TORTURE

The Palazzo Grande was located in the heart of Central City, and from its penthouse rooms crowning the top of the five star luxury hotel the rich and powerful could see the stark, forbidding cluster of skyscrapers that was the seat of power in Latelyspace. No doubt the movers and shakers in Latelian society who came to visit the homeworld enjoyed the feeling of might and power that came from being able to look down on the Chairwoman and the other politicians.

Garth, on the other hand, found the sight equally depressing and irritating, because the skyline reminded him of how sincerely screwed he was.

He’d accepted the OverSecretary’s overtures because doing so had kept him alive, winning him citizenship in the process. That alone gave him the opportunity to lay down long-term plans should it become necessary, up to and including joining the God Army. In his haste to secure the cherry of citizenship, he’d been totally blindsided by the change in rules; no longer legally able to compete with Offworlders, he was now required to go up against God soldiers. It might not happen right away, but if he had any plans of making it into the Final Contest, then yes, he would be expected to wrassle with a freak of nature that bore only a passing resemblance to Homo sapiens.

Theoretically, he could choose not to fight. The problems such a refusal would generate actually far outweighed any problems of getting his ass beat by a twelve foot tall rack of muscle and metal. Garth was certain that not only would the Contest promoters try to make his life a living, miserable hell, OverSecretary Terrance would find all kinds of reasons to get rid of the Trinity spy in their midst.

The only thing keeping Garth from losing his mind completely was his steadfast prayers that whatever ‘mechanism’ that made him stronger and faster would continue to do so, and hopefully at an accelerated rate. It was unrealistic to hope that he’d wake up one morning as augmented as a God soldier sans implants; the only other thing to do in that case would be to piss his pants and run away into the night. So when he looked out across the skyscraper-dotted skyline and beheld the wondrous life that the Latelians had built for themselves, Garth was depressed. He had every reason to be, because everyone single one of the paranoid, proteus-crazy bastards was going to hate him with every fiber in their bodies if he succeeded in his goals.

Sadly, there wasn’t anything he could do about his irritation, because he was pissed at himself; the overpowering urgency driving him for the last few months to locate the ship had completely obliterated all sense of caution and practicality the moment he’d landed on Hospitalis. He’d dove into the Latelian society with both feet without engaging in even the most rudimentary of examinations, and now he was well and truly fucked. Ignoring Terrance’s Machiavellian schemes to rid himself of Chairwoman Doans and her pro-Trinity agenda, there was still the small matter of angry Portsiders to deal with; there had to be some reason those bastards were after him, but try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a single answer. Ostensibly it was because of something he’d done, only trying to figure out what it was was proving to be like looking for a needle in a mountain of needles. Hell, with all the crazy-ass stuff happening to him, he hadn’t even had time to find out which Museum was hosting the Box.

Garth lay on the massage table as Si Georgia, a tall, lithe, gorgeous IndoRussian/Latelian woman worked the kinks out of his back, reflecting on the positive things he had going for him. He was filthy stinking rich and was probably going to have more money than the entire Latelian system inside another month. Ridiculous amounts of cashola would help grease a lot of wheels and smooth a lot of bumps. No longer rigged to explode, his proteus was now almost fully unlocked, giving him access to all manner of illegal government programs and data sources, which would help in plotting his plans over the course of the next month or so. When he could spare the time, Garth was also certain that he’d be able to remember what Lady Ha looked like, which was a definite plus because who in their right mind wouldn’t try to hire the system’s greatest programmer? Last and most certainly not least, he had Huey, who, if he could be liberated from his prison, would be of such invaluable assistance it wasn’t even funny.

Thinking about Huey prompted Garth to worry about the AI’s frame of mind; their last meeting had gone fine, although Garth was certain he’d detected a slight edge to Huey’s temperament. To an AI, a few days equaled a few thousand lifetimes, during which, any number of schizoid tendencies could erupt. Garth silently promised Huey that he’d visit at his next possible convenience.

Si Georgia finished up. “Will there be anything else?”

The massage hadn’t come anywhere close to the one he’d gotten the other day, but it had gotten rid of some of the kinks. A bonus had been confirmation that the flesh wound across the backs of his legs were either completely healed or not worth considering. “Um, no thanks, Si Georgia.” Garth flashed a tip to the woman’s proteus. “That was more than enough.”

Georgia packed up her equipment, smiled her thanks at the generous tip, and left. .

Garth pulled on a pair of loose pants he’d ordered from the on-site clothiers and headed into the bathroom so he could look at the rapidly fading scar on his shoulder. It, and all the other gunshot wounds he’d picked up, was the sole reason he was even beginning to think it would be possible for him to survive an encounter with a God soldier. Unlike the last memorable occasion of being shot full of holes, the current situation had involved far larger bullets and distinctly more uncomfortable spots; the severity of the wounds to his shoulder and leg should have required immediate surgery, but showed all the signs of being more than six months old. In a few more days, it would be as though they had never existed.

Bothering him more than his escalated healing was the fact that the sniper rounds should have gone right through his body with superlative ease. Instead, though, he was just fine.

Wherever the source for his miraculous luck and surprising adaptability originated, Garth welcomed them both. An old saw about gift horses percolated up out of the quirky morass that was his hidden memories, and it fit.

Garth’s proteus chimed with the now familiar sound of an incoming call, so he hurried back into the main sitting area. On his way there, he slid on one of his new black t-shirts, chuckling at the mental image of the uptight geezer who’d taken his order; the old codger had done everything in his power to keep his clearly insane Offworld customer from having ‘slogans’ put on them. In the end, both Garth’s obscene amount of money and perpetually dynamic ability to persist against all odds forced Chauncy to give in, caving like an old hooker kicked in the abdomen. Walking around in shirts labeled ‘Foreign Devil’, ‘Subversive Element’ and ‘Public Enemy #1’ would hopefully piss some people off.

It was Jimmy. He read Garth’s shirt and laughed. “Calling yourself a Foreign Devil won’t make you any friends, Garth.”

“Yeah, I know.” Garth smiled evilly. “But at least there’s no doubt this way.”

“The Palazzo Grande.” Jimmy admired the scenery behind Garth for a moment before continuing. “My brothers-in-law want to meet you tonight.”

It was about time. If the hatchet job he’d done on Huey’s personality matrix hadn’t driven the AI completely apeshit by now, the Port authorities’ attempts to force him into suicide by shooting different quantum frequencies and awful Latelian television shows at him had, and near as Garth could tell, a rogue AI was a bad thing for everyone involved. At the time of his hack, Garth hadn’t known anything about the anti-human sentiment most rogue –aka insane- artificially intelligent minds developed, and honestly, he was fairly sure it wouldn’t have mattered, but he needed Huey. Being saddled with a metal mind more interested in blowtorching people into ash than helping him out was not something Garth was prepared to deal with.

“Yeah?” Garth asked. “When?”

“Late tonight. ”

“Night owls, eh?” Garth made a show of looking at his proteus, working out the rest of his night. It was going to be tight, but he didn’t really have a choice; during the trip to the Palazzo, his buddy Robret had flashed him with the latest updates on what he was expected to do vis a vis the Contest. He needed to meet with the stooges in order to get into the Port undetected, and he damn sure couldn’t miss a single Contest fight, so he’d just have to figure out a way to make everything work. “I got my first elimination round at 7, so it’d better be a short meeting.”

“Oh?” Jimmy’s eyebrows rose of their own accord. After dropping Garth off, he’d planned on checking out his suspicions, but hadn’t been able to find the time; his wife’s brothers had been in the house, and they’d pressured him for more info on Garth.

Garth grimaced. “Yeah. Citizenship changed things in a big way. Gotta fight my own ‘people’ now.”

“Uhm, well. I’ll call you about ten minutes before I get to the Hotel.” Jimmy ended the call quickly.

