by Jaxon Reed
25
Evan is growing much more insistent in his advances, Stormy thought. As pressure mounts in the assignment, he’s looking for an outlet, a stress reliever. He wants me to relieve the stress. It’s getting to where he won’t take no for an answer much longer.
Why is it that some men react to pressure by demanding the women around them take care of things?
People take out their stress in different ways, she thought. If she had time to examine the psychology of it all, she would. Edge would make a great case study of how someone reacts when the screws are tightening.
But right now, things are far too intense to spend time studying personality quirks, she thought.
Another thing she noticed about the uptick in tension was the decidedly increased hostility between her two remaining team members.
Edge seemed to genuinely resent Marx’s presence. He also seemed to be treating Marx as a rival for Stormy’s affection, even though the smaller man had always maintained professional distance with her.
That’s just crazy, she thought. Why would someone automatically assume the other guy is a rival?
But then she remembered a story she read when she was much younger, when tales of adventure caught her fancy and she dreamed of becoming a spy one day. She gobbled up as much espionage fiction and historical accounts as she could back then.
In this story set in World War II, three agents slipped into Yugoslavia on a secret mission. Like now, the team was comprised of two men and a woman.
Stormy forgot their assignment, and most of the other details from the narrative had faded over time as well. What she remembered was the fact that both men fell for the woman while trying to reach their objective.
They began competing for her attention. Then, one of the men declared the other guilty of treason and shot him on the spot. With no more rival, he had the woman all to himself.
That story and the lessons she remembered learning from it, such as the fact that men do not like to share their women, popped up in the back of her mind as she watched Edge and Marx bicker with one another.
“Who drank all the milk? How am I supposed to eat cereal without milk, Marx?”
“Just add some to the next grocery order.”
“We’re supposed to limit our orders so the delivery drones don’t show up all the time. We can’t do that if you keep drinking all the milk, Marx!”
“Fine. You want milk? I will go out and get some milk, just to shut you up.”
Marx walked off in a huff, leaving Stormy alone with Edge in the kitchen.
Edge sat down at the table across from her with a bowl of dry cereal and a scowl.
“Try and keep it together a while longer,” Stormy said. “We’ve got a few more tech items I need from the black market.”
Thinking about Yugoslavia, she added, “And don’t kill each other yet.”
“Haven’t we got enough gadgets? I mean, you spent all our funds on the aerial satellite thing, and I can understand that. But why do we have to have all these city blocks covered? What’s the purpose of that? You probably spent three times what you should have.”
“You know the purpose of that. One building under the field sticks out like a sore thumb to people looking for that sort of thing. But if you cover an entire district, it’s not so obvious.”
“Fine. But you spent all our money on that, and now we have to go get more and it leads to things like Marx getting Chuckles killed.”
“Don’t start. We all knew the risks when we took on this assignment. And yes, I want more tech. We need more tech. It’ll make our jobs a lot easier.”
“We got the face changers. What more could you want?”
“Personal camo units would be nice. I’d like to be able to turn invisible on the run, not just in our cars. We could use more disposable implants, too. And those aren’t cheap.”
Edge stopped arguing and ate his cereal. The look on his face showed he disapproved, though. And not just from the lack of milk.
I can read him like a book, Stormy thought. If he had his druthers he’d kill Marx, ravish me and forget about our assignment.
Oh well. I’m still in charge. And none of those things are going to happen.
-+-
Boggs showed up first that morning, landing his car on the roof. He had to push hard on the old access door, since it was rusted shut from lack of use. Then he had trouble closing it back all the way.
He walked down the steps and found a much more modern doorway waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. This one had an access pad with a doorbell, which he rang. Looking around, he caught sight of a security camera up on the wall.
The door slid open and he walked into a nicely restored interior space.
“Hey, Sarge. You fixed the place up nice. Fast work, too.”
“Thanks. Yeah, the company I hired did a good job. You can hardly tell there were explosions in here.”
“No bloodstains or anything,” Boggs said, nodding in approval.
A few minutes later Collier showed up, following the same route down into the hideout.
Wilcox walked them over to a couple of very nice solid oak desks with matching black leather office chairs.
She said, “I bought furniture and had it delivered. This is on my own dime, but that’s okay. For our equipment, though, I had the Technology Department loan me some terminals. We should have everything we need.”
“How did you get ahold of this place so fast?” Collier asked, glancing around at the cozy interior. She decided the new paneling on the walls alone must have cost a month’s salary.
Wilcox said, “The building is being held by AOJ while we are seeking full ownership via criminal confiscation procedures. Evidently the title to this property is in the name of a shell corporation, and that’s delaying the transfer. They’re having trouble figuring out who the true owner is.
“I don’t expect too many difficulties, because confiscated property eventually gets transferred to the agency and then sold to help fund other things. At least, that’s the way it usually works. But if there are any problems and we have to leave quickly, we’ll just move my stuff elsewhere. For right now, you can both consider this your official office space, since there’s evidently nothing available for you back at HQ.”
