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“Wait!” Urle said.  But Short Circuit walked away quickly.

“Fisc,” Urle snapped.  “I didn’t think someone like him would know enough to be frightened by the alias alone . . .”

Kell was watching the man hurry away to a door that led outside.  He glanced back at them.

Urle rubbed his forehead.  “We need to move fast to find another broker before this guy tells on us.  We could get trouble then, Kell, of all sorts.  Or hell, maybe I’m just nuts.  Maybe this is a good sign that we should just let it go.”

He looked up.  “What do you think?”

But Kell was gone.

Urle jumped up.  Kell had been sitting on the inside, and without even disturbing the seat enough to be noticed, he had disappeared.

Whirling, Urle looking towards the door that Short Circuit had gone out, and then sprinted towards it.

Slamming the door open, he found himself in an alleyway between this bar and the next, on an elevated floor that was mostly empty.  Deeper down the alley, though, he saw movement, and he followed it.

Then he saw Kell.

“Don’t kill him!” Urle cried.

The Ambassador looked over to him, still holding Short Circuit’s body.

Urle’s scans suggested the man was still alive; electric activity in his body was still going, only at levels that suggested he was unconscious.

The man’s brain had gone out from oxygen deprivation, though why his electronics had likewise gone into standby was not as easy to explain.

“I have not killed him yet,” Kell said simply.

He let go of the man, letting him slump to the ground.

“Killing people for information is not how we do things, Kell!  This man has rights, he was a human being who-“

“Who was garbage, by your own words,” Kell said sharply.  “Who had a long list of crimes against others of his kind.  Even murder.  Is that not true?”

“You are not judge, jury, and executioner,” Urle said, standing his ground.  “That’s not how we work.”

“I thought you wished for justice and to save others.  Is this man’s life truly more important than those goals?” Kell asked.  “His mind is still mostly organic.  If I kill him then I can access it, as you could with the other man.  It is the easiest way to learn.”

“We’re not even sure that he’s involved in-“

“He is,” Kell said.  He pointed to the back of the man’s skull, where a metal implant stood out – just barely – as a slightly different shade of blue steel against the rest.  “This part matches the one you found at the store.  They are from the murdered man you wished to avenge.  He is involved.”

Urle moved closer, crouching, and touched the part.  His scans could not truly confirm that it had belonged to JaxIn, but it had been built to the same specifications, down to the batch of pigments used on the surface metal.  This was part of the same set – and it had recently had its edges cut to fit Short Circuit’s skull.

“This doesn’t prove that he knew it was stolen from a dead man,” Urle said softly.

“It bears marks that cannot be washed away.  Threads connect things, even after death, Zachariah Urle.  I can see it – whether you can or not does not change that.”

Kell pointed back out of the alley.

“Now leave.  I will make sure there is no body to find.”

Urle didn’t move.  “Like how you got rid of the Hev bodies?”

Kell was silent a moment, watching him.  Unblinking.  Urle felt his eyes water as the aura of Kell’s displeasure made itself known.

“Yes,” Kell finally said.

“What did you do with them?” Urle asked.  On some level he did not want to know, he was terrified to know, sickened to ask because he felt he knew, but the words were not easily said.

“I consumed them,” Kell told him.  “I had never consumed an alien species before.”

“Cannibalism-“

“Is normal among my kind,” Kell replied sharply.  “And these were our enemies.  You wish I should have left their corpses, containing poisons meant specifically to cause your kind a painful death?  I broke down their bodies, their poisons, and I learned from them.  On some level you can say I now understand their people.  And I can do that again here.  We will know exactly what we need to know, and we can prevent innocent beings from dying in the future.  If you believe this is still immoral, then I can only say that the moralities of our two people do not intersect.”

It was Urle’s turn to be silent, and Kell simply waited, showing no sign of impatience, still unblinking, still seeming a monster in human clothes.

“I won’t let you kill him.  And if he doesn’t store his data digitally then I can’t access it.”

Kell said nothing and walked out of the alley.

They were at a dead end.

Urle looked down at Short Circuit, wondering if the man’s life was really worth it.

He would go and report this to someone . . . but Kell had at least bought them a couple hours before that happened.

After a few moments of lingering, he went to the mouth of the alley, seeing Kell standing a dozen meters away, staring upward at the neon billboards.

Probably wondering why he even put up with humans, Urle thought.

A message popped up in his inbox.

It was, as far as he could tell, blank.  There was no sender, no original IP, only routing IPs – a lot of them, so many they became jumbled, useless data.

His heart beat faster.

The quality of this obfuscation was beyond him.  It was beyond anyone he had ever known.

It had to be the same person who had hacked into the server and made the openings in the defenses that they had used earlier.

Trying to be cautious about it, but knowing that any virus or attack someone this skilled might make would probably slice through him like he was made of tissue, he opened it.

STATION 247  |  DECK 19  |  COMPLEX 7

That was it.  Just text again.

But it might be the break they needed.

“Kell!” he called out.  “I know where to go.”

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< Ep 7 Part 40 | Ep 7 Part 42 >