Provenance I - Flee The Bonds (17 page)

Steve’s empty stomach simmered, ‘The same way you tried to warn his Guardian?’

Her eyes reengaged. ‘You know I could not. SIS would assume Jason had talked to Paul. It is fortunate they did not arrest you at Mitzys.’

‘How do you know I was at Mitzys?’

‘We. . . I have friends who watch you, so I can help.’

‘You mean your frizzy blonde haired friend? Tell her she needs a change of wardrobe.’ Steve waited for a reaction that never came. Not that he’d expected to glean much from the body language of a Level 12 Profiler. The thought occurred to him that CONSEC had been at Mitzys looking for an AH in a red duffle coat. Conjecture snaked in and wreathed in a knot of confusion.
The AH that’s tracking me killed Paul? Who for, the Resistance, SIS? CONSEC know of SIS’s plans, but haven’t told me?
He re-established eye contact. ‘I’ll speak with Admiral Smithson.’

Her stare crystallised. ‘If you do, Jason will never be avenged because we will all be dead.’ She leant forward. ‘You must trust me.’

He didn’t. Had SIS wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have activated the EM surge and if they’d sent an AH to kill Paul, it could just as easily have killed him. ‘It’s probably safer for you if I don’t.’

‘I understand, but we do not have much time. SIS know who has the sequence break algorithm. They will soon be able to start Provenance’s engines.’

* * * *
 

After Jannae left, Steve returned to the saloon. He’d move
Cool Breeze
to Eadsey wharf. Whatever the truth, the further away he was from Penny, the safer she’d be.

He picked up his MCD, and once again scrolled through Jason’s call log. There were several scrambled IDs, but only one used an encryption prefix he recognised. As Jason would have intended.

He tapped the scrambled ID and waited for it to decrypt.

‘Hello?’ The voice from the MCD sounded wary.

‘Hello, Alex.’

‘I-I think you have the wrong call ID.’

‘My name is Mr Wilkinson. I’m calling to thank you for my birthday present.’

‘What can I do for you, Mr Wilkinson?’

23:49 FRI 27:10:2119

FH 1, Chicago, USA, Sector 1

Steve glanced out of the cabin window. Several hundred metres below, deserted orange highways dissected the illuminated grid of street lamps. They were on final approach to FH 1 Chicago, Earth’s largest spaceport.

A female voice broke through the blue-tinted quietude. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll shortly be landing at flight hub one. Please be advised you are entering a red zone. All visitors to Sector 1 should report immediately to CONSEC station. Thank you and have a good day.’

Steve shook his head. It was 23:50, raining, and he’d lost six hours.

Tension in his harness gave the only indication that Hyper-Liner TSB-23 had landed. Through the rain-streaked porthole and beyond the unending row of security lamp posts, Steve could see the pulsating launch ramps. His gaze shifted to the blazing lights of the departure station.
Perhaps it’s a drill, or perhaps Jannae’s telling the truth.

Ambient chatter rose to an excited gabble, people moved across the aisle.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated.’ No one on the starboard side did.

A ‘Tubby’ slumbered on the ramp. As large as a bundle of four Saturn V rockets, the herculean white tube could carry four Praetorians. From above, its outline resembled a timer dial; a ninety-metre circle with a projecting point.

When the launch ramp pulsed red, cabin chatter dwindled to silence.

The lumbering white hulk began to move, and then catapulted into a steam-trailing streak. Seconds later, a boom reverberated around the flight hub and two distant globes of brilliance soared into the night sky. Everyone exhaled.

After disembarking, Steve passed unchallenged through three sets of security gates before leaving the terminal and hailing a taxi. He suspected the driver had wished he hadn’t.

Orange streetlight flickered over the taxi’s plastic interior and Steve’s black and red Interrogator uniform. The driver followed the expressway before turning onto the empty state tollway. His taciturnity came as no surprise to Steve; nobody voluntarily shared their thoughts with SIS. Once they’d been through your memory lockers, you’d never want to open them again.

Twenty minutes later, the towering concrete walls of Detention Centre 4 came into view. The walls gleamed fiercely under stark security lights, their contiguity broken only by the reception block’s band of arctic-blue windows.

Steve stepped out onto the glossy wet tarmac and swiped his MCD over the meter.

The driver didn’t make eye contact. ‘Th-Thank you, sir. Good night.’

Before Steve had stowed his MCD, the taxi was gone. The mere sight of a Detention Centre could elicit a full confession, as could Steve’s Interrogator uniform.

