Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all! For the season, we have an update for all my wonderful patrons, the first part of a small Christmas vignette. We'll also be getting a new update of The Serpent's Garden in the coming days, so stay tuned for that as well. Thank you for all your support over this last year, and I hope this winter is treating you well.
~
The Last Angel: Good Will To Men
Part 1:
“Where are they?” Joachim shouted into his headset comm. Fire alarms were whining like shrill bird cries throughout the building and the handful of emergency lights didn’t provide enough nearly enough illumination. They’d had only seconds between the power going out and the mains doors and back exit blowing in and tac troops in dark brown armour flooding the building. From the sounds of things, they’d hit the top floors too, dropping down onto the building’s roof. If he hadn’t been on the lower levels taking care of some business instead of in his office, he’d have been caught.
Gunshots, shouts and crashes echoed from everywhere. The assault was methodical and fast, a show of competence beyond what he’d come to expect from any of the locals. None of their contacts had offered even a hint that something like this might be going down. Joachim and his people had been taken completely by surprise.
What was this? What did those idiot police think they were doing?! You couldn’t just burst in here like this! Not here, not to him. Was this Hannerty? That asshole had been demanding more of a cut to look the other way. Or was it Then’ih? The Thoughtful had been getting to be a bigger and bigger problem since his promotion. This didn’t feel like any of the PCPD. No one with the authority had the balls to do this, and no one with the balls had the juice to pull this off.
What was happening?!
Joachim had tried to get a comm out of the building, but all the external lines were jammed. The building’s own intercom had gone down when the power was cut, and the radio was barely working well enough to reach anyone within the Vincent Industrial Exports skyscraper.
Static crackled back over his earpiece and Joachim cursed again. “Answer me! Where are they? Do we have any eyes on the hostiles?”
“Security systems compromised,” someone – Joachim didn’t recognize the speaker and didn’t waste any time trying to identify them – answered, their voice cracking. “They’ve overridden computer controls. They’ve locked down the upper levels. We can’t get out.” A pause, then a hysterical rise in pitch. “They’re here, Triarchs, they’re here!”
“Where are they?” Joachin screamed into the mic, but all he got back was terrified gibberish and then static. Cursing his underlings as useless, he hurried through the dark hallways. The building was surrounded, but his personal town car was reinforced more than its luxury frame would suggest. It could batter through the blockade. Once he got back underground, he could ditch it and get off-world before the net closed in again. He could regroup, figure out what had gone down and how to salvage their operations here on Peka.
The timing of the raid couldn’t be a coincidence. He’d been called in to handle the situation downstairs and then this had happened. They must have known he was here, but how? Joachim had heard that someone was looking into the organization, trying to dig through their interstellar connections. Sniffing around Joachim’s family and their operations was bad enough, but trying to get onto their business partners was trouble that they didn’t need. Joachim had pulled a few threads among his contacts here on Peka that led him to finding a rat inside the organization. Like all rats, he’d been poking his nose into places he had no business going.
Joachim had just finished questioning their former associate and sent the cleaners in to get rid of the mess when the lights went out. Seconds later his earpiece had come on with a panicked scream. “It’s a raid!” After that, he’d been running. His bodyguards, Luther and Drake, were moving him towards the basement garage while a couple more followed close behind. The garage was secure, private place for VIP vehicles. It was a recent addition to the building’s underground parking lot, installed for privacy and also for possibility of something like this, given those same vehicles access to the underground exit. It was strictly off the plans, and it looked like police had missed it. They hadn’t come across any sign of intruders. The only thing standing between Joachim and freedom was whatever police car that happened to be in his way.
Unfortunately, that assessment turned out to be overly optimistic.
As soon as Joachim and his guards got into the garage, getting halfway between the door and his vehicle, lights snapped on, catching them in a blinding white stare. A voice bellowed for them to raise their hands and drop to their knees. A thrill of fear spiked down Joachim’s back as he realized that he’d run right into a trap. They’d known he’d be coming this way. They’d counted on it.
Luther, flush with adrenaline and somehow thinking he could win a shootout with the police, went for his pistol. “Drop them!” someone else shouted. Joachim braced for the end, but instead of a barrage of bullets and beams that tore through him, there was just one pair of gunshots, so close together that it sounded like a single report.
