Legacy Of Ashes

by Ric Beard

  “Boots, love?” He looked at his wife. Kara wore a bright yellow dress that hung freely at the knees. Below that, expeditionary boots. At forty-six years, she was more than ninety years his junior and, other than their son, the lone keeper of that massive secret. The new world version of Mikael Jensen was not proud of how he’d come to push 150 years. He hadn’t made it public knowledge. Perhaps he’d publish his memoirs after the election. Until then, he would sit on it.

  “Aren’t they crete?” She twisted a boot on one toe to illustrate. “Perfect for the rain and they show our support for our forces out there in the badlands!” She kissed his cheek, flipped out her matching yellow umbrella and waved at the crowd, reminding him of the political spouses he’d come to despise, if only in form.

  Mikael could never despise this free spirit who delivered love into his life when he was way too old to expect it. She made for quite the contradiction. He regretted the actions that made it possible for him to live so long on one hand, but he adored the second chances that were Kara and Blake on the other. The old world never brought to Mikael the pangs that encouraged child rearing. But Kara changed that. She was a message from the universe that he should spend every day making up for what he once was.

  When he reached the landing at the top of the stone stairs, Mikael was met by a line of men and women standing under the shelter of the concrete overhang in their best suits, ready to glad-hand with him and Kara. He shook hands quickly, mumbled words here and there, nodded a few times and made his way to the podium, Kara taking up a spot next to him.

  As he stepped to the podium, Mikael cleared his throat.

  In spite of the rain, there stood the crowd of people milling at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the candidate who would oppose the mayor. Their signs waved above their heads, some pumping with enthusiasm. Some were dressed in little more than soaked rags hanging from their bodies while others wore fashionable clothing and held wide umbrellas to protect them from the elements. They represented two extremes in the city’s society to whom Mikael needed to relate. If he could win the minds of the crowd, perhaps they would see that Mikael valued service to the city enough to keep the mayor from running it into the ground. Triangle City couldn’t afford another four years of the tyrant.

  When Vaughn started his career, he was the lone contestant replacing a retiring mayor whose popularity was more a testament to new-world complacency than understanding of the new system. The dawning of this new world surprised Mikael and left him feeling naive. The way the systems of the old world had crumbled like a four-day-old cruller was a lesson in his mind not to repeat the short-sighted mistakes of the past. But the third native generation of this new city planted upon the ashes of the old reminded Mikael of the last generation of the previous iteration of humanity, a generation who stopped going to the polls, stopped paying attention to the liars who pandered for their votes with the same old lies, and just let life happen to them instead of taking it by the balls.

  How they had paid with their blood.

  Now these protestors stood at the bottom of the stairs, chanting and holding up their signs. From this single display, Mikael felt a tingle of hope and a burst of energy. Perhaps they were evidence that the human spirit wasn’t dead.

  He looked over at Kara and smiled before turning his eyes down at the crowd, taking in their diverse faces.

  “My fellow citizens of Triangle City,” Mikael began.

  Chapter Forty

  Talk to the Loser

  The mayor turned his eyes from the gray walls to the JenCorp label in the top corner of his Tab and frowned. It leaned against its stand, which charged the device for up to 120 hours, though it could also be charged via the slim solar strip running along the top of the face, above the screen. Vaughn found it offensive that every Tab in the city was manufactured by JenCorp. Two other companies tried to compete but found the market closed to their inferior technology. The company’s contract with the city meant every Tab used by the Expeditionary Forces was a JenCorp product, which created a consistent revenue stream and case study data to cyclically improve the devices. If Vaughn’s turning away volunteers reduced the need for JenCorp weapons and hit the company in its revenue reports, the Tabs kept them afloat.

  He had to admit that Mikael Jensen’s brainchild was a significant feat of engineering. It was light but durable, it was easily readable under a sunny sky or in a dark room with no eyestrain, and it was a mapping device, capable of location functions via cell towers. It had what JenCorp labeled a “Full-Field Bloom Light” capable of millions of colors and diverse lighting levels. It was capable of direct line, short wave communication if one wanted to avoid cellular—a nefarious feature if ever the mayor heard of one.

  He’d tried to force JenCorp to share the design, citing anti-trust rules that ensured distributed growth in the burgeoning city-state. Then JenCorp’s security expert, Lexi Shaw, wrote an opinion piece in The Herald, bashing the mayor for claiming to be pro-business while expecting proprietary designs to be shared openly, crippling the wills of inventors and innovators who pushed technology, and therefore society, forward. After all, Shaw argued, the mayor was calling for open sourcing the code of the very device upon which first contact with Oklahoma City had been made in conjunction with a long-range drone. She argued that contact might never have been established if not for the development budget pumped into the device resulting from JenCorp’s motivation to make a superior product and outpace its competition. The Jensens had played their cards well by letting one of their technology experts do the talking. It certainly didn’t hurt that Shaw was a real looker.

  Though the fallout in the media had been short lived, Vaughn learned a valuable lesson about JenCorp’s resources. His PR response to Shaw’s drivel had gained no traction, and his relationship with Mikael Jensen had ever since proved tenuous, at best, as proven by their conversation in the park the previous week.

