Short Story - 'Mechanism'

[The Pilot]

This is a story that I started to write for a class last year, and so I haven't done anything with it since completion. I would like some serious feedback on it, so... here it is. <3

(Also take note that I pull the science out of my ass. There are trace amounts of real physics in it, but.. maybe 2% of your daily dose at most.)

Mechanism
PG-13 for violence and language.

[The Pilot]

Part One: The End

It was proven generations ago that the universe was mostly void.

Funny that particles so few and far between in comparison to the vast empty space should create all the matter that we know.

Near countless numbers of atoms and molecules that make up a planet; the tiny electric pulses transmitted between neurons in the brain; the most basic of elements in the gas clouds of nebulas; the lab-crafted materials in the hull of a ship; the muscle tissue of a beating heart.

In between all of those things there is vast expanses of nothingness.

“…was a friend, a brother, a teacher, a leader. The spirit of Adam Leonard Malkovich will live on through all who knew him…”

Even the voice of a fellow commanding officer was only sound waves being manipulated by his vocal chords, the meaning of which only existed in the minds of those who listened. Their brains, too, were little more than spindly cells that had arranged themselves into a tightly coiled mass of electrical activity.

Yes, they had proven that there is void in between the smallest bits of matter, and the brain was no different. What they still didn’t know, though, was where human consciousness was hiding.

All around her were the faces of those in the service of the Federation armed forces, all silently grieving for the commanding officer Adam Malkovich. There were far more than the sixty or so members of her battalion in the congregation, but that was only expected, because Officer Malkovich was a friend to many. He was a highly acclaimed strategic genius out on the field, which in turn made him the most decorated officer of the Federation in the Kappa system. Countless battles were won under his leadership, through both brilliant offensive and defensive tactics, taking full advantage of the best military technology available and applying it in ways that no one thought to do so. As the young pilot thought, she caught herself thinking in descriptions of the deceased similar to those spoken by the other eulogists, and suddenly her deadpan expression sunk into a frown.

Keane rose from her seat in the last row and made to leave. She couldn’t sit still in there anymore, listening as other high-ranking officers read off a list of adjectives that didn’t even come close to describing the man, dressed in his ceremonial uniform with a folded flag in his hands, lying in the open casket. He died young: 62 years old, murdered by a weak, and scarred right ventricle in his heart.

She knew him very well, and Officer Hopkins was right in noting Malkovich’s gracefully filled roles of friend and teacher. Keane got a lot of shit from the other members of her brigade for being a woman, and her commanding officer was one of the only people to treat her as a human being. Growing up in an orphanage and then two foster homes wasn’t easy. The raid on colony E31 killed nearly everyone, and many children were orphaned. A good portion of those who lost their families in the skirmish grew up to be dysfunctional members of society, but not Keane. As soon as she was released from federal care, she enlisted into the armed forces out of a determination to keep the other colonies safe, and preventing other children from suffering like she did.

After her basic training, she eventually proved herself to be a talented pilot and soldier, but her reckless anger, violence toward other members of her unit, and drinking problems got her into trouble on numerous occasions. The first real conversation she had with Malkovich was in fact a discussion about checking her into rehab and getting her some psychological help in the form of anger management. The plan was a success in part; her excessive drinking lessened and she was far calmer than before, but the anger returned after a few months. Malkovich sought to know Keane a little more then, and after much resistance, her shields slowly came down.

Despite the unrelenting air of professionalism that wafted around his office, the young soldier found the room to be a sanctuary of sorts where it was safe to unwind and to vent her anger. Malkovich took her presence in his office with benign grace, a thing Keane was eternally grateful for. Her violent tendencies lessened up, but that didn’t mean she still didn’t have a history of breaking noses if provoked.

Things continued on like that for about a year before she was transferred to an air unit. Keane rarely got the chance to speak to her old commanding officer. Her cold intolerance slowly crept back until she was nearly as unreachable as she had been several years previous.

No one knew Adam Malkovich was ill. That is, no one knew before he began to go into cardiac arrest in a meeting one afternoon. Private Keane Black was in training rounds that day, and didn’t even know Malkovich was dead until several hours later. That was four days ago; she had felt numb ever since.

Now Keane was completely alone. She had many acquaintances but no close friends, she had no siblings or family, if she had any extended family, they made it clear years ago that they wanted no part in her life when no one stepped forward to take custody, and now the only friend and parental figure she did manage to find was dead.

All the fighting she did against the guerilla rebels on behalf of the Federation would be useless now that there was no way for her to fight the turmoil inside of her own heart so filled with subatomic void.

“You’re resigning, Private Black?” The young, fair-haired man asked her from behind his desk in the registration office. He was a lean, sinewy fellow, and one could tell by looking at him that he was not cut out for field combat. “But you’ll have only been in the service for six years, come March. And you’re the best new pilot we’ve gotten in years—“

“I’m going to go crazy if I stay here any longer, Collins. I need a breath of fresh air.” Her voice was low and without energy.

The young clerk stapled a thick stack of papers and set them down, sighing. “It’s because of Officer Malkovich, isn’t it.”

Black inhaled sharply and suddenly found the ground to be very interesting.

There was a long pause as Collins secured a last brass brad in an even thicker stack of papers, and slid them into a filing cabinet behind him. He swiveled back around in his office chair. “Where do you plan to go after you leave?” he asked at length.

“Probably another government job,” she said, looking up at him.

“You’re an awful liar,” he said. “I can’t see you doing a paper-pushing job like this.”

“Who said I was going to be behind a desk?”

Samuel Collins considered this. “Well, it’s your life,” he sighed. “I just hope you find what you want to do before you’re stuck doing something you hate.”

“I’m working on that.” The faintest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

The registrar looked at her and smiled. He held out his right hand, and Keane shook it. “Good luck,” Sam said. The young woman walked around his desk and headed for a door behind him labeled ‘RESIGNATION OFFICE’.

[The Pilot]

Part Two: Cornered

It was about three months later, and four since Adam Malkovich’s funeral, that Black found herself sitting in another office-- the atmosphere of which was very different than the one where her conversation with Collins took place. It was sterile and almost stifling, and the chair she took adjacent to the man behind the desk was not in agreement with her lower back.

“Now, I thought I knew you,” he said to Black, leaning back in his chair and taking one last drag of his cigarette before crushing it in an ash tray on the floor. “But when word spread of the shit you been pulling lately, I thought they been mistakin’ someone else for you.” She looked him over: from his receding hairline, to his sunken cheeks, to his dark gray untailored suit. This man, though greasy as a vat of lard he may have looked, was in fact the hard-ass head of the Federation’s Department of Criminal Investigation, and his name was John Nasmith. “So now that I’ve got you here in my office, I’d like to hear about what the hell you been up to lately, Ms. Black.”

The young woman looked at him poisonously. “You sure? It’s a long story,” she lied.

“I got plenty of time.”

