Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  What about …

  Recruiter 46795 cursed aloud, once, and then got control of himself. It wouldn’t do to let something like this cause the rest of his plans to spin out of control. Benson could be contained, if necessary.

  He’d wait and see what the operative did when he returned from his current assignment and then make some decisions about how to handle the situation.

  Patience, he reminded himself, patience.

  *

  Nate stumbled out of the farcaster and promptly vomited all over the floor. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and was overcome a second time by the sensation of falling from an immeasurable height, a fall that just went on and on and on …

  He leaned against the nearby wall and vomited a second time.

  With his stomach now empty, the feeling receded. He stayed where he was, waiting for the nausea to pass. Then, and only then, did he dare to straighten up.

  He wondered just how totally fucked he was.

  He’d gone through the farcaster without his injection and he had no idea what kind of effects that would have on his body. He felt all right aside from the previous bout of nausea, but he knew that meant nothing. He might be sprouting massive tumors deep inside his body this very minute and wouldn’t even know it.

  Fuck it. Can’t do anything about it now so might as well put it aside and concentrate on the job at hand.

  He found himself in a garage, empty save for a sedan parked nearby. It was a couple of years old, no more than that. The driver’s door was open and when he slid in behind the wheel he found the keys and a note above the dash.

  The note gave him a set of coordinates and instructions to bury what was in the trunk at that location.

  It had been awhile since he’d driven anything other than military vehicles and he slid the key in the ignition with a sense of anticipation. A smile came to his face as the car’s twin engines came to life, growling in unison like two caged beasts ready to break free. He steered around the empty garage for a few minutes, to get a feel for the vehicle, then took her out the front gate. As soon as he was clear, he hit the antigrav units and took the car up over the city.

  The Detroit-Windsor megaplex shone off to his left, hugging both banks of the Detroit River. He turned the car to the right and headed south along the river, searching for the coordinates.

  Twenty minutes later he set down on the north bank, in the midst of a clearing. He killed the engines and waited for them to shut down completely before getting out.

  Nate glanced around, but didn’t see anyone. He walked back to the trunk and opened it up.

  A large black body bag and one long-handled shovel stared back at him.

  “Color me surprised,” he said with a certain amount of fatalism and reached in for the shovel. It took him another half an hour to dig a hole deep enough that he thought the bag wouldn’t get dug up again by the local wildlife. He stabbed the shovel into the pile of dirt he’d created and went to get the body.

  Except it wasn’t a body at all. He knew that the moment he tried to pick it up. It was much too heavy and far too angular to be anything human. His curiosity getting the better of him, Nate reached for the zipper and pulled it down a few inches.

  The bag was full of cash. Bundles and bundles of it, all neatly stacked and wrapped with rubber bands.

  Nate stared at the money a moment, then, being careful not to touch any of it, zipped the bag back up again. Seeing all that money in one place was tempting, but messing with that kind of stuff was sure to put a price on his head. He intended to do what he was told and that was that.

  He dragged the bag out of the trunk and over to the hole he’d dug, and heaved it over the edge. It dropped the half-dozen feet and hit the bottom with a flat thunk. Nate gave it one last look and then began shoveling the dirt over it.

  There was about an hour left on the assignment clock when he finished the job, which left him plenty of time for the little outing he planned. He returned the car to the garage where he’d found it, leaving the keys inside and locking it up after him for safe keeping, figuring whoever had left it there would have a spare set of their own. If they didn’t … hey, not his problem.

  Instead of getting into the farcaster, Nate walked out of the garage and headed down the street to the convenience store he’d spotted from the air. The doors were locked and the lights off when he arrived, but that really didn’t matter to him. He made a beeline for the vending machines outside the front door and peered through the glass at the day’s newssheet.

  Even though he was expecting it, the date still left him a bit stunned.

  It was November, 15th, the same as when he had left but this November 15th was two years in the past.

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed.

  The final proof was staring him in the face.

  His thoughts were skipping in a thousand different directions by the time he made it back to the garage where the farcaster was located. He reached for the hypo and then stopped.

  Do I really want to take that? he asked himself. What if the first dose was tied to the second somehow? Would taking one without the other be dangerous?

  He didn’t know.

  Had no way of knowing at this point, not really.

  His gut was telling him not to, that the two were inexplicably linked and only bad things could come of taking the dose separate from the first. He’d learned to trust his gut.

  He took one last look at the angular injector and then hurled it away into the darkness of the garage. He heard glass shatter and for some reason the sound made him feel better.

  Time to go home, he thought.

  *

  Nate stepped out of the farcaster and rushed immediately for the rest room, determined not to vomit all over the floor. He leaned over the sink and waited for the nausea to strike.

  Surprisingly, it didn’t.

  He gave it another moment, just to be safe, but his stomach remained strangely acquiescent.

