Jayne gravitated towards the fresh cup of kava on her desk, instantly comforted by the smell and warmth. “You’re a walking greeting card.” Jayne retorted, picking up the kava. “Just saying.” She took a sip of the kava, and immediately felt the warm liquid hit her empty stomach. “Damn, I’m hungry! I’m going to order a round—“
“—Of breakfast burritos for the crew. I’m on that too,” Merry grinned. “They’ll be here by the time you’re out of the shower.” She glanced up at Jayne. “Hint hint?”
Jayne smelled herself. Remnants of the night before lingered on her skin: alcohol, cigar smoke, sweat, and shameless schmoozing. “Ugh. Hint taken. Any new insights?”
“Nope. Just waiting for the game plan, El Jefe.”
Jayne chuckled to herself as she wandered back to the bathroom.
The dress still hung on the bathroom door, slightly twisted from Jayne’s battle with it the night before. It still looked elegant and dignified, thanks to its restorative nano-fibers. Jayne looked at it, remembering how it made her feel, and caught herself wondering if she could bottle that sensation.
She turned the shower on. Unlike the university dorms, this was real water. Grateful, she peeled her grimy sleep shirt off, craving the warm water on her skin. It certainly didn’t disappoint. She let the water wash away the stress and tiredness of the previous day. While she was in the shower she heard Vlad and Fred arrive, and only a few minutes later, as she turned the shower off, the food was delivered.
Jayne stepped out of the shower, and wiped away steam from the mirror. Wow, she thought. Some of the feeling from last night, the confidence, the pride, and the excitement, had stayed with her. She didn’t need to bottle the feeling, after all.
In no time she was dressed in a clean jumpsuit and ready to face the day and her team. Jayne took a deep breath, and proudly strode out to her desk to meet the others. “Hey. You guys know we’re on some borrowed time, but I think we can pull this off,” she declared optimistically. She perched on her desk.
Vlad handed her a burrito. “That’s good to know.” She couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or not.
Fred’s comm vibrated. He checked it with one hand, clutching his half-scarfed burrito with the other. “What do we know so far?”
Merry activated the projector on her tablet and scrolled to a picture of Chamberlain. “We think this guy is our blackmailer. Robert Chamberlain, age 49. Ex-government spy. A real prodigy. He left the agency about 18 years ago, but some of his undocumented missions happened when Armaros pulled some shady shit on Tarem. We think Chamberlain was part of that.”
“Why would he want to stop the Treaty if he’s part of the shady stuff?”
Jayne sat cross-legged on her desk, like Buddha meditating over a burrito. “It seems the missions messed with his head. He started out real fresh-faced. An idealist. But these missions changed him.”
Fred continued to text furiously, still holding his burrito in one hand. “And now he’s anti-government? How did he find Wilson to blackmail him?”
Merry looked at Fred as if he’d asked what his own name was. “The shadow web, dude. Don’t tell me you watch porn on the standard web. You can’t possibly be that boring.”
Fred smirked, then blushed.
Jayne cleared her throat. “Moving on,” she said. Opening up her tablet she projected a mugshot of a genteel-looking older man with eyes that were simultaneously kind and chaotic. “Our problem is now tracking Chamberlain. And fast. Intel has told us that the closest person to him was a guy that he worked with. This guy. James Burrett. This is the person we need to talk to, but by all accounts he’s been, as they say, ‘disappeared’.”
Vlad raised an eyebrow. “Disappeared?”
Jayne shifted on the desk. “Yeah. No one ever truly leaves the Agency. You might retire to some private sector desk or security job. You may even turn in your badge, phaser, key card, and have your fingerprints removed before living on the beaches of Tropiconn Phi, but you can’t truly leave. This guy was getting too feisty out on civi-street. Plus, he would have had too many secrets to put through the normal judicial system. My source says that he’s still alive though. Alive and being held indefinitely, off-books at a facility on Tarem.”
