by Jett Lang
“You don’t know that. And even it’s true, where would we go?”
“I have contacts that owe me plenty of favors. They can help us once we’re out of here.”
“And how much do you trust ‘em?”
“About as much as I trust anyone. I’d rather take my chances than wait for a reply that may never come.”
“The boss has helped where he could.”
“With cryptic messages. For all we know, he’s a player in this, too, and we’re simply going about our roles. He could be giving me to Chamber the same way Chamber is giving me to Syntheia.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I gave you my trust, and it’s gotten us this far.” She set her hand in his, laced the fingers. “I need you to do the same so I can get us the rest of the way.”
He was quiet for a time. Then, “It’s that feelin’ of job loss you told me about. I’m gettin’ a bad case of it. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll get through this, employed or not.”
Jack kissed her knuckles. “You’re right. We just gotta be careful; we don’t know how many people we’ve upset.”
“I have contacts I’ve known for a long time. Most of them have zero corporate affiliation, and, in this case, that’s our one vouchsafe.”
“As long as you’ve checked ‘em,” he said. “I’ve heard some stories about the underground. None too good.”
“Some are true, but many more are exaggerated to scare the working man. Keep him on the steady grind to nowhere.”
“You sure you stopped writin’ poetry?” Jack said.
She grinned.
They waited and talked for three hours before a slender man in a security-blue jumpsuit came to escort them elsewhere. He introduced himself as Tommy, which was certainly a fake name, since, as Jack quipped, he looked like a Richard. Tommy blinked, insect-like, and about-faced to lead them through more corridors. It took several minutes for them to reach the hangar bay where they had earlier been detained. It was massive: hoverpads, cranes, freight containers, and workers – droid and human – going about their duties of unloading crates, checking crates, and lifting crates from one stack to another.
It was a brilliant display of mundane necessity.
Tommy did not speak again until he stood before their hovercraft. Then he turned on his heels and said, “You are free to leave.”
“What about our gear?” Queen said.
Tommy tossed the keys underhanded to Jack. “It’s in the vehicle. Rest assured, we did not tamper with your weapons.”
“Uh huh,” she said. “We’ll check anyway.”
“By all means,” Tommy said, twisting open the passenger door. Her zigzag bag, the rucksack, and Jack’s mesh duffel were neatly centered on each of the three backseats. Tommy gathered them and set them at her feet. “Check as you wish.”
She dropped to one leg and did just that. Removed every piece of equipment they had, verified that nothing was amiss. Tommy folded his arms and stood by. Jack went around the craft to check for any unwanted tracking devices or other surprises, she assumed. Before long both Queen and Jack decided, on the surface, everything was unsuspicious.
She repacked their gear and handed it off to Tommy. He restored the bags to their original positions, buckled them in like children. He strode to a grey console, printed out a hardcopy, and attached it to a clipboard. Handed Queen a pen.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Company policy. By signing this non-disclosure form, you hereby agree not to speak or write about what you have seen in this facility.”
“But we haven’t seen anythin’,” Jack said.
“Precisely,” Tommy said.
They signed the aliases listed on their CID cards. Tommy took back the clipboard, then presented them with a handscanner. It was a rectangle of translucent crystal, the outline of a hand in the middle. Queen had only seen one this cutting edge before. It captured her print in less than half a second after she pressed in. Jack followed suit.
“Anything else?” she said.
“Blood or urine, for example,” Jack added.
Queen swatted his ribs.
“I have what I need,” Tommy said. He returned to the console, placed the clipboard and handscanner atop. “Please be aware that your clearance codes will expire once you leave our airspace.”
“Noted.” Jack unlocked both front doors and she ducked into the passenger seat. He activated the multihued displays as the cabin sealed. There was a listening device unassumingly attached to the bottom of the glove compartment, which she silently conveyed to Jack.
“Let’s get ourselves to Prosperity, then,” he lied.
