Ghost Black

by Matthew S. Cox

  The face on the shimmering screen, grey-haired, wrinkled, froze. A tiny amount of color drained from his cheeks for a second before they reddened with fury.

  Risa stepped in-between the holo-panel and the dead man, adopting the posture of a broken marionette. “You shouldn’t have threatened my daughter, Liào.” She held her hands up, bringing bloody Nano claws into view of the camera. “You wanted an assassin?” She stepped closer. “You got one. I’ll be seeing you… and the rest of the board very soon.”

  Liào’s eyes went wide.

  She jammed her claws into the Vidphone unit, killing the call and sending a shower of sparks and smoke upward.

  Risa walked to the bathroom. “It’s me.”

  A click came from the lock.

  She stepped in.

  Kree sat on the closed toilet, covering her eyes with her hands. In the solace of a private room, she’d started crying. She sniffled to a state of quiet calm as Risa approached the sink and held her hands under the faucet. A sensor tripped the flow and she rinsed away the blood, retracting her blades a few seconds after no trace of red remained.

  “I’m sorry.” Risa bowed her head.

  Kree pulled her feet up and stood on the toilet lid. “Why are you sorry?”

  Risa didn’t bother to dry her hands―that would take too long. She swept Kree into her arms and hugged her. “For letting them take you.”

  “He tricked us both with a Pavo head.”

  She laughed despite her body surging with too much unspent adrenaline and rage. “Yeah.”

  “Did you kill them?”

  “Not the one who wanted to give you water.”

  Kree squirmed. “She wasn’t mean like the others.”

  “I know. That’s why I let her go. Close your eyes.”

  “’Kay.” Kree snuggled. “You did just like I drawed?”

  “Yeah. Just like you drew. I won’t ever let the bad people hurt you.” Risa kissed her on the head. “But I still don’t want you looking at it.”

  Risa carried her across the hotel room, down the hall to the elevator, and held her the whole way to the ground floor. She seethed to herself. She’d been acting like a normal kid. This is going to give her nightmares… she’s going to hide under the bed again. I’m going to tear that company apart. Guilt at what she’d been almost willing to do to Tamashī sent a sniffle into the crook of Kree’s neck.

  “Don’t cry. I knew you would find me.” Kree kissed her on the cheek and rested her head on Risa’s shoulder.

  You would not have killed Tamashī, said Raziel. Think of it as a theoretical question. You would choose the life of your child over the life of a non-relative. Do not feel shame for following a decision branch most biological creatures would select.

  The elevator door slid open. The Presidium Hotel lobby flashed blue from the lights of at least fifteen MDF cars. Risa crossed the fancy room, exiting the main doors as the first line of Defense Force officers reached the top, Pavo at the lead.

  He waved the others in and stopped, grasping her arms. “What the hell happened in there?”

  “Míngtiān wants Tamashī dead. They tried to pay off the Syndicate, but they didn’t go for it. As long as she works for them, they’ll protect her. Somehow Míngtiān found out about me… knew I could walk right into the Orbital, thought she’d never see it coming.” She never would have.

  Pavo pulled them both into an embrace.

  “Raziel spoofed my GPS going to Elysium. He backtracked their call and led me here.”

  “How many dead?” asked Pavo.

  “Two. One had a soul, so I let her go.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m going to China. I have an appointment with a Mister Liào… and the rest of their executive board.”

  Pavo shook his head. “Leave them to the Defense Force.”

  “China’s a sovereign state. They’re not UCF or ACC. What are your laws going to do? I told that old bastard he’s going to get the assassin he wanted.”

  “Mommy, please don’t go away again.” Kree sniffled.

  Pavo gestured at Kree as if to say ‘how can you argue with that.’

  “Míngtiān has a presence here, as well as UCF Earth. Offices as well as merchandise going into stores. We can deal with it. It probably won’t result in the death of their executives, but it’ll hurt them more… in the wallet. Let us deal with it.”

  “You better…” She fired back an ‘or I will’ look.

  Pavo’s NetMini chimed a second before Risa’s rang with an incoming call. Noticing the call came from Garrison, she patched it to her headware for privacy.

