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Godspeed was not the fastest jump ferry Grimes had ever been on.
It ploughed through empty space as if the cosmic void possessed the consistency of blackstrap molasses. Nine interminable days on board passed like so many years while Grimes did his best to blend in with the other passengers and pilgrims on their way to Gethsemane. Blending had never been his favorite activity, but he had mastered hiding in plain sight decades prior. He kept to his berth in the consular quarters and used the time for meditation and planning. Part of the assassin hated the fluidity of the current situation. Plans existed for a reason. Grimes knew that no plan truly survives contact with the enemy, but good plans kept things within acceptable standards for deviation. His plan to steal the memory core in his possession had started well enough. Yet the breadth and scope of the subsequent deviation could only be described with the bleakest of adjectives. When he managed to look at the entire mess from a place of calm objective introspection, Grimes found himself rather impressed with how bad a turn things had taken.
Beyond his objective self-reproach, part of Grimes thrilled at the thought of the current tactical landscape. It had been so long since he felt the icy prickle of apprehension that came with competent adversaries. The intensity borne of doubt and uncertainty flavored his every step with a spice he did not realize he missed. His body modifications made things too easy. It robbed him of something he had forgotten he needed in his life.
Fear.
As an unmodified man, every hunt Grimes participated in brought with it that sense of potential doom. Any mistake at all could be fatal. When the blandest oversight might get one killed, tiny missteps became catastrophic. The danger meant that the Grimes that planned and stalked and meditated with a singular focus required one hundred percent of his mind and body. He lived through those years knowing that any job not only could be his last, but that there was a very strong possibility each mission would be his last.
Seated on his cot in zazen position, Grimes remembered dealing with a squad of RUC operatives who had infiltrated a Red Hat logistics cell. The spies staged their operations from a food production dome set far from the wealthy city dome of Venus Caelestus. Grimes had stalked each of the four well-trained and heavily augmented operatives over a period of six days. In that time, he slept less than eleven hours total and ate nothing but nutritional gels. So far from any backup, neither Grimes nor his quarry could afford to let their guard down for even an instant. By never sleeping or stopping to eat, Grimes denied the spies any opportunity to track him. The enemy assumed he would have a hideout to retreat to when not stalking them, and this proved to be their downfall. Grimes thwarted them by never stopping his hunt. A single dedicated assassin, relentless and inexorable, Grimes simply wore his prey down with persistence. The last of his foes died exhausted, beaten to submission after a four-hour chase and a savage hand-to-hand war.
It was a grueling, miserable operation that left Grimes physically and mentally weak for a month afterward. Now such a hunt could be completed as a matter of course. Grimes realized that he had lost something when he let OmniCorp rebuild his body. Far too self-aware to be stupid about such things, Grimes allowed that what had been lost must be weighed against what had been gained if the evaluation was to have any merit whatsoever. His new tools ran well beyond back-alley cybernetics and basic prostheses, as OmniCorp’s interests in bleeding edge cybernetics rivaled those of Corpus Mundi and Praxis PharmaCorp. Maudlin reflections on the benefits of hard-won experience could not erase the reality of just how strong and fast his implants made him. Still, the trap of complacency beckoned. He wondered if the failure of his plan had anything to do with overreliance on his new power. He wondered how he might have done things differently without it.
He would not have attacked them as a group, that much was certain. The old Killam Grimes, knowing he could not possibly compete with any of them physically, would have separated the woman from the rest of her companions. He had done it before. Shame fueled the anger smoldering in his guts. He had beaten her once. Captured her. Unmodified Killam Grimes had achieved a greater victory that day than the newer, more powerful version.
No. That was not correct. Despite separating and capturing her before, she had escaped with relative ease, even tricking Grimes into suspecting Lincoln Hardesty’s treachery. It was the Ribiero woman who forced that first dagger of doubt through a tiny gap in his ideological armor, starting Grimes on this path of ruin in the first place. He had not lost the fight this time, either. He proved himself her better this round. He could have killed her had he wanted to do so. Old Grimes may have done things differently, but he could not say with certainty that old Grimes would have fared any better.
