by David Ryker
“So you had the same dream as a million others, including me,” Drake said dismissively. “Join the military, get out of the slums. So what?”
“So I got fucked over, just like my father!” Quinn said, swinging his feet off the desk and slamming his palms down on the desktop. “So did Major Zheng! He served with honor for decades, only to end up living in that Bellagio shithole in Vegas. And then he got his head blown off by the cyborg bastard who set us up in Astana.”
Drake tented his fingers under his chin and leaned back, but Quinn was sure he’d seen some alarm in the old man’s eyes. In the corner, the security drone bobbed down for a moment before Drake waved it away.
“Pardon my bluntness, Quinn, but boo-fucking-hoo. It’s a tough old world, and there’s no shortage of people who have it bad. That’s why we ended the war and created this new government. This new capital city has been transformed over the past two years to be a beacon to the world, to give people hope for the future.”
“Which brings us back to the original point of this whole thing,” said Quinn. “If we don’t do something about the aliens on Oberon One, there won’t be a future for any of us, and all your hard work will go up in smoke when that armada arrives on our doorstep. So I’d suggest you get your other tribunes on board ASAP and get us those pardons.”
“It’s not going to be that simple!” Drake snapped.
“That’s not my problem. You saw those messages in there.” Quinn cocked his thumb toward the door that led to the room where they’d left the others. “People are already asking questions and demanding answers, all over the world. You can’t cover this up.”
Drake glowered. “I could make you all disappear. You yourself pointed out that I know who Toomey is.”
“Try it,” Quinn said with a cold grin. “We’ve got a pretty good track record of surviving so far. I’ll put my money on my people any day of the week. And I get the sense from those messages that people are going to demand to see us, and soon.”
The two men glared at each other for several moments before Drake finally sat back in his chair.
“I’ll get to work on the pardons as soon as possible. But you need to understand that this situation is more complex than you can understand.”
“And you need to know that I don’t give a shit. Call off the dogs, let us out of here and we’ll get to work uniting the world against the aliens. Obviously we’d rather do it with the government’s cooperation, but it’s going to happen either way.”
Drake was silent for a long time before answering, which made Quinn wonder how much he himself didn’t know about the dynamics of this new world order. What was going on between Drake and his fellow tribunes that he was so reluctant to bring them in on this?
“All right,” Drake said finally. “You win. I’ll talk to the other tribunes at the earliest opportunity. As for you and the others, I’ll set you up in apartments in the Government House Tower.”
“We’ll need money. And I don’t want a security detail following us.”
“Fine. You’ll have guards for your protection in the Tower, but that’s all. We shouldn’t be on opposite sides of this, Quinn. If what you say is true—” He held up a hand to cut off Quinn before he could protest. “Sorry, I meant if we’re going to deal with this situation, then we all have to start acting like we’re on the same team. But the wheels grind slowly on my side of things; that’s just a fact.”
“All the more reason for us to get on the ground and put things in motion,” said Quinn. “Because judging by those messages on the network, the people don’t trust your government to give them the truth. And if we wait for official sanction, you’ll have alien ships in that beautiful blue sky outside before you can even decide on terms of reference. I’m not going to let that happen.”
Drake let out a heavy sigh. “You win. Go. Get out there and do what you’re going to do. I’ll take the heat with the other tribunes.”
Quinn stood and made for the door. Just as he reached it, Drake called out from behind him.
“Will you at least try to stay out of trouble?” he asked.
Quinn grinned and walked out without a word.
4
“Anybody else have trouble sleeping last night?”
Dev Schuster looked around the room at his companions, but Quinn knew he was specifically talking to him, Bishop and Maggott.
“I know what you mean,” said Bishop. “It’s like the bed in my apartment is almost too comfortable.”
Quinn cocked his head. Schuster was grinning at the joke, but there was something off about him. Like he had to work at it.
“Everything okay, Dev?”
“Sure,” he replied, just quickly and enthusiastically enough for Quinn to wonder even more.
Forget it, he told himself. If he’s got a problem, he’ll let me know.
Maggott shrugged. “We been sleepin’ four to a cell on cots as hard as rock fer the last two years. It’ll take some gettin’ used to. I’m just glad t’have a bed that I don’t spill over the sides of fer a change.”
“Technically, we’re still in cells,” said Quinn. “They’re just a little more comfortable than we’re used to. We still can’t leave the premises without being confronted by armed guards.”
“Well, I thought it was great to finally sleep in a proper bed with my man,” Ellie purred. “We haven’t done that in way too long.”
Quinn grinned at the redness blossoming in Bishop’s cheeks. The whole group was in the apartment that had been assigned to Quinn two days earlier. It was easily two thousand square feet—about four times the size of Quinn’s family home growing up—and featured a stocked kitchen and bar. Each of them had been given something similar, along with wristbands loaded with fifty thousand UFT credits each. Quinn didn’t have any new info on the pardons, but he had to admit Drake had come through on everything else.
