by Justin Sloan
Down here though, everything felt safe, like it was an entirely different space station. It sure looked the part, with the halls outside of the guild covered in grime, metal that once shone now dulled over. Up there, especially in the West Ward, it was all about appearances, about making the elites feel special. Not so with the workers, who acted like garbage only because they were treated as such. Every one of them had come to this station expecting a better life.
Worm grunted. “We actually have visitors today, offering a new job.”
“Is that right?” Intrepid asked.
Worm nodded, glancing over to him. “They might have asked us only because of our affiliation with you.”
“An affiliation we should try to keep quiet, if you don’t want PD soldiers showing up at your doorstep.”
“Right. But in this case, he certainly asked for you specifically.”
“Who, exactly?”
They went down a set of stairs. The first thing Intrepid saw in the darkness was the gleam of a bald head and then the man next to him. Veles with his bald henchman, Set.
“The infamous Intrepid, I presume?” Veles asked, standing and grinning. Set loomed over him—thin but clearly the muscle in the room. A glance at him showed that same sort of exoskeleton and brace Marick had been wearing the day he stopped being Stealth.
“A teleporter?” Intrepid asked, impressed.
“You heard the stories of Stealth’s escape?” Veles asked. “All rumors, I assure you.”
“But if it did work, is it true you need the enhancements to survive it?”
“With all those hypotheticals, let’s just say, ‘Sure.’” Veles turned to Scorpio, nodded, and narrowed his eyes. “We meet again.”
Scorpio stood there, stoic, and then walked off.
“What was that about?” Intrepid asked.
Veles shrugged. “We—and by that I mean me and mine—might not have been on the best standing with the Squad in his time.”
“I thought it was one of you who ratted them out.” Worm said.
In an instant, Set was at his side, slamming the young guard against the wall. More of the thieves emerged from halls nearby, some with weapons drawn, and Intrepid held up his hands.
“Just asking,” he said, realizing his error. They probably shouldn’t have allowed this meeting to take place so soon after Norwal’s betrayal when thoughts of such action were strong in each of their minds.
“There was a promise; the promise wasn’t fulfilled,” Veles explained, waving his hand and waiting for Set to release Worm. “I trust that won’t ever happen again.”
Set grinned, walking back over to Intrepid.
“A promise…” Intrepid said and prepared himself as he asked, “What’s the job?”
“Straight to business,” Set said with a grin. “I like this one.”
“It’s twofold,” Veles said, nodding in agreement. “There will be a shipment arriving from Titan soon. We need your team to ensure systems are offline for ten minutes while we retrieve the goods.”
“And the second part?” Scorpio asked.
“The guild is going to ensure the shipment reaches its destination. Not the one it was supposed to reach, of course, but its proper destination,” Veles said with a grin. “And if there’s any trouble, Set here will see that it’s handled.”
Intrepid shared a concerned look with Worm, but knew this wasn’t a request that could be ignored. Coming from Veles and considering the rumors he’d heard about Set since Marick’s departure and what the man had helped them achieve, he had a strong feeling that this was no request at all, but a requirement.
He’d have to get the team together sooner than he had hoped and convince them to do this. In the grand scheme of things, partnering with Veles in the overthrow of New Origins wasn’t a bad move. It was what came after their downfall that was worrisome, in his mind, especially if Veles or any of the criminal underground moved into a position of power.
As Intrepid agreed and turned to go, he reminded himself that he shouldn’t be so quick to judge these days, considering his own position in society. An “insider” on a team of anti-establishment and big-corporation technical assassins didn’t have much room to decide what was morally right or wrong. But he was doing this for all the right reasons. He’d seen what they’d done to Marick and what that had done to Alicia, and he was going to do everything in his power to see that such actions came to an end.
10
Alicia: Yokohama Love Hotel
The love hotel wasn’t exactly what Alicia remembered, but then again, the last time they’d used one had been on Okinawa, five years prior. That room had flaunted a mermaid theme, which excited her to no end at the time. The room had a large, hot-tube-style bath with jacuzzi, fancy lights that made the walls look like they were covered in bubbles, and even a small aquarium lining one wall. Not having seen Marick in too long, they’d quickly made the most of their time together.
But this? The room smelled of chlorine and air fresheners. The walls were an off white, almost yellow, and judging by the stench when she walked up to one, the stains were from tobacco smoke. One of the sheets even looked like it had retained the faint remnants of a blood stain.
“Are you trying to seduce me or murder me?” Marick asked with a nervous chuckle.
“Unfortunately, neither,” she admitted, going to the sink and at least finding clean water. “You’d think in this day and age someone would’ve invented a magic cleaning button that takes care of all this crap.”
“Tell that to everyone who would lose their jobs to… Oh, right.”
“Suddenly remembered most of the cleaning is done by automation?”
He laughed. “Gaps in my memory, remember?”
