Limbus, Inc.

One Job Too Many By Joseph Nassise

Recruiter 46795 stood in front of the window of his plush corner office on the seventy-eighth floor of the Hamilton Building, staring out at the rain that was trying to pound the city into submission. Where others might have seen it as a wet, dismal day, the kind of day where you stayed indoors with a blanket wrapped comfortably around your shoulders and a cup of something hot to drink in your hands doing your best to ignore the world outside your window, he saw it as a day full of opportunity, a day where just the slightest nudge might be enough to set the course of reality spinning off in a different direction. The right direction.

That was his job after all; to keep the wheel of fate spinning, to act as the hand of destiny in the lives of those down on the street below him, scurrying like ants to escape the crushing sense of futility and unworthiness that haunted them. They would not rise out of their squalor, out of the limited view in which they perceived the world around them. No, that kind of perspective was reserved for those who had climbed to the lofty heights that he had, those privileged few who were entrusted with tending the gears that drove the machinery of the world, those that kept this great glassy orb spinning in its place in the universe.

He watched and felt a surge of satisfaction that he was not one of the nameless, faceless many below him. Never would be one of them, thank the heavens.

Turning away from the window at last, 46795 crossed the room and took a seat at his desk. It was an expensive desk, the teak surface positively gleamed in the light. He allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction that his rise through the company was proceeding just as planned. A few more difficult cases and he should be primed to move up to the Executive Level on floor 88.

A few more difficult cases — like the one waiting for him now.

He opened the drawer in the center of his desk and drew forth a slim, red folder. He placed it on the desktop in front of him, opened it, and, taking a fine-tipped black marker from the inside pocket of his suit coat, wrote a single word on the tab at the top of the folder. He studied the word a moment, decided he’d performed the job to his satisfaction, and returned the pen to his pocket. The folder was then closed and returned to the desk drawer.

46795 sat back in his chair, feeling a real sense of accomplishment. The field had been plowed, the seed had been cast; now all that remained was to see if it bore fruit.

“Nate Benson to the Shift Manager’s office. Nate Benson, please report immediately to the Shift Manager’s office. That will be all.”

Nate stared up at the loudspeaker mounted on the wall above his head and felt the sudden urge to rip the thing from its moorings and hurl it across the room as far as it would go.

He’d been expecting the call all morning, was not, in fact, surprised that it had come, only that it had taken this long. He had no doubt what that call meant for him and his future here at General Electronics. Rumors of layoffs had been floating around for weeks and it seemed that the day had finally come; not a single one of those who’d been called throughout the morning had come back to the assembly line floor.

Nate remained still until he was certain that he had a lock on his anger, then he shut down his drill press. He took off his work gloves, shoved them in the back pocket of his coveralls, and began making his way across the floor to the steel staircase that led to the boss’ office on a platform high above the workroom floor. Most of his fellow workers studiously kept their eyes focused downward on the task in front of them, as if looking at Nate might cause them to share in his fate. But a few, George, Harris, and Daniels, for instance, caught his gaze and nodded in commiseration.

They were survivors, just as he was, veterans of the conflict that had consumed nearly an entire generation and left a third of the Earth as nothing more than a barren, decimated wasteland. What had started as a regional turf war over possession of natural resources had blossomed when the fanatics came to power, sending the religious and political ideologies of the east crashing headfirst into those of the west. Within weeks the conflict had spun out of control like a metastasizing cancer that consumed everything in its wake. For the third time in less than a century the major nations of the world found themselves embroiled in a war to end all wars. Twenty-three years later they were still feeling the fallout, both physically and figuratively. Millions had died. Entire nations were turned into twisted plains of blasted radioactive glass. Men like Nate came home to a country that saw them as nothing so much as living reminders of humanity’s capacity for murder on a grand scale, and shunned them as a result.

The Faith War left the world’s economy in shambles, with unemployment rates over twenty-five percent in even the most developed nations and inflation at an all-time high. The job market, already overburdened with too many qualified applicants for far too few jobs, was swamped by the return of thousands of trained soldiers. Nate was one of the lucky ones, landing this assembly line job after only ten months of searching. He knew guys who had been looking for two years and still hadn’t found a job.

Looks like you’re going to join them soon, he thought.

Nate knocked on the door to the boss man’s office and then waited for the muffled “Come in” to reach him before palming the lock and stepping inside.

Southwick was seated behind his desk, his fat body oozing over the sides of the suspensor chair that strained to do its job of keeping him off the floor. Flanking Southwick were two corporate security guards. Nate glanced at them as he came through the door, then dismissed them as no threat. They stood with their backs ramrod straight and their arms crossed over their chests, reducing their ability to move quickly if the situation necessitated. They scowled at him, trying to be intimidating, and Nate had to squelch the urge to laugh. After what he’d seen and done in the Arabian Desert, a couple of thugs like these two barely registered.

As usual, Southwick didn’t waste any time with pleasantries. Nate was hardly in the door before the shift boss tossed an envelope on the desk in front of him and said, “Two weeks’ pay, which is more than I would have given you. The contents of your locker will be forwarded to your last listed address.”

Nate didn’t ask why nor did he bother protesting. It wouldn’t have done any good. Southwick wasn’t the one pulling the operational strings; he just did as he was told, like all the other management hacks this far down the food chain. For Nate to keep his job he would have to talk to one of the execs back at the home office and he didn’t even know where that was, never mind who he’d need to speak to.

Besides which, they’d never listen to a guy like him.

Southwick’s next comment made that abundantly clear.

“It’s about time I got to fire your sorry ass. You go anywhere but straight through the back door and I’ll have you arrested for trespassing and thrown into a hole so dark you won’t remember what the light of day even looks like,” Southwick sneered. “You hearing me, Cutter?”

Nate was in the process of turning away when the insult stopped him cold.

The end of the war had dumped thousands of troops onto an already overburdened job market. Someone higher up the food chain had recognized that leaving hardened men who’d just been through hell and back without anything to do was a sure recipe for disaster, so the government fast tracked applications from veterans over those from civilians, even those with more experience or training in the job. This, of course, generated a wave of resentment among the civilians and lines were drawn in the sand.

Violence broke out on more than one occasion, usually started by hot-headed civilians and normally ended by grim-faced ex-soldiers who were more than happy to take out some of their frustrations on those who didn’t know well enough to leave things alone. Insults were tossed back and forth from both sides of the conflict, “Cutter” being one of them, a term meant to describe anyone who “cut the line,” so to speak and received benefits for which they weren’t actually entitled. It wasn’t the strongest of insults — there were far worse ones being bandied about— but it was an insult nonetheless.

Normally Nate’s desire to keep his job would have kept him from reacting, but Southwick himself just relieved the ex-soldier of that particular burden. Nate turned around to face his former employer, a grin spreading across his face as he realized he was no longer constrained by the need to behave.

“What did you say?” he asked.

Southwick either thought he was safe with his guards beside him or he’d forgotten the basic rule of the jungle — always know who the predator is and who is the prey — for he grinned up at Nate.

“I said get the fuck out of my office, Cutter scum!”

