by Matt Wallace
Finally, Rico rounds a corner and spots Danforth, the leader of Red Moon Company. Once upon a time, Danforth was a Purist Nation commando, just like Rico. Danforth was naked when it happened. His big body is charred black with flakes of deep red. Rico doesn’t know what expression Danforth had when he died because Danforth doesn’t have a face anymore.
Everywhere, there are bodies. Red Moon Company is no more. Rico is the only one left.
Later, Rico will learn that Purest Steel knew the magistrate’s hired guns were frequenting the bordello. Two Pure’s planted a homemade explosive in the upstairs rooms and waited for the Red Moon mercs to retire for the evening with their chosen companions.
Rico will briefly consider going after the gang, seeking vengeance, retribution for his comrades. He will realize the idea is something left over, some bit of instinct from his service days that will never fully die out. He will realize the Red Moon mercs were not his brothers-in-arms, just his co-workers.
He was lucky. He will choose to stay that way.
But all of that comes later. Right now the smell of burnt flesh and scorched wood is the overwhelming sensory input of the moment. Rico still cannot hear. He can’t really see.
The glimmering cinders on a wall move and shift, reshaping into the form of a snake-like man wearing a top hat.
How much more do you want to see here, cher?
Rico has to see all of it, just like he saw it when it happened in real life. The Red Moon mercs, he gets that — live by the gun, die by the gun. It’s the girls that bother him. They are small. They are young... some younger than any corpse should be.
And there’s a room, far away enough from the center of the blast to remain intact, but not far away enough to protect its occupants. It’s a room several of the working girls used to protect that which they didn’t want their clients and their business to sully.
Last chance, boy, the Loa says. Now the Loa is fully formed. It sits on Rico’s shoulder, neither angel nor devil. It whispers in his ear, simply an observer who has been a part of this scene many times before. Why not turn away this time? You don’t need to look... you don’t need to look.
Rico’s last chance to avoid this scene was long before now. It was years ago when he had the choice to become something besides this, besides a mercenary.
Rico steps inside the room, and the same words echo hauntingly in his sleeping mind that echoed in the actual moment.
High One help me, he thought somewhere under the ringing in his ears, this is a nursery...
Chapter 9: Fred
When Fred woke, his pulse was normal. His breathing was calm, regular. Practice makes perfect, it seemed — some of the dreams had come so often, they were like watching a familiar old movie. No surprises. This time, however, there were a few after-images. That happened sometimes. He blinked them away, his eyelids shuttering between horrific still frames until the past faded away and the present reclaimed dominance, until all he saw was the flophouse room’s dingy ceiling.
Fred sat up. His skin was damp here and there, but he wasn’t sweating, not really. Usually the memories that plagued his dreams were gone as soon as he opened his eyes. Sometimes, however, he couldn’t help reminiscing on those events and the ones that followed.
Those girls... that nursery... the little kids...
He couldn’t do anything for them then, and he couldn’t do anything now. If he hadn’t been part of Red Moon? Those same people would still be dead.
Fred folded his legs into the lotus position. He rested his hands on his knees. He breathed in slow, let it out slower. There was no Loa in the real world. Here, he was his own guide, and he could control his thoughts.
He could make those memories go away.
He finished his short meditation, then stood.
The memories hadn’t gone anywhere. Fred sighed. Some forms of meditation were better than others. He reached under the room’s lone chair and retrieved his shoulder rig. The blade of a knife whispered to him as he freed it from its sheath. He liked that sound. Not in any perverse or sadistic way. He liked that he could rely on it and what it meant. He liked the control.
In the dark room, Fred settled into a fighting stance. He worked his body through an old knife drill from his days as a raw recruit. He struck at the vulnerable points on an invisible opponent standing in front of him, slashing and puncturing each one in sequence over and over again. Sternum. Abdominal aorta. Perineum. Femoral artery. Brachial punch, then pierce the mandible.
Stab a man in the heart and loss of consciousness is instantaneous. Death follows in seconds. Stab him above the clavicle and blood will spray out so hard it will splash against the ceiling.
Fred slashed and skewered his invisible opponent until a thin sheen of sweat covered his body. Now, he was breathing hard, breathing hard in the good way of the here and now, not in the bad way of anguish and loss from which he would never be free.
When he’d bled an entire imaginary legion dry, he finally stopped. Fred stood perfectly still for a moment, sucking wind and staring at the vague outline of wall in the darkness.
Suddenly, he hurled the blade in his hand at that same wall. It struck with a loud, dull thud, buried several inches deep in the cheap plaster.
Fred thought he heard some muffled, sleepy complaint from the occupant of the next room, but he ignored it. He left the knife there. He dropped down to sit on the edge of his bed. He held his skull in his hands.
Fred found his head was suddenly throbbing quite badly.
Chapter 10: The History of a People
The Micovi Archives was a plain brown building forgotten by most. If Fred had learned one thing during his time in the mines, it was that the majority of people on this colony put little value on the past — or the future for that matter. They had nothing but the present. Here, life was short, and every moment had teeth of a hundred different shapes and sizes. People started each day wondering if they’d live to see the dawn.