Both of Joachim’s bodyguards fell, holes cored through their heads, right between their eyes by expertly-placed laser rounds. Steam from vapourized tissues and superheated body fluids rose into the air. Drake’s body twitched. Luther’s didn’t.
Panicking, Joachim turned to run. The stairway doors opened, one of his other two guards lunging for him, the other firing wildly towards the SWAT officers hidden behind their glaring lights, trying to make them scramble for cover. Safety was only a hand’s breadth away-
The guard at the door recoiled as red blossomed across his chest. The man reaching for Joachim’s eyes widened as a bullet went through his mouth, taking his jaw off. Red sprayed in slow motion, the man falling to the side-
-something slammed Joachim to the concrete. He hit hard enough that his vision blurred. By the time he could think about fighting back, his arms were being twisted behind his back and handcuffs were being clapped around his wrists. “Target secured,” a woman’s voice said from on top of him, a moment before he was pulled roughly to his feet and pushed against a concrete support beam.
A pair of tac ops agents in unmarked armour came forward. Others descended on the downed guards. Luther and Drake were dead. So was the one that had been trying to grab him. Half of the lower portion of his skull was missing. The fourth man, the one at the stairwell doors was wheezing and gasping. A medic was brought forward.
The troops pulled off Joachim’s headset, earpiece, phone and took his gun from his shoulder holster. He’d never even gotten to draw it. After a rough, but thorough search where all his belongings were stripped from him, he was pushed back to the pillar, one of the agents looking over at the woman. “He’s clean.”
She gave them a nod, then finally looked at Joachim. She was tall for a woman, though still an inch or two shorter than he was and somehow she’d manhandled him like a child.
“Joachim Vincent,” the woman said as she approached, holstering her sidearm. “We have some questions for you.” She paused for a moment, listening to radio chatter in her earpiece. A pause. “Understood.” Her face darkened as she looked back at Joachim and her eyes, a strangely vivid blue, narrowed. They’d probably found the downstairs interrogation chamber and the remains of the police informant.
“Do you know who I am?” Joachim demanded, rage and indignation bubbling up and starting to take hold. “Do you know who my family is? You come in here, breaking down doors, injuring my employees? Killing them? Assaulting me? Where’s your warrant?! Where’s your right to attack a legitimate business? These are clear violations of the citizens’ charter! You’re in big trouble, officer!”
The woman wasn’t fazed by his threats and bluster. “I know exactly who you are, Mr. Vincent, but I don’t think you know who I am,” she told him. She pulled out her ID. “Leading Special Agent Harper Catros, Compact Intelligence Services... and as I said, we have questions.”
The blood drained from Joachim’s face. His family’s business had connections within Rally and Peka’s police and government, including many among the ruling species. They’d been able to handle police investigations and probes for years, but CIS was something different. They didn’t play by the same rules. They were meticulous and once you were on their radar, they didn’t let you go until they had you.
“What is this about?” he snapped, a fresh burst of anger overwhelming the resurgent rush of fear. “You can’t just-”
“We can, Mr. Vincent,” Catros interrupted him. “Your business is charged with extrasolar illegal operations, and you are under suspicion of sedition. We have enough evidence to conduct this raid, and you’re going to give us a lot more.”
“You’ll get nothing from me,” Joachim spat. “Nothing, you hear me?”
Catros wasn’t any more impressed by the man’s defiance than by his anger. “Everyone says that,” she told him. “but we always get what we need.” The woman waved the troopers holding him to take him away. “Make sure Mr. Vincent is given personal accommodations for his trip back to Rally, will you? We wouldn’t want to treat him with anything less than he deserves.”
“You think this is over?” Joachim shouted as he was pulled away. “It’s not! You’re messing with something you don’t understand, agent! You crossed a line! You hear me?! You think you’re safe? You think you’re protected?! This isn’t over! They’ll find you! You get that? They’ll find you and they’ll kill you! You’re already dead!”
