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With a clean bill of health from the doctor, and a simple ship’s suit, but no shoes, I headed in the direction of the operations room, wondering what Mack wanted. I was also wondering why I’d had my access revoked, and where my room was, because the corridor wasn’t what I remembered from the last time I’d visited the medical unit. It crossed my mind that maybe I wasn’t on the right ship, and maybe that was the reason I couldn’t access anything.
And then it crossed my mind that I didn’t know what had happened to Bendigo or Bastien, or even how I’d been gotten out of the hidden complex. I tried to balance those feelings with the memory of being questioned by Delight, and Mack and Tens, the fact that I was no longer locked out of my head, and that Rohan had been very real. Even if I was compromised, the other four had been real, hadn’t they?
“Sit,” Mack said, as soon as I walked through the Ops Centre door.
I looked around for a chair, and spotted one set slightly to the side of his console. I crossed to it, and I sat. If this was a simulation, then it was a very good one. I wondered how I could confirm the theory, and ran through my implant, one more time. Nothing Rohan had done had affected its ability to connect with a network, but the network around me was closed.
Mack cleared his throat, and I blinked, focusing on him.
“You done?” he asked, and I realized he’d watched me disappear into my own head, and had been waiting for me to come out, again.
“I can’t connect,” I said, and his mouth tightened.
“I know.”
“Why?”
Even to me, I sounded plaintive. Around me, people got up from their consoles and left the room. The last person out, shut the door behind them.
“I need to be in your head.”
The very thought of it had me out of the seat, and poised for flight. Mack didn’t move. He just studied me, his eyes dark and unreadable. I stared at him, wary and uncertain, until I found my voice.
“Why?”
“To make sure Odyssey isn’t.”
“It’s your implant,” I said, and he slapped the arm of his chair with the flat of his hand, making me jump.
“And I put a link into it that let me drop in and check for breaches. How do you think I knew things were going wrong with Bendigo? Or where to find you in Bastien’s complex? You think Odyssey had the slightest clue?”
He was shouting, now, and I discovered I’d moved to place my chair between us, even before he’d risen out of his.
“I like my privacy,” I said, and he laughed; it was not a happy sound.
“Not on my ship, you don’t,” he retorted, and I guessed what was coming.
“Send me a link.”
I wanted to say ‘no’, but I didn’t want to return to Odyssey’s care, and I didn’t want to hear that it was my only other option. I put my hands on the back of the seat, gripping it tightly, and I did what he asked.
I didn’t know what to expect, whether Mack would melt away, his image replaced by Bendigo or Bastien the Ghoul, and the ops center replaced by... somewhere else. That thought terrified me, even as I told myself just how stupid I was being.
“Open your eyes.”
I hadn’t realized I’d closed them, but the voice was still Mack’s, so I opened them. Yup, still Mack, but there was something subtly different about the operations center. It took me a long minute, and then I realized what it was. It was so obvious that I almost kicked myself for not noticing before.
“You bastard,” I said, sinking into a crouch behind the seat. “You utter, utter bastard.”
I stayed behind the chair, one hand on the top of its back to steady myself, the other on the floor beside my bare feet—the solid floor, through which I couldn’t feel a single vibration. I should have known what felt off, the minute I woke up. I should have realized I wasn’t on a ship. I rested my head against the back of the chair, and wondered how I could have slipped so badly.
I stayed that way, even when the door to the operations center opened, and people filed back to their consoles. Not one of them spoke to me, or even seemed to notice, and I ignored them in return. I’m not sure how long I would have stayed that way, if Mack hadn’t come to stand beside the chair.
“You going to take a seat, Cutter?” he asked, and I decided I appreciated the courtesy of speech over direct mind-to-mind contact. At least this once.
I looked up at him, feeling more stupid than I’d thought possible, and he held out his hand.
“Fine,” I said, accepting his help, and letting him draw me to my feet. His next words had me freezing in my tracks, once more.
“Odyssey wants to borrow you,” he said, with a slight emphasis on the word ‘borrow’.
“No.”
The word was out before I could stop it, and there was more than one stifled gasp from those seated around the room. Mack looked around us, and then returned to his seat.
“It’s not like you don’t work for them already,” he said, indicating my fellow workers. “Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll explain what they need.”
This time, I caught my instinctive response, and kept it well behind my teeth. I even managed not to sub-vocalize it. Mack watched me, not a trace of amusement on his face, and, if he knew the skirmish I’d just won, he didn’t let on. I sat, and he leant toward me, inviting me to do the same.
With a begrudging sigh, I did.
“The Ghoul is still on the loose,” he said, and I couldn’t help glancing around us.
He reached out and laid a hand on my knee, and I jumped, biting back a scream. I pressed my knuckles to my mouth, scrunched my eyes closed, and forced myself to take three deep breaths. I didn’t even notice when Mack slid into my head, although his presence drove some of the fear away, even as he pulled up the files I’d downloaded on the Ghoul.
“That’s why Odyssey needs to borrow you,” he said, highlighting it. “You know what he looks like, and you’re familiar with his clones. You also know the hidden complex better than anyone, and that includes the teams that have made it to the server room.”
“They have?”
Mack nodded, easing out of my head as I opened my eyes.
“We know he hasn’t made it past the door you got to, but we don’t know where he is. He’s not in a single piece of footage taken after Delight led the team down to rescue you, and we’ve got nothing showing him leaving the room before, or after, the nanites attacked.”
“You mean Delight led the team to catch Bastien,” I said, “because we both know how she feels about me.”
Mack’s lips quirked.
“She’s a legend, you know.”
“She’s a pain in the ass,” I said, but I kept my voice down to a whisper, so as not to upset the Odyssey workers closest us.
