of cash he'd given her in the Zone, and threw it at him. The band broke on impact, and the bills swirled in the narrow alley. "Consider your contract fulfilled. I can get myself the rest of the way."

  "You'll need the cash to get on board the Imru'al-Qais. They may be anarchists, but they're not a cashless society. Take care of yourself, Doctor." He turned before she could say something else that might change his mind. She'd be fine. Fortunately, his eyes wouldn't be able to see her once he got more than a few steps away.

  Chapter Seven

  O

  ut of country or not, Joshi knew Netta wouldn't be safe while Bao still had her in his sights. The twinge behind his ribs at the thought of her being in danger didn't mean anything. Couldn't mean anything. She'd only put him on retainer to test her theories, not out of any affection for him.

  He dragged his hand down his face and growled his frustration into his palm.

  As though I hadn't agreed to help her to assuage my own guilt. They'd each been attempting to repair their pasts, in their own way. He tried to put his finger on the moment he could have pushed things in some other direction. Could have saved things for them. Nothing presented itself.