Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  The recruiter seemed taken aback that he’d been interrupted. “Excuuuse me?”

  “What’s in the hypo?” Nate asked again. If he was going to inject himself with something, then he wanted to know what the hell was in it. Seemed a fair question to him.

  The recruiter’s nostrils flared in irritation but he answered the question nonetheless.

  “Farcaster travel is … difficult. Traveling through the network without taking the proper precautions can leave an operator mentally disoriented, even physically ill. Reaction times and cognitive functions are slowed, sometimes drastically. All of which renders an operative unable to carry out their duties.”

  The recruiter pointed to the hypo unit Nate was holding. “The injector delivers a semi-aqueous solution containing a potent mix of microbial nanoselectors and morphotic radioisotopes that counteract the adverse reactions associated with farcaster travel, allowing you to make the transit with your mental and physical abilities intact.”

  “I … see,” Nate said, though he really had no idea what the hell the guy was talking about.

  “Please note that the counter agent has been designed specifically for you and you alone based on the results of the medical exam you just underwent. Taking a hypo injection meant for another operative could result in severe injury, possibly death. The same holds true for the farcaster you will be using. It has been keyed to your personal DNA signature. Use by another individual could be deadly.”

  Nate thought about the other rooms they’d passed in the hallway on their way to this one. Did each of those rooms contain a farcaster portal like this one? How many other hallways like that were in other buildings in this city? In other cities? Just how big was this agency?

  He didn’t bother to ask. He knew the recruiter wouldn’t answer; that kind of information was well above Nate’s pay grade.

  “Does that satisfy your curiosity, Mr. Benson? May I continue with my briefing now?”

  Nate nodded his head in acquiescence.

  “As I was saying, inject yourself with the hypo and then change into the clothes that have been provided for you. As with the hypo, they have been specifically tailored to suit you and help you look the part at your destination.”

  The recruiter turned and walked over to the farcaster unit, a round metal dome with a door in the center and a maze of pipes and wiring coming out of the top. A small control panel was inset to the left of the door.

  “When you arrive, your destination will already be programmed into your farcaster unit. All you need do is hit this button here …”—he pointed to a bright green button on the bottom right of the control panel—“and then step inside the unit. When you close the door, a countdown will begin. If, for some reason, you find you must abort the mission, you have exactly six seconds to do so.”

  Six seconds? He stared at the complex locking mechanism on the inside of the door and shook his head. Better hope you don’t have to abort or things are gonna get ugly …

  “Your PCD will deliver a set of coordinates to you once you exit the farcaster and can be used as a GPS device to locate those coordinates thereafter. At those coordinates will be instructions on what you are to do to complete the mission, as well as whatever specialized gear you might need to carry said mission out. You have exactly seventy-two hours in which to complete your assignment, not a minute more. When you have finished, you are to return to the same farcaster and use that to come home. Any questions?”

  “No. I’m good.”

  It was simple and straightforward, which Nate liked. He wasn’t thrilled with traveling by farcaster, but if that’s what the job required, he could live with it for what they were paying him.

  And they were paying him a lot.

  *

  Nate’s PCD went off for the first time three days later at precisely 6:30 a.m. Nate glanced at the display, noted the report time of 10:45, and dragged himself out of bed. Fifteen minutes later he was stepping aboard a slidetrain, headed for the Limbus offices as he’d been instructed.

  He used the employee identification card he’d been given to access the elevators and rode one straight to the ninety-seventh floor. Both the palm lock to the office suite and the one to the farcaster room opened at his touch.

  Nate changed into the casual clothes that were hanging in the locker, leaving his own in their place. Unsurprisingly there were no tags or other identifying marks in the clothing and the clothes themselves were average, everyday wear that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Whoever was running this operation seemed to know what they were doing, which he certainly appreciated. After all, it was his ass that was on the line should something go wrong.

  He picked up the hypo, hesitated a moment, then said “fuck it” aloud into the empty room and pressed the device against the inside of his wrist. There was the quick hiss of the injection followed by a moment of lightheadedness and then he was ready to go.

  Nate hit the green button, stepped into the farcaster unit, and pulled the door shut.

  He counted down from six to steady his nerves.

  “Six …”

  “Five …”

  “Four …”

  “Three …”

  “Two …”

  The world faded around him and the last thought he had on this side of the cast was to curse the sonofabitch who shorted him two seconds.

  *

  Nate stepped out of the utility closet into which he’d arrived and scanned the immediate vicinity, making sure no one had seen his exit.

  He appeared to be in a train station somewhere; travelers were hustling to and fro with bags in their hands and a voice over the PA system was announcing that the 10:51 express was ready to depart on track 118.

  The PCD in his pocket beeped. He took it out and glanced at the display, noting that it was showing a drop location less than fifty feet from where he was now standing. He followed the coordinates to their source, which, as he’d already guessed, turned out to be a self-storage locker.

