The downpour was growing stronger, and Rigel quickened his pace. The sounds of the rain hitting his hood joined the murmur of the people and the noise of the bikes breaking the puddles of water as they passed through the alley.
“Even the disadvantages of the Empire keep their advantages,” he repeated to himself, and again, the smile of memory.
However, the joy faded as quickly as the neon signs of the shops became multicolored stains in the rain, something as blurred as the division between happy and bitter memories.
“You like it, right?” Marie had told him that afternoon on the porch of their summer house. “When will you start to consider the job of a spy suits you better than that of an army officer?”
He had tried to dismiss the comment, but she knew him well.
“C’mon, Rigel! You love running information more than spending hours at a crime scene. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’d never understand, Marie. If you knew the amount of injustice that I see...”
“I know, or do you forget that I was there too? But Rigel, what makes you tick is not the injustices; it’s your addiction to delve into them to find out what is behind each thing.”
“Knowledge is power, or so they say, right?” he tried to defend himself.
She chuckled, though there was more sarcasm in it than real humor.
“Such a cliché phrase!” she said. “It’s true, though. But here is another one: Power corrupts. Look, honey, maybe you control your temper enough to pass a thousand secrets under the table without your face giving it away, but the truth is that you can’t control your true desires. It’s possible that today you don’t realize it, because when you don’t wanna realize something, you don’t do it no matter how much evidence is stuck in your nose, but that passion of yours for meddling in every secret is really your obsession with having everything under control. I hope you figure it out soon and slow down before someone else hits the brakes for you.”
Marie’s voice faded into his memory, slowly replaced by the crackling of the rain. And as if no people were crossing beside him, Rigel slowed down his steps until he came to a complete stop in the middle of the narrow street. He heard grumbling, and a boy, rushing to find a roof so he wouldn’t get wet, accidentally hit him on the shoulder.
“Move,” someone growled.
He lifted his head, the hood of his raincoat moved slightly, and the rain hit his cheeks. Was it possible that his little friction with the man in the alley had struck a chord in him, awakening memories he’d tried to leave behind?
But as if it were fate itself calling, his phone chimed. From the sound, he knew that it wasn’t the legal phone, the one he kept in his pants pocket, but the second one, the one he hid in his drop leg holster. One of his contacts had discovered something that had to reach him through unofficial channels or needed to meet with him outside of official channels. A shot of adrenaline made him revive, a rush of energy that pushed him to find a hiding place where he could calmly take out his phone and receive the message, away from any eye other than his own.
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And so, he imagined what Marie would have done if she had been there. “I told you so,” she would have said, shaking her head slowly and grinning from ear to ear.
Maybe it was time to accept that she had been right all along.
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Night had fallen. The pre-midnight patrol had ended a little over an hour ago, and while squads of soldiers continued to plow through the streets with their Daedalus thrusters, they did so less frequently than before.
After parking in the darkest sector and away from any light pole, the skinny officer got out of his vehicle with the box in hand, crossed the alley with some haste, and entered the park, going towards the area where the lights barely touched the bushes.
He was still wearing the uniform he had worn all day; the dark green strappy jumpsuit was sweaty and smelly, almost as bad as his cap, but personal hygiene was the last thing on his mind right now. Now he had to find...
Rigel appeared from among the trees, announcing himself with the crunch of his footsteps on the grass. From the looks of it—and the smell of it—the Detective Colonel hadn’t had time to change his uniform or take a bath either.
After a sigh, the only greeting the two men exchanged, Officer Snow handed over the box he was carrying to his superior. With the bill of his cap lowered over his eyes, the thin officer hid his identity quite well; only the silver reflection of his white beard peeked out from under the shadows of his face. “You go to investigate the crime of six geology students in the ass crack of the world,” he said, almost whispering, “and you come back with supplies seized from an abandoned lab.”
Moving the package slowly, Rigel verified that it was a little bigger and heavier than the ones Snow used to deliver to him. ‘Help little Detective Timmy solve the best puzzles!’ read the box next to the image of a smiling boy, with a huge magnifying glass in hand and dressed in a uniform very similar to the one they both were wearing at the moment, although the emblem of the Markabian Army there was so big it looked cartoonish. The perfect description of propaganda, Rigel thought.
“If we continue like this, soon your children’s toys will be out of their boxes,” he commented then.
“Don’t worry, I still have those of my nephews,” Snow replied and groped the box. “Here is what you asked for. Uhm, Sir… can I ask you something?”
Rigel didn’t say yes or no, and to Snow, that meant yes; he trusted the detective enough to allow himself to be nosy from time to time.
“Of the things we found in that storeroom, why these documents in particular? In that place, there were more valuable files than these, you know that.”
“Thank you,” Rigel said, referring to the box. That was his answer and his officer got it.
“You have until tomorrow to see if there’s anything problematic before we hand it over as evidence,” Snow reminded him.
“Fine,” Rigel agreed. “And about that monstrosity? What do you know?”
“You mean beauty, Colonel. A masterpiece of computer engineering, a perfect assembly of different machines, several of them stolen, as we supposed. Well, as we assumed, every last one of her circuits is blown. Although we found a pearl inside the shell. One of the machines that make up that beautiful whole is hidden under the main panel board, and it had a four-frequency emitter with it, which prevented its transistors from blowing up during the overload that killed the rest. Do you know what that means?”
“That whoever made that computer assembly wanted to make sure that part didn’t suffer any damage,” Rigel said. “And Froia?”
“Working on that part of the computer as we speak. He says he won’t sleep a wink until he figures out how to get into it.”
“Good. Keep me posted on that,” said Rigel, and with a nod, he thanked his officer for his services. Then they walked off in opposite directions into the darkness of the park.
Climbing into his vehicle, Rigel placed the box on the seat beside him—‘Help little Detective Timmy solve the best puzzles!’—and thought about its contents. He took a deep breath and, hoping he was doing the right thing, took out his secret phone from his holster, looked up his contact’s number, and set up a meeting.