The Nexus Series: Books 1-3 (42 page)

4

CHIEF
Home Planet Liaison Riley maneuvered his wheelchair down a hallway on
GoCom’s
ground floor.   Nervous conversations
about the morning’s events buzzed from the doorways.

He passed by a
staff lounge and saw a talk show on the mounted TV. 
Breaking News: 
Who are the “Guardian Angels?”
the headline said in bold letters.  The
local reporters were already raving about the incident.  “We should be
thanking them,” the woman on the right half of the screen was saying. 
“Why should we care what their names are?”

“They’re taking
matters into their own hands,” the balding man on the left half of the screen
countered.  “There’s no accountability!”

“We already have
a government with no accountability, which is exactly why we need these
so-called angels!”

“But what’s
their real agenda...?”

The debate faded
as Riley rolled beyond the lounge.  The argument was reverberating around
the city, and it wouldn’t stop anytime in the foreseeable future.

He entered a
series of narrow passages with no doorways.  Around a corner he came to a
small room with deep red carpet and old-fashioned wooden paneled walls. 
There was an elevator at one end of the room—an elevator almost no one ever
used; it wasn’t convenient to anyplace any
GoCom
employee or visitor would be going.

Riley called the
elevator and wheeled inside.  The console had buttons for floors one
through twelve.  He ignored the console, opened a panel in the wall, and
punched a twenty-digit code in the revealed keypad.

Nothing happened.

He punched it
again.

Nothing.

He grumbled to
himself as he took out his mobile and dialed a number.

The voice that
answered was the voice that had interrupted the gunman’s live video feed this
morning.  “I’m rather surprised it’s taken this long to hear from you.”

“Hello to you
too, Giles.  Am I right in thinking you’re supposed to notify me any time
you change the elevator codes?”

“Am I right in
thinking you haven’t checked your messages this morning?”

Riley growled,
hung up, checked his messages, and typed a different code into the elevator’s
secret console.

The elevator
descended.

TEN
stories beneath the ground floor of
GoCom
, the
elevator doors opened.

Riley rolled out
into the lobby.  The middle of the midnight blue carpet was emblazoned
with a shield emblem with THE NEXUS in bold letters.  To one side, next to
the doors into the main area of the department, a stairway led up to Director
Giles Holiday’s office.  Along with the stairway was a newly constructed
ramp, installed specifically for Riley last month when he had begun requiring
the use of a wheelchair.

Director Holiday
greeted him from the office doorway with an indecipherable look, steel-gray
eyes to match his steel-gray hair.  “Allow me,” he said.  He
descended and began pushing Riley up the ramp.

“A stirring speech
this morning,” Riley commented gruffly as they entered the office.  “You
always did have a flair for the dramatic, didn’t you, Giles?”

“Drama has its
uses at times.”  Holiday parked the wheelchair in front of his desk, and
took his own seat behind it.  The wall at his back was made up of windows
overlooking the busy HQ floor below.

“How long had you
known?” Riley asked.

“We’ve known of
the plan since the Lioness told us about it weeks ago,” Holiday replied. 
“We captured her thinking she was only a pawn in Sketch’s gang.  We had no
idea just how pivotal she would be.”

“So you could
have
stopped
this weeks ago!”

“We chose to let
things unfold—make some modifications to their weapons stockpile, allow the
attack to happen as scheduled.”

“And scare the devil
out of our entire government!”

Holiday’s gaze
grew cold.  “That was precisely the reason.  Now, there’s not a
criminal in this city—including any criminal sitting in a
GoCom
office—who feels secure.  We’ve got them all constantly looking over their
shoulders.”

Riley crossed his
arms.  “You might have let me in on your little plan.  You allowed me
to spend plenty of time and resources chasing a red herring.”

“You did seem
awfully bent on catching whatever sinister character had ordered all those
blank
Belentzer
3 shots.”

“Clearly, if I
had known they were blanks—!” the bald man burst.

The director
raised an eyebrow.  “You mean to tell me you traced the order, obtained
audio of the call, filtered the audio to find a vocal match, but didn’t bother
to check the invoice?”

Riley’s face grew
red.

“Not to mention,”
Holiday added, leaning forward on his desk, “you accosted one of my agents
without notifying me—in the middle of a desperately important mission,
incidentally.  Your meddling may have cost Doreen
Maybury’s
life.”

“The point is,”
Riley sputtered, “this could all have been avoided if you’d simply communicated
your plans to me as per regulations!”

“First of all,
there’s no such regulation.”

“The board has
strongly suggested—”

“And second of
all, it would be foolish for us to consult you regarding any of our plans
concerning the mayor, given your feelings for her.”

Riley’s lips
quivered.  “Now, look here—!”

“Don’t bother
denying it, Riley; we’re not idiots.  Your closeness to Miss Cole
compromises your judgment.  Had we informed you of our plans for this
morning, you would never have allowed us to proceed.”

“I certainly
would not have!”

“And yet the
mayor herself agreed to the idea.”

The chief Home
Planet liaison’s eyes widened.  “Even
she
knew?”  He pounded a
fist on the desk.  “This department cannot continue to function in this
manner!  I want honesty between the two of us, Giles.”

“Oh?” Holiday
asked calmly.  “Care to
honestly
tell me the details about your
depleting medical state?”

Riley looked away
silently.

“Not long ago,”
Holiday said, “you were the picture of health.  But over the last several
months you’ve regressed each and every time I’ve seen you.  Are you
certain that in your state you should still be acting chief home planet
liaison?”

“I certainly
don’t need you to assess whether or not I’m able to perform my job, Director
Holiday!” Riley spat.

Holiday gave a
brief nod.  “Nor do I need you to assess whether I’m able to perform
mine.  Are we clear?”

Riley’s mouth
twitched wordlessly.  He turned and left without a goodbye.

JILL
sat back on a leather sofa, alone with her thoughts.  Through the glass
wall in front of her she looked down on
GoCom’s
central lobby several stories below.  The lobby was lit and fairly
busy.  But the lounge where Jill sat was empty and dark, as it always was
in the evenings.

She’d found this
place a couple weeks after joining the department.  She usually came here
after a mission, just to sit by herself and contemplate while idly watching the
people in the lobby below.  It helped her unwind after the stress of being
on the job.  But it was hard to unwind with the thought that kept
repeating itself in her mind, the mental picture.

Doreen’s lifeless
body sprawled at the edge of the street.

It wasn’t my
fault
, Jill told herself without much conviction.

The Lioness had
cooperated nicely ever since they’d nabbed her.  But they’d been expecting
her to try to make a run for it, and this morning was the perfect
opportunity.  She would attempt to escape, all right, and it was Jill’s
job to make sure she didn’t get away.

Someone else had
found her first.

But it wasn’t
my fault
, Jill told herself again.  She’d helped set everything up in
the press room, then headed for her
skybike
. 
Riley’s men had stopped her. 
I should have resisted them, should have
stunned them, should have done
some
thing! 
But she’d gone along
with them.

And now Doreen
Maybury
was dead.  It wasn’t the first time Jill had
felt responsible for a life lost.

She sighed. 
She was also responsible for at least one life saved today, she reminded
herself.  Anne Marie Cole—more than just the new mayor of
Anterra
.  She had been the administrator of the
liaison office between Earth and
Anterra
and one of
the visionaries behind the formation of The Nexus.

She’d also once
contacted Jill personally.  Jill had watched the recording of that video
chat more times than she could count.

Even now she
subconsciously pulled up the recording again on her mobile.

“Very sorry to
disturb you at this hour, Miss Branch.”  Even in the grainy video, Ms.
Cole’s wavy auburn hair seemed to gleam.  Behind her the lights of the
Avenue of Towers glowed out her office window. 

“No problem,”
Jill’s voice interjected over the video.

“I wanted to
contact each one of you personally and congratulate you on the capture of Miss
Doreen
Maybury
.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s...one
other thing I wanted to tell you.  I don’t suppose I ought to be speaking
about it, but I felt you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s about your
father.”

A pause. 
Then,  “You know who my father is?”

“I knew him a
long time ago.  I only recently reconnected with him.  He came to me,
actually.  He wanted me to let you know that he thinks about you,
Jill.  Every day.”

Every day
,
Jill’s mind repeated the words as her eyes drifted away from her mobile screen.

