Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,26

handful of planetary governments or polities to be behind a random assassination attempt on a salvage worker, but the thought that one of the megacorporations might be after us was even worse.

Something of my worry must have shown on my face. “What’s going on, Langston? What do you know?”

“Not much. I… sent myself a recording. Somehow the branch of me that died had enough time to broadcast a message back to my console here on Daedalus. It’s six hours of video, though. I haven’t had a chance to go through it, but Sarah’s working on it now. She should have an edited version soon. I don’t know how much it will help, but it should give us a starting point.” I hesitated, reluctant to tell her more, to scare her more than she already was. But she needed to know. “That’s not all. When I woke up, aboard Prospect station… someone tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“They walked into my room and tried to put a knife in me. I stopped them, and then ran.” I sighed. The news about Miller shed some unwelcome light on my own re-coiling experience. “And something was wrong with my backup. It was corrupted. It took them a month to fix it and stick me back in a new coil. And even then, judging from the questions they asked, they weren’t terribly confident that I would still be me.” Which brought up an interesting question that I sure as hell didn’t want to think about. How could I be sure I was still me? The me I was before? If my backup had been damaged, tampered with, altered… I cut off that train of thought. It wasn’t as if there was anything I could do about it, so better to forget it and move on.

“Then they found you, too,” Chan said. “They tried to erase you.”

I nodded. “And when the doctors put me back together anyway, they sent someone to kill me so they could finish the job.”

Chan dropped her head into her hands. “They were probably looking for me, too. For my backups. I’m very… careful… about my digital footprint, Langston. About my identity. I do my best to keep my whereabouts hidden.” Something in her voice told me that that was an understatement. “It wouldn’t have been easy for whoever is behind this to have found out who I was. That might have kept me safe, this time. But no one can hide forever. What are we going to do?” she said softly.

Any answer I may have given was curtailed when a window popped open in my vision. It showed a feed from a security camera near the front hatch, where a trio of coils in dark singlesuits were pushing their way through the crowd. They had the same blank, emotionless look about them as the assassin from Prospect, and moved with the same implacable calm. A cold sweat broke out on my palms and I drew in a short, stuttering breath. Sarah, port that over to Bit.

Chan’s eyes went wide as her agent streamed her the same feed Sarah had shown me. There was a chance it was just coincidence, but the similarities to the assassin who came after me on Prospect couldn’t be ignored.

“Let’s go,” I said, sliding out of the booth. My hand went to the gun at my side, but I left it in the holster. There was still a chance we could slip out the back and vanish into the corridors before whoever was after us caught up. Outside of the dampening screen, the full force of the music hit me again, pulsing and throbbing, an almost physical wave of sound. But it didn’t quite mask the quick pop-pop-pop of gunfire. As Chan disentangled herself from the booth—moving uncertainly in her male body—I stared toward the entrance, where the doormen were slowly toppling to the ground as a wave of panicked screaming spread like ripples in a pond.

I grabbed Chan’s hand and pulled her the rest of the way out of the seat, propelling her toward the back of the club. Being on a hab wasn’t like dome living—you didn’t find exits plastered in a dozen convenient locations. Hatches were, by their very nature, weak points in the structure and had to meet very exacting standards to ensure they sealed properly and automatically in the event the station was breached to maintain the atmospheric integrity of the rest of the hab. But a place as big as the Black