I frown and roll my shoulders, as if Omar’s horrendous screams are having no effect on me. As if this is just another Monday evening. As if torturing the one clean cop left on Terra Novus is a tedious assignment that I can’t wait to be done with.
But I can tell that Rex is getting off on it. He has this blissed-out grin on his lumpy face, like a stim addict who’s just had his first taste of Glo.
Sadism is a job requirement when you’re working for Rajesh Mohinari. Worth over a trillion credits, he’s the richest man in this system, and one of the richest in the galaxy. And since money is power, that also makes him one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy.
And he’s my target.
“Ready to talk yet, scrigface?” Rex asks in a dulcet voice.
Omar mumbles something, his head slumping to his chest.
“What was that?” Rex demands, cupping a hand to one of his spiked ears.
Who the hell puts a ring of titanium spikes through their outer ear? Apparently, Rex doesn’t just get off on other people’s pain.
“You’re gonna have to speak up, Omar. Or I’m gonna have to push this button again...”
Rex hefts the remote for the spider, flaunting his power in Omar’s face. Rex doesn’t need a remote. He could control the spider directly through his neuralink, but then Omar wouldn’t be able to watch Rex’s grubby thumb poised over that big red button. He wouldn’t be able to sweat blood and piss himself as Rex’s finger inches toward it yet again.
We’re only on round two of big red button-mashing, and Omar already looks like he’s about to pass out. But there is another button for that. The blue one. That’ll send a signal to stimulate his adrenals and wake him up with a jolt of white-hot terror.
“Where did you hide the evidence?” Rex asks, sounding far too reasonable.
Another mumble. A whistling rasp. “Water.”
“Sorry, scrigg. No can do. First the evidence. Then you get a reward.” Rex reaches into a pocket and produces a holonet terminal in his left palm. It’s a small, flat, silver disc with a black eye in the center, from which a bluish-white screen materializes. It’s blank but for a blinking cursor and a search bar.
Omar can interact with that screen mentally to find the files we need in the cloud and then delete them while we watch. Of course, it would be one gentleman’s word to another as to whether or not he actually deleted all of the copies. He could have others squirreled away in the cloud, or stored offline. That would be smart—and stupid, depending how you look at it.
With that in mind, I’m starting to wonder what the point of this charade is. Maybe it’s intended as a visceral warning, a reminder that there are fates worse than death. Or maybe it’s to get him to reveal whoever he gave the hard copy to. I’m assuming that Omar was smart enough to give the evidence to someone and tell them to make it public if anything happened to him.
But it’s also possible that he couldn’t find anyone suicidal enough to hold a physical copy of damning evidence against Rajesh Mohinari.
“Just kill me,” Omar whispers. His eyes flick up to mine, bloodshot, tear-streaked, and pleading. He’s identified me as the weak link. Is it because I’m not the one pushing the buttons? Or has he noticed the muscle twitching in my cheek? Maybe he has a black market add-on for his neuralink and he can read my thoughts directly. If so, then he’s seen me picturing all of the different ways that I can murder Rex. But, I have a few black market modifications of my own, and my thoughts cannot be read that easily.
“Kill you?” Rex glances back at me with one eyebrow raised above his lumpy cheek. I offer the requisite sneer to show my solidarity. Rex looks back to Omar. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to kill your little girl. What’s her name? Sienna, right? And then your pretty wife, Damaris. But I’ll have some fun with her first, oh yes. You can be sure of that.”
Another muscle starts twitching, this time in my left eye as I imagine delivering an elbow like a hammer to the back of Rex’s neck. Snap. I could say it was an accident. He tripped down the stairs outside the warehouse where we are currently torturing Omar. But I know Rajesh has both myself and Rex monitored 24/7 via our neuralinks. The imagery from our optic nerves is being recorded and uploaded to the holonet in real time, so there is no way I can lie about anything after the fact. I’m deep undercover for this job, and to intervene now would mean breaking that cover wide open.
I’m a professional. I’m not supposed to act on impulses. The job comes first. The problem is, I’m also bound by a code. My code. Most hunters have a personal code they follow that lets them sleep at night. Some won’t take kill contracts. They think that absolves them of whatever happens to a live target after they deliver it to their employer. As for me, I decided to keep it simple. I swore just two things to myself:
One, I would only ever go after people who deserved it.
And two, I would never turn a blind eye to injustice.
I had enough of that shit for dinner while serving as a Paladin for the Coalition. And this right here, standing by while an innocent cop gets tortured and threatened for trying to uphold the law, that’s the worst kind of shit sandwich.
If the honest cops have to fear for their lives, then they’ll be too scared to do their jobs, and all that will be left are the scumbags. That’s pretty much already what we’re dealing with in the Alliance, but guys like Omar are the exception that proves the rule.
“Please.” Omar makes a visible effort to work some moisture into his mouth. Must be like a desert in there. He’s lost a good four liters of water between sweat and urine over the past half an hour, which is impressive considering how cold it is out here. But given enough pain you can sweat even when you’re ice cold. The puddles on the floor are testament to that. And yet, this poor scrigg is still holding out.
Why?
Sure, he’s an honest cop, taking his stand. Good for him. But that’s not reason enough. Not after Rex threatened his family. A guy like this, noble, decent, trying to hold the line against corruption, seems to me like he’d be the family type, so threatening his wife and kid ought to make him crumble.
Unless...
Oh Deus. He really is a scrigg. He gave the hard copies to his wife. This is going to end badly. Really fucking badly.
Chapter 2
“One last chance, Omar...” Rex says. “You give me what I need and all of this goes away. You go back home to your wife and tell her all about your shitty day, and how you pissed yourself because some kook pulled a plasma lancer on you, and you thought he was going to blow off your itty-bitty dick. In that story, you look like the pissant you are, but everyone still wins, and you get to live happily ever after. So just tell me where you have the files, and we can wrap this up.”
Omar cracks a wincing smile. His lips are split from where Rex smashed his face when we picked him off the street in a blind alley on 42nd between the old Requiem Center and the new Holoplex. A cold gleam enters Omar’s eyes with that smile, and I realize that he’s been holding some of his cards in reserve until now.
“If you kill me, or even get within a hundred feet of my family, the logs with your boss in them go live on fourteen different news feeds, including CHN. And then Mohinari won’t just be on trial for bribery and domestic violence here in the Alliance. He’ll be on trial in the Coalition for black market arms dealing and stim smuggling.”