Garth played the conversation back with the volume muted so he could concentrate on Jimmy’s body language. There was little doubt that the cabbie was unhappy at having to deal with his unsavory brothers-in-law, and with very good reason; Garth was willing to bet his left nut that Jimmy’s relatives were Portsiders, which put him in a bad way –if he was right and they were from the same gang who’d spent the last few days trying to kill him dead, then he was walking into a trap of profound proportions. There was little he could do about that except go with the flow. Getting onto the Port with Jimmy’s relatives wasn’t nearly as important as finding out how they got on. From there, it would be just a simple matter of subverting their technique for his own purposes.

Worse than that, though, was Jimmy’s state of mind. Learning that he was going to have to fight Latelians had sent the cabbie into a massive state of panic worse than anything Garth had ever seen. There was something about his change in status …

“Ahhh, shit, Jimmy.” Garth hung his head. Jimmy was in a world of trouble, and it was all his fault. If the gangsters were, for some reason, disinterested in killing him, they would have definitely been interested in Jimmy’s claims that he was going to take the Offworld Contest; following through on Jimmy’s sincerity, the two guys would’ve put a ton of money down, and probably at disproportionate odds.

Garth didn’t need to read Bettor and Bettor’s contractual guidelines to know that any advance betting on the winner was considered a huge risk, and that the arbiters on the case would treat his relocation to a different rosters the same as if he’d been kicked out of the competition altogether. All the money laid down would be lost, no chance for refunds, no possibility for arguments. And, powerful resources or not, no one fucked with Bettor and Bettor.

Jimmy’s body language during the call told Garth that the brothers-in-law had been sitting off screen the whole time, which meant that they, too, knew they were completely fucked out of a small fortune.

“Shit.” Garth didn’t have any problems taking whatever risks necessary to protect his own life, but Jimmy was involved, too. There was the slim chance that he could just pay back the Brothers Grim for their time and lost revenue, but it was highly unlikely; where they’d once decided to ignore their commanding officers orders to bring him in, they’d definitely find reason to try and kill him now.

Garth settled into his chair. If he was going to willingly hand himself over to the very same people who’d been after him since day one, Garth figured he should know as much about the Portsiders as one man possible could. Since he had plenty of time before Jimmy showed up, Garth planned on doing some info-gathering as well as spending time familiarizing himself further with a Military Intelligence proteus.

Remembering one of his often written, constantly forgotten mental notes, Garth decided to first check out the underside of his proteus to see just what had been causing the minute pinpricks of electricity along his forearm. He popped the locks open and flipped it over so he could look at the inner brace. There, along the longest portion of the proteus that came in direct contact with skin, was a series of ten discolored dots. It took only a matter of seconds to discover their purpose; each of the tiny dots generated a barely detected electrical pulse against the skin, charges that could be manipulated to create a complex variety of codes. The wearer could be warned of imminent danger, of compromised data, or of anything that the codewriter deemed important.

Wondering what other tricks his proteus was capable of, Garth picked a random menu and started working.

One of the more interesting features was a visual modification program that came with an array of preset faces that he could use as ‘real life’ avatars. The programming was fairly comprehensive, allowing for a good range of realistic expressions and reactions, but the real gold came with the add-on; for a fee, Garth was given the option of purchasing a portable scanner that fit onto the proteus. With it, he could digitally map his own face into the proteus, then use the software to tweak it into any mold he wanted, and from there, talk to whoever he wanted, perfectly camouflaged. Excited to have such a tool within his grasp, Garth eagerly ordered one of the devices, then spent a solid ten minutes hacking into the transfer protocols to remove his name from the purchase. There was a log program that consisted entirely of all protean conversations that were being transmitted through the nearest relay. A bit of finagling and he was able to remote-access any of the stations he wanted, anywhere on the planet. Of course, should two prote-wearers be sitting in the same room less than four or five feet apart, their conversation and all data transmitted wouldn’t be passed through local routers or relay stations, but the staggering violation of privacy surprised the hell out of Garth. He found it hard to believe that even the staunchest government supporters would sit idly by if they caught even a whiff of how much of their daily lives were monitored; this was Carnivore –an ancient email program designed to scan all emails for particular words without the sender or receiver’s knowledge- all grown up with a nasty set of teeth.

Garth decided he was going to be miserly with his conversations, even with Lady Ha’s protective programming.

Concluding that he could spend the rest of the night just goofing around with his proteus, Garth switched gears and got down to business. Even still, it took him another half an hour of hunting through the myriad systems and options the proteus had to offer before locating a hack-avatar that raided a proteus of all its data. Similar to the log-bot, the hacker was designed specifically to remote-access a civilian prote for all prote-signs and prote-site addresses; from there, the avatar would scan the recovered data for suspicious or earmarked signatures, and then begin the process all over, leapfrogging from proteus to proteus, building a database of people and locations that would eventually aid the agent in their duties. None of the ‘stolen’ data could be used in a court of law, or even presented during a formal reading of charges because there’d be far too many uncomfortable questions asked, but as an information gatherer, the bot was perfect. It took a long, long time to build up a working database using this function because the avatar was built to evade detection from entities –human or program- who scrutinized the flow of data across the planet, so while the hack-bot sifted the endless tide of electronic info, Garth noodled through his prote, growing ever more amazed and worried at how the Latelians ran their lives.

There were agents working authorized to summon a God soldier airstrike; right that moment, in geosynchronous orbit above Hospitalis, there were forty thousand soldiers locked into stasis in gigantic pods, silently dreaming of crushing and killing. The deployment pods could put hundreds, if not thousands, of the immense warriors anywhere on the planet in less than five minutes. Other agents had permission to use missile plateaus to raze down planets, or to activate the railcannons surrounding each of the planets. For a people who were apparently inordinately pro-Latelian, Garth found the notion of a single individual, operating outside any normal ordered environment, capable of summoning forth such destruction quite the opposite.

Worse than all of that combined, though, were the lists of blacked-out software programs available for use only by agents referred to as BCU operatives; Garth couldn’t decipher the acronym, but just reading over the types of things they could do, he knew exactly what they were. There were ‘men’ and ‘women’ out there who were, through a vastly more complex form of facial recognition software, capable of manipulating implants under their skin, becoming whoever they wanted. They were chameleons, roaming through the cities, making friendships, lives, and all the while spying on their neighbors.

Garth disagreed with virtually every decision the Trinity AI had made over the last ten thousand years, specifically those concerning radical sciences like nanotechnology, the prohibition of engine tech, and the violation of the machine/mind interface, but the Latelians…. They were using their sovereign status to do whatever the hell they wanted to one another, and were seemingly unconcerned with the kinds of problems rampant meddling could cause. Naturally, he wasn’t one to give a damn one way or the other what people wanted to do to themselves, but if even one of the agents plugged into an orbital array decided he didn’t like the skyline or if one of the BCU’s decided they wanted to play Chairperson, Latelyspace would find itself in more trouble than it could rise above.

Without Huey, he had to tread very carefully in the espionage-thick waters of Hospitalis.

An hour later, Garth saw a pattern, and understood why, on a world, in a system, where people could be tracked and monitored and identified in a million different ways gangs like the Portsiders could exist; sponsorship.

It had to be the only answer.

Random data loss, rolling node brown-outs, data corruption and miscommunication between departments could only be explained by the presence of moles, or of people in very high places pulling the strings. Even during the data-saturation periods brought on by the gameheads and their relentless consumption of bandwidth –which made tracking difficult in the extreme- someone somewhere would have to notice illegal goings on. Even by accident. But nothing of the sort happened, dot during the Contest, and certainly not at any other time, which pointed to events being orchestrated by powerful people. From time to time, to satisfy an angry government, lower-level key figures of the gangs would be sacrificed to make things easier for a time, but the overall structure of the criminal underground remained unperturbed. Trying to catch the kingpins of these organizations was made impossible by their sponsors.

Garth was beginning to appreciate the Chairwoman’s repeated use of the God soldiers. She was trying to send these unseen movers and shakers a clear, definitive warning: no prisoners. Eventually, one of the invisible hands would panic, or take umbrage at her callousness, and they’d make a mistake.

