Rath's Deception (The Janus Group Book 1)
Page 31
“Timer’s off? You have control of the truck?” Kitchener shouted.
“Yeah,” Rath confirmed. “Sorry about this.”
“Sorry about what?” Kitchener asked.
Rath pressed a button on the screen. With a loud BANG and a squeal of twisting metal, the demolition charge Rath had placed on the cab’s trailer hitch exploded, detaching the cab from the cargo container. Without the cab’s engine powering the trailer’s hoverjets, the cargo container went into immediate free-fall, the police cruiser still firmly clamped to the container’s roof. Kitchener glanced over his shoulder out the cab’s back window, catching a glimpse of the cruiser plummeting past, but before he could turn back to aim his pistol at Rath, his safety line went taut, yanking him out the open door.
* * *
At the controls of the police cruiser, Eldoran bellowed in alarm. His first instinct was to detach the clamp holding them to the cargo container, but as he reached for the switch, Noland caught his hand.
“No! If we let go, the hostages die!” Noland said.
“Shit!” Eldoran replied. He flipped the cruiser out of neutral and poured power into the hoverjets. The engine shrieked in protest, but as they watched the altimeter, their plunging descent began to slow.
“Can you land this thing?” Noland asked.
“Think so,” Eldoran replied tersely.
Noland let him concentrate, and flipped open his phone, dialing the station. “This is Tactical Response Team Four; I have a location and description for a vehicle with a suspect on the run, wanted for the murder of Senator Reid.” He relayed the truck’s description and then requested an ambulance at his own location, before signing off.
“We don’t have enough power to maneuver or gain altitude, but we’re still slowing down,” Eldoran told him. “By the time we reach ground level, we’ll only be dropping a few feet per second. We’ll be fine, it’s just not going to be a very comfortable landing for the guys in the trailer below us.”
A dark shape fell past his window, trailing a rope.
“Oh shit,” Noland said. “Kitchener!”
“Go haul him in!” Eldoran said. Noland started clambering into the backseat. “You’ve got about two minutes before we land, and he does not want to be anywhere below us when we do.”
Noland grabbed the rope and starting pulling Kitchener up, hand over hand.
* * *
Inside the cargo container, Beauceron wrinkled his nose at the overpowering smell of urine – Corporal Friedman had wet himself during the first gut-wrenching drop, and was still screaming incoherently. Beauceron could hear the whine of hoverjets and had felt several tugs on the container, so he guessed that another vehicle was trying to slow them down. He turned and wrapped his shackles around his wrists tightly, trying to bind himself more securely to the wall in advance of the inevitable crash.
They’re going to have my head for this. Assuming we survive at all.
* * *
Back in the cab of the truck, Rath reached under the seat and pulled out a backpack full of gear. He took out a lock-picking kit first, and spent thirty seconds removing the handcuffs from his wrists, changing his face and hair to another cover identity while he worked. Finished, he slipped into an armored vest, zipping a windbreaker over the top of it, and slid an auto-pistol into the police holster still on his waist. Lastly, he opened up the truck’s auto-pilot program and programmed a new course in, before pulling a helmet on over his head and face. As the truck accelerated and turned onto a new heading, he clambered back out of the cab, and worked his way to the rear of the vehicle. Holding onto the side of the truck, he loosened the ropes on the tarpaulin and pulled it off with a strong yank, watching as the wind whisked it away. Underneath was a high-performance hoverbike, mounted in a makeshift rack. Rath climbed aboard, started the engine, and swooped off in the opposite direction the truck was headed, dropping down several thousand feet to gain speed.
When he had put several miles between himself and the truck and descended to a more manageable two thousand feet, Rath slowed the bike and used its onboard computer to pull up a browser. He was tempted to access the live feed from the cargo container, just to verify that they had landed safely, but he was confident the police cruiser could handle it. Instead he entered in another URL, which took him to a map of the city. As he watched, his own location appeared, and then the map zoomed out and showed a blinking red dot several miles away. The dot appeared to be inside a building, but Rath watched it for several seconds to be sure. When it did not move, he smiled inside his helmet and revved the bike’s engine, veering onto a new course heading for the dot.
* * *
Franko dead-bolted the steel entry door behind them, and then set Rath’s Forge on a table nearby. Glint had already seated himself at the safehouse’s communications desk and was booting up the console.
“They are going to be so pissed,” Franko noted.
“You think?” Glint shot back. “Go check that the back exit is clear, in case we need it.”
