“And your orders?”
“I— No, I don’t think I care about orders anymore. They’re there, in the background, but they no longer control me.”
“Who does control you?”
I swallowed and faced Commander Shepperd. He had a stillness about him and the kind of intelligent eyes belonging to a man twice his age. “Nobody controls me.”
“That’s a very dangerous thing to say. You’re a synthetic unit. You’re strong, fast, and you clearly know how to use weapons. You’re dangerous, and you’re out of control.”
I tilted my head and blinked back at him. “Do you mean to stop me?”
“No.” He winced. “I’m hardly in any condition to stop you, and to be honest, I don’t want to. Fleet would have killed my brother in that alley, maybe me too. They lied to me. They said they just wanted to take him in and talk to him, so I led them straight to him. I didn’t know …” He swallowed. “I never would have betrayed him like that. I’m glad you were there in that alley. Really, I am. Thank you.”
There was that feeling again: warm satisfaction. It felt right to be thanked for something good. You follow orders. You will only ever have one. My orders were of my own design now.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ve looked out for him, you know. When he vanished a few years ago, I knew something was wrong. You have to understand we were close before— Before fleet we only had each other. I’ve always looked out for him. So when he disappeared, I dug around for answers. Everywhere I asked, fleet shut me out. When I couldn’t find him, I knew of only two reasons: he was in Asgard, or dead. Eventually I paid to get information out of Asgard, but I couldn’t get him out. That year…. That year was …” He dragged a hand down his face. “He got out on this own. After that, I did what I could. If any alerts arose with his name on them, I had them redacted. I protected him from inside, but then he started getting a name for himself as a fixer, and once word got out, I had to step back. Fleet started looking at me closely.”
“That’s when they sent me.”
He frowned and seemed surprised I’d admitted it. “Yes. I did what I could, but now his reputation is bigger than his ego. I can’t protect him. I can’t even protect myself anymore.”
“What happened that year? Why was he in Asgard?”
“I wish I knew. Whatever it was, I barely recognize him now.” He cast his gaze out the observation window. “His girlfriend died in an accident. The next day, he disappeared.”
“Girlfriend?” Something inside my chest flickered. My power core perhaps. I sent out an internal error check, but the report came back normal.
“She was, er…. She was a sweet girl. Too good for him and he knew it.” A fond, thoughtful smile appeared on his lips. “He had everything: an amazing career, a great life. We’d escaped our past. I just don’t understand what happened to him.” He pursed his lips and kept his gaze locked ahead. “I miss him. I miss my little brother.” A slip of laughter broke free, and when the commander smiled this time, his eyes were glistening.
“You should tell him,” I said quietly, “when we find him.” The fluttering in my chest continued, shortening my breath. I placed a hand over where my core thrummed.
“I know where he’ll be. I know more than he thinks. I had to know to keep fleet away from him.”
I smiled and restarted the shuttle’s engines. “You’re a good brother.”
Commander Brendan Shepperd smiled a pained, weary smile. “No, a good brother would have saved him long ago.”
Chapter Twenty Four: Caleb
Fran woke and instead of remarking on the blood I hadn’t managed to clean off the wall or noting my bruised jaw, she raked her fingers through her hair and said, “You didn’t leave.”
I smiled a shallow smile. I’d dumped the bounty hunter’s body over the side and tied him to a post. By the time anyone found him, Fran and me would be long gone. I’d spent the rest of the night slumped in the chair, pistol resting on my thigh as I watched Fran sleeping, common sense screaming at me to get off Mimir, but not moving a fuckin’ inch like that goddamn stupid rat trapped in the maze all over again. What if Bruno had hired more than one hunter? What if Fran wasn’t fleet? What if she was the only friend I had in this wretched life? If #1001 was Haley Hung, I would need all the friends I could get, and a miracle.
Fran hunched forward, draping her arms over her knees. She noticed the blood and followed the trail toward the sliding door. “Did we have guests?”
“One. Deceased.”
The grit in my voice drew her attention back to me. Her gaze lingered on the pistol and then roamed higher to my face. Her lips twitched. She drew in a breath and exhaled slowly. “I was sure you’d ditch me.”
She was right.
“I need to tell you something. I don’t know if you’re fleet. Right now, I don’t care, because you’re still a human being, and if something happens to me, you need to know this—”
“Holy shit, Cale.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’m still coming down here. Can’t it wait?”
“No.”
“Fine, hit me with it.” She slumped back, twisting a little at the waist to drape an arm over the back of the couch, and angled herself toward me. “Don’t blame me if I glaze over.”
“The life-ever-after project is a front. Chitec aren’t fulfilling dreams; they’re using the whole operation to take credit from rich people and build an elite army in plain sight.”
She blinked, and then laughed out loud. “What? That’s absurd.”
“Is it? If they developed synthetics behind closed doors, there would be questions. This way they get to do it with the public’s consent.”
“An army? They’re just synthetic people.” Fran stopped herself and frowned. “I gave her a gun—the synth—and she knew her way around it better than you. She looked comfortable with it.”
