Optional Retirement Plan

Chapter 3

3

On the way down I think about killing Strunk, right then and there. Mano a mano. Even factoring in the years, it’d be easy enough. He won’t be expecting it.

There’s a reason he won’t be expecting it. It’d be dumb. Something a young hothead like Strunk himself would do maybe. In Taulke Tower, in the heart of SynCorp HQ orbiting high above Earth, with cameras everywhere? They’d be waiting for me when the doors opened. And no matter how that went, I certainly wouldn’t make it off the station.

No, Tony’s given me three days to make my peace before he forces me into permanent retirement. It’s his gift for more than three decades of service. A day for every ten years. Eh, could’ve been worse. Strunk or any one of a dozen others could’ve taken me out from a distance. Tony didn’t owe me a meeting. I’m grateful.

“What’s it like?” Strunk asks. The hum of the vator’s descent from the penthouse fills the sound vacuum just fine, thank you very much. But d**k feels the need to converse. Some people just can’t stand silence. All righty, then.

“What’s what like?”

“Losing your mind.”

Strunk and I don’t think much of each other. If you were listening earlier, you know that. But I think he’s not being an asshole for once. He sounds genuinely curious.

“I wouldn’t know.”

I smile at my own joke. Whether I’m actually losing my mind or not, my answer fits.

He clicks his teeth. “Tick wasn’t the only one. You just don’t remember, old man.”

I hate to say it, but Strunk might have a point. If I’ve been running my mouth—and I don’t believe it’s true, but if I have—Tony’s right to want to retire me. He doesn’t act without thinking. And it was obvious from the look on his face—an honest look, not put on, not orchestrated, one I remember from when we ran together—this wasn’t a course he’d prefer. But that business about Planitia Prime pisses me off. I’m grateful for the meeting, but Tony owed me more than some half-assed fantasy at the end.

Flash, flash, flash.

The light on the panel clicks down a few more floors toward the flight deck. Now the drone of our descent is getting to me, too.

“Seriously, how would I know?”

“How would you know what?”

“If I don’t remember.”

Strunk clicks his teeth. “Fair enough.”

Flash, flash, flash.

“Will it be you?” I ask.

The hum of the vator fills the space again.

“Would you want it to be?”

Another serious question from my successor. I shrug, darting my eyes sideways. His hands are loose at his sides. He’s not worried about me trying something here. He knows I’m smarter than that.

“There’s a certain symmetry to that scenario,” I say.

Flash, flash.

Strunk turns his head.

“A certain what?”

Goddamn. The whole next generation is a walking example of the slide of modern society. Hotheaded, arrogant, and uneducated. No offense.

“You’re the EEO now. I used to be. As executive enforcement officer for the company, it’d fall to you.” I pause, thinking of the code. “It’s something Tony would want, I think.” The code is something unspoken. A list of do’s and don’ts, rights and wrongs we enforcers live by. I wonder if Strunk knows the code. Or, if he does, cares what it means, why it’s important.

“Ah,” he says. Oh good, he gets it. I think. “I’m responsible for seeing it done.”

Now I really want to kill d**k. As a gesture to Tony. A screw-you-and-your-three-days gesture. But I have some things I want to do first. And we’re almost to the flight deck. And there’s the code. Killing d**k now would be bad form. A sign of ingratitude.

Also, stupid.

“Good to know,” I say. Some conversations need to be bookended. I put just enough into my voice to make him think he’s told me something he shouldn’t have.

He’s still looking at me, so I smile at the vator door without looking back. The well-timed ding sounds like a rim shot to my ear. Who’s enjoying the joke now, d**k?

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Strunk says as I walk onto the flight deck, “but whatever it is, pack it in, old man. Make it easier on yourself.”

I stop and turn around. I just can’t resist. I’ve always had a low tolerance for bullies, even in this business. So we’re standing there, facing each other over the vator’s threshold, not six feet apart. Strunk crosses his arms again. I leave mine at my side. I’m not as stupid as you’d like me to be, I think.

“Easy isn’t something I do easily.”

The look on his face says I’ve confused him again. No challenge there.

Strunk decides to cease parsing my reply and narrows his eyes. I’ve used that look myself a thousand times. The look that says, don’t make me shoot anything deadlier at you than a few eye-daggers.

“Old man, you’ve got three days. Although why Tony gave you that … he should’ve let me cap you six months ago.” His grin creeps up one side of his face. His thumbs show how anxious the rest of his hands are to pull and be done with it, to hell with Tony’s wrath. To hell with the code.

As the doors start to close, I say, “Only now I know it’s coming.” I smile and wink some Fischer charm his way.

