PART TWO: THE HEIST

Takemura levelled the aerodyne. Through the canopy shone the burgeoning lights of the equatorial city; the arcologies had yet to bloom, and in the misty distance, they surged as dark needles, inches away from piercing the cylindrical embers of the sun.

“You can still turn around if you don’t feel it,” Takemura said.

“I wouldn’t have boarded your flitter otherwise. Luna knows what she’s doing. I am fine, and the idea of robbing a billionaire from the industrial age is enthralling enough. Now, shush. I need to slip into the skin of Ishi Sindris, antiquarian extraordinaire.”

Talasea leaned back in her seat. A strong wind washed over the canopy and the arcologies lit up all at once, candles cutting the skies in half. Harrow’s tower was the least luminous: its base, emerging from a blackish marsh, gleamed in pale blue, while the needletop pulsed in dark purple. The intermediate section remained unlit like a mausoleum. As the flitter closed in, Talasea noticed flocks of seagulls and terns on the prowl in the damp air, squawking as they descended on the unsuspecting fish of the delta below. Their young nested in a multitude of niches, carved into the sheer wall of the arcology by wind, rain and disrepair. There was nary a drone nor an airship in sight, and the only human lights she saw in the intermediate section belonged to a minuscule camp, hanging from an exposed beam at the one-kilometre mark. Repairfolk? Scavengers? Mountaineers? She could but guess, as the local networks, displayed on her augmented reality lenses, were as silent and empty as the arcology: it remained a tomb in all planes of existence. The flitter kept ascending in the annoying whine of its ducted fans.

“The bastard loves his peace and quiet,” said Takemura. “He’s been influential enough to prevent any further development of his arcology.”

Talasea wanted to contradict him: any spacer born in an O’Neill had a natural eye for megastructural engineering, and from the state of the tower, she could tell that it had never been intended for habitation. Not only were the innards empty (it was easy enough to see through the holes left by blown-away panels) but the exposed volumes did not show nearly enough beams to support the cities and gardens of a kilometric arcology. This sharp pyramid bore all the external and internal characteristics of a monument, of a show of force and architectural prowess never envisioned for human presence. It was meant to be admired from the zero-g maglev terminal at the north end, where the space-bound carriages transported thousands of Terran visitors a day, who would then wait for their shuttle to the equatorial city, gazing at the cylinder with enthralled eyes. Such statements of grandeur were always the first to go when a station fell into the routine of disrepair. As the flitter made its way to the last intact section of the tip and the ducted fans went to sleep, Talasea understood: Harrow wasn’t a king in his castle, but a barnacle that the sea had yet to dislodge.

A platform emerged from the darkness and lit its beacons up in response to Takemura’s hails. The flitter tilted its ducted fans to transition to horizontal flight, Takemura relinquished the controls to the autopilot, and the wheels made contact with the pad. Another, identical flitter was parked nearby.

“If that’s the rest of the guests, I’m going to a very private auction,” said Talasea while checking her makeup in the rear-view mirror. She wore dark blue lipstick and a faint touch of eyeliner: a distinguished Pleiadian connoisseur of Terran relics did not need more. She was here to see, not to be seen, and Harrow surely knew the difference.

“One sec, I almost forgot,” Takemura said, as he handed Talasea an engraved currency card. “There are three standard salaries on this, referenced in an anonymous account at the Zenobia bank of Alcyone. If you see something that would make sense for a Pleiadian emissary to buy, get it. Play the part. It’s important.”

“Let’s do a radio check.” She tapped her necklace. “You hear me?”

“All clear.”

She switched frequencies with a flick of her index finger.

“Luna?”

“I’ve got you. I’m well into my ascent, my ETA on the vault is twenty-five minutes. Don’t rush it, I can hold.”

Talasea nodded and hopped off. The canopy slid shut. A monumental door opened in the wall of the arcology, letting a blade of golden light seep through. A humanoid frame stood on the threshold. Upon seeing Talasea, it initiated a ponderous walk towards her, like a cursed statue noticing the daring adventuress in one of the dime novels they printed on Alcyone. Talasea shifted her necklace slightly to the right, ensuring that the concealed laser was within reach of her dominant hand. As it approached, the humanoid frame revealed itself as the white linen-coated skeleton of a drone, whose twin, bulbous cameras found Talasea’s eyes. The humanoid bowed. Its servos engaged, but did not whine: they were perfectly maintained, the motion of its powerful arms nigh frictionless under its semitransparent shroud. The hands were five-fingered, and the uncanny valley was kept at bay by the copious application of a gaudy silver coating that evoked the smooth finish of Merope-made porcelain bots.

