A few people laughed. Fighting the blush response, she backed up and hauled the door open, feeling weak when it took a two-handed grip to move it. Oh, great. I look like a complete noob. When she lifted her head, she forced an embarrassed laugh. On the far side of a large atrium, a curved wall at least twenty-five-meters wide contained a bas-relief of mountains and clouds with eagles soaring in the sky. Twelve men and women in green camouflage armor stood post at even intervals along the curve, each with a compact assault rifle. Black visors concealed their faces, though at least two quivered with silent chuckles at the idiot who’d walked into a door.
Four people in civilian dress suits staffed an information desk a distance ahead, nearer the middle of the room. On either side of the counter, heavy security barriers offered four scanning lanes, two per side, staffed by a handful of Military Police armed with pistols.
One MP in green camo fatigues trotted over. Barely-restrained contempt simmered in his gaze, though he saluted her before glancing at a portable computer wrapped around his left forearm. “Ma’am. Is there a problem?”
“First day. I’m so used to automatic doors…”
He smiled. “We get that a lot. Looks like you’re headed for ITC.” The MP pointed at one of six hallways. “That way.”
She walked with him to the security station. Her throat constricted at the worry the spray-on stuff wouldn’t conceal her cybernetics from the machinery. Even these low-ranking soldiers would question why an IT worker had top-of-the-line speedware, Nano claws, and a predictive target-analysis system. It better be worth feeling like I’m shrink-wrapped. Risa squirmed at the sensation.
Risa flashed a nervous smile. At least the ‘first day on the job’ cover allowed her to show some of her anxiety. A square-faced woman with cornrows and thick muscles waved her through with a pleasant nod.
Once clear of the scanner, Risa hurried down the indicated corridor and followed signs and arrows until she reached one labeled ‘ITC,’ with ‘Information Technology Command’ in smaller letters under it.
Inside, ten people lounged about in flagrant disregard of military decorum. Most had their feet up on their desks. One snored, two played video games, and one orange-haired woman who bore a strong resemblance to a shapeless young teen seemed to be stuck with the laborious task of reinstalling an operating system on the terminals. She had six of the silver bars set up on the table in front of her. Holographic panel screens displayed progressively further stages of the process. A pushcart behind her held seventy or so more.
“Hey Simp, looks like you got some help,” said the nearest man. “New blood.” He waved over his shoulder. “Go give Simp a hand with the update, she’s been whining all morning about it.”
Risa swallowed the urge to snap at him, since the majority of them screwed off while they made the WO1 do all the work. Unfortunately, the guy barking at her had Lieutenant’s bars on his sleeve and outranked her cover persona. “Sir.”
She went to the desk in back, where the skinny woman looked up with hope in her eyes. According to the badge on a near-identical black blazer as Risa wore, her name was Simpson, K. Nothing about her said military. She looked fresh out of high school… if not still in it.
“Looks like I got a cush assignment.” Risa pulled up a chair.
“Yeah, these are older TD-92s from Media Relations. Some jackass opened a flagged message and a virus monkeyfucked the entire network segment.”
Risa lost her composure at the language coming from such an innocent looking girl, and laughed.
“Oooh.” Simpson seethed. “Sometimes I think they should make these idiots pass an IQ test before they’re allowed to take government jobs.”
“They do,” said a deep-voiced man in the middle of blowing up a screen full of strange organic-looking space ships. “If they get too high a score, they don’t hire them.”
Chuckling spread over the room, except for the snoring woman.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Simpson. “Most of the time we’re on standby unless something breaks. It’s the tier-two guys… the security wonks who’re on call.”
Risa looked at the cart full of silver plastic terminal bars, each about the size of a large submarine sandwich. “I guess I’ll get started on some.”
While two of the ‘veterans’ dragged a folding table out of storage for her, Risa opened a connection to the GlobeNet with her headware. She searched using an image of the terminal unit and the phrase ‘OS reinstall.’ The system came back with over thirty-eight-million hits. Crap. I don’t think there’s that many posts on all of MarsNet. Uhh, shit. She mind-clicked on one at random while grabbing a unit from the top layer.
