Shackleton Magellan
Session 1 — The Ragged Edge of Space
Shackleton Magellan reads a room like a system diagram, looking for the input nobody is watching and the output nobody has secured. He came up out of cryo beside Rock Lavey with the same cargo-class frost on him as everyone else, another broke man at the end of the lanes, except Shack is broke the specific way that comes from owing Corvid Financial more than a life is worth and skipping the system before they could collect.
He got to work the moment the tour ended. He cloned his company card onto his wrist computer, because a physical key is a leash, and he hacked the barracks environmental controls and locked the temperature at a civilized seventy-two, quietly overwriting the eighty degrees Six had set. It was the first negotiation the crew ever ran and nobody even noticed it happen. At the Comet’s Tail he steered a service bot across the floor and turned it into a microphone aimed at Leocadia Zavia, and he had her coordinates almost in hand when Ronin Sanchez bellowed at the bot to clear off and the whole thing died at the worst possible second. That is the job. You do everything right and someone loud undoes it for free.
He sees more than he says. The Nova Nexus roulette wheel was rigged in the crew’s favor, a clumsy little mechanism under the felt throwing the ball to black, and Shack watched it, understood it, and let it ride without a word. He would rather talk quantum physics with a hostess than accept the comp she was sent to offer, because underneath the debt and the running there is still the man who went out past the charted lanes to find something, and who came back owing everything except the belief that the finding was real. The dead-end system is exactly the kind of nothing that hides a something. He can feel it in the dark the void is wrapped around.
Session 2 — The MacMillian Anomaly
Shack has spent enough weeks on MacMillian Station to read its paperwork the way he reads a dead relay, hunting the one wire that carries current when nothing is supposed to be on. So when the morning board came up with their crew stamped as the TAC team and half the other slots left blank, he clocked it, the same way he’d clocked the clumsy little mechanism under the Nova Nexus roulette wheel his first week. The station’s commission system for arrests was rigged, someone behind the felt throwing the ball where they wanted it. He didn’t say much. He filed it, the way he files everything, into the running log he cannot stop keeping.
He and Ronin Sanchez drew the entertainment district, which is how he ended up watching Peter Goodwin hold court at The Silk Abbey with the station manager fawning and expensive company on both arms. The investor was the loud thing, the thing you were meant to look at. The interesting thing was Solveig Kaufer sitting a careful distance off, tapping notes into a tablet with far more detail than any assistant needs to remember a dinner. Shack has spent a whole career telling the decoy from the payload. Kaufer was writing something down, and whoever it was for, it was not the manager.
Then the four a.m. alarm dragged them into Processing II, and he got the night he has been chasing since before Corvid ever owned his name. The blast door came apart under Zigurds Sloan’s torch and the welds underneath were old, resealed and disguised over and over, a locked room somebody had been walking in and out of for a long time and taking real pains to hide it. He found the footprints himself, a single clean track through the dust from the stairwell to one sealed container out of a whole bay of them, and he worked the control room off Sloan’s password to find three of the four cargo slots empty and the fourth holding the crate. What was inside is the thing he will re-read that log for the rest of his life. Human comms gear bolted into racks on one wall, and on the other, technology grown into the metal like it had once been alive, symbols on it that no human being was ever supposed to read. That is the find. The great one, the one out past the charted lanes he always swore was real, and it was sitting in a mothballed cargo bay under a shipping label.
And he watched it get taken. When the container tore loose and the depressurization alarms went, Shack held the control room while Six jumped the gap, and the external cameras told him the rest of it, that every station drone was dark, killed remote by a hand that knew exactly which switch to throw. The crate went out into the black and a vortex swallowed it whole. He got a scan of the two chunks Six carved free, a bare surface read and no more, before station security bagged them for evidence and shipped them off to Sloan. Then the orders came down: escort a maintenance run to Thides III, an exclusion zone, off-station, out of the way, and he and Rock Lavey read it for exactly what it was. You do not reassign the only people who saw the thing unless you want them somewhere they cannot say so. He cannot prove a word of it. And yet he knows what he saw, and someone spent a great deal of effort making sure nobody ever would.
Session 3 — Buckle Up, Motherfuckers
They made him squadron leader for the run, which he took the way he takes most authority, as a set of variables he was now responsible for. He led it well enough right up to the point where the physics stopped cooperating: a hull with no armor, a substance that ate their engines out of a clear sky, and a crash that put three of the four of them under. When they picked themselves up in the jungle it was Shack who called the retreat off the wreck, because a survey man knows the difference between a position you can hold and a position that is already lost, and the crash site was a beacon screaming into a world that hunts by exactly that. So he moved them, toward the one relay left unserviced, and walked them straight into the seam he has been reading toward his whole career.
