Traitor (Collaborator Book 1), Page 2

  Maybe she did need to see a shrink. Wrap plastic around her head until she couldn’t breathe, suffocate the way she deserved.

  Rebecca twitched, pushing past the internal commentary. She motioned to a small, unoccupied table overlooking the Drop, what residents called the three-story open atrium underneath the protective, translucent doom. Jupiter’s moon lacked a viable atmosphere, so the base was built within its own biosphere. At least it prevented most escape attempts from the secret prison depths below…depths she was certain she wasn’t supposed to know existed.

  Zain made a pleased sound. “I’m telling you, honest to all the gods, this is the best brisbin on the station.”

  She made vaguely interested sounds as he waxed poetic about his beverage. Her mind wandered back down to the bowels of the station and what really was down there. She’d never been down to the lower wards, of course. Well beyond her security clearance. In fact, there was a fair amount of the station she’d never seen. She’d never been beyond the public areas and her particular worker’s wing. She didn’t even have access to the others, thereby preventing her from visiting friends.

  Friends. What an odd word for a place like here. Acquaintances. Coworkers. People whose stories she pretended to listen to, but never knew her stories for she had none to tell. Talking about The Fall would open up questions and memories, ones she wasn’t even ready to deal with herself, let alone when surrounded by others. Talking about before The Fall? When life was the shits, but at least it was hers?

  Kat’s face flashed before Rebecca’s memory. Even now, after everything, Kat was so beautiful in the flashbacks. And, she’d been so, too, in real life. At least, up until the end and everything turned ugly. Four days before the damn space ships arrived. If they’d just made it until then, maybe Kat would still be alive and Rebecca wouldn’t be half-dead.

  One of the station guards walked by. Dark grey body armor over protective black woven fabric that would help shield the skin from full-powered pulse blasts.

  “Female,” Zain said.

  It was the game they all played. Guess the gender of the faceless guard, whose reflective black helmets obscured onlookers from identifying them. It was for neutrality, she’d been told. That way, all guards acted as one, and all citizens could feel they were dealing with the same guard.

  All Rebecca saw was a faceless terror who shot one of her shrieking coworkers on Earth when…

  Rebecca flinched. “Male.”

  “Small guy, if it is,” Zain said. “You’re a bit pale. You okay?”

  She was losing her mind. That was the only explanation. She was losing her goddamn mind. She glanced at the guard’s sidearm. Suicide by cop wouldn’t work because they used stun pulse rifles on the station. The settings weren’t even high enough to accidentally kill her via concussive forces. She could break into a weapon’s locker and steal a projectile pistol. Blow her brains out and shed a lifetime of regret.

  Rebecca amended her previous thought. She really did need to see a shrink.

  Motion caught Rebecca’s eye and she looked over Zain’s shoulder. Three men and three women in matching blue coveralls escorted an auto-lift of boxes. Two of the women had biosynthetic hands: metallic fingers, decorated with patches of regen skin growth, tapped against the auto-lift’s railing. One of the men returned her gaze and she noticed his one vibrant purple eye: a data uplink scanner implant.

  Rebecca shuddered and looked away. That’s what the war was about. Centuries upon centuries of war, apparently, over implants and genetic modifications. They’d returned to Earth because of it and, like fools, Earth resisted against people who could colonize other planets with as much forethought as planning what to do on a long weekend. It didn’t matter that everyone came from the same base genes; it didn’t matter that they were all humans, more or less. What mattered was tissue and tech to continue scientific experimentation and exploration.

  “Want to go down to Jupiter with me next month?”

  Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter. Was that the order? Or was Mars closer? Jesus Christ, what is wrong with me today?

  Zain looked at her and she could see a sheen of sweat forming on his creased forehead. His voice had been laid back, but there was a lot of weight to the question. He wanted her to travel down to the base with him. They’d have to share a room, no doubt, since she doubted she could afford her own.

  “I don’t have any time off,” she said cautiously, sipping at her perfect-temperature tea. She glanced up at the workers, now stopped a couple of meters away. They leaned over the glass and metal railing whispering amongst themselves. They weren’t a part of any of her work teams, judging by their uniforms. Probably delivery folks from the planet.

  Zain waved a hand. “You don’t have time off because you haven’t asked. They’ll let you go. I’ve been down there plenty of times. It isn’t like they don’t trust you.”

  Rebecca looked up from her tea and asked in a flat voice, “How do you know?”

  He put down his mug of brisbin and stared at her for a moment before answering. “Let’s see, they let you work here. You do know what this place actually is, right?”

  “I’ve heard the rumors,” she said. Rumor was the station was a secret internment camp for terrorists. A working station on top and a Blackout base underneath. “Obviously, I’ve only seen the public spaces.”

  “There you go. You have several access codes and technical schematics. You have your own net link, for cock’s sake! They’ve invested into training you so that you can work on our tech.” Zain took another sip of his beverage. “Yeah, I can see why you’d think no one trusts you.”

  Rebecca glared at him. “Zain, look, I don’t know if I’m even allowed to take holidays. I’m military property.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You’re not a fucking slave, Rebecca. If you don’t want to go, just say so.”