“Get one started before you put another on the table. That way you don’t have multiple steps occurring at the same time.” Simpson pointed at a three-inch black box tipped with an asterisk-shaped M3 prong. “The OS is on this. Since we’re doing a low-level reformat of all the neural memory, there’s no net drivers. We’ve got a whole bunch of custom tweaks to the OS for this facility, but the process is mostly automated. All you have to do is click past the prompts.”
Risa chuckled. “So all they need us for is plugging in the box.”
“Geez, Marsh… Not so loud or we’ll be out of a job.” Simpson winked.
“Right… or reassigned to a post where we’d need to do actual work.” Risa sat on a backless chair and connected the box to the first terminal.
Sure enough, the level of automation allowed her to sit back and watch progress bars. Every so often, she had to click a holographic button to acknowledge security protocols. By the time she had six terminals on her table, she stared at the clock. Come on… come on… I don’t want to spend all day here.
“It’s not afraid of you,” said Simpson with a grin. “Giving it the evil eye won’t make time go faster. Thanks for the help with this… Might actually finish this in one day now.”
“No problem.” Risa smiled.
Over the next hour and change, she limped through small talk with WO1 Kellie Simpson. She learned the girl was eighteen, from the southern end of East City, and wanted an education paid for by the military. Her parents had forbidden her from taking a combat role. Not that she had to listen to them, but she wasn’t too keen on getting shot either. Risa passed along tidbits of her constructed persona, making things up about her family quietly emigrating from Egypt when her grandfather’s parents realized their three-year-old was a telepath. This, of course, started a discussion among everyone in the ITC room about how outside of the UCF, psionics tended to be shot on sight, even in the more ‘enlightened’ countries.
GlobeNet to the rescue.
“Actually,” said Risa, while skimming an article floating in front of her on a virtual display. “It’s not that bad where I’m from. Psionics are registered and monitored. As long as they don’t use their abilities for criminal purposes, they’re fine.”
“You’re spewing the same dustblow they paste all over the media,” said the Lieutenant. “It ain’t your fault ’cause you obviously didn’t grow up there… but what they tell the world and what they do when no one’s watching are different. If we weren’t so busy worrying what the ACC was up to, we’d go in there and show them how democracy works.”
Risa suppressed a tremble of anger. “You think it’s that easy? Just sweep right in, replace a regime, and suddenly everyone’s smiling and all their problems go away? You can kill leaders, you can hunt down dissidents, but you can’t force people to be happy or to change how they live. You can bust your ass for years, even die for them, and the citizens probably won’t even notice or care.”
The Lieutenant raised a hand. “Whoa. Slow that down a bit. I meant diplomacy.”
Yeah, sure you did. “Sorry.”
“Wow,” whispered Simpson, scooting closer. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I have a few friends who’ve been on the receiving end of the government ‘happiness cannon.’”
Deep-voice muttered under his
breath, wondering how ‘Marsh’ made it through security screening since she sounded like a fanatic. The man nearest him chuckled. ‘Rebecca Marsh’ shouldn’t have been able to hear him, so she tried not to show a reaction.
Beep.
Her first terminal showed complete. She carried it to a different cart and added it to the bottom row of finished installs, then replaced it with another one from the overloaded cart and started the process over again. Damn this is boring. She gazed into the warped reflection of the ceiling lights on the mirror-finished plastic terminal bars, and smiled. But I’m not getting shot at.
“Hey Marsh,” yelled the Lieutenant.
“Sir?” She sat up tall in her seat, peering over the holo-panels.
“You up for a desk call?” He looked like a used-hovercar salesman.
“I don’t like that smile. This is some hazing rite-of-passage crap, isn’t it?” She folded her arms. “I’m not falling for that ‘go get a bucket of steam’ thing.”
“No way. Total serious request. Senator Nur sent in a trouble ticket, her desk terminal’s acting up.”
