by John Appel
“And she’s doing the same on the station?”
Okereke nodded. “Got started, anyway. Old Ketti’s stooges are dug in pretty deep.”
“Like ticks,” Meiko said. Okereke looked at her questioningly. “That’s right, you don’t have them here,” Meiko said. “Parasitic insects that burrow their heads into their targets.”
“Ewww.”
“Yes, not my favorite creatures either,” Meiko said.
“Well, something like that, maybe,” Okereke said. “Ketti was rotten, that’s damn certain. Fathya, my business partner, hated dealing with him. I think she had something to do with getting Toiwa assigned to the station, but she denies it.”
Meiko scrunched her butt around, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Does your firm work with the Constabulary often, then?”
Okereke laughed at this. “Before Toiwa? Not directly. Not often, anyway. Hell, half our business came to us because people on the station couldn’t trust most of the Constabulary. At least we quote our prices up front and you have recourse to a contract court if we fuck up, instead of a sergeant making vague hints about donations.”
“But there are some you can trust?” Meiko said with a nod towards Zheng, who dozed a few meters away.
Okereke nodded again. “I didn’t know her before the trip down, but someone I do trust vouched for her.”
“That Detective Sergeant?” Meiko asked, remembering the tall, slim man who’d pulled both Okereke and Fari aside before they’d all boarded the shuttle down.
“Daniel is good people,” Okereke said with a smile. “We’ve known each other for more than thirty years.”
“I see,” Meiko said. She thought she caught a wistful note in the other woman’s voice and called up the sergeant’s image. “He’s certainly fit for his age.”
“He is.” The conversation lagged for several moments, finally broken when Okereke stirred the fire, causing a brief eruption of sparks. Okereke looked around. The others were all still asleep or otherwise unconscious. “Can I ask you a question?” she said, softly.
Meiko shrugged, studying the other woman. She was curious. “You can certainly ask,” she said. “I might not answer.”
“Fair enough.” Okereke chewed on her lip a moment, as if choosing her words carefully. “We’re in deep shit here. Not here,” she said, waving one hand to indicate the cave. “Though this isn’t exactly a resort. At least as long as they pick us up soon. But this whole situation. Assassinations, riots, fucking spies with bombs and super-hackers. My partner getting a piece of fucking rock through her leg,” she said with a nod in Fari’s direction. “So we’re stuck together, working together, for a while longer. Until this is over, anyway.”
Meiko smiled wryly. “Assuming my boss doesn’t stuff me into a closet in the embassy to keep me out of further trouble.”
Okereke snorted. “OK, sure, that might happen. Until then, though, you’re part of this team.” She looked the other woman in the eye. “And we’re going to need to trust each other.”
Meiko cocked her head. “You don’t trust me now?”
“Not entirely, no.”
That bothered Meiko and she sat up straight, her shoulders squared back. “I think I’ve proved my worth any number of times.”
“I’m not talking about your abilities.” Okereke tapped her chest. “I’m talking about what’s in here.”
What the hell? She was tired and sore and her left arm still hurt. She’d fought rioters off this woman and helped carry her partner to safety, and she still wasn’t trusted? She forced herself to speak calmly. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
Okereke blew out a breath, frustrated. “What makes you do what you do, woman? Why are you here? Are you really in this to the end?”
The intensity of her words rocked Meiko back, and she looked away for a moment. Understanding crept in, slowly. “Your motive is personal, clear-cut. But this isn’t my world, my fight, so you don’t know why I care? Is that what you mean?”
“Something like that,” Okereke said. “And whether you want the real answers about what’s going on, or just an answer,” she added. “Are you just here to make sure the vote comes off and Ileri joins the Commonwealth?”
“Ah. I see. I think.” Meiko thought for a moment. “For myself, I want the real answer. Not just because I abhor untruths.”
“That’s a strange sentiment for a spy.”
