by J N Chaney
As we ran down the alley, I noticed for the first time that Veraldi was carrying something. It looked like a travel case, but it was such an awkward thing to be running around with that I just assumed it had to contain an assortment of weapons or high-tech spy gear. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. A Section 9 agent myself, I was still falling prey to fantasies and stereotypes about top secret intelligence agencies, because what Veraldi had was nothing like what I would have imagined.
We came to a kind of intersection, an open space between several buildings. We were deep in the maze now, and safe from any immediate pursuit. Veraldi stopped, and the rest of us did the same. He flicked the latches on the travel case open and nodded, satisfied. Whatever it was, he was happy with what he was looking at and thought it had been worth the effort. He threw the case down on the broken pavement.
“Everyone get changed. We need to alter our appearance before we go any further.”
It was a case full of clothes. Business casual, classy stuff. I shook my head, reminding myself for the hundredth time that this was just a job, even if it was a job that involved getting shot at constantly. Like my last job, now that I thought about it.
There wasn’t anything that really fit, though. It was all high-end stuff, but I ended up with a pair of baggy pants and shirtsleeves that didn’t quite reach all the way to my wrist. “This looks terrible.”
Veraldi looked me up and down. “It’s still an improvement.”
I was raising one arm and staring at the sleeve. There was just no way around it. The shirt didn’t fit. “Didn’t you have my size on file?”
“You think I carry a suit of clothes around with me? This is luggage, Barrett.”
I looked down at the case and realized what Vincenzo was saying. On his way out of the burning train, he’d had the presence of mind to scoop up someone else’s luggage just in case it had something that might prove useful to us. Such as a dead man’s clothes. That was the way you had to think if you wanted to succeed in Section 9.
The shirt I was wearing could easily belong to the person I’d heard shrieking just after I escaped. I felt a wave of nausea and something like sadness. If you can be sad for a person you’ve never even met.
Now that everyone had new clothes, Veraldi closed the case again. Before he tossed it aside, I noticed a long, dark streak along the front. It looked like blood.
I needed to sit down, so I stepped over and dropped down onto the curb. I felt better once I was sitting. My concussion was still affecting me, and I didn’t know how much of the nausea was due to my sense of horror at what had just happened and how much of it was just a head injury. When I turned my head, multiple images flashed in front of me. It was like my vision couldn’t quite catch up.
Sasha, meanwhile, was admiring his new outfit. “Gogol Berdan! This is a good shirt!” It seemed to fit him perfectly. He probably never had any trouble finding clothes that fit him. Some people are just like that.
Andrew Jones leaned in and peered at my face. “You have one hell of a black eye, Tycho. You feeling okay?”
“I have a concussion to go with the eye.I threw up a few times. Might do it again.”
“Well, be my guest. All of us were damn lucky, though.”
“Funny sort of luck. I just got blown up then crawled out of a flaming train into a burning building, then I ran off into a gang-infested neighborhood.”
Jones gave me a mockingly sympathetic look. “Buck up there, little buddy. Just a day in the life of a Section 9 agent.”
Weirdly enough, the return of Andrew’s condescending attitude was almost a relief compared to the angry shakiness from before. All that did, though, was remind me that three of our friends were missing in action, almost certainly dead. No more Bray with his weirdly on-point comments. No more Thomas Young. Well, Young wasn’t exactly a pleasant guy to work with. Still, he was useful to have around. No more Andrea.
I caught my breath as the thought hit me. Andrea could be dead. Hell, Andrea was probably dead. Half my reason for joining Section 9 had been my sense of personal friendship with Andrea Capanelli. We had been through a lot together, and I had told her things I had never talked about with anyone. Not even Gabriel or Sophie. However many years I remained a Section 9 agent, it wouldn’t be the same without her.
On a rooftop nearby, a shape emerged from the dark and stared down at us. I got Veraldi’s attention. “We’re starting to get noticed.”
