The Covert Academy (2 page)

Nearby a couple of people attempted to huddle under a filthy brown jacket, too small to shelter just one of them. Joshua looked at them enviously... at least they had each other. Joshua took small comfort in the thought that his long torn apart family was not an isolated case.

A few kids were spraying their names or their gang’s name in unintelligible lettering on a wall at the far end. That was reassuring. If a patrol decided to come around that corner there would be plenty of warning when the kids skittered away like roaches.

It was a rare opportunity to be off the ground. The smell was almost bearable twenty metres up. Even so, Joshua knew he couldn’t stay. He was more likely to be spotted by a drone the higher he got, but at least the human patrols were easier to avoid. Sometimes he made a game of it. He would see how long he could get a human patrol to chase him before they gave up in frustration, usually after Joshua had doubled back and sneaked up on them from behind so he could raid their wagon for supplies. But if he was ever caught, he wouldn’t do so well next time with a missing limb.

H
e’d never try that with a drone patrol, they were far more efficient at hunting. The way they seemed to float on thin air as if they were surfing was disturbing enough, but their sleek metallic panels in the form of a shark gave the impression of highly evolved predators. Joshua had seen it too many times, but he still got chills remembering the sounds those people made before being taken for “processing”. Everyone knew what it really meant: The end. No one ever came back from the evaluation centre, somewhere under the Colonnade.

The bars of the fire escape dug into Joshua’s legs, bringing his mind back to focus on
his reconnaissance. He ripped off a strip of air-dried rat with his teeth and craned his neck out. There, near the corner with the kids' artwork, was a dumpster. Where there was a dumpster, there was food. Or at least, something that would count as food once it was skinned and cooked for a week. Perfect.

He breathed deep and took a last bite of his dinner before heading down, back into the filth, looking for dessert.

The dumpster was empty.

‘What the hell?’ Joshua said aloud. The kids glanced over their shoulders at him and went back to colouring in their wall. Joshua looked around warily, looking for any sign the Confederates had been through here. It wasn’t like the dumpsters in this city were emptied on a regular basis unless the Confederates used them. For as long as Joshua could remember, dumpsters had been the one place he could rely on to find a meal. He thought back, the last time he’d seen a clean dumpster had been when Lucia was alive... no, he had to focus. Drawing himself up, he walked down the alley as casually as possible to the little artists.

‘Hey did you know...?’ h
e started. The little brats stared up at him with their tiny heads and giant eyes. They glanced off to their left, then as one, scrammed in the opposite direction. All that was left was a cloud of dust and a dropped spray can, rolling on the asphalt.

‘...that dumpster is clean?’ h
e finished, to no one but himself.

Lucia would have been able to get them to talk. She’d always been there to pick up the slack for Joshua while he fumbled his way through any given situation. Perhaps because there
was a good ten years separating them, Joshua had picked up few of his little sister’s people skills. But then, he was the one who had survived. Did that say more about the state of mind Joshua had descended into, or everyone else?

Sighing, he stepped forward into the T-junction to stop the noise from the rolling spray can with his foot.
A shimmer off a puddle of water drew him in. He hadn't seen his reflection in months. A sunken bony face stared back at him. He hardly recognised himself. Long dark hair came down almost to his shoulders. Sharp brown eyes peeked out from under the fringe that plastered over his boyish, grimy face. He stepped into the puddle, breaking his visage.

A blast of light hit him from his right.
He sucked in his breath, and shielded himself with an arm. Slowly lowering it back, he looked up and saw the setting sun.

‘Stup
id, the drones have a red light,’ he admonished himself. ‘But wait, uh...’ Joshua kept tilting his head back until he was looking almost straight up.

The building in front of him was the Tower.

The edge of it
s shadow was cast right at Joshua’s feet, but the shadow and the Tower itself were both enormous, like a gigantic sundial telling the city that the day would soon come to an end.

The Tower loomed over him, it
s intended effect of subjugation and intimidation magnified a hundred-fold at this angle. Near the top, Joshua could see tiny specks that must be drones flying out. But a regular patrol would come from the Colonnade, not the top of the Tower. These were different. The specks were moving with a purpose, spreading out to form a search grid.

Suddenly filled with vertigo, his eyes slid down over the shimmery grey-brown surface of the Tower, the same impenetrable metal the drones were made of, and realised the end of the alley was a mere stone’s throw from the base of the Tower.

‘What the? How... how could I have gotten so close? I’d better...’

Something smashed into the dumpster behind him. Whirling around, Joshua snapped his head back looking for who
ever had sneaked up on him.

‘Who’s there?’

The alley was deserted as if it always had been, even the two under the coat had moved on when the kids had left. Or maybe he had been seeing things. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d had hallucinations on his all-rat diet.

Joshua realised with a sinking feeling that being this close to the Tower meant a Confederate patrol could not be far away. Or worse, a squad of drones, those eternal eyes in the sky.

Quiet as a mouse, he crept back over to the dumpster.

He wondered for a moment how he could have made it so close to the Tower in the first place. It was true he had needed to move outside his usual route more often lately, with food becoming scarcer by the day. But the Tower was on the edge of the Colonnade, and no one in their right mind went anywhere near there of their own free will. He must have put too much faith in the presence of those street kids to make him feel safe,
they
at least were becoming bolder with each passing year, though they too tried their best to stay invisible.

He had a new feeling now, as though he was the one being crept up on. He could almost sense eyes watching him. Joshua hated it.

