Dragonfly (2 page)

My spine prickled. This wasn’t floor thirteen.

The elevator phased shut behind me with a sizzle. Alarm stung my body into action and I lurched backward, my hand flashing upwards for my pistol.

The hard, hot edge of an atomflash barrel jabbed into the base of my spine, and a warm male voice caressed my ear. “Think again.”

I froze, my hair springing tight. But I flushed, angry at myself. All very well to pay attention now. Slowly I eased my hand from my holster, fingers twitching. No need to ask who this was.

“I already told your boss
no
. What do you want?”

“Get inside.”

The shatterbolts cranked aside, and the vault eased open in a puff of warm darkness. A hand pressed me forward. I swallowed dryness and did as I was told.

2

Inside, a corridor stretched black under reddish icelights, glaring and uncomfortable. No calmlights here. They wanted you on edge. At the end, a fireproof black ultraglass door whisked open. My escort shoved me through, and the glass slammed shut with an echo straight from a bad prison-colony movie.

The man behind the desk looked up, and his green lasersight eyes slitted in the light like a cat’s. My stomach rippled. Arkady Surov, director of black ops division, the shady cousin no one talks about at Axis parties.

At counter-insurrection, we infiltrate, spy, collect information, do the odd elimination if necessary. We’re all a little angry and maladjusted, but we’re basically normal. Black ops agents just kill people for a government salary, and to get assigned there, you need to have something seriously wrong with you. They’ve been trying to poach Malachite for years, only he won’t go. It’s too anonymous for him. He likes the spotlight.

Apparently, I was now on Surov’s headhunting list. I wasn’t flattered.

I folded my arms, ignoring the atomflash still pointed at me and the warning tingle in my spine. Black ops agents think we at counter-insurrection are soft. We think they’re gung-ho freaks. Some things never change.

“You guys are such drama queens,” I said. “Slam this and crunch that. How about some blood dripping down the walls? That’d be a nice touch.”

“Aragon. So nice to see you.”

Surov flexed to his feet and slinked around the desk to drape himself on the front edge like a twitchy feline. He wore a standard black combat suit: tight, bullet-retardant armor that hugged his long muscles. A cortex stimulator flattened his dark hair over suspiciously sharp-pointed ears, and a plasma pistol lay half-stripped on his desk, like he’d just come in from the virtual range. He gestured to a black velvet lounge, and slick gunmetal claws gleamed in his fingertips.

I wrinkled my nose in distaste. I mean, we’ve all had work done, some plastic hyper-extending joints or a nose job or some superconductor filaments to spice up your reflexes. But metalcore biotech enhancements and weaponised gene splicing are illegal. It messes you up, everyone’s known that for four hundred years since the Kovalev Six Mutant Massacre. The fanatics at black ops just don’t care, and when you shoot people in the back for a living, you want every advantage you can get.

They say that Surov the cat-man can leap two stories high and shoot a man’s eyeball out in the dark from two thousand meters. I don’t doubt it. Hope it makes all the raw fish dinners worth it. And at least no one can say the folk who hand out codenames don’t have a sense of humor: Surov’s designation is Felix.

“Hear you’ve got a tasty new mission,” he said, licking his chops.

So much for omega blue.

I ignored the lounge and stayed standing, tossing my braid back over my shoulder. “Sorry, comrade. Can’t confirm or deny. You know the rules.”

“Dragonfly, mmm-hmm. How gratifying for you. Pity Renko won’t let you loose.”

Curiosity itched, and I squirmed. Damn it. “What do you mean?”

“You know.
Short of termination
and all that. Hardly revenge, is it?” He twitched one ear.

I bristled, because he was right. “Look, I already told you—”

“We at black ops want Dragonfly dead.” Surov’s pupils slitted wide. “No reason you can’t be the one to do it. No more than you deserve, the way Renko’s sidelined you since … Well, you know.”

I flushed, and there was no use hiding it. Ever since Mishka and my friends died, Director Renko hadn’t trusted me. She was always checking up on me, setting other agents to watch over me in case I lost my nerve. My most recent assignment was the first time she’d let me out on my own since Urumki City. And even now, with the Dragonfly mission, she’d crippled me with restrictions. Not to mention with Malachite, who’d graduated academician
cum laude
in Renko’s class at New Moskva Tech and probably still bought her drinks and let her beat him at chess whenever he was in town.

