One Dark Future

by Michael Anderle

  “There is no one following us, Jia,” Emma interrupted. “So stop it.”

  Jia grimaced, both startled and embarrassed by the comment. She’d thought she wasn’t being that obvious. Erik hadn’t commented, but it was hard to avoid the attention of Emma when she could see so many different ways. Even after their time together, it was easy to forget that sitting inside the MX 60 meant sitting inside Emma’s body.

  Erik frowned, and his gaze dipped to the dashboard and console displays. “Huh?” He turned toward Jia. “You think someone is following us? I doubt Melanie O’Shay’s going to come after us again after that embarrassment. Given how obvious she is, she’d probably be weaving in and out of her lanes, trying to fly stealthily.”

  “Jia’s paid a much higher than average amount of attention to the sensor and camera displays,” Emma explained. “I thought it was a temporary situation, but it might be better to bring it out in the open. Particularly since it is annoying me.”

  “The reporter got me thinking about some stuff, and I think it tripped my paranoia.” Jia sighed. “We screwed up, and you’re talking about your new fried chicken and spice obsessions. Somebody’s got to worry about it.”

  Erik looked her way, keeping a firm hand on the control yoke. “I’m not saying that I think my life’s a waste because I haven’t been seeking the best fried chicken across the UTC. I’m just saying I’ve let myself get too comfortable, mostly eating the same kind of thing. But what does this have to do with being followed? You really think that reporter is still after us?”

  “Forget about the chicken.” Jia looked down at a camera display. “And no, it’s not that I think she’s still after us. It’s that she knew too much. She mentioned incidents we were involved in.”

  “What? You’re still stuck on that?” Erik scoffed. “She didn’t know crap. She just was hoping we had something to do with all that. You heard her. She mentioned things we did, but she also mentioned a bunch of things we had nothing to do with. I hadn’t even read about half the stuff she mentioned.” He shook his head with a faint smirk. “If she’s a secret conspiracy spy, I’ll give up all forms of fried chicken forever. Shit. I’ll do you one better. I’ll give up beignets and fried chicken, all forms, all cuisines.”

  “Your beignets and chicken are safe. It’s not that I think she’s a spy. That’s not what I’m getting at.” Jia lay her head back on the seat. “She’s just some low-end reporter, but what about someone with better resources? What about actual investigators working for the conspiracy? We left a big trail.”

  “So they can trace us to Venus. Big deal. We weren’t as open about the other places, and it’s not like the conspiracy doesn’t already know about us. That’s why we use disguises and fake registrations so much. It’s not like we’re walking into a place and bellowing, ‘Erik and Jia are here to kick your ass!’”

  “I’m still wondering if we screwed up on Venus.”

  “How? By saving thousands of lives? By ending a bunch of insane cyborgs and some half-alien freak?” Erik grunted in irritation. “This isn’t like you.”

  “No, no.” Jia shook her head. “I should be clearer.”

  “It’d help,” Erik replied. “I don’t think anyone’s invented a mind-reading implant yet.”

  “On Venus, we used our reputation to bait the Brotherhood. We basically did walk in there and yell, ‘We’re here to kick your ass!’”

  Erik nodded slowly. “Yeah. I suppose we did, but in the end, it worked, didn’t it? That was the best plan we had given the time constraints, and if we’d spent time trying to investigate everything without using ourselves as bait, the Brotherhood might have been able to pull off their plan, and a lot of people would be dead. Any plan that ends with a lot of dead terrorists and fewer dead people is okay by me.”

  “But don’t you see?” Jia frowned and gestured around her. “I’m not complaining about saving people and taking down the Brotherhood, but I am worried we’ve traded short-term victories for long-term pain. Every time we do something like that, we feed into our already larger-than-life reputation, and we’re not cops anymore.”

  “What does us being cops have to do with it?”