It took very little imagination to dream up the sort of scenario that would play out after that because his proteus was loaded down with a hundred such, all of them detailed and timed down to the last second.

During the data raid, Garth was pleased to see that Jimmy was, in fact, an innocent; the cabdriver’s proteus was relatively clean of prote-sigs associated with known criminals. When all was said and done, Garth decided he was going to give Jimmy enough money to relocate to another planet so he could have a better life for himself.

Jimmy’s wife, Vernita, on the other hand, was a different story.

Her proteus ran chapter and verse like a Portsider charter. Every time his hack avatar came across a suspicious prote-sig, a three-dee holo popped up with the criminal’s face and a list of warrants and other pertinent details. It got to the point where Garth was forced to suspend that particular function of the avatar in order to get through the rest of the information in a timely fashion.

As he’d originally suspected, Vernita’s brothers, Jamal and Aaron, were lieutenants in the Portsider Army, but they seemed to be made of Teflon; none of their arrests stuck long enough to see them to trial because material witnesses and evidence vanished without a trace. The arresting agents, showing an interest in long-term breathing, always allowed the brothers to walk, knowing as they did that the two thugs were protected from on high. Through careful examination of Jamal and Aaron’s comm-logs, Garth was able to piece together a pretty decent travelogue the two men took, and from that, a reasonable location for what was probably the Portsider headquarters. Since now was not the time to beard the lions in their den, Garth petitioned one of the many geosynchronous satellites for a six-month old chunk of surveillance footage from that area, irately going through the process of dealing with the ‘warn-bot’ that had started showing its face when his search got into deep waters; it’s sole purpose was to inform him that he was accessing data that required a legal warrant if any progress was expected to be made in a court of law. Garth clicked patiently through the half-dozen ‘are you sures’ that popped up, downloaded the slice of footage, and jumped off the server; when the time was right, he’d use the surveillance data to plan an attack on the Portsiders.

Going back to Jamal and Aaron, Garth started reading up on the Brothers Grim. Thankfully, all the files on his proteus were up-to-date as of the moment the prote’d been given to him. Yet another warn-bot appeared, this one tasked with the mission of asking Garth if he’d like to log onto an agency server to download the latest bureau updates. Garth clicked ‘no’ and read what was available.

The two brothers were as nasty as they were intelligent; unlike most of the other suspected looeys in the employ of the Portsider Grand Poobah, Aaron and Jamal were given as much leash as they wanted. Given this relative freedom, they enjoyed the luxury of their own small group of fiendishly devoted goons and the right to decide what they wanted to do; Aaron was into prostitution, while Jamal was into protection, and the both of them worked over one of the suburbs and a smallish portion of Port City itself, kicking back roughly half of their income to Portsider central. From the way their history ran, Garth suspected that whoever was really in charge was grooming them both for their own Port Side Boys franchise sometime in the near future.

The freedoms they were given also explained their disinterest in using Jimmy as an aid in killing him; they were far more interested in furthering their own dreams than helping out the current de facto leader. But now they’d lost a bucket full of cash, and needed to save face in front of their own men, which meant either capturing him or killing him. Jimmy was most likely already living on borrowed time, which put Garth in a very difficult situation.

His natural instinct was to give Jimmish the money right away, put him on the next ship off-planet, and then go visit Aaron and Jamal on his own. If he did that, though, Garth knew he might as well just choke Jimmy to death with his own two hands; if the Portsider organization was as closely knit as the documentation seemed to indicate, whoever their contact at the Port was would probably recognize Jimmy immediately, which would have twofold consequences; one, Jimmy’d get killed, and two, his own chances of using the mole to get to Huey would be torpedoed.

The only way to save Jimmy’s life –if it was at all possible- was to meet with Aaron and Jamal and attempt to convince them to leave the poor man alone. Garth was willing to go so far as to use the footage he’d downloaded from agency servers as a bribe for safe passage off-planet, or his endless coffers to finance an internal rebellion, if it came right down to it. There was only a slim chance that either man would agree to those terms, but Garth couldn’t just let Jimmy die; on a world stuffed to the guts with intrigue, espionage, double-dealing and secret-keeping, the tubby cabdriver was probably one of three truly innocent people he’d met so far, and it would be a crime for the man to be murdered for another man’s cause without first knowing why.

Garth saved his progress and massaged his eyes with the heels of his hands. Doing his own Intel was not only a pain in the ass, it was tiring and he was constantly plagued with the feeling he was missing something right in front of his face. It didn’t help that as Captain of Armageddon Troop One, he’d relied on someone far more capable of acquiring the right information to do the job, or that while on the ground, he’d always been assisted by a steady stream of data from a BattleSystem. Because of his laziness, his eyes felt like poached eggs, his brain ached with that special kind of pain from reading too many files, and his legs were numb from the hips down. A quick check on the time told him there was several hours to go before Jimmy showed up, which meant that, Spidey-sense or not, he was going to try and catch a nap.

“Is there anything else on this guy, Reywin, anything at all?” Bolobo asked while he patiently tried to hack his way in to the FHSBC computer servers. He was doing his best to make the hack look amateurish, but it was hard going; after using next-gen avatar progs to tear everything but the most heavily protected systems into confetti, he’d lost most of the skills that had given him the nick ‘Icepick’ in his rougher days. And trying to make an awesome hack look like a bad one? That took paramount skill.

Reywin, who was working on guiding a number of spEyes into place around N’Chalez’ new, palatial room at the Palazzo without flipping any Hotel alarms, shook her head. “Sa Gorton is trying a line-hack on the dat-servs back in Central, but like us, he’s having a hard time of things. Going black isn’t easy.”

Bolobo knew what Reywin meant. One of the high points in his career had been a black op to catch a crooked data systems manager for the Agency; the director had been wired in at the very top levels of the Latelian monitoring system and had had access to limitless processing power, making him nearly impossible to catch. He hadn’t been a maniac out to destroy the world, just a man looking to make some extra money by selling secrets to the highest bidders. It’d been satisfying to beat the man at his own game. “What do you think?”

Reywin parked another spEye in place and wiped a dab of sweat from her forehead. Whoever was working security at the Palazzo was a genius. There were sensors specifically tasked to detect and destroy undesignated spEyes seeded throughout the entire building –it was only because she was using black ops spEyes that she’d managed to get her cameras into place at all. One wrong move could still set the alarms off and there was nothing she could do to prevent that without revealing her operation. “You’ve read the files, same as I have.”

“That’s not what I asked, si.” Bolobo grinned as his last avatar died an ignominious electronic death. The security systems determined that the hack had been defeated, not noticing that some if its own kernels had been rewritten to host a backdoor program. He sent off a dozen more avatars programmed with various versions of the ugly hack he’d spent twenty minutes working on and leaned back. In another five minutes, the backdoor would open and he’d be able to root around while the system was assaulted from twelve different locations. “You met the man in person, you decided we’d go black to try and catch this man.”

Reywin pushed her goggles up and blinked rapidly to clear her vision. “He doesn’t feel right, Bolo. Something about Garth N’Chalez doesn’t sit well with me. Can’t explain what it is.”

Bolobo flipped through the coroner’s reports for Injiri Katainn, Firnkle, and Marko. “Other than the fact that he’s single-mindedly bloodthirsty? And far, far stronger than he ought to be without any overt signs of aug?”

“Don’t forget he’s my prime suspect in the Portsider murders.” Reywin set the spEyes to ping their locations and begin sending sample sets of images.

Bolobo laughed. “The first group, yes, I agree he could have killed those four men and tossed them into the dumpster. It’s very definitely possible. But the second group?” He’d gone down to the crime scene on Rey’s orders and poked around on his own, using his status as an agent to deflect any curious policemen. He’d stolen one of the rounds used in the attack, taken around a thousand photos of the corpses, and located the sniper’s nest for the officers. “Blood evidence on the scene indicates that someone was shot with the sniper cannon. Probably more than once, and before the Portsiders were killed. The only people I could imagine taking multiple hits with a sniper round like the ones used are the Goddies. Our boy would’ve been dead from one of those sniper bullets.”