Since Mishka died, my job was all I had. If I stopped fighting for the Empire, he’d have died for nothing. But until Renko let me off the hook, my career was going nowhere.

And I couldn’t deny that the thought of killing Dragonfly—of being the one who pressed the atomflash to his smug forehead and jammed my thumb on the contact—ignited a spark of anticipation in my flesh that wasn’t entirely professional.

But I wasn’t dumb enough to imagine Surov the cat-man was doing me a favor.

They say that back on Planet Zero, before humans had ventured into space, the Old Russiyans had a vast military empire, the largest on the planet, bristling with holocaust weapons and backed up by iron-cast ideology and the spirit of revolution. Only they lost their nerve, and it all fell apart and gangsters took over. Not much had changed in a thousand years, except Planet Zero was a smoking ruin, and now the gangsters wore uniforms again.

I eyed Surov coolly. “So what’s in it for you if I kill him?”

Surov shrugged, his armor flexing like thick black skin. “Dead insurrectionist, well and good. But this Dragonfly has a dangerous mind. Exceptional mathematician, you may have heard. There are certain … concepts we’d rather he didn’t pursue.”

I shrugged. Whatever. I was good at math too, and self-appointed rebel geniuses were common as space junk. I didn’t care if Dragonfly was a concert pianist. He’d still melted my friends. And from what I’d heard, he mostly used his fancy number-theory tricks to crack bank vaults and cheat at cards. Not exactly a model citizen. “No, I mean what’s really in it for you?”

“You’ll come and work for us.” Surov’s sharp teeth glinted. “You’re wasted on Renko, Aragon. She’s lost her way. She’ll be peeved, certainly. I’ll personally cover you. And I’ve got a little vacancy here I think you’ll like.”

I snorted. “Cannon fodder in the Great Renko–Surov War? Thanks very much, comrade, but I think I’ll pass—”

“Assistant director operations,” he interrupted, scratching behind one ear. “It’s a step up for you, but I’ve every faith you’ll manage.”

I caught my breath. Assistant director was the promotion I’d dreamed of since I’d joined Axis, that I’d worked even harder for since my friends were murdered. The one I’d never get, so long as Renko was my boss. If I defied her and Dragonfly died on my watch, she’d stick me behind a dusty desk in Analysis and I’d never see an active mission again. That’s if she didn’t decide I was an unacceptable security risk and send her goons around to slit my throat.

But black ops? Was I cut out to be an assassin? Hell, I’d killed people; it was an occupational hazard. But black ops was different. Colder. More premeditated.

I swallowed. “Umm. I see. Well, I’ll have to … A vacancy? What happened to the last assistant director?”

I remembered him. He’d bought me a vodka or six once. Sharp smile, great hair, the planet’s cleanest shower. An okay guy. I mean, sure, he was a compulsive killer with laser-sparked reflexes and a twitch, but he was fun to talk to.

“He disappointed me.” Surov folded his long legs beneath him on the desk, and I swear that mentally he coiled a tail. Gene splicing, boys and girls. Don’t try it at home. “I’m sure you won’t. Kill Dragonfly, and the job’s yours.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You’re a big girl, Aragon. You figure it out.” He retrieved his pistol and stripped out the depleted energy rod, dismissing me with a twitch of his nose.

The atomflash prodded me in the spine again and Surov’s silent minion ushered me back out to the elevator.

I stepped inside, and that warm whisper brushed my neck once more. “Watch your back. You’re not the only one who wants the job.”

My nerves jumped. I whirled, but he was gone.

The door phased shut, and I cracked itchy knuckles, annoyed. Black ops prima donnas and their games.

“Thirteen,” I ordered again, and this time I paid attention.

3

Floor thirteen houses Axis’s information and intelligence branch. It’s where everything we bring in gets collated, indexed and analyzed, disseminated to those who need to know, and hidden from those who don’t. They have the latest neural supercomputers, ninth generation quantum cryptography, and people with neurotech grafted to their cortexes, loaded with analysis algorithms that would melt their brains if they didn’t already have high-orbit IQs. Even their coffee boy is so smart he can barely talk.

My postgrad degree was algebra, and I spent months in military cryptanalysis before I came to Axis, but at intel division, I feel like the village idiot. Mishka used to say they kept brains in jars and dribbling savants chained in steel cells. I couldn’t swear he was wrong. In any case, floor thirteen gives me the creeps.

