“Wait!” Urle said. But Short Circuit walked away quickly.
“Fisc,” Urle snapped. “I didn’t think someone like him would know enough to be frightened by the alias alone . . .”
Kell was watching the man hurry away to a door that led outside. He glanced back at them.
Urle rubbed his forehead. “We need to move fast to find another broker before this guy tells on us. We could get trouble then, Kell, of all sorts. Or hell, maybe I’m just nuts. Maybe this is a good sign that we should just let it go.”
He looked up. “What do you think?”
But Kell was gone.
Urle jumped up. Kell had been sitting on the inside, and without even disturbing the seat enough to be noticed, he had disappeared.
Whirling, Urle looking towards the door that Short Circuit had gone out, and then sprinted towards it.
Slamming the door open, he found himself in an alleyway between this bar and the next, on an elevated floor that was mostly empty. Deeper down the alley, though, he saw movement, and he followed it.
Then he saw Kell.
“Don’t kill him!” Urle cried.
The Ambassador looked over to him, still holding Short Circuit’s body.
Urle’s scans suggested the man was still alive; electric activity in his body was still going, only at levels that suggested he was unconscious.
The man’s brain had gone out from oxygen deprivation, though why his electronics had likewise gone into standby was not as easy to explain.
“I have not killed him yet,” Kell said simply.
He let go of the man, letting him slump to the ground.
“Killing people for information is not how we do things, Kell! This man has rights, he was a human being who-“
“Who was garbage, by your own words,” Kell said sharply. “Who had a long list of crimes against others of his kind. Even murder. Is that not true?”
“You are not judge, jury, and executioner,” Urle said, standing his ground. “That’s not how we work.”
“I thought you wished for justice and to save others. Is this man’s life truly more important than those goals?” Kell asked. “His mind is still mostly organic. If I kill him then I can access it, as you could with the other man. It is the easiest way to learn.”
“We’re not even sure that he’s involved in-“
“He is,” Kell said. He pointed to the back of the man’s skull, where a metal implant stood out – just barely – as a slightly different shade of blue steel against the rest. “This part matches the one you found at the store. They are from the murdered man you wished to avenge. He is involved.”
Urle moved closer, crouching, and touched the part. His scans could not truly confirm that it had belonged to JaxIn, but it had been built to the same specifications, down to the batch of pigments used on the surface metal. This was part of the same set – and it had recently had its edges cut to fit Short Circuit’s skull.
“This doesn’t prove that he knew it was stolen from a dead man,” Urle said softly.
“It bears marks that cannot be washed away. Threads connect things, even after death, Zachariah Urle. I can see it – whether you can or not does not change that.”
Kell pointed back out of the alley.
“Now leave. I will make sure there is no body to find.”
Urle didn’t move. “Like how you got rid of the Hev bodies?”
Kell was silent a moment, watching him. Unblinking. Urle felt his eyes water as the aura of Kell’s displeasure made itself known.
“Yes,” Kell finally said.
“What did you do with them?” Urle asked. On some level he did not want to know, he was terrified to know, sickened to ask because he felt he knew, but the words were not easily said.
“I consumed them,” Kell told him. “I had never consumed an alien species before.”
“Cannibalism-“
“Is normal among my kind,” Kell replied sharply. “And these were our enemies. You wish I should have left their corpses, containing poisons meant specifically to cause your kind a painful death? I broke down their bodies, their poisons, and I learned from them. On some level you can say I now understand their people. And I can do that again here. We will know exactly what we need to know, and we can prevent innocent beings from dying in the future. If you believe this is still immoral, then I can only say that the moralities of our two people do not intersect.”
It was Urle’s turn to be silent, and Kell simply waited, showing no sign of impatience, still unblinking, still seeming a monster in human clothes.
“I won’t let you kill him. And if he doesn’t store his data digitally then I can’t access it.”
Kell said nothing and walked out of the alley.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
They were at a dead end.
Urle looked down at Short Circuit, wondering if the man’s life was really worth it.
He would go and report this to someone . . . but Kell had at least bought them a couple hours before that happened.
After a few moments of lingering, he went to the mouth of the alley, seeing Kell standing a dozen meters away, staring upward at the neon billboards.
Probably wondering why he even put up with humans, Urle thought.
A message popped up in his inbox.
It was, as far as he could tell, blank. There was no sender, no original IP, only routing IPs – a lot of them, so many they became jumbled, useless data.
His heart beat faster.
The quality of this obfuscation was beyond him. It was beyond anyone he had ever known.
It had to be the same person who had hacked into the server and made the openings in the defenses that they had used earlier.
Trying to be cautious about it, but knowing that any virus or attack someone this skilled might make would probably slice through him like he was made of tissue, he opened it.
STATION 247 | DECK 19 | COMPLEX 7
That was it. Just text again.
But it might be the break they needed.
“Kell!” he called out. “I know where to go.”
----------------------------------------
Brooks had been to five bars so far, and he still didn’t have a lead.
After taking a shuttle from Gohhi Main Hub to the station called Vesper Glass, he’d then caught another to Transitory Heights, both stations of ill-repute with large black markets and a variety of shady dealings. Always a good place to find an informant.
Yet none of it had panned out.
