Heist

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  Bentley couldn’t help herself anymore. “Real fucking hero, right here,” she said.

  “Hush,” Shango ordered her. Even as she acquiesced, she felt resentment at the way he spoke to her as though she were a child. “My concern is your general cooperation. I am prepared to contribute whatever operational logistics are necessary.”

  “And I as well,” Blackfriar added. “As a show of good faith, I will share the additional intelligence on this operation the Odysseus has managed to gather prior to our arrival. It is nothing either of you could not gather on your own, of course, but it will certainly put you forward a few days.”

  Shango gave a shallow, yet gracious bow. “That would be appreciated,” he said.

  “What, like you’ve got better intel than us?” Nikola answered. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Perhaps not,” Captain Blackfriar conceded. “But I will leave that for you to discover.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Airlock tunnel connecting the Chesed and the Odysseus, Edge of Klaunox-Orion Sector

  The return trip through the tunnel that joined the two ships’ airlocks seemed oddly longer than it had on the way in. Partially this was because it was longer. Shango was moving slowly while briefing the crew on their new mission and information via corteX. Bentley, for her part, was no longer preoccupied with the strangeness of this tunnel, and now was content to occasionally stop and take it in, to peer through the stretches of transparent, mildly luminous film that served as both primary light sources and makeshift windows in this deep space bridge.

  Looking out at space from there wasn’t like seeing it on the Chesed’s main viewscreen; the inherent separation from there always made it feel like she could be on some well-populated space station watching old footage from some long-ended voyage. From here, though, she could see she how immersed they really were in the void, so close she could almost reach out and touch it.

  Her fingers traced the window-film and found it to have an oddly silken consistency.

  Loco’s voice came in on the corteX. “So now we’re teaming up with two whole ships? How come every mission lately ends up with us picking up more dead weight to worry about?”

  Bentley scowled out at the darkness. Loco still continued to describe her and Jade this way in spite of their being acknowledged on many occasions as part of the Chesed’s crew.

  “This is categorically different,” Shango said. “It is a temporary alliance while our goals converge. After the job is completed, we will have no further need to associate with either vessel.”

  “Different, huh?” Bentley called after Shango. The fact that he didn’t even try to come to her defense in this regard was unsurprising; few ever did when it came to discussing her value on the ship, except when the question regarded the sword she had in her possession.

  Before they had regained possession of it, she’d felt there was some question of whether that was the only reason they wanted to keep her aboard, but as the days passed with her keeping it, she’d noticed a distinct change. Their talk of returning home came up almost daily in her presence. Even Shango’s training, as useful as it had been to her survival, seemed geared to grooming her for that use. Her resentment only grew when Shango kept his slow stride, looking forward and not even acknowledging her remark.

  “The intelligence they have provided is extremely useful,” Jelly Bean said. “Thralldom station was not in any of my records, which I had found curious.”

  Shango continued to stride on through the tunnel. “Unsurprising, with it built at the edge of the sector like this. Is it a new station, then?”

  “Negative,” Jelly Bean replied. “It appears to be a purely commercial enterprise that does not advertise itself except by personal reference, primarily sustained by wealthy patrons.”

  Loco’s voice chimed in again. “The fuck would the rich want this far out in the middle of nowhere?”

  Olofi’s voice came in. “Maybe some kind of smuggling operation? An illegal trade hub?”

  “Not quite as nefarious,” Jelly Bean replied. “It appears to be a massive casino of sorts. The entire station is devoted to gaming and gambling, and its maintenance and upgrades all are funded from the earnings thereof.”

  “A bigshot casino, huh?” Bentley considered. “I guess that explains why the reward’s so huge.”

  Jade’s voice interjected. “Jedson mentioned something like that a few times. A big casino on the edge of the sector. He tried to get its coordinates and access a few times from some of our richer business partners. If he ever succeeded, he didn’t tell me. But there’s a lot he didn’t tell me, apparently.”

  “So this is what?” Olofi communicated. “Rob from the rich to give to the poor?”

  “It does not appear that they merely wish for us to rob the patrons or empty accounts,” Shango told them. “From what I am seeing in the little data we have been provided, there is something very specific our employer wants to get hold of. Something of exceptionally high value.”

  “Higher value than the collective gambling losses of a few thousand obscenely rich assholes?” Loco came in. “I can’t wait to see what that looks like. Lemme see, Jelly.”

  Jelly Bean responded after a moment. “The target has not yet been elaborated on. The employer seems to continue to wish to distribute our information piecemeal.”

  Loco’s growl could even be heard through the corteX channel. “If we weren’t getting paid so well I’d have told them to shove it by now,” he said. “Who the hell runs a job this way?”

  Shango answered gruffly. “Someone of great means and eccentricities. It is becoming clear to me from the manner in which the information was distributed that this person intended for us to work together to begin with.”

