Janus Challenge: The Journey: Janus Paradisi, #3

2094

Earth Orbit

Chapter 1

PRISON OF CHOICE

Earth Orbit, May 2094

Angel Flores chose to leave Earth behind.

She found herself in a prison in space.

She gazed through the spaceship compartment’s viewport at the small, white-flecked blue planet far below. The Earth. One and a half million kilometers away: more than nine hundred thousand miles. Her thoughts ran over the events she had witnessed, the choices she had made, and all the individual steps that had led her to this imprisonment.

Born of Asian-Hispanic parents in a Rio favela, she had fought her way up and out to a better life. Life in the walled elite enclave of the Citadel in New Phoenix had been good, if limited. Angel had been comfortable at Janus Security Corporation. She had made Chief Executive Officer in her early thirties. Her next step up would have been to a senior position at the Capitol. She had enough black data on enough people to leverage almost any position she wanted.

But Earth was dying.

To distract herself, she rearranged a list of planetary corrosions into alphabetical order. Anarchy, atomic war, drought, global warming, terrorism... There were more. Freedoms were increasingly limited by the growing need for security. Security versus freedom, the old debate. The entire Earth was a prison of sorts.

I am the head of a security company and I am in a prison. Ironic.

She chose to leave it all behind and gamble everything on a better life. Chose to manipulate her way aboard this great spaceship with a hundred of her best people.

It was the right choice. At the time. And yet within a day of boarding the ship, the freedom she sought had turned into imprisonment.

It was all wrong. The ship was supposed to travel for six months toward Jupiter then plunge into a wormhole, arriving within minutes at a paradise planet called New Eden in the Andromeda galaxy.

That was the plan. It had taken over a year to maneuver her way aboard. People had died. Good people had been left behind.

Damnit, I don’t even understand what a wormhole is! You go into one end and come out somewhere else in space millions of light years away, a galaxy away. Someone said it was like going down a rabbit-hole. Alice in Wonderland. Angel in Paradise.

It had been a journey of discovery: her employer bankrupting his business empire to buy tickets on this ship; a secret mission to move a hundred thousand of the world’s richest and most powerful to humanity’s new home on New Eden; a contract assassin hired by her ex-employer to kill her.

To kill me!

And it all brought me here, to this prison.

She looked at the wall display for the thousandth time. Lockdown. That word had been flashing for... I have no idea how long we’ve been trapped here.

The whole spaceship was in lockdown and she was trapped in this compartment.

Her lover, Zag Bishop, a man of action, was powerless. He had paced the floor for hours. Angel knew how he must hate this impotence. She hated the way he looked, wearing a surgical disguise to pass as her ex-employer, Jason Janus. It had been the only way for them to gain access to the ship, to take that journey to the stars. How she hated her ex-lover, ex-employer, ex-everything, who had paid a hitman to kill her on Earth, just months ago, although it seemed like a lifetime already.

She looked at Zag, his stupid dyed beard and an abandoned walking stick.

No. I just hate the man he resembles.

Her technical wizard, Peter Cobb, had been sweating at the control console, struggling to hack into the system and open the compartment’s sliding door. Sweating and struggling—and failing. There was no physical connection between this console and the door locks or ship-wide cameras. He was blocked. He mopped the sweat of concentration from his dark face and polished his spectacles again and again: a displacement activity.

From the Caribbean to MIT to a prison in space. What a trajectory for a genius.

The charm-filled Frenchman, Marcel LeClerc, Contracts Manager for the construction of the space stations and ships, sat calm and distracted, deep in his own internal world. He was still a mystery to her, with depths he kept well hidden under a layer of nonchalance and a second layer of confident secrecy.

The final member of her group, Katya Ulyanov, rising star of JCorp, was as agitated as Zag. Another person of action who must have been raging inside at the imprisonment.

If that girl starts to dismantle and reassemble every last weapon in the room again, I swear I’ll...

Hmm... Katya. That blonde is another mystery. Her abilities far outstrip the dismal record of her life before joining JCorp. As though she’s a different woman. I never dug deeper. Perhaps I should have. Too late now. Too late for anything much.

Scattered around the spaceship in their own sealed compartments were the best special ops contractors Zag could recruit.

The best. But they’re just more impotent action heroes without the right tools against strengthened, airtight doors. All they had been allowed to carry onto the ship were tasers and Lewie stun sticks. Useless against brute metal.

According to the ship-wide announcements, civil war was raging through the gangways beyond the locked slider.

The command crew were trying to evict the Reach Corp contract engineers who built the Fleet of Ten that had departed two years earlier. The contractors and their families were to make the journey on this, the eleventh ship, SS Challenge. But the ship’s command was trying to swap them and her JCorpers for the thousands of command crew relatives aboard the space station to which the ship was still docked.

I assume the lockdown has stranded them there.

We’re locked in and they’re locked out. Ironic.

Angel’s team had neutralized a few JCorpers who had sided with the command crew when they tried to evict her. That was the first Angel knew of the swap out plot.

She glanced at the two dead bodies on the floor: followers of JCorp’s shipboard Site Manager, Kate Barnsley, herself trussed and gagged alongside the corpses.