Harper watched as her troops carried Vincent off. He’d be taken to the CIS facility in the very imaginatively named Peka City, then transferred to the frigate in orbit for return to Rally. Joachim Vincent was used to the finer things in life, and his travel accommodations were going to be void of those creature comforts. If he cooperated, he’d have a tolerable journey. If he didn’t, he’d have a very uncomfortable one. The agency didn’t torture, but it knew how to get information from unwilling subjects.
The brunette listened to the reports coming in from the rest of the strike team. The building was secure. No casualties among her people, several dead on the other side. One – two, if the medics couldn’t save the guard on the stairwell – of them was because of her. It wasn’t the first time she’d taken a life. She might be a leading agent now, but she still found herself in the field. It was a joke that important people didn’t do fieldwork, but a lot of operations had so many moving parts that a senior agent needed to be present to make calls in real time. Especially off-world operations if – when – you couldn’t count on the locals. Peka City’s police were so thoroughly compromised by the Vincent family cartel that she’d had to almost entirely cut them out of the loop. She’d only brought them in when she’d been heard they had a man on the inside and needed to contact him, but as soon as that ran up the PCPD’s chain of command, it had been leaked straight to Vincent.
God damn it.
Most of the people here in VIE’s Peka headquarters were completely unaware of the goings-on of the Vincent family, or their connections. They were rightly-terrified civilians working for a legitimate business, and VIE was – at least on paper. Those people would be questioned, processed and released, but a lot more of the captives were on her list of targets.
Normally, CIS wouldn’t bother with local criminal syndicates, but the Vincent family had made connections off-world, and some of those connections led to troubling places. Harper had been working through the Vincent family’s organization for some time already, and she’d followed Joachim from Rally to Peka, one of the handful of colonies where humans could be found outside the Rally system, hoping that he’d lead her to those off-world connections. The Vincents had spent a generation sinking their roots in deep here on Peka, buying police and governmental protection, but if what she believed to be the case was true, none of that would save them from CIS.
She’d hoped to have more before she moved; she’d spent two years running down leads and identifying key players on Rally, but when Joachim snatched their informant, she’d had to act. Without getting the leads she’d been aiming for, some would say she’d acted too soon. After hearing what had happened to the informant, she knew she hadn’t moved soon enough.
Harper turned to consult with the tac teams’ commander. The building would be swept from top to bottom, its computers seized and personnel interrogated. This was just the start, though. The corruption that the Vincents had spread would be torn up by the roots, both here and back on Rally. It would be a long, ugly and dangerous task, but she’d been handling those for a long time. None of them held a candle to her mission to Baheila Osz and what had happened on that world of ice and buried nightmares.
That had the moment when she’d truly ‘crossed a line’, and the worst part was... she’d probably do it again.
“All right,” she said, turning to the tac team’s ideologue. “Let’s finish things up here, shall we?”
~
As the elevator rose, the single occupant inside it stared straight ahead. He was a human male, slightly taller than average with short brown hair. His eyes were a dark green. He was handsome, but not remarkably so. He might catch some attention from passersby, but not a lot. At least, while he was among other humans. Non-humans would either ignore him or stare no matter what he looked like. This wasn’t quite how he’d originally looked; he’d had face-altering surgery more than once, but there was just enough of his original blend of features that someone who’d known him might recognize him. It was pure sentimentality and a weakness in his line of work, but he’d discarded everything else about his identity.
He’d been born Aiden Schultz, an inhabitant of Rally’s Neomoscovite province, born in the small city of Silver Lake. Like his face, his name had changed several times. He wasn’t particularly attached to any of his aliases. He used them when they were necessary and discarded them when they weren’t. When he thought of himself, he did so the in way others had named him: he was the Courier. His job, just as it sounded, was the delivery of messages. Very special, very important messages that his clients trusted him to deliver to the letter and he’d made something of a reputation in the fringe, slowly working his way farther and farther from his homeworld, until the moment he’d taken a fateful assignment.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. He’d been scanned for weapons before getting on. If he’d been armed, the elevator wouldn’t have moved at all, deposited him on a different floor where a security team was waiting, or it would have disengaged from the rails and plummeted more than thirty stories down the shaft to flatten him on impact. He wasn’t worried about any of those possibilities. He hadn’t come up armed, nor was there a reason to dispose of him.
