It was the evening of the third day when she found the body in a Sebiestor station in Hakeri. It was fresh, dead for perhaps a day, and it startled her with it's mirror similarity. She thought it looked sad, curled on the floor. Lonely. It's arms bore strange scars, like some half-remembered form of writing. She was sure she should recognize it, that it might be significant, but it was getting so hard to keep such things in her mind these days. She could recognize, however, the significance of the tiny crimson dot just above the body's collar bone, angry looking purple veins radiating around it. Poison. A needle, or perhaps a gun. A tiny one, like the one she carried, that fired toxic slivers. Not a soldier's weapon, but an assassin's. She watched with horrified curiosity as her fingers reached for the body's hair, gently tugged free a leaf-shaped clip. This, more than the dead woman's features, was the proof she needed. Shintoko Akahoshi was dead.
She wondered as she stood looking at the clip, at the body on the floor, at her own reaction. Or rather, lack of reaction. Emotional Interference, the medtechs had called it. Another sign of her own impending collapse as the malfunctioning implant she had born for the past near decade continued inexorably to degrade.
"When that happens", the tech had said, "you'll know it's almost time. Complete neural collapse will soon follow."
She left the body on the floor and moved around the room. The sofa, just where she knew it would be. The kitchen with its pans. The pictures on the wall, pictures that she knew by heart: the band collage, images of a younger version of the body on the floor singing in a little club in Cistuvaert; the pilots, all grinning with the confidence of newly minted immortals, flight jackets bearing the name of a corporation she no longer knew; the child, very young, floating in microgravity, an open smile on her face. This was the same woman, she knew. The one she had been trying to find ever since she had returned from Delve.
There was meaning in this room. She could recognize that. But she couldn't tell what it was. That, probably, was the worst part of all of this. Her implant was killing her, erasing who she was. Reducing her. Assassin. The thought returned, unbidden. She had seen the mark on the woman's neck. That meant something. She had to keep that in her mind. She had to plan for it, to do something about it.
Security records. She hurried to the sofa, picked up the tablet that she knew would be there. The dead woman was paranoid. Untrusting. There would be video of her attacker. Fingers following muscle memory, she looked up the suite's history. A few false starts, then she had it. Video. A figure moving in the room. A little too tall, a little too thin. Something odd about her manners. Nothing she could put a finger on, but there just the same. Soft audio played. Music. The echo of whatever the dead woman was listening to. Then a skip, discontinuity. No music played in the video now, and the woman lay curled on the floor. Fingers tracing along the tablet, rewinding. There it was again. A skip in the video, then the woman was dead. Rewind again, then play, this time looking at the timestamp. Just after station midnight, the day before. Almost twenty four hours ago. Whoever had done this to her had managed to compromise her security, compromise the cameras that always recorded these suites.
Do they know I am here? The thought was uncomfortable. If the assassin could enter, despite the dead woman's security. If the assassin could then kill Akahoshi and erase any trace of that visit (other than the body curled on the floor), then they could have easily left something behind to inform them when someone else entered these suites. Are they hunting me even now? Adrenaline surged in her veins. How can I play the game if they keep changing the rules?
By the time she regained control, she was already moving, wide eyes wild and mouth dry, through passages one level up from the posh neighborhood the dead woman's suites were in. Stop that!, she thought to herself. Don't let fear drive you!
I am being hunted. The thought caused fear to surge again in her chest. She ran.
It was the gentle nudge of a cleaning drone that woke her. She could hear and feel the station around her. She was wedged into an access crawlway among a jungle of cables. She inhaled, feeling the sharp tang of ozone.
"Do you require assistance?" the drone repeated.
She lay still for a moment, memories of the previous day returning to her cloudy mind. She shook her head, but this was too much for the drone's simple programming.
"I do not understand. I shall call a medical team." the drone announced.
"N- no" she croaked. "I'm alright."
