Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (8 page)

The car arrived at the
requested level, the door sliding back to reveal only darkness. Machines ruled
this far beneath the building. Humans rarely came down here.

He paused in the
doorway. “Roof level, flyer pad, stopping at floors four, seven, and two, in
that order. Then return to maintenance sub-level two and deactivate for
service.” He authorized the action with that handy code, and hopped clear as
the door rolled closed.

His night vision cast
the echoing room in thick twilight. Shapes scurried around him, from immense to
tiny, machines driven by their immutable programming. One of them would be
leaving the building. Most of a medical facility’s garbage would be disposed of
in recyclers, but not the bodies. Those would be taken out to a morgue, or
returned to the families. Where and how often, he had no idea, but taking care
of that task in the overnight hours seemed logical. His inhead informed him
dawn was still hours off. He needed to be far away from here before the city
woke up.

A chunk of darkness
rushed toward him, solidifying into a transport cube twice his height. It
glided to a halt, telltales blinking impatiently at his obstruction. As he
stepped aside, it whispered on its way. He trotted along behind it until it
stopped again. A section of the wall facing the bot rolled up, the scent of
rain on pavement and old garbage washing over him from the opening. He charged
through the door with the transport, hearing the portal slam shut behind them.
The bot turned right, moving deeper into the sub-levels of the city, while he
chose the other direction, its upward slant promising access to the main
plazas.

Rainwater trickled down
from above, running dark in gutters on each side of the ramp. A gerbat the size
of a small cat watched him from an alleyway between two buildings, its eyes
reflecting red in the half light.

He noticed no one until
he reached the surface, still many meters below the commercial levels. Here,
vagrants picked through what trash had filtered down from the more prosperous
regions, and a handful of washed-up prostitutes vied for his attention. One, an
Acinonix, wore only a welter of cheap beads. Her dull, graying fur did little
to hide her flaccid breasts. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and ignored
her challenging gaze.
Not tonight, sweetheart, and not with a fur-face like
you
. Nothing but animals trying to look human.

But as he passed her,
he nodded and grumbled a phrase so guttural that it left his throat aching. The
Acinonix woman’s golden eyes widened, but she smiled and replied in kind. He
hurried on, but couldn’t shake the feeling that she watched him for a long
time.

So, he could speak
Acinonix. One more talent he couldn’t explain.

The Nameless Man
shivered in the chilly river of air flowing through the canyon of buildings,
the tech’s stolen scrubs offering little in the way of warmth. A cold front
moved through the city, its lowering clouds ruddy with the reflected lights of
the imperial complex. He spotted the spires of the royal residence towering
above the other structures, a holographic dragon flickering around them.

South of the palace lay
the Warren. That’s where he planned to go to ground; a man could get lost in
there forever. A memory surfaced. SpecOps paid special attention to the Warren
right now, but why? He halted, trying to reel in the thread of memory, but the
harder he fought to retrieve it, the further it slipped away. He could picture
Gray Eyes, a fork in her hand, gesturing and explaining her increased
surveillance in the Warren.

She told him? When?

He halted, squeezing
his eyes shut. Damn these fouled-up memories. So the Warren was out. What did
that leave? SpecOps would be running facial recognition on all the starports
and mag-lev stations, and probably waiting for him to use that damn access code
again. But getting off-world seemed his smartest move.

A private starport off
the coast catered to shuttle pilots. There wouldn’t be anything hypercapable,
but he could steal a ship that would get him to one of the orbital stations.
Until he could track down a way out of the star system, the kilometers of
vents, maintenance shafts and service tunnels of the station’s underworld would
serve as a perfect hiding place. Out in the Alliance, or better still, the Back
of Beyond, the skills of an augie could fetch him a pretty payday, as either a
bodyguard or an assassin.

Why think so small? He
could find some out-of-the-way gerbat-infested station or agrarian world and
just take over. He’d be the boss; screw it, he’d be an emperor. That sounded
more like it.

Once in the business
district, he could hijack an aircar for the flight out to the port. He turned
his back on the Warren and started walking. With each step, his muscles
tightened, his skin tingled. A creeping sense of uneasiness brought him to a
halt. He scanned around, but no one shared the trash-littered alley with him.
He huffed out a breath and continued, the simmering wrongness continuing to
build until it felt like icy spider’s feet crawling on his brain.

At the end of the
passage he turned right, and the odd sensations disappeared. Ahead of him, over
the sprawl of low buildings, the palace’s holos painted shifting colors on the
underbelly of the clouds. He’d turned back toward the Warren.

