by Piers Platt
“Nor do I particularly want a babysitter,” Paisen replied. “I’m going to retrieve my own Forge, since this one has less than half a tank. I also have some money there. We’re going to need both.”
“That’s it?” Beauceron asked.
“That’s it.”
“And you need to break in somewhere to get it?” Beauceron asked.
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to kill anyone,” Beauceron prompted.
“I’m not expecting to,” Paisen replied. “But the last time I went inside this building I got caught and sent to a radiation-soaked hell hole. I’m not going to let that happen again.”
Paisen picked up the finished grenade. On the tray in front of her, Rath saw the butt of an auto-pistol take shape. He sighed and shook his head.
Here comes another argument.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Beauceron flared the air car to a stop over the laboratory, and then settled down near the building’s front entrance. Rath saw a sign that read High Energy Research and Development – a Division of Armadyne. Paisen reached for the door handle, but Beauceron put his hand on her arm.
“Stun darts only,” he reminded her.
“Christ,” she said. “I got my fifty, they don’t give extra credit for more kills, okay?”
“Say it,” Beauceron repeated.
“Stun rounds only,” she said. She climbed out, slammed the door and strode across the parking lot.
“I don’t like this,” Beauceron said. “I’ve been an accessory to enough crimes lately.”
“Think of it this way,” Rath suggested. “Is it better to be an accessory, and keeping Paisen in check, or go home knowing she’s running around, doing whatever she wants?”
Beauceron twisted in his seat and looked at Rath in the rear view mirror. “You’d prefer I not keep her in check?”
“No, I’ve seen enough killing – I don’t want to be party to it any more than you do. But you and Rozhkov did kill those guards at the ranch house today.”
“I wish we hadn’t needed to,” Beauceron said. “It was in self-defense, I suppose, but ….”
“Kill or be killed,” Rath said. “I know. That’s not why I started killing, but it’s certainly how I felt by the time it was over.”
“And if you have to kill again?”
“I don’t know,” Rath said. “Most of my training was about making killing a reflex, so that you can kill without thinking about it. But now … I can’t do anything except think about it.”
“Even if it was in self-defense?” Beauceron persisted.
“I don’t know,” Rath said.
Abruptly, the doors to the building swung open, and Paisen jogged out, carrying a dirt-streaked over-the-shoulder messenger bag. She was holding the auto-pistol in one hand, Rath saw.
“Oh boy.”
Beauceron started the air car. Paisen rounded the back of a car several rows over and dropped to a knee, steadying the pistol on the car’s trunk. For several seconds, nothing happened, and then the doors opened again, and two security guards burst out at a full sprint. Paisen fired two rounds.
“Were those stun darts?” Beauceron asked.
“Yeah,” Rath said. “The guards are still twitching.”
Beauceron slewed to a halt behind her, and Paisen turned and opened the door, sliding in. Beauceron pushed the throttle forward, pouring power into the air car’s engines.
“Now we head for the spaceport,” she said. “No talking, I need to make a phone call.”
Rath watched as she removed a data drive from the Forge’s front pocket, slotted it into the car’s port, and then accessed a set of files. Paisen typed in a URL from memory, and then uploaded the files to the address. Next she placed a phone call.
“Yes?”
“Confirming delivery for job number eight-three-two-six,” Paisen reported.
“Stand by,” the voice told her. “That’s an inactive job code.”
“I’d like to reactivate it,” Paisen shot back.
“Wait a moment, I’ll need to contact the original requester.”
“I’ll be here,” Paisen told him.
In the distance ahead of them, a shuttle launched itself into orbit.
Beauceron pointed at it. “We’ll be at the spaceport in a few minutes.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Paisen said.
The man came back on the phone. “Your original contract has passed its expiration date, but I’ve been instructed to tell you the requester is willing to honor the contract at a forty percent discount.”
Paisen swore. “Tell him I’ll give him twenty percent off, final offer.”
