Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  "Guy's a dot-com geek named Zander Reeves, got rich on empty promises, and bailed before the crash rolled along. Used to be worth millions, but from what I gather, he's been burning it to support his dragon habit."

  "Do you know where he is?"

  "His house on the north side. Smug shit never moved once."

  "But he wasn't the direct actor so you went for Omicron."

  "Scary how much we think alike, only you're five steps behind."

  "We'd get along better if we had fewer discourses at gunpoint." Nikki flipped me off. "You have a nice evening now."

  I looked up Zander Reeves online and got an address on the north side. A recently annexed suburb full of overpriced houses and subpar infrastructure. I strolled out of there just as security was rushing up to tell me to leave. I did so without complaint. Boarding the little moped, I puttered off north. If we had a real detective in town, it wouldn't have taken us so long to follow up on the Hierophant. I was the closest approximation the Community had right now, and its one of those things I'm not that good at.

  I didn't know what I expected to find, but the house I was looking at was gaudy in its scale, but otherwise ordinary. It had the cheap "McMansion" vibe to it, vinyl siding, asphalt roof, triple-pane windows, three car garage, nothing that screamed cultist. It didn't even look like quality construction. A nice big "private property" notice graced the chain-link fence, along with a "We don't call 911" sign. It was the sly-wink version of the old "trespassers will be shot" signs. Thermal did pick up a pair of armed guards walking the perimeter. They had night vision instead of flashlights, and what looked like full-size battle rifles. A bad choice for a residential neighborhood. Of course, they walked around in the dark so no one would see that.

  Slipping back to the moped, I tucked my windbreaker into a saddlebag and plotted a course of infiltration. If my hand wasn't busted, I'd have gone with slip past the guards, climb the garage, and enter on the second floor. Problem is, aside from the climb, I was pretty sure the windows were alarmed. Since I was right-handed, and disabling alarms requires a bit of a deft touch, that wasn't the optimal point of entry. I watched the guards make another circuit, and debated ambushing them. I thought about my broken hand and the massive blind spot on my right side. It didn't seem like the best course of action. As they passed the corner of the house, a flutter of motion caught my eye. An innocuous detail that had escaped me before.

  A second floor window was open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. While it was inaccessible, it cast doubt on the assumption that the alarm system was active. Residential alarms could have multiple zones, but they tended to be split up by floor. The windows overlooking the garage roof could well be accessible without triggering an alarm. I went through the route again. Over the fence, onto the deck, on the railing, up to the garage roof, and to the isolated window. One of the reasons McMansions tended to be such godawful ugly buildings was because they were designed from the inside out, with the exterior treated as an afterthought. This meant little things like roof drainage and the rational placement of windows ended up neglected in favor of internal accoutrements.

  God bless the lazy bastards.

  Part 29

  I don't think the homeowner whose property backed onto Zander Reeves' back yard would have appreciated me using their nice gas grill as a platform to vault over the fence, but luckily they appeared to be sleeping. I rolled into a crouch in case the guards noticed my stunt. They continued walking away from me, the limited field of view from their night vision goggles stealing almost as much peripheral vision as I'd lost. Staying low, I skulked onto the deck as the guards continued towards the front lawn. The railing provided a little less of a boost to the garage roof than I'd expected, but I was able to slither onto the asphalt shingles. Easing myself into the darkest patch I could find, I watched the guards make another circuit through the back yard. They didn't look up.

  Window locks were an obnoxious little beast, not meant to be opened from the outside. Of course, while the realtor had all but certainly prattled on about the insulating and energy savings properties of triple-paned windows, they'd failed to mention that the locks were cheap. Another selling point which got undeserved attention was the ability to swing the panes inward to clean the outside. I should have paid more attention to which latch I was working, because I nearly leapt out of my skin when the lower half of the window fell inward. The curtains bulged and parted, leaving me staring at the upstairs hall, my heart in my throat.

  The light was off, but a wedge of illumination poured out of one of the doors on the left. A diffuse glow emanated from downstairs. Half the span of the hall was a balcony over the entryway. I lowered myself in to the side of the window. Closing my point of entry, I returned the curtains to their previous state. The lack of decor struck me. No furniture, decorations, or knick-knacks had been spared for the hallway. The rug running along the hardwood looked so generic that it probably came with the house. It suggested a lack of feminine influence. After all, in the male mind a hall existed to connect room A with room B, not serve as a display area.

  As I crept towards the wedge of light, I was acutely reminded of my lack of an eye when I tried to glance in. Instinct made me put as little of myself into the opening as possible. Shifting far enough to get my left eye over the gap left me feeling terribly exposed. It was a bedroom, but no one was inside. The wall hangings, furniture and dirty clothes suggested the occupant was an adolescent male, rather than a manchild who hadn't grown out of adolescence. Turning off the night vision on my goggles, I looked over the hall again. The dim glow under one of the doors further down jumped into high contrast with the shadowy surroundings.