Fred always expected more resistance when it came to penetrating government buildings. There was usually better security, and there was always more bullshit and bureaucracy. He was no master thief, no great cat burglar. He very rarely scaled walls or zip-lined onto rooftops. His specialty was walking right through the front door and receiving a nod and a wave from every uniform he encountered.
To do that here he would need to have a good disguise and the documents to back it up.
Fred started by spending some time at the Micovi coroner’s office. It was a busy place. He posed as a mining rep — from Achmad Drilling, not Rhingold — saying he would stay out of the way, he just wanted to find ways to streamline the body-delivery process. The first part of that, stay out of the way, was what the overworked coroner’s office staff wanted to hear. The second part, streamline, was also music to their ears: if he could save them some work, even a little, they were happy to tolerate his presence.
He learned what he needed to learn. The coroner was one of a few official offices that would have a reason to request access to the archives records, although he noticed they rarely did. Fred took note of their procedures, and he took special note of the coroner’s office workers themselves. We watched how they behaved and how people were used to them behaving.
After that, it was a simple matter of forging the right credentials and papers and acquiring the right clothing. A few touches from his masquerade kit did the rest.
When Fred walked through the rickety double doors of the archives, he was Dr. Edward Howe, assistant coroner. He was there to request files on a minor shipping magnate that died two weeks ago. The magnate had been a wealthy man, and two different women — both of whom had some pull with a shot-caller on Micovi — were presenting as his wife and attempting to claim the body. Only the official family records could help the coroner’s office clear things up.
Fred had all the right paperwork to back up the story — or at least paperwork that looked right.
There was a single office clerk on dut
y at the desk. Fred had waited until the last shift to make his move, when staff was minimal. The rest of those on duty at this time were mostly janitorial staff.
The clerk was a younger man, his attention fixed on a portable screen in his hands. From the sound, Fred thought he was watching a sporting event.
He approached the desk.
“Hi there, chief. I’m from the coroner’s office—”
“Dropping off or picking up?” The clerk was less than interested. He didn’t even look up.
“Well,” Fred began, a little thrown. “I need to locate some records on—”
“Records room is down that hall,” the clerk said with a single jerk of his head to a large archway to the right.
Fred looked at the entrance the kid had indicated. There wasn’t even a door between them and the hallway beyond. The pragmatic part of him couldn’t accept how easy this seemed and maybe didn’t want to accept that he’d spent four days preparing his disguise and cover story for this.
“Do you need me to fill out—”
The clerk finally looked up. “Look, man, if you can find whatever you need, you might as well just take it before it rots back there with the rest. Just don’t expect me to know where to point you. I’m third shift. I’ve never even been in there.”
“Thanks,” Fred said and walked down the hall. Yep, four days, wasted. That’s what he got for not scouting the full mission before diving into preparation for a single part.
The records room was suffering from terminal neglect. It was a tomb of scattered hard and soft copies that seemed to have almost no remaining order to any of it. A few moments of study made him realize the fact that looking for twenty-year-old files was actually going to work in his favor. The older records were in much better shape than the more recent filings. It seemed as if the Micovi archives was a system progressively breaking down, and its condition had accelerated drastically in the last few years.
Hacking their database proved to be the easy part. The technology was decades out of date, and there was little information here that anyone cared to protect. Most of the rich probably had their records kept elsewhere. Hell, they probably had their own system to handle deaths, even their own coroner. That was the way of things on Micovi.
He tapped into the computer records. He attached a worm-disc to the interface and set it to run, cross-referencing Quentin’s DNA with the names Quentin Barnes and Quincy Carbonaro.
The program found a hit almost immediately: Cillian Carbonaro. As Fred looked at the data, he understood why — Cillian had been in the Purist Nation military. The Nation didn’t keep closed records on non-Church citizens, unless you were in the armed forces. Cillian’s DNA — just like Fred’s — had been recorded as the main tracker for his military record.
The common DNA sequences left no question: this was Quentin’s father.
Fred called up Cillian’s record, only to find that most of it was blank. His military record showed a date of induction, boot camp and then... nothing.
“Cillian, my friend,” Fred said, “what kind of work did they have you doing?”
Possibly something high level, something secret. No discipline record, no deployment record, no commendations, health exams, nothing. A soldier with no military history? Such a thing didn’t exist.
Fred found a link to Cillian’s family. He let out a slow breath as he clicked it: if this information was also blank, he’d hit a dead end.
There wasn’t much in the family record, but it wasn’t blank:
Cillian Carbonaro, 2638-
Wife: Constance Carbonaro, 2637-
Daughter: Jeanine Carbonaro, 2654-
Son: Quaid Carbonaro (deceased), 2637-2637
Son: Quincy Carbonaro (deceased), 2659-2668
Son: Quentin Carbonaro (deceased), 2664-2671
No links, just names. No way to find out more about any of them, at least not from this record.
Fred stared at the readout. It made him feel sad, but also hopeful. Sad because of so much loss: one boy who didn’t make it past his first year, another dead at nine years old for stealing bread. Quentin was marked as dead, but that was probably a records error at the overburdened orphanage system. Maybe someone had done that as a kindness, to try and free him of his brother’s debt. Whatever the reason, a seven-year-old Quentin had been given a new name, and that new name had separated him from any connection with his real heritage.
