No matter how powerful the organization was, their reach had its limits. He, with Taia’s help, could find ways to exploit those limitations—not only for himself, but to give Bex, if she truly was innocent as she claimed, a chance of evading the Protection Bureau’s manhunt.
Chapter Three
Agent Styver might have wanted to send a threat or warning by sending the skimmer-cab for him, but Nolan found it was an awfully comfortable one. He reclined on the soft back seat of the vehicle and watched the tenement buildings, apartment complexes, businesses, and broad avenues of Grove District fly by. The skimmer-cab cut a route directly west toward the Shipyards, weaving through the slower-moving wheeled vehicles at a speed Nolan might have found uncomfortable had the driver not been so adept at handling his craft. At this rate, they’d reach the Imperial Planetary Port in less than half an hour.
Agent Styver clearly wasn’t messing around when he said it’s a time-sensitive matter. Nolan’s brow furrowed in thought. That must mean the whispers of Elden Croyle being part of some big terrorist attack are more than just rumors.
Nolan had given Elden’s dossier a once-over—he’d been too surprised to see Bex’s face on the video footage to dig deeper—and he’d found little more than the single tenuous link to Sic Semper Tyrannis. No history of radicalization in his family, nothing to tie him to the Terran League, not a single visit to any of the many darknet terrorist recruitment sites. Most likely, the Moabus-born Elden Croyle was a home-grown terrorist planning something on his own.
Whatever the case, Nolan had no qualms about stopping the man’s plans with extreme prejudice. After he got answers about Elden’s connection to the Protection Bureau, of course. If this Elden was the man who’d broken into the IAF armory, he’d stolen the guns that Agent Styver had ultimately sold to the White Sharks and Rücksichtslos. Nolan intended to ask the man a few pointed questions before carrying out the kill order.
“Nolan,” Taia’s voice echoed in his implanted earpiece, “we need to talk about Rebecca Ajeen—Bex.”
“What about her?” Nolan asked in his mind.
“I’ve managed to find birth records for fourteen Rebecca Ajeens in the Imperial databases, from five different planets—including two right here on Exodus VI.”
“Damn, Taia, that was fast!” Nolan couldn’t help being impressed. The AI had gotten Bex’s name just a few hours earlier. “Any idea which one she is?”
“No, but I will continue digging until I find out.” The AI seemed to hesitate—barely a one-second pause between sentences, but for Taia, that was as noticeable as a human drawing in a deep breath to broach an uncomfortable subject. “I’ve been trying every algorithm and theorem in my database, but I’m unable to come up with an answer that could explain your behavior.”
“My behavior?” Nolan’s eyebrow rose. “Helping out a Silverguard in need?”
“No, that is perfectly logical,” Taia replied. “I’m referring to your behavior with Bex after you discovered she is a terrorist and the one responsible for the IAF armory theft.”
A new voice played in Nolan’s earpiece—his own, recorded from his earlier conversation. “You don’t need to worry about me turning you over to the Imperial forces. I wasn’t lying when I said I believed you might not be guilty of the crimes you’re accused of.”
Bex’s harsh, rasping voice answered him. “Just like that? Why?”
“Why believe you?” A moment’s hesitation, then his response. “Because you’re a Silverguard. Team looks after team, right? Even just giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
“This behavior is both illogical and irrational,” Taia continued, once again speaking in her usual voice. “You have intel stating she is a terrorist, and yet a few words from her was all it took for you to believe she might be innocent. Why?”
It was Nolan’s turn to hesitate. He couldn’t quite explain intuition and gut reactions to an AI, so he had to find an answer that Taia would understand.
“Consider the source of the intel,” he finally said. “We got it from Agent Styver, who has been the primary source of a great deal of the information we’ve been given over the years.”
“The Protection Bureau’s intelligence-gathering capabilities exceed my own.” Taia almost sounded miffed, if such a thing were possible for an AI. “Including access to intelligence locked behind firewalls far too impenetrable for even my best hacking algorithms.”
“Right.” Nolan glanced at the skimmer-cab driver; the Protection Bureau man divided his attention between watching the road and watching Nolan. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, pretending to rest. “But the fact that all that information is so securely locked away means no one can access it but them. So no one can verify that it’s actually accurate but them. They can feed us false intel and we have no way to know it’s actually true.”
Taia remained silent, processing his words. “You suspect Agent Styver of duplicity?”
Nolan resisted the urge to snort in derision. “I know he’s a shady bastard. He straight-up lied to me when I asked him about Wolfe and the IAF armaments.”
Again a moment of silence, doubtless as Taia replayed the conversation in the Protection Bureau. “So you believe that if he lied about the guns, he’s lying about Bex?” she finally asked.
“Maybe he’s not lying,” Nolan answered, “but you heard and saw Bex’s reaction when I accused her of being a terrorist.”
“She attacked you.”
Nolan couldn’t help a little grin at that. “It’s what we’re trained to do when someone threatens us.” Even in her weakened condition, Bex’s Silverguard-honed instincts had been sharp. “We don’t take threats lying down—or, in her case, sitting down—unless there’s a damned good reason.”
“So it’s your shared history as Silverguards that leads you to trust her?” the AI asked.
The question was an innocent one, but it put into words something that Nolan couldn’t truly explain. No outsider could truly understand the bond formed between comrades-at-arms in the military, and more so in the special forces. Silverguards underwent the harshest training, both physical and mental, intended to winnow out the weaklings until only the toughest of the tough and best of the best remained. Anyone who endured enough to be inducted into the Silverguard received the honorary badge of brotherhood, no matter what team they operated for. A bond like that—even between total strangers—was damned difficult to break.
So, yes, in a way Nolan wanted to believe Bex because he couldn’t stomach the idea that a Silverguard could become what Agent Styver’s dossier claimed she was. But that wasn’t the only reason.
“I don’t trust her,” he answered truthfully. “Not completely, at least. That’s why I have you to keep an eye on her while I’m off-world. But I can’t just accept Agent Styver’s word that she’s a terrorist on face value. I’ve got to corroborate it for myself before I put a bullet into her. If she’s guilty, I won’t hesitate. But if there’s more to this than it appears, if Agent Styver isn’t on the up and up—which, as we learned with Wolfe, is more than a little likely—then I owe it to her to give her a chance to find the truth.”