Clean Breach

The job would have covered six months of dock fees and a new set of lungs for Orin's sister. All Cal Bennett had to do was cut the sensor node on a Syndicate lab ship and own her nervous system for eleven minutes, a trick he has pulled a dozen times on freighters.

The ship is no freighter, whatever her manifest says. Her wiring runs through a bypass loop his AI, Birdie, cannot find in any Syndicate schematic, and her cargo hold, three decks down and the size of a cathedral, is stacked floor to ceiling with coffin-sized cryo-vats glowing pale pink. Inside them, something pulses like a heart in a jar. The implant port behind Cal's ear flares hot. Four minutes into his eleven, six enforcers come through the far bulkheads, led by a woman with a barcode tattooed on her shaved head who already knows his name.

Her second shot shatters a vat behind him, and warm cells spray across his face and into the port. The pain is white and total. Orin goes down. Through the static comes a memory that is not Cal's own, a burning corridor and a woman calling him by another name, and his legs carry him along an escape route he has never walked. Dez shoves him into a two-seater shuttle and stays behind to fly a decoy. Alone on autopilot, Cal feels something moving under the skin around his implant, keeping a beat that is not his pulse. The comm, which he never switched on, crackles with a stranger's voice: "You shouldn't have come here."