Digital Chimera Read online

  “I was hardly, as Bray puts it, fucking around on the computer. I was erasing my tracks, making sure the hack of the card reader goes undetected. I’m still in the system, so we can use the same exploit on our next attempt if we need to.”

  “There won’t be another attempt,” said Andrea. “The hit has been called off.”

  Everyone but Veraldi seemed surprised by this. He raised an eyebrow. “Of course. If the cyborg unit we encountered during the Huxley case is any indication, Ivanovich’s work could dramatically shift the balance of power across the system.”

  “Did I miss something?” asked Bray, who liked to play dumb.

  “As usual,” said Thomas, who liked to let him. “Let me guess. Sasha Ivanovich has agreed to defect, offering information on Ares Terrestrial and his work in exchange for immunity and safe harbor.”

  “Exactly.” Andrea ran her fingers through her hair. “Tycho, I know this must be a bit dizzying, but this is how it goes sometimes. One minute, we’re supposed to kill a man, the next minute we’re his new best friends.”

  Bray groaned. “So, it’s an extraction now?”

  She nodded. “You’ve got it. Our orders are now to make contact with Ivanovich and escort him to the West.”

  Access to Hellas is only possible through either the eastern or western spaceports. Ares Terrestrial is so paranoid about the Sol Federation that travel through the eastern port is all but impossible—even for Section 9. It’s actually easier to sneak over the Wall, the so-called Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, despite the fact that the Wall was designed to keep people in, not out. All propaganda about “West Hellas imperialism” notwithstanding, of course.

  Andrew leaned back against a couch. “I don’t know, Andrea. It will take some time to produce documentation for Ivanovich to cross the border, and I don’t know if we have that much time. I’ve been here for a while, so take my word for it: the unrest is growing out there. It’s getting bad.”

  “What, the street preachers?” I said. “We passed one of them while we were tracking Ivanovich. The crowd seemed pretty calm.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. A Hellan neighborhood is never calm. When the crowd gets quiet, that’s the most ominous thing that could possibly happen. I’m telling you—this city is about to burn.”

  “Riots?” asked Bray.

  “No, no. More like civil war. Do you have any idea how many weapons there are out there? How many people are used to using them? The syndicates shoot at each other every single day, fighting for control of sex traffic and illicit trade. The violence spills over to the average citizen. Some of the neighborhoods have already started to organize their own militias to drive the syndicates out. Money is tight for the little guy, and Martian Sclerosis is killing people. The Ares Terrestrial board governs to increase corporate profits at the expense of its workers, ignoring everything that’s wrong with the city. It’s all magnesium waiting for a flame.”

  Bray laughed. “Never knew you were such a dissident, Jones.”

  “Dissident my ass. It’s all fact.”

  This was a side of Jones I hadn’t seen. Bray was right, it did sound like the man had some radical sympathies, or at least that he could see things from their perspective.

  Andrea gave him a look that was a little hard to read. “You’re not from here, Andrew. Don’t assume you know everything just because you researched it.” I happened to know that our commander was from Mars, but I had no idea where her own sympathies lay. As a Section 9 agent, she wasn’t supposed to have any. Then she turned to Thomas. “Can you intercept the Border Patrol’s datastream as we cross? Feed them false info in real time?”

  He smiled disdainfully. “Of course I can.”

  “Then our next steps are clear. We make contact with Ivanovich, pick him up, and escort him safely across the Wall.”

  “And if a civil war does break out?” asked Andrew.

  “We shoot our way out of it.”

  2

  “This morning we were going to kill Ivanovich; this evening we’re going to save him. Standard practice for Section 9.” Vincenzo Veraldi gave a little smile. “The mission was easier this morning, frankly. Unless he’s coming to us?”

  Andrea shook her head. “He is not. Jones is right about the situation here. The city’s unstable, and we have no way of knowing when something might kick off. He reached out through the embassy, so he doesn’t know where or even who we are. We have to go to him.”

