And nobody ever will.
I hit the brakes just before my car can smack into the one in front of us.
I was drifting slowly forward, lost in thought, thinking the line would inch forward soon, but these cars are not moving at all. What the hell is the hold up?
Brake lights burn bright red in a long, snaking line to the parking garage below.
A shit ton of tourists going home today. I glance at the feeds from the car’s external cameras to check for queue jumpers who might actually be gunning for us.
Nothing.
Yet.
I take a breath.
The Free Systems Alliance is the other side of the coin, the place where all the ex-cons and practicing criminals go. If I tell someone on Terra Novus that I have a criminal record, they’ll ask, you want to see mine?
A smirk lights my features. This is where all us rare creatures go. We’re not welcome in the Coalition. No jobs for us (not that there are many to begin with), but there are no UBI benefits, either. And no women or men who’ll want to date us—well, that’s not true. Lots of good little daddy’s girls will slum it with a bad boy for the night. They’ll ask about my scars and clear out in the morning. Suits me fine, because I’m no good at relationships, but sometimes it does leave a bad taste in my mouth—knowing that a one-night stand is all that anyone could ever want from me.
If a guy like me wants to move on and scrub that record clean, maybe become a family man and carve out a bubble of domestic bliss on some picture-perfect Coalition world, then they have to go for a dunk in Genesis. That’s what they call their simulated, correctional version of life. It’s the one where you get reborn as a baby and rewire your brain from the ground up in a nice, simulated AI family that’s scripted to play the part and produce a perfectly-adjusted human being.
That’s a fine corollary for the Coalition. Fixing people’s defects fixed their society. Husband cheated on you? Bad on you for not checking his monogamy scores before you got married, but don’t worry! One short visit to a behavioral clinic will fix him for good. He’ll never even look at another woman—or man. Not like that, anyway. He won’t be able to.
Yeah, the Coalition is a helluva place, but I’m worlds-fonder of the Alliance. Unexpected things still happen here. Chaos breeds uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds excitement. Not to mention jobs for me. Next time you watch a holovid, imagine what would happen to the story if there were no bad guys and no conflict at all. Just happy, smiling people without any problems. There are a hundred trillion of those shitty stories playing on repeat in the Coalition—not in their holoplexes, mind you—in real life.
It’s ironic, because I’ve built a career around hunting and often killing the human shit bags that make the Alliance interesting to me. Maybe it’s my inner utopian at work, the one who was born on Earth and infused with its ideals.
That was before the Paladins turned me into a twisted killing machine in the name of safe-guarding those ideals from external threats.
Threats like Mohinari.
Remembering the man we’re running from has me checking my surroundings again. But I still can’t see any cars jumping the line behind us, nor any screaming in from above or below.
So far we’re blending in nicely. I just hope that luck holds.
The military sounded great when I signed up. Get out there and kill the bad guys. Be a hero. But I didn’t know about all of the innocent people that I wouldn’t be authorized to save, or worse yet, the ones who would become collateral damage, standing between me and a target.
Those are the ghosts that follow me. The dark cloud. The ones who scream for justice and never let me sleep. They’re the ones who indirectly saved Omar’s life.
I’m my own boss now, so I get to decide which detours are worth the trouble. A glance at the car’s internal holo feed shows Omar on the back seat now, his daughter tucked against his side, sucking her thumb. She can’t be more than four years old. Omar’s wife has her hand laced through his, her knuckles white with fear.
A grim smile tugs, and one corner of my mouth twitches. I really hope they make it to Earth. It might be boring, but boring is safe.
Our car finally reaches the end of the chugging line of traffic and zips down, into an empty parking space on the top floor of the massive garage. I take one more look at the car’s sensors and external holofeeds. Still no signs of trouble.
“Everybody out,” I say.
Chapter 5
My hand drops casually to my DX-22 as my door slides open and I step out of the car. I stand there, eyes on my peripheral camera feeds, ready for a quick draw.
But everyone I can see walking around in the garage has hover carts full of luggage floating along behind them. No sign of anyone like me, traveling light because they’re not planning to travel.
Omar joins me on my side of the car with his wife and daughter. His family’s names pop up on my display, floating above their heads: Sienna and Damaris Trevos.
“Anything?” Omar whispers.
“Not yet. Try to keep up,” I say.
And then I take the lead, striding fast down a moving pedway between the front ends of the parked air cars. I hear Omar grunt and see on the picture-in-picture (PIP) rear-view at the top of my display that he’s just picked up his daughter. Her chubby little legs won’t keep up with mine.
People are joining the pedway ahead of us with their hovering stacks of luggage, blocking my way.
“Make a hole! Coming through!” I call out periodically to get them to step aside. It’s a risk. Mohinari will be looking for someone with my appearance and listening for someone with my voice. I had to have a vocal modulator installed for this job. Expensive, painful surgery, but at least it will help for other covert ops down the road.
We get to the end of the pedway and reach a maglev tram just now pulling into the station. It goes to and from the main concourse. I’m the first one stepping through the doors when they slide open. I accidentally push a striking young woman aside. She stumbles and glares at me with glowing orange eyes.
“Hey! Watch where you’re going, scrigg!”
My gaze lingers on hers as Omar and his family pile in beside me. A name appears above the woman’s head: Aurora Velez. She’s beyond striking, with fiery red hair to match her eyes, and just a couple of freckles on her cheeks. Perfection incarnate. Orange isn’t a natural pigment for eyes and she’s unusually pretty, so there are only a few possibilities for what she is:
Bot.
Engineered human.
Or a cyborg.
Her eyes are glowing. Using my holoband, I zoom in to see the colored specks of familiar icons around the edges of her pupils. Her mixed reality displays are projected directly over her eyes, which makes me suspect they aren’t real. Augmented Reality Contacts don’t let biological eyes breathe, and they’re a lot less comfortable and useful than holobands (no speakers or mic for comms and audio). Still, she could be an engineered human wearing ARCs. Can’t rule it out.
But I do. She turns away, and I find myself studying her clothes and shoes. Her v-cut white blouse and matching shimmersilk skirt are both clinging and too skimpy for this part of the planet. No heated linings. No thermal shield attached to a belt. And no hint of a panty line under that skirt. The heels on her boots are also far too high and uncomfortable for travel. It all adds up to the same thing: