Expelled (Interplanetary Spy for Hire Book 1)

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  Damien blinked. He couldn’t help but give a straight answer. “I’m good these days.”

  Burrett nodded. “I’m proud of you.” The evil that was always present in Burrett’s eyes disappeared. Damien only saw a frail man who was barely holding on. But Damien caught himself. Burrett was a master manipulator. Don’t fall for it, he reminded himself. Burrett leaned forward and the evil reemerged. “I need to know what you told this spy tart, Jayne Austin.”

  “I told her you were dangerous. I told her you saw life as a game and you were only interested in winning.” Damien laughed to himself. “I told her I wasn’t much for modern art.”

  Burrett laughed, too. “What’d Jayne say? What did she know?”

  “She knows enough. She’s good, Burrett. Listen carefully, because what I’m about to tell you is not a warning. It’s a threat. Jayne is the best challenge you’ll ever face. I found her file. I know what she’s done and what she’s capable of.” Damien relaxed and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think you’re going to win. Not this time.”

  Burrett mirrored Damien’s action, an interrogation tactic he never forgot. “In a sense, old friend, I think you’re right. I think we’re both going to lose.” Burrett rubbed his stubbly chin. “On the other hand, Jayne is the most inspiring person I’ve ever gotten to work with… No offense.”

  “Trust me, none taken.”

  “I want to make sure Jayne has a good time. That’s all. I feel I owe it to her.”

  Burrett stood up and walked over to his makeshift home in the corner of the decrepit yogurt shop. He turned on his tablet, and then opened an ancient laptop hooked up to the multi-level police scanner. He opened a tool kit and sifted through the plethora of clamps, screwdrivers, hammers, laser-yanks, and thermo-saws.

  “I’m building a gift for Jayne. It’s a playground, kind of. But I need an integrated A.I. unit for an array of death beams. Patterns, you know, are so boring.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you do, Burrett. You’re at the end of the line. Look at you! Maybe if you cooperate, the end won’t be so bad. You have enough information to swing a deal!”

  “No one wants me!” Burrett barked. He took a pair of needle nose pliers and a thermocutter with a plasma core out from his toolbox and brought them over to Damien. Burrett sat back down across from Damien. In an instant his calm had returned. “You made me lose my train of thought for a moment. Anyway, may I see your hand?”

  Damien held out his natural hand.

  “Very cute, Damien, but I am a busy man. Your other hand.”

  Reluctantly, Damien extended the new, robotic arm toward his enemy. Burrett powered on the thermocutter. “The A.I. system in most modern prosthetics is a little primitive, being a consumer grade technology, but it’s perfect for my intentions.”

  “Please, Burrett. It’s not worth this.”

  “I’m afraid it is, Damien. For me, it’s free. Sure I’ll have to recharge the plasma core on these cutters, but that costs no more than ten or fifteen credits. I’m saving a small fortune by stealing the A.I. integration out of your arm.” Burrett laughed as he performed the mechanical autopsy.

  Damien sat still. Either give in, or die. Maybe a stolen unit was covered by the two-weeks guarantee of adjustments.

  “Almost done, old friend. Just… getting the seal around this link open…”

  Damien remembered a promise he made to himself. A promise he had been trying to forget for the past hour, out of fear. But it returned to the forefront of his mind with full force. The promise that he would kill Burrett if he ever had the chance.

  Damien harnessed all of the remaining power and control his metal arm afforded him. In the split millisecond it took for his barely intact A.I. integration software to communicate his impulse to action, he clenched his fist and propelled it forward, plowing a deep and powerful punch into Burrett’s stomach.

  Burrett flipped over backward, toppling the chair with him. Damien rose from his chair and stood over Burrett.

  Burrett spat blood into his hand.

  “You’ll be stopped, Burrett. If not me, then the girl. But I’ll do it right now if I have to.” He raised his fist.

  “Between the two of you, my money is on the girl.” Burrett pulled a one-shot penny blaster from his boot and zapped Damien in the head. Damien fell over, a hole from his prefrontal cortex to his temporal lobe. His robotic arm twisted, confused at the loss of its primary control system.

