myself I’d quit again Real Soon Now.
He couldn’t keep his eyes from my body, but I wasn’t so egotistical as to think it was because I had the world’s most perfect figure.
He was looking at the tattoos.
I’m not entirely certain where the tradition started. I’ve heard that striker tattoos are the logical descendants of pre-plague criminal gangs, or the natural evolution of the rebel punk movement, or even just an attempt to mock the honor markings of Sarcodinay knights. Whatever the origins though, strikers wear tattoos the way the old military used to wear ribbons: there’s a tattoo for everything from how many years you’ve served to how many of the enemy you’ve sent to their graves. For someone who knows how to read the ink, a naked striker is an open file: what they know, who they’ve served with, what they’ve done, and who they’ve lost.
If a striker retires from duty, they join all the little disconnected blue-green-black symbols into a cohesive whole, a solid web of color and shading that can take months to complete and cover a sizable portion of the striker’s anatomy. It’s rare to see finished tattoos: most strikers don’t survive for long enough, or if they do, go right back out into the field again once they’d recovered from their injuries. Depending on their reasons for leaving active duty, a set of complete color ‘washed’ tattoos (call them ‘washed out’ if you want to start a fight) were either a mark of honor or...well...I guess the ones who weren’t proud their career didn’t have the ink washed, and that was that.
My tattoos were washed, forming a solid jacket that wrapped around both arms, my back, and covered each breast before meeting at the base of my sternum. There were a few other tattoos here and there, but they were pleasure instead of business. I’m not sure how much of the symbolism Campbell could interpret, or interpret correctly, but the black flag was easy enough to get right on the first guess.
“Nice tattoos,” Campbell said as his gaze wandered off my ink and further down my body. He seemed to shake himself and his eyes snapped back to my face.
“Thank you.” I grinned at him, then waved the cigarette around. “You’re not going to get into trouble for this, are you? I’m pretty sure there are boys in your command who think I can whip up plastic explosives and detonator switches with nothing but cotton fiber, tobacco and lighter fluid.”
He looked taken aback. “Can you?”
“No, I’d need chewing gum.”
He snickered. “The cigarettes came out of impound. Call it a peace offering—I hear those are fashionable right now.”
“That is so very friendly of you.” I inhaled. “I must say you’re surprising me.”
“So are you. I just assumed you’d want to wear clothes.”
“Ah, but you have such a pretty blush, Tal.”
He closed his eyes as if in pain. I felt some sympathy. I wasn’t setting the ideal mood for an interrogation.
“Why are you being so nice, Campbell?” I asked. “You don’t have any reason to be.”
He scowled. “You didn’t lie to me. You may have attacked me, but you didn’t lie. Forensics says your vambrace hadn’t been fired in at least 24 hours and the other pistol might be some weird hybrid they’ve never seen before, but it was only fired once, and it hit Ara-Anguiano’s arm just like you said. If you hadn’t lost it and attacked me and my men, we’d have no reason beyond some dress code and caste-mark violations to hold you right now.”
I laughed. “What can I say? I was having a bad day.”
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another, huh?”
“Anguiano’s the man in the gray jumpsuit?”
He looked to the side as if he were reading from a vid monitor, probably a cybernetic implant in one of his eyes. I wondered why he bothered with the helmet if the link to Kerethres was 24/7. “Ara-Anguiano Miguel. Janitor in sector 1200. Service-caste. Never given permission to mate. We’re still trying to figure out how he got the weapon.”
“Plenty of smugglers in town these days. Who was he—really?”
Campbell shook his head. “I just told you.”
“Nuts. No ‘janitor’ fights that well.”
“I’ve had Kerethres looking through records for hours now and there’s no indication his identity isn’t genuine. He was a janitor.”
“You didn’t see him move, Campbell. Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets up in the morning one day and decides they’re going to move like that.”
“That good?”
“That good.”
He glanced at me, then redoubled his blushing practice and looked away again. “Good enough to take on eight of my best men, who were ready for it, and leave them unconscious on the floor?”