In truth, he had not done so badly. He had the memory core. He had help waiting on Gethsemane too. Communications under jump drive were difficult, but there would be assets and assistance waiting for him when he arrived. The fixers would be waiting as well, as it was obvious that Pike’s ship would outrun the ferry with ease. Nevertheless, with his well-heeled backers preparing the ground for him, those Dockside troglodytes would find Gethsemane a very difficult place to ply their usual tricks. Grimes, on the other hand, would enjoy the cover only hefty donations to the ruling class of zealots might provide.
Zealots.
Grimes chewed the word over in his mind. He hated zealots, for he had been one for a very long time and the stupidity of it burned his throat like acid. Even if that were not the case, he expected the Bronze Age traditions codified into Gethsemane law to hinder his escape. Once, a more naïve Killam Grimes would have taken the religious foundations of Gethsemane at face value. On Venus, people lived too close together to worry about such things, so long as the faith did not preclude the existence of any others. When the sky weeps acid and the surface of your homeworld can kill you in less than a second, wise people chose not to antagonize each other over esoteric dogma. Those people inclined to do so were going to believe in a greater power no matter what you thought about it, and only a great fool would waste time or energy worrying about the philosophy of another. His own meditations on the hereafter did not preclude the existence of an all-powerful deity, and like most Venusians Grimes always assumed that one person’s faith was as good as any other’s. Now he knew better. He started to sweat when he considered all the faithful, diligent, and pious people feeding the profits of Gethsemane’s powerful elites. Their leaders were all hypocrites, though Grimes cursed his imagination for its inability to find a stronger word for that. There was simply no way for a governing class that wealthy and powerful to be as benevolent and righteous as they claimed to be. Grimes felt his own shame when he thought of the millions of ardent penitents. Honest, good, hard-working people stuck plying their trades and paying tithes to a machine that cared nothing for them. He had been one such fool for too long, in his own way. He hated himself and hated them for making him feel the pain all over again.
Grimes inhaled and held the breath a long time before releasing it. Controlling his anger got more difficult each day. Without mushin, his dark moods grew more powerful. They lasted longer and demanded more satisfaction each time. The fear surprised him more than anything else. It was one thing to stare into the abyss. Grimes was no stranger to his own personal darkness. However, his headlong tumble toward madness pained him more for no other reason than how well he understood it. He knew better. He was better.
For the hundredth time that duty cycle, Grimes forced himself to calm. There would be time to sort out his mental state later. As if to make that point, the room speaker interrupted his musings. His eyes snapped open at the sound of a friendly chime, followed by a pleasant woman’s voice announcing their arrival. As a registered diplomat, Grimes would be on the first shuttle to the surface. Still, there was no great rush. He had no belongings to pack, nor did he have any tasks to prepare for. He did not even have a working comm to fiddle with. He sat on his bunk with legs crossed and waited to be called to the shuttle bay.
Forty-seven minutes later, Grimes took his first steps on the surface of Gethsemane. The glowering edifices and towering columns of Port Piety drew a wan smile from the assassin. The ornate carvings, the ubiquitous holographic effigies, and the moving frescoes playing across the ceilings struck him as garish. Like cheap souvenirs in a tourist trap, the pageantry lacked any real depth to his jaded eyes. Judging by the gaping wonder splashed across the faces of his fellow passengers, he felt unique in this. Grimes moved on without a second glance for any of it.
When it was his turn to pass through the scanning arch, Grimes braced himself for an argument. The agent in his deep red livery frowned at the readout, then looked up to appraise Grimes with his eyes. This made little sense, as there was nothing externally visible on Killam Grimes to mark him as an augmented human or cyborg. He met the agent’s gaze with a neutral stare that conveyed neither malice nor warmth. The agent chewed his lip for a moment and waved Grimes through.