Hopeful because there was no death record for the father, the mother and the sister. Why hadn’t Quentin ever mentioned a sister?
Fred finally had something to work with. The computer database had nothing else, but he was surrounded by several tons of paper — hard-copy records that had probably never been entered into the computer. Paper... just amazing how backward this place was.
Fortunately, Fred came prepared. He dug a small rectangular device with an adhesive back from his kit. It was a combination high-intensity X-ray scanner and data-retrieval program. Once attached, it would read every page in a stack five feet deep and scan each one for preprogrammed key words and phrases.
He entered the names into the scanner. That was the easy part. The real work that night turned out to be separating and stacking files so Fred could scan them. After ten minutes he felt more like a mover than a military-trained private investigator. He was also working up a hell of a sweat. Maybe he should hire an assistant. In the movies, the investigator always had a young assistant who was willing to do the grunt work.
He often entertained that thought, and just as often, he chased it away. He had a lonely job, but at least he didn’t have to bury anyone else. You work with someone, you get close to them. You get close to someone, you lose them — Fred never wanted to get close to anyone ever again.
After three hours, he was beginning to consider he might be at this all night with no results when the scanner lit up a deep, affirmative green. That meant a hit.
He lifted the scanner from a stack of folders and checked its readout. The small screen displayed an image of a faded document that included the name Carbonaro. It also told Fred how deep into the current stack the image was taken.
What Fred pulled from the stack turned out to be an official death record, but one that hadn’t been fully filled out.
“Why can’t it ever just be easy?” he said to no one.
The form had a last name, Carbonaro, and a sex designation, female, but no first name. There was also a destination for the remains: Grim Tyrant Valley.
Which one was it? Constance or Jeanine? One of them was dead. Which would be worse news for Quentin: his mother or his sister? And what news did Fred have, really? Your mother or sister is dead for certain, but the other one is probably dead as well, even though I don’t have a record of it. And, come to think of it, your father is also probably gone because Micovi is the armpit of a system that is the armpit of the galaxy.
No death record didn’t mean a lot on Micovi. You were lucky if you got a grave, luckier if anyone documented your passing. Cillian was probably just as dead as his wife, just as dead as his sons, just as dead as his daughter.
No matter which one — sister or mother — Fred knew Quentin would be crushed. A starting Tier One quarterback, the face of a franchise, watched by billions and worshipped by millions, yet for all of that, he was just a twenty-year-old kid.
Fred examined the piece of paper closer. There was a date field, but that corner had been torn off the form. There was one more field filled out: Remains received by Alastair Britton, Grim Tyrant Valley sexton.
Fred started to put the piece of paper back where it belonged when he heard the distinctive rush of air behind him.
Fred had only a second to react, but it was more than enough. He picked up the biggest stack of files he could heft and swung it one hundred eighty degrees. It collided with the small, winged body that was attempting to dive-bomb the base of Fred’s skull and sent it careening into the wall of the records room. That body hit hard and fluttered disjointedly to t
he floor.
Fred reached under his coat and unsheathed his concealed kerambit. He walked over to the body, reached down and grabbed the thing by its wing, lifting and pinning it to the wall.
“Goolie,” Fred said, “we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“You’ve damaged two of my sensory pits, you ground-walking, milk-fed grrrshhaaat!”
The final word was a garble. It had to be a Harrah insult that his speaker-box couldn’t accurately translate.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Fred said. “That is, if Harrah even have mothers. I need to read up on inter-species biology.”
Something metallic caught Fred’s eye. He glanced at the floor. Down there was a small needle attached to a curved handle that fit the Harrah mouth-flaps. It was a syringe gun — if Goolie had gotten close enough, that needle would have probably gone right into Fred’s back.
“Goolie, what’s in the syringe?”
“What syringe?”
Fred actually laughed and was surprised by the sound.
“You know, Goolie, I should clip these wings of yours. But I’m not going to do that. Do you know why?”
“Because you know I’m connected and you’d be killed for it?”
“No,” Fred said. “And you’re not really that connected, Goolie, or you wouldn’t be doing a job on shucking Micovi, where your kind would be killed by most of the sentients here. I’m guessing you’re here because you owe someone a favor. Someone powerful. Am I right?”
“Then I don’t know why you’re not going to clip me,” he said, avoiding the question about who had hired him.
“I’m not going to kill you out of professional courtesy,” Fred said. “Whatever else you might be, you’re a specialist. Like me. A very skilled one at that. And that’s something I value, even if you don’t.”
For once, Goolie seemed speechless. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t tell yet if Fred was being honest.
Fred then slowly twisted Goolie’s wing until the dwarven Harrah hissed in pain.
“However,” Fred said, “professional courtesy extends only so far. I’m going to pretend whatever is in that syringe wouldn’t do me any harm because if I found out you were trying to kill me? Let’s just say that Sklorno are not the only species that likes the taste of Harrah. You keep putting yourself in front of me, and your second-story days will be over.”