"You must not rest in this crawlway", the drone primly insisted. "It is not safe for organics."
"Yeah, yeah", she replied, wriggling herself out of the narrow space. Outside was an open area, deserted, except for her and the drone. Dim, warm lightning illuminated a maze of conduits, some on the far walls, some on the ceiling, some leading to waist-high pedestals with orange and yellow blinking lights. A soft hum filled the chamber.
She stood, sadly regarding her clothing. Torn knees, one shoe missing. At some point the day before she had purchased a plain brown knit jacket with a hood, which covered her pilot's implants. She could pass on these baseliner levels, but she wasn't exactly inconspicuous.
"Drone, where am I?"
"Fourth mezzanine, among the communications capilliaries", the drone stated. "Are you certain you do not require assistance?"
"No", she said. "I just had a bit of a hard night."
"The Republic offers councelling for drug and alcohol addiction at no charge, to citizens and resident aliens alike."
"Puritan." She glared at it.
"The Republic cares", the drone offered as she marched away.
She took inventory of herself as she walked. Nothing felt injured. Her knees were sore from making her way through the crawlspace, and her gait was awkward, uneven. She slipped her remaining shoe off her foot and continued barefoot. Her mind felt better. This would be one of the good days, when difficult concepts were not so far out of her grasp. It had gotten worse since she returned from Delve, but not uniformly. Some days she could barely hold a thought in her head, only recognizing that things were happening that she could not understand. On others she felt almost normal. For what was maybe the hundredth time, she considered simply recloning herself, to have the implant gone once and for all.
"Tuk explained it", she said to herself. "If I did that, I could be stuck like this. Forever."
She wished he was here with her, his comforting presence ready to shield her from all the things she did not understand.
"That's ridiculous", she muttered. She hadn't seen him in a year. Not since she had set out for the hostile wastes of Delve. There had been a reason why he didn't come, though she couldn't remember it. He hadn't wanted to, in any case.
"Who could blame him?", her voice blended into the background hum of fans. This level of the station seemed to be made of nothing but fans, set into mysterious rust colored boxes. She imagined tiny people living in the boxes, the fans blowing a spicey warm breeze across their sleeping forms in their beds. Spicey. They weren't sleeping, then. Cooking.
The thought made her suddenly aware that she hadn't had anything to eat since her hurried lunch of snap-fried Caldari rolls yesterday. She pressed her hand against her belly, which gurgled a greeting.
"C'mon, belly", she said, "let's go find something we can eat."
She was lingering over the last bits of some kind of egg and fried vegetable in a diner filled mostly with burly laborers when the sound of a police hovercar caught her ear. She rubbed her head, drawing a curious look from one of the men at the counter. The man had come in soon after she and had taken a seat, glancing at her from time to time. She grimaced at him, then turned back to her food.
"Do you mind if we join you?"
The speaker was tall and thin, with a smile that didn't touch his eyes. He slid into the seat, his body a little too close for comfort. A shorter, stockier man with a face like a maudlin frog sat opposite her. She tried to give him a stern look, drawing a chuckle.
"If I'd known you'd stay on the station", he purred in an amused tone, "I would have arranged a better welcome. You've given us quite a bit of trouble, you know?"
"Wh- who are you?", she asked.
"Look at her", the frog-faced man said in an almost comically high pitched voice. "Look at her eyes. She doesn't know."
She frowned, her brows drawing together. "Know what?"
The thin man chuckled again. "Your brain is burned, sweetie. We'll take care of it."
She peered suspiciously at the man. Something about his tone disturbed her.
"Go away", she demanded, her voice tight in her throat.
The man shook his head. "Sweetie, we're here for your own good. For all of our collective good."
She frowns at the man and started to rise. He shook his head briskly, once. "That's not going to help. Sit."
She sat.
"You've broken nearly every cloning law there is", the thin man said. "CONCORD and local. Did you know that?"