  Given what he had learned on the other side, it was clear now that his initial suspicions were correct. He was travelling not just in distance but in time as well via the farcaster, going back and fixing errors, adjusting outcomes, eliminating targets, so that the present, his present, would unfold in a certain way.

  The implications were staggering.

  It raised all sorts of interesting questions about his employer, Limbus Inc. Who were they really? He’d known from the start that they were a front, but a front for who? Or what? The answers to those questions seemed far more important now than they had when he’d first walked in the door.

  Trouble was, he didn’t know how he was going to find them.

  As he finished getting dressed, his gaze fell upon the hypo he’d failed to use before leaving earlier that morning. It was still sitting there on the locker shelf, untouched, which meant the cleanup crew hadn’t been around yet.

  He took the hypo, walked into the bathroom, and dumped it contents down the sink. He ran the water, washing any trace of the stuff down the drain, then returned the empty hypo to the locker.

  Satisfied that he’d covered his tracks, Nate left the prep room and closed the door firmly behind him. He planned on learning as much about Limbus as he could, but not before he got a decent night’s rest.

  As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he noticed that one of the other doors was slightly open.

  The sight brought him up short.

  All the time he’d been coming here, he’d never run into another employee. The only interaction he’d had was with his recruiter and even those meetings were few and far between. Nate was suddenly, intensely curious about his co-workers. Who were they? What were they like? How many of them were there?

  Maybe he’d find some of the answers he was looking for inside that room.

  The open door seemed to beckon.

  What can it hurt?

  Casting caution to the wind, Nate stepped forward and gently pushed it open.

  The room bey
ond looked identical to the one he’d just left. The same lack of general furnishings. The same bare walls. The same locker and farcaster unit.

  The stretcher was new, however.

  It stood in the middle of the room, as if someone had been getting ready to wheel it out and had stepped away for a moment to deal with something else. There was an odd, lumpy shape resting atop the stretcher, covered by a sheet now stained with blood and other fluids.

  That shape drew Nate like a magnet.

  He stepped forward, watching as his hand reached out almost of its own accord and grasped the edge of the sheet. He’d seen more than his fair share of the dead and dying while on active duty and wouldn’t be put off by the sight of a corpse, yet still he hesitated.

  Something felt … wrong.

  Off.

  Something told him that he didn’t want to see what was under that sheet, that he wouldn’t be able to just forget about it and get on with his life, that once he saw it things would be forever changed …

  He pulled the sheet back anyway.

  And immediately wished he hadn’t.

  The thing under the sheet had once been human, but it was hard to tell that now. It was as if some higher force had taken a human form, twisted it inside out and then added hundreds of runaway growths between the glistening wet organs and miles of ropy blood vessels; it was horrifying and strangely, eerily fascinating at the same time.

  Nate was staring at it intently, trying to understand just what the hell it was that he was looking at, when a pair of eyes popped opened in what had once been the thing’s face and he nearly leapt out of his shoes.

  It was still alive!

  The two of them stared at each other and then the thing erupted with a mewling cry of such pain and despair that Nate cringed at the sound. He was frozen in place, unable to move as the thing on the stretcher continued to wail in misery, and so he didn’t notice anyone else was in the room with him until a hand snapped forward and yanked the sheet back up where it belonged.

  The awful, hideous cry stopped immediately.

  “What do you think you are doing? This area is off-limits!”

  Nate shook himself, trying to banish the memory of that awful thing, and turned to find his recruiter staring at him with murder in his eyes.

  “Get out!” the man said, pointing behind them at the door.

  “What was that …”

  “I said GET OUT! Or I will terminate you immediately!”

  The threat to his livelihood—or was that to his life?—was enough to get him moving. He scrambled backward until he found the door and then slipped out into the hall. He knew better than to leave; something in his recruiter’s tone had made that clear, so he began to pace back and forth within the narrow confines instead.

  When his recruiter emerged from the room moments later, Nate couldn’t hold his questions in any longer.

  “What the fuck was that?” he asked, jabbing his finger past the other man’s head to point at the room he’d just left. “What happened to that guy?”

  Nate was expecting his recruiter to give him the typical runaround and so he was surprised when the other man answered calmly.

  “What happened?” he repeated, a superior little smile on his face. “He fucked up; that’s what happened. Thought he could pull a fast one and claim that he’d done the job when he really hadn’t. I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”

  Nate stared at him, horrified. “What did you do?”

  The recruiter laughed. “I flipped his switch, of course! Did you think we’d send you idiots roaming around out there without some means of controlling you? Do you really think we’re that stupid? He tried to fuck with me so I flipped his switch and activated all those little bastards in his bloodstream. Turned him inside out before he even knew what hit him!”

  A chill washed over Nate as he realized the implications of what he was hearing. Whatever had been done to that guy had more than likely been done to him as well …

  He had to force himself to keep from grabbing the front of the recruiter’s shirt and slamming him up against the wall.

  “What did you do to me?” he asked, the anger clear in his voice.

