Deadland Drifter: A Scifi Thriller

by J. N. Chaney

  It didn’t seem a decision was coming soon, so they sat quietly for a while, watching the crowds. The place was busy at this time in the afternoon. Businessmen in expensive suits on their way to lunch meetings congregated with mothers running afternoon errands while their kids were at school. Union bureaucrats sat around with their faces buried in their pads. Burner’s mind catalogued faces, read lips, and examined body language automatically. No one was looking at them, or avoiding looking at them, or otherwise showed any signs of hostility toward them.

  He decided to use his uncanny ability to break the silence. “You see that guy over there?” Burner pointed to one of the men in business suits in the near distance. “See how he keeps checking his datapad for the time, and patting his front coat pocket to check to make sure he has his wallet? He’s very nervous for his meeting, doesn’t want to be late or not have the money to pay for the lunch. Notice how his suit is older and frayed, definitely off-rack? Business hasn’t been good for him lately. And the way he’s tapping his foot? There’s agitation under that nervousness. If I had to guess, I’d say he just got chewed out by his boss and told that this is his last chance to make a deal.”

  Sara took her time watching at the man Burner had pointed out. She nodded slowly. “Not bad. But I think the more interesting character is that woman over there.” She pointed to a young woman wearing a high cut dress and heels. “She’s cheating on her husband and is on her way to meet with her lover.”

  Burner raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s wearing her wedding band, so clearly she’s married. You don’t wear a dress that flattering or spend so much time on your make-up for afternoon grocery shopping, and it’s too early for her to be going out to clubs. She’s dressing up for someone special.”

  Burner smiled playfully. “But does it have to be a lover? Maybe she wants to do something special for her husband. Maybe it’s their anniversary?”

  She wagged her finger at him like a teacher lecturing a student. “Look at her body language. She’s frequently checking over her shoulder as if she’s worried about being seen. And who might she be afraid to bump into at a metro station in the middle of the afternoon while dressed in her seductive best?”

  “Her husband.” Burner nodded his head approvingly. “Yes, I see your point. You missed one thing, though.”

  Sara leaned back on the bench and looked at him. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “She’s going there with the intention of ending things with her lover.” He gestured to his lips. “She’s been talking to herself, not out loud but her mouth has been moving. She is practicing the speech she’s going to have to give when she gets there, and you don’t need a speech for ‘let’s take off each other’s clothes.’ Her face isn’t confident, so she might not go through with it, but she has the intention, at least.”

  Sara’s eyes narrowed. “Or maybe she’s just crazy and likes talking to herself? Ah, never mind, you’re probably right. But how about—”

  Their little competition was brought to a halt by an incoming call notification on the disposable comm. Burner leaned in closer to Sara before answering so she could also listen. “I’ve been wondering when you were going to call,” Burner said, his voice steady and light. “The job’s done. But this was a one-time deal. I don’t ever want to hear from you again.” It was exactly what they would expect him to say. They would make their next demands anyway.

  The voice that came over the com was disguised with a voice modulator. “You think we’re stupid?”

  Burner looked to Sara, who shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a simple yes or no question. Do—you—think—we’re—stupid?” The caller took a pause between every word for impact.

  Burner noted the use of the word “we.” Hostage takers would often use the word “we” during negotiations to try to make it seem like they were not in control. “We have hostages,” or “we demand an unmarked vehicle” makes it seem like if the demands are not met then it’s not the hostage taker’s fault what happens. On the other hand, when they use the word “I” a lot, that means they want you to think that they’re the ones calling the shots.

  It was an interesting choice of word to use here. Burner filed it away in his mind for later.

  When Burner did not respond to the question, the terrorist continued. “It was a nice little scam you had going there, Burner. Did you think you could trick us? Well, you failed. You didn’t follow the rules. And to think, we tried to make it as simple for you as we could. We figured out the schedule, procured the weapon, and we even picked out a window for you to shoot from. All you had to do was take the shot.”

  “Which I did.” Burner spoke deliberately, but his blood was rushing as he realized where this was going.

  “You think a few blood packs would fool us? Think again. For your insolence, we’re going to blow up the space station anyway. And it’s on you, Burner. It is all on you.” There was a click and the call disconnected.

  They sat there in stunned silence, taking in what had just happened. The plan had failed somehow. The space station was in imminent danger.

  Sara’s hands were shaking with frustration. “How could they know so soon? There’s no way the Union’s cover story was blown already.”

  Burner worked through the problem aloud. “Maybe they had somebody nearby who saw it and could tell? It looked pretty real from where I was sitting, but I was at a distance.”

  “I was on the ground,” Sara reminded him. “It looked real. That poor aide that got covered in the splatter had to be carted off due to the shock. Even if they were on the steps, they wouldn’t have been able to tell.”

  He nodded. “That just leaves a mole.”

  She froze. “Someone in the Union?”

  “Who else knew the plan besides a handful of Union officers?” Burner rubbed at his jaw and winced. The pain was making it hard to focus. If only he had been able to deal with the tooth, maybe he would have solved this already.