Just outside the doors, a female Didact in black and red armour waited for him. He stepped off the elevator and she held up a hand, drawing a scanner wand and waving it over him. “Trouble?” he asked. Security measures were always tight, but this was a bit more than usual.
“Just being careful,” the woman answered. One of her ears was only half there, torn off at the midpoint. It was an easy fix for modern medicine, but the Bloodsworn liked to wear their scars openly. In the courier’s line of work, anything that made you identifiable was a liability, but his job was very different from that of the Red Hand’s elite guard. “There’s been some... discontent about our presence here.”
The courier nodded and allowed the soldier to finish her scans without further comment. He understood. The Red Hand had been on the Grasp for decades now, but never in force and as only one of many Unbound gangs. Now the Red Queen was one of the Five, and her fellow pirate lords were most displeased that such a lowly creature as a Broken stood among them. An ‘unfortunate accident’ removing the newly-crowned Lady of Ash would be most welcome. And, some doubtless thought, who better to arrange such a thing than someone who’d tried to kill the Red Hand’s monarch once already?
The Bloodsworn escorted the courier down the hall. There were work teams repainting the halls and pulling down the trophies, sigils and banners that had once stood in ostentatious acclaim of the previous inhabitants’ wealth, power and status. Outside the doors to the main offices, a pair of the Red Queen’s own armsmen stood in silent watch, looking over the courier. He was expected, but they still glanced to his escort before opening the doors and allowing him into the sanctum of the Red Queen.
She was sitting behind a desk much too large for her. It had belonged to the room’s previous occupant until he had chosen to challenge her. No one else was present. That was a considerable show of trust towards a man who’d once tried to kill her, but the courier wasn’t that man any more. There’d been a missing part of him that he’d never been able to fill, a hole he hadn’t even realized he was there, but the Red Queen had. By rights, she should have killed him that day. Sometimes he still wondered why she hadn’t. It wasn’t just for his skills. She had on call the services of a dozen messengers as good as he was, and a hundred more that were nearly as capable. Saving his life was counter to every lesson the courier had learned in the fringe.
No one could ever think of the woman was soft or weak, though. Though she looked like a human woman, albeit one with some cosmetic modifications, she was anything but. If he did try to kill her, he would be dead or crippled before he draw a weapon.
The Red Queen was merciless to those that crossed her and the punishments she meted out for those sins was enough to disturb even the courier. In his time, he’d delivered several messages on her behalf, and from the look on her face, he knew it was time to do so again. “Majesty,” he said, with a deferential tilt of his head towards her.
“Aiden,” she replied. She was the only person in a dozen light-years who knew his real name. On the day they’d met, she’d called him by it. The name still meant nothing to him, but there was some part of him that was touched to hear it. It was the same part that hadn’t let him completely obliterate all trace of his heritage from his features and probably even the same part that had indirectly led him to serve her. Not through fear or the promise of wealth as so many others did, but because she had been right on that day.
Aren’t you tired?
He was the courier now, a deliverer of very specific, very direct messages, but some part of him still was Aiden Schultz, a man who’d been dead for years until those strangely vivid blue eyes looked into him and seen past the anger, over the emptiness and into what remained of the soul he didn’t even know he had left. “You have an assignment for me?”
The courier saw his monarch smile. He didn’t waste her time with dissembling or kowtowing. She liked that. “There was an... incident close to Rally about two weeks ago,” she said. “Someone there is getting a little too big for their britches. They’ve overstepped. I want a message sent.”
“That’s what I do,” the courier promised. “Who’s the recipient?”
The Red Queen slid a datascroll across the table. “Target information and mission briefing,” she told him. “This is time sensitive. I have a ship ready to launch immediately, and the necessary paperwork to get you on-planet.” A pause. “Will it be a problem working on Rally?”
“No,” the courier promised. “It won’t.” He hadn’t been on his home planet for many years. Like his name, it was something from his past that he’d sloughed off. He accepted the datascroll from his monarch, looking at the image of the message’s recipient. He read a little of their bio, then raised his head, meeting the Red Queen’s eyes. “This will kick the beehive,” he told her.
