by Robyn Bachar
She picked up a photo and held it with trembling hands. Jiang cradled an infant Sasha as Valentin beamed at them both. The image didn’t fade or flicker, and Jiang smiled. Real. But then she flinched at another stab of pain like a hot needle behind her eyes.
How did they get the pictures? New Hong Kong was destroyed.
They could have been stored off world, like in a backup data archive.
On a pilot’s budget? Are you really that stupid?
“Jiang?”
Again the voice struck a chord, and she turned toward the familiar sound. Valentin looked older—his face was creased with lines of stress and worry, but his eyes were filled with astonishment as he stared at her. His sandy blond hair was still cut into the same short style, and he looked as fit as ever. Jiang’s mind stumbled as she tried to remember what he did for a living. It would have to be something physically demanding to result in that muscle tone—
Valentin rushed forward and embraced her as Sasha had, holding her tight as though she might vanish at any moment. A giggle bubbled up in her chest at the idea that she was as much a phantom to them as they had been to her. She returned the embrace, and the sharp scent of his cologne triggered a faint memory of the two of them in bed, laughing as she threw a pillow at him.
Valentin cupped her face with his hands. “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know,” she said. It was an honest answer. “How did you escape when New Hong Kong was attacked?”
He smiled, and the expression sparked another memory. Valentin’s face was spattered with blood that was bright against his pale skin. He smiled and handed her an assault rifle. “Always a step behind. Don’t worry, I left a few for you to kill.”
Jiang jerked away. “Valentin?”
His smile faded as his expression hardened. He tilted his head and tapped his chin with one finger. “Now, that is interesting.” He turned to Sasha. “But she called you by name?”
“Yes,” Sasha said.
“I don’t understand,” Jiang said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, my dear. Everything will be right again once you wake.”
For one startled moment Jiang wondered if this had all been a bizarre dream and she was about to wake up next to Ryder in their hotel room. Then Valentin lunged and stabbed her with an autoinjector, and she was unconscious before she hit the floor.
* * *
Ryder had been torn between the certainty that something was rotten—they were being followed, this was all too convenient—and Jiang’s faith that this was true. Finding out that the family she thought was dead was actually alive scored fairly high on his weird-shit-o’meter, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Besides, anyone could see that Jiang’s reaction to Sasha was honest, and he wanted to be happy for her. She’d found a real connection to her past. But then Jiang collapsed, and his world went red with rage.
He bellowed like a charging bull and lunged at the man to rip him apart—Valentin, Jiang had called him. The gentle aura of the long-lost husband vanished as he dodged Ryder’s attack. Military training—civvies didn’t have reflexes like that. Shit.
“Secure her,” Valentin ordered Sasha.
“Don’t touch her,” Ryder said. He braced for an attack as he tried to put himself between them and Jiang—if he had two good arms he could guard her and drag her to safety, but he had to settle for being a human shield.
Valentin darted forward and tried to stab Ryder with the same autoinjector that had felled Jiang, but Ryder lurched out of the way. He grabbed a blobby ceramic sculpture from the table and swung it at Valentin like a club. Valentin backed out of the way but stumbled as he collided with a coffee table behind him, and he dropped the injector. It rolled away under a chair, and Ryder grinned.
Sasha darted forward and grabbed for Jiang, and Ryder hesitated. She was a kid—a teenager by the look of her. He couldn’t hit a kid. She was a civilian. Probably some starving urchin tempted into this charade in exchange for a hot meal.
Valentin took advantage of Ryder’s hesitation and attacked. He drove a fist into Ryder’s gut, and he grunted from the impact. The wiry Russkie bastard hit hard, and Ryder’s jaw clenched as he swung at his attacker in reflex—with the fist of his missing arm. His stump flailed in a spectacular reminder of his disability, and Valentin clocked him in the jaw. Pain exploded through Ryder’s head as he stumbled from the impact.
“Alliance sends a crippled agent,” Valentin said. “Pathetic.”
Ryder roared, lowered his head and charged again, tackling Valentin in the midsection and knocking the man off his feet. They wrestled for dominance, and then Ryder jerked as two stun bolts shocked him. He dropped in a twitching, cursing heap as Sasha loomed over him wielding an energy pistol.
“Should I kill him?” she asked.
“No,” Valentin said. “Not yet. We’ll question him first. Agent Kwan can eliminate him after her restoration.”
Chapter Eleven
Ryder was no stranger to pain. True, he didn’t remember much about having his arm blown off, but as an Alliance marine and as the Mombasa’s chief of security he’d seen combat on a regular basis. He had endured a litany of wounds—he’d been stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, set on fire, hit with chairs, run over by a hover bike. He’d lost count of the number of bones he had broken.
He didn’t fear pain. But he had never been tortured before, and he’d prefer to keep it that way.
His mind dragged itself toward consciousness like a drunk stumbling toward a med kit in desperate search of painkillers. While he’d been out, someone had started a thumping dance party inside his skull, and his head pounded with every bang of his pulse. Something cold and sharp screamed at him not to wake up and warned that it would only get worse when he did, but Ryder shoved it away. He controlled his breathing to steady his heart rate as he slowly opened his eyes and studied his surroundings.
