Nate was staring at it intently, trying to understand just what the hell it was that he was looking at, when a pair of eyes popped opened in what had once been the thing’s face and he nearly leapt out of his shoes.
It was still alive!
The two of them stared at each other and then the thing erupted with a mewling cry of such pain and despair that Nate cringed at the sound. He was frozen in place, unable to move as the thing on the stretcher continued to wail in misery, and so he didn’t notice anyone else was in the room with him until a hand snapped forward and yanked the sheet back up where it belonged.
The awful, hideous cry stopped immediately.
“What do you think you are doing? This area is off-limits!”
Nate shook himself, trying to banish the memory of that awful thing, and turned to find his recruiter staring at him with murder in his eyes.
“Get out!” the man said, pointing behind them at the door.
“What was that…”
“I said GET OUT! Or I will terminate you immediately!”
The threat to his livelihood—or was that to his life? — was enough to get him moving. He scrambled backward until he found the door and then slipped out into the hall. He knew better than to leave; something in his recruiter’s tone had made that clear, so he began to pace back and forth within the narrow confines instead.
When his recruiter emerged from the room moments later, Nate couldn’t hold his questions in any longer.
“What the fuck was that?” he asked, jabbing his finger past the other man’s head to point at the room he’d just left. “What happened to that guy?”
Nate was expecting his recruiter to give him the typical runaround and so he was surprised when the other man answered calmly.
“What happened?” he repeated, a superior little smile on his face. “He fucked up; that’s what happened. Thought he could pull a fast one and claim that he’d done the job when he really hadn’t. I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”
Nate stared at him, horrified. “What did you do?”
The recruiter laughed. “I flipped his switch, of course! Did you think we’d send you idiots roaming around out there without some means of controlling you? Do you really think we’re that stupid? He tried to fuck with me so I flipped his switch and activated all those little bastards in his bloodstream. Turned him inside out before he even knew what hit him!”
A chill washed over Nate as he realized the implications of what he was hearing. Whatever had been done to that guy had more than likely been done to him as well…
He had to force himself to keep from grabbing the front of the recruiter’s shirt and slamming him up against the wall.
“What did you do to me?” he asked, the anger clear in his voice.
The recruiter laughed, seemingly not afraid of Nate at all.
“I didn’t do anything to you. You did it to yourself. You asked for employment. You signed the waivers. You submitted to the medical ‘tests.’ You’ll just have to live with the consequences.”
Nate stared furiously at the man, stunned to realize that what the recruiter had just said was true. He’d been so eager to get off the street and back to something useful that he hadn’t even stopped to read the paperwork that had been placed in front of him.
But his recruiter wasn’t finished yet.
“Don’t even think about running, Nate,” he said with a sneer. “Limbus owns you now and we take our investments very seriously. If you run, we’ll use the subcutaneous tracking device we’ve implanted in your skin to find where you’ve gone and bring you back again, at which point you’ll be punished for the trouble you’ve caused.”
The recruiter looked back at the door of the room they’d just exited and Nate got the message, loud and clear.
Suddenly Nate understood why Charlie had looked the way he had in the bar that night. It hadn’t been fear that had caused his hands to tremble and his face to drain of color. No, not fear at all. It had been guilt.
Guilt that he’d been getting Nate involved with this mess in the first place.
Nate glanced down the hall to the elevator doors. He could run, he thought. Get out of here, find a doc who could take the transponder out of his system, lay low until the storm passes. He’d survived the Faith War, he could survive this.
The other man caught the look, realized what he was no doubt thinking.
“Don’t be stupid,” his recruiter said. “You’ve got a good thing going here, why make a mess of it all? If you carry out the assignments as requested, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Nate wanted nothing more at that moment than to knock the man on his ass, but he restrained himself. You’ve got to keep cool if you want to get out of here, he told himself.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said aloud, forcing himself to smile. “No sense screwing up a good thing. You’ve got to protect your assets; every corporation has to do that. Just good business sense, right?”
The recruiter grinned at him. “That’s right. Stick with the program and who knows? A few years from now I might even recommend you for the junior level management program. Get you off the streets for good. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Nate made himself nod. “Of course I would. Last thing I want to do is end up like that guy in there,” he said, pointing over the other man’s shoulder at the door behind him.
The recruiter watched him closely for a moment and then nodded, as if to himself. “Good. Glad to hear it. Go home. Get some rest. When you’ve had a chance to think everything over you’ll feel much better. I’m sure of it.”
Permission granted, Nate got out of there as fast as he could.
Two hours later Recruiter 46795 stood staring out the window of his office, trying to figure out how he was going to clean up the mess he currently found himself in.
It had not been a good day.
First he’d had to terminate Wojowitski’s employment and then there had been that business with Benson. Two disasters in one day, both with the potential of screwing with his chances of getting the promotion he’d been angling for since he’d been relocated to this office from his former post in New Los Angeles.
One rogue operative he could deal with. The long-term effects of farcaster travel were still unknown and Wojowitski had been at it longer than most. Claiming the operative had simply cracked under the strain would keep the focus off of himself and on Wojowitski, where it belonged. Besides, Wojowitski had been recruited by his predecessor, so claiming it was a poor recruit in the first place was still an option he could fall back on to avoid any blame.
But Benson… Benson was a different story. He was one of his own personal recruits and had only managed a handful of assignments in the last few months. There was no way to claim Benson was someone else’s responsibility nor that the farcaster travel had begun to mess with the operator’s neocortex; everyone knew that only happened after more than fifty jumps.
Recruiter 46795 stepped over to the wet bar in the corner of his office and poured himself a stiff drink. He downed the first one in a single gulp in an effort to calm his nerves and then poured a second of equal size. That one he took back to his desk with him and slowly nursed it as he gave the problem more thought.
It seemed clear to him that he’d compounded the problem with Benson when he’d confronted him earlier that evening. Discovering the unused hypo in Benson’s locker had put him on edge, a situation that hadn’t been helped much when he’d found Benson inside Wojowitski’s prep room hours later. That’s where things had really gone wrong.