“Twelve of ten. The quiet fledgling lies dreaming.”

  I finish off the dense ration-bar the goons brought back, its holographic splash exciter criminally lying with its promised flavor ‘Identical To Free-Range Narwal!’ More like "truck stop gloryhole." I wipe my hands clean of the oily preservative residue. It’ll replace some of the energy I used during the fight - moving that fast doesn’t come for free - but it's like eating a brick of sawdust. Still squatting in the street, I tap my fingers against my thigh while I wait for my message to make its way to my handler.

  This is the most dangerous part of the op.

  Subspace comms rely on gravity pulses rather than the exotic entanglements that form the Protectorate’s quantum datanet, which means I have to wait for those pulses to reach the data buoy set up on the outskirts of the system - ten light minutes away. It’s quicker than the slowboat couriers that normally shuttle galactic updates to the system via hardcopy crystals, but the delay feels interminable compared to the instantaneous communication that marks any civilized Protectorate planet. The message itself is in the only code that works anymore, a one time cipher shared solely between Agent and support team. It makes communication vastly more difficult, but Ascendant Intelligence, those parts of it that remain, eat and drink cryption for lunch. One time pads are the oldest of old tech, but it’s all we have.

  Unfortunately, even sending a message is risky. Despite the Protectorate’s best efforts, AI sympathizers still riddle the ranks of every level of society, including Unusual Affairs. If a symp is lurking in my unit, or working the comm array, and they’ve tipped to my mission, they’ll know exactly where the message came from. The Protectorate counts millions of systems in its domain, but there’s only one with this particular comm setup.

  Lucky me.

  Worrying about it isn’t going to change anything, though. I keep an eye on the goons, who look like they’d rather be in a Belphegor fighting pit facing several mega-bison, but they don’t have the stink of symps. Failures, yes, but not symps. After an interminable twenty minutes, the comm crackles back into life.

  “Heaven’s star shines fiercely, beneath lurid light. Attend darkly, with stillness.”

  I flick off the comm, concealing my frown beneath the smooth mask of placidity I prefer to wear as my base expression. Home wants me to avoid detection on the return, and to avoid requisitioning any official resources. The only way that makes sense is if Home thinks I’m in danger of being tracked and intercepted by Protectorate-equivalent forces. Capturing the Stalker should have neutralized any real danger on this planet, but I’m not about to argue with Home. Not after what happened to Agent Five last year.

  Taking a deep breath, I stand back up. I’ve reverted the Agency symbol on my hand to its camouflage setting, a deep tan like one would find on a UV-heavy world with no gene-clinics, but the rent-a-guards still look at me in abject terror. I don’t blame them. Everyone in the Protectorate knows you don’t mess with Unusual Affairs, not if you want to enjoy any semblance of a normal life. I hand the communication unit back to the portly one, presumably their leader, piss still staining his trousers and stinging my nostrils.

  “Thanks for the comm. I need a ship. One off the books.”

  He stares at me, his facial scar twisting in interesting folds.

  “An undcov? Well, we have the old intra-system cutter, but it’s pretty beat up. I don’t think anyone’s actually taken it out in decades, not since we had that problem with the qbit runners.” He turned to the scrawny guard. “That was what, twenty years ago? Thirty?” The scrawny guard half nods, half shrugs, too afraid to speak.

  “Does its slice drive work?”

  The leader tugs at his collar, sweat dotting his forehead.

  “Uhh, I think so? I’m not a techie. No one ever goes into that hangar.”

  “Fuknhel.” I withhold a sigh. “Well, why don’t you tell me the access codes and I’ll see what I can do with it.”

  He waves a hand at me, sending the pertinent information through the planet’s local information net, and I stifle another sigh.

  “You’re going to have to actually tell me. No augments.”

  He gawks, as if I just told him I was born without a brain, then haltingly reads off a string of letters and numbers from his internal display. I memorize them, silently cursing the cumbersome exchange. I know why I can’t have augments, not with the job I have, but it doesn’t make operating in an ubiquitously interconnected society any less of a pain in my ass. Even Castor II, backwater that it is, has a planetary datanet, but without the right augment it might as well not exist for me, not without a middleman reader that would instantly blow my cover. He trails to a stop, and I review my recent memory.

  “Got it, thanks.”

  I turn to go, then whirl on my heel and fix all three of them with my best ‘I’ll make soup from your spleens’ glare.

  “And I don’t have to remind you that I was never here, right?”

  Three heads jerk up and down like pistons, fear etching their features in deep wrinkles.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Good. Why don’t you go help out whoever’s left alive in that bar. Gas explosions can be nasty business.”

  They scurry down the steps, accepting my excuse and joining the small emergency services crew that just arrived. I set off into the outpost while calling up my own internal map of the colony, the original now five months out of date but carefully notated with updates I've made. A small schematic flashes into existence in my right eye, blocking out parts of my vision, retinal cells momentarily repurposed into combination output/input. The technique is far cruder than an augment’s beamed light, unable to match the ability to tune anywhere from full occlusion to full transparency depending on situation and user desire, but augments are vulnerable to AI corruption, not to mention made of metal, and part of my user desire is to avoid my eyeballs rocketing out of my face when fighting a Stalker.