As he retraced his
steps, the itching inside his mind intensified until he screamed, knotting his
fists in the tangles of his hair. He dashed back to the alley and slid down the
wall, huddling at its base.

Computers controlled
every function inside an augie. Did Gray Eyes have a program running on one of
them, forcing him to do her bidding? The sudden loss of free will terrified
him. He clawed at his chest as if he could dig out the invasive electronics.

Think it through. That
made no sense. Why warn me to stay out of the Warren, then try to force me to
go into it?

Could it only be that elusive
second set of memories that seemed to surface when he needed them? But they had
never forced his actions, only passively supplied information; information that
had helped him get this far. He pulled up the hem of his scrubs’ top and wiped
sweat from his upper lip, then scrambled to his feet.

He told—demanded—his
body to turn left as he stepped from the darkness. His feet carried him to the
right. The Nameless Man reeled to a halt and glanced back over his shoulder at
the path to a future now closed to him, and surrendered to the compulsion,
letting it carry him into the squalor of the Warren.

After a few minutes he
gave up trying to keep track of the alleys he slipped through, the narrow
streets he cut across. Withdrawing into the anger of his own thoughts, he
allowed that mysterious imperative to guide his steps.

His inhead display
flashed across his vision in a blizzard of read-outs, alarms, and targeting
reticles, sending him staggering to a stop. His combat systems lit up, settling
into a hot stand-by as the threat assessment board mapped out possible
scenarios. A man stood in front of him, barely discernable through the jumble
of alphanumerics. He banished the display to a window at the corner of his
vision, and opened up a tactical readout. It displayed the tableau from
overhead, and he knew the icon in the middle represented him. Three other
symbols moved in toward him from each remaining side.

“Where you off to,
tech-boy?” A gaunt man faced him, his forearms bearing the telltale dotting of
scabs that marked him as a RTZ addict. One shaking hand held a sharpened
screwdriver. “If you’re down here looking for a hooker or a joy-boy, then you
got some creds on you. Hand ’um over.”

“Sorry man, I got
nothing.” He thought-clicked targeting reticles over the other three thugs.

“I ain’t buying that.”
The druggie stepped forward, nodding to his friends.

When the Nameless Man
dropped into HK this time, he embraced it. The world slowed to a crawl and he
flashed through it like a laser beam. He twisted the weapon out of the thug’s
hand, driving his palm into the underside of the man’s jaw with augmented
force. Bones cracked. Trusting his inhead, he flicked the screwdriver to the
left without looking. A strangled cry from behind told him his aim with the
tool had been true. He spun to the right and rammed his knee up between the
third man’s legs.

The final tough was
fast, just not fast enough. The Nameless Man clamped his fingers around the
thug’s hand on the pistol and forced it up, jamming the muzzle against the
underside of the now terrified man’s jaw. He had time to savor the panic in his
attacker’s eyes before squeezing the trigger. He untangled dead fingers from
the pistol’s grip and turned to bring down the last of his attackers, who’d gotten
up and tried to hobble away.

A search of the bodies
netted him a handful of cred chips, another pistol, three knives and a jacket.
It smelled of whiskey and stale sweat, but was warm. He stuffed the pockets with
his newfound possessions, stepped over the bodies, and continued toward his
unknown destination.

Hunger drove him into
an all-night eatery. He used some of the cred chips to purchase a couple of hot
meat pies, wolfing them down as he walked. In the Warren, who knew what kind of
meat they contained, probably gerbat, but his hunger kept him from caring. He
licked the last of the grease from his fingers as he reached a boarded-up
electronics shop.

This section of the
Warren catered to semi-reputable establishments, but he didn’t think this one
had seen any business for many years. The sign over the entrance had long since
faded into illegibility. His compulsion drove him to a set of ancient metal
stairs around the side. The treads were rusted out, and groaned as he ascended.
The featureless entrance, however, displayed a security lock far newer than the
rest of the structure. As he reached for it, the panel slid open.

The sudden flare of
light overloaded his night vision. He flinched, but a hand reached out, dragged
him inside, and shoved him against a wall.

“Where the fuck you
been, asshole. You should have been here hours ago.”

The Nameless Man
blinked away the purple after-images, and faced a stocky stranger with ginger
hair and a florid complexion. Before he could offer the man a suggestion they
both knew was anatomically impossible, a cultured voice interrupted.

