by Dan Moren
The jostle of the crowd in front of the terminal knocked this thought from his mind. Shaking his head, he skirted the taxi stand; he might have been away for almost a decade, but that didn’t change the fact that the city’s autocabs were for tourists and suckers. He could take a crosstown bus from here, then swap to the line that would take him home, but the rising tide of nostalgia made the idea of walking surprisingly appealing.
The soles of his boots rasped like sandpaper over the sidewalks as he navigated the streets of Raleigh City. Everything, even the tall buildings, looked smaller than he remembered. Not physically—Eli was pretty sure he’d been done growing by the time he’d shipped off to the academy—but the reality of the place was dwarfed by his memory, in which it had all seemed much more imposing. It had the disturbing effect of making everything that had happened in the past decade seem like a dream. Had he ever really left? Joined the Illyrican military? Been stuck at an arctic installation on a remote planet for five long years?
And then, as he waited to cross a boulevard, he caught a whiff of the city’s distinctive smell and his eyes widened. Well that hasn’t changed. A heady bouquet of engine exhaust from the ground-skimmers and transpo buses mixed with the sharp sea air and just a hint of stale beer. He could remember asking his dad about that last one when he’d been a little kid, but Connor Brody hadn’t been a man for answering questions, simple or otherwise. It wasn’t until his own first trip to a bar at the age of sixteen that he’d put two and two together and gotten thoroughly drunk. Threw up in the middle of the street, too, as I recall. It hadn’t been the last time for either of those.
He slowed as he reached a large plaza, arranged around a square park. Someone had spent considerable time and resources cultivating a carefully manicured patch of greenery, in contrast with the general brown of Caledonian grass. Little question who, either: In the midst of the park stood a bronze statue about two stories high, dressed in a classical style with robes draped artfully over his body, one hand outstretched as though issuing a blessing and the other clutching a scroll. The face was chiseled, both literally and figuratively, with sharp, stern features and blank, unseeing eyes.
Eli came to a stop and let the duffle bag slide from his grip to the ground. Bloody Alaric. It wasn’t enough the old bastard took over our home—he wanted us to love him for it. Emperor Alaric II of the Illyrican Empire had been middle-aged when he’d begun his conquest, and that was roughly the age at which the statue depicted him. That had been over twenty years ago, though, and the conqueror in the meantime had grown old and, if the persistent rumors were to be believed, infirm.
There were streamers hanging from the bottom of the monument, and as he looked around he could see other banners that had been affixed to lamp posts and strung across streets: crimson and gold, the colors of the Illyrican Empire. The traditional decorations of the highest of Illyrican-imposed holidays—the Emperor’s Birthday. That time of year already, huh?
He’d lost all track of time while on Sabaea, but a quick glance at the comm Fielding had given him showed that the Emperor’s Birthday was in fact just a couple of days away. Looking around, he tried to picture the square thronging full of people getting drunk, followed by a riot or two—the locals weren’t big fans of pomp and circumstance, especially when it was a reminder of their continued subjugation. If there’s anything Caledonians enjoy, it’s a good riot. Practically a national tradition.
This particular statue of Alaric—and there were many scattered about the planet, because “humility’” was not in the emperor’s vocabulary—was an especially popular target for abuse. Though the Caledonian Public Works department had removed the frequent and colorful vandalism almost as fast as it appeared, Eli wondered what the Illyricans would have said if they’d known that more than one morning had found a civil servant cleaning off insults that she herself had scrawled there the night before. Probably something along the lines of “put your back into it.”
Then again, maybe the Imperium had caught on. Eli’s grin faded. The statue was freshly polished and gleaming brighter than ever; any trace of spray-on graffiti eradicated. There were still spots where people had actually carved things into the metal—“crims go home” and “occupy this”—but even they were faded and buffed to the point of illegibility. Actually, he and Eamon had once taken their dad’s pocket knife to this very statue, producing a rather respectable if crude illustration of male genit—
“Oi, mister.”