  “They could have just told us that to begin with,” Olofi said. “It’s not like we’ve never taken a job with partners before.”

  Shango glanced sideways to make sure that Bentley was still following, as he continued the conversation. “It is unlikely that we would have taken a job with unknown partners in our currently precarious situation,” he observed, his stride slowing to a stop momentarily before resuming. “And I am certain those rebels would have refused to join forces with anyone not immediately allied with them. Whoever employed us for this job obviously wanted all of us specifically on this job and knew that arranging that on its own would be impossible.”

  Jade chimed in again. “That’s pretty risky, isn’t it? What if we’d been blown up in the process? Or one of the others had?”

  Shango sighed. “When you have enough information, very little need be left to chance.” In his stoic monotone Bentley almost thought she could hear admiration for their mystery client. “This individual or group has an impeccable measure of all of our motivations and capabilities. It is likely that this outcome was deemed the only logical conclusion, as calculable as the amount of money it would take to attract us all as individuals but also maintain our services collectively.”

  Loco sounded indignant. “It’s bullshit, is what it is!”

  “Well, I’m just glad it’s not just a bankroll robbery,” Olofi said. “We’re not bandits. I refuse to sink that low.”

  “Somehow I feel lower like this,” Loco contended, sounding increasingly irritated. “We’re just fucking puppets to this guy, pulling us to the edge of space by waving some shiny volts, making us team up with these other assholes like it was our own idea, still not even being upfront about who he is or what he wants us to do or get… It’s fucked. No way to live.”

  Loco’s words seldom resonated with Bentley, but this time she found them affecting her deeply. It wasn’t in the way he intended them, of course. She wasn’t nearly as bothered by being flung across space on some mystery job as he was. But the question of why was what truly stuck in her mind. She realized that the way Loco derisively talked about their employer was little different from the way Shango treated her on the Chesed: generously, but with a constant air of mystery and indifference t
o her needs. Even now, when he claimed to have told her everything, what he had told her still felt beyond belief. All she could really trust were his intentions, and above all his intent was for her to use the sword as he needed. She felt like a puppet now, a mere means to an end, and she agreed with Loco: that was no way to live.

  “Bentley,” Shango called out to her from up ahead. She looked up at him and noticed she’d fallen behind staring into the emptiness the entire time. “We need to be moving.”

  “Right,” Bentley acknowledged, not hiding the resentment in her voice, confident that he would take it as beneath his notice. She hurriedly caught up to him.

  When they finally reached the airlock into the Chesed, Bentley knew she had already come to her decision: however long it took or whatever risks it might entail, this would be her last mission as a member of this ship’s crew. Her rightful share of the profits was more than enough for her to strike out alone, after all. She could leave the Klaunox sector for good and simply disappear. To some, leaving such a large stretch they called home might have been difficult. For Bentley, she realized, it was no different from any other place. The entire universe was a stranger to her, and she began to truly feel the freedom that could come from leaving.

  The airlock opened, and she stepped inside. But with her new decision she couldn’t help but allow a relaxed smile to spread on her face. It was as though a great weight had been suddenly lifted from her shoulders. She would be her own person.

  She would be nobody’s puppet.

  +++

  Aboard the Geburah, Foll System, Klaunox Sector

  Amroth stood in the midst of the Geburah’s modified engine room, staring at the space where the Sword of the Cross-Roads had been placed.

  In its stead there was a crude crystalline rod encased in a silver carbon matrix. It wasn’t a sword by any measure, but for his purposes there was no discernible reason for it to be such. Its place was here, as a part of the ship, serving its singular purpose of opening a new, stable gateway to the unseen world. And this had been the moment he was waiting for, when all of this would be ready: no more scrambling about for pieces of Legba’s technology. No more chasing that cursed girl across the far reaches of the galaxy or engaging in needless, unproductive battles with the Chesed’s crew. There was only one goal, manifest before his very eyes.

  Doctor Metzinger looked, perhaps, even more elated at this experiment than Amroth himself felt, and not just because the former was so irritatingly bad at keeping his emotions properly masked. The cybernetically augmented scientist gnashed his metal teeth and waved his skeletal arms above his head while he watched the sparking of the appropriate energies flowing through their newly constructed conduit.

  “Oh yeah!” Metzinger cried out as he waved his hand to activate a new charge to go through the conduit. This time the sparks gave off deep impulses that seemed to make the very fabric that the universe was composed of shudder. “Let’s get ready to tear this world a new one! Let’s do this! The causal misericorde! Activate!”

  Amroth felt his own heart rate accelerating ever so slightly in anticipation. There was another shuddering in the world’s essence, and a spark. The conduit rod flashed, and drew a line down its machinery that began to glow and bleed into the air around it. Only moments, now, and the unseen world would reveal itself to him.

