The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  This was the last thing she wanted to talk about, but she couldn’t help but ask. “Then why didn’t the sniper shoot me too?”

  Jang shook his head. “I can’t say. Perhaps the shot wasn’t clear. We’ve no idea how far away he or she was. All I can say for certain is that when she fell, the others jumped into action. It was not terribly well planned on their part. If it had been, they would have all attacked at once, and more than likely you’d be dead.”

  “Jeez, Kojo, are you criticizing them for it?” Evelyn asked.

  He turned to her. “Certainly I am happy for their… lack of coordination. Like the two men and the woman who attacked us on Titan Prime, they were not professionals.”

  “More innocents coerced by Victor’s nanites,” Staples said regretfully.

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps sloppy mercenaries who leapt at the opportunity to make money. Either way, they will survive, for better or worse. Let us hope that in investigating the incident that the authorities do not link it to us.”

  Staples had been too busy coping with shock and grieving to deal with the wider implications of getting into a gunfight on Earth. If the police did come to arrest, question, or detain them, it could be a real problem. Victor had already demonstrated his ability and willingness to attempt to bribe police and other authorities. The only reason Staples was still alive was that Martin Glover was a good man.

  “God, I hope they don’t,” she muttered. Even if they only fired in self-defense, she knew that fleeing Las Vegas and failing to report their involvement in the incident would be considered crimes.

  “I suppose our next step is Philadelphia,” Evelyn said cheerily. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  Staples looked at her sympathetically. “That’s only because you never have.”

  Chapter 16

  From atop a three-story building half a block away from the Blaina Press coffee shop, Amit Sadana watched the local authorities try to make sense of the situation. He didn’t fault their confusion; he could barely understand it himself.

  Sinners were more plentiful on Earth, most especially in Sin City, and God had provided him with six this time. Two were to keep pace with the two women, the one they had been following and the captain, and the other four would follow. These two would, he had hoped, lead them to more members of her crew, and then they would strike. Amit had learned during his time in military intelligence that simple plans tended to be the best, especially when dealing with a fluid situation, and this one was not complicated.

  Then, out of nowhere, the dark-haired woman had fallen. It seemed that she had been shot by a sniper, but that was none of Amit’s doing, nor that of the people God had chosen for him to guide towards redemption. Perhaps the woman had other enemies? Was there another team? The end result for her would have been the same; she would have to face His judgment now. The timing, however, had been disastrous for their ambush. The sniper, whoever he or she was, had sprung the trap before it had had sufficient time to close, and as a result the crewmembers of Gringolet had slipped away.

  The failure tasted bitter. Amit had failed many times in his life. He had failed himself, his family, as well as children that he had never met, but nothing wounded him more greatly than failing the Lord. Twice now God had handed him the instruments to perform his task, and twice now that task had failed. That these failures were seemingly due to factors beyond his control was incidental. The fault could not be with God, and so it must rest with him. To consider anything else was to face a part of himself he had walled off, a bottomless void of hopelessness and lack of purpose, a part that had nearly cost him his life.

  For a time, things had been good. Amit found a job after college that had allowed him to serve both God and his country. Four years after entering the military, he had worked himself up to a counter-terrorism intelligence unit. To Amit, terrorists were bullies, and he had learned long ago God’s judgment concerning bullies.

  The first two operations he had led had been solid: clean kills. One was an arms dealer supplying extremists with rifles and grenades. Amit’s network told him that the dealer visited her lover every Tuesday. Once they had hacked her phone and pinned down the location, a villa on the outskirts of a remote town, Amit had arranged an ambush with a squad on loan from the Army. He had even taken the time to have the woman’s lover arrested to keep him out of harm’s way, an effort that his superiors found a waste of time, but one he deemed necessary. The woman had died resisting arrest. His second had been a drone strike against a truck carrying half a dozen faces from the terrorist watch list. That one had gotten him a commendation.

