Chapter 3
The man code-named Chalio, lately known as Faraday Brenner, and who privately thought of himself as Renner, sat in the corner closest to the door in the small, borrowed storeroom.
With no windows and no roof leaks to let the rain in, the room smelled of dust, desiccant, and roach repellent.
The half-functional overhead daylight simulator cast uneven, inconsistently colored pools of pastel light.
Despite the pain in his hips, he sat forward in the creaky real-wood chair to remind himself not to lean against the suspiciously rickety back. The mismatched tables and chairs changed with every visit, as the used-goods store up front sold them and acquired more.
The other people in the room sat around an impractically small square table currently littered with pouches, mugs, and inhalants. Free-flowing chems, from classic alcohol to unregulated exotic neuro-glides, loosened everyone’s tongues but did nothing for their focus or common sense.
He glanced at the display on his dented wristcomp as he folded the now-empty water pouch.
Fuck. He’d been sitting for over an hour, waiting for them to get to the point.
This was his eighth clandestine meeting with what appeared to be the core members.
He’d been hoping for information and knowledge he could use.
So far, all it did was pass the time until he found something better.
Shukra, a wiry woman in gray, slammed her mug on the table.
“I called this meeting, so I’ll go first. Demolish the retention dam above White Pyramid Point.
” Her accent matched the Asian heritage evident in her features.
She worked for a long-haul transport service and cursed volubly in Mandarin.
She’d lost two of her immediate family to minder-drug debilitation.
Renner thought she might be a sifter, so he was careful not to lie around her if he could help it.
His natural immunity to telepaths, twisters, and cleaners only partly worked against sifters and empaths.
Top-level sifters could sense his neurochem pattern and that he had minder talent, and he didn’t know her strength.
Shukra’s eyes gleamed as she crooked a long finger toward Helios like she was clawing a fish. “The whole base would drown.”
Helios, a tall, muscular man with complex geometric patterns deep-etched on every visible centimeter of his dark black skin, made a disgusting wet sound, then wiped drool off his lips.
“So would half the metro.” His chem of choice was the locally popular hallucinogenic pinzai on a slap-patch.
It apparently made his lips numb and slurred his diction.
He spoke colorful street patois from a city and planet Renner didn’t recognize, but he was usually understandable.
The man was a freelance enforcer for any theft crew in the Canals or the Gatesea district with funds.
He’d offered to make connections for Renner for a weekly percentage of the pay.
From what Renner could tell, Helios hated the Citizen Protection Service because they had rejected his common, low-level ramper talent as insufficient for a commission with the CPS Minder Corps. “The Canals be hell, but they be home.”
Renner agreed with Helios. The Canals was the largest and oldest of the Ridderth slum districts, and the first to flood when torrential rainstorms stalled farther north and filled the waterways. The Canals had once been the only home Renner had ever known.
Back then, he’d worked for violent and vindictive crew chiefs who warred over business and turf. Their common enemy had been the even more violent and vindictive Ridderth City Police.
Then he’d been captured by a man far worse than any of them, a covert operations manager named Davidro who worked for the CPS.
Those days were gone, but the memories weren’t.
It was the universe’s idea of karma that Renner had traveled the galaxy, only to end up restarting his life back in the Canals.
This time, though, he knew the real enemy.
Shukra sneered. “Fine, Helios, let’s hear your idea.”
The code names were supposed to add a layer of anonymity for the self-styled resistance group, but Renner doubted the CPS would even bother infiltrating them.
He gathered they were a shard of a larger group that had splintered five years ago during the infamous Mabingion Purge riots that had made galactic news.
The other members had chosen deity names from pre-Flight mythology.
Renner chose his from an old news story he’d read that morning.
He’d been called many names over the years. One was as good as another.
Helios took a long draught of something lavender and bubbly without dribbling it down his chin this time. “Put inhib in the water supply. See how the Minder Corps assholes react when their enhancement drugs suddenly don’t work, and they’re all in withdrawal.”
