Rise

by Victoria Powell

  “No, sir.”

  “Yet I have here a maid who would happily listen to my private conversations.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t think. I just....”

  “What?” He barked.

  “I just wanted to know more.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

  He tapped the table with his fingers, the insistent little patter drumming into Alex’s head.

  “You know, I spoke about this with the Ambassador,” he said.

  “About this?”

  He sniggered. “Well, about the risk of terrorists to our energy market. He said it was the least of his problems.”

  “Oh,” Alex said, trying to fill the silence.

  “Really, you’re as ignorant as him about it, but at least he has a good reason for being distracted,” Simons said. “For one, he’s got a police commander who keeps hanging people.”

  Alex scoffed at that. “They’re his police.”

  “They were his police,” Mr Simons insisted. “You don’t know how politics works here.”

  “I’m sure I don’t want to. It’s all corrupt.”

  He shook his head and paused. “Do you want to work here?”

  He took her off guard. “Um... yes.”

  “Well, answer me one question - what do you really know about the Ambassador?”

  What did she know? She thought hard. “He’s ordered the deaths of hundreds of people.”

  “Have you seen the orders?” He chided her.

  “No.”

  “Next. What do you know about the Ambassador?” He coaxed.

  “The Ambassador orders the police to capture illegals.”

  He shook his head. “Ambassadors are just big knobs from Tameri who’ve upset some bigger knobs. They are sent away for a couple of decades to cool off. When they arrive in their new walled city an Ambassador doesn’t know anything about the colonies, because nobody in Tameri does. It’s very easy for the police to gain power over a new Ambassador and control him.”

  “Does that make him blameless?” She asked.

  He paused. “What do you know about the Ambassador?”

  She was getting angry with this game. “He’s a cold, hard man who hides behind a mask.”

  He sighed, irritated. “I’m disappointed. He’s more than just the mask.”

  “Ok,” She replied flippantly.

  “I know what I’m talking about. I suppose you could say, I’m one of the few people who’ve seen him without the mask. I’ve seen his character,” Mr Simons grinned to himself.

  “He talks with you?”

  “A lot of people trust a blind man,” he said.

  She trusted him. Even knowing how close he was to the Ambassador, something told her that he wouldn’t lie to her, he wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Think about this - the Ambassador has been betrayed by his country. They exiled him. Kicked him out. What would a man like that really want? Despite everything, he wants to go home. He wants to go home and blow the government wide open. He wants to expose the secret subjugation of the colonies. He wants to make the country’s leaders pay for ruining his life. Now that’s something, isn’t it?”

  Why was he telling her this? What did the Ambassador plan to do when he got back home?

  Alex leant forward in her chair. “Why doesn’t he try to help the illegals? If he hates what’s happening to the colonies so much then why doesn’t he stop it?”

  “He is helping. The illegals are killing people, so the police react in kind. The Ambassador can hardly command the police to stop shooting back. If the illegals surrender then things can change.” He flung up his arms in exasperation. “But that will never happen.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  Silence bloomed.

  His face softened. “Well, do you understand now? Do you think you could see the world from his perspective for one day?”

  The whole conversation turned her body to ice, like feeling the chill of wind as she balanced on the edge of a tower.

  “All they want is to get out, get away from the fighting.”

  He straightened in his chair. “Is that what you want? To get away from the city?”

  “Yes. Is that a bad thing? Can things be worse anywhere else?” She shuffled in the seat. Had she said too much?

  A smile twitch just for a moment. “Yes, things can be worse, but I see what you mean.”

  “Whatever his motives, the Ambassador is not doing the right thing for the city. Neither are the activists.”

  Mr Simons stood up, indicating for Alex to do the same. “I’ve said too much. If you tell anyone we’ve had this conversation... I could get into a lot of trouble. The Ambassador would slit my throat.”

  She looked cautiously at him. “Your secret is safe with me, sir.”

  “Are you staying in my service?” He asked.

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  31 - The Tech

  Hot, dry and musty; the room was choked with noise and heat generated by whirling supercomputers wedged into the lab. A scruffy looking cop, possibly in his early twenties and into his twentieth consecutive hour in the office, squeezed between two of the machines checking their output temperatures. The machines had been running for sixteen days, the temperature slowly increasing towards critical. Maybe they had two more days of run time before an emergency shutdown was needed.

  “How’s it looking back there, Ricky?” A voice shouted over the computers from somewhere beyond the moonscape of hardware.

  The junior cop pushed his shirtsleeves up higher. “Looking good for now. Can we get any extra fans brought in to buy us a couple more days?”

  “Got all the fans already.”

  “You sure, Sarge?” Ricky called back, sidestepping towards the voice along the narrow passage between the machines.

  He turned the corner and into a more open space, next to the doorway. The sergeant, slightly older and more weather-worn, was sitting at a narrow table with a network of five monitoring screens plastered across a wall. Reams of code rippled across the screens. The lines danced, telling an avid story to Sergeant Jack Davies.

