Rogue Memory

by Tiffany Frost

  "What happened?"

  Ana shook her head. "I just woke up."

  "The woman?"

  She shrugged.

  Her guard crossed the room, moving to check the pulse of the man on the floor. "He's dead."

  He went to check the bathroom.

  Ana scrambled out of bed and pulled on a robe. She swung her wrist up and tried to call Stephanie. No answer.

  The guard came out of the bathroom. “All clear.”

  Ana spoke through gritted teeth. “Find out what happened here. Where Stephanie went. Why there is a body on my bedroom floor. And who was on duty.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her jaw was beginning to ache. “Get me a new room while the police are crawling over this one.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t worry.”

  “Do I look worried?” She didn’t feel worried. Anger pulsed through her, hot and lethargic, like lava. If this man was connected to any organization. If they’d taken Stephanie, she was going to make sure every single one of them burned.

  She wasn’t some lower level senator or a regular ambassador to be blackmailed or bargained with - and why else would they have taken Stephanie?

  She was the heir to a 95% voting share of the planet Cetus. She had the resources her position demanded.

  The guard didn’t answer, sensing that the question had been rhetorical.

  Ana frowned. “And find out where his clothes are.”

  That was the weird part. How had he died and why was he naked? Would something about his clothes have identified the organization he worked with?

  * * *

  Stephanie came out the other side of the gate and set a course for the next connecting gate. It would take a day and a half to cross the small system. She sighed, frustrated by the distance between Garnet Gates. Why they couldn’t build a gate that allowed travel to multiple systems was beyond her. As was why they had to be built so far apart. Surely a scientist somewhere could figure out how to dampen the effects of gravity on the gates.

  She felt the killer sitting at the back of her mind. A cold, squat presence that demanded death.

  Too late, buddy. She thought in his direction. You’re the one who’s dead.

  This did not bother him. What bothered him was the fact that he had failed and someone else would kill her in his place.

  Stephanie’s breath hitched.

  Is there a tracking device in the ship? Maia asked. How were they going to find her when she’d left the system?

  Not in the ship, the killer muttered.

  Stephanie’s wrist itched. She glanced down. Her coms device. She quickly removed the external section, the easy to upgrade part, disconnecting it from the power source. She stared at the part of her wrist where the power source connected to a vein, feeding off her body’s glucose or ketone levels, depending on what she’d eaten that day. This was the part that was never removed, rarely updated as most people found the surgical procedure annoying and the rare upgrades to that part of the technology didn’t seem much of an improvement.

  If she were going to put a tracker in anything, it would be there.

  She winced, realizing what she had to do.

  She went through the killer’s ship, looking for supplies. It was small. The cockpit was one multipurpose room. A cot folded out of the wall, as did a small kitchenette filled with ready meals and a heating unit. She continued searching, thinking how much easier it would have been if the killer was cooperating with her.

  A bathroom folded out of the wall beside the kitchenette. She blinked. Did the killer ever use them both at the same time?

  She packed the kitchenette and bathroom away, noting their positions for future reference. She needed a med-bay, or a first aid kit.

  Her body moved on autopilot, moving to touch a section of the wall beside the bed.

  Thank you, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  The killer turned away, not acknowledging that he’d sent the impulse to go that way to her body.

  She pulled the med unit further out, opening drawers. She had everything she might have needed. A nerve blocker. Surgical glue. Antiseptic and various tools. Everything she needed except a clue about how to proceed.

  I don’t suppose either of you know how to do this? She asked.

  Seriously? Maia laughed. She didn’t even know how to operate a shower system before, the cult she’d grown up with had shunned technology to that degree.

  She sensed, rather than heard, the negative response from the killer.

  She was on her own.

  She sat down on the small, fold-out bed beside the medical supplies. She checked she had everything she thought she’d need. Checked again.

  Her breath was coming too fast.

  She made a conscious effort to slow it. A sedative was out of the question, not only because she may or may not have been allergic, but because she couldn’t risk dulling her own mental faculties. She needed to concentrate. Keep a clear head. Stop procrastinating.

  She set the nerve block, cringing as her hand felt like it was turning numb. She rested her arm on the edge of the fold-out table, its copper surface evincing no reaction from her numbed flesh.

  She prepped the area, sterilizing everything.

  She psyched herself up. It’s not going to get easier, the longer you think about it. Picked up a cutter and pressed it against her wrist.

  The killer wanted to move it a millimeter to the left so she moved it a few millimeters to the right before cutting.

  Blood welled up around the opening and she fought the urge to look away. She felt a twinge, like someone had pinched her but she told herself it was probably psychosomatic and kept cutting.

