The Nexus Series: Books 1-3 (2 page)

“What floor?” the
attendant asked as the doors closed.  He seemed cheerful.  His shift
must just be starting.  Who could stay cheerful riding up and down
elevators all day?

“Ninety-ninth,
please.”

“Sure.  Just
need to see your identification.”

She knew he’d be
asking for that.  Any floor above the fiftieth required identification.

“Right,” she
said.

Then she darted a
hand to the button that held the elevator doors closed.

The attendant
blinked.  “What the...?”

Her briefcase
fell open and he was looking down the barrel of her gun.  “Ninety-ninth,
please,” she said again.

He nodded slowly,
and reached for his key as if he was going to comply.  Then he lunged for
the alarm button.

As if she
wouldn’t have anticipated this.  A swift kick sent his arm away from the
button.  Another to the gut had him doubled over.

“I’m kind of in a
hurry,” she said, eyeing him over her gun.

“Do it yourself,”
the man moaned.

“Fine.”  She
pulled the trigger and loosed a stunner at his neck.  He slumped
unconsciously against the reflective elevator wall.  Jill grabbed his key
and slid it into the slot for the ninety-ninth floor.  Then she grabbed
his limp hand and pressed it against the print-reader for the required confirmation.

The elevator
started moving up.

She looked up at
the tiny security camera that had caught the whole thing.  She smiled at
whoever would be watching the recording later.  By the time they found the
unconscious attendant and reviewed the security footage to see what had
happened, she would be long gone.

2

THE
elevator doors opened.  Jill stepped out into the ninety-ninth floor
lounge.  It was empty.  She put a potted plant in the elevator
doorway to keep it from closing. 
Take the corridor to your right
,
the man on the phone had said. 
At the dead end, take the corridor on
the left to Suite 9999-B
.

She carried her
briefcase with one hand, and the plain, unmarked box under her other arm. 
She didn’t pass anyone in the halls.  The lights were dim, as if these offices
had closed down for the night.

She found the
door that said 9999-B, and reached for the doorknob.

Then she froze.

Something wasn’t
right.

When you lived on
the streets—when you made a living as an errander—you developed certain
instincts.  You got a sixth sense for when things weren’t quite as they
should be.  And right now, at Suite 9999-B of the Trans-Spatial
Communications building, things were not as they should be.

Jill wasn’t sure
what was wrong, exactly.  Maybe the drop point was compromised.  Maybe
this whole errand was a setup.  Maybe something else.  It didn’t
matter, really.

All the mattered
was getting out of there.

She turned and
ran, grabbing her gun out of the briefcase as she went.  She heard the
door to Suite 9999-B burst open behind her.  Someone was yelling.

She dropped, spun
around on the floor.

Two people came
after her.  They wore armored suits and helmets with dark mirrored
eyes.  Cops.

A setup.

THE
man in the long coat and brimmed hat stood with his back to the window.

“We’re blown,” a
voice crackled in his earpiece.

“She didn’t
come?”

“She showed, but
now she’s running away.”

Two shots sounded
from the hallway outside the empty office.

The man
frowned.  “You’re not killing her, are you?”

“We’re not the
one’s doing the shooting, sir.”

JILL’S
stun slugs couldn’t pierce the armored uniforms.  But for all they knew
she was sending real bullets at them.  They took cover and raised weapons
of their own.  Maybe they were only armed with stun slugs too.  Or
maybe not.

Jill didn’t stick
around to find out.  She was back on her feet running down the hall. 
One hand still gripped her weapon; the other hand took out the electronic key
to her skybike—a very special key.

It wasn’t until
several steps later that she realized she’d dropped the package.

She ducked into
another dark suite, hurried through the reception area into the office in back,
and locked the door behind her.  She went to the window, and looked down
at the side parking lot ninety-nine stories below.

There was her
skybike, a dot near the corner of the lot.

She pushed a
button on her electronic key.

There was a thump
and a yell at the office door.  Another thump, and the doorknob
shook.  They’d be inside in a minute.

She found a short
metal file cabinet next to the desk.  It was too heavy to lift.

“Put down the
weapon, girl!” a voice came from outside the door.  “We’re coming in, and
we don’t want to shoot you.  Just come quietly, why don’t you?”