Franko nodded, slinging his auto-rifle over one shoulder, and headed out of the room. Glint typed at the keyboard for a time, and then the wall-sized screen across from him lit up, flashing a large Connecting – Please Wait sign.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Glint muttered, chewing on his thumb.
“Secure connection established,” a female voice announced.
The screen stayed blank, but Glint heard a man clear his throat. “Identify,” the man said.
“Collection Team Two, Team Leader,” Glint said.
He waited a second, and then the screen came on, showing a supervisor in an isolation room.
“Well?” the supervisor said, crossing his arms. “We lost the video feed while you were still in the middle of extracting hemobots. Please tell me there’s a good reason Contractor 621’s vital signs are still registering on our monitoring system.”
Glint coughed. “Uh, he’s still alive,” he admitted. “The cops found us, somehow, and now they have him. I lost a team member – Shark – and Franko and I barely—”
The supervisor cut him off. “Where is 621 now?”
“I don’t know,” Glint said, looking up as Franko came back into the room. “Don’t you guys have his location on your tracker?”
The supervisor shook his head. “No. When we disabled him, we cut his data connection – we lost his audio and video feeds, hemobot access, location, everything. All we have are biometrics right now.”
“You can’t disable him again?” Glint asked.
“Not without hemobot access, no. But we’re rebooting his system from this end, and he’s still got hemobots in his bloodstream. We’ll have access again in a few minutes.”
Glint breathed a sigh of relief. “So we’ll be able to shut him down.”
“Luckily for you, yes. But you can bet your ass the director is going to want to know how he pulled one over on you guys. This is right up there with 339’s botched collection,” he turned his head. “Hang on,” the supervisor said. He held up a hand, muting the feed to talk to someone off-screen.
“Are we gonna get fired?” Franko asked Glint, while they waited for the supervisor to return.
Glint sighed. “I’m going to be happy if they don’t kill us,” he replied.
The supervisor dropped his arm, and spoke to Glint again. “Where’s your team, right now?”
“Safehouse six,” Glint replied. “Why?”
“621’s location tracker just rebooted, he’s—” the screen went blank.
* * *
Rath flattened himself against the outer wall and triggered first the EMP grenade, then the breaching charge. The building’s door exploded off its hinges, flipping through the air twice before crashing into Glint and the communications desk. Rath came through the door frame hot on the heels of the blast, saw Franko raising his rifle, and put two pistol rounds through his forehead. Then he swept the room’s corners, twice, before seeing his Forge on the table by the door. He smile
d and walked over, stopping to pat it affectionately, and then shrugged it on, cinching the straps tight.
Rath heard a low groan coming from the middle of the room. The mangled entry door shifted slightly atop the ruins of the communications desk, and Rath pulled it off to one side, pointing his pistol at the body beneath.
“Hello, Glint,” he said.
Glint moaned, and spat a stream of blood onto the floor. Rath squatted down next to him.
“Let me go ahead and address the big question that is undoubtedly going through your mind right now. I sewed a tracking device into the fabric of my Forge – that’s how I found you. Now, someone’s bound to have heard that big, noisy demolition charge I set off, so the police are going to be here momentarily,” Rath told him. “Seems like every time we meet, the cops interrupt, huh? But if you can prove that you have some useful intelligence about the location of the Group’s headquarters, I might be convinced to haul your ass out of here before they arrive.”
“Don’t know,” Glint managed. “No one knows where Headquarters is.”
“No? What about the training planet?” Rath asked.
Glint shook his head, wincing.
“That’s a shame,” Rath said.
“What the hell are you going to do, anyway?” Glint asked.
“I’m going to get my goddamn money,” Rath told him.
Glint snorted. “How? You’re physically and mentally broken, with an entire planet of cops on your tail, and the Group’s already assigning every available contractor to come kill you. If they don’t reactivate your hemobots and kill you first. You’re not going to do shit.”
Rath locked eyes with Glint. “I never said I was going to do it alone,” he said. He stood up and took aim.
“I thought you didn’t like killing,” Glint said.
“I’m not going to lose any sleep over you,” Rath replied.
He fired twice, then took an incendiary grenade off his belt and tossed it into the room. With an audible pop, the grenade spurted out molten phosphorus, and a lively fire took hold. Rath holstered his pistol and headed out the door, back to his hoverbike.
31
The contractor was asleep in his simulator, but the insistent voice of his companion avatar roused him awake.
“What?” he asked, rubbing his face with both hands. He had spent most of the night playing with the avatar, on the way home after another successful mission.