  “Because our reputation used to be an advantage when we were cops.” Jia saw another bright MX 60 in a nearby lane. Sometimes she forgot Erik wasn’t the only owner of the model. “It used to be we’d walk into a room and have a good chance of some low-level criminal giving up because it was us. Not always, but enough to make it worthwhile, but the situation’s different now. Attracting extra attention isn’t going to make people surrender. It’s just going to raise the chance of trouble, and that won’t always end with us taking down the remnants of some arm of the conspiracy. We’ve got no guarantee that next time it won’t cause us more trouble.”

  “Sure, but that goes along with everything we’ve done. That’s not the first hard call we’ve had to make, and it won’t be the last while we’re investigating the conspiracy.” Erik brought the MX 60 into a lower lane. “But I get what you’re saying, and I’ll make you an important promise now. I’m never going to get behind a call that cost a bunch of innocent people’s lives no matter what. I’m doing this to get revenge for the Knights Errant, but I’m not going to turn myself into some bastard who doesn’t give a shit about who he kills. The only people dying in this are the people who have it coming. That’s the way I’ve always been, and that’s the way I’ll keep going.”

  Jia winced, now worried about his misunderstanding. “I know you would never do something like that. You don’t have to make that promise to me.” She let out a pained chuckle. “If anything, it’s the opposite. You’re the one who had to pull me back when I was getting out of hand. I’m always going to be grateful for that.”

  “I just wanted to make sure that’s clear.”

  “I suppose I’m trying to be the perfect Lady Justice again, the woman who always knows the right thing to do, but that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen if we want results. We left the police force because there was no way we could take down the rest of Sophia Vand’s friends without taking risks. If that means the occasional stupid reporter bothers us, it’s a small price to pay.” Jia shook her head. “And we’re beginning to win. That’s something.”

  Erik looked into the distance, his hands loose on the control yoke. He didn’t speak for a long while, concentrating on the flow of the traffic. Emma could take control at any time, so Jia could only assume her words had loosened more thoughts than her partner was comfortable with.

  “While we’re talking about all this,” Erik began, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead,” Jia replied. “You know I’ll always be honest with you.”

  “You don’t think she was it?” Erik asked. “You don’t think that Vand was the only real member of the conspiracy, right?”

  “Of course not.” Ji shook her head. “If she was, I think the ID would have already seen some indication, and operational disruptions would probably show up. Besides, nobody runs a conspiracy that wide without a lot of people near the top. This isn’t just a bad corporation or even a corrupt politician. Even if she’s the head, she has to have a lot of assistants. No one woman could run something like this.”

  “Good. I agree, just was curious if we were on the same page. Vand mentioned someone else, a woman. The way she talked before the end was like she thought that woman had set her up. I half-wondered if she meant Alina, but I don’t think Alina’s even on their radar. I’m not sure if that means there is someone else out there hunting the conspiracy, or if someone else in the conspiracy decided to screw her over. I figure it works out for us either way.”

  “I’m glad the ID at least has Vand’s name to follow up on because just knowing another woman might be involved doesn’t help much.” Jia laughed. “Now we only have ten billion suspects across the UTC. It might take a while for us to investigate them all, even if the Defense Directorate does end up turning over the jumpship. This might be
one slow revenge quest.”

  Erik grinned. “Hey, I’ve got hundreds of millions of years to spend.” His grin faded slowly. “You don’t think they’ll hand it over? Alina seemed to think it was a done deal, and Raphael was pretty enthusiastic about working with us. He’s kind of annoying that way, but not too bad.”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s a powerful piece of technology to effectively hand over to another directorate’s contractors, but it’s an expensive doorstop without Emma, and the DD gets that there’s no way they can just snatch Emma.”

  “And I don’t intend to volunteer to work for them anytime soon,” the AI offered. “It’d be to their advantage to perform whatever tests they need with your help.”

  Jia managed a small smile. “I’ll believe it when they hand it over. Until then, it’s just a bunch of promises from the government, and I’m not a person who reflexively trusts everything the government says.”

