by J. N. Chaney
A shifty looking character stayed at the edges of the crowd, occasionally making glances and whispers to similarly shady looking people passing by. A drug peddler. Or at least, that’s what he wanted everyone to think. He was too alert, his posture too straight, his manner too practiced, to be a real dealer. Part of a sting operation by Security, then. Every one of the little containers he sold must have a transmitter planted on it somewhere, which would eventually allow Security to perform a sweep of buyers in the area. A dirty tactic, but one all too common in a system in which the real dealers themselves are often backed by enough monied interests to make them difficult to prosecute.
In the seats just across from Burner’s, two men and a woman waited for their own transport. The men were related, brothers most likely based on the similarities in their facial structure, ears, and closeness in age. The older of the two held hands with the woman, and matching rings gave them away as husband and wife. Unbeknownst to the husband, when he turned away, his younger brother and his wife exchanged meaningful glances, their faces filled with mischievousness and barely contained longing. An affair. It made Burner glad not to have any brothers.
As Burner continued to scan the room, his instincts pointed him to a potential source of danger. A woman, a tourist by the looks of her, had just stepped off one of the arriving shuttles and was making her way absentmindedly through the crowd. She one handedly tapped away on a handheld pad while her other hand dangled in her purse. It was clear that she was unfamiliar with the dangers of a planet crowded with so many different types of people, a danger made evident by the man with the pulled-up hood who was carefully following her through the crowd.
The man’s focus was fixed on the woman’s dangling purse. One hand was tucked into a coat pocket where Burner would gamble he had grip on a knife. Burner could already see how this would play out. He’d follow her till she found herself in a less crowded area, then he’d pull the knife on her and demand her purse. She would be in shock but would give it over quickly. Adrenaline rushing, the mugger would demand her handheld and anything else of value she had on her. She would do her best to comply, and chances were she would get off with nothing more than just a loss of her valuables, but muggings were unpredictable encounters, and people sometimes got hurt.
It wasn’t really Burner’s problem. He had his own, much bigger concerns and couldn’t afford to take the risk of making a scene by interfering. People got mugged all the time; it would be a learning experience to that tourist not to dangle her purse so provocatively.
That’s what Burner thought, anyway. Yet his body seemed to have other ideas. He found himself following the woman and her potential mugger through the crowd, out of the spaceport, and into the open market. The mugger prepared to make his move, reaching one hand toward the tourist’s purse while he began to slowly slide the other out of his pocket.
Burner’s hands were faster. He grabbed the mugger’s knife arm and, in a single fluid motion, gave it a sharp twist. There was a snap as the wrist broke. The would-be mugger cried out in surprise and agony before darting away, his other hand recoiling from the woman’s purse and knocking it from her grip, before taking off running back the way he came.
The woman glanced around briefly to glare at whomever had rudely jostled the purse out of her hands, unaware how close she had just come to being mugged.
Burner picked the purse up and handed it back to her. “You should be more careful with this out in public. Especially here.” Without waiting for a reply, he faded back into the crowd, making his way back to spaceport.
He got back just in time to hear the boarding announcement for his transport. Darting through the crowds, he managed to arrive at his gate just as the line was being let on to the shuttle that would take them up to the ship.
As he took his place in line, Burner gave every one of the passengers in view a dedicated stare, trying to get the feeling for whether any one of them was there to watch him. This would be the organization’s last chance to keep tabs on him until he reached the weapon shop. If they had no one watching him now, they were likely to lose him. And yet no passenger who boarded ahead of him registered as suspicious. Tourists returning home, Union officials on their way back to work, a few youths looking to start a new life in the Union after being lied to by advertisements. Nobody seemed to be paying Burner much mind, and that was very odd.
Just what game were his kidnappers playing? Did they really have so much faith he would go exactly where they wanted that they didn’t feel any need to track him? Or was he missing something somewhere, a pursuer that had somehow managed to escape his honed senses?
As he reached the front of the line and handed over his ticket to the stewardess, his attention was caught by a gorgeous blonde sitting at the gate. Her face was mischievous and full of life. Her lips were curled up ever so slightly as if she was perpetually amused by something only she knew. The curves of her body were smooth and sculpted to perfection, but what attracted Burner most was her legs, which seemed to go on forever. He was so taken with her that he didn’t notice when the stewardess tried to hand him back his ticket.
He boarded the shuttle, feeling certain that there was something familiar with that leggy blonde, though he couldn’t place her. Certainly, he wouldn’t forget a woman who looked like that, so why was it he felt sure he had seen her before?
The answer came to him as he took his seat and saw the blonde come aboard the shuttle. He had seen her earlier that day, outside the dentist’s office. That morning he had been exhausted without his coffee and distracted by his toothache so he’d barely noticed, but even in that state his brain wouldn’t ignore someone like that. She had been leaving the dentist’s office just as he had been entering.