Black picked something out of the corner of her eye before beginning. Nasmith knew as of that morning, the hothead sitting in the chair across from him was Private Keane Black, recently resigned from the military after the death of her CO. What few possessions she had were put in a duffle bag and taken with her when she left. She took the first shuttle headed planetside from the orbiting station, and there stayed in a hotel room for a few days while she avoided thinking about what she was going to do with her life.

As it turned out, the first employment opportunity that Keane seemed to be even remotely interested in after she left the armed forces was bounty hunting. She had gotten into a fight with a rowdy sleaze ball at a bar one night, and apparently someone took an interest in her smooth, no-bullshit fighting style. She had the bastard on his back in a matter of seconds, pinning him to the floor with her knee pressing into his neck. She was kicked out the bar shortly after, but before she was able to walk away in search of another watering hole, a mysterious man followed her out the door and stopped her. He introduced himself as a Mr. Van Dyk, and said he was interested in offering her employment with his company. Her interest piqued, she followed when he asked her to have a drink with him at another bar. After much conversation, she eventually drew out enough information to discern that she was being offered a job as a mercenary for a crime lord. She would have said no, but the pay was so high, that it dwarfed all doubts she had about the position, and in two days she consented to take the job.

“You sure?” Nasmth interrupted. “I wouldda thought that you military types had more discipline and a stronger will than that.”

“I needed money,” she snarled. The response was quick, and seemed almost automated.

“Heh. You don’t sound convinced.”

Black ignored his patronizing and continued.

In the two and a half months time that she was working for the mysterious Mr. Van Dyk, she had taken out 19 people: some were rival criminals of her employer, some were rebellious subordinate employees, and others just posed a potential threat to Mr. Van Dyk’s operation. In that short period of time, she made so much money that she was able to purchase her own gunship, state-of-the-art weaponry, and even a full body suit and helmet to mask her identity. Unfortunately, however, local law enforcement and Federation officials began to get whiff of her despite her tactful approach. Eventually, in a police raid, one of her arms suppliers ratted her out when interrogated. “Goes by Black Jack on the street,” he said.

An undercover operation led to her arrest, and she was put in the slammer for only a night; by morning Keane’s identity was processed, and she was promptly sent to Nasmith’s office, where she was sitting right now.

“Yeah, yeah. I know the last part.” John lit another cigarette and took a long drag before saying anything. Keane hated the smell of tobacco. Being a pilot and all, she was prohibited from smoking, but even if that restriction weren’t in place she would have stayed as far away from the damned stuff as she could. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and made a point to breathe through her mouth.

John leaned forward suddenly and rested his forearms on his desk, staring at her. “Let’s get to the point, Private. You’re here,” he said, taking another drag. “Because there are 19 counts of second degree murder on your rap sheet. Now, I suppose you got lucky that whoever employed you never had you go after any cops. And you know very well that killing a cop is—“

“Murder in the first degree.”

Nasmith nodded and grinned, showing two rows of teeth, gray and yellow from years of smoking. “That’s right, Private. As I was sayin’. You got lucky that you never killed any cops, or else I wouldn’t be able to make this deal with you right now…” Keane scoffed, but Nasmith ignored her and continued. “If you rat out who hired you and where he is, we’ll eliminate all the jail time that you would have had, and you’ll get to work—“ he leaned back in his chair and gestured with his thumb to accentuate the point. “For me.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said, standing up. “I want a lawyer.”
Nasmith laughed. “Right, and spend months wrestling with courts and bureaucracy?”

“I’ve got the money.” Keane was about to turn and leave the office, but he stopped her.

“If you go to court, you’re lookin’ at a life sentence, Private.”

“The only people I killed were drug lords and petty criminals. If you caught them, they would have just been wasting away in prison anyways. Using up tax dollars.”

“I know what you’re going to do, Black. You’re going to leave this office, and then you’re going to leave this planet, never to be heard from again.” Nasmith put out his cigarette. “Let’s say, for just a minute, that that’s what you’re gonna do. You run. This department is going to be all over your trail. We’d hunt you down and put you in slam anyways. Now let’s pretend, for another minute, we didn’t go after you. That you were a free woman with no criminal charges against her as soon as you walked out of this office. What then? Where would you go, Black? I have your file; the kind military personnel at your old station sent the info right over this morning. Appears you’ve got quite a record. Surprised I hadn’t heard of any of this shit… four broken noses, a sprained ankle… threatening a fellow soldier with a steak knife?” The man angrily shut off the small notepad, and tossed the thin electronic device on his desk. He sighed very audibly. “Black, I know where you came from, and I know where you’re headed. Don’t you do this to yourself. Where are you gonna go? I’ll be damned if the best pilot I’ve heard about in years lives out the rest of her life in some slum on a backwater planet. You’ve had no formal education, no proper upbringing. I hate to say it, Private, but no one’s gonna tolerate your violence other than us, and especially not in prison.”

Keane just stood there and considered what exactly John Nasmith was proposing. People at his level could bypass the strict rules and irritating details of the law with little effort, so long as it was within reason, of course. Was this within reason? He was telling her to forfeit her inevitable life sentence in slam in favor of a life sentence of servitude for the Department of Criminal Investigation. The DCI was a large, richly funded branch of the Federation. Most of that budget was spent streamlining the operation, making it cleaner, quieter, and almost immune to the spotlight of the omniscient media. Few people knew what exactly the department did other than process criminal cases, and how big it was. But the DCI sure did have a strong reputation with the people it had a problem with.

In the past the division got more face time with the news, and there were rumors of all sorts of scandal, unlawful arrests and seizures, and a number of other corrupt acts. That was when the government started paying all the major media conglomerates nine and ten figure dues every year to shut them up. No one was able to gather enough evidence against the department to bring them to court before it faded away and out of apparent existence. A majority of people believed that because of all the bad rap against the DCI, the Federation decided to do away with it. But that was far from the truth.
Malkovich told her all of that, Keane remembered.

She suddenly found herself fighting off a familiar tide of numb despondency. No, she needed her emotions right now. She needed to be able to process and consider this proposition with a sound mind. Images of her 19 hits crept into her mind, the grotesque, pitiful faces of those criminals. Then she looked at Nasmith.

But was it really all that different? No. She would be doing the exact same thing as before, except she would be upholding the law— at least as law-conscious as a mercenary in the employment of a government division of questionable integrity could be, at any rate. Black was beginning to hate herself more than she did already.

Right now, she had two options: take the job, or go to prison. It was that simple. And yet, why was it so difficult for her to choose?

“Can I get back with you tomorrow?” she said, quiet but firm.

“Take your time.”

Black turned around and left the office, heading in the general direction of the hangar her ship was docked at. It was a sleepless night in the holding cell after her arrest the day before, and she damn well intended on resting tonight, hoping that she will have made a decision by morning.

Damn, she was beginning to have a horrible migraine.

[The Pilot]

Part Three: Terms & Conditions

Keane Black didn't smell fresh smoke, which meant that Nasmith hadn't even lit his first cigarette that morning yet.

"You just get here?" she asked, sitting in the hard, unforgiving chair.

