Nemesis (14 page)

‘Sorry,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’ Still, his mood refused to settle.

‘We’re not here because we’re your groupies, Will,’ she said. ‘Please remember that. We’re peers, and we’re all trying to solve the same problem. Do I need to remind you who’s been looking after your agenda for the last
two years
?’

Will shook his head. ‘You don’t.’

‘Had it not been for me, there’d be no research ships mapping the Depleted Zone,’ she said. ‘There’d be no Omega Oversight Programme keeping all your little roboteers safe. Do you think it’s easy to make money from the IPSO budget disappear to cover all that? You haven’t so much as
looked
at that stuff in years. Do you think I take on that work just for fun?’

Will knew she was right, even if it didn’t sit well with him. After Rachel’s ship had been lost in the Zone, he’d stopped managing his own side-projects. He’d just given up and delegated almost everything to his friends to give himself room to grieve. Somehow he’d never got around to picking up the reins of leadership afterwards. There’d always been too much to do.

‘And what about Nelson?’ she said, gesturing. ‘Who do you think has been looking after your bloody ship while you attended all those charity dinners? Who do you call up every time you have another damned war nightmare?’

‘Please,’ said Nelson. ‘I’m not sure that’s strictly relevant. I suspect Will is just trying to clear out some of his familial guilt issues and this mission will run more smoothly if he does. I think Mark’s involvement is a terrific idea, even if it does complicate matters.’

Will rubbed his temples. ‘Look, I appreciate everything you’ve both done, more than I can say. I’d have come apart by now if I didn’t have you two. But the flip side of that is that I’ve been running on rails for far too long and letting you both cover for me. Now I’m fixing that. I need to.’

Pari snorted. ‘You chose a fine time to do your fixing.’

‘I chose the one opportunity I had,’ Will snapped. ‘I’ve had no chance to do anything better, stuck in bullshit meetings every goddamn day. The reason why I put Mark in the captain’s seat is because he’s a better fucking pilot than any of the alternatives. What would be the point of sitting him in there as a sub? Decoration?’

Pari’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that what you think those meetings are, Will? Bullshit? Have you any idea what would happen to your credibility and your precious political balance if I hadn’t been packing your calendar with friendly faces for all those months? You’d be a joke already if it wasn’t for me. Or more of a joke, at any rate.’ She threw up her hands. ‘I’m done for tonight,’ she said and strode for the door. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Will, because out there I won’t be around to wipe your ass for you.’

The door leapt open at her approach and crept shut afterwards as if anxious at her departure.

‘Well,’ said Nelson, slapping his knees, ‘
that
was interesting.’ He stood and offered Will a warm, amused smile. ‘Something tells me we’re not going to get a great deal more useful planning done this evening. I propose that we all reconvene in the morning before the mission briefing when everyone has cooled down a little. How does that sound?’

Will stood. ‘Fine.’

He felt more embarrassed than he wanted to let Nelson see. Giving Mark a ship had been his last great attempt to clear his moral decks, but it felt as if he was simply sliding closer to failure yet again. With every step he seemed to alienate someone he needed.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m being a fool,’ he said.

‘You’re taking risks,’ said Nelson, ‘but you’re also taking control and being proactive. It’s an appropriate reaction under the circumstances. Not the one everyone would take, I admit, but appropriate, so don’t worry about it.’ He nodded to Will from the doorway. ‘Goodnight, Boss. See you on the morrow.’

Will waved as the door slid shut. As soon as they left, he fell back into the couch, covering his face with his hands. Guilt and embarrassment slurped around inside him – a storm in own his personal teacup. Yet as he sat there, he found a smile inexorably drawing itself across his face.

Mark had looked as uncomfortable as ever. Trouble still followed him like a shadow and Will knew he should have guessed something like this might happen. Mark’s software had been way out of date despite the nanny SAP he carried. He’d never have been so easily targeted otherwise. He probably hadn’t touched his interface code since moving to Earth. Will felt a little guilt for having not predicted that, either.

It shocked him, too, how naive Mark still appeared to be. Will saw now, with hindsight, the foolishness of trying to shield his protégé from the risks his life entailed. He probably shouldn’t even have tried. Nevertheless, he felt a certain perverse satisfaction in resolving this new problem quickly and quietly. He hadn’t told the others about the software patch he’d rigged. He doubted they’d have approved.

Nelson would have said that by intervening, Will had exposed himself. That he was acting out his need for personal contact and jeopardising the very relationship he wished to foster. Will lacked the energy to talk it through. He called up a submind and sent it off to tweak the Fleet agenda for the following day – removing certain checks and tests from Mark’s list so that nobody would find out what had happened.