  As I passed that door, I heard a flush and a tap starting. I found a darkened door and slipped inside. The occupant stepped out of the bathroom and leaned against the balcony rail. He looked to be my age, or a smidgeon younger. "Hey, Ms. Carver," he called. "Why don't you come on upstairs?" His voice had the smug tone of someone used to getting their way.

  "I think not," a woman's voice called back. I presumed it to be Ms. Carver. "Your father wouldn't appreciate it."

  "He's not here, and you're supposed to be keeping an eye on me," he said. "You can keep a real close eye on me." The conceit in his voice made me want to make him eat the railing.

  "Uh, no," Ms. Carver said. The youth grumbled something obscene. I resisted the urge to inflict pain on the brat.

  "You need to stop playing hard to get," he said. I wanted to strangle the little shit. Ms. Carver was clearly older than either of us and not the least interested in his clumsy advances. He was willfully blind to the moral and legal implications of his attitude.

  "Who's playing? Just go to bed."

  "I'm trying."

  "Alone."

  The youth openly swore at her and stomped off to his bedroom. I'm still not sure how I managed to keep from introducing the snot to my fist. Probably because I was raised to be better than that. Once the hallway was clear, I left the unoccupied bedroom I'd taken refuge in and continued down the hall. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. Something to point me to Doctor Omicron or another part of the Final Star organization. Instinct was drawing me towards the door at the end of the hall opposite where I'd entered. I had no evidence to back up this choice, and the analytical me was warning me to be prepared to be embarrassed as I approached the door.

  I clicked back on the night vision before I turned the doorknob and eased the door open. It was a home office. My instinct told analytical me to suck it as I slipped inside. I hate myself sometimes.

  The right hand wall housed a liquor cabinet and a television. Opposite them was a bay window with a low bench overlooking the back yard. Smaller windows and shelving units sat behind the desk that dominated the middle of the room. Whoever sat at the desk would be facing the door. What I found most conspicuous was the lack of a computer. Zan
der Reeves had supposedly made his money back during the dot-com bubble. Not finding a computer on his desk just didn't fit.

  I placed a camera over the door frame, staring down the hallway. Closing the office door, I called up the video feed on my wrist computer. The little disc might have been cheap and disposable, but it still had night vision capability. It showed a nice boring scene. Keeping half an eye on the feed, I set about searching the room. I smirked as I found no middle drawer on the desk and a thin seam down the middle of its deck. Feeling under the middle span of the desk, I found a switch. Flicking it, I practically had to stop myself from grinning. The surface of the deck split at the seam, sliding apart and folding against the sides of the desk. The gridded surface it revealed lit up and a holographic display flickered to life.

  It was asking for a password.

  If Zander Reeves was really a computer guy, he'd have put some effort into making his password hard. If he were just a salesman who'd talked a good pitch to overeager venture capitalists, it could be bone-headedly stupid. Guessing would take too long and could prove futile. Unspooling a link cable, I plugged my wrist computer into the desk. The Universal Serial Bus wasn't designed for computer-to-computer communication, but in this day and age, subverting the bad guy's electronic equipment was just another part of hero work. An option window popped up on my wrist computer's fold-out display, "Emulate USB Devices." I selected "Disk Drive (Bootable)" and "Keyboard." Once it acknowledged that the desk computer had accepted the new "devices," I gave it a three-finger salute.

  A lot of people, even computer people, never bother to set a password on their BIOS. Partly because most people don't have a clue what that is, and partly because it's a royal pain if you forget what it is and need troubleshooting. Zander Reeves was no different, and I was able to change the boot order to load from my wrist computer's disk instead of its own hard drive. It came up, but without the specialized drivers for the holographic display, the surface of the desk acted like a traditional monitor. I rooted around on the hard drive of Zander's computer, looking for anything that stood out.

  The folder "Archived Comms" caught my attention. It contained triplets of files, an audio file and two of a format I didn't recognize. I guessed they were a form of archived hologram. I plugged in an earbud and called up one of the audio files.

  "I don't like how your 'friend' Omicron does business," Jasmine Greeler's voice said.

  "He is the only one around here who seems to be pulling their own weight," a thin, reedy voice I recognized from an earlier eavesdropping said. I guessed this was Zander. "Anyway, what is it this time?"

  "He wants me to find him yet another laboratory, but won't explain why," Greeler said. "And he talks to me like I'm an idiot."

  "He's the product of another era, when casual racism and sexism was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if he was holding back his true opinions."

  "Why don't you can him?"

  "What part of 'no one else is getting results' don't you understand? If you back out of our deal now, you get nothing. Find him somewhere to move to."

  "You can't talk to me like that."

  "Really? Where does our agreement say I have to coddle your bruised ego?"

  "I'm going to--"

  "To what? Sue me for discrimination? Your default threat carries no weight when you enjoy the title of 'co-conspirator,' Mrs. Greeler."

