“You didn’t have to sic them on me either.”
He swallowed nervously and tried to size me up. “You’re not an assassin, are you? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to come with me. Somewhere we can talk in private.”
He looked up and down the street, probably hoping some ally of his would suddenly show up. “I’ll follow you behind that warehouse.”
“I’d appreciate it if you don’t assume I’m that dumb. I’ll follow you.”
“If you’re planning to kill me—”
I gestured with my pistol and he went ahead. He kept looking around, peering at the loading devices and trash compactors behind the warehouse as if help was hiding in the shadows. The building and all its machinery sat empty and idle, a thin layer of red dust on every surface. The warehouse, like much of Chryse, seemed to have run into hard times.
“Okay.” He swallowed. “What do you want with me?”
“I happen to know that you were the contact for the human trafficking network that supplies Ares Terrestrial.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me, then nervously put both hands in his pockets.
“Take your hands out of your pockets. Slowly.” I kept my gun trained on his head while he pulled his hands out and spread them to show me how empty they were.
“Look, man. Calm down. I’m sure we can work this out, yeah?”
“I need to know who they are. How you contacted them. Names.”
He suddenly grinned, showing pure relief. A clue as to how scared he really was.
“That’s it? You’re just interested in doing business? That’s good to hear, sir. Absolutely wonderful. Though I must say—”
I pressed the gun to his forehead, which seemed to help him focus his thoughts a little.
“Look, I don’t really know who these people are! That’s not the sort of thing they would want me to know, okay? I’m serious, please!”
“Then I guess there’s no reason for us to continue this conversation,” I replied calmly.
When he took my meaning, he started to babble. “No, no, hold on! Wait! Wait! I just don’t want to be cut out of the loop. Is that so wrong?”
“It’s either that, or you die right here, right now.”
He seemed to be struggling to accept this fact. As I stood there quietly with my gun against his forehead, he wrestled with the implications of being completely powerless. It seemed to shrink the man. He kept crouching lower and lower by tiny increments as if trying to melt away from the gun, until he was finally bent over ludicrously with his hands in the air, his face a portrait of absolute misery. I almost felt bad for him.
“Okay. Okay!” He sighed, but it sounded almost like a dog whining. “They work for David Kote.”
That wasn’t an answer I was expecting. “David Kote the industrialist? Mining, Water extraction?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Look, these are bad men, you understand me? Not like me! I play the big man here in Chryse, but I’m only a middleman. I’ve never been anything more than that. And if you’re here to take over my business, I’ll never even be that again. I’m just trying to make a living. But these guys? They’re fucking evil.”
That was how he saw himself, an innocent entrepreneur. A victim. A poor man who had the rotten luck of doing business with monsters. I asked myself if a facilitator was responsible for the crimes he enabled. I thought about the Cavadoran child I’d seen inside that dead cyborg in East Hellas. Then I finished what I’d come here to do.
Aboard a Martian train winding toward the Chryse spaceport, I looked out the window and thought about how my life had changed over the past few years. How I had changed. I had started as an Arbiter, a member of the solar system’s most elite law enforcement agency. In that role I’d gone to Venus, in the company of my friend and mentor, Gabriel Anderson. We’d been assigned to resolve a mystery, why the power had gone out in Tower 7, and what any of it had to do with August Marcenn, the commander of the local police. Of course, it turned out to be a much bigger issue than it had originally appeared to be. When it was all over, Gabriel Anderson was dead, I had killed August Marcenn, and I’d been drawn into the world of Section 9.
But I never really fit in there. Watching the narrow and maze-like Martian streets go by below me, I thought about the strange, lost feeling I’d lived with ever since Gabe’s death. I thought about his widow, Sophie, another friend who had died too young. Killed for no better reason than having known me. I thought about how I’d been framed for her murder, forced into killing an Arbiter, and left with essentially no choice but to join this unit. I thought of how the members of my Section 9 team were the only family or friends I had left.
But it was time to let all that go.
It was time to stop brooding, time to stop thinking too much about where life had brought me. There was nothing left for me to do except embrace that future and let it take me wherever it led.
2
“Tycho Barrett! You’re back from Mars!”
Raven Sommer, our dark-skinned young sniper with long black hair, came running across the living room of our Terran safehouse and threw herself into my arms. I didn’t take the gesture all that personally. Raven was the demonstrative type.
“Hi, Raven. Yeah, I’m back.”
She drew back and looked me in the eyes, half-playfully analyzing whatever she saw there. “So, mission accomplished then?”
“Mission accomplished.”
I looked around at the safehouse. Like any of the others we often used, this one was roomy, bright, and almost tastelessly clean—high ceilings and spotless shelving and expensive art devoid of any personality.
“Nice place,” I commented dryly. Thomas Young, our computer expert, happened to be walking by.
He stopped dead in his tracks. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He was a somewhat eccentric man, and something about him seemed even stranger today. His long hair hung down to his shoulders, and his eyes seemed weirdly enthusiastic yet almost despairing.
I didn’t want to know about it. “Hello, Thomas. I’m back.”
“You were gone somewhere?”
That’s the thing about Thomas. He always likes to make the point that he doesn’t really see you. Before I could give my sarcastic reply, Thomas wandered back out of the room, obviously still lost wherever his thoughts had taken him.
I shook my head, threw my bag down on a couch, and took a seat. Andrew Jones came walking by, sharply dressed and as irritatingly irreverent as ever. “Don’t get too comfortable there, Panic. The boss called a meeting as soon as she heard you were on your way over.”
Panic was Jones’s nickname for me. It’s a long story. “Good to see you too, Andrew.” I leaned back on the couch, put my feet up on an ottoman, and closed my eyes. A moment later, someone picked up my feet and dropped them on the floor. I opened my eyes again. “Oh. Hello, Veraldi.”
Vincenzo Veraldi was our team’s second in-command and resident knife-fighting expert. I couldn’t see any blades concealed beneath his expensive white shirt, which probably meant he was only wearing two or three of them. He was glaring at me in a not-overly-friendly way. “Feet off the furniture, Barrett. This stuff is rented, not owned.”