by Sean Platt
“They’ll notice that they can’t see us,” said Dominic.
“Not with this one,” said Austin. “It’s a really good one. Got it from a guy in Little Harajuku. It’s more than a privacy jammer. It’ll spoof the surveillance feed based on conversations we’ve already had. Besides, nobody’s watching live.” He stood and walked to the door, which had a Beam sensor but also a plain old-fashioned thumb lock. He turned the lock and said, “No, sir, we’re alone.”
Dominic looked at the agent with fresh eyes. A small, knowing smile lit Austin’s lips at the corner. The smile asked if the professionals understood each other, cop to cop. Agent Smith had just exposed himself with an illegal privacy bot, and he’d removed both of their civility masks. It was a move that encouraged Dominic to speak openly — not because the agent wanted to build a case against him, but because if they could get past the bullshit, they might be able to shoot straight and help each other.
“I don’t think you’re a bad cop, Dominic,” said Austin. “You’re too good to be a bad cop. You’re like an imitation of a bad cop. The dirty cops we see, they’re working angles. They have a vibe. They have a bearing. You? You’re a Boy Scout. Three generations on this force, and as far as we can tell, you’ve all been Boy Scouts. Your grandfather refused a mafia bribe back in the 2010’s. The rest of the department took the money, but not your grandpappy. And he didn’t testify. He just didn’t take the money. Your father…”
“I know my history,” said Dominic. Something had shifted between them, their footing leveled.
“Nobody’s listening. So c’mon. Tell me why you did it. Why send moondust to the Organas?”
Dominic watched him, silent.
Austin sighed. “All right, then. Let me tell you a story,” he said, again sitting on the table’s edge. “A few years ago, we were on the case of a serial child rapist. We caught up with him in this shitty little apartment near the park. It was me and my partner at the time — a nice guy named Clem who retired last year. We were tipped that he was in the building, but the witnesses couldn’t agree on which apartment. We think it was because he moved around, seeing as so much of the building was abandoned and empty. They’d sent in bots, but it was during that sun storm, when the bots were all acting glitchy, and we’d gotten tired of fighting with our hover’s canvas to try and get them to cover us, seeing as we thought he had a victim with him at the time. So we went in ourselves. Clem took one corridor and I took another, searching what was open before barging into the locked apartments — basically trying to cover ground and kill time while waiting for the sweepers. I ended up surprising the guy in an unlocked apartment. Surprised myself, too, seeing as I wasn’t expecting to find him out in the open. Let’s just say I caught him red-handed. So I pointed my slumber at him and told him not to move. The guy raises his hands, and I see a red ring around his right wrist.”
“A pass.” Dominic had heard about passes. A red ring around the right wrist was supposed to say what license plate medallions had said back in Grandy’s day — that any person who a cop encountered wearing one had been tapped by someone important as being untouchable.
Austin nodded. “But I didn’t want to let him go. I have kids, see. Two of them. So I kept my gun up, started to get out my cuffs, and opened my mouth to call for Clem. But then I looked again at that red ring, and I realized that even if I did the right thing, this fucker would be let right back onto the streets by someone less righteous than I was. So I lowered my slumber and pulled my grandfather’s old service pistol from my shimmer holster, and since there’s no record of that weapon, I shot him twice.”
Dominic’s heart was racing, but he doubted it showed as he stared at Austin as he waited for the man to finish.
“Clem heard the shots, of course, but Clem’s a good man, like I said. We backed out, taking the kid he’d had with him back to the hover, all the while waiting for the sweepers to show. But they never did. We got lucky. The kid we recovered played along, told the recorder that another degenerate had shot his abductor and that he’d run out of the building and right into us. Nobody investigated further. Just another nugget of shit dead in the ghetto.”
Austin turned to Dominic, looking him in the eye.