“Video footage from the ‘massage’ parlor shows Garth was on the scene before and after the attack.” Reywin persisted doggedly. “Blood evidence came back genetically neutral. Forensic teams swept the man’s room and found similar DNA samples.”

“That could mean anything, Rey. The two sample sets are different. Yes, they share the same weird lack of markers, but other than that, they’re completely different. Wow.” Bolobo blinked his eyes, read the data again, and flashed it over to Reywin. “Look at this.”

Over the course of her twenty years in field operations, Reywin had seen more bank accounts than she could ever remember. She’d seen people with more money in petty cash than she would ever make in her entire lifetime even if she lived to be fifty-two thousand one hundred and nine years old –she’d spent a boring hour figuring that exact number out. Never in her life would she have expected to see a man with that much money in his account. “What is that? Four hundred trillion dollars?”

“Yes. In Trinity dollars.” Bolobo killed the hack when the data was finished downloading and sat back on his haunches. “Deposit records come from every major planet in Trinityspace. Billions of credits at a time, starting from a few months ago until yesterday. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No…” Reywin’s initial supposition was that Garth was a Trinity spy. She’d spent two years training with Trinity agencies as part of an agreement between the AI and the Chairwoman, and Garth had all the characteristics of someone working deep undercover. Beyond all that though, something about him rubbed her the wrong way, and that, more than anything, was why they were watching him against direct orders. The money, while disconcerting, didn’t make much difference in her plans.

Si Trumann walked up the short flight of stairs to the plateau where Bolobo and Reywin were working. Across the way she could make out men and women having the time of their lives in one of the many open-air dining establishments the Palazzo offered. “There is a call for you, si.”

Quizzically, Reywin checked her prote. “I don’t have anything logged.”

Trumann held out the small Q-comm that was a part of any good black ops goodie kit; one of the only surefire ways to ensure that your conversations weren’t being monitored for blackmail at some later date was to use scrambled quantum communications. It cost a fortune, and required four hours of paperwork for each call made, but it was the safest way to talk.

“No one knows we’re here.” Bolobo said, drawing his sidearm. He looked around nervously.

“Relax, Bolo.” Trumann handed the phone over to Reywin. “It’s not local.”

Reywin accepted the Q-comm with trepidation. “But that would mean …” She logged in to the call. “Si Reywin duFresne.”

The man on the other end of the line began to talk, outlining what he would like to have happen and the extent of his gratitude. He went on for some time, going into great detail a number of times to ensure that what he wanted was met with extreme precision. The man explained that not only would he be grateful in the short-term, but there was potential for long-term satisfaction as well, depending on the outcome and her adherence to his requests. Then he mentioned a number.

It was a very large number. And what the man wanted done was, essentially, what she was doing in the first place. The only difference was that if she did as she was asked, she wouldn’t be the one to do it, and she and her team would be paid a disgusting amount of money for letting it happen.

“I … all right.” Reywin ended the comm and looked at the two agents present. “There has been a revision in my plan. Initially my goal was to document N’Chalez’ actions here on Hospitalis, build a case against him, and kill him for endangering the lives of innocent civilians.”

It made Trumann uncomfortable to hear the plan spoken out loud so brazenly, but she nodded alongside Bolo; Garth N’Chalez was clearly a subversive element and was undoubtedly working towards some inexplicable Trinity goal. Bolo spoke up. “What’s changed?”

“An … outside party has requested that we simply watch him for the time being. That we accumulate as much data on N’Chalez as we possibly can, then hand that information over to a third-party contract worker.”

‘Contract worker’ was an agency euphemism for assassin, and everyone present knew it. Neither Bolobo nor Trumann were stupid. They saw the writing on the wall. “Is there going to be some kind of expression?” Trumann asked.

“Yes.” Reywin smiled thinly. “A rather large one. For each of us, so long as we do our jobs properly.”

“How long until this contract worker gets here?” Bolobo asked.

“The man is traveling along military routes through Trinityspace. Presumably he’ll do the same on this side. No more than two weeks at the outside, possibly less, depending on the type of vessel he uses.” Reywin took her goggles off and dropped them into her kit. “The person I spoke with will be sending us an encrypted file with the third-party’s particulars. We will apparently need to make his arrival here on Hospitalis as smooth as possible.”

“What does that mean?” Trumann demanded. Because of the Offworld addition to the Contest, entrance into the system was easier than ever.

“J… the man I spoke to didn’t say much, other than this Chadsik-al-Taryin fellow is … different.” Reywin’s prote chimed, drawing her back to the surveillance spEyes. “He’s on the move. Jimmish the cab driver must be on his way. Remember: we’re not going to do anything but watch and catalogue.”

“What if he starts killing people?” Bolobo asked.

“The level of gratitude is quite high, Bolo.” Reywin flashed a number to his and Trumann’s protes, nodding when their faces blanched. “And based on Jimmish’s extended family, it’s highly probable that any killing this man does will be Portsiders. Are we clear?”

Trumann and Bolobo nodded. Reywin was right. It was a very big number, and anyone getting killed would probably be Portsiders.

“So … tell me about your in-laws, Jimmy.” Garth asked from the back seat. At his feet was a huge duffel bag. In it were some of the supplies he’d asked the cabbie to buy what felt like ten million years ago; most of the stuff in the bag, like the titanium pitons and duronium wire, had been slated for use in a jerry-rigged quantum baffle for Huey’s escape, but now they were going to be used in a very different way.

“Jamal and Aaron?” Jimmy shrugged. “They’re okay, I guess. All things considered.”

Garth smiled sadly to himself. Jimmy’d sold him out. It was okay, of course, because maybe a tenth of a percent of people had the stones to stand up to people like Jamal and Aaron. They were bad men who made good people hurt, and when a guy like Jimmy was forced to choose between an immediate threat and an Offworlder, Garth hadn’t entertained any doubts about which way things would turn out. Hell, after everything that had happened to Jimmy in the last few days, Garth was impressed the guy got his shoes on.“How long you been married?”

“Ten years.” When the cab began maneuvering off the high speed roads towards surface roads, Jimmy accepted control from the autopilot and took the street his house was on.

The residential sections were a hue and cry away from the bustling exuberance of the main cities, and as they drove through moonlit avenues, Garth took a moment to enjoy the solitude. Even though it was late at night, the way the streets and housing areas were set up showed the handiwork of those dastardly genius city planners in action once more; even during the busiest part of the day, the suburban sections would stay quiet because the roads themselves would only permit so much traffic, and the distance between houses was enough to prevent backwash from noisy families. “How much do houses out here run?”

“Thinking of buying?” Jimmy asked idiotically.

“Well, I’m not really a white picket fence kind of fella, Jimmy, but yeah, it’d be nice to have a place to hide out in, to get away from the noise of the city.” Just in case his Fortress of Doom got blown up and he needed a place to lay low, maybe…

Jimmy, who sometimes got bone-crackingly bad migraine headaches from driving in Port City all day long, nodded seriously. You got used to the noise, managed to tune it out, but it never went away. He pointed through the windshield at a green and blue house further up the road on the left hand side. “That’s me.”

Garth shoved the duffel bag under Jimmy’s chair as best he could with his feet. As they got closer to the charming split-level house with its very own miniature relay node spiraling out of the roof, Garth saw a large industrial van parked in the driveway. Aaron and Jamal were in the house, most likely with a handful of their thugs, lying in wait like trapdoor spiders, eager to earn more brownie points with their boss.

And Garth was pretty sure he’d figured out just what it was that the Portsiders wanted, and it sure as hell wasn’t him.

It was his ship, the Meadowlark Lemon.