“I know you’d
probably rather he told you himself,” she heard Ms. Cole’s recorded voice
continue, “but I’m afraid that just isn’t possible.  But I wanted to relay
the message to you right away.”

The recording was
interrupted as her mobile received a message from Corey: 
Coming?

Be right there
,
she replied, jumping to her feet.

Every day
,
she thought again as she headed down to HQ. 
Every day
... 

5

FIVE
minutes later Jill was on her bike heading toward the skyscrapers of downtown. 
Traffic was thick, even at the highest
skytraffic
level.  Thirty feet below her roared the lower level of
skytraffic
, and thirty feet below that was the congested
ground level of Route 12.

She finally found
a parking spot in a tiered garage near the Avenue of Towers and took an
elevator to street level.  The crowds were thick tonight, thicker and
thicker as she made her way to the
Jann
-Birch Plaza
just west of the Avenue.  It was the center of the week’s activities
celebrating
Anterra’s
centennial.

By the time she
reached the border of the extensive plaza, she practically had to elbow her way
through the mob to get anywhere.  Booths of food, games, and souvenirs
were packed along the walk.  The proprietors attempted out-yelling each
other to attract business.  Couples surveyed the scene arm in arm, and
families pushed strollers and tugged at toddlers.  The crowds were a
healthy sampling of
Anterra’s
ethnic
variety—Europeans and Euro-Americans, Japanese, Chinese and other Southeast
Asians, Africans (mostly of African American heritage), Indians and Pakistanis,
Latin Americans—almost every culture on earth was represented on the
satellite.  She saw a few Koreans, too, though they mostly kept to
themselves.  She didn’t see any half-Koreans besides herself.

By the time she’d
made it through the maze of vendors, harsh sounding music was already blaring
from the stage at the end of the plaza.  Jill smiled. 
Dizzie
Mason and her bright pink guitar were largely
responsible for the sound.  A digital marquis over the stage proclaimed
THE LAWN FLAMINGOS in sparkling script.  A sizable audience had pressed
itself in front of the stage.  Jill was content to stop just outside the
fringes of the crowd.

“There you are,”
she heard Corey’s voice amid the din.

“Hey.  Sorry,
I guess I sort of lost track of time...”

“No
problem.”  He smiled his endearing smile.

She tried to
smile back.  “Where’s Amber?”

He nodded toward
the enthusiastic crowd packed in front of the stage.

Jill raised an
eyebrow.  “Seriously?”

“I know.  I
was just as surprised.”

“She’s in good
mood tonight?”

Corey bit his
lip.  “Or she’s...got a lot on her mind, and she could use the
distraction.”

Jill
nodded.  She and Corey had done a lot of speculating about what Amber had
been up to lately.  It seemed like every minute that she wasn’t on a
mission for the department she was out working on a mission of her own. 
Whatever it was, Amber didn’t talk much about it.  “Don’t tell me
Bradley’s in there too?”

Corey
snorted.  “No way.  Bradley doesn’t like anything that resembles
fun.  I have no idea where he is.”

“Nice job this
morning, by the way.”

“Thanks. 
You too.”

Jill looked away.

“I tried to find
you as soon as we got back,” Corey told her, “but I figured you needed a little
alone time.  I just wanted to make sure you were okay after everything
that happened.”

“I’m okay. 
I guess.”

She felt his hand
touch her shoulder.  “It wasn’t your fault.  You did everything you
could.”

“I know,” she
said softly—too softly to be heard over the Lawn Flamingos. 
Did I
actually?

Corey’s hand
withdrew from her shoulder as Amber appeared out of the masses.  “Hey,
Jill!”

“Hey.”

“You guys should
come to the mosh pit with me.”

“No, thank you,”
Corey stated firmly.

“Oh, come on,
it’s
Dizzie’s
band!”  She seized his hand and
tugged him toward the crowd.  “Jill?”

“Maybe in a
minute,” she said, waving them on.

They pushed their
way into the close packed audience and vanished.  In the midst of the
centennial celebrators, Jill stood in a two meter radius of alone-ness.

“IF
I didn’t know better,”
Dizzie
said with her mouth
full of sushi, “I’d say I saw Amber Phoenix in the middle of the mayhem right
in front of the stage.”

