Rath's Gambit (The Janus Group Book 2) (11 page)

“For the radiation?” she asked.

“No,” Grip said, grinning crookedly. “For the bodies. Mostly skeletons by now, but they do tend to get in the way, so you’ll need to move some sooner or later. Gets messy.”

Paisen had seen several bodies during their walk out to the site, but there were many more inside the buildings. They found that the building had already been plundered for the more valuable items like electronic components, but Grip judged it was worth searching for other items, namely consumer goods that were still in working order. They worked together for the rest of the afternoon, carefully entering rooms, backing out if their badges protested, and slowly filling Tina’s cargo bed with usable items – a stack of chairs, half of a broken viewscreen, several boxes of cutlery and dishes from a cafeteria, and a large spool of electrical cable from a storage closet.

On Grip’s recommendation, Paisen searched the second floor for some time on her own, then as the sun began to set, she descended back down a fire stairwell and made her way through a row of cubicles to the crumbled entrance. She saw Grip crouched behind a twisted set of girders, and at the same instant, her enhanced hearing caught the sounds of people outside. Grip motioned her to duck down and join him, so she crossed the room silently, stopping to pick up a wooden table leg, before squatting next to him. Grip put a finger to his lips, and then slid the finger across his throat. Paisen raised an eyebrow questioningly, then raised herself slightly, peering between two girders.

Three men wearing dusty civilian clothes were sorting through the scrap they had collected in Tina’s cargo bed. The duffel bags of spare clothing and supplies Paisen and Grip had brought with them were already slung over the shoulders of one of the men, who was tapping the blade of his machete impatiently against the toe of his boot. The other two appeared to be armed as well – one with a makeshift spear, another with a massive metal wrench. Paisen’s eyes narrowed. She shifted her position, and looked around the street for signs of other men.

Grip saw her surveying the street and nodded. “Definitely more,” he mouthed silently. “Hiding.”

The looters decided that none of their scrap was worth stealing, and the one with the metal wrench swung it in a high arc, bringing it down hard onto the sled’s control panel. There was an audible crunch, and Paisen saw Grip flinch and shake his head in chagrin.

“Thanks for the grub,” one of the men shouted, laughing. The three headed off down the street, and had soon disappeared from view. Grip shifted and sat down, putting his back against the rubble heap.

“We’ll wait ‘til it’s dark,” he whispered. Paisen sat next to him, laying her club across her lap.

When they snuck down from their hiding spot nearly an hour later, they found Tina’s screen shattered and non-responsive. Grip swore quietly.

“Fuckin’ waste,” he observed in a low voice. “Come on, let’s get back to the compound. Gonna be a long trip without Tina to guide us.”

“Who were they?” Paisen asked.

“Inmates, just like us,” Grip told her. “Mostly folks with long sentences. They got no chance of parole, so why bother hauling scrap? Better to just live out here on their own. They steal from us, and scavenge what they can from the city. Best to avoid them – fighting will get your sentence extended. This is their territory, and they feel like everything we haul out is something they might have wanted to use.”

“Why did they break the sled?”

Grip shrugged. “To piss us off. Stops us from hauling our scrap back to the compound, and costs the prison company money to repair it. Be happy that’s all they did.”

“How many of them are there?” Paisen asked.

“I dunno. Couple hundred, I think. They roam in gangs, mostly. The biggest – and nastiest – are the Warriors. Stay away from sector J22.”

“Warriors?”

“Yeah, they’re soldiers, or used to be. Mercenaries. Rumor is they herded a whole town’s worth of people into an air transport after a battle, and then programmed it to take a nose-dive into the ocean. The whole platoon got brought up on war crimes, and sent here, all twelve of them. They’re the most dangerous gang out there, so over the years they’ve attracted some followers who tag along with them for security.”

“Were those Warriors today?”

“The ones that smashed Tina? No. You’ll know Warriors by the red tattoo on their cheek, of an animal skull. The original ones have it, at least – they don’t let the new recruits get tattooed. If those had been Warriors, we’d be dead – they would have set fire to the building, then killed us when we tried to come out, just for fun. They might have let you live, though – they usually keep the women alive.” Grip cleared his throat to cover the awkward silence. “Anyway, if we see Warriors, we run.” 