She started the bathtub, let down by the fact that they didn’t have a western-style shower. When she saw Marick watching her, she smiled, then slowly began to pull off her weapons and wrist computers. Next, she unzipped the back of her shirt, eyes never leaving his.
“I thought…” he began to say and looked away. “You said you weren’t going to seduce me.”
“Technically, I said I’m not trying to,” she replied with a grin. “But no, I’m just getting clean. It seems wrong to me that a woman should be bashful in front of her own husband, no?”
He gulped but tilted his head from side to side. “Well…”
“You aren’t curious?”
“There’s a large part of me that would very much love to see you, er, undressed.”
“Is that right?” She spared a glance at his crotch and he rolled his eyes.
“I didn’t mean that. I’m not the type to brag about—well, I guess you’d know and—”
“Marick, stop.” She paused, her shirt still on enough to cover her breasts. “I’m not going to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Hell, I certainly don’t want to make this the place where we first, you know, return to how things were for the first time. But trust me, they were great.”
He grinned.
“But I do miss my husband.” She leaned into him, head on his chest.
“I’m right here.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She pulled back, took one of his hands, and ran it along her neck, across her exposed shoulder. “This is what I meant.”
When she pulled her hand away, he continued, his thumb moving across her collarbone, and he leaned in, kissing her gently on the shoulder and then the neck. He paused there, lips pressed against her, then leaned back, eyes narrowed.
“The pills worked,” he said. “You might feel a bit low for a while but maybe not, since you had some enhancements already. Even so, we should use them sparingly.”
She nodded, looking up at him with eyes that pleaded for him to kiss her like that again.
“I’m sorry,” he said and turned away. “You were in so much pain, and it was all my fault.”
“Marick, dear.” She took him by the chin with one finger, turning him back to face her. “You saved our lives. If
you hadn’t gotten us out of there, they would’ve filled us with holes. Speaking of which, how’s your back?”
He shrugged, turning and letting her move his shirt enough to check.
“The shirt is singed, but the skin has healed already.” She started undoing the exoskeleton and harness as she talked. “Come on, let’s get you bathed.”
“Alicia…”
“Marick, shut up. I’m deciding this right here, right now. We’re together again, and I’m damn sure not going to let either of us be embarrassed or shy. It ends now.”
He cocked his head, then smiled. “I like this side of you.”
“You like it when I take control?” she said with a laugh. “Honey, that’s why you fell in love with me in the first place.”
He grinned, eyes widening as she now began to undo his pants. This time, he didn’t try to stop her, didn’t even argue. When she had everything off but his boxer briefs, she led him to the bath, which was nearly full.
Turning it off, she said, “You first.”
He shook his head. “Together.”
She nodded, undressing and loving every second of his eyes on her, moving across her body as if his eyes themselves were making love to her. When she was done, she lowered herself into the water and watched him remove the last bit of clothes and do the same.
“They usually rinse before entering the bath,” Alicia said, shrugging. “But this’ll have to do.”
He nodded, eyes burning into her. When he leaned in and kissed her, pressing his body against hers, she melted into his arms and wished they never had to leave this nasty, disgusting love hotel.
It stopped there, both of them agreeing this was their chance to have a first time all over and finding it sweet that they each wanted to make it special. Soon they were bathing each other, working the soap into a lather on each other’s bodies, and laughing as it tickled.
“You think life will ever be the same?” she asked.
He frowned. “How would I know what it was before? But… I promise to make it the best I can.”
“Right. I mean, with us, able to heal, especially you. And they said it was genetic modifications, right? Based on what, I’d love to know. Will that…?” A horrible ball formed in her stomach as she said, “Will that affect our children, when we have them? Or even our ability to have them?”
He turned back to her again, moving in the bath so that he was practically straddling her, and pressed his lips to hers ever so gently. “We will make it work. I’ll give you children, and if… whatever’s-out-there forbid, if it’s not for us, we’ll find another way. Science can work wonders in that regard.”
She nodded, leaning her head into him, moving her hand around in circles in the water and watching the bubbles move apart to briefly reveal him below.
With a smile and another kiss, she nodded, laughed, and pulled herself out of the water. “How did I get such a perfect husband?”
“I’m pretty sure the answer to that is that you gave up everything and spent a year on a space station hunting me down,” he replied with a teasing smile, then followed her out.
“Shut up.”
She threw him a towel. At least they were clean and soft and fluffy, which almost made her forgive the rest of the room’s faults. The place had a quick wash for clothes, one of the older models that took ten minutes to wash and dry, so while they waited they sat in their towels, brainstorming their next moves.
“Your sister is definitely in DC?” he asked.
“Quantico, actually.”
“Do we have enough credits to get to Quantico?”
She nodded. “The magnetized underwater tunnel will have us to the west coast in about an hour. The American train system is still horrible, but lucky us, there’s a train that goes from San Francisco to DC, and Quantico isn’t far from there.”
“Of course, Nightshade will be expecting this.”
Alicia frowned, jokingly. “She does seem rather obsessed with you, doesn’t she? Is there some past I should know about?”