Nate wasn’t the type to let an insult go by without answering it. All the crap he’d taken from Southwick during his time here welled up in the back of his mind and he decided it was time to teach the fat fuck a lesson about respecting his betters. Nate was still smiling politely when he threw himself across the top of the desk and slammed into Southwick, driving the man and his ridiculous floating chair into the tiled floor beneath their feet before the bodyguards realized what was happening. By the time their brains had caught up with the action going on in front of them, Nate had already landed several good blows to Southwick’s face with his thick fist, smashing the man’s nose and fracturing at least the left cheekbone, possibly the right as well. By the time the guards managed to drag Nate off of his former boss, the other man was lying bloody and unconscious on the floor.

There won’t be any more layoffs today, Nate thought, just before the guard on his left drew his stun baton, jammed it in Nate’s ribs, and pulled the trigger. Even the stun charge that shot through his frame and froze him into immobility couldn’t wipe the smile of satisfaction off his face.

Lisa refused to come down and bail him out, so Nate was forced to use the services of one of the bondsman that set up shop across the street from the lock-up. The interest the sonofabitch was charging was outrageous, but what choice did he have? If he didn’t make bail he’d sit inside the cell and rot for a few weeks before they brought his case before a judge. Nate knew he’d end up getting in trouble if he stayed on the inside. There were plenty of gangs who would shank a veteran just for the hell of it and Nate would have no choice but to kill anyone who came after him. That would add years to whatever sentence the judge would give him for assault against Southwick. So he paid the fee, ignoring the bondsman’s vulpine grin as he did, then waited the requisite twenty-four hours for the paperwork to be processed. He kept to himself and made it through the evening without incident. Late the next day he went home, only to receive the second surprise in what was turning out to be a pretty shitty week.

The apartment was empty.

Not just empty as in “Lisa wasn’t home,” but more like “Lisa had cleared out and taken all their shit with her” empty.

He stood in the doorway, staring across the living room, now stripped of its furniture, and into the kitchen where only the built-in appliances still remained. She’d taken everything that wasn’t bolted down, including the refrigerator.

He walked into the apartment and over to the tiny bedroom they’d shared as a couple. What little clothing he owned was still on the shelves in the closet, along with the box containing a few mementos from his time in the service, but that was about it.

She hadn’t even left a note saying goodbye.

First his job. Then his girl. Could it get any worse?

A vision of the Waste flashed before his eyes, stretches of desert sand broken every few yards by the burning hulks of assault vehicles and the broken bodies of the dead.

Yes, he supposed it could, indeed, get worse. The thought helped prompt his decision to get out of there before things actually did. He had better things to do than to wait around for bad luck to find him.

Like getting drunk and forgetting it all.

He turned on his heel and walked out of the apartment, pulling the door shut behind as he went. He didn’t bother locking it, as there wasn’t anything to steal. If anybody was desperate enough to swipe his dirty laundry, they were welcome to it.

Nate took the lift down to street level, crossed the cracked plasticrete floor of the lobby, and stepped out into the night. Turning left, he headed down the block and slipped into the first bar he could find.

Two hours later Nate was just knocking back his fifth — or was it sixth? — synthetic whiskey of the night when someone slid into the booth across from him uninvited. He looked up, angry at the intrusion, and was just a hairsbreadth shy of telling the newcomer to fuck off and leave him alone when he realized he knew the squat, dark-haired man now seated across from him.

Charlie “Two-Fingers” Vantolini.

They’d served together in A Company shortly after the fall of Syria, when Charlie had been transferred into Nate’s platoon after a rocket attack had blown their communications sergeant into a thousand little pieces. Charlie’s nickname had been well-established by then, a result of the body parts he’d lost when an enemy bullet tore through his hand during the Battle of Al-Gahad, and he’d been received by the rest of the team with, if not enthusiasm, then at least acceptance. He wasn’t fresh meat and for that they were thankful; at least someone else wouldn’t go home in a quick-grown casket because Two Fingers had fucked up without knowing any better, as typically happened when the squad got a newbie.

Nate hadn’t seen Charlie in close to two years and blinked up at him now, his alcohol-fuzzed mind trying to reconcile the sudden intersection of his old life with this one but failing miserably. Two Fingers Vantolini was probably the last person Nate would have expected to run into in a place like this. Not because he didn’t like to drink; no, ole Two Fingers could knock it back with the best of them just fine. It was simply because Nate thought Charlie was dead. That was, in fact, the thought that tumbled out of his mouth thirty seconds later when his lips finally decided to follow the commands his mind was shouting down to them.

“Thought you were dead.”

Charlie cocked his head to one side and stared at him unblinkingly. A sudden memory flashed across Nate’s mind; a view of Charlie looking down at a wounded enemy soldier with exactly the same expression just before he causally lifted his gun and shot the man through the head. “Do I look dead to you?”

No, not dead, Nate thought. Scared. You look scared. Charlie was putting on his usual tough-talking wise guy exterior, but with a flash of clarity Nate saw beneath it all, saw the truth of the matter staring him right in the face. A thin sheen of sweat covered Charlie’s forehead and the hand resting on the table before him trembled just enough to be noticeable if you were looking for it. For all his bravado, in that moment Charlie looked like nothing more than a little kid who was stuck staring at his half-opened closet door in the middle of the night, convinced that he’d just seen it move of its own accord.

For an instant Nate wanted to get up and run away, just get the hell out of there as fast as he could, before Charlie had a chance to say anything.

Then his old squad mate smiled his old devil-may-care grin and whatever crazy thoughts Nate had been having vanished as quickly as they had come.

He grinned back at his one-time squad mate. “Two-Fingers Vantolini, live and in living color. What the hell are you doing in this shithole?”

Charlie’s gaze lost some of its intensity and he signaled the waitress for another round of drinks. He looked back at Nate.

“I hear you’re looking for work.”

Nate frowned as the warning bells in the back of his head went off, telling him something wasn’t right here. Something was off. How the hell had word that he was out of a job gotten out so fast? He’d only been unemployed since yesterday. Or was that the day before? Given the number of drinks he’d had he couldn’t be sure…

“I could be,” he answered, the question making him uncomfortable for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “You got something?”

Charlie glanced around, as if making sure they weren’t being observed, and then slid something small and white across the table to Nate.

It was a business card, white with black lettering.

Nate stared at it. Limbus? What the hell kind of name was that?

He looked up to ask Charlie that very same question, only to discover the seat opposite him was now empty.

Where the hell did he go?

Looking around he caught a glimpse of his old squad mate pushing his way through the crowd near the door, clearly in a hurry to leave. For a moment Nate considered going after him, even got so far as pushing himself up and out of his booth, but when the room started spinning with just that little bit of physical effort, he decided the best course of action was to put his ass back in his seat and finish his drink.

He shoved the card in the pocket of his pants and raised his hand to signal the waitress for another round.

Nate was lying in a puddle of his own vomit when he awoke after his four-day bender. The stench drove him up off the living room floor and sent him stumbling to the bathroom where he fell to his knees just in time to retch miserably into the toilet bowl. The bile burned his throat; his stomach had already emptied itself hours before. Now there was nothing left to come up but his own sense of shame and that seemed to have firmly wrapped itself around his spine with no intention of letting go.

He had only the vaguest recollection of the last several days. He remembered going for a drink after finally getting out on bail, but everything after that was pretty much a blur. Apparently, he’d managed to achieve his goal of drinking enough to briefly forget his problems, and then some.