“Welcome to the mansion, mistress Sindris,” the drone said in a deeply textured male voice that seemed to come out of thin air, for it possessed had no visible speakers, and the lipless faceplate remained impassible. “My name is Delos. I am a Tivulan-class personal living space assistant, in service of Mister Harrow.”

Talasea bowed in return, her palm flat against her heart.

“Thank you for receiving me. Your make is rare.”

“As is yours.” The drone tilted its head to the side. “And you are wearing a colour-shifting sari. Quite a bold fashion statement in our day and age, if I may say so myself. Would you give me a demonstration?”

Talasea thought it safer to oblige and pulled the string. A moving front of fibre-optic light ran from her ankles to her head, and the gold fabric turned blue.

“Quite pleasing, indeed. Come.”

Beyond the threshold lay a tall-roofed hall, where fossilised palm trees reached towards foggy heights in a cascading avalanche of glittering gold. Talasea’s heels clicked on the marble slabs; they seemed authentic. After a few steps, Talasea began feeling ill-at-ease. This display of lavishness had an alien quality, not unlike the out-of-place beauty of a Sequence palace, this delicate ode to genocide. Alcyone and Merope possessed countless houses of wonders, cyclopean fields and sea gardens that teemed with whitewood, coral, limestone, blooming world-trees and solid sunlight, but these marvels were always public, in design, construction, maintenance and practice. They were not the domain of a single man. They were not seats of personal wealth.

A sharp-dressed, green-eyed and white-haired man walked up to Talasea. He did not look entirely there, and the disconnect between his calculated swagger and his shifty eyes made her think of a malfunctioning android until she noticed the faint scent of lavender that floated around him. He was high on golden lichen, and not the cheap kind: a pure Vyirangan strain, one of the few that allowed a seamless transition between the waking and dreaming worlds.

“Mistress Sindris, here is mister Pavus, who came all the way from the Traverse to attend this auction,” said Delos. “I think he has you beat by about a hundred light-years.”

“Sixty, to be accurate,” corrected Pavus, while giving her a loose handshake. “But close enough. Now…” he massaged his forehead. “Can we get on with this auction?”

“Yes. Please follow me.”

Delos sauntered through the many-pillared hall, Pavus and Talasea in tow, in the direction of a marble arch surrounded by a legion of mechanical birds that had long ceased to chirp, but tried to regardless and their thousands of beaks laboured in silence. Talasea and Pavus passed under the arch. Delos slammed the door shut, then clapped, and a ring of blue light rose from the marble slabs, outlining a table upon which it had arranged a vase, a flag and a human skull. Talasea’s necklace buzzed to signify that it had lost connection. Pavus tapped his ear.

“Sorry,” said the bot. “But this is a private auction. We do not object to recordings and outside communication, except inside this room. There will be no calls to handlers or long-distance bidding. Only outgoing comms will be for financial transactions. Now, shall we begin?”

“Aren’t you waiting for more guests?” Talasea asked.

“Mister Harrow approved seventy-eight guests this week. Seventy-six opted not to come.”

“Is this rate of non-attendance common?”

“You are the first guest to attend an auction in three years and fifteen weeks. I suspect most of the reservations are spam or jokes.”

“I want to see the old man,” Pavus said. “I need to size the seller up before making a purchase.”

“Mister Harrow feels unwell at the moment. I have full power to prosecute the sale in his place. May we begin?”

“No, I don’t like this,” Pavus insisted. “I came here to see Harrow specifically, and I will not take part in the auction until he steps down from his castle and shows himself in this room.”

“Mister Pavus, you arrived here for an auction, not for a chat with mister Harrow. Now, shall we?”

“Fine, go ahead,” Pavus agreed. Delos extended its right arm above the table, like a magician showing his new trick. Talasea wondered. Was Delos an AI avatar? It looked like a drone through and through, but appearances could be deceiving with unknown makes.

“This auction concerns three objects from Mister Harrow’s private collection,” Delos announced. It tapped the table to highlight the vase: it was transparent and perfectly mundane, the kind that could be found by the millions on any planet bearing the ruins of a recently extinct civilisation. The fact that this household ornament came from the only known world where a complex technological had *survived* its collapse did not make it anymore interesting in Talasea’s eyes.