Relay Station 11 was a forgery. He read it the way he read the rigged commission board and the roulette wheel before it — the one wire carrying current that nothing was supposed to be on. Two years of maintenance logged clean under a name nobody knew, a hexagon of grown alien metal wired into the comms and lying to the whole network in that stranger’s hand. And when he put the telescope to the dark five miles off, there it was, the payload the whole restricted planet was the decoy for: a lit compound, ships on the pads, and a hyperspace vortex tearing open right against the atmosphere to drop a hull straight in without so much as brushing a satellite. That is the find. Not the container this time, gone into the black before he could hold it — a whole operation, standing still, close enough to walk to. The great one he swore was real out past the charted lanes, and it was running freight on a world he’d been told was empty.
So the treasure-hunter did the thing he almost never gets to do, which is take the treasure. He ran the numbers on Six’s EMP — blast radius here, spare the old ship, kill the command house and the Kinetic Logistics hull and the fences all in one pulse — and the numbers were his to run because for once nobody was shouting over the operation while it happened. It worked the way clean math works. They came over the fence into an EMP-dark compound, took the older ship whole, and Shack walked up the ramp of a vessel wired with alien nav and gateless jump drives and understood that he was no longer a man who had seen the impossible and lost it. He was a man carrying a piece of it home in a stolen hull, a running log finally attached to a thing he could set on a table. He has wanted proof his whole broke, running life. He has it now, and he is clear-eyed enough to know it is the most dangerous cargo he has ever flown.
Session 4 — The Case of the Missing Courtesan
He spent one of his gizmos on a tracker and put it on the ship’s transponder relay, quiet, no ping, answering only to his own frequency. Then he spent the rest of the three hours on the thing in the nav computer, and worked out what it was. Beaconless. Coordinates read straight off gravity wells instead of off the Republic’s markers, and a jump you could plot into the top of an atmosphere without dying of it. Nothing the Federal Republican Interstellar Fleet has ever flown does that. He had the whole of it, the device and the drives and the wires running aft to something he never got to open, sitting under his hands for three hours. It is the find of his career and of anyone’s career, and he had a shift and a half with it before the Marshal’s people put a seal on the door.
So he did what he always does when the thing itself is taken away, which is build a record. He talked Holger Graeme into full station security access and pulled the Royale Hotel footage himself. He watched a woman go into a room and not come out. He watched Solveig Kaufer arrive and leave with two men, and a human cleaning crew go in where the droids should have gone, and he recognised one of their faces from a scan he ran months ago and never expected to need, Hildebrand Panza, military record redacted. He clocked the cameras going dark ten minutes early and coming back an hour late. In the suite he matched an earring to a photograph from memory. Down in the basement he noticed that the sheets going through the laundry were not the sheets from that room, which is the smallest observation of the session and possibly the most damning, because it means the bedding never went into the system at all.
He traded with the reporter because that is what you do when you cannot hold the evidence yourself. Give Pia Kadyrov the footage and the name, take her research and her reach, and put a copy of the truth somewhere outside the reach of the people who keep deleting it. He read Samina Ventura correctly and without flattering himself about it, an employer counting a lost asset and pricing a lawsuit, not a woman in grief. And when Julija Borja asked him questions he answered them, all of them, because a man who has spent years being disbelieved by institutions does not pass up the one institution finally taking notes.
Then he pinged the tracker, and nothing came back. He built the thing knowing its limit, that distance eats the answer, and so silence has exactly one meaning. The ship is out of the Thides System. It went out of a federal quarantine, with the alien nav and the gateless drives and the hold full of the impossible, and the only reason anyone on this station knows it happened is a gizmo he spent on a hunch. He had the proof in his hands for a day. He is a man who has now lost the great find twice, and the second time he watched it go from the inside of the building that was supposed to be holding it.
Session 5 — Hostile Takeover
He staged the scene before security arrived, which is a thing he did not used to know how to do. Kicked the broken prototype across the deck so the dead would read as armed, kept a working one, watched Rock Lavey keep another, and when a security officer asked whether he would submit to a search he said he did not consent, flat, in the voice of a man quoting a regulation he has actually read. Then he spent two days of enforced downtime taking the grazer apart with his eyes. A gamma-ray laser. No federal marks, no security grip, no tooling marks from any production line he could name. He found the safety and came within one wrong move of locking the weapon shut forever, and the thing that stopped him was the habit of assuming he did not understand it yet.
