Onekka - The Tragedy of Jaqui Fennet (4 page)

She punctured the seal, and squeezed some dark ooze onto her fingers.

The whole of
Onekka was deathly quiet. Home hour was done, evening refs had passed, and
darkness had swept through the corridors. The residents called this the
Witching Hour. It was the gap between the lights being turned off, and the
disabling of other station systems. During the middle of the night, Onekka
drifted without ai gravity, climate control, or internal hydraulic power.
Energy was at a premium, and to keep these services active at night in any but
the residential sleeping zones was seen as a waste. Witching Hour was a safety
margin, giving late revellers a last chance to get to their bunks, and it was
Jaq's only shot at completing her self-appointed mission.
She slunk along the corridors like a panther through shadow. In the half-light
generated by partially active vid screens and system diagnostic LEDs, the faux
office building became a bizarre environment. Sharp edges sluiced across her
vision, strange shapes that looked like a stained glass windows, but stained only
in shades of smoke. Screens which usually displayed space extensions and
supposedly transparent balconies made no visual sense when they lacked power.
Jaq felt like she was trapped in an expressionist art installation, or a
painting of symmetrical nightmares become real.
Her face and hands were entirely black - the oil had done its job. Combined
with her utterly opaque black cat-suit and ultra-soft plimsolls, it made her
invisible as well as silent. With luck, even the continuously operating
security grid would not properly register her. That was the bit Jaq didn't like
so much - the luck factor - but sometimes there's no choice.
Heading across the arboretum at least gave her reprieve from the forest of
clean-cut angles. Amongst the swaying trees and rustling bushes, she felt a
sense of calm. There was no animosity in the plants, and no duality of
intention. No honeysuckle bush ever lied about its intention to dominate - it
just did so, and left it up to the plants around it to try and stop it. If only
people were so easily figured out.
Garret had been a good boss, these last few years. He was always attentive,
rarely angry beyond the point of occasional sarcasm, and openly approachable.
It's
just a shame he wasn't even approaching open.
As a man, he'd never hit on
her, though his gaze lingered on her breasts and posterior occasionally. She'd
wondered more than once if he'd make a better lover than the forceful, forward
guys she inevitably ended up with. Perhaps he would, but she'd always known
he'd come with a large side order of commitment, and that left a very bitter
tang in her mouth.
To discover his involvement in dealings that were definitely shady, and
possibly downright illegal, was almost offensive to Jaq. So much for her
character assessment!
She crept into the glass lift and whispered, "Admin one," into the
control console. As the doors closed and she flew upward, Jaq pressed herself
into the rear corner, hoping it was the least visible position. To anyone
watching the lift, it would look like a maintenance sweep - a regular elevator
run to ensure oil and cable was evenly utilised.
She rose over the shadow city like an angel of night, or so her imagination
told her. The adrenalin was pumping through her, and she was aware of it just
enough to know the strange thoughts were a side effect. With Onekka laid out,
silent and sinister, below, Jaq marvelled all over again at the station's
technical achievements. She was a firm believer that people were just another
species, as motes of dust to the power of nature, but sights such as this
reminded her of the grandeur that human endeavour could touch.
She was nearly at her floor.
Time to find out if I can rely on Helen.
As
the elevator swooped silently to a halt, she stood in the middle and faced the
camera. Helen had agreed to delay removing Jaq from the security system,
knowing that Garret would defer the task to her. The only problem would be if
DePennier took care of the task himself.
Standing there in the black nothing, forcing her eyes to stay open against the
urge to squeeze them shut, Jaq began to wonder. A bead of sweat trickled down
her nose and the need to scratch was gigantic. Instead, she pressed her fists
into tiny balls and focused her mind on the pain her nails inflicted. As the
agonising wait continued, the silence seemed to fill with ghostly echoes.
Was that a clarion, far below - had she been found out? Jaq had just convinced
herself she could hear running feet converging on her position when a tiny
green light winked into existence before her. Through the sigh of relief and
the accustomed dark, it was powerfully intense.