He entered the ambient sterility of the beige foyer and authenticated. An opening appeared in the wall ahead.

‘Thank you, Mr Hojeda. Please proceed.’

The reception hall was warmer, but no less sterile. Ahead, silver tiles bordered a pair of polished metal doors and to the right a windowed booth extended out from the corner. As Steve approached, a Defender stood. His colleague continued to stare at a bank of monitors.

‘Hello, Mr Hojeda, how are you today?’

Steve glanced up at the LED readout above the booth, 00:32:14.

‘Fine thank you, is everything ready?’

‘Yes, sir. The prisoner is in room seven, level two. SECCOM is on channel seven-one-eight.’

The Defender’s shoulder dropped and the polished metal lift doors opened.

Steve smiled. ‘You have been most efficient.’

The lift descended and opened into a bleak corridor, its bare concrete walls starkly lit by a line of domed ceiling lights reflecting
in glossy floor tiles.

Room seven, like all interrogation rooms, had ash-grey walls, a matching tiled floor and two overhead strip lights. A rectangular metal table separated the padded interrogator’s chair from the detainee’s bare metal one. Steve dropped his ruckall next to the chair and sat opposite a shorthaired woman with large dark eyes. The pink sleeves of her white coveralls denoted her crime. She was pregnant.

‘You’re wasting your time, I ain’t gonna tell you who the father is.’

Steve gripped the table and pushed back. ‘Are you sure? You’re only twenty-three. You have your whole life ahead of you.’

Her head arched back exposing the mahogany smooth skin below her jaw. ‘Life, what do you know about life, apart from taking it.’

‘Does he love you?’

Her head dropped, her snarl uncoiling into a flat smile. ‘We finished here?’

Steve sighed, reached down to the ruckall, and retrieved the ultrasonic cutter. ‘Unfortunately not.’ He tapped his MPS. ‘This is room seven, turn off surveillance.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Steve removed the MCD from his tunic pocket and placed it on the table.

She struggled against the metal restraints, her resilience crumbling into a sob. ‘Don’t hurt my baby.’

He walked around the table and placed his hand on her trembling arm. ‘No one’s going to hurt your baby, Michelle, or you. My name’s Steve, I’m a friend of Dee’s. Keep an eye on the MCD. If it turns red, pretend to be unconscious.’

Steve knelt down and placed the V-shaped cutting head on the chair’s control panel. ‘You’ll smell burning, but don’t worry.’

The plasma burst through the metal cover in seconds, four clicks followed.

He led Michelle to the middle of the room. ‘Stand still, arms by your side, and look down.’ After scanning her with the MCD, he removed an HSS, a PSYOPS uniform and the Identity Masking Kit from his ruckall. ‘You’re Lieutenant Barnes, a Level Five Profiler.’

Michelle pointed at the black cylinder. ‘What’s that?’

‘Holographic projector, it should give us some time.’

After transferring the image, Steve placed the HSS under the table, adjusted the projection angle, and stepped back. The light intensity increased until a credible hologram of Michelle appeared.

‘That’ll have to do. I—’ Steve snatched up his vibrating MPS, the scanner icon flashed.
Prefect
.

Her deep brown eyes implored his. ‘What’s that noise?’

The distinctive hum drew closer, louder, until the reverberations drummed against the door. He guided Michelle to the adjacent corner and raised a finger to his lips.

Steve faced the door and tapped the keypad. Before it had fully opened, the matt black Prefect pivoted towards him. Steve leapt, grabbing the casing’s top edge with his left hand and driving the cutter into the indicator panel with his right. The Prefect retaliated, slamming him into the corridor wall and twisting its black shell against his body. He coughed as the screaming anti-gravity drive filled the corridor with a whorl of hot metallic exhaust. Through stinging eyes, he looked down. The cutter tip blazed white against the indicator panel and smoke curled around his clenched hand. It wasn’t penetrating. Steve’s other hand began to slip off the smooth black casing.

In his periphery, a stubby barrel emerged from the Prefect’s weapons port. He stabbed the cutter into the open port and dropped to the floor. The Prefect lurched up, crashing into a ceiling light and showering him in glass pellets.

