The Black Garden: Chapter 17

BRRT BRRT.

I stirred groggily as my morning alarm and several message alerts purred against my inner ear. My lower back was cramped, and I grimaced as I shifted around and my hips clicked. I’d moved the hotel room armchair so that it backed the closed bathroom door and gave me a view of the bed, windows and entry to the suite. My pistol and the now-empty bottle of whiskey sat on a small side table by my elbow. I’d polished it off to help me get to sleep… and  now I had another full day at the hospital.

BRRT BRRT.

"Ugggh." I shut off the alarm with a thought, and brought up the messages. I felt a grim sense of satisfaction when I saw they were all from Mert. I switched to COMMS and checked who was on shift.

"Hey, Big D, has Jak's plane touched down yet?" I let Mert’s twelve seperate messages hang while I stretched and yawned, reaching for my smokes.

“Yeah, he made it,” he said. Safe and sound and very confused that he isn't allowed to pay rent for his new condo in Punawahu. He handed those letters over to an archivist for proper preservation... poor bastard can barely remember Boris now he's left New Warder."

The fist that had been gripping my heart most of the evening finally unclenched. I closed my eyes for a moment, sinking back into the chair. "That’s great to hear."

"There was an orange notice out for him like there was for you, but we caught it ahead of time this time. Cunts down in New Warder think they're smarter than me and Lil... well, we showed 'em how it's done. Of course, once the authorities realize, they're going to be combing every flight and every road exit out of New Warder. So we booked a phantom ticket for him on tomorrow's evening flight out of the city. They'll spend their night searching the airport for ghosts, buy you a bit more time. But if I were you, I'd ditch that car."

I lit a cigarette, briefly lightening the morning gloom. "Already ahead of you. Traded it in for a motorcycle under a temporary ID."

"Good man. Now, to bring you up to speed: now that we’ve confirmed demonic involvement, the Taga Avaya is in position and has identified a potential target. Gaius, Blackie and Ratcatcher dropped about an hour ago and has RV’d with them at their command center."

"Excellent. I guess I'm still on covert duty?"

"Affirmative. The Taga are okay with us helping out, but they want to handle the grunt work. They’re fielding three Khem and four Axuma Marines. The Axuma are stirred up like a hive of bees over the Nu-suht involvement."

I winced. "Yeah. Lot of bad blood there. Listen: I've got to do some time-sensitive phone sex with my shiny new C.I, so send me whatever the Taga are giving us and I'll run through it on the way to work."

"Sure. Please tell me you gave the guy a burner key and not your actual-."

"Of course I gave him a burner. What do you think I am?"

"Other than the biggest slut in the Arnab System? Don’t worry, I’m just taking the piss. Godspeed, Z."

I made a face in his general direction and hung up.

Mert’s first message was a dick pic. Of course. The second was an unintentionally transphobic, rambling breeding fantasy I skimmed but refused to actually read. I tagged both with little hearts and a thirsty face.

"Can't stop thinking about you," was the next line. "Got time for a quickie before work?"

"Sadly no," I texted back. "But tell you what... me, you, a hotel room and a bottle of wine after works sounds amazing. My treat."

"Evening? I can't wait that long. Already beaten off twice thinking about you.”

Ah yes, masturbation: the highest form of flattery. “They need me in theatre, but... I could make some time on my break if you bring me some more gossip."

"Gossip?"

"Well yeah. About what happened with Chani. I'm from a rival department. We fucking hate those IES bitches."

"Ohhh." He sent a devil face.

I gathered my things up with one hand, cigarette in the other, typing with the telemetric interface. "If she really abandoned post and eloped with her boy, that's fucking wild. Really have to wonder what she was doing before that."

"Haha, yeah. I was in a meeting with the two of them. Barely remember them though. Also, kinda feels like you're trying to squeeze information out of me," he typed back.

"Of course I am. 100%. I said regret being a catty bitch to you, not a catty bitch in general. You spill this tea and I'm down for anything."

There was a long pause. Then he typed: "I'll see what I can do, baby." Then another. "Why you into me, anyway? Thought you’d be more into your cop buddy."

I took a deep drag of my smoke, mashed it out, and threw it into the quantum locker while I packed a go-bag. "Don't like cops. I like guys with big brains and big-“ I ended the message with a sausage emoji.

“Oh yeah? Good thing I got both.” Mert reacted with a laugh. Then sent me another dick pic, this one clearly inside of his car after he had just parked at work. In his defense, he wasn’t lying about one half of that statement. The composition of the picture was also strangely artistic.

