by Ed Greenwood
Perhaps, just perhaps, the evacuation had left a few Jolt packs behind. If so, Jacobs had to find them.
The BEM resisted, but Jacobs forced her to follow him into the gloom of the building. He clicked on his suit light. Power usage no longer concerned him, only finding more Jolt packs.
What he found was disarray beyond any caused by an evacuation. Yes, they had abandoned the Base camp, but once it was open to the outside, something had entered. Must have been BEMs. BEMs had invaded and systematically ransacked the camp. The place smelled of charred and burned food and furniture. Cabinet doors lay open and revealed empty shelves or remnants of trash.
He checked the communications room. All the remaining equipment lay smashed. What about the automatic beacon? Up on the hill, powered by a small solar panel. Solar panel? Even if he managed to jury-rig the low-voltage connection, the trickle charge to his Jolt pack would take months. He needed a charged Jolt pack now.
Forty minutes.
Jacobs located the military supply annex and forced his way past some overturned shelves. He played his light over the cabinet labels, seeking Jolt packs. There. Three cabinets labeled Jolt packs. He pushed the BEM against a structural support and secured her to the post.
Thirty minutes.
He opened the first cabinet. Empty. The next was likewise empty, and so was the third. He ran down the length of the wall and jerked open the remaining doors. Except for a misplaced cabinet containing packaged underwear, all were empty. At the far end of the room, a broken and twisted battle suit lay on the floor. Desperate, Jacobs examined the empty suit for its Jolt pack. Gone.
Twenty minutes.
He glanced at the BEM still tied to the support post. She stared at him with those big blue bug eyes; myriad faceted eyes, which he could neither read nor fathom.
What should he do? Seventy klicks to the next Base camp, but no way to communicate, no way to get help—the low charge warning beep for his suit increased—no way to breathe. He was finished.
What about his prisoner? How cruel would it be to leave her tied to the support post while he suffocated? Maybe her people would find her before she died. Maybe not.
Jacobs released her from the post and guided her outside. He drew his knife and spun her around. She visibly straightened. Jacobs almost smiled. Apparently, she expected to die. She expected him to knife her.
Ten minutes.
He cut her bonds and stepped back. After a moment of hesitation, she turned to face him. He could see his blue-tinted reflections in the multiple lenses of her eyes. She watched without moving. He took another step back, sheathed his knife, and pointed in the direction of the mountains. She inclined her face in the direction he pointed. Without nod or acknowledgement, she turned toward the mountains and walked.
After about thirty meters, she turned back and with a flat accent, spoke a single word: “Why?”
So she could speak English. Jacobs was fascinated that she had finally spoken. The simple, single word interrupted the boredom of his pointless death.
He shrugged. “You and I, we are soldiers. What would be the purpose of more death? Here my promises, my duty ends. Call it professional courtesy.”
Had she understood any of what he said?
The BEM did not reply or otherwise acknowledge that she understood his words. She simply walked away.
When she was sixty meters out, ten BEMs emerged from the nearby hills. Had they waited there the entire time or just arrived? Three wore blue, the rest wore green. Jacobs glanced at his slung Blaser. He had no Jolt pack except the failing one that powered his suit.
No matter.
He dropped the exhausted Blaser to the ground. When they attacked, he would defend himself with his knife until his breath was gone.
Five minutes. He could last perhaps ten extra minutes with the visor open to the caustic atmosphere, but it would hurt.
The BEMs walked down the hillside to his former prisoner. They met and huddled. After they mingled, Jacobs could not tell which of the blue leotards had been his prisoner and which was simply another Bug-Eyed-Monster.
Two blue BEMs separated from the group and approached him. The visor warning beep switched to the steady final alarm, telling him that his suit Jolt pack was exhausted. He checked his blood oxygen level. The meter still read high nineties, but time was up. He extracted the Jolt pack to stop the irritating noise. His visor console and biometrics flashed out. Without the backpressure, caustic air seeped into his partially open visor. His nasal passages burned.