Amber gave an
embarrassed smile.  “I’ll have you know I went to many a concert back in
my day.”

“Doesn’t really
seem like your thing,” Bradley noted absently, studying a shrimp he twisted
between his fingers.

“You do seem
like you’re in a rare mood,” Corey added, giving Amber a pointed look.

“I...made some
progress today,” She replied cryptically.  “It’s got me a little giddy,
that’s all.”

Giddy wasn’t
the right word, Jill thought.  Amber was keyed up, all right—the kind of
keyed up that comes from being stressed, or from too much busyness and not
enough sleep.  It was the way Jill felt whenever she drank a lot of
caffeine to make up for exhaustion.

She kept her
thoughts to herself.

They were
having a late dinner on a rooftop restaurant overlooking
Jann
-Birch
Plaza.  The crowds were still in full force among the booths and stalls
that bordered the open area.  It was the last day of
Anterra’s
first century of existence.  Tomorrow the new century would be ushered in,
and the festivities would reach their apex.  The formal element of the
celebration would feature a speech from newly inaugurated Mayor Cole. 
Jill and her team would constitute part of the mayor’s bodyguard.

“By the way,”
said
Dizzie
, mouth still full, “it’s my first chance
to congratulate you all on the mission this morning.”

“You too,
Diz
,” said Corey.  “All of you, job well done.”

Bradley cleared
his throat and stuffed another shrimp in his mouth.

“Something to
say, Mr. Park?” Amber asked with a frown.  “You don’t agree with that
assessment of the morning’s events?”

Jill winced.

“Oh, it went
fine,” Bradley replied, “other than the fact that a prisoner and key source of
intelligence escaped and got herself killed before we could bring her back in.”

“Hey,”
Dizzie
said hotly, “there was nothing we could do about
that.”

“Nothing?” he
repeated significantly.

Jill looked
silently at the tabletop.

“You may have
heard,” Amber shot, “that the chief liaison arrested Jill on false
charges.”  She looked like she wanted to continue her tirade, but an
incoming message on her mobile distracted her.

“There’s such a
thing as resisting arrest,” Bradley retorted.

“You think Jill
should have resisted Chief Riley?”
Dizzie
demanded,
flinging her fork down on her plate.  “Our
boss’s boss?”

“In a situation
like that, yes.  There was too much at stake.”

Amber stared intently
at her mobile screen as she stepped to a private corner of the rooftop. 
Corey glanced after her.

“If I had it to
do over again...” Jill said quietly.

“Well, you
don’t,” Bradley muttered.  “
Maybury’s
dead.”  He scarfed down the last of his shrimp and stood to leave.

“Don’t you walk
away from this table,”
Dizzie
spat at him.

Bradley ignored
her and headed toward the exit.

“Bradley Park!”
Dizzie
bellowed, jumping to her feet and dashing
after him.  She strode directly next to him, giving him a heated earful
with every step.

Corey remained
seated across from Jill in awkward silence.

“Why didn’t you
say anything?” Jill asked softly, fighting the tears that threatened.

“I...I’m
sorry,” Corey sputtered.

“I mean, I know
he’s your friend, and all.”

“He’s not a
friend.  He’s a member of my team, and I’m hesitant to publicly come down
on any member of my team.”

“How about
publicly sticking up for a member of your team when someone else comes down on
her?” she asked, dark eyes burning.  She let her stare linger a moment
before standing to leave.

Corey
sighed.  “He has his reasons for lashing out, Jill.  He’s still a
jerk, but you have to know there are reasons.”

“I bet you
wouldn’t have let him talk like that to Amber,” she said over her shoulder as
she walked away.

Corey watched
her silently until she disappeared through the exit.  His eyes drifted
back to Amber.  She was making a call, now, pacing nervously.  Corey
got up and stepped toward her.

“...time does
he get off?” he heard her ask.  “Okay, thanks.”  She hung up and
headed swiftly for the exit, never noticing Corey’s approach.

JILL
felt terrible about what she’d said.  She kept telling herself to go back
and smooth things out, but something—fear, pride, anger—kept her from turning
around.