  His bust appeared in midair, coated in grey dust. 「Risa. Do not return to the safehouse. Situation critical.」

  「What? No. I just found out you’re my father for real… I’m not going to let you die a month later.」

  「Wait what?」 yelled Genevieve. She leaned into the frame with Garrison. 「Father? What!」

  「I’m sorry, Bit. I love you. The most important thing to me is that you stay alive. I’m sorry. You have to stay away. It’s too late.」 Garrison lingered for a second, and ran off camera.

  Genevieve stepped in, gazing off to the side. She pulled a filter mask down, exposing a patch of clean skin around her mouth and nose, the rest grey with dust. 「What the hell?」

  A massive explosion overloaded the audio channel.

  Risa screamed. Kree slipped from her arms as she grabbed the sides of her head, cringing from the volume. The child landed on her feet and clung to her side. Her brain quivered from a roar that would’ve blown eardrums out had it not been mere electrons being fired into nerves, making her swoon to her knees. Genevieve’s floating apparition vanished in a cloud of smoke.

  The line went dead.

  “Risa?” Pavo grasped her shoulders and shook her. “What the hell was that?”

  She stared at him, wordless.

  He shook her again. “Risa.”

  “Bombs… They blew it up.”

  “Blew what up?”

  “Everyone.” She jumped up. “I have to go…”

  His grip slid down to her forearms and he yanked her back. “Go where? The safehouse? Why? If they blew it up, it’s gone. It’s done. There’s nothing there for you now. What are you going to do?”

  She used an aikido technique to reverse his grip, grabbed his wrists, and pulled his arms around Kree. “Gen said she disarmed most of the bombs. There’s gotta be survivors. He’s my father, dammit. I have to try.”

  Kree reached up, put her hand on Pavo’s cheek, and squeezed. “He doesn’t feel fake.”

  “Risa, don’t.” He grabbed for her, but she evaded with a backward leap.

  “Please watch her. I… can’t not know.”

  He growled. “You’re not going alone.”

  “Does the MDF know the way through the vents?” Anxiety made her bounce on her toes.

  Pavo scooped Kree into his arms. “Risa…”

  Dad. No… Dad. The emotion in Garrison’s eyes before he disappeared from the comm looked too resigned, as if he knew his time was up. She ran to the curb, and a taxi obelisk. Before the automated voice could say “Thank you for using PubTran,” Pavo grabbed her arm and pulled her around to face him.

  “No way. We’ll make better time in mine.”

  He dragged her back to his patrol car, pulled the door open, and let Kree slip down. The girl crawled into the back seat. After bodily lifting Risa into the passenger seat, he slammed the door.

  Risa dug her fingers into the cushion. Endless attempts to call Garrison’s Vidphone and NetMini all failed, as did Genevieve’s. She tried Osebi, Lancaster, Ralek, Huang… all went to Vidmail without even ringing.

  Please… Please… Please… Her head snapped around to the left as Pavo got in. “They’re not answering. No one is answering.”

  Pavo gripped the wheel with a grim, determined stare. The tires squealed as the car whipped around, the rapid turn bouncing Risa off her door. A half-second later, the car got a grip
and rocketed forward. She twisted to peer back at Kree huddled in the back seat. The child appeared frightened, but gave her a grateful smile.

  Pavo muttered under his breath while plotting a Nav pin for the shuttleport.

  “I’m okay,” whispered Kree. “Little scared.”

  Unable to think of anything to say, Risa squeezed her hand and stared at the tiny person peering back over her knees. The tiny person that meant so much to her.

  “Can we still go to the park tomorrow?” asked Kree.

  “Yes… of course.” Risa smiled, despite the tears rolling down her face. She had made a choice, Kree over everyone else that mattered in her life.

  She could have peace with that, but not unless she at least tried to help them, however futile it might be.

  28

  Black Swan

  The thirty-six-minute flight from Arcadia to Primus may as well have been an eternity. She’d given up her endless rotation of trying to call anyone only after the landing pad came into view. Between Pavo’s police ID and the look in her eyes, the flight crew hadn’t given them too much of a problem when she got out of her seat before the shuttle touched down. He’d taken an MDF car from the regiment based out of the shuttle terminal, but Risa insisted she could get there faster on foot. Primus City’s congested subterranean streets did not tolerate vehicles well. Even in places where the stone had been cut wide enough, too many people and too much junk had clogged them over the decades.