He spat several times to clear this mouth, then pulled himself to his feet through sheer force of will and leaned over the sink. He turned the faucet on, waited for the rusty tinge to clear itself from the running water, then bent down to drink from the tap, the cool water a welcome balm to his ravaged esophagus.

He straightened up, being careful to avoid glancing in the mirror as he did so; he didn’t much like what he saw in it these days. His physical decline had started long before he’d lost his job. The lean, mean, fighting machine was gone and in its place was some sorry fuck that Nate didn’t even recognize, never mind like. Looking into that pathetic loser’s eyes after waking up in a puddle of vomit was not the way he’d intended to start his day, thank you very much.

He didn’t have a towel handy—when was the last time he’d done laundry anyway? — so he just wiped his face with the back of his hand and headed for the kitchen.

He grabbed a mug out of the cabinet, one of the few Lisa hadn’t taken when she’d split, and punched the power button on the coffee maker. He glanced idly about while waiting for his coffee to finish brewing, his thoughts already working to try and figure out how he was going to find the money to get a drink, and that’s when he saw it.

A business card, propped up against the salt shaker in the middle of the cramped little counter he used as a kitchen table. The crisp, clean whiteness of the card stood out against the sweat-and-food-stained surface of the counter top.

What the hell?

He stalked over and picked it up.

Limbus, it said.

It was followed by what he took to be the company slogan—“We Employ”—and a telephone number. But it was the last and final line of the card that really caught his eye.

“You are running out of time,” it said.

Nate scowled down at it. Running out of time? What the hell did that mean?

He flipped it over, hoping he might have scrawled something on the back to remind him of where he’d gotten it or what the company actually did, but there was nothing there. The back of the card was blank.

He racked his brains for a minute, a not insignificant task given how hung-over he was, and was just about to give up when a face floated out of the recesses of his memory.

Charlie.

Just like that the floodgates opened.

He remembered he’d gone to Julio’s hoping to find something with legs and a pair of tits to shack up with for the night, and had run into Charlie instead. It had been Charlie who’d given him the card; Charlie who’d told him that there was work available, if he wanted it.

Work.

The word was like a beacon in the night, jarring him from his apathy and setting his heart to beating again. He glanced around the hovel he was living in and mentally winced at the depths to which he’d sunk. He’d lost his edge, lost his drive, and this was where it had gotten him. It was time to turn things around, to get moving again. No more of this self-pitying bullshit. It was time to start living again.

Work.

That’s what Charlie had said. There was work available if he wanted it.

Damn right he did.

He turned the card over again, looking for an address, but didn’t find one. He noted with a start that he had read the last line incorrectly the first time around; he must be more hung over than he thought. Instead of telling him his time was running out, the line below the telephone number actually read “You won’t regret your decision to join us!”

Yeah, we’ll see about that, he thought.

He turned to the comm unit and punched in the number. It rang only once before a cheerful female voice answered it. “Limbus — We Employ. Will you be joining us, Mr. Benson?”

The connection was voice only, no video. Nate wondered if he was talking to a real person or just a computer simulacrum.

“How do you know my name?” he asked.

“Your comm unit identified you when you called in to our offices, Mr. Benson.”

“Oh, right.” Nate felt stupid for even asking. Of course the unit had identified him; all comm units used broadcast identification as a default setting.

A little paranoid, Nate?

He didn’t bother answering himself.

“Are you still with us, Mr. Benson?”

Nate cleared his throat. “Yes, yes I am. I’m calling about a job opening.”

“Of course you are, Mr. Benson. It would be my pleasure to serve you.”

As it turned out, they were doing interviews all day in one of the corporate buildings downtown. Nate booked an appointment, wrote down the address, and then, after disconnecting the call, went to look for something to help his hangover.

Two hours later he stepped off the slidetrain and slipped through the crowds lining the platform, headed for the nearest exit to the street beyond.

He’d made himself look as presentable as he could. He wore a clean pair of jeans and a reasonably new button-down shirt under a light jacket to fend off the light drizzle that was falling.

This section of New Manhattan was all corporate high-rises and company-owned businesses. Everyone he passed on the street was wearing the latest fashions and he drew more than a few curious stares as he moved through the crowds in his far more humble attire, but he didn’t care. He was here about a job and the rest of them could go take a flyin’ hike for all he cared.

The address he was looking for turned out to be a one hundred and twelve story building several blocks from the train station. He checked with the robodirectory when he arrived and the squat humanoid-looking construct told him the offices he was looking for were located on the seventy-eighth floor. Gravlift eighteen was the easiest way of reaching that destination, he was told, so he sauntered off in that direction.

Once on the correct floor, it only took him a moment to find their offices at the end of the hall; the titanium plaque on the front door displayed the company name in letters a foot tall.

As he reached for the door handle a feeling of unease unfurled in his gut, a sense that if he went through that door things would be irrevocably changed, and that brought him up short, his hand hanging there in mid-air as if he’d forgotten what to do with it. For a moment it seemed he wasn’t going to go through with it, that he was just going to stand there indefinitely, but then he shook himself all over, like a dog shedding water from its coat, and the feeling passed. He grabbed the door, pulled it open, and stepped inside.

He found himself in a large reception area. A row of leather chairs lined the wall to his left while a desk stood to his right. Both were empty. Beyond the desk was an open door, which Nate assumed led to an inner office.

He took a seat, assuming the receptionist was in the back office area and would no doubt return momentarily. He had only been there a few minutes when he felt someone’s gaze upon him. Looking up, he started with surprise to see a bald-headed man in a dark suit staring at him from the open door behind the receptionist’s desk.

“Hi,” Nate said, his heart thumping at the man’s sudden appearance. “I’m Nate Benson. I have a two o’clock appointment.”

He guessed the man in the suit was somewhere in his late forties, which would make him about a decade older than Nate. He was tall and rather thin, with long fingers that reminded Nate of a piano player he’d once seen at an after-hours club in the Holy City, but unlike that piano player this man’s suit was impeccably cut and probably cost more than Nate made in a month.

On second thought, make that two.

The man didn’t say anything, just nodded once and waved for him to follow before disappearing back through the open door.

What the hell?

Nate got to his feet and did as he was told. The doorway led to a short corridor that ended in a large, corner office, an office almost as large as the reception area itself. A desk that looked as big as the Titanic stood in one corner and behind it sat the man in the suit. In front of the desk was a single, empty chair.

While Nate took it all in, the man said, “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here about a job? You know, for an interview?” Nate said.

The man nodded. “Of course, you are. Please, have a seat.”

Nate pulled out the chair and did as he was asked.

The man looked him over, nodding to himself as he did so. He opened the top right drawer of the desk, removed a slim file, and then closed the drawer before placing the file carefully on the desk in front of him. The recruiter — that was how Nate was beginning to think of him — opened the file and began reading.

Nate opened his mouth to say something, but the man cut him off, holding up a finger in a “wait-a-minute” gesture without looking up from his paperwork. Nate’s mouth closed with a snap.

The man continued reading for another moment, before looking up at Nate.

“You spent six years in the military?”

“Seven, actually,” Nate replied. “Is that a problem?”

The man smiled. “Not at all. Just trying to get a better understanding of your background, that’s all.”

