by Bill Denise
She decided not to fight the feeling and chose to act, or overreact she thought, on the side of caution. Back in her room, she gathered the old remnants of her Flight Bag.
Her rebel friends always carried a single bag—a Flight Bag—with all of their “run and hide” essentials. Simple things like money, clothes, ID, a public unassigned screen, stealthing software, and a short list of one-time links for emergency secure communication were all included. She still kept most of her Flight Bag with her, but it had been a while since she checked it and updated its contents. She hoped that her very old screen, codes, and software were still good enough because she didn't have time to procure new ones.
Before leaving the room, she used the courtesy screen to pull up Damon's request for a date. She loaded a copy of her very illegal Decrypto software into the screen and hoped that it wasn't so outdated that it would set off alarms. I have got to get a new copy sometime soon, she thought, although she hadn't been in contact with the right people for many years.
Once the Decrypto was up and running and did not report that it had been compromised, she used it to dismantle Damon's message. She expertly pulled essential codes out so she could craft a note where only he could read the true contents. Anyone else who intercepted it would see a fake, though believable, reply. When Damon opened it, he would see a completely different message; one she fervently hoped he would take seriously. Once she was satisfied with the message, she killed the Decrypto, leaving no trace.
She left her vehicle in its assigned parking spot and walked ten blocks to a small mom and pop rental agency. Using only cash, and including a ridiculous tip for the “right” to pay directly rather than through her personal account, she rented a nondescript car.
Once she finished the rental process, she climbed in the vehicle and programmed it to take her to a restaurant halfway across the city.
Twenty minutes later, Joann manually stopped the car, got out, and sent it on its way. She pulled out her public screen and checked for the nearest shopping center within walking distance. There was nothing nearby, so she resigned herself to a long walk. Lucky I wore comfortable shoes!
**** ****
Renard and Jeffrey sat in the office back at the Spire discussing mundane details of everyday activities. They were both anxious to hear about the outcome of the Demon's first mission, although unsure whether success or failure would serve them better. Through an unspoken agreement, they decided that work would be the best way to pass the time.
Without warning, the elevator door opened and a red-faced Dr. Baksa stomped into the room.
“You've got a lot of nerve,” she said loudly as she walked up to Renard and nearly poked him in the chest with her finger.
Jeffrey jumped up and signaled for guards with his screen.
“How could you do that? You promised me their safety.” She started to cry as she collapsed into a nearby chair.
Both men looked down on the sobbing woman, unsure of how to react. Four guards piled into the room with autorifles drawn, and Renard directed a disapproving glare at Jeffrey, who shrugged and signaled the guards to leave.
Renard knelt in front of Dr. Baksa and said, “Avelina, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Please tell me so I can help.”
“Don't patronize me! They're gone, every one of them—GONE! You promised me they'd be safe!” She sniffed and wiped her eyes, but continued to glare at Renard.
“Really, my dear, if you are talking about your lab team, if they are missing, I had nothing to do with it, but I will try to find out what happened.”
Avelina looked directly into his eyes for few long moments, then sighed and put her head in her hands. “I don't know,” she said quietly. “I don't know what to believe anymore.” Then she added after a long pause, “Forgive me Reverend.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Renard said, taking her hands in his. “You are worried about your friends and colleagues, which is honorable and proper. You thought that I had something to do with their disappearance, which troubles me. But I assure you, we did not kill your coworkers.”
Avelina continued to cry while Renard led her in a quiet prayer to Kyndra for forgiveness and for the safety of her co-workers. Jeffrey looked on with a scowl for moment and then went back to his screen.
A few minutes later, after Avelina composed herself, Renard escorted her to the elevator making reassuring statements that he would get to the bottom of the issue.
After she had left, he turned back to Jeffrey and said “That was not entirely unexpected, although her emotional reaction was greater than I imagined.”
When Jeffrey didn't answer, Renard continued, “We do have them all in custody, correct? I really don't want any casualties.”
Jeffrey consulted his screen and looked slightly ill-at-ease, something unusual for him. “Well, we have all but one.”
It took only a second for the importance of his statement to sink in. “All but one?” Renard echoed. “Who's the one?”
Jeffrey was hesitant to answer, “The new one, Dr. Joann Tashus.”
“Did you complete a background check on her before you let her on the program?”
“Of course!” he snapped.
Renard knew Jeffrey would be offended by the question, but he had to ask. He immediately regretted the implication that he doubted Jeffrey’s efficiency, or worse, his loyalty.
“Jeffrey, I'm not questioning your abilities or your diligence, but why would this one person disappear when all the others were easily picked up? What’s her story, and who’s she working for? Sounds suspiciously like a Pryke plant to me.
“We need to find her, of course, but please,” Renard paused, “please keep it quiet.”