“Most of my job is really about finding the truth.” Meiko poked the fire herself, but no sparks burst forth. “These people are trying to break the peace. Keeping that peace has been my life’s work. What’s happening here is the kind of situation that could spark a conflict like we haven’t seen since the Second Colonial War.”
“Why are the Saljuans spun up so hard? Because they think that if Ileri joins the Commonwealth, the power shifts too far in your favor?”
Meiko shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. But we’ve tried space wars. They’re hard and expensive, and the example of Goa and Shenzen wrecking themselves for several generations ought to be pretty fresh in people’s minds.”
Okereke snorted. “Not everyone’s minds. There’s seventy million people on this planet, and nearly a quarter of them are under the age of thirty. They’re too young to remember the war. I bet it’s the same elsewhere.”
“Huh.” Meiko thought about that. She remembered background briefings mentioning the burgeoning demographic changes as the population-growth curve on the Cluster’s established worlds shot ever-higher. There were a lot of young people, and despite the best efforts of educators—and the free press, where it existed—she knew first-hand that people often forgot the lessons of the past.
But none of that got to Okereke’s question. And if she wanted to succeed, to clear her reputation and make whatever happened next in her career her own choice, and not that of Kumar or the legion of bureaucrats back home, she needed to work with this woman. And Zheng, and Fari, and even Teng.
How much do I need to tell her before she believes me?
“My last mission,” she said at last. “The Fenghuang recovery.” Okereke nodded but kept quiet. “It was a mess. I have—well, I had—a good bit of freedom to pursue opportunistic leads. A colleague let me know someone was hunting for a war wreck out in the wild space between Novo Brasilia and Shenzen. I signed on, and, well.” She paused as memories of desperate hours on the ice came to the fore, memories of blood and burning and of watching a young man twitching on the floor as hostile signals fired along his synapses and nerves.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and the tension flowed out of her. She could see the future after this affair clearly now. Even if she pulled it all off and Kumar gave her a glowing report, she knew this was her last hurrah.
She turned to face Okereke, and her eyes burned into the other woman’s.
“For the first time in forty years, people died because I didn’t trust them, and because they didn’t trust me,” she said. “I was running solo, and we were twelve light years from the nearest settled system. Our ship had left for repairs after encountering a leftover munition from Fenghuang’s last battle, the one in which it was supposedly destroyed. If I’d only been dealing with the prick who wanted… who wanted something the Fenghuang was carrying, I might have been able to work with the allies I made after he showed his hand.” She swallowed again. “But there was someone else along who wanted to keep secrets buried forever, and they damn near killed us all to make that happen. If I’d trusted some of my companions earlier, we might have figured things out, and some of the innocent might not have died. And yes, we rescued those survivors in the stasis capsules, people who everyone had thought dead for more than twenty years, but only just. It was a bloody mess in every way, and I fucked up, badly, for the first time in my career.
“You asked why I’m doing this. I need you to trust me, trust my motives.” She took a deep breath. “I’m done after this mission, I know that now. They’ll never let me operate in t
he field again. But I can still do good here. We can find the killer, save lives, and keep the peace. And if this is my last chance to do that work, then I don’t mean to fail. And I need your help.”
For a moment, the only sounds within the cave were the crackling of the fire. Meiko thought about the career of forty years that she knew was over, turned to ashes like the wood burning beside them.
But even as it burned, it gave light, and warmth, and saved lives.
Okereke reached out with her right hand. Meiko stared at it for a few seconds, then reached out to clasp it.
“Call me Noo.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Toiwa
Constabulary HQ, Ileri Station,
Forward Ring
“We can sustain the loss of one airplant to the rebels, ma’am. We only need one operational per ring. The others are primarily for redundancy.”
The Infrastructure supervisor for the forward ring was a lighter-skinned woman with tired, narrow eyes set in a thin, angular face. Toiwa’s constables, backed by an Army fire team, had located her at her post in the forward spindle. A fiber-optic line had been strung post-haste between the control station and Constabulary HQ, where Toiwa still maintained her base of operations. The technical services people had every fabber they could re-task running full out to make more cable.
