With her knees still jittery from the adrenaline rush of the fight, Juliet approached the dimly lit secret doorway. She smelled something odd, like a hot, steamy bleach in the air, and wrinkled her nose. “Angel, what’s that odor?” Thanks to her olfactory implants, Angel had no problem identifying precisely what it was.
“There’s a lingering scent of bleach, and the moisture content in the air is elevated, along with a three-degree increase in the ambient temperature. I’d speculate that an autoclave or similar device is being operated. The hum of machinery is consistent with that hypothesis.” Her brain rushing through the implications, Juliet once again sliced the pie on the doorway, ensuring another assailant wasn’t waiting. She cautiously entered the secret room when she saw nothing near the door other than a large stainless-steel cabinet with three drawers, a desk—bare save a single high-end data cube, and a rolling desk chair.
The big cabinet had blocked much of her view, but once she stepped in and looked around it, Juliet froze in her tracks, dumbstruck by the incongruity of what she saw. Her brain couldn’t reconcile the scene with what she’d expected to find in a dirty corpo-sec officer’s apartment. Three stainless refrigerated cabinets lined the room's far wall, a compact auto-surgeon table sat against another wall, and a big, hissing, occasionally steaming, rectangular device sat in the far corner. “What the hell is this?”
Her eyes were focused on the hissing device, and Angel must have taken her question literally. “That’s a RodorCo industrial biological waste disposal oven.”
“Something tells me the dirty corpos in Luna Security are up to a lot more than just robbing hangars in the industrial domes. This guy is dirtier than dirty.” The air in the room was noticeably warmer than in the hallway, and the lingering smell of disinfectant stung Juliet’s eyes. It seemed the synth had just finished cleaning something up when she and Angel surprised him. “I’m scared to look in those fridges.”
“Judging by the nature of the equipment in this secret room, I’m not sure we’ll like what you find.”
Juliet nodded, but she felt an urgency to get moving, and, realizing that, she knew why. The synth might very well have sent a message before it fried its synthetic brain. She could have dirty corpo sec on her in minutes. She holstered her needler and hurried over to the first fridge, pulling it wide. Opaque, heat-sealed black plastic bags lined the shelves. She reached for one at random and brought it over to the auto-surgeon table. It wasn’t large—about the size of a three-liter freezer bag, but it was heavy. With her vibroblade, she slit a seam open and dumped the contents onto the table.
The thing that rolled out was so unexpected and bizarre that she didn’t react at first. She stared at it for several long seconds before Angel helped by saying, “That’s a human brain.”
“What the hell is going on in here?” Juliet hissed, grabbing another black bag and slicing it open. That one contained a heart. “Holy shit!” She yanked open the doors on the other two industrial refrigerators, and Angel tallied the sealed bags for her—forty-three.
“They’re harvesting organs.” At Angel’s answer to her obvious but unspoken question, Juliet looked at the humming, steaming waste disposal oven with a new level of horror.
“We need to get out of here.” She lifted the data cube off the charging pad and pulled the single wire out of the back—a network cable running along the wall to the auto-surgeon. Gripping it in her left hand, she hurried out the door. “If the synth got a message out, we can expect Lopez or one of his dirty buddies to come around here any second. Shit, we might have a whole dirty corpo-sec SWAT team on us any minute now.”
“Wait!” Angel said, freezing Juliet in her tracks. “We don’t know the synth got a message out. We don’t know that Evan even has access to this room. He may play a minor role in this whole thing. Perhaps he’s simply one to find the marks and bring them home.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be a little cautious. You should drag the synth back into the room and close it up.”
Juliet was on edge and really wanted to bolt, but she had to admit Angel had a point. If the synth hadn’t sent a message, Juliet would be tipping her hand if she left him lying in the hallway. Groaning with stress and disgust, she grabbed the synth’s limp, dead hand and dragged him back into the secret room. It wasn’t hard to find the cleaning supplies—they were in the top drawer of the big cabinet. With a wad of paper towels and some sanitizing spray, she cleaned the white, gooey synth blood off the vinyl flooring, adding to the overall chemical odor of the air. That done, she hurried to the control panel, closed the secret door, and put the digital picture frame back into place.
“I hope you’re right, ‘cause if corpo-sec were coming in hot, they’d be here by now.”
“They would only respond in secret; they wouldn’t want news streams to get wind of what Evan Lopez has stored in his apartment.”