  The third operation, the one that should have made his career, actually resulted in its end. Two months of data crunching, tailing suspicious persons of interest, and some guesswork had turned up a training camp in the Satpura Mountain Range. There were various terrorist cells and organizations spread throughout Amit’s home country, most of them dedicated to a return to more traditional values. The cultural abandonment of the caste system in India, a move a long time coming but difficult to achieve, had disenfranchised certain groups and families who felt it was their right to rule over others. A very few of these old-world proponents, mostly Kshatriyas, had turned to resistance and terrorism to further their goals.

  Amit could sympathize with their plight. He knew that it was never easy to lose one’s status, and as someone who had grown up dirt poor, he understood the fear of returning to that. However, as a Christian, he also believed that all were equal in God’s sight, and that the treatment of the Shudras and Dalits under the caste system had often been no better than the treatment of the Jews in pre-Christian Egypt. If these people wanted to set themselves violently against the tide of progress, they would have to risk being swept under.

  Amit, confident of his righteousness, had ordered the drone strike. He had even slept well that night. When the pictures from the sweeper team came in, he saw the bodies of the children who had been living in the camp. The team had found more than enough evidence to confirm that the camp was in fact training men and women in weapons and tactics, and so his commanding officers had slapped him on the wrist for not doing his homework better and then shrugged their shoulders. It wasn’t their fault; it was the fault of the parents. What kind of parent takes their children to that kind of place? they said.

  What kind of parent abandons their child? Amit thought. It destroyed him. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had rushed the job. The two months of work it had taken to find the camp had been so tedious, so exhausting, that when he had done so, he had not done his due diligence.

  He lost faith in himself, which made it impossible for him to continue doing his job. He began drinking, missing shifts, and less than a month later he received a dishonorable discharge. Perhaps his commanding officers could have tried to salvage him, but when they looked in his eyes, they knew; he was finished.

  The loss of his confidence and his job were nearly insignificant to Amit compared to his loss of faith in God. As he drank away his savings and pension, he asked himself questions he never had before. If bullies love their children, do they deserve God’s wrath? What kind of God allows a devoted servant to kill children for pride and expediency? Did Ishan, the boy who had tormented him as a child, have a tormentor as well? Did he deserve to die?

  Amit seriously contemplated the possibility of a world without a God for the first time in his life, and the chasm yawned deeper. If there is no God, he thought, then we are nothing more than fools gathered around a fire making burnt offerings. If there is no God, he thought, then we are truly on our own. Perhaps more than any other, that thought terrified him, because he had seen the worst that humanity had to offer, both in Dharavi and in himself, and he knew that humans were petty, selfish, and twisted creatures. If there is no God, he thought, then all is chaos. The madmen rule bedlam, and there is only one escape.

  His service pistol slowly moved closer to him. It spent a month staring at him from the opened safe.
One day, as he sat sweating and drunk in the heat, he noticed that it had moved from the safe to his coffee table. It waited there, whispering to him, until he was ready to let it closer. A few weeks later it had found its way to his nightstand. One night, like a nightmare-plagued child, it had climbed into bed with him, and he had held it tenderly.

  It was only when it had finished its journey, when the cold metal of the barrel had moved past his teeth and into his mouth, that he had felt the implants in his head awaken. When he was discharged from the service, he had placed them in passive mode, but now they flared to life of their own accord. This was only possible with the access codes, and the codes resided in some musty basement in a military base full of men and women who cared nothing for Amit or what had become of him.

  Then the word of God had come, stenciled across his vision in block letters, and all had become clear. God needed no access codes. He told Amit of the task before him. He told Amit that there was a ship of sinners, named Gringolet, and that like the denizens of Gomorrah or first born sons of the lords of Egypt, they had been chosen to die.

  Amit did not question why. On some level, quite deep down, he was aware that not asking why was tantamount to his lack of research into the camp in the Satpuras, but that was the point. God had spoken to him, and that meant that he did not need to question anymore. There was a hand on the wheel of the universe again, and humanity was relieved of responsibility. Amit was relieved of responsibility, and that was the best feeling in the world. The pistol returned to the safe, and Amit went to work.