"Twenty minutes ago," he said, organizing papers and datapads on his desk, and taking a swig of hot, black coffee. "To be honest, I'm surprised you came back." Keane just looked at him and sat straight in her chair. "You reach a verdict?"

A short silence passed before she spoke. "I'll take the offer."
Nasmith smiled and reclined in his chair. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a box of menthol Kools, took one out, and stuck it between his lips. "I knew you would." He pulled out his torch and lit it. "I mean, come on. The only reason you'd even consider life in prison was if you had some vendetta against the Federation or something. What am I talking about; you were in the military for years. You must have to be damn devoted to this government." He let a steady puff of blue smoke out of his mouth, and then cocked his eye at her when the statement was greeted with silence. "You weren't seriously considering life in slam as an option, were you?"

Black glared at him. "All that matters is I'm taking your offer."

The head of the DCI looked at her suspiciously. "Listen, Private. If I got any reason to doubt your integrity, this contract--" he pulled a document out from somewhere and slammed it on the desk in front of her. "Is null and void. I don’t want any bullshit. Do I make myself clear?"

It took all of her willpower not to laugh at the irony in his statement; she wanted to spit the word ‘integrity’ onto his desk. "Crystal," Black said instead, successful in her attempt to keep her detached demeanor intact.

"Here." Nasmith plucked a pen from its holder on his desk and set it down on the short stack of papers.

Black started reading over the print carefully, but before she could even get to the next page, she looked up at Nasmith, who had taken to going over what seemed to be criminal files and cases that were in-progress. She cleared her throat to get his attention. "Before I sign anything," she began. "I have a few demands that need to be met."

The man roared with laughter. "You honestly think you're in any kind of position to bargain with me?"

"I'm obviously a valuable asset to this Department, or else you would have just let me go to jail to begin with." Private Black leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. "So yes, I think I'm safe in assuming I have some leverage here."

Nasmith just stared daggers at her. He smothered his cigarette in his ashtray and cracked his knuckles. "Alright. What is it that you want."

"I want my ship back."

"Can't do that. It's in confiscation. Anythin' of yours we got is being considered as evidence against you if we ever did take you to court."

"Fine then. I demand a new one."

"What? An ice cube's chance in hell, Private."

"Then explain to me how the hell I'm going to get around, chasing my assignments from one end of the galaxy to the other?"

Nasmith rubbed his eyes and groaned. "Fine. You got yourself a goddamned ship. It's gonna be one of those Messier 2600's, though. Any bells and whistles you want you're gotta have to pay for yourself."

"That's all I need."

"Anything else?" he asked angrily.

"Yes, as a matter of fact. One more thing."

"And what is that.”

"I demand that I not be referred to as a female in any records or documentation of this operation. In fact, I don't want anyone aside from you, the secretary, and that security guard to know who I am."

He chuckled. “Who you runnin’ from?”

Black stared at him. “Nothing unusual. Just the past.”
Nasmith considered this for a long moment. He looked at her with his bright, sunken eyes, then said: "You got yourself a deal, Private Black." He stretched forward his hand as if to make it official. Keane handed him the contract, which he promptly stuck in the PyroCan™. A faint and muffled explosion was heard as the paper was incinerated.

"Let me get that contract amended. It'll be a few minutes while the attorney’s office writes it up downstairs. You can go and get something to eat if you want. Just be back in an hour."
Black nodded and turned to leave the office. Just before she closed the door, she heard Nasmith, her new boss, get on the phone with the guys downstairs.

[The Pilot]

Part Four: Occam’s Razor

It was probably a week later when Black got her first assignment in a simple text document sent to her from an encrypted location. The note only contained a name, occupation, and system, and it was up to her to hunt down the bounty. It was a drug smuggling operation, and her target, Scott Pala, was the head of the illegal venture. He was an easy hit, and as soon as the evidence was sent back over to Nasmith, payment was wired into her account by the end of the day: five thousand credits. Good. Just a few more jobs, and she’d have enough to get a second artificial sleep locker installed in her ship, with some extra precautions taken of course, for when she would start getting assignments that paid more for delivering live bounties.

Things went on like that for months. Her hunting record was spotless, and with a 100% success rate, she was slowly climbing the ladder in the dangerous underground world of mercenaries. People started asking questions in hushed voices, about the appearance of that mysterious hunter named Black Jack. Who did he work for? How old was he? More importantly, where did he learn to kill like he did? Black couldn’t possibly have been just some kid from a slum looking to make some money, no. This Black Jack, whoever the bastard was, could have only been a career killer. Then how come the cops didn’t have a warrant out for his arrest yet?

Keane heard her alter ego being brought up in discussions more and more in the bars and clubs around the metropolitan systems she made stops at. Most of the men that were worried and frustrated by Black’s success as a merc were all mercs themselves, worried if their payroll would be impacted by the new, seemingly law-immune hotshot.
It was a few weeks later that she got attacked by another hunter while on the job. He was a vicious son of a bitch, and she nearly killed him, but decided that knocking him out would be sufficient when she remembered a word of warning from Nasmith: “You don’t kill anyone that I don’t tell you to.”

A few more months went by, and her arsenal continued to grow, and that ASL was eventually installed, to her satisfaction. Black decided to name the ship too. The words “The Harvest” would be painted in silver along one of the haunches of the boosters, in a generic yet somehow fitting typeface that described by style alone just the sort of person piloting the craft.

It was just about a year into her employment under the seal of the DCI did she receive a particularly haunting assignment. Black was sitting in her pilot’s chair, reading messages off the control panel screen, running a hull integrity check, when the info came up. Black’s breath caught in her throat and her blood ran cold when her eyes passed over the name Nathaniel Reade.

The assignment was no different than any other, and was as follows:

Name: Nathaniel Reade
Occupation: Escaped Convict
Last Known System: Gratzca EII
Price: 200K Alive; 0 Dead

The last line in the assignment threw her off. Not only was he worth more than all of her other hits combined, but he was worth nothing if she killed him. Nothing. But this hit was not like the other hits, oh no. This was Nathaniel Reade she was being asked to hunt down and bring in. The very same Nathe Reade that was abandoned as an infant, brought up in a string of foster homes, killed 5 of his classmates a few months into his freshman year at some well-known engineering school, and spent the next ten years after that caught in a vicious cycle of imprisonment in various maximum security prisons, escape, living on the run, getting caught, and being sent back to prison again. He was the galaxy’s most feared killer. Rumor had it that the blood of more than 250 people was on his hands, and that he didn’t care who he killed: innocents, prison guards, mercs; you name it, he probably did one in.

But was it really true that she was being asked to hunt the hit of hits? Was Nasmith toying with her? Was he deliberately trying to get her killed in a way that couldn’t be traceable back to the Federation? Black read the stub of information again. The fact that he was wanted alive only fostered that idea even more. But damn… that was a lot of money. Keane slumped in her chair and forced herself to breathe steadily. She’d give it a good, long think.

