by Nick Webb
“Fine. But I’ll just be a few minutes. And if Rex isn’t here, then Admiral Tigre will have to take over the investigation.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Stretch. He muttered something into his shoulder comm set while he and the other, taller marine took positions on either side of the doors, scanning the cars, sidewalks, and windows across the street for potential threats.
As soon as she opened the door, a chime sounded, and a man emerged from the back office. He was short—shorter than Stretch. A smart business suit and slickly-parted hair told her this was Rex, the used-ship salesman.
“Good afternoon—” he glanced at the bars near her left shoulder, “Admiral? I’m sorry, I don’t often get IDF folks in here.”
“Yes, Admiral Proctor.”
He smiled. “Ah, I haven’t forgotten the ranks, at least. My brother served in IDF for two years back in the day. Pilot.”
She took a few steps forward into the showroom, studying the ships projected up into the air, wondering if the Magdalena Issachar had once been displayed above one of the kiosks. “Rex Ramanujan?”
“Pleased to meet you, Admiral,” he said, extending a hand. “How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a ship. Heard of the Magdalena Issachar?”
His face went white. Interesting. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “I have. It went missing a few weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken.”
She took a few more steps into the showroom, glancing at a few more of the holographic ships projected up into the air. She wondered how much a used, broken-down ship went for, and how Danny had managed to come up with the money. “Did you sell it to Danny?”
“To Danny? Ah. Admiral Proctor.” He nodded a few times. “I understand. You’re his aunt?”
She turned to him, surprised. “He mentioned me?”
“Of course! Danny’s a good friend.”
“So you did sell the Issachar to him.”
“No. No I didn’t. But … here, come, sit down with me. Coffee?” He motioned to the sitting area off to the side of the kiosks and began pouring two cups. “You know, Danny practically worships you.”
She allowed herself to be led to the firm, low, commercial-grade couch, and silently groaned as her knee protested the deep bend required to sit. “He’s a good kid. Always dreamed of piloting his own ship, but unfortunately never had any interest in IDF.”
Rex nodded. “Sounds like Danny.”
Proctor accepted the steaming cup, but frowned. “It sounds like you know him more than a typical used ship salesman knows his clients.”
The man sat down across from her in a swiveling chair. “It’s true. I know him very well. You see, long before I ever helped him get his ship, I was also his pastor.”
Proctor did a double take. “Pastor?”
He nodded, solemnly.
“Danny was never religious.”
“He wasn’t. He is now. He said he’d felt a huge void in his life, and by the grace of God and his messenger, I helped him find his path.”
So, Danny let himself be swayed by the god-folks. Interesting. Proctor had been raised by nominally Methodist parents, but went to meetings so rarely that she felt she grew up attending the holy church of jazz, as her parents took her to live combos almost every Sunday evening. She’d always meant to explore that side of her life more, perhaps find god, perhaps find some deeper meaning, but she’d always been too damn busy saving Earth and shit.
She only nodded, and waved for him to continue.
“Danny started coming to my meetings about a year ago. He’d just moved into his apartment here in Ciudad Libertador, and seemed to be struggling making friends and finding work. He was walking by on that very sidewalk outside while I was leading a prayer meeting here, and he pressed his face up to the window, staring at the holographic ships,” he waved to the slowly rotating merchant freighters and yachts hovering over the kiosks, “and I motioned for him to come in. Well, he did, and sat through the whole prayer meeting, never taking his eyes off the ships. I finished the final prayer, and he said ‘amen’, still staring at the freighter next to him.” Rex started to chuckle.
“Sounds like he converted to the church of the holy starliner, Mr. Ramanujan.”
“He was truly taken, just smitten, by the idea of flying his own someday. But he started paying attention. And we became friends—he found a lot of friends among my small flock. And he eventually came to feel called to his Lord, and the Lord’s messenger.”
A cold feeling went up Proctor’s spine at the words. He’d said something similar before, but the word had passed her by. Messenger.
