Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Pavo put an arm around her back and guided her to a table in the rear corner, several feet from an empty stage. Like most of the décor, it was black. “She’ll stand out. Goes by the name Tamashī.”

  She sat, squinting at him. “I don’t like the sound of that. First you tell me not to go to Japan, and now we’re working with someone who sounds Japanese?”

  He shrugged. “Garrison had this lined up before you roasted your nerves.”

  “I didn’t roast my nerves.” She swatted at the terminal to bring up a hologram menu. “Cheap wiring did that. You can thank General Maris.”

  Pavo chuckled.

  A man in his early twenties wearing a charcoal shirt and white pants approached. “Hello, welcome to Eiphos 3. I’m Joseph. Can I start you off with anything to drink?”

  “Purified water,” said Risa.

  Pavo leaned an arm over the back of the chair. “Sweet tea.”

  “Why spend the extra ten credits on purified? Don’t you have a Tox Filter?”

  Risa rubbed her throat. “Yeah, but I don’t want to burn it out when I can avoid it. I breathe enough poison already. I’m guessing you never had the pleasure of changing the membrane. It’s like stuffing a huge tampon down your throat.”

  “I…” He held his hands up. Whatever he was going to say next stalled. He pointed.

  A small Asian woman scurried through the door, head to toe in black: leggings, sweater, boots, and scarf. The bag over her shoulder made her look like a high-school student, something her stature did little to dissuade. Her skin tone gave away her Earthly origin. The girl was probably unremarkable on the blue ball, but here, among Marsborn, she stood out.

  “That’s the deck jockey Garrison made arrangements with?” Risa narrowed her eyes. “What is she, fifteen?”

  A hand gesture from Pavo caught the woman’s eye. “We’re not really sure. She’s been active on the net for at least fourteen years, so she has to be at least twenty or so… assuming she started at six, which is unlikely. Anyone with enough credits can be as old as they want to be.”

  Tamashī slid the bag from her shoulder and joined them at the table, studying Risa for a moment before speaking. “I expected someone bigger.”

  Risa chuckled. “So did I.”

  The girl crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap, wearing a wry grin. “I got some cosmetic work. It helps with social engineering. I’m older than I look.”

  Their waiter returned with drinks for Pavo and Risa. Tamashī ordered green tea. The women chose the chicken wrap, while Pavo opted for a steak sandwich. Joseph did not have to work at all to push the more expensive vat-grown meat. He walked away looking pleased with himself.

  Tamashī leaned forward once he’d gotten out of earshot. “What’s the job?”

  “Our organization has located a substantial cache of credits tucked away in a custom partition within the RedLink network,” said Pavo. “It’s accessible only from an isolated terminal inside their main office here in Primus. However, we located a physical backdoor.”

  The conversation paused long enough for Joseph to drop off the tea.

  “Go on,” said Tamashī, cradling the cup to warm her hands.

  “There is a data conduit on the eleventh tier that connects the RedLink corporate system to the starport’s network.”

  Tamashī sipped. “Proprietary high-speed uplink. They have AIs handling passenger and cargo distribution based on conditions at the starport. You’re saying their connection patches over to the island network?” She squinted. “That makes no sense. The whole point of an island network is isolation.”

  “We had a guy inside set up a hardlink they don’t know about,” said Risa. “Whoever has been stashing the credits in the hidden node doesn’t even know we have an opening. The beauty of it lies in that the guy stealing from his employer doesn’t know we’re about to take his cache. When it goes down, they’ll probably be looking at him. That’s the reason we need to move so fast. We escort you to the link and cover you while you go in. Eighty–twenty split.”

  “Twenty percent?” Tamashī frowned. “If your people said twenty percent on the call, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Risa chuckled. “We’re talking over forty million credits. What you’re walking away with is already excessive given the amount of risk and work involved. Besides, you would be doing the true children of Mars a great service.”

  The childlike cyberspace jock examined the backs of her hands, as if to call attention to her skin tone, proof she hadn’t been born on the Red Planet. Risa disregarded the gesture. Joseph returned with their food. Both chicken wraps had square plates, while Pavo’s sirloin-on-baguette came on an oval dish.