With that done, he looked back over the web of security bypasses woven around the habitat ring that housed the privacy suites. It was a remarkably thorough job for some sect baron to have cooked up on short notice. So thorough, in fact, that it made no sense.

Will paged through visualisations of the data till he found one that worked for him. The messaging protocol for the suites took on the form of a landscape of networked nodes, and the security alterations became spiderlike structures straddling it. Presented that way, the truth stood out: there hadn’t been one set of security alterations but two. One set had been designed to unlock and broadcast content when triggered. Had that happened, Mark’s actions would have wound up fully documented and in the hands of the receiving party – almost certainly the same people who’d arranged his fight.

A different set of alterations had been imposed over the top, seemingly without knowledge of the edits already in play. While far less intrusive than the first, they’d successfully prevented the first set from releasing their message payload.

That the House representatives who wanted Mark ejected from the mission had cooked up a scandal came as no surprise. That there were conflicting security objectives layered over the same site worried him deeply. Deeper forces might be at work than he’d surmised.

Security had been a big concern for Will ever since the war. Repeatedly being shot, burned and poisoned in assassination attempts had taught him to pay much closer attention to the intentions of others than he’d ever dreamed would be necessary. That in turn had led him to keep Mark’s genetic heritage secret from everyone, including Mark.

All the children from the Omega Programme he and Rachel had launched so disastrously contained the same set of genetic mods he’d received himself. Only one of them, though, contained genetic material from
her
. He could see her in Mark every time he looked. Mark had the same compact, muscular build, the same dark, brooding complexion. They’d tried to prevent all those children from becoming political targets, but Mark first and foremost.

Pari had a point. If Will really wanted Mark safe, he couldn’t be too careful. Maybe he’d be able to find someone on the mission to help cover that base. But in the meantime, he shouldn’t leave things to chance.

He opened up a channel to the new software in Mark’s interface and tightened the security a little more, adding a self-aware routine to watch for trouble. Mark didn’t even need to know it was there. Yunus wouldn’t be able to touch him now. Will sprawled, satisfied with himself and feeling childish for it. However it panned out, tomorrow was going to be an interesting day.

4:
DEPARTURE

4.1: ANN

It was two in the morning when Ann received an unexpected second message from the fixer. She sat up in bed and fumbled around for a touchboard to make sure her security filters were still in place, then tapped the icon with trepidation.

My men are half-dead. Meet me in the back room at Poseidon’s in one hour to renegotiate. Otherwise I will go public about Fleet operatives hiring criminals for cash.

Ann stared at the message and didn’t breathe. She thought back through the steps she’d taken and the software fail-safes she’d put in place to cover her tracks. At no time had there been any evidence that the FiveClan fixer had seen through her cover. His checks on her phoney sect status had all been perfectly managed. There’d been no evidence of a trace from the memory bead, either. So where did the accusation of Fleet involvement come from?

She desperately wished she could contact Sam, but that’d be the last thing he’d want. In the League, once something screwed up, agents dealt with their problems independently unless they absolutely needed backup. That way, the screw-ups didn’t spread.

Ann thought over her options. The one that leapt out as the most responsible was also the one she liked least. She had to find out just how compromised the League had become and take action accordingly. She composed a status report for Sam and put it in a time-locked address in the Fleet’s database. If she got back before the lock opened, the message would disappear and Sam would never have to know what had happened. If she didn’t, everything he needed to take the next steps would be delivered to him via one of the League’s secure pipes.

Ann started her preparation by testing the waters. She composed a short reply to the fixer and sent it.

WTF? Is that really you? You said no more contact!

She rebuilt the security shield she’d need to cover her actions in the field while she waited to see if he’d ping again. His next reply came swiftly. It contained just two words.

One hour.

Below that, he’d included a snippet of an error statement from a broken piece of SAP code. Fleet headers were all over it, along with all manner of time and address stamps that made it clear whose security software had been running on the privacy ring around the time when Ruiz was supposed to be intercepted by the FiveClan heavies.

Ann couldn’t have asked for a more incriminating log file. She hadn’t been told – and hadn’t asked – how word of Mark’s behaviour was supposed to get back to the Fleet after the fight. As it was, she could now make a pretty good guess. Sam had chosen that particular fixer because he’d already sold the guy a compromised security-blackout kit. In other words, the tools for a possible covert op on Triton had been carefully deployed by Sam months ago. She updated her status report, finished her security shield and headed down to the undercover desk as fast as she could.

Fifty minutes later, Ann was back in disguise and pushing her way through the drunken throng at the entrance to Poseidon’s Bar on the lo-gee level of Ring Nine. Between all the shouting and the endless slamming beat of the kiddicore they were playing, she could barely hear herself think. The syrupy blue illumination kept surging on and off.