11

Rath and Beauceron met the following day at a conferencing facility downtown, where Beauceron reserved a small meeting room with a computer terminal and a display board. He showed up several minutes early, but Rath was already there, waiting.

“You’re early,” Beauceron noted, by way of greeting. “I assume you came early to make sure there wasn’t a Tactical Team waiting to arrest you?”

Rath gave him a lopsided grin. “Wouldn’t you be worried, if our roles were reversed?”

Beauceron nodded. “I don’t trust you either, not yet. That’s why I decided you’re going to wear this.” He handed Rath an ankle bracelet.

Rath took it, staring at it suspiciously. “And this is …?”

“A tracker cuff, similar to the ones parolees wear upon leaving prison. I want to know where you are at all times. That way, if you ever change your mind about turning yourself in, I can still find you.”

Rath shook his head, setting the bracelet on the desk. “No way. You don’t know the lengths I just went to in order to remove the trackers the Guild put in me.”

“Let’s get this straight,” Beauceron said. “I could go to jail for helping you – right now, I’m failing to turn you in, and that’s a crime. I’m not doing it to help you find your friend, or ease your guilty conscience, or anything like that. The only reason I haven’t turned you in already is that helping you right now gives me a chance – slim though it may be – at helping Interstellar Police make progress against the Guild. But you’re going to jail at the end of all this, regardless of what happens with the Guild. So you wear the tracker, or I call the police right now.”

Rath chewed his lip.

My Forge will make short work of this thing if I need to get it off. And if we get separated, and the Guild catches me, it’s not a bad insurance policy to have a cop that knows how to find me.

“Fine. But you need to promise me you won’t share my location with anyone else, ever.”

“Very well,” Beauceron agreed. He watched as Rath buckled the cuff around his right ankle, then checked his holophone that the tracker was active. “Okay, so let’s find your friend, this other contractor that saved you. What do you know about him?”

“Her,” Rath corrected. “She went by ‘Contractor 339’ in the Guild, but her real name is Paisen Oryx. Like me, she completed all fifty kills, then escaped when they tried to kill her. They sent me after her, on a place called Lakeworld, but she disarmed me and then warned me what was going to happen when I reached fifty kills. That was four years ago. I went back to Lakeworld and spent two weeks looking for her, but she never showed up.”

“You agreed to meet four years later?” Beauceron asked. He was scribbling fast in his notebook.

“No,” Rath shook his head. “She took my bracelet – this one is hers.” Rath triggered it, showing Beauceron the glowing
50
symbol. “She was supposed to monitor my bracelet, and head to Lakeworld as soon as I hit fifty.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t just miss her?”

Rath pulled the computer keyboard over and opened up the browser, pulling up the video feed from the micro-drone he had left at the spillway. Beauceron leaned across the desk to get a better look.

“This is a live feed of the place we were supposed to meet,” Rath said. “I’ve been checking it religiously since I left, but haven’t seen anyone.”

Beauceron stood up and walked over to the display board, activating it with a finger tap. “Okay, she’s not where you agreed to meet, so we have to determine the other possibilities. Where else could she be, in other words. Might she have forgotten about your rendezvous?” He scrawled several words on the board.

“No,” Rath shook his head.

“Could she have changed her mind?”

Rath frowned. “I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible, a lot can happen in four years. But she seemed pretty adamant. I don’t much care what happens to the Guild, as long as they leave me alone. But Paisen wants revenge – she wants her money. And I watched her stab herself multiple times, just to make it seem as if we had fought each other. She’s a very motivated woman.”

“Okay,” Beauceron agreed. On the board, he crossed out the words
Forgot
and
Changed Mind
. “Let’s assume that she’s still motivated. That means something is preventing her from meeting you there.”

“You think the Guild got her?” Rath asked. He felt a weight settle in his stomach.

“Possibly, yes,” Beauceron said. He wrote
Guild
on the board. “Would they kill her upon capturing her?”

