by Piers Platt
Well, I tried.
Rath stooped and took a seat in the back of the air car, behind the driver. The other guard walked around the car and sat next to him. Rath let the driver take off and maneuver the vehicle over to an exit shaft, which launched the car vertically upwards. They shot up into the night sky, the embassy whisking past the window, disappearing below them. Rath leaned back against the plush leather headrest and closed his eyes, hoping to discourage conversation with the guards.
Inventory. One holophone, one mostly-expended toxin needle, and … that’s it. This is why you should have figured out a way to bring your Forge on the mission with you, he chided himself.
Rath loosened the needle in its forearm holster and surreptitiously unbuckled his belt. He stabbed the guard next to him first, hoping there was enough toxin left in the needle to incapacitate him.
“What the …?” the guard said, knocking the needle out of his leg with alarm.
But Rath ignored him: he was busy sliding off his belt. He leaned forward and dropped a loop around the driver’s head, cinching it tight before yanking back hard on the leather with both hands. The driver’s cry of protest was instantly choked off.
“Engage autopilot: emergency landing,” Rath ordered the air car.
The vehicle went into a steep dive, heading back to the ground. The guard next to him had recovered his wits; Rath saw him sit forward and reach behind his back for his gun. Rath let go of the belt, twisted in his seat, and kicked the man hard with both feet, slamming him into the door. The guard grunted in pain, and Rath rolled forward, launching himself over the seats onto the guard. After a second of confused grappling, he managed to slam his left forearm into the man’s throat, pinning him against the door. With his other hand, Rath reached behind the guard, but the man already had his gun in his hand. Rath scrabbled against the door for a second until he found what he was looking for.
“Safety protocols override: unlock rear doors,” Rath said.
The guard’s eyes went wide in realization, and Rath saw him open his mouth to issue his own voice command, but Rath was already pulling on the door handle. He gave a last push on the man’s throat with his forearm, and then the door was open and the guard tumbled out with a scream. The door slammed shut immediately, pushed closed by the turbulent winds outside the car. Rath turned to address the driver, but as he did, he heard a gunshot, felt a sharp pain in his temple, and suddenly the simulator went dark.
Ow.
When the simulator rebooted, Rath found himself seated in the standard mission briefing room, with the training avatar waiting for him.
“The driver shot me in the head?”
The avatar nodded. “Yes, he did. Are you ready for the post-mortem?”
Rath sighed, “Sure.”
“Let’s start with your chosen persona. Why did you pick to imitate a waiter?”
Rath rubbed at his forehead where he had been shot – it still smarted. “I thought about doing a guest, but the threat of discovery would be too high – the other guests would know the man I impersonated, and I wouldn’t be able to hold up conversation for very long. Someone would ask me a question I should know the answer to, and the game would be up,” Rath said.
“True. It was a good decision,” the avatar agreed. “That said, your mission planning continues to be uninspired. Your default plan is to put yourself as close to the target as possible and kill via direct action. That’s dangerous and risky, not least because your combat ratings are merely average. For some missions, you will have no choice but to get up close and personal. For all others, you should consider how to take action from a distance. Did you know that there are some trainees who completed the embassy test without even entering the building?”
Rath sighed. “How? An accomplice?”
The avatar shrugged. “There are several ways. All of that criticism aside, your mimicry skills are excellent – your speed and accuracy are among the highest I’ve seen. Which does give you an advantage in close combat. You also think well on your feet, but you need to be smarter about planning the mission in the first place. You’re not going to be able to improvise your way out of every problem in the real world. As you’re about to find out.”
“Wait, I passed?” Rath asked.
The avatar shook Rath’s hand. “You did.”
“But I died,” Rath said, frowning.
“You completed your assignment,” the avatar corrected. “Good luck, Contractor 621.”
When he stepped out of the simulator, Rath found a notification waiting for him on the datascroll. He ignored it, however, first showering and changing into his utility clothes, before ordering a small meal and eating it in silence. Then he flicked the datascroll on, and took a moment to flip through all six pages of his training checklist. He smiled with satisfaction at seeing the final box marked Complete. Finally, he tapped on the notification.
On the wall across from him, the view-screen lit up, the gold 50 rotating slowly against the black background.
“Congratulations – you are now a fully certified contractor, ready to begin assignments for the Group. A shuttle will soon arrive to transport you off-planet, for the journey on to your staging planet, Volpes, which will serve as a base of operations for you throughout your career. However, the Group would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the contract governing your employment stipulates certain penalties for breach of contract. The following are videos of two different contractors who broke their contract with the Group, and like every contractor throughout history that has done so – every single one – the Group found them, and punished them severely. Here is what happened to a contractor who divulged company secrets after being captured by law enforcement during one of his assignments.”
The 50 disappeared, and it was replaced by what appeared to be security footage from a police interrogation room. A man in a suit and tie was questioning a prisoner who was shackled to the table between them.
“… what can you tell me about the training process?” the man in the tie asked.
“I was flown to a planet, and a shuttle took me down to the surface. I think there were other candidates on the flight with me, but they kept us in our rooms or blindfolded, so I don’t know for sure. The planet was cold – there was an island, red sand, mountains with a forest. I just remember being cold and hungry, the whole time.”
