“Forget it,” Mr Mac told Janet. “I can swing IDs for two only, and no vampires. No offence, Doctor, but your kind simply don’t exist down the well. You wouldn’t last a day before being picked up.”
Janet didn’t really do angry, but today was clearly an exception. “You have no comprehension of my abilities,” she replied, voice soft and face very still. “And I’d thank you not to make assumptions.”
We were in the shed where Kruger kept his non-farming tech, an impressive array of comms gear and weaponry. Whilst no one on this hab went armed - they didn’t even have a police force - the former Sergeant Major felt the need to stockpile various breeds of assault-carbine and combat gear. “It was the Colonel’s suggestion,” he told me with a shrug. “Insurance against an uncertain future. For now, we govern ourselves largely without CAOS interference. It doesn’t mean it will stay that way forever.”
Kruger’s farm was one of several on the hab’s second level, a cluster of buildings rising from the otherwise uninterrupted dark green blanket of hemp. A directional array of UV lights running through the centre of the level provided a twenty-four hour light and darkness cycle. Kruger and Trudy, his wife and fellow veteran who spoke through a voice modulator grafted into her neck, maintained a small army of bots to water the plants and till the soil. Come harvest time their produce would form a full ten percent of the hab’s only source of income.
“Every time some Jed blazes up or chows down on a brownie,” Trudy told me, the Slab-born cadence of her voice jarring a little with the upper-class English accent produced by her modulator, “there’s a one in four chance it comes from Cerberus. Wouldn’t think it looking at the place, but everyone here is rich as shit.”
The Colonel’s ad hoc security team began to arrive shortly after we did, six ex-Commando types, most sporting some long-standing injury or artificial augmentation. Given their attrition rate during the war, I was surprised Kruger could gather so many. They all treated Kruger and Riviera with such automatic, fully ingrained discipline and obedience you’d be forgiven for thinking the war had ended only a day before.
“He’s right,” I told Janet, as gently as I could. “Besides, I need you to research Vargold. Leyla and Timor don’t have your skills.”
She remained completely still, eyes unblinking, though I noticed her claws had begun to extend and her mouth bulge under the pressure of elongating canines. Mr Mac began to edge away, eyes flicking towards Kruger’s armoury. “Relax,” I told him softly. Janet closed her eyes, maintaining her mannequin-like stillness for a full ten seconds before her claws and canines slowly retracted.
“Very well,” she told me, opening her eyes, though the habitual smile had vanished from her lips. “But I reserve the right to undertake independent action, should I judge it necessary.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said, turning to Mr Mac. “You have resources to call on down the well, I assume?”
He nodded. “So, you’re really intent on going there?”
“That’s where the leads are. Whatever it is Vargold didn’t want me to find is down there somewhere.”
“The IDs I’ve sourced will work once we’re on the ground, but I don’t have anything that’ll get us through port security. Your face and mine will be near the top of any Fed Sec recognition database, and I doubt they’ll just wipe our records on the off chance that we’re really dead.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I said, holding up the basic smart he’d asked Kruger to buy from the Cerberus market. “You’re sure this is secure?”
“All comms routed through my own private server. It’s swept for viruses and trojans every thirty micro-seconds. Costs a fortune to maintain, but it doesn’t pay to skimp on security. Just one of the reasons it took you so long to catch me.”
“I didn’t catch you,” I said and nodded at Janet. “She did. Best get some rest, we ship out at 0500.”
Kruger and Trudy had plenty of room, their farm buildings consisting of re-purposed ships left over from the war, including a troop-shuttle complete with sleeping compartments. Janet and I had taken the officer’s suite, though the bunk couldn’t handle two people so we’d pushed a pair of mattresses together on the floor. She lay next to me, skin free of sweat, unlike mine. Once again, her fangs had made an appearance at the critical moment, but she managed to avoid drawing blood this time.
“Completely,” I told her. “It’s one of the more depressing things about him, the delusion that we’re actually best friends.”
She remained silent for a time and I turned on my side, looking at her profile outlined in the dim blue light seeping through the cabin’s porthole. The longer I looked, the less perfect she seemed, more human. It made me want to go on looking for a long time. “I really don’t like him,” she said, breaking the silence. “He’s… wrong.”
“If you mean crazy, I think I got there already.”
“No, not insane exactly, just badly made. It’s like his internal wiring’s not right. And I’d hazard a guess he’s always been this way. The war didn’t do it to him.”
I put an arm about her shoulders, pulling her close. “Don’t worry about it.”
“We don’t have to do this. You do know that, I assume? There are many places we could go. The Belt, the Outer Stations.”
There was no real conviction in her voice, no actual desire to run away. If anything, I suspected she just felt obligated to point out the alternatives. “Joe,” I said. “Vandeman, Kurota, Rybak, not to mention that SWAT team I sent to their deaths. It all needs a reckoning. Something I realised when I first became a Demon; it’s not about justice, or the law, or controlling society or any of that shit. It’s about balance. Sometimes things get pushed too far, a gang war, a murder, a rape. It’s my job to push it back, fix it. And I think we both know that whatever Vargold’s up to really needs fixing.”
She raised herself up, staring into my eyes and I felt myself get captured. She’d told me her mesmerism tricks didn’t work on me, said I was too strong, but there were times when I wondered if she hadn’t just been massaging my ego. “I’m getting tired of this exciting interlude, Alex,” she told me, breath soft on my lips. “I’d like to be boring again, and I think I’d rather be bored with you than anyone else. So go fix whatever needs fixing, just make sure you come back.”