  The nerve of the man, talking to the city leader in such insulting, casual terms. But he couldn’t exactly send Stevens, to have a ‘talk’ with a man of his status. Hell, he couldn’t have Stevens do anything while the public was rejoicing in the death of his heavy-handed partner, Jon Abel. Once The Herald had run the story of the anonymous source—probably Copeland, somehow—about what Abel had done in the alley in the old world sector that night, the mayor had been forced to tone things down a bit.

  Again, Miles had played his cards well, giving a homeless man enough money to buy a house. In return, that homeless man gave convenient public statements that a Security Services officer had been about to murder an unarmed man before turning the weapon on said homeless man. That little tidbit played very well in the media. Vaughn was painted as a bastard who lacked empathy, who halted projects begun by his predecessor aimed at housing for the homeless in the interest of lining his own pockets. He considered manipulating the man into changing his story by threatening to seize the funds given him by a known criminal, but if he’d learned anything of late, it had been the media was no longer on his side.

  When it rained, it poured.

  He tapped the screen harder than needed, and it came to life. Notification of a new report from Morgan flashed in his encrypted inbox. Speak of the devil. The header was labeled, appropriately enough, “The Diamond Sky Attack.”

  Vaughn sighed.

  Further into the report, he found the dossier on the presumed criminal who had unleashed the attack. Labyrinth was a member of The Underground, which had split into two factions last week, according to the report handed over by JenCorp. Labyrinth’s identity was unknown. Supposedly, he was the more docile of the two faction leaders. The use of a drug that could be disbursed without violent episodes seemed to fit the profile.

  He closed the report and found a second in his inbox, titled, simply enough, “Truck Bombing.”

  The more violent-natured CorpKill62—and what kind of old-world, idiotic name was that?—claimed responsibility for the atrocity. Video logs were being
scoured to identify people leaving the city. It seemed this CorpKill was resourceful. He’d managed to acquire a sniping rig used to protect military installations and farms. Though it was designed as a motion detecting, automatic turret, the automated functions were disabled so the attack didn’t take any lives. The manual setting required line of sight that far into the safe zone because there was no wireless mesh network that far out. Whoever pulled off the attack had been right there, waiting for the truck.

  That took balls.

  The media narrative seemed so planned out in advance, Vaughn considered rousing the do-gooder, blogger bastards, perhaps make them reconsider their life choices. But now that he’d learned—from Jensen, of all people—of his squad’s protection rackets and how they’d been abusing their authority with business owners, he was forced to keep quiet—especially during an election cycle.

  He’d put a stop to that, had told his crew to stand down and play it clean until the election was over. Another posthumous victory for that bastard Miles. He’d considered sending his crew outside to track the ingrate, but Miles wasn’t going to leave a trail. He’d covered his tracks by bringing down an entire building. There were even theories out there that Vaughn had something to do with that little fiasco. People were morons.

  The media hadn’t bothered to report on the mayor’s press statement about the caved-in tunnel the bots found when clearing the wreckage nearest the wall. One of the bots sent into the tunnel found the remains of a huge snake that had died of stab wounds. He had to admit the idea of the melee interactions had surprised him. It seemed Miles was resourceful, taking out Jon Abel with his own weapon and then stabbing a massive snake to death.

  I hope the snake gave you a good squeeze before you took it down, bastard.

  Of course, now the blogger sphere was calling for extermination efforts by the city to ensure the safety of the citizens from the new reptilian threat. It never ended.

  Vaughn sat back and listened to the beginnings of yet another dose of rain as it tapped on his office window. He shook his head in derision at the real-life metaphor. He looked up as the sound of his doors whooshing open was followed by the appearance of his resident vampire.

  “I have Expeditionary Forces orders for you to sign, Mister Mayor.”

  “I gave you the signature codes so that I don’t have to deal with that shit.”

  “Yes, Mister Mayor.”

  Gray bags slouched beneath Morgan’s eyes. He was even paler than usual, perhaps the lack of sleep topping off his anemia issues. His suit, however, was as clean and wrinkle-free as ever. The mayor’s man burnt his candle long into the night with regularity, but with campaign strategy and the need to pen responses to allegations from the other camp, as well as the media, he wondered if Morgan was sleeping at all. Usually, he couldn’t tell.

  “CorpKill,” he said, changing the subject to the reason he’d called Morgan in. “Labyrinth. Who are they?” He motioned to the chair across the desk from him. Morgan took it, gently pulling his coat tails behind him. “And why are you wearing that jacket in my office. Take it off, relax. You look like shit.”

  “You are the picture of beauty yourself, Mr. Mayor,” Morgan quipped, as he removed his jacket and folded it over the back of his chair.

  “Funny.”

  “We’re still assessing, Mister Mayor. I have the full force of the Security Services’ Intelligence Wing on it, per your instructions. They’re scouring the city’s camera footage around the clock, questioning known dissenters, rounding up protesters to question them, the usual.”