Everyone found something to look busy doing, even Simpson.
Don’t sound too eager. “That guy’s playing a damn video game. Send him. What’s the big deal?”
Simpson looked at her like they’d scheduled her new friend for execution. “Nur’s a bitch. You do one tiny little thing wrong in there and she’ll get you reassigned to custodial services or booted to Mars.” Fear made the girl look even younger. “And I don’t mean actual ‘wrong.’ I mean ‘wrong’ according to an unreasonable intergalactic megacunt.”
A few of the guys chuckled.
Risa frowned. “I get the feeling I don’t get a lot of choice in this.”
“I could order you to,” said the Lieutenant. “But then I’ll feel bad if you wind up cleaning latrines.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said the formerly sleeping woman.
“Fine.” Risa stood, faking defiance. “She’s probably just a misunderstood busy person who senses your lack of respect.” She walked around the table full of terminals, heels clicking on the white-tiled floor. “What’s the issue?”
“Her terminal’s frozen up. She sent this in from her NetMini. In her technical opinion, ‘it’s completely fucked.’”
Risa laughed. “Love a diagnosis from a paper pusher.”
“Good luck.” The Lieutenant leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head.
“You’re not picking on me because I’m a woman, are you?”
“Nope. If that were the case, I’d have grabbed your ass by now, and I don’t feel like going through another sensitivity e-learn. You’re getting it because you’re the FNG.”
“Right.” Risa snagged a datapad as well as a case of delicate tools, and headed out. Finally.
The door slid shut behind her. Her augmented hearing picked up Simpson’s sigh and mutter of, “And I was just beginning to like her.”
Relief at getting away from the monotonous reinstallation procedure kept her nerves at bay as she made her way out of the ITC room, down the hall, and crossed in front of the long sculpture and Marine guards. In the main foyer, the echo of her shoes carried with such volume she wondered if Pavo could hear her walking. A few of the guards checked her out. One gave her an inviting wink. She returned a flirty smile, but didn’t slow down.
The trouble ticket showing on the datapad’s clipboard-sized screen provided a navigation assistant, which led her to the elevator and to the sixty-second floor, down a curving hallway of muted-blue carpet. Dark-brown wainscoting covered half the corridor wall, topped with slabs of faux jade. Brass light fixtures every thirty feet held a trio of flower-shaped glass shades. What is it about government that makes them like old-looking stuff? Her shoes made no noise on the carpet here, for which she felt grateful. For most of her life, first as an orphan hiding in the tunnels and later with the MLF, stealth and silence had been tantamount to life. She still hated loud noises, especially ones she made. Hope she could spare Kree that mental scar pushed aside her unease.
Two men in fancy suits passed by, not even affording her a glance. She ignored them and kept walking. Rectangular silicon wafers jutted out from the wall by each door, bearing various Senator’s names. A short dark-skinned woman in an expensive-looking suit slowed and glanced at her. Her hair resembled some manner of prehistoric bush, an explosion of inch-thick braids. Risa’s attention gravitated to a pearl broach surrounded by gold filigree over the woman’s breast pocket. That’s probably a camera.
“Good afternoon”―the woman leaned closer―“Miss Marsh. You’re new here, aren’t you? I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”
“Yes. First day. ITC.”
The woman shook her head, flashing a weak grin. “Welcome to the madhouse. I hope you turn out different from the rest of your compatriots. Seems all they want to do is sleep.”
She’s gotta be a Senator. “No, ma’am. I’m here to get the job done, not sit around.”
“I like your attitude. If you manage to keep it, you’ll do well here.” The woman smiled and walked on by.
Risa kept going until she spotted the nameplate for ‘Senator Marta Nur.’ The door handle rattled in her grip, locked. She swiped ‘Rebecca’s’ NetMini near the reader on the wall, but it didn’t do anything. Shit. What am I supposed to do now? She raised a hand to knock, but thought better of it. A flash of white on her black blazer caught her eye, and she tried swiping her dangling ID badge.