This flat statement confused and angered her. It must have shown, for the frog faced man again spoke.
"I don't think she's even aware of it. C'mon. Let's get her out of here."
The thin man smiled unpleasantly and leaned close to her.
"Sweetie, we're all going to take a walk together. If you know what's good for you, you'll come quietly."
Something about the man's voice made her rise obediently and follow him out the door, trailed by the frog faced man. A hovercraft was waiting for them. The thin man put his hand on her head and bent her forward, pressing her into the back of the hovercraft. The frog faced man scooted in next to her, while the thin man went around to get in on the other side. The interior was plain, with scuffed surfaces and a smell like stale tobacco. An opaque divider separated the back of the hovercraft from the driver's seat. The thin man rapped on the divider and the car moved off.
"Where are we going?", she asked. The thin man gave her another unpleasant smile and pulled a small pistol from his pocket. She stared at it, at the tiny hole at the end. Understanding dawned, a perversely triumphant feeling. These were the assassins.
"We're going to Yulai. You, on the other hand..."
She turned to the frog faced man, desperation on her face, but he merely inhaled and began to recite.
"Shintoko Akahoshi, you are under arrest for violation of the CONCORD Unary accords. You have the right to submit to genetic testing in an attempt to disprove these charges. Due to the nature of the charges, failure to pass testing will result in an immediate guilty verdict. Likewise, failure to exercise your right to defense will also result in a guilty verdict. Do you wish to exercise your civil right?"
She didn't understand. CONCORD Unity accords? Those had something to do with cloning crime. She opened her mouth to speak.
There was a sound, so low and loud that she felt it far more than heard it. The hovercraft skewed around violently, shuddering as it smashed into something. The frog faced man was yelling something, but no sound came from his mouth. Another impact hammered on the car, and half of it was simply gone. The frog faced man silently yelled again, then tumbled out into the space where the door was. She felt something wet on her face and turned. The thin man was looking frantically around, his pistol held high. An angry looking gash marred his forehead, blood running freely down his face. The hovercraft ground to a silent stop. She smelled something burning. Acrid. The thin man pressed her back into the seat with a hand and started to rise, then shuddered and fell back with a line of red dots stitched along his cheek. Something stung her neck like a wasp, and she knew no more.
It wasn't dark, nor was it light. A uniform green non-glow pervaded everything. She was aware that she wasn't seeing this. Not with her eyes, at least. Some other mode of perception was at work. She couldn't remember where she was, or how she had got there. She couldn't remember much of anything. Memory was lost, while perception remained.
After a time she became aware that dim shadows were moving among the non-glow. Some color outside of the colors she knew, they itched and smelled like dry grass. They chimed at her when she concentrated on them. A deep sound, yet soft, which tasted yellow. She liked that. She sharpened her focus on the shadows, which became words. An unending string of words whose meaning she no longer knew. At some level, she felt that the words were her. They covered the whole of her existance, a monstrous sentence that both described her and delimited her and gave form to what remained of her thoughts. She felt the words, their complex forms slipping like oiled metal through her sensorium. An unending stream for her to follow.
"Good morning", the voice said. It sounded pleasant. Assured.
The voice had come to her before, during her brief periods of awareness. She remembered the tone of the voice, though she could not remember any words it had said, only that it had washed over her like a tide.
It was dark in the room. Cool and dark, with a sharp tang to it. She knew she could respond to the voice, if only she remembered how.
She awoke, aware of a presence in the dark with her. It felt familiar. She made a sound.
"Good morning", a man said. She knew the voice. It was the same man who had spoken before. He had a strange accent.
"Can you open your eyes for me today?", the voice asked.
She did not know what it meant by that. She made a dispairing sound, trying to reach him with her own voice. She felt a gentle, warm touch.
"Here", the voice said. "Feel where my fingers are. Your eyes. Your eyelids. Can you open them?"
She concentrated on the touch. There was something significant about it. Could she affect it? She tried.
