Chapter 20 - A Thread to Pull

  Everybody had a low-grade headache.

  Apparently, it was entirely normal and expected after upgrading any implants, but it certainly didn’t help the interpersonal issues that had been slowly cropping up over the last few days.

  Dr. Bennett – or whatever his real name was – had tossed a small bottle of pills at Harlan, told him to make sure that everyone took one a day for the next three days, and promptly left. Nobody really missed him – he was the kind of man you were grateful to have on your side, but equally grateful to see leave. True to his word, he’d installed the new optics without a single casualty, though his bedside manner left much to be desired.

  Darius still wasn’t sure whether the faint hum at the edge of his vision was psychosomatic or a quirk of the IR scrambling field. The others hadn’t complained, so he kept it to himself. Complaining wouldn’t fix it, anyway, and after being cooped up for what felt like weeks, he wasn’t in the mood to dwell on imperfections. The upgrades worked, and that was what mattered.

  Mostly worked, anyway. As Harlan had taken great pains to repeatedly inform them, the facial recognition scrambler didn’t make them invisible to actual people. A security guard didn’t need an algorithm to match a face to a wanted picture.

  “Short trips,” he’d said. “If you absolutely must leave the safehouse for whatever reason, don’t waste time wandering around – do whatever needs doing, and get straight back. You’re not invincible just because the cameras can’t see you. And for the love of whatever gods you believe in, don’t be stupid.”

  – – –

  Darius adjusted his jacket, scuffing his boots against the edge of the pavement. Getting out from the confines of the apartment was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. The others had left too, one by one, muttering half-hearted excuses as they went. None of them had said it out loud, but they were all sick of each other.

  For all that they were here for the same reasons and could work together well enough, none of them were actually friends with each other. He wasn’t sure where the others had gone, but Harlan had seemed resigned to it, muttering something about “getting it out of their system.”

  Darius had taken that as his cue to leave. The residential sector wasn’t much to look at—rows of identical prefabs stacked on top of each other like shipping crates, interspersed with walkways that were just narrow enough to feel claustrophobic.

  The streets were clear, at least – wide enough to cater for vehicles that most of the residents either couldn’t afford or simply didn’t bother with. It made for a pleasant walkway, at least. The faint hum of ventilation systems thrummed overhead, joined by the occasional burst of conversation or laughter.

  It wasn’t exactly bustling, but there were enough people milling around to make him keep his head down.

  He drifted aimlessly toward the lower end of the sector, where the makeshift shops and open stalls clustered. There was something oddly comforting about the steady buzz of conversation and the clatter of vendors peddling their wares. He wasn’t in the market for bootleg holos or reconditioned power packs, but the tech stores held a different kind of draw.

  Now that he had been forced to spend some time learning about what went into building a drone frame, he found himself with a deeper appreciation of some of the random second-hand parts that people sold at markets like this one. It was actually surprisingly fun, figuring out how everything came together. Like a giant puzzle.

  Hell, once Echo was gone, he might even keep learning about it. Could make for an interesting hobby. Probably expensive, though. He wasn’t under any illusions about his finances. With his accounts frozen, anything more expensive than a can of synth-coffee was out of the question, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t look.

  He turned a corner and slowed his pace as the crowd thinned. The shops ahead were packed with scavenged equipment—he caught sight of cracked display cases filled with second-hand optics, piles of disassembled drones, and a monitor flashing static in a desperate plea for repair. Most of it was junk, but that didn’t bother him.

  Most of the ships he worked on as a technician were little better than junk. Hell, when you got right down to it, most of Exeter Station was junk – some parts were just a little newer than others. One of the hazards of a frontier colony - they were largely left to fend for themselves.

  {Where are you going?} Echo’s voice filtered through his auditory implants, cool and neutral.

  Darius didn’t jump, but it was a close thing. He’d almost forgotten the thing was along for the ride. “Window shopping,” he muttered under his breath, torn between keeping his voice low enough that no one nearby would overhear, or just pretending he was on a call. The last thing he needed was someone asking who he was talking to.

  {This expedition does not appear to have a purpose. Are you lost?}

  “I’m not lost,” Darius said, running a hand through his hair. “I’m looking for something. Tech parts. You know, stuff that could be useful.”

  {For the frame.} Echo’s tone wasn’t quite a question, but it carried the faintest trace of approval.

  “Yeah, for the frame.” Darius paused, squinting through the smudged glass of one stall’s display case. Nothing there but outdated modules. “Not that it matters. My accounts are frozen, remember?”

  There was a pause before Echo responded. {Do you wish to withdraw some funds?}

  Darius tilted his head. “Do you not know what ‘frozen accounts’ means? You were the one who told me they were frozen in the first place.”

  {The freeze is a localised restriction,} Echo responded evenly. {Your accounts are not actually frozen at the source. They are held off-world, beyond the local Imperial force’s immediate jurisdiction. The restriction only affects your ability to access them through local terminals and point-of-sale systems.}

  Darius stopped in his tracks, staring blankly at a pile of disassembled drone parts in one of the stalls. “What are you saying?” he asked, lowering his voice. “That the Empire didn’t really freeze my accounts?”