  According to the schematic, the local constabulary controls three hangars tucked into the far corner of the spaceport, two of them large and boxy, sufficient for anything up to a destroyer, the third a smaller dome that can house maybe a pinnace at most. Security not much more than a mono-fil fence and the entrance codes, both easily defeated. Definitely better to approach at night, though, which means I have about four hours to kill - just enough time to sterilize the small shack where I’ve been reluctantly living for the past five months.

  I set off through Castor II’s muck-covered streets, carrying the same disinterested expression as every other person stuck wandering this purgatory. A group of ritually-scarred apostate monks from Lankheim IV surrounding a wilting ZG Orbitor pressed against a prefab wall ignore my presence and I return the favor, their fingers flashing to life again once they think I can’t see, sewn up mouths unsmiling and dour, hard eyes focused on the hairless lanky zero-gravity space dweller. The ZG Orbitor doesn’t even try to ask me for help. Castor II isn’t that kind of place. A pair of Tendrith symmetricals force me to step around them, each movement in eerie unison as they march down the street shoulder to shoulder, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, but I don’t mind. What’s an extra second or two at this point? All the time I needed was compressed into that microsecond of violence back at the bar. A Recalcitrant Mechanist watches me pass as she sips from her oil flask, thick brown smears encircling her mouth like crusted scabs, drawn no doubt by the promise of cheap hydrocarbons on a developing world.

  Hundreds of examples of the ever-changing variations of humanity that find themselves roaming the muck and mud under the Protectorate’s watchful eye traverse the muddy track masquerading as a street, ultimate destinations unknown, each of them far from anyone who gives a damn if they live or die. If they knew someone, they wouldn’t be here.

  Several minutes of walking brings me to the itinerant workers’ quarters where what little gear isn’t built into my body resides, and I busy myself with a thorough cleansing of the decrepit hut, eliminating any cellular evidence of my existence. Accompanied by nothing but my thoughts and the almost imperceptible weight of the Stalker’s memory cube in my pocket, I take a moment while disinfecting the floor to reflect on what I’d miss about this latest assignment.

  It sums up to “absolutely nothing.”

  I’m not going to miss Castor II’s omnipresent smog, laced with the dueling scents of sulfur and arsenic, nor am I going to miss the sad collection of prefab polymer huts and towers huddled together that comprises its only city... though city implies some sort of culture, and the only culture in Castor II is bubbling away in the agri-vats. Sitting in rancid bars listening to sad, desperate losers convince themselves that this time they were really going to make it, this time was going to be their big break when the terraforming finally kicked in? Not going to miss that, not in the slightest. I’m especially not going to miss the squelchy slime-molds oozing their way across every available surface, and the mud... well. The mud can go fuck itself. Who knows, it might already be doing that.

  Sitting on the room’s tattered bed, I feel the familiar post-op depression settle over me, that stifling blanket of mundanity that always follows a successful mission. Five months of wretched, boring craftwork, gathering information, narrowing down the suspects, setting out plans and contingencies, and all for what?

  That wonderfully brief moment of complication, when the stakes are my continued existence or sudden cessation, a moment where the dice rattle along death's tabletop, no one sure of the outcome, the moment I finally feel alive, bursting with adrenaline and anticipation and the sheer thrill that only comes from dancing on the razor’s edge, boredom finally banished.

  And every time it ends all too soon, returning me to this drab nothingness.

  With a heavy sigh I pick up my backpack, barely one-third full, its only contents an extra combat singlesuit, some ration bars, and an old entertainment unit. My life, such as it is - small enough to travel in a hurry, cheap enough to discard without a second thought. I check my chrono. Two hours to burn until nightfall, my cleaning as efficient as always. Go, me.

  I step out of the shack and head towards one of the few palatable food printers nearby, an old PortaYum run out of a streetcart by a one-legged man named Skred. I’m pretty sure it’s not the name he was born with, but I don’t care enough to inquire further and Skred never talks. All that matters is his streetmeat isn’t overtly poisonous, and it doesn’t taste like ration bars. Eating ration bars makes me want to kill things, and I'm tired of killing things.

  Skred’s occupying his usual spot, one block north of my shack, a battered corner adjoining the entrance to one of the numerous hydrocarbon facilities pocking Castor II’s surface like unburst pimples. Across from his sun-faded cart is a line of cheap storefronts selling the eminently forgettable debris common to unregarded planets. I step into line behind the day-shift workers stopping for a bite to take home. Their conversation consists of the usual gripes about shitty overseer algorithms, too-short breaks, and wildly unsafe working conditions, all of which I ignore with the ease of practice, grayness still dragging down my mind. The promise of a plot of land in a garden utopia is undeniable, but the adverts always leave out the dangerous slog it takes to get there.

  The line moves slowly forward, one questionable meal at a time, the greyness growing heavier every second, and then someone starts whistling, a low atonal shrill steadily gaining in volume. I look around to tell whoever it is to knock it the fuck off, the forced jocularity setting my teeth on edge, but it’s not until I see the white contrail streaking in from overhead that I realize it’s not a worker.

  My enhanced hearing was picking up the incoming sound of a hyper-velocity rocket, and I register it right as I realize I’m entirely too close to the projected impact point. I have just enough time to turn halfway around in a futile attempt to escape.

  The explosion hits like explosions always do - first a searing brightness, stabbing into my pupils like a knife, then a soundless wall of force tossing me into the air in a ragdoll spin, vision whirling crazily from sky to ground and back again. A bone-jarring impact follows, and my consciousness flicks out like a snuffed candle.