Jacobs lightly rested his hand on his knife and waited. The two Bug-Eyed Monsters stopped about two meters away. One—was she his former prisoner?—took a large duffle from the other BEM and tossed it at Jacobs’s feet.
Confused, Jacobs regarded the duffle for a moment. The duffle flap was unsecured, and he nudged it open with his foot. He glanced into the bag. Jolt packs, perhaps a dozen.
With eyes blurry from the caustic air, Jacobs studied the two aliens’ impassive faces, but he did not understand their motives.
“Why?”
The BEM who had tossed the duffle pointed in the direction of the next base and said, “Professional courtesy.”
The two Bug-Eyed Monsters returned to their waiting companions. By the time Jacobs had installed a fresh Jolt pack in his suit and got his visor system rebooted, all the BEMs were gone.
He swung the duffle over his shoulder and regarded his empty Blaser on the ground. Seventy klicks to the next Base…should he waste a Jolt pack? Then he wondered what Sarge might think about the situation.
Philosophy. He tightened his lips to a thin smile. “Well, Sarge, I’m not bored.”
Jacobs keyed the homing function to pick up the next Base. Out of range or dead. With a shrug, he picked up the Blaser, snapped in a Jolt pack, reviewed his visor map, and trudged off.
When he got to Base, they might bust him to private for asking, but someone there better have a damn good explanation.
In the Arms
of Lachiga
By Alex J. Kane
Two figures emerged from the shadows, and I knew the night was far from over.
Moonlight filtering in through the skylights of my apartment glinted off the ruby monocles secured to their masks. No doubt, by now, their sonar lenses had revealed to them my concealed Xing-Barron .45, a felony, as well as the amount of high-end tech scattered throughout my trashed living room. My implant would tell them everything they needed to know, right down to my blood type and server number. An endless stream of sensitive information with which to identify and blackmail me.
I froze, arms raised in surrender. There were only two of them, but two would be more than enough.
They’d trailed me here, I knew, all the way from the old city. Why else would they have suspected me? Shadowplay didn’t perform door-to-door audits. It was no game.
“I’m a mod,” I said. It came out as a harsh, quavering whisper.
As if my job mattered to them. I was screwed. They had me for possession, for one—not to mention the countless illegal apps on my drives, should they choose to search them.
“We know what you are,” the one closest to me said. A hand reached out through the dimness and seized my throat.
Choking amid silence, I fought to pry the gloved fingers loose.
The agent tightened his grasp and then hurled me onto the couch. I resisted the urge to reach for my pistol, knowing I had little chance of success. I’d be dead before my finger even twitched.
The second operative, a woman, came at my flank. She held me down with an outstretched arm, and rammed a hypodermic injector into my shoulder.
The neurotoxin struck me like a bolt of white-hot lightning, and though my body tried to shiver at the flood of tingling sensations that swept through my muscles, I remained completely still. Paralyzed.
“Dax Marquand?” the male agent asked. He came closer, presumably to get a better look at my face; the camera lens on his mask would relay my image back to H
Q for verification. And then they could either bring me to justice—if such a thing existed—or dispose of me, wiping clean every trace.
I briefly considered lying, but said: “In the flesh.” A grunt, barely intelligible. But I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.
The man drew a wand and pressed it against my neck. One tap of the switch would fire a regulated pulse of electricity through my body, inflicting as much pain as could be dealt without causing me to black out.
“You wanna die in prison?” the agent holding the shockstick asked. “Because that thing under your arm is worth at least a life sentence, if anybody were to find out you ever used it. Just a single shot caught on camera…” He applied pressure to my airway. My vision blurred in a wash of white fuzz.
“It’s just a precautionary measure,” I stammered, finding comfort in the antiquated virtue of honesty. “I’ve never fired the thing.”