  “Well, shit.” Bray looked glum. “Why didn’t we just grab him this morning? Barrett here was right behind the guy.”

  “Uh-huh. And if we had done that, how do you think his bodyguards would have reacted? How would StateSec have reacted?”

  From her tone of voice, you would have thought she was talking to an eight-year-old, and not an especially bright eight-year-old at that.

  Bray was unfazed. “You don’t want any drama down here. I get that. But is there really a plan where we can get in and out without making some noise? You just said he wasn’t coming to us. I assume that means we’re going to him.”

  “Some of us are, yes. We’re not declaring war; we’re slipping in and slipping out again. Team of two, thermoptic camouflage.”

  Veraldi nodded. “It’s been a while…”

  “I wasn’t talking about you, Vincenzo. I was talking about Tycho.”

  Jones raised an eyebrow. “Tycho? I mean, yeah, he’s trained in it. No field experience, though.”

  “And how am I supposed to get field experience?” I pointed out.

  “I don’t know.” Jones shrugged. “A beer run, maybe?”

  In Section 9 slang, a “beer run” meant a low-risk mission. It was an ironic term, because some Section 9 operative had apparently walked into an ambush while picking up beer for the safehouse once, resulting in an extended firefight. A mission was considered a beer run if there were no known risks, but you could never rule out unknown risks.

  “When was the last time we even did a beer run?” asked Bray.

  He might have said this because he wanted beer, but that wasn’t how Andrea took it. “The last time we did a beer run was before Venus, and there’s a reason for that. Tycho needs to pay his dues, and that will never happen if we babysit him. He’s coming with me.”

  She turned to me. “Ivanovich has a history of remaining at Ares Terrestrial for days at a time, so that’s where we’re going. In this case, speed is worth the risk of exposure. Come with me. We’ll get suited up.”

  Thomas turned to go back to the bedroom but paused in the doorway first. “I’ll run interference from here, yes?”

  Andrea nodded, and he went back to his computers. A few minutes later, I was dressed in the same active camo suit Andrea usually wore. I associated the suit so strongly with Andrea that it felt strange to put it on, like I was playing dress-up.

  She must have seen the uncomfortable look on my face. “You’ll get used to being invisible in no time. In fact, it’s kind of fun.”

  “I take it we’re all on standby?” Bray looked disgusted, not because I was wearing the thermoptic camo but because he couldn’t get out there and have some fun of his own.

  “You’re a smart guy, Jonathan,” she said, and dropped from view. A moment later I did the same, and stepped into the phantom world Andrea spent so much time in.

  One amusing advantage of being invisible is that you don’t have to pay to take the train. We slipped in through the closing doors without anyone noticing—the slight distortion the suits make in the air is only detectable if you know to look for it—and stood out of the way of the crowds coming and going. We went to the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs by the fastest route but were forced to get out two stops away because the tracks were blocked.

  Andrea sent me a message. This feels like trouble.

  She was right. As we approached on foot, the usual foot traffic of early evening passed back and forth all around us like nothing was wrong. This was a company neighborhood, so many of the people we saw wer
e corporate employees on their night off. People met each other in front of restaurants or joined the lines at trendy nightclubs, and the neon lights all around us looked like a downtown area on any of the primary colonies. It all seemed normal, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt tense, like a finger hovering in the trigger guard while you listen for approaching footsteps.

  As we approached the medical labs, we heard the crowd. They didn’t roar and they didn’t chant, but the presence of that many people in a relatively small space was loud anyway, with an ominous shuffling of expectant feet. I couldn’t see anything beyond the crowd at first, but one thing I could tell as soon as I saw them was that they were ordinary Martians—very different from the corporate employees at the nightclub district we had just passed through.

  They were listening to a speaker, and as we slipped along the fringes of the crowd, I finally caught a glimpse of him. He was standing on a makeshift platform in front of the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs. In his green tunic, with his neat gray beard, he looked cultured and almost elegant—but his words were fire.