***

Short-term hormonal manipulation and dependency was not the ideal way to cultivate an asset, unless you did it slowly over a long period of time. An obsessed man in a position of power was unpredictable, especially if he thought you were manipulating him, so I went into work fully expecting him to roll in with six Hellions, a bunch of cops, and their robot police dogs. I was mildly surprised when the day turned out to be entirely uneventful, at least until about two in the afternoon. I had just come out of theater and was stripping down in the decontamination room, throwing my bloody scrubs into a chute, when I got a new message alert.

"Found some stuff you might be interested in. Kind of worried about it though," Mert wrote. "Still up for tonight?"

"Been thinking about you all day." I lied, pushing a button for the shower. "Want to get a room downtown?"

"Sure. Meet me at Die Hoekkroeg. Classy bar with rooms above. When you off?"

"Six or seven. I'll try and be there at six-thirty."

"Bet."

The rest of the day taken up by appendectomies and a heart surgery alongside Jacobs. My instincts told me Mert was as sincere an informant as a chemically-motivated creep could be, but that was no reason to trust that things would go smoothly.

Once my shift ended, I headed back to my room to gear up for the mission. I adjusted my Z-suit to match my skin tone and bonded packs of liquid armor over vital points. My helmet, designed for thermo-optic camouflage when necessary, doubled conveniently as a motorcycle helmet. I set it to racing colors. The armored suit was substantially thicker than the nanoweave I’d worn on the violator hunt and gave me a bulkier, more masculine body profile under my clothes, but was otherwise almost impossible to make out unless you were right up in my business.

It was misting a fine, warm, tropical rain by the time I left for Die Hoekkroeg. The armor and the weight of the QFD grenades under my jacket felt like old friends as my bike purred quietly through the darkening streets of New Warder, passing trendy restaurants and nightclubs. The poverty that afflicted the outer residential areas wasn’t so visible here, where the lights glittered and the distant boom and throb of music could be heard through the walls of clubs and bars. Die Hoekkroeg was on the corner of one of these well-to-do streets. The windows blazed with warm gold and orange light as I pulled up half a block away, resting one foot to the curb as the bike whirred to a stop.

It was busy. That was a good sign. I brought up my ATLAS and used one of its functions to scan for Mert’s numberplate on any of the cars or bikes parked on the road. No matches. It wasn’t entirely unexpected that I’d be the first to arrive, but I didn’t like it when my sources weren’t already in the building and waiting for me.

“COMMS, no contact yet,” I thought to Digger. “Me and Mert left the exact time for the meeting a bit loose, so not a huge red flag… but I’ll see if I can get a ping out of him before I head inside.”

“Roger that, Z. COMMS monitoring.” Digger was back to his terse, professional radio voice.

I sucked on one of my teeth, resting back on the saddle, and kept the scanner up while I brought up my messages with Mert. “Where are you, stud? I’m at the bar, waiting for a table.”

Almost immediately, I got a terse text message. “OMW.”

Mert hadn’t used any shorthand contractions like that in his other messages. My eyes narrowed – and as I felt Tsariel suddenly, inexplicably start to pay attention to the street, my intuition reached a fever pitch. I glanced around, then backed the motorcycle up into a half-size space between a car and the edge of the sidewalk where it jutted out a ways to divide one twelve-space lot from the next one over. It put me and the machine in the wedge of shadow formed by an overhead streetlight. One might call it ‘light concealment’.

It took less than five minutes for my paranoia to be vindicated. A familiar red truck cruised by, the windows rolled up and tinted. It turned the corner at Die Hoekkroeg and vanished. My scanner flagged the plate as the same one from the airport.

“Hellions are here,” I reported. “And here comes Mert.”

Mert’s grey government car turned around onto the street from my left, moving slowly.

“Hunter.” Tsariel’s voice rang between my ears, even as I knocked the kickstand back into place. “Flee.”

A pulse of raw malevolence spawned from the vehicle like sonar just as I twisted the throttle and turned out onto the street. Some of the people on the sidewalks stopped as they were suddenly suffused with wordless dread, sensing but not understanding the source. I suppressed my heart rate and clamped down on my CNS to prevent shocks and spikes of adrenaline, keeping to the speed limit. There was a second pulse, and this one washed over my back like freezing sunlight.

The car behind me hit the accelerator.