figured an autopsy hadn't been performed. Along her neck, a band of spotted bruising made a shape like purple fingers. She had been strangled before the fall. Sometimes the bruises take hours to show on the pallid skin. I wondered if they would have found the implant and if they would have started an investigation based on the data core's contents. The screen at the base of the shelf read that she was scheduled for incineration before six in the morning the next day. I guessed that was my answer.
The implant was where I knew it would be, a discreet fold of skin behind the left ear. I peeled the ear forward and saw the micro data core in the skin flap. It was careful work to remove it without damaging it accidentally.
A taxi took me back to the dumpster where I collected my things and changed back into my clothing. I kept the bundled Agent uniform in a sack that I found in the alley, closing the top of it and keeping it close to my body to cover the helmet from view. The tram was welcome silence as I rode it home, other passengers sitting on benches or staring through the glass. I unloaded what I had collected onto my couch, pushing aside takeout containers and paper coffee cups to make room. The sunken couch formed to my body as I slumped into it, putting my combat boots on the coffee table. I connected the new data core to my mobile and started the video feed.
The audio crackled and the frame distorted for a few moments but the picture clarified. Tara was standing in front of her mirror, blond hair tussled and lips dark and moist. She was applying eyeshadow in her living room, wearing the white button-down but otherwise naked. Her skin glistened with sweat and her nipples were hard and dark through the thin shirt. She glanced over her shoulder and the view swung to her couch where a muscled Caucasian man was sitting naked on the edge of the cushion. His face was long and thin with high cheekbones and a crew cut of umber-colored hair. In front of him on the coffee table lay a crinkled reflective sheet with a handful of blue beads on it. He was working the base of a kitchen knife with the palm of his hand, grinding a bead into light blue powder.
The back of a pale hand obscured the frame for a moment like she was brushing a strand of hair away from her face, “You going first tonight?”
He grunted something in response that sounded distorted over the speaker. Keeping at his work, he began guiding the dust with the blade of the knife into a peaked line, “When you start buying the hits of Grav off the junkies, you can go first.”
She seemed to ignore the comment but kept her eyes fixed on him, keeping his entire body in the video frame. I figured she wanted to make sure the footage could be used with facial recognition when she threatened him later.
He took a short metal tube from the table and placed one end into a nostril. Plugging the other side with his hand, he bent down and inhaled the powder. It took him a few breaths to get through the whole line. When it was done, he slumped back against the couch and closed his eyes. His eyelids began to spasm and his lips quivered, a bead of saliva forming at the corner of his mouth. He was still for several long seconds, his breathing slowing as his eyelids relaxed and stopped moving.
The view got closer to him as she took short unsteady steps toward the couch, “Hey, you okay?”
His eyes snapped open and his body began to shake, his face turning to look around the living room. He screamed tonelessly, staring into the frame with dilated eyes peeled back. A flailed arm struck her across the face, the video feed flickering. The view jostled back looking down at the coffee table as her leg stumbled over it. He jerked from the couch, feet stomping across the carpet as he stooped where she had fallen. The lighting panel overhead cast his shape as a formless shadow—dark eyes like pits against the pinched forehead, the white of his teeth showing from his open mouth. Large hands came towards the frame, disappearing at the bottom. Muscles and tendons clenched beneath tight skin as he squeezed and her hands came up, groping at his face. She managed to drive a thumb into his eye and he released, stepping back as he shouted and flinched away from it.
The frame rattled as she began to scramble to her feet, pale arms and legs scratching and kicking against the carpet. The view bucked and wheeled, the screen turning white as it swung by the lighting panel. She looked down at his leg as it was pulling back, he'd kicked her in the stomach I guessed. His thick sinewy hands eclipsed the screen again, this time disappearing at the top of the frame, like he was grabbing her by the hair.