Veraldi glanced discreetly in the direction I was looking. “Yeah. Inevitable, really, but we shouldn’t push our luck. We’ll move out in a minute. If they make a move on us, just get as many of them as you can. Never die alone, right?”
“Right.” Sometimes nihilism is all you’ve got. Was that something Gabe used to say to me or just something I always said to myself? I couldn’t remember.
Sasha looked around. “What? We should be worried about back-street scum?”
“Keep your voice down!” Veraldi hissed. “If you have a death wish, you leave us out of it.”
Sasha chuckled, but he did lower his voice. A little. “No death wish here. These people are the dregs. The company keeps them around just to do all those little menial things that need doing in any society. Scared of them? I don’t think so. I scrape them off my boot.”
For a man without a death wish, Ivanovich seemed determined to get us in a firefight. Not that he seemed likely to be much use if that ended up happening. Like one of those guys who starts a bar fight and then walks away and leaves his friends to fight it, Ivanovich was mouthing off and counting on us to protect him. Veraldi sighed, then straightened up and assumed the bearing of an officer.
“You know our mission. Even if we all wish things had stayed as simple as they were this morning, our priority now is the safe passage of Ivanovich to West Hellas.”
Andrew gave a crazy little laugh, probably because Vincenzo had just implied that we all wished we could still kill Sasha Ivanovich. Sasha, of course, had no idea what Veraldi had just said about him. He had his hands on his hips and was staring up at the rooftops like he was daring the locals to do something. I followed his gaze, but what I saw there didn’t make me anywhere near as happy as it seemed to be making him. There was no longer a shadowy figure on the building across from me. Instead, there were three.
Veraldi continued. “Jones, do you still have what we need?”
Andrew sighed and shook his head. “No. This place is a fucking backwater. You can’t just transfer a verified data file, you have to show a booklet. A physical, embossed booklet with a Permission to Travel stamp. Scientific research conference, approved at the highest levels…”
“And? I thought you dealt with all that at the hotel.”
“I did. Best forgeries I could come up with on such short notice, but it would have been touch-and-go honestly. Anyway, it’s gone. It slipped out of my jacket pocket when I was crawling out of the wreckage.”
“Alright.” Veraldi seemed to be bracing himself. “That means we go to the backup plan.”
“We sneak across?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, we do not. That border is tightly controlled. They shoot people who try to slip across. And, honestly, they’re good at it. Every single thing has gone wrong on this mission so far, let’s not tempt the gods.”
“So…” I spread my hands apart, in a what the hell are we going to do then gesture.
“It’s almost impossible to get to West Hellas if anyone thinks you really want to. If it’s all just business, on the other hand…” He shrugged.
“A smuggling syndicate?” asked Andrew. “That makes me nervous, boss. Those people are bad news. Even more so than everyone else here.”
“That is true,” Sasha commented. “Smugglers are serious.” Considering his apparent disdain for the syndicate whose territory we were currently violating, this did not make me feel any better. On the other hand, we had enough problems where we were. The three shadows on the roof across from me had
now been joined by two more on another rooftop.
Veraldi shrugged. “It’s like I said, we can’t really sneak across the border. But there are people who can sneak us across the border. They’re the experts. It’s what they do.”
Andrew was looking more suspicious, not less. “Well, who exactly are we talking about?”
“The Black Kuei.”
There was a long and awkward silence, punctuated only by a low whistle from Sasha Ivanovich. Jones finally spoke up. “Section 9 has contacts in the Black Kuei?”
Veraldi nodded then turned away as if the admission shamed him a little. Of all the syndicates in Hellas, the Black Kuei was one of only a few that had merited an entry of its own in our briefing materials. They weren’t even an East Hellas syndicate, of which there were dozens. They were a West Hellas syndicate, of which there were only two. Powerful, wealthy, and ruthless, the Black Kuei had crews on both sides of the border and made most of their money moving things from one side to the other.
