Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2)

by A. G. Claymore

  Tim shook his head with mock sadness. “Look at me. I used to be such a sharp negotiator but now I’m as transparent as Aunt Tilly’s nightdress.”

  Paul laughed at the rogue. “I’ll take that to mean I’m paying more than I should. How much is that, exactly?”

  An aggrieved expression appeared on Tim’s face but it quickly dissolved into a laugh. “The holster with the data point… sixteen hundred.”

  “One of us must be sniffing exhaust fumes,” Paul declared, “because I was expecting to hear something in the under-thousand range.”

  “Must be you.” Tim made a show of peering closely at Paul. “You look a little dark around the eyes. Tell you what, I’ll knock off two hundred to help cover the meds you’re gonna need to get all those toxins out of your system.”

  “I hear those meds are costly.” Paul sighed dramatically. “If I’m going to kick the habit, I’ll be needing another hundred off…”

  “Fifty.”

  Paul held out his hand and they shook on it.

  He waved a hand over the pad on Tim’s counter to transfer credits from the account Ava had set up. Essentially, now that he was a registered Justice, the funds in the account were legally required if he was to investigate his niece’s abduction. Working for free was grounds for dismissal from the Justice Department.

  Tim showed him how to attach the data point to the holster and walked him through how to use it on the planetary data net.

  Paul left the shop and linked his CPU to the data point. As a test, he started out by looking for a café. Unsurprisingly, there were far more cafés in Ravenna than Justice Bureaus.

  Coffee was the one crop that no colony had ever failed to include in its farming plan.

  He found a decent place built adjacent to a junction of two walkways. He took his steaming mug out to a table on the patio that offered a magnificent view into the depths of the urban tangle.

  Across the chasm from his perch, a pair of workmen dropped a large pane of glass when one of them tripped. The large object slammed to the ground without breaking and a cloud of birds swarmed out of a nearby grove of trees. Paul heard the echoing slap of the falling glass a few milli-days later.

  As the two workers struggled to lift the heavy pane again, the small flock continued to orbit the trees, never going more than a few meters from their origin. He continued to look out at the struggling workmen so he could turn his attention inward without looking strange to the café’s other patrons.

  Using his data point to conceal his CPU, he spent a few minutes searching for a biometrics database. The system was organized differently from its Imperial counterparts, but there were still some similarities, even after five centuries of divergent history.

  Once he found the database, he brought up a sample of Ava’s visitor and ran a match. The result came up before he could take his first sip.

  Able Pfizer was, apparently, unemployed and had been for several years. He didn’t seem to be hurting for money, though. It came as no shock that he’d been flagged by the system as a possible criminal.

  Paul took a drink, looking down at the mug in surprise at the sharp taste. Whatever they had in the soil here, it made good coffee. He returned to Mr. Pfizer. He was just a low-level dogsbody. He’d have a controller who gave him his marching orders, probably at a neutral location.

  He accessed the monitor net and extracted Able’s movement history. There were quite a few holes in his trace, but only a few of them occurred in the same spot more than once. It was a pretty safe bet the man would go dark when meeting his controller.

  He probably got his pay at those meetings.

  Paul smiled to himself and took another sip. What criminal would wander the city with a full credit chip on their person? He brought up Able’s banking records. A series of deposits coincided nicely with the timing for one of the blackout locations.

  Able Pfizer was cautious, but his caution betrayed him. He’d taken care to alter his approach when going to meet his controller. It may have made it harder to ambush him, but it also created dozens of vectors that pointed in the general direction of the meetings.

  He always took care to go dark before getting too close, but all those truncated paths still pointed at the ultimate destination. It was probably near the center of the rough empty sphere where he never had his chip active.

  Paul brought up a virtual projection, visible only to himself, and isolated a three-dimensional map of the city within the dark sphere. He picked a truncated trace, selecting the time frame closest to his niece’s disappearance, and located Able on the public security camera records.

  He froze the image and set a facial recognition algorithm so he could automatically follow him from camera to camera without having to scramble and find him from new angles. The algorithm was powered by the city’s own servers so he had enough time to finish half his coffee.

  He released the image freeze and watched as his target strolled along. Paul had to admit, his tradecraft was better than he’d expected. He wasn’t overtly glancing over his shoulder to look for a tail. He was using more natural, explainable methods. Every now and then, he’d cross a lane set aside for ground effect vehicles and have to look back to ensure he wasn’t about to be run over.

  He even passed through a few choke-points before finding a plausible reason to look back. Anyone trying to follow him would be scrambling to keep up and he would have spotted them.

  This was no ordinary thug. Mr. Able Pfizer was a skilled operator but Paul was dead certain he wasn’t the one holding Saoirse. It would have been inconsistently foolish to use a pro to deliver the message to Ava if he also knew where to find the hostage. It opened the whole enterprise to an unacceptable level of risk that even the most inept conspirator would immediately recognize.

  He would definitely have a controller. Someone to insulate him from his customers and handle the money.

