Celestial Hit List

by Charles Ingrid

  He moved inside. The air immediately felt warmer and his shivering stopped. A mild fog rose inside his visor. He reached up and pulled it out slightly to allow the air circulation to even out the temperatures. As he looked about he saw no cameras. Jack smiled to himself. The inhabiter of these dens wanted no recordings of the activities here. He did not wonder at that. He wondered, instead, who he would find on the other side of the office walling since the operation’s original creator was dead. Huan Ng had been killed for chilling Jack down and selling him as a contract laborer instead of terminating him.

  Well, Jack was back and he was mad.

  Jack wasted no time kicking the door in. The lab operator at the console across the room turned half-around, snapping, “What do you think you’re doing? Final chilling is in process. Get that temperature leveled off or we’re going to have dead meat on our hands.”

  “Then I’d say you have a problem,” Jack answered smoothly as he pulled off his hood.

  The woman swung around. She was not beautiful. Half-Oriental blooded and half-redhead, the freckles were incongruous on her dark skin. Her almond shaped eyes widened. Her hand stabbed out for the beam that would call in Security, but Jack caught her by the wrist.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She sat back in her chair, her wrist pulled in his grip, but he did not free her. “What do you want here?”

  “Just a few answers. I could want more, but I haven’t the time to waste. About fourteen months ago, I was processed through here as a contract laborer.”

  The woman’s lips thickened momentarily. Then she forced a smile. “I was not the operator here then.”

  “That I know. Your father was—or perhaps your brother. It doesn’t matter to me and I doubt if it mattered to you.” As he talked, Jack made a few minor repairs to the control console, then released her. It wouldn’t matter now if she tried to summon Security. Her board was temporarily out of commission. She coiled back in her chair.

  “If you know who was in charge then, you know that he was killed for not doing his job properly—a situation I do not intend to face.” Her not quite brown hair was heavily overcast with red, and she wore it in two thick braids, pulled back from her round moon of a face. She was not pretty in any sense of the word, reminding Jack of a spade-headed viper, sizing up the strike zone. “My father ran a lot of contract laborers through here.”

  “I’m different,” Jack said. “I’m the one he got killed for.”

  Her eyes darkened. Her gaze flicked away, then back. He followed her line of sight and saw the butt of a hand laser, taped or in a magnetic holder, under the top of the desk next to hers. He moved subtly, just enough to block her reach.

  She said carefully, “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  “I’m a Dominion Knight.”

  Her breath went out in a low hiss. “So you’re the bastard.”

  Jack folded his arms.

  She spat. It pooled off to the side, not far from the hip he had leaned insolently against the desk. “I’ll tell you nothing.”

  “I think you will. There’s an empty gurney or two out there. I’ve been chilled down a few times in my life. Without preparation, the blood spoils. Cells disrupt when the temperature drops. The hypothermia of waking is nearly impossible to counteract.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Wouldn’t I? It makes no difference to me. I’ve got the lab suit. Your workers won’t be back in until next shift, to move these bodies out and new ones in. You won’t be discovered for hours. By then, it will be too late. And, maybe by then, I’ll have accessed your files and found what I wanted to know.”

  “Father would never have put anything like that into his files.”

  He stared at the woman’s angry face. He shrugged negligently. “It’s up to you.”

  “I will suffer my father’s fate if it is known that I told you.”

  “Perhaps. If I’m clumsy. But I’m not, or I wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

  He blocked her view of the gun. She hesitated, drawing herself up in her chair. The viper getting ready to strike, Jack told himself in warning. He braced himself slightly.

  Then she relaxed visibly. “It makes no difference,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. My father was hired by the Green Shirts—you will not have heard of them before, probably—they wanted to take out a member of the emperor’s guard to show him that he was not as invulnerable as he thought himself. Emperors are made, not born, in these centuries. It was Pepys who was attacked, through you.”