  Tamashī tapped her fingers on the table until the waiter left. “Fine… but if this turns out to be risky, I want thirty.”

  “We’ll have to run that by Garrison first.” Pavo smirked at the little tan log on his plate passing itself off as lunch. “What the…? I’ll need four more of these to even notice I ate anything.”

  Risa picked hers up, pointing her pinky finger at three squiggles of green goo on his plate. “Don’t forget to eat your vegetables.” She took a bite, impressed by the taste if not by the portion. “I can talk him into twenty-five, but only if things go pear shaped.”

  Tamashī extended a hand toward Risa. “Agreed.”

  Minimal conversation occurred over the rest of their meal. When people sat at the next table, making sensitive discussions dangerous, Tamashī adopted the affect of a hyper-caffeinated teenager and rambled at Risa about how horrible some musician was. Her effort to annoy the eavesdroppers away seemed to have more impact on Pavo, who stared at her as if he wanted to wring her neck.

  After finishing their meal, they caught a PubTran taxi into the business district. The destination Pavo gave it was a good mile and a half away from where they would access the deep underground. He led them down the wide street of a corporate complex full of false plants, fiber-optic artwork, and advert bots. All the ambient holograms painted the world in shades of cyan and pink, with building façades glimmering in deep blues or emerald greens. At the center of a recessed courtyard to the left, a rotating silver cube bore the logo for NinTek Corporation. Every few buildings, a cluster of tiny restaurants jammed between offices, taking advantage of a large number of workers in search of lunch.

  Pavo ducked past the counter of a ramen bar, nodded at the cook, and continued into the back room. The proprietor had Chinese features, but the same snow-white skin as Pavo and Risa. He disregarded the women as if they weren’t even there.

  Risa scooted up behind Pavo, tugging at his arm. “You’re stopping for food again?”

  “Nope.” He poked the wall, causing a silver metal panel to slide away from a door-sized hole in the stone. “This is our in.”

  Primus had a lot of old maintenance tunnels and passageways between the larger hollows that functioned as homes, stores, and offices. Most members of the Pueri Verum Martis knew them by heart, though few others did. Risa could navigate the vents of Primus City in her sleep, but she’d never been in these old shafts. Still, the narrow rock-walled passageways felt comfortable. Luxurious in their size compared to vents and far less exposed than a city street. Tamashī, however, seemed unsettled by the tight confines.

  The Wraith kicked in when the cook closed the door behind them, plunging everything into darkness. With her neural interface upgrade, the grey ghostly shape of the Japanese girl behind her retained enough detail to paint a terrified expression.

  Risa grinned, not that the others could see. “You’re afraid of the dark?”

  “It’s not the dark.” Tamashī grabbed Risa’s shoulder. “It’s a tight space with no way out.”

  For a second, Risa’s thoughts went back to that night. Eight years old, fire chasing her into the dark. Her voice sounded lifeless. “You get used to it.”

  A flashlight in Pavo’s raised hand lit up the narrow passage. Risa suppressed her instinct to distance herse
lf from the glow. Visibility works both ways… Tamashī followed in silence, but left her hand on Risa’s shoulder. The stagnant air in the hidden corridor tasted like metal and dirt, and the walls offered little option but a single-file march for the better part of a quarter mile. Every so often, low-hanging wires or pipes forced the trio to crawl under damage, but for the most part they made good time.

  After about an hour, they reached a long-defunct elevator shaft. Pavo kicked the door off the hinges, sending it tumbling into the darkness. The clatter of metal on stone reverberated into silence.

  Tamashī looked at Pavo. “How deep is―”

  Wham.

  “Fourteen stories,” said Pavo. “We don’t need to go all the way down.”

  Risa smirked at the hacker. If she’s pretending to be young, she’s too deep in character. She shoved past Pavo and leapt onto a rickety ladder running the length of the shaft at the front-right corner. Why is everyone on Mars so eager to grow up? Her own teenaged voice shrieked in her mind, yelling at Garrison, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ Risa fumed at herself as she descended.

  A hundred and ten feet below, she kicked at the inside face of sealed elevator doors. A resounding metallic boom, boom, boom ran up and down the shaft, knocking dust from the walls.