“So yes, I get it. Sometimes you have to break the rules you’re supposed to uphold if you want to do what’s right. I think that’s what you do, too, Dominic. Somehow, some way, you’re doing what you think is right. I know about your sister, and I think you bought her way out of Respero. I’d have done the same. So what you’re doing with the moondust and Omar Jones and the Organas… all I can figure is that there’s a reason there. A moral reason. Tell me that reason, Dominic.”
Dominic chewed on his thoughts, not knowing how to respond. He could explain the situation with the Organas. But was there more to this? Did Austin know about the station’s security breach? Did he know which specific record was accessed, and did they know about the second person Dominic had bought out of Respero? The subtle, underhanded way the record was stolen suggested its importance to someone, somewhere.
Austin continued to watch Dominic, waiting.
Dominic believed every word of Austin’s story, and knew what a risk the agent was taking in telling him. It was hard not to reciprocate. Austin had also sealed the room and made it private using an illegal device, so even if Austin could use what Dominic said against him, it would be stupid to do so without Dominic’s permission. Dominic now had something on Agent Smith, just as Agent Smith had something on him.
Austin asked, “Is it the same reason you let Leah go?”
Dominic’s resolve broke. He looked at the privacy jammer, which had moved into a corner and was standing still, idling.
“Yes.”
“Are you helping them? Trying to stage some sort of a revolt?”
Dominic thought of the riots in the city, and how he hadn’t tried particularly hard to beat them down. But those didn’t involve Organa at all.
“I’m helping them. I believe in their cause. But I don’t believe they’re planning a revolt.”
Austin looked askance at Dominic, seemingly trying to decide whether to believe him.
“What do you mean, ‘you believe in their cause?’ ”
“It’s like you said. My family has always been cops. We’re blue-collar, hard-working people. We have blue-collar, hard-working friends. Yeah, I make a good dole from the party. But even if it were small, like my dad’s, I’d still be Directorate. It’s how we’re wired. We do our work as best we can and then we go home. But more and more, folks like me and folks I know are vanishing into The Beam. They stop worrying about life because they can take their dole and plug in all day. The Organas think The Beam is an opiate, and that in the end it just helps the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I tend to agree. So I think Organa represents an important movement. A sort of check and balance.”
“But you aren’t helping them plan a revolt.”
Dominic sighed. “They’re just a bunch of hippies. They have huts in the mountains and use their ‘extensive funding’ to buy paper books and smoke moondust.”
“But they have hackers among them.”
“A few. But… come on. They’re addicts. You know how addicts are. And you know what happens when addicts run out. I didn’t start them on dust, but I don’t want to see them die when they can’t get it. That’s all.”
“So this is a ‘save the people’ sort of initiative? Like a charity?”
“If I stop, they die. That’s all.”
“And again, when you say they’re ‘important’…”
Dominic didn’t know how to explain it any other way and didn’t feel like trying. He felt broken and tired.
“Take it however you’d like.” he said.
Austin stood up. “Okay. Fine.”
Dominic stood to match him.
“There’s just one last thing,” said Austin. “I need to know something about a person who’s at the village. Someone who maybe has more going on than you might t
hink.”
Dominic wanted to close his eyes and give up. They knew about the vagrant, who the Organas called Crumb. They knew that Dominic was supposed to send him to Respero but had taken him into the mountains instead. This was the reason for the security breach at the station. That was how, somehow, they’d learned about Dominic and Omar. The vagrant. The vagrant, who he’d always somehow worried would be his undoing.
Austin touched the wall behind him, calling up an image that must have been stored inside the room ahead of time, seeing as the jammer was still idling in the corner. But the image on the wall wasn’t of Crumb. It was of an old man with two gray pigtails, a beard, and a bright rainbow headband.
“Tell me everything you know about Leo Booker,” the agent said.
