Dreamlands (12 page)

Romejinoff spent a lot of time with Wolf, mostly telling him about how much of a scum Fairinox was to her. I wasn’t surprised that that the ice bitch latched on to Wolf like a lamprey as the days went on.

She wanted him, and she distracted him from what was happening, but I still didn’t like it. There were also hot and cold Trustees running through the place, so we all had to keep our noses clean. Some I didn’t mind, like the sweet little old lady called Elizabeth Peabody-Stewart Adams, who even I knew it would be bad to mouth off to, even if she looked like a nice grandma. Others, mostly Erik Collins, were assholes and got on my nerves, so I tried to avoid them. Most of the Trustees thought they were something special because they believed they ran the place. I’d like to see how they acted with a Hákarl chasing them for lunch.

“Collins is harassing Anya,” Wolf said one morning. Boylston Street had been buzzing like a beehive for a little more than a week.

Most of it was bullshit, like they were going to shut this place down or that we were all going to get shipped out to different branches of the Trust because we let Heiseg pull the crap he did. “Fairinox’s doing the same thing.”

I just shrugged, and he got pissed. “Mason―”

“Her rep’s bitin’ her on the ass,” I said bluntly. “Both of them think that she’ll fuck ’em. I don’t know if she will and don’t care.

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Romejinoff’s got the rep of being a piece of easy tail. She should have someone like McGann move in with her if she’s worried.” Wolf frowned.

“I don’t like her. I really don’t like that she screwed you over and that you’re opening yourself up to having it happen again,” I said. “Just don’t have her move in with you. You can’t afford to have another bed burning at your place.”

“I don’t think―” he started,

“She will, because she was like this before you hooked up, and you aren’t going to be able to change her.” Wolf frowned some more as Murphy walked into the room, cutting off my explanation that Romejinoff had been a whore for a while and not the kind with a heart of gold. “Fairinox wants to talk to you both about Inuzaka.”

Murphy sounded confused, and I didn’t blame him. He wasn’t calling Keno a “gook” any more, which was a good thing. If he did, Wolf was going to have to pull me off the man, if he didn’t beat me to killing him. I missed the kid, not that he’d talked to me much. But Keno had gotten used to me, and I viewed it like I was dealing with one of the feral cats in my neighborhood. Just feed him and don’t crowd him, and he’d eventually trust you. We’d gotten to the trust part, because he knew I wasn’t after his ass and had given him some protection, as well as fed him. Then he’d gotten pretty all of a sudden, and Murphy and McGann had declared him open season.

“Where’s the fu―”

“Mason!” Wolf exclaimed.

“Server room,” Murphy said. “Talk to the man. Nicely. Or else―”

“We will be in deep shit,” I said tiredly. “And you will terminate my ass.”

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Termination wasn’t being fired; it was being dumped in a field with a bullet in your brain, mutilated enough that you couldn’t be ID’d.

It rarely happened, because a TC usually went bugfuck insane or got eaten before they got into that much trouble with the big bosses.

Murphy opened his mouth to say something else, but I talked over him. “Doesn’t fucking matter. I stopped thinking that we were the good guys after Keno.”

“The day Mason behaves with the authorities, I’m taking him to the infirmary to see if he’s sick,” Wolf said. “We’ll talk to the man, but it isn’t like we can tell him a lot. You sent us off site for three months before this happened.”

Wolf sounded pissed, and I didn’t blame him. He hadn’t wanted Keno to be alone at Christmas, and he had been. All because he had told McGann that Keno should be treated with respect. I’d been a little more blunt. I’d asked Murphy when Keno had become part of the company benefits. The man had had a screaming fit after that comment, and I was on the road with Wolf as soon as he’d calmed down enough to give us our orders.

“Just talk to the man,” Murphy snarled. “And remember that the Trustees want him here.”

I shrugged, and Wolf hustled me out the door before I could piss Murphy off some more. We were quiet for the elevator ride down.

There really wasn’t much to say, and I didn’t want anything caught on tape that could be used against either of us.

Fairinox was looking at the scratches on the doors to the server room when we got down there. They hadn’t been there before that night. “What took you so long?” he asked sharply.

