Counterweight

Counterweight

By A.G. Claymore

Edited by Beryl MacFadyen

Copyright 2014 A.G. Claymore

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
incidents and brands are either products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners
of any products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without
permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized,
associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

History’s Orphans

Changing Trajectories

Intersection

New Purpose

The Gloves Come Off

From the Author

Pruning the Tree

Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

C
allum
McKinnon was about to kill someone. He wasn’t doing it personally, but he’d
been the one to give the order and so the responsibility was his. Still, D’Nei had to
carry
some
of the responsibility. He’d displayed a complete lack of
regard for the concept of secrecy.

Cal closed his jacket against the cold of the lower levels
and moved along the railing to get away from a hover cab that had parked in his
line of vision. Even from his new vantage point, he could still smell the stink
of ozone from the vehicle’s faulty mag-emitters. The odor blended with the
acrid scent of raw minerals carried by the fog of the first sixty levels.

Down here in the thirties, the fog never thinned enough to
permit a glimpse of the vast atrium bisecting the sub-oceanic city. The vapor
condensed on the walkways and shops, gathering into myriad rills that flowed
over the edges of one level to spatter unwary pedestrians on the next, leaving
a grimy trail of ore dust in its wake.

Cal had settled behind a sheet of water that slid off the
roof of a rail shop on the level above. The small pastry stand was built on the
outside of the thick graphene railing and, like most such shops, looked like it
might collapse at any moment.

A large quantity of water was running off its corrugated
aluminum roof, providing excellent cover for the Human agent as he leaned on
the railing, pretending to read a message on his palm.

 The city was an insurgent’s dream – overcrowded and
built like a massive rabbit warren. There were almost endless choices for
escape and evasion should he happen to run into trouble with the law, and the
millions of Tauhentan expatriates living down here made it very easy for a
Human to blend in. The two species were practically indistinguishable.

Built into a narrow, ocean-floor canyon, Tsekoh was the only
population center on the Republic-controlled landless world of Chaco Benthic.
Roughly four kilometers long, one kilometer high and averaging a half kilometer
in width, the city contained just over a half billion square meters of floor
space and housed just over fifteen million citizens – legally.

There were at least another eight million NRW’s, as the
administration referred to them – non-registered workers who had no fixed
address and simply found a place to lay their heads between shifts. They mostly
had jobs but there was only so much space set aside for housing. NRW’s worked their
shifts, predominately in ore processing facilities, paid for a few minutes in a
public shower and changed at their rented lockers before meeting their friends
at one of the thousands of public houses for dinner.

They produced ore and they generated tax revenue through
their spending so the Dactari corporation that ran this planet couldn’t care
less where they slept. It was an ideal solution to what would have otherwise
been a severe labor shortage.

Not so ideal if you were an NRW.

There was a combustible feeling to the place, and that was
the reason Callum had been assigned here. The Alliance liked to find small
fringe worlds like this one where there was no Republic military presence. Stir
up enough trouble here and the enemy would have to deploy troops to put it
down, bleeding off their central reserves.

This was Callum’s eighth assignment. Each one took roughly a
decade to plan and execute properly and, each time, he came to identify more
with his target world than he did with Earth. Almost a century of pretending to
be a Tauhentan expatriate had severed his emotional links to his real home
world – a world he wasn’t welcome on anyway. His post-vaccination lifespan was
estimated at just over thirty-five hundred years, but he just couldn’t see
himself ever returning to Earth.

 He felt a tingle in his right hand and looked down at
his palm. The message, spelled out by fluorescent compounds in his skin,
suggested a get-together at a popular eating establishment in the mid levels.
He made a fist, clearing the message, and looked for the target that it was
meant to indicate.

The messages were displayed on the recipient’s palm by a
sophisticated network of transmitters that could locate the customer and
fluoresce text or green-shade images by creating highly-focused interference
patterns in the skin. It was an efficient way to communicate, but  it
wasn’t secure. A bank of computers in the central core constantly monitored all
message traffic, looking for flagged content – words such as bomb, kill,
uprising or even worse – union.

You certainly couldn’t use it to say ‘The guy we’re planning
to kill is about to walk past you – one level down…’, but you could send an
innocuous dinner invitation, listing a restaurant that was fifty-one floors
above the subject’s current level. Callum had picked an odd number, knowing
that the tracking software would correlate suspicious activity with any message
traffic that matched the floor as well as any even offsets, such as ten floors
up or down.

The real art, of course, was in killing the subject without
arousing any suspicion.

Callum leaned on the slick graphene railing and looked down
to the steady flow of pedestrians, barely visible through the mist, on the wide
pedway one level down and fifty meters away. The target was across the atrium
from his position. The languid traffic flow was in contrast to the hurried
crowds an hour earlier, rushing to start the night shift.

These pedestrians were fresh from their post-shift showers,
some already half drunk from whatever pick-me-up they kept in their lockers,
and they were walking off the stresses of collecting manganese nodules from the
ocean floor with nothing but a centuries-old shield-suit to hold back the
crushing deep. Over the next hour, they would drift in and out of the shops and
alehouses until exhaustion forced them to their cramped quarters or, for the
NRW’s, to some quiet corner of the city.

