Shadow Agents

by David Alastair Hayden

  Siv darted out into the hallway, opened the safe, and retrieved the syringes of Calm they needed. While he was there, he cleared out their stock of Awake and Aware. A few of the former might be useful for him if things got rough with his withdrawal. The rest they could sell to bring in a few extra hard credits.

  “Shall we dose them now?” he asked.

  “The sooner, the better, sir.”

  “I’ll do the honors,” Mitsuki chirped.

  “There’s something wrong with you, Mits.”

  “There’s something wrong with everyone, Sivvy.”

  They dragged the men across the hallway and into the other room. Then Mitsuki, with a smile on her face, dosed the bouncer and all the Star Cutters.

  “Didn’t I see a trash receptacle just outside?” Mitsuki asked.

  “It’s right below the safe where they keep the drugs,” Siv answered.

  She pressed the eject switch for the bouncer’s chippy. “That’s perfect. If we dump these, they’ll have no way of calling for help.”

  “Cruel,” Siv said, bending down to eject the chippy from the temple of one of the Star Cutters. “But smart. It will buy us at least a few more minutes, maybe even a few hours.”

  “I cannot condone these actions or be party to them,” Silky said. “It’s an awful insult to all my kind.”

  “You don’t care about these dumb 4G chippies,” Mitsuki replied.

  “Maybe I do, madam. Maybe I do.”

  "Come on, Silky," Siv said. "On many occasions, you've said all chippies below a 7G are pointless. And you've said you are far beyond all others and in a class of your own."

  “Using my own words against me, sir? How rude! Regardless of my personal thoughts, I do believe all chippies deserve respect.”

  “Regardless,” Mitsuki said. “Dumping their chippies will make it a lot harder for them to contact their comrades or track us down when they do wake up, so we’re doing it.”

  While Mitsuki dumped their chippies into the trash, Siv set aside two of their shock-clubs and two of their neural disruptors to add to their arsenal. Then he gathered up the rest of their weapons and ID cards and tossed them into the trash.

  “Let’s get Alarra.”

  As they marched down the hallway, someone banged on one of the doors.

  “Looks like someone’s realized they’re trapped.”

  “Do you want me to give them communication access to the office now, sir?”

  “That was the plan, wasn’t—” Siv noted the comm panel above the door’s entry pad. “Wait. I’ve got an idea. Can you give us access through this panel?”

  “Done, sir.”

  Siv leaned in, touched a button, and then spoke with a reassuring voice. “Hi, I’m with maintenance. You okay in there?”

  “We can’t get the door open,” a woman responded.

  “Get her name, sir.”

  “Everyone else is in the same boat as you, um…”

  “Teila.”

  “The locking system is buggered all through Downtimes. The comms, too. We’ve got an automated routine trying to fix the glitch. I’m working on getting these doors open. Hang tight, Teila.”

  “Thank you,” she responded.

  As they walked away, Mitsuki patted him on the shoulder, her hand flickering into view as she did so. “Well played… Wait, did my hand just turn visible?”

  “Nothing to worry about…I think,” Silky said. “It’s probably a conflict with the sensor array. The two units are designed to work together. Having them separated like this is causing some confusion.”

  “Do an analysis and be sure,” Siv told him.

  “Already working on it, sir.”

  When they reached the office, Siv noted Alarra’s position across the room using the locator in his HUD. Silky unlocked the door, and Siv started to open it.

  “Sir, wait. She’s armed, and her adrenaline is high.”

  “Armed with?”

  “A plasma pistol.”

  “‘Nevolence, the last thing we need is for her to open fire,” Mitsuki said.

  “How does she even have a pistol in here legally?”

  “According to the station’s database, Downtimes was granted a permit for one plasma pistol, sir.”

  “So the authorities aren’t going to think anything’s amiss with her having it out and charged up?”

  “Hard to say, sir. But I recommend shutting it down before an algorithm in the station’s mainframe pegs it as an anomaly.”