The room was pale green, dimly lit by sunlight streaming through a window in the wall. She lay in a bed, surrounded by strange things with glowing lights. A man stood over her bed, smiling at her.
"That's it", he said encouragingly. "Now try to speak."
She understood what he wanted. He wanted her to make sounds at him, to respond in the same manner as he. She tried. Grunted. Furrowed her brows in concentration as she worked her mouth, in vain.
"Don't worry", his voice was soothing, a balm. "Your voice will return. Can you understand me?"
She moved her head. She wanted to let him know that she did. She must have succeeded, because he smiled again.
"Good! You're coming along nicely."
She tried to mimic his smile, but exhaustion caught up with her before she could and she slept again.
It was night when she next woke, and the man was studying some of the equipment by her bed.
"Good evening", he said, the singsong cadence of Villorean accenting his Gallentean.
She opened her mouth and stirred her reluctant voice into action. "Good evening."
He smiled brightly at her. "Excellent! How are you feeling tonight?"
"Grrrn", her tongue stumbled over the response.
"Take your time", he soothed. She took a deep breath and tried again.
"Better", she said. "Where am I?"
The man smiled again at her, "Aufay, in the Gallente Federation."
"How...?"
"Don't worry about that. You'll get all the answers you want in time. Are you hungry?"
Saliva flooded her mouth and she nodded vigorously. He chuckled. "Good. I'll have something sent up to you. It's about time you ate solid food again."
She swallowed, spoke, with difficulty. "How long have I been here?"
"Three months", he replied as he tapped for dinner on his tablet. "You've been here for three months."
"My name is Etienne". The man sat on the edge of a chair, light from the window illuminating his face. His Villorean accent reminded her of her doctor, "You know me."
The room smelled of antiseptics mixed with the scent of some sort of tree. She nodded.
"I know you. You're my..."
"Case officer", he finished. "Do you remember anything that happened to you before today?"
She nodded again, the movement odd and alien feeling. "Airkio..."
"Omerta Syndicate. Yes." He nodded again, watching her gravely.
"I gave you data", she continued, the words becoming easier as she spoke. "I betrayed them for you."
"You came to us. Do you remember?"
"I came to you", she nodded. "Tierijev... My clade..."
"They're safe, do you remember? We ensured that."
The memories tumbled into view like a box of pictures upended onto a table. Her family, her clade, numbered thirty eight. Relics of a centuries old attempt to create humans better suited to life in space, her people had found themselves abandoned and unfinished when the Caldari seceded from the Federation and war began. For over a century they survived in their asteroid habitat in Luminaire, its nearly polar orbit rendering it practically undetectable, while they nursed their aging power and life support systems. Rendered sterile by their creators, they relied on a quartet of artificial wombs to reproduce.
Change had come gradually after their inevitable rediscovery by the Federation. Their creators had wanted to minimize the possibility of unanticipated mutation while they were engineering them. Bacteria and virii, both beneficial and not, had been stripped from them. Likewise their immune systems, more mutable and unpredictable than nearly any other symbiotes, were simply gone. Visitors could not mingle with them except in sterilized space suits, while they could only leave their habitat while similarly equipped. That almost fifteen years passed before a viable artificial immune system was developed suitable for their use was understandable. Unusual but by no means unique within the frenetically multicultural Federation, their situation attracted only cursory attention from the scholarly community.
Yet they found that culturally they remained apart from the majority of the Federation. Pride, perhaps. The artificial immune systems which allowed them to rejoin the Federation was not without side effects, often unexpected and extreme. More than that, though, was the bond they felt for one another, a bond they were unwilling to put aside. And so they remained, living within their small habitat, while few of them left and even fewer thrived in the wider cluster. Yet remaining was not without its own problems. Their gene pool was minuscule, recessives often severe. It became obvious that their numbers were dwindling, that they were failing as a clade.
