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  Maya’s eyes flared, but her voice was controlled when she spoke. “And you’re going to support her?”

  Bob took a swig of whiskey. “I don’t see any other option. If she’s right about the toxin, we have a duty to protect our citizens, regardless of what company is going to benefit.”

  “By telling a lie?” Maya’s voice was terse now. She reined herself in. “I don’t think this girl who wrote the paper is one of the bad guys. I think she is a scapegoat, or a plant, or whatever. The only person who benefits from this toxin getting out is Ms. Newld. I would have thought that was obvious.”

  Bob looked extra anxious as he took another deep swig of whiskey. His head was down slightly, like he was trying to hide his expression, but his eyes scanned sideways.

  Maya narrowed her eyes, watching him. “There’s something else you’re not telling me.” He was more anxious than if this was just a high-profile story.

  He’d be excited at an actual story, she realized.

  Bob drank again, and discreetly tapped his ear with two fingers, making it look like a scratch.

  Maya got it. They were being monitored.

  She resisted the overwhelming urge to look at the cameras. Who knew what other devices were in the offices?

  The systems.

  Asshole.

  If they had access to the Newstainment systems, they would also know she was onto them, if they were monitoring her usage. She must have flagged sensitive documents.

  She gasped, suddenly realizing why Jessica Newld had been so weird with her. She wasn’t just some unknown journalist to her.

  Maya hurriedly said goodnight. Trying to explain more about what she’d discovered to Bob would only put them both in more danger. Besides, it looked like he already had an idea. And while he was running the stories that Newld wanted him to, he was useful. Maya, as idealistic as she was, couldn’t deny him that right now.

  She flew back to her desk to collect her jacket and quickly left the building. She needed headspace… and to be somewhere where her connection wasn’t going to be monitored.

  Ventus Research Facility, downtown Spire

  “Yo!” Pieter called out to Eugene. “You’ve got incoming.” He swiveled his chair out of the way so that Eugene could get back to his desk holo. “It’s a data packet from Molly,” he announced.

  Joel wandered over and Pieter stayed close, looking over Eugene’s arm as it finished downloading.

  Joel was the one to ask the question. “What’s it say?”

  Eugene examined the contents of the file. “Looks like a schematic for a device that we need to build. And - yes! She’s got the sequence for the antidote.”

  Pieter pumped his fist in the air. “Boo-ja!” he cheered.

  Joel and Eugene looked at him.

  Pieter removed his fist from the air, and blushed a little.

  Joel and Eugene looked back at the holo screen.

  Eugene swiped through some of the pages in the download, opening up different screens to assess the situation.

  He stopped on a schematic. “Ah.” His tone was one of trouble.

  Joel looked down at him. “’Ah’?”

  Eugene looked across at Pieter and then pushed one of the frames his way for him to take a look.

  Pieter scanned it with his eyes and then looked back at him. “You know how to build this?”

  Eugene shook his head. Turning to Joel, “This is way more complicated than what we are set up to build here. The sequencing, no problem. But that engineering stuff… waaaay out of my league.”

  Joel looked back to Pieter to confirm with him too. “You too?”

  Pieter nodded. “Yeah. It would take me forever to figure it out. I mean, I’m more than willing to try, but-”

  “Maybe I can help.” Sean’s voice traveled through the lab. The group looked up to see him push himself off the door frame where he had been leaning, and walk into the room as casually as if he were showing up for late night poker with the boys.

  “May I?” he asked, looking at Eugene. Eugene looked up, nodded and without taking his eyes off the space marine, pushed the holoscreen up to Sean so he could see.

  Joel’s jaw had set. “So you’re an engineer as well, eh?”

  He immediately caught himself.

  Dick!

  This team needed to work; and if Sean could help them avert a crisis, he wasn’t going to let his personal feelings get in the way.

  Sean scanned over the design, nodding his head. “Impressive work,” he said. “Yes, kind of. And I know someone who can build this quickly.” He looked up at Joel who tried to straighten his face, and look pleased at the offer of help.

  “Great!” Joel exclaimed.