  “It’s not that and you know it,” she snapped back.

  Zain lifted an eyebrow and he grinned at her. “I always thought there was a firework waiting to spark off under that mask of yours.”

  It was Rebecca’s turn to roll her eyes. “Not everything needs to be described as a poem.”

  “Poetry is the language of humanity.” He sniffed. “Every civilized person knows that, Earther.”

  She ignored the jab, even if it was meant to be light-hearted. A little holiday would be nice, but what would she do, other than be awkward in a room alone with Zain? She’d not shared a bed with anyone in a long time, not since Earth. Not since Kat.

  The six figures behind them fiddled with each other’s outfits in pairs, huddled together whispering and nodding. Rebecca absently watched them while one glared at her. She turned her face back to focus on her tea. Kat was dead. She needed to accept that and move on. She just didn’t think that would be with Zain.

  “Why are you pushing so hard?” Rebecca finally asked.

  “What do you mean?” He asked so smoothly that Rebecca’s instincts screamed there was something else going on here.

  “I mean, why now? Why not last week? Why not next month? Why are you bugging me about this now?”

  Zain kept his gaze on his mug, but she didn’t buy the shy boy act. No, he had a plan. A creepy-assed plan, no doubt. “Look, I think you should come. It’ll be good for you. Besides, Jupiter is a military planet. If you were going to escape the evil clutches of the Corps,” he laughed, “running away to a military planet is probably not where you’d go.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Rebecca said absently. She already knew her answer was no, and would remain no. But Zain never took no well, and she wasn’t in the mood today to argue with him. She’d rather just push it off to another day like the coward she was.

  They sipped at their beverages in silence. On Earth, the translators called them the Coalition, which officially her own device said was accurate. However, they were nicknamed the Corps. It took her about a year to make the mental adjustment from Coalition to Corps. It took about a year to ma
ke a lot of mental adjustments, really.

  Rebecca eyed the delivery people over the rim of her mug. They shook each other’s hands and the man with the scanner implant hugged one of the other men. They pushed their auto-lift behind them, and stood in a line. In unison, they attached cables to the metal railing, the decorative part of the glass safety barrier.

  One of the women with the biosynthetic arm stared at Rebecca and mouthed, “Traitor.”

  “Zain…” Rebecca said. Her guts knotted.

  In a flash of blue, the coveralls came off, revealing flags and names of conquered planets. The woman with the biosynthetic arm wore a white shirt that simply read, EARTH, in big block letters.

  “What?” He looked over his shoulder and did a double take, spilling brisbin down the front of his own coveralls. “Cock,” he swore, and tapped the small implant behind his left ear. “Security! Jumpers on the upper level of the market. Under the dome, yes. Six.”

  Rebecca stared at the woman who recognized her. The woman’s pale skin flushed scarlet and shimmered with sweat. A hangman’s noose of metal cabling around her neck. Rebecca’s heart raced and the tea sloshed in her guts. Her mouth hung open, unable to speak. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t even turn her head away.

  “Hurry! They are going to jump!” Zain shouted at whoever was on the other end of the line. Security, she supposed.

  The six inclined their heads to each other. In unison, they shouted, “Freedom!”

  They vaulted over the railing. The cables cut clean through the bone and severed heads rained down on Bubble Town.

  Chapter 2

  Day 1

  Captain Katherine Frances took a deep breath when she stepped out of the civilian transport and toward the security scanners. From this point, she was now Captain Amelia Andrewson, or whatever her name actually was when not filtered into English. It wasn’t uncommon for military personnel to use civilian services, so she was confident no alarm bells had been triggered. She’d been allowed to board, which meant her ID was still holding. Now, she faced the real test of her forged ID files.

  All she cared about was completing this mission and getting back to base. She shouldn't even be on Jupiter station, but she was the only person who could reasonably pull off the mission. She imagined she had six days, max, before her cover was blown. Six days to execute a high-stakes con and prison break was not a part of any military training she’d ever received back on Earth. Of course, they’d never trained her to be a rebel, either, but it came rather too naturally these days.

  Terrorist, she corrected herself. She had to play the part. Those who fought the mighty hand of the Corps were evil insurgents who must be crushed.

  Ironically, she had been trained in counter-insurgency as part of her several tours with the military police overseas. Some voluntary, some required, all the same in the end. She was now here because she could walk that walk better than the others. In fact, the only others from her resistance cell who could do it better were currently sitting in Jupiter’s basement awaiting endless torture before the sweet release of death by execution.

  Katherine didn’t speak to the security customs officer who scanned her hand imprint and then ran the retina scan. She just followed the instructions like she would any other mundane task. She didn’t even watch the screen, for fear it would make her nervous. Assuming Joslin and the girls did their job right, she should still be coming up as a Blackout. Corps black ops. Extralegal. Outside the reach of the law. Ghosts. Wraiths. Whispers.

  The young security guard’s eyes widened and he glanced up at her in stunned amazement. “Um, everything is in order, Captain.”