  Suddenly the sparks being fed into the rod were sent every which way in the room, and the entire area was illuminated with a blindingly powerful flash of light. Amroth shut his eyes until he could no longer feel them being assailed by the flash…

  …and opened them to find the entire mechanism burned to cinder.

  Metzinger looked at the remains, mortified, as though the machine were more valuable to him than any living subordinate of his. And, Amroth knew, this was almost certainly the case.

  “Noooooooooooo!” the doctor screamed, his mechanical voice audibly contorting to show his agony. “Not my conduit! You were so beautiful… So perfect…”

  Amroth took two steps towards Metzinger, making sure the click of his boots on the chrome flooring was audible enough the make him aware of the approach even in his grief. “Doctor,” Amroth said. “You assured me that this would work.”

  “It should have,” Metzinger sobbed, not even turning to meet Amroth’s cold, wrathful gaze. “Something… No, my conduit was perfect. There’s something else…” He opened up three viewscreens to analyze the data in-depth, and gasped. “Right, of course!” he said. “That’s it. We just don’t have the right cipher!”

  Amroth felt his patience already exhausted, but kept his composure. “Then you can make the appropriate adjustments.”

  The smell of burning materials drifted through the air, and several of the other scientists scuttled around the experiment putting out fires and throwing coolant on the frazzled computers.

  Metzinger’s head swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees to look at Amroth standing behind him, before his body turned to catch up with him, letting off a series of clicking sounds. He shook his head. “Nuh-uh,” he said, with the usual irreverence he showed his Lord. “See, we have the tech. But we don’t have the cipher. The girl, I mean. We need her.”

  “Yes,” Amroth acknowledged. “This was presumed to be the case, but you assured me that her DNA would be enough to substitute this.”

  Metzinger’s teeth showed in what could either be a grin or a grimace. His emotions continued to be too erratic for Amroth to parse as he could with most mortal men. “It was,” he said. “In theory. But that’s the thing with theories, Bossman. Sometimes they don’t pan out. You scrap it and build a new one. Science marches on.”

  “You will come up with a new theory, then,” Amroth instructed him.

  “Naw,” Metzinger answered with a flippancy that Amroth no longer wished to tolerate. “We gotta go back to the old model. The girl and the device. See, I thought I could decode the cipher in her DNA, but it’s just way too complex. Deeper than anything I thought was possible. Every time I go a few inches deep into its solution, it automatically adapts, changes itself up. Almost like it’s alive, thinking. Like it’s actively trying to keep us out.”

  The doctor’s glowing monochrome pools that substituted for his eyes flickered while he smiled. “I’ve never seen anything like it in organic DNA. Hell, even for software this would be a level of complexity that would make our ship’s computer look like a defunct model corteX. Really something.”

  Metzinger continued to ramble, but Amroth found the words washing over him. They were meaningless, nothing but empty jugglery of speech to dance around one simple fact: this experiment had failed, and Amroth would need both Bentley and the sword, as he always had. This little dalliance had wasted time and resources that could have been spent in active pursuit of both. He hadn’t felt rage like this boil in his blood in some time, but he maintained his usual impenetrable exterior of calm.

  “So I guess it’s back to square one, huh Bo—” Metzinger’s words were cut off suddenly when Amroth activated his pendant without warning. That green gem that was hung over his uniform like a grand accolade flashed, showing its power to the awe and terror of everyone in the hall. A ghostly tendril of pale green light lashed out from it like a malicious, unworldly tongue that buried itself in the cyborg doctor’s chest. He opened his mouth to scream, but only incoherent, synthetic sounds made it out of his artificial voice box before being completely silenced. Wisps of green light escaped his mouth and eyes, hollowing out his spirit from within, and then drawing the gathered essence quickly back into Amroth’s gem. The light faded, and Metzinger dropped to his knees. His expression empty, even the mechanized light in his eyes faded to nothing.

  “I was beginning to wonder if there was anything left in you to take,” Amroth said, his teeth bared with his own brand of sadism that seldom made it to his face.

  The hollowed-out husk of Metzinger looked up at Amroth and obediently stood up. It lowered its head, awaiting orders. But Amroth paid no attention to
him, instead looking around at the rest of the Geburah’s present crew. He set up a comm to the ship’s global channel and spoke with a loud, commanding tone, more spirited than his voice had been in years.

  “Attention!” Amroth called out. “Our priority is what it was. We are to secure the location of the Chesed immediately. The girl Bentley and the sword are to be located. Failure will mean not a single soul on this ship will ever see their families again.”

  His precise wording filled the room with such horror that Amroth could feel it practically emanating from every corner of the room. He glanced at the scientists scurrying about to work on new coordinates.

  Of course, Amroth thought. This was always how it had to be.

  And, once more, he found himself indulging in the slightest twisted grin.

  CHAPTER FOUR