I still had to capture Ivan Solovyov. Getting her out of Windsor on Highfall was going to be difficult—I doubted she would go willingly—and I couldn’t think of any scenario where it didn’t look like a kidnapping. Then again, that’s exactly what it would be, so why fight the impression? Solovyov’s new body was small. I could subdue her and put her in a travel bag. First thing was first, though, and I returned to Solovyov’s bedroom.
There was no sign of her anywhere. Solovyov’s old body was still floating in the center of the room. The devices at his temples were smoking, and I plucked one from his head. Its casing crumbled like ash in my hand, and the internal components had burned away to a lump of blackened metal and graphene.
I entered the hidden room behind the far wall and saw it was just a bathroom. All I found was a bathtub filled with lukewarm salt water and two more of the devices Katerina had placed on Solovyov’s head, also destroyed. I did a perfunctory search of the rest of the penthouse and verified what I already knew. The young girl hosting an ancient consciousness was already out there somewhere in the streets of Valhalla.
Epilogue
A light rain was falling on Calais when I arrived at the train station. I closed my umbrella and shook the water from it before heading inside the ticket office. I bought my pass and sat on a bench by the platform to wait for my contact.
The holo overhead was streaming the regional news. Like most dispatches in the last day, the stream was dominated by news of the shocking murder of retired diplomat Ivan Solovyov in his home on Callisto. For some reason StateSec couldn’t understand, all the surveillance video from within the building seemed to have been erased, and the receptionist who had seen the killer wasn’t cooperating with the authorities. I wondered if that was Section 9 or Solovyov’s doing.
“You know, that really wasn’t what I would call discreet.” Andrew Jones was standing next to me, dressed like a businessman in a plain blue suit. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“I ran into complications,” I replied.
“You don’t say. Did you really kill her?”
“If she were here, she’d have half a mind to tell you.”
He sat down next to me. “You got lucky, right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
We sat there in silence for a minute, watching the rain fall.
“I’m sending you a dataspike transfer,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked as the file was coming through.
“It’s a decryption cypher. For this.”
He opened up his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Light reading for the trip.”
I followed Andrew back to his car and started leafing through the pages as soon as I was sitting inside. It was all garbled nonsense, page after page of glyphs and shapes.
“What language is this?” I asked.
“Keep looking at it. Sometimes it takes a minute.”
I looked at a page, searching for something I might have missed. The shapes suddenly cleared in my vision and formed into legible text. As I flipped through the pages, I noticed multiple references to Whitehall and the North Atlantic States Interior Office.
“That’s interesting,” I commented. “I’ve never seen it done that way before.”
“Fun, isn’t it? The book is useless without the app, and the app is useless without the book. Thank the R and D people.”
As our car pulled into a train carriage for the trip beneath the English Channel, Andrew turned off the screens so we couldn’t see what was going on outside the car. “Going through the Chunnel makes me nervous, honestly. I’d rather not see it.”
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“London. After the attack on our HQ, Andrea threw out everything.”
I found this a little hard to wrap my head around. “What do you mean she threw out everything?”
“I mean exactly everything—all bug-out protocols, all safehouses, our entire infrastructure. Katerina may have compromised any or all of it, so all we can do is burn it down and start over.”
“It’s incredible how much damage she did. What do we have left?”
“Nothing at all.” He didn’t seem too worried. In fact, Andrew Jones seemed positively cheerful. He was drumming his fingers on his leg as if making music.
“So what is there in England for us?”
“You really worry too much, Tycho. It’s all been arranged, and the only thing we need to do is turn up where and when they tell us to turn up.”
“So you do know.”
“Yes.”
“Andrew, could you just answer my question? As a favor?”
“Alright, sure, why not? Anything legacy had to be scrapped, so while the groundwork for new infrastructure is being built, Section 9 are going to be guests of the North Atlantic States.”
“What kind of sense does that make?” I asked. “Aren’t there bad feelings between the NAS and the Sol Federation?”
In my experience, the North Atlantic States was far from friendly to the Sol Federation, which logically implied they would be even less friendly to its intelligence agencies. There had been rumors of war for a long time now, although no one in the North Atlantic States government seemed to want to provoke it. Were we heading straight into the lion’s mouth here?
“Like I said, you worry too much. Anything they’re sending us into has been set up ahead of time, and we won’t have any more trouble than we usually have.”
“Andrew, the amount of trouble we usually have is a lot.”
He shrugged. “So nothing to worry about then. It’s just a day at the office, right?”
Tycho will return in NOCICEPTOR, coming soon!
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About J.N. Chaney
J. N. Chaney is a USA Today Bestselling author and has a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He fancies himself quite the Super Mario Bros. fan. When he isn’t writing or gaming, you can find him online at www.jnchaney.com.
He migrates often, but was last seen in Las Vegas, NV. Any sightings should be reported, as they are rare.