“And who is that messenger, Mr. Ramanujan? Christ? Mohammed? A Boddhisatva?”
Rex looked surprised. “Of course not. I worship God and his Christ, of course, but their messenger in these times is the Hero of Earth. Granger.”
Oh, God. She lowered her face into a hand.
Her voice dropped to icy steel. “Mr. Ramanujan, I served with Tim Granger. He was my captain for four months. We went through hell and back together, and he did some amazing things, saving Earth and fifty billion people and humanity and all. But he was human. Human. He was no angel, no saint, and certainly no savior.”
He smiled rapturously. “Your part in his ascension is well known to us, Admiral Proctor. You have an honored place in our theology.”
“Theology?” She let out an exasperated puff of air. “Theology? How do you build a theology around someone I once saw sprawled on his couch, half drunk in his underwear picking at his toenails with a blunt kitchen knife and telling me it was all over and we should just go have one-night stands because tomorrow we were going to die?”
He waited several moments before answering. “The fact that he was able to overcome the flesh only makes his ascension that much more—”
“He’s Tim! He’s not your damn savior! He—” she broke off and brought her fist to her mouth to cut off the insults she was about to hurl.
Rex looked flustered, and set his cup down, still mostly full. “I’m sorry, Admiral Proctor, I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re here to find Danny, and I want you to find him.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How did you find out he was missing?”
“Well, for one, you’re here looking for him. You don’t search for something that is not lost. And second, he hasn’t come to a meeting in weeks. He never misses a Sunday, and when he does, he always drops me a quick line telling me where he is, and when he forgets I’ll send him a message and he always responds right back, wherever he is.” He picked his coffee back up. “I should have never helped him get that ship.”
“So you did sell it to him?”
“No, I didn’t. But I did connect him with the folks that did. I know most of the other ship dealers in Ciudad Libertador. And Danny, well, he was persistent. He wanted a ship. Something to call his own. To get out and, well, to be free. Unfettered.”
Damn. That did sound like Danny.
“Who?”
Rex finished his coffee and set the cup back down. “As we both know, Danny was quite the idealist. He believes in causes. He wanted to think that he was involved in something greater than—”
“Who?” she repeated, interrupting. The pastor liked to hear himself talk far too much.
“A company called Emigrant Metrics. But that’s just a front. It’s a GPC firm. I know the guy that runs it—GPC through and through. But Danny didn’t care. He just wanted his own ship, and this was a cheap and easy way to get one. Sign up for the GPC, run a few missions for them in exchange for the freighter, and on the side he could take his own transport jobs and make enough to pay off the ship. He and two other friends went in on it together, though Danny was majority owner, I think. The other two were just in it for the easy money.”
She nodded. His story checked out—at least the part about Emigrant Metrics. Miguel’s information confirmed that much. “I want an introduction.”
He nodded. Before he could say anything,
Stretch opened the door and leaned in. “Ma’am, backup should be here shortly.”
“Thank you, corporal—” but even as the words were half out of her mouth, she heard a crack. A fine red mist blew out from Stretch’s forehead, and his confused face bloomed with an eruption of blood.
Chapter Thirty
Irigoyen Sector, San Martin System, San Martin
Shuttle Fenway, High orbit
Zivic could hardly believe how fast she managed to get the mask adhered to his face and blended into his natural skin tone with a little—
“Wait, is that make-up?” He pulled away from the applicator in her hands.
“Oh don’t be a big baby. Come’ere.”
He grudgingly submitted, letting her apply the disguise pigment—he refused to even think of it as make-up in his head. “My dad would disown me, again, if he knew I was putting on makeup.”
“Seriously? Stop being such as dick.” She wrenched his head to the left and continued her work. “So … he actually disowned you? Like, literal disowning, with paperwork and all that?”