  Able was past the halfway point of the dark zone now and he swerved closer to a treed area near the edge of the walkway. He passed beneath the trees to a long graphene bench and sat for a while.

  Paul zoomed out the recording, looking for the approaching controller, but the pedestrian traffic seemed to have no interest in the secluded grove of trees. He frowned in frustration as Able got up and walked out of the zone in a different direction from the one he’d taken to arrive.

  At no point had anything been handed over. He followed the man’s progress until he’d turned his chip back on. Was it simply an aborted meeting? Paul raised his cup but stopped it halfway and set it back down.

  He began rewinding the video file, but overlaid the electromagnetic record. After Able backed up to the bench and sat down, a coinciding, low-intensity, EM burst occurred in his location.

  It was a dead-drop.

  Someone had been there earlier and attached a chip to the bench, somewhere where it wouldn’t be seen. Paul’s first impulse was to go find it, but he knew the site was probably under observation. Whoever was behind this was sophisticated enough to use professionals. They’d want to keep an eye on investigative choke-points like this one.

  And it was probably a burner chip anyway. Paul was better off finding out who’d put it there in the first place. He cut the algorithm loose from Able’s face and set the view to remain in place. Running backwards at high speed, he watched several people come close but it was nearly a full deci-day before anyone actually sat there.

  He waited until the man stood and began walking away, backwards of course, before halting the rewind and moving forward again at regular speed.

  He settled on the bench and took out a bag of crumbs. With an indulgently absent smile he began tossing crumbs to the birds. Not once did he behave in even a slightly unusual fashion, except for the fact that his hands never touched the bench. Paul suppressed a sigh, not wanting to look like someone who was seeing something disappointing in an advanced neural interface.

  He took a drink of his rapidly cooling coffee and looked out at the view. The
workmen were gone but the birds were still there.

  He sat up a fraction straighter, staring intently at the little grove of trees. Those birds didn’t go very far, even though they’d been startled by a hell of a loud noise.

  He opened a query on the data net, pairing the keywords, ‘territorial’, ‘bird’, and ‘Ravenna’.

  The result was the Alley Shrike. An indigenous bird, native to the deep mountain ravines near the city, Alley Shrikes are incredibly territorial, often staying in the same bush in the same mountain ravine for dozens of generations. As long as the food source lasts, they stay in the same place. Even if food becomes harder to find, they’re still likely to travel from their place of birth to hunt and then return with the catch.

  Over the course of five centuries, they had adapted to the deep ravines of the Human city.

  He allowed a thin smile of grudging admiration. There must have been a nanodot mixed in with the crumbs the man had fed to those birds. It was a clever way to organize a dead-drop.

  It left the scene clear of old evidence. The birds held onto the dot until Able could come to retrieve the data. The chances of the bird leaving with the dot were minimal and it was far less suspicious than leaning over to shove something under a bench.

  He ran a search for the man’s face and found Darius Mecklenberg. Darius was an employee of the Cobalt Group and they listed him as a junior accounting executive.

  Low enough to attract little interest but, in a position where he could get his hands on money.

  Paul was done with Able Pfizer now, but he knew Darius would be a harder nut to crack. He most likely didn’t rely on dead-drops to get his own marching orders.

  This was going to take a more personal touch.

  Changing the Game

  Julia stood at the end of the dock in Segusium where she’d first set foot on Ravenna, one hand idly scratching at the spot where her citizen chip had been injected. She’d registered the Ava Klum and delegated Hale to flesh out the two crews with new recruits.

  A small passenger carrier left the floating monastery to drift toward her.

  She had posted the necessary maintenance bond with the shipyard on Hatteras Station as well, but she was less than comfortable with the way she’d had to do it. Borrowing funds from Paul’s sister was the last thing she’d had in mind, but Ava had been adamant.

  She knew Julia’s ships would slip out of her fingers in a matter of days if she didn’t look after the business end of things. She had been clear about there being no time frame on the repayment but, as far as Julia was concerned, the sooner her two ships were back in action and earning bounty, the better.

  Julia figured that was what Ava wanted as well. Not to get her money back, though, but to further integrate her brother’s lover into the fabric of local society.

  She knew Ava was doing this because she approved of her, but she still wished she hadn’t landed in her debt within hours of arriving.

  She returned the polite gesture of the alien monk and stepped down into his small craft. The monk was humanoid in form, but his head was covered in bony plates that segmented their way down to the chin. Sharp mandibles protruded from his mouth and two slits served for nostrils.

  She could see no eyes anywhere on the head, but small, glossy dark spots covered the entire surface. If they were eyes, then this species must have all around vision. She wondered what kind of mind it took to process the extra visual input.

  Perhaps that was part of the reason their kind had developed such a mystique as well as a reputation for intelligence-gathering. That was her reason for meeting with them and it was also, undoubtedly, their reason for flying their enigmatic little community down to the shores of Segusium.

  They would have known she was here, after all, and a new captain with two ships and bills to pay needed good intelligence.