Callum had no trouble spotting D’Nei. He was a Tauhentan (a
real one) who had been an NRW since coming here as a child with his father.
He’d constantly gotten the short end of every stick in the universe and Cal
usually found such subjects eager to join in the struggle against oppression.
Still, every now and then they internalized the wrong message from their
induction.

For D’Nei, it wasn’t about the struggle; it was about
him
.
He’d taken on an air of self-importance since joining one of Cal’s insurgent
cells and he was drawing too much attention. He’d even begun flapping his gums
about the organization. A casino manager who was into him for eighty thousand
credits had sent his goons to give D’Nei a friendly thumping and he had somehow
gotten the idea that Cal would make good on the debt.

The damage had been contained and the casino was now a regular,
if somewhat reluctant, ‘contributor’ to the cause, but Cal couldn’t afford to
let a walking risk vector like D’Nei continue breathing. He had to be stopped.

Cal realized with a flush of pride that he couldn’t make the
operator from cell thirteen who’d been tasked for the op.  There wasn’t
the slightest sign that D’Nei was being tailed and Cal wondered, with a sudden
flash of concern, whether the man had lost his target. D’Nei was almost to the
cab stand. If it was going to happen, it would be in the next ten seconds. He
felt the surge of adrenaline and fought to control his physical behavior. If a
passerby noticed his agitation only seconds before D’Nei was shoved over the
railing-free edge of the cab stand, they might make the connection.

D’Nei was halfway past the ten-meter cab stand. A group of
company magisters was approaching from the opposite direction and Cal felt the
urge to curse but stifled it. It was too risky. There were five of the lawmen
and they raised the risk to unacceptable levels. They would have to set up for
tomorrow and let D’Nei have one more night to damage the cause.

Cal was just about to turn away when he saw a disturbance
among the company enforcers. One magister had been knocked to the floor and
almost rolled over the glowing red strip marking the edge of the stand. He’d
been stopped by one of his quicker comrades who held him, legs dangling, over
the sixty-meter drop of the central atrium, the red-hazed mist roiling around
his head.

A brief moment of exertion and he was safe again, sitting on
the floor in the grip of an adrenaline rush. One of his fellow officials
dragged the cause of the accident into the clear space left by the watching
crowd, throwing him down in front of the shuddering judge.

It was D’Nei.

Cal forced an expression of mild interest to hide the smile
in his head. His operator had obviously absorbed every detail of his briefing.
D’Nei had more than ninety demerits on his account.

They had learned of his predicament when he’d reached
seventy-five. At fifty demerits, you’re deemed too stupid to operate a
passenger vehicle and your license is revoked. At seventy-five you’re denied
the privilege of reproduction and an implant is hidden somewhere on your body
to render you sterile. With limited space and resources, the administrators
didn’t want the city filling up with criminals or idiots.

D’Nei had been spotted coming out of the clinic and Cal had
learned of it within the hour. Through a ‘friend’ in the records department,
they had watched with growing concern as the number of his demerits continued
to grow. He’d accumulated the vast majority of points since his induction to
the movement, pushing ever closer to that fateful hundred.

If you accumulated a hundred demerits, you just didn’t
belong in Tsekoh. The cost to leave was beyond most citizens. There was only
one way out – up the orbital tether through a shielded corridor protecting
passengers from the immense pressure of the ocean as well as the poisonous
gasses of the planetary atmosphere. The price per kilogram of an elevator ride
up the carbon tether was usually only achievable after years of saving.

And there was no way the administration was going to pay to
ship malcontents off world…

The magister climbed back to his feet and pulled out his
handheld. One of his colleagues reached down, grabbing the grovelling D’Nei’s
hand and held it, palm up, for identification.

D’Nei’s hand fluoresced his identity code and the aggrieved
magister scanned it, grinning as his readout flashed red. Assault carried a
range of five to thirty demerits and, when the accused had almost killed a
company magister in the process, the maximum was considered justifiable. The
magisters edged D’Nei over to the glowing red warning line, one of them waving
off an approaching cab – directing it to drop its passengers at the next level
up.

A registered citizen who accumulated a hundred demerits
would still serve the city – as an organ bank. They were far less likely to be
addicted to narcotics and their organs were usually all claimed within the
first week. It at least gave them a chance to put their affairs in order.

If you were an NRW, the risk of contamination was deemed too
high. Far better to simply get rid of them, but there was still that nagging
problem concerning the cost of deportation. Well, they
were
criminals,
after all.

Ignoring D’Nei’s frantic pleas, the officer he’d hit raised
his unit and pulled the trigger. The energy burst began at center of mass,
blasting D’Nei’s tissues outward in a spray of flesh and fluid, vaporizing every
last bit of him within a one meter radius. He was now one with the mist. It was
clean, efficient and absolutely terrifying to watch.

Though Cal was disgusted by this demonstration of law
enforcement, he was still able to appreciate how well the operative from cell
thirteen had performed. He’d spotted the magisters but, instead of simply
aborting, he’d used his knowledge of the target to engineer his death at the
hands of the administration.

The operator would certainly bear watching, but in a much
more positive connotation than D’Nei.