I heard the whooshing sound of the baton being raised, then felt it crack the top of my skull. Pain blossomed like an explosive headache and my eyesight flickered in the darkness. Bastard.
“Of course you haven’t. If you fired even a single shot, we’d know about it the second it happened. That’s not why we’re here.”
Was I supposed to feel relieved?
The woman who’d stuck me with the needle crossed to the light switch, which glowed upon being touched. The overhead lights cast their bluish illumination throughout the apartment.
The sole window gave a view of little more than high-elevation air, and I realized there was no way to signal for help. The citizens living across from me would have to use a pair of binoculars to see into my living room, so that didn’t help me. And security drones seldom journeyed near the upper levels. The Shadowplay operatives were free to search the place, even torture me if they wanted.
Massive heaps of raw, uncovered server components littered the floor, dozens of tiny LED lights winking in a rainbow of colors. Electricity thrummed steadily while telecommunication data chittered in its alien tongue. Fiber-optic cables and electrical wires snaked across the floor in a webwork of chaotic connections, all leading from the makeshift computer to the broadcast throne. My implant tingled in the back of my skull at the sight of it, like a junkie about to get his fix.
Home at last.
My head lurched forward, numb and uncontrollable, and I saw the shadow of the male operative as he leaned down over me. Too close for my taste.
In my peripheral vision, I spotted impenetrable armor beneath the assassin’s outfit. A slew of lethal and nonlethal weapons hung from an elaborate waistband connected to a bandolier. Electronic equipment, gear even I was unfamiliar with, was strung across the agent’s chest and linked into the compact monocle.
There was no getting out of this.
“What?” I rasped. “What do you want from me?”
A hand cradled my chin and raised it so that I was eye to eye with the Shadowplay operative in front of me. I gazed into the uncovered human eye.
“Normally we don’t waste our time with worthless fucks like you,” he said, “but since it seems you’ve got more than your share of secrets, we have nothing to lose by enlisting the help of someone with your…skills.”
I felt sensation begin returning to my tongue. The neurotoxin had been a mild one.
“A mod, as I said?” I glared at him, no longer entirely afraid. They needed my help, or I’d have already been dead.
I fought to raise my head, and relaxed into the couch that on any other night would have seemed incredibly comfortable. I released a held breath.
“That’s not all you do,” said the female agent. She stood with her back to the window, arms crossed over her chest. “Some of your friends, we hear, are also our friends.”
Curious, I thought. I didn’t exactly have many friends these days.
“Such as…?”
“Jed,” she said. “Told us you’d remember the name.”
Jed Sodexho had been my best friend. I’d never forget the name as long as I lived, though I’d tried to forget the man. Hadn’t seen him in years. I contemplated what sort of ties Jed might have to the multinational security organization, but everything I came up with caused only an upsurge of anger that licked like fire at my thudding heart.
I made a fist. “What about him?”
The agent at the window took a step forward. “He’s compromised Disarmament stability,” she said thickly. “And that’s the one thing that Shadowplay does not want compromised.”
I was surprised to hear either of them speak the agency’s name aloud, even though I wasn’t online and the room was fairly secure. Perhaps they’d gone offline as well.
“How?” Several long seconds passed as I waited for an answer.
“Murder,” said the man next to me.
No shit?
Jed was no killer—not the Jed I’d known. He’d have to be pushed hard, to the limits of his very being, to end a human life. What the hell had he gotten himself into?
The operative nearest me reached into my leather jacket and retrieved my handgun. He weighed the weapon in his hands, examined it briefly, and then pointed it at my face.
I gazed up into the blackness of the tiny barrel and the world felt as if it might crumble beneath my feet. The room swayed, and a cold sweat trickled down my back. In this reality, human beings were expendable. Respawn time was rendered moot by the disheartening truth of mortality. And I hated the thought of being filed as Lachiga’s latest missing person.