She yanked files
out of the cabinet until she could lift it.  Then she hoisted it on her
shoulder and heaved it at the window.  The glass cracked but didn’t break.

She threw the
cabinet again.  The glass wouldn’t last long.

Neither would the
door.  The frame was about to give way.  Another thump...

On her third
throw a spider-web of cracks spread across the window.  She grabbed a
floor lamp, using the pole and base to whack the glass out of the frame.

The door burst
open.  The two cops dashed inside just in time to see Jill throwing
herself out the window.  Then they heard the roar of her skybike,
ninety-nine stories above the ground, booking it away from the TSC building.

A
voice
crackled in the man’s earpiece again.  “She, uh...”

“Got away,” he
finished.

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Out the window
onto a skybike.”

“Alright, backup,
you heard.  Get after her.”  He didn’t sound angry in the
least.  “She’s good, eh?”

“Hope plan B
works,” one of his men muttered.

The boss shook
his head.  “Nothing unexpected has happened yet.  This is still plan
A, believe me.”

JILL
dropped to the legal sixty foot elevation and headed away from the Avenue of
Towers.  Seamlessly she slipped into the flow of traffic on Twentieth,
heading north through the rain.

Two other
skybikes
started following her from a block behind. 
They had no trouble finding her; she hadn’t had time to put on her
helmet.  In her rear-view mirror she saw them weaving closer to her.

Forget trying to
seem unsuspicious.  Jill came to an alley, gunned her engine, whipped
around into the narrow space between two office buildings.  She killed her
lights as she descended suddenly.  Her stomach lurched.

Overhead the
lights of her pursuers showed in the alley.  By the time they saw her
she’d spun around and darted back out into traffic—this time at the thirty-foot
level.  She flicked her lights on again, edged into the passing lane, flew
past a stream of
skycars
.  She sneaked into a
side street a few blocks later.

Had she lost
them?

No.  There
they were.

At least she was
getting some separation.  She gunned it again, angled upward.  She
raced toward the gap of night sky showing above her between the buildings.

Her bike shot
over the edge of the top of a building to one side.  She glided along the
rooftop and checked her mirrors again.

They were still
tailing her.

She cursed and
dipped down behind the building.  The long alley stretched away from
downtown and emptied into the street right in front of the cathedral.

She knew what she
had to do—didn’t want to, but had to.  She unbuckled her security harness
and swooped the bike down near ground level.

Across the street
at the far end of the alley the massive round stained-glass window over the
cathedral doors grew closer and closer—a giant bull’s-eye, and she was the
dart.

There was a
dumpster coming up on one side of the alley, overflowing with swelled garbage
bags.

She gunned the
engine one last time.

And kicked
herself off...

She winced as she
plummeted into a sea of garbage.

It was a long
moment before she swam up through the trash and peeked over the edge of the
dumpster.

The two
skybikes
that had been after her were now parked next to
the cathedral, and the drivers were running up the stone steps to the front
door.  Above them the round window had exploded inward.  Smoke rose
from somewhere inside the building.  People were shouting and talking
excitedly in the street.  A siren sounded from somewhere in the distance,
getting closer with each second.

Jill pushed
herself out of the dumpster, and walked quickly along the alley away from the
cathedral.

“DIRECTOR?”
 
The voice that crackled in the man’s earpiece was not happy.

“Let me
guess:  She got away again.”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s all
right.  You did what you could, I’m sure.”  He looked at his other
two associates, now standing in the office with him.  “Don’t worry,” he
told them.  “Still Plan A.”

IT
was
almost dawn when Jill reached the cheap motel.  The Avenue was now far
behind her.  She was in a rundown part of town where it wasn’t unusual for
suspicious characters to need a room in a hurry any time of day or night. 
Around here motels would take cash and not your name—not that Jill’s ID had her
real name anyway.

Still, the
sleepy-eyed clerk did stare a little at the young woman in a rain-soaked and
garbage-smeared business suit.  She carried a plastic shopping bag with
some clothes and toiletries she’d bought at a 24-hour convenience store on the
same block.

Her room smelled
like stale cigarettes.  She sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the
grimy window.  The sun was a bright red jewel, rising over the dark orb of
Earth on the horizon.  The artificial sky over Anterra was a nice sunrise
orange.  She watched it turn to gold, to gray, to blue.