“This urn was unearthed in 2256 from the ninth layer of the inverted metropolis of Lyon. It sports the characteristic mass-produced look of industrial-era vases, and was likely used to keep flowers in place. Centimetre-scale engravings at the bottom show the name of either a manufacturer or an owner. The auction for this artefact begins at a tenth of a yearly salary.”

“It’s glass, right?” Pavus asked. Talasea tried to follow the motion of his eyes and began feeling sick.

“The outer layer of the vase is indeed made of glass,” Delos answered. “The astute connoisseur will without a doubt recognise the crude, yet endearing make of this savage era.”

“It ain’t worth shit. We have billions of these. I’m not buying.”

Talasea shook her head. Delos moved to the flag, which it unfolded with care, displaying the washed-out colours of a national emblem: red stripes and white stars that evoked, somewhere at the back of Talasea’s romantic mind, the soft rustle of the wind in the endless, scorched plains of a dying continent. Was it…

“The flag of the United States of America,” Delos said. “Recovered from the remains of an AUSCOM drone taken down above Mexico in 2389, pristine condition, albeit UV exposure has taken its toll: it’s been used as a bar decoration for two centuries and only recently removed from display. The fabric is made of soft linen, and…”

“It’s fake,” interjected Pavus. “The flag of the United States had fifty stars. This one has forty-eight.”

“It is from a later era.”

“Only Florida was removed after it sank. Modern AUSCOM flags have forty-nine stars. Still fake.” He grinned. “I took an industrial era course in uni. OK, what about the skull? Who did it belong to?”

Delos seemed lost for a moment; then, presumed Talasea, the next pre-recorded presentation began.

“This human skull was radiocarbon-dated to the 2070s, and DNA analysis shows it belonged to a person assigned male at birth. It was retrieved on Mars, near the Pavonis Mons historical site. A square-shaped hole on the right temple hints at some manner of now-removed neural implant. I should note that another skeleton was found near this skull. It belonged to a lower-class individual and held an industrial cutter, which was employed to remove this head from its original body. It is a thrilling piece of early solar settlement history! The auction begins at one yearly salary.”

Pavus sighed.

“I’m not paying for a skull. Look, just…just lead me to Harrow, I want to talk to him.”

Delos pivoted his twin cameras towards Talasea.

“Is Mistress Sindris interested in the skull?”

“I may be.”

“One yearly salary for the skull. Mister Pavus, do you wish to…”

With his eyes still on the artefact, Pavus unfolded his dominant arm, and a two-shot, gold-plated laser derringer spawned from his sleeve and into his palm. The lens chimed against Delos’ torso panel.

“Bring me to Harrow. Now.”

“Warning,” Delos said. “I am fully optimised for close combat. My protection plate is rated for…”

Talasea closed her eyes for a split second before Pavus pulled the trigger twice. A pair of muffled bangs saturated the room, followed by a loud thump as Delos collapsed, a burning hole in its torso.

“Yeah, yeah,” Pavus said, as he cleared the smoke with a pocket fan. “You were manufactured five centuries ago. Keep up with the times, buddy.”

He pivoted in Talasea’s direction, still holding his now-empty derringer. Glassed dust on the lens gleamed like the half-lit end of a cigar.

“Now, who the hell are you working for, mistress Sindris, or whatever you name is? You don’t look like an Alcyone thug. The sari’s too old-fashioned for an Eloran nightrunner. I’ve never seen the Martians hire a Pleiadian. So what? Solar envoy? I really hope you aren’t a Laniakean goon.”

“Astropostale, actually.”

“What did Harrow even do to you?”

“Killed two of our people a century ago. We are returning a favour.”

“Look. I really don’t want to kill the mood, but you’re way in over your head and I work better alone, so I’m going to take a pair of cuffs from my pocket and you’ll kindly put them on and wait for the Babylon authority to show up while I explain to the old guy that scamming us isn’t a good idea, okay? Don’t worry, the shackles are lined with world-tree wood; they don’t hurt. You can just tell the cops the truth, I’ll be long gone when they find you.”

“An interesting follow-up question would be: why do you have cuffs at the ready? Leisure?”