“You will restrict yourself to the commercial zones and such administrative areas as your business on Gethsemane requires, Mr. Grimes,” said the agent. “Church areas are strictly forbidden to those such as yourself.” Disdain oozed from every word, and the agent made no attempt to hide his disapproval.
Grimes could not resist. “And if I desire forgiveness and penance? How do I go about securing the state of my immortal soul?”
The agent’s cheek twitched. “Then you can go see one of the Teutons. They will explain the Path to you.”
“And is the Path available to me?”
“Part of your tithe will be the cost of returning the sacred vessel of your soul to its rightful state, Mr. Grimes.” The agent peered at Grimes as if searching for a trick or a lie in his eyes. “If that is what you truly desire.”
Grimes tilted his head in a gesture of feigned respect. He considered how many millions it would take to remove his augmentations and regrow all the organic bits he no longer had. “I see. Admission to heaven is a costly thing, I gather.” Now Grimes let the ugly sneer he had been restraining peel his lips back from his teeth. “Cheaper to stay a sinner, then.”
The agent blanched pure white when their eyes met. Grimes knew why. A hundred others had done the same when he finally caught them. Something about that moment when a mark at last understood exactly who and what he faced always elicited this same reaction. It reminded Grimes of a cobra in the exact moment it discovers that the tasty rodent it hunted was in fact a mongoose, and things were about to take a turn for the very bad. It brought Grimes great joy to see the snotty agent make that face. He was being petty, he knew. But he did not care. The stupid little man would do well to learn that there were more things in the universe to fear than his God. Grimes pushed past the quaking agent with a harsh laugh and headed into the bowels of the port in search of a comm vendor.
Fleming had codelocked an expense account to his DNA, but he needed an InfoNet connection and a biometric device to access it. Half the comm vendors in the retail section of Port Piety were owned by OmniCorp, so in short order Grimes found himself in possession of two new handhelds and two earpieces. One comm was encoded to the maximum extent standard InfoNet access would allow, though Grimes did not believe that this would prove too difficult for Richardson to slice. The other connected to the private OmniCorp InfoNet, and Fleming assured him that a hundred code-jockeys could not break that encryption if they had a century to try. Grimes had to admit that wet work under corporate auspices was a very different thing than what he had been trained for. More bait for the complacency trap, he reminded himself.
He left the retail zone and followed helpful hologram guides to the exits. His eyes darted to every shadow and scoured each face he passed. The fixers might be stupid enough to try their luck at the port, even though that would be a disaster. Richardson was unlikely to allow such a mistake. However, the yawning gulf between ‘unlikely’ and ‘impossible’ often snared unprepared operatives. Grimes remained wary.
A moving hologram of Gethsemane’s leading conclave of Church Elders marked the exit to the spaceport’s surrounding metropolis. Each wizened man extended a translucent hand in blessing, wishing the pilgrims and travelers a pleasant stay. Grimes walked past with a sallow sneer on his face. He saw Lincoln Hardesty in each empty smile, and it turned his stomach.
The sight greeting Grimes when he at last cleared the doors and stepped onto the street helped wash the bilious taste of disgust from his mouth. The sprawling mass of gilded buildings and bustling streets of Port Piety stretched out in every direction. Spotless sidewalks in light gray outlined the jet-black surface of the road extending to either side of the assassin. Saturated neon ran in lines parallel to the sidewalk, guiding cars and trams to their destinations and signaling traffic rules to those machines still helmed by human hands. The local star beamed bright, bouncing light from each gleaming surface. It lent an air of cheer to the city, as if the objects themselves were happy and not just the people. As a commercial zone, the city of Port Piety did not suffer from the glut of religious iconography so prevalent in the port building itself. Nevertheless, the towering form of some saint or priest loomed hundreds of feet overhead. The statue looked to be a few blocks away. Grimes could only see the top third of the serious-faced man as it stared over the surrounding buildings. He shook his head and began to walk.