“I told you he would be
here, Ian. He always did move at his own schedule.”

The redhead growled,
but stepped back.

The speaker sat at the
back of the room, his dark suit blending him into the shadows, making his thin,
pale face seem to hover in midair. He smelled of expensive cologne, and the
fingers resting on the table were slender and neatly manicured. At his elbow
sat a tea service, a pair of delicate china cups and an ornate pot that looked
to be an antique. In the shabby room, with its pealing walls and dust encrusted
furniture, a two thousand credit teapot looked as out of place as a turd on a
ballroom floor.

A low whisper started
inside his head, along with a sense of danger so sharp the hair on his arms
rose beneath his shabby coat. His threat assessment flashed, warning that the
redhead had moved behind him to block his escape, and displayed a 97.3 percent
chance that Red was also an augie.

The dark-clad man
lifted a cup and sipped, the delicate scent of the tea with cream and sugar
hung in the musty air. “You always did hate to do what you were told.”

He didn’t know this
man, didn’t know what about him spawned such anger, only knew that his second
set of memories screamed and clawed at the back of his mind like a trapped
animal. He licked his suddenly dry lips. “So now I’m here. What the hell do you
want with me?”

The thin man seemed not
to have heard, but put his cup carefully on its saucer and began to prepare a
second one. He dosed it liberally with cream and three sugars and stirred, the
spoon clinking against the china unnaturally loud to enhanced hearing. He rose
and offered the drink.

“Cup of tea, Old
Friend?” the man said, and smiled.

Then The Nameless Man
knew why he hated this person, knew why he wanted to rip his throat out. It was
that smile. Most definitely the smile.

Fitz paced, ten strides
across the hospital waiting room, ten back. She halted at the processor and
ordered another cup of coffee. The last one, along with a pastry, had come back
up almost as soon as she’d forced it down. This time it didn’t even make it as
far as her mouth. The smell alone roiled her stomach, and the untasted cup and
its contents went into the recycler. She opted instead for another hit of
elixir from her pharmacopeia. The read-out showed the reservoir already half
empty. She groaned. Tomorrow she’d be forced to get a refill—and an
accompanying lecture—from Doc Ski. Until then, she could only pace. And wait.

“It wasn’t him, Boss
Lady. It wasn’t him.”
Jumper hunkered on the room’s single
table, his feet tucked tight beneath his chest so that he resembled a rumpled
black ball. The untouched bowl of neubeast stew beside him testified to his
agitated state of mind.

“The mind I touched
felt mean, thoughtless. He wanted to do terrible things to you.”

The high collar on
Fitz’s uniform jacket grew uncomfortably tight, constricting her breath. She
fumbled the seal open. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted to hurt me.”

“Not like this.”
He opened his green eyes, inner eyelids partially covering the corners like an
old, sick cat
. “He wanted to do sexual things. He didn’t care if it hurt you
as long as he got his pleasures. Not like Wolf. I’ve been in his mind when he
had kinky thoughts about you…”

“Jumper,” Fitz warned,
feeling her face grow warm.

“Well, he does. And so
do you, but the two of you enjoy each other. There’s love along with the lust.
This was just selfish greed. It felt sociopathic.”

Fitz didn’t know which
bothered her more, that Wolf had kinky thoughts about her, or that Jumper
listened in on their lovemaking.

“And yet, I think I
could still feel him there, far down below that other personality. Sort of like
when you’re using a computer. Like Lizzy. At one level, you know she’s her
usual crotchety self, but underneath there’s all this software running that
makes it happen. Does that make any sense?”

“Hell, it makes a lot
of sense. That explains how he knew to use Wolf’s access codes, why he could
lay all those false trails and find his way out of the building so easily.” If
she thought it would be a nightmare to hunt down a man wearing her partner’s
body, how much worse if that usurper had access—even at only a deep, gut
level—to all of Wolf’s knowledge, skills, and deviousness?

Ski stormed into the
room, kicking the door when it didn’t retract fast enough. She stalked to the
processor, pawing through the entries with a balled up fist.

“Yig’s balls, doesn’t
this bitch have any alcohol in it?” By the end of the sentence she was shouting.
“Rum, whiskey, hell, I’ll take coolant tank hooch.” She settled for a cup of
tea.

“Liquor doesn’t have
any effect on us,” Fitz pointed out.

“I almost think life
was easier as an alcoholic.”

“What?”