I dropped in quickly to collect my briefing, which I planned to study on the trip to Esperanza station, and fidgeted as I waited by the orchids while the spooks collected my material. I hadn’t decided what to do about Surov the cat-man’s offer. Tempting though it was to kill Dragonfly and get a promotion for it—assistant director, a stellar achievement for a girl from the galactic backwaters like me, perks and privileges ahoy and out from under Renko’s pointy thumb at last—being a pawn in the perennial squabbles between Surov and Renko could end stickily and painfully. A director’s promises counted for nothing when the safeties came off.

I’d have to assess the situation when I got there. Weigh up the pros and cons, analyze the intelligence and all that.

Or, I could just blow Dragonfly’s murdering head off and chance the consequences. Suited me. Playing it Renko’s way had gotten me nowhere. Maybe it was time I took matters into my own hands. Lost my nerve, had I? We’d see about that.

The slim, dark-haired agent behind the intel security desk glanced up at me, a half-smile dimpling his smooth cheeks. It took me a moment to realize I’d seen him here before. No doubt I’d had the same reaction last time, and the time before. He was cute but nondescript, unremarkable. Like me, he’d had all distinguishing marks removed, anything that made his face memorable or unusual altered by cosmetic surgery. Axis call it
normalizing
, and most of us in counter-insurrection have had it done. It makes it easier to infiltrate, provoke, destroy. Not Malachite, though. No one dared to suggest it, and he was audacious enough not to need it. Normalizing Malachite would be like jimmying the jewels off a Fabergé egg.

An unsettling tingle shot through my torso as the invisible security system took its molecular core sample. A diode flashed on the agent’s console, the computer confirming that I was me. Lucky for me, or that sweet young thing would have vaporized me in an instant. He smiled wider, and slid an oblong security case of clear hardened plastic and a silver chip across the counter with a weapon-callused hand.

“My pleasure,” he said, giving me a swift, sexy undress with his eyes that said he was interested in more than my core sample.

Cheeky. My skin sparkled in response. Cute, and smart too—my favorite combination. I could use an hour or two of indulgence; I was still weary from my interrupted vacation.

Axis encourages casual liaisons between agents. It’s an efficient way to get natural frustrations out of the system; quick, easy, and no lying about what you do for a living, and let’s face it, most of us don’t have a clingy personality type. On any other day I might have thought seriously about it, but I was too shaken up. I kept thinking about Mishka, Dragonfly, Surov’s proposition, Malachite and his goddamn lies. Too many ugly relics from my past unearthed in one day.

I just mumbled, “Sure,” and took the case and the chip.

The plastic case—
Aragon
, the tiny black letters said—stayed cool in my hand as I descended in the elevator. It contained my omega briefing, and was keyed to my body chemistry. If anyone but me tried to open it, or held it for too long, it’d self-destruct. The chip was my equipment requisition, and I took it down to hardware straight away to have it filled.

The basement hangar where our hardware people work is always littered with spaceship parts and dismantled weapons, blackened metal gleaming under long rows of white xenon icelights. Technicians and white-suited inventors slouched around, banging metal cases with spanners and splicing plastic-coated wires together.

The head tech, Onyx, threw me a grin, her curly black hair swept back under a dented vis-helmet. “Heard you be coming down,
señorita
.” Her Rus was flat with that Espan accent she’d never managed to shake. Like me, she had an unfashionable heritage. Unlike me, she didn’t try to hide it. “Thought you were on vacation.”

I handed her the chip. “So did I.”

Onyx wiped greasy hands on her blue fireproof boilersuit and jacked the chip into her vis-helmet, slotting the hexagonal glass display down over one eye. “
Está bien.
I get this one
prioridad
this morning—I got your ship stocked already.
Un fénix,
beat to shit.”

I wrinkled my nose. Director Renko’s rotten sense of humor strikes again. “Nothing like traveling in style.”

“You got that right. Who you piss off to get these lousy missions? At least your kit inside got some class.”

Onyx led me through the hangar and out into the massive spaceport, past lines of shiny Sliver-class fighters and two square Monolith transports, their radshields crusted black with decay. A half-dismantled Starshine cruiser lay like a giant fossil being unearthed, its shiny parts scattered, techs climbing around in its skeleton with theodolites and laser cutters.