She couldn’t go
home.  The people after her would be able to find where she lived. 
She wondered why they hadn’t found her there in the first place...wondered why
they wanted her at all, whoever they were.

She’d have to
start over—get a new alias, a new false ID to match, a new place, a new contact
to get jobs.  It wasn’t the first time. 
Erranders
had to start over all the time.  That was the way it was in this
business.  It didn’t stop her from being one of the best at what she did.

She sighed, took
off the filthy suit jacket, and flopped backwards onto the bed.  Thoughts
turned into dreams.

SHE’D
slept maybe an hour before her rude awakening.

Her first
conscious thought was,
How did they find me?

They were at the
door and the window, wearing those same armored suits and
visored
helmets.  She had no chance, but she fought anyway.  She always
fought when she didn’t have a chance...and sometimes she won.

Not this
time.  She’d landed one good kick or two

before they took her down. 
Her flailing and screaming didn’t stop until a
stunstick
was pressed into her neck.

Fat Frank
,
she thought as she slipped into unconsciousness. 
It had to be him
.

3

JILL
had never met her dad.

She’d asked about
him all the time as a kid, obviously.  Who was he? 
Where
was
he?

Her mother always
had answers—vague answers that had something to do with Mommy and Daddy not
getting along.  Sometimes she sounded angry that Daddy had treated her
wrongly.  Sometimes she sounded like she felt sorry for him for some
reason, and she’d shake her head and call him, “Poor guy.”  Sometimes she
was brief and blunt in her answers, like she didn’t care or just didn’t want to
talk about it.

One day when Jill
was ten years old, she asked about her dad one last time.  Her mother gave
her a cold look and said to stop asking about her father.

So Jill stopped.

At least, she
stopped asking out loud.  The question was still there inside, unrelenting. 
How could it not be?

Jill had
questions about her mom, too.  She’d always known her mother was involved
in things...secret things that she wouldn’t talk about.  Jill had tried
spying on her, even following her when she left in the middle of the night one
time.  But she couldn’t keep up long enough to discover anything.

When Jill turned
twelve, her mother finally confided in her.  She told her that she was an
errander.  She had been ever since Jill’s father had left.

And she would
teach Jill to be an errander too.  She’d teach Jill to be the best
errander Anterra had ever seen.

That was how it
began.

SHE
was thirsty.

It was her first
sensation as she woke up.  She’d been thirsty for a long time in her
dreams.  Now she was consciously, painfully aware of it.

She was lying on
something soft but not too soft.  There was a greenish-white light that
blinded her when she opened her eyes.  Finally she got used to the light
and saw that it came from a panel in the ceiling.

She sat up
groggily and looked around.  She was still wearing the same filthy
remnants of her disguise from last night’s errand, and she was on a cot in a
cement-walled room.

A cell of some
sort.

Something about
the room wasn’t quite right.

Besides the cot
there was nothing here but a toilet and a sink.  She went to the sink and
took several gulps of cold water straight from the tap.  It tasted a
little rusty.

Now she saw what
wasn’t right about the cell.  There was no door.

Then, with a deep
grating sound, one of the walls started sliding slowly open.  A cop came
into the cell.

“Good, you’re
awake,” he said.  His masked helmet distorted his voice, making it
unnaturally deep and mechanical sounding.  “This way.”

Another cop was
waiting in the dark cement-walled hall.  There must be other cells behind
the slabs in the wall.  They cuffed her hands behind her back, and she
walked between them while they held their guns on her.

They came to the
end of the hall.  One of her escorts key-carded the door open, and they
were in a cramped switchback stairwell with daylight coming through small
windows at each landing.  While they led her downstairs Jill glanced
through the windows.  She saw a view of the Avenue of Towers across the
lake.

And she suddenly
knew where she was: the Anterran Governmental Complex building—GoCom, as most
called it.  Up to now she’d only seen the massive island building from the
lakeshore.  This was her first inside view.

Not that she was
especially glad to be here.

They got to the
ground floor, keyed through another door, and proceeded down a narrow
hall.  They passed no one.  Finally they emerged into a small room
with red carpet and wood-paneled walls.  Old fashioned lamps stood on the
floor and hung from the ceiling.  

