Jagcoop emerged from the office and hooked a thumb behind his shoulder. “Hey, El, this bozo thinks the Green Spacer is Iltai. Remember, the one that got eliminated in the first episode? Can you believe that?”
I shook my head, distracted. My hand hovered over the tab as the footsteps approached. Something was copying over, progress bars popping up and vanishing in a hamster wheel of data. I was grabbing some shit. Hoped it was good shit.
The door opened.
Brassard stood framed by the doorway, and some weedy tech guy shifted beside him. They were both backed by a rousing chorus of four beefy security personnel. Brassard’s attention was all on me. Did he know the plans were mine? He had to.
I covered to give the tab a few more seconds. “Brassard, there you are!”
Brassard frowned. “Henderson.”
The new muscle swept around Brassard and his colleague, two lunkheads heading straight towards me. Time to grab. I spoke while doing so to divert attention from what my hands were doing. Like a magician. “I saw your new engine, and I was so excited, I came down here to talk to you about it some more.”
Jagcoop blinked. “Weren’t you fetching something?”
The tab was out of the port and in my palm behind my back. It was time to talk my way out of this.
“So we didn’t expect you,” Brassard said while looking at me. He jerked his chin about three meters to my right. “Her, we expected.”
The other two bodybuilders reached behind a shelving unit and yanked Myka Benton into view.
So I figured out why Glezos had sent Myka to the expo. If the contract worker was fazed, she didn’t show it, even as a muscular woman stripped her of her weapons—two pistols and a knife.
Jagcoop’s jaw dropped. “Boss, I didn’t see—”
“Shut up, Jagcoop.” Brassard glared.
Jagcoop shut up.
The tech dweeb, a short guy with mechanic’s optical implants, looked past me at the computer. “She got a hack program run through it.”
Brassard held out a hand like an exasperated parent. “Give me the data tab, Henderson.”
My not-brilliant infiltration plan was crumbling. “Data tab?”
“You can make this easy or hard. Take your pick.”
One of the toughs stepped toward me, fists clenched in preparation for the hard option.
I panicked. I was not a fighter. More of a runner, except there was nowhere to run. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep the data tab from being taken by the Sev Tech goons.
I swallowed it.
Plopped it in my mouth and swallowed, casting it down my throat and into my stomach. Wasn’t sure at the time if that was safe, for either me or the data tab, but it was a solution of some kind, wasn’t it?
Brassard gaped as if I’d just pulled a rabbit from my pants. I raised my hands pointedly and shrugged.
Myka was shoved to my side by the warrior woman. Once there, she assessed me, no doubt accommodating to an unplanned variable in her mission.
“So,” Brassard said. “I guess we’ll have to wait for that to come out the other end before we let you go.”
“Seriously?” It was my turn to gape.
“Frederic.” He spoke to one of the bullyboys. “Go get some laxatives. We’ll speed this along.”
“Listen, Brassard, it’s my design. You know that. I’m just taking what’s mine.”
He graced me with the look he probably bestowed upon the Becker exam assessors. “World’s not fair, Henderson. It may have started out as your design. But it’s Sev Tech’s design now.”
Myka stuck her neck out. “It’s actually the intellectual property of the Cadinoff Corporation, as I’m sure everyone here is aware.”
“I designed the damn engine!”
Brassard ignored me to nod at another brute. “Cuff ‘em together while we wait.”
Said hunk of muscle unfurled metal handcuffs as he stomped towards me and Myka. The handcuffs were those fancy ones with techlock as opposed to a cheap mechanical locking mechanism. Highest quality. He clamped one cuff over my right wrist before hooking Myka’s left wrist with the other.
“You’re seriously gonna dig through my shit to find this data tab?” I held up my cuffed wrist, yanking Myka’s arm along with it.
“I’m not,” Brassard said. “Jagcoop is.”
Sweaty Jagcoop clutched his chest.
“Jagcoop brought you in. He can deal with the consequences.”
The plan was apparently to force laxatives down my throat, then wait until I shit—while cuffed to Myka of all people—then have Jagcoop dig through the shit to unearth the data tab. I hadn’t set myself up for a pleasant night.
But they wouldn’t be doing all this if there weren’t a possibility I’d actually gotten the design on my data tab. That meant I had a chance to still get out of this with my design. I just needed to get out of this basement, detach myself from Myka, and get my tab to a secure system.
Myka. She was going to try to grab this tab when it…emerged. It was harder to play keep-away from her given our current predicament. A techlock couldn’t be broken with standard cutting tools, but I had some equipment back at my shop that could separate us. Downside, I’d have to take Myka to my shop.
Eh. She knew what was in there anyway.
As the Sev Tech troop huddled, I tugged at Myka’s cuffed hand to get her attention. She looked at me with those big, brown eyes, and it was a struggle to keep my focus for a moment.
“We’re gonna need to work together.” I kept my voice to a whisper.
Myka didn’t respond. She physically looked away as if in rejection. Welp, this partnership wasn’t off to a great start.
Then a boom shook the room.
