The faint tapping of gloved fingers on glass, a barely audible voice, insistent shoves. I groaned, wanting badly to slip back into what had been a blessedly absolute slumber. A hard snick then an icy blast on my face as my suit helmet was none-too-gently pulled off.
“Alex!” More shoving and groaning, the air like a million tiny needles on my skin as I felt the blood streaming from my nose begin to freeze. “We have to move! Come…” Mr Mac grunted as he hauled me into a sitting position, “…on!”
I let out a shout of pain as my eyes finally opened to be greeted by a world of blinding white. “Just keep blinking,” he told me. “It’ll fade. Can you walk?”
I tried to move my legs, finding to my surprise that they actually worked. “Yeah.” I shook my head to try and clear the ache, eyes stinging with the chill as they slowly adjusted and the unbroken sphere of white surrounding us gradually resolved into snow-covered ice beneath a pale blue sky. “Fuck, it’s cold.”
“Welcome to Earth.” He hooked his arms under mine and heaved me up, holding me steady as my legs did their best to fail me.
“What’s our position?” I asked.
“Over three klicks from the intended drop zone. Gives us a tight window to make the rendezvous.”
“Will your guy wait?”
“I wouldn’t.” He reached down to retrieve my helmet. “Hypothermia in ten minutes without this.” He tossed it to me before checking the readout on his wrist. “No beacons or pings. Nothing in the air for twenty klicks in all directions.” He grinned at me. “It worked. You’re a military genius after all.”
“Wasting time,” I said, slotting my helmet into place and taking the first unsteady steps south. “Let’s go.”
At first glance, the extractor rig looked like a giant recreation of an ancient kitsch television, a curving, hollowed-out rectangle rising from the white mist to a height of well over two hundred metres. There were more to the east and west, stretching away to the horizon like sentinels from a bygone age, which is pretty much what they were.
“So this is how they were going to save the world,” Mr Mac commented as we trudged closer, voice a little ragged in my ‘phones. The two hour forced march to get here hadn’t been made any easier by his constant need to chat. “Still, I guess they were desperate,” he went on. “Needed to do something to get the carbon out of the atmosphere before the planet turned into another Venus. The largest geo-engineering project in human history, bankrupted the North American economies over the course of a decade, only for fusion to come along and make it all irrelevant. Some historians theorise the economic impact, coupled with the destabilising effects of such an abrupt shift away from fossil fuels, were a direct cause of the Rapture Wars and the dissolution of the United States.”
“Guess you’ve had plenty of time for reading,” I muttered. “In between all the murders, I mean.”
“Benefits of an expensive education. But I guess Oksana told you all that. How is she, by the way?”
“Worried. Thought I was there to tell her I’d killed you.”
“Little sis was always of a nervous disposition. Was it at her place that Dr Vaughn caught the scent, I wonder?” I gave no reply and he glanced over his shoulder, teeth gleaming behind the visor as he laughed. “I’ll figure it out eventually, y’know.”
We stopped three hundred metres short of the extractor and I used the suit’s optics to scan the huge supporting base, icons blinking as they detected a tracked vehicle parked outside an access port. “That him?” I asked.
“It better be.” Mr Mac cracked open his suit’s leg compartment and extracted a military-spec Berretta 10mm.
“So he’s a trustworthy type?” I enquired, drawing the Colt from my own suit.
“He’s a professional criminal with a dozen or more international warrants on his head.” Mr Mac started forward at a steady plod. “So, yes I trust him. Not sure what he’ll make of you, though, so please try to put a muzzle on the judgemental, hard-nosed Demon crap. I’m not keen on killing a prized asset if I can help it.”
We moved to within twenty feet of the vehicle, a squat snow-tractor with faded white and blue camouflage, the windscreen dark and all power off. Mr Mac voice-activated his smart and sent a short message: “Spare me the paranoia, Simon. I told you I’d be bringing a friend.”
A soft crunch of snow had me whirling, Colt snapping round to aim at a dark shape to our rear. For a moment, I thought I was about to commit a heinous bio-crime by taking down a polar bear, the shape having reared up to an impressive height, snow cascading from furry flanks. Not a bear, I realised as the long barrel of a sniper rifle appeared, the fur falling away to reveal a man in thermal combat gear, face hidden behind an insectoid mask of optics. He was tall and lean with that rangy look long-serving military types always seemed to have. I noted he had to fight an instinctive impulse to bring his rifle to bear on me as the optics swept over my face.
“Simon, say hello to Alex,” Mr Mac said. “Alex, Simon.”
I said nothing and neither did Simon. It was evident we were engaged in a moment of mutual recognition. The gear and the look made it obvious. “Fed Sec SF,” I said. “I guess you’re not choosy about who you employ.”
“He’s very much retired,” Mr Mac told me. “And will be permanently if they ever find him. Right, Simon?”
Simon’s optics lingered on me. “Face changed, retinas haven’t,” he said finally, voice gravelly but otherwise accentless. The erosion of identity was a principal facet of their training; vocal characteristics, personal history, even their original names, all conditioned out to leave the perfect covert operative. I’d killed a few during the war, and none had been easy.