Another quiet moment as the recruiter continued to study Nate’s file. Or, at least, that’s what Nate thought it was. He was impressed that they’d managed to assemble a file on him so quickly when he’d only just called for the appointment a few hours ago; that was efficiency, that’s for sure!

“Extremely high marks in small unit tactics, hand-to-hand combat. And an Expert Marksman with a rifle,” the man said. “Were you a sniper?”

Nate shook his head. “Long Range Recon.”

The man nodded, made a note in the file, then set it aside. “Did your friend Charlie tell you what it is we do here?” he asked.

Nate shook his head. “Just said there was work to be had, if I was interested.”

“And are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Interested?”

“Of course I am! I’m sitting here, ain’t I?”

Nate winced, instantly regretting his tone. His anger and impatience was going to cost him a shot at a legitimate job and he had no one to blame but himself.

Damn your mouth, fool!

But, to his amazement, the recruiter didn’t seem to hear. He simply smiled in Nate’s direction and said, “You seem to be particularly well-suited to our program, Mr. Benson.”

“And what program is that, if you don’t mind my asking.”

The recruiter shrugged. “We… solve problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

Another shrug. “Whatever kind need fixing.”

Nate leaned back in his chair, frowning slightly. He’d come in looking for a job. He’d asked a straightforward question about that job and instead of being given a straightforward answer, what he was getting was the kind of double-talk he hadn’t heard since the time he and his team had run cover for that pair of Defense Intelligence Agency spooks during the fall of Jerusalem. If they couldn’t tell him what the job entailed, how did they expect…

Wait a minute!

He ran through what he’d seen so far, mentally comparing each element against a checklist he’d developed after years of working in clandestine ops. From the office address in a high-class business district to provide an atmosphere of success and privilege to the unremarkable front man with a face you’d forget five seconds after seeing it, it all pointed to one thing.

Limbus was a front!

It had to be. Nate would bet his left nut it was nothing more than a shell company set up to give them a public face, a sense of legitimacy, while the real work went on behind the scenes, hidden from prying eyes.

The recruiter had said it himself, hadn’t he? You seem particularly well suited to our program. Nate had a certain specific range of skills, skills that weren’t all that useful in your typical corporate setting, and it was for that very reason he’d been having trouble finding work since being discharged. He could defuse a bomb with a paperclip and a pair of salad forks in less than ten seconds or sneak into an enemy encampment, cut the leader’s head off his shoulders, and get out again before anyone even noticed something was amiss, but he didn’t remember seeing a spot for those particular skills on the last few dozen job applications he’d filled out.

If he was well suited to their needs, that meant…

Nate let out a slow, lazy smile of his own. “Ah, I see.”

The recruiter cocked his head to one side. “Do you now?”

“I do. I really do.” Nate wondered just which agency was running the show here. It didn’t feel like the DIA, but then again, that was exactly the modus operandi that those boys used all the time. They were specialists in making it look like some other agency was responsible throughout the entire op. That way, if things went sour, they had plausible deniability and could let the other agency take the heat while their people slipped quietly away into the night.

It really could be anybody, though; the World Federated Government had far more clandestine agencies than the average citizen suspected or even imagined. From the Unified Police Agency (UPA) to the Federated Transportation and Safety Administration (FTSA), the possibilities were practically endless.

Not that it really mattered. One branch of the government was as good as any other.

“So then, are you requesting employment with us here at Limbus?”

Requesting employment? It seemed an odd way of putting it to Nate, but yes, that was essentially what he was doing, he guessed.

He nodded.

The recruiter shook his head. “I’m sorry. I need a verbal answer.”

Nate frowned. Guy was a bit of a stickler it seemed. Fine. “Yes, I am requesting employment.”

A sheaf of papers appeared and was placed on the desk in front of him.

“This is our standard contract and corporate non-disclosure agreement. Details all the usual benefits. I need you to sign here, here, and here.” The recruiter placed a pen on the desk next to the contract.

Nate glanced at it. Twenty-something pages of typical bureaucratic legalese; made him dizzy just looking at it, never mind trying to understand. No way was he reading all that crap. He was only interested in one item and he found it under subsection 21-F Compensation. He took a look at the number listed there and then picked up the pen and signed where he’d been asked.

The recruiter positively beamed. “Excellent! Welcome aboard, Mr. Benson. If you would follow me, please, we’ll get you started.”

Nate was surprised. “Now?”

“Yes, now,” the recruiter responded, his mouth twisted into a slight frown. “Or did you have somewhere else you needed to be?”

Nate heard the threat, loud and clear.

“No, no. Now is fine. Nothing like getting started right away to learn the ropes.”

The recruiter seemed to ponder that for a moment. “Quite right,” he said at last.

Nate followed him out of the office and down a hall to what turned out to be a cutting-edge medical suite. An examination table stood in the center of the room with a medibot suspended over it. Consoles lined the walls, the computer screens on them currently dark.

After the recruiter moved to one of the consoles and input a series of commands, the medibot surged into life, reminding Nate of a giant mechanical spider. It sent a chill up his spine at the sight.

He didn’t like spiders.

Positively hated hospitals.

This was not, he decided, going to be fun.

“Please disrobe down to your undershorts and climb up on the examination table,” the recruiter said, his attention on the command console before him.

Nate looked doubtfully up at the mechanical arachnid above the table and then back over to the recruiter. “Do you know how to operate one of these things?”

The recruiter slowly turned and stared at him.

Didn’t say a word; just glared.

Nate took the hint, disrobed, and climbed up onto the table.

In ten minutes he’d had his blood taken, his brain waves recorded, and been scanned all the way down to the molecular level. As he dressed he considered the fact that his new employer now knew everything there was to know about him physically; had the technology existed they could have created a physically identical body double.

Nate wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“This way, please.”

The recruiter led him out of the office and down the hallway to the same elevator he’d arrived in. Nate knew better than to say anything while out in public, where it might be overheard by any number of listening devices planted by competing organizations, so the short trip up to the ninety-seventh floor passed in silence.

They emerged from the elevator and moved down the hall to a door near the far end. A silver scanner was embedded into the wall next to the door. The recruiter fussed with the keypad for a moment and then stepped to the side, out of the way of the device. “If you don’t mind…” he said, looking at Nate expectantly and indicating the scanner.

“Of course.”

Nate stepped forward and placed his hand in the center of the scanner.

There was a sudden, sharp buzzing sound and a pale blue light flared briefly under his hand before the door beside him opened with the sharp click of a releasing lock.

With a wave of his hand, the recruiter—what the hell was his name anyway? — ushered Nate inside.

He found himself in a long hallway with doors on either side. The recruiter led him to the fifth door on the left where they repeated the business with the palm lock. The office suite just beyond contained a slim storage locker, a restroom, and a personal farcaster unit.

Farcasters had been developed ten years ago by the scientists in the Defense Research Agency and had yet to see even limited use among the civilian population. Owning one was a capital crime, punishable by forty years of hard labor.

The government gets all the cool toys, Nate thought with a smile.

The recruiter walked over to the locker and opened it. Inside was a change of clothing — a dark-colored suit, a shirt, tie, and dress shoes — hanging from the locker’s only hook. On the shelf above were a hypoinjector unit and a personal beeper.

“Listen carefully, please, as I’d prefer not to repeat myself,” the recruiter said, as he handed the beeper to Nate.