**** ****
After Joann made it to the mall, she immediately found a place to get her hair cut and colored. Not impressed with the results, she looked at herself in the mirror with dismay. The color was obviously fake, and she looked like a teenage rebel punk, except she was obviously too old to play that part. She decided to buy clothes from a discount store and turn her look into a wannabe without the means to buy designer clothes. Slightly excessive costume jewelry rounded out the makeshift disguise. She knew that it wouldn't fool a professional, but it could deflect the casual observer, and possibly any Recog software they might run on security cameras.
She made her way to the public transportation hub and caught a ride to the spaceport.
“Where to?” The ticket clerk didn’t look up as she spoke.
“Mamre.” The planet name alone stirred feelings in Joann she didn't care to think about. She finished the transaction and busied herself with the boarding process. Only when she was in the ship and they had broken atmosphere did she allow herself to really examine what it meant to her to be going back to Mamre.
It was a name from her younger years which she spent with Kevin Woodall, her former fiancé, and his rebel friends. They thought of themselves as true Kyndrists, though they were not worshipers, making grandiose plans to overthrow oppression and turn the Consensus into a better place. They believed in the principles Kyndra taught and wanted to return to her ideal. Joann now wished that she had paid more attention to the guys who preached ‘stay off the grid’ and showed them how to remain hidden.
There were also painful memories of a broken engagement and broken friendships when she went ‘mainstream’ to get her advanced Biolectrical Engineering degree. Things got even worse when she took a job with SecForce. She went to work for the very people she had originally pledged to destroy. In reality, she realized that she couldn't live the poor, desolate life of a rebel. She wanted something more ‘normal,’ accepting the high quality of life that the Consensus, even though flawed, still offered a vast majority of its citizens.
She wondered how well they would receive her, although it might help that she was ready to admit they were right, and she was prepared for their ‘I told you so’ attitudes. It would be worth it to get their help, and, she finally admitted to he
rself, it would be good to go home.
**** ****
Damon awoke to complete darkness. His last memory was of grenades exploding. Only one icon showed in his vision:
“. . . 0% . . .”
He couldn't move and he couldn't see, but now sounds were coming through and he could make out hushed conversations and movement around him. He felt bruised and battered, something he hadn't felt in a long time. He wondered if his armor was still intact.
Concentrating on the sounds around him, he couldn't make out anything coherent. Either they were too far away, or he didn't have enough power to detect them properly. He couldn't access any of his control functions, and couldn't even run a diagnostic.
Suddenly, some of Damon's systems popped up in his vision. He was charging! His power plant was back online and producing a trickle of power. He ran a quick systems check and everything was fine, except for power levels, of course.
“. . . 1% . . .”
He knew that he would be able to see now, but decided to keep his eyes closed anyway. Using passive sensors he determined that he was inside a small room, in a building with other rooms on all sides, and floors above and below.
When he did open his eyes, he realized he was sitting on the floor, wrapped in steel banding straps, in roughly the same position he was when the grenades hit. He realized that the armor must have frozen in that position at the time of impact.
His armor was slowly coming online, although he was careful not to give that fact away by his movements. Someone in the room noticed his open eyes and ran into the hall, returning in less than a minute with another person. Shrigauri Krych, my target, Damon thought. How convenient!
Shrigauri peered closely into his face and said “I see you're awake, now who in Kyndra's Harem are you?”
“Call me Demon.”
“Huh,” Shrigauri grunted, unimpressed, “working for the Council I presume. You did a lot of damage, you're quite the weapon. Supposed to kill me, I'd bet, and that's where you failed. Once we figure out how to get through that skin of yours we're going to take you apart and find out how you work.”
“Good luck with that,” Damon said, but the man's confidence was disconcerting.
“So,” Shrigauri continued, “sent here to take me out, or to talk me back into the fold?” When Damon did not answer, he continued anyway, “Doesn't matter, you failed. Do you have any idea why you were sent to stop me?”
Again Damon did not reply. He didn't know and he didn't care. However, he did care about his power levels.
“. . . 5% . . .”
He hatched a plan to finish the job and escape at the same time. He worried about the steel banding. He couldn’t determine its strength, and it was applied in multiple layers. He was afraid it might actually be able to hold him.
Shrigauri continued, “They’re afraid of me, of course. Not so much of me personally, but they are afraid of what I represent. What is that, you ask?”
Damon hadn't asked.
“I represent the power of the people to rise up against the unfair control exerted over our lives by the rich and powerful. I don't just mean any old rich and powerful, oh no, I mean the super-rich: the original dynasty families. I mean Yeboah, Kline, Debar, and Doering; our so-called founders. I call them our founding exploiters! Oh I know what you're thinking, some of those families don't even exist anymore, but you'd be wrong.”
Damon wasn't thinking anything of the sort, he didn't even know what this madman was ranting about.
“They exist all right. They may have changed their names, but they still exist. They are still out there collecting all the money to themselves. How, you ask?”
He hadn't asked.
“They take it from everyone else!” Shrigauri Krych stopped his ranting and was breathing hard from his exertion.
Damon barely noticed that he had stopped talking because he was concentrating on one number in his vision.
“. . . 8% . . .”