At The Silk Abbey he did the harder thing. He sat down with Kate Broadbeck and told her the truth, that Brianna Melvin was almost certainly dead and that the people in that hotel room were why, and then he paid her to go back into the station manager’s quarters on purpose. He gave her a signal device and told her to use it only if she was genuinely frightened, and he meant every part of the arrangement kindly, and it was still a man with a debt problem putting a woman in a room to see what came out of it. He left the receiver with Holger Graeme when the crew shipped out, which was the responsible thing available. Graeme spent the back half of the session locked in his own office.
Thides I took a piece out of him. He found the missing part that made the vehicle run, buried in a collapsed shelf that scavengers had picked past, and he noticed the moved dust under the parked machines that said the plant was live, and then four armoured soldiers came down the catwalks and one of them put a blaster round through his suit. He went down hard. He came back up on trauma patches and other people’s hands. He took his one long shot at the last operative in the control room through a window opaque with blood, and missed, and Six closed the distance and finished it, and somewhere in there Six asked whether he ought to be shot to avoid capture, sincerely, as a kindness.
And then the thing he has been circling since Session 4 finally answered him. In the ship’s gutted stateroom the cube turned under his hands, symbols coming up across facets that have no business holding symbols, and it told him, in whatever way it tells anyone anything, that it did not need the gate. Eight fighters had locks on them. He opened a hole in space beside a station that controls every legitimate way in or out of this system, and the ship went through it, and it shut behind them. He has spent years chasing the discovery that clears his name. He is now carrying it, along with a body count, a stolen weapon, a hostage, and a woman he paid to walk into the room where a man died.
Session 6 — The Albatross Takes Flight
He spent four days with the manuals and the cube and came out of it more unsettled than he went in. The ship itself was legible enough, a fusion plant burning hydrogen with scoops to drink more of it out of a gas envelope, everything aboard running off the one plant. Everything except the twenty-sided thing bolted in where the galley used to be, which draws its power from somewhere he cannot find and does not have a word for.
What it does is worse than what it is. It navigates by the bend gravity puts in hyperspace, reading the pull of stars it never consults a beacon about, and it cut a seven day crossing to four while he watched. It is a miniature of the vortex arrays the Republic bolts to battlecruisers and feeds from dedicated power decks, and somebody has shrunk it to the size of a footlocker. And in its interface, sitting there like bookmarks, were three coordinates it already knew: a point in the atmosphere of Phoenix III, somewhere deep inside the Sargasso Void, and Corwin II.
It took them to the third one whether they liked it or not. He tried the terminal four times and it overrode him inside seconds each time, and he had to sit and watch a ship fly itself down a crack in a crater. Inside the facility he did what he is actually good at, which is being curious in a room that does not want him there. Johnson’s children failed. Johnson’s dog worked. He bridged his own system into an air-gapped Pratrock terminal with a gizmo and walked away still holding it, which he has not yet said out loud might also be holding him.
He gave the order to shoot the drone. Ronin Sanchez had said no. He said yes, and the lights went out, and everything after that followed from his mouth. He laid three limpet mines inside the bay doors and then went back and picked all three up again, which he would describe as a change of assessment. Then he plotted the Eris System jump by hand off a cube that will no longer fly the ship, and read a line of business traffic saying that Kinetic Logistics had ceased to exist, and understood that the thing they are pulling on is much larger than the company that shot at them.
Session 7 — The Goodwin Contract
The ship told him a secret on the way in, and it was worse than a malfunction. Shackleton went through the communication logs and found that the Corwin autopilot seizure had been a hijack, an attachment on the comms array taking an external signal and relaying it through the alien device straight into the nav computer. Somebody outside the hull had flown their ship. His answer was a switch, a length of wire, duct tape, and a handwritten label reading “Autopilot On-Off” stuck to the dashboard. It is absurd against technology no Republic engineer can follow, and it is also a physical break in a circuit, which no signal can argue with.
He talked them past the Montgomery with the transponder flipped on a beat before it mattered, agreed pleasantly to an inspection he will never attend, and paid the docking fee like a man with nothing to hide. At the House of Parts he haggled with a robot that insisted it was the owner, bought a fuse capacitor the third airlock button needed, and then caught the thing nobody else caught: Roselyn Monroe’s thumb sliding over the biometric reader while her little device took the credit. The bag opened to her touch. She was the right Monroe, and she wanted them to think a gadget did it, and now he knows both of those things and she only knows he watched.
