Bad For Business

Connolly,” I stopped on a landing and let my hand casually rest near my hip, the finger of one hand touching the grip of my gun, “Please come this way.”

  “What are you doing here? This is supposed to be a secure transport,” His hand went into his coat and his fingers gripped something inside the pocket.

  “We have reason to believe the spaceport has been compromised. I was sent to be your bodyguard until you're off the station,” I glanced toward a service entrance near the tunnel, an unlabeled door with a clearance lock. The green LED light on the mounted camera above it went dark.

  “Why wasn't I informed of this?” His eyes narrowed and the muscles of his arm tensed under the fabric of his clothing.

  “Someone may be listening to our com signals. We couldn't risk the breach to give you a heads up,” I needed to get him through the door soon, Devin could only keep the cameras off for a short window of time.

  He kept his hand in his pocket, finger around the trigger of what I figured for a gun. Then his grip relaxed and his elbow sagged, “Fine, where are we headed?”

  I took him to the service door and slid my hacked clearance card, the light changed color and the door swung open. It was for Connolly's benefit. I'd had Devin open the door remotely when the card's signal appeared on the network. He could only do that trick a few times before his intrusion would raise an alert. I needed to make it count.

  I led Connolly through the network of corridors in silence, pretending to clear doors that were already open and passing cameras that were turned off. We reached a room with glass walls and a glass door, the round panel of a retina scanner mounted next to it. From here we could see the edge of the glass dome and out into the star field. From this distance, the dome was visible, not as a continuous solid sheet of featureless glass but instead the honeycombs of individual cells that made up the whole. Cells that could be patched or replaced when such repairs were necessary.

  The glass door led to an airlock and an empty maintenance bay. A stack of crates lined with clear plastic ran along one wall, a boxy wheeled loader beside them with its forks in the raised position.

  Connolly stopped at the glass door and scanned the bay beyond, “This is the wrong bay, why are we here?”

  I drew the rail pistol from my belt and pressed the barrel into his spine, “Open the door.”

  He turned and drove an elbow at my helmet, the edge of my false hand stopping it short. His other hand went into his pocket and a square-barreled pistol slid out of the folds of fabric. I swept out his leg with one reinforced boot and seized the gun in his hand as he fell to his back, the metallic floor ringing with the impact. My own sidearm clattered away onto the floor. With one hand I stabilized his wrist while twisting his elbow with the other, settling my weight over his to drive his face against the floor. He sucked in a breath and groaned, releasing his grip on the weapon. My cybernetic hand squeezed it until the barrel sheered off, a few shells falling from the chamber as the pieces hit the ground.

  I loosened my grip on his arm and took a step away from him, “Open the door.”

  His eyes fell to the rail pistol on the floor behind me. His face became taut and he licked his lips—but he didn't move, “Fine.”

  Connolly got to his feet as I squatted and scooped up my weapon, training it on his sternum as soon as it was in my hand. He stepped toward the retina scanner and lowered his face to the panel. The indicator light pulsed as it processed the image, staying solid as the seal released from the glass door—a sucking hiss accompanying the clicking mechanism.

  We passed through the airlock and emerged onto a raised walkway with stairs leading into the maintenance bay. I kept the weapon aimed at his spine and he didn't bother to look back.

  “Who are you, then? A corporate assassin maybe?” He started down the stairs, his shoes sounding hollow against the sheet metal steps.

  I didn't say anything as I fell into step behind him, never letting my aim shift away.

  “Maybe you were her brother—or another boyfriend?” He stepped off the stairs and moved to the center of the vacant bay, standing near the loader.

  “I didn't know her alive,” I kept the rail pistol near my body, walking a half circle around him to be near the loader. I couldn't be sure if he was planning to do anything with it.

  He turned back to look at me, his eyes narrowed and his lips stretched thin, “How did you find me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Fine,” I glanced up at a security camera to make sure the light was still off—it was. I still needed a few minutes for Devin to finish his part, “Tara was trying to extort you. The way I figure it, she was going to use her implant to get footage of you getting high. Then she would threaten you from a safe distance and give the footage to the Agency if you didn't pay. I found the data core that she had been recording on the night you killed her.”

