Severance (25 page)

He resumed the playback, watching as the image panned past
the entryway to less useful angles. Just as he was about to stop the replay,
the front doors opened, three officers stepping outside. Bruce nearly choked
when he saw they were leading Stein out the door, her hands behind her back. He
dashed back around the corner, catching a glimpse of them entering the
escalator at the other end of the block. He walked as quickly as he dared
towards the escalator, not wanting to prematurely draw any attention to
himself. When he reached the escalator, he took the steps two at a time,
stopping on the third floor, dashing into the street, spinning around. Not
seeing them, he circled around to the escalator down to the second floor,
panicking slightly as he finally guessed at their destination. They were taking
her to the first floor. Where a security van would be waiting. He withdrew his
pistol and sprinted down the escalator.

He caught a glimpse of the gray wall of the security van
driving away as he leapt off the end of the escalator, nearly colliding with a pair
of security officers as he did so. “Easy, lady,” one of them said, his smile
fading as he recognized Bruce and the object in Bruce’s hand. Bruce faintly
recognized him too, and, for the second time that day, knocked him unconscious
with a shot to the face. The other officer reacted, not quickly enough. Bruce
stepped over their bodies and stared down the street, watching the back of the
security van retreat to the south.

“Assey shit!” he yelled, knowing it was going to the main
security headquarters. Behind the barricades and bulkhead doors, completely out
of reach. Furious, he shot both officers in the crotch. “It’ll be more of the
same if you don’t let her go!” he yelled at their comatose bodies before
tossing his wig to the ground.

§

Hogg pulled the van to a halt in front of the plastic
barricade. Through the windshield, he waved at the helmeted officers on the
other side. “Come on, guys,” he said to himself, knowing they couldn’t hear him.
“Move that thing.” He waved again. One of the officers waved back. “What are
they doing?” he asked.

“Dunno,” Linze said from the passenger seat. She opened the
door and stepped out of the van. One of the less regrettable officers under
Hogg’s command, he had let Linze stick around for the delivery. Linze walked up
to the barricade where she proceeded to get in an animated discussion with one
of the officers standing there. Hogg turned to look through the interior door
to the passenger compartment, checking that Stein was still there. She was,
head bowed, looking defeated. Satisfied, Hogg opened his door and stepped out
of the van.

“What’s up, guys?” he said, approaching the barricade. “Move
that piece of junk. Thorias is expecting us.” He stopped beside Linze, facing
off from the morons on the other side of said piece of junk. The head moron
turned to him, looking him up and down carefully. Hogg didn’t recognize the man’s
face. Which was unusual, doubly so in this case. He thought he had met all the
on–duty officers, or at least seen their faces around. And this particular face
was ugly enough to remember.

The moron held his terminal up to his ear, a finger raised to
silence Hogg. That was a gesture Hogg let few people get away with, and he started
to consider simply driving over the buffoon. Finally, the pig–faced officer
lowered his terminal. “You’ve been ordered to hand over the prisoner and the
van to us and to continue hunting for the remaining terrorists.”

“Have I?” Hogg asked. “You’d think that if I’d been ordered
that, someone other than you would be telling me about it.” The smile that was
spreading across his face stopped, interrupted by a beep from his own terminal,
no doubt telling him exactly that. He ignored the message and set his jaw. “Get
out of my way. This is my damned prisoner, which my damned team got shot in
their damned faces for. I’m handing her over to Thorias myself.”

The ugly officer sneered at him. “No, you’re not, Sergeant.
Turn around.”

“No.”

Suddenly the ugly, stupid officer withdrew his pistol. “Sergeant,
I am under orders to let no one cross this barricade. That includes you. Don’t
make me use this.”

Hogg took one large step forward and punched the officer in
the jaw, sending him to the ground. “Then don’t use it,” he told the squealing
asshole. He stared down two of the other officers on the barricade, daring them
to say something. No one moved, so Hogg stepped back and grabbed the barricade,
Linze moving to the far end of it. Together they started shifting the flimsy
barrier out of the way of the van. They were interrupted by the sound of a
gunshot, Hogg feeling the back end of the barricade hitting the ground behind
him, a second before the sound of Linze doing the same. He turned to find
himself staring down the gun of the pig–faced asshole.