Some people believe in coincidences. They would say that this woman’s appearance at Tooth-30 Dentistry this morning and on this shuttle right now was nothing more than happenstance and you shouldn’t think anything more of it.
Burner was not one of those people.
7
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to enter slipspace, so please strap in until the transition is complete. The warning light will go off once it is again safe to move about the ship.”
The voice of the captain of the passenger transport ship Polyeus was accompanied by the flashing of the warning lights overhead for all passengers to take their seats. Burner had to resist rolling his eyes as he pulled his own seat straps over him. He’d been through this countless times and couldn’t recall any kind of jolt coming or leaving the slip tunnels. He supposed it was a common safety practice, protection against technical difficulties with the artificial gravity or the stabilizers as the ship’s power was drawn into opening a slip tunnel. But if the ship started having those kinds of issues then they had much bigger problems on their hands than could be solved with a strap.
Burner watched the holo screen feed as the darkness of space was replaced with the bright and colorful passing lights of the slip tunnel. Slipspace was one of man’s big mysteries. These tunnels linked various points in space—known as Slip Gap Points or S.G. Points—and allowed travel between the systems they intersected at a speed that would otherwise be impossible. While what made these tunnels work was still unknown, without the ability to open and travel through slip tunnels, the galactic spread of civilization would not be possible.
It was one of the great wonders of the universe. One that made Burner slightly uncomfortable. Burner wasn’t really afraid; fear was one of those emotions that the Intelligence training helps you neatly dispose of. It was just the faint feeling of being unsettled during the long hours, or gods forbid, days, of travel in slipspace.
Burner’s job, the core of what he had been trained to do, was to take observations and make deductions based on them. Taking what he heard and saw to determine the only possible truth behind them. But despite some very bright scientists working very diligently to observe the workings of slipspace, little progress had been made on that front.
/> Burner did not like things that defied observational deduction.
Instead of worrying about it, Burner turned his attention back to the blonde. He’d been discreetly watching her ever since the shuttle docked on the Polyeus, keeping a distance and using the darkness of his sunglasses to conceal his glances at her. He kept expecting her to get up and approach him at some point during the flight, to plop down next to him and make some threats, to try and apply some form of leverage that would ensure his continued cooperation. But she had spent the entirety of the trip in her seat and seemed relatively unconcerned with him. If it was a ploy, she was a hell of an actress.
He theorized that her job was surveillance only. Since they were both stuck together on the same ship anyway, she had decided she didn’t need to keep that close an eye on him. Plus, it was easier to pretend you weren’t watching someone when you actually weren’t watching them.
Burner was tempted to rush across the aisle and question the woman right there. It was tough having a potential lead so close to you and not be able to do anything about it, but it was a bad idea to cause a scene on the ship. There were usually one or two plainclothes officers on a transport like this, and if he and the blonde got into a fight, they could both wind up in cuffs.
All he could do for now was keep an eye on her and bide his time.
There was no fanfare upon Burner’s return to Union space. Nor was an army of soldiers ready to take him into custody on made-up charges. Overall, stepping onto Dobbulla UX8 and officially being on Union soil again felt somewhat anticlimactic after all the efforts he had made to avoid it.
Of course, he knew first impressions could be deceiving. There were rules he would be expected to follow here, rules that might necessarily impede his investigation. He would need to be cautious from here on out.
As this was a Union planet, it was no surprise that they weren’t allowed to get from the shuttle bay to the rest of the spaceport without going through a checkpoint. An imaging scanner checked all the passengers and their luggage for any contraband, while two uniformed officers ran IDs through a portable database to check for active warrants.
Burner never traveled anywhere with fewer than three fake IDs, any one of which had the authenticity to beat the Union’s scanners. He was debating which one he should use when a sudden instinct overtook him.
Assess, Plan, Act—the three-step philosophy that his Intelligence training had drilled right into the fiber of his being. But in the field, sometimes with only fractions of a second to make a decision, you sometimes just had to trust your gut.
The instinct was like a sixth sense, something that built up over years of missions and rapid-fire decision making. Every success you had, as well as every failure, every near miss, and every eked-out accomplishment, fed your gut, priming it to give you an instinctual hit at a moment in which you didn’t have the proper time to assess and plan. The more you listened to it, the more you trusted it, the stronger that sense became, to the point that some could react to danger before they were even consciously aware of it.
In this case, Burner’s gut was telling him to give the officers his ID. His real ID, with Jack Burner plastered across the nameplate. He only had a few seconds to make a decision, so without even understanding why his instinct was to hand over his real ID, he was reaching into a pocket. He handed over the identification with Jack Burner’s name and waited while the officer scanned it into the database.
The guard waved him on.