He was strapped to a diagnostic bed, and the sensors dispassionately reported his vital signs. A small circle of light formed a ring of illumination around the bed, but past that was pitch black like the dark void of deep space. It was impossible to judge where he was being held—it could have been a cell or a warehouse. Either way, it did not bode well, and Jiang was nowhere in sight. Ryder clung to the hope that she was all right, because of the two of them, she was in better shape to take care of herself.
“Ah. I see you are awake.”
The sound of English being spoken raised his hopes for a moment, but when Ryder tried to turn toward the voice he discovered that even his head was restrained. Shit, had they shaved his head? He’d burn the whole damn Party down if they messed with his dreads.
The speaker stepped into the light, predictably revealing Valentin. Now he wore the olive uniform of a Soviet soldier, decorated with red-and-gold ornamentation that signified an important Party member. In any army you could always spot the important assholes by the amount of shiny shit on their jackets.
“You must be the smart one,” Ryder said. Valentin chuckled, the sound humorless and threatening. Ryder bet he practiced it in the mirror, just like his smarmy, soulless smile. “They teach you how to laugh like that in commie spy school?”
“Do they teach disrespect in Alliance military training?” Valentin asked. “Or is that a skill you acquire when you become pirate scum?”
Ryder snorted. “I’m not a pirate.”
“No?” Valentin held up a data tablet and turned the screen toward Ryder. He recognized the text—the Alliance bounty alert that blamed the Mombasa for the destruction of New Nairobi.
“You must be a shit spy if you don’t know that’s not true.”
Another smile. Ryder wanted to wipe it off Valentin’s face with his fist.
“Truth is...malleable,” Valentin said. He set his tablet down on the empty spot on the diagnostic
bed where Ryder’s right hand would have been. Valentin spread his hands palms up, like an old Earth image of a saint addressing the heavens. “Truth is like metal in its molten form. You can shape it into anything you like. It can be a beam that supports a great building, or it can be a sword that topples regimes.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how truth works. When you stretch it into something else it’s generally called a lie. Unless this is one of those Soviet opposite jokes.” Valentin frowned, so Ryder plowed on. “You know. Like, ‘In Alliance space you break law. In Soviet space law breaks you!’”
Not even a giggle. Tough crowd.
Valentin’s head slowly tilted as one pale finger tapped his lips. He’d done that before he jumped Jiang, so it could be one of his tells. Not necessarily useful information at the moment, but it might come in handy later. Another smile split Valentin’s face, but this one sent a chill down Ryder’s spine.
“An appropriate choice of words.” Valentin picked up his tablet and with a few taps issued a command to the diagnostic bed, but instead of distributing medication it injected Ryder with a drug that set every nerve in his body on fire.
Ryder swallowed a scream and clenched his jaw so hard he thought he heard his teeth crack under the pressure. The pain vanished and he gasped for air.
“I have questions—” Valentin began, but Ryder cut him off.
“Yeah? Me, too. Where’s Jiang?”
Valentin’s eyes narrowed. “There is no Jiang. That identity was fiction, and clearly it was already beginning to fail.”
“Huh?”
“She recognized me. Me—not the name of my cover for that mission. The scientists found it interesting. Our head researcher was the one who insisted on introducing the charade to see how she would react, like some sort of experiment. If it were up to me I would have detained her when the system flagged her at the spaceport.” He shrugged and waved a dismissive hand. “But that’s neither here nor there. Soon this cover will no longer exist, and she can return to duty.”
Ryder jerked against his restraints, overwhelmed with the urge to strangle the commie bastard. “You can’t do that! You’ll kill her.”
“No. We are restoring her. Agent Kwan is a valuable asset.”
“If she’s so valuable why’d you send a shooter after her on New Hong Kong?”
“An amateur shooter,” Valentin scoffed. “The researchers wished to test her, and she passed. We look forward to having her rejoin our family.”
Ryder ground his teeth. Jiang wasn’t their family, she was his. His and everyone else’s on the Mombasa. Valentin had no right to erase her from existence. Ryder had failed her—the Jiang he knew would be as dead as the unit he’d lost on Nouvelle Quebec, and there was nothing he could do to save her.
“Now,” Valentin said, “tell me everything you know about Project Compliance.”
Huh. That was new—Valentin probably meant the super weapon. It was such a Soviet thing to give a weapons development project a name like Compliance. Sure, scaring a planet shitless when a giant fucking cannon arrived in orbit would definitely inspire compliance.
“How ’bout you tell me everything you know about Project Compliance, and I’ll nod every time it’s something we’ve found.” Ryder grinned and attempted to nod in example, but was reminded that his head was immobilized. “Or I could blink. Once for yes, twice for no.”
“Very amusing.”
“I try.”
Valentin raised his tablet. “Let’s see how long your good humor holds out.”
* * *
Jiang blinked, momentarily blinded by the bright light above her. When her vision focused she found herself strapped to an operating table. Ominous machines beeped around her, monitoring, recording and dispensing mysterious liquids into tubes jammed into her arms and legs.
