| |
He never used to call it “murder.”
He had killed dozens of people before this, of course. The vast majority of which he had been proud to call “assassinations.” Sometimes he liked the word “execution” when he was feeling especially profound. Murder was for thugs and criminals, and that younger version of himself would tolerate no such base motivations for the grand task of ending a life. When his mind rolled back to those halcyon days, it bothered him to realize there was always a different word, a better word, for the simple act of killing. There was a weird sort of sorcery to words. A kind of magic where merely changing the label of a thing could shade its connotation without altering the unpleasant facts. An older, wiser, far more jaded man knew better.
It was an older, wiser, and much more jaded man who stalked the dim corridors of the Steelport Station engineering level wearing a dirty coat and a tight-lipped frown. The narrow hall squeezed his perceptions to a pinpoint, and the smell of gear oil and ionized air assaulted his hypersensitive nostrils in persistent waves. A few million extra olfactory receptors helped him identify the specific scent of his quarry from within the mess, and the information was routed to his dull orange eyes in the form of subtle magenta wisps. Years before, in a time and place where “murder” was beneath him, hard-learned ideological rigidity had led this man to eschew biotechnological enhancements. He was well beyond that kind of silliness now. No longer chained to ideas of biological purity, the lean man skulking through smelly corridors had since invested in his body with an expert’s attention to detail and craft. His myriad modifications remained new and strange, though he grew more comfortable with them every day. Seeing what his nose was smelling had been one of the hardest adjustments to make. It had surprised him just how much bionic enhancements relied on each other to work. The doctors made it all sound so simple, when in truth each alteration he underwent necessitated other alterations to make them effective.
His body was muscular without being bulky, the result of a life spent in rigorous training and dedicated practice. Though his fitness regimen might kill a lesser man, copious quantities of MyoFiber supplemented his natural gifts with superhuman strength as well. All this extra force production had in turn necessitated the installation of OsteoPlast skeletal reinforcement. Otherwise, his new strength would tear his own joints apart and shatter his bones. He went from 180 pounds to 275 overnight, and subsequently found all the great agility and skill of his youth gone due to the sudden changes in mass and power. This necessitated the purchase of agility enhancements, and since his skull was already open for the procedure, why not improve his reflexes while they were poking around in there? Because the human brain evolved to rely on visual stimulus, the input from his other enhanced senses worked best when translated into visual data. For this he of course needed new eyes.
And so his metamorphosis progressed in increments, each new modification requiring subsequent changes to make the whole of it work. They wove microfilament into his skin to make it stronger and mask him from scanning, filled his cavities with reservoirs of helpful pharmaceuticals, and rewired the very nerves of his body to drive all this technology without killing the host. When the biotech team finished, he had lost count of all the things changed or replaced. The process reforged him, baptized him to a new life. A life devoted to the purity of killing.
A life of murder.
The wafting pink trail of spoor guided him to a door. The metal rectangle would have been easy to miss were he not led directly to it. Painted black with no signage, it stood quiet and still in a shallow recess where shadows might lead a less wary man to walk past. His eyes twitched in their sockets, absorbing ambient light like the event horizon of a black hole. They pulsed orange and picked out tiny details with only the scant illumination available in the poorly lit station sublevels. He did not need to try the door to know it was locked. Nor did he need to fuss about with lockpicks or subterfuge to get inside. His nose told him that the prey went through this door. His eyes picked out the mechanical latch and the tiny hidden alarm sensor on the handle. His ears told him that his target hid beyond, cowering alone. Once, a stalk like this might have taken much longer and required a surplus of care. Now, it all came together so damned easy.
Did he miss the old days? He could not say. He missed something about them, though exactly what even he did not like to think about. He inhaled, savoring the rot and the stink and the pollution of the filthy air. It tasted of hopelessness and mediocrity. He wanted to spit it out. Instead, he held the breath, clearing his mind and grasping for the objective calm of mushin. As with so many times before, the emptiness and detachment eluded him. He had lost it, and now it was gone. In its place he took zanshin. Zanshin was always there, and he knew why. With zanshin, a man could hold on to his anger, use it to hone resolve to a razor’s edge. The killer needed his anger.
His foot struck the door just beneath the latch. Reinforced muscles akin to steel cables drove bones as dense as granite into the unsuspecting panel like a battering ram, snapping the locking bolt with a loud clang and few pathetic orange sparks. The door swung inward with a crunch, revealing a dark room and its lone occupant beneath the dying light of a single guttering lamp. The target was a large man, and he attacked without hesitation. A pistol rose, much too late to make a difference. The weapon flew off into the shadows unfired, hurled by a single knife-hand strike that shattered the radius bone of its wielder. The heel of one palm followed, dislocating the jaw. The big man turned and started to fall, but the killer caught him by the jacket with one hand and hauled him upright. Then more blows came.