To be even more specific, it was Huey that the Portsiders were risking their lives for, proving with unshakeable certainty that the gang was being run by someone with a lot more intelligence and a lot of expendable cash; the only thing a Portsider would be able to use Huey for was a rousing game of baseball.

After heavy deliberation and some cross-checking of facts, though, Garth’s assumption was the right one. Thanks to his tardiness, arriving on Hospitalis more than ten hours behind the first rush of Offworld Contestants meant that only a half-dozen people or so had known of his landing. Assuming that OverSecretary Terrance had known of his arrival from his admission through the space port –giving the man more than a week to spin a story shiny enough to catch his interest- gave the politician a free pass on being the Portsider’s number one man; Terrance did want him dead, no doubt about it, but in the most fantastically publicized and gruesome way possible. After that, credentials proving the Offworlder to be a member of some elite Trinity agency would be ‘leaked’ to the public, and from there, Chairwoman Doans’ plans to introduce Latelyspace to Trinity would be backshelved for who knew how long.

The beautiful young woman at the Information Desk was automatically off his list because Garth couldn’t possibly imagine someone as phenomenally beautiful as her being anything other than on the up and up. His old drill instructor, Kaptan Innit, would die of a heart attack only so he could come back to life and haunt him as a zombie if he ever caught wind of such a baseless assumption, but there it was; Garth had no choice in the matter.

The only two plausible characters he’d met from landing to the Hotel –he’d seriously considered Mijomi for a time before deciding there’d been too little time to coordinate an attack- were the Security Officer and the Customs Official. Either one could’ve easily contacted the Portsiders’ boss about his arrival; it was a nice, neat decision because either one could also just as easily be the Inside Man at the Port for the gang’s illegal comings and goings.

Now all he needed to do was find out why the Boss Man wanted Huey so badly; badly enough to kill, badly enough to waste precious resources, badly enough to risk condemnation by his or her own government and most importantly, badly enough to make the seriously stupid decision to piss of the most dangerous man on the planet.

Jimmy pulled into the driveway behind the van and climbed out. Garth followed suit, asking, “Everything okay, Jimmish?”

The cabbie looked from Garth to the house then back to the Offworlder. “Yeah. I’m just tired. It’s been a very long day, sa, and like you, I got to be at work at seven. Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Three miles away and at an altitude of four hundred meters, Reywin and the others watched Garth go into the house. Thermal scans identified eight males and one female. Because they were black, they couldn’t get info from the orbital satellites on who was inside without relaying their position, but Reywin wasn’t worried about that; what bothered her, and more than she could articulate, was Garth’s willingness to walk into a trap. From the records made of his journey from the Hotel, Garth wasn’t in the least bit worried about anything, even though he simply had to know he was in trouble.

“Any local comm traffic?” Reywin asked Bolo, who was hunched over his portable node-hacker. It was a far more powerful and insidious tool than the hack available on their proteii; it had no ‘footprint’, making it invisible to the monitors.

“No, si. Everyone in a five mile radius of that house is asleep. Like we should be.” Bolo cut the node-hack and looked to Trumann, who was resting idly in the gunpit. She’d painted a number of low-resistance points on the house and was putting the avatars through their paces to ensure maximum structural damage. “What’re you doing that for?”

Trumann shrugged. “Got nothing else to do, and besides, if this N’Chalez person goes off the reservation and starts eating people, he isn’t going to get very fucking far.” She looked over her shoulder at Reywin to see if the boss understood she wasn’t kidding around, smiling triumphantly when she got the nod. Untold fortunes were all very well and good, but if you couldn’t sleep at night, what was the point?

Bolo grunted and got to work on laying down call displacers that would route all emergency calls to his comm unit. They’d let the man get this far, they were going to keep the situation self-contained. If it was called for.

Reywin flashed an update to everyone in the flier. Something was happening in the house. Her mouth a grim line of determination, Reywin brought them in closer.

Garth took a right at the bottom of the stairs, following Jimmy. His ears picked up the sounds of six, maybe seven guys in the room, all of them exuding that weird force of silence he’d always been able to hear –it was almost as if he could hear them all thinking ‘be quiet be quiet be quiet’ to themselves over and over again. He steeled himself for the inevitable and walked into the trap.

When Garth walked around the corner, someone whacked him on the side of the head with a baseball bat. He fell down with an obliging grunt of pain and ground his teeth when the bat was smashed across the back of his skull a second and third time. He heard Jimmy scream incoherently at the sudden escalation of violence.

There was nothing for a few seconds but the sounds of silent struggling as Jimmy sought to free himself. All sounds except some heavy breathing stopped. Rough hands grabbed Garth at the shoulders and feet. Playing possum, Garth opened his eyes a slit, flopping every now and then as though he was trying to come back to consciousness; he took the opportunity to survey his surroundings. Two gangsters hauled him up like a sack of potatoes and threw him into a chair. They started tying him down.

What Garth saw hardened his heart.

They hadn’t gagged Jimmish, like he’d been hoping. They’d cut his throat from ear to ear and so deeply he’d bled out in a matter of seconds. The expression of haunted betrayal on Jimmy’s face was all the accusation Garth needed.

Garth rarely allowed himself the luxury of getting angry. It was dangerous, self-destructive and sometimes impractical. Since coming to Hospitalis, he had done everything in his power to keep from completely losing his cool because he was not in a friendly neck of the Universe. But what Jamal and Aaron had done was beyond all limits. No one in the house, not even Jimmy’s wife, would go unpunished.

The innocent, the weak, civilians like Jimmy needed to be spared the indignities of a harsh and cruel world so they could go on to forge a new path to a better age when men like him weren’t needed, to a time when men like him couldn’t even exist. The notion was an ember of white hot rage burning in Garth’s guts, and even though he wasn’t entirely certain where the sentiment was coming from, by the time the last knot was tied on his ropes, he knew two things: prior to his interment in suspended animation, protecting the innocents had been more than a guideline, it had been his way of life, and two, he’d willingly gone into the suspension to bring hope and survival to those very same people at some later date.

Hands as big as shovels slapped him ‘awake’. Garth opened his eyes blearily and drooled onto his shirt. He hoped the fuckers appreciated the lengths he was going to here. He was ruining a brand new shirt.

“Wake him up.” One of the voices snapped.

From recordings lifted from Vernita’s proteus, the one talking was Vernita’s AfroEgyptian half-brother, Jamal; Aaron and Vernita were full siblings, and rather than kick Jamal out after his mother died, they had accepted the younger man as a full relation. Of the two men, Jamal was the one with more authority and ranking in the Portsider organization because of tenure and his willingness to do the dirty work without hesitation.

Garth pegged Jamal as the one responsible, so he was going to be the one to pay the bitter price. A tube of noxious chemical stimulant was snapped open under his nose. Garth gagged loudly and opened his eyes.

There were eight Latelians, all of them on the heavier side of the norm, but nowhere as intimidating as a God soldier; if anything, the eight plus Jamal and Aaron looked nothing so much as washed-out soldier wannabes doing whatever they could to live some kind of glory. Regardless of their failures in life, they were also nearly identical in how they dressed, stood, and acted; sitting there, drooling on himself, Garth wondered if there was a Portsider training facility as well as a Gangster Boutique.

They milled around him, nervously excited. All of them were higher than kites on whatever kinds of drugs the whacky Latelians favored, and not one of them seemed concerned that he was personally responsible for the deaths of eight of their friends. Jamal and Aaron stood off to one side, smiling cockily, never once thinking that they were the ones who’d walked into a trap.

Garth paid close attention to the boisterous, posturing thugs as they walked back and forth, working themselves into frenzy. Unlike the other Portsiders he’d come across, Garth saw that his new friends weren’t carrying Stretch guns, having favored knuckles, knives, batons and other silent weapons. Garth had to restrain a grin and a chuckle. They wanted to pound him into hamburger before killing him.

If only they’d done a little thinking, at least one of them should have been packing a gun.

