by Sean Platt
What a dick.
Dominic rose from his desk, kicked at his door, and snorted when it failed to close. Doors didn’t open like box tops in the Quark wing; they slid into walls like science fiction films had always said doors should. You could practically have a Noah West avatar butler tending to your every need, and all you had to do was ask it to handle things for you. Close the door please, Noah. Wipe my ass please, Noah. Real cops couldn’t even get their steel doors to sit in the jamb when kicked.
Dominic was mostly back to his seat by the time he realized he’d need to use his hands to close the door and sighed back to sitting with an air of, Oh, screw it. Public relations gold continued to bleed into the captain’s office — Quark cops chattering about all the good this agency was doing for the city in its time of unrest. Unrest that, to Dominic, seemed to have disproportionately included Natasha Ryan, Isaac’s cunt of a wife.
But really, that wasn’t fair. Dominic had bent Isaac over his knee and made the Big Bad Directorate figurehead do his bidding many times over the years, but he’d barely met Natasha. She might not be a cunt. But pretty much everyone, everywhere, agreed that she was. So maybe it wasn’t fair, but it was a safe assumption.
He took a moment to flagellate himself by listening to Quark PR outside, with their fancy holograms and crime location maps, talking about how Quark could do things the normal police force could not: use their superior Beam intelligence parsing of City Surveillance feeds to not only pinpoint crimes in progress, but to predict them, for instance.
To Dominic, that sounded more science fiction than doors that slid into walls on a verbal command. The kind of sci-fi that people once wrote as a warning. That was some Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report shit right there. Quark was already setting up house inside everyone’s brains (everyone’s but Dominic’s; he’d kept that nano enhancement crap out of his body), so why not start raping their futures too?
He turned from the noise. It was a distraction, and Dominic knew it. He didn’t want to face the deepening grave he was digging with Omar and didn’t want to think about what must be happening with Leo and the Organas. The latter was a one-two-three punch. First, Dominic had failed the Organas as their dust supplier. Then he’d betrayed an old friend by planting Agent Austin’s bug in Leo’s house. And now, as the final insult, Leo and his followers had to be tearing their hair out in withdrawal — or maybe ripping each other apart if the agents who’d raided the compound had failed to restrain them fully enough during the ride back to the city for processing.
Dominic shook it off. Yes, he’d planted the bug. But if NPS had raided the village, it meant Leo had said something damning within range of the thing’s electronic ear. And you didn’t say something damning if you weren’t up to something damning. That meant that whatever Leo was in for, he’d brought it on himself. Same for the withdrawal. If Leo hadn’t wanted to go through Lunis withdrawal, he shouldn’t have started taking Lunis. And if he hadn’t wanted to put his group through the agony, maybe he shouldn’t have introduced them to the drug in the first place.
Dominic looked at his crappy, non-Beam desk. His fingers drummed the wood.
Thinking about Leo was another form of distraction, like thinking about the Quark cops posturing outside.
Omar, you son of a bitch. You’re going to get us all caught, he thought.
Omar’s voice replied, They can’t catch ghosts, Dom.
Dominic touched his console screen to wake it then opened the DZPD Beam connection. What he was doing, by virtue of being captain (and, in time, temporary commissioner) was supposed to be secure and entirely confidential, but even so Dominic found his fingers shaking. This wasn’t just saving his sister or Crumb (ahem, Stephen York) from Respero, which was illegal enough. This was somehow beyond illegal. There were no laws to prevent the specific form of espionage they were planning. If caught, they probably wouldn’t be tossed into a prison flat. Their punishment might be far worse, especially given what he’d already dug up about Craig Braemon and his strange ability to stay untouchable.
Dominic’s connection was supposed to be highly privileged, totally private. But just a little while ago someone had hacked into the station, right into Dominic’s private business, and snooped information about the day he’d saved Crumb’s life and hidden him away.
