Chapter Seven
Over The Clouds
March 18, Sunday. 125 S.A.
United Kingdom Airspace.
Rumenia Ruzicka, also known as Rum, leaned over the security railing, looked down and took a sip of her coffee.
She was a human girl of young appearance, who liked to dress monochromatically and, in her attire at least when she was not working, the color black predominated.
She had slightly wavy black hair. Her pale skin stood out against her dark attire. The only color on her face was her light brown eyes and freckles on her cheeks, that seemed to give her face a blush that was not really there.
"Why don't you look?" she asked, turning around and smiling innocently.
Some meters away from her Michael Levin, also known as Stan, looked at her with a blank stare, sitting on one of the deck benches. He had a slight pallor on his face, as if at any moment he was going to puke loudly and pointedly enough to shoot down one of the birds fluttering around the flying ferry.
Stan had a tougher look than his partner. He had dark eyes, prominent cheekbones and blond hair. Although, at that moment, it seemed as if the color in his face had disappeared due to the discomfort he felt.
He didn't like the ferry, or any kind of transportation that had a certain reminiscence of a boat.
They slept for a couple of hours during the early hours of the morning, while they put the vehicle in automatic gear and headed to Glasgow. From there, they left the vehicle, changed to casual clothes, and taken the first transport that could get them out of the country. They would have preferred to go directly south, but they could not get passage faster than the second morning ferry to Northern Ireland.
Passage on the ship was rather scarce, and most of the people were on the floor below them, so they had the deck all to themselves.
For Rum, the view of the Firth of Clyde pleased her. They were barely traveling above the sparse morning low clouds, and the Orbital Belt appeared blurred to the south, since at that hour it had changed from polar to equatorial orbit, so they could see the sky clear from east to west.
In Stan's case, although he felt sick from the altitude and vertigo, he was trying to dress his partner in crime in different virtual outfits secretly through his Neurowire. He was watching her in a classic bunny outfit at the time, when a new movement of the ferry reminded him that he was just over 3000 meters off the ground.
"Ugh…"
"If you're feeling that bad, let's go below, at least with people around you won't notice we're in the air."
"No. No need. I need air."
"I guess we're not the only ones," Rum said, looking to the far side of the stern.
Stan looked to the same side and then noticed.
There was a man standing with his back turned, hands in his pockets, facing east. He appeared to be quite tall, with blond hair, combed in a quiff style. He was wearing white pants, a Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops completed his portrait. It wouldn't have been unusual in any other month of the summer, except that it was still March and at an altitude of ten thousand feet. It didn't matter how they looked at it, it was weird. Or maybe he had enough enhancements in his body not to feel the cold at that altitude.
Rum and Stan looked at each other and she shrugged as all response.
Stan looked away and sank further into the bench. He put his hands on the leather jacket and there he found the only reason he felt it was worth being aboard the ferry.
He fumbled with the small cube between his fingers. Rum saw the movement in the pockets and smiled. "Don't wear it out from touching it so much," she said and walked over to sit on the bench next to him.
The cube. A fortune in their hands, but also a problem.
"How are we supposed to change that thing?" she asked.
"We have to find a safe way to sell it without getting thrown into Dragon's Peak," Stan admitted grimly, and deactivated the augmented reality he was dressing Rum with.
"Yeah... the problem is finding a buyer rich enough. We can't sell it to a government and say we found it."
"We could... but they wouldn't pay us its real price."
They both looked at each other, pursed their lips and sighed wearily. The truth was that it could be months before they could find someone interested enough.
The Edinburgh job. Stealing the identities of two MCITHQ forensic technicians. Then stealing a body from the crime scene and transporting it to the abandoned pier, where the delivery was to take place. The payment for the job had been a fractus cube that was worth a fortune on the market because it was so high-end.
During the time of payment they had been so surprised that, as a means of payment, the stranger had offered a cube, that they never worried about the real problem that constituted. How they were going to get a buyer. No matter how they looked at it, they had a fortune on their hands, but for the moment they had no way of getting it, also there was a high possibility that others might want to finish them off for it. And they would have to be careful to find a buyer.
Why did the guy offer something so valuable in payment for a corpse that wasn't even complete to begin with? Rum thought.
Rum, remembering the strange fey that accompanied him, couldn't help but shiver again, not to mention that some of the man's parting words echoed in her ears. Undoubtedly that job had been one of the strangest in a long time.
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They continued to argue for a few moments. Long enough for Stan to forget about his nausea, and they were so engrossed in their conversation, that they didn't notice when the strange man who had been standing a few seconds ago in the stern, was now leaning against the deck railing in front of them with a ridiculous smile on his face that seemed to come out of nowhere. He wore dark, thin-rimmed glasses on his aquiline nose and looked at them without any discretion.
"..." Stan and Rum looked at him in silence, and wondered how much of the conversation they had been having was overheard.
After a few awkward seconds, Rum could no longer contain herself. "Excuse me, can I help you?" she asked in a polite tone, that didn't disguise her anger at being scanned by the eyes of the strange individual.
"We were having a private conversation," Stan said, in a less polite tone. There was something strange about the man that he almost didn't understand.