As she squeezed towards the bar, someone elbowed her in the ribs. A minute later, another clod accidentally tipped half their drink down the back of her barely adequate dress. Ann buffered up her claustrophobia and pressed it into a sense of purpose. This was all just part of the day’s work. A badly botched, frightening day, for sure, but just a day.

She forced her way to the bar and pinged the room’s SAP for some human attention. When a cocktail-bot tried to take her drink order, she waved it angrily away. Eventually, a woman in a skintight blue bodysuit decorated with mermaid scales came grudgingly through a door and slouched towards her. She didn’t bother trying to talk over the din, just subvoked a message straight to Ann over the public channel. The text appeared in her view.

‘Can I help you?’

She didn’t need to sound bored. Ann could see it in her eyes. Bars on Triton required a live human attendant in case of emergency. That didn’t mean they liked being disturbed.

Ann replied in kind. ‘Someone’s waiting for me in the back room.’

The woman rolled her eyes. ‘We don’t have a back room.’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Ann. Using a silent command, she pulled up the message the fixer had asked her to use as ident on their first meeting and briefly pasted it back into her public persona.

‘Oh –
that
back room,’ said the woman, her eyes suddenly alight with attention. ‘Follow me.’

She led Ann around the side of the bar and down a corridor where the music was a little less deafening. Other than a few couples making out, the place was empty. The woman took her to a blank plastic wall panel at the far end decorated with animations of cavorting sea-sprites. It slid aside at their approach. As soon as Ann was through, it slid back into place.

On the other side lay a room with black, deactivated walls and a large interactive table of the sort gamblers preferred. The fixer sat behind it dressed in a charcoal grey mocksuit, arms folded. A pair of men in black gym-wear with grotesquely augmented muscles flanked him on either side. The fixer’s huge brown eyes radiated contempt. He didn’t look so young any more.

‘My boys are almost dead,’ he said. ‘They showed up in the hospital about twenty minutes ago with some convenient memory problems. One of them also had motor-neurone damage. He’ll be on myelin support for about a year. We didn’t sign up for that, so I want money to cover their medical bills.’

While he talked, Ann’s shield scanned the room for the inevitable surveillance and quietly shut it down.

‘How much?’ said Ann.

‘Two million peace,’ said the fixer.

‘I don’t have that kind of cash,’ she said. ‘And neither does my dad.’

The fixer slammed the table with both hands. ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ he yelled. ‘Your fucking
daddy
is a Fleet operative, you little bitch, and so are you. And if you don’t fucking pay me what I’m due, I’m going to spill that SAP-dump on every public channel I can find.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ann, feigning fear. ‘What’s all this got to do with an SAP-dump?’

‘Listen to me,’ said the fixer. He waved a finger at her. ‘You think I don’t know when I’ve been stitched up? Your fucking
daddy
is the man who gave me that blackout code in the first place. I traded with him in good faith. I thought he was
Clan
. Do you think I’d ever have passed him a trial-rigger if I’d known I was messing with the Fleet?’

Ann no longer had to feign confusion. Unscrupulous pharma corps used trial-riggers to fake the results of drug tests. At least she now knew what the software patches were for, but knowing raised more questions than it answered.

‘That blackout code was supposed to keep the whole privacy level locked while my boys were in there,’ said the fixer. He sounded hurt. ‘And it worked fine for months before you showed up. Then tonight, it almost shut down halfway through the job. Surprise surprise. When I tried to unhook it afterwards, it started spewing that shit I sent you all over my view.
Fleet
script, I note.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Ann. ‘A
trial-rigger
?’

‘Don’t,’ said the fixer, fighting down apoplexy. ‘Don’t play dumb with me. We’re way past that. If I’m on the hook to the Fleet I’ve got nothing to lose, do you understand? I might as well go public. I’m here because I’m a
businessman
, and I had this dim, dim hope that maybe we’d be able to sort this all out like grown-ups. I don’t care who you’re trying to bust. So long as it’s not me, you can do what the fuck you like, but I still need to cover my fucking costs. I don’t expect to be used like a fucking
noob
.’

Ann spread her hands as if in confusion. At the same time, she subvoked the safeties off the stun-wands embedded in her forearms. Darts flashed out, burying themselves in the bodies of the two huge bodyguards. The fixer had half a second to look surprised and dive sideways. Ann’s third dart sliced through the air behind him.

‘Wait!’ he yelled, but Ann was already in motion, vaulting around the side of the table in the low-gees, her heels lost somewhere in the air behind her. Her fourth dart caught him in the neck as he scrabbled for cover. He slumped face down on the floor.

Ann took a moment to catch her breath. She rubbed her arms and grimaced as she inspected the tiny wounds the weapons had left. She’d need a little surgical attention when she returned to the dorm, but that problem was for later. First, she had to figure out how to get out of the mess she’d landed in.

