Location : Henan Radiation Zone
Contract Holder : None
Iris and Silvy were packed into the fuselage of a horizon skimmer transportation jet so close their knees bumped against one another. It wasn’t the fastest plane in the world by a long shot, but it did wonders at flying through any and all weather conditions so close to the ground radar would never be able to catch them before it was too late. It was also so noisy they had to crank the music up to max and it still sounded like the band had blown out their amps trying to wow the crowd with static instead of with music.
Not that the two of them were talking. Silvy was too busy sulking and staring out the window.
Iris tried to get conversation flowing. “I think we might be able to get a look at the old Three Gorges Dam before we arrive at the Jian Line, that will be pretty cool.”
“It’s a heaping pile of concrete from two centuries ago, without a lick of aesthetics to it.”
“Yeah, but it’s so big they say it literally changed the length of a day on Earth!” Iris’ forced smile died in the face of Silvy’s sustained pout. “Are you at least going to tell me what’s got your panties twisted about this?”
“It’s nothing…”
“Are you upset you’re on field work?”
“I’m getting paid double for being in the field. I’m fine.”
“Were you forced to reschedule a date or something?”
“Pfft.”
“Sorry I asked… Were you scheduled for a holiday rotation?”
“Please stop guessing.”
“Then tell me, or stop sulking.”
Silvy groaned and rolled her head back to stare at the roof. “It’s stupid, that’s why I don’t want to tell you.”
Iris frowned and kept up her stare. Sometimes, not needing to blink really came in handy. “Then are you going to stop sulking?”
Silvy thought it over and asked, “How much longer is this flight?”
“About thirty minutes,” the pilot AI answered.
She sighed. “I guess… it’s really dumb though. It shouldn’t be affecting me like this, I know that. You’re going to think it’s dumb. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“Oh, just spit it out, would you? I can’t even zone out to watch my adventure path serials with you huffing over there like a heartbroken teenager.”
Silvy huffed again, and Iris had to remind herself the girl was barely into her twenties. “I had been selected to compete in Liar Liar and now I’m going to miss it.”
Iris forgot to glare. She waited for the punchline, but Silvy just went back to sulking. “You were going to be on Liar Liar?” she blurted out. “How the hell did you get selected?”
“Just a qualifier round, it was nothing special. Tons of people get to join the qualifier rounds. There’s only like a half a percent success rate at those things. That’s why I’m trying to not let it get to me.”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry. You’re getting robbed! I could have worked with another Overwatch if I knew you were going to be on Liar Liar.” It was the biggest game show in northern Europe, and rapidly catching on around the rest of the world. The premise always sounded stupid, like grown adults playing capture the flag, but the showrunners always had just the right kind of quirks to the game that the most absurd and clever situations would crop up. The tournament bracket was unmatched drama, the cream of the crop of cunning bastards at each other’s throats. By contrast, the qualifiers seemed to be random chance, but they had a charm of their own. And Silvy had just gotten screwed out of competing.
Silvy balked. “What? And let someone else get the credit of helping you? Like hell. Don’t get me wrong, Iris, I’m already dreaming of the commission payout we’ll get if we turn over a smuggling operation to the American government. We get a cut of any hard assets we seize, and that’s way better than losing a game of Liar Liar just because I got randomly assigned to a team of idiots.”
It was Iris’ turn to huff and sulk. “Well, I would have been rooting for you. You’ve got actual experience. I bet you would have had an advantage. You could have totally made it through the qualifier.” They both sighed and soaked in the ensuing silence. She tried to spot the Three Gorges Dam, but they were way too low to the ground. She couldn’t see beyond the nearest copse of trees, let alone to the biggest dam in Asia.
“Fifteen minutes until landing,” the AI pilot announced.
Silvy rolled her eyes and sat forward, putting her elbows on her knees. “We should at least talk shop.” Iris nodded. “I’ll have a hummingbird tailing you, as best I can, but you’re going in alone to the train. In the event you meet something you can’t kill or break, the plane here has six penetrator missiles. As long as we can communicate locations, we can turn anything to slag.”
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“Except we’re going to be in the radiation zone, so how good is communications going to be?”
Silvy shrugged. “Better than it used to be, that’s for sure. We can give you a surefire relay, but everyone would be able to recognize it as a glance, and–”
Iris rolled her eyes. “You’re sending me incognito.”
“It’s that, or put you with the cargo and–”
“I’m not equipment, right. Okay, so what’s the passenger list like this time?”
Answering that proved tricky. Ever since the Korean Independence War, relations with UAAF had been tense to say the least. The calorie exchange has kept the Jian Line running out of necessity. With that structure to build on, all the corporations that had straddled the gulf became multi-nationals, tying the two nations together with the flow of goods. While the common people couldn’t travel the Jian Line, there were any number of corporate interests that could traverse the borders.
“Gamblers,” Silvy said. “To be precise, sports gamblers.”
Iris blinked. “They have sports in Korea?”