“Ha, ha, ha… No.” He looked up at the ceiling, debating. “We might want to consider secondary means of travel, right? If that’s what she would expect, what would she not expect?”
“Thinking this through,” Alicia replied, tapping her nails on the floor, “by now they’ve likely connected us, right? They thought I was dead before, but not as likely now… which puts my sister at risk.”
“They’ll have someone watching her, at a minimum.”
“But here’s the thing: last I heard, she was training to be FBI with the hopes of making it to the SID team.”
“The Shared Intelligence Directorate?” He nodded, impressed. “They’re hardcore.”
“Exactly. Meaning, she knows what she’s doing… I’ve got it!” Alicia said, sitting straight and smiling wide. “She expects us to go straight there. Nightshade thinks we’ll all walk into her trap, but if my sister’s as awesome as I know she is, that isn’t happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s going to escape, undetected, and meet us halfway.”
Marick scrunched his nose. “And that would be some secret island in the Pacific?”
She shook her head, still grinning. “Not the Pacific. That’s the direction Nightshade expects us to go, so we’re going the opposite.”
Alicia stood, excited to have a solid plan, but even more excited at the prospect of seeing her sister again. Traveling the world with Marick, even though it wasn’t exactly a honeymoon, was the best way she could think of for getting to know him again, and soon they’d be done with this chip and the information on it, done with New Origins and everyone involved with their plans.
Maybe life wouldn’t ever be normal again, but it was off to an exciting start.
11
Quantico, VA
Although she had finished her training at the Academy, Shrina wasn’t done yet. With new SIA billets open to members of the intelligence community from around the world, she’d realized that was her best option for really making a global difference.
For her, it wasn’t just about catching the bad guys, but about ensuring the world could avoid wars when possible—wars like the one that’d taken her parents. But not just wars either. She wanted to be involved with everything going on in the Earth/Space divide, to understand how it was that these private organizations had risen to have such power—so much power that her brother-in-law had gone missing without explanation and then her sister had been killed only a month later.
It didn’t add up, and Shrina wanted answers. She’d been in training for the FBI before any of this happened and had always talked with her sister about maybe going SIA, but it was only after these tragic life events that she’d dedicated herself to it.
With a sigh, she put down the study tablet for SIA, wondering how she was ever going to get through this. Not only did they want their agents familiar with all global intel agencies—which she felt fine with—but they also expected them to be fluent in at least three of four languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Her family argued that it didn’t make sense now that the majority of the world spoke English, and it was standard on the space stations, but she knew better. In many poor parts of the world, people didn’t speak the common tongue, or if they did, they didn’t speak it well. She would study these languages not to communicate with colleagues or attend ambassadorial dinners, but to get her hands dirty on the job, interacting with the lower classes.
That thrilled her.
She already spoke Japanese and Spanish, and had studied enough Russian to know that language wouldn’t be a problem. She had hoped that the transition from Japanese to Chinese would be smooth enough that it wouldn’t take long to learn the latter, but she was quickly learning the error in that hope.
Part of the problem was that Japanese had always been her thing with Alicia when they were growing up. The two of them would quiz each other on Kanji, trying to come up with creative mnemonic devices, suc
h as a character that reminded Alicia of a man bending over, which she had thought was hilarious at the time. “Stick-up-butt,” they’d called one character; another they’d called “hand-slapping-man.” The afternoons spent together on this had been wonderful, but now they would creep back into Shrina’s mind every time she practiced a Chinese character. They were very similar to Japanese, some even the same, and it made sense to try to learn, but damn, it hurt.
Heading for the door, she nodded to Reyez and then Cooper, who were also sticking around late to study for SIA.
“Calling it quits so soon?” Reyez asked.
She shook her head. “Any longer and my sis will kill me. You know how it is.”
“Give Prestige a hug for me,” Cooper said, then stood and smiled as he tossed her a small box. “And this.”
Shrina glanced down at the box of crayons and laughed. “She’s twelve, Coop.”
“Yeah, well, someone left them over and I don’t have any use for them. Twelve is too old for crayons?”
“No age is too old for crayons,” Shrina said, holding them up and giving him a nod of gratitude. Prestige had grown up drawing on tablets and had always been too old for crayons, but he didn’t need to know that.
Maybe she could find a use for them herself, practicing her Chinese writing or something. She exited through the thick metal doors, glancing over at the “Deadly Force Authorized” sign and giving the camera a nod, then descended the stairs and made for the hypertube train that ran from Quantico to her home in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a bit of a trek, but she couldn’t see herself leaving her sister alone with their grandparents. Adopted sister, true, but that thought rarely entered her mind.
A call came in and Shrina answered. “Hello?” But all she heard was breathing, so she tried again. “Hello?”
“Oh, Shrina,” Prestige said, her perkiness always uplifting, considering all she’d been through.
“Don’t tell me,” Shrina replied. “They forgot?”