“I told you you’re not crossing this thing, Sergeant,” the
asshole said. “You’re not going to get any more warnings.”

“Warnings?” Hogg yelled. He bent down to check the warning
that had thudded into Linze. “Are you fucking crazy?” he yelled. “WE’RE ON YOUR
SIDE!”

“You’re on that side right now, Sergeant,” the officer
shouted back. “And until that changes, stay the fuck away from this barricade.”
He twitched the pistol back down the street. “If you doubt me, read your fucking
terminal.”

Hogg’s hand slid down to his terminal, calculating how much
farther it had to travel to reach his pistol. A bit too far. Frustrated, he
opened his terminal and read the message. It was from Thorias, and it confirmed
everything pig–face had just said.

“Fuck you,” Hogg said, but the words felt perfunctory. The
fight had gone out of him. He looked down at Linze, then up at the van, then
down at Linze again and growled with frustration. Finally, he bent down and
hoisted Linze up onto her knees, then up and over his shoulder. Without saying
another word to pig–face, he slowly returned back in the direction he had come.

§

Sergei watched in dismay as Hogg retreated around the
corner. Hogg hadn’t noticed him on the line, distracted by his confrontation
with Chester. Sergei wondered if he should have interjected himself in that
confrontation, talked Hogg down somehow. Chester was one of the recently
recalled officers and had been put in charge of the barricade only an hour
previous, apparently rewarded for some favor he had earned a decade earlier.

After Hogg disappeared from view, Chester moved around to
the back of the van, opened the door, peered inside, then slammed it shut.
Sergei felt his muscles stiffen; he knew who was in there. As Chester strutted
back to the front of the van, Sergei imagined himself the star of a big romantic
scene, professing his undying love for the terrorist mastermind, making a
daring bid for her freedom.

But he only imagined it.

The message he had received from Kay Sampson had been pretty
confusing, until he finally realized it was a pseudonym Laura was using. Which
was a neat trick; he would have to ask how she did that sometime. The message
was coded, referring to completely fictional friends, and encounters, and plans
the pair of them supposedly had. But between the lines, he figured out what she
was saying. She had said she didn’t do it. And he believed that.

But there wasn’t much he could do about it. Certainly not
with a dozen other cops watching him.

Chester stepped inside the van and prodded it forward, the
van slowly inching past the barricades. Sergei watched it pass, feeling a
little guilty. But just a little. It certainly wasn’t his fault she had gotten
into this mess. And it would be sorted out soon enough. He would talk to her
then. If he squinted, he could sort of imagine her understanding that.
Apologies after the fact were cheaper than career–limiting stunts up front.
That
was exactly the kind of thing she liked to say.

Done lying to himself for the moment, Sergei helped the
officers shift the plastic barricade back into place, turning his back on the
van carrying away his sometime lover.

Over the rim of his glass, Harold surveyed the room of happy
little people having happy little conversations. It looked like fun. He missed
fun.

It had been six months since he had found Kevin’s message,
months spent with his back in knots, waiting for a hammer blow that never came.
They didn’t know he knew. He still barely knew himself — most of the evidence
that Kevin had compiled was impenetrable, miles outside of Harold’s expertise.
He had spent weeks trying to figure out the navigational and fuel consumption
data before giving up, his vision swimming with important looking tangents
intersecting important looking hyperboles. There were also instructions on how he
could verify all these fuel consumption calculations himself, but they looked
useless to anyone who wasn’t standing right beside the reactor, a location he
would have a hard time explaining his presence in. “It’s all right; I’m a
doctor,” could only get away with so much.

But the memos and recorded conversations were far more clear–cut,
and as Kevin had suggested, at times terrifying. The captain and his staff,
casually discussing mass–murder. By the time Kevin had gotten around to
recording their conversations, they had even started joking about it. Harold
felt proud of Kevin for trying to stop these monsters. He hoped he could live
up to the young man’s example.

Except for maybe the last part of that example.