“Stand by … your offer is accepted.”
Paisen typed on the screen. “I’ve sent you the encryption key.”
“I have it. Your account has been credited with two hundred thousand dollars. Good day.”
“Two hundred grand?” Rath asked. “What’s on that thing?”
“Engineering schematics for a prototype,” Paisen told him. She pocketed the data drive. “Maybe we’ll build one on the Forges later on and have some fun. But first: we get off this fucking dust ball.”
* * *
Paisen finished eating and set her empty plate back on the cabin’s desk. On the bulkhead over the desk, the viewscreen showed a map of their spaceliner’s progress, between advertisements for tourist destinations and in-flight upgrades. She shut it off and took a seat on one of the cabin’s bunks.
“Okay, mission planning. Let’s start with inventory.”
Rath nodded, but saw Beauceron frowning, so he explained. “We inventory what we have, our equipment and capabilities – know yourself first, or know your team, in this case. That gives us a sense for what we can do, given those resources.”
“I’ll start,” Paisen said. “Minor electrical burn damage, some damage to lungs from forced oxygen deprivation, and lacerations on the arms and legs. My hemobots should have that healed in under twenty-four hours.”
“Wait, you still have your hemobots?” Rath asked.
“You don’t?”
“No,” Rath said. “How did you keep them in?”
“I hired a bioprogrammer to rewire them. The same guy that disconnected my feed to Headquarters, and rebooted my implants. You do still have your implants, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Paisen shook her head. “Well, at least there’s that. You’re much less combat effective without the hemobots, though. Back to inventory - hemobots and full implants, degraded physical capabilities, but fully mission capable in twenty-four hours. One working Forge, with eighty-five percent full replenishment canisters.” She shot Rath a stern look. “No weapons forged. Three hundred and two thousand dollars in cash reserves.”
Rath cleared his throat. “Full implants, no hemobots. Shrapnel wound left leg, gunshot wounds left shoulder, right leg – all in advanced stages of healing.”
“How long until you’re one hundred percent?” Paisen asked.
“I don’t know,” Rath admitted. “Hard to tell without the nanos in there monitoring for me. Another month, probably? Forge with forty percent replenishment canisters, phone, three hundred in cash, no weapons.”
“Three hundred thousand?” Paisen asked.
“Uh, no. Three hundred. Total,” Rath admitted.
They looked at Beauceron. “Um, I’m not sick or hurt. I have fresh clothes in my suitcase, but I’m running out of toothpaste. I have some money.”
“How much?” Paisen asked.
“I get a monthly payment from my pension, and I have eighty thousand or so saved.”
“Do you still have your police ID?” Paisen asked.
“No, they took it from me. I have Rozhkov’s badge, though.”
Paisen pursed her lips. “Hold on to it – we might need it. Rath could always impersonate him.”
Beauceron opened his mouth to protest, but Rath cut in first. “Let’s talk mission objectives. What’
s our desired end state?”
“The Janus Group exposed, all employees arrested, an actionable amount of evidence collected,” Beauceron replied.
Paisen shook her head. “No. The Group needs to be neutralized as a threat. Exposing them doesn’t necessarily do that.”
“It might, though,” Rath said.
“We don’t know enough about the organization,” Paisen told him. “They might have fail safes in place in case leadership gets caught. Then the company continues to function as if nothing happened – and is still pursuing us. And I want to be clear: neutralizing the Group is only a defensive measure – I want what’s owed me.”
“Blood money,” Beauceron pointed out.
“Call it what you want, I earned it.” She pointed at Rath. “So did he.”
Beauceron met her gaze silently. Rath fidgeted in his chair. “I think we can argue about the exact end goals later,” he said. “First we need to find them. Then we can decide what to do about it.”
“So where are they?” Beauceron asked.
“I don’t know,” Paisen said.
Rath turned to face her. “You don’t know? I thought you had a plan … I thought you knew someone at Headquarters.”