I winced. He sounded like a pissed-off hooker. His voice was high enough to be a woman’s too, and I wondered if he was missing a few more things besides his brains and morals.

“The fucking elevator’s slower than shit,” I said. “What do you want?”

“What do you know about Keno Inuzaka?” Fairinox demanded.

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“We treated him like shit,” I said.

Wolf winced. I know that we had this good guy/bad guy act going, where I was the bad one, but he didn’t think I should be pushing things like this. Murphy’s threat of being terminated was a serious one, because who’d miss us? I was a foster kid and had been in prison. Most of the other guys were like that, off the radar from their families and the government. No one would miss us. And even Wolf had figured out I wasn’t Murphy’s favorite person.

“Besides that,” he barked.

“He was a programmer, and we couldn’t figure out how he got into the servers,” Wolf said, trying to save my ass, as usual. “Once we had him on site, he was productive, working on any project he was thrown. Genius really, just not too good with people.”

“Kid was scared shitless most of the time,” I added.

“What about his family?”

I shrugged, and Wolf looked confused. “Most of that shit, you’d have to talk to the suits for,” I said. “He didn’t talk about them. He didn’t say much about anything to anyone.”

“He was from the Kanto area, some city just outside Tokyo,” Wolf said after thinking for a second. “That was all I knew. Even with me, he didn’t say much.”

Fairinox jumped on that. “You? Were you good friends?” Wolf glared. “The kid wasn’t friends with anyone, not like that. If he was….”

“So he was still a virgin?” Fairinox demanded.

Wolf looked uncomfortable. I was just getting pissed off.

“According to the reports, he got raped by Heiseg that night. I don’t know if it was the first time or not.”

Wolf snarled. “Mason―”

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“Shit, it isn’t like it’s a secret, unless that was dropped from the report. Heiseg raped anything that didn’t move fast enough that night.

Probably was dropped because people never want to find out that dirty bit of news.”

“What about the incident in November?” Fairinox asked, voice still strident.

I shrugged. I had been out on assignment that night, so I came in on the tail end of the mess. But Heiseg had been bothering Keno enough that I figured he wanted a bit more than help with his spreadsheet if he was bugging Keno at that time of the night.

Wolf looked angry. “Heiseg tried to drag Keno off to fix something. He told him no, and Heiseg hit him. I had walked in on it, because I wanted to check how he was doing since he had been looking sick earlier. Keno was shaking, and he looked exhausted. Heiseg still got him to work on his problem. Keno looked like he had the flu, but it didn’t stop him from working. He never saw the doctor about it, either.

He was too scared to, I think.”

“And then what happened?”

“I reported it, and Heiseg reported it too. Me and Mason were shipped off site until the night of the incident after that report, because… because I told Ms. McGann that Keno should be treated with more care than he had been from us,” Wolf said. “I wasn’t hearing about anything after we were off site, but―”

“The kid was doing okay, staying in the server room more than anyplace else, according to what I heard,” I said. “But it was a rough three months for him. Murphy had declared him open season, according to the reports I got, since we were off site so long before Heiseg went nuts.”

“So that wasn’t it?” Fairinox muttered, sort of talking to himself.

“Why did that woman take him? Why not one of the others? Why not more of the survivors?”

“Well, shit, why did that asshole do it?” I asked.

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Fairinox looked at me funny, and I wanted to haul off and hit him one. But I wasn’t that much of a dumb fuck. “You know how fucking crazy you have to be to think that something like that is going to work?” I asked.

“Mason!” Wolf groaned. I thought that he was having visions of being the one who had to shoot me. I could have told him that neither McGann nor Murphy would make him do it. They liked him a lot better than they did me, so they’d never give him the termination order. Wolf would hear about what happened from someone else after a few days worrying about me.

“Heiseg’s notes show that the man was having some issues,” Fairinox said snidely. “But he was hiding it well from his co-workers and his girlfriend. Now yours, it seems.” I moved to block Wolf from hitting him. Romejinoff was getting to be a sore spot. I was going to ask McGann how fast she could have her ass shipped out to Alaska or maybe someplace even further. The moon was looking good to me right now.

“Ms. Romejinoff and I have known each other for a while,” Wolf said stiffly.