  {Not entirely. The local banking network flags your payments as invalid, but the underlying accounts are untouched. With the proper bypass, you could access them remotely.}

  Darius thought about that for a moment, mind racing. “Okay, but doesn’t that mean that as soon as I try to make a payment, it’ll throw up all sorts of alerts?”

  {Normally, yes. However, if you withdraw your funds onto a cred-chip, I should be able to overwrite the chip’s stored ID. The credits will still be accessible, but any attempts to track the identity of the payee will return an error.}

  That… could be a game-changer. Cred-chips were the future’s answer to hard currency. Credits could be stored on the card itself, meaning even if the colony somehow lost connection with the central banking system, payments could still be made. An incredibly rare occurrence, certainly, but even subspace relays could fail occasionally.

  Usually, the chips stored a copy of all transactions so that as soon as the connection was re-established, the relevant accounts would be updated. It was mostly a way to make sure people didn’t try to skip out on paying taxes, but it also meant that even if the chip itself was lost the money could be recovered.

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  It was definitely possible to mess with the ID chip and disrupt that process, but most people didn’t do it because it meant that if they lost the chip, they lost all of the money on it as well. The kinds of people who messed with the ID were pretty much exclusively criminals who cared more about being tracked than they did about losing money.

  Criminals… like he was now.

  For some reason, it was only now that he was thinking about how to avoid having his money tracked that he finally felt like a criminal. The only constants in life were death and taxes, after all, and here he was taking steps that would avoid one of them.

  And probably hasten the other. Life was funny that way.

  Darius exhaled sharply through his nose, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “Okay, but what about that initial withdrawal? Would they be able to track that?”

  {It is likely they would detect the transaction,} Echo replied calmly. {I should be able to disable the cameras of the dispensary unit itself, but there is little I can do about the surrounding surveillance systems. It is also probable they will dispatch personnel to investigate, personnel against which your new optic will do little.}

  “The optics won’t help much anyway,” Darius said offhandedly, working over the problem in his mind. “They’ll know it’s me from the withdrawal, and then they can just look for the one person whose face they can’t see and follow me back to the safehouse that way. No, we’re going to need to disappear somewhere that doesn’t have cameras at all.”

  There was a long pause.

  {I believe I may have a location that suits your needs.}

  – – –

  The room smelled like stale coffee and too much grease—industrial grease, not the kind that came from food. Thalina Veris sat across from a scrawny, grease-smeared technician who clearly wanted to be anywhere else. Her dataslate rested on the scarred metal table in front of her, its screen displaying a rotating series of images: Darius Kallan’s work file, his sparse public history, and his very much outdated employee photo.

  She resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose.

  “I’ve already told you everything,” the man said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. His name was Jaff. Or maybe it was Raff. It didn’t matter. “I don’t know the guy outside of work.”

  Thalina kept her expression neutral. Professional. This wasn’t her first frustrating interview, and it wouldn’t be the last. “For clarity,” she said, her voice smooth and even, “you’re saying that in the time you worked alongside Mr. Kallan, you never once spoke to him outside of the job?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” Jaff—or Raff—glared at her, his oily hair flopping over one eye. “He wasn’t exactly friendly, you know? Kept to himself. Did his job. Went home. I mean, sure, we’d say the occasional ‘hey’ or whatever, but that’s it.”

  Thalina tapped something on her datapad. “And during those ‘occasional hey’ interactions, did he ever mention any personal projects? Hobbies? Friends? Anything at all that stood out?”

  Jaff let out a long-suffering sigh. “Lady, if you’re trying to find his secret poker buddies or whatever, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Kallan didn’t talk about himself. Ever. He just did his thing and went home.”

  She maintained her outward calm, but inwardly, her patience was fraying. This entire investigation felt like a monumental waste of time. Even according to the files in front of her, Darius Kallan was a nobody – a quiet, unassuming technician with no ties to anyone significant and nothing more notable than a brief stint in prison for a crime that she couldn’t even find any evidence that he’d actually committed in the first place.

  True, that could have been an indication that there was something amiss, but when she’d done a little digging she’d found a downright shocking number of cases that had been similarly mishandled. Worth looking into a little more, certainly, but hardly a high priority.

  The likelihood of the man simply being caught up in something greater than himself was looking higher by the moment.

  “Why does it even matter, anyway?” Jaff was saying now, his tone edging toward hostility. “Guy never gave me trouble. Always showed up on time, did his job, and went home. Why are you hassling me about him?”

  “I’m not ‘hassling’ you,” Thalina said evenly, though she couldn’t quite keep the edge out of her voice. “I’m simply trying to determine if Mr. Kallan had any connections or motivations that could shed light on his recent actions.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” Jaff muttered. “Like I said, he wasn’t exactly chatty.”

  Thalina suppressed a sigh and glanced at the datapad again. It wasn’t just this interview. Every person she’d spoken to so far had said the same thing: Darius was a closed-off loner who didn’t socialise outside of work. No friends, no significant connections, no one who would miss him if he disappeared. Which made the effort to track him down feel even more absurd. Her gut told her that he wasn’t some grand conspirator. He was just… some guy.