“I’m aware, but like I said – I want a message sent. I want a statement, Aiden. I want them to understand that they’ve trespassed, and what the consequences of that are.” She paused. “Is this something that you can handle?”
He held her gaze. “Yes, Majesty. I’ll take care of it.” He smiled. “Haven’t I always?”
“All but once,” she answered with a small grin of her own. Then her expression sobered. “There’s something else in the file, an additional task that I want you take care of while you’re there. It’s outside your normal field of expertise, but it shouldn’t cause you too much trouble.”
He looked down at the last rider in the briefing, blinking in surprise. “Not something like that,” he agreed, closing the ‘scroll and tucking it into his jacket. He didn’t ask why she wanted such a thing. The Red Queen was a creature of secrets, more than him and he had lived a life of secrets for nearly twenty years now. He didn’t need to know the whys of his mission, only that he had one. The Red Queen had entrusted this to him, and he’d seen it done.
“There’s a very small window here, Aiden,” she said and for the first time, he thought he saw something more than urgency in her eyes, but it was gone before he could understand what it was. “This has to be taken care of before...” she paused, catching herself. “Before that window closes.”
“I understand,” the courier promised. A half-truth; he understood the timing, but not why it mattered. That too was irrelevant; he’d never asked questions of his clients before, and he didn’t ask them of his queen now. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll get it done.”
Her taut frame loosened just a fraction, his confidence assuring his monarch, but he could already tell that she wouldn’t feel better until this was done. Giving her a nod, the courier took his leave. He had a ship to catch, and a message to deliver.
~
It was before dawn on December 24rd when Harper’s vessel reached Rally. Like always, she went straight from orbit to the hub of all intelligence operations in and around Rally: Kiel Point’s Century Tower.
“Welcome back planetside,” Dietrich Kapperstone said, greeting Harper with a coffee as she stepped off the elevator into Century Tower’s CIS levels, quickly falling in-step alongside his former protege and matching her pace. “How was Peka?”
“Brown,” Harper told him. “The sky was brown, the ground was brown, the plants were brown, the cities were brown.” She’d missed Rally’s blue skies. She’d missed the way the Landing Plains seemed to stretch out forever, the shadow of the tall, stark Reclaimer mountains to the north and the harsh, crashing ocean against the cliffs and breakers that held it back from Kiel Point. She missed her home. She missed her son, the way he smiled, the way he felt when she picked him up and the way he made everything she did feel worth it. It had been selfish of her to have him when her life threw her into situations like Peka, but he was a perfect example of why she did what she did. Him, and a class of students from which she was the only graduate.
Dietrich nodded. His hair had turned fully white over the last few years, but he still had that friendly aura that had made him such a valuable recruiter. Just by looking at him, you felt you could trust him with anything. Harper had thought that way too, once upon a time. “I heard that you ran into some trouble.”
“Joachim was tipped off by the local police and pinched our asset. I had to move before I wanted to. Things got... tricky.” The situation on-planet hadn’t cooled down after the raid. If anything, things had escalated. Someone took a shot at her from a moving car, and a bomb had been planted on her shuttle. Local police were ‘investigating’. Harper wasn’t optimistic. The locals weren’t all on the take, but they were resentful and dismissive of a Broken giving them orders. As soon as her back was turned, they’d probably thrown the investigation in the dumpster, but she’d passed word to local CIS assets and reported to Rally’s own intelligence division for a follow-up.
It wasn’t outside the realm of normalcy for CIS agents to be targeted, but it was rare for the attempts to be so brazen. Rather than scaring her off, it told her investigation was on the right track. Someone hadn’t wanted her to get off of Peka, and they’d tried very hard to make that happen. Whatever the Vincents’ connections were, she’d made the wrong person nervous that she was digging into them and that meant she was doing her job. “How are things here?”
Dietrich was a recruiter now, but he was still a CIS veteran and had friends in every department. He was the best source of scuttlebutt and backdoor information that Harper knew. He knew more than she’d ever guessed, and not just about the goings-on of the agency’s departments. He probably knew even more than what he’d let slip in the past, but she hadn’t been able to press on that issue. Not without him knowing what she wanted, and guessing why she did. He was still her friend, but now she suspected it wasn’t just for her potential as an agent that he’d reached out to her so many years ago.
