A flicker of movement interrupts my thoughts. Christophe just sat up. Now he’s standing.
“Target is Oscar Mike,” I say into my comms.
“Copy.”
Christophe Zabelle drops a kiss on his wife’s lips. She grabs his neck to make it last. He pulls away and nods to his daughter. Says something. She sits up. Says something back. I risk tuning my comms to the nearest of the bugs that I planted on the yacht last night.
“...with you where?” his daughter, Bella asks.
“To see Dekari.”
Who the hell is Dekari? I wonder.
“He’s there?”
“Of course, he’s there. You asked me to put in a good word for him.”
“And Chronus hired him?”
“Do I look like a man who takes no for an answer?”
“Sparks! Thanks, Dad!”
Christophe waves off his daughter’s gratitude, but she leaps out of her chaise lounge and throws her arms around his neck. A moment later she pulls back with a beaming smile, and walks into the yacht leaning on her father’s arm.
The shallori fish wrap that I had for lunch is busy marinating in a roiling cauldron of acid. Sparks fly down my arms to my fingers as adrenaline surges in my system. This is not good.
“Charlie Kilo to Montauk Actual, target has flipped the script, now has co-pilot. Please advise, over.”
A new voice gets on the line in my ear. It’s deeper and grittier than my handler’s, but the hell if I know who it is. Deep cover assignments like this one keep operators in the dark as much as possible. “Montauk Actual speaking. Who is the co-pilot?”
“The daughter.”
A brief, buzzing pause hisses over the comms, followed by—
“Proceed as planned, Charlie Kilo.”
I try to reply, but my mouth is suddenly too dry to do more than hiss with exhalations of stale air.
“Charlie Kilo, do you copy?”
“Copy, Montauk.”
“Montauk out.”
A sigh builds like a balloon inside my chest, filling my lungs to the point of exploding. I try to let it out, but the air gets stuck behind a knot in my throat.
Twenty minutes later, I’m watching the air car lift off. Mrs. Zabelle is waving from the back of the yacht, smiling as her husband and their daughter fly away from her for the last time.
Twenty-two minutes later the side of the car blows open and it bursts into flames as one of the engines explodes.
The car lists sharply to the side now gushing fire, and goes into a whistling dive from five hundred meters up.
Mrs. Zabelle is screaming, then snapping up a holoband and calling her husband.
“Eject! ... Then fire the brakes! What do you mean it’s not working? Don’t you dare leave me alone! ... Resurrection! Christophe!” She’s sobbing now. Muffling her words. “...won’t be... same. Don’t you—”
I mute the audio from the yacht and struggle to swallow past that knot in my throat. Nadine Zabelle, wife and mother, clutches the ship railing with white-knuckled hands as the car with her husband and daughter screams into the gold and ruby-shimmering embrace of the ocean. The car hits at the speed of sound and explodes into a thousand glittering fragments. Through my scope I see tears racing down Mrs. Zabelle’s cheeks. She hammers the railing with her palms, screaming and raging against what she probably thinks was just a freak accident; fate; or maybe Karma.
Bots rally around her. Lifeless machines with no real sense of empathy. The only one who truly feels her pain is the one on the other side of this scope, the man who killed her family.
Mrs. Zabelle’s only hope is to bring them back. Resurrect them from their latest neuroscans, but like she said, it won’t be the same. Should work for the daughter, because we didn’t have any reason to corrupt her scans. But Christophe is permadead. Nothing left to resurrect.
A stale breath rattles past my lips, carrying with it a familiar phrase, “Target neutralized.”
“Good work, Charlie Kilo. Proceed to extraction point.”
“Copy.”
There’ll be no keeping the ghosts in their closet tonight.
PART 1: A HUNTER'S CODE
Chapter 1
Twenty-five Years Later...
The Year 557 UGC
Terra Novus, Alliance Space
I’m standing in an abandoned packing center on a glacial ridge outside Liberty City, the stim-harvesting capital city of Terra Novus. A creeping chill makes it through to my skin, prickling my neck and arms with goosebumps. It’s freezing in here, even below my heated clothes and thermal shield.
Terra Novus is a mostly glacial world with a narrow band of temperate regions around the equator. The atmosphere, gravity, and overall habitability are about as close to Earth as a planet can be, but it’s still a frozen wasteland as far as I’m concerned. Back when it was first colonized, people thought it was an exotic paradise. Finding euphoria-inducing stims in the glacial rifts was a driving force for colonization, and it soon became the most populous world beyond Earth.
It’s also where the civil war began, and after its independence was officially recognized, Terra Novus became the capital planet of the Free Systems Alliance.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a den of accumulated human filth.
The dirty floor of the packing center is covered with a dusting of fresh snow blown in from a wall of broken windows. From there, I can see the gleaming blue, green, and purple lights of Liberty City’s hundred-story towers. Cold wavelengths of light to match the cold of the glacial rift in which the city was founded. The only other light besides that distant neon glow is from the hovering drone bulb that my partner Rex Brogan deployed when we got here.
“Not talking, huh?” Rex asks. “Okay.”
An inhuman shriek draws my eyes to the subject sitting tied with shockcuffs to a chair beneath the drone light: Omar Trevos, an average-sized man with curly black hair, brown eyes wrinkled at the corners, and a naturally tan face. At the moment, that face is streaked with tears and blood. One eye is swollen partially-shut, and his lips are split and bloodied. He’s wearing a black uniform with reflective silver piping and a matching silver emblem on his left shoulder. The octagon-shaped badge of Liberty PD. Two silver bars on each sleeve speak to his rank. Lieutenant.
There is a black device clutching Omar’s skull that looks vaguely like a metal spider with six legs. That’s actually the colloquial name for it. A brain spider. Officially, it’s an NSP-16, a bot designed to interact directly with a subject’s gray matter and neural implants in order to read memories and thoughts, or as it’s currently being used, to directly activate specific regions. Right now the spider has a hair-thin wire embedded directly into Omar’s dorsal posterior insula, otherwise known as the brain’s pain center. Imagine the agony of being burned alive—an NSP-16 can simulate it without any of the mess or subsequent permanence of death.
This interrogation could have been as easy as using the spider to pull the information we need directly from Omar’s memories, but he was smart enough to scrub himself and dump the info in the bio-encrypted storage of his neuralink. The encryption keys are entangled with some random bundle of neurons, so that only Omar’s neuralink can access them. If someone else tries to crack in, they’ll destroy the data. That type of encryption only works for very specific types of information. Memories. Secrets. It was a smart move, except now we have to extract his secrets the old-fashioned way.