All he’d managed to learn so far was that the figure Silva had mentioned, Vermillion Dawn, was the biggest, the most influential, the most knowledgeable. He’d overheard two men talking in hushed tones insisting that she knew about every transaction that happened in the entirety of Gohhi.
However exaggerated that was, it surely meant they knew about him. But not a word – from Vermillion Dawn or any of the other brokers.
He’d never heard of it being this hard to get in contact with one, which meant that this information was incredibly dear – and Hoc Rem’s backers were truly someone formidable.
It might also mean that someone knew who he was and was keeping him running around uselessly while they prepared.
Which might even be a trap. There was a bounty on his head in some places on the fringe, and Gohhi probably harbored a lot of bounty hunters. Though trying to take in an SU officer would cause a massive problem for Gohhi, so they heavily discouraged such attempts.
Could also be an attempt on his life, but he honestly didn’t see himself as that valuable in the scheme of things.
It could be either or both of those scenarios. There might even be more than one interested party with different or converging agendas, he mused, frustrated that he honestly didn’t have any clues and was over-analyzing.
He’d actually gotten a drink this time, though he’d scanned it for any dangerous compounds and was sipping carefully.
A drone came over and he tensed, not expecting it. It lowered over the table and dropped a white slip.
Setting down his drink and eyeing the cramped, sparse bar, he then unfolded the note.
They were coordinates on the station. They didn’t lead to a bar or other business, or even a residence. Just a corner junction in a station that didn’t even have gravity.
Leaving his drink, he left the bar, pulling himself on handholds until he was out. Microgravity allowed the area to be packed with businesses, with storefronts on all surfaces.
Passing a pet store selling endangered rare fish from a dozen different worlds, he turned down one passage through a large tunnel that led between different streets.
Dodging a floating mass of cargo wrapped in netting and grabbing onto a railing, he hauled himself through.
Five minutes of travel brought him near the coordinates, though he did not yet approach.
Standing in a darkened cross-tunnel, he scanned the area.
This part of the station seemed at least partially-abandoned, a fate many stations in Gohhi underwent.
There was a terrible ecosystem here; a station was built, and over time it might take enough wear and tear that its quality degraded. Investors only interested in quick money would abandon it in droves and it would decay.
Then squatters and the desperately poor would move in.
If they formed a community with any kind of legitimate culture of its own, the place could become a sort of Bohemian retreat from the cutthroat business in other stations.
Then, if the place was still worth it, someone might buy it and invest and develop it into something expensive, luring new dwellers on the perceived culture, only to drive out those very same people in the process. The final product of detournement under a capitalist way of life, in a sense.
So far, the station did not seem to have even gotten to that second phase, if it ever would.
He saw no one, but there were structures all around. All shuttered and dark.
In the middle, centered by pylons from all six walls, was a sculpture of children, floating together – feet touching, arms stretched out, hand in hand. Around them was a sphere of hexagons, perhaps representing the station itself.
It was an interesting piece, he thought, and he found himself wondering who had lived here before its abandonment.
Checking the coordinates again, he saw they were very precise, showing him . . . a trash can.
It was on the ceiling relative to him, and he pushed off the nearest wall to approach the sculpture.
Inspecting the can as he approached, he saw that its vacuum, used to suck up trash without letting old pieces out, had long since been turned off. It appeared to have been stripped of parts as well, leaving the device a mere shell. But there were marks in the dust on it, showing that someone had opened the lid recently.
He got no signals that might suggest an explosive was inside, and reaching the statue, he pulled himself towards it by crawling over the sphere of hexagons.
Reaching the can, he carefully opened the lid.
There was nothing inside, and then an alarm was screaming in his ear.
He jerked his head and body back just as a rifle cracked, a bullet passed through the space where he’d just been.
His sensors had detected the muzzle pointed at him, and without even knowing where it was coming from he’d moved – only through sheer dumb luck had he moved in the right direction.
His system had triangulated the position of the shooter, but he’d lost his grip on the sphere.
Hooking his foot, he tried to pull himself away, but there was no cover here, and he was moving in a predictable arc, the next shot would be easy-
A swarm of drones buzzed around him. Another shot rang out, and a drone burst apart as it took the bullet for him, showering him with debris.
Throwing his arm up to protect his face, he pulled his sidearm and prepared to aim, but he stood no chance against a swarm of drones, even if there hadn’t been a shooter.
But as he uncovered his eyes he saw that the drones were not here for him.
Rather than swarming him, they were moving between him and the shooter.
More shots popped off, but from the drones rather than his attacker.
They were suppressing a window with broken slats, and one crashed in through it, with flashes of light following.
It seemed that he had friends.
Grabbing back onto the hexagon sphere, he looked at the handful of drones that had stayed with him. They had cameras focused on him. His benefactor was clearly curious.
“Thank you,” he said. “Who are you?”
They scattered, flying in all directions, save for a single drone – one with a line of gold on it. The buffed metal strip was flawless, and it hesitated a moment longer before slowly moving away.
Looking to the window, he saw that the drones were flying back out, scattering and going off with haste through other windows, doors, tunnels, even vents.
But the gold-striped drone was still moving slowly, its camera trained on him.
Well, then.
He pushed off the sphere towards it.
“Lead the way,” he said.