“Enemy operative, Codename Fenrir,” Simon went on. “Pursue and eliminate with extreme prejudice, regardless of risk.”
We stared at each other in silence until he shouldered his rifle and strode towards the base of the extractor. “Too late to start out now,” he told Mr Mac. “Food and supplies inside.”
“Fenrir, huh?” Despite the smallness of the smart screen I could detect a certain amusement on Janet’s face. I sat huddled against the wall of the extractor’s maintenance bay, arms folded tight and the smart propped against my drawn up thighs. I’d been cold before but this was a whole new world, literally.
“You know what it means?” I asked, steam billowing from my mouth.
“Old Norse mythology,” she said. “Fenrir is the monstrous wolf who eats Odin during the great battle that heralds the coming of Ragnarok. Viking Armageddon.” Her smile broadened. “I think it suits you quite well, actually.”
I sniffed and stifled a shudder. “You get anything yet?”
“It’s slow going, I’m afraid. Vargold has been very careful in managing his public image, all biographical profiles are basically a variation of the same story: born in Sweden forty-six years ago to a North American refugee family, came up the well aged eighteen with minimal education. Worked basic ore processing whilst he studied technology and design spare time, eventually won a full scholarship to Lorenzo Uni where he met Rybak. Two years later, they drop out of school and self-fund a start-up: Astravista. Their first few millions came from communications software, they wrote much of the code that runs the smart network. Astravista begins a rapid expansion, becomes the third largest corporate entity in orbit within seven years, then the war starts. All corporations are quick to declare their allegiance to the UN, except Astravista. Vargold and Rybak establish Hephaestus Station beyond Lunar orbit, the principal CAOS weapons manufactory. It’s pretty clear from my own research that CAOS would’ve lost without it. The war ends, Hephaestus Station is formally ceded to Central Governance though Astravista still holds the bulk of the contracts. Six years ago, Vargold proposes using it as the main construction site for the Ad Astra Project and humanity’s journey to the stars begins. All pretty inspiring really, if you don’t know he’s a mass murderer.”
“Family? Relationships?”
“No wife, no kids. Gossip-mills have linked him to a few models slash actresses over the years, but nothing seems to have lasted more than a few months. One starlet did a tell-all interview for a Downside celeb-rag a few years ago, called him an emotionless monster. But that could all have been post-dump venting. Failing to latch onto a billionaire has to sting a bit.”
“There’s got to be more, a reason for all this.”
“Open sources can only tell you so much. We really need access to Pol-net and security databases if we’re going to make any progress.”
“Not easy when you’re dead.”
“Kruger says he has a few contacts from the old days, military people who might be sympathetic. As for Pol-net, I thought Chief Mordecai…”
“No. I don’t want her involved, not yet anyway. She’s way too exposed.” I glanced over at Mr Mac. He sat close to the portable heater Simon had set up earlier, eyes intent on his smart. “How’s Leyla?”
“On the mend.” Janet gave a rueful grin. “Hates me more than ever.”
“Lucy?”
“Made it back safe and well. She asked me to tutor her for her GEC exams so I guess we’re bonding.”
“Good to know. When Kruger gets you access, concentrate on the war years and check for links to Haunai Genetics.” I forced a smile and managed to stop my teeth chattering. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d’ve liked it down here. Expect a call in twenty-four hours. If not, assume I’m dead and get yourself and the others on a shuttle to the Belt. Lucy knows plenty of places to hide.”
I shut down the smart before she could object and got up, moving close to the heater with hands extended. Simon sat opposite cleaning his disassembled rifle. Sans optics his features were revealed as Caucasian, lean and generically handsome, but not enough to be especially memorable. I wondered if he even remembered what his original face looked like.
“How many Upside deployments for you?” I asked, expecting a vague and non-committal answer but he replied without hesitation, blue eyes lacking emotion as he raised them to meet mine.
“Five.”
“Confirmed kills?”
“Forty-eight.”
“Anyone I knew?”
“Play nice kids,” Mr Mac murmured, glancing up from his smart. “Bygones etcetera.”
“How much longer in this dump?” I asked him, but it was Simon who answered.
“Six hours. You arrived just ahead of a weather front. We need to sit it out before heading south.”
“And then?”
“There’s a mag-lev hub on Ellesmere Island,” Mr Mac said. “Gateway to the world. Just depends where we go first.”
“Salacia,” I said. “And me, not we. You’re overwatch on this, just like the war.”
He frowned a little. “You always did have a serious hero complex problem, Alex.”
“I need to interact with local law-enforcement, something you can’t do. Besides, sooner or later I’m going to start raising flags on Vargold’s map. You and your pet ninja here are going to keep me alive when his people come looking.”
Simon slotted the barrel of his rifle into the stock with a loud clack. The pet ninja jibe had been a gambit, a test to see if he had any skin to get under. If so, he was expert at concealing it. “Better get some sleep,” he said, settling back and pulling the hood of his combat smock over his head. “Long haul tomorrow.”