Only Superhuman (25 page)

She looked at his avatar in gratitude, her eyes glistening. “Thank you, Zephy. So I guess we’re in agreement.”

“I guess so.”

She came over to the wall display and kissed his avatar on the cheek. “See you in a few weeks, honey. Hopefully with good news.”

He gave her a smile in return, pitching his voice soothingly. “Whatever the news, my friend, we’ll face it together.”

October 2107

Psyche herself escorted Emry on the mission, while Eliot Thorne took over managing the final days of the conference. The women left on a small, private ship, following the normal travel routes between Bolasats to remain inconspicuous—meaning they were in for a good ten days of travel, according to Psyche. Emry regretfully declined Psyche’s offer to pass the time with sex, wishing to keep her head clear until she was sure she could trust the woman.

Psyche would tell Emry little of what she was going to see, except for the ominous hint that it had something to do with Rafael Mkunu’s recent decision to step down from his dictatorship of the Zenj habitat—an act apparently motivated by grief at the loss of his only son.

But their destination turned out to be a small, dormant Outer Belt comet currently some twenty million kilometers from Zenj. It had a small mining outpost on it, nothing more than an inflatable dome attached to its side. They went incognito, with Emry donning a dark brown wig and blue contacts while Psyche dyed her hair and eyebrows jet black, donned brown contacts, and hid her butterfly tattoos with makeup. They wore loose outfits to conceal their attention-grabbing figures, plus Emry’s equipment belt, which Psyche had insisted she bring along. They completed their disguises by donning wide-brimmed hats with gauzy veils, a fashion that helped defend against the dust in places like this. Psyche wore her hair in a surprisingly compact bun beneath her hat.

It was a small outpost, so they spotted their quarry fairly quickly. “Aaron Donner? Blitz?” Emry asked when Psyche pointed him out, a lanky, spiky-haired blond man coasting recklessly along in the microgravity of the main concourse, typically unconcerned for the people who had to scramble out of his way. “Psyche, the guy isn’t even a Troubleshooter! Not a real one. The Corps wouldn’t even let that punker in the door.”

Psyche studied her, reacting to the contempt in her voice. “Your dislike sounds personal.”

“He used to be in a gang, butted heads with the Freakshow a couple times. Even then he was a creep. Now he goes around pretending to be a crimefighter, but it’s just a game for him. Something he does for the thrill, the power—the money. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt along the way.” Donner had adopted a persona fitting his thunderous surname, getting bionic and electric-eel mods that made him a walking joy buzzer, able to shock people on contact with anything up to instantly lethal intensity. He supplemented it with shockdart throwers and UV-laser lightning guns. Such weapons were nominally nonlethal, but not always, and Donner used them frequently and casually. “Plus he isn’t above taking graft or skimming off part of a bad guy’s stash when he ‘rescues’ it. He’s a sadistic merc pretending to be a hero.”

“Oh, I know all about him,” Psyche said. “I got acquainted with him a few weeks ago, in a different disguise than this. You’re right, he’s a creep. But a vain one, and it was easy enough to buy him a few drinks, say the right things, and get him to boast about this whole thing just to impress me.”

“What whole thing?”

“You’ll see—assuming you can slip some bugs onto him without him noticing.”

Emry scoffed. “Easy as pickin’ a pocket. Easier.”

“Show me,” Psyche replied with a challenging smile.

The only tricky part was getting close to Blitz without risking recognition. Once she’d successfully sprayed him with a sensory smart dust, it was simply a matter of staying in range so she could ping the passive nanosensors with an RF beam to read their contents. Emry understood now why Psyche had let her bring her own equipment; she wanted Emry to trust that what she saw and heard was not faked.

They followed Blitz into a tapped-out ice pocket, now a yawning cavern within the comet’s loosely packed body, and lost the signal a couple of times along the way. When they found it again, the crude image from the nanosensors, fractally enhanced but still low-res, showed an adolescent, African-featured boy bound to the wall, with Blitz’s hands on the sides of his head, electrocuting him. Emry swallowed, and made an educated guess. “Mkunu’s son?”

“Joseph. Right.”

The boy’s screams came through the low-fidelity audio feed as Blitz shocked him once again. “He’s torturing the kid! We gotta save him!”

Psyche stopped her. “It’s already in hand. Just wait.”