  Jack absorbed her words without emotion, not doubting her, but wondering if even she knew the whole truth. When she had finished speaking, she turned her back to him and began to monitor the lab once more.

  “That’s all?”

  She flashed him a triumphant look over her shoulder. “That is enough. Having heard of the Green Shirts, you’re as dead as my father. Only, you do not yet know it.”

  He left the labs without being challenged once. The workers parted to let him through, and he realized she had called ahead, giving him a free exit.

  She must have a lot of faith in the Green Shirts, he thought, peeling off his insulation suit and leaving it in a heap by the front portals. Enough that being a martyr appealed to her.

  Chapter Ten

  Jack. Where are you?”

  No answer. Her voice echoed down the dark corridors, not only unanswered, but she feared, unheard. Amber stumbled to a halt, twisted and looked back, but the darkness pooling about her was deeper than night. She could not see through it. She could smell darkness and mold, street dirt, and her own fear.

  “Amber.”

  It wasn’t Jack’s voice, but one she knew—and feared—better. Amber sucked in a breath so cold it burned her chest as she held it. Don’t let him find her. Please, God, by all the gods, don’t let him find her.

  “Amber.” Closer now. Coming inevitably toward her. She stopped breathing altogether and felt her heart hammer in her chest.

  “Amber. It’s time to kill, now.”

  Right next to her! Soft voice in her ear, warm breath tickling the shell of her chilled flesh, stirring the fine hair along her neck. By biting her lip so hard that blood sprang forth, she kept herself from jumping, crying out, betraying herself to Rolf.

  He could not see her if she could not see him. She told herself that several times as she waited in the dark. Long seconds crawled by. Her chest swelled with rank air and ached for fresh.

  The man moved away. He said, with laughter in his voice, “I have the word, Amber. All I have to do is say it.”

  He didn’t know she was there. How could he? He had no idea where she was. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been with Jack, who had only been a mercenary. For all Rolf knew, she could be a roadie, following Jack from assignment to assignment.

  How would he know where she was?

  But she did not doubt that he did. Rolf was more than a pimp. He had access to a network of underground information that never made it into the master system.

  The need to breathe clawed at her throat until she could no longer think.

  “Amber?”

  The voice was now farther away in the darkness. By stretching out her arm, she just might see her wrist. She, too, was clothed in black. She touched her fingertips to her face. A black mask muffled her cheekbones.

  Now she remembered why she was here. She’d come here to kill someone.

  Amber tilted back her head and screamed.

  The noise woke her up, shaking, in the half-lit illumination of her room. The sheets under her pressed damp and rumpled lines into her body. She put a trembling hand to her mouth to still her cries… and drew it away covered with blood.

  Amber savagely slapped her hand down on the light switch, flooding the room. She sat, curled up in the bed, surrounded by the rankness of sweat and fear. Damn Jack. Damn him and his bad dreams anyway. Now she was having them.

&nbs
p; When the trembling left her limbs, she lifted her face from its resting place on her knees, a dimple in her skin where her pointed chin had dug. “Dreams,” she said again. “Dreams that can kill.”

  There was something about Jack, had always been something about him, and she hoped she would always see it in him. He might be a soldier, but he had roots in the earth, in the life that earth could hold and nurture from world to world. He had told her it was because he’d once been a farmer’s son and then a ranger, but she thought it was something purer that managed to shine through him. Like the sun. And the only clouds that ever shadowed it were those of his dreams—and now she was dreaming.

  Was Rolf out there somewhere, rapping on her psychic keyboard? Tapping her soul? Could he, somehow, someway, still use her as an assassin?

  Amber abruptly swung her feet off the bed and stood up. There was only one man she knew and trusted besides Jack, and that man had more than a little experience with souls.