  He stopped suddenly, his face turning visibly pale. When Sara was about to ask him what it was, he held up his finger for quiet. Then he took out his comm and hurriedly typed a message before handing to her.

  She took one look at it and her face dropped.

  16

  Herod’s District, Dobulla UX8, Union Space

  The message was short, three words written in plain text on Burner’s pad screen. Yet the simplicity of the message belied its impact on the two operatives seated at the Herod’s District Metro Station.

  -I’m the mole!-

  Before Sara could question how that could possibly be, Burner opened his mouth and pointed. He gestured to the aching part of his jaw and ran his finger up till he was pointing inside his mouth.

  Without further prodding, she activated a light on her comm and took a look inside his mouth. She wasn’t entirely sure what she should be looking for. Of all the classes they taught during training, dentistry was not an option. The area around one of the molars looked a little red and swollen, which made sense. She had observed Burner grimacing at some point in his mouth from time to time since they’d met. But she couldn’t find anything that looked like a listening device, or any incision marking where one might have been planted.

  She clicked off the light and gave Burner the universal hand gesture for “nothing.” Without a word, he rose and walked off, gesturing for her to follow. Burner could be a bit stiff, but he had a good head on his shoulders. She decided to trust him a while longer and followed.

  He was walking fast, and with his long stride eating up the ground, Sara found herself nearly needing to break into a jog just to keep up. They walked a good ten minutes this way, saying nothing. Sara kept her eyes out for a tail, but as far as she could tell they were not being followed.

  Burner finally stopped outside a general store called The Admiralty, one of the bigger chains this side of Union space and conveniently named for the situation. He raced inside like he
was on fire and the only extinguisher for kilometers was inside. He made a beeline down the aisles purposefully. First to the hardware aisle, where he found a small pair of pliers, then to the first aid section, where he picked up a bottle of painkillers. He slammed them down in front of the clerk and practically tossed the creds to pay for them at the boy’s face.

  “Where’s your washroom?” Burner asked the clerk after paying for his strange purchase. It was the first thing he had said since getting up from the bench at the Metro Station.

  The boy pointed to the back of the store. Burner excused himself, gesturing for Sara to wait here, then darted off in the way he was directed.

  “What was that all about?” Sara wondered aloud.

  The young clerk shook his head. “When you got to go…”

  For the second time that week, Burner contemplated how closely linked dentistry and torture were. Sure, they had different goals and motivations, but their methods were awfully similar. That’s because the mouth is incredibly sensitive to pain, and it was the kind of pain you couldn’t really train yourself to be better at handling. While a hardened soldier might take a beating, stabbing, or cutting of his skin with stoic indifference, once you start poking in the gums and around the teeth, they quickly find the voice to scream.

  Needless to say, Burner was not looking forward to the next part.

  He preemptively popped a couple of the pain pills. The knowledge of what was about to come presented him with a pressing need to take more, but he fought that down. He couldn’t afford to hinder his mental capacity in any way right now.

  The washroom of the general store was surprisingly clean. The mirror in front of him presented him with a crystal-clear image of himself, already grimacing from the thought of what he was about to do. He shook his head and shoved aside all that useless weakness. This was the mission right now, and you don’t run from a mission just because it’s going to hurt. He took a few deep breaths and found a place of calm inside himself.

  Then he lifted up the pliers and guided them inside his mouth.

  An immediate pain shot through him as he closed the pliers around the offending tooth. He wobbled on his feet but was steadied by the fact that the feeling of the tooth indicated he was right. At the very least, this would not all be for nothing.

  A few more deep breaths, and he began to rock his tooth back and forth. It was a delicate balancing game he played with the pliers. He had to hold the tooth in a tight enough grip to get it to move, but if he pressed too hard, he risked cracking the tooth, and the pain from that might be enough to send him to the floor. So he rocked it gently, then more forcefully, slowly loosening his jaw bone’s grip on the molar.

  His mouth began to fill with the coppery taste of blood. He took a moment to spit some of it in the sink and then went right back to it. If he paused for too long, the pain might overwhelm him. The process was taking too long, so he added a trick he knew from his experience with torture would loosen the tooth quicker, though at great agony to himself: he started to twist. One way, then the reverse, he forcefully twisted the tooth in addition to the rocking motion.

  The pain was enough to bring him to his knees, but he kept going on sheer will. Blood dribbled out of his mouth and down his chin, the droplets falling from his face and landing audibly in the sink, but he was close now. The tooth was loose. He began to pull straight out, blocking out all the pain signals that were screaming at him to stop. It was slow coming at first, and then all at once the gum gave up its hold and the tooth came free.

  The moan he let out was a mix of agony and relief. He spat his mouthful of blood into the sink and rinsed off his face, then he swished some water around in his mouth to collect the rest of the blood and spat that as well.