[The Pilot]

Part Five: Predator

The young woman was eating breakfast at a diner a few blocks away from the port her ship was docked at; it was the morning of the second day after she got her assignment. She set down her fork after finishing an omelet, and officially decided that she would accept the job. It wouldn’t be easy. Black would probably spend several weeks hunting him down, and there
was a good chance that she’d get killed or seriously injured, or
she’d lose him.

Black paid the bill, walked back to her ship, and started planning out how exactly she was going to take him out. The only way she would be able to get him into the ASL locker on her ship was through one of three ways:

1. Knock him out where she found him, and have local police help transport him to her ship.
2. Lure him into her ship and tranquilize him there, and situate him in the locker herself.
3. Tranq him where she found him, then use one of those biotransmitters to get him onto her ship.

The more she thought about the three choices, the more she was beginning to like option number three. If she asked for police help, they might take the opportunity to bring in her bounty and collect her rightfully earned dues. Reade was a publicly wanted criminal with a good price on his head, and there were many people that knew that. The problem with number two, luring him onto her ship while he was fully awake and alert, could spell out certain death for her because she would have to confront him in a small space. That left her with the last option. The problem was that biotransmitters though, was that they were expensive and hard to get a hold of, due to their potentially hazardous nature. Using one required that the organism to be transmitted was unconscious, and that they be injected with a huge dose of Psyanocerotine, a liquid metamaterial of sorts, which glowed under low-spectrum ultraviolet light. The catch was that the biotransmitters only transported organic material that had trace amounts of the chemical absorbed into it, for a string of complicated reasons that included avoiding transporting inorganic material along with the organism, bits and pieces of the surface on which they were laying, molecules of gas and dust in the air around them, et cetera. Unfortunately, due to the inability to wait the recommended length of time for all the cells in the body to absorb the Psyanocerotine sometimes, organisms had been known to finish transmission with huge surface wounds and sometimes ended up needing skin grafts, and always finishing transmission without body hair.

Black nodded to herself and, despite all of the dangers associated with biotransmission, thought it was the best idea. If Reade ended up on her ship bleeding and needing skin grafts, what did she care? So long as he was alive, that’s all that mattered.

It was later in the day that Black went about acquiring one of the transmitters. Luckily for her, Nasmith took the liberty to provide her with licenses for every catalogued weapon in circulation, so that all she needed to do was find a supplier. After some research, she found that the only retailer of the device on the planet she was located was a research group called BioTek Labs. Apparently filling out mass amounts of forms was required before they would even consider her for retail.

She finished about an hour later, and created a rather convincing back-story about her being an experimental physicist not content with simply reading about the device in scientific publications, and she wanted one to work with in her lab. The registrar collected the stack of papers and informed her that they would review her paper work and contact her in 7-10 business days, and to have a nice afternoon.

Black glanced around and cleared her throat before leaning in over the desk. “I need you guys to make a decision by today,” she said in a low, cold voice.

The polite, policy-driven kindness started to slip away from the woman’s demeanor. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we need time to review your information and decide if you are a good candidate for possessing the product.”

Black chuckled to herself. “You don’t seem to understand. I need that transmitter by today.” With that, she reached into her pocket and pulled out an ID card, identifying herself as being a representative of the Department of Criminal Investigation. The white-clad woman gasped as she saw the laminated plastic card, and quickly turned to her intercom.

“I have someone here to see you, Dr. Lossey,” she said anxiously, then glancing back at Black, she quickly added:

“It’s urgent.”

A distant voice answered. “Uh… send her in then, I guess, Jill.”
The woman quickly pressed another button and an airlock door slid open to the left of the window, and the young soldier walked through, casting a harsh, parting glance at the registrar.

Black passed into a short white hall with three doors on the right, each labeled with a name, and one to her left, which had a small viewing window made of bulletproof plastic. Glancing through the tiny porthole, she saw a huge laboratory, clean and crisp, with white-jacketed chemists and biologists busy with their experiments. Turning away from the view, she found a Dr. Lossey’s door, and opened it without so much as a warning knock, and caught the man by surprise.
The doctor looked her up and down before speaking. “Jill said this was an emergency?”

“I’m with the DCI,” she said. “And I need a biotransmitter. Now.”

Lossey’s eyes opened wide upon hearing the name of her employer. “I… we… we can’t do that,” he sputtered. “The transmitter is a dangerous product, and we need time to see if it’s going into responsible hands.”

Black gripped the edge of his desk and leaned over, like a wild cat. “Now,” she repeated.

The doctor’s eyes averted hers and instead searched all of the papers on his desk as though they had an answer to his potentially dangerous predicament. Perhaps he feared for his funding, or perhaps he feared for his facilities. Either way, he probably knew what the DCI could do if he didn’t comply with their demands. “Do you have a license?” The question was more of a plea, as though he was depending on a lack of her ability to posses the transmitter legally as a means of denying her.

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Black reached into a vest pocket and produced a small datapad, and tossed it onto the desk. “And if you’re worried about me using it against civilians, you’re wrong. I need it to capture a very dangerous man.”

Dr. Lossey looked at her for a few moments, going over everything that was happening. At length he sighed deeply and slumped in his chair. “Alright. I’ll sign one over to you.” He turned to his computer and began typing up the proper documents. “I need your contact information.” She gave him the name ‘Black’ and then the address to Nasmith’s office, which sufficed.

By the end of the day, she had in her possession a chrome briefcase containing the transmitter, six doses of Psyanocerotine a handheld UV light, a hypodermic gun, a small aerosol can of alcohol, and a piece of micro-fiber cloth. She also made sure that the proper funds were wired to BioTek Labs. Now all she had to do was hunt down Reade.

Though it took several weeks of stalking and research, Black thought she may have tracked down the man that was Nathaniel Reade. She hadn’t yet seen him, but had obtained information on his whereabouts, and now sat in a warehouse, hidden behind some decades-old barrels containing god-knows-what, waiting. From what the unfortunate weapons dealer told her, Reade had taken up a similar occupation after he escaped from the Satellite Penitentiary. He was supposedly closing some sort of illegal deal with someone tonight, and was actually going to kill the man. The one left standing would be her target.

Black had been waiting for about an hour in the deep shadows behind those barrels, cloaked even further by her gunmetal body suit and helmet. The suit was designed and plated in just a way to mask her gender almost completely, making her look like a lean young man an inch or two short of six feet.
The warehouse was dank, and lit only by the rays of a dying sun filtering through filthy windows high in the rafters. The hunter waited there in complete silence, a #27 sonic rifle in one hand, and a heavy tranquilizer gun in the other. After what to her seemed like just short of an eternity, Black’s straining ear began to hear footsteps. She heard two pairs of feet coming from the same end of the warehouse, but none from the other.

“So, do you have the money, Mr. Wright?” came from one end.

“Yeah, I do.” The voice was deep and scathing.

“Then let’s see it.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

Blam. Blam.

What? That was it? No hostile banter? No fight? Black stilled her thoughts, and remembered who she was dealing with here. He was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer that would take every opportunity for a cheap shot. This wasn't a movie. He was the kind of man to kick someone while they were down, and do it with a grin on his face. Bastard deserved to go back to prison.

