Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  “Okay, then.” Bray stood and pulled a small panel from the wall. He started humming to himself incongruously, some kind of nightclub dance tune. As he punched in a series of numbers, I imagined Jonathan Bray on his days off. Did he really go clubbing, or had he just picked up this tune through some random experience? It was hard to picture him on the dance floor, knocking everyone else over with his gigantic frame.

  A door slid open in the wall, revealing a narrow shaft built directly into the airlock.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Smuggling tunnel,” Bray replied. “You can find them all over Hellas. The syndicates control the construction guilds so it’s easy for them to get these built. They use them to move contraband from one section to another.” He led the way down the tight corridor, but he had to do it sideways, which limited us all to a strange, slow shuffle.

  “I have to say, Andrea,” Bray commented. “I’m not really loving this.” His voice was tense, and I realized the big man must be feeling claustrophobic.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked.

  Bray was tiptoeing forward because of the need to walk sideways. Andrea was shuffling along behind him. “Rendezvous with Thomas Young,” she answered. “He’s waiting for us up ahead. This mission has gone sideways a hundred ways, but we’re going to get it back on track.”

  “Sideways is definitely the word for it. We’ve been working our way across gang territory since the bombing. First the Hive, then Geneicide, then the Kagebushin. There hasn’t been a single moment where someone didn’t want to kill us. Hell of a society they’ve got here.”

  “It’s not an easy place to work, Tycho, I’ll give you that. Every society is an adaptation, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they’re all adaptations to whatever’s going on around them. Nobody ever woke up and decided they wanted to live like this. Everyone’s winging it.”

  “Maybe so, but they’ve painted themselves into a hell of a corner here.”

  “Yeah. They have. That’s why Bensouda Hafidi happened. This place needs to change, but there are powerful people who want to keep the status quo. Whenever that happens, you get a revolution.”

  That was exactly why I had jumped in to help out the crowd. All they wanted was a better life, the idea of turning the Erinyes on them was just obscene. We walked in silence for a few moments as I considered whether or not to raise the point, and I finally decided to let go. “If Thomas is waiting for us, then what about the other two?”

  “Vincenzo and Andrew? You were with them up until you jumped down into the street. You tell me. What happened, Tycho?”

  So much for that. “I couldn’t just stand by and watch the Erinyes murder all those people. That doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to my comrades. Or the mission.” I didn’t like her implication, but I was doing my level best to keep it civil.

  She was silent for a moment. The only sound was Bray’s labored breathing as we shuffled along in that narrow corridor.

  Andrea finally broke the silence. “They decided to keep moving vertically for now. They’re already several levels up above us. We’ll meet up with them at the rendezvous.”

  There was something she wasn’t saying, and the longer it went unsaid, the worse it was. Instead of meeting it head-on, I tried to change the topic.

  “We thought you were dead, Andrea. We thought all three of you were.”

  She sounded slightly amused. “Is that something everyone thought, or was it just you?”

  I didn’t like the implication of that either. Was she trying to say I was too emotional, too worried about things beyond the mission?

  “It wasn’t just me,” I said. “Veraldi told me more than once that you were probably dead and that we just had to keep moving.”

  “He was right about the last part. I’ve been through plenty of these situations, Tycho. If I had a credit for every time I’ve almost been killed in this job, I’d be the richest woman in the system.”

  “Yeah, almost getting killed does seem to be a daily task. Still, that must have been an especially close one. What happened up there?”

  “I don’t really know. I don’t have any memory of the actual explosion. I’ve been picking up snippets from the others just to stay caught up. The last thing I remember is sitting on the train and everybody talking about… something. The usual bullshit, I guess. Then the next thing I remember is lying on the street, somewhere way down below the train tracks. I must have been thrown clear of the falling cars somewhere along the way until I landed on something solid.”

  The fact that the fall hadn’t killed her was almost a miracle, although being unconscious was probably the reason. Like a drunk taking a tumble down a staircase and then getting right up again, she had survived because she was too out of it to stiffen up.

  “Damn, Capanelli. You lucked out.”

  “I guess so. It’s not something I like to think about too much, honestly. Hafidi’s car was torn in half in the derailment, so if anyone was lucky it was Jonathan and Thomas.”

  “I saw what was left of that car before it fell. I didn’t realize it had actually been ripped in half though. How the hell did those two survive?”

  “This big ogre here actually shielded Thomas from the blast and lost a layer or two of skin in the process. The two of them were thrown onto a rooftop, but they were fairly unscathed aside from Jonathan’s burns.”

  “Yeah.” Bray shook his head. “That honestly sucked.”

  It kind of goes without saying that having a bomb blow up behind you and then falling out of a train onto a rooftop is not a pleasant experience.

  “What about you,” said Andrea. “After everything we went through, we thought you might have been overwhelmed by StateSec before you could even leave the crash site. I’m glad to see that you all managed to evade them, of course, but how did you do it?”

  “What do you mean? We didn’t have any problems with StateSec until we got to Fuji Section.”

  Andrea laughed.