“You do know,” said Lunesti pointedly, with a vaguely Hindi lilt to his tenor voice, “that inhib breaks down in water in ten minutes, yes?” Lunesti had wide hips and a narrow waist and shoulders.
His void-black eyes and short, spiky hair were a striking contrast to his chalk-white skin.
He physically presented as gender-plus but used male pronouns.
To pay the rent, he worked in a quiet joyhouse as a medic and off-label chems dealer.
Renner thought he might be a minder healer, too.
His dexterous fingers toyed with an inhalant cartridge.
A tendril of Renner’s talent for manipulating electricity told him the cartridge was flatlined.
“That’s why it’s safe for neuro-glide and enhancer overdoses. ”
The Citizen Protection Service had whole panoplies of drugs they billed as enhancers for minder talents for members of the Minder Corps.
Somehow, all high- and top-level minders ended up addicted to them for life.
For the few who couldn’t be controlled by drugs and were too useful to terminate, the CPS had crueler analog methods.
Renner suppressed the impulse to touch the now perfectly smooth skin of his neck.
Helios airily waved aside the criticism.
“Yeah, well, it’s better than your idea of stealing a decommed spider walker from Ground Division’s graveyard hangar.
Even if we could find someone to activate the walker’s AI, they’re only three stories tall and no longer have weapons.
A few mech-suited Jumpers armed with shoulder-mount hellrails could stop it long before it got to the CPS part of the base. ”
Shukra skewered Renner with a glare. “Your turn, Chalio.” The others turned to focus on him as well.
Renner shook his head. “Still thinking.”
He owed the CPS as much death and destruction as he could inflict for what they’d allowed his former boss to do to him and the others. For what they’d done to the woman who’d shown him that he was more than a mindless rage machine.
Shukra tapped the table and gave him a pointed look. He met her eyes with a flat, unblinking stare. After a moment, she looked away.
Very few people were immune to his barely controlled berserker expression. He wasn’t as broadly muscular as he used to be and no longer had ornate skin art or disturbing scars, but he still had the rage.
Be’un, an older woman with a cloud of white hair and warm brown skin, focused on his hands and lap with narrowed eyes and thinned lips.
“Water again? Got something against chems?” Her looks and perfect Standard English reminded him of the woman he’d once cared for deeply, but Be’un’s paranoid preemptive attacks got old, fast.
Renner knew cleverness wasn’t his gift, but even he heard the implied accusation that he might be a spy, since he wasn’t chemming like the rest of them.
It was none of their fucking business that most recreational neuros didn’t work very well on him because his unique minder talent burned them out too fast to feel the effects.
And because he hated not being in control of himself.
He’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.
He tilted his head toward the door that led to the used-goods store’s sales floor out front. “If the shop gets raided for selling blackmarket chems, someone has to be unwarped.” He crossed his arms, fists under his biceps to make them bulge, and gave her his basilisk stare.
Be’un frowned, but let the matter drop. She focused on her mug of red ale, spinning it slowly. Renner hadn’t figured out what the woman did for funds or whether she was a minder, but he respected her fanatic hatred of the CPS.
He relaxed his arms and made himself stay seated, despite his aching hips. It took conscious effort to stay there.
After all his months in the rehab center, learning to make the newly cloned and repaired parts of him work together again, his body was now more accustomed to sitting, but phantom pain still haunted him.
His former boss had required him to stand anytime the man was in the room, whether for minutes or hours.
Security wasn’t his career path anymore, but it was the only job he knew well.
The vigilant habits of nineteen years, however unwillingly acquired, died hard.
The conversation drifted back into a familiar litany of grievances about local politics, the chaotic futures market, and family feuds. Renner had nothing to contribute, so he listened to the rain.
As part of Davidro’s circus, he’d been to thousands of cities throughout the Central Galactic Concordance’s five hundred-plus member planets, rarely staying for more than a few days in any of them. None had weather like Ridderth.
The odds of ending up again in the city of his birth — and of his rebirth when the red angel pulled him from the rubble — were incalculably low, meaning the universe still wanted something from him. He wished to hell he knew what.