At which point the mad Caldari Vassili Zaitsev extended a helping hand. Chief Executive of a renegade Ishukone subsidiary with a shadowy history of biotech research, he had acquired the shuttered remnants of the corporation which had originally developed her clade. In exchange for her loyalty, he offered it all, along with the assistance of researchers to solve the clades problems and return them to viability. She agreed. What else could she do? In the years that followed, her clade grew to its present size, split between their original habitat in Luminaire and a new one in Tierijev.
And then Heth came to power. Zaitsev's organization was stripped of its power, its members scattered or jailed, and Tierijev threatened to become a war zone.
"You did", she admitted. "When the Federation rolled into Tierijev, you ensured our habitat was classed as a Federation multinational."
Etienne had done more than that, she recalled. Promised access to the war zone, as well as military cover, she stayed for weeks in a cloaked industrial, prepared to evacuate the Tierijev habitat at a moment's notice.
"They didn't trust you, your friends."
"The implant", she said. "Zaitsev had me implanted."
"Yes", he replied.
"It was killing me."
His face grew somber. "We don't think that was the objective of the implant. We found a clone. In Hakeri. Like you, it also bore an implant."
She remembered the face on the floor. Her face. She sat up suddenly in the bed, the monitors chirping their disapproval.
"Easy there", his voice was soothing, like syrup. "You remember, I see."
"My clone!" Her voice rose in pitch. "That was my clone!"
She remembered two men taking her to a hovercraft. A gun.
"CONCORD...", she began. Multi-cloning was a crime of the highest magnitude among any of the nations.
"The two men who picked you up were not CONCORD", Etienne replied. "We think CONCORD hasn't become aware of the situation, and we'd prefer to keep in that way."
"Then who were they?"
"We're not sure, but we suspect they have ties to the Cartel."
She frowned, her brows knitting, settling back down onto the bed.
"We think Zaitsev was experimenting in both mediated memory and memory retrieval", he explained. "We recovered the clone right before we found you, and we were able to partially reverse engineer its implant. Both its implant and yours could mediate memory, but yours also functioned as a transmitter. We think that the clone was being rewritten with your own experiences, perhaps as a way for Zaitsev to remain aware of what you were doing. There were signs of extensive mental degradation in the clone, however. I would not have called the experiment a success."
"You're using the past tense, Etienne", she pointed out. "Functioned. Past tense."
He nodded reassuringly.
"We were able to repair the damage to your implant, and render it effectively inert. It will no longer interfere with your memories."
Relief hit her like a physical force. She closed her eyes but could not stop the tears which had begun to course down her cheeks.
"Etienne, I want out."
She sat up in her bed, carefully watching his face. Behind her the monitors chirped out their atonal music.
"Don't you think...", he began. She cut him off.
"No. Etienne, I did what you asked. I gave you what you needed to know. Now I want out. Termination. Retirement."
He sighed and looked at her. She returned his gaze, the silence stretching out like an elastic band. She was surprised when he spoke first.
"Kaika", he said, "We need you for one more task. Just one."
"I'm through, Etienne."
"I'm asking you, Kaika. Please. This is an easy one. We don't have many capsuleer agents free with a history of State support. We need you for this one."
She wavered.
"I can't go through something like that again", she said.
He smiled at her, his voice soothing.
"You won't have to. This is strictly passive observation. You'd be joining an organization..."
"No!" She insisted.
"Hear me out!"
She closed her mouth.
"You'd be joining an organization as a mercenary. They're strictly a militia corporation. Fly with them for a few months, report, and then come home."
"And then?"
"Whatever you want," he said. "You can retire, if you'd like, with my gratitude and the gratitude of the Bureau."
She snorted.
He waited. This time, it was she who broke the silence.
"Who are they?"
He smiled.
"It's a small organization, mostly frigate pilots, called Pyre Falcon Defense Combine..."
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Topic: F.M. (Read 1553 times)