He calculated that he needed at least ten percent to make his move. Of course, escape after that might need more power, too, so he revised his number to be fifteen percent, and he resolved to avoid confrontation on the way out. Krych was talking to him again.
“Well?” he was saying in Damon's face.
“I have no idea what you're talking about,” which was true, since he hadn't been listening.
“I asked: why do you align yourself with the super-rich? They are never going to give you any of it. I'm going to guess that you come from the streets. I bet your family was poor and you had to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, am I right?”
“Not completely,” Damon said.
“AH HA!” Krych said loud enough to make Damon flinch. “I knew it! They are taking street gang kids and forcing them to do their dirty work.” Shrigauri was smiling and nodding to himself. He looked around the room in triumph, and the other men nodded in agreement.
“So why? You haven't answered my question.” He was looking back at Damon now.
“Because they pay me a lot?” Damon said, unable to think of a more clever and sarcastic answer.
“You don't know what you're saying. I won't go into all the details, but the only way the rich keep getting richer is if the middle and lower classes are pushed down farther and farther into the muck. Now what if people like us don't want to go farther down? What then? I'll tell you, if we don't want to be crushed, we fight back. We claw our way back up and cut the head off the monster, we take out the super-rich and redistribute the wealth. I know what you're thinking,”
No you don't, Damon countered mentally.
“That's socialism. Well it's not, all we want is to make things legal and fair, that's all, it's not that we live off their money, but the money gets earned by a bigger group.”
“The real problem lies in the fact that the people have no HOPE. They can’t see any time in the future when things might get better, or even change at all! The Kyndra-cursed Council effectively shuts down all innovation and research in order to preserve their monopoly on technology. If nothing new is ever invented, then they will be in power forever. Or so they think. The more they try to squeeze us into their control, the more people are itching to break free.”
Shrigauri Krych moved closer and leaned in toward Damon before saying, “You realize, don't you, that you’re killing your own kind? By following their orders and hitting the targets they give you, you are killing your own family.”
Damon flinched back at the word, and Krych pounced on his reaction.
“That's right, Demon, you're working for the bad guys. You’re killing the other downtrodden street folks, the ones just like you. Imagine instead that you are killing your own people. Imagine those you killed tonight—many of them my friends—imagine they were your own gang-mates out there that you slaughtered.”
Damon's head swam for a minute as the image forced itself into his head. He saw the soldiers he had slaughtered, but in his mind instead of having unrecognizable faces, he saw Yaz, Jeremy, Michael, and finally Andrea falling under his attack. Damon lost track of everything else while fighting off the implication.
“That's right, Demon, you're a pawn, being used like a tool to kill off your own kind.”
“No,” Damon said without force, the images still swirling in his head. I'm not killing my own, I'm killing dangerous lunatics like you that want to bring the Consensus down in chaos. You don't want to save the Consensus, you want to kill it and feed on the corpse!
“. . . 14%...”
“Close enough.” Damon said out loud while three things happened simultaneously.
First, he rolled forward far enough so his hands were pointed at the floor. Second, while still in motion, he fired laser cutters and blasters directly into the floor making a large hole that went through a few levels below him. Third, just before falling into the hole, he popped two grenades into the room with Shrigauri and his men, set for 1 second delay.
Unable to react quickly enough, the men died a
s the whole area was obliterated in the powerful explosions. Fires broke out everywhere as Damon fell through multiple floors, either through the holes he had cut or by the weight of his falling body making its own holes. Finally, he hit concrete and stopped falling. Straining with his strength boosted to max, he was able to break the bands, but it was scary how effective they were in holding him back. A few more layers and I might still be stuck, waiting for them to come pick me up again.
“. . . 3% . . .”
He sent out a powerful active scan to map the area quickly and plot his escape route. He saved the map and had it display in three-dimensional first-person view overlaid on his enhanced vision in order to guide him to safety. He turned off all active sensors and switched all weaponry off except for the slug guns and ECBs.
Following the map he met with minimal resistance which he easily dispatched with the kinetic weapons, using little or no power. Once he felt that he was in the clear, he contacted Gregor again.
“Where have you been?” Gregor demanded immediately.
“Good to see you too, I'm fine, how are you?” Damon responded.
“Very funny. What happened?”
“I ran into a little more trouble than I expected.”
“I can see that from the telemetry, and you can be sure I'm going to review the mission records. Once I'm done, we will need to discuss any questions and recommendations I have.”
“Yeah, right. I have a couple of questions and recommendations for the design team too!” Damon angrily cut off radio communication and proceeded to the rendezvous site. I am not a tool. He told himself over and over. I’m not killing my own! I need to follow my orders, I remember what happens when I try to make my own decisions. The last face to linger in his mind’s eye was that of Melanie.
Chapter Six
Anger and frustration seethed around the table as the Council completed their review of Damon's mission records. They got to see everything that happened from his point of view, along with commands he had given the armor and control system. Technically, the mission was a success because Shrigauri Krych was dead, but otherwise it was a disaster.