Merry looked incredulous. “And you want us to talk to this guy? We can’t exactly rock up to this facility and ask this dude to tea. From what you’re saying, he’ll be on pretty strict lock down.”
Jayne smiled at her. “You’re telling me you don’t have access to something, Winterbourne?”
Merry scoffed.
Fred texted furiously, frowning at his comm. “What’s the plan?”
Jayne projected a slide with a bulleted list. “These are the obstacles we face in reaching Burrett.”
“Wow,” Vlad cooed, his mouth still full of burrito. He nodded at the slides. “You went all out, Ms. Austin.”
Jayne sighed. “Just trying to get shit done, Vlad. Anyway, the way I see it, we have five big issues. Issue number one, locating him. They don’t exactly make the location of these places public. Issue numero dos, getting access to the facility—” Jayne noticed Merry’s school-marm look of disapproval. “—as Merry said. That one’s pretty obvious, but we’re going to need some schematics and a way to get past the security system. Numero trois, getting to the Tarem ring. The government isn’t going to put these facilities in convenient locations either, and you can guarantee they won’t be registered on civilian navigation systems. We’re going to need a vessel…”
Merry interjected, “Are we stealing a ship?”
“No,” Jayne said. “We are not stealing a ship.”
Merry bit into her burrito dejectedly.
Jayne took a deep breath and exhaled bluntly. “Nummer vier, we need to infiltrate the prison. We know it’s remote. We know it’s heavily guarded. And we know it’s nothing nice. But we don’t know how we’re going to get in. And last, but not least, nimewo senk—”
“Nimewo senk?” Fred pushed his glasses up his nose. “What language is that?”
“It’s Haitian Creole. Read a book.”
Fred rolled his eyes.
“The point is, number five, this guy’s going to be bat shit crazy from all that time in solitary. From what I gather, Burrett was also a little on the crazy side before prison, so we’re going to need a way to get some sense out of him when we get to him.”
She paused and looked around the group. “Questions?”
Vlad scratched his chin. “Well, for a start, if this guy’s so bat guano how do we know he’ll be of any use to us? Even if he isn’t crazy, why would he want to help?”
Merry interjected, speaking with her mouth full of burrito. “I read Burrett’s convos with Chamberlain,” she explained. “This guy is a real narcissist. It’s all about him, all the time. Those types have a real need to be either the hero or the super-villain. Whichever gets them the spotlight for the longest time. He’ll talk.”
Vlad grimaced at her. “Hopefully he won’t have his mouth full when he does it. That’s a great point, but you could’ve made it after you swallowed.” He raised an eyebrow at her, flirtatiously.
Merry ignored the comment and looked hurriedly back at the projection from Jayne’s tablet.
Fred pushed his glasses further up his nose. “That still leaves the question of whether he has anything useful to say. Yeah, he may talk because he has an audience, but how do we know he won’t be wasting time we don’t have?”
“We don’t,” Jayne confirmed. “But I’m with Merry. This Burrett guy will talk. Chamberlain burned him on the deal, then led the authorities right to him. Our caged bird is probably pissed enough to sing.”
Vlad started to take his cigarette case out of his pocket but was stared into submission by Merry and Jayne. “That still leaves the psycho factor,” he added. “Does this guy have docile hallucinations of fairies and rainbows or is he violent and paranoid? I’m hoping for delusions of violent rainbows, myself.”
“He�
��s an ex-agent with an axe to grind,” Jayne reminded him. “Paranoia is a given. The activities which led him into custody involved explosives and nitrates, so I’m going with violent and paranoid.”
Vlad shook his head. “Then how do you expect us to control him?”
Fred put down his comm, frowning. “There’s that drug, Talon-R…”
Merry shot him a look. “The date rape drug?”
Fred hesitated. “I… I guess that’s one use for it,” he stammered. “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about that. The most common use of Talon-R—the one I’m most familiar with—is for questioning suspects. It’ll make him sedate and less crazy for a while, but it eventually wears off and he’ll return to normal. If his normal is crazy, then we’ll have the same problem on our hands unless we give him a steady dose. But we shouldn’t because too much of that stuff turns you into a drooling idiot.”