There’s the slightest droop in Strunk’s grin. The slightest release of the baby crow’s feet around his eyes. I see the fight inside him, his pea-brain warring with his fat fingers to keep him from pulling.

The doors meet.

At the last second, Strunk realizes he’s wrong. He knows exactly what I’m thinking. I have three days. Not to get my affairs in order, but to plan. And despite all that youthful pomposity, he’s worried. Knocked off-balance a little. Some payback for the retirement party I’d just been thrown.

Step one.

Done.

Step three was to get off the station and go to ground. That’d be easier since I didn’t have an SCI. Everyone has them installed at birth these days, I know, but if you haven’t done so yet, you ought to get it removed. Having no implant makes it harder to be tracked, right? No biometrics, no constant uploads to SynCorp’s medical dbase, no SPS targeting by the Marshals Service. It’s part of what kept me alive, and helped me do the same so often for my new angel of death, Tony Two-point-oh. On the other hand, it would’ve alerted me to the Alzheimer’s—assuming I even had it—when I could still do something about it.

Life’s full of little screw-you trade-offs like that.

But before heading into an off-grid black hole, I needed to hit The Slate. That was step two. I wanted to talk to Mercy Stotes, The Slate’s insomniac bartender, and find out what she knew. If I’d been blowing out of turn, she’d know about it. Whether she’d tell me or not … well, she’d tell me.

I waited till Strunk was well on his way to the penthouse again before moving. I wanted him to think I’d headed off station. Since I’d left things the way I did before those doors closed, he’d assume I’d be running for my life. That’s what I’d expect a mark of mine to do, if he knew I was coming after him.

Not a chance. Not yet, anyway.

“Hey kid! Hey!”

One of SynCorp’s millions of minimum-SCD worker bees looked my way. If he was out of his teens, I was still in my twenties.

“Yes, sir?” he said, punching something into his parking manifest.

I walked over to his service station and dangled the platinum key to my ship in front of him. He was surprised that somebody dressed like me had a personal ship, given SynCorp’s extensive public transportation network and restrictions on personal ownership.

“Take the Hearse over there for a quick jaunt, would you?” I call it the Hearse. Funny guy, huh? “When you bring it back, park it in temp. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Sir?”

Expected.

“See that black and grey job over there? The one with the dented front end.”

Unlike its namesake, the Hearse was a small, single-person job meant for speed and with plenty of room in the back for hauling … cargo. Its lines were slim and its coloring dim. Attracting attention is a bad idea in our line of work, right?

“I want you to run it around Earth orbit once, then bring it back and park it in temporary parking.”

“Oh. Why sir?”

I held up my syncer. He looked at it and forgot his question, bringing up his own arm. I programmed in five-hundred SynCorp dollars and sent them his way. Fortunately for the kid, I route my transactions through a dozen different IPs. Virtually untraceable.

“Thank you, sir. Will there be anything else?”

“Just make sure you park it in temp. If you forget, I won’t like it.” I flashed him my best set of Strunk eyes.

“Y-yes, sir. Not a problem, sir. You realize if you’re overdue in temp parking, you’ll be ticketed, sir?”

I just smiled to thank him for his concern.

“Right then, sir.”

Off he went.

The departure would register on SynCorp’s manifest, which Strunk would check as soon as he got back to the penthouse, if he had any brains in his head. Whether he’d check it or not was, therefore, debatable.

I know what you’re thinking—by law, the Marshals Service has SPS trackers in every ship that flies. So they can track the Hearse no matter what, right? Wrong. Had that removed about the same time I opted out of having an implant installed. And all at SynCorp’s expense.

I love irony, when I’m not the nail it’s hammering in.

If Minimum Wage did what I told him when he brought the Hearse back, he’d park it in temporary parking, which—due to its quickstop nature—wouldn’t autolog into the flight deck’s master manifest. No need to take up dataspace with a parking routine meant to last no longer than fifteen minutes. At fifteen minutes and one second, SynCorp auto-tickets the offender, and the ticket goes into the Service’s dbase. Built-in incentive to move along for those few lucky shmucks who own their own ships.

If I wasn’t back when the ticker passed fifteen minutes, I’d not only be auto-ticketed by SynCorp, I’d also trip an alarm letting Strunk know I was still on-station.

Advantage: d**k.

Fortunately, like any good bar, The Slate was close to the flight deck, just two decks up. I watched Minimum Wage fire up the Hearse and lift off. Including the joy ride and parking meter ticker, I had about half an hour before d**k got wise.

Time for step two and a quick trip to The Slate to feel out Mercy Stotes.

Off I went.