“And what did you do on the island?”
“Obstacle courses, puzzles, meaningless physical tasks … all kinds of things. They didn’t let us sleep—”
Suddenly, the man started choking, a bloody froth appearing at his mouth. His eyes looked panicked, and Rath saw his arms straining at the handcuffs. The man in the suit jumped up and ran to the door, calling for medical assistance. The video skipped forward, showing several minutes of the prisoner writhing in agony, medical personnel working hard to save him, before he finally collapsed. The screen went black again.
“That contractor decided to reveal information about the Group in an attempt to secure immunity for his crimes. The Group monitors audio-visual recordings throughout assignments, so we knew he had been captured, and had decided to betray the Group. As a result, the Group remotely asserted control over his hemobots, and directed them to manufacture a lethal toxin that was delivered directly into his bloodstream. You can see that he suffered greatly before he died. Here is what happened to a contractor who refused to accept an assignment, and attempted to flee and ignore his remaining obligations to the Group.”
The screen showed the first-person view of a man leaning out of an air-car side door, a dart-gun resting lightly in his lap. As the air car slowed and hovered over a large crowd of people in an open square, the man held up a transparent datascroll and panned it over the crowd, scanning until the outline of a single man blinked, highlighted on the screen. The man in the air car tapped a control on his screen, and the contractor down in the square collapsed abruptly, apparently having a seizure. Rath frowned. Wow, look at all these gr
eat hemobot capabilities the Group conveniently left out of my briefings …
On screen, the air car landed near the prostrated contractor, and two men stepped out and hauled him on board, after quickly patting him down for weapons or explosive devices. The video skipped forward. The contractor was lying, naked, on a medical gurney beneath a bright light. He was receiving a blood transfusion, and Rath could see copious amounts of blood both on the gurney and draining slowly through a grate in the cement floor. The camera panned up to reveal a mirror suspended from the ceiling directly over the gurney, so that the contractor could see all of his bruised, torn body. On several trays and tables around the gurney Rath noted power tools, surgical instruments, and even a blowtorch.
“Wake up,” a voice commanded.
“I’m awake,” the contractor said, eyes opening, fear and pain evident in his voice.
“Why are you here?” the voice asked.
“Because I broke my contract with the Group.”
“How long have you been here?”
“This is the morning of the eighth day.”
“What happens each night?” the voice continued.
“I … I sleep. You induce me into a medical coma, and my hemobots heal me.” Tears rolled down the man’s cheeks.
“How long are we going to keep doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what’s the first thing we do to you when you wake up each morning?”
“Please, no! Just kill me. I’m begging you.”
Unmoved, the voice repeated the question. “What’s the first thing we do to you when you wake up each morning?”
The contractor, sobbing, told him. Rath watched as a man moved into frame, attaching a device to the contractor’s face that simultaneously gagged him and forced his eyelids to stay open. Then, abruptly, the viewpoint shifted, and the viewscreen showed the recording from the contractor’s cybernetic eyes, staring up at his own reflection in the mirror. Rath winced, reluctant to watch, but unable to stop himself.
After several minutes, the screen went black again, but Rath knew he would remember the contractor’s muffled cries of anguish for some time. He heard the wheel lock spin on the hatch to his room, and found a masked man standing on the far side when it swung open. The man declined to speak to Rath, simply beckoning with a hand for Rath to follow him.
“Do I need to bring anything?” Rath asked.
The man shook his head. Rath took a last look at the room in which he had spent the better part of a year, and then followed him down the hall to the elevator bank. Back up at the surface, the same driverless air car sat on the same landing pad. It flew him back to the island, where a shuttle was waiting for him.
12
The room was crowded, a raucous cacophony of sound, as patrons tried to make themselves heard over the throbbing music. Rath sat at one end of the long bar, drinking a sparkling water with a twist of lime out of a lowball glass, which he hoped looked like a gin and tonic to the people around him. He could have ordered a real drink and then activated his hemobots to neutralize the alcohol content, but he had never tried that, and for his first assignment, he decided not to run any unnecessary risks.
The target sat alone at a low table several feet back from the bar, working his way through his fourth beer in less than half an hour. Rath had entered the bar several minutes after the target, as his surveillance training dictated, and he suspected that the man had taken at least one shot before switching to beers. So he was apparently as nervous as Rath, he just wasn’t hiding it as well. Rath was determined not to underestimate the man – regardless of being drunk and anxious, his target was a seasoned mercenary with six years of experience fighting in various low intensity conflicts in the Territories. Rath found he was gripping his fighting knife’s hilt under the bar again, and relaxed his hand, forcing himself to breathe deeply.
Alberon was just the fourth planet Rath had visited, after his homeworld of Tarkis, wherever it was the Group had trained him, and his staging planet of Volpes. It was completely different from the industrialized mega-cities of Tarkis – instead, the planet’s populace was settled over a sprawling network of small islands amidst a vast ocean. The ‘Archipelago Planet,’ Rath recalled, from the guidebook he had read.