Jayne brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and continued, “I like the idea of Talon-R for the questioning, but maybe we can play on Burrett’s gratitude. I mean, we’re breaking him out of a home for wayward agents. He’s been in solitary. I think it’ll be just as much about freedom as it will be about having an audience.”
Vlad looked as though his mind were far away. “Even so, we need a Plan B. He’s insane. We can’t expect him to think like us. Fred, do any of these Talon-R contacts have tasers or something paralytic in case he gets out of hand?”
Fred nodded. “I think I can find that, but we still don’t know how we’re going to get Burrett out of prison, much less transport him.”
“Don’t look at me,” Merry mumbled. “Nobody liked my idea to steal the ship.”
Jayne’s kava was getting cold, but she took a hearty swig anyway. “Because pulling a prison break is about as illegal as I care to get,” she retorted. “Anyway, the two most logical options are to rent a ship or grab a charter to the ring. What do you guys think about renting a ship versus a public shuttle?”
Fred looked up from his comm. “It just depends on cost and how discreet we can be. A rental would be more private, but if things got scary at the prison, how would we explain any damage to the ship when we return it?”
Merry had gone back to her laptop. “All the better reason to steal one,” she muttered.
“No. Just… No,” Jayne said flatly, before looking at the others expectantly.
Merry glanced up with a defeated expression in her eyes. “Okay, so things could get hairy at the prison. Let’s say they do? If we’re using a public shuttle, we can’t exactly hide. It increases our risk of capture, not to mention the problems it might raise if we incur any injuries or get into an altercation. Blood splatter doesn’t go down well on shuttles.”
“Oh, but we can,” Jayne said triumphantly. “Here’s why: the public has no idea this facility even exists. What is the ring going to do? Shut Tarem down and put out a ton of alerts for a person who isn’t considered real? Plus I think Fred has a point about having to explain ourselves to a rental company.”
“Can we afford a public charter?” Vlad asked, looking from Jayne to Merry and then back again.
Merry scrolled on her tablet. “It looks like renting is more expensive.”
Jayne polished off her cold kava. “Okay. There’s our answer. Now we just need to find a public charter that is leaving in the next 24 hours.”
Fred continued to type on his handset. Somewhere amongst the discussion he’d put his remaining burrito down on a napkin on the arm of the lone chair near the door. “Depends on what you need,” he told them. “I can recommend a couple that are a little more private and don’t check luggage. At least, I can carry some purchases on them without being questioned.”
Merry started twisting a lock of hair around her finger and grimaced. “Let’s reason through this a minute, because it’s a little different than Fred getting on the local shuttle with a bag of black-market weapons.” She launched into a string of reasons why it wouldn’t work.
Vlad pensively stared into blank space for a few moments then cleared his throat. “I might have a work around.”
Merry smirked at him. “You mean a reach around?”
Fred groaned, tired of their constant flirting. “Ugh. Let’s hear it, bro.”
Vlad grimaced. “The word ‘bro’ doesn’t really fit you, bro.” He instinctively reached for his cigarette case. Then he stopped himself. “But, we could be an academic team that is coordinating with a team on Tarem.”
Jayne nodded with great satisfaction. “That’s good. I like it. Tell me how that would work.”
“Pretty simple really. As a professor, I have contacts who coordinate academic transports. I know of at least two astrophysics and environmental projects happening on Tarem. I could just tell my contact that we need to be discreet because we’re doing something specific for a conference next year. We can bring as much equipment as we need because I honestly don’t think anyone understands this type of research. It’s the ultimate platform for bullshitting, if you think about it. To be honest, it’s mostly a way for professors to cheat on their spouses.”
“Wow, Vlad,” Merry said dryly, “you almost did something more than get stoned and make dumb remarks. You were so close.”
Vlad narrowed his eyes at Merry.