Garth rolled his eyes up into their sockets, let a thick stream of bloody spittle trail weakly out of his mouth, and moaned. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Whofuck said you could talk?” One of the thugs demanded wildly, pupils a vanishing point in a sea of white. He slipped his knuckles on and drove a fist into Garth’s stomach, eliciting laughter from his buddies when the Offworlder groaned loudly.

Garth regretted not taking the time to prepare some blood packets for the guys. They were obviously enjoying themselves a whole lot, and would have enjoyed more of a show. As it was, though, he thought he was doing a pretty good job of things. As long as they didn’t decide to go Reservoir Dog on his ass, everything would be copacetic. “I just … I just …”

The guy hit him again, this time in the chest. The room filled with laughter as he, and the chair, fell backwards. Garth toppled to the floor in a clatter. He got a good look into Jimmy’s soulless eyes and felt a twinge of guilt. The thugs righted his chair.

Jamal stepped out from behind the thugs, Aaron at his side. Their resemblance was much plainer to see in person than through the photographs on Vernita’s cheap prote. Both of the stocky, burly men carried a hint of their father in them, especially around the eyes. “This the guy who killed eight of our guys?” Jamal asked one of the stooges.

The thug nodded. “Uhuh.”

Jamal’s face was a thundercloud of anger and rage. Things were not going well for them, and hadn’t been long enough for the Man to start asking questions about his decisions to grant them a small independent piece of the pie. Drug shipments were late or never showed up, someone was skimming off the top more than usual and the Devil Nuts were actually trying to make a land grab. The way of things dictated that all problems could be solved with cash, so when Jimmish had come to them with the mother of all inside tips, naturally they’d leaped at the chance; a bribe to someone in the Promotion Offices verified Garth N’Chalez as a clear contender for the Offworld Contest, and that was all the prompting they’d needed.

Under normal circumstances, Jamal and Aaron would’ve gone right to The Man in person with their inside connection to Garth, but things weren’t normal, so they’d done the only thing that could be done: they’d wagered large. With their entire bankroll, plus most of the money in their tiny chapter’s kitty.

Hearing that Garth N’Chalez was now a citizen had been a devastating blow to Aaron and Jamal. With all the money gone and no chance of getting any of it back, their path had become terribly clear; catch Garth, bring him to The Man and ask for forgiveness. If they were lucky, The Man would ignore their misdeeds and let them live. If not, well, that was that. End of the line for Aaron and Jamal. But Jamal, who knew why The Man wanted Garth N’Chalez, doubted that the night would end badly.

The Offworlder was tied to a chair and surrounded by Portsiders. What in the world could go wrong?

The look on Jamal’s face told Garth all he needed to know; any second now, they were going to start pounding the living daylights out of him. With luck, their plans didn’t involve his death, but the glazed, hungry looks on some of the Portsider drones weren’t very convincing; more than half the lumbering hulks clearly hated Offworlders no matter what the Portsider’s official policy on dealing with immigrants actually was, but this was okay by Garth.

He had a plan. It was dangerous, and might not work at all, but it was the only thing he’d been able to think of with such limited time. He was a bad-ass motherfucker, to be sure, but even he doubted his ability to take on more than eight Latelians who wanted to turn him a red smear; in order to beat the house, he was going to have to move as fast and as precisely as he had during the fight with Injiri.

The plan was dangerous because Garth didn’t know exactly how he’d done it last time, and he was filled with vague worries that if something went wrong, his night was going to end very abruptly. It might not even work because, again, the memory of the trick was bogged down with the ridiculously blissful feeling of serenity that’d come over him during the fight.

In preparation, he’d spent an hour or so working on a self-hypnotic trigger that would –if all was right with the world and Lady Luck still had the hots for him- drop his consciousness down into a similar state of perfection. From there, still riding on the off chance that Someone Out There liked him an awful lot, he’d do some major ass-kickery before anyone copped wise and ran away. If not, he was going to take a severe beating while trying to figure out a way to wing it.

Garth sat there projecting an image of pathetic terror for all he worth, literally trying to pummel the Portsiders with his weakness. He shut his eyes the moment he saw the one who’d hit him before take a running start, Knuckled hand windmilling crazily. Around him, laughter filled the basement.

The duronium-coated Knuckles crashed painfully into his chest. Garth threw his weight backwards, feeling relieved when it tipped up on the two back legs. “Please!” He shouted loudly…

… someone smacked him on the back of the head, bringing him Out. It was his Father, upset that he’d done It wrong again.

“Every time,” his father said, voice deep and rumbling, but always carrying a hint of the deep love he felt for his son, “every time you enter that way, you make a noise. A big, loud noise that any one of us can hear, see, and feel. We’ll come running if we can, son, to see what the hell’s going on. But that’s not the worst part, is it?”

Garth, a young boy barely out of diapers, shook his head. Luckily his dad’d knocked him Out so quickly; the pressure of returning from the bad ex-dee trip felt a little bit like skinning his knees, only all over and all the way through. “No, sir. The longer I do it wrong, the worse it gets when I come Out. I could die.”

His Father nodded. Then he winked, and vanished, leaving in his wake such a gentle susurration of energies that there was hardly anything to see at all. As a matter of fact, the only way to see Kith Antal go ex-dee was with your own two eyes, and up close. The burly man reappeared just as quickly, just as quietly, only in his hands he held two sodas. “Now we try again. Except this time, if you do it wrong, I’m not helping.”

Garth took a sip from the soda, closed his eyes and started all over…

Reywin jerked her eyes away from the readouts along with the other two agents. All three blinked their eyes madly to clear them from painful starbursts and pinwheels, it took several long seconds during which Reywin irrationally feared she was permanently blind. By the time everyone could see properly, the flier’s diagnostic programs announced the cause behind the surge; an unspecified energy event similar to the detonation of an EMP-type device had blown all the circuits.

“What the fuck?” the senior agent demanded, moving to check the onboard systems.

Bolo pinched the bridge of his nose. “What was that?” he asked, accepting part of the workload from Reywin’s prote as they started booting the machinery up. If they were lucky, the surge had just flipped the internal breakers. If they were unlucky, most of their surveillance equipment was toast, which would put their clandestine operation right in the toilet.

Trumann flexed her jaw rhythmically as she tried to access the mini-relay on top of the house, cursing when it and every single piece of machinery –other than their ship- in a one block radius failed to respond to overrides. Everything was dead. Concern rose quickly in Trumann, but she quashed it for the time being. Reywin was right; anyone Garth N’Chalez was going to kill would deserve it. So long as the Offworlder didn’t run out of the house screaming bloody murder, Trumann put the chances of his survival fairly high. “All right people, we’re going to have to go to thermals. Internal cams, protes, and receivers are down.”

Everyone went back to their viewfinders to see what they could see.

…Garth moved through the crowd of stunned Latelians like a dream, moving with fast, deadly accuracy, leaving in his wake a wave of destruction that sickened the crew in the flier. Even with his eyes closed against the painful luminescence that seemed to fill the otherworldly domain he ran through, Garth found he could mark his enemies’ locations by the dark blots their shadows cast against his eyelids. He moved like a razor between the men, cutting them down one by one, until all but one of the men –Garth was certain it was Jamal- was dead. The eventual target for interrogation dropped to the ground like a pole-axed steer from a gentle brush of the fingertips.

When it was done, Garth braced himself for what would come next, and opened his eyes; he knew from the unlocked memories that ‘going ex-dee’ carrying the burden of any emotion beyond placid acceptance was to court death because that other place was one of pure energy where thought could be given form. Moving through that place while so encumbered generated a synergistic imbalance that would need to be displaced upon exiting; with the body half in and half out of wherever ex-dee was, the build-up of force needing to be channeled back out into the Universe would be immense.