  “Protestors. A new scourge.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let them protest,” Vaughn said. “Let’s not make things worse by pulling them in and giving the media yet another thing to complain about.”

  Yes, Mister Mayor.”

  “We should expect more attacks,” Vaughn said.

  “The chatter has stopped. Both factions of The Underground have gone radio silent. “

  The mayor sighed.

  “Maybe they’re using new forums to communicate. Does intelligence have any guesses why?”

  Morgan shrugged. “To keep their opposing factions from knowing what they are doing? Perhaps they don’t want to expose themselves to each other, now that they’re at odds.”

  “I doubt it.” The mayor pondered for a moment, tapping fingers on his desk. Then he looked up. “Their end goals are the same; the ruination of this office seems to top the list. Could their silence mean they’re meeting in person?”

  “It would go against everything we know of them. Anonymity equals protection.”

  “And yet we jailed one of their conspirators last year. There are ways.”

  “True.”

  “They’re communicating somehow. How else would they pull off the attacks?”

  “Solo,” Morgan said. When the mayor raised a quizzical eyebrow, he continued. “The attack on the oil truck was very likely pulled off by a single person, as you can read in my report. The Diamond Sky attack could have been set by a single person.”

  “Then why don’t we know how they pulled off the Diamond Sky attack?”

  Morgan shrugged.

  “How many of them do we think there are, in total?”

  “Judging from the communications intercepted by JenCorp’s chief of security, perhaps hundreds. JenCorp only intercepted a couple of communications before Miles took to the trees and the two factions split and stopped talking. But thirty handles were seen online during those communications.”

  “And we don’t have leads on any of them?”

  “They’re very adept at what they do.”

  The mayor leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin.

  “Talk to the loser we have in prison, that hacker. Maybe we can finally convince him to talk.”

  “Doubtful,” Morgan said. “Prison has yet to compare to the idea of turning The Underground against him. I assure you they could reach into the prison with that bunch of profiteers we have for guards. The last person who slighted them couldn’t order food because they redirected his orders to a virtual girl suite he frequented for virtual sex. It is rumored he ordered a film to watch at home and ended up with a gay porn title. But on the inside, The Underground’s options would be limited, perhaps to violence. Surely the prisoner knows this.”

  “I think it depends on what we offer and what assurances we can give that their involvement would be kept quiet. Perhaps a promise of early release. As much as I’d rather keep him in prison, we need to think of the bigger picture. I don’t have to tell you this office is in a very dire situation. If we don’t start responding effectively, if we aren’t ready to make sacrifices in order to take the other side’s queen, we are going to be unemployed.”

  Morgan sighed.

  “What?”

  Morgan said nothing.

  “What?”

  “All due resp—”

  “Get on with it!”

  “If he walks out of prison prematurely after people get rounded up, they’ll know. If a guy starts getting special treatment on the inside, they’ll know. These people have their hands in every bowl from which they can pull candy. They know people on the inside. They might even be people on the inside.”

  The slow way he drones on makes me want to choke somebody, sometimes.

  “That’s what they want us to think. That’s really their play, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You theorized that the jobs could be pulled off by one person,” the mayor said. “So, why should we operate as if we’re dealing with more than two?”

  Morgan leaned forward in his chair. “Go ahead.”

  “Two attacks. The same day. Within hours of each other. Almost like they were coordinated.”

  “But they wouldn’t be so stupid as to tip their hand,” Morgan interrupted. “If they know their communications were intercepted and wanted us to think they were divided, the last thing they would do is plan their attacks at the
same time. I believe they were racing each other to prove a point.”

  “That’s what they want you to think.” The mayor let the statement swirl around the room for a minute as he watched Morgan work it in his head.

  “Tricky. Perhaps they never disbanded. Perhaps they knew JenCorp had someone on the inside, protecting corporate interests, ensuring they didn’t become targets.” His eyes widened. “Perhaps JenCorp is complicit in their strategies, considering the company’s hatred of you in the wake of the Tab monopoly question and the loss of weapon revenues.”

  “Their complicity is too much to hope for. The Jensens are not that stupid. But consider this. Let’s assume the transcript from JenCorp is genuine, even though those slimy bastards can’t be trusted. Let’s assume they’re doing their civic duty by turning the conversations over to us, or at the least, covering their asses so they don’t get prosecuted for holding onto it. If the transcript reflects exactly what was said, then why not just kill the people on the truck?”

  Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps CorpKill isn’t as extreme and reckless as we’re being led to believe.”

  “Right. I’ve seen Miles manipulate the narrative long enough to know that nothing The Underground does or says is transparent. We’ve been playing from behind for too long. So, if we can’t convince our prisoner to tell us how to get to them with promises of early release or in-confinement privileges, perhaps we can take another tack.”

  Morgan stared at him for a long moment and Vaughn waited for the little tick of his eyes that would signal understanding.

  There it is.

  “Sinclair?”

  “Yes.” The mayor nodded. “I think Sinclair is just the man for the job.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  My Best Red Dress