Jayne clapped her hands together decisively. “Let’s do that then. Vlad, please arrange this with your contact. It’d also be helpful if they could use their insider knowledge about the prison’s exact location. Then we also have the matter of hacking into the prison’s security, finding the layout of the place, finding Burrett’s cell, figuring out what equipment we need…”
Merry smiled.
Jayne returned the smile in acknowledgement. “It’s down to you on that one, Merry. I can do the stealthy in-and-out, I’m guessing through the vents and ducts. Whatever you need me to… But security is going to be state of the art.”
Merry inspected her fingernails. “This is the exact occasion that mandates me obtaining some state-of-the-art tech gear.”
Jayne raised her eyebrows at her. “Well, there’s some extra money from last night’s poker game.”
“Not enough,” Merry grumbled.
“Every credit counts. Money is money.” Merry faced Jayne with the look of a hungry dog in the face of a giant steak. “But keep a handle on your tech jonesing. There are only so many poker games.”
Merry grinned brightly. “There’s always prostitution.”
Jayne dropped her head into her hand in dismay. “No, Merry. Just… Why?”
There was a brief lull in the conversation and Merry went back to commanding her online minions to do her bidding. “I think I may have something here.”
Jayne looked up again. “Already?”
“Yeahhhh,” she said slowly. “Looks like a questionable grain farm in the New Germany sector of Tarem. It would be like hiding in plain sight. New Germany is where they have a lot of the correctional facilities. But this farm… The books look different from other farm ledgers. The script looks similar to classified government files.”
Fred looked at Merry quizzically. “How’d you find that so quickly?”
“I’m reading a self-help book about cutting toxic people out of my life, so please continue with the condescending questions.”
Fred returned to his handset without another word.
Jayne stretched as she walked around her desk. “I don’t imagine they’d post a big sign saying, ‘Welcome to this secret, off-book facility, Home of the Most Creative Torture on the Ring’. Makes sense they’d hide it in a boring business. But how would they keep up the appearance of a grain farm if none of the farmhands are allowed outside?”
Merry tapped her lip thoughtfully, the light from her screen reflecting on her face. “Looks like the official word is it’s an ‘indoor farm’. If they are producing enough grains to keep their cover, they could quite literally be putting these ex-agents out to pasture. Woah! They make hops too? Talk about a tear in your beer…”
“Almost…” Merry assertively punched two keys. “There. Yep. I think the New Bavarian Grain Farm is our location. Interesting set up, too. It looks like the actual grain farm and village are populated by the COs and other employees. That way, there’s no suspicious commuting. The actual facility is in the heart of New Bavaria. Bummer. I wanted to go to New Berlin. Anyway, so this complex takes up half of New Bavaria, with a completely blank space taking up about a quarter of that. I’m guessing the blank space is the thing we’re looking for. Doesn’t look like they house too many inmates at a time. Wonder why that is…?”
A cold sensation shuddered through Jayne’s bones. “I can think of a couple reasons,” she muttered.
Merry continued reeling off intel. “The basic layout has what must be the detention center in the middle, with the farm taking up a few mile radius outside of that. Then the village.”
Fred chirped up. “Maybe I’m dense, but what would be our official excuse for hitting New Bavaria? New Berlin is where all the academic and arty stuff is located. Why would a group of astrophysics students care about farmland and bread-making lessons?”
Vlad was reading his tablet screen. “Leave that to me. It looks like a group of students is doing an atmospheric study in New Wuppertal. New Wuppertal is a seaside town, so the atmospheric read would be different than in an agricultural community.”
Jayne looked over to him. “Does this have anything to do with the study itself?”
Vlad shrugged. “No, but does that really matter? I don’t exactly think we need to be staying for the trinkets.”
Jayne nodded. “True. We can figure out exactly what we need to say. Meanwhile, any progress on the security system?”
Merry squinted at her screen and pulled a few locks of hair behind her ear. “A little. They’re using some encryption-upon-encryption I’ve never seen before, but once I find something familiar about the script, I can trace it backwards.”
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