The rest was logistics and legwork, which is to say the parts of exploration nobody writes songs about. He found the blank transponders in the junkyard, pooled credits with Rock Lavey for twelve days of rations when the larder turned out to be nearly empty, walked out of the transit stop facing the wrong way, and stood in a back alley counting cameras on the Firetemic Tower’s two-stage armored garage while a cleaning van taught him the shift pattern. He has a plan forming about a spoofed transponder and a fake business meeting. He also has a contract he did not ask for, a delivery address at Storage B-342, and a client whose failure clause was stated more clearly than her name.
Session 8 — A Crappy Plan Comes Together
The plan needed a badge and Shackleton remembered where one was. Edvin, drunkest of the engineers, had staggered off toward the transit stop hours earlier, and drunk men in a city that size end up on benches. He was on one, upper platform of the Aethel Subway Station, snoring against a post with his card on his chest and four security droids asleep in their alcoves around him. Shackleton did not touch the card. He stood beside a sleeping stranger with a device in his palm and let the near-field do the work while Rock Lavey and Ronin Sanchez put their bodies between him and the cameras, and the moment the copy finished a droid woke up and came walking. It looked at Edvin. Edvin still had his card. No crime. They walked out, and Shackleton had already used the walk to read Peter Goodwin’s lips at the limousine: the shipment has already gone out and cannot be stopped. He put that in the notebook with everything else.
The badge got them through the front door and got them to the 16th floor, and no higher, which is the kind of gap between a plan and a building that he is used to. The floor was a Firetemic Corporation lab, printers and scorched test rooms and canisters with nothing on them but numbers, and among the prototypes he found a pair of small round grenades whose only known property was that the engineers had been proud of them. When Rock’s boots on the ladder brought blaster fire up the shaft, he dropped one into the dark. Bang, wet splat, silence, and then the muffled sounds of men trying to get foam out of their guns. He would very much like to know what the second one does.
Up through Six’s hole and into the aftermath, the swarm went out ahead of him into a jamming field that blanketed the whole floor, and it painted him a picture anyway: a hallway, a cargo robot walking purposefully out with something, a room behind curtains and shutters that his nanobots could not see into at all, four guards in foam coming out of the service elevator, and other nanobots, not his, moving on the floor. He punched a warning through the jamming and got, in return, somebody else’s teletext on the crew’s own channel telling them to sit still and leave their stuff alone. Then the robot was gone and the room was gone and the power cut and the shutters came up, and Shackleton understood he had just watched a second job happen on the same floor as his own, and had not been able to read any of it.
Six went out through the glass. Ronin went out after him and fell, and the smart rope took the weight, and Ronin went again and fell again, and the rope took it again. Shackleton held the anchor and did the maths on the sirens. In the sewers afterward, listening to the local channels report immense damage and a federal name at the scene, he confirmed the destination out loud, Storage B-342, because somebody had to say where they were going and he was the one with the map.
Session 9 — Snakes on a Catwalk
The scanner found what a sewer wall does not advertise: vibration sensors and noise sensors, a dense net of them in the earth around the perimeter. He gave the crew the answer. Dig slowly, dig next to a big pipe, let the waste flow cover the noise. While Six cut into the wall he walked further down the tunnel and came back with corrugated sheathing and scrap pipe that somebody else had left there before them, which said the route had been used, and he shored the roof with Rock Lavey. Then a small round security drone came round the corner and put its light on him, and he ran the other way to draw it off the tunnel.
He led it along the catwalks, past the chunk of concrete Rock threw, which rang off the drone and changed nothing, and when the drone closed he fired the 40mm EMP, knowing it would take his own unhardened kit with it. The drone went into the sewer water. His electronics went dark for several seconds, and the Aethel Safety Bureau officers came up with armor, sonic stunners and blaster rifles while he was blind and deaf to everything around him. They told him to kneel. He knelt, hands visible. When the gear came back he put the Smart Rope into the water to swim like a snake and told them, in a calm voice, that there was a very poisonous sewer snake between him and them. The officers stopped, trained their lights on the water, and radioed in encrypted reports from behind. It held until they got tired of it and shot the rope to pieces with blasters. He ran, throwing corrugated steel behind him, into a sewage discharge room with a maintenance ladder and a crude set of stone stairs on no map. He took the stairs.