“Notification of a new assignment will come via this personal computing device, or PCD. You are to report to this room at the time indicated on the page. The farcaster will already be programmed with the proper coordinates and you will use it to travel to and from your destination.”

He reached for the hypo, handed that to Nate.

“Inject yourself with the hypo, then change into the…”

Nate interrupted. “What’s in the hypo?”

The recruiter seemed taken aback that he’d been interrupted. “Excuuuse me?”

“What’s in the hypo?” Nate asked again. If he was going to inject himself with something, then he wanted to know what the hell was in it. Seemed a fair question to him.

The recruiter’s nostrils flared in irritation but he answered the question nonetheless.

“Farcaster travel is… difficult. Traveling through the network without taking the proper precautions can leave an operator mentally disoriented, even physically ill. Reaction times and cognitive functions are slowed, sometimes drastically. All of which renders an operative unable to carry out their duties.”

The recruiter pointed to the hypo unit Nate was holding. “The injector delivers a semi-aqueous solution containing a potent mix of microbial nanoselectors and morphotic radioisotopes that counteract the adverse reactions associated with farcaster travel, allowing you to make the transit with your mental and physical abilities intact.”

“I… see,” Nate said, though he really had no idea what the hell the guy was talking about.

“Please note that the counter agent has been designed specifically for you and you alone based on the results of the medical exam you just underwent. Taking a hypo injection meant for another operative could result in severe injury, possibly death. The same holds true for the farcaster you will be using. It has been keyed to your personal DNA signature. Use by another individual could be deadly.”

Nate thought about the other rooms they’d passed in the hallway on their way to this one. Did each of those rooms contain a farcaster portal like this one? How many other hallways like that were in other buildings in this city? In other cities? Just how big was this agency?

He didn’t bother to ask. He knew the recruiter wouldn’t answer; that kind of information was well above Nate’s pay grade.

“Does that satisfy your curiosity, Mr. Benson? May I continue with my briefing now?”

Nate nodded his head in acquiescence.

“As I was saying, inject yourself with the hypo and then change into the clothes that have been provided for you. As with the hypo, they have been specifically tailored to suit you and help you look the part at your destination.”

The recruiter turned and walked over to the farcaster unit, a round metal dome with a door in the center and a maze of pipes and wiring coming out of the top. A small control panel was inset to the left of the door.

“When you arrive, your destination will already be programmed into your farcaster unit. All you need do is hit this button here…”—he pointed to a bright green button on the bottom right of the control panel—“and then step inside the unit. When you close the door, a countdown will begin. If, for some reason, you find you must abort the mission, you have exactly six seconds to do so.”

Six seconds? He stared at the complex locking mechanism on the inside of the door and shook his head. Better hope you don’t have to abort or things are gonna get ugly…

“Your PCD will deliver a set of coordinates to you once you exit the farcaster and can be used as a GPS device to locate those coordinates thereafter. At those coordinates will be instructions on what you are to do to complete the mission, as well as whatever specialized gear you might need to carry said mission out. You have exactly seventy-two hours in which to complete your assignment, not a minute more. When you have finished, you are to return to the same farcaster and use that to come home. Any questions?”

“No. I’m good.”

It was simple and straightforward, which Nate liked. He wasn’t thrilled with traveling by farcaster, but if that’s what the job required, he could live with it for what they were paying him.

And they were paying him a lot.

Nate’s PCD went off for the first time three days later at precisely 6:30 a.m. Nate glanced at the display, noted the report time of 10:45, and dragged himself out of bed. Fifteen minutes later he was stepping aboard a slidetrain, headed for the Limbus offices as he’d been instructed.

He used the employee identification card he’d been given to access the elevators and rode one straight to the ninety-seventh floor. Both the palm lock to the office suite and the one to the farcaster room opened at his touch.

Nate changed into the casual clothes that were hanging in the locker, leaving his own in their place. Unsurprisingly there were no tags or other identifying marks in the clothing and the clothes themselves were average, everyday wear that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Whoever was running this operation seemed to know what they were doing, which he certainly appreciated. After all, it was his ass that was on the line should something go wrong.

He picked up the hypo, hesitated a moment, then said “fuck it” aloud into the empty room and pressed the device against the inside of his wrist. There was the quick hiss of the injection followed by a moment of lightheadedness and then he was ready to go.

Nate hit the green button, stepped into the farcaster unit, and pulled the door shut.

He counted down from six to steady his nerves.

“Six…”

“Five…”

“Four…”

“Three…”

“Two…”

The world faded around him and the last thought he had on this side of the cast was to curse the sonofabitch who shorted him two seconds.

Nate stepped out of the utility closet into which he’d arrived and scanned the immediate vicinity, making sure no one had seen his exit.

He appeared to be in a train station somewhere; travelers were hustling to and fro with bags in their hands and a voice over the PA system was announcing that the 10:51 express was ready to depart on track 118.

The PCD in his pocket beeped. He took it out and glanced at the display, noting that it was showing a drop location less than fifty feet from where he was now standing. He followed the coordinates to their source, which, as he’d already guessed, turned out to be a self-storage locker.

He spent a moment or two pondering what the combination might be, then shrugged and punched in the street address of the Limbus building.

The lock popped open with a flat clang.

An information disk for his PCD sat on the shelf inside, next to a small stack of currency. He popped the chip into his PCD and absently stuffed the cash into his pockets while watching the information that came up on his screen.

The mission looked to be a relatively simple. He was supposed to wait outside a certain restaurant — address included — and photograph a meeting between two men. Photos of each of them had been provided for identification purposes. Nate studied them for a moment, committing their features to memory. He was certain he’d never seen either one of them before; not that it mattered in the long run. He would have done the job even if he’d known them for the last twenty years. A job was a job.

It went without saying that there was to be no contact with either individual. Once he had obtained the necessary photographs, he was to leave the vicinity as soon as possible and make his way back to the equipment drop. There he would receive the coordinates for the return trip.

The equipment drop contained a nylon backpack complete with a camera, telephoto lens, and press credentials from some rag called The Global Inquirer.

He slipped the credentials into the pocket of his jacket and slung the backpack over his shoulder, then made his way out of the station to the street beyond. A glance at his PCD told him he had less than twenty minutes to get into position, so he hustled to the front of the cab line and climbed into the first vehicle, slamming the door in the face of the woman he’d just cut in front of. He handed some cash to the driver to get him to ignore the angry shouts of the woman standing outside and told him he’d pay double the fare if the driver could get him to their destination in less than fifteen minutes.

Tires squealed and Nate was pushed back into his seat as the driver rose to the challenge.

The driver was too busy concentrating on navigating to be chatting, which Nate was thankful for. The car he was in was an older model, without any modern conveniences it seemed. Even the ads seemed ten years out of date, for heaven’s sake. But the cabbie knew the city and that’s all Nate really cared about. Exactly thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds later, Nate was getting out of the cab a block from his final destination, having told the driver to pull over to reduce the chance of being seen. Not that he expected to be recognized by his targets, but why take the chance if it wasn’t necessary?

He walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and found a place to sit on a bench in a small park across the way. His position gave him a clear view of both the front entrance and the outdoor eating area on the side of the building. If his targets chose the former, he’d wander inside and get a table. If they chose the latter, he’d be in a perfect position to watch them while they ate.