“Wait?! I can’t just sit by and let someone get tortured!”

“I hate it too, but it’s the only way. I promise, it won’t be long.”

Indeed, it was only a few minutes before Blitz stopped … though Emry imagined it must have felt like an eternity to Joseph Mkunu.
“Well, I’d love to stay and continue our game,”
Blitz told his victim,
“but I’ve got an appointment. At least, I’d better—I’m still owed half my payment for this gig. Hope I get it, kid—or I’ll be in a rotten mood when I get back.”
Giving the boy one more shock, he left the cavern, forcing Emry and Psyche to retreat out of the shaft.

Emry wanted to go back in and free the boy, but again Psyche stopped her. “He’ll be free inside an hour. Follow Donner and you’ll see why.”

They followed Blitz toward his rendezvous, but Psyche wouldn’t let Emry ping his nanobugs during the meeting itself. “The person he’s meeting with has very good equipment.”

“Troubleshooter good?” Emry said skeptically … but regretted those words when she saw the confirmation on Psyche’s face.

Once Blitz left his meeting, Emry pinged him again, downloading the saved data from the smart dust. As she watched the playback, her worst fears were confirmed. Though the image was crude, she still recognized the face and voice of Elise Pasteris—Tin Lizzy, her fellow Troubleshooter.
“The boy’s alive?”
Elise asked.

“Hey, I’m one of the good guys, remember? I took care of him. He’s freshly singed around the edges, but he’ll recover.”

“You’ve continued torturing him?”
Elise asked in outrage.
“Mkunu buckled over a week ago!”

“And if I’d stopped then, it would’ve given away the game if the kid told anyone. I had to play it out. Like I said, he’ll be fine.”

Emry couldn’t clearly see Elise’s face, but she could imagine its expression.
“Physically, maybe. Nobody’s ever ‘fine’ after something like this.”

“Tell that to Mkunu’s victims.”
But Donner’s tone was cavalier. He was more concerned with getting paid.

Elise handed Donner a pouch that he opened and peered into.
“The best Vestan jade,”
she assured him. Donner seemed to accept her assessment and gave Elise the boy’s location. To her credit, Tin Lizzy sped off as soon as she had the information.

“Tonight the news will be filled with the story of how the heroic Troubleshooters found Joseph Mkunu alive after all,” Psyche said, “abducted by enemies who tortured him for information.”

“But really,” Emry answered quietly, “Blitz took him, tortured him, to blackmail Mkunu into stepping down. Into allowing the elections—which the reformist party would probably win.”

“A party that’s backed by Ceres,” Psyche affirmed. “They kept him a while longer so the connection wouldn’t be obvious. Now, as per the terms of Joseph’s release, Mkunu will express his profound gratitude toward the TSC and endorse its proposal to monitor the elections on Zenj.”

“And with his endorsement, the faction that’s still loyal to him won’t be able to keep painting the Troubleshooters as opposition puppets. Won’t block them or fight them when they come in.”

“So the TSC and Ceres get their way without violence—except for one fifteen-year-old boy being tortured for three weeks. And since Blitz is a mercenary, disapproved of by the Troubleshooters, the Corps has plausible deniability even if Joseph can identify him.”

*   *   *

As they monitored from their ship the following day, en route to its next destination, Rafael Mkunu came before the cameras and acted out the precise scenario Psyche had described. But Emry still resisted Psyche’s allegations. “It could just be Lizzy and Blitz working together,” she insisted. But even as she said it, it rang hollow. Elise may have been aggressive in her approach to Troubleshooting, but given her history, she wasn’t the type to concoct a plan involving the torture of a teenaged boy.

“I’m afraid you’ll soon see it’s bigger than that,” Psyche said.

Emry sensed her agitation. “You think we might not get there in time for—whatever?”

“The time and date of the event are set. But we’re going to be cutting it pretty close if we want to stop it. Orbital mechanics says we’ll reach Gagaringrad with hours to spare, but if there are delays in the spaceport or after…”

“This ‘event’ … what are we talking about? If it’s so important we stop it, then I need to be prepared.”

Psyche sighed. “You won’t like it.”

“I don’t like a lot of things lately!”

“It’s … an assassination.”

Emry stared. “You put an
assassination
off till
second?
!”