  Davies shrugged. “The model needs another five days of run time, which we haven’t got.”

  “We need to get this equipment moved to an office with an outside wall. We need an extractor fan system.”

  “Constable, you remember how sensitive this project is? We’re stuck in this office, in the bowels of the station, because it is secure here,” Davies said.

  Rick Travis had been working as a constable for the past five years. His chances of promotion were nil. His chances of recognition were slim. All his future held was this stinking, steaming office filled with computers and another random military project to work on.

  He sighed deeply. “No, I know. Another secret project.”

  “Hey, it proves we trust you, eh?” Davies smirked at him.

  “Well,” Rick said. “I guess I’ve got a lot of secrets now.”

  Davies nodded up at the screen and motioned for Rick to sit next to him. “Back to the project at hand. We can’t run a complete simulation, but we can make sound assumptions from these results. This city wall defence system would be effective against most aerial and terrestrial attacks.”

  “You’d be happy to present findings with an incomplete simulation set?” Rick asked.

  “We don’t have any choice. We can’t wait,” Davies said.

  Why couldn’t they wait? Were they expecting someone to attack the city? Rick had learnt from experience not to ask questions like that, but the questions were still there in the back of his mind. What was outside the city walls?

  “Ok, we can start writing up the report now.”

  “Run the simulation to the end of cycle ninety-five, then pull off the stats. Let the sim keep running until the temperature hits critical. If any anomalies spike after cycle ninety-five then we can capture those in the report before submission,” Davies instructed.

  “Got it.”


  Davies chucked a notepad and pen in front of his constable. “Ok, get this down. So far, we know the west side is the weakest defence point. That’s always where breaches occur during the more extreme simulations. We know that if there’s an air strike the CBD is covered from the north and east, but the south and west need more intensive air defence systems.”

  Rick scribbled furiously. “It also showed six energy sites that were insecure.”

  “And that we need to diversify our transport routes for food entering the city,” Davies added.

  Rick nodded intensely, glancing up at the screen for inspiration. “Do we want to tell them about the risk to the fuel cells on the border of Falisans?”

  Davies shook his head. “You know that those are top secret. We can’t mention them in this report. Attach impact maps to the report. That will make the vulnerabilities of secret sites obvious to the right people.”

  “Ok. They might have moved the fuel cells to another site by now.”

  “That’s why we make the maps, to cover our backs.”

  There was a knock at the door, then it rapidly opened without waiting for an invitation. An inspector, in his fifties with a thick moustache, stepped inside and took in the confines and smells of the room.

  “Which one of you is Constable Travis?” He demanded.

  Rick put his notepad face down on the table. He knew the rules about security.

  “I am, sir,” Rick answered.

  Defoe strode over to the young man and shook his hand warmly. “Inspector Defoe. I work with insurgent intelligence. Deputy Commander Remea instructed me to speak to you about an active tracker.”

  Davies stood up. “Inspector? I’m Sergeant Davies. Do you have clearance to be in this room?”

  “Excuse me?” Inspector Defoe barked.

  Rick stood up too, intervening. “Inspector Defoe, let’s step into the satellite network lab and see if we can find your mark.”

  “Travis,” Davies said. “This project is time-sensitive.”

  “I won’t keep your lap dog long, Davies,” Defoe said wryly.

  Rick felt violated by that comment, but followed the Inspector into the next room, turning apologetically to Davies as he left. The Inspector seemed like a jerk, but most of them were. They grew extra layers of skin to cover over the mental scarring left by working the streets. Sometimes Rick looked back at his time in the police and reminded himself what a cushy number he had.

  Ignoring his superior, Rick walked past the Inspector and settled down in front of one of many monitors in the smaller, but cooler computer lab. The screen came to life as he typed in a passcode.

  “So, Inspector, who are we looking for?” Rick asked as he prepped the tracker search engine.

  Defoe shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I can’t tell you who we are tracking and I can’t talk about the wheres or whatfors of why we are tracking them.”

  This wasn’t the first time Rick had been asked to track someone without knowing who it was. They had four hundred trackers passing through there every year. Half of them never activated and a quarter of them were activated but nobody ever requested the tracking data. That left one hundred new souls who wandered around the city every year never knowing that they were being actively monitored. Rick only had name labels for about forty of those few.

  “That’s Ok, Inspector. Do you have the tracker number?” Rick asked.

  “Nope. I know it became active within the last week, more than a day ago,” Defoe said.

  That could narrow it down to a handful. Rick clicked on the advanced search function to restrict the date range. The computer whizzed and pulled up three trackers.

  “Can you give me anything else to refine the search?” Rick asked tentatively.

  “Like what?”

  “Locations, preferably where they were when the tracker was planted. It takes the tracker a couple of days to link up with enough satellites to pin-point someone’s exact location, but if the subject is in a stable location for a few hours we could find which region they are in,” Rick said. This was nearly a script now.

  Defoe hesitated.

  “Inspector, I’m working on more secretive projects than this,” Rick said.