In the end, it was all rather anticlimactic. The two men he was waiting for arrived a few minutes after he did. To his relief, they chose to eat outside, absolving him of the need to go inside and find a table. Instead, he didn’t have to do anything more than point the camera in their general direction; the telephoto lens got everything he needed with the touch of a button. It was so simple a child could have done it.

When he was satisfied that he’d gotten what he needed, Nate put the camera back into the pack and went to find another cab, which would take him back to the station. Once there, he put the backpack containing the camera back into the locker and hit the lock button.

Already thinking about the paycheck that came with the successful completion of the job, Nate went to find his farcaster home.

Over the course of the next three weeks Nate handled two more assignments. The first required him to pick up a package from the equipment locker, cross town to a hotel, and leave it for an incoming guest. The second involved breaking into an office building on the outskirts of the business district and removing several files from the company president’s office on the fifth floor. Both times he’d arrived with very little time to spare and had to hustle to get in position by the time indicated on his orders, but that was the only hiccup he encountered. Even the B&E didn’t bother him; they were paying him, and paying him well, to take risks on their behalf and the petty crime barely registered on his personal morality meter. He’d done far worse during his time in the service.

About a week after his third assignment, Nate was having breakfast in an upscale joint on 84^th Avenue, the kind of place that was so high above his previous standard of living that three months ago he wouldn’t have even looked at it. A news clip on the screen behind the receptionist’s station caught his eye.

He tapped the controls next to his right hand and the screen embedded into his table top came to life.

“… for good behavior after serving ten years on espionage charges. Owens was caught on camera in a now famous photograph showing him exchanging documentation on the Raptor III drone-launched missile system with this man, Lee Fong, a member of a so-called Chinese trade delegation. Fong’s diplomatic credentials were revoked and he was expelled from this country immediately following the incident. At the time, Owens claimed that…”

Nate stared at the photograph on the screen—one of the photographs that he’d taken as his first job for Limbus!

A ten-year sentence? How in hell was that even possible?

A trial like that would take months just to get scheduled in front of a judge, never mind the additional months it would take to try the case. There was just no way. The newscaster must have misspoken.

But as Nate changed stations and listened to several other broadcasts, he realized that they were all saying the same thing. Owens was being released after serving a ten-year sentence for espionage. A sentence that was the result of a guilty verdict that had been obtained using the photographs that Nate himself had taken!

Something was very, very wrong.

Nate paid his bill and then left the restaurant, his thoughts awhirl. He wanted to learn more about the Owens case, but wasn’t about to make any inquiries from his PCD where it could be traced back to him. He needed a cyber café.

The first one he came to looked a bit too upscale to have what he wanted, so he passed it by and kept looking. After another fifteen minutes he found another place, sandwiched between an auto mechanic and a shoe repair shop in an alley off of 69^th that would do the trick. He paid for an hour of time at a private terminal and the proprietor led him to a closet-sized space in the back of the room that contained a triD terminal with a built-in keyboard. The gear was at least fifteen years out of date but it fired up without difficulty when Nate sat down in front of it and that was good enough for him. The age of the terminal would make what he had to do next easier, actually.

He flexed his fingers and then punched in a coding sequence he’d learned from an electronics specialist first class while overseas. The commands rerouted the console’s connection to the cybernet through twenty different pirate data havens, one after another, each one scrubbing the identifiers out of the data and hiding the originating signal in a blizzard of false streams that would take a decent hacker at least a week, maybe more, to unravel. By the time they did that, he’d be long gone.

Once he knew his efforts couldn’t be traced back to him, Nate began digging into the background of the Owens case, trying to make sense of it all. According to the documents he was able to access, the government had been chasing a leak within their classified weapons program for more than a year before investigators began to focus their attention on Owens. The break had come when an anonymous source sent in half-a-dozen photographs showing Owens passing a packet of information to Fong while they were dining together at an outdoor restaurant. There was no way for the photographs to be used in court, as the investigators couldn’t prove they were authentic given their anonymous source, but that didn’t stop investigators from using them to confront Owens, who, upon seeing the evidence, broke down and confessed. Owens had then pled guilty, saving the government years of effort and no doubt millions of dollars that would have been needed to convict him.

Nate double-checked the dates. Owens had been sentenced just over ten years ago, according to the information.

Has to be a different photograph, he thought.

He called up the image and expanded it on the screen.

It wasn’t a different photograph; he knew that immediately. While Nate had never actually held the images he’d taken that day, he had been looking through the camera’s viewfinder when he’d taken them and the image he called up on the screen was identical to the one he had in his memory.

It was his photograph.

There was no mistaking it.

He thought for a moment and then hunched over the keys once more, tapping furiously.

The console obediently put the information he asked for on the screen in front of him.

Seeing it, Nate sat back in his chair. His stomach did a slow roll and he had to take several deep breaths in order to keep from throwing up.

On the screen was an article about the hotel he’d delivered the package to during his second assignment. According to the press, a terrorist bomb had gone off on the hotel’s eighteenth floor, killing three people and starting a fire that rapidly burned out of control and ended up destroying the entire building.

The date of the fire was five years ago.

Nate’s hands shook.

“Holy shit!” he breathed.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a loud beeping sound filled the cubicle, Nate jumped out of his seat, glancing wildly about, convinced in those first few seconds that the corporate bigwigs at Limbus had discovered what he was up to and had sent in the riot police to drag him downtown…

There was no one there.

The beeping sound was the pager on his PCD.

Telling himself to calm down, he fumbled it off his belt, slipped the switch to silence the alarm, and looked down at the readout.

1:15, it read.

Nate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not only did he have an immediate assignment, but he had twenty-five minutes to make it there.

He wiped all traces of what he’d been doing from the terminal, then exited the cyber café. Using his PCD he called for a limousine, knowing it would be faster than the slidetrain and might just mean the difference between success and failure. He had no idea what would happen if he missed the deadline and frankly he had no intention of finding out. The chauffeured vehicle had slid out of the sky seconds later and got him to the Limbus offices with three minutes to go before the deadline.

He rushed to the prep room, swapped his clothes for the ones waiting there for him, and jumped into the farcaster, his thoughts a million miles away.

As the countdown neared its final seconds, Nate glanced out through the porthole in the middle of the farcaster door and saw that he’d left the door to his locker open.

That was the least of his worries.

There, on the top shelf, was the hypo he’d forgotten to take.

In the next second reality dropped away from him and Nate felt like he was falling… falling… falling…

Recruiter 46795 entered Nate Benson’s mission prep room ten minutes after the other man had left. Despite having six operators under his direct supervision, management had yet to see fit to provide him with an assistant, so he was forced to handle even the trivial tasks like refilling the hypos and resetting the farcaster units himself.

He considered that aspect of the job to be far beneath him and constantly railed to himself against the short-sightedness of those above him. When he was promoted to executive, he’d be sure to let the others know just how demeaning he’d considered the whole…

His thoughts trailed off as he caught sight of the hypo sitting on the locker’s top shelf.

Unused.

Questions swarmed his thoughts.

How much did Benson know? Was it a simple accident that he hadn’t taken the hypo or had he avoided the injection purposely? Was he an enemy plant? Or, God forbid, working for another agency? Could he still be trusted?