He started to shake his head no when she grabbed him again to keep him still. “Naw. I … I’m just a huge disappointment to him. When I was grounded—my fighter credentials revoked—that was like the final straw for him. We’d butted heads for years. And after mom and my stepdad died, well, he got kinda weird after that, and his disappointing son just pushed him over the edge, I guess.”
“Oh. Sorry,” she said. “About your mom. I lost my uncles and grandparents during the Swarm War. I wasn’t born yet, of course. But one of my aunts was pretty maimed in a factory explosion—she was working on President Avery’s secret anti-matter project. Basically melted her skin off. Should’ve died.”
“Oh god…” he said, trying to keep still for her to finish her work. “She ok now? I mean, it is thirty years on….”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Face looks like shit after five operations to make her look normal, though I suppose she looks better than if they’d left it all melty. There!”
“Done?” He reached up to touch his cheek, which now lacked all feeling as it was covered in cellulose and adhesive.
She slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch it! Still has to dry and set.”
“Uh, we’re kind of on a time crunch here. We can’t just hang out in orbit while my … makeup dries.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Of course not. You’re going to pilot us down to the commercial spaceport in Ciudad Libertador while I get my own mask on. And then find us a good place to stay while we switch masks and fiddle with our hair and plan the next step.”
He swiveled back to the flight controls and plotted in a course to the spaceport down in the capital city. “We’ve got an IDF transponder. They’ll probably want us to divert to IDF CENTCOM’s port, but I’m going to claim salvage, which, uh, isn’t that far from the truth. That should at least get us on the landing platform and into customs. From there, we’ve got to find a way to give the authorities the slip while we can duck into a hotel and … uh, reapply our makeup.”
The shuttle bumped a little bit as it descended through the atmosphere. He noticed Batak tense up, and reminded himself that not everyone found atmospheric flight as thrilling as he did. “So. What were your plans after….”
“After what?”
“You know. After you … do your time at Shovik-Orion, I guess.”
“Do my time?”
The shuttle hit a patch of turbulence and nearly knocked them out of their chairs. “Buckle up,” he said, pointing to the restraints. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like a prison sentence….”
She shrugged. “Well, you’re right. It is like a prison sentence. Gotta eat somehow, you know? All social programs were cut after the war, right? That’s old history. If your daddy ain’t rich, if you don’t feel like being a boot in IDF, and if you don’t feel like rotting in a classroom at university, then this is it, honey. Hard, dirty work. No chance of promotion. Hardly any benefits. Long hours. Space jocks like you looking down their noses at me. Middle managers over-managing me, justifying their jobs by meddling in mine. And just being at the whim of administrators and bureaucrats who care more about dotting the ‘I’s on their contracts with IDF than actually, you know, taking care of its own people.”
He fell silent. How do you reply to that?
“You seem like a smart woman—why not go into IDF?”
She fiddled with her face prosthetic and smeared some more adhesive underneath the forehead flap. “Because I don’t want to. Never was cut out for the military.”
“Then why not go to university? Be a scientist or senior engineer or something. You got the brains for it.”
She shrugged. “Because I don’t want to. I want to do my work. Get paid for it. Then go relax at home with my dogs, my brew, and my tunes.”
Silence as she pressed the rest of the mask firmly to her cheeks and chin. “It’s a wonder the GPC doesn’t control half the UE by now.”
“Huh?”
“Just sayin’. I’m a natural candidate for GPC recruitment. They’re for the common man and woman. The worker. The ignored and left-behind. I’m right up their alley. Most of the GPC is staffed by people like me.”
“Why aren’t you?”
She started swiping cream onto the seams of the mask. “Because. You’d think that we learned our lesson thirty years ago. The Swarm struck right at our weakest moment, when we were most divided. The Russian Confederation and the UE government were almost in a state of open war—in fact, it did go to open war there for awhile, in the middle of the Swarm War. And the Caliphate? Relations sucked with them at the time. And the Chinese? They might not have fought us, but they weren’t exactly our allies. They sure sucked up our money, though, even while IDF helped defend their worlds. So this time around, I’m not going to be one to contribute to our division. Divided we fall, and all that shit.”