They led her to
an elevator at one end of the room.  The console inside had buttons for
floors one through twelve.

Her escorts
ignored the console.  One of them slid aside a panel in the elevator
wall.  There was a numbered keypad behind it.  He typed a
twenty-digit code from memory.

When he’d
finished the elevator started moving.  Jill knew they had been on the
ground floor, but the elevator was definitely moving down.

And down.

And down...

THE
doors finally opened.

Between her
escorts Jill stepped out into a wide lobby.  The furniture was modern,
black edged with silver.  The walls were polished black, accented with
panoramic shots of nighttime city skylines.  Jill recognized some of the
cities from pictures she’d seen of the home planet—Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo,
London.  The carpet in the lobby was deep indigo blue.  In the very
center of the room the carpet was emblazoned with a large, official-looking
shield insignia with THE NEXUS written across it.

There were
several exits from the lobby.  The escorts led her up a short stairway to
one side.

At the top they
entered an office of similar décor.  At the back was a massive black
desk.  Next to the desk hung a long gray coat and brimmed hat. 
Behind the desk sat the owner of the coat and hat.

He stood and
regarded Jill wordlessly for a time.  She couldn’t read his
expression—which irritated her, since she considered herself good at reading
expressions.  He had short silver hair and gray eyes.  They were nice
eyes, Jill thought.  Eyes that could make you feel at ease and filled with
curiosity at the same time.

She didn’t look
into those eyes.  She couldn’t let her guard down.

“Well,
well...Jillian Branch,” he said.  He had an accent something like the
British from Earth.

Jill recognized
his voice from the phone call. 
Watch for the light
, he had told
her.

He nodded at her
escorts, and they left her alone with the man with gray eyes.

“It really is a
pleasure to meet you,” he said when they’d gone.  “Perhaps you don’t
believe me when I say it.  And even if you do, I doubt you share my
pleasure.  After all you didn’t choose to meet—would not have chosen to be
here at all, which is why I had to bring you here rather by force, I’m
afraid.  I hope that in the end you will find it has been worth your
time.”

Jill said
nothing.

The man with gray
eyes came out from behind his desk and paced slowly while he kept
talking.  “You have no idea how difficult it has been to find you. 
Then again, maybe you do.  You’re a very elusive person, Jillian. 
This is one of the first things that drew us to you.  There are plenty of
erranders
out there, of course.  But we were looking
for someone with a particular combination of characteristics.”

It was weird
being talked about this way, like he saw much more than she could know through
those gray eyes; like her whole life had been a film he’d watched
carefully.  She found him impressive, even a little scary.  And she
wasn’t impressed or scared easily.

“Yes, we’ve had
our eyes on you for some time,” he went on.  “It’s not idle flattery when
I tell you we were very happy to have found you.  It just so happens that
you met our list of requirements to the letter.”

It sounded like
he wanted to hire her.  Was the government in the business of hiring
erranders
now?  Or was this guy running some sort of
rogue operation?  “If you have a job for me,” she spoke for the first
time, “you don’t have to butter me up first.  Just tell me what you want.”

“Ah, what I
want.”  He stopped pacing.  The gray eyes were looking right into
hers.  She couldn’t look away this time for some reason.  “The very
question you should be asking yourself.”

Where was he
going with this?

“What is it you
want, Jillian Branch?” he asked her slowly, deliberately.  His eyes
weren’t budging from hers.

What did he mean
what did she want?  Maybe this was his way of beginning negotiations for
her payment.  “If you’re wondering my asking price—” she began.

The man with gray
eyes smirked.  “In the first place, you are in no position to, as you put
it, ask a price for your services.  As you did not willingly come to us,
you will not be able to leave us until we decide—
if
we decide—to release
you.  And in the second place, don’t pretend that money is what you really
want.”

“No?”

“Of course
not.  You could easily have already found another job—a quite legal job, I
might add—and be making twice the money an errander makes.”

Well...that was
probably true.  “So what is it you think I want?”