  “How many of us have seen it in our own families? The early signs, so easy to mistake for something else, so easy to convince yourself it’s something else, because you don’t want to believe it’s happened to the ones you love. He’s always been clumsy, we tell ourselves. She’s just tired. But then it gets worse. And in the end, you have no choice except to admit the truth. The one you love has Chandra’s disease!”

  Andrea filled me in, although she wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t read in the briefing.

  That’s Bensouda Hafidi. He’s talking about MS.

  MS was short for “Martian Sclerosis,” colloquially known as “Chandra’s disease.” It was incurable, one hundred percent fatal, and increasingly common. Bensouda Hafidi was an imam, a well-known spiritual leader in one of the East Hellas temple networks. I couldn’t say which one; Martian religious groups hate each other as much as religious groups anywhere, but I’ve never been able to figure out what the differences between them are supposed to be.

  Hafidi continued. “And we could accept this. It’s the will of God that sickness and suffering should come to all of us. This is not unusual; it isn’t anything to shake your fist at God about. Ah, but God commands! Does he not command us?”

  In that silent crowd, three thousand fists raised all at once.

  This is going to get bad. Get moving, Tycho.

  I wanted to get moving, but it wasn’t going to be easy to get any closer than we already were. The crowd occupied the entire space in front of the Medical Labs, and silent men with raised fists were packed so densely in front of me that I could no longer make any progress, even by skirting the edges of the crowd. Just past the platform on which Hafidi was standing, I could see the helmets of StateSec’s armed guards. This situation had every potential to become a massacre—the only question was who was going to massacre whom.

  “God commands us…” cried Hafidi, and the crowd waited on him like an avalanche waiting for a loud noise. If he had told them that God commanded them to storm the medical labs and rip apart every human being they found inside, I’m sure they would have done exactly that. “God commands us to love our neighbor, to help our ailing brother. Have they done so? Has Ares Terrestrial helped its neighbor?”

  Then the roar came, the wave of suppressed rage that had been building up in every throat. It didn’t sound like a crowd of angry people. It sounded like the ocean, gathering its force to roll in as a tsunami.

  Hafidi wasn’t done. “Ares Terrestrial is like the rich man of scripture, who would not give one coin to aid the poor and the imprisoned, and who God caused to be swallowed up by a sandstorm so that even the memory of his name was erased from the world! My Sisters! My Brothers! Hellas, you are that sandstorm!”

  That’s when StateSec finally acted. From the roof of the lab, a small squadron of drones came gliding out. They spread out through the square then started firing into the angry crowd—non-lethal munitions, although that can be something of a misnomer.

  Someone grabbed the speaker, whisking him to safety before StateSec could snatch him. The crowd was panicking, people running in all directions to escape the drones. A path cleared in front of me, and I noticed the faint shimmer in the air as Andrea took her opportunity.

  Move, Tycho!

  I sprinted forward through the gap, narrowly dodging a StateSec officer who was raising his weapon menacingly and pointing it directly at the crowd. Something hit the plasticrete pillar beside me and broke free a fist-sized chip—a “nonlethal” munition at work. Something else hit the wall in front of me and flared up into flame for a brief moment. It took me a second, but I realized it was an improvised firebomb thrown by someone in the crowd.

  It’s one thing to know that someone is “running interference” with electronic countermeasures and security blackout windows, but it’s another thing to trust that enough to just casually walk into a secure facility swarming with armed guards. I’d seen what Thomas could do on more than one occasion, and I still didn’t feel sure. Andrea must have been a bit more confident, because one of the doors opened right in front of me and I saw the shimmer in the air as she passed through it.

  With an angry mob right outside, that door should have been locked—which meant Thomas had hacked it, buying us a moment to slip on through. The StateSec officers were so focused on the crowd that they didn’t even notice the locked door opening and closing behind them. Anyone watching the monitor of the security feed could probably have figured out what was going on—but no, Thomas would already have cut the security feed or even doctored it to appear normal.