  The recruiter laughed, seemingly not afraid of Nate at all.

  “I didn’t do anything to you. You did it to yourself. You asked for employment. You signed the waivers. You submitted to the medical ‘tests.’ You’ll just have to live with the consequences.”

  Nate stared furiously at the man, stunned to realize that what the recruiter had just said was true. He’d been so eager to get off the street and back to something useful that he hadn’t even stopped to read the paperwork that had been placed in front of him.

  But his recruiter wasn’t finished yet.

  “Don’t even think about running, Nate,” he said with a sneer. “Limbus owns you now and we take our investments very seriously. If you run, we’ll use the subcutaneous tracking device we’ve implanted in your skin to find where you’ve gone and bring you back again, at which point you’ll be punished for the trouble you’ve caused.”

  The recruiter looked back at the door of the room they’d just exited and Nate got the message, loud and clear.

  Suddenly Nate understood why Charlie had looked the way he had in the bar that night. It hadn’t been fear that had caused his hands to tremble and his face to drain of color. No, not fear at all. It had been guilt.

  Guilt that he’d been getting Nate involved with this mess in the first place.

  Nate glanced down the hall to the elevator doors. He could run, he thought. Get out of here, find a doc who could take the transponder out of his system, lay low until the storm passes. He’d survived the Faith War, he could survive this.

  The other man caught the look, realized what he was no doubt thinking.

  “Don’t be stupid,” his recruiter said. “You’ve got a good thing going here, why make a mess of it all? If you carry out the assignments as requested, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Nate wanted nothing more at that moment than to knock the man on his ass, but he restrained himself. You’ve got to keep cool if you want to get out of here, he told himself.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said aloud, forcing himself to smile. “No sense screwing up a good thing. You’ve got to protect your assets; every corporation has to do that. Just good business sense, right?”

  The recruiter grinned at him. “That’s right. Stick with the program and who knows? A few years from now I might even recommend you for the junior level management program. Get you off the streets for good. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Nate made himself nod. “Of course I would. Last thing I want to do is end up like that guy in there,” he said, pointing over the other man’s shoulder at the door behind him.

  The recruiter watched him closely for a moment and then nodded, as if to himself. “Good. Glad to hear it. Go home. Get some rest. When you’ve had a chance to think everything over you’ll feel much better. I’m sure of it.”

  Permission granted, Nate got out of there as fast as he could.

  *

  Two hours later Recruiter 46795 stood staring out the window of his office, trying to figure out how he was going to clean up the mess he currently found himself in.

  It had not been a good day.

  First he’d had to terminate Wojowitski’s employment and then there had been that business with Benson. Two disasters in one day, both with the potential of screwing with his chances of getting the promotion he’d been angling for since he’d been relocated to this office from his former post in New Los Angeles.

  One rogue operative he could deal with. The long-term effects of farcaster travel were still unknown and Wojowitski had been at it longer than most. Claiming the operative had simply cracked under the strain would keep the focus off of himself and on Wojowitski, where it belonged. Besides, Wojowitski had been recruited by his predecessor, so claiming it was a poor recruit in the first place was still an opt
ion he could fall back on to avoid any blame.

  But Benson … Benson was a different story. He was one of his own personal recruits and had only managed a handful of assignments in the last few months. There was no way to claim Benson was someone else’s responsibility nor that the farcaster travel had begun to mess with the operator’s neocortex; everyone knew that only happened after more than fifty jumps.

  Recruiter 46795 stepped over to the wet bar in the corner of his office and poured himself a stiff drink. He downed the first one in a single gulp in an effort to calm his nerves and then poured a second of equal size. That one he took back to his desk with him and slowly nursed it as he gave the problem more thought.

  It seemed clear to him that he’d compounded the problem with Benson when he’d confronted him earlier that evening. Discovering the unused hypo in Benson’s locker had put him on edge, a situation that hadn’t been helped much when he’d found Benson inside Wojowitski’s prep room hours later. That’s where things had really gone wrong.

  I never should have run my mouth off like that, he thought. Benson wasn’t an idiot; if he was looking for information, he’d been given a boatload of it when I did that.

  He shook his head. It was too late to do anything about that now; what was done was done. He needed to focus on the future. To contain this thing before it got more out of hand.

  That, of course, brought the problem around full circle. Without knowing Benson’s true motives it was hard to say what he would do next and not knowing what he would do next made it extremely difficult to decide how to handle the problem itself. It was a Catch-22.

  Unless …

  The idea was a bit out of the box, but that was why Limbus had put him in this position in the first place, wasn’t it? To come up with out-of-the-box solutions to the problems at hand.

  Of course it was.

  Suddenly energized, Recruiter 46795 sat up and began making plans to handle Benson in a way that was certain to keep him and the potential mess he represented from ever posing a problem in the future.

  *

  The page came in just after one a.m., startling Nate into wakefulness. He grabbed the PCD off his nightstand and squinted at the readout.