“I did. And I know where Headquarters was. But … they’re smarter than I anticipated.”
Beauceron crossed his arms. “You better catch us up.”
Paisen sat forward on the bunk. “After my fortieth kill, I was on the spaceliner, getting a drink at the bar on my way back to my home station, when a woman started hitting on me. It was just small talk, and I was tired, so I tried to brush her off and go back to my cabin, but she was persistent. And after a minute I recognized her voice: she had given me mission updates during an assignment a year or two before, over the radio. I realized it was no coincidence she had approached me during faster-than-light travel.”
“That’s the one time we’re not streaming our audio-visual feed to Headquarters,” Rath clarified.
“Right,” Paisen agreed. “So I played along, and let her think I was into her, too … and eventually invited her back to my cabin. When we got inside, she confessed everything in a rush – how she’d been watching me, and had fallen in love, and wanted to save me from the Group. She told me what they did to contractors that completed their fifty kills.”
“You believed her?” Rath asked.
“She had no reason to lie to me. And … I questioned her. Extensively.”
“Your tortured her?” Beauceron asked.
Paisen shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it torture. But I needed to know the truth.”
“And once you knew, why did you continue in the program? You still had ten kills to go,” Beauceron pointed out.
“I needed time.”
“To figure out how to escape,” Rath guessed. “What did you learn about the Group? What did she tell you?”
“They have a single headquarters building, where all techs and supervisors are located. They’re not split up in remote cells or anything like that. The Group is set up as a private company, run by a single family – they pass down leadership from generation to generation. Only the most senior supervisors know the identity of that family. They are highly profitable – they pay employees extremely well, so that tends to keep folks in line. But employees are also monitored, just like contractors. Hemobots and audio-visual feed, and the minute the Group senses one of them is stepping out of line, they flip the kill switch.”
Rath rubbed at his jaw. “We know how that goes.”
“She gave you the location of Headquarters?” Beauceron asked.
“Yeah,” Paisen said. “And I checked it out, after I escaped. But that was four years later, they were gone – it was just some software development company.”
“You’re sure that wasn’t just a front?” Beauceron asked.
“I’m sure. I got a job there for a short while. Most boring month of my life. And eventually I got the rental records from the real estate company – a company called ‘New Horizons Wealth Management’ had leased the space at the time the tech was working there.” She watched as Beauceron took note of the name in his notebook. “Before you ask: yes, I searched for them. According to public records, they went out of business at the same time the lease ended.”
“They set up a new front company under a different name each time they change locations,” Rath guessed.
“Probably. So that’s a dead end.”
“What else did she tell you?” Beauceron asked. “Number of employees at Headquarters, number of contractors in operation … anything?”
Paisen blew out a long breath. “Not really. They don’t tell low-level mission technicians much at all – just what they need to know. Plus, it was a short flight, and I was more concerned with getting information that would help me escape.”
“Well, she’s still at Headquarters, right? If we can figure out a way to contact her, maybe we can arrange another meet-up,” Rath suggested.
“Mmm … no,” Paisen said.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s not still at Headquarters.”
Beauceron put his pencil down. “You killed her?”
Paisen sighed. “Beauceron, you have got to stop asking questions that you don’t want answered.”
“She didn’t deserve that,” Rath muttered.
“Don’t you start in on me, too,” Paisen warned him. “Of course she didn’t deserve it. But you know better than anyone – deserve has nothing to do with it. I wasn’t prepared to escape yet, and I couldn’t let her go back to Headquarters – what if she confessed? I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“What was her name?” Beauceron asked.
Paisen glared at him, then looked away. “Laney.”
They were silent for a time, and then Paisen stood up. “After I ran out of options looking for Headquarters, I shifted my search to concentrate on the planet where we were trained. Laney told me the Group owns that planet, or at least colonization rights to it.”
“But Headquarters isn’t there,” Rath said.