By now the warehouse was almost completely dark, and she wondered how Reade could still see what he was doing as he checked for bugs on each of the bodies. Black carefully, slowly turned herself around and knelt closer to the floor, looking for the tiniest of cracks to peer through to get a good look at her hit. Her fingers felt up the side of her helmet and pressed a small button, turning on her night-vision. The world turned green, and suddenly she was able to see a thin slice of the killer as he casually crushed a small piece of electronic under his boot, which she assumed was a bug. She shifted her weight from one foot to another, and Reade froze.

Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit. Black saw him slowly turn his head from side to side, looking for her. He knew he was not alone. Then, suddenly, he darted off into the darkness. Shit!

Black debated with herself on whether or not to jump out and look for him, because that would put her at a disadvantage, but he could have run, and it would take her weeks to find him again. But if what his criminal profile said was right, then he was not the type to run from any confrontation. The young soldier sat and waited, her grip tightening around her weapons. A tiny, orange light began to flash in a corner of her visor. With a single movement that almost resembled a reflex, she whipped herself around and fired her sonic rifle at Reade’s chest, sending him flying backward into a wall with the force of a jackhammer. He coughed as the wind was knocked out of him, but was up again just as quickly as he went down, and the next thing she felt was the killer’s fist slamming into her gut. She fell back into the steel barrels, the rifle knocked from her grasp. Reade’s arm rushed forward again, but she rolled out of the way, barely escaping the blade in his hand. Still gasping for breath, Black darted around the pile of barrels to get her bearings. Reade simply jumped over the mess and landed about six feet in front of her, a look on his face saying that he wanted her dead, and fast. A smile spread across her face that her opponent couldn’t see. She raised her heavy tranq gun and fired a cap into his shoulder; Reade looked at it and pulled it out, threw it on the floor, and started after her. Black fired two more at him, one in his leg and one in his stomach. He took the one out of his leg with effort, but before he could get at the second, he stopped. “You son of a bitch,” Reade snarled. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out with a groan.

Black stood over him, her weapon ready to fire again, and she waited for a few heart-pounding moments for him to stir. He did not. The mercenary made quick work of Reade. She tore off her helmet after retrieving her chrome briefcase, and a small light illuminated her work area. She took a second sedative cartridge from the magazine of her tranq gun, and pushed the needle into the side of his neck, to make sure he was out good.

The transmitter came in two parts, one for the delivering end, and one for the receiving end. She pushed up his black shirt and pressed the transmitter to his skin on top of what would be his solar plexus, then loaded the first dose of Psyanocerotine into the hypodermic gun. She pressed the thing to his arm and pulled the trigger. Black surmised that it must’ve felt like a sharp punch, from the way the limb moved when she injected him with the stuff. She did the same to the other arm, and waited. About a half hour later she turned off the light in the case and took out the UV, passing it over his body. Small, faint splotches of his skin glowed, mostly around his neck, face, and torso. Perfect; the stuff was getting absorbed.

Black waited for maybe another half hour, sitting silently in the dark, before packing up and heading out. Just before she left, though, she injected Reade with one more dose of sedative; she picked her sonic rifle out from the mess of barrels, put her helmet back on, and slipped silently out the back door. It was twenty minutes of jogging through a vacated, dilapidated industrial district before she was able to board The Harvest. Once back in the safety of her ship, she set to work with the receiving end of the transmitter. Black hastily cleared off the floor of the main cabin, and placed the receiver/projector on the floor, pressing a small button on the side that suction-locked it to the surface. She took the alcohol and sprayed it on the projection lens, and carefully wiped it clean with the cloth. Putting that away, she then pressed a second button, near the lens, and then she waited. A green light lit on the side, and she sat in a chair in the back, watching, when a few minutes later the light started blinking. It began slowly, but flashed progressively faster until it became solid again. A shadow vaguely in the form of a sleeping person appeared on top of the device, and with a small burst of light, Reade appeared, lying on the floor. He was unconscious, hairless, bleeding, and… without clothes.

She turned from him with disgust and searched the back of the ship, gathering a few rolls of coagulant-coated bandages, and a pair of pants that she hoped would fit him. “Lights to full,” she said, and the dimness gave out to brightness, so that she could see what she was doing. The mercenary knelt beside Reade and assessed his abrasion-like skin injures. Black imagined what it must have looked like back at the warehouse, Reade’s pile of clothes with the transmitter in his shirt, and his hair and pieces of skin scattered about the garments. She chuckled to herself, and began to bandage up his wounds. (Most of them were on his hands and legs.) She didn’t want him bleeding to death on the long journey to the DCI nerve center, after all. Black wrestled the old par of gray cargo pants on him, and then set about trying to figure out how to get him into the artificial sleep locker.

Her hit weighed at least a good 40 or 50 pounds more than she did, and holding him upright while strapping him in would be no easy task. The mercenary sat his limp body up and slung his heavy arm over her shoulder, and stood up, hoisting him up with her. It was extremely difficult, because he was all dead weight. She made a lot of noise, gathering up every ounce of strength and adrenaline she could muster as she stood him up, and with a last war cry she let him fall against the restraints in the open locker. Black held him up with her shoulder and elbow pressing up against his sternum, catching her breath. After a minute and with all her might, she held him up as she fastened the restraints: three across his torso, two on each leg, two to hold his arms at his side, and a brace to keep his head from lolling around. She finished with a silicon/acrylic "blindfold" so that he wouldn’t be able to see. Black stepped out of the shallow locker and shut the orange, bullet-proof plexiglass door and initiated the airlock. Each restraint had sensors on them to monitor Reade’s vital signs, too- everything from heart rate to body temperature to brain waves. If the computer detected that he was waking up, it would fill the locker with a sedative gas and put him back to sleep again.

Black stood in front of the locker, still catching her breath, and she looked at Reade for the first time. He was a human, a few inches taller than her, with average complexion, and a good build. She didn’t recall what color hair he had, thought it was dark, and she didn’t know what color his eyes were. He had a long, straight nose, and his features were rough, as though they were hastily carved out of the harshest of interstellar debris. The soldier cocked her head to the side as she detachedly studied his closed eyes. Even in sleep, she noted, he seemed to be scowling.

She turned from the convict and stepped over to the control panel, punching in coordinates and other necessary things for inter-system travel. Contrary to the science-fiction of ages past, it was against the laws of physics to travel at or near the speed of light if you were not a photon yourself. In fact, it was in a science fiction parody of long ago that came closest to reality, in the author’s scientifically comic invention of an “infinite probability drive” that allowed for fast space travel. The reality was that interstellar ships were equipped with Alternate Path drives that took advantage of subatomic particles’ ability to be everywhere at once, but settle on the ‘most probable’ location, also called the Sum Over Histories Theory. This, coupled with the Weak Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis, allowed for almost instantaneous interstellar travel, under the condition that no consciousness be involved, which is why travelers had to be put to sleep. Computers were required to monitor the state of the brain of every traveler, and anything short of a coma could put everyone at serious risk. In fact, if the computer sensed that anyone was coming out of sleep early, the alternate path drive would shut down until all people on board were out again.