She heard the propulsion jets increase their output, the silo widen to the star-burned sky. “Wake me when we get there,” she replied, and laid her chair flat.
Heartland
On the northern side of the snow-capped mountain range, the hovercraft touched down. Its frontal lights cut cones into the dark. Queen stepped out of the passenger-side door holding the pin-shaped listening device. She stood in a grass field bracketed by pines, wound back and pitched the device. Leaves rustled in the distance.
As she considered the forest beyond, she could hear Jack from their transport’s lighted interior. He rummaged, made sure there was no other monitoring equipment secreted away. He had killed the engine. Only the sounds of nocturnal creatures pervaded. Strong scent of pine.
There was comfort in the wide spaces, the sensation alien after such a long time in the cities. Crowds and markets and skyscrapers given way to unpopulated forests and mountains. She wanted to escape into it. No Angel Bay, no New Paradise or Prosperity. No confinement, only expanses. Yet, for all the appeal of this thought, she was addled. What was she going to do out there? Settle down and live in isolation?
How will I get my job back then?
“Found another,” Jack said.
He drew her attention back to their craft. Jack had swung every door upward to make the search easier. He leaned over the middle backseat, fidgeting something free at the underside. Doing a horrible job, too.
“Hey, one sec.” she said, half-amused and somewhat puzzled. Every liquidation employee was trained in proper debugging of vehicles and buildings. They wouldn’t have skimped on Jack’s education even if he was just a pilot.
“You have to be gentler,” Queen said, approaching him.
She stopped. Jack’s hip-holsters lacked a key item: the Winnow. She had retrieved it for him while he was piloting. He said he wanted to be prepared when they landed again. You never know what’s lurking in the forest, after all. She thought it sensible at the time. Now, miles removed from civilization, and, as far as she could tell, corporate facilities, she was beginning to wonder. No, it was more than a matter of wonder; it was realization.
She withdrew her machine pistol. “Jack.”
“Yeah?” he said, not turning.
“Why is your gun drawn?”
He ceased moving. No tension in the action, just attentiveness to her words. His loose and wrinkled flight suit ruffled in the breeze.
“What’s that?”
“Why is your gun drawn?” A silent rage burned in her chest.
“I thought I’d go huntin’ for caribou.” Flatness in his tone. The usual jocular sarcasm was missing.
“Don’t.”
“Wouldn’t wanna starve out here, would ya?”
The rage cooled, numbed. She felt disquietingly rational. “So I was right,” she said. “The boss is a player in this, too.”
Jack was silent.
“And you were sent here to watch over the delivery until the liquidation order.” Her words seemed far away from where she stood. Cold mountain wind prickled at her cheeks. “I was willing to start over with you. And not on a whim. Do you know what that means?”
“It wasn’t anythin’ more than lust. Not for me. For me, it’s an assignment.” When he laughed, it was a hollow
sound.
“You don’t have to do this.” There was pain in her voice, and she despised herself for betraying it, even as minuscule as it was.
“That’s not how this works. You know that.”
She let the numbness wash over her completely, let emotion drain out. Then, “So this is the real you.”
“As real as it gets, sister.”
His Winnow was in his right hand. He rose up and faced her. The gun swung in a slow-motion arc. And she fired. Sent the weapon flying into the cabin. He cried out and held his trigger-finger, now broken backwards, bleeding. She kicked him in the stomach, and sent him slumping against the steel threshold. He stared up at her, teeth gritted.
A tendril of smoke curled from her muzzle. “Lay on the ground.”
He stood, but made no further effort to comply. “I won’t take orders from a failure.”
Queen unloaded a round into his left foot. He screamed behind his teeth as he went to one knee, then to his side. She put a boot to him, into his gut. Hard. He grunted, but didn’t move. She kept her weapon trained on him, unbuckled and yanked out his mesh duffel bag from the open door, along with the rucksack and glow-in-the-dark zigzag that was hers. In the upholstery where he’d been wrestling with a tracking device, she found his ORD. Green glow.
The order.