Juliet nodded, some relief entering her voice, “Good point. If they’re going to respond, it will be just dirty corpos, and they’ll do it on the down-low.” Hoping that meant she still had a little time, Juliet bolted for the front door and slipped out. She knew Angel had control of the cameras, so she wasn’t worried anyone was lurking on the other side. She practically flew down the steps, ducked past the neighbor’s condo, and jogged over to her bike, tossing the cube into the compartment under the seat. She wasn’t sure she’d find anything on the device, but Angel had said the secret room’s door panel was air-gapped; maybe the cube had been, too.
She didn’t bother walking her bike out of the spot she’d wedged it into. She just drove forward onto the sidewalk, then past a few parked cars before angling back onto the road. “Guide me to one of the agridomes, Angel. I’m going to try to lay low until the city wakes up, and I can disappear in some traffic on the way to the industrial domes.”
“Will do. I’m also altering your bike’s color; we’ll cycle through a few shades as we pass through tunnels. Do you think we’ll find anything on that data cube?”
“It looked like it wasn’t there permanently. Like, it was sitting on the corner of the desk with the wire pulled forward. Something tells me that synth brings it and leaves with it whenever he visits Evan’s secret room.”
“Oh, I see. You’re assuming that synth came and went. It wasn’t there at Evan’s whim?”
“I don’t know!” Juliet fought the urge to twist the throttle and fly out of the city; she had to keep from being too conspicuous. “It seemed like a damn high-end synth to leave sitting in an organ-harvesting room. You saw how fast he was! Anyway, this just got a hell of a lot more complicated. You still have eyes on Evan’s place, right? Anything?”
“No, there hasn’t been any activity at the townhome.”
“Well, that’s reassuring. I’d think someone would have shown up by now.” Juliet breathed a little easier as she took the onramp to the interdome highway leading to Agridome W4. She was cruising along calmly, staying close to the few vehicles she saw, not zooming past anyone. She was currently riding in the wake of a big, automated, flatbed truck. Looking down, she saw the chassis of her bike was pale green with an opalescent sheen, and she kind of liked it. “I thought my bike could only take on a handful of factory colors.”
“Once I looked at the code, I saw there were nearly endless possible colors. The manufacturer has five approved, proprietary paints, but I didn’t see why we should be limited that way.”
“Well, I agree; they’re just trying to enforce their branding.” Juliet looked at her AUI, saw the time was 0240, and stifled a yawn. “I’m going to be so tired today.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“It’s Saturday; you can sleep!”
“Yeah. Find us a breakfast place. I bet the farmers eat early, right?”
“There’s a twenty-four-hour diner and tractor supply store in the next dome.”
“Tractor supply store?”
“They sell farm equipment, fuel, feed, and various other supplies. The reviews on the breakfast food are surprisingly positive. RoyalCocoa2090 says their biscuits and gravy are worth killing for.”
“Good to know.” Juliet smiled, ever amused by the trivia Angel chose to share with her.
She zoned out, trusting Angel to highlight her exit. Her brain was only about ten percent focused on her driving as she thought about everything she’d just seen at Evan Lopez’s apartment. While the organs in the refrigeration units were horrifying, the synth unnerved her the most. He was definitely a killer, not just an organ-harvesting assistant. Hines said he’d known Evan since he was a kid. She couldn’t imagine the sergeant could be so blind that he wouldn’t realize Evan had become some kind of crime kingpin. No, if she were guessing, she’d say Evan answered to the synth, not the other way around. Who did the synth answer to, though?
After a few minutes, she pulled up to Carbon Feed and Supply, an establishment that looked a lot like a fuel depot crossed with a hardware store with a restaurant tacked on for good measure. Despite it being three in the morning, there were quite a few vehicles in the lot, and she could see through the windows that the restaurant wasn’t even close to empty. She snatched the data cube out from under her seat, then, in a moment of panic, asked, “Shit, Angel! Is there any signal coming off this thing?”
“No, I’ve been monitoring it.”
“Thank you! Whew! Well, I guess it makes sense that the wireless would be off if they had it air-gapped. Still, it could have a tracker. I’ll let you have a good look through the data port before I power it on.” As she pulled her helmet off, she sighed with relief at the touch of the cool morning air, shaking out her hair, fluffing the sweaty strands at the nape of her neck, and letting some air under them to tickle her skin. “That feels good.”
A few minutes later, she was seated in a booth, sipping a strong cup of coffee with some vanilla-flavored creamer, and idly tapping her fingers while she waited for Angel’s report on the data cube. She was starting to crash pretty hard, and the coffee was hitting the spot. She’d had a deep craving for something sweet, so she’d also ordered some “sunshine” pancakes, but according to the AUI widget from the restaurant, they were still seven minutes from being ready. After stewing for a few minutes, her mind replaying her encounter with the synth, trying to think of what she could have done better, she broke down and asked, “Anything?”