“If only they could find out where human consciousness was hiding,” Keane whispered her herself as she got situated in her locker directly adjacent to Reade’s. Take off from the planet was very smooth. It was a clear day down below, and the atmosphere wasn’t terribly thick, despite the fact that it was a cosmopolitan planet. She gazed through the small porthole on the far wall at the blue and brown planet they were currently orbiting. Tightening her harness around her weightless body, she pressed a few buttons on the inside of her locker, initiating the airlock, and giving the autopilot the O-K. The mercenary breathed deeply as her casket-sized locker filled with gas. Her vision swirled with a brief, but sweet euphoria, before everything grew dark and Keane Black passed out of existence.

[The Pilot]

Part 6: Prey

It was at first a little tickle, the faintest caress of existence beyond her eyelids. All easily recoverable, that is, until her breathing shifted from auto to manual drive. When she was conscious of her lungs and had to think about her next breath. The state of sleep was definitely over from there.

Keane slowly pulled open her eyes and looked down at the liquid crystal information panel embedded in the plexiglass in front of her. As the symbols began to register and form words, she opened her eyes wide and stared at it: HEAVY CONTAINMENT LOCKER: FLATLINE. Keane jerked her head up to see his limp body herself and gasped- Reade’s locker was empty.

The mercenary, in a furious panic, tore off her bindings and released herself into weightlessness. Just as she was about to open the airlock, a question presented itself to her: if Reade was loose in her ship, why wasn’t she dead yet? The thought disturbed her immensely, and she opened the door with care. Her eyes darted around, looking for any sign of movement in the dark recesses of her small ship. The air that greeted her was cold, and she noted that her breath became opaque with every exhale. Silence beat against her ears. Black reached up with limber hands to grasp a railing on the ceiling, quietly guiding herself to the back, where she might grab a gun and a round of tranquilizers without being seen. Where in the bloody hell was Reade? There weren’t many places in the ship that he could lie in wait… unless of course, he was gone. Which would also explain why he hadn’t killed her while she was still asleep. But how he would’ve gotten off The Harvest in the middle of space without immediately perishing in the vacuum was beyond her. But if he managed to get around all the security precautions she had taken when purchasing his locker, this didn’t seem to be an ordinary man she was dealing with. Black pushed away from the ceiling and grabbed a handle on the wall, giving it a good yank. A rack slid out, bearing weapons of all shapes and sizes, like some rusted tree bearing rotted fruit. Her eyes were open and looking around all the while she armed herself. She had a plasma gun, a compact tranq gun, and a microedge knife. She paused and held her breath, but still, there was no sound. Not so much as the rough hum of an idling engine. The ship was cold, dark, and without power. If Black didn’t want to freeze to death like she would in a few hours, she had to restore the power that she assumed Reade turned off when he somehow escaped from his artificial sleep.

She floated out of the chamber, around the corner and into the engine room, and stopped when she reached the tiny maintenance closet. Black shivered; it was getting colder. The inside of the closet was illuminated by two vertically-oriented tubes of blue EL lights, both powered by an emergency battery somewhere amid the countless wires and pipes. Fitting her plasma gun snugly between her knees, she got to work opening up the panels that led into the infinitely complicated electronic infrastructure of The Harvest. Having been a pilot, however, she did happen to know a thing or two about how ships worked. After about ten minutes of digging, she found that there was a tiny, integral piece of machinery that was missing. About the size of a man’s thumb, the cable that fed power from the main generator to the rest of the ship had been completely removed. Black felt anger rise in her chest. She slammed the panels shut, pounded one with her fist, and shouted: “READE! YOU GET OUT HERE, YOU FUCKING COWARD—“

“You don’t have to yell,” he said with his steel and gravel voice, chuckling. “I’m right here.”

Black jerked her head from where she hit the panel to out the door, where she saw a black figure, the contours of his face and chest barely illuminated by the blue light. The mercenary swallowed hard, before pulling out the gun from between her knees and launching herself out of the closet, only to catch the door way. She aimed the gun at the killer.

“I should kill you right now,” she growled.

Laughter. Speed. Precision. In an instant, he had her up against the wall, back to him, with a knife on her throat. Her knife. The only redeeming quality this situation had, she thought to herself, was the fact that he was warm against the freezing cold. She saw his breath next to her face, made to glow like bright blue smoke by the EL lights. “What,” he said next to her ear. Chiding. “Before I kill you?”

Another move. Fast. Precise. Black kicked him off her with all her might, and aimed her gun at him again. Reade laughed.

“I’m not worth anything dead.”

Black fought to control her anger. “You’re not worth SHIT either way.”

“My, my,” he said. “This is a first. A mercenary that’s thinking of the situation in terms of ethics instead of credits.” Black smoldered and said nothing. “You know what else is a first? Getting captured by a woman. I gotta admit, I was pretty pissed off back in that warehouse. When I woke up here, I was going to kill you in your sleep, and do it with your own weapon.” The killer was advancing toward her, inching his way back to her as he held to bundles of wires and pipes on the ceiling like monkey bars. “I was ready to ghost a man, but I was thrown off when I saw you.” Closer. “Five foot ten, chin-length blonde hair, athletic build…” Closer. “I could almost say you were beautiful if I knew what the word meant.”

Pieces, pieces. Countless atoms assembled to create the human body, the human brain. Like cogs they worked, each in its own place in the vast sea of particles.

“Where did you put the cable,” Black demanded, though her voice was weak and she looked at his chest instead of his face. She still had the gun pointed at him.

“You cold?” he chuckled. “It’s only about forty in here. I thought that being an ex-pilot would’ve made you stronger than that.”

Black’s breath caught in her throat. “How do you know that,” she hissed.

“Simple hacking skills. Seems you’ve got a fiery past,” he said, then added in a mocking tone: “Private Black.”

Pure rage swept through her. “You son of a bitch!" The merc threw herself at him, disregarding the existence of the gun in her hands as she straddled his midsection and began punching him in the face as hard as she possibly could. After laying five or so on him, he caught both of her wrists in one of his hands, and grabbed her chin with the other, forcing her to look at him. She saw dark blood dripping from his nose where she hit him, floating into the air and beading up like tiny marbles.

“You be careful.” Reade’s tone was low, dark, and laced with violence. “And remember who the fuck you’re messing with.” He spun them both around and slammed her against another wall, his fingers around her neck holding her there. Black saw that he was pushing against a row of thick cables with his feet to mimic weight and leverage. It took skill to kick someone’s ass when you didn’t weigh anything. Reade’s grip on her neck wasn’t hard enough to stop her from breathing, but it was definitely enough to cause considerable discomfort. She swallowed and gasped as she fought to gain back the ability to breathe sufficiently. Nathaniel Reade just looked at her with a strange combination of entertainment and contempt, before tilting his head forward as he bent over her. “We’re not so different, you and I,” he said into her left ear, his voice low.

“I don’t murder people for kicks,” she wheezed.