  Sean returned the holo frame to Eugene. “I’ll need a couple of hours.” Then he looked back to Joel. “You good to upload it to that server?”

  “Of course!” he replied.

  Fuck. Can anyone say overcompensation?? he scolded himself.

  Sean turned on his heels and disappeared. “I’ll be in touch very soon.” And with that he disappeared out of the door again.

  “Okay, let’s get you cracking on that antidote,” Joel said, rallying the troops and clapping his hands together like he would training his squad. “Oh, and Pieter - you want to send Molly a message back to let her know what’s going on with both items and the three locations.”

  Pieter swung back to his own workstation without getting up from his wheelie chair. “On it, boss!”

  Joel looked across at the door where Sean had just left, and shook his head, putting his hands on his hips.

  McKenzie Drive-Thru, Spire

  Maya pulled the car into an all night drive-thru.

  Shit, shit shit shit shit.

  She’d gone in to that office guns blazing, and now they - whoever they were - knew that she and Bob were onto them.

  Fucking dammit!

  She rested her forehead on the steering wheel, like a puppet doll.

  Think, Maya. Think.

  Okay, so if this toxin is out there, then these experiments weren’t incidents in their own right. Even with Newstainment in their pocket, the Jessica Bitch-Club would still need more leverage to have government funding released at a level that would rival the kinds of revenue their drugs would generate.

  They wouldn’t be doing all this for pocket-change.

  Maya pulled up her holo.

  First she disconnected it from the XtraNET, and turned off all network ports. Then she opened up port 212 in isolation. Using that, she quickly located the XtraNET connection associated with the drive-thru. If anyone were searching for her, they wouldn’t be able to track her activity now.

  She smiled to herself. Then refocused.

  So which funds are they going after? she wondered. It needs to be big enough to make it worth their while…

  It didn’t take much searching before she found exactly what she was looking for: Garet Beaufort had just given a press conference on why he was backing the Iantrogen bid for the Pandemic Prevention Fund.

  She swiped through a few more search results.

  120 billion credits worth of funding for the entire Central Systems. Okay, this looked like what they were after.

  She talked herself through the logic. Now, for that kind of money, there needs to be a real and present danger. That means a real threat - personified by Molly Bates - and an actual incident to point to. That means people have to die. Lots of people.

  She closed down the screens she had been accessing. Closing her eyes sometimes helped her imagine. So if she were an evil ice queen, and she wanted to show that this toxin was a real threat to lots of people in the central systems, she would need to…

  Show them how deadly it can be. And how wide-ranged. What better place to do it than the capital city?

  So how is she going to infect a large number of people? Touch? Nope. It’s not a germ, so it won’t transfer to host.

  By air? Possibly.

  Water?

  S
he pulled up the holo again. Finding the thesis on her device, she flicked through. The toxin was in liquid form - meaning it needed a fluid as a carrier.

  Yes. Water. They’re going after the water supply!

  She started searching for water processing plants. There was one nearby, just over an hour’s drive from here. She downloaded a map and checked the route before disconnecting her holo, leaving all the ports disconnected.

  Wiping her face with her hands, she took a breath and started the car.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hotel Remona, New Versaille, 37 km East of Spire.

  There was a restrained knock at the door, dulled. It wasn’t bare-knuckled.

  David Rek lay on the bed in the fetal position, gently rocking himself.

  Henry got up from the chair still holding the gun. He opened the door. Rek heard voices.

  Henry stepped aside.

  Rek turned his head to see who was there. An average build, average height figure stepped into the room. The stranger had no distinguishing features, and kept his face hidden behind a helmet.

  Rek tried to appeal to the faceless man regardless. “Listen, I can give you anything you want. Just let me go free. I’ll take my family and we’ll disappear. You have the toxin. You don’t need to do this.”

  Erik was watching from the outside. He reached over to the door and pulled it closed.

  The figure in the black atmos suit seemed unresponsive. He pulled the bag from around his back, and reached in to get something out.

  Probably a gun.

  “Please. Fucking hell. Please. You don’t need to…”

  The figure produced a round device, about the size of his palm. He held it out to David, who instinctively started to reach out.

