APRIL 7, 2074
TITUSVILLE, FLORIDA
“She’s mortal. Not god,” FBI Special Agent Barrett Anders said to the motel’s bathroom mirror while running his wet hands through his salt and pepper hair. He needed to decide about his partner, Kristi, in the next few minutes. In or out. Live or die. Flip a coin, it could go either way.
His skin looked pasty white in the mirror against the bathroom’s pallid gray tile and taupe sinktop. This motel was as nondescript as they came. A cheap rent-by-the-hour hotsheets heavily perfumed with disinfectant. Even though it was night, the in-room air conditioner strained and whined, losing a futile battle against Florida’s humidity and heat. It was close to the Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island spaceports and they could stay here, off the radar, while they waited for their shuttle to low Earth orbit.
His cheeks were puffy, too, and he looked like he’d gained twenty pounds since his partner’s funeral, although it was closer to fifteen. All of it around his midsection, spilling over his titanium hip replacement and mechanical legs like a deformed donut. As if he had somewhere else to gain weight. His aluminum and silicone augment legs were exactly the same weight as the day the ortho surgeon installed them.
“Who are you trying to convince, me or you?” Kristi shouted from the bedroom.
Special Agent Kristi Lindsay, a woman with insipid blond hair banded into a ponytail, a grating voice, and a gym addiction. She had a wife who made heaps of money as a filthy romance author working from home, and five kids.
Kristi Reliable Lindsay, she wasn’t. She’d been shot twice in the thigh, but refused a prosthetic for her lame leg and walked around with a gimp. Complaints had been lodged about her wife’s disgusting novels. It didn’t make the agency look good to have an agent’s wife publishing such garbage. But Kristi was seen as a goddamn agency hero and her kids were cute, so the agency hid behind the First Amendment.
He straightened his blue suit, letting his hand linger over the pistol in his shoulder holster.
It was the boss’ idea to pair them together. His punishment for not taking the leave the therapybot recommended. He didn’t need a babysitter. He needed to be on the job, on the move, inching closer and building a case on the woman that killed his previous partner.
He’d been dry for a week, but his eyes were still bloodshot and his hands trembled. His therapybot said he drank his anger, stating the obvious in scientific deadpan as if it would tranquilize him. Bromides from a computer. Who needed them?
“It’s just a fact, Kristi. She’s not a machine,” he said to the mirror, loud enough that his voice carried to the hotel bedroom. “She breathes air, bleeds red, and puts her slacks on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.”
Well, not him. His entire lower torso was an augment.
He laughed at himself in the mirror. Building a case. Kate Devana would never be convicted. The worst ones never were. He only needed enough evidence to make it look like a clean shoot. Or jail her long enough to let nature take its course behind bars. As much as he’d relish pulling the trigger in a crowded bar, watching her take her last breath on a grimy floor like his partner Mia Bolkov six months ago, it didn’t need to be him that killed her. There were all sorts of violent, bloody ways to die in this business.
He met Devana at Mia’s funeral—the first one he’d been to on a space station. Devana paid for it, a sure sign she was corrupt. She went around hugging the family, brazenly shedding crocodile tears as if Mia was a lifelong friend. She talked to Mia’s kids, telling them how brave she was and that she was a hero, even conning Mia’s husband into letting her spread Mia’s ashes into space.
Devana wore her Space Force black-and-gray dress uniform to the funeral as if all her medals made her impervious to justice. He shook hands with her and could smell the lies on her perfume. He knew then he’d kill her.
“She has friends in high places, Brett.”
Chrissake. He hated it when Kristi called him that. One month together, she acted like they were best friends. She was only here because the boss thought he needed oversight. Berating and punching the therapybot’s screen was a onetime thing.
“She needs to be in jail.”
“Word is, Defense Secretary Cruz personally authorized the wetwork on Bill Caddell,” Kristi continued.
“Caddell was an agency Director.”
“Also a domestic terrorist.”
“Evidence. Trial. Conviction. Department of Justice still believes in that, right?”
“Oh c’mon, Brett. Hasn’t been that way since—for a hundred and fifty years, at least, before Hoover.”
“Kate Devana has friends in low places, too, don’t forget that. She got Mia slaughtered and walked right off that cartel’s space station. No way she does that unless she’s bent.”
He turned the cold water on and splashed his face again. The chill soothed his angry eyes. A wave of exhaustion poured over his temples. He hadn’t slept in months.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Kate Devana had a thirty million dollar bounty on her head. He couldn’t rest until he’d delivered her to jail, so she could get shanked in a prison fight. Maybe she’d die right away, or maybe she’d die after a long painful bout of sepsis. Either way, he’d collect the money. One million for every wasted year of his career at this motherless whore of an agency. They owed it to him.
“Mia volunteered for that mission, Brett, you know that. She was a good agent.”
What the hell did Kristi know? Mia was his partner for three years. “How do you walk off a Russian cartel’s space station, unless they were protecting her?”
“Because she’s crazy as fuck. That’s what everyone says about her. She booby-trapped her ship to blow, so if she died, they all died.”
“So why not blow the whole station up? She’d wipe seven most wanted off the map.”
“Along with a lot of innocent people. Make up your mind. Is she a vigilante, or not?” He pictured Kristi sitting on the bed in the bedroom air-drumming and mouthing ba-dum-bum, an annoying habit she had when she thought she caught him in a contradiction.