  Tears streamed out of the corners of her eyes as she ran through the crowd, ducking large people, shoving smaller ones out of her way, and jumping over the occasional child. She’d spent a few minutes trying to explain to Kree―who did not want to be separated from her so soon―why she had to go underground. Still, the agonized look in the girl’s dark-blue eyes as she left her with Pavo haunted her the entire way down to Tier 4. Kree’s composure had finally crumbled when Risa sprinted out of the elevator on Tier 1 and yelled, “watch her.”

  The farther down she went, the thinner the crowd got. Speedware pushed her to about thirty miles per hour on a dash across the lower reaches of civilization. Fortunately, she only sent one person flying into a window.

  Risa slowed as she approached the familiar dead-end alley where the huge ventilation intake offered the best entry to the unpopulated deep tiers. A moan emanated from the waist-high trash as she slogged past it, raking her hands side to side to displace food cartons and cups. One vagrant sat up with a plastic ramen bowl for a hat.

  “Spare a couple creds?”

  She pulled the vent open. “Bit of a hurry. I’ll get ya on the way out.”

  Eighteen meters in, right turn. Forty-five meters, right turn. Sixteen feet, vertical shaft down. Risa didn’t rush to enable any vision modes; she knew this section of duct like the back of her hand. While easing her way down, counting each time her right palm pressed against the cold plastisteel, she activated the Wraith. A weak hum, out of the range of normal hearing, emanated from the little device clinging to her head above her ear.

  The grey-on-black world she’d spent five years in returned.

  Her boots hit the floor thirty meters below her entry point. In total darkness, the Wraith surrounded her with walls made of shimmery ethereal vapor that shifted around, appearing stronger whenever she moved, fading if she kept still. She dropped to all fours, once more crawling into the life she blamed on the UCF: darkness, tunnels, and bombs.

  Already, the stink of NE6 explosive hung in the air, settling on her tongue with the flavor of acidic metal and a trace of dirt. Unfamiliar shapes glided toward her on the floor, things that should not be here. Risa stopped crawling and switched to active IR night vision, which illuminated an opaque wall in front of her.

  Smoke, something the Wraith did not ‘see.’

  Chunks of debris had skittered into the vent; a fragment of black plastic housing, likely from one of the charges, sat near a pile of small rocks. She forced herself onward, clinging to her anger as a lifeline, knowing the second she let go, she’d break down with it. She feared what she’d find in the safehouse… if a safehouse even remained to be found.

  Two minutes of crawling later, she headed left at an intersection. After thirteen meters, she slipped into another narrow vertical, which ran the rest of the way down to what would have been Tier 8 had the city not stopped developing. Coughing started as soon as she breathed. She collapsed on her knees in dust too thick to see beyond the length of her arm. IR didn’t show her anything but haze, so she switched back to the Wraith. Grey-on-black ductwork became visible, but the passage she’d once thought of as home looked foreign.

  A noticeable twist warped what had once been a sixty-meter-long straightaway connected to an intake duct feeding the safehouse, which ultimately led to Garrison’s office. The passage in front of her stopped after only twenty-three meters, according to her targeting system. Dirt and rocks, ranging from pebble to bigger than her skull, had caved in. What little fragments of her childhood she’d hidden there, burned dolls and toys, lay buried out of reach.

  No…

  She ran over the tunnel map in her memory. At fifteen, she’d gotten General Maris unusually enraged at her ability to sneak past all their sensors unnoticed. He’d ordered Huang to double down. At the time, she lacked the expertise to disable them… so she’d gone around. Risa knew ways into the safehouse that even Maris didn’t… though two of them wouldn’t work now that she had grown up. The old water mains had been a tight squeeze even at ten.