  “Play the same trick as before,” Mitsuki suggested.

  “I’ve got a vocal sample of the girl we just talked to, sir. And we know her name.”

  “Clever move getting her name,” Mitsuki said.

  “It’s what I do, Wings.”

  Siv assured Alarra that the system was on the fritz and that a station repairman was already here.

  “Who called it in?” she asked with a hint of suspicion.

  “Bouncer’s name?” Siv asked Silky.

  “Joris, sir.”

  “Someone named Joris called it in. Said he was having trouble getting out of a room. We ran an analysis and realized your whole system was down."

  “Oh, okay,” she replied, her tone sounding more relaxed.

  “Can you get to the entry pad on your side?”

  “Of course,” she answered.

  Siv watched in the locator as she crossed the room.

  “Sir, she left the plasma pistol on the desk.”

  “Mits,” Siv said.

  “Ready.”

  Standing just out of sight, he swiped the entry pad. The door swooshed open, and Mitsuki opened fire with her neural disruptor, hitting the woman square in the chest. They entered and picked Alarra up between them. Siv held her by the shoulders and Mitsuki by her feet, which created a weird sight with Mitsuki still invisible.

  “I don’t think she has a clue what happened,” Mitsuki said.

  “Speaking of which… Sir, I’ve done some analysis on drug combos. If you hit someone with two doses of Aware while they’re unconscious or nearly so due to a heavy dose of Calm, it will cause them to suffer a memory blackout. They’ll lose all recollection of the last few hours.”

  "Would that work if someone was knocked out by a single dose of Calm added to the effects of a neural pulse?" Siv asked.

  “Based on the simulations I ran, there’s a high probability that it would. It might even have a stronger effect.”

  “Would it harm them?”

  “No lasting damage, sir. Just several days of mental fog and general confusion. Medical literature covers quite a few instances where someone took near coma-causing levels of Calm while under the influence of Aware, and they turned out okay after a few weeks of recovery.”

  As they got Alarra into the room and closed the door, Siv turned to Mitsuki. “Care to do the honors?”

  “I’d love to.”

  She administered the doses then began stripping the clothes off one of the men.

  Siv flinched. “Mits, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Convincing them they came here and had a good time.” She shrugged, confused by his reaction. “It was your idea, remember? Get the clothes off Alarra, please.”

  “That’s borderline assault, Mits.”

  "I'm certain it's beyond the borderline, sir."

  “She offered to strip for you, and you’re not going to do anything but take her clothes off.”

  Siv shook his head. “That’s wrong.”

  “Fine, I’ll do it myself. You scatter some syringes around the room. Oh, and get some drink glasses. Put a bunch of them out on the tables.”

  Siv scattered the syringes then left the room. He retrieved wine bottles and glasses from a closet in the hallway and then poured most of the wine down a sink. When he returned, Mitsuki had all of them in the nude with their clothes strewn messily around the room. Siv distributed the bottles and glasses, trying to make the scene appear as natural as possible.

  “This won’
t explain the loss of their chippies,” Siv said.

  "You took everything valuable from them, sir. They'll think they've been robbed."

  “Good point.” Mitsuki darted out of the room. “I’m going to hit cycle on the trash receptacle and flush their chippies far away.”

  Silky growled. “You’re a horrible being, Mits.”

  They returned to their original room, and Silky released the override on all the locked doors in Downtimes except for theirs and the one across the hall.

  For the next half hour, they tensely monitored the other employees’ movements and communications with one another. After the other women that worked there couldn’t find the bouncer or Alarra or raise them using calls on their chippies, they turned off the neon sign outside and changed the digital display to read “Closed.”

  The women debated contacting the authorities but then decided first to search the rooms they hadn’t used themselves since “clientele privacy comes first.”

  When they couldn’t open the door across the hallway, they banged on it. They didn’t get a response.