“Vincent Sr. has been raising ten kinds of Hell about the ‘extrajudicial assault’ on his family’s ‘legitimate business holdings’,” Dietrich was saying, “but talk is that the old man is sweating. His partners aren’t happy that they’re risking exposure. He’s feeling the heat and word is, it’s a lot of heat.”
Harper nodded. Someone with initiative had purged VIE’s records the instant the tac teams hit the building. Cyber-slicers were trying to reconstruct the data, but a lot of it was too badly scrambled to recover. That made Joachim much more valuable than she’d thought, but on the trip back to Rally, after their first conversation and he realized just how deep he was in, the man had dashed his head against the wall of his cell. It wasn’t fatal, but they put him into a medically induced coma and wait for the swelling to recede and the damage to be repaired before they could continue questioning him. He’d been transferred to one of CIS’s own prison complex until he recovered... and started talking. It would keep him away from anyone in his own organization or outside it who wanted to silence him before he could say anything. “I don’t expect he’s all that happy with me.”
“Be careful, Harper,” Dietrich advised. “Scuttlebutt has it that the old man isn’t just taking us bagging his son personally, but he’s thinking that if he can get the investigation derailed, his partners might not try and scratch Joachim.”
“And by ‘derail the investigation’, you mean kill me.”
“Taking out a lead investigator does tend to have certain effects on the case. Internal is trying to find out how, but your name got out. Word from Peka shouldn’t have reached us this soon, so either Vincent’s friends are very well-connected or...”
“...or someone in-house is gossiping.”
Dietrch nodded soberly. CIS looked after their own. If the elder Vincent was stupid, vindictive or just desperate enough to kill one of their people, then the entire agency would come down on him and his organization like a ton of bricks, but that wouldn’t bring the dead back to life. “There’s nothing on if he’s committed yet, but whether or not he does, there’s still someone out there that isn’t afraid to mount a CIS head above their mantle. They’ve tried twice already. Rally might be our home ground, but this feels bigger than usual.”
“Don’t worry,” Harper promised. “I’m not blind. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Good,” Dietrich said, pausing to give her a comradely hug and clap on the back. “Get your briefing done with the chief, and then go see your son.”
“We’re still on for Boxing Day?” Harper asked as she headed down the corridor to the chief’s office.
Dietrich smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
~
“Mama!”
“Baby bear!” Harper called out as she dropped her keys and scooped her nine year old son up as he rushed at her. The fatigue of a long journey and a long debriefing fled as she held her son in her arms. “Oof, you’re getting so big!” she teased, setting him back down. “Let me look at you,” she cupped his face, brushing some hair out of his eyes. He had a lot of her father in him. She’d never seen a picture of the donor, but she could pick out traces of him in her son, too. His eyes, though – his eyes were just like hers. “And you’re such a handsome little man,” she cooed.
“Mom...” he groaned.
“I know, I know. I embarrass you, but I’m allowed to.” She gave him another hug, sizing him up. “You’ve grown like a foot since I left! Soon I won’t be able to lift you at all.” That wasn’t really true. Her prosthetics meant she could handle a grown man like Joachim Vincent as easily as her boy, but she played into it for Robbie. She stood and tussled his hair, looking at Fiona, his nanny. “How was he?”
The older woman smiled. Her skin had a darker olive hue than Harper’s did. The CIS agent had the same faint brown complexion of most Kiel Point natives, though she was somewhat paler than the norm. Part of that was the time she spent indoors or off-world. The other part... she’d thought she’d gotten that from her father, but she now knew she’d actually inherited it from her mother. Her eyes, a shade of blue that was rare, if not impossible to find in the human genome, were another trait. She’d always wondered where she’d gotten them from. Her father’s eyes had been a calm grey, while the woman who was her actual mother and not simply a genetic donor, had had green eyes.
It had been some time since she’d learned the truth about all of that, but Harper was still trying to process everything. The woman she’d thought was her mother for most of her life had become increasingly distant after Harper’s father died, practically cutting her out of her life. The other... well, that was a whole mess that Harper tried to avoid whenever she could. Not that it worked. It was always there, always in the back of her mind. Always something she was trying to understand.