  “Those dumb assholes,” grumbled Jonathan.

  “What?” I asked.

  “They sent the fireteam after the wrong people.” She was shaking her head, marveling at the incompetence of local law enforcement. “You really didn’t see any StateSec officers?”

  “We really didn’t. I woke up in the train car and crawled out of it somehow, then I figured out we’d crashed into an office building. Our car was still attached to Hafidi’s. The top half of Hafidi’s car, I guess. That car was hanging off the front of the building and dragging ours down with it. It was only a matter of time before they both fell out, and the building was burning. I wasn’t sure if I should try to help people or just get out of the building.”

  “You get out of the building.” Bray was feeling more talkative by the minute. “That’s the answer, Barrett. You get out of the building.”

  “Yeah, well. I was trying to crawl back into the train car and see if anyone needed help. Jones pulled me back out, and a moment later the whole damn thing fell out of the building and into the street below.”

  “Like I said,” Bray added. “A knight in shining armor.”

  “But there weren’t any StateSec people waiting on the street for you?” asked Andrea.

  I shook my head. She seemed to be having a hard time accepting this. “We met up with Veraldi and Ivanovich down there, and Veraldi led us into Pretorius. That’s a shared territory between the Hive and Geneicide, but for whatever reason the Hive didn’t seem to have an issue with us. They escorted us through all these back alleys, but they never took a shot at us, although I think they were considering it. It was only once we entered Geneicide territory that we ran into any trouble, and that’s when we found out they had a contract on us. So you ran into trouble with StateSec?”

  Bray laughed quietly. Andrea whistled. “Oh yeah. We came under attack from a StateSec fire team almost immediately after the bombing. It’s a hell of a thing, having to fight
your way out of an ambush when you don’t remember most of the last half hour.”

  “I remembered it,” said Bray. “It was hot garbage. There’s no way that was a random attack.”

  Andrea shook her head. “Definitely not. They knew exactly where to find us, although they fucked up and sent their fire team after the group that didn’t have Sasha Ivanovich. In my opinion, the timing was not an accident.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean that the bombing wasn’t sectarian violence. It was a false flag operation by Ares Terrestrial.” I felt a flash of heat across my face as I considered the mentality behind a plan like that. Of someone who would send a child onto a passenger train with a suicide vest just to kill a handful of inconvenient people and frame someone else for it.

  “Those motherfuckers.”

  “I’m not a huge fan myself,” said Andrea. “But there’s not much room for emotion here. They have their own objectives, and we have ours. As soon as I woke up, I dragged myself to my feet again and went dark just in case. Jonathan and Thomas were both nearby, so I made my way to them. That’s all it is, Tycho. That’s all it can be. You do the job in front of you, and you don’t go looking for extraneous work.”

  Extraneous work? Was that what she thought of saving lives? Of preventing casualties?

  “Okay, we all have our own objectives. But no matter what our objectives may be, we wouldn’t try to achieve them by strapping a bunch of explosives onto a kid and then sending him onto a train full of civilians.”

  “It’s a strategy I wouldn’t use, but they’re obviously willing to use strategies I wouldn’t think of using.”

  It was clear that she really didn’t take it personally, and I couldn’t understand that. The people who ran Ares Terrestrial deserved to die. They were monsters, and if I ever had the opportunity, I would kill them personally. Andrea didn’t feel the same. To her, it was all just measures and counter-measures in a game we either win or die. Her professionalism bordered on sociopathy.

  I tried to ignore the thought. “So when did StateSec attack?”

  “Almost as soon as I found Thomas and Jonathan. The crash site was too hot to verify other survivors right away, but I knew that if anyone else from Section 9 was still alive, you would try to make contact with The Black Kuei. We were about to start moving in that direction when we came under fire.”

  “Jones didn’t seem to know about Section 9’s relationship with the Black Kuei.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. It’s the kind of thing he’d get a little weird about. If Vincenzo had been killed, Thomas would have received an update message as the new acting field commander. It would have told him where to go, even if he wouldn’t have been all that happy with it. Anyway, StateSec threw everything they had at us, which means that they knew we were on that train and had no intention of letting us get away from the scene alive.”

  “Wait, are you saying the bomb was really meant for us?”

  “No, I’m sure it was meant for Bensouda Hafidi, but I’m also sure they were hoping to get us at the same time. If they had succeeded in killing us there at the scene of the bombing, they could claim they had successfully wiped out the terrorist cell. No more troublemaking imam, no more spies, and no more defector. And all without taking any of the blame.”

  “I have to admit, it has a certain elegance.”

  “I’m glad to hear you admire their work,” she said drily. “But we fucked it up for them. We didn’t just escape the area, we wiped out the entire team they sent in after us. No survivors. That made them think twice about using their own people for the job, so the company decided to circulate the surveillance images they had of us along with the promise of a sizable bounty. They placed the blame for the bombing directly on our heads, in hopes that the city itself could finish the job.”

  “They certainly tried. The Geneicide hit-team was second rate, but the Kagebushin—”

  “They almost got you?” Her voice was cold.