She unzipped her bag, removed her cards, and examined them for any tracking device. Jack was halfway to a fetal position, moaning low against the grass. She found three tiny peel-on trackers stickered onto her cash-cards. She knew that Jack had been sent to keep an eye on her, but she never suspected this degree of monitoring. If she hadn’t been so busied by Jack at the hotel, maybe she would have had time to inspect thoroughly. He had run interference on her subtlety and effectively, gaining her affection through patient-care, flirtation, and an easy-going demeanor. What a fool she had been.
What a gullible little fool.
She peeled off the trackers and let the wind carry them off. The rucksack was emptied of its contents next, food containers clattering. She swapped her credits, Jack’s double-barrel, and a retractable dagger over, fastened the top, and replaced it on the backseat. Then she thought better of it, and took his whole knife kit.
“You can keep the rest,” she said. His bag landed beside him.
His chuckle was husky. “It doesn’t matter how far underground you go.”
She disassembled the machine pistol, tossed the parts one by one in random directions. When nothing but the handle remained, she dropped it behind her and knelt. The remote-key for the hovercraft was in Jack’s topmost pocket. As she retrieved it, he smiled, half his face concealed.
“You think you’re doin’ me a favor. You’re not,” Jack said. “Boss’ll axe me and find someone else – you know the rundown.”
“Then I guess you’re destined for unemployment, too,” she said, rising with the remote clutched firmly in her hand. “If I see you again, I won’t just wound you.”
“You’ll never be safe again.”
“Take some time and reply to your boss.” She threw his ORD well past him. White ticker-tape tailed out the back; the digital readout still shone green. “You should lie and buy yourself some time. You’re good at that.”
“Good enough to have fooled you.”
She keyed every door closed except the pilot’s side. Jack’s Winnow was resting in the grass there, having flown from his hand and out the other side of the vehicle. It was the single most expensive firearm on the market, and there it lay, like its user, with a bullet hole through it, in disrepair. Before she met Jack this would have appeared a tragedy in her eyes, but now she didn’t know what it represented. Too many things. Or maybe nothing.
“Hey.”
“What do you want, Jack?”
“I can tick something off my bucket list now.”
“What’s that?”
“A list of activities you wanna do before you die.”
“Go fuck yourself, Jack.” Queen slipped onto the pilot seat. She began the start-up sequence, and the engine hummed alive.
Jack said something else, but the wind was now at a full gale and she couldn’t hear it. She didn’t need to hear it anyway. He was dead to her and dead to the company that wanted her in an unmarked grave. Her only hope for a remedy was in her contacts, those who fell outside of the corporate realm that dominated the continent. Each year that list grew shorter, but there were enough stubborn holdouts to give her options. It would be difficult, but the difficulty was better than the alternative.
She combed her fingers through her hair, let out a breath. She sealed the door, the cool outside air leaking in through the broken window in the back. The pine scent had turned odious. She looked out the passenger windows as she completed the final prep for the takeoff. The Dead Man Jack was not in view. He’d have no time to crawl for the machine pistol and reassemble it. Not with a broken hand. And that bag she left him had only knives and miscellaneous utility items. What would he do? Slash at the paintjob?
She brought her attention back to the pilot’s panel. The battery charge was at seventy percent, which was plenty to get her to Prosperity. She knew someone there who could help her debug and re-register this craft for her use, possibly even sell it. If he was alive.
Queen lifted out of the pine grove and up into a panorama of starlit dark and wind-swept trees. Far below, she imagined Jack staring up at her, his grimacing face unchanged. She’d remember the truth, not the deception. It would make the eventual forgetting easier, she hoped. Then again, she had hoped for a lot of things with him.
Easing the throttle forward, she soared to Prosperity.
※
A man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit led Queen through a maze of shelves packed high with dysfunctional technology. Circuit boards, car motors, computer monitors, and plastic crates overflowing with nuts, bolts, and screws. All of these were balanced perilously beside her and overhead, and when the man at last led her to the glow of a modern holographic screen, she breathed out in relief.
