Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(60)

The Movement had to remain secret, and as long as she acted as its agent, that meant she had to be just as invisible.

Human memory was the only rough spot. Sentinels and Guards couldn’t have their memories erased, so Beck kept to the shadows when making her way across the abandoned Rez. The few people keeping an eye on the place would probably be doing so through the network of cameras, but Beck had prepared for this as well. For the next two hours, the cameras at her destination and all along the route she took to get there were on a loop. At night, with no moving bodies, there was little chance anyone would notice. More complicated, fail-safe ways of managing it came to mind, but she was only one person and even with her access, writing a program that triggered cameras to loop to old footage when in proximity to her armor was just too much work.

“Let’s see what secrets you keep, Mister Gilman,” Beck muttered as she moved through his home. It was a simple, single-bedroom unit. On first glance it seemed odd that the place wasn’t part of a larger block building, instead being one of four standalone units taking up a quarter of a Rez block. Then she remembered why Gilman was a lead in the first place and the special treatment made sense.

One: he survived the bloom. That alone was not enough to make him suspicious among the few hundred who had survived, but Beck had pulled up the security footage from that day and studied it intensely. Gilman was to have been at work but called in sick, which he had never done before. As his work was at the clinic, the most likely place where Fade B might be injected into a na?ve subject, it seemed too convenient for the man to suddenly find himself ill. Knowing the incubation period of Fade B meant he could position himself exactly where he needed to be in order to survive.

Beck jacked her suit into the computer controlling the tiny isolation chamber in the small housing unit’s utility room. Beck read the log, and excitement rose up in her.

“You were locked in here for two hours before the first alarm went off,” she said. “You fucking knew.”

Worse, he was probably responsible. Being part of a secretive conspiracy herself, Beck was all too aware of how hard it could be to build a network of agents in a given location while maintaining that secrecy. The likeliest probability was that Gilman worked alone here, but Beck didn’t plan to trust her instincts on it.

She spent ten minutes isolating the networked devices in Gilman’s home from the Mesh. Accidentally tripping an alarm programmed into the system to send out an alert someone was snooping wasn’t how she wanted her day to end.

Rather than spend the time she was invisible to the network poring over the information saved to his various devices, she simply copied everything to a data card and went about erasing every trace of her presence.

Once she made it back to the side tunnel her Loop carriage was hidden in, she could spend the ride back sorting through it at her leisure.

*

Beck wanted to make her base of operations in the lab, but Bowers shot this down. The more traffic to and from the place, the more likely it was to be discovered. That was the reason, and not one she bought into. There were already a bunch of transits to and from the place in a given week. She suspected the truth was simply that Bowers wanted her to work without the sort of distractions Eshton and Parker would provide. In fairness, he was probably right that actually spending time with human beings she liked would make her work less efficient.

Instead her office and workshop were located in the abandoned subway station where she first met Bowers. Other Movement agents flitted through, but she was one of only three who lived there even semi-permanently.

Once out of her armor and with the door secured, Beck hastily ate a meal bar and sent an encrypted message request to Bowers. No way to know how long it would be until he could respond. The man did run the entire Deathwatch, after all.

While she waited, Beck tinkered with a prototype laying in several pieces on her work bench. One advantage of being in the Movement was access to resources like spare pieces of armor she could alter and play with as she saw fit. This particular section was a forearm plate made for the attachment points of her scout armor. She didn’t mess with that side of it; the automated clamps that would snap onto the base layer were delicate and didn’t need alteration.

She was halfway through wiring the small magnetic repulsion unit attached to the top side of the plate when the wall monitor blazed to life.

“What are you building, there?” Bowers asked, squinting over the encrypted connection.

Beck looked up, then back down at her project. She raised it up in front of the camera, then grabbed one of the short spears that were standard issue for Sentinel units. “See how the clamp automatically locks into place when you put the spear shaft in here?” She demonstrated, which left the spear firmly attached to the forearm plate. While worn, it would give the user a long spike protruding from the end of their arm, extending their reach by up to a yard.

“Hmm,” Bowers said, resting his chin on his palm. “Looks a little awkward.”

Beck nodded. “It is, and I’m still having trouble making the mount strong enough not to snap off when used in combat. But that’s actually a secondary use. There’s a control attached that turns this into a miniature magnetic launching system. It’ll shoot that spear off at about a hundred-and-forty miles an hour.”

Bowers shook his head. “You’re wasted as an agent. You should be in our Science division. What possessed you to build something like that?”