  Unfortunately, now that he had found a purpose, he seemed unable to achieve it. He knew the tools he was working with, civilian sinners and not soldiers, were hardly ideal, but he was still determined to do as God had bid him. If he couldn’t, he knew what was waiting in the safe.

  The word of God came again, burned in his vision. As ever, the word was clear.

  TWICE THE AGENTS OF THE LORD HAVE FAILED. FLESH IS WEAK. IT IS TIME TO TAKE ACTION YOURSELF. YOU WILL NEED A CODEBREAKER.

  Chapter 17

  Wesley Threndon was three drinks into his evening when he realized that he had miscalculated. He had distinctly remembered that there was another bottle of whiskey in the cabinet over his seldom-used stove, but when he went to retrieve it, he found the cupboard bare. There was a fifth of vodka in the bar and some horribly sweet smelling schnapps left over from his housewarming party, but neither of them seemed palatable to him at the moment. He glanced at his watch. It was only ten after twenty-one; plenty of time to walk the three blocks to the corner liquor store and buy some scotch.

  Teetering only slightly as he plucked his keys and wallet from the table by the front door, he let himself out into the balmy Texan evening. He had changed out of his uniform when he had gotten home shortly after nineteen, and now he wore a comfortable pair of khaki slacks, moccasins, and a black West Point tee shirt. Reflexively, he reached up to feel his face. He hadn’t shaved in two days. He was supposed to shave every day, but lately he had failed to see the point. Tomorrow morning would do for a shower and shave, especially if he woke up to one of the hangovers that had begun to greet him daily.

  His house was barely deserving of the appellation. A two-bedroom townhome squeezed between more of the same, it had only a number to distinguish it from every other residence on the street. Twice in the nine months since he had moved in he had tried to use his key on the wrong door by mistake. Dark alleyways stretched between each block of houses, home to trash cans, recycling bins, and raccoons. There was only a sliver of a Moon rising this evening, and he eyed the slightly blurry and luminescent crescent as he shuffled along the pavement. Threndon knew that there were fifty thousand people living on the Moon, but the ant-farm like cities and the trains that connected them could not be seen with the naked eye from Earth. His wife, his ex-wife now, had wanted to move to the Moon. Well, he thought, now she could.

  Less than ten minutes later he heard the tinkling bell over the door to Luke’s Liquors ring as he entered. Luke wasn’t behind the counter; instead it was some kid reading a textbook. The young man looked up at him, nodded once in greeting, then bent back to his work. Threndon wondered if he had ever done a day’s hard labor in his life. There was no one else in evidence.

  The whiskey section drew him in like a magnet. He could have made his way through the store blindfolded. Upon reaching it, he pulled down a bottle of Wild Turkey without hesitation. The bell over the front door sounded again. After a moment of thought, he took another bottle as well, tucking the first under his arm. What the hell, the weekend was coming up. As he approached the front counter, he caught sight of the new patron, and she nearly caused him to walk into a standee of tiny wine bottles.

  The woman was average height and slim, and her figure was tight and well-sculpted. She wasn’t particularly busty, but her blue skirt and tank top complimented her curves well. She wore knee-high boots, the kind for which Threndon had always had a soft spot. What had stunned him, however, was her face.

  The woman was perhaps in her early thirties. Her face was heart-shaped with large, chestnut-brown eyes and lovely arching eyebrows. Her lips were pleasantly full, though not ostentatious, and her chin was slightly cleft. A line of freckles danced across strong cheekbones and the bridge of her ski-slope nose. Long red hair cascaded past her shoulders. She wore no jewelry, and Threndon thought that she needed none. She was the most beautiful woman he had seen in weeks.

  She looked right at him, and her eyes were friendly and without guile. “Careful there,” she admonished.