  “Almost. At one point I was sure I was as good as dead. I couldn’t hit the guy I was fighting, and I couldn’t block him. Then I figured out he was using one of these.” I unclipped the holographic emitter from my belt and held it up.

  She turned to look at it. “It almost looks like—”

  “Prototype military tech? That’s because it is. It combines thermoptics and holography.”

  “And now you have it.” There was that coldness again. “Is that why you were feeling so invincible?”

  “What do you mean?” I clipped it to my belt again.

  “I mean you jumped down from your exit and involved yourself in a fight that had nothing to do with you. I mean you nearly gave Ares Terrestrial the win they were looking for.”

  She had stopped in the corridor, but Bray kept going for a few paces before he realized she wasn’t keeping up with him.

  I held up my hands in protest. “I wasn’t risking the mission.”

  “You were. You decided that preventing collateral damage was worth risking not only the mission but the entire unit.”

  “That just isn’t true. I never expected anyone to follow me. I figured Veraldi and Jones would just keep going, and the consequences would fall on me and me alone. You have to understand—”

  “I have to understand what? That you still see yourself as a part-time member of this unit?”

  “Those Furies were killing civilians. Firing directly into a crowd of men, women, and children. What did you expect me to do?”

  “I expect you to complete your mission. Or at least not to actively endanger it.”

  I stopped myself from responding and took a pause to let the momentum reset, for the both of us. I lowered my voice, trying to de-escalate things as much as possible.

  “I’m not ignoring you, Andrea. I just don’t understand how it really would have affected anything if I’d gotten killed. It just would have meant one more anonymous body for them to clean up in the aftermath of the riots.”

  “Ares Terrestrial knows enough to identify us as operatives, even if they don’t know precisely who we work for.”

  Now that I was an agent for Section 9, I’d become something I would previously have described as an urban legend. I was an operative, a “spook,” a mysterious killer working for unknown powers from behind the scenes. When I was still an Arbiter, I would occasionally run across stories of such people, and I had even met a few individuals who seemed to fit the bill. What I never realized was that the stories were true, that the shady characters who flitted around the edges of major crimes and political events were essentially just people doing their jobs. And I was now one of them.

  “Okay.” I nodded slowly, considering Andrea’s words. “So they know we’re spooks.”

  “Right. And what do you think that would mean if they managed to capture you? If they tortured you into revealing the existence of Section 9?”

  “I’ve had the classes in resisting torture.”

  “You know as well as I do that’s just about buying time. It's more a question of when you’ll break from interrogation, not if. But let’s say you’re the stuff of legend and you didn't say a word. There’s still the chemical composition of your stomach contents. There’s still the radiation type and exposure levels of your skin and hair tissues. There’s still your biometric markers. It all tells a story.”

  “Okay, I can see that. Still—”

  “You’re an asset. Losing you would weaken the unit. Do you understand that?”

  “I’m supposed to put the unit above everything else?”

  “Is there any other way to do it?” interjected Bray, his voice an ominous rumble from behind Andrea’s back.

  “Bray’s got it,” she said. “When Ares Terrestrial is done pulling all the information from you they possibly can, it still wouldn’t be over. Your corpse could be used for propaganda—an off-world agent, sent to East Hellas to interfere in its internal affairs. They’d mount your head on a pike for the whole system to see, a warning
to the Federation and anyone else trying to change things here. I know you sympathize with these revolutionaries, but nothing could be worse for their cause than that.”

  “It’s not that I sympathize with the revolutionaries.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “The death. The only thing I was thinking about was how they were murdering all those people, how they were actually using the Furies against their own people.”

  “These aren’t their people at all as far as they’re concerned. The ones we saw in those restaurants on our way to the Medical Lab, that’s who they see as theirs. And even then, they’d toss any of those people in a recycling unit if it would help their bottom line.”

  “Exactly, Andrea. Just think about what you’re saying there. What’s the point? If we can’t stop monsters like that from committing atrocities, then what’s the point?”

  “Could we save the ethical debate for the goddamn hotel room?” Bray demanded.

  “Sorry, Jonathan.” Andrea turned away from me. “I didn’t mean to make this any harder on you, but Tycho here needs to get his head on straight. Go ahead and keep moving forward. We’ll get this worked out on the way.”

  Bray started walking again, and after we’d been shuffling along for a minute or two, Andrea finally spoke again. “The most effective thing we can do to prevent atrocities is to complete our mission. We’re extracting Sasha Ivanovich so he can testify against Ares Terrestrial. They’ll have to pay for what they’ve done, and that will tend to discourage other companies from making the same mistake in the future.”

  “The same mistake? That big one fired two shipboard cannons directly into a crowd of people. The air was humid from blood. The smell—”

  “Whoever did that, they’ll have to answer for it. Maybe not right away, but they will answer for it in time. That’s the best we can do, Tycho. It’s really all we can do.”

  “I don’t believe that. It’s always the same. It’s just like it was on Tower 7.”