Once, the killer had believed it an act of the highest conviction to kill an enemy. Each dead victim represented a solemn demonstration of ideological superiority manifested through physical superiority. Ending the life of those who stood in opposition to all that one knew to be good and right was the ultimate expression of righteousness. The kill itself should be a somber ritual, an honor, and a sacred responsibility.
Or so he had once thought. The magic of the act died long ago, and now he knew better. Shame swelled in his chest, fueling an incandescent rage not easily sated. Remembering the naïveté of his previous life sent his guts roiling with humiliation. How stupid he had been. An entire life wasted killing in the name of something no longer real, and likely never had been. Nearly thirty years spent as the unwitting tool of two-faced liars and false leaders gnawed at his pride like a writhing swarm of hungry centipedes. All his skill, all his training and talent, every bit of what made him exceptional reduced to weaponized hypocrisy. It stung enough to make a strong man puke, or a lesser man weep. He struck more, faster and harder now. Each impact broke something, ruptured something. He maimed with indiscriminate precision, his only goal to brutalize his prey and satisfy the darkness in his head with someone else’s suffering.
Rage made a mess of the task. His work had once been clean to the point of surgical. A master of his craft, the victims he terminated often died never knowing he was there, and never feeling a thing. Somewhere along the line his attention to finesse had been deposed by a need to punish those he hunted. It got worse each with each sniveling victim and he no longer cared to resist these urges. He stopped hitting when he ran out of bones to break and let the man fall with a wet squelch.
Beneath his feet, the twisted remains of what had once been a human man gurgled in pain and sluiced blood in red rivers onto the dull gray deck plates of a remote frontier station. Even in the dim, inconsistent light of these smuggling tunnels, the killer’s lip twitched at the sight of his own handiwork. He could have killed his mark with a flick of the wrist, but tonight he indulged his rage instead. This work was beneath him. Murdering one drug-addled slaver insulted his abilities and what it had taken to acquire them. The shame of it pricked at his ego with white-hot needles. It did not help his mood to know that the dying pile of flesh trading in slaves. This ought to have calmed him. With this murder, he saved sixty-one children from being sold as cheap labor to work the domes—or worse, the brothels—of these lawless enclaves drifting in asteroid fields between the Anson Gates. Sixty-one young lives stolen just as his had been. Now saved from the sickness of human depravity and the allure of large profit margins. Hunting the captain of a drifting rust-bucket full to bursting with human cargo stank of a righteousness he used to crave. He should have been satisfied. The killer could remember that feeling, though he found its memory fading with each gruesome kill.
The bounty for this mark was a pittance, further enraging the assassin. If this captain had embezzled a few million credits from a corporation, there would be dozens of pursuers from multiple Lodges on the chase. Since human beings of meager means were the only thing being stolen here, the offered bounty would barely pay for the expenses of tracking him down. Grimes found the call sheet on the Steelport Station bounty boards, posted by a local charity group incensed by the lack of intervention from the local constabulary. Grimes would have done it for free, but a man needs to eat, after all. The profit for this hunt would cover a few more days of lodging and the jump to another station for more of the same. Part of him understood that this should bother him more than it did. A flicker of disappointment sprinted across the surface of his thoughts and then disappeared, ending his moment of self-doubt. All that mattered anymore was the killing. Nothing else made any sense.
It was enough.
He pulled an identicator from a coat pocket with one hand while securing his victim’s wrist with the other. The broken man groaned and vomited a glob of blood and bile with the sudden motion. It splattered down his cheek to pool on the deck. One eye remained open, the other ruined beyond repair beneath a smashed orbital. The killer ignored the silent plea in that one eye and pressed the identicator to the captain’s index finger. The screen came to life with a rotating mug shot of the captain’s head while relevant information about the man scrolled along the bottom. Grimes claimed the bounty with a swipe of his thumb, leaving a greasy red streak in its wake. The screen flashed a question:
Contract resolution: alive/dead?
A thin lip twitched, and he looked back down to the mangled body at his feet. It moved and breathed still, though he knew that beneath the skin more than a dozen bones were fractured and several organs bled from numerous punctures. The pain had to be excruciating, and the tortured gasps and gurgles blowing the collected blood in the mouth into frothy bubbles told the assassin that this man would be dying for a while yet. He scowled at the question on that screen, blinking red like an angry accusation. The captain’s wounds did not need to be fatal. With prompt medical attention his bones could be mended, and his organs repaired. People across the galaxy survived this much and worse every day. This did not have to be yet another murder.
He swiped his answer with an angry flourish and stuffed the device back into his coat pocket. His gaze returned to his victim and the glorious carnage he had wrought. He squatted onto his haunches, peering deeper into the bruised face of the erstwhile slaver captain.