“Not good ones, no. But that’s not the point. They’ve got a bunch of entertainers and influencers and stuff to bet on their slapdash amateur teams. Them being bad at the games actually helps the ratings. The show is these people. The show is watching them burn through billions of yuan and losing to stupidity, only to make it back on side bets. There’s actually a ton of betting on the betting. There are some real hardcore analysts that treat these people like race horses.”
“And you expect me to blend in with these people?”
Silvy’s moping shifted. A sly grin appeared on her face. “We prepared a maid–”
“No, I’m not going on the train as a serving girl.”
“It would work really well!”
“No.”
Silvy deflated and her grin vanished. “Suit and tie it is…”
The plane dropped Iris off between two passenger cars of the train, on the maintenance platform where she could get changed. It had to be done while the train was moving, the wind howling with centuries old damned. By the time she had the outfit on, HQ had hacked into the Jian Line’s database to add her to the registry. As soon as she could throw on the sportcoat, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, she cut the door lock and strolled in.
The first people she saw were butlers and bunnygirls. The kind of low brow eye candy that kept eyes glued to a television. Despite all her indignation, she faced a moment of insecurity, of feeling like she had completely missed the dress code. They all glanced at her, studied her, wondered who she was and why she looked like that.
“Relax,” Silvy whispered in her ear. “They’re just looking because you can make anything look good.”
Iris manually blocked the blush reflex from manifesting. Her faux skin was still just numb enough that it worked. “Can’t you find another way to phrase that?” She strode into the first passenger compartment and headed for the bar. The Jian Line wasn’t like other trains. It wasn’t particularly fast for starters, but that was because of how much armor plating the thing had. Dating back from the post-apocalypse, the thing was like a caterpillar tank flying from Korea to the Himalayan Sprawl. They never had stretched it to Japan, but it had at least provided radiation proof transport for a hundred years.
“Come on Iris, you’ve got a designer body. If no one reminded you about that, I swear you’d forget. And why are you getting a drink? You don’t even have a stomach.”
Iris in fact did have a stomach, if a food holding tank counted, but not even Silvy was privy to that. “Camouflage,” she said, and got herself a mixed drink they had labeled a Rising Sun. She had picked it because the glass was nearly the size of a wine bottle, but the mix seemed to be some kind of red syrup at the bottom, ice, and vodka all the way to the top. The syrup slowly bubbled, sucking up from the bottom of the glass and struggling to reach the surface.
“Drink quick,” the bartender said with a smirk.
“Right, thanks,” she mumbled, watching the glob of who-knew-what threaten to reach the surface.
“Lose a bet already?” a loud mouthed man asked as he threw an elbow up on the counter next to her and grinned. He had on some kind of silk suitcoat over a t-shirt, comically too much bronzer, and–
Iris slammed her drink down and covered her mouth as she snorted a laugh. She did her absolute best to suppress the reaction and turned again to look at the bleached blond mullet. Silvy sent in a data packet, which labeled the guy as Park Young, the man behind One Man Eats. Seventy-two million subscribers, estimated yearly income triple her own. That took the humor out of his appearance faster than a cold shower. “It sounded tasty.”
Park Young threw back his head and laughed. “You’ll be a dangerous one then. If that doesn't scare you, how are we going to wager against you?”
She sipped the vodka like it was water. With optional tastebuds, it may as well have been. “Don’t blame me for having a competitive advantage.”
The man grinned with teeth so white they almost looked blue. “I’m not familiar with you. The name’s–
“Park Young?”
He nodded. “And you?”
“I’m the wildcard.”
That made him pause. The playboy act stopped as he considered her, then it came right back. “I think the producers might finally have some good taste. I suppose chatting you up now would be some kind of cheating?”
“Only if you get caught. But, out of professional etiquette, I have to at least make it hard on you,” she said, and walked away from him. She hoped that hook of intrigue would motivate the man to actually not talk about her at all. He wouldn’t want to lose an advantage to win billions. Not that she had such an advantage, she just needed to move through the cars without getting stopped. The only attention she could afford to get was of the drunken kind, not the wary.
That had been the point of the mixed drink. She may as well have been holding up a sign that read, “I’m one of you.” It served as a passport to take her to the front of the train, where the actually important cargo resided. Between every car she had to pass through a tunnel of heavy rubber, a flexible shielding between her and the lingering radiation, and then once more emerged into playrooms straight out of old Las Vegas.
Then she got a data packet that stopped her dead. She ducked into a bathroom in a panic, hiding herself within the stench of recent hookups. It was enough to get her heart racing as she patched over to Silvy once more and said, “I’m going to need something more than my micro-blade.” She had a pair of them hidden across her back.
“That has to be a mistake. There’s no way she’s here,” Silvy said, and she re-queried the database based on Iris’ feed. They both saw the same data file come back for the same woman as last time.
Leilani Blake was getting interviewed by some hot shot host. The butcher of Panama Canal was sitting not even fifteen meters away from Iris, between her and the cargo cars.