Rath had been watching the target’s apartment for three days, and following him each time he left it, which had resulted in very little sleep for Rath. The mercenary kept odd hours and frequented this and several other bars in the area. Rath had multiple opportunities over those three days to kill the man, but he hadn’t, and his own nerves were not the only reason – his assignment stated that he needed to locate a data drive that the target possessed before he killed the man. So far, Rath had not seen the drive, and had been unable to confirm where the man kept it. Rath assumed that the man was trying to sell the information on the data drive, which must have been pretty sensitive to warrant a Group contract. But Rath was running out of time, as the persistent message from the Group reminded him, and the only plan he had thought of was to capture the man alive, then threaten him until he gave up the location of the drive. Not a good plan, Rath thought, chagrined.
“Anything else?” the bartender asked.
“Hmm?” Rath was caught off guard. “Oh, no – thanks.”
“That’ll be six-fifty,” the bartender told him, clearly hoping Rath would shove off and make room for a more lucrative patron.
“Right,” Rath said. He patted his pocket reflexively, ensuring his holophone was there before taking it out. Rath stopped in the midst of paying, an idea forming in his mind.
“Something the matter?” the bartender asked, impatient.
“No,” Rath said, holding his phone up to the bar’s payment scanner, and depositing a fifty dollar tip. “Keep the change. But I need your help with something.”
“Sure,” the bartender agreed, suddenly eager to please.
“I found a data drive on the floor as I came in a few minutes ago,” Rath lied, leaning forward to ensure the man could hear him. “You know, one of those mini, plug-in types? Can you turn the music off and make an announcement, see if anyone lost one?”
“Okay,” the bartender told him. He stepped over to a touchscreen and tapped a few controls. The music stopped abruptly, noisy conversations suddenly dropping off midstream as people looked up from their tables. “Anyone lose a data drive?” the bartender asked. Rath, watching the mercenary closely, saw a look of panic cross his face, as the man reached for his right coat pocket.
Gotcha.
The mercenary scanned the room quickly, and Rath looked away as the music came back on, pretending to check the time on his wristwatch, avoiding eye contact. When he risked a glance back at the table, the man was already on his feet, headed fast toward the rear of the bar. Rath slid off his own stool, interrupting the bartender as he came back over to talk to Rath.
“Bathroom’s at the back?” Rath asked, shouldering his Forge pack.
“Yeah. Want to leave that data drive with me?”
Rath ignored him, weaving his way through the crowd. At the back of the bar, the mercenary continued past the bathrooms, pushing through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Rath slipped his knife out of its sheath, holding the blade flat against his forearm, and followed. The door opened into a storeroom, stacked haphazardly with boxes of liquor and cleaning supplies. The mercenary was not in the storeroom, but Rath heard the fire exit at the far end of the room click shut. He took a deep breath, and went through the door.
The mercenary hit him hard over the back of the head with what felt like a wooden board, and Rath immediately went down on his knees. His user interface warned him that unconsciousness was imminent, but the hemobots automatically went into overdrive, pumping him full of adrenaline and super-oxygenated blood before Rath realized what was happening. He managed to turn in time to catch the second blow on his forearm, but the force of it knocked him onto his back, where he lay for several seconds, trying to regain his equilibrium. Th
e pain in his arm faded almost immediately, though Rath suspected he was in for a serious bruise later on, if not a mild fracture. He rolled onto his stomach, and pushed himself back up onto his feet.
He had expected to find his target halfway down the alley already, but the man was bent over against the far wall, coughing hard and holding his throat. He looked up as Rath approached, fear plain on his face. He shook his head as if to ward Rath off, and Rath noted that his eyes were tearing up. Is he choking on something? Rath moved closer, warily.
“I don’t have it, man,” the man cleared his throat, wincing.
“Yes, you do,” Rath told him. The man lunged forward suddenly, a knife in his own hand, and Rath had to dodge quickly to clear the weapon’s path. The mercenary drew his knife back for another low thrust at Rath’s belly, and this time Rath let him come, sidestepping the blade before catching his wrist. Rath brought his own knife down in a sweeping blow, plunging it into the mercenary’s torso where his shoulder met his neck. The man screamed and collapsed to his knees, still coughing. Rath wrenched his knife cruelly, feeling it grate against the man’s collarbone, and slammed the man’s knife hand into the brick wall. He heard the knife fall to the ground.
“Ahh! Stop, stop,” the man begged. “Look, I’ll give you half the money, just don’t kill me.” He stopped as another fit of coughing seized him.
Rath ignored him, kneeling and holding him in place with his knife, using his free hand to open the man’s jacket pocket. It was empty. Rath looked up into the man’s eyes.
“Where is it?”
The man managed a short laugh. “I swallowed it,” he said.
Rath swore. Suddenly, he remembered to check the alley, and flipped to thermal vision quickly to scan for security cameras and confirm they were alone. Sloppy as a soup sandwich, Rath thought to himself, hearing the training avatar’s voice in his mind. He pulled the knife out, placing it against the man’s carotid artery, and then hesitated. He had killed countless avatars in the simulator, but suddenly, face to face with a real, sweating, bleeding human, Rath realized the import of what he was about to do.