But there was no choice. He was in too deep. It was either move forward or get trapped in the middle, like a man stuck in tar while predators approach from behind.
Dominic began to search, dragging Beam data into a pile.
Who the hell was Thomas Stahl?
And really, why did Omar care? Once Dominic formed the dossier on this guy Stahl and grabbed the code that Omar wanted him to, what good would it be to Kate? She was a smuggler, not a hacker. Dominic had already considered and rejected the idea of recruiting Leah, who might be able to…well, not penetrate Braemon’s security, probably, but at least get closer than the three of them ever could. But Leah might be under arrest with the remaining Organas, and her priorities would be elsewhere even if she hadn’t been. Besides, Leah was a freedom fighter. She distrusted The Beam the same as Dominic, but there was no way he could convince her that committing high crimes wasn’t just selfishness.
You’re an idiot, Omar, Dominic had said. You can’t slip yourself into a dead person’s shell. If you could, every thug keen on identity theft would be doing it.
Tom Stahl isn’t exactly dead, Dom.
What is he?
He’s something else.
Hmm. And Kate’s going to put him on like a suit? She’s going to log in as Stahl, fool all the AI, and waltz right in.
Maybe it’s just that simple, Omar had said.
But he wouldn’t elaborate. He’d just given that maddening smile and said that Dominic should stop being a spoilsport and enjoy the ride.
Doc Stahl ain’t alive or dead. And trust me, Katie can make his ghost dance just the way we need.
Dominic wanted to disagree on principle. When Omar had said the last thing, Dominic had nearly punched him in his expensive dental work. Even now, Dominic was half-tempted to turn Omar in instead of following his plan. It would be easy. Omar was slippery in person, but Dominic could send a team first and ask questions later. And really, the way Dominic had felt about Omar recently, maybe Omar would tragically die during his apprehension and the problem would solve itself. Half the force was dirty. Dominic could definitely make it happen.
But it was all fantasy. For better or worse, Dominic, Omar, and apparently Kate were in bed together. As much as he hated Omar and his mysteries and his cockiness, this was his best bet. Possibly his only bet. The only way, maybe, to solve his Lunis problem, the Organa’s issues, and any future dirty dealings with Omar all at once.
Dominic temporarily turned off his wireless, isolating the canvas. He inserted the slip drive then offloaded the data spider. Once the AI pattern-matched and hid like good soldiers, Dominic reactivated the wireless.
This time, when he searched for Thomas “Doc” Stahl, a stream of covered data flowed to the slip drive holding the code. Dominic watched it go, following the blinking of the activity monitor.
Inside the drive, the dossier grew more complete. Not on their target of Craig Braemon, but on an anonymous man, Thomas Stahl, who’d gone missing and was presumed dead. A snake and double-dealer, as far as Dominic could tell. A man who smiled from one side of his mouth while lying with the other. A man who’d sell you shit and tell you it was ice cream. A man, as it turned out, who’d had many encounters with the police according to cross-referencing with the station’s records — encounters that were usually dutifully recorded, sometimes conveniently obscured.
Dominic’s eyes narrowed as he flicked through pages, giving each only the most cursory of glances. He didn’t need to read any of this; the AI was working behind the scenes, scraping what it needed, building a shell that Omar naively believed Kate would be able to don like a virtual coat. But something had caught his eye, so
he flicked back.
What was this connection between Stahl and Nicolai Costa? Dominic didn’t know Nicolai beyond the man’s name. Unless it was a coincidence (and Dominic didn’t think so; Nicolai Costa wasn’t a common name), the man was Isaac Ryan’s speechwriter. Or rather, he used to be; Dominic had caught some gossipy stories ranking near BeamTop about drama around Costa. Mostly those stories were drama surrounding Isaac and Natasha, but Costa had been in there, too. He might have defected? He might have started working for Isaac’s brother, Micah? It wasn’t clear.