  “Need a hand?” asked Pavo, right above her.

  “I have a key.” Risa’s claws sprouted. She shredded the thin rolled steel with a few well-placed swipes. I’m not impressed by strong.

  Pavo chuckled. “I thought you were the mistress of subtle.”

  She slipped through the opening, entering a larger corridor. Bundles of pipes ran along the ceiling, holding a dead LED bulb every ten meters. The air was still and humid, far warmer than what she expected this far below the surface, and reeked of sulphur. Must be catching the outflow from a processing station. She sighed. This is going to suck. Pavo set his boot on the inner edge of the other door and shoved it open with an ear-splitting screech. Tamashī jumped from the ladder to the corridor after Pavo moved out of her way.

  The Japanese girl scrunched her nose. “Ugh, it smells even worse down here.”

  “No one’s been down here in fifty years,” said Risa. “Not many people know the fiber run goes this deep.”

  Pavo jogged up alongside her. “It’s a link to the intercity backbone. Primus was supposed to be three times its size.”

  All the money goes into war. A glimmering amber light trail, courtesy of her headware, appeared in her field of view, pointing out a spot along the left wall by the floor. Following the counter at the bottom of her vision, she stopped 122.7 meters from the shaft and squatted by a metal pipe, fourteen inches in diameter, close to the floor. One Nano claw extended from her index finger to cut a face-sized oval in the steel. A cobalt-blue glow leaked out of the hole as the slab of pipe fell away. Bundles of luminous fiber-optic wires shimmered and pulsed with uncountable terabytes of data.

  “Will this work?” Risa looked up at Tamashī.

  The girl shrugged. “It’ll take me awhile to find the right line, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “I can handle boring,” said Pavo. “Beats getting shot at.”

  “Yeah.” Tamashī knelt by the hole, swinging her bag off her back.

  She opened a few plastic fasteners and took out a two-by-four-by-ten slab of gloss black with a line of dim red kanji glowing on the right side. Once she set it on the outside of the bag, she grabbed a clear wand and plugged it in. Line by line, she poked and prodded through the fiber bundle.

  Pavo leaned against the wall. Risa paced in a circle, glancing left and right down the hallway. Smooth plastisteel wall panels gave way to rough, bare stone wherever the construction crews had been too lazy to clear it and built the walls around.

  Tamashī looked up after forty-five minutes, pinching one thread out of the glowing bundle between two fingers. “Got a hit. Hold this?”

  Risa squatted and grasped the delicate fiber while the girl put the wand away and pulled out a small box that opened like a clamshell. She clamped it around the line and squeezed a button on the side. A tiny red dot flashed four times and went a steady green.

  “Is that good?” asked Risa.

  “Yes.” Tamashī pulled a retractable wire from the rear of the deck and plugged it into the tap. “They did not detect the splice. I’m going in now.” She plugged another wire from the deck into her skull behind the right ear, and slouched with her head tilted forward, hands clasped over the Nishihama Shinobi deck in her lap.

  Her posture resembled that of an obedient servant girl lifted from the history pages of feudal Japan. The cold light leaking from the metal conduit in front of her tinted her features and cast an exaggerated pulsing shadow on the wall.

  Pavo found a thin pipe at the perfect height upon which to hang the heel of his right boot and tapped the toe against the wall. Risa kept pacing. Minutes stretched to an hour. Sweat dripped down her back, moving wherever the clingy ballistic suit separated from her skin. She plucked at the neck of her flexible armor, longing for the feel of cool air on her skin.

  Worry kept it on.

  “How can you wear that coat?” Risa looked up from the demure-looking girl.

  Pavo glanced to his right, off into the dark. “I put my arms in the sleeves and―”

  “You know what I mean, smartass.” She opened the seal on her ballistic stealth down to her stomach, waving air over her bare chest. “It’s a sauna down here. How are you not even sweating?”

  “I’m not nervous.” He let his head lean back until it touched metal. “Looks so innocent now, doesn’t she? You’d never expect a sweet little girl like that would squeeze us for another two million.”

  “Everyone looks innocent when they sleep.” Even me. Risa fanned air over her breast for a moment before pulling the fastener up to her jaw. “I’d never think she was a merc from looking at her.”