Chapter 5
Kai gripped the man in the liquid metal suit, her hands feeling the cold alloy as it shifted under her hands. Now that they’d visited whatever passed for the soldiers’ station (and, by extension, somehow Micah Ryan’s station; she didn't totally understand that) and they’d given her a second, stronger, more evolved dose of whatever drug they’d given her back in the shack, she felt as if she was mostly back to being herself. Her memories of the Orion weren’t gone, but their traumatic edge had been dulled. It felt now as if she’d been in a fight instead of having been tortured. When she'd first come off the Orion, her very foundation had been shaken, her very reality thrown to question. She hadn’t been able to trust her feet or arms. She’d felt helpless, at the mercy (or cruelty) of something she couldn’t see or prevent. At any time, it had seemed, the pain might return. She’d flinched not only literally, but psychologically as well, and with all of her soul at once.
But now that fog had dissipated, and the memory of being ripped apart seemed only to harden her, like a well-earned scar. Kai's high-end nanobots had had time to finish their work; her bruises and cuts were mostly gone. Her muscles felt tuned, not at all sore. She was ready to rumble.
But now, according to the soldier, Kai was supposed to rumble against one of her friends.
They were retracing their steps, once again speeding away from District Zero, blitzing through the air a dozen feet above the roads, then houses, then trees, then rivers and grasslands. Kai didn’t have a mask like the one worn by the screetbike’s driver, so whipping wind stung her eyes and she had to keep her head behind his for protection. The sound of the air screaming by them was a constant, high-frequency thumping. Beside them, the other soldier drove his screetbike with no passenger behind him. But one way or another, the loose end of that missing passenger would soon be resolved.
Kai felt an itch on her nose and wanted to scratch it, but both of her wrists were wrapped in liquid metal at the driver’s front. The soldier in the suit had waited until Kai had re-mounted the bike and re-wrapped her arms around his waist to tell her about Doc and what she was supposed to do to him. Before he'd said a word of it, his suit had fashioned the built-in cuffs to hold her in place. Kai didn’t understand how the suit worked, but it seemed to respond to the man's will or perhaps his brain waves. It (he?) had made a wise choice in restraining her, seeing as how her own brain waves weren't very friendly right now. Still, she couldn’t help but feel flattered. The man's suit made him incredibly strong and incredibly fast, and it even seemed to be able to manufacture weapons at will. Only a small portion of the soldier's face — just his mouth and chin — were visible. If he was genuinely worried that the unarmed, unarmored, 115-pound woman might be able to harm him, then Kai was scarier than she thought.
“Do you at least know where he is?” Kai yelled into the soldier’s ear. She hoped the answer was no. She was with two heavily armed, heavily augmented men. Even with her own defenses, Kai was essentially naked. She’d never be able to fight, outrun, or outmaneuver them. It was kill or be killed — but she and Doc were the only two people in that equation. A stalemate was the only way out, and the only way they’d get one would be if Doc managed to stay hidden.
“We know exactly where he is,” the driver yelled back. Beside them, ten feet away, the other bike's driver nodded, having heard Kai's question through his partner's input.
“He’s sneaky,” she said. “He can elude you forever.”
The driver turned his head long enough for Kai to worry that he might run into something. Even over the wind's whipping, she heard his small, condescending laugh. “You don’t know shit about what’s going on here, lady.”
Strangely, the soldier’s use of the word “lady” bothered Kai more than anything else he'd said during their hover back to the scene of Doc's escape. It was so belittling. He said “lady” the way you’d yell at a crazy bag woman. At a customer in a store who was being an asshole. At an incompetent ditz who couldn’t get her canvas to turn on the lights or make macaroni and cheese.
He turned back. Kai swallowed her irritation. She had to figure a way out. So far, there was none. They claimed they could track Doc as if he had a siren mounted on his head — and based on what Kai had seen of Micah’s more covert dealings, she had no reason to doubt that they were telling the truth. There were things Micah had access to — things he seemed to know or be able to do — that defied what Kai thought was possible. Nicolai had told her he’d seen some of the same things from Isaac. But whether the Ryans and their ilk had access to technology that Kai didn’t was immaterial; the point was that she knew they'd find Doc faster than she wanted. Their superior tracking would defeat his inferior efforts to hide. Once they found him, their superior speed and agility would defeat his inferior human flight. They’d hold him using their superior restraints. And then they’d sight her with their superior weapons and bring the ultimatum down to brass tacks: Kai would kill Doc or they’d kill her... and then kill Doc anyway.