“It was the only way to work out the timing, to show you how far this reaches.”

But the implication had sunk in now. “No. Wait. You’re not saying this is something the T-shooters are preventing, are you?”

“No.”

“No. No, Psyche. The TSC would never do that!”

After a moment, Psyche said, “The Gagaringrad mafia and the Yohannes family have negotiated a truce. Yes?” Emry nodded. Since the TSC had driven the Yohannes mob from Vesta, it had been trying to move in on Eunomia, clashing with the G-grad mob for control. “I’m sure you’ve been briefed. Their plans are ambitious. Drugs, gunrunning, backing military coups with their mod enforcers … a partnership between them would be a serious threat to Belt security, and to Ceres’s Eunomian interests.”

Emry saw where she was going. “You’re talking about sabotaging the truce. Staging a hit on one side, blaming the other.”

“Right. Malik Yohannes is coming to Gagaringrad for a celebration of the alliance, a show of friendship. If he’s assassinated there—”

“His mob will blame the G-grad mob. Instant gang war.” Emry shook her head. “No. No way would the T-shooters do that! We don’t have the right! And too many innocents would be killed in the crossfire.”

“Emry … if I’m right, it means someone’s going to be murdered, and no doubt a lot more people right after that. You’d want to stop that if there were any chance at all that it was true, wouldn’t you?”

Emry let out a heavy breath. “Yeah, I would.”

Still, the rest of their trip was very quiet.

Gagaringrad habitat
In orbit of Eunomia

In Greek mythology, Eunomia was the personification of law and order. Few asteroids were so inaptly named. Eunomia was a massive, boxy stroid with an irregularly textured surface, the core remnant of a differentiated body that had lost a third or more of its mass in a vast collision, creating the Eunomia family of stroids. This wreck of a planetoid was almost as rich in minerals and gems as Vesta, making it a burgeoning industrial and financial center, but its orbital inclination isolated it somewhat from the mainstream of Belt civilization, while aligning it somewhat with Interamnia, whose criminal elements were drawn to its wealth; hence the abundance of mob activity on its habs.

Emry and Psyche kept their altered hair and eye color when they reached Gagaringrad, though without the veils, and had little trouble infiltrating the mob gathering as part of the entertainment—meaning dancers, mercifully, since the sex workers had to go through more stringent security checks. But at their first opportunity, they slipped away and began searching for the sniper. Emry had a strong suspicion who that might be, but she still resisted accepting that another Troubleshooter would be involved in something like this.

The party was in the penthouse courtyard of Radovan Lenski, leader of the Gagaringrad mafia. The neighboring rooftops had been secured by Lenski’s people, and the penthouse’s highly lethal defense systems were covering the airspace. Infrared and optical motion detectors covered the penthouse in all directions. But Emry’s gaze went to the single nearby building with mirrored glass windows. Glass was opaque to infrared. The building was heavily guarded to compensate, but Emry could think of at least three ways of sneaking into it. If there were an assassin—one with TSC training—that was where he’d be.

Luckily, that building was antispinward, so she could surreptitiously spray a mist of nanosensors in the air and let the Cori winds waft it over onto the tower’s mirrored glass. The sensors were thinly enough spread that it was hard to get clear readings, but soon she detected movement on the top floor. From what little she could see and hear, it seemed the sniper was still setting up. They had time, but not much.

She called Psyche over and filled her in. “We should warn them, get them inside.”

“Not us,” Psyche said. “Even the suspicion that Lenski planned the hit would be enough to spark a mob war. I’ll tip off one of Lenski’s people, have
them
warn Yohannes and the rest. You go after the sniper.” She looked over the edge at the street twenty stories below. “I just hope these buildings have fast elevators.”

“No time for that.” Gauging the distance, she jogged back to the penthouse wall and lowered herself into a runner’s crouch, drawing her concealed sidearm.

Psyche gaped. “You’re gonna
jump
? Emry, are you crazy?”

She smirked. “What, you think a sane person would do this for a living?”

As she spoke, she charged her legs’ muscle nanofibers to maximum so they would contract with the greatest possible force. She’d be sore afterward, but it gave her an extra burst of speed as she launched herself off the roof, Old Man Coriolis giving her a little extra push. Still, she was arcing downward and would hit a few stories below the sniper.