“What do you think I
was doing when Wolf found me? Pickling my liver on some gerbat-infested mining
colony, treating equally drunk miners. You’ve noticed he has a habit of finding
lost souls, like some damn kid dragging home abandoned puppies.”

“Kittens,”
Jumper corrected.

“Them, too. He’s like
an enormous gas giant, dragging people into his orbit and settling them in
nice, neat lives around him. Like me. And Fen Donkenny.”

“And Bartonelli?” Fitz
asked.

The doctor sighed, reminded
of her patient. “Now, she was an odd one. She came looking for him. I heard she
tried to sign on with the Dragons, but was turned away because she didn’t have
the experience. She found a unit that would take her, put in a couple of years,
and came right back the next time we had an open enlistment. You’d almost think
she’d appointed herself his personal guardian angel.”

“She’s infatuated with
him?” That would explain the animosity she sometimes felt from the merc.

Ski shrugged. “Who
knows? I do know it’ll tear him up when he learns what he did to her.”

“It wasn’t him,” Fitz
said. Jumper’s thoughts echoed her words.

“No, but he’ll feel
responsible for it. You know he will. He believes it’s his job to protect all
his friends.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
Fitz remembered the night he stepped in front of her, taking the shot meant to
kill her.

He’d trusted her with
the life of his friend, and she’d failed to protect Bartonelli. “Will she be
okay?”

“If you’re asking me if
she’ll live? I think so, but will she be the same as before? That I’m not so
sure of. Spinal injuries are tricky, and he tore her up pretty bad. There’s
only so much the nanites can do.”

Fitz wrapped her arms
around her stomach to hold back the wave of nausea climbing her throat.

Ski continued. “She
placed a life-codicil in her contract with the Dragons; most mercs have them.
States that if she’s injured so badly she can’t function, she’d rather be
released.”

Something in the dead
tone of the doctor’s voice told Fitz she wasn’t talking about a discharge from
the unit.

“Euthanasia?”

Ski nodded, and tossed
her empty cup in the recycler. “Yeah. I’d better head back and check on her.”

“Wait, she knows
about…about us. Have you talked to her about the symbiont?”

“Becoming a Lazzinair?
Yeah, we talked once. Said if she couldn’t die, she’d never make it to Heaven,
or Nirvana, or wherever NeoBuddhists think they’re going to end up after
they’ve reincarnated enough times. Course she was drunk at the time.”

“We’re tough, but not
indestructible. She’d still get her chance at Nirvana; it’ll just take a
while.”

Ski’s jaw worked as she
considered that. “Yeah, but with that codicil in her file, I’d need her commanding
officer to override it.”

“Wolf’s not exactly
available right at the moment.”

“I suppose I could comm
back to Rainbow and get Donkenny to sign off on it, but that would take a
while.”

“No need. Before Wolf
went under, he assigned the sergeant to me. As I see it, that makes me her commanding
officer.”

A smile spread across
the doctor’s freckled face. “Yes, yes it does.”

“Then do it. We’ll
worry about the fallout later. If you need any written authorization, send it
to me. I’ll sign off on it.”

“Sign off on what?”
Braylin Pike asked as he stepped through the door. “Are we talking about
Thylia? Is she going to be okay?”

Fitz had seen lost
puppies look happier than her young aide.

The doctor pushed past
him, patting his arm. “She’s going to be fine, Lieutenant, just fine.” Once she
was behind him, she grinned at Fitz and rolled her eyes as she departed.

Fitz fought to keep
from returning the smile. When had those two found the time to get on a first
name basis? “What do you have for me? I’m sure you didn’t come all the way from
Headquarters just to ask about the sergeant.”

Pike stammered, and a
flush rose from beneath his uniform’s high black collar to cover his face.
Perhaps he had chased her down only to inquire about Bartonelli.

“It’s about the
Triumvir…uh, Youngblood…uh…”

“Why don’t we just
refer to him as the suspect?” Fitz pulled her hair back into an untidy pony
tail and straightened her torn jacket, stained and spotted with blood from the
fight. “I need to shower and change. You can brief me on the way back.”

Jumper trotted ahead of
them as the pair headed to the lift.

“All indications are
that he, uh, the suspect…”

“Wait.” Fitz pulled him
to a stop as she ran a surveillance scan. No listening devices registered, but
passive scans wouldn’t show up, and those could originate from far outside the
building. She tapped her temple. “We’re in public, use your comm—level three
beta.”