What about…

Recruiter 46795 cursed aloud, once, and then got control of himself. It wouldn’t do to let something like this cause the rest of his plans to spin out of control. Benson could be contained, if necessary.

He’d wait and see what the operative did when he returned from his current assignment and then make some decisions about how to handle the situation.

Patience, he reminded himself, patience.

Nate stumbled out of the farcaster and promptly vomited all over the floor. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and was overcome a second time by the sensation of falling from an immeasurable height, a fall that just went on and on and on…

He leaned against the nearby wall and vomited a second time.

With his stomach now empty, the feeling receded. He stayed where he was, waiting for the nausea to pass. Then, and only then, did he dare to straighten up.

He wondered just how totally fucked he was.

He’d gone through the farcaster without his injection and he had no idea what kind of effects that would have on his body. He felt all right aside from the previous bout of nausea, but he knew that meant nothing. He might be sprouting massive tumors deep inside his body this very minute and wouldn’t even know it.

Fuck it. Can’t do anything about it now so might as well put it aside and concentrate on the job at hand.

He found himself in a garage, empty save for a sedan parked nearby. It was a couple of years old, no more than that. The driver’s door was open and when he slid in behind the wheel he found the keys and a note above the dash.

The note gave him a set of coordinates and instructions to bury what was in the trunk at that location.

It had been awhile since he’d driven anything other than military vehicles and he slid the key in the ignition with a sense of anticipation. A smile came to his face as the car’s twin engines came to life, growling in unison like two caged beasts ready to break free. He steered around the empty garage for a few minutes, to get a feel for the vehicle, then took her out the front gate. As soon as he was clear, he hit the antigrav units and took the car up over the city.

The Detroit-Windsor megaplex shone off to his left, hugging both banks of the Detroit River. He turned the car to the right and headed south along the river, searching for the coordinates.

Twenty minutes later he set down on the north bank, in the midst of a clearing. He killed the engines and waited for them to shut down completely before getting out.

Nate glanced around, but didn’t see anyone. He walked back to the trunk and opened it up.

A large black body bag and one long-handled shovel stared back at him.

“Color me surprised,” he said with a certain amount of fatalism and reached in for the shovel. It took him another half an hour to dig a hole deep enough that he thought the bag wouldn’t get dug up again by the local wildlife. He stabbed the shovel into the pile of dirt he’d created and went to get the body.

Except it wasn’t a body at all. He knew that the moment he tried to pick it up. It was much too heavy and far too angular to be anything human. His curiosity getting the better of him, Nate reached for the zipper and pulled it down a few inches.

The bag was full of cash. Bundles and bundles of it, all neatly stacked and wrapped with rubber bands.

Nate stared at the money a moment, then, being careful not to touch any of it, zipped the bag back up again. Seeing all that money in one place was tempting, but messing with that kind of stuff was sure to put a price on his head. He intended to do what he was told and that was that.

He dragged the bag out of the trunk and over to the hole he’d dug, and heaved it over the edge. It dropped the half-dozen feet and hit the bottom with a flat thunk. Nate gave it one last look and then began shoveling the dirt over it.

There was about an hour left on the assignment clock when he finished the job, which left him plenty of time for the little outing he planned. He returned the car to the garage where he’d found it, leaving the keys inside and locking it up after him for safe keeping, figuring whoever had left it there would have a spare set of their own. If they didn’t… hey, not his problem.

Instead of getting into the farcaster, Nate walked out of the garage and headed down the street to the convenience store he’d spotted from the air. The doors were locked and the lights off when he arrived, but that really didn’t matter to him. He made a beeline for the vending machines outside the front door and peered through the glass at the day’s newssheet.

Even though he was expecting it, the date still left him a bit stunned.

It was November, 15^th, the same as when he had left but this November 15^th was two years in the past.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed.

The final proof was staring him in the face.

His thoughts were skipping in a thousand different directions by the time he made it back to the garage where the farcaster was located. He reached for the hypo and then stopped.

Do I really want to take that? he asked himself. What if the first dose was tied to the second somehow? Would taking one without the other be dangerous?

He didn’t know.

Had no way of knowing at this point, not really.

His gut was telling him not to, that the two were inexplicably linked and only bad things could come of taking the dose separate from the first. He’d learned to trust his gut.

He took one last look at the angular injector and then hurled it away into the darkness of the garage. He heard glass shatter and for some reason the sound made him feel better.

Time to go home, he thought.

Nate stepped out of the farcaster and rushed immediately for the rest room, determined not to vomit all over the floor. He leaned over the sink and waited for the nausea to strike.

Surprisingly, it didn’t.

He gave it another moment, just to be safe, but his stomach remained strangely acquiescent.

Given what he had learned on the other side, it was clear now that his initial suspicions were correct. He was travelling not just in distance but in time as well via the farcaster, going back and fixing errors, adjusting outcomes, eliminating targets, so that the present, his present, would unfold in a certain way.

The implications were staggering.

It raised all sorts of interesting questions about his employer, Limbus Inc. Who were they really? He’d known from the start that they were a front, but a front for who? Or what? The answers to those questions seemed far more important now than they had when he’d first walked in the door.

Trouble was, he didn’t know how he was going to find them.

As he finished getting dressed, his gaze fell upon the hypo he’d failed to use before leaving earlier that morning. It was still sitting there on the locker shelf, untouched, which meant the clean-up crew hadn’t been around yet.

He took the hypo, walked into the bathroom, and dumped it contents down the sink. He ran the water, washing any trace of the stuff down the drain, then returned the empty hypo to the locker.

Satisfied that he’d covered his tracks, Nate left the prep room and closed the door firmly behind him. He planned on learning as much about Limbus as he could, but not before he got a decent night’s rest.

As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he noticed that one of the other doors was slightly open.

The sight brought him up short.

All the time he’d been coming here, he’d never run into another employee. The only interaction he’d had was with his recruiter and even those meetings were few and far between. Nate was suddenly, intensely curious about his co-workers. Who were they? What were they like? How many of them were there?

Maybe he’d find some of the answers he was looking for inside that room.

The open door seemed to beckon.

What can it hurt?

Casting caution to the wind, Nate stepped forward and gently pushed it open.

The room beyond looked identical to the one he’d just left. The same lack of general furnishings. The same bare walls. The same locker and farcaster unit.

The stretcher was new, however.

It stood in the middle of the room, as if someone had been getting ready to wheel it out and had stepped away for a moment to deal with something else. There was an odd, lumpy shape resting atop the stretcher, covered by a sheet now stained with blood and other fluids.

That shape drew Nate like a magnet.

He stepped forward, watching as his hand reached out almost of its own accord and grasped the edge of the sheet. He’d seen more than his fair share of the dead and dying while on active duty and wouldn’t be put off by the sight of a corpse, yet still he hesitated.

Something felt… wrong.

Off.

Something told him that he didn’t want to see what was under that sheet, that he wouldn’t be able to just forget about it and get on with his life, that once he saw it things would be forever changed…

He pulled the sheet back anyway.

And immediately wished he hadn’t.

The thing under the sheet had once been human, but it was hard to tell that now. It was as if some higher force had taken a human form, twisted it inside out and then added hundreds of runaway growths between the glistening wet organs and miles of ropy blood vessels; it was horrifying and strangely, eerily fascinating at the same time.

