Rising Sun Read Free Page B

off, slamming the clerk in the face and knocking him backward into a stack of cardboard boxes, which break his fall. The heavy lid lands on the warehouse floor with an echoing whap .
    Vienne steps out of the crate, knocking packing material from her symbiarmor as Malinche heads for the office.
    “Thought that fossicker was never going to shut up.” Vienne grabs her armalite from the bottom of the crate. “This is why Regulators are cremated on a pyre. No soul could ever find Valhalla in a box.”
    I kneel by the clerk to check his breathing, which is fine. “Point taken.”
    Not that I like the idea of having to send Vienne off to the afterlife. I’m not a big believer in the beautiful death that most Regulators want to have when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Speaking of which, the clerk hasn’t lost his coil, though shuffling is all he’ll manage when he wakes up. There’s an angry knot on his forehead with splinters sticking out of it. I pluck the splinters and roll him onto his back for easy lifting.
    With Vienne taking his feet and me his hands, we lift him into a large packing box that is filled with actual toiletries. We secure his hands and feet with zip ties.
    “I’m glad he decided to open the lid,” I say.
    “He decided to open it,” Vienne says, “the instant your special friend acted like she shouldn’t. Basic psychology. Mimi taught me that.”
    I close the flaps on the box, hiding the clerk’s body. “What d’ you mean, special ? We met each other in Battle School. Years ago.”
    Vienne rolls her eyes. “Yes, Battle School. As if I’ve never heard that line before.”
    “Line?” I say. “It’s not a line. It’s the truth.”
    “Security systems overridden,” Malinche says as she returns from the office. “The lift’s on its way up. Vienne, can you cover us and keep watch on the clerk? This should take ten minutes, tops.”
    “Roger that,” Vienne says with an icy edge, then cuts her eyes at me. “I’m very good at babysitting.”
     
    “What was that all about?” Malinche asks, after I roll the crate inside the lift and the doors close. She inserts a key and holds the down button. The hydraulics engage, and we start to drop. “Vienne’s crack about babysitting?”
    “Just a running joke,” I say. “When I joined my first davos, our chief assigned Vienne to babysit me till I earned my keep. She’s never let me forget it.”
    “For a joke,” Malinche says, “it’s not very funny.”
    “Vienne doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.” The lift stops. “But she does have an itchy trigger finger, so I hope for his sake that clerk stays unconscious.”
    The door opens on a high-tech lab. From floor to ceiling, it’s all multinets. Most of the monitors are connected to lab equipment—robotics, centrifuges, laser bores, cryogenics boxes, and a metric ton of gear too advanced for my pay grade. It’s all coated in thick dust, uncovered, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry.
    “Would you like me to tell you the function of the equipment?” Mimi says. “I can cross-reference it with the catalogs—”
    “No thanks,” I tell her. For some reason, I don’t want to know any more about this place than I have to.
    “Walk this way,” Malinche says, and leads me to a small lab.
    This lab is anything but official. There’s no sign on the door, no mark identifying the place, except for four small letters stenciled to the transom: MUSE .
    “What is this lab?” I ask as we step inside. “It sure isn’t the one I visited before.”
    “It’s your father’s secret lair.”
    “Ha ha, very funny. Vienne is starting to rub off on you.” I roll the crate to the middle of the room, and Malinche pushes off the lid. “Seriously, what is this? I spent my childhood in this library, and I didn’t know it had a basement.”
    “That’s no surprise.” She starts loading the box with scientific equipment. “Because it really was your father’s secret lair. All