State of Control E-Book

Vanessa Muir

• Herausgeber: Hidden Sphinx
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Agent Charlotte “Charlie” Spade has that feeling in her gut. The one telling her that something isn’t right. The one that has her looking over her shoulder to make sure nobody’s watching or listening.

Her Stormshield work partner, Jones, is off the rails. For no apparent reason, he’s angry, violent, and unpredictable. Are his ramblings about cover-ups and lies just delusions?

When her job is on the line, Charlie must weigh the risk and reward. She can listen to Jones and discover the truth, but lose all she’s worked so hard for. Or she can ignore her instincts and stop digging, but let the State maintain false control.

There’s one decision Charlie has already made… trust no one.

Leseprobe

State of Control

A Charlie Spade Prequel

Vanessa Muir

Copyright © 2019 Creative Brand Ventures, LLC. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, organizations, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations or persons, living or dead, is fictionalized or coincidental.

This book is a Hidden Sphinx production. For inquiries regarding this book, please email [email protected].

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author or publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-950687-08-4 (ebook)

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Enjoyed The Story?

Hidden Sphinx Book Club

1

The rope creaked, sending shivers down Charlie’s spine. She wasn’t usually squeamish, but there was something about this. Maybe it was how tight the rope had become—cutting into the neck, the purple bruises on the man’s flesh—or maybe it was that she hadn’t seen a dead body in over a week.

Either way.

“You OK there, Spade?” Jones, her partner, nudged her with his elbow.

It was the dead of the night. The streets in Corden Prime Central were never quite silent, but the sounds of traffic were muted this far into the massive centerpiece of a park in the city. It was dark except for the lights that trailed along either side of the winding path across the grass.

Charlie stared up at the body.

Blond hair. Male. Caucasian. Bulging blue eyes, veins burst in one. Missing a finger on his right hand. Middle finger. Shoes had been removed, as well, and there was a puddle of… something, wetting the grass and dirt beneath him.

“Spade?” Jones touched her shoulder this time.

She stepped out of his reach. “What do you think that is?” she asked, nodding to the puddle. “Vomit?”

“No stains on his clothing or pants. Doubtful.”

“Then what?” Charlie asked.

She’d been working with the Stormshield Services Group, and with Jones, for over two years, now, but she hadn’t had the chance to take the lead on a case. Jones was her superior. He preferred her to ask questions, and she did so, both to learn and as a favor to him, though it did eat at her.

“Then let’s find out,” he said. “Do the honors.”

Charlie removed the analyzer from her pocket—the thin silver tube would collect the fluid and give them a read on what it was. That was its only function, unfortunately. They hadn’t yet reached the point where they could do away with the lab and its techies at SSG entirely.

“What are you waiting for?” Jones asked gruffly.

Her partner didn’t take any crap, simply put. He’d seen too many lows and just as many bottoms of the bottle in his life. With dark hair and wrinkles around his eyes that belong to a man twice his age, he was one of the legends at SSG.

She was lucky to be working with him. Too bad he pissed her off so much. Then again, everyone pissed Charlie off. That was what came of having a famous father.

“Come on, princess,” Jones said, clicking his fingers at her.

“Do that again, and I’ll snap them off.”

“Promises, promises. You’re not really threatening a senior officer, are you, Spade?”

“You imagined it,” she replied, but flashed a grin his way to soften him up.

He did like her, Jones did, even though he hadn’t wanted to at first. Charlie knew the hard work she’d put in had paid off. Now, he respected her work ethic.

Jones was nothing if not a worker bee. SSG’s golden boy without the golden hair.

Charlie walked a careful circle around the body, once, then collected some of the fluid from underneath it. She did this by dabbing the end of the analyzer’s silver bud to the droplets collected on the grass sheathes.

“What do we got?” Jones asked, remaining in place, his head tilting this way and that. He did that with every corpse they encountered, every case, no matter how big or small. An examination of the body from one side then the other. He liked to sink time into it.

Charlie waited for the analyzer to bleat its result, tapping her foot.

The noise came, and she tapped her temple, bringing up the results in the scrolling feed provided by the link she had to SSG and all its devices.

“Wow,” Charlie said.

“What is it?” Jones could just as easily tap his temple.

“Piss.”

“Well, piss to you too,” he replied.

“No, I mean it’s urine.” She frowned as the result flashed on the screen. “Weird.”

“The piss or something else?” Jones asked.

“Both. The result is compromised,” she replied. “Another chemical that shouldn’t be in the solution.”

“A drug?” Jones did tap his temple this time. His jaw clenched, eyes flicking from side-to-side. “I see.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Nothing we can prove,” he replied.

Charlie drew her fingers over her forehead. “Is it his?”

“What?”

“Urine. The pants are dry, the grass still wet,” Charlie said.

Jones raised a bushy eyebrow at her. He always did this kind of thing. The silence, the judging, the waiting for her to figure it out like she was so many steps behind him. Christ, to be fair, she had been for most of their partnership, but things had started to change.

Stupid question to ask. Of course, it doesn’t belong to him.

Charlie walked up to the body again, removed a set of memory latex gloves from her pocket, and put them on. They snapped and settled against her skin, pressing out any space or air between it and the latex. She hated the feeling.