“The spaceliner just came out of faster-than-light travel, sir, and you have an urgent message waiting,” she said.
He rolled out of the simulated bed, yawning, and picked a small knife off of the bedside table. Then he crossed the room to where she was standing. She was naked, her wrists bound in metal cuffs attached to the concrete ceiling via a rusty chain. She flinched as he approached, trying to hide her bruised face behind her arms. He studied her, twirling the knife idly through the fingers of one hand. He hit her with his other hand and she sobbed, as he had programmed her to. But as with everything in the world of the simulator, her whimpering wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it would have been from a real girl.
“Thanks for the wake-up call,” he told her. “Change into a new girl the next time I sign in. A feisty one, this time. I want you to fight back.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied meekly.
“Log out,” he ordered, and the simulated world faded to reveal his cabin. He picked his datascroll off the bedside table and opened the message.
<*Special Remarks: in lieu of monetary bounty, all contractors assisting in the live capture of the target will be credited with five (5) kills toward their 50-kill obligation>
Contractor 700 tossed the datascroll onto the bed, pulled out his suitcase, and began packing his gear.
Keep reading for an exclusive excerpt from Rath's Gambit, Book Two in The Janus Group series:
Rath shivered on the back of the hoverbike, the crisp wind of the mid-altitude slipstream cutting through his clothes.
Should have picked a warmer coat.
The elation of his successful escape was rapidly wearing off, the adrenaline leeching out of him, to be replaced with the familiar bone-deep weariness from his years of nightmare-riddled insomnia.
Stay sharp – you’re not nearly in the clear yet.
On reflex, he accessed his neural interface, and called up the hemobot menu, intending to give himself a boost of caffeine. But the interface threw him an error message, and he punched the hoverbike’s console in frustration.
Can’t access the few hemobots you have left, stupid. And you gotta figure out a way to get them out of you before the Group realizes you’re still alive.
A police cruiser flashed past him headed in the opposite direction, sirens wailing. Rath’s heart skipped a beat, then he realized they were probably heading for the safehouse he had just left.
Where they will find two dead Group operatives … that I killed. If they can find anything at all in the fire that I started. Every cop on the planet was already out to get me after I killed a senator and kidnapped a couple cops … better stop giving them more evidence to find.
On instinct, he dropped altitude, changing course and heading out of the city.
A little warmer down here, too.
He took a deep breath, trying to remain calm.
Okay, let’s do mission planning. First priority: get the hemobots out.
He wasn’t sure why the Group hadn’t activated them yet – his data connection had been interrupted, but it had recently come back on, so he had to assume that Headquarters had reconnected with his cybernetic systems.
Which means I’m still streaming my audio and visual feeds to them, and they can track my location as well. So why haven’t they activated my hemobots and disabled me, like they did before? Regardless, second priority is cutting off that data feed – doubtless they have other contractors en route to recapture me. If the cops don’t find me, they definitely will.
His original plan had been to head straight for the spaceport and hop a flight off-planet; faster-than-light travel interrupted his data connection to Headquarters, so he had planned to use the flight time to figure out a way to permanently disable his data feed.
That’s not happening until I patch up my leg – can’t walk through security bleeding like this. And the spaceports will be on lock-down for a few more hours thanks to me. Was the senator’s assassination only this morning? God, it feels like it was years ago. A flight would give me time to heal up.
He winced and flexed his shoulder, where the gunshot wound from the mission at Suspensys was still healing. The wounds in his legs ached as well, given that most of his hemobots had been extracted and the rest were inactive. He realized they must have been suppressing the pain pretty heavily – it had been years since he had felt pain this raw.
At least I got my Forge back. And I’ve got one auto-pistol with a spare magazine, my fighting knife … and about twelve thousand dollars on my phone. Enough for a flight or two, but not much else. I need to find a hospital – no, the Interstellar Police will be looking for me there, they know I’m wounded. A clinic, maybe?
Rath’s heads-up display flickered, and then a message popped up:
“Oh, shit,” Rath said.
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Rath just assassinated a senator, and completed his final mission for the Janus Group. Now every Interstellar Police officer on Alberon is searching for him. If they don’t find him, one of his fellow contractors certainly will … and the most feared criminal organization in the galaxy has severe punishments for employees who break the rules. Rath’s only hope is to find the rogue contractor who helped him escape a company deathtrap after his final mission. United, the two assassins might just get free from the Janus Group and get what they’re owed. But first they’ll need to survive.
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Text copyright 2015 by Piers Platt
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Table of Contents
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