“The first answer
that occurs to you will not be the correct one.  You have hardened
yourself, Jillian; buried yourself inside a thick, protective shell. 
You’ve learned to hide your feelings and your desires from even yourself. 
And I’m asking about a desire far beyond those on the surface.  The animal
drives for food, for water, for companionship...those answers do not interest
me at the moment.  You are going to have to look far deeper to answer my
question.”

Was he some kind
of philosopher?  Some religious fanatic who was trying to convert her to a
cult?  “What does kidnapping me have to do with any of this?”

“Arresting you,” he
corrected her.  “And it has everything to do with it.”

“You have a job
for me?”

“Indeed we do.”

“Tell me about
it.”

He still had that
unreadable expression.  “For now, there are only two things you need to
know,” he said.  “Number one:  Should you accept the job, your
criminal record will be wiped clean.”

She raised an
eyebrow.

“Number
two:  Until you accept the job, you will be told nothing more about it.”

She
scoffed.  “That’s ridiculous.”

He scoffed
back.  “More ridiculous than being a pawn for criminals who couldn’t care
less whether you live or die once they’ve done with you?”

She looked at him
sideways.  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I could not be
more so.”

“I don’t take a
job unless I know the details.”

“That’s absolute
drivel, of course.  You try to know as little as possible about the jobs
you take.”

“I still know
more than nothing.”

“You do know more
than nothing.  You know that your only other option is jail.”

She
swallowed.  “So this job is going to give me this...this thing that I
don’t have but I really want but I don’t know that I want it?”

“It is.”

“But it isn’t
money?”

“No.  But
don’t misunderstand me, you will be paid.  Handsomely.  Handsomely
enough to make a generous charitable donation to the cathedral for the reparations
they will now be requiring.”  He was smiling, but his gray eyes seemed
colder.

She looked
around.  “We
are
at GoCom, right?  You
are
with the
government, right?  Wouldn’t you get in at least a little bit of trouble
for hiring an errander?”

“If you accept my
offer, you will no longer be an errander.  Not ever.”

Now there was
some food for thought.  Then again, what kind of job did the government
make you do when they caught you?  “I’m guessing it’s something dangerous
if it pays so well,” she said with a frown.  In her line of work it was
the riskiest jobs that paid the best.

“At times it
certainly is.  But I’m assuming danger is not particularly distasteful to
someone who leaps out of skyscraper windows and throws herself off of speeding
projectiles in dark alleys.”  He smirked again.  Jill was noticing
this guy smirked a lot.  “Even at your young age, Jillian, you have
learned that a life well lived involves certain risks.”

“Risks like
taking a job I know nothing about.”

He nodded. 
“If you decide it’s worth it,” he said.  “I ask you again, Jillian: 
What is it you truly want?”

She
shrugged.  “I give up.”

“Ah, but you’re
not giving up!  You’re thinking about it right now, even as we speak.”

She was. 
But she wasn’t coming up with an answer.  “It may take a while.”

“Take all the
time you need.  There won’t be much else to do back in your cell.”

“You sure you
don’t want to give me a hint?”

“I’ve practically
given away the answer already, but I’ll sum it up for you:  If you did
something with your life that you would do no matter what, even if it meant
giving up all the money and all the comfort and all the convenience in the
world, what would you have?”

“A mental
illness?”

He was a little
amused.  A little.  “Perhaps.”  He pushed a button on his
desk.  “Then again, what sort of mental shape are you in if you plan on
being an errander for the rest of your life?”

He had her there.

The two masked
cops were back on either side of her.

“By the way,” the
man with gray eyes said as she was escorted out of the room, “I don’t suppose
you plan on being in a ten-by-twelve cement walled room the rest of your life
either.  Perhaps that will make my offer seem a bit more attractive. 
Think it over.  Gentlemen, please make sure the young lady is properly
dressed for the occasion.”

A
few minutes later she was alone in the cell again.  This time she was
wearing the style-less gray clothes prescribed to all prisoners.

She wanted to
think things over, like the man with gray eyes had said.  She wanted to
consider his offer as thoroughly and rationally as possible.  But she
didn’t.

She couldn’t.

When you’ve been
an errander for a while your instincts kick in too hard to stop and think
rationally sometimes.  And the only thing her instincts were telling her
right now was:  
Find a way out
.  An opportunity would
come.  One always did.

Any possibility
of accepting the man’s offer was buried.