  Greeler said something impolite and the call ended. Looking at the files in the directory, I realized that there was no way I could sift through them all here. I told the desk computer to copy the audio files to my wrist computer's disk.

  My crappy luck held true to form. Just as the copy initiated, there was motion on the camera. Or rather, a wash of light. A thin, narrow-faced man with sandy blond hair and a patch of beard on his chin ascended the stairs and turned towards the office. I ducked under the desk. Closing the cover was impossible with the link cable connecting the two computers. Not that it looked like I had the time, as Zander was already at the door. I choked on my breath as the door swung open.

  The lack of an immediate reaction grated on my nerves. With no view inside the room, I had no way of knowing if he was walking over to check on his desk. It should have been patently obvious someone was messing around. There was a clink of glass at the liquor cabinet, followed by the sound of liquid being poured. "Andrew," Zander called in his reedy voice. "What have you been doing to the computer?"

  On my video feed, the youth poked his head out of the bedroom. "I didn't touch your toy, Dad."

  "Then why does it look like it's running a system restore?"

  "Maybe you got a virus. I didn't touch it."

  "We're going to have a long talk about this in the morning, young man."

  "Whatever," Andrew said, his dismissive tone jabbing the part of my hindbrain that burned with self-righteous fury. It was the same part of me that had urged carving Uth-sk into bloody chunks. I tried not to listen to it, though it always had the most viscerally satisfying courses of action. Downing his drink, Zander left the office, closing the door behind him. I blinked in surprise as he headed to the bathroom. The sound of a shower starting up drowned out most of the ambient sounds in the house. It was muffled with the close of the door, but it was still audible.

  Peering over the desk, I checked on the progress of the copy. It was nearing completion. While it ran through the last stack of files, I rooted around some more for anything else of interest. A "Projects" folder piqued my interest. It was subdivided into folders marked zero through fifteen. Most were suffixed with "(Failure)," but project zero and project thirteen were not. I copied the whole directory tree over. He didn't appear to store his e-mail locally, or if he did, I couldn't find it.

  Running low on disk space on my wrist computer, I rebooted the desk and switched its BIOS back to the way I'd found it. Once it finished booting and was asking for a password, I left it open. Zander had seen it in that state, so I didn't want to arouse any more suspicion by making things too tidy. Checking the camera view, I found the hallway still lit, but unoccupied. I eased open the office door and recovered my camera. Skulking to the other end of the hall, I opened the window.

  And the alarm started blaring.

  Zander must have armed it when he came home. I slipped through the opening, and skidded down the roof of the garage. Sliding off the edge in a nearly uncontrolled fall, I almost took a tumble when my feet found the rail. As I wobbled, the perimeter guards ran down the gap between the garage and the fence. I kicked one in the face and landed an elbow drop on the other as I fell from the railing. A few more punches and kicks left them in no state to start shooting. I took off running, vaulting the rear fence, heedless of the clatter of chain link as I scrambled over. At this point, stealth wasn't going to help much.

  It was hard to peel out on a moped, but the twisted mass of cul-de-sacs of the subdivision meant their vehicles were at a disadvantage. I, on the other hand, could take the pedestrian trails and short-circuit the tangled web. While somewhat undignified, the small and unassuming vehicle had its advantages. I terrified a few stray cats, but found no sign of the Final Star on my tail.

  I had a sense of deja vu as I was checked in to Vanguard Hospital. I'm not sure why, as I'm not usually conscious when they drag me in. For some reason, I expected that when the surgeons affixed the bionic eye to my optic nerve it would click on like a camera. This didn't happen, and I remained blind in my right eye as they sutured the ocular muscles to the attachment points along the electronic orb. I had my teeth clenched throughout the operation. Despite the anesthetic taking away the pain, I was fully aware of them fiddling about inside my eye socket. No matter how much my analytical side preached that it was for my own good, the rest of me wasn't all that placated.

  One of the nurses taped a gauze bandage over my eye as the surgeon scribbled something on my chart. "Now," the sur
geon said. "There's still a lot of healing left to do. The optic nerve is being induced to grow into the interface for the implant. Until that happens, you're not going to be able to see out of that eye. Also, after the muscles have healed, we have to check on the state of the tear duct. If it's not working, you're going to need to use drops to keep the eyelids from becoming inflamed drawing across the surface of the implant. It's not serious either way."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "I see you're not on painkillers. I'm going to prescribe some just to be on the safe side."

  "Unless it's going to hurt worse than it has been, I don't need any."

  "It's a precautionary measure." He turned to the nurse. "Are you just about done?" She nodded. "I need a moment with the patient." She shrugged and headed out.

  "So what is it?" I asked.

  "That implant is a prototype," he said. "Most are only designed to replace the lost vision. This was built with the needs of Fund members in mind." He was being euphemistic out of habit. We all still tried to pretend that "Fund member" wasn't code for "licensed hero."