  Pavo chuckled. “That’s probably why she spends so much on cosmetic tweaking.”

  Risa frowned. “I doubt she spends her money on it.”

  A rattling metal hiss built up in the wall. The pitch changed as an object within one of the ceiling pipes whizzed by. Pavo’s head swiveled, following the sound. Risa tensed.

  “Relax. Sounds like a rat-bot looking for vermin.”

  She took two steps, pressing her back into the wall opposite him. “In case you hadn’t noticed… at the moment, we squeak.”

  Minute scratching intruded on her augmented hearing, as if someone scraped at her skull. She ceased breathing as her attention focused on the source of the nigh-imperceptible sound. The legs of a black metal spider crested the top of a pipe overhead. It lowered itself over the side, emitting a faint click as a tiny, magnetized clip fixed its backside to the wall by a thread.

  Pavo lifted an eyebrow at Risa’s cat-ready-to-pounce stance. He grabbed his sidearm when Nano claws emerged from her fingertips. The palm-sized spider wound out its line, descending toward Tamashī’s head. Inch-long needles sprouted from its forelegs. Tiny eyestalks, themselves fiber-optic prongs, swiveled at Risa as she lunged. It detached from the cord in an effort to avoid her by falling. Her speedware kicked in, accelerating her reflexes to the point the world stopped. A spike of panic pushed the new hardware to its limit, startling her with the sight of the tiny robot all but hovering in midair. Her claws raked across a composite armor shell with a loud plastic click. It weighed so little, the blades failed to go all the way through.

  A sparking, twitching microbot landed in front of Pavo’s foot. He leapt away from the wall as it attempted to flip itself over and jump at him. It clattered to the floor after a short hop, far shy of the face it aimed for. Sputtering, half the legs on its right side blurred in a sporadic flurry, while its rear-left leg dragged limp.

  Risa hovered by Tamashī, scanning for more. Pavo punted it down the shaft and aimed. It got itself upright and came skittering back, only managing to close two meters before it exploded amid an orange flash of laser. He kept his pisto
l out, arm lowering as he stared over the dimming tip at the smoldering debris.

  Risa. Raziel’s voice flooded her senses. Walls shimmered with amber light as her body tingled. His presence caressed her muscles with a prickling, innervating, raw energy so powerful she couldn’t even think, stronger than she had ever felt him. You must flee. Your companion has been detected. They come.

  She moaned, somewhere between agony and rapture, and collapsed to her knees holding her head in both arms. Pavo stowed his weapon, rushing to her side. He grabbed her shoulders and gave her a light shake.

  “You okay?” He shone his flashlight in her eye.

  Risa shuddered, unable to move for several seconds until the presence withdrew.

  “Now’s not a great time to flake out.” He pulled her up. “Damn, I thought that ‘ware was good.”

  “W-we gotta go.” She stumbled toward Tamashī. “No time to explain. Raziel said they are coming.”

  Pavo tugged her around by the arm. “Your hallucinations are going to get you killed one of these days. It was just a damn spidercam, relax.”

  She flowed like liquid from his grip, spiraling up to Tamashī and clasping her fingers around the wire behind the girl’s ear. “It had needles. It was trying to kill her.”

  A tiny spark leapt between the implanted socket and the asterisk-shaped M3 prong when Risa yanked the wire free. Tamashī’s meditative calm shattered in a convulsing fit. She thrashed, eyes rolled back and mouth foaming. Risa hurried to pack the deck, wires, and tap into the bag. Any one of the components could trace back to them.

  “What the hell did you go and do that f―” Pavo’s angry whisper stalled at the sound of a distant clank.

  He whirled as flashlights wavered in the dusty dark. At least eight beams converged, lighting up his chest.

  “Is that a hallucination?” Risa jammed the cyberspace deck into Tamashī’s backpack before hauling the seizing girl over her shoulder. “Come on!”

  Pavo fired while backpedaling. His laser rendered the shadows of armored men in brief orange flashes. Sparks flew from the impact of several bullets around the pipes and struts, while two poorly aimed incoming shots from a yellow laser lofted the scent of molten rock.