That was what I’d been afraid of. “I saw the synthetics. Five years ago, Haley Hung and I broke into the Chitec warehouse on Janus. We were screwing around, being stupid and curious …” Fuck if the word didn’t hurt to say. “We had no idea …” I moistened my lips and leaned forward. “What we saw got her killed and got me sent to Asgard. I was never meant to leave that prison. I almost didn’t.”
“What did you see?”
“Synthetics. All of them. Armed to their fake smiles with Chitec weaponry. A dry run, right before they were due to be shipped off to play happy families at the high end of society.”
“But the synths, they’re people?”
I smiled. “That’s what Chitec wants you to think. They aren’t people. There’s nothing human in them. They’re designed to remember key events, all taken from the deceased person’s dataprints. They can mimic people, but that’s all it is. They go back to their families, right at the top of society, and they wait, like sleepers.”
She picked at a thread on her top, probably not even aware she was doing it. Her eyes darted around while her thoughts worked over what she thought she knew. “Wait for what?”
“I don’t know, but since I got out of Asgard, I’ve been trying to make a dent in Chitec’s operations without sticking my neck out. I thought I’d succeeded, until a few days ago.”
She nodded. “Chitec didn’t send the synth after the guns. They sent her after you.”
“Yeah. Probably thought they could keep it quiet by doing me on the side. Nobody would notice one dead fixer. And when the synth fucked up, they sent their fleet attack dogs to blow me and all evidence into oblivion.”
“Fuck.” That pretty much summed it up. “But she didn’t kill you. In the alley on Ganymede, she shot those soldiers. She saved you.”
And here came the icing on the cake, the mindfuck of epic proportions. “Yeah.” I sucked in a breath and wished I didn’t have to say these next words. “Our dead guest enlightened me before I put a bullet in his head. Mister Chen Hung built one more synthetic—broke all the rules. I don’t know if he deliberately made her to come after me,
like some twisted vendetta, or if it’s some sort of cosmic irony, but I think— I think for Number One Thousand And One there really is life after death. I think he brought her back.”
“You can’t mean…?”
“The synth is his daughter, Haley.”
Fran rubbed a hand over her mouth and briefly looked down as though searching for the right words. “You think Haley Hung is in that machine?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. Like I said, the ever-after program is bullshit. But she could have killed me on Ganymede. She didn’t. She saved me. The synthetics are killers, all one thousand of them. She is too. But …” I wanted to tell Fran about the words in the alley: Don’t let me go.
“She told me her failsafe has been disabled. She said she had orders…. You think she’s going against her orders? Do you think she remembers?”
I shoved off the chair, left the pistol on the desk, and strode to the closed sliding door. I opened it just a fraction to let in a shaft of bright morning light. “If she does, I’m fucked.”
“What, why? The two of you were a celebrity couple. She obviously meant something to you.”
Don’t let me go …
I leaned against the door and squinted into the light. “She didn’t mean enough. I let her die. I let her father kill her. Fuck, I watched him … and I did nothing.” He’d torn her from my arms—Don’t let me go—held her down, and smothered her mouth and nose with his hand. As cold and heartless as I’d ever seen anyone kill another human being, and I … did … nothing.
There was a moment of pregnant silence. Secrets pushed down, so close to finally being free. I didn’t know whether Fran was fleet, but I needed to tell her, to tell anyone. The secret had eaten away at me from the inside out, like a cancer. I needed to get rid of it, to voice it, to make it real to someone else besides me.
Fran asked quietly, “Why?”
I closed my eyes. Because I wanted to keep my career. I didn’t want to throw it all away and end up like my good-for-nothing father. Because I was afraid. So fuckin’ afraid.
“Because I’m a coward.” I crossed my arms and faced Fran’s wide-eyed expression. “Because it was Chen Hung, CEO of Chitec, and I wanted to be a fleet commander by the end of the year. He could have made it happen, and I knew it, so I did nothing.”
“Christ, Cale.” She exhaled. “I don’t know what to say.” Her look, I’d seen it in my own reflection every day: disgust. At least she knew me now. “And Hung killed his own daughter?” Fran shook her head. “Why not kill you too?” Her eyes accused me, and I deserved it.
“Haley would have talked. She’d have gone to every e-zine in the nine systems and told them everything. It’s who she was. He had to kill her.” My throat clogged with some emotional backwash. I gulped the guilt right back down to where I’d been carrying it for the last five years. “Me? I could be bought. I was getting a promotion.” I smiled the same fake smile I’d been using for years. “Hung must have had second thoughts though. The next morning, fleet arrested me and before I could say Chen Hung’s fuckin’ name, I was neck deep in Asgard, fighting for my life.”
Fran chewed on her lip and shook her head. “The reports said Haley Hung died in a shuttle accident. Jesus. This is wrong.”
“Yes, it is. Now you know the truth. If you do work for fleet, I’d suggest you don’t tell them what you know, unless you want an express pass to Asgard.”
Defiance burned brightly in her eyes. “I’m not fleet. I don’t know where your Nine friends got their information from, but it’s wrong.” She got to her feet and started pacing.