  He spent a moment or two pondering what the combination might be, then shrugged and punched in the street address of the Limbus building.

  The lock popped open with a flat clang.

  An information disk for his PCD sat on the shelf inside, next to a small stack of currency. He popped the chip into his PCD and absently stuffed the cash into his pockets while watching the information that came up on his screen.

  The mission looked to be a relatively simple. He was supposed to wait outside a certain restaurant—address included—and photograph a meeting between two men. Photos of each of them had been provided for identification purposes. Nate studied them for a moment, committing their features to memory. He was certain he’d never seen either one of them before; not that it mattered in the long run. He would have done the job even if he’d known them for the last twenty years. A job was a job.

  It went without saying that there was to be no contact with either individual. Once he had obtained the necessary photographs, he was to leave the vicinity as soon as possible and make his way back to the equipment drop. There he would receive the coordinates for the return trip.

  The equipment drop contained a nylon backpack complete with a camera, telephoto lens, and press credentials from some rag called The Global Inquirer.

  He slipped the credentials into the pocket of his jacket and slung the backpack over his shoulder, then made his way out of the station to the street beyond. A glance at his PCD told him he had less than twenty minutes to get into position, so he hustled to the front of the cab line and climbed into the first vehicle, slamming the door in the face of the woman he’d just cut in front of. He handed some cash to the driver to get him to ignore the angry shouts of the woman standing outside and told him he’d pay double the fare if the driver could get him to their destination in less than fifteen minutes.

  Tires squealed and Nate was pushed back into his seat as the driver rose to the challenge.

  The driver was too busy concentrating on navigating to be
chatting, which Nate was thankful for. The car he was in was an older model, without any modern conveniences it seemed. Even the ads seemed ten years out of date, for heaven’s sake. But the cabbie knew the city and that’s all Nate really cared about. Exactly thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds later, Nate was getting out of the cab a block from his final destination, having told the driver to pull over to reduce the chance of being seen. Not that he expected to be recognized by his targets, but why take the chance if it wasn’t necessary?

  He walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and found a place to sit on a bench in a small park across the way. His position gave him a clear view of both the front entrance and the outdoor eating area on the side of the building. If his targets chose the former, he’d wander inside and get a table. If they chose the latter, he’d be in a perfect position to watch them while they ate.

  In the end, it was all rather anticlimactic. The two men he was waiting for arrived a few minutes after he did. To his relief, they chose to eat outside, absolving him of the need to go inside and find a table. Instead, he didn’t have to do anything more than point the camera in their general direction; the telephoto lens got everything he needed with the touch of a button. It was so simple a child could have done it.

  When he was satisfied that he’d gotten what he needed, Nate put the camera back into the pack and went to find another cab, which would take him back to the station. Once there, he put the backpack containing the camera back into the locker and hit the lock button.

  Already thinking about the paycheck that came with the successful completion of the job, Nate went to find his farcaster home.

  *

  Over the course of the next three weeks Nate handled two more assignments. The first required him to pick up a package from the equipment locker, cross town to a hotel, and leave it for an incoming guest. The second involved breaking into an office building on the outskirts of the business district and removing several files from the company president’s office on the fifth floor. Both times he’d arrived with very little time to spare and had to hustle to get in position by the time indicated on his orders, but that was the only hiccup he encountered. Even the B&E didn’t bother him; they were paying him, and paying him well, to take risks on their behalf and the petty crime barely registered on his personal morality meter. He’d done far worse during his time in the service.

  About a week after his third assignment, Nate was having breakfast in an upscale joint on 84th Avenue, the kind of place that was so high above his previous standard of living that three months ago he wouldn’t have even looked at it. A news clip on the screen behind the receptionist’s station caught his eye.

  He tapped the controls next to his right hand and the screen embedded into his table top came to life.

  “… for good behavior after serving ten years on espionage charges. Owens was caught on camera in a now famous photograph showing him exchanging documentation on the Raptor III drone-launched missile system with this man, Lee Fong, a member of a so-called Chinese trade delegation. Fong’s diplomatic credentials were revoked and he was expelled from this country immediately following the incident. At the time, Owens claimed that …”

  Nate stared at the photograph on the screen—one of the photographs that he’d taken as his first job for Limbus!

  A ten-year sentence? How in hell was that even possible?

  A trial like that would take months just to get scheduled in front of a judge, never mind the additional months it would take to try the case. There was just no way. The newscaster must have misspoken.

  But as Nate changed stations and listened to several other broadcasts, he realized that they were all saying the same thing. Owens was being released after serving a ten-year sentence for espionage. A sentence that was the result of a guilty verdict that had been obtained using the photographs that Nate himself had taken!

  Something was very, very wrong.

  Nate paid his bill and then left the restaurant, his thoughts awhirl. He wanted to learn more about the Owens case, but wasn’t about to make any inquiries from his PCD where it could be traced back to him. He needed a cyber café.