Dominic augmented the connection. It was blurred somehow. He couldn’t tell how Stahl and Costa were connected, only that they were. The meta — visible only on zooming, to someone with raw logs access like Dominic — suggested a casual connection that may have been made by pattern-matching AI inside City Surveillance. Which meant they just may have been spotted in the same places repeatedly, or that their connectivity blips had a way of colocating more often than coincidence would suggest.
Curious, with his policeman’s senses tingling, Dominic tried to explode the data to learn more. He couldn’t access enough to get the full picture without commissioner’s access, but for now, fascinatingly, he could see that…
There was a knock at the open door. Dominic’s eyes flicked up, sure that he must look guilty. But the cop standing there couldn’t see Dominic’s crappy console screen, and even if he could, perusing citizen and arrest records wasn’t against the law.
“Captain Long?”
“Yeah.”
“The suspect you asked me to keep an eye on? Leo Booker?”
“What about him?”
The young officer nodded. “He’s arrived at NPS.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.” Dominic blanked his screen, pocketed the slip drive full of Thomas Stahl, and glanced back up. The kid hadn’t left his doorway.
“What is it?” Dom asked. “Something wrong with Booker?”
The officer shook his head. “From what I’m seeing, Booker has already been moved to holding without incident.”
“And?”
“It’s the people they brought in with him, Captain. NPS has asked us to send officers to help escort and contain them.”
“You mean the peacenik, granola-munching Organas?”
“Not so peaceful anymore, sir,” the kid said.
Chapter Seven
Leo sat in the small room, alone with his thoughts. After thirty seconds, he sat on his hands — the only way to keep them from shaking.
He told himself that he could do this.
He told himself that he’d almost weaned completely off the drug. The past few days had been tough, as he’d waited for his small dose, but he’d managed each of the lengthening intervals without caving early and shortening any of them. Now, he was almost down to nothing. The only difference between this jones and all those that had preceded it was that this time, there would be no dose returning to normal. Which wasn’t a problem since he’d eased himself to almost nothing anyway.
Same as last time. Same pain. I just have to wait a bit longer. Then a bit longer after that. Then a bit longer after that, on into forever.
It didn’t help. It actually made his withdrawal symptoms worse because now he had the added element of panic. Specifically, he had the panic that came with the idea that no new dose of Lunis was coming. Almost zero wasn’t the same as zero. What he’d been taking, as his weaning neared its end, was barely the tip of a fingernail of moondust. He’d walked to the cliff’s edge, teetering between dependence and freedom.
But there was still that leap to make. Going from weaning off of dust to not a dust taker was terrifying. He’d always known he’d need to leap, but with NPS’s intervention, the die had been cast. He’d hoped to cross the no-dust gulf at home, safe in knowing that if he couldn’t stand the pain, he could backtrack and dose again. Doing so would crush him, and he’d feel like a failure. But knowing it was possible would at least offer him a sense of certainty, something to dull the red-hot panic.
But the way out was no longer there.
In its place, Leo felt growing panic.
He bit his cheek. He dug his thumbnail into his wrist, just above the old omnidirectional radiocarpal joint he’d had frozen in the ’40s. Once upon a time, he’d been able to bend his wrist in every direction except where his arm bones physically got in the way. But it was hard to blend in, as a teacher, when he kept forgetting to feign normal motion and grabbed board styluses from directly above, folding his wrist back far enough to brush his flesh.
The thumbnail digging into his skin — pressing into the muscle beneath, pinning it between metal and keratin — hurt enough to clear Leo’s fog.
He could do this.
An encouraging voice said, It’s all in your head.
He didn’t recognize that voice. Leo wasn’t big on talking to himself. And yet ever since he’d been taken in by NPS, his brain had been chattering back at him like a dinnertime companion. Like a yammering networker at a cocktail party. He wasn’t used to the intrusion. It kept showing Leo his past, his present, and all sorts of stuff he didn’t even understand or remember.
“You’re not going crazy,” Leo told the empty room.