  Jack looked across the vast complex of the emperor’s grounds. He hadn’t been gone that long but the view seemed to have changed, or perhaps he had. Amber had accused him of being a coward, of being afraid to enter his armor and draw Bogie out. Perhaps he had been. He had the new armor on order, but knew now that he would never use it. The last hope of knowing who he was and regaining his past might lie within the old armor, in the being slumbering there. The techs had played games with his memories, but they hadn’t known about Bogie… and Bogie had been alive on Milos, even back then, and so just might retain that shred of his consciousness that could tell him who he was.

  All he had to do was wake Bogie and hope to control the berserker soul long enough to find out who he was. Before Bogie regenerated enough to become a true parasite and devour him a bit at a time. It was a gamble, but then, what choice did Jack have? What choice had he ever had?

  He flashed his palm print at the security gate and was let in. Sulfur-colored lights glowed over the barracks. The grass had been watered earlier. It made damp sounds under his feet until he reached the pathway to his private officers’ quarters. The door wasn’t locked firmly when he opened it, and he smiled, knowing Amber was waiting there for him. Jack stepped inside the doorway.

  He froze as the men rose from their resting positions, but the flash of their uniforms made him pause, waiting, because these people weren’t supposed to be the enemy in this part of Malthen, though Amber thought otherwise. The World Police devices on their shoulders winked on their epaulets.

  “Captain Storm, good evening. We’ve been waiting for you since we received word you’d docked.”

  He dropped his duffel just inside the doorway as he said, “Thank you, gentlemen. What can I do for you?”

  The man in charge of the trio was a big, lean man and his nose had been broken at one time. He evidently had liked it that way, for he wore it now as if it were a badge of distinction, not having had cosmetic surgery to restore it. “I’m Captain Drefford. The emperor has asked me to debrief you on your findings.”

  The door closed at Jack’s heels, a shield against his back. He looked from Drefford to the two escorts who stared blandly back at him. He noted that the second one to the rear, wore a black caduceus in addition to his WP markings. A medical interrogator.

  “My leave was for personal reasons,” Jack answered, wondering what was going on here. “If Pepys wants to know what I found, I’ll be glad to ask for an audience.”

  “Your leave,” Drefford said, with a faint and ugly emphasis, “was on the emperor’s behalf.”

  “He gave me leave to go.”

  “He ordered you to go,” Drefford corrected. “And it is perhaps best you don’t remember what you learned. Mavor.” He crooked a finger and the medical interrogator came forward.

  The smallish, dark-skinned man smiled. “It’s best you have a seat, captain. The floor can be hard when you topple.”

  If the door had been open, Jack would have bolted. As it was he made to shrug as Drefford and the third man caught his arms, but they had him too closely quartered as Mavor came forward with the air needle. Jack did the second best thing. He lowered his chin to his chest, took a deep breath, and ordered his mind to perform the mental exercises he’d learned long ago as a Knight of the “Pure” wars—training which Amber had later reinforced for him—and thought of a time when an emperor would not have treated his own man in such a way.

  He woke with a dull pounding permanently lodged in his head. In the grayish light of early dawn, Bogie hung from his equipment rack like a golem, a mechanical homunculus. Jack scrubbed at his eyes. The drugs had left a brackish taste in his mouth, and thinking that, Jack sat up quickly.

  He remembered! He had not been intended to, but he had. And then he remembered that Mavor had gotten very little out of him… nothing about his visit to the rehab center, only about the cold sleep lab and the Green Shirts, because Jack had had to give them something… it had been turning him inside out to retain anything.

  Jack staggered into the bathroom and put his face in the washbasin, standing crouched over it while he splashed cold water, then rinsed his mouth and spat. When he stood up to look at himself in the mirror, it was with a grim expression of satisfaction. But he said nothing aloud, knowing that WP had probably bugged the apartment, too, and he would have to have it swept later. He’d be able to cover that action of his.

  But now he would not be able to take further action against the organization that had kidnapped him and sold him into contract labor. That information had been taken from him and he should no longer be able to remember.

  Jack winced as he scraped a razor over his face. Could he trust the emperor to take advantage of that information? Would there be vengeance taken for him? He could only watch silently and carefully to see.