A small victory in a bigger war. And I have no idea who is winning or if the Reachers will be on our side.

Information was her lifeblood. Here, she had none. It was as though the oxygen was being drained from her body.

Locked in. Waiting for Challenge Command Security and more of her own renegade personnel to come for her.

She was impatient but not despairing. Zag and Katya were some of JCorp’s best people, some of the most effective killers on her books. Angel’s trapped group would not be taken easily. She just had to wait for that godforsaken slider to open.

When they come, we’ll be ready. I just wish they would damn well come.

Peter’s exited voice broke into her thoughts. It’s war! On Earth! Somehow he had accessed a news channel.

News? Zag snarled. Of Earth? Who the hell cares? It’s in the past.

Marcel stirred from his reverie and stared at the screen. Wait a small moment. Iran has launched a nuclear attack on Israel. They’ve responded. It’s getting out of hand.

Angel intervened, her voice flat, emotionless. Looks as though we got off the planet just in time. Thank you, Peter. Now focus on getting us out of here or it won’t matter a damn what’s happening below.

Inside, she felt pain. Oh, my God, all those millions of poor people...

With clear reluctance, Peter closed the channel and returned to his task.

Marcel murmured, As above, so below.

What? Angel turned her head slowly and stared at him. What did they say about Marcel having strange, dark contacts? Manticore had abandoned their investigation of him. Why?

Damnit, I’m getting jumpy. It was just a quote, just a quote. He’s an educated man. I know the quote, why shouldn’t he? And it’s appropriate, after all.

Zag hissed, Shhh! and pointed at the slider.

There were voices in the gangway outside.

He and Katya raised their weapons and prepared for combat as the others took cover behind the furniture.

Angel remained standing, ready to face whatever came, weaponless and defiant.

The voices continued.

The wait was interminable.

The slider glided open.

In the gangway stood two figures dressed in Challenge crew blue...

Chapter 2

ENCOUNTER

The newcomers were a man and a young woman. Angel assessed them quickly, information coming to her in bursts. Neither carried a weapon. Their outfits were janitorial ombre blue.

Janitors? Not combatants? But I know about disguises. And how the hell did they manage to break the lockdown security? Something’s not right here.

The man was tall, powerfully built, dark haired. His name tag claimed he was Devro Tezer. He wore a bandage on his right hand. Work-related injury? Or something less innocent?

The woman had dark, almond-shaped eyes; her black hair was tucked up inside her cap. Her tag read Greeta Volk.

They seemed more surprised than hostile. Caught in the aim of the JCorp tasers, they froze, making no attempt to flee or to enter the compartment.

Angel saw the man’s gaze linger on Zag and Katya, both kneeling with weapons trained on the pair, then flicker briefly over the inert bodies on the floor. Everyone in the compartment wore JCorp gray, the defenders and the fallen. He must be uncertain about allegiances here.

She could almost taste that uncertainty, picture his calculations for escape or negotiation. He was taking his time to assess the situation. Wise man. The woman was looking at her companion, not at the JCorpers. She was looking for his guidance. He was the leader here, the one to watch for, to talk to.

Angel subvocalized to Zag, using their embedded comms chips. Threat?

He replied in kind without changing from his ready position. No. Not tensing for fight or flight. Just tense. Not janitors. See her soft, uncalloused hands? Stay cautious.

The part of Angel’s mind that held a catalog of names, faces and leverageable misdemeanors signaled to her who the man was. He carried no black marks in her memory bank. She stepped forward and placed a hand on Zag’s shoulder, speaking warmly to the newcomers. The infamous Chief Solomon Reach, I presume?

Reachers wore red uniforms. His janitor-blue coveralls had briefly thrown her. This was the man who had built the fleet and who Challenge Command announced over the ship’s speakers had gone ‘rogue.’ They had demanded his capture. Well, she took no orders from those callous bastards and in any case, he had now been detained by JCorp. Reach did not look like much of a threat at present—at least, not an immediate threat to her team.

She wanted to know more about this. She considered the woman. This was a surprise.

Hmm... and the daughter of XO Justice, I imagine.

Angel smiled to herself. Interesting companions. What game is Reach playing?

Katya still held her weapon ready despite Angel’s restraining touch on Zag’s arm and her reassuring, welcoming voice.

A ‘rogue’ engineer and a top-ranking Challenge Command Officer’s daughter? Angel was not ready for trust after the past few months of betrayal and deceit. Not that I ever trusted anyone much, just Zag.

The newcomers made an interesting couple. She needed to know more before accepting them. Angel subvocalized to Zag. Greet them as Janus. Negotiate an alliance. Get us past this situation.

Without a word, Zag holstered his taser and stood, grabbing his cane to assist in his continuing impersonation of an injured Jason Janus. He slipped back into his role easily. Angel noted Reach’s flicker of recognition as soon as Zag lowered the weapon that had been obscuring his face.

Zag spoke warmly. Reach, you’re just the man we wanted to see, actually. He had seen the chief just once: Reach’s hologram presentation at the Project Briefing Meeting a few months ago. The real Janus had met Reach several times, in person and via holography. The impersonation was at risk.