He sat on his hands again, listening to the rattle of secondary restraints as they dragged across the bench. They’d injected his arms and legs with paralyzers, of course, but the agents who’d done it had scanned him and thrown up their hands at all the latent hardware their hippie suspect seemed to have hiding in his body. There was no way to be sure that the paralyzers would do their job. The old man, they seemed to reason, used to head a gang steeped in technological insurgence — and, if accusations held, was still head of that gang. His own defenses might counteract the NPS nanos. Hence, the secondary restraints.
Nobody in the room answered about the possibility of Leo being crazy. Because he was alone. And yet the room was surely being watched, and now Leo had just spoken aloud about his mental state. What would the NPS officers make of that? What would the NPS station’s AI make of it? Had Leo hurt his case by speaking, or had he helped it, beginning a case for insanity?
It’s fine. It’s good. You have a plan. You just need to wait for the plan to take root. Wait for help. Then wait for the others to be given what they need, through whatever means necessary.
This time, Leo nodded at the suggestion. Somehow, he felt sure that the voice was only trying to pacify him because it needed to use him, but right now that didn’t matter. And besides, what kind of crazy bullshit thinking was that? It was a voice in his head.
What do you call it when you think the voices in your head are out to get you?
Leo didn’t want to think about it. He remembered all the cult stories in the late 1900s and early 2000s, which scared him enough to leave a mark. People saying that something outside of themselves whispered in their ears and made them do horrible things. The devil made me do it. Hell, Son of Sam had been driven to murder on the advice of his dog.
Maybe he really was losing his mind. Maybe Lunis withdrawal was deadly. Maybe you couldn’t actually wean yourself off it.
That’s what everyone said, but Leo had been arrogant enough to think he could quit the drug and keep his sanity. Well, har-har on him; he’d felt something snap inside during the train ride down while listening to the screaming Organas one car back. As bad as his withdrawal was, theirs must be ten times worse.
If Leo was hearing voices and feeling strange, murderous impulses, then the others — who hadn’t had time or foreknowledge to wean before being cut off cold-turkey — must be about to claw out their eyes to rid themselves of crawling bugs.
Wait for help, Leo. You know it’s coming.
Of course Leo knew. But he didn’t like the new voice of insanity reminding him.
Fight the withdrawal, Leo. You always knew coming here was the only way to beat it.
And of course he knew that, too. It’s why he’d stood right beside the bug and made up all of those delicious lie
s about revitalizing a never truly dormant Gaia’s Hammer, daring NPS to truck up and arrest them all.
But again, that was none of the voice’s business. He didn’t trust the voice and didn’t appreciate its agreement. The voice wanted Leo to kick at the first person who came in to speak with him. The voice wanted Leo to bite the hand that tried to inject him then use his metal legs to drag that person in and break his or her neck. The voice wanted Leo to run, despite its farce of civility — of urging calm and patience. Because the voice didn’t just want to help Leo out. It wanted him to kill.
In the train, everything had clicked on like a switch. All those old add-ons had sopped up the approaching core grid Beam access like a sponge, hungry after so much time spent dormant in the mountains. And as they’d come alight, Leo had felt downright inspired.
I never should have dismantled Gaia’s Hammer. I should have kept it active because the establishment needs lessons. It makes so much sense now.
And then the images. The plans. The schemes and how-to-kill tutorials entering his desperate mind fully formed, as if piped in from outside or rising from deep within. The minute he got out of here, Leo knew what to do. He knew where to go, and whom to go after.
Leo pressed his fingernail deeper into his wrist, bringing more pain. The fog backed away. The sense of red-hot panic lessened. The urge to kill and maim took a step back but remained ready, like a fantastic idea awaiting its time.
Maybe he was going crazy.
He could only imagine how it must be for the others.
Wait for Leah, the voice told him. And wait for Austin Smith.
One, then the other.
The pain would end.
His imprisonment would end.
And then you can move on to what matters most, the voice added.