  Inside the building, I had to quickly orient myself to the schematics on my dataspike. We had to find the lab of Sasha Ivanovich, ideally before two or three thousand bloodthirsty Martians succeeded in knocking the doors down.

  This way. Don’t engage unless you have no choice.

  Now that my schematics were up in front of my eyes, I no longer needed to watch the space in front of me closely to follow Andrea. I could see her location on my map of the building, although I couldn’t see where anyone else was because our jammers prevented even our own backscatter scanning.

  We moved as quickly as we could without making sound, hugging the right wall in single file. From time to time, we passed people who worked in the facility: researchers in lab coats and their tired assistants; private security guards, nearly indistinguishable from syndicate gunmen; and StateSec officers rushing to reinforce the men outside.

  I didn’t know whether the lab would fall or not. It probably wouldn’t, given the panic when the drones attacked. Still, it might, and there would be nowhere to hide from a crowd that big. They’d come pouring in through these corridors like a flood, and we’d be trampled to death before they even realized we were in here.

  Sneaking through the antiseptic and brightly lit corridors of the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs, I felt grateful for only one thing other than my active camouflage: the absence of any android proxies. It was somewhat strange not to see them, considering that we suspected the company of involvement in things much worse than using android security guards. Still, they must have decided that the use of androids wasn’t worth the risk.

  Back on Tower 7, a heavy weapons android had been responsible for killing my friend and mentor, Gabriel Anderson. Before I managed to get off of Venus, I’d had to fight or flee from so many androids I never wanted to even look at one again. I’d wiped out dozens of the things, but I hadn’t killed enough of them. Right in front of my eyes, android proxies under the control of August Marcenn had mowed down hundreds of unarmed civilians. When Thomas Young used his hacking skills to gain control of their programming, those same androids slaughtered Marcenn’s Nightwatch just as obediently. If the people who ran Ares Terrestrial didn’t want to trust their security to programmable killers, and I couldn’t blame them.

  Whenever possible, Andrea and I avoided being in anyone’s line of sight. It does
n’t happen all that often, but someone could spot a person in active camo just by noticing the distortion shimmer. It’s safer not to rely on the gear exclusively, using it more as a backup to standard infiltration skills. We ducked around corners wherever possible, but most of the doors along the way were closed and locked and we could hardly ask Thomas to just hack them all.

  When we had no choice, we slipped by people who had things to do, which seemed to be just about everyone, considering the security crisis outside. A person hurrying from one urgent task to another doesn’t have much time to even look up and is more likely to ignore a little thing like a faint shimmer in the air. We did get funny looks once or twice, but most of those people probably assumed what they were seeing was something else. A figment of the imagination maybe, or a problem with their dataspike. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as important as whatever they were dealing with.

  We reached a door with a placard reading IVANOVICH, and Andrea paused. If he was monitoring his dataspike, Thomas should know exactly where we were. If he saw where we were, he should know what we needed him to do next. And sure enough, he did. The red light on the door lock changed from red to green, and the door slid open with a quiet hiss. No need for shaped charges or anything else so loud and dramatic.

  We slipped inside, and Andrea dropped out of active camouflage. I stayed invisible at first, but after looking around for a second, she gave the order. “Decloak for now.”

  I deactivated the camo gear, and Andrea glanced at me. “So far, so good. No major errors.”

  I wondered what she meant by “no major errors.” I hadn’t been aware of making any minor errors. Before I could ask, she turned away and started looking around. At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anyone in the lab. No Sasha Ivanovich, no bodyguards, no one. Just an empty work area, all kitted out with the latest and shiniest scientific equipment I had no hope of understanding.

  The place looked so empty—or perhaps unused would be the better word—that it almost looked like a model laboratory, a place you would show university students so they could see what a real research lab looked like.