Charlie approached the corpse, tapped her temple and scanned him for ID. “Hank Albertson,” she said. “Twenty-three-years-old. Last check-in at a Memory Removal facility was… wow. Two months ago.”

“Spare me the obvious details,” Jones said. “Switch off that thing in your head and tell me what you see. With your eyes.”

Unorthodox. Charlie had been trained to take SSG seriously. So had everyone else. They had been raised to love the State, to want to impress the leaders, one of whom just so happened to be her father.

She licked her lips, despising that he had injected himself into her thoughts again. Charlie tapped her temple.

“All right.” She sniffed. “The urine isn’t from him. His pants aren’t wet, and there’s no possible way he peed himself on the spot, changed, and then strung himself up thereafter. That’s not what a suicidal person does.”

“I’m hoping you’re not speaking from experience.” Jones removed a stick of gum from his pocket. It was Insta-Quit, the brand of mint gum that helped combat addictions. Jones had never told her what his was, and she didn’t want to know.

People in the State weren’t meant to rely on crutches. Suicide and death were supposed to be unheard of. This was utopia.

But is it?

“What else?” Jones asked between chews.

“There’s evidence of a fight in the grass.” She pointed. “Crushed blades, a shoe print that’s one size too small to be the vic’s.”

“You realize what you’re suggesting.”

Charlie nodded, studying the body, the bulging eyes, the mask of death she’d seen too many times in the “perfect world” they lived in. “Someone killed him, strung him up, then pissed on his feet.”

“Or at them,” Jones said, smacking his lips. “Might have lost bladder control. Either a sign of mockery, fear, or excitement.”

“I’m checking his pockets.” Charlie reached into them, drawing out a wallet, a collection of empty pill containers, unlabeled, and a crumpled piece of paper. She unfolded the last. “Suicide note.” She handed it to Jones without reading it.

“We’ll get that to an analyst,” he said. “He can’t have written it himself.”

“Isn’t that an assumption?” Charlie asked.

“Are you missing something, Spade? I thought we solved the case of the mystery puddle.”

“I’m just saying that it’s possible the man was suicidal and wrote the note. The murderer could have taken advantage of the situation. It’s a stretch, but it’s still an option.”

“Anything’s an option at this point.” Jones’ nod was approving. “But don’t let SSG operatives hear you say that. They would hate to believe this was anything but some horrible fluke. You know, since we’re such a balanced and problem-free society.” He snorted.

Charlie’s watch pinged, and she checked it. “They’re on their way to clean up.”

“Then let’s get the fuck back to HQ before they get here.” Jones grimaced. “You know how I feel about suits.”

“Strange, given you are one.”

He snapped the yellow and blue uniform shirt he wore. “This is a second skin, not a suit.”

And then they were off, back to HQ, Charlie with questions burning in her mind alongside that ever-present need to prove herself.

2

“I hate these things,” Charlie said as they stopped outside a Memory Facility in Corden Prime Beta Sector. It was an upper-echelon area, and the facility itself was off-white and chrome, state-of-the-art and in keeping with the aesthetic of the area.

“Thought you would love ‘em,” Jones replied. “What’s the matter? You don’t like daddy’s handiwork? Big shoes to fill?”

Nathaniel, her father, had been one of the engineers of the rebellion—a movement that had overthrown corruption and the government and introduced the State, the memory machines, and the utopian society they lived in.

“It’s not about that,” she said.

“Oh yeah?”

“I just don’t like people messing with my head.”

“They don’t erase your memories, Spade. They save them,” Jones said, his brow wrinkling as he glanced at the building’s front. The inside of his shuttle was hot. He’d cut off the air conditioning when they’d parked.

“Yeah, I’m aware of the purpose of the machines,” she said, trying not to snap at him and failing miserably. “I just don’t like them. Seems too easy to exploit.”

“Don’t tell me you have your doubts about Mem Store?” He pressed a hand to his mouth in a mockery of shock. “Not you.”

“Shut up.”

“All right, buttercup, let’s go.” He opened the door then heaved himself out.

Charlie followed. Shit, she probably shouldn’t have mentioned her dislike of the machines—in the time since she’d started working with Jones, she’d let too many things slip about herself. She’d been too open.

She’d learned long ago that being herself was punished by disdain. Christ, if Boss Ink, her superior, caught wind of the fact that she had any doubts about Mem Store and the memory machines, he’d eat her for breakfast. Or make her eat her standard-issue watch for lunch.

Jones and Charlie halted on the sidewalk outside the facility.

“Name is Mya Albertson. Sister of the deceased. Lives with him in their home in this sector. She’s got an appointment today, according to SSG records.” Jones read off the information in a bored tone, his finger tapping his temple as he scrolled through the information. “Blonde hair, slim build, her previous visit to a facility was a week ago. Looks like she’s got a pretty steady record of storing memories.”

Charlie grimaced. “Rich area. Rich woman.”

“Luckily, not a dead woman,” Jones said. “Given that her brother was murdered, and if we assume she didn’t do it.”

“You said she was slim. Maybe not strong enough to lift a body.”

“I never doubt human ingenuity.” The glass front door of the facility slid back to admit Jones and Charlie.

They entered, neither needing to flash any type of identification. The people of the State, of Corden Prime which had once been called North America, knew to get out of the way or to cooperate with the SSG, depending on what they wanted.