"Oh, yes. My apologies," the man said, in a soft tone. "I suppose discussing something as valuable as a fractus core, which value you can't just advertise on the market, is a rather delicate subject. Isn't it?"
Rum's smile disappeared and Stan stiffened his gesture. They didn't need to look at each other. They already knew each other well enough, to know what the other would do in such a situation. They had left the usual weapons unarmed, compressed in the bracelets, in the meager luggage they were carrying, but they had two much more discreet polymer weapons in case something went wrong.
They drew the guns quickly, and pointed them at the head of the man. The man smiled and did not flinch in the first moment at the presence of the guns, although he did move quickly for something else. Stan, when he drew his gun so quickly, did not notice that something else escaped from his jacket and rolled onto the deck.
As if he were some sort of ninja acrobat, the man bent down and kicked the priceless cube. It bounced off one of the other walls behind Stan, traced an arc over their heads and the man caught it between two of his fingers as he sat up. Rum blinked in confusion at the strange movement, but it was too late, the man had moved between them like a lightning bolt, and the next second the weapons had disappeared from both of their hands.
"Miss Ruzicka, Mr. Levin, please," the man said, without losing his friendly tone, while examining the strange cube. "I simply wish to converse. I have something to offer you, in exchange for your services."
Stan, with his mouth ajar, watched as the stranger played with the cube between his fingers. "We're out of business. We retired... a few hours ago."
"I still haven't told you what I'm offering."
In less than twenty-four hours already two people had called our names.
We've gotten careless, Rum thought. "How do you know who we are?"
"I have ears in many places… for a long time. Information is much more valuable than money... if you know how... rather when it should be handled." The man held out his hand and offered the two small pistols. "They wouldn't do anything to me either way."
Stan and Rum took them carefully and wordlessly.
"You're not human... Aeon? Thelepath?" Stan guessed. He had already ruled out that he was a fey due to the absence of pointed ears, or any other abnormal features beyond his odd appearance. Although the issue of the ears was not one hundred percent certain, because it could be that he was wearing some form of camouflage.
"Not exactly. But, for conversation's sake, you can say am I a aeon. You can call me Janus. On the other hand... I don't think I'm the only one who isn't exactly human. Right, Mr. Levin?" Janus walked between them and pointed to the deck benches.
They had no choice. He had already shown them that he could be faster and, more worrisome, he could put their identities in the hands of who knows who. He had already made it clear that information was his business. If it wasn't an Aeon it could be an artificial intelligence excommunicated from the Hive Mind for some crime. In case it was a thelepath it could be even more dangerous for them.
They both put away their weapons and sat down in front of their host, who kept moving the cube amusingly between his fingers. "Your exposure to an DE is what caused you to acquire that metamorphic shapeshifter ability, right? At least in your body, I mean." Janus asked Stan.
"What's the point? If you already know everything about me, then you must have read all the reports," Stan said, annoyed.
"Oh yes, but to be frank with you, I'm not really interested in who you are. What I am interested in is what you can do for me right now. Which, believe me, would bring you a lot of benefit," Janus said with a fancy car salesman's smile.
Stan frowned at that statement. His files were sealed, if the man could access them it meant he really wasn't kidding when he said his job was information.
"We already said we're retired," Rum said.
"I don't think you'll be able to retire until you get a buyer for this object. I don't deny that it would be of great interest to certain governments or agencies, clandestine or otherwise. But the problem is, you need to get the money, so you can consider yourself out of the game for good."
"…"
"What I want to offer you is to pay what this little fellow costs," Janus said, as he passed the small cube between his fingers.
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Stan and Rum looked at each other sideways. The whole thing smelled very bad. It was too much of a coincidence that a buyer appeared out of nowhere, only a few hours after the payment had been delivered.
Janus smiled and threw the cube at Rum. She caught it with one hand and put it in her jacket. But that had already interested her.
"How much are you offering?"
"Enough to buy a small planet or live a life of luxury anywhere in the Solar System."
"How much are we talking about?" Stan asked.
"Enough… money is not a problem for me," Janus said and took off his glasses, revealing dark eyes whose look was totally different from the smile on his lips. "If I had wanted the cube, I would have simply thrown both of you overboard and kept it. The money is not the issue here. It's the service you can do for me."
"...What do you need?"
"Not just a what... but rather a what, and whom," Janus said and, making a few motions with his right hand, sent two images to the Neurowires of the two rogues, followed by a strange schematic of what appeared to be some kind of strange camera or machine.
They both examined the pictures and frowned.
"Is this a joke?" Rum asked.
"No. I need you on a certain day, at a certain time, to abduct these two individuals, to transport them to another location where someone else will be waiting for them."
"Alive... I guess? We are not assassins."
"Yes, alive."
"She's a raven!" Stan said, incredulously.
"Shouldn't be a problem once you disable her Neurowire. Ah! But, first I need the machine in the schematic. It's the first thing I need before people. In fact you can accomplish the objective of the machine and the first individual in the same place."
"You want these two people, the machine, and in exchange you would buy the cube from us?" Rum asked hesitantly.
"That would be it. It's very simple."
"Who is the man?"
"No one... here and yet, but it was someone important."
"What do you mean?" Stan asked.
"Time... it's a strange thing," said Janus, smiling and putting his glasses back on. "Do you want more details?"