Steve had studied Prefects in intimate detail, and not only in his nightmares. This one was different, but not different enough. The cutter had jammed the weapons port inner door. The Prefect’s weapon couldn’t fully extend, couldn’t lock, couldn’t fire. He stepped back and grimaced in anticipation of the ear-splitting screech. It never came. Instead, the Prefect sank to the floor. Its weapon’s port vomited, spewing the blackened cutter and rivulets of molten orange onto the pale tiles.

Swathed in soot-laden smog the Prefect fell silent. A few seconds later, it began its metronomic beep.

00:46 SAT 28:10:2119

DC 4, Chicago, USA, Sector 1

Steve’s boots screeched on the corridor’s polished floor. He scrambled back into room seven, grabbed Michelle’s hand and winced. A part of his disguise had melted into his palm.

He ran towards the lift, feeling the tension in his arm as she struggled to keep up. His boots slid to a halt and he stabbed the glowing button before stepping in front of Michelle. Twenty metres away sat the Prefect’s smoking carcass; his body wouldn’t offer much protection.

The lift chimed. Steve scooped Michelle in his arm and charged inside. The doors closed after three seconds, the lift started to rise after two more, and the Prefect exploded one second after that.

Michelle screamed in the dark, the lift shook, its silent motion replaced by a metal-squealing judder. He held her quivering body close, blackness mutated to a red hue, the squeal to a whine. ‘We’re almost there, when the doors open stay here.’ Her grip on his arm tightened.

Emergency red lighting saturated the reception hall; the Defenders had retreated behind the booth’s blast shutters. Steve strode to the door and rapped on it. ‘Mr Walker, it’s Mr Hojeda. What has happened?’

The door squeaked ajar and Walker’s shiny rotund face peeked out, followed by stale sweat. ‘We don’t know.’

‘It sounded like an explosion to me, let me in.’

Steve stepped into the glare. Walker’s grey uniform stretched over a corpulent body and black circles spread from the armpits. Walker had good reason to be worried. An infraction at a Detention Centre could result in expulsion from Continuity. Walker would survive that, but not the retribution from his disfranchised relatives.

‘Where’s your colleague?’

The rubicund head directed a nod at a metal door in the booth’s rear wall. ‘He’s gone down to have a look.’

‘Is my prisoner secure?’

Walker plodded to the wall of monitors, slumped into a chair and pointed up. ‘They’re sending in another Prefect. We think one of the new ones malfunctioned.’

Steve followed Walker’s pudgy finger to the monitor. The Prefect’s intense light beam shone through a dust-choked corridor. Concrete fragments encrusted the floor and twisted tendrils of reinforcement sprouted from the shattered walls. There was no room seven, or six or eight. The beam terminated in the void of the open lift shaft.

‘Well, Mr Walker, as there’s no trace of her biofield, I think it’s safe to assume I won’t be interviewing her again.’

Walker appeared to wilt. ‘I don’t understand. Why did it explode?’

Steve rested one hand on Walker’s shoulder and reached down under the desk with the other. ‘I wish I knew. Now please let me out.’

‘But — yes, sir.’ The doughy hand slapped a large red button on the console.

Steve turned towards the door. ‘Thank you, Mr Walker.’ He never doubted Walker’s compliance, no one argued with SIS. That was the problem.

‘You’re welcome.’ Walker sighed. ‘I’ll be lucky if they don’t put me on the other side for this.’

Steve stopped smiling. ‘We all have to give up something when we put on the uniform.’ As his hand touched the door handle, Walker spoke again.

‘Mr Hojeda?’

Steve didn’t turn around, ‘Yes, Mr Walker?’

‘One of your eyes has changed colour.’

‘Goodnight, Mr Walker.’

Approaching the lift, Steve touched the MPS screen. ‘Aw give me a break!’ Walker’s despairing outburst confirmed success. The thumb sized Electronic Disruption Device Steve had placed under the edge of Walker’s desk had fired and the resultant near-field EM pulse had induced a system reset. Every camera within a twenty-metre radius was offline. He extracted the frantic Michelle from the lift and left.

Four hours later, they stood outside the
Whistling Goose
at Eadsey Wharf and watched the taxi disappear into the dawn mist.

Michelle yawned. ‘You live here?’

Steve smiled up at the pub’s brick facade. ‘Not far away.’
 

* * * *
 

Aromatic fresh coffee wafted through
Cool Breeze
. Michelle had showered and changed first, Steve knew he’d take much longer. From the exposed parts of his body, he’d had to peel away the deep copper skin of the native Sevillian, Miguel de Hojeda. For his fused right palm, he’d had to resort to a scalpel.