Episode 6 - Thunder Across a Blue Sky

  Chapter 52 - Operation: Crowded Tank

  It is dark enough. Wake now.

  I don’t need any alarm to stir from my sleep when Pooka is with me. We never sleep at the same time; one of our bodies is always alert, even if we are not in the same place together.

  Not that I think much would wake the workers around me. In the tight quarters of the barracks, exhausted by a day's labor, most of my fellow free-men sleep through deep, dreamless nights. They get used to snoring and breathing and coughing soon enough living here.

  I won’t have to. I have a private apartment to go home to after tonight.

  It was a luxury I might have once considered excessive. But, like running water between my fingers, a lot of my feelings on a lot of matters have become more slippery. It’s not like I can give up my apartment and suddenly the lives of other people would be improved? So should I hate myself just because I look forward to sleeping in a bed in silence again?

  I don’t know what to do with these dirty little feelings when I have them. I don’t know how to reconcile them in a way my heart would be at peace. I could just be growing up… what a grim thought.

  I sit up silently in my bunk, pulling on clean coveralls over the black tank and boxer shorts I sleep in here. Then I bend over my bed in the dark, feeling beneath me for my boots and the single backpack of belongings I have with me on this operation. I line the base of my backpack with a spare set of underwear and dump every other belonging I have with me out on the end of my bed. The only thing that is valuable to me now is the metal case I withdraw from a secret pocket on the side of the bag, and stick in my chest pocket. Contained within it is a handful of black business cards embossed with a gold Aquila. It’s the only ID I ever need anymore. Everything else now comes second to the cargo I’m about to pick up.

  Berlinger has been such a long contract because it took us several weeks to find our targets: the cell culture labs and the new strains of plants within. There are hundreds of greenhouses, and just as many clean rooms for cloning the nearly fifty species of food crop Berlinger cultivates. My ability to search was limited by the role I took to get planted here, relying instead on the singular Vespa that accompanied me to do most of the scouting, as well as Pooka, who… lets say he’s seldom motivated to help on tasks he considers boring.

  As my fingers stumble on my laces, my bunkmate across from me stirs. I pause and silently wait to see if she’s awake, watching the movement of her chest. As her breathing settles again, and she rolls slightly while pulling her blanket higher, I get to my feet. With careful steps, I sling my mostly empty backpack over one shoulder and stalk up the aisle between the bunks to exit the women’s barracks.

  As I shut the door silently behind me, a figure across the way is standing leaning near the doorway to the common bathrooms vaping. Even in the dark, I can recognize Ed Foster’s lanky figure, his head turned away from me to watch back towards the men’s barracks.

  I pause, considering my options, then make what I already know is a bad decision.

  “What’s up, cob?” I whisper.

  He starts, scrambling to hide his vape stick behind his back, then relaxes when he sees me. “Jeez Conrada. I think you took five years off my life.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I mutter, leaning on the wall at his side.

  “What-cha doin’ this late? You want a smoke?” he asks, offering me the vape-stick between two fingers.

  I shake my head.

  “Something else then?”

  I can hear the interest in his voice. I sigh. He was fun, about the only thing that kept this job interesting. “Figured I’d say goodbye given you were up,” I say.

  He stiffens and turns a little, then his eyebrows raise as he sees the backpack over my shoulder. “What do you mean ‘goodbye’? You’re… leaving?”

  I nod. The red glow from the emergency exit lighting is enough to see his figure in the dark but not his facial expressions.

  “How?”

  “I was never gonna be here long term,” I reply. “I’m sorry, it’s gonna be real mank for you. They’ll know it was me and we hung out too much.”

  “What do-? You’re not here to work, are you? You’re one of those corporate spies?” Suddenly his hands grip my shoulders, and he bends to look me in the eye. “Take me with you! Take me out of here with you.”

  I draw a shuddering breath. “I don’t have that power,” I reply rather meekly.

  “Let me help you,” he begs, shaking my shoulder in a way that begins to make me feel uncomfortable. “Tell me what you are here for and I can come too! There has to be something I can do?”

  “Keep your voice down,” I hiss, but the words don’t have the command they should. I shouldn’t have stopped for him; this was a terrible idea. Why did he have to be awake? Why him of all people?

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Conrada, please. If I meant anything to you, please. I can’t stay here, I can’t.”

  The desperation in his voice sucks the moisture from my mouth. I swallow, and I cut us apart with the precision of a killer. “You were just entertainment to me while I was here. That was it. I thought I’d say sorry for the interrogations you’ll get tomorrow morning when they find out what I came for. Nothing else.”

  I can almost see the color drain from his face in the red glow we both stand under. I can definitely feel the sudden tightening of his grip on my shoulders. “You’re a fucking clock watcher, like the rest of them. Was this your plan all along?”

  I can no longer look at his face, and I hide my shame by removing his hands from my shoulder. My fingers land on the pocket on my chest, brushing the top of the metal case of black business cards there. Then I let the thought pass, drifting my hand down to my side.