As soon as he woke up, the fixer was likely to follow through on his promise and go public with his data. Furthermore, he almost certainly had the package on a timer, so killing him would only guarantee the release of everything he knew. If he was a smart man, he’d have timed the package to need a check-in after their meeting, which meant she might have just minutes to figure this out. She needed leverage and couldn’t secure it with the tools she had on her. Time to ask for help.

The prospect of calling Sam still didn’t appeal. He’d take a dim view. Furthermore, he’d be likely to use a rather absolutist approach to clean-up. The fixer would probably suffer until he divulged the key to the package and then vanish for ever. Given the kind of stakes the League played for, she doubted that dispatching a few crooks would stack up as relevant for Sam. Her new first officer – Jaco Brinsen – would almost certainly favour the same approach.

If she could find one, Ann wanted a less fatal way to resolve the problem. The fixer’s business operation couldn’t be that big, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered meeting his clients in person. Furthermore, he’d been liberal enough with his information to look almost honest. Executing him didn’t feel right.

She brought up the
Chiyome
’s crew listing in her view – just six names including her own. Everyone on that ship’s roster was a League operative. They had to be, given what the
Chiyome
was there to do. Of the officers arrayed before her, one leapt out: Kuril Najoma, the ship’s engineer. She’d worked with Kuril before. He was a good man – a professional and definitely not a killer.

Ann routed a call through her security shield to Kuril at his dorm room with a League security seal attached. An icon in her view pulsed as she waited for the link to open. Twenty long seconds later, he answered. Ann exhaled with relief as Kuril’s broad, earnest face filled a window in her display, his forehead wrinkled in confusion. She could tell he’d been asleep from the scrambled thatch of brown hair on his head.

‘Captain?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

Ann subvoked a message and sent it as raw text. The sight or even the sound of her right now would only confuse him.

Need a favour. Go to the pharm counter downstairs and get me a dose of field-issue stun-gone, two doses of Redact, one vial standard-issue medical micromachines, and an on-site programmer. Then come to this address immediately. Tell no one, and keep your traffic tag visible only to me.

His eyes went wide. She watched him quickly check the security seal on the message, worry drawing creases in his features.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way. I can be there in ten.’

Make it five.

She brought up a local map for him and watched his traffic tag light up in red as it changed status. While she waited for Kuril to arrive, Ann carefully reached out into the bar’s security system via her contacts, acquiring the command code for the door and prepping some database requests for the task to come. As soon as Kuril’s tag showed him at the building, Ann sent him a follow up message.

Go straight through the bar. Take the passage at the back on the left-hand side. Walk as far as the end wall.

As Kuril reached the hidden door, Ann slid it open to admit him. He stepped inside.

Kuril was a huge bear of a man with a gentle, introverted temperament. How he’d ended up involved in the desperate business of the League, Ann had never asked. He took in the sight of the unconscious criminals and then stared at her like a stranger, his eyes flicking back and forth between her face and her cleavage.

‘Captain?’ he said incredulously.

‘Good to see you,’ she said. ‘Did you bring the things I asked for?’

Kuril nodded absently, still not quite sure what he’d walked in on.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to change my face or voice right now, it hurts like hell. If you need proof, try this: three years ago I beat you at Go in a guayusa shop on Harmony that had live locusts in the window display.’

Kuril’s mouth fell open and then shut again. ‘You look … different,’ he said, blushing slightly. ‘What do you need me to do?’

‘Give those two meatbots the Redact doses. The scrawny one gets the micromachines. We target the pain pathways in his central nervous system.’

He regarded her anxiously. ‘We’re torturing someone?’

‘Not if we can help it,’ said Ann.

Kuril moved quickly from body to body, administering the drugs while Ann picked up the programmer box, tethering it to the processor in her contacts and setting up the configuration she wanted. As soon as she was ready, she had Kuril help her prop the fixer up in his chair.

‘Now get behind him,’ she said. ‘It’s best if he never sees your face.’

She sat the programmer-box unobtrusively on the floor under the fixer’s chair. From there, it had enough network range to reach the tiny devices they’d injected without being obvious. Then she applied a quarter dose of the stun-gone to the fixer’s neck.

His eyes fluttered as he drifted back into consciousness. As his eyes took her in, his mouth curled into a sneer.

‘You’re a fool,’ he slurred. ‘Data’s on a timer. Who doesn’t these days?’

‘I guessed that,’ she said. ‘So I put you on a timer, too.’

She opened up the link to the programmer in her display and sent him a short jolt of pure pain. The fixer bucked in his chair with surprising force for a man still doped to the eyes. He didn’t scream. He was too busy trying to suck air into his struggling lungs.