Callum did as he was told. He hadn’t noticed dawn arriving above the glare of the torch. That was reasonable enough, as it hadn’t come to the horizon. Instead, directly overhead, a wide strip of the sky was tinged with an insipid gray light. He frowned at the anomaly, scanning around in a full circle. As the light grew, he realized he was in the bottom of a canyon, but the poor light was making it difficult to judge the scale of the rock walls on either side. That and his mind was refusing to accept what he saw. He was constantly trying to adjust the perspective.
His jaw slowly hinged open as reality soaked his brain in parallel to the weak sunlight. The sheer cliffs were at least seven kilometers high, probably more, with a floor maybe five kilometers across. He’d been to the Grand Canyon a few years ago, done the whole tourist routine—some rafting, climbed an easy face of rock. This was an order of magnitude larger, which was ridiculous.
“Where the hell are we?” he blurted.
“You just called it, asshole,” Donbul mocked. “Hell. Otherwise known as Zagreus.”
“No,” Callum said. “No, no. That’s not possible.” He didn’t have to consult Apollo’s files for that; Zagreus was an exoplanet slightly larger than Earth, but with an atmosphere as thin as Mars and no surface water. It orbited three AUs out from Alpha Centauri A. When the
“Still think you can get us out of here?” Foluwakemi sneered.
—
Yuri looked around the domestic disaster zone that was Callum’s flat and wrinkled his nose, partly from the sight, but there was also a weird smell coming from the galley kitchen.
“Don’t we pay him enough for a housekeeping service?” Kohei asked.
Yuri grunted. “Apparently not.”
Two technical officers came in and went over to the small white block in the corner of the room, which was the G3Turing house manager.
“I want a complete memory download,” Yuri told them. “Unlocked files available to my desk in two hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
He walked across the living area, frowning in disapproval at the large number of empty pizza boxes scattered around. “Plenty of people were here,” he said. “He knew he was planning a one-way trip, so what’s the point of clearing up?”
“You think they planned it here?” Kohei said.
“Probably. It doesn’t matter now.”
“So why are we here?”
Yuri pulled a face, unable to fully explain his sense that somehow they’d lost, that Callum was laughing at them. After so many years in the job you got a feel for things, for people in all their crazy glory. His old training back in Russia concentrated on individuals, where everyone was considered suspect, untruthful, corrupt. Now his corporate staff were all strictly procedure-focused, utilizing data trawls and analysis matrices. If they wanted someone, they didn’t go out of the office and hunt them, they just waited until facial recognition algorithms pulled them out of a public street camera. There were no real chases, only drones auto-tracking their targets. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed running the undercover ops division; intelligence gathering was as close as he got to old-school these days. Until Callum Hepburn had come along.
Callum didn’t fit any profile they were used to. He wasn’t motivated by greed or ideology or religion; wasn’t mentally ill or drug addled. Didn’t want to rule the world. Callum was a man in love, and desperate. Best of all, he was smart and tough, unafraid to take chances.
“Do you not think something’s wrong with all this?” Yuri asked.
Kohei let out a small groan. “We got them all. What could be wrong?”
“Yes. We were always going to get them.”
“Not necessarily. It was only because you’re smart enough to work out what was going down that we found Phil Murray.”
“They stuck tape across his mouth. He’d have chewed through eventually.”
“In a disused warehouse.”
“Due a maintenance visit for the lights. And anyway, when Callum took a dive through the portal into exile, we’d have known Murray had been substituted.”
“They’re gone, chief. You need to close the file.”
Yuri stared at a large framed picture on the wall with an August 2091 date along the base. It was Callum and his team gathered around their Ducati 999, all of them with their arms around one another’s shoulders, smiling exuberantly. A tight crew.
“Would you do that for me?” Yuri asked his deputy.
“Chief?”
“If my fiancée had been renditioned, and I was planning to go after her, would you help me, knowing that help would be discovered, and the outcome would mean exile? Permanent exile in the most remote hellhole Connexion could find?”
“Well…I don’t know.”