Eli looked over his shoulder to find a grizzled but hopeful-looking old man dressed in tattered clothes and holding out his hand.
“Spare a mark for a veteran of the Occupation War?” The man rubbed his filthy thumb and index finger together.
Eli jammed his hands in his pockets, searching for some of the currency Fielding had given him on the Indefatigable. Producing a handful of the plastic chits that the Illyricans used as cash, he flipped through the various denominations, trying to ignore the hawkish eyes of the man before him.
“Here you go.” A pair of five-mark chits rattled into the old man’s hand.
“Bless you, sir. Bless you.” The old man clasped his dirt-stained hands around Eli’s. His grin showcased a full and surprisingly white set of teeth. “You’re a good man, sir. A good man.”
“Er, thanks.”
“Too many youngsters got no respect for their elders these days,” said the man, still pumping Eli’s hand. “I fought the crims at Kinsale, you know.”
“Oh, really?” He dimly recalled the battle from a history class—like so many of them, a slaughter by the Illyricans. “Well, uh, thanks. Keep up the good work.” Keep up the good work? “I’ve gotta go.”
“Course you do, sir. Course you do.” He relinquished Eli’s hand at last. “You have a good day, now.” With another grin, he strolled off down the street, whistling a jaunty tune to himself.
Eli shook his head, then suddenly noticed that though he’d given the man two fives, he was somehow still holding a twenty-mark piece. About to call after the old man, he flipped the disc over and his mouth snapped shut. In neat black letters around the edge of the obverse were the words “295 W. Highland; 1900H. -F”
He looked around for the panhandler, but the man had vanished into the bustling rush hour crowds that had begun to surround the square. Cloak and dagger, Eli thought, rolling his eyes. Why not just send him a comm message?
His heart thumped slowly. Maybe Fielding thought the comm was bugged? Or maybe he thought Eli was being followed? After all, if the Commonwealth had found him, surely the Illyricans could as well. Trying to look casual, Eli surveyed the area, scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Had he passed one of those women at the terminal? Was that the man he’d sat next to on the shuttle?
The world spun slowly and Eli leaned back against the statue and took a deep breath. Don’t get carried away. Fielding was a spy; all this subterfuge probably came second nature to him. No reason to think that the Illyricans knew anything. As far as the Imperium was concerned, Elijah Brody was dead and the only person who had showed up on Caledonia was the perfectly innocent Marcus Wellington.
With that note of sanity injected, Eli rubbed a hand against the stubble on his chin and hefted his bag once again. Fielding wanted to meet in less than three hours; by that point, he’d better be well on his way to finding Eamon. Home or not, this was going to be the last trip he made to Caledonia; that he swore.
Fortunately, Caledonia’s traditionally inefficient public transit authority hadn’t developed a burning need for self-improvement in the last nine years. The same bus routes that he’d taken as a kid were still in operation, and a half-hour ride through the winding streets of Raleigh City deposited him on the outskirts of the planet’s capital.
Upham had been designed by the colony’s civil engineers to be a pleasant, tree-lined residential district of Raleigh City, but as so often seemed to happen, the place had fallen into disrepair and neither the local government nor the Illyricans seem to ha
ve been interested in spending the money to improve it.
The few street lights that were still operating flickered to life as the last vestiges of sunlight faded into evening. Eli shouldered his duffle bag and stepped through the forbidding concrete pillars that marked the entrance to Block 17—the One-Seven, as it was called by its residents. The knot that had settled into his stomach since he’d arrived on-world was accruing mass in a decidedly black hole-ish fashion.
If anything, the One-Seven looked even worse than it had when Eli had lived there. Broken bottles and discarded food packets littered the ground, and the few plants and saplings that had once lined the walkway into the block proper had been uprooted and removed, leaving only dry patches of dirt. There wasn’t even any brown grass here, just concrete and metal.