The frame rate stuttered and she was looking along a glass horizon—the window quivering as the view struck it. The first crack was a long streak of forked lightning that arched to the curtain. His voice screamed again, the volume of it making the speaker crackle. The glass shattered in a storm of tumbling shards—her arms flailing limply in the frame as the window shrank away, a single lit panel against the steel sky of the slums. There was another sound of breaking glass and the video feed blackened.
I thumbed back through the video frames, searching for a clear screenshot. I decided on a still of him on the couch, a neutral expression over his weathered face. It would work for facial recognition. I tapped into my mobile's grid and found the wireless signal for the security network. His name was Ryan Connolly. When I tried to find his records from the LEA, the search returned negative.
I routed a connection through a satellite that sent my signal to the Earth network. A few scans of paper forms appeared on the search, but any fields other than name and numbers had been marked with strokes of black ink. Enlarging the scan showed pen scratches beneath the ink, many were half or partial letters—the words lost in the pixels. Raising the contrast on my screen showed the letters brighter. Among the gibberish of the recovered text, a single name was legible. Deidra Moore.
Deidra's records were easier find. She had lived in New York until she was nineteen. She had disappeared on the third of June; the Agency report had been first filed as a missing person. A week after the disappearance had been filed by her roommate, who's name had been removed, her body had been found in her car—submerged under the east bridge. A scanned suicide note was on file, apparently having been found in the car's glove box. I cross-referenced the date the case had been marked closed with the little information I'd found on Connolly's record. He had transferred to New Independence that same week in June.
A final search on the station's security network reported that Agent Connolly had filed for a leave of absence—effective immediately.
I searched the spaceport's network next, accessing the flight schedule for the next outbound transport. It is expensive to send a shuttle between New Independence and Earth, they don't make the trip every day. The large transports only depart when they're full of passengers and cargo. The next departure was scheduled to leave in six days. I doubted that Connolly would wait that long. I checked arrivals next and found that an unmarked cargo craft would be arriving in a maintenance bay, no delivery was scheduled. According to the file, the transport would arrive in thirteen hours.
I clicked my mobile off and watched as the rectangular screen went dark. I stepped to my window and told it to open. I had forgotten to buy my tobacco and I was jonesing. I drummed my fingers along the sill and looked out at the sector. The lights continued to flicker in the Earth shadow, beads of liquid color along the geometric landscape. The long night was almost over.
I took the dirty glass off my windowsill and refilled it with the grain alcohol from my cabinet. I drank it until my lips felt numb. I didn't make it to my bed that night, pulling my shirt off and laying on the couch instead. The amber glow of the streetlights outside pulsed against my wall, making shadow puppets of my furniture. I woke a few hours later, my arm crackling with pain like fire inside my bones. I rolled over and groaned, putting my fingers in place to release the lock on the socket. I pulled the cybernetic arm off and let it tumble to the floor with a thud. I turned over on the lumpy couch, still drunk and still in pain, until finally I fell into the placid shadows of sleep.
07
In my dreams, I emerged fro
m the soft blanket of dark silence and found myself clenching the ribbed rubber grip of an assault rifle. I was laying prone amid the tall growth of a rice crop, my laminate tactical vest soaking through with mud. The sky was black, speckled with pinpricks of starlight that shone down on the Nepalese farmland. A rustle in the rice crop near me was the only indication that Private Kimble was still there.
A long inky shape crawled along the ridge of a nearby hill showing matte black against the twinkling stars. Even at our distance, the shadows of the six robot legs moving in tandem were visible. The walking tank stopped on the crest of the hill, the turret swiveling in place with the barrel of the main gun like a black lance. A floodlight on the turret flashed twice, the alabaster light casting the hillside in monochrome relief before going dark.
Joshua Kimble reached a hand through the mud to tap me on the shoulder, “They have a sniper with a rail gun.”
Across the length of the rice field, the tall shape of a water tower was visible against the few lights of a nearby village. A light on the tower repeated the tank's signal before winking out in the star lit night.
“I'm more worried about