  Burrett returned to work. He removed the A.I. integration hardware from the arm. With the needle nose pliers, he carefully placed the fragile component into a foam-lined pocket-sized carrying case.

  He left Damien’s body behind, along with the rest of the evidence of his hideout. This spot was one of his many deteriorating adoptive homes. Damien was one of the many bodies he planned to leave in his wake.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  ISA Offices, Malicarsh Building, L45, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros

  Once things had settled down, Jayne went back to the office, if only because she had nowhere else to go. Part of her wanted to go straight back to level twelve and search every inch of the slum until she found Burrett. The rest of her wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for a week. She was leaning towards the second option, if only because the first carried a possibility of further endangering Cameron's job.

  Unfortunately, she opened the office door and found Merry was already there waiting for her.

  "Do me a favor," she said before the other woman could speak. "Save the I-told-you-so's for tomorrow. Just give me a day, alright?"

  "I'm not a monster, Jayne." Merry, sitting at her desk, looked mildly offended, but mostly just as tired as Jayne was. "Do you really think I'm the kind of person that would rub this in your face?"

  "Why not?" Jayne asked, throwing her hands up and sinking down onto the settee, still in her coat and boots. "You were right! I couldn't leave well enough alone. I insisted on going after Burrett at the expense of everything else, and now I've blown our cover and a man is dead."

  "You didn't ask Ray to go in there," Merry said. "That's not on you. And you didn't blow your cover either. I heard what he said in there. He already knew you were watching him. He was waiting for you."

  "Yeah, and I gave him exactly what he wanted!" There was a hysterical edge to Jayne's voice and a sting in her eyes. She rose from the couch to pace, her hands in her hair. "I played right into his hands! I'm so goddamn predictable."

  "You couldn't have known—"

  "But you did! You knew I was being a dumbass! If I had listened to you, none of this would have happened!"

  Merry shut her mouth. She didn't have an answer for that.

  "What the fuck am I supposed to do now Merry?" Jayne demanded, rounding on her. "We're never going to get the drop on him now! We never had it to begin with! He's not going to show himself again unless he's baiting me, and if I go after him I'll get more people killed! And if I don't… "

  "You need to sleep." Merry answered firmly, standing up. "That is all you need to do right now."

  She tried to usher Jayne towards the bedroom and Jayne pushed her away, hard enough to make her stumble. Jayne's fists were hard at her sides, her breathing rough and uneven. She wanted a fight so badly she could taste it and the fact that Merry wouldn't give it to her was the most infuriating part of this.

  "What I need to do is get ahead of him!" Jayne snapped. "What I need is for you to stop pretending to be my mother and do the job I fucking pay you for! Get me a god damn lead before this lunatic kills someone else!"

  "For fuck's sake, Jayne," Merry said, exasperated. "Would you stop?"

  "Stop what?" Jayne demanded, stepping into Merry's space, goading her. "Trying to catch the psychopath we set loose?"

  "Stop pretending this is about him!" Merry shouted back, her patience worn thin. Despite how hard she'd been pushing, it caught Jayne off guard when Merry pushed back. "Stop trying to act like he's the reason you're fucked up! You're not even fooling your
self anymore! It's Chamberlain! It's been Chamberlain since the beginning."

  So soon after being called out the same way by Burrett, Jayne didn't have an answer. She stepped back, scrambling for a denial.

  "It was the first time you'd killed anyone," Merry said, more frustrated than angry. "That would fuck up anyone. But you… you think you're not allowed to let it bother you or something. Like because you're a spy that's not going to affect you? So we've been waiting months for you to deal with it, to talk to someone about it, but you won't even admit that's what's wrong! You just fixated on Burrett, like if you could catch him it would just magically fix everything. Well it won’t, Jayne! Even if you had caught Burrett tonight, you would still feel like this."

  Jayne shook her head, refusing to believe it, and Merry sighed.