High above rose the towers, a few lit windows shining against the dark background. Each block had four residential units, twenty-two stories tall, and each story contained a dozen apartments of various sizes. In theory, the towers had been designed for a thousand-some residents each—in reality, they’d housed at least twice that. Families of six or ten were regularly packed into apartments meant for two or three. Pay from the mining companies had always been low, and it had gotten even worse when the Imperium had nationalized the industry, citing matters of “Imperial security.”
As he rounded the corner of the 17-East tower toward his own childhood home of 17-North, Eli was struck by how much brighter and more open the block seemed, even in the twilight. Nothing like the claustrophobic environment of his childhood where he’d felt constantly hemmed in on every side. The wind whipped at him, raising tears in his eyes.
It took him a minute to realize exactly why the block felt so much more open, why the sky in front of him seemed a far vaster expanse than the one he’d known as a kid.
The enormous 17-North residential block, his childhood home and his best chance at finding Eamon, was gone.
CHAPTER SIX
Kovalic strode with purpose down the street, hands jammed in his pockets, eyes front. Raleigh City’s late afternoon crowd brushed past him, most on their way home from work, all ignoring the single man threading his way upstream.
He’d spent an hour after leaving the Commonwealth Embassy strolling around the city, getting his bearings and reviewing the matter at hand. Danzig hadn’t quite been the font of useful information that he’d hoped but, despite that, the bureaucrat had been more helpful than he had expected. What he wouldn’t give for a copy of just one of Jim Wallace’s reports: putting together a puzzle was infinitely easier when you had the picture on the front of the box.
As he reached the next intersection, he glanced up at the address on the illuminated street sign then took a sharp right onto Kelvin Boulevard. The busy thoroughfare divided the less well-to-do neighborhood known as the Flats from the more affluent Highgate area. Strange to think that the difference of a dozen yards represented a median income change of roughly four or five hundred percent, but that was exactly the case. Then again, the rich and the poor had always lived within spitting distance, even on Earth—it was just a matter of how much heed they paid each other.
Another few blocks and Kovalic reached the address Danzig had given him. Unsurprisingly, it was on the seedier side of the street, in a tenement house that had clearly never seen better days, jammed between a place that offered payday loans and a hole-in-the-wall eatery that could only have passed health codes by the good graces of a guardian angel or straight-up bribery. Strangely enough, that didn’t make the smell of cooking sausage wafting from the doorway any less appealing, though the tubby man in the greasy, sweat-stained shirt who was standing at the door effectively curbed Kovalic’s appetite.
Climbing the crumbling steps up to the door of Wallace’s building, Kovalic let himself in. The foyer, no less dingy than the outside, narrowed toward the building’s rear while a set of threadbare, carpeted stairs rose to the second floor. A vacant front desk to his left said that this wasn’t the kind of place where people wanted their movements accounted for by an automated kiosk. Here, it was face-to-face interaction, probably handled in cash.
As if summoned by the thought, a weedy, thin-faced elderly woman appeared behind the counter. Though she tottered like she might fall over, her green eyes sharply sized up Kovalic—his dress, his bearing, his clean-cut appearance—and hung a price tag on him.
“Two ’undred marks a week, love.” Her voice creaked like an old door, and Kovalic couldn’t help but think of the tales his father had told him of the witch Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house.
He resisted glancing around for a mortar and a pestle and instead donned his best dealing-with-people face. “Actually, I’m looking for a friend of mine who’s staying here.”
The woman didn’t reply, just sat and watched him expectantly. Kovalic fancied he could hear her mentally tallying the money she was losing by him standing there.
“A Mr. Andrews?”
“Never ’eard of ’im,” said the woman automatically, but her eyes darted involuntarily toward the stairs.
Kovalic produced a twenty-mark chit from his pocket and casually slid it onto the counter, one finger pinning it in place. The woman eyed it and shrugged.
“We ’ave a lot of folks in and out,” she wheedled. “I can’t be expected to remember ’em all.”