A month earlier, Captain Barston, the monster–in–chief, had
announced that the ship was off–course, though assured the ship that it was ‘Nothing
To Worry About.’ A course correction — the Turn — was coming and would fix
everything. The news had not gone over well, the ship more than a little
nervous to hear tell of this little mishap, so close on the heels of their
inadvertent basting with cosmic radiation. The news feeds had been hounding
everyone in a naval uniform relentlessly since then, looking for someone to
hang. The only responses they got mirrored the official explanation: they were
off course not because of malice, but simple stupidity. An unsatisfying explanation,
though a convincing one.

Harold had struggled to feign surprise when the news broke —
he had been neck–deep in navigational calculations for months and had forgotten
that their cross–eyed way–finding wasn’t common knowledge. The planned course
correction was accounted for in Kevin’s evidence. Kevin thought it was small,
and would have a negligible effect on the fuel load, but this was the part of
the evidence Harold was least sure of. He was hopeful someone else could do
better with it.

To that end, he had been loitering in the bar for the past week,
a copy of Kevin’s data, less the video message, on a dummy terminal tucked in
his waistband. All three of the main news feeds had offices in this neighborhood,
the hacks and pretty boys who worked there regularly spending their free time
in the bar. Any one of whom would potentially be very interested in what he had
stuffed in his pants.

For much of the past week he had been weighing the pros and
cons of simply handing the evidence over to a reporter. But the months of fear
and paranoia, and the memory of Chief Hatchens’ mirthless smile, had convinced
him of the folly of that plan. He had instead decided he would find some way to
dump this information off anonymously.

His eyes settled on three of the carefree bastards standing
on the far side of the bar, easily picking them out by their teeth, white to
the point of fluorescence. One of them in particular caught his eye, a reporter
from
NewsFantastic!
Chet Something. Big, broad–shouldered, constantly
grinning. He had been more aggressive than most of his colleagues while
harassing his sources about the Turn, even managing to use his big toothy grin
to bed a junior naval officer, apparently getting the poor girl thrown into the
brig. It had been the talk of the bar a couple of nights earlier. For Harold’s
purposes, he would be perfect. Not only would he be interested in the story, but
to an outside observer it would be plausible that he had dug it up on his own.

How to actually get the terminal in his hands was trickier,
though a number of feeble ideas had been battling it out in Harold’s mind for
the past hour. As he watched the three reporters, Chet Something got up from
his chair and crossed the bar, heading to the men’s washroom. Harold sat up
straight, watching this with interest. Sensing an opportunity, he made a snap
decision and followed the big reporter.

Inside the washroom, Harold saw his quarry at the far end of
the bank of urinals, his back turned to the door. Harold went to the sink and
washed his hands, looking over his shoulder. The rest of the washroom appeared
to be empty. Harold tugged the terminal out of his pants and set it down beside
the sink, setting it to display “READ ME” in bright green letters. Drying his
hands, he turned and went for the door, casting a glance at Chet, just shaking
himself off.

Outside the washroom, Harold picked his way back across the
bar floor to his table. As he sat down, he looked up to see Chet Something’s
big empty smile as he was already sitting back down with his friends. Harold
realized Chet must have left seconds after, right on Harold’s heels. He wasn’t
in possession of the terminal, nor had the expression of a man who had just
uncovered a diabolical conspiracy. “You filthy bastard,” Harold said, shaking
his head, the doctor in him dismayed by the man’s hygiene.

While he berated himself for the short–sightedness of his
plan, he watched another sap enter the washroom. Assuming he wasn’t a filthy
degenerate himself, he would be in for a surprise. For the next two minutes, Harold
sat extremely still, only his hands moving, but those not stopping. Finally,
the man walked out of the washroom, terminal in hand, a wary expression on his face.
Harold looked down at his own glass, eyes locked on the rim, not daring to look
directly at the man. He watched through the corner of his eye as the man sat
down with his friends, not far from where Harold was sitting himself. His ears
strained to pick out their conversation over the music and clamor of the crowd.
Nothing about a mysterious terminal or murderous plot to sunder the ship. They
were talking about work — it sounded like they worked for one of the feeds.
Harold realized he had been holding his breath and inhaled deeply, then
rewarded himself with a hefty pull from his now warm drink. Ass–backwards, he
had managed to get the terminal to someone who might do something with it.
Harold finished his drink, stood up, and left the bar, feeling a long–forgotten
lightness return to his step.