They had changed all
the encryption codes to prevent any former DIS agents from deciphering their
transmissions. Without access to the new ones, their broadcast would appear to
an eavesdropper as senseless babble.

The lieutenant’s sub-vocalizations
came across as a flat computer-generated voice inside her head. “I think he escaped
the building almost immediately, but before he did, he penetrated the security
system and shut down a bunch of feeds, setting up half a dozen diversionary routes.
By the time we got enough people in here to check them all, he’d already
escaped.”

The lift car arrived,
the door opening on two med-techs leaning against the wall chatting. They
tensed as the two black-clad agents stepped aboard, shifting as far from the
newcomers as possible. The SpecOps uniform had always engendered a healthy
respect, but in the decade since Fitz had last been posted in Striefbourne
City, that apprehension had morphed into outright fear. She could thank DIS for
that. How long before the civilian population—and a good portion of the
military—stopped seeing her as the enemy?

She relaxed, clasped
her hands in front of her, and feigned an air of indifference while she
listened to Pike continue his report.

“We think he went out
one of the maintenance sub-levels. A surveillance camera came back with a 95.2
percent positive identification as he exited the underground two blocks from
here. We lost him for a while, but he resurfaced in Six Corners. That’s a
semi-legitimate commercial district on the edge of the Warren.”

Fitz stepped from the
lift and made for the exit to the rooftop landing pad. “I’m well aware of what
Six Corners is, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course
you are, Colonel FitzWarren.” He seemed to be reminding himself of the derivation
of her name.

The glare of sunlight
blasted her vision to its lowest level as she pushed through the door and onto
the landing pad. While she’d been worrying about Bartonelli’s outcome, night
had given way to daylight. The cold front had passed, leaving the morning air
crisp and the sun balanced above the horizon. A sleek black aircar waited, the SpecOps’
crossed swords insignia emblazoned on its side. Fitz walked around to open the
pilot’s side. Flying might help take the ragged buzz off her nerves. “I’ll take
left seat.”

Pike scrambled to the
other side, continuing his report aloud as the doors sealed and the suppression
field kicked in. “After that we lost him. The enforcers report that they can’t
keep any cameras operating in the Warren. No matter how well they conceal them,
the units always disappear.”

Fitz looked at him
incredulously, then reminded herself that he came from an upper middle class
family and had not the slightest idea what life in her former home was like.
“There’s not much else for kids to do in there but hunt down the equipment and
steal it. How do you think I made enough creds to eat regularly? We’d strip out
the components and sell them to those semi-legitimate tech dealers in Six
Corners.”

“We could send in some
drones to look for signs of him,” Pike said.

Fitz snorted. “They
wouldn’t last as long as the cameras. The gang bosses don’t want anyone
watching what they’ve got going down, so they put a nice bounty on the drones.
One of those could net me more than scrounging for cameras all day long.”

Pike gave her a
speculative glance. “I hadn’t realized you were so, ah… resourceful as a kid.”

Fitz snugged down her
seatbelt. “Why the hell do you think SpecOps recruited me?”

She firewalled the
throttle, and the aircar shot straight up, gees driving them down into their
seats. Claws extended, Jumper clung to the center console as he flattened out
like a furry pancake.

Pike scrambled for his
restraints while she tipped the car up on one wing to zip between two heavy
haulers, then climbed through the traffic stream to break out into the clear
airspace above, her transponder squawking to those nearby that they were
Special Operations. Her aide kept one hand braced on the instrument panel, as
if that would protect him if they collided with anything larger than an insect
at this speed. Within minutes, she received her clearance to the imperial
residence. The holographic dragons shrouding the palace flashed multicolored
lights across the interior of the aircar as she rolled onto a final approach to
the parking structure.

Hoping to slip into the
office unnoticed, they took a service lift down from the garage, but her
Principal Staff Officer, Sergeant Devon Perez, waited there in ambush. She
hadn’t stepped a foot out of the lift when he announced, “The Emperor wants to
see you at your earliest convenience.”

Although Jumper denied
sensing it, Fitz had often thought Perez might be clairvoyant. He had the
uncanny knack of locating her, no matter how hard she tried to evade him.

“Can I at least take a
shower first?” She stepped around him.

“I don’t know; Her
Imperialness sounded impatient.” Perez fell into step with her, moving with a
decided limp. He’d been a marine until an injury cost him part of one leg. He’d
been offered a cybernetic replacement but refused, choosing instead to command
an office staff with the same iron discipline he’d used on his marines.