  “They’re trying to do a manual override on the lock, sir.”

  “Any chance they can manage it?”

  “Not in a dozen universes, sir.”

  After they failed to manage an override, they banged on Siv's door. He responded by pounding back urgently.

  “They’re trying the manual override here, too, sir.”

  “Give them access.”

  The door swooshed open. Siv sighed as if relieved then adopted a tone of annoyance.

  “It’s about time! I used my chippy to call the front desk and the police ages ago. What the hell?!”

  One of the women tried to look him in the face but failed. “Apparently we experienced some technical problems.”

  “Apparently?” he snorted.

  “We don’t know what happened,” another said. “And some of our people are missing.”

  A third woman glanced around the room.

  “There’s no one in here,” he snapped. “I asked…I think her name was Alarra…to get me another drink and to strip for me when she came back, but she never showed.”

  “We don’t know where she is,” the first woman said. “Did she say anything to you?”

  “She said she’d be back in a few minutes. That she needed to see the bouncer about something.” Siv shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  The women exchanged looks with one another.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have places to be.”

  “Of course, sir,” the first said.

  Mitsuki slipped in behind Siv. Just when they were nearly out of Downtimes, one of the girls ran forward. “Hold on, sir.”

  Siv waited nervously while the girl entered the front office. She returned a minute later with a hundred hard credits and handed them over.

  “A refund, plus extra for your trouble. We hope you’ll visit again. We don’t normally have problems like this. In fact, we never have any trouble here.”

  He nodded. “Thanks for the refund. I appreciate it.”

  As they slipped out, Mitsuki contacted him in silent mode. “I didn’t even think to rob the place.”

  “I’m mentally kicking myself,” Siv said.

  “I considered it,” Silky said.

  “But you didn’t care to share the idea?” Mitsuki snapped.

  “I thought it would be going overboard. Steal too much and the authorities might lock down the station. If they discovered the theft soon enough, you’d never get out of here, and we can’t keep Mitsuki invisible forever.”

  “How long do I have?” she asked.

  “Still plenty long enough to reach the planet,” Silky replied. “But I’m a little concerned about the field’s stability. The unit hasn’t run for this long in a single day in two hundred years.”

  Even though they reached the shuttle bay earlier than they had wanted, they were able to board. The flight filled up, so Mitsuki had to cram herself into a tight space between the cockpit and the boarding ramp leading into the passenger compartment.

  Hopefully, the pilot would remain in the cockpit. Otherwise, he’d trip over her. They’d considered having her sit in Siv’s lap, but they worried interference might reveal her.

  Fortunately, the refraction cloak held and the pilot remained in the cockpit. They entered the atmosphere of Zayer Prime and descended through a raging storm that caused the shuttle to buck and shudder.

  “A hurricane,” Siv groaned. “Just what we needed.“

  “I don’t see why it matters, sir. It’s just one more storm to brave. Isn’t that our life now? Besides, I’m sure there’s worse to come.”

  “Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Mitsuki lamented.

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t weather it,” Silky replied.

  “You didn’t say we would either,” she pointed out.

  Silky didn’t respond.

  25

  Karson Bishop

  Karson woke, buzzing with nervous energy. He dressed clumsily inside his tiny sleeping cubicle then climbed out to look for Kyralla and Oona. He hurried onto the bridge, and then the galley. But they were both empty. Suppressing the bubbles of panic welling up in his chest, he rushed around the rest of the ship searching for them. Empty. Finally, he asked Bartimaeus, his 6G chippy, where the girls were.

  “Sir, Oona and Kyralla are both still asleep.”

  Of course. Where else would they be? It’s not like they would step out into space or get captured without him noticing the ship being boarded.

  “Thank you, Barty.” Karson sank into a seat in the galley and took several deep breaths, trying to get his pulse back to normal. It was silly to let his fear get a hold of him like that. His worry for Mitsuki and Siv was just making him jumpy. “Have you finished installing the update Silky gave you?”