  Nausea crawled up in her gut and she hurried to disconnect the device. It was attached to a large vein.

  She swallowed and turned back to the supplies she had laid out. Her head was beginning to feel light. How much was she bleeding? How much blood could she afford to lose?

  She found a device which she was pretty sure was supposed to hold things still, and activated it, angling it at the veins in her wrist.

  She sliced through the vein quickly, pulling the power source of her coms out of the way and dropping it on the table. The severed vein floated before her and she blinked trying to clear her vision as bright spots followed by shadows danced across it.

  She levered the vein closer to its other edge, feeling like she was connecting tiny pipes or wires. Not human.

  The surgical glue squirted across the vein like icing, salmon pink. She filled the area with as much of the stuff as she could, pulling the edges of her skin together and wrapping them in some kind of gauze.

  Then she passed out.

  * * *

  Stephanie woke up with a pounding headache and a feeling of dread. She pushed herself to a sitting position, slowly.

  Her arm was numb.

  She removed the nerve blocker and checked the area. Pain immediately flooded her senses and she nearly blacked out again.

  She breathed deeply. Her vision cleared.

  It didn’t look that bad.

  There was blood on the sheets but she must have gotten it there when she was removing her coms. Her wrist wasn’t bleeding, the healing accelerants in the surgical glue had worked while she was unconscious. A mottled pink wad of scar tissue twisted up the inside of her wrist. She thought she’d cut in a straight line but maybe the cutting didn’t matter as much as how you pulled the skin together afterwards.

  She stood up, stretching her hands over her head to try and relieve some of the aches in her body.

  She went to the kitchenette, downing an electrolyte drink and meal replacement bar in minutes.

  Then she started cleaning up.

  It wasn’t until she’d packed the sheets into a washing compartment and packed away the surgical equipment that she realized she still hadn’t gotten rid of her coms unit. The internal part was lying on a table. The external part sitting on the floor
beside the pilot’s chair.

  She gathered them quickly, throwing them into the airlock and opening the external door.

  She watched the items fly into the void outside, sucked into space to become another piece of space debris.

  The ship’s system beeped, alerting her to her close proximity to the second Garnet Gate. She sat down, piloting the ship to the gate.

  She’d been unconscious for nearly a day and a half?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ana reread the report she’d gotten from her security before they’d handed the case over to the Icarus Station police department.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  The vid-feeds hadn’t been tampered with but they showed no one had entered her room and no one had left.

  Yet the door opened and closed.

  The guards on duty had all mysteriously fallen asleep at the exact same time and yet their systems showed they were drug-free when tested that morning. She would have blamed them more if she hadn’t slept through the night herself.

  Most mysteriously of all, the body they had found was not, exactly, human.

  She went over that part of the report again, frowning as she struggled to understand the details. It was difficult even with the notes in the margins. She hadn’t studied a science since general education, unless political science and sociology counted, and they certainly weren’t helpful in reading the notes on the genetic sample from the body.

  Parts of his genome had been tampered with. Beyond what was normal and legal to protect the health of an individual in standard gene cleaning.

  She couldn’t understand what the parts that had been tampered with meant and she wasn’t sure if the person writing the report had understood everything clearly, from the questions jotted beside some of the notes.

  This much was obvious though. Somebody had made very careful and very illegal changes to the genome of the body that had ended up on her floor.

  He hadn’t been seen going into her room and Stephanie hadn’t been seen leaving. The fact that he was later found naked made it seem obvious that whatever he had been wearing had rendered him invisible, at least to the vid-feeds.

  It seemed more and more likely that Stephanie had woken up, fought the man, and killed him. Then she’d taken his clothes and disappeared. What Ana didn’t get was why she would do that. Why had she left?

  Who was this genetically engineered man with an invisibility suit? Why did he come? Was it an attack against Ana or had he been after Stephanie? And if he had come for Stephanie, what in the worlds had she gotten herself mixed up in?

  Ana shook her head.

  The report raised more questions than it had answered and she was still no closer to figuring out what had happened, or where Stephanie had gone.

  * * *

  Sato Maric was sitting behind a desk going over some figures, when Ivan entered the room, escorted by two of his guards.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, voice low as it reverberated through his heavy-set frame.

  “Is that any way to greet an old friend?” Ivan asked. He spun the chair in front of the desk around and sat down, leaning his arm across the back.

  “When were we friends?” Sato snorted.

  “Friendly acquaintances.”

  “You had one job to do and you blew it.”

  Ivan waved a hand dismissively. “The product got there in the end. There’s no need to be so negative.”