I pressed myself up against the plastic wall and smiled. “Better. He had me dead in his sights. He could have killed me and walked right out the door. Instead he topped himself and let me tell you, he was happy to do it. He died with the kind of smile on his face that usually only happens when a man’s found with a blonde, a brunette and a redhead after a seven-day bender out on Liberty.”
Campbell was pure Admin, so it took him a minute to follow what I was saying, and then he blushed to his shoes. I stifled the desire to chuckle. The middle-castes were a prudish lot: not pampered enough to be decadent, not oppressed enough to be disaffected. I’m sure it hadn’t helped his imagination any to have the punch-line delivered by a naked woman pressing herself up against a transparent wall. I’m sure I was quite a sight.
He coughed and asked, “And where did you learn to fight like that? You’re service-caste too. Don’t blame the League: I’ve fought too many League rebels to think that’s standard training.”
I flicked some cigarette ash into the floor. “You have my file. What does it say?”
He didn’t respond immediately, but I saw his jaw tighten. “Are you going to dress yourself?”
“Say please.”
“What?” He glanced back at me in surprise.
“I have a weakness for men who say please.”
His jaw clenched white then. Maybe I’d pushed him too far. “Please,” he muttered. “And if I have to say it again, I’m flooding the room with knockout gas and having an assistant dress you while you’re unconscious.”
I laughed. “You sure you wouldn’t prefer to do it yourself?” I started to dress, but I can’t say I wasn’t enjoying myself. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me. I also knew that he was intrigued and infuriated, more than a little attracted, and probably had about as much experience with the opposite sex as...well...as an Urban Admin, honestly.
So I was toying with him, mostly because I could.
He didn’t look at me. “Aren’t you being a bit overly flirtatious for a woman who just saw her friend’s chest melt?”
The room spun and I stopped smiling.
I finished dressing in silence. He let me.
When I was dressed, he spoke. “Your file doesn’t say, you know. Where you learned how to fight like that.”
I turned back to face him. “It would be listed under education. And people say the Sarcodinay don’t have a sense of humor.”
Campbell shook his head. “There’s a gap in the record.”
I paused and leaned a shoulder against the plastic. “Gap? What kind of gap?”
“Ten years.” He shook his head. “You know, they give us files on Black Flags: Szabo, Flynn, Sinclair, Jester...murderers, assassins, madmen, pirates. Very complete. As complete as they can make them. What they like. What they don’t like. Where they were born. What they can do. Psych profiles and methods of operation. But you? I could look up what you had for breakfast every morning until you were eight, and then you drop off the grid. Next thing the records say, you’re eighteen-years-old and helping a striketeam blow up a Sector 14 power generating station. That’s not a clerical error: that’s an edit.”
“Sounds like someone higher up in the food chain is hiding something, don’t you think? Unless I somehow managed to hack the MOJ AI and changed the entries myself.”
He glar
ed. The thought gave MOJ people nightmares.
“Of course,” I continued, “If I did do something like that, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave it blank. I’d have invented some nice believable filler, maybe given me a promotion back up to Gala. Nothing at all raises too many flags, and not the black one I would have been an idiot to keep.”
“You people wear a black flag as a mark of pride.” He gestured towards my arm, to the tattoo of a black flag that was now clearly visible. That had been the tattoo Vanessa had most wanted me to hide.
“For some of us it is,” I murmured as I traced the ink with my fingertips. “It’s a compliment of sorts: to be considered so dangerous that my name has been forwarded to a Sarcodinay High Guard. That somewhere out there is a telepathic assassin who has been assigned to kill me. Gives it all that personal touch.”
“I don’t know that I would consider that so flattering.”
“No. I suppose it really isn’t.” I closed my eyes and looked away.
“I called the League. They tell me you were assigned as an assistant to the Janus Project for a few years before your striketeam days, but you already had the flag on you by then. So I’m seeing a gap of at least six years where neither the Sarcodinay nor the League have any idea what you were up to.”
“Don’t be stupid. The Sarcodinay know perfectly well what I was doing.”
“If that were true, it would be in your file.”
I smiled at him, traced the outline of his face on the plastic with my fingertip. “And you think this has something to do with