  “I have installed as much of the update as my limited 6G capabilities will allow, sir. It will take quite a while to integrate all the new functions.”

  “Keep at it, Barty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Seneca heated and seasoned one of the ration packs for him. He ate it and sipped at the bitter tea that was, unfortunately, the best drink they had onboard. Meanwhile, he carefully read over all of the new information on cryogenic storage Bartimaeus had gathered for him.

  “One thing’s for certain, Barty. For it to last ten millennia, the technology preserving the priestess has to be far beyond anything we have.”

  Siv was lucky he'd made it a hundred years without any complications. According to all the test results published online, commercially available cryo-storage units usually failed within fifty years.

  He went over the scans Siv had done of the capsule using the ScanField-3 sensor array. The Ancient stasis pod was utterly different from the ones humans used. It wasn’t cryo-sleep for starters, and the power source was unusual. A small box, not unlike a power pack, mounted underneath the control panel provided power to the entire capsule. The box emitted flux energy in keeping with residuals he’d expect to see from a discharging power pack or a stardrive.

  "Barty, I think she's being preserved by a hyperphasic generator of some sort. Look at the energy signatures coming directly from the power cube. Remind you of anything?"

  “Very similar to a stardrive’s signature, sir.”

  Karson nodded. “I think the Ancients’ version of cryo-sleep involved displacing the occupant into an alternate dimension where time flows differently. Sort of like dull space, only in regards to time instead of space.”

  “I suppose, sir, that it is theoretically possible such a place could exist.”

  “The device that projects the “bubble” keeping her in this alternate dimension must be malfunctioning so that she’s…leaking…into realspace.”

  “If your theory is correct, sir, that would make sense.”

  “The priestess told Oona her condition began to deteriorate once she returned to real space after thousands of years in hyperspace
. So if there’s a containment leak, perhaps there’s a conflict of energies between real space and this slow space. Or maybe hyperspace enhances the effects of slow space or…”

  “Your theorizing is becoming increasingly speculative, sir.”

  Karson took a final bite of his breakfast, leaned back, and sighed. “I don’t know enough about hyperphasic physics to solve this. I doubt anyone does. The best course would be to repair the failing systems, but I can’t do that without tearing it apart. And that’s assuming the technology would even begin to make sense. If it’s anything like stardrive technology, I don’t have a chance in hell of fixing it.”

  Only the Benevolence had known how to make stardrives and perhaps understood the physics behind them. Since the Fall, millions of scientists had worked on figuring them out but hadn’t gotten anywhere.

  “There is someone who should know how to address the problem, sir.”

  Karson frowned, puzzled.“Who’s that?”

  “The priestess herself, sir.”

  Karson nodded but didn’t respond. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that they would lose the last living Ancient. But he couldn’t take up any of Oona’s time, having the priestess respond to technical questions he might not even understand the answers to. The fate of the galaxy depended on Oona surviving her trial.

  He finished his tea then fiddled nervously with his spoon, glancing at the documents and scans again. He had to figure out how to save the priestess on his own.

  It would have been helpful if the scans could have penetrated the surface of the module, but whatever material it was, Silky couldn’t get a read on anything inside it. Octavian’s instruments hadn’t fared any better.

  “Sir, perhaps you should engage in an activity. You’re not going to learn anything new today.”

  “You’re right, Barty. I should get busy doing something productive.”

  Karson went to cargo bay two, where all the archaeological equipment was stored. He had nearly finished analyzing everything. He knew what all the machines were for because Octavian had told him. But with Siv's permission, he was going to begin disassembling some devices for parts that he could use to repair the skimmer car or add new features.

  Outside of that, it would be useful to have a collection of general parts that could be used for any number of emergency repairs on the ship, the skimmer car, or the small transport skimmer. The parts or equipment not worth breaking down, they could sell off later.