  “Now you sound like some sort of insurrectionist.” Erik grinned.

  “I’d punch you, but you’re flying.” Jia rolled her eyes. “Once you lose your innocence, it’s hard to trust anyone.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Erik slowed the flitter to flow better with the surrounding traffic. “But as long as we’ve got each other, we’ll do okay. And we’ve got Emma, Malcolm, Alina, and the others helping.”

  Jia looked down at a stream of flitters outside the window, most of her earlier paranoia absent. The enemy would continue to come, and they might be years away from completing the investigation, but with Erik at her side, they would triumph. She held her onto her fantasies of what that might bring, but they depended on how Erik handled things.

  “Will it be enough if other people do it?” Jia asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Right now, the ID is doing everything they can to find all of Sophia Vand’s friends,” Jia replied. “They’re helping us because we’re good at taking care of trouble, but what if they find twenty people spread out over the UTC and the ID sends their own people to clean it up? What if you don’t get to be the one to take them down? What if one day Alina shows up and tells you they’ve dismantled the conspiracy and it’s all over?”

  Erik pondered the question in silence for a long moment. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been honest that this is about revenge from the beginning, but if I’m certain the people responsible are out, I’ll be able to sleep better at night. I want the people who took down my unit to pay, but I’m not going to whine if a ghost makes them pay instead of me.”

  “Good to know.” Jia took a deep breath and slowly let it out, an eerie calm spreading through her. “I keep telling myself that it might take years, but a big fish has already fallen, and now the ID has leads. This could all be over pretty quickly.”

  She wanted to push into what that would mean for their relationship, but it wasn’t the right time. She’d joined Erik out of a sense of justice and outrage at the depths of corruption the conspiracy represented, but that didn’t change the strong pull she felt toward the man.

  “Quick is relative.” Erik scratched his eyelid. “But I’m not going to cry if we get lucky and it turns out all the leaders of the conspiracy are meeting in the apartment across the hall.”

  Jia smirked. “I somehow doubt that we’ll get that lucky.”

  “Hey, did you ever think we’d run into a half-Leem mutant?” Erik’s brow lifted in challenge.

  “No, I can’t say I did.” Jia snickered. “Expect the unexpected?”

  “Yeah. And shoot it when it shows up.” Erik drummed his fingers on the control yoke. “Oh, that reminds me. I was going to stop by tomorrow and check in with Malcolm. He said he was going to the hangar to work on some stuff. I’m afraid if I leave him alone with Lanara for too long, she might grind him up as spare oil. You want to come?”

  Jia laughed. “I’m good. Have fun. Make sure she doesn’t grind you up.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  Chapter Four

  April 11, 2230, Neo Southern California Metroplex, Private Hangar of the Argo

  Erik lifted his head and took in the full majesty of the Argo. Everything about the ship, from its sleek curves to its weaponry, separated it from the tiny, pathetic transport he’d been using to help out Alina. He finally had a ship worthy of his mission—one worthy of him.

  He nodded in satisfaction. Since Erik’s time back on Earth, he’d learned to accept that having some nice toys didn’t hurt nor say anything bad about a man. He might have purchased his MX 60 mostly as a disguise, but there was no shame in flying around a luxury flitter, and the capabilities of the vehicle, both factory-ready and post-modification, had helped him countless times. A good soldier needed the proper tools to do his job.

  Half the reason we lost on Molino was that those merc bastards had better equipment, Erik thought. I like being on the other side of the equation.

  As with the MX 60, the upgrade from the Pegasus to the Argo wasn’t just an exercise in style. The weapons and maneuverability of the ship had saved them during their confrontation with Sophia Vand. He tried to imagine how they could have captured or taken her down in the Pegasus but decided it would have ended with the entire crew dead and floating through space in plasma-scorched debris. They would be filed as a flight accident and buried by the Intelligence Directorate to cover its tracks.