“There are no innocent people on that space station. It’s a zero-g whorehouse wrapped in a drug den with terrorists as customers.” He pulled his eyelids down. The dark circles weren’t going away. He pulled at the skin on his pasty cheeks, splashing more cold water on his face. He’d hit the bottle pretty hard for months, but didn’t see any jaundice from liver damage. Some drops would clear his red eyes.
“I give you that.”
“She runs a shitshow up there. She let robots run around with their freedom.”
“And? You’re practically half robot yourself.”
She was out of line, calling him a robot. His brain was wet, the way nature intended. It wasn’t like those solid-state AI brains that lived in a box on a server rack.
He reached under his pressed blue jacket. His pistol was loaded. No use otherwise. The way he’d write it up, someone busted through the door to rob the motel room. It happened all the time at these hotsheets. He’d say the four of them struggled, one of them stole his pistol, and shot Kristi in the face. He’d done it before. There were all sorts of violent, bloody ways to die in this business. She should have taken disability leave. Not like she needed the money.
He unclicked the retention snap on his holster. “Evidence. Trial. Conviction. I want her in jail. Everywhere she goes, trouble follows, and people die. Good people, like Mia Bolkov.”
“Ever ask yourself, Brett, why the boss has let you pursue this hobby of yours for the last six months?”
“She’s not a hobby.”
“You prefer the word obsession?”
“Three-quarters of the agency wants her locked up, same as me. The boss all but said so.”
“But why you?”
“Why not me?” Anders took a step towards the bathroom door, his black polymer and steel automatic pistol in hand. The magazine held twenty-one rounds, but he figured he’d take her by surprise and would need one, maybe two bullets.
Why shouldn’t it be him? Kate Devana led his partner into a slaughterhouse, outnumbered, outgunned, ill-trained, and unprepared.
Kristi didn’t respond. He paused at the door, gun up, his finger on the trigger. His file had eleven use of force complaints. Allegations of corruption had been hounding him for eighteen months. And his exes piled on, dredging up accusations of domestic violence. Yet, the boss let him pursue Devana, and he knew why.
“We’re tools, Brett.”
That was right. He’d come to the same conclusion a week ago in a rare moment of clarity while spinning his great-grandfather’s NYPD revolver. Sitting in his living room sofa rubbing the blued steel, tasting the muzzle’s gun oil in his mouth, replaying how his boss called him a hothead and rogue agent, he realized the agency hadn’t fired him, because it wanted him sober, so he could finish Kate Devana. They let him pursue his obsession because they wanted him to succeed, and his record gave them plausible deniability. Afterwards, they’d fire him and trash him in the media. They’d use the words his boss used, rogue and hotheaded and impulsive, maybe worse. He didn’t care. They didn’t know about the thirty million.
Another reason to kill Kristi: she didn’t know about the money either. That was a side deal, through a connection of a confidential informant. She didn’t need it anyway, and there was no way in hell he was splitting it with her.
He slid open the bathroom and poked his gun out just as his phone pinged. He heard Kristi’s phone ding at the same time.
He blew out a breath and holstered his pistol. He would have to wait.
Outside the bathroom, Kristi sat on the bed, with her dull yellow ponytail swishing over the back of her blue suit as she mumbled yes, got it, and ok into the phone. The boss’s first rule: nothing in writing. He liked to use burner phones and rarely texted.
After a few moments of nodding and eyebrow bouncing, she hung up the phone and turned her frowning brown eyes to him. A grating voice, a health nut, a wife who made her money writing nasty novels, five kids polluting the planet, but the most galling thing about Kristi was that the boss made her the senior agent, even though she was almost fifteen years younger than him with a lame leg.
“Change of plans,” she said, grimacing at him. “Looks like you got your wish.”
“Ding-dong the bitch is dead?”
“We are being rerouted to the colony. We are booked on the 9am shuttle.” She smiled, her eyebrows hopping. “First class too. The boss wants us there yesterday.”
A grin crept over his face. “Arrest warrant?”
“Yes, but not for her. Frank Lebofield and his parents.”
“I thought he escaped on some supply shuttle to Mars?” The wave of exhaustion he’d felt in the bathroom submerged him again.
“Well, she agreed to pick him up.” Kristi stood, smoothing her blue suit. “We are on prisoner transport duty. We are to pick them up on the colony and bring them back to D.C. for trial.”
“She is boarding a supply ship and taking them—alone?”
“I told you, her middle name is crazy as fuck.”
“The way she operates, this will be a body transport, not a prisoner transport.”
“As if you’ll shed a tear.” He was between her and the door. She stepped towards him, putting her right index finger to her temple, tapping twice. “Think about it. If there is anything on Devana, we’ll find it there.”
She passed him and then opened the motel door.
“Where are we going?” He swiveled.
She held the door open. Swampy Florida air gushed through, bringing hotsheets-motel dumpster scent with it. “First, food. Then we are checking out of this roach pit and checking into something nicer. We don’t need to hide here any longer.”
The grin crept back onto his face.
Kristi waved him out of the door, her ponytail flapping with the humid Florida breeze. “After you.”
He froze. He could kill her here. Messy. Still doable. No one would question a Florida hotsheets robbery gone wrong. But now she was his ticket to the moon. A new plan sprouted. If he killed Kristi on the moon, with Devana dead, there would be no one to investigate her death.
Kristi cocked her head, frowning. “You don’t want to go? I thought this was your dream, get Devana on her own turf.”
His knee servos whined as he stepped into the Florida night air. “Just surprised is all. Wondering why the boss is sending us.”
“You know why, Brett. We’re tools.”