The two young agents smiled at her.
Boggs said, “It’s nicer than what everybody else our rank has back there.”
Collier nodded in agreement, looking around in wide-eyed wonder.
Wilcox said, “Our first order of business is to map out the entire area under this reflection field. If my hunch is correct, the Black Goggle Gang is using one of these buildings for their hideout, too. When we find it, we can take them out like we did the assassin.”
Collier said, “Don’t you think they’ll be ready for us after this? Maybe they know we’re here, too.”
Wilcox smiled and said, “Doesn’t matter. Either way, forewarned or not, we’re going to find the Black Goggle Gang and they are going down.”
26
Before heading out to “pound the pavement” as Boggs put it, Wilcox checked in on her droid doppelgänger.
She made a call to it over the neural network. Once the link was established, she prowled around its electronics with her mind.
The circuitry looked incredibly complex. Wilcox recalled exploring the X99, though, and this too was a Verberger droid, so she had a blueprint to follow.
It was set up to be much more human-like than the battle bots, though. Soon she found, to her surprise, an interface that allowed for several adjustments.
“What’s this? Personality? Hmmm.”
She understood basic personality theory, that certain common factors comprise an individual’s natural disposition.
On the interface she discovered 72 factors, adjustable on a scale of 1-10.
“Did those bastards at RNI copy my personality? Wait, how do they even know . . . how do they gauge a personality without someone taking a test? Did
I take a test? Did they give me one without my knowledge?”
She thought about it for a moment.
“No. I definitely did not take a personality test with them. I took one in college . . . Maybe they stole the results. But personalities change over time, right? Is this my personality from college or now?”
She looked over the list of characteristics.
“What? ‘Reserved in Public Settings.’ That’s a five? ‘Challenges Authority.’ Why is that a seven out of ten? ‘Self-esteem.’ Nine.”
She thought about it a moment, then she adjusted the self-esteem setting up to ten.
“Never hurts to have more self-esteem. Hey look at that. ‘General Irritability’ is a three. Ha! I wonder what ‘bitch’ setting is?”
She scaled it up to nine. Then she thought better of it and dialed “General Irritability” back down to seven.
“Watch out, Aunt Flo has come to visit!”
Next, she worked on taking over the droid completely.
Suddenly, she looked out of its eyes at her office back at HQ.
“Testing, testing. One, two, three. It works!”
The droid stood at her mental command and held her arms out, shaking her shoulders.
“I can feel that! Hey, is this thing anatomically correct? Wow, it is. Okay, that’s enough playing around. You, get back to work . . . you . . . What do I call you?”
The droid, controlled by Wilcox at the moment, did not respond.
“Well anyway, you can have your mind back.”
-+-
An hour passed and Applegate groaned at the figures on his office holo.
The autopsy on the bomber’s body was complete, but his identity remained elusive. PLAIR had zero information on the DNA, fingerprints or anything else.
Applegate muttered a curse under his breath and stood to stretch. Then he decided to share some of his displeasure with the new girl.
He walked to his office door and it swished open. He strode across the open area in front of Molly’s desk.
“Good morning, Assistant Director Applegate! How are you?”
“Hush.”
He stood in front of Wilcox’s office and touched the panel, activating the bell.
The door slid open and he walked in. Gina’s droid sat behind her desk.
He said, “Look, I know you think you did something, and it’s good that scum is off the street. But can you please do it by the book next time? We have no idea who this guy is. Nothing, nada. If you could have just collared him, with plenty of backup, we could have him in a nice cell administering interrogation right now. But as it is, all I’ve got to talk to is a corpse. And the corpse can’t speak!”
He did not mean to raise his voice at the end, but his frustration and the pressure momentarily overwhelmed his sense of propriety.
He stood there, breathing hard, staring at the droid.
Her eyes narrowed.
She stood, but crouched so that her head remained on the same level as the shorter man’s.
“Now, you listen to me. I have been dragged into this piss-poor, pitiful excuse for a law enforcement agency, and I don’t give a rat’s hind end if you and Malarky out there are the last two ADs standing after the previous bailout of this department’s incompetence.
“But I will not STAND to be lectured to like a fourth grader from some snobbish know-it-all who didn’t even bother to read Forensics’ reports on all the crime scenes.
“If you had practiced Investigations 101 instead of running around worrying about what everybody thinks, you might have had a clue where to begin! So don’t lecture me about following procedure. If I had followed procedure, that murderer would still be on the loose!”
His ears moved back on his head from the unexpected force of her remarks.
When he replied again he brought his tone way down, back to a much more reasonable level.
“Look, I’m sorry. And yeah, it was a good job. But we got nothing on this John Doe. It’s like he doesn’t even exist.”
The droid glared at him. Then she tapped the implant under her ear.