“Remind you of anyone?” Mack teased, and I raised my head, ready to fire back a sharp retort, until I saw he was baiting me.
“Yeah, well,” I managed, and ducked my head. “What else do they want me for?”
“Well, it’s not your good looks and personality,” he said, stretching out to tap the keyboard on the console in front of him. He brought up a map of the complex, waving me to come closer so I could see the monitor.
My chair was on wheels. Cool. I scooted over to see what he had.
“This,” he said, indicating a point on the map, “is where we found you. You were out cold, but sleeping, and drugged to the gills. How Rohan even managed to keep you moving that far is beyond any of us.”
“I didn’t want to fall down,” I said, “and running into the wall kept me awake.”
“I’ll tell him you said that,” Mack said. “It’ll make him feel better. He still feels guilty about the wall.”
“Bendigo was screaming?” I asked.
“Yeah, him and the Ghouls,” Mack added, his eyes darkening, again, as a haunted expression crossed his face.
“The nanite swarm?”
“Yeah.” He turned back to the screen. “Thing is. We’re pretty sure the Ghoul didn’t make it out of that lab. We’re just as sure that he wasn’t one of the dead Ghouls we found in that lab, and we know he wasn’t disguised as one of the doctors. What we don’t know is where he went... or how.”
“Did you check the floor?” I asked, and Mack gave me a look that said a lot about grandmothers and sucking eggs, and made me sorry for thinking he was stupid, before he replied.
“Not yet. You haven’t been out that long, and we’ve only just cleared the bodies out of there. That, and there’s some concern about the nanites.”
“They just have to give the dogs a DNA sample,” I said, and caught Mack’s blank look. “What?”
“They took out all the dogs.” He sighed. “They went in with extreme prejudice, and they annihilated anything left standing, and then they went through and made doubly sure of anything they’d dropped.”
“Except me,” I said, but I had my doubts.
“Delight stood over you, and kept her team moving past. If she hadn’t...” he hesitated, again. “I think they’re just so used to making sure that it’s become second nature for them to put an extra round into the head of any corpse they see.”
“Standing over me?” I asked, my voice sounding faint. If she’d been standing over me, there’d have been plenty of head for her team to see, and shoot at. What wasn’t Mack telling me?
He refused to be drawn, deliberately misunderstanding what I had asked.
“She kept you alive,” he said. “She could have been rid of you, right then, and everyone would have put it down to the hazards of the game, but she made sure you came out of there in one piece.”
“Did she know what I was doing with the data?” I asked, thinking that would be the only logical explanation for her going to the trouble. I mean, a blaster to the head, could just as easily be a blaster to the implant, and then where would they have been for the data?
Mack shook his head.
“No. Not until later, which is why I’m puzzled.”
I got the impression that not many things puzzled Mack, so I paid attention. Delight had kept me alive, and, as far as I could tell, she very much wanted me dead, and could have let it happen as an accident. Yet she hadn’t. I wondered if Mack wanted to know why as badly as I did, and figured that was impossible, too.
I shrugged it away, pushing aside the questions of why, and for what reason, Delight had saved me. Those could all wait for later.
“So, I said. “Apart from looking over the security footage, for very obvious reasons, what else does Odyssey want me to do?”
“This,” he said, his hands moving over the keyboard, and I saw a spreadsheet that appeared to be populating itself. “Ghoul was a researcher. He had patents pending on almost a hundred legal products, and then there were the patents pending on legal products for which the research would have had to have been illegal, and the projects he had under way. You get a percentage of the profit of each and every one.”
I did, huh? Well, that was something.
“What’s that got to do with me?” I asked, making an attempt at indifference. “I mean, beyond a pretty good pay day.”
And Mack grinned. It was an evil grin, and I knew I wasn’t going to like what was coming.
“You,” he said, sounding very pleased with himself, “get to help sort the files into completely legal from the research base through to the end product, the illegal, and therefore unusable, and the only-with-a-good-lawyer legal, so Odyssey knows what it can own up to having.”
Which didn’t tell me why he was so pleased with the idea. Given I knew he wouldn’t tell me in an office full of Odyssey folk, I didn’t bother asking, figured I could leave that question until later. In the meantime, I had a different one.
“And what do they do with ones they can’t own up to?”
“They’ll delete it,” Mack said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.
I looked at him, because I was darn sure he no more believed that than I did. In fact, I’d go so far as putting money on the idea that Odyssey would keep every idea, and use what was done, finish what could be finished without using immoral methods—and, boy, did I want to believe that—and store the rest for reference.
Yeah. Sure they will, came Mack’s voice in my head, but they don’t need to realize you’re thinking that.
I took the hint. He was right. Odyssey definitely didn’t need to know what I was thinking. I decided Mack needed an answer, if only for all the little Odyssey ears that had come back into the ops centre.
“So, I don’t need to go back down into the complex?”
“Not unless you can think of a reason why you need to?” he replied, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nope. Not a one...” and then it hit me. Of course, I’d have to go back into the complex. Of course, there was a reason. Why in all the stars had I thought it would be otherwise? “Fuck.”
Again, the room stilled around us. Mack restarted activity by surveying the surrounding agents with a disapproving stare, which had the effect of reminding them they should be focused on their consoles.
“You going to tell me why?”
But I’d followed his gaze, and the thought had occurred to me that Odyssey was a big organisation and, Agent Delight aside, not immune to infiltration.
“Not here,” I said, then added, “It’s just a theory, but I don’t want to float it in public.”
Mack gave me what passed as a smile, and pushed away from his desk.
“Girl can be taught,” he said, leading the way to the door.