“A rowdy little angel, like always.” She had her suitcase with her; when Harper was off-world, Fiona usually stayed with Robbie to look after him and take care of the house.
Harper gave her son another hug. “Wait here, baby bear; I’m just going to help Fiona get her things to the car.” She lifted the other woman’s suitcase easily, walking her down the steps to the nanny’s vehicle. “I can’t say how much I appreciate you,” she said as Fiona opened the trunk and she placed the luggage inside. “You’ve been a lifesaver. You really have.” She’d gone through several nannies before finding Fiona. Her work schedule was too erratic and too unpredictable for them, but Fiona was more than willing to be adaptable and work on call. She had two child of her own, both a few years older than Robbie, but the three of them got along like a house on fire.
“It’s no trouble,” the other woman assured her. “The extra money’s nice to have, and Robbie’s a sweetheart. Tia and Anthony adore him.” Though she didn’t say it, there were also benefits to working for a CIS agent. Harper was very private; for a long time, Fiona just thought that Ms. Catros was just a governmental clerk or administrator. That would have explained the uptick in her social assimilation standing, but there was more to it. About two years ago, Harper had noticed Fiona was upset and she’d asked her about it. Without intending to, Fiona eventually ended up telling her about the problems she’d been having with her ex. He was younger than her and worked in the financial sector. He didn’t care much about their children, but he did care that she’d been the one to break things off and through his position and connections, he’d been making her life hell.
None of that was Ms. Catros’s problem, and it had been completely unprofessional to unload that on her, but looking back on that conversation, Fiona believed that she’d been subject to a gentle interrogation. She still didn’t know what it was that Harper did; certainly more than just sit behind a desk, but other than that she had no clue. She just knew that a few days after she’d spoken to the woman, all the problems with her ex stopped.
“How was he,” Harper asked again, “really?”
Fiona paused. “He misses you,” she said, phrasing her words carefully. “He’s old enough to understand why you’re gone so much, but it still hurts him. He’s a lovely boy, he really is... but not knowing when you’re coming back has an effect on him.”
Harper was quiet for a moment. That was something she’d struggled with for years. Her work could take her off-planet for weeks or months at a time and it rarely ended on schedule. Sometimes things went quicker than expected, but more often than not, there was always a catch or an unexpected twist – like the Baheila Osz mission – that threw everything into the air. She loved her job. She loved being able to give back to the planet that had given her so much, and she did this for every other boy and girl like Robbie out there, but sometimes she wished it asked less of her.
“Did you get everything on the list I left for you?” she asked.
“Everything but the last item. I called everywhere, but no one had it available.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that one,” Harper assured her. “I made some calls before I left. It’s on lay-away. I just forgot to take it off the list.”
Fiona smiled. “You’re spoiling that boy.”
“I know, but I’m gone so much I want to make it up to him.” Harper looked back at the house. “This is probably the last Christmas where he’ll still believe in Santa. I want that to be special for him. He hasn’t asked for much, either. It’s the least I can do for him.”
Fiona nodded sadly. “You should come around tomorrow,” she told. “Bring Robbie. The kids will be glad to see him.”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t do that.”
“You’d be doing me a favour,” Fiona insisted. “My parents’ travel plans got delayed. I’ve already made most of the food and it’s too much for me and the children to handle by ourselves. A couple extra mouths would keep it from going to waste.” She put her hand on Harper’s arm, her smile this time gentle and inviting. “You should come. The more the merrier.”
Harper hesitated, then gave in. “The evening,” she promised. “I just got back into town. I want to spend some time with Robbie, just the two of us.”
“Then we’ll see you tomorrow evening,” Fiona said. She held out a hand, taking Harper’s in both of hers and shaking it. “You and Robbie have a good Christmas.”
“You too,” Harper told the other woman. As Fiona drove off, Harper headed back up into her home to see her son. She could spend a little time with him, but she had a brief errand to run. Just one last little bit of preparation she’d made for what might be the last holiday she’d have with her son when there was still magic in the air.