Under Dark Sky Law (9 page)

After opening the door, she immediately had a
good feeling about the officers just from seeing their expressions.
They were wearing camo uniforms instead of the obnoxious dress
uniforms that she’d seen everyone wearing since being released.
They were still serious and lacking any outward emotion, but in her
eyes, she saw something.

“Agent Pietrovich?” the taller one said. He
had dark skin and a thick but groomed mustache. He was of medium
build, and he was taller, older, and a few ranks higher than his
partner, who was also darkly complected but clean shaven.

She cocked her head to the side. “Yes?” she
said.

The older one extended his hand. “Captain
Stone,” he said and gave her hand a firm shake. “I just wanted to
thank you,” “We heard about what you did for Sanchez.”

The younger one stepped forward and shook her
hand as well. “Lieutenant Avery. Thank you so much. Sanchez is like
a father to us,” he said.

Xero nodded. “Sanchez is a good man. I’m glad
he’s going to pull through—that was entirely too close for
comfort,” she said.

There was a tall upright piece of travel
luggage behind the two of them. Stone wheeled it forward and gave
her the handle. She raised an eyebrow.

“Everything you need should be in there.
There are things happening out here—it’s not safe. Once you go back
inside we’re going to reactivate the security cameras out here in
the hall for safety purposes. Orders from the higher ups are to not
let you out of the room until you’re moved to another facility for
debriefing tomorrow, but you let us know if you need anything, and
we’ll make sure you get it,” Stone said.

“I’ll be directly supervising all the
security details this evening, so you let me know if anything else
happens, and I’ll take care of it. We were delayed getting here
because of continuing incidents at the border,” Avery said with a
look that led her to believe that he’d seen what had happened with
the younger recruit earlier.

She wanted to ask them more questions, but
knew it wouldn’t be appropriate. She didn’t want to risk getting
the men in trouble, and from the sounds of it, the tools she needed
to get her answers were in the bag.

“I’ll see to it that you’re not disturbed the
remainder of the evening—as I understand it you were also gravely
injured and could use some rest,” Stone said.

She gave them a genuine smile. “Thank you
both very much. Good luck dealing with these new recruits. They’re
quite a handful,” she said.

“You’re telling me,” Avery said and rolled
his eyes. Stone kicked his foot lightly.

Stone cleared his throat. “There have been
challenging staff shortages recently, which I’m sure you’ll read
more about this evening. We’ve got this hotel monitored—a lot of
important business and political figures are taking asylum here,
but keep your ears open,” he said, alluding to the point that he
didn’t quite trust his own staff to carry out duties
effectively.

That explained why she was here and not in
some dingy military bunker on the outskirts of the dome. She
figured it was just their typical dome habit of holding on to
protocols regardless of the situation—runners in Phoenix were
treated well because they found that it reduced incidents of theft
and misconduct when the runners were treated with respect and
value. Imagine that. The fact that they were protecting her in the
same area as key political figures also meant that someone felt she
was an important political object herself. Curious.

They both shook her hand again, restating
their gratitude for saving Sanchez, knowing that she could have
just as easily dumped his body out of the combat vehicle and left
him to die while she escaped. The fact that she had raised their
opinion of her enough to stop thinking of her as pit trash spoke
volumes about their character, and she was glad to finally have a
few people with some kind of sense around again.

After wheeling in the suitcase and securing
the door again, she stripped down to her underwear again. At least
it was a comfortable temperature—that was one thing that she
sometimes missed about the domes. The flats were always erratic in
their temperature fluctuations, while the pits were typically
either too hot or too cold. The tightly controlled environment in
the domes were always just right. In fact, if you were in a dome
that wasn’t doing a good job of keeping the temperature constant,
it was a good bet that something was about to go catastrophically
wrong. It was like the harbinger of a dying star, a good sign that
the dome would fail and become another abandoned flat. Each of the
domes had a vested interest in keeping the other domes in various
cities running—if a dome failed the citizens would inevitably
attempt to migrate to another dome city. This had of course led to
widespread debates about border security and immigration policies.
The ones that were excepted for immigration became a burden to the
fragile closed systems—the ones that didn’t get accepted died in
the pits, which would spark cavalcades of political unrest.

This was one of the reasons why media had
become so severely restricted in the past few years. It was much
easier to advocate for stricter immigration policies if you didn’t
have to deal with images of your friends and neighbors suffocating
to death in the pits. In the early days Xero had opened a
quarantined area for those who were not evolved enough to breath
outside the domes. These days the air in the pits had gotten so bad
that there really wasn’t a need for such halfway houses—most people
were dead before they ever even made it to a pit colony.

Now comfortably in her PJs, she tossed the
suitcase onto the tall bed and jumped up there after it. She
couldn’t help but take a moment to roll around in the soft morass
of frothy white blankets and pillows. She scissored her arms and
legs back and forth like she was a making a snow angel. Snow—that
was something she hadn’t seen in awhile. Some northern domes used
to simulate snow in the winter for the psychological comfort of
those who weren’t used to living without it, but that had long ago
become too expensive, and it had been a long time since she’d done
a run far enough north into Canada to see any real snow in the
pits.

After enjoying the minute of frivolous
indulgence, she stopped fucking around and opened the suitcase.
Inside there was everything she could have hoped for—there were
business casual clothes, the sort she would have gone somewhere and
bought if she hadn’t been put on lockdown after the attack, and
there were also some hardier selections, like a pair of military
camo pants and other casual clothing items along with some useful
toiletries. No additional wig was available, but she wouldn’t have
expected them to think of something like that. She was just going
to have to deal with reconciling her two personas. Sometimes it was
good to have Xero readily accessible, even when they were in
Anastasia’s territory.