Finally, the office doors slid open and she slunk forward, as silent as she
could manage. It may have only been moments she'd stood in that elevator but it
felt like a week had passed. She didn't have much time to work - if she wasn't
out of the office by the end of Witching Hour, she'd be floating down the
maintenance stairs in the deadly cold of space.
First stop was the boardroom where they'd met with Armcorp. It seemed like a
decade ago to Jaq that she'd unwittingly made the faux pas that so drastically
changed her life on Onekka. This was the only room large enough to accommodate
the full delegation, so this would be where any future meetings occurred while
she was safely hidden away on her audit. The first strange thing was that the
door was locked. Caught momentarily off guard, it took Jaq a moment to realise
she still had access rights to the boardroom. Slipping her hand across the
access panel, she unlocked and opened the door. In three years of that job, Jaq
had never needed to unlock the boardroom.
In the near blackness, the chair backs were like soldiers, standing in
formation around a fallen foe. The second strange thing hit her - a faint
odour, like burnt candy on the breeze, as though someone had over-toasted a
marshmallow at a campfire.
Jaq shook her head to dispel the fanciful thoughts and flicked on her portable
light. Nothing seemed amiss. Table, chairs, vid comm screen, automated refs bar
- all were present and correct. She did a slow lap of the room, shining her
light beneath the furniture and behind panels. Nothing different.
So why
lock it?
It was then that something gruesome occurred to her. Bile rising as fear
clutched at her stomach, Jaq switched her light to ultra violet. She almost
dropped the light, and suppressed a gasp.
There were blood stains everywhere. Pools had flooded the floor and chair
seats, arcs had splashed across the table, and spatters formed a layout like
stars on the ceiling. They glowed with ghostly light, pale stains of humanity
against the dark. Worst of all, great round impact patterns adorned the walls.
As clean as the placed looked now, this had been a hideous mess not long ago.
That explained the smell - somebody had used a heat cleaner in here, and the
remaining residue was toasted.
The fact that all the surfaces were intact told Jaq what type of weaponry had
been used. Air cannons, often deployed for riot pacification, fired boles of
compacted air that burst explosively when they met a surface. Usually, they
were enough to knock people over, perhaps cause concussion or unconsciousness.
Turn them up high enough, though, and you could... well, she was looking at the
result. In a sound-suppressed boardroom, not a peep would have escaped to those
out in the office. The walls were vid screens, and could show anything they
were told to. Yes, air cannons were the perfect weapon for this and, worst of
all, Jaq knew Onekka held several of them against a breakdown in public order.
When the whole station relied on hull integrity, such weapons were the only
choice.
Jaq forced herself to pause in her thinking for a moment and breathe. What was
she looking at here - had the Armcorp staff really been massacred in the
familiar board room of her office?
Two weeks ago I was serving purple cup
cakes to school children in here, and helping them pour tea for their teddy
bears.
It all just seemed a little nuts.
A sound made panic jump in her heart. Suppressing a hiss of surprise, she switched
off the light and crouched behind the table. No sounds should intrude through
the audio dampening, which meant the door was the only thing that could have
caused it. Was there someone else here? The UV light should not have been
obvious and the door would have returned to its locked status when it closed,
in the absence of a different setting. Even if there was another person out
there - a security guard or particularly dedicated employee - Jaq may not have
been exposed.
For what seemed like an hour, she squatted motionless, barely daring to
breathe. The very air throbbed, thick silence threatening to deafen. No further
sound came, but Jaq was coming to understand how vulnerable she was here. If
she got caught now, losing her job would be the best thing that happened to her
in the next year.
After a few more minutes with her ear pressed up to the door, she risked
peeking out - empty. A glance at her comm unit told her Witching Hour was more
than half gone, and a sensible person would hightail it back to their bunk. She
actually got to the elevator doors before stopping herself. After what she
found in the boardroom, it was more important than ever that she discovered
what was going on. What she had was half a story and a great big heap of
suspicion. What she needed was through that door, and access to it meant
Garret's office.