It didn’t make him trust the man any more than he had before, but it was a step in the right direction. At the very least, it was good to have some true down time after six weeks of what seemed like constant fighting for their lives.
“I miss floating in a sleeping bag in zero-G on the way to Earth,” Chelsea said wistfully.
“What are you, the princess and the pea?” asked Gloom with a mocking grin. “You’ve got the princess part down, anyway.”
“At least I sleep,” Chelsea countered with a smile of her own. “Have you stopped scanning the network for even an hour since the broadcast went out?”
“What can I say? I’m an addict, and online attention is my drug of choice.”
“And there’s no shortage of supply,” said Ben, who was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa next to Gloom. “We’ve had millions of messages of support over the last thirty-six hours. Some licenced news contributors have even been reporting on it on their official broadcasts. That hasn’t happened to my content since the Prometheus exposé.”
Quinn didn’t know what to make of it all. Growing up in the slums and then joining the Marines meant he’d had very little interaction with the network in his lifetime. It had always been more of a Tower thing.
“Hey, man,” Ulysses said to Ben from his seat on the other side of the living room rug. “Y’know what I jest realized? Everythin’ we been through the last couple days and we don’t even know yer damn last name.”
“Jakande,” said Ben. “And contrary to the online name I chose, I’m from Nigeria, not Kenya.”
Chelsea looked at him curiously. “How did you end up as an outlaw journalist? I was under the impression that network access was almost impossible outside of a few small centers in Africa.”
Quinn had been to North African battle zones during the war, but knew little more about them other than that the countries bordering the Mediterranean had technically supported the Indus Alliance. What little he’d seen of the coastal areas had shown him essentially hell on Earth—desperate poverty, chaos and violence. Since the world had switched to fusion energy an
d stopped relying on fossil fuels, the entire continent of Africa had essentially lost any strategic influence in the global economy and fallen into a state of near-constant civil war for decades.
“It depends on how you look at it,” said Ben. “The network infrastructure is in place all over the continent; has been since the early part of the 21st century, though it’s far from cutting edge. It’s getting access to the technology to use it that’s the hard part. If you know where to look, you can hack in. The majority of people don’t bother because they’re too busy trying to stay alive.”
“So why did you feel like you had to expose the injustices of the world?” Ellie asked with a smile.
Ben’s expression darkened. “When I was twelve, my parents agreed to move to Johannesburg to work for a Tower family. We lived on the bottom basement floor, but at least it wasn’t the slum, and I got to go to school, which was the main reason for them taking the jobs. Things were better than they had been in Nigeria… at least until my mother jumped out of the family’s living room window on the 54th floor six months later.”
Whoa, Quinn thought.
“Oh my God,” Ellie breathed. “I’m sorry, I had no idea. What happened?”
“She was being raped by her bosses on a daily basis.” Ben was looking at the floor now. “The couple my parents worked for were sadists. They’d abuse my mother all night, then expect her to look after their children all day. And they expected my father to ignore it all. Two days after she died, he disappeared, and I was sent to an orphanage. I knew that it would be the end of me if I didn’t work to educate myself and learn how to get out of the slums.
“I found an old terminal in an abandoned store one day that was still functional, and I taught myself how to use it. It was from the days before holographic hard drives, so it was severely limited, but I learned all I could and then sold it for enough credits to buy a better one. I just kept doing that until I had a decent terminal.”
“I kinda did the same thing at that age,” said Ulysses. “Not with computers, though. I learned a different trade with the Southern Saints, if yuh get what I mean.”
Quinn didn’t want to get it; he still had trouble reconciling the fact that one of his most trusted allies had spent the better part of his life as a criminal.
“Go on, Ben,” he said.
“Then one day I came across someone who recognized my name,” said Ben. “She was an aid worker from Angola and told me she had known my father. He was sold to a faction in the civil war there, and she’d gotten to know him. She told me he would talk about me all the time.” He swallowed hard. “She also told me he’d been killed years earlier. That was when I discovered that thousands of servants, not just in Africa but around the world, were being sold as fighters by their employers. In a lot of cases, like my father’s, it was because they knew too much about their employers. Sometimes they had outlived their usefulness, and in some cases it was simply because their employers were looking to downsize.”
“Let me guess: that was your first story?” Chelsea offered.
He nodded. “I made it my mission to find out how it was being done, and who was doing it. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions. Got beaten up more than a few times, and had my life threatened more often than I can remember, but I eventually got the story that I wanted. One day, a licenced news crew was in Johannesburg for a political summit, so I tracked them down and tried to pitch it to them, but they said they didn’t have the time. Which I think really meant they just didn’t care.”
“That must have been devastating,” said Quinn. “But I’m guessing it just made you more determined?”
“Exactly. I eventually met a hacker online who helped me get around the network roadblocks and post the footage and story illegally. I didn’t use my real name for fear that someone would track me down and kill me. And that’s when Foster Kenya was born. The more stories I put out, the bigger my audience grew. Some of them started funding me with anonymous donations, and it just went from there.”