  "Jayne," she said quietly. "Please. I can't watch you destroy yourself over something this stupid..."

  Jayne's futile anger was draining quickly towards exhaustion again, no matter how hard she tried to hang on to it. Silently, she shuffled past Merry towards the back room.

  "You're right," she said. "I do need to sleep."

  Before either of them could say any more, a sharp static sound from Merry's computer interrupted them. Merry turned to look at it, lips pursed in confusion. A window had opened in the center of her screen and it was flashing an image steadily.

  "A popup?" Jayne guessed, confused. "Don't you have adblock?"

  "Yeah, to say the least," Merry confirmed, sitting down at her desk. "Wait, isn't that...?"

  She trailed off, because she and Jayne had both recognized it. A pinup style logo of a smiling woman in an improbable space suit, holding a box of donuts and riding a comet. The mascot of Cosmos donuts. Beneath the image flashed neon words "COME FIND ME."

  "Trace it," Jayne said immediately.

  "Already on it," Merry replied, bringing up a quantum-IP trace in a few clicks.

  "Why is he baiting us already?" Jayne asked, panic creeping into her voice. "There's no way he's set something up for us this fast."

  "More importantly how the hell did he get past my security?" Merry's agitation was obvious, and only grew more so as the IP traceback returned six different locations, none of them on this continent. "Of course. Asshole couldn't make it easy for us even when he wants us to find him. This is going to take a while."

  Jayne backed off to let her work, taking a deep breath. Maybe she should try to get some rest while Merry was working this out.

  Before she could make a decision, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered it immediately, relieved to hear Cameron's voice.

  "Good news," he said. "I still have a job."

  "That's a relief." Jayne leaned against Merry's desk, rubbing her eyes. "I'm so sorry for this mess Cameron."

  "It's not your fault," he said. "Neither of us could have expected what Ray was planning."

  Jayne put a hand over her face, took deep breaths to stop the guilt and shame that tried to overwhelm her.

  "I'm sorry," she said again, her voice breaking.

  "Burrett is the only one to blame here," Cameron said. "So tell me we're going to catch that son of a bitch."

  "Of course," Jayne said immediately, ignoring her doubts for the moment. "The cocky asshole just sent us a message. ‘Come find me’."

  "Seriously?"

  "Merry's tracking it now."

  "Trying to, anyway," Merry called out. "The crazy bastard bounced it through at least a dozen proxies. I'm trying to trace it back, but it's basically a needle in a haystack at this point."

  "Does she know if he used a satellite?" Cameron asked.

  "Hang on," Jayne said, putting him on speakerphone. "Merry, did he use a satellite?"

  "Probably," Merry said with a shrug. "The best proxies bounce to a satellite first and then scatter to planetside servers. I could probably even tell you which one he used with a little work. Of course, I don't have clearance to go poking around in satellite data. I can hack it, but the first stretch of gaining access is going to be a lot of guesswork. Without some kind of clearance, it’d take me at least a couple days.”

  "I may be able to help with that, actually," Cameron said. "Stay put. I'll be right there."

  +++

  He arrived within the hour, just a little behind Fred, who they’d called right after him.

  "Donuts, really?" Cameron said, spotting the boxed dozen Fred had brought with him.

  "If we want to find Burrett, we’ve got to think like Burrett." Fred said defensively, mouth full of donut.

  "What have you got for me?" Merry asked as Cameron made directly for her desk.

  "I called in a favor from a friend," he said. "They do a lot of work with satellites, and they keep a tag on any they've worked on. I got you a login to the unlisted hidden site where they store live backups of any activity that passes through their tagged satellites. If you can tell which satellite Burrett went through and it's one of the ones my friend has tagged, it should get you a little closer."

  Merry's eyes widened. "Hell yeah, it should! It'll also make us fucking millionaires! Do you have any idea how valuable that kind of information is?"

  "I do not," Cameron confessed. "But I imagine that's why my friend said to tell you that this login would only work once, and that if you touch anything except what you came for, they will personally — this is a direct quote by the way — ‘remove your fingers one joint at a time’."