The situation made Kai furious. She'd never precisely considered Micah a friend, but he’d always been good to her. He’d picked her up off the streets and given her a start when she'd needed it most. He'd taught her most of her subterfuge and cruelty skill set. He’d saved her ass in a few cases where she couldn’t save herself, and just a few hours ago, he'd responded to her beacon and sent two iron men to defeat the Beamers — Beamers who, if she understood right, were more or less on his side. He’d refused all of her advances (the ones she'd intended as returned favors and the ones she'd made because Micah was very handsome and magnetic), insisting that he couldn’t think of her as sexual. But if she was in any way like a daughter to Micah (something he’d said many times before), how could he torture her like this?
Kai knew the answer; it just wasn't something she wanted to see. The reason was that Micah always took care of Micah first.
What made it worse was that as twisted as it seemed, Kai could almost sympathize with Micah's thinking on the matter of The Troubling Issue of Thomas Stahl. Micah (or those who worked with him) had had a compelling reason to detain Doc — apparently something to do with what he'd seen at Xenia. Doc's escape made him a ticking bomb, and Micah, caught between a rock and a hard place, had to know if Kai was ticking, too. Maybe, as repugnant as she found the idea, she'd have to find a way to do it. There might literally be no other way. She’d done Micah’s dirty work plenty of times before, after all — had killed dozens of people on his orders. He’d paid her well, knocked her status right to the top of the Presque Beau. Given what she suspected about the elite tier just above hers, she seemed to be on the cusp of crossing a few final, critical inches. If Micah decided she could be trusted, then she might be able to move up — into this "Beau Monde" she kept hearing in whispers.
If she ended up having to do it, she told herself, it would be nothing personal. A job was a job. Kai was sometimes paid to stop a heartbeat, the same as an engineer might be called to stop an out-of-control machine. It didn’t matter that she knew Doc or that she considered him a friend. When the boss (and, honestly, the closest person Kai had to a father) said to handle someone, you handled them.
Except that Kai didn’t want to “handle” this job at all �
�� no-win situation notwithstanding.
She did like Doc. She did consider him a friend, as big of an asshole as he could sometimes be. It was personal. And what was more, Kai didn’t like the idea of being controlled. She’d always chosen who she fucked. She wasn’t like a taxi with her light on, for hire by any Joe who could manage the fare. And so far, she hadn’t precisely chosen her hit jobs (because a body was, in the end, just a body), but she also had chosen them in a way. She'd been up for each, and opposed to none. She hadn’t known any of the victims, either in person or by association. They had all been adults, mostly male, shifty enough in bearing that Kai could, the next day, look her pretty self in the mirror and convince herself that they had earned their demise. Kai had never been sicced on anyone too young, ill, pathetic, or helpless, and if she had, she'd have refused because she wasn't a taxi as an assassin, either. She’d never gone after anyone who couldn’t put up a fight. And she'd never gone after a friend.
Possibly the worst thing about "the Doc job" was that doing it would make her a tool wielded by someone else. Someone other than Kai would be deciding what Kai was going to do. The only decision she could make would be to decide whether or not she would allow that to happen — whether or not she would permit someone else to decide for her.
And once she thought about it in those terms, the answer became obvious.
Besides, Doc was a friend. He was also a client and a supplier. Kai even admired him — admired how he'd scrapped his way up from the bottom, just as she had. He wasn’t proud of everything in his past, just as Kai wasn't proud of everything in hers. It wasn't healthy to be proud of everything you left behind you in life. Everyone who had ever achieved anything had done so by taking chances... and when omelets were made, eggs got broken. Humans were flawed creatures. Untarnished people made Kai nervous. Unflinching honesty was a dishonest way to live, and there were too many bullshitters, layabouts, and whiners in this world to waste a perfectly good Doc Stahl.