“Do I look like a policefolk? Besides, you’re Pleiadian, so you know that *leisure cuffs* can’t be actually hard locked, it would be unsafe otherwise. It’s just nice to have ties at the ready in my line of work.” He let out a deep sigh. “Why…why am I discussing this? Please, just…go sit in a corner.”

“I have another question.”

“Fine.”

“How will you coerce me into doing your bidding, exactly? Your derringer is empty. I don’t see a blade on you.”

“I can reload.”

“You’d have to be fast.”

“You’d have to be faster.”

“Bet.”

“You’re wasting my time. I’ll just knock you out.”

Pavus twitched: he clearly intended to hit first, thought Talasea, and it made sense if his only knowledge of Pleiadian close combat were the complex dances of Alcyone martial artists. She had no intent to give a demonstration, so she struck Pavus in the stomach, then the neck, and headbutted him. He fell, and she caught him before he impacted the ground, then carried him to the table. He breathed still. From his pockets, she retrieved two chemical oxygen iodine cartridges, a bag of premium quality golden lichen, and a ring stamped with the seven-branched sun of the planet Vyiranga. So Pavus worked for the golden lichen cartel: had Harrow angered them? Or had he treated one of their crews like the mailmen of the Theodora?

She tapped her necklace and found the line still unresponsive, which meant the jamming did not come from Delos.

Unless…

The whirr of servos echoed under the dome, followed by the grinding of tungsten fingers against the marble slabs. Delos’s torso slowly rose up, its head turned one-eighty degrees, and its cameras surveyed the room. Talasea curled up on the other side of the table, unfolded her sari and pulled the command string. A shimmer washed over her as she dissolved into transparency.

Backup mode engaged flashed an emergency LCD screen in old English at the back of Delos’ head. No ROE master file detected. Switching to default. Terminating active hostiles.

The drone stood up with great slowness, unable to find its balance, collapsed, and resumed its efforts. It clenched its hands: titanium claws screeched as they exited the sheaths embedded in the knucklebones. They pierced through the table with unsettling ease, as Delos used them to stabilise its posture. It examined Pavus and left him alone, seeing no threat in him. Talasea made a dash for the door leading to the hall, escaped the watchful gaze of Delos’ cameras, but found the heavy steel wings sealed shut, with nary a switch nor a handle in sight; she only managed to break a fingernail, and the ghosting following her swift movement was enough to allow Delos to target her. It tried to rush her, tripped, planted its claws in the marble slabs, stood back up again. She sidestepped and ran for the other side of the room with little concern for her invisibility. A sign pointed to the bathroom: she followed, hoping Delos would take time to notice and catch up with her.

The clanking of machinery followed her as she ran through a half-lit hallway and inside a lavatory that looked as if it had not been used in decades: the washing jets hanging from the toilets were mouldy and the mirrors covered in dust. The clanking intensified. Talasea found the access hatch to the ventilation duct behind a maintenance shack disguised as a spare toilet, punched the grid open and slipped inside just as Delos’ shadow began to loom through the threshold. She retracted her heels, crawled just enough for her feet to disappear from the view of the drone and froze. Was it sharp enough to understand where she had gone? Could it even perceive the three-dimensional layout of the room? If Pavus’ boast was accurate, then Delos was a tool of the industrial era, of the age of large language models and nuclear weapons, of this incomprehensible decorrelation of capability and thought. And perhaps, she hoped, the same logic was at play in Delos’ make: perhaps it could pierce through solid oak with ease, and paid for this strength with a blissful ignorance of the concept of a ventilation duct.

Delos stopped. Servos whirred once more as its head performed a full rotation on its neck-pivot and utter silence fell upon the bathroom.

The clanking of Delos’ feet back towards the hallway came as deliverance. Talasea waited until she couldn’t hear the drone anymore, then resumed crawling. Halfway through the duct, she tried her necklace again.

“Luna? Can you hear me?” she whispered. “I’m in the pipe, moving towards the airlock. There’s been a problem; a golden lichen cartel member was here, I knocked him out, but Harrow’s personal drone activated and is hunting me down. How did we miss its actual nature?”

No answer.

“Hideyoshi, can you hear me?”