He nodded slowly. “That was … very philosophical of you.”
“You sound surprised. Didn’t think a mechanic had it in her?”
“No, not at all. I just—it’s just hard to parse through your that’s what she said’s with your lofty ideals there. Sorry, it’s me, not you.”
“Truer words…” she mumbled. The atmospheric turbulence had died down, and they were now soaring down towards the capital city, coming in high over the ocean. “How’d your mom die?”
He grit his teeth. No one had asked him that in two years. And he wasn’t sure he was ready to start talking about it.
“I’d … rather talk about something else.”
She shrugged. “Ok.” It looked like she was finally done with her makeup—a strange face stared back at him, a little pudgier, whiter, and older. “Like what?”
He glanced back down at his instruments. And did a double-take, looking back and forth between the console and the viewport. “Like that squadron of IDF fighters heading straight towards us.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Irigoyen Sector, San Martin System, San Martin
550 Alabama Boulevard, Ciudad Libertador
Both Proctor and Rex bolted to their feet and retreated farther back into the store. The other marine standing outside dove through the door, which was now propped open by Stretch’s bloody corpse, and brought his sidearm to bear on the street as he found cover behind a kiosk. A second later, the glass windows exploded in a hail of gunfire.
Rex grabbed Proctor’s arm. “Into the office!”
She let him pull her through the door of the office, even as a constant pounding of assault rifle fire ripped the showroom to shreds.
“Corporal, get in here!” she yelled at the marine crouched behind the kiosk. He was peering around it, squeezing off a few rounds as he found targets.
“Multiple hostiles incoming!” he yelled, firing off three more shots through the broken windows. A hail of gunfire answered him.
Rex yelled in her ear. “Come with me!”
She shrugged him off.
He pushed the desk to one side and ripped up the shag rug from the floor, revealing the outline of a trapdoor. “Come!” he repeated, pulling the door up by an exposed hook.
More gunfire.
“I’m not getting in there,” she yelled, scanning the room for anything she could use as a weapon, even as she scoffed at herself for the thought. What was she going to do, throw an employee of the month plaque at someone holding an assault rifle?
“It’s not a room, it’s a tunnel. Grangerites have been persecuted for years, and I’ve always kept an escape route just in case.” He held out a hand. His face looked terrified. But honest. Dammit.
“Corporal, get in here. That’s an order!” she yelled out into the showroom before grabbing Rex’s hand. She let him lower her into the passage under the floor. Another barrage of gunfire rang out from the showroom, and moments later, the marine jumped down into the dark, dank space, followed by Rex himself. He pulled the door closed and locked it. Then, grabbing two iron bars on the floor, he shoved them through two other latches. No one was getting through that door without explosives. Which she assumed their attackers had.
“We can’t stay here,” said the marine, panting. Blood oozed out of his shoulder. Proctor swore, and reached for it. He shook her off. “Just cut by glass.”
“We’re not staying here. Follow me. Quickly.” Rex shoved past them to where the tunnel’s roof narrowed down to just a meter off the ground. He stooped down and started crawling. Proctor followed, groaning as her bad knee struggled to support her weight without betraying her to searing pain. If the marine behind her felt any pain from the gash in his shoulder, he didn’t say as he crawled steadily behind her.
Proctor was surprised at how fast she could move when she knew there were bullets trying to find her. They crawled at a steady clip for over two minutes, and the gunfire seemed to fade away before ending completely. She wondered if was just because they had crawled out of hearing range or if the unknown assailants had finally figured out that no one was firing back. Or if the police had finally arrived, though any regular police force would be overwhelmed with the firepower these people had. Those sounded like military-grade weapons. Either way, she crawled, trying to put as much distance in between them and the people with big guns.