“No,” Paisen agreed.
“They might have moved it there,” Beauceron noted. “We don’t know.”
“It’s possible,” Paisen allowed. “I was more thinking the employees on the planet would be able to tell me where Headquarters was. Or better yet, someone there would have access to Group financial accounts.”
“Beauceron and I looked for the training planet, too,” Rath said. “Found a cyber-doc on Alberon who had done a surgical rotation there, but they were careful not to let him know where he was going.”
“Yeah, makes sense. But there would be full-time employees there, too – administrative staff to handle the surgical teams, and someone was monitoring the drones that took us through Selection, controlling them, talking to us through them.”
“It’s our best lead,” Beauceron agreed. “Did you make any progress?”
Paisen sighed. “Does eliminating possibilities count? I sifted through internet archives for every planet humans have ever visited or sent a drone to. I narrowed it down to planets with human-compatible gravity, atmosphere, and climate, and then manually reviewed survey data for each. That’s over thirty thousand planets, by the way.”
“And?”
“And none of them fit the bill.”
“Do you think the Janus Group discovered a planet on their own? A habitable planet that no one else knows about?” Beauceron asked.
Paisen shrugged. “What does it matter? All I know for sure is it’s not publicly listed.”
Rath looked at Beauceron. “What about the mobile kitchens angle?”
Beauceron leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temple. “Mm, perhaps.” He looked at Paisen. “I met a journalist by the name of Mehta, several years ago – he had discovered that the Janus Group was using mobile kitchens to test new recruits. You chatted with him online, actually – that’s how we found you.
“They murdered Mehta and his family when they disco
vered his investigation,” Beauceron continued. “We could try following his lead, locating a recruit and shadowing them. But … it will be challenging in the extreme to find one. I doubt they’re still using kitchens any more – they know that Mehta discovered that method, they will have switched to something new. And even if we find a recruit, we’d need someone waiting on the transfer station at all times, ready to do a spacewalk to set a tracking device on the hull of the ship.”
Rath chewed on his thumb, watching as Paisen stood and paced the small cabin.
After a minute, Beauceron spoke. “Mehta wanted to find the training planet, too. And he failed.”
“Mehta was foolish,” Paisen told him. “You don’t advertise to your enemies that you’re investigating them.” She raised an eyebrow questioningly. “That was an encrypted chat, I followed standard protocols. How did you find me, exactly?”
“You encrypted the chat,” Rath explained. “And routed through multiple proxy servers, just like they taught us. But I know a hacker; he was able to triangulate your origin to the Territories, and then we accessed their criminal databases and found your arrest record.”
Beauceron tapped his pencil idly on the cover of his notebook, thinking. “Wait, how did he find her location?”
“Um. He traced her through the proxy servers—”
“No,” Beauceron interrupted. “You said he triangulated.”
“Okay,” Rath agreed. “So?”
“Where did you fly to the training planet from?”
“My home planet. Tarkis.”
“And how long were you on that flight?”
“About a week? There was no clock.”
“And you, Paisen?”
“Delta Copernica. It was longer than a week. Maybe ten, eleven sleep cycles.”
Beauceron drew two dots on the notepad, and then a wide circle around each. Where the two circles overlapped, he shaded the area in. He held up the makeshift diagram for them to see. “I think I know how to find the training planet.”
* * *
When a full hour had passed with no activity at the ranch house, the man broke cover and stood up. He lifted the camouflage veil over his head, revealing a mass of pink burn scars. Still wearing his grass-covered ghillie suit, 700 jogged toward the ranch, cradling a scoped rifle in his crossed arms. As he neared the house, he slowed, and brought the weapon to his shoulder. He approached and inspected each of the bodies in turn, discovering another body inside the house, near one of the windows. The rest of the house was abandoned. He spent some time examining the tall, grey-haired man’s body, sifting through his pockets for anything useful. Then he took a clear picture of the man’s face.