The external grid of the conduit slowly came into view, and with it the first camera; Talasea switched her optical camouflage back on. Three input vents led inside the vault and, through the carbon mesh that protected them, Talasea could make out thick roots and smell the rich scent of humus. Had the cameras not been in place, it would have been trivial to cut a hole in the mesh and send a drone through…alas, it made little doubt that the vents were rigged to close, or worse, in case of detection. Leaving them unguarded would have been foolish, and the robot aptly showed that Harrow was a man of precautions. Talasea faced the ground to further minimise her visual footprint, and, centimetre by centimetre, managed to reach the exit without triggering the cameras. It took her a good minute to unhinge the grid and drop inside the maintenance hallway that led to the external airlock. There were no more cameras in sight: she decloaked with two minutes of battery left.

“Luna? Do you hear me?”

Someone knocked on the outer plate of the airlock twice.

“Luna?”

Same answer. Talasea detached the laser stylus from her necklace and shot the hinges open. The door hissed as the damp air of the arcology rushed inside, bringing a stale odour and a thick fog. Talasea slid the airlock to the side and waved.

Luna hung right beneath the airlock, her harness secured on the safety handles of the door, held at gunpoint by a jumpsuit-clad woman with the same haziness in her eyes as Pavus.

“Don’t utter a word or you see the inside of her brain,” she said in Sanskrit. “Give me that stylus.”

Talasea obliged. She had no reason to doubt the quickness of the henchwoman’s draw (flying high as a stratospheric kite had not prevented Pavus from getting the jump on Delos) and her gold-plated antique seemed more than able to kill.

“Good,” said the henchwoman while pocketing the stylus. “Now, hoist her. Slowly.”

Talasea grabbed Luna by the hand and helped her inside; the henchwoman kept tracking her with the gun.

“Are you hurt?” Talasea asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Luna was out of breath. “She caught me just as I was about to enter. I suppose she was covering for a colleague.”

“Speaking of!” The henchwoman peeked through the airlock; the laser sight of her gun shone on Talasea’s forehead. “What did you do to Pavus?”

“He attacked me,” Talasea answered. “He became agitated during the auction, claiming he wanted to see Harrow, and drew a laser on the security drone. He then intended to knock me out, so I defended myself.”

“Hmmmm.” The henchwoman climbed in turn. “Hmmmmmmmm.” She sat against the wall and munched on golden lichen kibble taken from her pocket. “So you have no idea why we are here?”

“Pavus mentioned a debt.”

“Yeah. Ten years ago, Harrow bought a lifetime of golden lichen from us. Premium quality. Unfiltered. No questions asked and, crucially, no customs tax. Wanted to live the rest of his days in a dream palace, I guess. The problem is that we were supposed to receive cocoa beans in payment. The bosses hoped to grow the trees on Vyiranga. Harrow promised the shipment within the year. Two years passed. Three. Then five. We called. We demanded explanations. No answer. Not even a bogus excuse. But the lichen had already been delivered. Stealthily. In due time! We’re professionals. So we decided to size up the man. See what was what. And if needed be, get the beans ourselves. Now. Your girlfriend has a modem, I suppose the scheme was to hack the vault open? That’s good. We’ll do that.”

“What was your plan?” Luna asked.

“Get it open at gunpoint. But if Harrow refuses to come down from his ivory tower, a hack will do the trick. Now go.”

“What about Pavus?”

“Can you drag him through the conduit?”

“I can,” Luna said.

“Yeah I don’t doubt it, but if I dispatch you there, you won’t be here to crack the door. And I’m not sending miss invisible sari alone.” The henchwoman tapped Talasea’s shoulder. “Yes, girl, your Luna snitched. She’s quite talkative.” She cocked the gun: pure theatrics, as it looked to be an automatic. “The vault connects to Harrow’s apartments, which then loop back to the hall. I’ll get Pavus there, load him into the flitter and leave. You have someone waiting for you?”

“Yes. Solar envoy.”

“Then once we’re out of range of the drone’s jammer, you’ll tell him to fuck off. Now, move up.”

A harsh light fell upon the hallway that led to the armoured gate of the vault, whose biometric reader blinked like the red eye of a fallen giant. The henchwoman gestured at the cameras on the ceiling.

“How did you intend on dealing with these?” she asked.

“I can hack the door remotely. The cameras are on the same intranet. I take both at once.”

“The eyeball is not on the net.”

“The biometric system has an active lens, it’s enough for me to get in.”

“Adversarial input attack?”

“I’m not an amateur. I’ve done this before.”

“Yeah. And there’s no need to be subtle anymore.” The henchwoman blinked once for each camera, then pushed a button on the side of her pistol and pulled the trigger. The gun swivelled automatically, three flashes followed and the cameras exploded one after the other. “Problem solved. Rig the door.”