It was as though an angry God, passing through the neighborhood on His way to somewhere more deity-friendly, paused momentarily to teach him a lesson. Garth’s stomach quailed at the thought that, as he flew through the air towards a distant concrete wall, he might not survive; even before he stuck the wall at mach force speeds, he felt the cells in his body tremor at the abuse and blood began to leave through all available exits. Collision with the wall was not like it was in the movies; there was no interesting depression cracked into the thick slab, nor did he just stop, get up, and dust himself off. The reality, while far less exciting, was nevertheless intimately painful.

Garth lay there on the floor, vomiting up a mouthful of blood that joined the pool pouring freely from his eyes, ears, and his nose. The agony crawling along just underneath his skin was exquisite, a firm reminder that he took his life into his hands if he decided to do something so goddamned stupid ever again in this, or any, lifetime. Wiping bloody tears away with the palms of his hands, Garth eventually struggled to a seated position, resting his back against the wall that had almost taken his life. Gingerly, he began taking stock of his situation by poking and prodding different parts of his body that seemed to have taken more damage than others; his legs and arms had slammed into a couple of hardware racks during his trip to the wall, and one of his legs had hit some kind tablesaw upon impact. Luckily nothing was broken, but the bruises were the most fantastic shade of spoiled blood Garth had ever seen. He decided that he’d avoid checking out his back because the thought of seeing a bruise that big would probably put him in a crabby mood. After a few more minutes of sitting there, enjoying his continued ability to breathe, Garth reflected on his life choices and wondered if maybe he hadn’t made a mistake of gargantuan proportions by rushing into things. Pushing off from the wall into a standing position, Garth surveyed the carnage he’d wrought. It wasn’t pretty. Not as bad as what had happened to Injiri, perhaps, but the number of the dead and the obvious agony they’d suffered more than made up for the lack of blood. All of the men save Jamal, who’d most likely try to kill himself if he knew what was waiting for him, looked like they’d each been hit by a particularly pissed off Mack truck. Arms, legs and heads were broken at unnatural angles. A few of the dead men seemed to stare accusingly at Garth, looks which the ex-mercenary ignored with stoicism. They had been prepared to kill him, which made everything equal. Nudging a dead body out of the way with a foot, Garth headed into the bathroom he’d seen so he could wash off the drying blood.

A shriek of outrage brought Garth hustling back into the other room. Vernita stood in the middle of the carnage, pale as a sheet and screaming bloody murder. She stumbled backwards to get away from the murderous Offworlder and tripped over Jimmy’s body. Falling into a pool of blood, Vernita gave out one final shriek of unholy terror before passing out on top of her dead husband. Garth stood there trying to decide what to do with Vernita.. If she hadn’t specifically asked one of her brothers to kill the man, she’d definitely known about it and done nothing to stop them.

Garth went over to the woman, checked to see if she hadn’t managed to die from fright then went upstairs and out to the cab. He retrieved his bag of goodies and then inspected the passenger van with his proteus. According to the readout, the vehicle wasn’t registered anywhere and didn’t even have a transponder that law enforcement could use to track it down. Garth smiled. It was nice when things were given to him freely. A few seconds work with the crypto-avatars stripped the van’s onboard computers of the locks and put new ones on, ones that only he could unlock. Shouldering his duffel bag, Garth made his way back down into the basement, preparing himself for the grim work ahead.

The first thing Garth did was secure Vernita to Jimmy with a length of rope. He figured she deserved that sort of punishment more than actual murder. If the woman made it through to morning without losing her mind, Garth was willing to call it even. With an efficiency that should disturb him, Garth then moved all the dead bodies into another room in the basement, pausing long enough to rifle through their pockets. It took a little longer than he wanted because of the sheer volume of weapons and trinkets the Portsiders carried with them. Garth picked through the best of the knives and dropped them into the duffel bag.

He needed chairs; during his ex-dee ass-kicking, the one he’d been tied to had broken, and there was no easy way to torture … interrogate… someone without a chair. Garth zipped upstairs, found the kitchen table, and shouldered a heavy-duty oak chair on each side, then hurried back down. After setting them down, Garth struggled to get Jamal into one of the chairs without breaking any bones –dead weight on a Latelian was clumsy. Whistling the theme song to Star Trek, Garth applied some adhesive tape to Jamal, then dragged the unconscious Portsider over to the wall.

Garth stepped back and admired his handiwork. Other than Jamal’s arms, the Portsider was so firmly attached to the chair that they were practically one. All that remained was to do something with the arms. He went to the duffel bag and pulled out four of the climbing pitons.

Jimmy had done an excellent job in picking out the best money had to offer. The pitons were duronium coated, making them ridiculously strong, and were self-mounting –each one of them was outfitted with a tiny pressurized canister of propellant that would drive an inner spike up to four inches into any climbing surface. Garth popped the top of one just to watch the spike drive out with enough force to penetrate even the most dense rock face. When the spike got out to its furthest point, dozens of miniscule spikes flanged outward to prevent the piton from being pulled out. The noise the spike made sent a chill down Garth’s spine. Garth eyeballed Jamal for a second, took an estimate on optimal placement, then drove four pitons into the wall, two on either side. Then he started tying Jamal’s arms out.

Garth slapped Jamal awake. The Portsider glared daggers at him for a moment before trying to break free. Waiting to see if Jamal was going to break the chair or pull his arms out of the ropes mounting him to the wall, Garth went back up to the kitchen to see what was in the fridge when it became apparent that no amount of struggling would work.

There was sandwich fixings and a jug of citrus juice and little else, so he set to making sandwiches, pausing every couple of minutes to listen to Jamal’s venomous threats and incoherent thrashing. Garth went back down to the basement with his late night snack and sat down in the chair opposite Jamal.

“Who do you work for?” Garth asked, making a show of eating. He jerked his sandwich out of the way when Jamal hocked a loogie. “Guess you don’t realize what kind of shape you’re in here, pal.” Garth put his snack on a table out of spit range and headed over to the duffel bag.

Grinning evilly, Garth brought a few pitons over for Jamal to see. “These,” Garth explained, “are climbing pitons. Ever seen ‘em?”

Jamal didn’t say anything, but he stopped struggling.

Garth put all but one of the pitons on the floor by his feet. He smacked the top of the climbing tool with the palm of his hand. The basement filled with the sharp crack as the pressurized canister popped open and the distinctly chilling snik of the spike sliding out of its home reached Jamal’s ears. “These are safety rated for any kind of mountain you want to climb, Jamal. They go through anything.” He paused for effect. “Anything.”

Garth took a drink of juice and ate some of his sandwich in silence, playing with the expended piton. He washed the sandwich down and started again. “Who do you work for?”

“The Portsiders.” Jamal answered. There was no way the Offworlder was crazy enough to do what he was implying. Jamal looked around. He had killed everyone except him. Maybe … maybe he wasn’t in such a good position. Garth went back into the duffel bag and pulled out the spool of duronium wire and a fancy jet engine lighter he’d liberated from one of the dead bodies. He uncoiled a bit of the wire and played the flame over the tip. Then he stuck the tip, which blazed with furious heat, into the wooden table. There was a satisfying hiss and the brief smell of charred wood.

“Now,” Garth said, “I’m not going to stick you with a burning hot wire. That’s very last year. What I am going to do is much worse. I will take these pitons and I will stick them in you. Every time you give me an answer I don’t like, I’m going to connect two of the pitons together with a length of this wire. Then I’m going to heat the wire up. This is d-wire, so it won’t ever melt. It’ll just get hotter and hotter and hotter. Eventually, the pitons will begin to heat up as well. You might smell something at that point. It’ll be you, cooking from the inside out.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Jamal spat.

“Let me explain something while I put a few of these into you.” Garth picked up two of the pitons by Jamal’s feet and hefted them thoughtfully. He looked deep into Jamal’s panicky brown eyes. “I’m not a nice man. I’ve been hunted since I landed, attacked at every fucking turn. I’m not here to fuck with your planet or anything so fucking stupid. I know you work for the fucking Portsiders, and I know you want my ship. I want to know two things: who are the people who give you guys your orders, and why did you kill Jimmy?” He jabbed one of the explosive pitons into the densest portion of Jamal’s thigh, then punctured the same spot on the other leg.

