The Machine Awakes (11 page)

“You'll need to pass the Bureau training on the staser,” said Braben.

Kodiak
hmmmed.
“Yeah, not sure I need that.” He thumbed one of the controls, pointed the gun at Braben, and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat something white and fizzy and the agent cried out, sliding sideways off his chair.

Avalon was on her feet in a second, her hand reaching for her own staser on her belt.

“Von! What the
hell?
”

Kodiak flicked the safety back on and put the gun back into the case. He rolled his chair back a little and nudged Braben with his foot. The agent rolled on the floor, moaning in pain.

“I'm just returning a favor,” he said. Then, ignoring Braben's semi-conscious form, he pulled himself back to the table. He locked the case and placed it on the floor beside his chair. Then he tapped at the table display, bringing up the image of the deceased Fleet Admiral and the maps of the city.

Avalon slowly lowered herself back down, her hand moving away from her gun, her eyes darting between Kodiak and Braben on the floor.

Kodiak looked up at her and waved his hand. “He'll be fine. Now, let's get to work.”

 

11

The farther Cait walked,
the faster her pace. After a couple of hours she pulled up by a railing that circled an empty yard in front of a warehouse, hand on her chest as she caught her breath and realized she'd practically sprinted the last block. The confidence she had felt earlier had been short lived. Right now, she felt alone.

She felt afraid.

She checked her watch. She was still on time. In fact, she was
ahead
of schedule. She could afford a moment to stop and collect herself before continuing to the rendezvous. But not here, not in the open. She needed darkness and shadow, because while she was alone in the deserted streets, she also knew that they were watching. Surely, they were watching. Waiting.

Half a block on was a large intersection, a number of narrow, tall buildings offering myriad hiding places. She stuck to the side of the building behind her, checked that the coast was clear, then darted across the intersection and into another alley, thanking the universe that Salt City was a disorganized, organic mess of buildings and architectures.

Lost again in the dark, she sank to the ground. She closed her eyes, reaching out. Calling to him.

To Tyler.

Nothing. Nothing but the rush of blood in her ears and the cool night breeze. And the faint sounds of people, lots of people, brought to her on that wind.

Cait opened her eyes, and listened. She was on track, getting closer to her destination. The stretch of industrial warehouses and abandoned factories would soon come to an end, the streets already becoming brighter as she approached a night market. The sounds were carried on the breeze and echoed off the walls of the alley, but they were close—perhaps just on the other side of this block of warehouses.

The night markets of Salt City were famous and popular, not just among the refugees who lived and worked in the slum, but even among upstanding citizens of New Orem, the more adventurous of whom were known to venture out to see what exotic bargains could be found. Those were a different kind of night market, arrayed on the outskirts of Salt City, safe enough for New Orem tourists and with artificially raised prices to match their comparatively rich clientele.

It was sickening, the people of New Orem content to patronize the markets while turning a blind eye to the plight of Salt City itself. But tonight, of course, those markets would be closed, the citizens of the Fleet capital held under curfew.

But here, farther in, deep enough for outsiders to never reach, were the
real
night markets of Salt City. Here there was more on sale than overpriced knick-knacks and badly cooked street food.

In the heart of Salt City, you could buy almost anything, from art—smuggled, crumbling artifacts from the ruins of South America—to
people,
likewise smuggled, likewise crumbling. To passage off planet. Even to weaponry, stolen from the Fleet, serial numbers etched off and fire control CPUs hacked with a buggy, pirate OS. Like the sniper rifle in Cait's pack, she supposed, with its glitching computer. She'd collected it from the pre-arranged hiding place, in a difficult-to-reach water conduit below one of Salt City's main thoroughfares. She'd been impressed that they'd gotten her almost exactly the same kind of rifle she had trained with in the Academy. The weapon appeared to be new, as well. They must have hit a weapons dump to steal it.

Of
course.
The gun.