Leaving the spaceport was a calculated risk, though Grimes agreed with its necessity. He might have stayed on board to see where Godspeed might take him, except that ship left for Enterprise Station in two hours. Fleeing back to Pike’s personal stronghold did not feel like a smart move.
The fixers would be watching the port, and no one could say which customs agents and administrators they had already bribed. Just boarding another ship and leaving again courted disaster. Gethsemane was not a free trade zone like Enterprise. Any high-ranking official could be bribed to cancel his diplomatic token at any time, and while not a betting man Grimes would have wagered a fortune that this was already being arranged.
Before Grimes attempted to get off-planet, he intended to lead his pursuers on a bit of a chase, passing off the memory core to an OmniCorp agent along the way. If things went well, the fixers would be chasing Grimes from spaceport to spaceport unaware of the deception. If the fixers picked up on the ruse, the core would change hands several more times, just to obscure the identity of the final courier as much as possible.
Grimes was supposed to meet his first contact at a café near the port building. If the drop looked clean, the OmniCorp operative would take the core and get him to some place called Gomorrah. This Gomorrah place had its own small spaceport, and once things looked safe Grimes would be smuggled into a shuttle and whisked away to a waiting OmniCorp vessel for extraction. Though simple, the plan possessed many discreet failure points requiring careful management. The fixers had a head start on him, and they certainly had a plan to stop his escape. Fleming assured Grimes that all the necessary precautions had been taken to ensure success, but Grimes knew better than to trust a corporate man when it came to wet work. The enemy would have several opportunities to catch one of the handoffs or interdict Grimes himself. The assassin expected them to exploit every one of these. He respected them too much to treat anything as a foregone conclusion.
The forgotten thrill returned. The rush of fear and exhilaration he had missed for so long sent icy pins and needles dancing across his skin. His senses surged to life in response. He felt the tiny hairs on his face sway with each step, the footfalls jostling the memory core strapped to his back. His nose twitched, telling him that the half-drunk man seated at an outdoor bar across the street liked two olives in his martini but did not care about the quality of his gin. He saw the young boy dressed in some kind of school uniform sneak a candy bar off a street vendor without paying. It happened more than a hundred yards down the street and Grimes could read the wrapper.
He missed this. This moment of perfect clarity and purpose. To exist outside of himself and be a passive observer to his universe. To think and plan and calculate unencumbered by ego. It was so close to mushin he could almost grasp it, but he knew better than to try. Mushin could not be pursued. Mushin was not something one did; it was something one allowed to happen. It would come back, he knew. He just had to be patient.
The tasteful signage adorning the café glowed with a soft blue light. Neither loud nor obnoxious, a rotating coffee mug twisted lazily above the door with the words “St. Drogo’s Respite” looping the hologram in a gentle serpentine. Grimes had no idea who Saint Drogo was, though the cheerful image of a man in a friar’s frock smiled at Grimes from the door panel. His question found its answer when he paused to read the inscription below it, Saint Drogo of Sebourg had been an ancient Penitent and the patron saint of coffee. He should have guessed as much. The Church was as big on branding as any megacorporation, it seemed.
Once inside, Grimes spotted his contact instantly. At a table near the window, Grimes saw a man in a brown suit sipping something hot and pale from a clear mug. He smelled mild roast, heavy cream, cinnamon, and far too much sugar. The hairs on his arms stood up when Grimes scanned the room with eyes and sensors both. Half the patrons sitting at the tables and bar clearly did not belong here. One man wore a gun on his hip beneath his jacket. Beneath the skin of another, Grimes saw small amounts of MyoFiber and OsteoPlast. A woman sipping a latte at the counter darted furtive glances his way every time she thought he was not looking. Grimes resisted the urge to sigh. He let his eyes meet those of his contact. The man looked back from across the café, confused.
Idiot. Amateur. Grimes wanted to shout it out loud. He did not bother. He turned on his heel and left the café without a word.
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