  Merry rolled her eyes. "Like I’ve never heard that one before. Just let me figure out which satellite we're looking for."

  "What exactly does your friend do?" Jayne asked, raising an eyebrow.

  "That's classified," Cameron replied. "But let's just say any evidence found in that data would definitely not be admissible in court."

  Even with all Merry's skill and the data Cameron had found her, it took her several hours to find what they were looking for. Jayne, despite her certainty that she wouldn't be able to sleep any time soon, dozed against Cameron's shoulder as he and Fred sat on the settee talking quietly about a video game they both played.

  "Got it," Merry said at last, making Jayne jerk back to alertness and drop the donut she'd fallen asleep eating. "And frankly, I am not paid enough. I had to write a whole program to make this database searchable before I could even find the right satellite, and then another to find the correct signature among the billions of signals that bounced off that satellite during the right time frame. Then I had to trace that back to the proxy service Burrett sent it through and hack that to get Burrett's user ID and original IP—"

  "But you found him?" Jayne said.

  "Yes," Merry said, cutting to the chase. "I found him. Narrowed it down to an address on level fifteen. A graveyard."

  Fred scoffed. “How on-brand.”

  Jayne stared at the address just a moment longer, memorizing it, then spun away to grab her jacket.

  "Jayne, wait-" Merry said as Jayne headed for the door, Cameron and Fred scrambling to grab their things.

  "I know," Jayne said, cutting Merry off. "This is stupid. It's a trap, and if I had two brain cells to rub together I'd get a good night's rest and then tell the police. That about cover it?"

  "Pretty much," Merry said with a sigh.

  "I'm going anyway," Jayne replied, turning back to the door.

  "Hang on," Merry said, standing up and grabbing her own jacket. "I'm going with you."

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Eternal Grace Graveyard, L15, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros

  Death in the city was as complicated as everything else. Death was a thing to both ignore and romanticize. Whenever possible it should be tucked away from sight and never mentioned. But when the simple necessity of it insisted upon intrusion into daily life, then at least it should come wrapped in roses and marble.

  Jayne figured that dressing it up in pageantry and ritual made it easier to pretend that death was something pretty, something that arrived at its appointed time. But death, in her experience, was neith
er romantic nor timely. It was as plain as water, as common as a spring shower, and twice as likely to appear out of nowhere just when you thought the forecast called for nothing but sun.

  While people would have preferred the dead to be kept somewhere far from the living, on a lovely green hill in a pasture somewhere perhaps, practicality had other ideas. There were two options for the dead in Theron. Space in the sub-level catacombs, overcrowded, expensive, and difficult to access for mourners, was reserved for those with strong religious or cultural objections to cremation. Everyone else had their ashes interred in a slim, elegant marble drawer in one of the graveyards.

  There was at least one on each level. A discreet building usually, somewhere out of the way, and often only subtly labeled, if at all. Inside, the walls were lined with marble cells set with brass plaques bearing the names and inscriptions of the deceased. Occasionally, an ornate door would mark the entrance to a family mausoleum, a room the size of a walk-in closet where extended family could be laid to rest together, assuming the family in question had the money.

  "Still can't believe this guy literally lives in a graveyard." Fred shook his head in disbelief as they parked Cameron's cruiser just out of sight of the building, its plain white brick stained yellow by smog.

  "It makes sense actually," Jayne said, scanning the building for anything suspicious. "Especially an old one like this down in the low levels. It reached capacity ages ago, and even the freshest burials are too old to expect regular visitors. A caretaker comes through maybe once a season. Private, unmonitored, and climate controlled to boot. A perfect place to lay low."

  "Just watch your step," Merry said behind them, her eyes on her tablet. "This is definitely a trap."

  "You see anything?" Fred asked, leaning in to look at the tablet over her shoulder. Merry shook her head.

  "This is where the signal came from," she confirmed. "But there aren't any signals coming in or out of there now on any frequency I can see. If he's left any surprises in there for us, they're too analog to pick up."