“I’m still combatting the ICE. This deck has a very high-end processor and sophisticated anti-tampering software. You should put it on that charging pad because it’s burning a lot of power, fending me off.”
“Oh? All right.” Juliet did as Angel suggested, moving the palm-sized cube onto the charging pad next to the salt and pepper shakers. A message notification popped up on her AUI, and when she stared at it, it expanded to show a note from Aya:
Where are you?
Since Angel was busy, Juliet mentally “touched” the reply button and said, “Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you when I left. I had a late-night surveillance gig. I’ll be home early.” After she touched send, she chuckled. “Home. My home is a broken-down spaceship in a hangar.”
“Home is where the heart . . .”
“Don’t you dare!” Juliet laughed, cutting off Angel’s platitude. After another minute of silence, she mused aloud, “If I had a monoblade, that encounter would have gone a lot differently.”
“If you’d severed the synth’s head and quickly plugged in your cable, we might have salvaged some valuable intel before it could react.”
“That and it never would have gotten ahold of my ankle or pushed me down the hallway. The needler is great, but a monoblade is just as silent and a hell of a lot more dangerous.”
“Unless you don’t want to kill your opponent.”
Juliet knew Angel was preoccupied, but she seemed to be fine carrying on a conversation at the same time, so she pestered her again. “What’s it looking like? Are you going to be able to get in?”
“I’m making progress. I’ve already disabled a logic bomb and a secondary kill switch. I should be able to start brute forcing the ICE now.” Angel’s voice didn’t exactly sound strained, but Juliet could detect a slight edge to it. She decided to leave her alone while she worked. She looked around the booth and saw that she was pretty much alone at that end of the restaurant. The closest customer was a tall, heavyset man wearing well-soiled overalls three tables over. Quite a few customers were closer to the kitchen, sitting at a long counter and a grouping of closer booths.
Feeling relatively anonymous in the restaurant, especially as more and more early risers came in, Juliet decided to try to reach out to Hines. She tapped the call icon on her AUI and typed in the first couple of letters, and when Hines popped up on the contact list, she selected it. “Juliet, I can help you manage calls; it’s not that difficult to . . .”
“Hush! I can fend for myself for a while. You do your thing.”
“All right, but . . .”
“Angel, it’s fine!” Juliet chuckled, then mentally touched the call icon under the image of Sergeant Hines. Several call tones sounded, but Hines never answered. She canceled the call, then sighed, leaning back in the booth, wishing there was some way she could help Angel. She was saved from boredom by another message from Aya.
Don’t forget I have that meeting with your doctor this afternoon. Are you sure she’s not going out of her way too much to meet me on a Saturday? Sorry to pester you, but do you think you’ll be able to get me that PAI before then? It’s at 2.
“Oh shoot!” Juliet had forgotten. She touched the reply button and then spoke a quick reply, “I’ll pick it up on my way back this morning. Don’t worry about Ladia; she doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. Also, go back to bed!” Aya replied with Thank you! and a heart emoji.
Juliet’s next distraction came in the form of a plate of hot, syrupy pancakes, and she dug in with gusto, only having to stifle a single, savage yawn as she finished, using her finger to scoop extra syrup off her plate. The back of her neck was hot, and she knew Angel was working hard, so she didn’t say anything as she leaned into the corner of her booth and let her eyes close. She drifted between wakefulness and sleep for several minutes and probably would have fallen soundly asleep if she hadn’t kept jerking awake with each jingle of the bell on the restaurant door. In an effort to keep alert, she said, “Put a window on my AUI with a rotating cam feed from Lopez’s apartment.”
Angel didn’t reply, but, as Juliet had requested, a window appeared in the corner of her vision, showing rotating images of Lopez’s front stoop, his main living area, and the hallway outside his bedroom. Everything looked the same as when Juliet had left. She watched the feed for a while, but her eyes grew heavy, and she closed them again. It felt almost immediate, but when Angel spoke up, startling her awake, her AUI said it was 0428. “Mm? Sheesh, I dozed off!”
Angel sounded almost euphoric. “I’m in, and it was worth the effort to breach this cube!”
“What do we have?”
