The open hatch leading out onto the public catwalk was the only line of sight into the restaurant. Through the hatch, I saw people streaming back and forth, sliding in and out of view. But across the walkway, over the cavernous proportions of the central plaza, a flash of light glinted off a lens. My ocular readout measured the distance as 650 yards over a crowd and through cycling air currents—an impossible shot, even with guided ballistics.
Time slammed back into motion. Crater’s associates exploded from their tables. A pistol blast singed my hair. I whirled and ran for the exit. Another shot splattered a burning ball of sparks against the wall. I veered left, darting into the security sweeps. The system let me pass on through without so much as a blip, but when Crater’s people rushed inside, guns hot, alarms shrilled and bars slammed down, sealing them inside with their howled curses.
I dashed out of the restaurant and into the milling crowd.
My hand instinctively rested on my whip. Magic buzzed up my arm, eager to be unleashed. A glance back through the crowd and it appeared clear. Crater’s people weren’t following, but they would as soon as they hacked their own security.
I strode on, keeping my head down. I’d threatened Crater, twice including the original message, and I had been two feet away when his brain matter blew out the side of his face. It would be difficult to argue I wasn’t the one who’d killed him. This was bad, but not over yet.
“Sota, what’s the quickest route to the source of that shot?”
My drone wouldn’t have missed the shot or its source. He captured and recorded everything.
“The quickest route to getting dead, Kesh?” he replied, voice back to his normal, virtually human drawl and dripping with sarcasm. He hovered behind my shoulder, staying low to keep our pursuers from spotting him. “There’s a tram arriving in three minutes,” he added, unprompted. “If we hurry, we can board, and we’ll be back at your container in approximately twenty minutes.”
Sota’s plan was entirely too predictable and typical of the drone, who rarely thought much beyond his own self-preservation. “Sota, show me the route to where the shooter was holed up. Now.”
An arrow blinked in my vision, pointing the way over catwalks, across the plaza and into what looked like a block of habitat containers still under construction. Sota whispered smoothly, “Take the drone home. Spend the night in—”
“Shh. They won’t follow us.” We crossed the plaza. So far, so good. “They’ll think I ran for the trams.”
“Oh. Fine,” Sota huffed.
A smile lifted my lips. For an ex-military drone, he had a coward’s protocols. That’s what happened when you spliced the artificial intelligence of a personal assistant with an attack drone’s processors. It made for some interesting late-night conversations.
Sota hovered closer to my shoulder, stirring my hair. “Did you see what happened to his face?” he mock-whispered. “I don’t want that to happen to my face.”
“You don’t have a face.”
I veered off, out of the crowd, toward the massive stacks of residential containers. Digital security threw a laser net across the site’s entrance. Teasing a few magical threads, I sent out a mental push. The laser-like mesh peeled open, inviting me inside. I stepped through, and Sota buzzed in low behind me. The lasers zipped closed behind us.
Sota scanned the yard. With space inside Calicto’s environmental domes at a premium, the site entrance immediately funneled into a narrow security scanner. Sota’s single large lens of an eye screwed down, reducing its “pupil” to a red dot. That intense red dot of the SOTA drones was often the last thing many soldiers saw right before they had their bones flash-incinerated. But Sota wouldn’t—couldn’t hurt me.
“Down, boy. I’ll protect you.” I flashed Sota a grin and plucked my whip free. Its crackling magic-charged length uncoiled, spilling blue sparks across the floor and over my boots. “Stay close.”
He tucked in close, static energy tickling my neck. Just like at the restaurant security, we walked through the scanners, barely stirring more than a fine layer of dust. As far as the tek was concerned, we didn’t exist.
“You are creepy,” Sota reported, the words all the more amusing when coming from a tactical drone.
Around us, the habitat containers had been slotted into place, each potential new home stacked on top of another, climbing twenty stories high.
I entered the nearest container and peered out through an open window. Someday soon, it would be someone’s single window overlooking the plaza outside. At ground level, we were too low for the shooter to get a clear shot. He or she had to be several levels above.
My boots left shallow impressions in a layer of metal shaving dust as I walked down the single main corridor toward the stairs module. The air tasted metallic and tinged with something organic that tugged on my memory. Something sweet and tempting.
I shook my head, shrugging off the familiar sensation. “Any movement ahead of us?”
“Nothing on this level.”
“Anything above?”
His motors whirred. “Maybe.”
I rolled my eyes. “Can you be more specific?”
“No, something is blocking my sensors beyond twenty meters.”
That was unusual. Sota’s sensors were some of the most advanced available. If they were blocked, someone was deliberately hiding something—or themselves—from scanners.
“Activate stealth,” I ordered.
“Really?” His motors whined.
“Do we have to go through this every time?”
“It’s a terrible drain on my batteri—”
Sota received the look I reserved for assholes and disobedient drones everywhere.
His background buzzing ceased. His matte black, chunky outer shell cracked open and reformed into a conical shape. His coating rippled, turning him almost entirely transparent except for a slight reflective dissonance with his surroundings. He couldn’t activate his weapons while stealthed, but he made a great scout.
I nodded at my drone and tracked his rippling distortion in the air until he disappeared up the stairs. A small box in the corner of my vision relayed Sota’s point of view. I watched from the bottom of the stairs as he drifted down a corridor exactly like the others in this block. Vacant doorways gaped left and right.
“Stop,” I whispered. “Look down.” He focused on the gray patches tracking down the corridor. Footprints. Large, with deep treads, likely male and probably from the mines. Factory workers weren’t equipped with heavy work boots.
“Careful,” I warned Sota.
He focused his lens down the corridor.
“I don’t see anything else…”
He couldn’t reply, not while stealthed. Something I’d promised I would rectify once I had the right equipment for his next upgrade.
I climbed the stairs and saw the boot prints leading away. They originated in the first right-hand container. A quick glance inside revealed a gap in the wall where it hadn’t yet been sealed to its neighbor. A plastic sheet flapped in the wind. And outside, a crane’s boom rested a few meters from the edge. That had been our suspect’s point of entry. Whoever he was, he must have had balls the size of boulders to climb that crane. This had been planned, just like the message. You have eighteen seconds to live. Whoever orchestrated this had lain in wait, knowing I would arrive with that message. Eighteen seconds. Long enough to line up the target in their crosshairs. That didn’t account for the impossible shot through various air currents and a busy crowd. Something more did that.