  As he straightened, to a pounding at the back of his head, the general com line sounded.

  “Guard alert. Guard alert. All available personnel report. Assassination attempt in the west wing.”

  Jack paused long enough to grab his hand laser from its wall cabinet. He looked longingly at Bogie, knew he didn’t have the time to put his armor on. The west wing… the emperor’s personal recreation wing! He ran across the grounds.

  WP lights had come on, flooding the gray dawn with white-hot light, bleeding the pink buildings out. He could see the tall, slender, silver-haired man forming trios and sending them out. The Owner of the Purple—no, Jack corrected himself—Kavin, and he felt again the keen edge of betrayal. If he had been a Knight, why did he not fight for the complete resurrection of the Knights, with all the ideals and codes… or did Pepys know what he was harboring as his right arm?

  As Jack fell in, the Purple’s brown eyes sought him out. Always laughing, the expression in those eyes, unless things were terribly, terribly wrong. The expression was somber now and as their gazes held, Jack wondered if he had told WP about Kavin. He could not remember.

  “Captain,” called the commander. “Good timing. The floors have been secured, but I need a detail at the North-Six exit.”

  Jack nodded briskly. He pointed at two he knew. “Farrel and Davidis. Come with me.”

  Farrel, short and wiry, had gone through Basic with Jack. Davidis, tall, chestnut-haired and incredibly young looking, was one of the new Knights. Jack knew him only from the parade grounds. Both were fit and fast-thinking men and he did not hesitate to have them with him. Farrel was in his armor, carrying his helmet, but Davidis like himself had only taken time to dress and grab a weapon.

  The sixth floor north exit was in bleak shadows, on the far side from the WP lights, and the moment Jack craned his head back to look at it, the hairs prickled at the back of his neck and he knew what his friend had done to him.

  If the assassin were looking for a way out, this was the way he would come. Jack had no doubt of it.

  “Shit,” Farrel said. Neither, it appeared, did he.

  Davidis only asked, “How are we getting up there?”

  “We’re climbing,
” Jack answered. He motioned for Farrel to affix the grappling hook carried in his belt pack. A WP alarm shut down all systems, trapping the perpetrators inside, but also effectively hindering entrance through the doors and elevator shafts. Jack wondered briefly if the emperor had been home to greet his callers. If so, he was locked in with them.

  With a retort, the wrist barrel fired and Farrel’s grappling hook and line arced into the air. It anchored just off the balcony of North-Sixth’s doorway. Jack smiled thinly. Just where he wanted it.

  He signaled for Farrel to notify the commander and he went up first, hand over hand, feeling the pounding of the drug-induced interrogation hammering at the back of his head. Davidis scrambled up behind him and, as told to, took a crouched position where he could lay a cross fire in front of the doorway. Farrel came up the side of the building as though he were moonwalking, but his face was slightly flushed inside the armor’s neckline. He landed and, at Jack’s nod, notified the Purple they were in position.

  Jack heard the Purple’s muffled response, “Systems coming on. Get ready.”

  Davidis’ exotically dark skin paled a little. Jack heard the thrum of power, and the North-Six door blew.

  Two figures just inside, hugging the portal, began to edge out.

  “Hold it right there,” Jack said.

  They froze. Then, the man in faded blue trousers, with a magnificent dark blue robe over them, stepped forward. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “We haven’t done anything.”

  Jack straightened up as he recognized the voice of St. Colin of the Blue Wheel. A lithe figure cowered in his shadow.

  “What are you doing here? There’s been an assassination attempt.”

  “I know,” Colin said in his deep, ringing voice. He’d been a handsome man once, and his face showed the ruins of it. He looked back over his shoulder. “There’s a dead man back there, in the corridor. I think it’s that broadcaster, Scott. He seems to have gotten in the way.”

  He could hear the tramp of WP boots in the corridors behind. He motioned for Davidis to go “at ease,” and it was only then the shadow stood up and came forward.