Once he was through and had a moment as he was walking into the spaceport, he analyzed his decision to turn over his real ID. The consequence was going to be that he was leaving a trail with his true identity attached to it. It wouldn’t take any Union official tracking him long to figure out which checkpoint he had come through, and thus which ship he had arrived on, and from there what planet he had come from.
A reckless decision, but Burner had long ago learned to trust his instincts. His gut had saved him on more than one occasion and he wasn’t going to ignore it now.
It also meant authorities might also be alerted to his presence—him being someone they are instructed to “keep an eye on.” And there was the benefit. If Burner needed assistance in stopping the assassination, he’d have an easier time getting the authorities’ attention when they already knew who he was and what his qualifications were.
Like every time he trusted his gut, it had been a gamble, but thinking of it from that perspective he knew it had been well worth it. Using his real ID had been the right decision.
As he walked through the space port and into the city beyond, Burner marveled at how much things had changed since he had last been in Union space.
Things had certainly been built up since his last visit. Massive skyscrapers pierced the sky and covered the surface. Holographic billboards projected images of sports drinks and the latest in VR technology on every street corner. Digital displays on every storefront scanned the IDs of passersby and displayed advertisements promising the best prices on things relevant to the person’s account history.
Union cities had always been massive and impersonal places, but it had been cranked up to an 11 out of 10.
Aside from all the changes to the city itself, the people were the same as they had always been. The streets were packed with foot traffic, enough people to make the population of Halliburn City Center feel like a quaint village. Yet the traffic flowed smoothly in all directions. People instinctively walked on the right and took efficient turns at the intersections. In crowded stores, orderly lines formed without the need for markers and guides. Here and there a squad of uniformed Union soldiers would come down the street and the crowd would collaboratively part to let them pass. The properness and manners of the Union folk apparently resisted the rigors of time.
There was the strange mix of feelings of being stifled and secure. In the Union you were safe as part of the system—a system that was driven by commerce and controlled by massive, impersonal corporations. In the system personal status is built through accumulation of wealth and influence. But that safety came at the cost of individualism. There was only one proper path by Union philosophy, and those who didn’t conform were considered malcontents.
By contrast, in the Deadlands, survival of the fittest was both the law and the philosophy. An individual’s success was based entirely on his own merits, street smarts, and what they personally brought to every transaction and encounter. It was a dangerous, chaotic system, one in which one poor decision could, and often did, lead to the end of life. But they were your decisions to make, without judgement.
Freedom versus security. Individuality versus order. Both philosophies had their merits, but both also had their extremes.
Perhaps it was just because he had spent so long in living in Union space and feeling stifled by it, but if he had to pick one, he would go for freedom—every time. Of course, he had a very specific set of skills that allowed him to not just survive but also thrive in that dangerous anarchic space. Ironically, these skills he had only acquired by being part of the Union Intelligence agency. He was a product of both ideals and could see the value in both.
That’s why Burner liked living on the frontier. More freedom than living in Union space, without quite as much danger as living in the Deadlands proper. One day the Union might come and make good on their promises to claim the region for real, but until that time it served as a serviceable in-between.
Burner was still getting his bearings in the massive city when he got the feeling he was being followed. He walked closer to the shops so that he could get a look at the reflection in their windows and he caught a glimpse of curly blonde hair. It seemed his friend from the bus had come to say hi.
He rotated through his standard array of counter-surveillance techniques. Pretending like he was lost in this unfamiliar city and frequently stopping to ask directions, he circled the same three blocks, taking different turns, different alleys, and occasionally passing through stores. He would stop just long
enough at store windows to see if he could get a glimpse of curly blonde hair, and he would. She was definitely following him. And she was good. An amateur would have been shaken by now.
He took the next turn and darted into the first store on that street, which turned out to be a hardware store. Reaching into his coat pocket, he undid the safety on his weapon, just in case, though he doubted she would attack him in a shop. In fact, if his earlier theory held, her only job was surveillance, keeping tabs on him and reporting back to the rest of the kidnappers. He decided to test whether she would follow him into the shop if he acted like a consumer.
Burner pretended to be browsing for something. He noticed the cameras at the front and back of the store right away, as well as a back door that would probably lead out into an alley. The shopkeeper was reading something on his pad while leaning against the front counter, placid boredom written on his face. Burner wouldn’t be surprised if he was packing a weapon underneath the counter though.
Burner browsed the shelves furthest from the window, an assortment of tools he might legitimately be interested in taking a closer look at if the situation was slightly different. He carefully glanced back at the front window and saw that same curly head of blonde hair loitering with her back to the window. It seemed she was satisfied just waiting for him to come back out.
Not wanting to give up that he was on to his pursuer, he spent some more time acting like he was trying to find something. He even approached the bored-looking shopkeeper, forcing him to put down his digital magazine to talk to a potential customer.
“I’m looking for a high-powered electric spanner,” Burner said, giving the name of a tool he was certain the shop wouldn’t carry just based on the ridiculousness of the price tag.