  Katherine recognized the wide-eyed idolization of young bucks who’d had childhood dreams of special operations. She’d had them once, too. Movies had made them all look so very, very cool. Now she was doing all of those things, and more. She missed pulling over drunk drivers on base and investigating which of the Tremblay kids had broken windows with their baseball again. Now she was Jane Bond, only less cool.

  She didn’t smile at the pasty-faced security officer who barely looked old enough to be finished training, though she kept her tone professional. “I need to speak with Captain David Dags immediately.”

  “Yes. Of...of course.” He tapped some buttons on his screen and then began speaking. “Hey, Lieutenant? Yeah. Nah. Look, I have a Captain Andrewson here to see Captain Dags. It’s...” he lowered his voice, “Blackout related. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure. I’ll close down my queue.”

  He locked down his terminal and said to the other officers. “I gotta bring her to the Captain. Be back in twenty. Sorry about that, Captain. I’ll have to bring you up to his office, since you aren’t set with security to get through the upper levels.”

  “Thank you, Ensign…?”

  “Ensign Nate Lowell, sir. I’m still in cadet training. This is my first field post, in fact.” Katherine gave him a tight-lipped smile, to acknowledge that she’d heard him, but had no further need for conversation. He stood awkwardly for a handful of seconds until he got the hint. “Well, I’ll take you up. Do you need help with your luggage? No, I guess you probably don’t.”

  Katherine did let a bemused smile flicker on her face at that. She towed the little case behind her with clothes, toiletries, and enough tech schematics to make several untraceable crude bombs if her plan fell apart. She did so love blowing shit up.

  Katherine followed the nervous guard through the busy corridors of the station and through two more sets of security screenings, each less strict than the first. By the time they’d reached the main market area, they were being waved through without the guards even pausing to ask her identity.

  She nodded at the last set of guards, giving off the aura that she belonged in this place of murderers. She kept her eyes steady and ahead, but made note of possible escape routes, unmanned access ports, open-access computer terminals, maintenance hatches, and the like. The environmental systems were all helpfully colour-coded with blue hazard stickers. She eyed two more of the blue stickers on the other side of the wall. She had three different nerve agent schematics loaded on her phone, encrypted and pulled apart so that most cyberwarfare investigators would assume they were unfinished prototypes for various space drone needs. They’d need two different compiler apps to rebuild the schematics, neither of which were installed on her phone.

  “Have you been here before, Captain?” Lowell asked.

  “No,” Katherine said honestly. Lying about being here would just get her challenged. Rebels avoided extralegal prisons whenever possible as a standard practice, but she was intimately familiar with Corps tech and inner workings. Plus, her former military experience gave her that air of belonging.

  “Why ever not? This is a busy space port!”

  She shrugged. “You know Command.”

  The ensign replied by way of a snort.

  Every woman in her former life had said she was too damn good at lying. She used to think it was a curse, but lying had become a rather fantastic skill. Spin enough truth into the lie so that the seams never show.

  They went through another checkpoint and again her identity wasn’t scanned or challenged. No wonder there were over a dozen undercover agents on the station, if security was this lax outside of customs. Once she got past the hurdle named Captain Dags, she’d make discreet contact and enlist some help, provided she could arrange extraction. Because once the first sign of trouble went up, they would need an exit strategy.

  Katherine gulped hard to push away the lump that formed in her throat. Rebecca was onboard. What’s more was that she needed Rebecca’s help. If she said no? Well, then Katherine would need a bomb big enough to blow a hole straight through the bubble dome and all of its shields. And Rebecca was enough of a coward that she’d probably help Katherine with the prison break, just to save these murdering bastards.

  Katherine had read some of the recent security surveillance done on her ex-girlfriend. Did Rebecca even realize she was being mon
itored by someone in Blackout? Was that why she never sent any messages, never used more than her allotted share of rations? Or had the old spitfire crashed and burned, leaving behind a husk? All she deserved, really. What a fucking waste of skin she’d turned out to be.

  “Here’s the Captain’s office,” the ensign said, interrupting her thoughts. He tapped the wall panel. “Captain Andrewson here to see you.”

  “Send her in,” came a masculine voice through the intercom.

  Katherine gave the ensign a tight nod when he saluted her. Then she sucked in a breath and marched into Captain Dags’ office.

  She inclined her head at him. He was tall, but not out of the ordinary. His skin tone was much lighter than hers, but their hair was nearly the same colour of dark brown. His braids were significantly longer than her own hair, matching fashion’s current gender roles perfectly. She quite enjoyed the short crop cut, and the eighties hair band fan inside her appreciated his long hair. His neat locks didn’t fool her senses, though. She noticed his brown eyes had different hues to them, a tale-tell sign one or both were implants of some kind. Though, without a scanner, she couldn’t verify which one it was.

  Katherine also noticed this was a private office and not anywhere near the operations centre. One side of her mouth quirked upward. “Captain Dags, I assume?”

  He nodded. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t let you dawdle through Ops.”

  She let go of her suitcase’s handle and folded her hands behind her back. She made a show of looking about the room. Then, after a few seconds, she said, “If our circumstances were reversed, I’d have you locked in holding by now.”

  “Good tip. Why are you here?”

  “There’s a problem onboard your station.”