  He lets me withdraw, stepping back from me. He always seemed like a good guy at heart, he wouldn’t hurt me. “I’ll raise the alarm,” he threatens.

  “You won’t. You’re a dreg who’s never trusted security in your life.” I declare. “And it doesn’t matter, I’ll be gone before they can do anything about it.”

  “You’re a mank bitch.”

  “Yeah. I said I’m sorry. See ya, Foster.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I shouldn’t have stopped. I duck away from him and march down the hall towards the greenhouses. I don’t spare him a look back over my shoulder.

  As I enter the first greenhouse, a Vespa buzzes onto my ear. “Commence operation?” I ask Adrian on the other end, hoping that any unsteadiness in my voice doesn’t make it to him.

  “Commence Operation Crowded Tank. Lock in is not necessary. No tactical support is operational. You have field command?”

  “I have field command. Just make sure the train is ready for me.”

  “Mia organized everything earlier today. You have two hours, the train is at 0251. Once you check in at the Intertrain counters, they should have your tickets already. I’ll monitor things, but otherwise I’m going to bed. You’re the only one active tonight.”

  “Thanks. See you soon.”

  I take off running between the greenhouses. I know where every camera is already. I’d mentally begun planning this route the moment we identified the target lab. The cameras are not the biggest threat to watch for, anyway.

  I’ve fallen into the habit of operating alone at Aquila. There are several reasons for it, and they’re all secrets that Adrian and I keep tight between us.

  Our first secret is the reason why I never lock in when any other operation is likely to occur. I am something Pooka calls a ‘conduit’. My bond with Pooka goes both ways when every other bond is a uni-direction chain from the human master to the symbiont slave. We overlap. Adrian’s Vespa replicates this bond by injecting her venom and opening Adrian’s bond onwards to new targets, allowing him silent simultaneous communication with anyone stung until the toxin is metabolized… as well as secret control of them like the human hosts have over their own symbionts.

  But not for me. When I lock in my bond opens us up to full communion, an overlapping mental space where we all mingle as equals. I don’t need Adrian to coordinate his symbiont, Espah, for reconnaissance or communication when operating in high stakes. They become my bodies as much as they are his.

  My second secret we guard even closer. But that hasn’t prevented us from putting it to use to make me indispensable to Aquila. There is a power and safety that comes with indispensability even I can’t deny.

  Everyone at Aquila is trained to watch for cameras, to observe movement, and to adapt when things inevitably go wrong. Because they always go wrong. I have one skill no one else has though.

  I pause in the doorway and look across the crops. Most of the lights are out for their dark cycle. To anyone else, the greenhouse would be empty. I blink. Then I blink again. And I see the late-night workers that everyone else is blind to.

  Between the green tendrils of bean vines, symbionts labor while their hosts sleep. Simians perched or climbing between the vertical scaffolds of the stacked blocks of grow media. There’s at least five genera represented here, crooning to the crops with cupped human-like hands. Under their tender care, the flowers always bloom and the fruits grow fat and heavy. They accelerate plant growth enough for these greenhouses to be ten-times the productivity they might otherwise be without the symbiont energy to power them.

  Symbionts need no food or water, no sunlight, nor even air apparently. Whatever they need to exist, they get from the bond to the host that chains them. And somehow, they summon energy to do things technology could never replicate. Energy human society relies upon for our survival when so many resources are thin.

  Adrian is the only person at Aquila who knows my secrets, just as he knows everyone else's.

  When I walk into the first greenhouse to cross to the labs at the western edge of the facility, it is not just the cameras I can dodge… but the watching eyes of the Simians working through the night.

  I have a reputation for being a prodigious infiltrator now, capable of never being seen by camera or symbiont, like trailing smoke rather than human agent. People don’t ask questions when you deliver results, and Adrian keeps me operating independently wherever we can keep our thumbs on the scale. And the peace of our arrangement has worked well for several months now. It’s my one-year anniversary soon at Aquila Operations, and no agent as green as I am operates on their own as frequently as I do.

  I carefully watch the movement of a pair of Nomascus gibbon symbionts above me. Both are distracted with their constant labors, and I move beneath them all quietly, keeping to the side of the greenhouse where their tending for the night is already completed. It only takes me a few moments to pass through to the next greenhouse, this one empty of symbionts, and I break into a jog again, working my way back towards where I was earlier in the day.

  As I reach the secure labs, I duck for cover behind some stacked disused trays and framing. Pooka let me in, and we can finally get out of here.

  I let my mind drift to watch through his eyes as he stirs from sitting under the work benches and lifts his lip back across his teeth in a snarl of displeasure. Then he rears up onto his hind paws, pushing the door handle down and outwards. There’s no lock from the inside, because normally the only people who can get in are those who have the clearances to be there. I slip inside, and pull the door shut behind me.