Beep. A small red light turned green.
She entered an enormous office, its blue carpeting flecked with black diamonds. Heavy green curtains gathered at either end of a window that ran the length of the far wall, offering a drab-grey view of the Moon. It seemed as though the Senate tower was the only item of color anywhere in Paramount City.
Behind an imposing desk of burgundy-hued ‘wood,’ a dour older woman in a pale-grey skirt suit hammered her fingers into the tiny screen of a NetMini, hard enough to make her puffy cheeks tremble. Senator Nur couldn’t be called ‘overweight,’ but she definitely wanted for nothing. She looked older than the image Everett had provided, and made Risa think of the villain from a cartoon she’d watched with Kree a few days ago. Add black dragon wings and they could’ve been sisters.
Risa stood in place feigning awkwardness for almost two minutes before the Senator looked up.
“Well, one of you finally decided to show up. I suppose I should consider myself grateful I managed to get someone here the same day.” She waved a long-nailed hand at the lump of silver plastic on her desk.
“Yes, ma’am. You’re having a problem with your terminal?”
“You can read, can’t you?” Senator Nur rose from her chair. “Why do they make us fill out those silly forms if you people are too lazy to even look at the system?”
“I’m sorry; I was just trying to be friendly.”
The woman drew a breath, likely ready to blast her with another rant, though Risa’s ‘sent-to-the-principal’s-office’ posture seemed to placate her need to feel important. “Fix it… if you can. What’s your name?”
“Marsh, ma’am. Rebecca.”
“Humph.” Senator Nur walked to the left, away from the desk to the wall of swirled wood texture. A previously invisible door became apparent when she touched a spot and it popped open. The room beyond contained a bed, smaller desk, and a six-person conference table. “This place is unbelievable. Do what you have to do and get out.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Risa stared at the rug as if she were in trouble. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about assassinating this bitch.
The Senator slipped into the concealed room, pulling the door to but not closed. Risa rounded the desk, not daring to sit in the woman’s chair, and dragged her fingertip over the terminal housing. Blank indigo on the holographic panel changed to a desktop view, displaying an error about a security lockdown.
A glance to the left confirmed the Senator had her back facing the main
office, while muttering at the NetMini. She tuned out the complaining about idiots working for the support staff, how someone incompetent is costing her time because her terminal is dead, and so on.
She reached into the blazer pocket and withdrew the pen, twisted the cap, and pointed the nozzle at the M3 port. Two seconds of spray saturated the plug before she trailed it off across the desk to the edge. Risa took care not to allow any gaps, moving her arm like a careful painter. Twenty-eight seconds later, she’d covered the entire underside, and the canister went dry.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Senator Nur, head poking in.
Risa froze, squatting in front of the desk with her arm in the hollow. She pivoted the pen in her fingers, and slipped it into her sleeve before pulling her arm into view. “There was an update with our neural memory cluster last night. Your terminal detected a time shift in the clock of eighty-seven-hundredths of a second and locked itself down as a security precaution.”
“Why are you crawling under my desk?”
Risa flashed an embarrassed smile. “I didn’t want to sit on your chair; I lost my balance.”
“Use the damn chair. I don’t have crabs… and next time tell Hoffman that I require notice of updates like this.” Senator Nur whirled away from the door and disappeared inside the hidden room.
Holy shit. Risa’s heart raced. She poked the little-used spot on the terminal housing that created a holographic keyboard, and typed in the sequence of meaningless letters and numbers that Berkeley gave her to disable the fake lockout.
“Nur,” said the Senator.
Risa glanced at the door. The woman remained out of sight. A mental nudge eked up the setting on her augmented hearing.
“Ahh, Andreas… so nice to hear from you.”
Alas, from the NetMini’s tiny earpiece, Risa could only make out a man’s voice warbling in an upset tone. The urge to record this gripped her. As soon as she wanted to, a little panel appeared at the top-right corner of her vision with an equalizer graph.
Ghost Black Page 29