  “You make it sound like she didn't do anything wrong. According to Devin, I wasn't the first. She made a living off it—like a parasite,” His voice had gotten sharp, snapping his teeth as he finished the words. I thought of the man back in the slums, chained to the wall.

  “She didn't kill anyone. She just wanted something better—Tara was trying to escape the slums with the only skills she had,” I kept my tone level and dispassionate, the speaker on the helmet giving it a mechanical quality.

  “I didn't mean to kill her. I lost control. The drugs took over and messed up my mind. I didn't know what I was doing,” Connolly began to pace until he found a crate and leaned against it.

  “You still did it. Then you tried to cover your ass. When you thought I'd found something, you paid men to kill me—you would have done anything to protect to yourself. To hide your secret,” I glanced out into the star field behind the crates and the hexagonal panel of glass that separated us from it. It was empty and cold, the shadow of the earth in the distance, “But you have other secrets—don't you?”

  His eyes fixed on me over the distance of the bay, narrowing to slits. He stood up from the crate and took a few steps toward me, jabbing a finger at my chest, “You got lucky with the Razors. If the Agency investigates their deaths, they'll find connections to their own dirty Agents. They can't let that information out, even for the cost of letting you get away with it.”

  “What are you saying?” I had the gun very close to him now, just a few inches from his sternum, my finger hovering over the trigger. An accidental brush over the trigger sensor and the weapon would go off—it would be done.

  He looked down at my hand gripping the pistol and then back at me, trying to find my eyes behind the reflection of the visor, “That's a very unique weapon.”

  I avoided meeting his eyes, looking instead through the glass behind him.

  “The Agency won't brush my death away. Ballistics will dig that bullet out of the wall and analyze it. They won't even have to match it to the rifling in the barrel, they made maybe a hundred of those? There's no way you can walk away from this—you pull that trigger and you'll be on the next flight to a Mars prison,” His eyes seemed to lose their focus and dilate, the corners of his mouth becoming wet.

  “Tell me about Deidra Moore,” I wasn't sure how long I could keep him talking, Devin would be late and I would be on my own.

  His lips tightened, his jaw was working like he was grinding his teeth, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “Bullshit,” I raised my voice in the helmet, the speaker squealing, “I found your records from New York. The two of you lived together until you reported her missing. This wasn't your first rodeo, was it?”

  Connolly didn't look at me. His eyes fixed instead on some point on the floor, a vein in his neck throbbing.

  “I couldn't figure why you did her. Guy like you probably didn't need much reason. That was back before your Grav addiction—you murdered her with a clear head. Then you went to the LEA with blood on your hands asking them to wash you cl
ean. How many messes did you think you could get away with? How long until something caught up with you?” The barrel of the rail pistol pushed into his sternum, the muscles in my arm flexing through the tight black jumpsuit, “There aren't many studies on the side effects of Grav use. Several of them never saw publication. A few can still be found in the dark corners of the underground network. There is a connection between the Fiends and the brain makeup of a psychopath.”

  “What do you want from me?” He turned to look at me, his hooded eyes strained and bloodshot.

  “Your neural pathways are more likely to be corrupted. What the drug really does is to weaken the barriers between the id and the ego. You were your truest self when you killed Tara—I think part of you knows that,” I began to step away from Connolly, pulling the gun from his chest. He was right, I couldn't shoot him with it, “Why did you do it?”

  “I already—”

  “Why did you treat her like trash after she died? She deserved something better,” My fingers squeezed the pistol grip through the reinforced glove, my knuckles popping.

  “She was trash!” The muscles in his neck tensed, tendons showing through the skin, “All I ever was to her was a meal ticket, a bank account. All she was to me was a whore!”

  Connolly clenched a fist, the skin turning white as the blood drained from it—he was losing control. The Grav-use had