Vincenzo rallied. “Andrea, Jonathan, and Young have either gone dark or died. If we still had those fake passports, we’d be using them to get across, but we don’t. Section 9 maintains contacts in just about every major criminal organization in the solar system for exactly this kind of situation. There are agents whose only job is to build and maintain those relationships. So don’t get lost drawing a line between good guys and bad guys now.”
“I didn’t say anything,” said Andrew.
“You did, though. It was in your eyes.”
“Forget I mentioned it then. But those guys—”
“I know.” Veraldi nodded. “I know. But we just don’t have a choice. And we’d better get moving. Not only are things going to kick off around here if we don’t get out of their faces, but we have a long way to go. Our contacts in the Black Kuei are in Great Wall.”
“Great Wall? That’s, what, about forty kilometers from here?” Sasha seemed amazed and almost offended at the notion. He might not be worried about crossing gang territory, but the idea of traveling that far was unacceptable.
“The sooner we get moving, the quicker we’ll get there.”
“If we ever get there.” Jones was looking at the rooftops, where it was no longer easy to say how many gang members had gathered around us. While Veraldi was filling us in on our situation, the local syndicate had been gathering its forces. All of a sudden, the maze of back alleys felt a lot like a spiderweb, and I felt a lot like a trapped fly.
Veraldi started moving, looking up at the rooftops the whole time. “Don’t show your weapons unless I order it.” His voice was flat, but I thought I detected a hint of something. Not fear exactly, but an understanding that our situation had become precarious.
“Move it, Ivanovich.” Jones prodded the scientist, who scoffed at the sight of the gang members and strode forward confidently. I could hardly believe the man’s stupidity. Despite their inability to control the city, direct employees of Ares Terrestrial still saw themselves as an upper class, vastly superior to the plebian hordes who ruled these narrow streets. As asinine as that might be, it might look like it made sense if you were eating a steak in some candle-lit restaurant in Med Lab. Anyone but the most arrogant fool would realize it made no sense here.
I took the rear position, a welcome change from walking point all the time. If an ambush was coming, the guy in the lead would get it first. It might start with a tripwire attached to a grenade. There could be someone up ahead of us stringing the wire right now, a young gang member looking to make his bones and move up in the organization. It might start with a sniper shot, a single bullet to Veraldi’s head. With one of us down, the rest would naturally be hesitant to keep moving forward. We’d freeze in place or crouch against the plasticrete walls. They could pick us off, one after another, till none were left.
Vincenzo paused, talking over his shoulder to us. “If I go down, don’t stay in one place whatever you do. Run straight ahead, that’s your best chance to escape the ambush zone.”
He said this quietly, as it wouldn’t do to let the gangsters hear it. Then he just kept walking, like he hadn’t just told us what to do in the event of his sudden death.
“Come on, Veraldi. We’re not all as wet behind the ears as Tycho here.”
“Zip it, Jones.”
As we moved along, the shadows on the rooftops moved silently with us. The streets were so narrow, the buildings so tightly packed, that the gang members could literally step from one rooftop to another. I wondered, at first, why they were even concerned with us. They would know we weren’t local, but we weren’t StateSec either. If they weren’t going to rob us, and it didn’t seem like they were, then why even shadow us?
Then I figured it out. They must have seen us changing, or maybe it had been one of their spies in the neighborhood. They didn’t think we were StateSec, and it would never even occur to them that we were federal agents. They probably thought we were criminals, and they wanted to know what we were up to in their section. Whether we lived or died depended on how they interpreted our actions. On the way to something else? We might be allowed to pass through. There to make trouble? Not a chance.
And they weren’t far wrong. Regular intelligence agencies, like the first eight sections of Sol Federation Intelligence, had rules to live by. They had official standards, clearly defined areas of operation. They were accountable to the law, in theory. They might bend it sometimes; they might break it frequently. It all depended on their mission, and on how attached their agents were to doing things by the book.