With a raised eyebrow, Kovalic placed a second chit down next to the first. The woman eyed them hungrily.
“Andrews, you say?” She gave the appearance of racking her memory, and then her face cracked into a broad grin of yellowed and missing teeth. “Oh, yes, Mr. Andrews. Big gentleman; ’andsome, too. Lovely man. Paid tree months in advance, ’e did. Room 207.”
With a nod and a smile, Kovalic slid the chits over the counter. “Thanks for your help, ma’am.”
The woman waved her hands and the credit chits vanished into her safekeeping—never to be seen again, Kovalic trusted. He crossed to the stairs and already had his foot on the first step when the woman called out to him.
“I’m not sure ’e’s in, love. ’Aven’t seen ’im in a while.”
“That’s all right,” said Kovalic over his shoulder. “I can wait.”
The stairs, as befit their advanced age, protested as he climbed to the second floor. At the top, hallways stretched off to the left and right with no sign indicating which rooms lay in which direction. Kovalic tried the left hand corridor first, working his way down the hall while checking the room numbers. That turned out to be a dead end, terminating in what, upon inspection, appeared to be a shared bathroom. This wasn’t exactly the kind of place that prided itself on its facilities, he supposed. He reversed course to check the other direction.
Room 207 proved to be halfway down the other corridor. The door looked like all of the others: wooden, thin, with an old-fashioned mechanical lock. It showed no sign of having been forced—no splintered wood, no undue scratches other than what looked like claw marks probably left by a stray cat. He knocked quietly.
There was no response from within, so he crouched down and studied the knob. Wallace was a pro—he would have left something to prevent his room from being tampered with. He scanned the door’s seams and peered at the lock, but turned up nothing.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Kovalic slid out the thin folder that contained his lock picks and pulled out the torsion wrench and one of the long rake picks. Most operatives didn’t bother to learn lock picking these days; the vast majority of locks one encountered were electronic, not mechanical, and for those that weren’t, many favored the speed and simplicity of a pick gun. There was just no appreciation for history or the lost arts in his line of work. For him, though, there was something about the careful work of picking a lock that he found surprisingly calming.
The lock on Andrews’s door was cheap, yielding up its secrets in under a minute. Kovalic smiled as he heard it click open, carefully replacing his picks into his pocket. Next he removed a small telescoping mirror with a light attached
. This he ran under the edge of the door, looking for any of the telltale signs of a tripwire or other trigger.
Nothing.
He frowned. The only thing more worrisome than finding a trap was not finding a trap. Getting to his feet, Kovalic slowly pushed the door open with his foot and surveyed the room. The curtains were drawn, leaving the entire apartment cast in a twilight dimness. Kovalic waited at the doorway until his eyes adjusted. There was a small foyer before the main room, but his view inside was obscured by the angle of the entryway wall.
He checked again, scanning the room for anything Wallace might have left to keep himself apprised of visitors—could be as simple as a piece of gum on the floor—but still came up with nothing. Which meant either there really was nothing there or that Wallace was a lot better at hiding things than Kovalic was at finding them.
There wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter, so Kovalic took the risk and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. No klaxon sounded, there was no telltale click of a grenade trap being armed—nothing. Somehow that was the opposite of reassuring.
He walked slowly down the short entryway, pausing as he reached the end of the wall that blocked the view of the room at large, then peered around the corner.
The room wasn’t huge; it extended maybe another fifteen feet in that direction. In one corner, against the back wall, was a single bed, rumpled from use. Between Kovalic and the bed was a small kitchen table flanked by a countertop and simple kitchenette; against the opposite wall was a cheap, rickety desk and equally suspect bureau. There was no en-suite bathroom that he could see but there had been that shared one at the other end of the hall.
Other than that, the room was more or less empty. Operatives tended to lead a spartan existence, especially when they were in the field, and Wallace appeared to have been no exception.