Chelsea cocked an eyebrow. “Another guess,” she said. “Did this hacker you met turn out to be a young woman with short hair and big, dark eyes when you finally met her?”
“Keep your mouth shut, Ben,” said Gloom, a mischievous grin on her lips. “Remember, journalists don’t reveal sources.”
“That’s why I was so happy to finally meet her in person,” said Ben. “If it wasn’t for Gloom, Foster Kenya wouldn’t exist, and, to be honest, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
Quinn thought about that. He was right—if not for their mysterious new friend, the Jarheads likely would have died that night at the Golden Nugget, and only Chelsea would have been able to tell the story about Oberon One. Her father would probably have had her committed, and no one would ever know about the aliens until it was far too late.
Assuming it already isn’t too late, he thought. No, he couldn’t allow himself to give in to doubt. They had to believe there was still time. He turned to Gloom to distract himself from the dark thoughts.
“So what’s your story, young lady?” he asked. “Ben left the perfect segue for you.”
She lifted her middle finger. “I got your segue right here, Captain Crewcut.”
Quinn chuckled and shook his head—he should have known better. Beside him, Schuster looked annoyed while Maggott hooted laughter.
“She’s got yuir number, sir,” he said with a sigh. “Ach, I mean Lee. Sorry.”
Quinn grinned and shook his head. He should have known better.
“Hey, Ben,” he said as a sudden idea came to him. “While we’re on the subject, I don’t suppose you ever did any reporting on Frank King’s kidnapping, did you?”
“I did some digging trying to find out what happened, but it didn’t lead anywhere.” Ben gave him a sheepish look. “I hate to admit it, but I believed you guys were guilty, too. I just assumed you’d been paid to assassinate him.”
“Don’t feel bad,” said Bishop. “After meeting Zero, it’s easy to see that we were set up by a pro. The evidence he planted was air-tight: Quinn’s face on the recording, the account in the name of the company we were going to start after the war. And our only defense was that we couldn’t remember anything. Hell, I would have convicted us.”
“The question is who was behind it,” said Quinn. “Zero got away from us before I had the chance to question him about it. If we could find him, we could find out the truth about Astana.”
Ben nodded. “I’ll do what I can to track down more on King and Astana. It’s safe to assume that Zero killed him, though, right?”
Schuster barked a bitter laugh. “I think if we’ve learned anything in the last six weeks, it’s never to assume anything.”
The others sat silent for a beat before breaking out in laughter themselves, Quinn included. It was funny not just because it was true, but because they were all emotionally exhausted, and at the moment, they had the luxury of a little time. Time to regroup, to recharge, to just sit around and have a laugh, knowing that there wasn’t someone out there trying to kill them.
The entrance bell chimed, and Quinn stood up.
“That’ll be the food I ordered,” he said, crossing the wide, open living room to the front door. “And before you ask, Maggott, yes, I ordered extra. Don’t want you gnawing on any of our friends here.”
The big man feigned shock. “Oi! I resemble that remark!”
The laughter broke out again as Quinn waved his hand over the door controls. When it slid open, his laughter stopped dead in his throat as he saw the business end of a shock rifle pointed directly between his eyes.
5
Oscar Bloom wrinkled his nose as he scanned the area around them, which made Morley Drake want to punch that nose as hard as he could.
They were on the waterfront at the edge of a vast green park, near a food shuttle that sold fresh auto-steamed Dungeness crab with real butter. The chubby redheaded gal who ran the shuttle dropped him a knowing wink when Bloom showed up. D
rake had arrived early for the meeting and asked her what she had overheard of his discussion with a strange-looking bald man in the same spot a few days earlier, and she’d replied that she had no idea what he was talking about.
Drake liked people who could keep their mouths shut. That was one of the reasons he hated Oscar Bloom.
“Problem with the fresh air, Oscar?”
“I have a problem with meeting in public places,” Bloom grumbled. “Why couldn’t we have done this at your office?”
“Because my office is a public place. Everything I say there is recorded. Out here, I can send my security drone to a safe distance and not be overheard.”
“It’s still recording video of us.”
Drake sighed. “It’s recording video of two acquaintances meeting in a park. If we’d met in my office, it would have been considered official business, and you better believe people would start asking why the UFT tribune was meeting with the head of a Global Family, whose daughter was just returned to him by the men that tribune had recruited for a secret mission and then testified against at their court martial. And who are now network celebrities. Try to keep up with this stuff, will you?”
The look on Bloom’s chiseled face told him the man wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. Well, tough titty, as his great-grandfather used to say. Morley Drake hadn’t fought like a tiger to get to where he was so that he could suck up to rich assholes who’d been handed everything in their lives and whose brows had never felt a bead of sweat.
And he sure as hell wasn’t about to sit here and be Oscar Bloom’s whipping boy.
“What the hell happened, Drake?” asked Bloom, ignoring the shot. “One minute I’m telling you to find my daughter, the next thing I know she’s on a viral video with fucking Toomey himself, while he spills the beans about Astana and Frank King! You know damn well that neither one of us wants the whole truth about that to come out!”