Section 9 had no book. We weren’t accountable to anyone, not in any meaningful way. The people who would want us to be accountable to someone didn’t know we existed and would never be allowed to find out. We were effectively outlaws but acting in the security interests of the Sol Federation. So, when the local syndicate members assumed we were criminals, they were half-right.
Of course, there was one big difference between us and criminals. Criminals can go to prison. Even in a gangster’s playground like East Hellas, it happens occasionally. We don’t go to prison. Just before I joined up, I killed an officer of the Arbiter Force and injured another. Not only was I free, there wasn’t even a warrant out for me. Section 9 had quashed it all. The only way that would ever change is if our existence got exposed, and the politicians decided to cover their own asses by washing their hands of us for good. Even then, they wouldn’t want us naming names in resentment. Much easier to kill us all.
Then there were places like East Hellas that didn’t acknowledge the authority of the Sol Federation in the first place. We could go to prison in a place like this, but only if they caught us. Whatever the gangsters on the rooftops were planning, I was pretty sure handing us over to StateSec wasn’t what they had in mind.
We went single file, squeezing our way between the buildings. Every now and then it was worse than that, when an old piece of furniture or a broken-down machine of some kind blocked our way. We’d have to suck in our stomachs as we wiggled past, a perfect spot for an ambush if there ever was one. Sasha barely made it through some of those tight spots, and never once without complaining.
“I am a prominent researcher. An important witness. How is it even possible that I am being treated like this?” Sasha’s belly was sucked in as far as it would go, but he was still having trouble getting past the rusted old motor blocking the alley.
“Because we haven’t quite decided to execute you yet.” Jones pushed him through, and Sasha cried out in irritation.
“My shirt! You insipid buffoon, you’ve ripped my shirt!”
“Move it, or you’ll lose more than a few buttons.”
Jones turned to me. “All informants are a pain, but this one rates particularly high. If anything happens to me, shoot him in the head before you run off.” Sasha turned back and glared at me, which hardly seemed fair. I wasn’t the one who said it. He had been rather fond of that shirt though, and it did seem like a shame.
We came to ano
ther small open area where the path split. At the left fork, a man with his face covered by a black scarf stood holding a rifle. There were others behind him, and the shadowy figures on the buildings to the left were openly aiming at us.
At the right fork, there was nobody blocking our path. There were still people on the rooftops, but they weren’t actually aiming their guns at us.
The message was clear. They didn’t want us to go left and were willing to go as hard as necessary to prevent that from happening. They would let us go right, either to funnel us into an ambush or to direct us back to one of the main streets.
Veraldi went right without a word. There wasn’t much choice.
After the first time, it kept on happening. We’d be left alone if there was no choice about what direction to take, although we were shadowed the entire way. If there was a choice, armed gang members would block one of the two choices and allow the other one, directing us along a single route. At one intersection with four alleys, they blocked three of them and let us use the remaining option.
It was a strange journey, like a conversation without any words. It was a little like having a local guide directing the lost traveler back to the main drag. They didn’t seem to want to kill us, just to control our journey through their territory. But there were hints of tension. At one point, they blocked us from proceeding by either alley and just left us where we were, while seemingly debating something with each other in whispered voices.
Jones leaned in toward Veraldi. “Should we be getting ready to shoot our way out of here?”
Veraldi held up a hand. “Don’t do anything yet. If they had decided to kill us, they would have opened fire by now.”
For maybe thirty more seconds—it was a long thirty seconds, with my hand itching for my concealed gun the whole time—they kept debating our fate, before one gangster finally stepped aside and waved us forward. I felt their eyes on my back as I took those last few steps, knowing that they must have been talking about whether to make an end of us. Veraldi kept walking, and the rest of us followed him. His voice was quiet, but the tone was deadly serious. “Whatever you do, don’t touch your weapons.”