“Getting back to Keno,” I said. I really didn’t want to hear about the shit Fairinox was dealing. I wasn’t happy about Romejinoff either, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “We don’t know why that chick wanted him.”

“According to the survivors’ reports,’ Fairinox said, “The woman was dressed in an old-fashioned Japanese outfit. What do you know about that?”

I shrugged. “Not something that I give a flying fuck about.”

“That isn’t something that either one of us really knows about,” Wolf said, glaring at me for being so uncooperative. “What about the experts?”

Fairinox sniffed. “They can’t tell me anything. I don’t know why you think―”

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“And two grunts are going to pull the answer out of our ass for you?” I asked.

He looked pissed, but I thought he liked it too. The guy was an asshole, but he wasn’t being a snob. I knew that most of the “experts” the Trust had wouldn’t have liked my attitude either. This guy liked the fact I wasn’t kissing his ass, even if it was annoying. But I knew that bowing down to the guy would just make things worse.

“I like you, Mr. Kairns,” Fairinox said, grinning nastily. “And I am really going to enjoy sending you through that gate.” IT was about a week later that we were pulled into a briefing. It wasn’t one that had been on the schedule, but I wasn’t surprised to see Fairinox in the front of the room with Collins. Fairinox was looking smug, and Collins had a wad of papers in his left hand. The place was crowded with TCs, as well as some of the experts on staff.

Wolf and I looked at each other, and I knew from the sinking feeling in my stomach that we were screwed. We grabbed some seats, and I settled down to see the show, trying to enjoy it even though I knew I was going to get fucked over by whatever happened here.

I was surprised to see McGann was here, as well as Romejinoff.

One or two of the language guys too, plus other types of eggheads. The rest were TCs, about a dozen from a couple of different teams, but not from mine or Wolf’s. We usually worked with the same set of guys, because knowing the people at your back usually kept you from becoming monster munch. Mrs. Adams―who had bigger balls than Collins, I’d found out during the last couple of weeks―was here too.

I’d seen her stop some of the shit Collins and a couple of the Trustees were handing out. I’d wanted to hug her after she was through. The room settled down when Fairinox went to the front.

“As you all know,” he started, “a few of weeks ago there was a breach in this facility. We have found a way to find out who attacked us and attack them, destroying them.”

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I bit my tongue to stop myself from pointing out that Heiseg was the nut who attacked us. But I guess that wasn’t too popular an idea right now. I looked at Wolf and saw the same pissed off confusion I was feeling in his eyes. This was going to be a bullshit mission, just like the one that made us drag Keno into this life. Unfortunately, the rest of them were eating this all up.

“We will be able to open a gate at 0700 tomorrow,” Fairinox announced, “just outside the server room. We will be sending through a heavily armed strike team, which includes a couple of translators and scientists. While the territory can be considered hostile, we may be able to find allies there.”

Collins stepped up. “I just want to tell you how proud I am to be part of this. We are finally able to take our fight back to the source.” Now Wolf was looking like he was eating up this bullshit, even though he
knew
it was bullshit, along with a lot of the others. All of the ones who were ex-military were buying this line of crap. I was never in the military, so I saw it for the crap it was. Mrs. Adams did too, from the look on her face. She looked like she wanted to kick Collins’s ass. I guess that not all the Trustees thought this was a good idea. Made me like the woman a lot more.

Collins droned on for a few more minutes, hitting all the high points, before naming the lucky group that was going to be dragged into this. I wasn’t surprised to hear Romejinoff was on this mess, because she hadn’t given him any incentive not to give her this shit.

But I also thought Collins was a big enough asshole that even if she had given it up for him, he would have sent her on this trip anyways. I wondered if that’s why she hadn’t put out, because she had figured it out too.

McGann probably was the same story; she was being sent because she wouldn’t bend over for the man. I would have thought that he would have sent one of the less sane ’paths on this mess. Murphy was in charge, and he looked fucking
thrilled
about it. I guess he didn’t like the fact that he was going out in the field after being at a desk for the last ten years. Wolf and I were the first TCs named to go, and there was a bunch of other ones. At least none of the Trustees were going along.