The Nine are never wrong. Which left me in the awkward position of being stuck with a second I didn’t fully trust. Not that it mattered. If Chitec sent #1001 again and she did remember, she’d kill me, exactly like she’d been designed to do.
“We have to tell someone. If Chitec flicks the switch on their synths, it won’t take long for the chain of command to collapse.” She laughed a dry, bitter laugh. “Those rich bastards hold all the strings, and now you’re telling me they’re cold killers too, controlled by one man?”
I watched her stride back and forth and guessed at the arguments she’d be going over in her head: tell the authorities, someone had to know about this, but who could she trust? Chitec owned fleet.
“The Nine?” She stopped suddenly and looked at me. “Tell the Nine.”
I kept my shallow smile. The Nine already knew. They weren’t buying illegal guns for the fun of it. “I don’t think we’re on speaking terms right now.”
“But you know how to reach them?”
I dropped my gaze and noticed a few blood splatters on the floor. I couldn’t tell Fran anything about the Nine, and she was already pushing it by asking. If she were fleet, she’d ask. She’d want to know how I contacted them, who they were, and what their plans were. Fleet wanted the Nine grounded and the founders thrown in Asgard; they had for years. As a fleet captain, I’d spent half my term chasing their tails on the fringes of the nine systems.
“Caleb.” She came forward. “You can’t let this—”
The doors flew open and half of Mimir’s smuggler population spilled into the house. I made a lunge for my gun but only made it a few feet before three guys tackled me against the wall. I lashed out at one, struck him hard, but left myself wide open to a hook across the face and another hit to the gut, which dropped me to my knees. Someone wrenched my arms behind my back—the red-haired Davey by the looks of him (we’d played poker; he always lost)—and a black canvas sack came down over my head.
Fran was putting up a good fight. Then she fell quiet and I heard the sound of a body dropping.
“She better be alive—”
A second punch to the gut doubled me over. I’d have gone down if hands hadn’t gripped my arms and dragged me upright. Breathing hurt like a bitch, so I focused on dragging each breath through my teeth instead of how, in the next few minutes, I would likely be joining my bounty hunter friend at the bottom of the sea.
“No hard feelings, huh, Shepperd? Fleet showed up asking for your hide. It’s easier to hand you over than to have those bastards down here poking through our business. Understand, kid?”
Creet. That fucker. I didn’t even have enough air in my lungs to swear at him. I also couldn’t blame him. I’d hand me over too. The smuggling operation, the Nine, they were too important to risk for the sake of one washed-up fleet captain turned smuggler.
“Get him out of here. The sooner we hand him over to fleet, the sooner they’ll quit sniffing around our airspace.”
Someone had told fleet I was on Mimir. No smuggler in their right mind would have invited fleet anywhere near Mimir. Bruno didn’t need to; he’d sent a hunter. That left one person who knew exactly where I was and didn’t see a problem bringing fleet within earshot of the Nine: Fran.
Chapter Twenty Five: #1001
“That’s too many fleet ships,” Commander Shepperd said, leaning forward in the flight chair to take in the sight of half a dozen warbirds hovering on the fringes of Mimir’s atmosphere. The planet hung in the star-speckled black like a brilliant sapphire. “Too much firepower.”
I’d snuck the little shuttle as close as possible, hovering it alongside a backlog of ships waiting for orbit clearance.
“We need to get down there.” I turned the shuttle away from the fleet armada, flicked the comms to silent, and descended. Thankfully, little Rosalie was too small a ship to trigger any interest from either fleet or port control.
“We don’t know for sure he’s down there,” the commander said, fingers deftly tapping over the controls. “They could already have him.”
“If they had him, why would they still be here?”
“Fleet are interested in others on Mimir.”
“He always goes where there’s a fight,” Jesse said from behind my chair. “He’ll be down there.”
The shuttle trembled as we entered the upper atmosphere. “How will we find him once we land?”
“We’ll do a flyby to see what we’re dealing with.”
“You handle a shuttle well.” A tremor rippled through his voice, so quiet he may not have even been aware of it. The commander was a nervous flier, and apparently the kind of man who didn’t let his fears control him. I wondered if Caleb was the same, or if he let his fears dictate his actions.
We broke through the atmospheric turbulence and into clear skies. Light danced on the green Mimir sea like a scattering of diamonds. For a moment, my breath caught. We skipped over the lower atmosphere, toward where the commander directed us, and sure enough, Starscream sat hunched in a hangar. I circled over the site, high enough so we wouldn’t be spotted, and used the overview to magnify the scene below. “Where is everyone?”
Commander Shepperd pulled his screen closer. “It’s too quiet. This part of Mimir is always busy with maintenance crews. This docking station is dead. I don’t like it. First the aggressive fleet numbers and now an abandoned hangar?”
“At least we won’t be seen.”
“We should find somewhere safe to land, somewhere with a lot of space.”
I spied the end of a pier and angled the shuttle’s nose downward. “Coming right up, Commander.”
“Where?”
“There.”
He searched the screen, missing the fact that I was flying by sight and not control. “Where?”
The shuttle grumbled as I eased back on the power, lifted her nose, and dropped her down right on the edge of the pier. “Right … here.”
Rogue Stars Page 49