Her personal holo popped into existence, and a non-descript male with an eminently forgettable face appeared.
He said, “Smithers.”
“If I send some DNA info can you cross-check with captured League SSI records and get us an ID on our Humphries murderer?”
“I can try. Yeah, that data is not connected with PLAIR yet, we’d have to do it here at Naval Intelligence.”
The droid glared at Applegate. He shrugged and produced a holosheet with fingerprints and DNA data. It disappeared in Smithers’s holo as she sent it over the neural net.
Smithers said, “Hold on, I’m getting it. Okay, yeah. Here’s a match. Timothy Phan. His codename was Phantom. Ooh, nasty fella. Glad you got this one, he’s wanted by us. Pretty high on the list. I will mark him off . . . as deceased. Good job, Wilcox! Give Jodi my regards.”
The connection ended and Smithers’s face disappeared.
The droid floated over a new holosheet with information about Timothy Phan on it. Applegate glanced over the data before filing it in his implant.
She said, “Happy?”
“I, uh . . . yeah. This is . . . this is great. Thanks.”
He headed to the door and it swished open for him.
He turned and smiled, somewhat abashed.
“Hey I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. How about drinks later? I’m buying.”
“GET OUT!”
“Okay, okay! Sorry!”
He hurried out the door and it swished shut behind him.
27
Scanning all the buildings with her mental powers within the huge multi-block radius the reflective field covered would not be easy, Wilcox realized.
As she, Boggs and Collier walked out onto the street outside the Phantom’s old residence, Wilcox quickly discovered not all the buildings in this neighborhood were abandoned.
She had expected to be able to do a brisk walk, checking each site off the list, but she found out it was not that simple.
The building next door housed a car customization shop. The entire ground floor was a garage with doors open to the street. Inside, workers painted vehicles old and new, terrestrial and flying versions.
The next building was a factory of sorts, an automated meat processing plant with a solitary human supervisor and half a dozen bots. Animals were slaughtered and prepped elsewhere, evidently, then the carcasses delivered here where they were processed and packaged for consumption.
Nothing seemed out of place in the structure’s electronics.
Further down the street, another old factory had been turned into a makeshift apartment complex. It served as cheap housing for individuals who could not afford flats in a nicer part of town.
Wilcox suspected the interior renovations were completed without a permit. Someone probably bribed someone at City Hall to get away with it.
They finally found an abandoned building three blocks away, but it was truly abandoned with only homeless people inside. Search as she might, spreading out her senses, Wilcox could find nothing unusual.
This was not a fake abandoned building like the Phantom’s. Nor was it the source of the giant reflection field sitting on top of this entire area, hiding the streets and rooftops from satellites and overhead flights.
As they continued walking, Collier took it upon herself to sort through real estate data, looking up landlords and other lists of information for the area.
She said, “I’m not seeing anything suspicious, really. I mean, considering the fact the killer’s place is owned by a shell corporation, I presume most of these other buildings are, too.”
Wilcox nodded and said, “Corporate ownership of commercial properties is not uncommon. It provides a level of protection for people. Unfortunately for us it can shield a human from law enforcement, too.”
“How does that work?” Boggs said.
“One corporation owns a building,” Wilc
ox said, “but is itself owned by another corporation that controls ten or more identical ones. The holding company is in turn owned by yet another corporation, providing another layer of obfuscation. I’m sure our legal team is having fun sorting through all the titles with my building right now.”
“Your building?” Boggs said with a smile.
“Figure of speech. I dunno. Maybe I’ll buy it. The neighborhood kinda sucks, though.”
Collier found herself wondering how a former Marine sergeant working in a government job could afford to buy an entire building, even if it was in the slums.
For that matter, the number of guns in that storage unit must have cost a small fortune, she thought.
She decided not to ask any questions that might be perceived as nosy.
For his part, Boggs continued visually scanning the street for threats.
Above them, a sleek black sports car lifted off from a nearby building, and promptly disappeared before leaving the protection of the reflection field.
-+-
In one of Octavia Park’s tonier districts, the Diamond Market beckoned to well-heeled clients and tourists alike.
A traditional retail zone originally aimed at wholesale jewelry merchants, it had expanded in recent years to offering other luxury goods such as leather products from Italia, pearls from Sporades, and similar fine wares across the galaxy.
Still, at its heart, diamond merchants bought and sold from each other. Here, hundred thousand credit deals were not uncommon.
In roughly a half square kilometer, most of the diamonds bought and sold in the Republic passed through the district at some time or other. They were delivered via cargo ships carrying them from planets and asteroids with mining operations. In secure buildings with few if any windows, the stones were cut and polished and prepared for retail.
From there, they found their way to display cases. Wholesalers showed up in person to ritually inspect the gems and make deals. Tokens and precious stones swapped hands over coffee and a handshake. Visitors from other planets often bought a year’s worth of merchandise, then headed straight for the spaceport and home.
