Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,3

was time to stop brooding, time to stop thinking too much about where life had brought me. There was nothing left for me to do except embrace that future and let it take me wherever it led.

2

“Tycho Barrett! You’re back from Mars!”

Raven Sommer, our dark-skinned young sniper with long black hair, came running across the living room of our Terran safehouse and threw herself into my arms. I didn’t take the gesture all that personally. Raven was the demonstrative type.

“Hi, Raven. Yeah, I’m back.”

She drew back and looked me in the eyes, half-playfully analyzing whatever she saw there. “So, mission accomplished then?”

“Mission accomplished.”

I looked around at the safehouse. Like any of the others we often used, this one was roomy, bright, and almost tastelessly clean—high ceilings and spotless shelving and expensive art devoid of any personality.

“Nice place,” I commented dryly. Thomas Young, our computer expert, happened to be walking by.

He stopped dead in his tracks. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He was a somewhat eccentric man, and something about him seemed even stranger today. His long hair hung down to his shoulders, and his eyes seemed weirdly enthusiastic yet almost despairing.

I didn’t want to know about it. “Hello, Thomas. I’m back.”

“You were gone somewhere?”

That’s the thing about Thomas. He always likes to make the point that he doesn’t really see you. Before I could give my sarcastic reply, Thomas wandered back out of the room, obviously still lost wherever his thoughts had taken him.

I shook my head, threw my bag down on a couch, and took a seat. Andrew Jones came walking by, sharply dressed and as irritatingly irreverent as ever. “Don’t get too comfortable there, Panic. The boss called a meeting as soon as she heard you were on your way over.”

Panic was Jones’s nickname for me. It’s a long story. “Good to see you too, Andrew.” I leaned back on the couch, put my feet up on an ottoman, and closed my eyes. A moment later, someone picked up my feet and dropped them on the floor. I opened my eyes again. “Oh. Hello, Veraldi.”

Vincenzo Veraldi was our team’s second in-command and resident knife-fighting expert. I couldn’t see any blades concealed beneath his expensive white shirt, which probably meant he was only wearing two or three of them. He was glaring at me in a not-overly-friendly way. “Feet off the furniture, Barrett. This stuff is rented, not owned.”

“Now, let’s be reasonable,” I replied. “We both know that this safehouse will eventually be destroyed by rampaging cyborgs, and everything in it will be destroyed along with it. That includes this ottoman, so why not just make use of it?”

“That only happened to one safehouse, Tycho,” Raven pointed out.

Veraldi didn’t bother to try to reason with me. “Feet off the furniture,” was all he said, and all he apparently meant to say.

“Is that Tycho’s voice I hear in there?” called Andrea Capanelli, our commanding officer and my sometime friend.

“It’s me, Andrea.”

She walked into the room, brushing her now shoulder-length blonde hair out of her eyes. “Welcome back. How did it go?”

“I located Rosenstein, got him alone, and had a talk.”

“Uh-huh.” She was watching me skeptically, uncertain of how to take my mood. “Elaborate.”

“He said the trafficking crew he worked with were employed by David Kote.”

I didn’t think she necessarily needed to hear about the encounter with the bodyguards, or how I had left Rosenstein.

“David Kote?” asked Andrew Jones. “Astrochemical Technology Group, David Kote?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Rosenstein explained to me that those were genuinely evil people who set no value on human life. Unlike him, of course.”

“He probably believes that,” Andrea replied. “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”

“She’s absolutely right,” Jones quipped. “I have no idea how evil I actually am.” He was lying halfway down on another couch, playing with a puzzle box.

“Oh, please,” said Raven. “Unless you’ve switched combat roles and become a sniper, I don’t even want to hear about it.”

The funny thing was, Raven was easily the most caring individual in our entire crew. She was the only one I could consistently count on to show human emotional responses like sympathy or concern.

“David Kote…” mused Andrea Capanelli. “We’ll have to find out everything we can about him—who he’s talked to, where he’s been, finances, friends, all of it. Can you handle that, Andrew?”

“Sure thing,” he replied. “Full dossier on your desk.”

He didn’t mean that literally, of course. The dossier would actually be sent from his dataspike to hers, the usual method of sharing information.

Thomas Young came