  Erik understood superior gear alone wouldn’t be enough to secure a victory. Dealing with the conspiracy would require a combination of equipment, savvy, and force. If it were as simple as blasting open a door and slapping on binding ties, the Criminal Investigations Directorate and the Intelligence Directorate would have sniffed out Sophia Vand and her friends long before Erik arrived back home.

  Someone growled behind Erik, low and threatening. Recognizing the sound, he didn’t go for his gun despite the risk. It might not be a yaoguai behind him, but that didn’t mean he was safe. A man always needed to be careful in territory controlled by someone else.

  “Just because it looks patched up from the outside doesn’t mean it’s fixed, Blackwell,” snarled Lanara. She stomped in front of him and poked him in the chest, which required her to reach up. “Just because it has decent self-repair, it doesn’t mean it can fix everything when you blow holes in it. It’s not magic.”

  Erik chuckled and raised his hands in mock surrender. “I know. I was on the ship with you when we flew back, and you kept cursing at me and telling me that. In my defense, I didn’t blow holes in it, Sophia Vand did. Technically, I imagine her crew did, but you know…”

  “Don’t feed me that crap.” Lanara shook her fist, her eyes narrowed. “You should have solved that shit in Parvati, so we didn’t end up in a shootout in space.”

  Erik suppressed a laugh. The engineer was trying to intimidate him, but her size made it like a Chihuahua barking at a Doberman. Even Jia could do a decent job looming over Lanara. Sheer personality let the engineer bully Malcolm.

  “It wasn’t like we were dragging our feet,” Erik replied. “And she was a big fish. We couldn’t let her get away.”

  “Couldn’t you have just reported her?” Lanara huffed and folded her arms. “Then you could have had a bunch of ghosts waiting to pick her up somewhere.”

  “That would have been nice, but we had no idea where she was going.” Erik frowned. “And somebody with her kind of pull could have burned hard for the HTP and bluffed or bribed her way through, assuming she didn’t switch to a different ship and use fake identification. If we hadn’t chased her down right then and there, she could have ended up halfway across the galaxy before we could begin to track her. We might not have been able to capture and interrogate her, but when you’re fighting a war and the enemy general parades out in the open, you take the shot. That’s the only way you win.”

  “That’s what this is to you? A war?”

  Erik shrugged. “I’m not going to spew out a bunch of crap about how this is all for the good of the UTC, because honestly, I don’t care as much as Jia about
that. I want the Knights Errant avenged. It just so happens doing that involves cleaning out trash as well. So, yeah, it’s a war of bloody damned vengeance, one I’m not quitting until either I’m dead or the enemy is taken out.”

  Lanara squinted. “You crazy bastard. Just try to be more careful next time.” She rolled her eyes, her fingers tightening around her arms. “No reason to continue bitching about it now, even though I’ve had to waste all my time doing repairs. That said, since I had to go in and fix a bunch of stuff anyway, I decided to work on improving internal power transmission and rearranging the grav field emitters.” Her speech sped up, and the anger drained from her face. “I was thinking last week about how if you don’t rely on a standard Yau Manifold for emitting patterns, you could potentially tweak efficiency as much as point-two percent in most of the emitters. And then—”

  “Okay,” Erik interrupted, waving a hand. “You do whatever you need to do. Neither Jia nor I knows shit about this sort of thing. Okay, maybe Jia does, but not more than you. We both trust you to do what you need to get the best of the ship, and as good as we are at wasting scum, you’re that good at tweaking this ship.”

  The engineer leaned forward, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed in suspicion. “Good. It’s important to let the experts handle things. You stick to killing bad guys, and I’ll stick to fixing the ship when you don’t kill the bad guys quickly enough that they blow holes in it.”

  “About that.” Erik inclined his head toward the Argo. “I’m good at what I do, but I can do a better job with better tools.”

  “What are you getting at, Blackwell?”

  “If we had more or better guns, we could take out enemy ships a lot faster.” Erik offered her a pleasant smile. “The faster we do that, the fewer holes end up in the Argo. Simple logic, right?”