“So taking back the plant they hold in this ring needn’t be top priority?” Toiwa asked.
The Infrastructure woman began to answer but Kala Valverdes, back on duty, broke into the call. “Governor? Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a group here that Inspector Zinsou said you’d want to see right away.”
She glanced at the identities of the new arrivals and hastened to finish the call. “Send them in, please. We’ll speak later,” Toiwa promised the station manager, and closed the connection as her office door opened. Chijindu, now sporting sergeant’s tabs on his shoulders, levered himself to his feet as the newcomers entered.
This looks like a good sign for a change. Toiwa carefully rose and made her way around her desk to greet her visitors. “M. Okafor, M. Shariff, I’m very glad to see you’re all right,” she said as she motioned for them to take seats at her briefing table. “I hadn’t realized you were both in this ring when the rebels attacked.”
“We weren’t,” Shariff said. “Pericles Loh brought us. He’s waiting in your outer office.”
Surprise rooted Toiwa where she stood, and her brain raced. What the hell is one of the leaders of the Fingers doing here? She knew who Loh was from intelligence reports, but of course she’d never met him. For a few seconds she wished Shariff’s partner, Okereke, was here rather than planetside; rumor had it she knew Loh well.
The three women seated themselves in her conversation nook as a commissary bot rumbled in bearing a tray of wrappers filled with coconut rice, strips of newt meat, crisp cucumber and boiled eggs. Chijindu transferred the tray’s contents to the table, set two wrappers in front of Toiwa, and shot her a look akin to the ones Eduardo gave her when she’d neglected to eat while studying for her lieutenant’s exam. Her heart ached at the memory.
Still, he was right. Food was fuel, and her body needed fuel to keep going. Chijindu placed spoons at each place and set the tea things on the table before fading into the background. She picked up her spoon and gestured to the women. “First things first. A senior leader of the Fingers brought you here himself?”
“Yes,” Okafor said. “Actually, his people saved me from death or capture.” Her fingers traced the edges of the paper around her serving, then peeled it open. She spooned a generous helping into her mouth.
“Could you elaborate on that, please?” Toiwa asked.
Okafor finished chewing and swallowed. “My apologies. I’ve missed several meals.” She laid her spoon down, freeing both her hands to manipulate her AR windows. She briefly related the story of her near-capture.
Toiwa heard Chijindu start to say something, then cut himself off. She turned to him. “Something to add, Sergeant?”
“Just that, well, that’s hard to believe, ma’am,” he said. “Military armor’s hardened against malware attacks.”
“I did not say it was easy,” Okafor said mildly.
“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Toiwa waved her spoon at Chijindu. “Sergeant, let’s stipulate that M. Okafor is as good at her job as you are at yours.” The big man nodded. “The Fingers rescued you. Why?”
“If Loh is to be believed, I attracted the Fingers’ attention some time ago,” Okafor said. “He knows about the ancient dark net and knew I was investigating it. He claims he received warnings about the coup just before it happened, and dispatched people to ensure my safety.”
Shariff took up the tale, and Okafor went back to her food. “In my case, he appeared at my offices in the south ring a couple hours ago with Okafor here in tow,” she said, waving her spoon at the infonet specialist. “He asked, for the sake of his long-term acquaintance with my partner, for me to broker an audience with you.”
“What does he want with me?”
“To propose an alliance for the purpose of retaking the station from Miguna’s goons,” Shariff said.
Stunned with surprise, Toiwa sank back into her chair, thoughts racing. The idea that the Fingers would take an active role in the conflict, on the side of Toiwa and the government, was incredible. She tried to reorient herself. “What is he offering?”