Reade pulled back and laughed. “Oh that’s right, you murder people for money.” He looked down at her and cocked his head, grinning. Black was staring daggers and poison and a number of deadly, unsavory things at him. “Or is it something else?” The words rolled off his tongue like gravel as he enunciated them slowly, curiously. His breath looked like a white cloud every time he exhaled: the cabin was slowly getting colder. “For pride? Or perhaps fear?” The killer’s chiding words wore on her. Black’s throat constricted, but not because of Reade. “You see? We are very much alike.” His face was creeping closer to hers again. “We kill because we have nothing left.”

Black sucked in a ragged breath. “What do you want from me,” she whispered. Energy gone. The firing neurons were slowing.

“I want you to reconsider the situation,” he muttered. Then he released her.

The young soldier remained where she was, floating against the wall as Reade pushed himself away from her. “I can’t let you go.” Her voice was hoarse. “Please, give me back the power cable, or else we’re going to freeze to death.” She shivered, and started to rub her arms vigorously. It was probably below forty at that point.

Reade floated about four feet in front of her as he stared her down. Black noticed that he looked very different now than when she last got a good look at him, unconscious in his locker, about 4 days ago. His hair was starting to grow back in, and he had a good amount of stubble. There were visible traces of where his eyebrows were too. Against the dim blue light and ominous blackness of the rest of the room, the white bandages around the palms of his hands, forearms, and feet struck a bright contrast. She saw goose bumps interrupting the patina of his skin, and an odd feeling ebbed when she realized that he was just as cold as her.

“If you drop me off at the nearest port.”

Black swallowed. “I can’t make any promises.”

“You sure as hell better.” With that, he kicked off of a wall and disappeared into the blackness of the cabin, leaving Keane to herself. For some reason unknown to her, the temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees when he left the room. She hugged herself and brought her knees up to her chin, partly in an effort to stay warm. The burn crept back into her throat and her breath hitched. No, dammit! She was not weak. She was a product of her environment, and her environment was cold and hostile. Black closed her eyes, bringing her thumb and forefinger to apply a gentle pressure between them. Why did her environment have to be hostile? Why didn’t she choose prison over this? Why did Malkovich have to die?

“Where is human consciousness hiding…”

The plea was barely audible, even to her, which was why she was so surprised to feel an answer. Cold fingers belonging to large cold hands grasped her arms and hoisted her up. What came over her then she didn’t know, but Black felt a sudden, dangerous compulsion, and she didn’t know what else to do other than give in and follow where it led.

“No one knows,” Reade said in a low voice when she embraced him.

There they were, floating in a weightless embrace, both of them career killers; the only difference between them was that one had come to terms with his motives long before. They stayed like that for a long time, until a single shiver on Reade’s part interrupted the scene. “Let’s get this fucking thermostat up,” he muttered, pulling the power cable from his pocket and floating into the maintenance closet. She heard him fumbling with the panels. After a minute, he emerged again, and rounded the corner, returning to the cabin. Black followed. She floated over to the pilot’s chair and Reade took the one next to hers. Her hands skillfully passed over the control panel, flipping switches and pressing buttons; a second later and Black brought The Harvest back to life.

“Lights to half,” she said. “And thermostat to 72.”

Black strapped herself into the chair for the sole purpose of remaining stationary without exerting effort on her part. She closed her eyes and sighed as the cabin began to fill with warmer air. There was a long silence between them.

“Why did you kill those students?”

“What?”

“Why did you kill those 5 boys during your first year at Annex?”

He cast her a look from the corner of his eye. “The five of them gang raped a high school senior and got away with it. They also happened to be the same 5 bastards that gave me shit all the time because I got into the program on a full scholarship.”

Black stared forward. “I always thought that those students were innocent people and you murdered them out of a psychotic rage.”

“You got the second half right. Those fuckers were just as innocent as you or I.” He started to peel away the bandages around his hands and fingers. “I don’t kill honest people, Keane.”

She flinched when he said her first name. “Then how come I’m not dead yet.”

“You’re one of the few honest people in a dishonest fucking world.” Black looked at him as Reade watched the bloody bandages float in front of his face. She glanced at his hands as he turned them over under his gaze, and she hissed.

“That must hurt,” she said languidly.

“I was knocked out when you did it,” he chuckled. “But I’ve felt much worse.” Reade turned and leapt out of the co-pilot’s chair into the head of the ship, where she assumed he was changing bandages.

“Where do we go from here?” she said to the dead air in front of her.

His voice was muffled slightly, as one calling out from another room. “You take me to the closest system and be on your way.” The killer floated back into his seat, covered in fresh bandages.

“And if I refuse?”

He looked at her with pale blue eyes. “You won’t.”

[The Pilot]

Part 7: Judas

Black had taken to floating over the bunk in her tiny sleeping chamber after having eaten her full of freeze-dried space food. She would have lain down had gravity been there, and she would have let her body succumb to the gentle pull into the sheets. The dark isolation of the confining room was a comfort at the moment. A distant memory of a song ebbed and flowed through her mind like a weak current, and soon enough her lips began forming unspoken words before her brain had a chance to catch up.

“I had a dream I met a Galilean…
A most amazing man
He had that look you very rarely find
The haunting, hunted kind
I asked him to say what had happened
How it all began
I asked again, he never said a word
As if he hadn't heard
And next, the room was full of wild and angry men
They seemed to hate this man
They fell on him, and then
Disappeared again
Then I saw thousands of millions
Crying for this man
And then I heard them mentioning my name
And leaving me the blame…”

It was a song that she heard one of her more mild-mannered bunkmates sing every once and a while, when he thought he was alone. She was intrigued by the tune, and after hearing bits and pieces of it a few times, Black began to wonder who a Galilean was, and which man the song was about… It took good amounts of research in what little spare time she had, but Black finally managed to come to the conclusion that the song was about none other than a 2500-year-old religious figure named Jesus. Suddenly, she was numbly aware of another presence occupying the room.

“Do you believe Pilate went to hell?” she asked Reade in little more than a whisper. Her back was to him, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t hear, had they not been stuck in empty, silent, deep space.

“I don’t know,” came the rumbling answer. In his tone were traces of fatigue.

Black twisted around to face him, the large silhouette in the doorway. She gently kicked off from the wall with one sock-encased foot and brushed past him, back into the main cabin. It would be another 36 hours or so of travel before they reached the nearest colonized system. Path Jumps were generally anywhere from 20 to 50 light-years in length, with a second or two pause in between each jump. That allowed for travel at least ten times the “speed” of light, which made interstellar voyages much faster than were capable before, but still slow due to the considerable size of the galaxy.

“Look Reade, I know what you want, and I’ll get to it as soon as I recover from… this.”

The killer drifted next to her near the pilot’s seat, and cast her a strange look that she couldn’t decipher. He laughed to himself, a dark noise that permeated the walls of his throat and the bones of his ribcage. She was about to quickly cover herself and say something to the extent of ‘being in a four-day coma’, but just as she opened her mouth, he cut her off.

“You only know a small part of what I want.”