Jamal started screaming incoherently.

Garth went back to his snack.

Reywin closed her eyes. The screams coming through the ship speakers were horrible. And they were letting it happen.

Trumann thrust her chin at Reywin. “We should do something.”

Agent Reywin snapped off the audio feed for a minute. They’d heard the hiss and snap of two more pitons. From the thermal scans of the home they could tell Garth was now doing as he promised, and was slowly cooking Jamal’s legs through conduction. “This is information we can use.”

“What are you talking about?” Trumann hissed. “He’s torturing that man to death.”

Bolo saw where his boss was headed. “It’s also something we would never, ever do. We’ve been trying to find out who funds the Portsiders for six years. We’ve done wire taps, prote assaults, relay hacks. We’ve tried to get our own agents in on the ground floor and they always wind up dead. The Portsiders are untouchable, Trumann. The last time one of our own tortured a Portsider for information, she ended up very, very dead. And so did her family. And some of her friends.”

Reywin nodded. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Trumann, but Bolo’s got it right. N’Chalez is clearly going to get some information he needs. It’s not as though the Portsiders are going to leave him alone after this, not now, not ever, so he’s going to have to go to war with them if he wants to survive. That means getting as much info as he can on their inner networks.”

“This is insane.” Trumann had a younger brother who was in the Portsiders. There were no misconceptions that the Ministry knew about his recent induction into the organization, and she’d taken great pains to sever her relationship with Thompson the moment she’d found out –she loved her brother dearly, but couldn’t afford to have any black marks on her record. “Garth N’Chalez will bring a war into the streets of Port City, just to make a point. We should stop him.”

“No.” Reywin grabbed hold of Trumann’s shoulders. “He’s doing something distasteful, yes, maybe even evil, but he’s also doing our work for us in a way we never can. The ‘siders are a criminal organization, Trumann, not just a gang. Gang’s don’t have access to sniper cannons or the ability to smuggle things from planet to planet. If N’Chalez can get something worthwhile out of Jamal, I say we let him continue.”

“I want to go on record as being opposed to this particular course of action, Reywin.” Trumann pulled away from his supervisor. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making a little extra cash, everyone does that, but if we get hauled in front of a review board for this, I’m not going to prison.”

“Fine.” Reywin exchanged glances with Bolo. “If N’Chalez doesn’t get anywhere in another ten minutes, blow up the truck. That’ll bring him out.”

Garth was impressed with Jamal’s pain tolerance. He’d managed to withstand four pitons in the legs and the subsequent slow roasting with the d-wire joining them together as well as having his arms physically mounted to the wall behind him. The smell of roasted flesh was pretty nauseating, but Garth couldn’t let that get the better of him. If Jamal didn’t give up some good secrets before dying, he was going to be back at square one. Worse, the Portsiders would not look kindly on the torture-death and execution of ten more men.

“Are you going to make me torture your sister, Jamal?” Garth separated Vernita from Jimmy’s corpse and dragged her over to the second chair. She’d come to once during the torture session for about three and a half seconds before going into some kind of convulsion. He’d broken off to make sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue, and as he’d checked her vital signs, Jamal had paid very close attention.

Garth taped the lolling woman to the chair and turned to Jamal; the Portsider’s entire body was taut with pain. “I’m not keen on hurting a woman, Jamal, but she did let you kill her husband. Probably asked you to do it. But,” he held out a piton, “I will drive this into her stomach. It won’t kill her, but it will hurt more than anything you can possibly imagine. It’ll puncture her stomach and the digestive acids will begin to leak out. She’ll die unless treated by a physician, Jamal, but it’ll take days, maybe even weeks, for that to happen. And the whole time this is going on, those acids will eat away at her insides. It will be agony, and I have the time to sit here and make sure it happens.”

Jamal closed his eyes.

Garth slapped Jamal across the face. “Open your eyes, Jamal.” He kept on hitting the Portsider until his demands were met. He fixed Jamal with an icy glare. “You’ve seen what I can do here tonight, Jamal. I’ll do it. I’ll feel bad for awhile, but I won’t lose any sleep. . If you don’t answer right away, she gets one in the lung. Won’t kill her, but it’ll hurt, brother Jamal. After that, I’ll bolt her hands together. Then her feet. Then her elbows. And, if by some miracle, you still don’t answer me, I use electricity. You ever see someone burned with electricity, Jamal? Hurts a million time worse than fire. The nerves feel like they’re on fire and the skin cooks. Cells will be permanently destroyed, Jamal. When I am done with your sister, she will be begging for death and out of her mind. And it’ll be all your fault.”

“Go … fuck … yourself.” Jamal grated.

Garth sighed. It was always the same. Gang ties were stronger than family ties. He hadn’t wanted it to come down to this, but he was committed to staying alive. Garth pivoted, piton in hand…

“Wait! Wait! Wait.” Jamal let loose with a hitching sob that would have been heartbreaking under other circumstances. “Wait.”

“That was real close, Jamal.” Garth wasn’t lying; the tip of the piton was less than half an inch away from Vernita’s stomach. “You’d better not be fucking with me, either. Tell me what I want to know and a couple of things are going to happen. One, you and your dear ol’ sis will live. Two, I will leave you alone unless what you tell me turns out to be wrong. If you lied, this happens again. Do you believe that I can find you wherever you go, Jamal? Do you believe that I can reach out with my hands and find you no matter where you are and make you die?”

Jamal nodded and burst into tears.

Bolobo felt sick to his stomach. “This … he’s … he’s not human.”

Reywin’s opinion differed; unlike her teammates, she’d gone through rigorous training on this sort of thing, how to both administer and survive such tactics. Garth’s methodology was perhaps more visceral than she preferred, but according to her old instructors, it was the end result that mattered. “He’s a master at this sort of thing, that’s for sure. Watching him work, while uncomfortable, is a good lesson for us. This is a man who is capable of doing anything for what he believes.”

“For what he believes?” Trumann demanded. “He could have gotten his answers, the name of The Man, in less than fifteen minutes if he’d wanted to!” She was sickened by the scene. To imagine for a minute that anyone was capable of such horrific actions, even in self-preservation …

“Weren’t you listening to his five minute monologue about the innocent?” Bolobo called up the text and flashed it to Trumann. “Read that over. Jamal was punished for killing Jimmish and for no other reason.”

“I assumed he was talking just for the sake of frightening Jamal further.” Trumann didn’t need to read the document over. Everything Garth had said and done was burned into her mind forever.

Reywin snorted. “No. Our man here has a very clear notion of innocence and guilt. Get one of the avatars working on a profile and shut up; if it comes to it, I need to know if this Offworlder is going to start targeting people like us because of our jobs.”

That shut everyone in the flier up. In the pursuit of their mandate to protect the Latelian way of life, each one of them had done things that could quite easily be viewed as wrong, and if Garth N’Chalez was the sort of man to take it upon himself to protect the innocent, then they were all in a lot of trouble.

Garth logged Jamal’s confession, then encrypted it on the off chance that he was picked up by some of Terrance’s boys. The man at the top of the pyramid wasn’t anyone Garth knew, but he got the impression from Jamal, who was weeping like a child, that Ashok Guillfoyle was a powerful man with even more powerful contacts.

With only two hours remaining before he was expected to be at the Arena, Garth only did a half-assed job of wiping down his prints and getting rid of other incriminating evidence. His only hope for not getting caught for the murder and torture of ‘innocent’ Latelians lay with the sheer gruesomeness of the scene. Hopefully everyone would think the Devil Nuts had done the job and move on to them.

Barely satisfied with the job, Garth nevertheless packed up his gear, gave the room a quick once-over, then headed outside to the van.

If he hurried, he could catch the Continental Breakfast at the Palazzo.