  She climbed up one tier and scurried along another duct to a twelve-foot-square fan chamber. The massive air mover hadn’t seen power since probably before she’d been born, and looked no closer to working. A mild contortionist dance got her past a gap in the blades and into a crouch on the soft, springy bed of silt below it. Few things on Mars made Risa’s spine lock up from disgust, but stepping barefoot in whatever lived at the bottom of this chamber as a kid had been one of them. Even now, wearing boots, the squishy/springiness of walking on it made her sick―or maybe the heavy feeling in her gut came from nerves.

  The shaft ahead was twice as wide as most ducts, but had a low ceiling, forcing her to move in a tight hands-and-knees crawl. She gave serious consideration to repurposing her panties into a face mask given all the dust, but didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them out from under her armor. Instead, she reduced her breaths to shallow sips of air. Even with a Tox Filter in her trachea, she coughed. Her grasping hands found more loose rocks as she dragged herself forward, following a path that would take her into the safehouse vents in a little over a hundred meters. If she remembered correctly, this path would lead to a grille at the right-angle corner in Death Row, where she’d played ‘speeware’ with Kree and the boys.

  Her hope died less than fifty meters later; she expected a vertical descent, but found a solid mass of dirt in the passage. Four times, she grabbed handfuls, refusing to believe what her senses told her. Her father, her ‘older sister,’ and a crew she’d trust with her life lay somewhere down that shaft, buried under thousands of tons of Martian regolith. Genevieve wouldn’t have even been there if not for her.

  Risa lowered her forehead to touch her arm, and cried. It’s not fair.

  Minutes later, she quieted, lying limp on the bottom of a ventilation duct seven stories below the surface of Mars. Amid the stillness, Garrison’s voice whispered in her memory.

  You chose your child over everyone else. That’s what a real mother would do.

  He didn’t sound as though he minded she let him die. She gasped, sniffled, and wiped her face. Every angry thing she’d ever screamed at him came to haunt her in the silent dark. A slow breath filled her throat with the flavor of dirt. I can’t stay here. Kree…

  A pitiful wail echoed in the tunnel. Risa blinked, sure she’d imagined it. When it happened again, she sprang up to all fours.

  “Hello?” yelled Risa.

  When no response came, she sighed. It’s in my head.

&nbs
p; “Help!” The voice sounded distant… and female.

  “Hello? Where are you?” yelled Risa.

  “Ri?”

  “Gen!” Risa shouted and scrambled forward. “Where are you?”

  A weak reply echoed back a few seconds later amid coughing. “Motor pool vent. Trapped. Can’t breathe.”

  “Save your air. I’m coming.”

  Risa crawled as fast as the tunnel would allow. Burrs and bolts in the wall and ceiling nipped at her back and butt, though couldn’t cut the ballistic suit. If Genevieve had gone into the vents from the garage, she’d be in another section of passages one level up. That part was closer to the cave exit and built higher into the underground.

  Four minutes later, she emerged in the fan chamber, disregarding the clammy, spongy muck oozing between her fingers, and slithered up past the dead turbine. She climbed onto the blade, bypassing the side channel she’d come in from, and went out an opening in the top. The inter-tier shaft sucked air down from exterior vents, and offered a straight shot up to a surface building. An impractical exit, as too many still-functioning fans blocked the way.

  She ascended another eleven meters before slipping into a square lateral duct. Though it offered enough height to duck walk, she opted for a faster crawl. In her head, she visualized the path she’d take if she were trying to leave the safehouse via vent from the garage. After clearing three turns and one short vertical drop, her Wraith picked up motion ahead, rendering it as a grey blur fluttering near the floor.

  “Gen?”

  “Ri!” Something soft thumped on metal three times. “I’m here! Holy shit. You found me… Help.”

  Risa crawled forward, ignoring sharp rocks under her hands. Detail crept into the grey form, which solidified into a woman’s hand sticking out from between inch-thick square bars. She hustled over and grabbed on.

  “Gen!”

  “I can’t see shit.” Genevieve coughed. “Too much dust. What is this?”

  Risa looked around, moving her head in a shallow side-to-side bob to keep ‘the environment’ in motion and visible via the Wraith. Genevieve’s upper body stuck out from a pile of dirt that had come down from an opening in the chamber above her. The bars between them were most likely the grille covering that had fallen off the junction, knocked loose by the avalanche and wedged.