Luna grabbed a portable modem from her backpack, unfolded its laser emitter and aimed at the biometric eye. Talasea twitched.

“Don’t,” the henchwoman said. “You’ve seen the autotargeting at work.”

Luna blinked twice, out of the henchwoman’s view. Her lips spelled out: keep her talking.

“Tell me,” Talasea asked. “What do you plan on doing while you’re in front of Harrow? Kill him?”

“What manner of question is that? Do I look like a murderer to you?”

“You have a gun.”

“Because you’re dangerous.”

“How so?”

“Both of you look like you can knock me out cold. Not taking any chances, especially with Pavus down. I have my eyes on you, blue lady. You know your way around a hectic situation, you could probably strangle me with ease, and you’ve got an invisible sari. You are a threat. I value my personal safety over that of others. So yes, Talasea. I’d splatter your brain on the wall if I had to.”

“For cocoa beans?”

“For the ghosts of the Earth. Open a history book. Worse has been done. Worse will be done. Now, shush.”

Luna tapped numbers on her modem.

“You said I could strangle you with ease,” Talasea continued. “How do you know that? I punched Pavus, did not choke him out. I'm not that visibly strong, am I?”

“No. Your girlfriend clearly lifts, though.”

“Alas, Pleiadians don’t build visible muscle mass easily, especially in the upper body.”

“A shame. I don’t think you’d look bad with Luna’s muscles. Not that you look bad right now. With or without the sari.”

“Would you, by chance, be hitting on me?”

“That is neither here nor there.”

“You *are* hitting on me.”

“I’m not.”

“Are you ready to shoot a girl you’re hitting on?”

“I don’t want to shoot anyone.”

“Yet you’re waving that gun around.”

“You’re trying to get me to lower my guard.”

“Why? You clearly don’t want to shoot me.”

“Ah!” The henchwoman massaged her temples with her freed hand. “Shit! I’ve never killed anyone, alright? And I don’t want to begin today! You weren’t part of my plans! I had to improvise! I’m… I’m not really sure what I’m doing. But I have a gun. Don’t…”

Luna pressed a button on her modem. The gun buzzed. The slide recoiled even though the trigger remained inert, ejecting the ammunition already engaged the barrel, then the magazine dropped.

“Hey! Piece of crap!”

Talasea kneed the henchwoman in the stomach, sidestepped behind her, locked her arms in place and forced her to the ground: she knew she couldn’t hold her for more than a few seconds.

“Luna! I need help!”

The Selenite rushed to Talasea, grabbed the struggling henchwoman by the hips and twisted her arms, so that the Pleiadian could use Pavus’ cuffs to finally hold her wrists in place. The henchwoman kicked Talasea, sending her against the wall, and Luna quickly dragged her companion in crime to safety. Talasea recovered her laser stylus: she expected a stream of expletives and a desperate struggle, but the henchwoman gave them a disappointed grin and a sad look.

“This was my first time holding someone at gunpoint. You could have let me enjoy it a bit longer. Fuck. I told the armourer their smart guns weren’t secure.” She spat blood. “You may now understand that neither Pavus nor I are assassins.”

“Don’t move,” Luna said. “Tal. We’re getting the beans. We went too far to come back home empty-handed.”

“What about the drone?”

“No change of plans, we hack it. You need direct contact with my modem. Like hull to hull. Tal, do you feel like you can do it?”

“If you distract Delos long enough, I probably can.”

The henchwoman snorted.

“You can use my gun.”

Luna recovered the weapon and the spare magazine, engaged the ammunition, racked the slide and turned the smart module back on with a push of a button. Talasea got the henchwoman on her feet, but kept the cuffs on and gently pushed her forwards as Luna returned to her modem. The biometric eye blinked: Luna flicked a switch and the door opened with a whine. A loud clanking echoed on the metallic deck beyond the lock.

Delos emerged from the smoke; its servos whirred as it prepared to lunge forwards. The henchwoman froze. Luna squeezed the trigger. Three bullets crashed against the robot’s armoured torso: the crushed projectiles rang as they rolled on the floor. It staggered.

“Tali! Modem on the drone, now!” Luna yelled.