  Defoe smirked. “I’ll take your word on that. Assume the subject was near business district, the vacant warehouses near Falisans.”

  Rick checked the screen. One of the trackers was activated in Falisans. The other two were closer together. “Ok, are we talking about the warehouses near Central or Middle Meadston?”

  “The first one. That’s close to Drayton, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did the subject go next?”

  Rick opened up the tracking data for Tracker #859010. The screen loaded a map showing all activity over the past month - if the tracker had been active that long. It showed heartrate and sleep patterns too. Most cops wanted to know when their subject was most vulnerable.

  “Wow, this is odd,” Rick said, squinting at the screen.

  “What?”

  “The tracking data is really erratic. The subject was in a stable location, but then there was a sudden wake up, spikes in heartrate and... the tracker disappear for nearly two hours.” Rick whizzed forwards through the sequence.

  “Would it disappear if the subject died?”

  “No. I mean, the heartrate would flatline but the tracker wouldn’t disappear. Plus, I’ve set up an alarm if one of our tracked subjects flatlines. I always know which ones are dead.” Rick paused the tracker sequence. “And here we are,” he said with relief. “The tracker started talking with satellites again. It’s narrowing down on a location in the cafe district.”

  “Has it found one?”

  Rick noticed the eagerness sneaking into Defoe’s voice. He flicked the tracker data forward to present time. “Yeah, it’s still in the cafe district.” On the screen he circled the house the tracker appeared to be inside. “The tracker has been stable at this location for over forty-eight hours.”

  Rick wrote down the address and passed it to Defoe. The Inspector looked at it in awe. Knowing his job, Rick turned back to the screen and looked at the present heartrate data.

  “The subject is calm and resting. There’s sufficient movement activity over the past twenty-four hours to suggest the subject has free reign of the house. They spend the nights in an upstairs room,” he added.

  Defoe pointed at the address. “Look up this address. I want to know who lives there.”

  Rick nodded. He didn’t get this request often. Cops usually segregated the tracker analysts from the actual investigation. Rick opened up the central database and clicked on the address finder tab.

  “Ok, let’s see.” Rick tapped in the address. “Ah. It’s a restricted access address.”

  Defoe checked the screen. “You get those often?”

  “No, sir. There are few reasons why an address is restricted in the database,” Rick said.

  Defoe stood up. He looked confused. “I better scout out the address.”

  “The subject doesn’t seem to be in a rush to leave.”

  Defoe nodded. “I don’t want to bolt in and scare any potential contacts away, but that house could be home to some dignitary or senior police officer. We can’t risk leaving the subject there.”

  “Good luck, Inspector.”

  32 - The Leader

  The warehouse looked no sturdier or more secure in the full beams of mid-afternoon sunlight than it had in the light of the flickering bulbs pinned to the building’s skeleton. Giving it a cursory review on her approach back to the building, Zoe saw the structural flaws. Metal sheets on the west wall were poised to slip. Some of the windows were broken and joints were wasted with rust. What had she been thinking, bringing them here?

  Her day had been fruitful. While Toby was scouting the city centre Zoe skimmed the edge of the cafe district. Three of the buildings on her list of potential hideouts were still empty. One terrace house with a large basement complex ticked the
final box on her checklist. The place was not perfect, but it was a thousand times better than the dump they were in now.

  The entrance to the warehouse was ajar, showing the guts of the building to anyone who passed. Zoe approached tentatively. Had she been away too long? Had something happened inside? There weren’t any cops about. The police were the opposite of subtle after a raid, but it wasn’t only the police that posed a threat to them.

  Getting closer, skirting the building’s rusty shell, Zoe watched the entrance. Something shifted inside. The shadow of a man? Voices were coming from inside. They sounded stressed, but not panicked or pained. What was going on?

  Barely a metre from the entrance, Ewan Thompson walked past the doorway, closely followed by Emma. Neither looked under duress. They would be soon. Zoe pushed through the part-opened doorway ready to kick her way through the lacklustre guards inside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She shouted.

  There they were, six or seven of them, bickering near the doorway. Ewan and Emma were the most senior people there. Hywel’s bit on the side was smirking at them. That woman knew how to push buttons. Zoe recognised one of the newer guards standing next to Emma holding a crate of vegetables or food stuffs. Was he Harry or Gary? He was an idiot, that’s for sure.

  “Zoe, you’re back early,” Ewan said.

  Zoe closed the entrance and lowered the barriers. “Good thing too. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The young guard dropped his box. “Helping move crates.”

  “Did Toby train you to do that?”

  The boy looked a sheepish white. “No...”

  “Look dumbass, never leave the door. Never leave the door unguarded, never leave the door open and unguarded, and you certainly do not ever leave the door open and unguarded and make a ruckus inside,” Zoe growled at him. “If you’d prefer to act as Emma and Debbie’s pack animal then you should volunteer to work in the kitchen rather than as a guard. Is that clear, Dobbin?”

  “Zoe,” Ewan said.