“I used to be a righteous man, Captain.” His voice was barely more than a whisper. “But there really is no such thing, is there?” His hand moved beneath his coat, reaching around to his back and reappearing with a long black dagger. The captain’s one good eye went wide, and the ghost of a smile touched the killer’s lips at the sight of it. “It’s intoxicating, being righteous. You can do absolutely anything when you think you are doing what is just. No sin is unforgivable, so long as you know you’re right.” The killer leaned into that last word, savoring the taste of it, dragging the single syllable out for just a touch longer than necessary. “But then again, I suppose intoxicating isn’t the best word for it. Words are strange, magical things, don’t you think? ‘Intoxicating’ makes it sound... I don’t know, romantic? I think a better word might be ‘addictive.’ Nothing romantic about that, is there? What do you think?”
If the captain had any thoughts at all on the strange question, his collapsing lungs and shattered jaw prevented him from responding. In truth, the killer was not really looking for an answer. Not from one dying slaver, anyway.
“Addiction is a disease, Captain. I was addicted to my own righteousness for a long time. Very long...” His voice drifted off, and his eyes seemed to be staring at something off in the distance. Catching himself, he shook his head with a rueful smile. “Too long, if I’m being honest. I think perhaps I still am. Do you know why?”
The captain did not, and so the killer answered his own question.
“Because I’m going to kill you instead of bringing you in. It’s going to cost me twenty-five percent of the bounty, but I just can’t help myself.”
The captain wheezed and tried to move. His limbs twitched and flopped against the floor, accomplishing nothing. Tears leaked from his surviving eye, and blood ran anew from the corners of his mouth. A sharp pop startled a squeak of pain and terror from the captain, and the edge of the killer’s dagger began to glow orange in the dim tunnel. A soft hum filled air, a buzzing like the wings of a mechanical insect. The killer held the blade before his victim’s good eye, let the heat of its edge just prickle against the blood-soaked stubble. “Do you know why I’m going to kill you, even though it will cost me money?” He paused, head tilted as if waiting for an answer. The captain’s struggles increased in fervor. The killer shook his head, and this time the smile was easier to see. “Because it just feels right. And I guess I still want that feeling. Silly, isn’t it? We both know very well that there is no such thing as right and wrong, don’t we? You, a slave trader, and me, a murderer? Oh, I think we know that much for sure. Yet here I sit, chasing that feeling even as I admit I can never have it. Like I said, it’s addictive. I suppose I need my fix.”
The blade descended, driving through the captain’s sternum with no resistance whatsoever. The dagger sank to its hilt, pinning the captain to the deck like a butterfly. The man heaved one final time, coughed blood across his killer’s clenched hands, and collapsed. The killer withdrew the blade with a wet hiss and wrinkled his nose at the familiar stench of burning meat and the coppery tang of boiling blood. He wiped his hands against the dead body’s pants and stood. For ten seconds, the killer basked in the memories of a time long past. A time when killing meant something. All too soon, the moment ended, and reality returned the permafrost to his expression. The humming stopped abruptly, and the dagger disappeared beneath his coat once more. His comm handheld chimed from within a pocket, and assuming the sound indicated that his funds had been transferred, he ignored it.
Yet as he turned to leave, the chiming continued. With a scowl, the killer fished an earpiece from a pocket and inserted it.
“Yes?” he replied while walking.
“This is Alex Fleming, I’m a senior project manager for OmniCorp—”
“I know who you are.” The killer’s voice had the edge of danger.
“I wasn’t sure if you would. The last time I saw you, you were in a surgical suite. I was wondering if you were interested in doing a little job for me.”
“Why in all of time and space would corporate scum like you think I would be interested in any job you had? OmniCorp is no friend to me. Not after what you did to my home.”
“OmniCorp didn’t do anything to your home that it wasn’t already doing to itself. Isn’t that why you left?” Fleming did not wait for an answer. “And you owe OmniCorp a great debt whether you like it or not. We’re calling in our favor right now. We’ll wipe your ledger out entirely if you are successful.” A moment of silence followed while the killer considered the magnitude of this. Fleming pressed on when the moment stretched. “Unless you’d like to return all your fancy new biotech, that is.”
The killer was glad his caller could not see him flinch. “I’m still far more inclined to kill you than work for you, Fleming.”
“Is that so? What if I told you that the job involved Roland Tankowicz?”
The killer stopped walking. “What?”
“That’s right. I want you to steal something from him, and I do not care who ends up dead in the doing. Kill Tankowicz, kill his girlfriend, you can even kill that former partisan pal of yours too. As long as we get the item, you can do as you please with our full support.”
The killer began to walk again. “I’m listening.”
“I thought you might come around, Mr. Grimes. Call me back when you are in a secure place, and we will discuss the details.”
Killam Grimes ended the call without saying anything.
––––––––