She had no idea if Solomon Reach knew of JJ’s involvement in Challenge Command’s swap out plot. Angel had to take the risk while playing both sides, until she saw how Reach responded.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Sometimes.

She put two hands on the back of a nearby chair. Have a seat, Chief and... Dextra, isn’t it?

Is Dextra Justice ‘rogue,’ too? And what the hell does that mean, anyway? What is their story?

I have no time for a chat, Solomon said. What do you want?

Angel understood his impatience. He was a man on the run, after all, and at this stage probably did not know who to trust. Neither did she. But she needed someone on her side who could open doors. Reach could open sliders. That was good enough. She listened to Zag play his part.

Let’s put it this way, Zag’s lopsided grin was distorted by the surgery, producing an ambiguous expression, we may be in a position to be mutually beneficial to each other.

In the doorway, Solomon took his time to respond, looking at and assessing each person in the room. Most were strangers, although he would know Marcel well from their years of working together on the Paradisi Project. Seeing him with the JCorpers must earn them trust points.

Or does Solomon know more about Marcel than I do? Is Marcel not as clean as he claims? I’m starting to doubt that man. I need more data. I’ll watch how they interact and see if he trusts Marcel.

Solomon’s eyes lingered on Katya, assessing her the longest. She was ready for anything, her face a stern mask.

He’s being cautious of her. Good. This uncertain situation puts him at a negotiating disadvantage, as do our weapons.

Finally, Solomon stepped into the compartment, accepting the situation. It was a logical choice. Dextra followed. He closed the slider behind them and picked up on Zag’s offer. Beneficial? And how’s that, Janus?

It seemed the disguise was holding.

Marcel intervened, oozing Gallic charm and encouraging everyone to sit. He pulled a chair out for Dextra and introduced himself to her as she sat. He took the seat next to hers and took her hand. Enchanté, mademoiselle.

Huh! Charming an impressionable young woman with an exaggerated stereotyping he can drop at a moment’s notice. He’s learned to dampen that ‘Frenchness’ when he tries to charm me.

A thought struck Angel.

Yes, he does try to charm me...

The JCorpers introduced themselves as they took their seats. Only Katya remained standing, wary and watchful. Her voice was harsh as she called out her name.

Solomon first wanted to know about the bodies in JCorp uniforms on the floor.

Not important. Zag was dismissive. Founder loyalists.

Oh, yes. ‘Founders.’ That’s what they called themselves in JJ’s contracts. Founders, indeed! Founding Families, Founding Fathers of America, Founding Families of the Illuminati...

So we have identified our enemy as his enemy. Now it begins...

Solomon showed surprise. Clearly, he was still assessing the situation. Angel hoped he was coming around.

Dextra objected, glaring at Zag. Not all Founders are corrupt!

That remains to be seen, he responded.

Angel summarized their situation and asked for Solomon’s story.

He told how he had discovered the crew swap out plan and sabotaged the ship’s drive to prevent it. Later, he had locked the ship down to prevent the swap and allow him to move around the ship more freely, as he alone had the security override codes. Dextra was helping him. Her mother would be furious when she found out. Dextra had been ignorant of the swap out plot; she was not allied with the members of Challenge Command who had planned it.

Solomon was putting a plan into operation. He would say no more.

Angel accepted this, speaking with approval. You seem to have done well so far. But now you need help.

Negotiations began.

Chapter 3

ALLIANCE

Angel listened as Zag opened the bidding. The deal is simple, Solomon: we need your override codes so we can move freely about the ship and release some of our crewmen who are trapped in various locations due to the lockdown.

She saw Solomon’s eyes narrow with suspicion.

"I see. Why do you need further access? What is your end game?"

Zag explained that they wanted to protect their people and restore the ship’s original mission.

Solomon asked about JCorp’s plans for his Reacher crew.

Angel leaned forward to reinforce her words. "We know they are irreplaceable on this ship and as future citizens of New Eden. We want you to remain on board. We’ll need your intelligence and expertise in the months ahead."

Solomon looked reassured and even smiled. Well, that’s the first I’ve ever heard anyone utter those words.

Angel and Zag stressed that they wanted only to remove the hostile command members so those with valid spacepasses could continue the journey as planned. Their visitor could not disagree with that.

We want to free up several key players in our organization—some of which are just now prepping for cryo sleep—so we can begin readying for any eventuality.

Any eventuality? Dextra asked. She was clearly not happy with that.

Ms. Justice, Marcel spoke calmingly with a patient smile, with three thousand people waiting in the wings to take over the Reacher spots, we may not be able to put an end to this without a fight.

That’s not acceptable, Dextra countered. We have obligations and procedures—

All of which Challenge Command has flatly ignored, Solomon finished the sentence for her but not as she had expected.

Dextra glared at him.

He turned to face her. You’ve seen it with your own eyes.

Angel leaned back, leaving the conversation, signaling that the couple should fight this out between themselves. She was confident that he, at least, understood the realities of the situation.

Solomon gently reminded