Black swallowed hard and ignored the statement, instead busying herself with the small computer screen to the left of her chair. The database was searching for the exact coordinates of the nearest system, Siduri I, so that she could plan their trajectory and make it there in one piece- literally. (Particle scattering often happened if any passengers were conscious during alternate path travel.) Black pushed herself out of the seat and glided over to Reade’s heavy-containment locker. Through the orange-tinted glass, she saw that most of the bonds were broken, rendering most of them and the sensors embedded in them useless.

“So that’s how you broke out of there,” she murmured. “How did you stay awake when you were gassed again?”

“Held my breath.”

“Dammit, Reade. That’s going to cost a lot to fix.”

The killer floated over to where his captor was, looking at his own handiwork. “You’ve got the credits.”

Black started. “Along with all of my private logs, behavioral information, and military documents, you took a fucking gander at my account?”

He grinned, showing off his two rows of straight, white teeth. Her despondency lifted somewhat as anger began to creep back. He knew almost everything about her now. It was good he was done with his mind games, though. Or was he?

“I was up for three hours while I waited for you to wake up on your own after I turned off the sedative drip in your locker. What the hell else was I supposed to do?”

The merc turned away from him and looked at the damage he had caused to the device in order to escape. Those bonds were supposed to have been able to hold anyone. They were made of padded bands of woven steel fibers, bolted to the wall. She saw he ripped out the ones for his arms and torso so that they hung there loosely, uselessly. The blinder just floated in there like it was some kind of joke. A sickening wave of fear overtook her as she fully realized the situation. Black was not accustomed to showing fear, however, so it manifested itself into furious resentment.

“It’ll take the next 80 years to reach civilization if we can’t make jumps,” she hissed. “We don’t even have enough fuel to last us a week of going three-quarters light-speed. We’re going to fucking die out here if both of us can’t be in stasis at the same time.”

Reade thought for a short moment, his large hand passing over the stubble on his face. “Double the sedative,” he said.

“What?” Black stared at him.

“We program your locker to double the sedative.” He turned around and looked into her locker, eyeing out the dimensions.

“The both of us won’t be able to fit in there,” she said, glancing at the locker herself. “They’re built for one person. There’s gotta be another way.”

“What, you want to fill the entire ship with gas just because you don’t want to touch me?”

Black realized the stupidity of her suggestion when Reade said it in plain words. He was right; the only way to survive the situation was to cram both of them in a locker. She suddenly hated him. If he hadn’t done all that he did in the past few hours, her whole operation would be running smoothly. She sucked in a breath and stared him down. “You fucking bastard, we wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for you.” Her voice was low, and she sounded surprisingly calm, even to her.

Reade said nothing, only glared at her with fierce eyes. The stare down lasted several seconds before he broke away. “You know what I’m thinking,” he growled.

“Fuck you, Nathan Reade.”

The killer snorted. “You want to live or not, missy.”

Black went back to the controls of The Harvest and confirmed their coordinates. She ran an integrity check of the AP drive as well as the generator, making sure their fuel cells would last them the rest of the trip. Perishing alone, in deep space with no one but another cold, empty soul like herself to provide the last moments of comfort before they either starved or froze was not something she was ready to let happen.

She confirmed their destination.

“Get in the locker, Reade.”

She looked back at him as he took one last quick survey of the space before maneuvering inside, back to the wall. Black floated over to the closterphobic space and looked inside what could very well be her coffin. She could see that Reade pressing himself up against the back wall as much as he could, but that still only left about a foot of space –if that, even- between him and what would soon be an airlock door. Reade just looked at her with unreadable features as she hesitated. She muttered a quiet and tired “fuck it” before backing herself in, closing the door in front of her. The pad was hard to get to on the side of the locker. There was almost no room left for moving at all, and any movement that either of them did make was horribly awkward, at least on her part. With effort, she managed to bring her hand up to the pad. “You ready?” The airlock initiated: it was a mechanical sucking sound that made her anxious beyond her ability to control or even understand.

“Am I ever,” the killer behind her said. Black felt his words more than she heard them.

With a sharp inhale, she was about to confirm the release of the tranquilizing gas. “Reade,” she said, hesitating again.

“Hnh,” he grunted.

Black hesitated again, staring out the orange glass into the now dark ship. She must’ve been silent for a while, because the man behind her questioned her silence.

“What is it, Keane.”

She didn’t like it when he said her first name. She preferred Black by far. The young merc noted that his tone was not so icy and distant as it was a minute before. “Do you believe Judas went to hell?”

The question was simple. She jumped when she felt his arms moving around at her side, and relaxed by a small amount when he let his hands rest on her shoulders. They were no longer cold.

“I don’t think he did,” he murmured, and then squeezed gently. Keane sighed. A strange feeling of contentment washed over her; it was a feeling that she was not incredibly familiar with, but was curious and grateful that she managed to feel it nonetheless. “Now let’s go to sleep.”

Black pressed the button and shoved her hand at her side as the soft hiss of the sweet tranquilizing gas filled the locker. The world swam before her eyes, and a few minutes later, it became impossible to keep her heavy lids open.

---

It took about three days to get to Siduri I; the computer recorded exactly 35 hours and 28 minutes of jump time, with another 3 hours of planetside approach at booster speed. The Harvest penetrated the planet’s atmosphere without trouble, and she managed to snag a landing pad at a port in a metropolitan district of the planet’s capital city. Black and Reade had lunch at a nearby diner, eating in silence, and then they parted ways. Few words were spoken between them for a reason that Black wasn’t fully aware of, and she was almost sure that the killer didn’t entirely understand it either.

Keane walked back to her docked ship, her head high and shoulders squared, mind empty and open. She felt taller somehow; warmer, too.
The young mercenary spent the night on her ship in the docking bay, and dreamt of Malkovich. She was in his office again, sitting in the old chair across from him, his benign smile turned towards her. It was a long dream, and when she awoke the next morning, the only think she remembered was embracing him and telling him goodbye.

Keane fired up her ship and punched in the familiar coordinates for the planet that the DCI was located. Nasmith wouldn’t be happy that his pride and joy failed her latest mission. She thought about what she would tell him, and after a while decided on a short, simple, honest reason, realizing that she didn’t care whether her boss accepted it or not:

She let him go.

Why?

She wasn’t like all the other mercenaries in the known worlds, even though her flawless track record would now be tarnished: her single failure marked by a single name.

The honest murderer was the only man she couldn’t catch.




End.

[Lady Hammer]

<3


That's all I can say, plain and simple. I absolutely adored this. You are brilliant. :3 I wish I could offer criticism, but I loved it too much to pick at it. xD

[The Pilot]

Oh yay, thank you. ^^

I'm glad you had the attention span to actually read it, haha.

[Lady Hammer]

Yeah, I felt bad for it 'cause I figured that no one else would have the attention span to (happens a lot with my stuff, 'cause my chapters are really long... >_>), so I was like "What the hell, I have time, I think I'm gonna read this!"

And I was just like... *hooked* zomg. You are awesome.