Excitement rifling through her lungs while nerves laid mines in her gut, Jaq
left the elevator and headed for her goal. It boiled down to one's purpose, she
thought. Without even her day job for distraction, this seemed like the right
thing to be doing. Her dreams goaded her like dimly recognised ambitions,
beckoning her forward with a sense of need.
Is this my destiny - knocking
around in the dark, trying to uncover half-understood secrets?
As with the boardroom, her hand opened Garret's office door. When it clicked
shut behind her, she was in a world of thick silence. Where would he keep his
key? Jaq sneaked to the back of his desk, intending to check for any drawers.
When she crouched next to his chair, a sound intruded from the direction of the
door. She wasn't alone!
Before she had time to react, the world burgeoned into a blinding morass of
pain and light. Jaq toppled back, bashing her coccyx on the floor and yelping
in pain.
"You just couldn't leave it alone could you?" roared a voice. It took
her a moment to realise it was Dane Garret speaking - she'd never heard him so
angry. As her vision cleared, his face came into view, incandescent with rage
as he took his finger from the light switch. "You stupid bitch! I was
trying to protect you. DePennier wanted you out the way - permanently. I
convinced him to just move you, but you've blown that now."
Anger rose in Jaq's breast at his tone; partly, she thought, because common
sense said he was right. Suspicious or not, she hadn't been screwed over. She
could have walked away and been no worse off - after all, was anything going to
be worse than working on Onekka?
Oh yes, there is something much worse, but
it isn't a rational thought, is it?
"Fuck you, Dane!" she spat. "What happened to the Armcorp guys?
You're riding me for wanting the truth when someone's committed mass
murder!"
He rolled up his sleeves. "You have no idea what you're messing with,
Fennet. You should have just taken your medicine and slunk off to your next
posting. Now I can't give you that option." She squinted at his face,
astonished to see a tear tracking its path down his cheek. "DePennier gave
me no choice, Jaq."
He strode towards her from the doorway, slipping something foot-long and
cylindrical from a belt loop. Was that ... it was a night stick! Jaq had only
seen them on the private security officers before, and never been on the
receiving end. Despite looking like a simple baton, the stick caused instant numbness
wherever it struck. It was designed to pacify by paralysing the limbs of
aggressors but, like the non lethal air cannon, could be applied inventively. A
solid strike to the back of the neck would cause instant death.
Jaq scrambled back, trying to reconcile her established image of Garret -
awkward, shy and hesitant - with the man approaching her, violence shining in
his eyes. As he turned the edge of his desk, she threw herself across it,
sliding on one hip and an outstretched hand, and made for the door. She jammed
her hand onto the release, but nothing happened. Panic grasped at her then, and
Jaq found herself yanking impotently at the door handle.
Pull yourself
together, woman!
She found calm, and ran her hand up the door edge, seeking
a secondary lock.
"I bolted it," said Garret's voice in her ear, and suddenly she was
falling. Pain bit at her lower back as her legs folded beneath her - the
bastard had numbed her spine!
"Dane, there has to be another way!" she shouted from the floor.
"You don't have to do this."
He lifted one leg across her to stand astride her prostrate form, positioning
himself over her chest. "Actually, yes I do." He brandished the night
stick, holding it over his head for a good swing. Jaq wondered briefly if he'd
chicken out and not finish her, but the tick in his eye was dancing with
stress. He really would kill her, she realized. "I'm sorry, Fennet."
I'm sorry, too, but if I have to fight, I may as well fight dirty.
She
slammed her portable lamp into his unprotected genitals. He clamped one hand to
his groin and slumped forward with a shocked groan, but didn't drop the night
stick. Jaq, still paralysed from the waist down, used her empty hand to shove
him backwards. As he fell, the stick swung round and connected to her forearm,
which promptly went dead.
He was down, momentarily incapacitated, but Jaq was reduced to a single working
limb and a two hour wait before her others returned to working order. Seeing no
other choice, she smashed the weight of the lamp into the hand held
protectively against his privates. A wet crack sounded and he shrieked, pulling
the broken hand into his chest. Jaw set in determination, Jaq hit him thrice
more where it hurt, as hard as she could manage. Then she dragged herself atop
his writhing form.