Cait listened to the sounds of the market as she ran an idea around her mind.

Her plan was to hit the rendezvous right on time and demand some answers, trusting her training and her talent to keep her alive. Even as she thought of the plan again, she felt the nerves return. It sounded simple—too simple. She was walking into the unknown, and she knew it, and she wasn't even able to reach out to her brother's mind anymore.

But he was out there. He was alive. He
had
to be alive. This is what she was doing it for.

And there was a chance, a slim one perhaps, that her employers
weren't
behind the Admiral's assassination. Perhaps all they knew was that the Fleet Admiral was dead—proof enough that Cait had fulfilled the task assigned to her.

Perhaps to get the answers she wanted, she needed to walk into the rendezvous like nothing was wrong. Like everything had gone according to plan.

She needed to bluff. And to bluff, she needed a little bit of evidence.

The alley was dark and smelly, the ground wet not from the recent rain but with something thick and sticky oozing from the garbage stacked high at the far end of the narrow passage. Cait headed toward it and crouched down on the other side, the fetid heap of refuse providing ample cover. Then she slid her backpack off and began taking the pieces of the sniper rifle out. In less than a minute, the gun was assembled and ready.

Hoping that the death of the Fleet Admiral was all that mattered, hoping—perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, there was no time to second-guess herself now—that her employers were just as much in the dark as she was, Cait raised the sniper on her hip, pointing it at a sharp angle toward the sky, and pulled the trigger.

There was no flash. For a sniper, detection meant death, so the gun released only a muffled
crack
as the invisible energy bolt flew skyward. Despite just a row of buildings separating Cait from the night market, no one would have heard the shot.

Cait lowered the weapon, relieved that the gun had worked, glitching OS and all. Shielding the display with her hand, Cait thumbed a control on the top of the weapon. The gun had been fired—and now there was the log to prove it. More than that, for once the glitching OS would be to her advantage, the log's scrambled timestamp making it impossible to pinpoint the last time the weapon had been used. Now, if they checked the gun, they'd think she had been the one who had downed the Fleet Admiral. All according to the plan.

Cait found herself smiling as she pulled the weapon to pieces and slid them into the compartments in her backpack. She had no idea if her plan would work, but she felt good just doing
something.
It was better than staying hidden, or running away. And if things went south, she could fight—for herself, and for her brother.

Caitlin Smith was a
warrior.

She stood, swung the pack onto her back, and walked out into the main street, turning toward the sounds of the crowds ahead. All she had to do was reach the market and cross it, enter the dark streets in the next quarter, and she would make the rendezvous.

She walked for a few minutes, to the end of the block, then turned into a wide thoroughfare. Ahead of her, the street was filled with people, the crowd increasing in density farther along as the night market proper began.

“Excuse me, Ms. Smith.”

Cait froze, eyes wide. Then she turned to face the voice behind her.

It was the man in the pale coat. He stood with his hands clasped in front of him. He was middle-aged and wore glasses and his hair was brown and short. His expression was flat, still.

Oh, shit. She
had
been followed, and now they had found her. She was still a kilometer or so away from the rendezvous. Whoever the man was, he wasn't—
couldn't
—be with her employers.

A rival organization. They were behind it all. They'd taken out the Admiral, and now they were taking out everyone else.

Or … the Fleet. The Fleet
Bureau.
She'd been tracked from the Memorial, despite her jammed manifest tag. She'd been tracked, and now this guy, this agent, was going to take her down.

Cait felt her throat close, a shiver passing over her skin as
it
started to happen. She watched the man in the pale coat hesitate, his eyes widening as he looked at her.

She could fight. Or …

The night market behind her, toward the other end of the thoroughfare, was huge, a sprawling collection of stalls and tables, funneling customers, drinkers, and diners into a maze of brightly colored passageways, disgorging them into large squares and plazas, then bottlenecking them back into narrow streets packed with wares for sale. The perfect place to get lost.