  “I told you that if you ever came back here we’d have your kneecaps for selling us out like that.”

  “It was a tactical risk. I had a contact in evidence storage.” Ivan shrugged. “It really wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Two of my men ended up in jail.”

  “I told you, I work best alone.”

  “So, keep doing that.” Sato nodded to the door.

  “Come on, Maric. Don’t you believe in second chances?”

  Sato Maric narrowed his eyes, staring Ivan down.

  Ivan held his ground, maintaining his at-ease posture. The only thing that gave him away was a quick flick of his eyes toward the door.

  “I only let you through the door because you’re a rat-sneak bastard and I thought you might have had something to trade.”

  Sato moved to call one of his guards and Ivan caught him by the wrist.

  Ivan smiled, teeth white against tan skin. “I never said I came empty handed.”

  “What have you got for me?”

  Ivan slid a data chip across Sato’s desk. He slipped it into his coms device and raised an eyebrow at the display.

  Sato cleared his throat, face falling back into his usual expression. The one that looked as though he’d just smelled something bad, lip curled in disgust.

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a fair price for this and we can look into other business dealings in the future... but I’m an honest business man. People know what to expect when they deal with me and I plan on keeping things that way.”

  “Okay...” Ivan shifted uneasily, tying to try and keep sight of the two guards that stood at his back. He had a sneaking suspicion he knew exactly what was coming, but he needed the money if he was going to keep searching.

  “So, if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s this...” Maric nodded to his guards, “I always keep my promises...”

  * * *

  Ivan lay on the floor outside his ship, curled around himself. He was shaking. Cold sweat stood out on his brow. He’d blacked out twice.

  Just three more meters, he thought.

  That got him to his ship, anyway. He wasn’t quite ready to think about how long it would take him to get from the entrance to medical bay, or the procedure that awaited him.

  He visualized piecing the bone back together, a nerve block set just above his knees. The phantom twinges as he worked would be hard to deal with, but there was no other way. He had to stay conscious while operating.

  He pushed himself up onto his hands, gritted his teeth, and dragged himself forward.

  Don’t think about the pain. Think about something nice. Like kittens.

  Pain swept over him and he let out a low scream.

  He lay back down, cradling his face in the crook of his arm. At least the floor was clean thanks to a yellow cleaning droid that had passed him ten minutes before, its squat form nudging his side as it tried to clean around him. He couldn’t imagine how much worse this would be if he was working around a pool of vomit or piss or something. He hadn’t been able to afford a port that close to a bar and suddenly he was grateful.

  His breath was steadier now and he glanced around, trying to assess how much further it was to the door.

  Two more meters.

  Then he’d have to figure out how to reach the door lock.

  He prepared himself and dragged his crumpled form closer. Bright sparks flashed across his vision, leaving black spots behind, but he kept going until he hit the wall. He pulled himself into a sitting position and leaned back. He could see the whole docking hall from this vantage point. Not that he was expecting anyone at this time of night. They’d picked a good time to dump him.

  He wondered how much they paid to keep the authorities away.

  He closed his eyes for a second.

  When he opened them, there was a woman.

  She was stunning, a curvy body wrapped in skin tight black. Dark brown-red tendrils of hair curled around a heart shaped face. She stared down at him with wide green eyes, a thin line between her brows.

  He smiled, one side going up higher than the other in what he hoped was a charming grin.

  “I’m-” he started.

  She sprayed something in his face.

  Darkness washed across his vision and the world around him went silent.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ivan blinked his eyes open and stared up at the ceiling.

  There was a metal taste in his mouth and a sense of deja vu lingering in the corners of his mind.

  It took him a mom
ent to figure out where he was.

  The last thing he remembered, he’d been lying outside his ship trying to figure out how to open the door with broken knees.

  He glanced down, surprised to find that his legs weren’t screaming red points of agony. His knees were encased in inflatable casts, and there was a thin surgical line on each knee, already pink and healing due to the accelerants in the surgical glue. He frowned.

  Who did the surgery? And what did they do with my pants?

  The floor of the airlock was digging into the backs of his thighs.

  “No, I think he can still help us...” He heard a woman’s voice, the soft buzz of an outer planet accent making her words twang.

  He listened.

  The woman paused.

  “I’m not going to kill him.”

  He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or nervous.

  “Leave me alone, he should be waking up soon.”

  He saw the woman walking toward him through the window. She was even more beautiful than he remembered her being, even with a dark bruise shadowing one eye. Wide, luminous green eyes studied him. Crimson waves curved around her face like... well, he’d never been good at metaphors. But something about her face made something in his stomach jump. He felt a part of his soul that he’d thought long dead stir to life.