  “Wait.” He pulled his hand back. “What… what is this?”

  The figure spoke, but his voice was synthesized, or scrambled. Or both.

  “Take it. You will be taken to a location to deploy it into the water supply. Hit the depressible section here before you drop it in…” The faceless figure turned his wrist to reveal a section of the device that looked like it could be pressed in, “… and then make sure you evacuate the area as fast as you can. You will then be taken to your family, and given transport to any city of your choosing.

  David took the device.

  “And if I refuse?” he asked.

  The figure pulled a gun out from behind his back. “Then we have a problem.” The figure pointed the gun straight at Rek’s forehead. “And we then also have a problem with your family.”

  David, hyperventilating and sweating now, nodded vigorously. “Okay. Okay… I … I understand.”

  Henry watched the exchange, immersed in the action. If he had popcorn, he could be mindlessly throwing it up to his mouth only to have it bounce off his face back into the bucket.

  The figure pulled the gun back and put it away. Zipping up the bag he had brought the device in, he turned and waited to be let out of the door.

  Henry, suddenly aware of his role, jumped a little, and scuffled over to the door. Opening it up, he watched, still mesmerized, as the man in black left the room.

  Erik let him pass, watching him as he left, too. Rek noticed the sense of awe that even the more grounded Ogg had for the unknown person.

  Once the footsteps had disappeared down the corridor, Erik stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “We leave in five minutes,” he said. “Get your shit together. You’re not coming back here.”

  Relief and fresh anxiety flooded David’s adrenals at the same time. Heart in his mouth, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he fumbled about trying to gather his belongings. Shirt. Atmos jacket. Wallet. Device that could only contain the toxin he had developed for the evil Jessica and her henchmen. Check.

  Within ten minutes, the three of them were out in the car, speeding towards the strato highway.

  Ventus Research Facility, downtown Spire

  The lab was quiet in intense concentration. Joel paced back and forth at the far end thinking through anything they might have missed.

  Eugene sat monitoring the replication device from which he was effectively “growing” the new antidote, having sequenced the DNA and stimulated it to replicate in yeast, engineered just for this purpose.

  Pieter monitored the cameras, despite the futility of the action. It gave him something to focus on so he didn’t have to think about the millions of people who would die painful deaths if this toxin was released into the water supply.

  Joel mumbled for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. “There must be a way to head them off at the pass.”

  Pieter tried to help this time. “The only other thing we can do is guard each access point - which we will do as soon as we have the antidote. We can’t physically get there and back in time. This is the optimal strategy, given the number of bodies we can trust. Everything else results in high probabilities of casualties.”

  Joel looked over at him. “You sound like Molly.”

  Pieter looked up from his holoscreens of camera feeds. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Joel smiled. “Yeah. You should, actually.”

  Just then there was a clatter at the entrance to the lab. Sean appeared, bustling, as much as a space marine could bustle. He strode across the floor, clutching a small device in his hand.

  “Got it. This is what we managed to produce… with a few design improvements.”

  Eugene was up and out of his chair in a flash, hands out to take the device. “Great! We’ll be ready in about five minutes with the antidote, and then it will take a few minutes to transfer into the device. After that, you can take it.”

  Sean looked over at Joel who had stopped pacing and was now square on to the action, albeit it several yards away from everyone else. “I guess you and I should be the ones to take it to the main target?” he suggested. “Then if there is any activity on the cameras, we can just switch course or location and apply the antidote as needed.”

  Joel nodded. “I concur.” It was a military strategy he was familiar with; it wouldn’t prevent the attack, but was the most efficient, in terms of neutralizing the effect when they knew the intended target.

  Joel thought a moment. “But who are ‘we’ exactly?” he asked.

  Sean had moved over to Eugene’s workstation and was watching the count down on his screen. “Huh?” he grunted, looking over at him again.

  Joel started to walk over to join the others around the workstations. “You said ‘we’. As in you and other people,” Joel clarified. “Who is ‘we’?”

  Joel noticed Sean take a slightly deeper breath before responding. “I don’t mean to be all mysterious and shit, but that’s a ‘need to know’.”