“Many things! Photos of the victims, a database of their DNA samples, destination codes, a delivery and pickup schedule, correspondence between Yavik—that’s the name of the synth you killed—and several others in his organization, including his ‘farmers,’ one of whom is Evan Lopez. Yavik seems to be primarily employed and motivated by Life-Ultra Pharmaceutical Corp.”
“Holy! Evan is named?”
“Yes, it seems Yavik was either confident in the security of his data or he didn’t care what would happen to his accomplices if he were compromised. I have the names of seven other Luna Security Corp. officers.”
“This is huge, Angel. Can I unplug this cube?” Juliet started to slide out of the booth, noting with chagrin that quite a few nearby tables were now occupied. She wondered if the waitstaff had wanted to wake her during her little nap.
“Yes. I have what I need, and I’ve re-encrypted it.”
Juliet stood, palmed the cube, and then started for the door. She didn’t try to make eye contact with any of the clientele—better that she didn’t make an impression—but a tall man wearing jeans and a button-up shirt, covered in stains and mended tears had other ideas. He was leaning over a table, talking to the couple sitting there in friendly tones. When she passed by, he stood up straight and sort of shifted into her path, looking her right in the eyes. “Awful nice little piece you got there in that holster. You a corpo-sec? Off duty?”
“Not a chance.” Juliet tried to sidestep around him, but he moved, blocking her path. He was a handsome man, if rugged, with leathery, tan skin that made his bright, pale brown eyes really stand out. Juliet often wondered about working men like that with nice ocular implants—did he keep the color he was born with, or did he splurge a little to try to put a shine on an otherwise rough-cut gem? “I’m in a hurry, friendo.”
“Friendo? Sounds like a city thing.”
“Oh, please!” Juliet laughed. “You live in a dome on the moon. Don’t try to play the country hick.” Again, she moved to the left, pressing uncomfortably close to an elderly woman sitting at a table, and again, he blocked her path. Juliet sighed and, before her impulse for violence got the better of her, took a deep, slow breath and asked, “Would you mind letting me pass? I’m late.”
“Move out of her way, Len!” the woman he’d been talking to said. “What’s gotten into you?”
Len grinned and took a step back. “Sorry, ma’am, but when I saw you sleeping over at that booth, I almost fell over. Never seen such a pretty face, and I wasn’t going to let you walk out of here without at least introducing myself.” He held out his large, calloused hand, and Juliet frowned, contemplating violence again.
Angel, closer to her thoughts than ever, intervened, “We shouldn’t make a scene.”
Juliet forced a smile and took Len’s hand, alarmed and also impressed by how hard and rough it was. “Lydia.” She wasn’t sure why she’d fallen back on the old cover ID, but she didn’t want to tell him her real name or handle, and it was the first thing that came to her tongue. Regardless, he smiled, squeezed her hand, and looked down at the woman who’d come to Juliet’s aid.
“She’s got a hell of a grip, Ophelia.”
Now that she had his hand in hers, Juliet didn’t waste any time bearing down with the enormous pressure of her cybernetic grip and pressing forward, pushing him back a couple of steps while she passed around him. His eyes widened, and she could see he wanted to cry out or at least protest, but some kind of pride wouldn’t let him. Juliet grinned wickedly, locking eyes with him. “Nice to meet you, Len. Do yourself a favor, and don’t be so pushy next time.” Before he could respond, Juliet let go and slipped out the door. He didn’t follow.
“I don’t think he meant any harm.” She tossed the deck into the storage under her seat, slammed her helmet onto her head, and hopped onto the bike. Ten seconds later, she was goosing the throttle, aiming for the ramp leading to the interdome highway.
“I thought it was strange, but then, I’ve never tried to pick up a pretty woman out of the blue. What’s our next move?”
“You’re sweet, Angel. Anyway, what’s next? We’ll get Aya’s PAI from the Wing. After that? Sleep for five or six hours.”
“And after that? Or, during that? What should I do?”
“I think we need to make a move on Evan Lopez. He knows more about the network of dirty cops, and he doesn’t know there’s a dead synth in his apartment. I imagine he’ll sleep when he gets home, and I want to be there when he wakes up.”
“What about your date with Applebaum and the others?”
“Well, I was thinking about that before I fell asleep. I know they want to get to know me, and they have this squad game they want to play. I mean, it sounds fun, but maybe I should be the one to provide the team-building activity. You know what I mean? Seems like Hines had me bite off a little more than I’m comfortable chewing alone. Let’s see if we can get the ‘guys’ involved.” Juliet glanced at her AUI, saw the time was 0441, and laughed. “Let’s wake up Frida. Get her on the line.”