But they needed my help, and I was on the market for freelance work. A decent insurance policy, especially since it would likely cost only a few days’ labor at most. A rarity.
The pistol moved closer and my left eye twitched in response. “You’re going to convince Jed that he’s innocent. That the murder was in fact an accident, maybe suicide, and that he had nothing to do with it.”
That would be a problem. I doubted Jed would want to talk to me at all, let alone allow me enough influence over his mind to persuade him into believing something he would know was completely false. A nightmare chore, to say the least.
I already felt exhausted.
“And how the hell would I do that?”
The agent lowered the gun, pointing it at the floor.
The female operative flitted across the room and stood beside her partner. “Induce false memory syndrome, implant him with an alternate grasp of his own reality. Should be easy enough for a programmer who constructs and pushes illegal apps.”
Her uncovered eye regarded me with disgust; to Shadowplay, I was a human virus. A scourge upon the commercial frontier of cyberspace. But I certainly wasn’t the last of my kind. Just the best.
“FMS takes months, sometimes years to successfully cultivate,” I lied. “And I’m not just gonna dive right in and tamper with the mind of an old friend. No way. Maybe if it was somebody else, sure, but Jed…”
“You do it,” the male operative said, “or you disappear.”
I swallowed hard to clear my throat. My head ached. “Forget it.”
The man raised the .45 and pushed it hard against my chest, aimed directly at my shuddering heart. “You’re the only fucker within a three-hundred-kilometer radius that’s even heard of Jed. You’re the only one that knows a damn thing about him, besides us. As an agency, we’ve got no clear window—no way into his mind, his memories. You, on the other hand, probably have hundreds. His file shows that you guys knew each other for quite a while growing up.”
I nodded absently, struck by regret. “I’ll give it a shot.”
Would it even work? And if so, what were the chances that somewhere, somebody might have evidence to his guilt anyway? It was definitely a gamble. I didn’t really look forward to bumping into Jed to begin with, not to mention the prospect of screwing with his head. Losing his friendship—for a second time, no less—would be the least of my concerns. Should I fail, Shadowplay would kill me.
I stood. “Where is he?”
>
It really didn’t surprise me to hear that Jed was on the run. He’d always been the running type. What troubled me was the idea that he’d killed someone. Shadowplay were the ones that national governments around the globe usually hired to perform cleanup ops. Jed was just one man; he definitely wasn’t the head of some rogue ballistic weapons manufacturer.
Shadowplay had the resources to covertly infiltrate his apartment and capture him for questioning, but there stood the risk that he might put a pistol to his head or jump from the ledge of the city walls. A fall from one thousand meters into a frozen lake would make it difficult to perform any sort of synaptic forgery on him. He couldn’t see it coming.
At the sight of me, his gun would undoubtedly be pointed in my direction.
Fortunately, Lachiga had gone silent. Fluorescent streetlights cast darkened shadows along the empty, walled-in streets and walkways. Snowfall sailed in through the open top of the enormous, funnel-shaped city, painting it in a contrasting veil of soft white.
Since the Magnetrak had shut down for the night, the droning whine of electric motors had also ceased. The tranquility, it seemed, was disturbed only by the sound of my footfalls crunching the snow that dappled the smooth concrete.
The whole city slept, save for me and Shadowplay. Everyone else was plugged in, gaming or dreaming with one hemisphere while the other half of the brain rested.
I made my way along the upper tier of the residential bowl, circling the endless walkway in search of first-class apartment number 718, Jed’s last known safe house. I grew dizzy, tired from the entwined effects of the cold and sleep deprivation. My breath fogged the air in front of my face, and I dreaded the impending confrontation.
It wouldn’t be friendly. They’d allowed me to keep my gun.
I glanced behind me, feeling as though the Shadowplay operatives might be tailing me. In all likelihood, they probably had. I’d become a huge liability, knowing not only of their existence—knowledge I’d held for years, due to my occupation—but also of their mission to secure Jed.