  The first one he came to looked a bit too upscale to have what he wanted, so he passed it by and kept looking. After another fifteen minutes he found another place, sandwiched between an auto mechanic and a shoe repair shop in an alley off of 69th that would do the trick. He paid for an hour of time at a private terminal and the proprietor led him to a closet-sized space in the back of the room that contained a triD terminal with a built-in keyboard. The gear was at least fifteen years out of date but it fired up without difficulty when Nate sat down in front of it and that was good enough for him. The age of the terminal would make what he had to do next easier, actually.

  He flexed his fingers and then punched in a coding sequence he’d learned from an electronics specialist first class while overseas. The commands rerouted the console’s connection to the cybernet through twenty different pirate data havens, one after another, each one scrubbing the identifiers out of the data and hiding the originating signal in a blizzard of false streams that would take a decent hacker at least a week, maybe more, to unravel. By the time they did that, he’d be long gone.

  Once he knew his efforts couldn’t be traced back to him, Nate began digging into the background of the Owens case, trying to make sense of it all. According to the documents he was able to access, the government had been chasing a leak within their classified weapons program for more than a year before investigators began to focus their attention on Owens. The break had come when an anonymous source sent in half-a-dozen photographs showing Owens passing a packet of information to Fong while they were dining together at an outdoor restaurant. There was no way for the photographs to be used in court, as the investigators couldn’t prove they were authentic given their anonymous source, but that didn’t stop investigators from using them to confront Owens, who, upon seeing the evidence, broke down and confessed. Owens had then pled guilty, saving the government years of effort and no doubt millions of dollars that would have been needed to convict him.

  Nate double-checked the dates. Owens had been sentenced just over ten years ago, according to the information.

  Has to be a different photograph, he thought.

  He called up the image and expanded it on the screen.

  It wasn’t a different photograph; he knew that immediately. While Nate had never actually held the images he’d taken that day, he had been looking through the camera’s viewfinder when he’d taken them and the image he called up on the screen was identical to the one he had in his memory.

  It was his photograph.

  There was no mistaking it.

  He thought for a moment and then hunched over the keys once more, tapping furiously.

  The console obediently put the information he asked for on the screen in front of him.

  Seeing it, Nate sat back in his chair. His stomach did a slow roll and he had to take several deep breaths in order to keep from throwing up.

  On the screen was an article about the hotel he’d delivered the package to during his second assignment. According to the press, a terrorist bomb had gone off on the hotel’s eighteenth floor, killing three people and starting a fire that rapidly burned out of control and ended up destroying the entire building.

  The date of the fire was five years ago.

  Nate’s hands shook.

  “Holy shit!” he breathed.

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a loud beeping sound filled the cubicle, Nate jumped out of his seat, glancing wildly about, convinced in those first few seconds that the corporate bigwigs at Limbus had discovered what he was up to and had sent in the riot police to drag him downtown …

  There was no one there.

  The beeping sound was the pager on his PCD.

  Telling himself to calm down, he fumbled it off his belt, slipped the switch to silence the alarm, and looked down at the readout.

&nb
sp; 1:15, it read.

  Nate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not only did he have an immediate assignment, but he had twenty-five minutes to make it there.

  He wiped all traces of what he’d been doing from the terminal, then exited the cyber café. Using his PCD he called for a limousine, knowing it would be faster than the slidetrain and might just mean the difference between success and failure. He had no idea what would happen if he missed the deadline and frankly he had no intention of finding out. The chauffeured vehicle had slid out of the sky seconds later and got him to the Limbus offices with three minutes to go before the deadline.

  He rushed to the prep room, swapped his clothes for the ones waiting there for him, and jumped into the farcaster, his thoughts a million miles away.

  As the countdown neared its final seconds, Nate glanced out through the porthole in the middle of the farcaster door and saw that he’d left the door to his locker open.

  That was the least of his worries.

  There, on the top shelf, was the hypo he’d forgotten to take.

  In the next second reality dropped away from him and Nate felt like he was falling … falling … falling …

  *

  Recruiter 46795 entered Nate Benson’s mission prep room ten minutes after the other man had left. Despite having six operators under his direct supervision, management had yet to see fit to provide him with an assistant, so he was forced to handle even the trivial tasks like refilling the hypos and resetting the farcaster units himself.

  He considered that aspect of the job to be far beneath him and constantly railed to himself against the short-sightedness of those above him. When he was promoted to executive, he’d be sure to let the others know just how demeaning he’d considered the whole …

  His thoughts trailed off as he caught sight of the hypo sitting on the locker’s top shelf.

  Unused.

  Questions swarmed his thoughts.

  How much did Benson know? Was it a simple accident that he hadn’t taken the hypo or had he avoided the injection purposely? Was he an enemy plant? Or, God forbid, working for another agency? Could he still be trusted?