  He looked at her in confusion for a moment, then followed her gaze down to the cardboard standee he had nearly upset. “Um, thanks,” he said. “I will be. I mean, I am.”

  He cursed inwardly at his verbal ineptitude. He was very smart, he knew, and had met and seduced or been seduced by more than his fair share of attractive women in his life. That had ended, however, when he had married Gretchen, a marriage that had lasted over twelve years. Now that he was divorced, he felt clumsy, out of practice, and old. He thought he had a decade on the beauty in front of him, and his ego told him that he didn’t stand a chance with her.

  “Are you going to drink those yourself?” She inclined her head towards the bottles in his hand and under his arm. She spoke without a southwestern accent. Perhaps she was new in town, like him.

  “Not at the same time,” he smiled lamely, wincing inwardly at his poor humor. The woman apparently thought it was delightful, however, and she laughed deeply and richly.

  “I thought you maybe had a partner in crime waiting for you.”

  Threndon shook his head, only dimly aware that the young man behind the counter was staring at the woman as well. “No such luck.” He pulled a caricature of a sad face to show that he wasn’t really sad.

  She held up a cautionary finger as if scolding a child. “You do know that’s one of the signs, don’t you? Drinking alone?”

  He finally composed himself enough to walk forward and set his bottles of Wild Tukey on the counter. The student made no move to pick them up. “If it’s between that and not drinking,” he said with a shrug, “I guess I’ll have to wear one of the signs.”

  “You know, there is an option C,” she placed a hand on her hip, unabashedly watching him take out his wallet.

  He had no difficulty understanding her innuendo. She was laying it on pretty thick, but he couldn’t quite believe it. It wasn’t that he thought that she was angling to go to bed with him, but he was aging and not quite in the shape that he used to be. The woman in front of him could have her pick of men in any bar in town, for drinks or any other activity. It was obvious that the kid behind the counter, who had finally come alive enough to ring up his purchases, would crawl over hot coals to share a drink with her. Maybe she was just looking for a free drink, he thought. Well, that was all right with him. He could afford it, and he would be glad of the company.

  Some dim part of his partially inebriated brain warned him that when
something seemed too good to be true, it usually was. There were stories about seductress-spies from rival countries that circulated in officer training. The possibility also existed that this woman’s boyfriend was waiting with a knife outside the store ready to mug him, but he didn’t think so. Her face was open and warm; this wasn’t a woman who had lived a hard life. There was an innocence about her, a capacity for joy that was refreshing. This woman, he felt certain, only kept the company of men whom she wanted to, and for whatever reason, she wanted his now. He couldn’t think of a good reason not to play along.

  “Option C, huh?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” she replied emphatically. “Find someone to drink with.”

  “Do you know anyone?” He handed over the cash for his bottles. He found that the student had shifted from staring at the lovely woman to staring at him with a mixture of awe, wonder, and confusion. Well, let him. It felt good to have a beautiful woman go for him instead of the young guy in the room.

  “I know a girl who’s new in town, just visiting a friend for a week. Seems her friend has to work evenings, and this girl is all on her own and wants a friendly person to walk the town with her and have a few drinks.” If possible, the woman’s eyes were becoming even more inviting.

  Threndon picked up his brown bags. “Well, if this girl’s half as pretty as you, I think I can help. Does she have a name, this girl?”

  She laughed her throaty laugh again. “Stacey Adams,” she said and walk-skipped out of the store. As the bell tinkled, Threndon followed. Just before he exited, he tipped a wink at the still-gawking kid and said, “Have a good night!”

  They’d walked and talked for nearly an hour, each taking sips from the whiskey in the brown bag, when Stacey started to become more affectionate. She bumped hips with him a few times. The first he wrote off to the alcohol in their systems, but the second two were unmistakable. When she accepted the bottle from him, her fingers lingered on his. He noticed that they were hard and dry. He couldn’t help but wonder what they would feel like on his chest or his back.