Talasea cloaked and dashed towards Delos, modem in hand, keeping as close to the wall as possible. Delos saw through her ghosting trail at the last second, pivoted its head like an owl’s. Talasea put the modem against its back, a loud buzz filled the portable speaker, and –

Delos stopped, its limbs locked in place like the hands of a dying clock. Then it prostrated itself, its cameras blinked, and its communicators buzzed.

“Ident required: Delos-class termination unit model seven-five-niner, serial number zero-zero-six-alpha-charlie-zero. Elapsed time since last shutdown: five years, five months, three weeks and two days. Elapsed time since last factory reset: overflow error. Reset to factory settings in progress.”

The drone stood upwards, its joints clicking as they slid into a non-threatening configuration, with the legs fused together and the arms in a T-pose. The tungsten claws hissed as the knucklebones swallowed them.

“Factory reset effective. All rules of engagement set to: no engagement. Warning. This is a transportation mode only. This unit should be kept at your local ROE whenever possible. Inquire with a Eurofront official for guidance. Warning: memory was not reset. Warning: no available Eurofront networks found. Please see a technician for wireless card maintenance. If beyond the border, please set this unit to independent mode. Warning: in independent mode, this unit will auto-target unapproved phenotypes. If there are Eurofront agents nearby with unapproved phenotypes, please tag them properly before engaging independent mode. This unit stands by for orders.”

“Luna,” Talasea asked. “Can you kill it?”

“Yeah.”

Another buzz filled the room and Delos collapsed; a spark ran through its ravaged chestplate, its leg twitched, and the frame became inert.

“Thanks.”

“What…what did it mean by *targeting unapproved phenotypes*?” Talasea asked.

The henchwoman shook her head. Luna let out a prolonged sigh.

“Take a long, hard look at human history on Earth, and guess.”

“I...”

“Now you see why Terrans are sad. Come. Let’s abandon this monster behind us, and tackle the one we have left.”

Talasea tapped her necklace. The signal was back up.

“Hideyoshi, this is Tal. We’ve had a few complications, but we’re heading for the vault. Any movement on your end?”

“None, do you want me to get inside?”

“No, we’re exiting as planned.”

Luna stepped through the smoke, empty gun in hand.

The vault reeked of rot and moisture and fungal spores: the decaying stagnation of a long-deceased garden, anathema to the station dweller. The clogged up qarez exhaled a faint ground mist. Ten diminutive trees stood in a hallway lit only by emergency lanterns, their bare branches dancing in the obstinate flow of grinding fans; dead leaves, the colour of rust, lay scattered at their feet. Harrow sat by the door to his apartment: more man than corpse or more corpse than man, it mattered little, now, as hungry centipedes had devoured his eyes and ants scrubbed him clean, leaving nothing but a sterile tunic, impossibly white bones, and a mummified head through which poked the copper tendrils of a centuries-old neural implant. Harrow had died clinging to the chair. At his feet lay a defibrillator case, still locked. Harrow’s last conscious gesture, noted Talasea, had not been to try and open the case, switching on the autonomous mode that may have saved his life. It had been to shove his entire stock of cocoa beans through the shredder-granulator hybrid resting near the door: the machine had collapsed and burned out, not before spewing out a pile of fine grey powder, and scrubbing the innards clean with a laser. Talasea went to check the apartment, a precious nest of gold and marble and copper that was covered in dust and reeked of stale wastewater. Harrow’s laptop remained plugged in and wasn’t locked, but a script had scoured the hard drive clean, leaving a single set of instructions for Delos, five years prior: Scare off anyone who enquires. Set up a meeting and trap. Kill only if they persist. And sell everything. And that he had: the shelves, wardrobe and storage closet were empty, save for a lone chocolate tablet, that Talasea pocketed before heading back to the vault.

“Why didn’t Delos tend to the garden?” she asked.

“This heap of scrap?” Luna sighed. “It was a robot. A fucking genocide assistant! Do you think it knew how to garden? Back in the day, Eurofront used bots like this to walk through settlements in the Jordan and rip out all the olive trees they found, then build resorts in their place. Fuck me if it even knows what gardening is.”

“What a waste.”

“Waste? It’s not waste! It’s intent!” Luna grabbed Harrow’s corpse by the shoulders. “You old, decrepit bastard! If you couldn’t have it, then no one should, right? You could have given Babylon the cocoa trees! You could have allowed the exports of the beans! You had a nigh-extinct species in your palm and you used it, squeezed it, and buried yourself with it! Like you did with everything else you couldn’t copyright, back on Earth! Did you even feel anything? Did you even think about anything? Did you have any vision or idea beyond self-preservation? Why were you allowed to live? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Harrow’s head detached from his corpse under Luna’s violent shaking, and Talasea grabbed the Selenite’s wrist, gently pulling her back.