  Her datapad chimed softly. A notification flashed across the screen, and her heart sank before she even read it. She tapped the message open, skimming the contents.

  ALERT: ACTIVITY DETECTED ON WATCHED ACCOUNT

  Information: Funds withdrawn from terminal #30562.

  Clearly, her gut was not to be trusted.

  Although setting up an alert tied to Darius Kallan’s accounts had definitely paid off. It had been a passing idea that she had almost dismissed, but now… well, now she had a chance to impress Agent Falk, which could lead to some very interesting career options.

  With a satisfied gleam in her eye, she quickly tapped her commlink to call Falk. The connection barely clicked before his voice cut in, brisk and sharp.

  “I’ve already seen it,” Agent Falk said. “The withdrawal’s been flagged, and I’m dispatching a squad now. We’re pulling up every camera in the area. Finish what you’re doing there and report back to me immediately.”

  Thalina’s jaw tightened, but she managed to keep her tone steady. “Understood, sir.”

  The commlink cut off with a harsh beep, leaving her staring at her dataslate with a mix of irritation and relief. Of course the Agent had already seen it. The man practically lived inside the surveillance network. She shouldn’t have expected otherwise. Still, she’d hoped to present the information herself, if only to prove her own initiative.

  That chance was gone now, but at least it meant she could wrap up this series of pointless interviews.

  She stood, tucking her datapad under one arm, and gave the man across the table a polite, if perfunctory, smile. “Thank you for your time,” she said. “Your cooperation has been noted. You are free to return to your duties now.”

  Jaff—or Raff, as she still hadn’t bothered to clarify—snorted, pushing his chair back with a noisy scrape. “Yeah, sure. Thanks for wasting my morning.”

  Her movements didn’t falter, though her jaw tightened imperceptibly. She’d dealt with his type before: the kind who thought a hint of defiance made them clever. Unfortunately, her lack of reaction only seemed to embolden him.

  “You know, being as you’ve wasted my morning, I reckon it’s only fair you give me a note for my supervisor to explain why I’m late.”

  She would almost be impressed by the audacity if the man had put the request in politer terms. As it was, she had to resist the urge to send the man’s supervisor a note explaining why he had a broken nose.

  Thalina blinked. Clearly, she was more frustrated by the pointless interviews than she’d realised. A moment later, she frowned and tapped at her dataslate.

  “I’m not seeing supervisor as a listed position here,” she pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

  Jaff snorted derisively. “Yeah, ’cause if it were an official position, they’d have to attach an associated pay raise. It’s an informal thing, just another worker that keeps an eye on the bigger picture and assigns workers accordingly.”

  Thalina’s eyebrow arched further. That was, quite literally, the most information any of her interviewees had volunteered so far. Why was this man suddenly being so helpful?

  Ah. Of course.

  “Certainly,” she said smoothly, quickly tapping out and transferring a file with a simple explanation. “This should do the trick.”

  Anything to get the man out of here faster—especially because she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving him unsupervised. Borrowed office or not, there was no way she was going to leave someone like Jaff alone in it. Who knew what he’d get up to.

  Jaff’s face brightened as he received the file. She allowed herself a certain spiteful satisfaction as she watched his expression twist when he realised the file included the exact timestamps of the interview. Trying to use her as an excuse to get out of work? Not a chance.

  “Thanks,” he said sourly, finally stomping toward the door.

  “Wait,” Thalina called as a thought occurred. She hesitated briefly. This would lead to yet another interview. Almost certainly another pointless one. But… damn it. She didn’t have it in her to leave a job half-finished.

  “Do you happen to know who Kallan’s supervisor was?” she asked.

  Jaff grunted, his disinterest obvious. “Finn, I think. Finn Calder.”

  “Very well. Please inform Mr. Calder that I will be contacting him to ask some questions in the next few days,” Thalina said, keeping any signs of irritation from her voice.

  Jaff’s steps faltered near the door. He half-turned, his expression a mix of irritation and disbelief. “You want me to tell him?” he asked, gesturing vaguely toward her dataslate. “Isn’t that your job?”

  Thalina kept her face neutral, though her patience wore thinner with every passing second. “You’re welcome to simply let him know you were asked,” she said coolly. “I doubt it will take much effort on your part.”

  Jaff muttered something unintelligible—though the tone suggested it wasn’t flattering—and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Fine. Whatever,” he said, and with that, he stomped out of the room.

  Thalina let the door hiss shut behind him before exhaling slowly, allowing herself a brief moment of release. The temptation to rub her temples was strong, but she resisted. Even with no one watching, professionalism was a habit, and she’d had it drilled into her for years.

  With a measured breath, she tapped a few quick notes about Finn into her slate, her expression thoughtful. Though her gut feelings had just been called into question, she couldn’t help but feel like this man – Finn Calder – was important in some way.

  Shaking her head slightly, she tucked the slate under her arm and turned toward the door. Time would tell if her instincts were right.