Back at street
level she crossed the plaza again.  She passed by the fenced off area that
designated the one place protesters were allowed at the site.  Quite a mob
of
Earthsiders
had shown up to protest the centennial
celebration.  There were plenty of people unhappy with
Anterra
—unhappy
with the entire idea of the Metropolitan Satellite Project.  Some stood
fairly peacefully; some were really obnoxious.  ANTERROGANCE, several of
the signs said.  
I see what they did there
, Jill thought with
a roll of her eyes.  HONOR YOUR MOTHER was another popular one.  She
assumed they were implying that Earth was the motherland of the human race, and
that the
Anterrans
were essentially rejecting their
own heritage by leaving.  It was a common sentiment.

Maybe they were
onto something.  Maybe MS9 had failed because mankind was never meant to
leave the Home Planet.

Then again, she
thought as she watched the vehement picketers shouting and waving their fists,
maybe humans were pretty screwed up wherever they were.  Subconsciously
she glanced toward Earth, its dark curve visible between the skyscrapers along
the Avenue of Towers.  Every sunrise on
Anterra
was delayed behind the planet’s looming form, casting the satellite into shadow
for that much longer.

Jill caught
sight of one more sign before she’d passed the protesters’ area:  YOU’LL
ALWAYS BE IN OUR SHADOW.

Maybe they were
right.

HYUN
Ki Kim usually passed the time feeling bitter.  There was a lot to be
bitter about, like the fact that he was rotting here in a
GoCom
prison cell.

Then there was
his missing eye.  That was always a fun one to have a pity party about.
 A black eye patch had covered the grotesque socket in the months after it
happened.  Then his crookedly acquired profits increased enough to have a
robotic replacement inserted into the socket.  He kept wearing the patch
whenever he was around his cohorts.  It had become an integral part of the
image he’d cultivated.  He was proud of that image even if enhancing it
had meant taking a switchblade to the eyeball.

But lately he
felt more like being bitter than being proud.  Chilling in the slammer
will do that to you.

Today he felt
like being particularly bitter, not just whining to himself about his eye or
his plight.  It seemed like a day for sinking into the depths, for
reaching down to the roots of his bitterness.  Today, he thought of
another Hyun Ki Kim, his great-great-grandfather—or Kim Hyun Ki, as he would
have been called back home.  That Hyun Ki Kim had been an aerospace
engineer, not a criminal.  That Hyun Ki Kim had been the first Korean
designer in the United Space Programs and had helped pioneer the Metropolitan
Satellite Project.

The pioneer’s
great-great-grandson frowned on his cot.  They’d never truly appreciated
his ancestor’s contributions.

The controversy
was well documented.  One day, just over a century ago, Hyun Ki Kim had
approached the project team with a breakthrough concept regarding atmospheric
generation for the inhabitable satellites.  They dismissed his idea
outright.  A month later a Japanese engineer was credited with an almost
identical breakthrough.  Kim attempted to sue, eventually losing a lengthy
court battle.  When the Japanese engineer was found dead in his Okinawa
home not long afterward, no one hesitated to jump to conclusions.  The
judge ruled Kim innocent of any involvement.  The public hardly agreed.

It had happened
on one of the first project team visits to the under-construction
Metropolitan
Satellite IX.
  During the journey a malfunction in cabin pressure had
left the shuttle passengers temporarily unconscious.  When the correction
was made and the project members came to, Kim didn’t.

He never did.

No proof could
be found to charge anyone with harmful intent.  But Kim’s
great-great-grandson knew better.

One hundred
years later the Koreans on
Anterra
were still viewed
as second citizens, if not outright hated.  His father, like his
grandfather, had tried to make the best of things, running a small business in
Anterra’s
tightknit Korean Town.  But by the time the
younger Hyun Ki Kim had reached the age of sixteen, he’d had enough of the
dirty looks and the hurled slurs and the graffiti tags left on the house and
the shop front.  It was time his family faced it:  This place was not
the paradise the USP had intended.  It would never be.  There was no
point in dreaming about it any longer.  They needed a new dream.

Kim found
one.  Life on the streets came easily to him.  He joined an
incendiary group known as the Flaming
Taeguk
,
sparking miniature rebellions and riots against the oppression of the
Anterran
government.