The workstation the man slouched over was in dire need of a dusting, though that could be said for the entire warehouse. He, on the other hand, was the picture of cleanliness and style; the jumpsuit a custom job, form-fitted to his short and sturdy build. He manipulated a three-dimensional rendering of her hovercraft in his hands, the normally dusky tone whitened in the light. Five red dots blinked within the projection.
“Damn, woman, this thing is loaded.”
“That’s why I’m here, Eddie. Can you take them out?”
Eddie shrugged. “For the right price I can turn this baby into a parade float.” He raised his right hand over his shoulder, rubbed his thumb over his fore and middle finger.
Queen unslung her rucksack and withdrew two of her untraceable cash-cards. She slapped them down on the dusted metal of the workstation. Eddie barely turned his head. Considered the currency.
“My fee has gone up since last time.”
“That was three months ago.”
“And security is hammering on my usual suppliers. Arresting those who won’t cooperate, or are too stupid not to hide.” He tapped the two cards. “Rate has doubled.”
She had already paid Eddie for the privilege of landing in his warehouse, but he was a shrewd businessman and she knew he would have no scruples about kicking her out. She’d known him for a short span, so there was no rapport between them, no room to haggle. The price was firm.
She doubled down. It was a good thing she had not spent excessively on clothing or literature. Her past frugality would serve her well in the money vacuum that was the underworld.
“Now we’re talking,” Eddie said, his wet and pearly smile gleaming in the holo-light. “I see New Paradise is still treating you good.”
“You know it.”
Eddie waved a slim tablet through the hovercraft hologram and the 3D image transferred, shrunken to a smaller but discerning size over the tablet screen. He swept the cards into one of the workstations many dra
wers, scraped it shut.
“That thing needs an oiling.”
“Me too,” Eddie said.
“Don’t look at me.”
As he returned to the maze, Queen fell in step behind him, her rucksack over her shoulder. “This is going to take a while.” He rounded corners without averting his eyes from the hologram. “I have a rest area if you–”
“I’d like to watch, if it’s all the same.”
“That works. Plenty of my customers have trust issues. It’s hard to find an honest man in illicit business.”
No doubt. “Do you have an ETA? I’m on a schedule.”
“Four hours. Longer if I find trackers that aren’t showing up on my software.”
“Do you think you’ll find more?”
“The ones I’ve pinged are in painfully obvious spots – decoys, most likely. I won’t know for certain till I start rooting around.”
“Is it extra if you find more?”
“It’s all-inclusive,” Eddie said. “I charged you an arm and a leg to dock here for a reason.”
“Smart.”
“I like to think so.”
It took Eddie six hours to find every tracker. Queen sat on a padded foldout chair at a safe distance from his plasma cutter and industrial drill. In the expansiveness of the shadowed warehouse, Eddie worked with the aid of a darkened face shield and ground-mounted LED cylinders. Plentiful light allowed her to observe the dismantling, and the power tools were dampened by sound absorbers along the ceiling and walls. The hovercraft seating had been removed early on and placed off to the side, four of the seats leaning back-to-back against one another while a fifth lay overturned on the smooth grey concrete.
Eddie tossed the last four-by-three inch tracker onto a pile next to his feet and hoisted himself out of the vehicle. He squatted and picked up one of the little black boxes, examined it close. Loose red, green, and blue wiring tailed out from the thin black cords connected to the tracker. He traced his index finger across.
“Whoever installed these was on a budget. Cheap model.” Eddie flipped his face shield up, walked to the dark borderland where she sat. “This was the most expensive one of the batch, but it’s still only a hundred credits, if that. Discount tech. The main tracker was hardwired under your dashboard and feeding directly off your electrical system. The others were tethered into it by a series of cables beneath the floor and ceiling; that’s the only reason I had to cut in. Elaborate, but low-cost. Not the work of a rookie.” When he offered her the part, she took it.