They led to a floor panel that slid aside into a Hidden Basement, stacked with tarped crates on rollers, kitchen noise coming through a door, and a heavy fire exit marked with an alarm warning. He pushed it and nothing sounded. He came up into an alley below street level, then onto a street of bars and automated cabs by the Bamboo Union 103 Lodge, and worked the crowds and back alleys off the cameras until the police cars went past the other way. He passed a service gate on a false identity seconds before the lockdown and reached Storage B-342, where Roselyn Monroe was waiting with a hose and Leonard Romeijn took Peter Goodwin away in a crate. An hour later Monroe fitted a legal Federal Transponder under the hull and registered The Albatross in his name, so the ship was a real vessel with a real identity, until someone looked at the paperwork behind it. She handed him a frequency code for a board of unofficial jobs, told him she expected the crew to come when she called, and left. The crew took the thousand-credit run to Peric IV D on Marlo Petrak’s advice.
Session 10 — Six Shooters and Four Arms
Shackleton took the Peric IV D run as the quiet job and asked the ship how to get there. The twenty-sided thing in the nav console offered three days and a 65% chance of arriving, and said it would want seven days of scanning the far system to do better. He took the gate and six days.
He spent them inside his own ship. The mess hall is gone; in its place sits a compact alien jump drive holding a dreadnought’s worth of stored energy in a space five yards across, and one hit on it while it is charged ends The Albatross and anything near her. The device in the console, which now answers to ICO or at least does not object, is aware to a degree, plots lanes through gravity in real time, and touches the ship only through navigation. He typed a request for its name and got a cascade of symbols. He asked whether ICO would do and got nothing. He remembered Gary Johnson, who wired all of it in.
At Acheron’s Rest he handled the paper: the delivery slip from Edward Greenchee, 998 credits from Bergljot Peric, 200 of it straight back for food and water, thirty to Marlo Petrak, and a second contract for two pallets to the Roberts homestead. The morning after the cantina, a woman watched him from the window of The Krusty Sextant and waved: Aliya Pontecorvo, who had sat with Nat the night before. He gave the crew fifteen minutes to finish their whiskey.
On the road he put the swarm over the ridge and found twins with hunting rifles, stunned one, fed the other’s position to Six’s helmet, scorched a raider at the truck, and missed the man running off with the cargo (The Rocky Pass Ambush).
Session 11 — The Cost of a Clone’s Life
Shack read the plains on the way in: mines, domes, gangs of identical men, and gardens sized to feed a workforce. At the Roberts Estate he checked the guest quarters before he trusted them, and found the doors locked from inside only. At dinner he told Harding Roberts about the ambush and got the answer whole: clones bought from Castellan Biodynamics, a drug that keeps them alive, bounties at the outpost for the ones that go feral, and the Acheronites’ claim to the moon.
He went out into the storm with Six and rode in Roberts’s vehicle for the chase (The Roberts Estate Storm Raid). At breakfast Roberts pressed a card into his hand, an introduction to Aliya Pontecorvo. Shack noted that the mines he could see do not pay for the house he had slept under.
At The Krusty Sextant he put the card on the counter and took the job: cargo from the moon to a hidden station near Peric III, a second load on to the Katha System, three thousand credits. Aliya waved off the black ice leaves he offered her as weeds. Santo Jin gave him a memory stick with a mining equipment manifest. Then he plotted a blind jump, aimed at open space, and it held: four days, on schedule, intact. In the transit he burned his gizmos to help Rock Lavey take the thumbprint lock off a captured Grazer Rifle.
Session 12 — That Would Be a Mistake
The blind jump put The Albatross into the Katha System behind a line of ships waiting at the gate from Peric. Shack worked the comms: a ticker of jellyfish prices, then the Republic closing the system for forty-eight hours (The Katha Lockdown). With a hold full of black ice he talked the ship down to Katha V as sightseers, paid seventy-five credits for the pad, and handed Six a hundred and twenty for a boat trip. That left him two hundred and eighty and no thanks.
He spent hours in the terminal at Furosuto Supaia Spaceport and came out with three rumours and one fact: a liner’s butler, worn thin by tourists in shorts, said the marshals had asked for his manifest and wanted one person. That night his sensors caught trucks working through the snow to the Good Fortune building and a scan team walking tripod scanners down every hull on the field. He sent nanobots after the team and lost them behind a restricted door.
