#criminals

Jess took a slow swig from the thermos flask on her hip, savoring the flavor of Von’s “House Blend”. It’d only get her so far, but it was still worlds better than the legal stuff. Tasted better, too – somehow, Von could work that ubiquitous shitty synthcaf astringency into something actually drinkable.

“I’ve got the cameras,” Nine’s voice came in over Jess’s earpiece. “One guard at the front desk, two on the inner doors, a bunch more patrolling. And… perfect, someone’s heading out. Inner doors opening in 3, 2, 1, now.”

Feeling the buzz of caffeine entering her system, Jess activated one of the chemoglyphs on the inside of her jacket, and sprung into motion as the world slowed down around her. By the time the guards and bystanders understood what they were seeing, Jess was already through the inner doors, racing three times faster than any normal human. She ran confidently down the corridors, following the directions on her visor as alarms began to blare.

"Okay, I’m up to speed now too,” said Nine, her voice sounding slightly tinny over audio codecs optimized for normal-speed human speech. “You’ve got company at the next corner. Three guards, accelerated, heavy armor. Looks a lot less breathable than your gear, I bet you can steam ’em no trouble.”

Jess gave a grunt of acknowledgement, charging another chemoglyph as she rounded the corner. An oppressive heat quickly filled the corridor. The guards opened fire, but they already seemed to be sweltering behind their masks, and their guns were standard-issue models not designed for accelerated combat. She quickly disarmed one, and shoved another out a plate-glass window; hopefully he’d gone through “cat training” for using accelerated mobility to survive falls.

Six re-emerges through the hatch onto the cramped bridge, swearing in several languages.

“How bad is it?” Anya asks, tossing over a ration pouch.

Six catches it and takes a long swig before answering. “Fucked, is how bad. That missile the Blowjob Brothers hit us with had a bio payload, one of those engineered slime molds the fucking Accordance use for sabotage ops. Kill to know how the hell the bastards got their hands on that shit… Anyway, it ate half the engine before I could vent it, plus I think some of it might’ve gotten into the fuel lines, so I’m gonna have to empty the tanks, decontaminate the fuel, flush the whole system before I can even start on repairs…” She does some quick mental math. “Five days.”

“Five days?”

“Five days for me. Anyone else, it’d take a couple weeks.”

“So we’re out, then.” Anya slumps forward in her seat, forehead against the dashboard. “Even at max speed, we’ll just barely beat the last stragglers to Eris XIII. No first-place finish, no grand prize, no money to pay off the Ocelot before he harvests my organs…” She turns her head slightly, looking at Six out of one eye. Times like this, Six always has some sort of miracle waiting in her back pocket. Maybe, just maybe…

“How much do you know about nullspace drives?”

Anya sits upright slowly. “I know they’re fast. And I know they’re ridiculously illegal in pretty much every inhabited system. Six, you didn’t –”

~~~~~~~

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click

“Seraph.”

“Uh, hello, I – listen, Seraph, do you have a secure line we could use?”

“This is a secure line.”

“No, I mean like, a scrambled one? I have a box, I just need –”

“No.”

“… You don’t – then how are we supposed to – listen, this is sensitive, Orca always uses a scrambled line for –”

“And Orca is now unavailable, which is why you are contacting me. How long have you been operating in Sanctfell?”

“Uh, about a year now, but –”

“If you want to last five years here, you will listen to me. You do not use a scrambler in Sanctfell. It is not conducive to your freedom or your survival.”

“But I thought the phones here are –”

“The telephones are of course tapped, but there is almost nothing you can say that is more suspicious than refusal to be overheard. Your words can all be made to disappear – for the right price, which is included in my consulting fee, paid to the right people, who know me well. Your concealment, however, will eventually raise alarms that cannot be so easily dismissed, and the Commission do not need to know what you have said. They know where you live.”

“So I’m just supposed to tell you everything when I know they’re listening?”

“Are you plotting the assassination of the High Magistrate?”

“… What? No!”

“Are you, perhaps, planting bombs to destroy the Third Clocktower?”

“No!”

“Have you abducted the Ursine Ambassador’s child for ransom?”

Sundial stared out at the Arctos skyline through the large window of Silk’s new 18th-story office, and wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing with her life. She was great at dealing with the sorts of problems she could infiltrate, exfiltrate, and purloin her way out of, but that didn’t seem to be a useful approach here. If a girl buys you tickets on an intercontinental flight and has you move in together, does that mean she likes you? Or were they just fleeing the country as friends?

Her thoughts were interrupted when the front door was kicked in with a loud BANG, and a tall muscular woman with a face mask and a pistol stormed into the room.

“Hands where I can see ’em! Sundial Votive, the Reliquary would like a word with you. Now come along quietly, or –”

As Sundial turned startled to face the door and raised her hands slowly, she heard a faint sound from the window behind her, and felt the blade of a knife held against her throat.

“Sundial Votive, my employer sends their re—” The quiet voice in her ear stopped abruptly. “Anchor?”

“Tulip, what the hell are you –”

The two intruders stared at each other.

“Anchor, you said this was going to be a nice little vacation, no work stuff!”

Anchor stared pointedly down at the knife in Tulip’s hand.

“… Okay, yes, point taken, but look, the money on this contract was way too good to just pass up!”

Silk stared down at the wooden case on her desk, and at the object inside, whirring to itself and glowing softly. She stared back up at the thief, Sundial, sitting across from her, face nervous and expectant. She stared back down at the case.

She’d seen plenty of well-constructed fakes over the years, but this … no, there was no mistaking it. The longer she looked, the more the whirring seemed to resolve into whispered words on the edge of hearing, and the harder the clearly-unnatural sense of joyful wonder tried to shove its way in from the back of her mind. She lowered the lid of the case, closing it slowly with a fearful caution stronger than her sense of urgency.

Silk and Sundial stared at each other for a long silence. Finally, Silk spoke. “What. In God’s name. Have you done.”

“I – I brought it, just like you asked for? Oh, don’t worry about the box, the wood’s at least a thousand years old so it should hold fine for a week or two –”

“This isn’t about the damned box, you idiot! I know what the fuck you did, but why? Why would you actually go and steal the real thing, are you out of your mind?!”

“Y-you didn’t… want the real thing?” Sundial asked, shriveling under Silk’s glare.

“Of course I didn’t want the real thing! My clients don’t want the real thing, nobody wants the real thing! What they want is the mystique, the idea that just maybe it might be, so they can keep it in a fancy little box, maybe in a special room in their cellar, go down and look at it every now and then, feel that little thrill of terror and wonder, and then go upstairs and go to sleep and wake up alive the next morning! And they know me, they know I work with the best, they know I got whatever I’m selling from an expert thief, they don’t ask questions about where the thief got it from, and neither do I! But you, you, …”