Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,2

went ahead. He kept looking around, peering at the loading devices and trash compactors behind the warehouse as if help was hiding in the shadows. The building and all its machinery sat empty and idle, a thin layer of red dust on every surface. The warehouse, like much of Chryse, seemed to have run into hard times.

“Okay.” He swallowed. “What do you want with me?”

“I happen to know that you were the contact for the human trafficking network that supplies Ares Terrestrial.”

He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me, then nervously put both hands in his pockets.

“Take your hands out of your pockets. Slowly.” I kept my gun trained on his head while he pulled his hands out and spread them to show me how empty they were.

“Look, man. Calm down. I’m sure we can work this out, yeah?”

“I need to know who they are. How you contacted them. Names.”

He suddenly grinned, showing pure relief. A clue as to how scared he really was.

“That’s it? You’re just interested in doing business? That’s good to hear, sir. Absolutely wonderful. Though I must say—”

I pressed the gun to his forehead, which seemed to help him focus his thoughts a little.

“Look, I don’t really know who these people are! That’s not the sort of thing they would want me to know, okay? I’m serious, please!”

“Then I guess there’s no reason for us to continue this conversation,” I replied calmly.

When he took my meaning, he started to babble. “No, no, hold on! Wait! Wait! I just don’t want to be cut out of the loop. Is that so wrong?”

“It’s either that, or you die right here, right now.”

He seemed to be struggling to accept this fact. As I stood there quietly with my gun against his forehead, he wrestled with the implications of being completely powerless. It seemed to shrink the man. He kept crouching lower and lower by tiny increments as if trying to melt away from the gun, until he was finally bent over ludicrously with his hands in the air, his face a portrait of absolute misery. I almost felt bad for him.

“Okay. Okay!” He sighed, but it sounded almost like a dog whining. “They work for David Kote.”

That wasn’t an answer I was expecting. “David Kote the industrialist? Mining, Water extraction?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Look, these are bad men, you understand me? Not like me! I play the big man here in Chryse, but I’m only a middleman. I’ve never been anything more than that. And if you’re here to take over my business, I’ll never even be that again. I’m just trying to make a living. But these guys? They’re fucking evil.”

That was how he saw himself, an innocent entrepreneur. A victim. A poor man who had the rotten luck of doing business with monsters. I asked myself if a facilitator was responsible for the crimes he enabled. I thought about the Cavadoran child I’d seen inside that dead cyborg in East Hellas. Then I finished what I’d come here to do.

Aboard a Martian train winding toward the Chryse spaceport, I looked out the window and thought about how my life had changed over the past few years. How I had changed. I had started as an Arbiter, a member of the solar system’s most elite law enforcement agency. In that role I’d gone to Venus, in the company of my friend and mentor, Gabriel Anderson. We’d been assigned to resolve a mystery, why the power had gone out in Tower 7, and what any of it had to do with August Marcenn, the commander of the local police. Of course, it turned out to be a much bigger issue than it had originally appeared to be. When it was all over, Gabriel Anderson was dead, I had killed August Marcenn, and I’d been drawn into the world of Section 9.

But I never really fit in there. Watching the narrow and maze-like Martian streets go by below me, I thought about the strange, lost feeling I’d lived with ever since Gabe’s death. I thought about his widow, Sophie, another friend who had died too young. Killed for no better reason than having known me. I thought about how I’d been framed for her murder, forced into killing an Arbiter, and left with essentially no choice but to join this unit. I thought of how the members of my Section 9 team were the only family or friends I had left.

But it was time to let all that go.

It