Hasib Eberhardt came aboard to search and found nothing. He showed them a hologram of a missing star. Shack knew her from the news, and Rock Lavey found her face in Six’s photographs. They weighed it and settled on an anonymous tip. Shack called station security, gave his name and his ship, and then asked if the call was recorded. The sergeant took the picture and came back later, furious, with nothing to show for it.
At Chae-gul 147 the delivery fell apart in one sentence and Shack counted half an hour before the station came for them. His sensors caught the beacon that latched on as they pulled away. He plotted a blind jump to the edge of the Dinon System and made it by a single point (The Chae-gul 147 Breakaway). In transit he went back to the alien drive and reached the end of what he can learn alone. He needs an engineer or a physicist, and the nearest are at Startbase Tosell. The news carried a five-hundred-credit warrant for a docking bay and nothing about the cargo.
Session 13 — Albatross Security LLC: The Zenith Job
Shack read the job board for Six, who could not find it, and turned up a security contract with no limit on hires. At Desk 47 he read the Apice Security Contract properly, which seemed fair, since nobody else aboard reads anything all the way to the bottom. That habit is the only reason he found the clause: anything done without Apice Entertainment’s explicit direction is the contractor’s own legal responsibility. He had been here before. The last time a contract looked this generous, Corvid Financial ended up owning his life. He tried for a better rate, the recruiter took the paper back, and Shack discovered that he wanted the job more than the principle. He signed for Albatross Security LLC with the rest of them, and somewhere Corvid’s ledger did not move.
In the applicant line Six challenged him for his place. Shack offered to let him have it, which turned out to break the rules of a game only Six knew, so they thumb-wrestled. He lost to a combat-grown grip and decided it counted as a moral victory. On the monorail Six’s wishlist of Zenith Day merchandise had arrived on his wrist one item at a time, each followed by its failed payment, and Shack had reminded him they needed the job first. He felt like the only parent on a school trip.
At the Perihelion Super 8 he watched the Apice Entertainment channels advertise Zenith meet-and-greets with stars the company owns, set an alarm, and sent the crew a meeting time and place for the shift. He and Rock ate meat on a stick from the carts on the way.
On the Meridian Esplanade he called Paul Harrelson to check the Channel 7 News credentials. They were genuine, though he and Rock both thought the crew looked like the protesters from earlier. When Six pinged the hotel window, Shack sent the swarm up through the rain without stopping to think, which is the one thing he never has to think about. The feed came back clean and ugly: a scoped rifle on a bipod on the bed, a surveillance rig beside it, a laptop flashing an alarm, and someone already moving for the door (The Esplanade Sniper). His rig had found the thing first again, before anyone stuck their neck out. Then the order came to stand down, the person his rig had found walked out, and Shack was left holding the best footage of the night with nothing to do with it.
Session 14 — Iced Tea
Rock made a good case for doing nothing, and Shack told him so, and then said he did not care. Nobody had told him to do anything, so the evening was his, and he had a better idea for it. The van from the noodle place led back to Davis Electronics, and the cleanest way into a building full of electronics is to switch the electronics off. Ronin set the EMP and got clear. It went off beside a neighbourhood transformer, and the whole of Motel District 7 went dark. His comms died with everyone else’s, and somewhere out there sirens started up. It was not the surgical strike he had planned. Somewhere a man from Corvid Financial would have enjoyed it.
In the dark the swarm did what it was built for. Room by room it gave him the shop: a repair bay holding far more android and automaton parts than any second-hand business needs, three people upstairs jabbing at dead light switches, stacks of fresh P.E.T.A. pamphlets and placards, and an equipment case he had last seen with a Channel 7 News crew. In the garage, the van. Cleaning gear, mops, a big automated floor machine, and an Apex Bio Cleaning Corporation logo that wasn’t paint. It was an LED display. You could put any company on the side of that van in a second.
He made the call quietly. The swarm went deep into the Apex Bio Cleaning Van, dropped to passive so a sweep would miss it, set to wake only on his signal and to melt itself to slag if anyone found it. Leaving the heart of his invention in a stranger’s van is a gamble, and he took it. The canister refills. The information does not.
On the second shift he watched the ground, and the ground was full of Apex: overalls, branded vans, bins and cleaning machines all over the Zenith Day Festival Cordon. None of the faces matched Davis Electronics or the fake news crew. The sheer number of them was the point. At The Club that night a man from the shop was dragged out with pamphlets in his hands, and Shack recognised him. Six’s report on Harrelson is in his pocket, waiting to be cut down to something nobody gets fired for.