Underneath the clothes was the real important
stuff, and she made sure to hold the lid of the suitcase at an
angle so that any cameras wouldn’t have a good view of anything
inside. There was a small computer that she recognized as one of
the newer models she’d been shipping from dome to dome recently.
There wasn’t a whole lot of use for them in the pits, so she
typically just kept them stashed about various hiding places in the
domes that she frequented the most. This was exactly what she
needed.

There was also a small toolkit that had the
miniature screw drivers and wire cutters that she’d need to get
some of her work done, along with various wires and connectors. The
last piece of the puzzle was a communicator with a scrambling unit
on it. Perfect. Avery and Stone won the prize for being her new
best friends. She looked around the room and located the main
camera and microphone surveying sleeping area. It was hidden
amongst some of the glowing decorations, but she was well-practiced
in locating and disabling surveillance equipment, and within a few
minutes she had it rewired to show another nearby room. Hopefully
with the help of Avery and Stone no one would charge in demanding
to know what she’d done with the surveillance machines. From the
sound of it, they had more important people to keep an eye on, and
more pressing issues to deal with.

She went about the rest of the suite and used
the scrambling unit on the communicator as a makeshift scanner for
anything she might have missed. There was actually one left, and
she was especially happy disabling a sneaky camera hidden inside
shower. Perverts. When everything looked clear, she took one of the
screwdrivers and partially dismantled the television. After a
little digging she removed a monitoring device from the back of the
unit and unceremoniously dumped it into the trash. Not that anyone
using the suite after her would likely care if their television
watching habits were being monitored, but just the principle of the
thing bothered Xero, and she might decide to wire the computer to
the bigger screen for better intel if she managed to tap into any
valuable underground news networks.

While replacing the back panel of the
television she thought of Evan, and she was silently grateful for
all of the engineering know-how that he’d taught her over the
years. Neptune was an amazing engineer, maybe one of the best she’d
ever seen, but she couldn’t even begin to hold a candle to Evan.
Her face went blank. She had long ago stopped mourning for all the
people she had lost and continued to lose on a daily basis, but she
didn’t think she’d ever totally stop missing Evan. She shook off
the thought and finished making her rounds of the hotel.

During the course of her security inspection,
she found that the fancy curtains were actually affixed to the
window, making it impossible for her to see out and vice versa. She
probably could have pried them free, but it would have been at
significant cost and damage to the facilities. As much as she would
have liked to see out and watch what was going on downtown, it was
probably better that no one could see up through her window either.
At least she had access to a clock to keep track of the relative
time. It was 6pm, and it would be getting dark outside soon.
Someone would probably be coming to retrieve her early in the
morning, but there should still be plenty of time to try and gather
intel and also get some sleep. She knew from experience that not
taking care of yourself after a rapid healing treatment could have
some unpleasant side effects.

Once she was satisfied with the setup of the
room, she slipped on a pair of jeans and a black tank top that were
among the clothing selections in the suitcase. With any hope she
would be undisturbed, but it was probably better to remain clothed
in case any of the military folk got nosy and decided to come
bother the exotic pit runner. An unsettling trend of fighting naked
or half naked was shaping up that week, and it wasn’t a tradition
that she particularly wanted to continue.

The big executive desk would serve as a great
workbench, and she set up all of the technical equipment in a
meticulous fashion. It cemented her feelings that Stone and Avery
were no fools, and were likely actually on special ops teams. They
had included everything that she could have possibly wanted for
security and intelligence hacking. This was going to be a breeze.
With a few minutes she had connected to the internet and bypassed
all the monitoring protocols. It was so much faster and easier with
the powerful laptop than it had been trying to patch things
together on the fly with the tablet a few days ago at the
hospital.

Now she was able to access the reputable
underground news agencies, and she immediately understood why there
had been so many personnel shortages. There were riots breaking out
all across the flats, and there had been a near breach on the
western side of the Phoenix dome. It wasn’t totally clear from the
patch reports, but looked like skeletons had been involved with all
or most of the attacks. Calavera had some real explaining to do.
Although honestly, she didn’t think Calavera had the resources or
the smarts to pull something like this off. There was something
very suspicious about the whole thing. The attacks seemed
incredibly well-planned, but in the end the rioters were just
retreating and giving up after causing a sufficient amount of
mayhem. Calavera wouldn’t be able to come up with anything so
sophisticated. At best she was a charismatic two bit criminal with
a cult-like following, which is why in the end she had decided to
ally with Xero. She had a much more developed network of
underground activities, and the whole Southern Arizona territory
basically belonged to her. Calavera’s thugs were dangerous to
tangle with, as Argon had learned the hard way back in the flats,
but in the end they were really just an annoyance. Xero had agreed
to a truce primarily as a way to avoid inconvenience. Burying
bodies in the hot desert sand was hard work.

She flexed her fingers and got ready to poke
around at some seriously questionable sites. Since hacking really
wasn’t her primary business, she didn’t usually go messing with
some of the higher security clearance sites because there was
always a decent risk that she might get caught, but she was pretty
desperate and impatient for information. During debriefing she may
or may not get any kind of reasonable update. She would try getting
ahold of one of the Grease Weasels via communicator, but even with
all the known bugs removed from the room she didn’t want to take
unnecessary risk by talking about sensitive information over them.
There was no way she would even attempt reaching Calavera directly,
as much as she wanted to tear her a new one. Communicators
essentially worked on modified radio waves, and even one encrypted
with a scrambler didn’t have the most airtight security. Out in the
pits there typically weren’t enough people with the type of
equipment to pick up those kinds of signals even if they wanted to,
but they had fairly strict rules against using communicators while
in the dome for a reason.