  Ava had insisted they were the best and so Julia stepped out of the small craft onto a stone-paved walkway. She followed her guide into the heart of the rustic, if alien looking, village, noticing the heavy timber-framed buildings and the small open park areas where trees and grass grew wild.

  She was led to a large central building. The first level was a solid-looking stone structure with the upper two levels framed in heavy timber. Balconies ran around the exterior on the two upper levels and the curving roof was shingled with angle-cut slate, giving it a scaled look.

  The guide stopped at the heavy wooden doors flanked by solid stone buttresses and gestured for her to pass alone through the open and unguarded entrance.

  Her ocular implants adjusted easily to the dimly lit interior but there was no way to negate the odd smell of the burning incense. A quick scan of the interior space revealed a raised platform at the far end where three monks sat on a pile of wood shavings.

  She crossed the room and stood at the foot of the platform, saying nothing. This was going to be part negotiation and part interrogation. The Brotherhood of Confidences was reported to have many sources, but one of their chief sources was the steady flow of captains who came to buy information from them.

  All of them invariably talked much more than they should. Thousands of captains on several worlds were clients of the Brotherhood and the little things that slipped at the monasteries added up to a surprisingly good picture.

  Julia reminded herself that the Brotherhood had come down to the edge of the lake because they wanted to see her as much as she needed to see them. Let them be the ones to talk first and reveal their thoughts.

  “So,” the one in the middle croaked at her, his voice a rattling, sibilant thing, “you have come.”

  Julia supposed that kind of comment might get a client talking. It seemed to say nothing beyond the obvious, but it was a clear attempt to convince Julia that she was the supplicant.

  Julia had watched them come to Segusium the previous night, after the second bout of creaking had died down. She smiled, both out of politeness and at the memory. “As have you.” She replied politely.

  An awkward silence filled the space between them and Julia was perfectly happy to see how long it would live.

  The one on her right gestured to a small pile of wood shavings. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  Another delay tactic, not that she cared. “Thank you.” She mounted the platform and settled on the pile, crossing her legs. The silence wore on.

  It wasn’t that the Brotherhood would refuse to sell her information. They were all too eager to do so, but they also relied heavily on drawing captains into a conversation before getting down to business.

  Most privateers couldn’t resist regaling others with tales of their martial prowess. Moons raided, shipments intercepted by clever ruses – reputation was everything and no captain was immune to the need to maintain their image. As a rule, privateer captains were a talkative bunch and the Brotherhood excelled at reading between the boasts.

  Thousands of incidents yielded thousands of data points – a specific cargo seized on its way to a certain destination, a grouping of ships found in an unexpected location – it all added up. The Brotherhood paid attention to everything you said, even if you didn’t.

  They seemed to decide that Julia wasn’t the kind of client who gave anything away for free because the one in the center began speaking. “Let us come straight to the point. We are willing to mitigate the charges for data rendered in return for whatever information you might be able to provide us.”

  Julia definitely had information they could use. She had schematics on Gray cruisers as well as detailed schematics for their prototype carrier. She’d seen the origin-controlled wormhole generator that allowed the ship to create wormholes independent of any gate system.

  The three monks in front of her were gamely trying to downplay the value of her knowledge, but she was willing to call it a day and return to Ava’s house. She was still recruiting the crew for her small fleet and there was the small matter of replacing the main armament on the Mary Starbuck.

  It wasn’t like she was
heading straight out into the black the second she stepped off this bizarre flying island. That was the basis for her proposal. Why get information now? Far better to establish a relationship and maintain some level of control over it.

  “I can give you the schematics for the Gray cruiser,” she told them, “but I don’t need information from you just yet. As I’m sure you already know, intelligence has a very short shelf life.”

  The center monk cocked his head to the side. “Then why are you here now?”

  “As I said, I can give you information, but I’m not here to haggle over two prices at once. Let’s decide on the value of what I offer and then I’ll use that credit as need arises.”

  “The cruiser is not the only Gray ship you’ve been aboard,” the monk on her left rattled.

  “That will be the second phase of our relationship,” she replied with a polite nod. “I’ll see how far the first set of data gets me before deciding if it’s worth it to trade what I have on their prototype carrier.”

  The center monk, who seemed to be their leader, nodded. “This has been done before. I believe we can achieve mutual benefit from such an arrangement.”

  Julia began to nod but stopped as the monk’s comment triggered an idea. The lack of professional militaries out here in the colonies meant there was no official Intelligence Corps. It was why the Brotherhood was so successful.

  But perhaps they could find another way to achieve mutual benefit.

  “Have you ever given thought to posting monks directly on ships?” She leaned forward slightly. “They would gather information far more effectively if they were present when a battle occurs. They could report to you whenever we reach worlds where a chapter exists.”

  A rattling hiss. “Your captains are already hesitant about passing small snippets. It’s madness to think they’d let us aboard one of their ships – a spy in their midst!”

  “A spy, yes, but a friendly spy,” she countered calmly. “Imagine that one of your brothers came with me. I’d provide a private cabin and a workstation on our bridge, but there would be certain rules.”