“You’ll have to get the details from him, but he said his assistance would be threefold,” Shariff said. “First, as he demonstrated by bringing Okafor from the trailing ring and me from the south ring, he’s got ways to bypass the rebels. No, he didn’t let me get a good look at it,” she said, waving off Toiwa’s unasked question. “Had to put my djinn in a Faraday wrapper and made me wear a blindfold.”
“You weren’t worried for your safety?” Toiwa couldn’t help but ask.
Fathya Shariff’s laugh at that was loud and ringing. “Not from anything his people might try,” she said. “He knows Noo would neuter him if he betrayed me. And if she didn’t, my granddaughter would.” Shariff sipped her tea before continuing. “As for the rest, he says bringing us here is a sign of good faith. He wants to make the rest of his pitch in person.”
“I see.” Toiwa thought furiously. With communications down, and some the bulk of the military’s arsenal in rebel hands, even the limited control her forces had over parts of the station was tenuous at best. But to deal with the Fingers, with their centuries-old legacy of extortion, smuggling, and occasional murder? Was that a bridge she was willing to cross?
Would that actually be better than capitulating to Miguna?
Maybe. If the deal is good enough.
She glanced at Sergeant Chijindu’s implacable face. Would I betray the trust of this man, and all the others putting their lives on the line, by making some kind of deal?
Could she afford to not at least hear Loh out?
Stalling for time, she turned back to Shariff. “What’s it like out there?”
The businesswoman frowned as she set down her teacup. “Not good,” she said. “With transit and the infonet down, and most fabbers and bots offline, people are stuck wherever they are with only what provisions they’ve got. Folks are taking care of each other, from what I’ve seen, helping out their neighbors, people stuck away from their home rings. No one’s going to go badly hungry for a few days, though a few might miss some meals.” She squared her shoulders and faced Toiwa directly. “But people are scared. They’ve seen soldiers and constables shooting other constables, and seizing airplants and med centers, and the university in the south ring. There’s a lot of rumors. Everyone seems to know about Miguna’s claim that he’s the new PM, but I didn’t even know you were alive until Loh told us. And”—her eyes dropped to the floor—“some of the regular people? They’re on his side. Some agree with him. Or at least the Saljuans showing up and throwing their weight around has scared them into agreeing with him on that point. There’s poc
kets held by One Worlders and their sympathizers.”
“That sounds like what we hear from down the cable,” Toiwa said. She explained the overall situation to her guests. She turned to the infonet specialist. “M. Okafor, you witnessed, at least partially, the fighting at Government House. Can you confirm whether the rebel claims the governor’s been killed are true?” Since they lied about killing me...
“While I had access to the suit, I tracked the force attacking the complex,” Okafor replied. “Loh’s people offered me video evidence confirming the governor’s death, and I verified the imagery they gave me isn’t adulterated, but a sighted person will need to view it. Loh had another data point, though, a more hopeful one. The Commonwealth delegation that arrived on Amazonas was taken with no deaths and only minimal injuries and moved to another location. His people managed to track them.”
Thank the Mother. “Give all that to Inspector Valverdes, please.”
“Already done.”
“Good.”
“It would seem, then,” Shariff interjected carefully, “that an option that might help resolve the situation quickly is worth considering.”
Right. That crystallized her thinking. “It can’t hurt to hear his proposal, I suppose.” She called Valverdes. “Show M. Loh in, please.”
For someone who by all accounts had trekked through the bowels of the station, Loh looked surprisingly dapper. He greeted Toiwa with warm politeness, and even graced Chijindu with an acknowledging nod. Toiwa cut short the niceties once he was seated. “You have a proposal. I’d like to hear it.”
“Very well.” He settled himself comfortably in his chair. “I take it the first capability I can offer has been demonstrated by bringing these two notables into your care?”
“You’re offering us access to the smuggler’s ways, or part of them,” Toiwa said more hotly than she’d intended. Fatigue had caught up with her, making her irritable. “That’s one item. M. Shariff mentioned you have two additional things to offer.”