Or to lose someone.

Cait turned, ready to run, then swallowed a cry of surprise. Standing in front of her was another man, this one dressed in black and wearing a hard, flat black mask, smooth except for two inset goggles.

Cait curled her fists and drew her chin up. “I don't know who you are, but you're going to have to get out of my—”

The man drove a fist into Cait's stomach, the blow driving the air from her lungs. She doubled over, her arms instinctively folding over her middle before they were grabbed from behind and twisted behind her back. Cait wheezed, tears streaming down her face. She looked down at the road, watched as the puddles beneath her began to move, water streaming
away
from her like they were being blown by a fan. She looked up, willing the power to obey her, trying to find some way to control it, to
direct
it. She saw a tiny reflection of herself in the man's goggles.

And then something sharp and cold was slipped into her neck, and a black bag was slipped over her head and her world was nothing but musty chemical darkness.

 

12

They'd been going for
hours: Kodiak sat in the front row, beside him an empty seat left by Braben as he got up to lead the team through the next section of the briefing. On his other side, Commander Avalon, datapad on her knee, making notes.

The planning room was packed, standing room only. So many agents had been called in—more than ever worked in a regular shift, that the situation briefing was being repeated three times that day. Braben and Avalon shared briefing duties, while Kodiak sat, ready to field questions and pick up anything useful that might come up from the other agents. But, really, he needed this briefing as much as anyone else. He'd been out of touch for a year and was now dropped right back into the middle of a genuine crisis.

At least he had managed to grab a few fitful hours of sleep before they'd started. After meeting with the chief, he'd started to feel the effects of his “capture” on Helprin's Gambit and his subsequent unconscious transit back to Earth. The chief had seen he was running on adrenaline and little else, and arranged for him to take one of the Bureau safe houses within the precincts of the Capitol Complex. The apartment was basic, to say the least, but comfortable and within easy reach of the office itself. Permitted a scant few glorious hours of rest, Kodiak had ditched the dirty scarlet suit, stuffing it into the trash disposal chute in the apartment's tiny kitchen, and had then stood under the piping hot shower for what felt like a lifetime. Then a nap—just two hours, enough to recharge while Braben got the briefings organized.

When his alarm woke him, Kodiak realized to his chagrin that he'd thrown out the only garments in the apartment. Cursing his own lack of foresight, Kodiak had grabbed the shrink-wrapped bathrobe that was in the closet and, using it as his sole item of clothing, he'd padded down to the Bureau uniform store, requisitioning himself a set of gear from the bemused officer on duty.

He now sat in the planning room wearing a black combat jumpsuit, over the top of which was a lightly armored gilet with the words
FLEET BUREAU
spelled across the chest in big white letters, the same on the back. It was functional and comfortable, and allowed him to focus his attention on more important things than his wardrobe.

Like who was responsible for the assassination of Fleet Admiral Sebela, the leader and commander-in-chief of
all
of humanity, spread out across what was referred to as Fleetspace—the portion of the galaxy that belonged to the Earth, rather than the Earth's enemy, the Spiders.

Kodiak crossed his legs as he listened to Braben, immaculate as ever in a steel gray suit that matched the color of the walls, give a rundown of another terror group profile—the Spiders may have been the Fleet's combat enemy, but there were plenty of organizations within Fleetspace that rejected the leadership and directives for war issued from Earth. Some were little more than small gangs, their members only loosely affiliated, their activities limited to crime and black marketeering. Some were larger, more organized—others still had hierarchies, mission statements, even uniforms and logos. What they all had in common was a disregard for the Fleet's authority and a desire to impose their own order on things—whether that threat was credible or not was what they were in the briefing to discuss. None had claimed responsibility for the crime—but that didn't mean none of them was involved. Some organizations loved to broadcast their exploits, their demands. Others operated in shadow, causing trouble where they could but not reveling in some twisted glory, at least publically.