Being as careful as possible to stick to the shadows, he stepped through a heavy mist from a manhole cover and finally reached the dumpster. He gripped the edge to peek over the top. It took him a moment to process what he saw.

It was a body, limbs splayed in impossible directions, dressed in a crisp dark-green uniform. On the shoulders, were four bright silver stars.

‘Stop window shoppin’ Jensen, you’re on mission here.’

The heavy Texan drawl seemed to come from inside her head, the double-edged sword that was
her "intra-Personal Computer". No one outside of the High Council members and certain Confederate-favoured scientists had access to these tools. Sarah hated to think what would happen if one of them ever hacked the software inside her body and invaded it with spambots.

She fired up her HUD and
scanned the selection of week old fruit on display, casually blending with the crowd. At least she had been able to keep
one
of her own human eyes. A fair trade, she mused, as she scanned the fruit for everything from bacteria to ripeness, took thermal imaging of the shopkeeper for any concealed weapons, and held a picture-in-picture conversation with Master Casey Jayne out of the corner of her metal eye.

More like “Headcase”
, Sarah thought, while he talked inside her head as he was now. She just called him “Case” to his face, which was close enough.

‘Do we need to go over the mission parameters again?’ the Headcase was saying.

‘Funny. I could ask the same of you,' she replied. 'I thought my orders were for radio silence to minimize chances of interception until I get a visual of the target.’ Sarah knew the Headcase couldn’t resist military chatter from a pretty face, even if it was only a video-call.

‘Yeah, well, in case you hadn’t noticed, the shadow of the Tower says you’re runnin’ late. You’re still four blocks from the rendezvous.’

‘Sigh,’ Sarah pointedly said the word out loud. ‘I’m blending in...’ The shopkeeper gave her a strange look as he handed her a kiwifruit.

‘...For a smoothie,
’ she finished for his benefit, giving him an old beat-up packet of cigarettes in return. He smiled toothlessly and went back to smoking whatever foul smelling substance he had tucked under the stall. He was probably more impressed she had access to enough electricity to power a blender. These markets would have been right at home in the dark ages.

‘I expect you to follow my instructions no m
atter how smooth I really am,’ the Headcase piped up.

‘Ok
ay alright, I’m on the move,’ Sarah said. ‘You can tell Richard I’ve picked up a souvenir for him.’ She was in no mood for their usual tête à tête.

‘Wilco, Casey out.’

The kiwifruit disappeared into one of Sarah’s pockets as she wound her way to the fringes of the market. The fruit wasn’t really meant for eating, it was a test, or maybe more of a game, since she enjoyed it so much, to see if she could bring it back to base in one piece. Like the classic school-children’s task of decorating and babysitting eggs as an experiment to see if they could handle a child of their own, Sarah saw this as an extension of her own missing childhood. That, or she enjoyed showing off after every successful mission. This was the life she had chosen for herself after all, and she really did enjoy it, even milk runs like today.

The plan was as simple as it got:

1. Infiltrate a Confederate laboratory on the outskirts of the Colonnade.

2. Make contact with an Academy sympathiser and hear him out.

3. Await new orders, or return to base if it turns out to be the wild goose chase it promised to be.

Why Casey had chosen to send Sarah was the only baffling part. The Academy received dozens of offers of assistance a day from people hoping for a reward, or a ticket out of whatever dump they were stuck in at the time. Very few were genuine and fewer still ever turned into useful intel.

Casey should have sent
Ryan
, Sarah thought. The new guy was young and inexperienced, but smart and strong and ready for a simple mission such as this. He'd only been training with them for a year, but already he had been mouthing off that he could handle anything the trainers cared to throw at him.

Sarah had been doing this most of her life. She briefly imagined
Ryan squeezing through the laboratory air conditioning system in black tights and reconsidered with a chuckle. Maybe she was the better choice for infiltration, but hell, even Richard could do this one, and he rarely stepped outside his cockpit.

Once she had crossed the river, the crowd quickly got too thin to provide any decent cover from the eyes in the sky. Sarah pulled her jumpsuit's hood up over a hastily tied ponytail. A few loose strands of the fiery auburn hair fell down over her smooth fair skin and keen blue eyes.

She
turned onto what was once Franklin Street, at least that's what the bent and faded street sign told her. With no public or private transportation available for the masses, street names had become almost useless. People had to rely on their own two feet. The postal service was a distant memory.

Sarah didn’t need a map to tell her how close she was to the Tower and Colonnade. She could see the elevated train line that had once been the famous Chicago Loop, long since converted into an outer wall and patrol route for the guards of the Colonnade inside.

Her iPC’s Head’s Up Display told her she was less than 100 metres from the laboratory. As far as she could tell, it was close to the Tower, but outside the Colonnade at least.

Could be worse
, she thought.

The
rear-view on her HUD showed a solitary drone peel off from the Colonnade wall and start towards her.

‘
Crap! I’ve got a metal tail,’ she said under her breath.

Casey was instantly online and
all business.

‘Are you made?’ h
e asked. The mission would be over before it began. Sarah quickly checked her rear-view again.

‘Negative. It’s just one.’

‘You there!’ Now a human guard had spotted her too.

‘
Verpiss dich
...
’ she lapsed into German, but quietly. This was not Sarah’s day. Had she underestimated the security? She was still a block away from the Colonnade.

‘Focus Jensen. You’re a lost foreigner. The simplest lie, right?
’ The Headcase had his moments.