She was alone for the moment, and she wasn’t certain if she should be worried or relieved by the absence of doctors and med techs. Visions of ways to escape danced in her head, but whoever restrained her had done a good job.
“I always thought you survived, Xiaoling,” Valentin said.
“My name is Jiang.” She glared at him as he loomed into view above her. She’d give anything to break his nose right then.
“Jiang was a cover.” Valentin straightened and ran a hand over his perfect hair. Correction—she’d give anything to grab a handful of his perfect hair and smash his face into the floor. “A fiction. We uploaded just enough memory for you to play the part.”
She blinked. “You... I don’t understand.”
Valentin patted her hand. “Of course you don’t, my dear. You’re still running the cover program. It was never meant to last this long, so it’s just as well that your implant was damaged.”
A cover. A mission. “But Sasha? I know her. I recognized her.”
“You recognized her part in your cover. Cadet Stein is an agent in training. Like you once were.”
It was a small relief to know that she hadn’t forgotten her daughter. “So I never had a child?”
“Of course not. That would interfere with your service.” He sighed at her confused expression, and he leaned against the side of the table. “The lab rats were all fascinated by how you remembered my name instead of my cover’s name. What does it all mean? They were theorizing that it was your original personality trying to reassert itself, but I have a different theory.” Valentin grinned. “Must be love.”
“Fuck off.”
“I’ll accept your apology once you’re in your right mind.” Valentin tapped his head. “We are the fortunate few, you and I. Most subjects rejected the implants. They went mad, seized, or ended up as vegetables. Messy. But where others failed, we flourished.”
“So you have this implant, too?” she asked.
“It’s what makes me superior. The perfect agent.”
Jiang wanted to punch him in his perfect teeth. “How are we connected to the super weapon? Is Dr. Koslov here?”
“No. He’s visiting an off-world facility.” He snorted. “Super weapon. So dramatic. You’ve spent too much time surrounded by handwringing Alliance agents. This is so much more than a simple weapon, and we were the prototypes.”
She frowned—that made no sense, unless Maria’s theory that Jiang was the super weapon had somehow turned out to be true. But what had Sveta and her crew stumbled over, then? Sveta had described a massive piece of machinery, something that could well have been a part of a giant doomsday weapon.
“You missed much of the project development these past few years. It’s inspired. The original Alliance tech was cutting edge, for its time, but it was limited in scope. They sought a method for their agents to receive dead drops that were tailored to the agent’s DNA, and visible only to them. But that was as far as the Alliance’s science went. Our scientists took it further. Instead of simply affecting the agent’s sensory input, they pioneered technology that allows an agent to be imprinted with entirely new personalities tailored to their missions. We can become anyone. And if captured, we would never break cover. We can’t. All of the mission data is stored in our subconscious.”
Jiang licked her lips, her mouth dry. That was how she had been corrupted aboard the Mombasa, how she had unknowingly betrayed her crew members and sent Erik to his death. The implant hadn’t malfunctioned—it had worked as intended.
“You’re building an army of super agents?” she asked.
“Of course not. Our implant only works in a very small percentage of people. After the war we developed a new program, able to affect entire populations.” Valentin broke off as a group of people clad in surgical whites shuffled into the room. “Ah, it’s time. Don’t worry, Xiaoling. Everything will be clear once you are restored to your true self.”
“No!” Jiang struggled against her restraints. “I don’t want this! Why don’
t you just kill me? I’m a traitor, right? I should be executed.”
Valentin laughed. “You’re no traitor, my dear. You were simply an agent who had gone off mission. Sleep now. You’ll feel so much better when you wake.”
Chapter Twelve
Everything hurt, but Xiaoling had no idea why. That wasn’t unusual after a restoration—there had been several times when she woke with serious injuries that had happened during missions she no longer had any memory of. Yet this was different. Her head throbbed as it had after she had first gained the implant, and there was a buzzing in her ears like the constant hiss of white noise.
“How do you feel?”
She opened her eyes and blinked at Agent Petrov. “Shredded. Report?”
“Your mission failed. You were missing in action for some time before we were able to recover you.” Agent Petrov helped her ease into sitting up and handed her a cup of water. She sipped at it cautiously; the water was blessedly cool against her cracked lips. She must have been under for longer than usual as they restored her. Odd.
“I failed? Bullshit. I never fail.”
He chuckled. “True. The failure was not yours. New Hong Kong was bombarded before you could make contact with the target. You were caught in a building collapse.”
That would explain the additional aches and pains. “How long was I out?”
“Eight years.”
Xiaoling choked on her water. “What?”
“You were assumed killed in action. You suffered head trauma from the collapse, and it damaged your implant. Since then you have been living as your cover.”
A flash—three women clinking metal mugs with her in the noise of an engine room. Drink up, comrade. It will get darker before the dawn.
Xiaoling blinked and the image vanished. She set her water down and rubbed her eyes. “Sounds awful. Does that mean I won’t be paid for that time?”
Agent Petrov barked a quick laugh. She must be truly amusing to have earned an honest laugh from him. Valentin had always been a slippery eel. She was a little surprised that he hadn’t advanced in rank in the past eight years. He had the smarmy temperament for command.