“Yes,” Rath said. “But not right away. The Guild likes to torture escaped contractors, as punishment.”

“In that case, I think our investigation can’t be limited to finding this Paisen Oryx. We should pursue leads about the Guild as well, in case they have captured her. Two lines of inquiry often converge, I’ve found. And that has the benefit of building our evidence file against the Guild, for the time when we decide to take this public.”

“I suppose,” Rath agreed. “But I think chasing down anything directly related to Paisen should be our first priority.”

Beauceron turned back to the board and wrote
Dead
, next to
Guild
. “She may have died of other causes, too.”

Rath’s face fell. “She wouldn’t be easy to kill,” he argued. “You haven’t seen her fight.”

Beauceron ignored that comment. “If she is dead, and the body was found, we should be able to find a record of it in the mortuary database. I don’t technically have access anymore, but I know the morgue staff here on Alberon well.”

“Shouldn’t we just assume she’s still alive? This whole thing is pointless otherwise.”

“No,” Beauceron shook his head. “We need to address all of the possibilities. Process of elimination is our best bet.”

“If you say so.” Rath rubbed at his forehead, discouraged. He looked up as Beauceron jotted another word on the board.

“Really? Arrested,” Rath asked.

“Yes, it’s a possibility,” Beauceron confirmed. “Criminals often revert to habit under stress – there’s an excellent chance she continued to kill on her own; freelance, if you will. But she will have been arrested under an assumed identity, no?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Rath agreed, feeling a hint of hope again. “The Guild shared her cover identities with me, but she wouldn’t be using them anymore, for safety. So she could be literally any female within certain height and weight limits.”

Beauceron pursed his lips. “That does pose a challenge. Still, the police will have arrest records, and they scan all incoming criminals for implants as a matter of course. Would she still have those installed?”

“Almost certainly,” Rath told him. “I do.”

“So it might not be a dead end,” Beauceron said.

“But you can bet the Guild has been keeping their eye on that database, too,” Rath assured him.

“Likely,” Beauceron agreed. “I can’t access those databases anymore, anyway. I mean, I can try, I still have a friend on the force, but … I’d prefer not to go that route unless we have to.”

Beauceron took a seat, staring up at the display board. “Okay, so we need to check the mortuary database, and perhaps the arrests database. Where else could she be?” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “She could have been detained by some other party, or injured ….” he stood again, and wrote
Hospitals?
on the board. “Interstellar Police can access hospital admittance records, too. I don’t know if they track implants, but they might.”

“The Guild told me her home planet, she might have gone there,” Rath suggested.

“Why?” Beauceron asked.

“I don’t know,” Rath shrugged. “She knows it well, could be that she would feel safer there, be able to keep a low profile more effectively.”

“Would you go back to Tarkis?” Beauceron asked.

Rath considered for a second. “Probably not.”

“Okay,” Beauceron said. “Let’s examine the Guild angle. What do we know about them today?”

“Not much,” Rath sighed. “I told you my story yesterday at the diner, and it sounds like it just confirmed some of your suspicions from your own investigations.”

“Not necessarily – I knew of the recruiting process, but you added a lot. Details about the training planet, the medical staff there, the recruiters, the headquarters staff that run your missions … those are all things IP has suspected for years, but have never been able to confirm.”

“It doesn’t get us any closer to finding them, though,” Rath pointed out.

“I’m not sure,” Beauceron replied. “The Organized Crime Division has never made progress on the Guild because the only employees we’ve been able to catch are the contractors, and that only rarely, and not long enough to get any useful intelligence. Now we know that there are three other kinds of employees: the recruiters, the headquarters staff that run the operations center, and the medical staff who treat the contractors when they complete Training.”

“Selection,” Rath corrected. “Training Phase comes later.”

“Yes, sorry. If Organized Crime had this information, they would undoubtedly try to find one of these employees, and then flip them – offer amnesty in exchange for cooperation.”

“So how do we find them?” Rath asked.

“Well, we might be able to locate your recruiter back on Tarkis, given your description. But again, that would require police access. I’m not sure what we can do with the headquarters people, but I think the medical staff are a real possibility.”