“Luna. He’s gone. It’s over. We aren’t getting anything from his vault.”

“No, that we aren’t,” the henchwoman scoffed. “Now, could you please uncuff me? You can keep the gun, and I keep Pavus. Do we have a deal?”

Luna sighed.

The thin drizzle that had accompanied Talasea’s arrival to the arcology had turned into a downpour. Pavus slept soundly in the henchwoman’s flitter, kept under by his monad as it repaired the damage from Talasea’s punches. The rain clicked on the half-open canopy, dripping on the landing legs and joining the rivers that fell towards the deep darkness of the forests; the sun tube was a blackened spear bisecting the world.

“I insist,” the henchwoman said when Luna tried to hand her back the pistol. “It’s ruined anyway. Now, you two watch yourselves. We know your faces. Next time you’re on Vyiranga, go visit us. Good travels.”

The henchwoman waved, closed the canopy, and the flitter took off in the synchronised whispers of its ducted fans. Takemura sighed.

“Serves me well to think myself a vigilante when a shitty pacemaker already avenged my dad.”

“Are we clean?” Luna asked.

“There were no outgoing alarms. As far as Babylon is concerned, nothing happened tonight. I’ll ring a friend to clean up the mess and give Harrow a grave. I...need some space. You can take my flitter down. I’ll call another.”

“You won’t get one until sunrise.”

“It’s raining and the arcology is cold,” Talasea said. “Are you sure you’ll be fine?”

“I don’t mind, Tali.” He looked at the needle top of the tower, at the mould and rain and dark coral. “In fact, I don’t think I care about anything in particular tonight.”

They sat by the Akiva lake, Talasea, Takemura and Luna, and they watched the cirrus clouds that curved and bent and moved along the great tube of the world. Luna had brought a beer, Talasea a cup of tea, and Takemura a glass of sake: the breeze carried the scent of grilled vegetables and steamed fish from Luna’s portable cooker. A pair of flitters darted about. One of them was an ornithopter with thin, transparent wings that drew an iridescent haze as they caught sunlight.

“It’s all clean,” Takemura said. “All records of my flitter’s ascent were erased, and a convincing report of Harrow’s death from natural causes just arrived on the Babylonian Authority’s desk. It’s only half a forgery.”

“What did it cost?”

“Many phone calls.”

“What are you going to do?” Luna asked.

“I’ll take the Hashima Maru to Mercury. My dad wanted a sky burial, so I will launch him into the sun.”

“You want me to come?” Talasea wondered.

“It’s kind of you to ask, but I’m fine. And I do not want you to bother with Terran affairs.”

“Then I invite you to stay at Charon’s Den,” Luna said.

“Invitation accepted. You have a lovely place and, despite what you might tell me, I think there are many things to say and many things to hear on this station.”

“That’s because you haven’t lived here for the past thirty years, but I don’t judge.”

They all took a sip of their beverages. Talasea’s tea was dark and bitter: just as she enjoyed it.

“You ever considered we were indeed in way over our heads?” Talasea wondered.

“Not more than the Vyirangans,” Takemura said.

“True.”

She took another sip. A seagull darted back and shrieked.

“How many are left, you think?” Luna asked.

“Cocoa beans?”

“Prehistorical billionaires.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Harrow had been the last,” Takemura sighed. “But you never know. AUSCOM is still there, after all.”

“Does anybody want the gun?”

“What would I do with it?” Talasea asked.

“Trash it,” Takemura concluded, and Luna threw the firearm to the pikes. Talasea took the chocolate tablet from her pocket, broke it into three chunks and shared them with the Selenite and the solar envoy. She found the taste disappointing: the treat was neither sugary nor bitter enough, and was hard as a ration tack. She did not finish her share of the tablet.

“Luna, would you have a spare swimsuit?” she asked. “I’d happily take a dip before lunch. The day is nice.”

And they were on Babylon Port, the place where all the days were nice, for there was no winter nor summer to complain about, and the sun hung in the sky with the resolute immobility of a bored god.

THE END. 

Illustration by Viktor Titov for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.