  Burner shoved the pliers into a pocket with shaking hands and walked back out into the store. Sara was still waiting for him up in the front, a perplexed expression on her face. He held out his hand and revealed his tooth capped inside a crown. There, embedded within between the two entities was a familiar silver chip. A bug.

  He’d had a bug planted in his tooth. It hadn’t escaped him that maybe he could have just removed the crown from the tooth, but given the amount of pain, the tooth needed to come out. Plus, looking more closely at the pieces that lay in his hand, he wasn’t entirely sure that the device hadn’t been spliced into the tooth itself before being covered with the crown. This was never meant to be a long-term bug, he realized. That tooth was always going to become more infected and need extraction. He wondered if perhaps Suffolk had done that deliberately… a way of sabotaging his captors? Regardless, this was how the terrorists had been listening in on him. How they knew that the admiral hadn’t really been assassinated. Burner had been the mole this whole time without realizing it.

  Sara made a smashing motion with her hands, suggesting they crush it. Burner shook his head, placed a finger to his lips, and carefully placed the tooth and bug in his pocket. She looked at him dubiously but gave him an assenting nod.

  With that crisis taken care of, Burner led them out of the general store and back toward the Metro Station. As he stepped out into the afternoon sun, he came to a decision that made him feel a little better about what he had just been through.

  If he captured one of the terrorists and had to use forceful means of interrogation, he now knew what method he was going to start with.

  SPACE PORT ROMEO-9, DOBULLA UX8, UNION SPACE

  The side trip should have made them miss the hover bus they had been waiting for, but fortunately for them (and unfortunately for the rest of the impatient passengers) the bus had been running fifteen minutes late today. They took the trip to the space port then hurried to the first low-rent hotel they could see. It turned out to be a strange place called The Bean Counter. Burner took its name to mean that their intended clientele were accountants and bankers, though he couldn’t imagine they’d want to stay in a place that looked like it got cleaned every other month.

  They checked in under the new identities Hank had provided them—Lane Torrence and Sandra O’Connel. Neither of them had the chance yet to get themselves into the looks of their new aliases, but the receptionist didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would remember faces. Or remember much of anything at all given the glazed expression on his face.

  Once they were in their room, Burner headed straight for the bathroom. He carefully pulled the device out of his pocket and placed it next to the sink. Then he turned on the tap and left it running as he left the bathroom, gently closing the door behind him. Sara hoisted their single bag of supplies onto the bed against the far wall.

  She had an uncomfortable look on her face. “So, a bug, huh?” Despite the device in question being in the bathroom, drowned out by running water, behind a closed door, and across the room from them, she still chose to speak softly. “So this whole time, they’ve been able to listen to everything you say. We say. That’s how they knew we faked the assassination: we told them, when we were so certain we had removed any possibility of being spied on.”

  Burner held a bag of ice to his jaw, which still ached tremendously. “Sure seems that way. I’ll admit to being kind of impressed by it.”

  Despite speaking softly, Sara’s words carried a certain edge to them. “You realize they are the enemy, right? How are you going to be impressed by them?”

  “Well, just think about the amount of planning it must have taken.” He tapped his fingers as he made his points. “I had been operating under the assumption that using Suffolk to get to me had been more about opportunity than planning, that it was just the first chance they saw to knock me out and take me. But this proves that the whole thing was thought out, that Suffolk being a dentist was by design not coincidence.”

  She was still frowning but her next words were not as harsh. “They planned on you not wanting to cooperate with them so they came up with a way to call and threaten you when you were getting off track. Clever.”

  Burner thought they were more than just cl
ever. Whoever was behind this had well above average intelligence. They were a planner who thought through every step. Most likely the obsessive type, someone who worried about the little details to the point of agitation when things didn’t line up the proper way. Anger issues, as if being a terrorist did not make that obvious enough. Planners like this often took their failures the hardest, because, in their minds, their obsessively thought out plan had no flaws and should have worked. They were also the kind of person to quickly assign blame to others just to have someone to unleash that rage on.

  He mentally filed away the evolving profile for later analysis. For now, they needed to figure out what this revelation meant for their next move.

  “Clearly, we can’t lie low now,” Sara declared. Of course, they never had any intention of following Hank’s orders, but it was nice to have some kind of justification they could use later at the impending court martial.

  Burner ran through the scenarios in his mind, letting them all play out to their likely conclusion. Unfortunately, they still had so little information about the masterminds behind all this to go on, it made predictions difficult.

  Predicting the Union was a little easier. “We can’t risk telling the authorities that the terrorists know. They’re likely to act rashly and take us into custody. If we’re locked up, we’re no good to anyone.”

  Despite being a Union operative, Sara had no argument about their behavior. “The space station is doomed. There’s nothing stopping them from following through with their threat now.”

  “The Union is still on it.” It felt weird to Burner to say they needed to rely on the Union right after warning about their policies. “They need to proceed as planned anyway. The fact that the terrorists might accelerate their timetable for detonating the station doesn’t change things for them. But we have our own job to do: find these scumbags and stop them. No scumbags, no bombs being detonated. Simple as that.”