Nate was staring at it intently, trying to understand just what the hell it was that he was looking at, when a pair of eyes popped opened in what had once been the thing’s face and he nearly leapt out of his shoes.

It was still alive!

The two of them stared at each other and then the thing erupted with a mewling cry of such pain and despair that Nate cringed at the sound. He was frozen in place, unable to move as the thing on the stretcher continued to wail in misery, and so he didn’t notice anyone else was in the room with him until a hand snapped forward and yanked the sheet back up where it belonged.

The awful, hideous cry stopped immediately.

“What do you think you are doing? This area is off-limits!”

Nate shook himself, trying to banish the memory of that awful thing, and turned to find his recruiter staring at him with murder in his eyes.

“Get out!” the man said, pointing behind them at the door.

“What was that…”

“I said GET OUT! Or I will terminate you immediately!”

The threat to his livelihood—or was that to his life? — was enough to get him moving. He scrambled backward until he found the door and then slipped out into the hall. He knew better than to leave; something in his recruiter’s tone had made that clear, so he began to pace back and forth within the narrow confines instead.

When his recruiter emerged from the room moments later, Nate couldn’t hold his questions in any longer.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked, jabbing his finger past the other man’s head to point at the room he’d just left. “What happened to that guy?”

Nate was expecting his recruiter to give him the typical runaround and so he was surprised when the other man answered calmly.

“What happened?” he repeated, a superior little smile on his face. “He fucked up; that’s what happened. Thought he could pull a fast one and claim that he’d done the job when he really hadn’t. I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”

Nate stared at him, horrified. “What did you do?”

The recruiter laughed. “I flipped his switch, of course! Did you think we’d send you idiots roaming around out there without some means of controlling you? Do you really think we’re that stupid? He tried to fuck with me so I flipped his switch and activated all those little bastards in his bloodstream. Turned him inside out before he even knew what hit him!”

A chill washed over Nate as he realized the implications of what he was hearing. Whatever had been done to that guy had more than likely been done to him as well…

He had to force himself to keep from grabbing the front of the recruiter’s shirt and slamming him up against the wall.

“What did you do to me?” he asked, the anger clear in his voice.

The recruiter laughed, seemingly not afraid of Nate at all.

“I didn’t do anything to you. You did it to yourself. You asked for employment. You signed the waivers. You submitted to the medical ‘tests.’ You’ll just have to live with the consequences.”

Nate stared furiously at the man, stunned to realize that what the recruiter had just said was true. He’d been so eager to get off the street and back to something useful that he hadn’t even stopped to read the paperwork that had been placed in front of him.

But his recruiter wasn’t finished yet.

“Don’t even think about running, Nate,” he said with a sneer. “Limbus owns you now and we take our investments very seriously. If you run, we’ll use the subcutaneous tracking device we’ve implanted in your skin to find where you’ve gone and bring you back again, at which point you’ll be punished for the trouble you’ve caused.”

The recruiter looked back at the door of the room they’d just exited and Nate got the message, loud and clear.

Suddenly Nate understood why Charlie had looked the way he had in the bar that night. It hadn’t been fear that had caused his hands to tremble and his face to drain of color. No, not fear at all. It had been guilt.

Guilt that he’d been getting Nate involved with this mess in the first place.

Nate glanced down the hall to the elevator doors. He could run, he thought. Get out of here, find a doc who could take the transponder out of his system, lay low until the storm passes. He’d survived the Faith War, he could survive this.

The other man caught the look, realized what he was no doubt thinking.

“Don’t be stupid,” his recruiter said. “You’ve got a good thing going here, why make a mess of it all? If you carry out the assignments as requested, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Nate wanted nothing more at that moment than to knock the man on his ass, but he restrained himself. You’ve got to keep cool if you want to get out of here, he told himself.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said aloud, forcing himself to smile. “No sense screwing up a good thing. You’ve got to protect your assets; every corporation has to do that. Just good business sense, right?”

The recruiter grinned at him. “That’s right. Stick with the program and who knows? A few years from now I might even recommend you for the junior level management program. Get you off the streets for good. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Nate made himself nod. “Of course I would. Last thing I want to do is end up like that guy in there,” he said, pointing over the other man’s shoulder at the door behind him.

The recruiter watched him closely for a moment and then nodded, as if to himself. “Good. Glad to hear it. Go home. Get some rest. When you’ve had a chance to think everything over you’ll feel much better. I’m sure of it.”

Permission granted, Nate got out of there as fast as he could.

Two hours later Recruiter 46795 stood staring out the window of his office, trying to figure out how he was going to clean up the mess he currently found himself in.

It had not been a good day.

First he’d had to terminate Wojowitski’s employment and then there had been that business with Benson. Two disasters in one day, both with the potential of screwing with his chances of getting the promotion he’d been angling for since he’d been relocated to this office from his former post in New Los Angeles.

One rogue operative he could deal with. The long-term effects of farcaster travel were still unknown and Wojowitski had been at it longer than most. Claiming the operative had simply cracked under the strain would keep the focus off of himself and on Wojowitski, where it belonged. Besides, Wojowitski had been recruited by his predecessor, so claiming it was a poor recruit in the first place was still an option he could fall back on to avoid any blame.

But Benson… Benson was a different story. He was one of his own personal recruits and had only managed a handful of assignments in the last few months. There was no way to claim Benson was someone else’s responsibility nor that the farcaster travel had begun to mess with the operator’s neocortex; everyone knew that only happened after more than fifty jumps.

Recruiter 46795 stepped over to the wet bar in the corner of his office and poured himself a stiff drink. He downed the first one in a single gulp in an effort to calm his nerves and then poured a second of equal size. That one he took back to his desk with him and slowly nursed it as he gave the problem more thought.

It seemed clear to him that he’d compounded the problem with Benson when he’d confronted him earlier that evening. Discovering the unused hypo in Benson’s locker had put him on edge, a situation that hadn’t been helped much when he’d found Benson inside Wojowitski’s prep room hours later. That’s where things had really gone wrong.

I never should have run my mouth off like that, he thought. Benson wasn’t an idiot; if he was looking for information, he’d been given a boatload of it when I did that.

He shook his head. It was too late to do anything about that now; what was done was done. He needed to focus on the future. To contain this thing before it got more out of hand.

That, of course, brought the problem around full circle. Without knowing Benson’s true motives it was hard to say what he would do next and not knowing what he would do next made it extremely difficult to decide how to handle the problem itself. It was a Catch-22.

Unless…

The idea was a bit out of the box, but that was why Limbus had put him in this position in the first place, wasn’t it? To come up with out-of-the-box solutions to the problems at hand.

Of course it was.

Suddenly energized, Recruiter 46795 sat up and began making plans to handle Benson in a way that was certain to keep him and the potential mess he represented from ever posing a problem in the future.

The page came in just after one a.m., startling Nate into wakefulness. He grabbed the PCD off his nightstand and squinted at the readout.

2:30, it read.

Shit! Now what?

He didn’t know. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening thinking about the things he’d seen and heard earlier that day, but hadn’t been able to come to a decision about what to do. As far as he could tell, Limbus had his nuts in a vice and he was pretty much screwed no matter what he did.

If he ran, they would catch him; he was pretty sure of it. That didn’t mean running was out of the question, just that he had to be ready to deal with them when they came. And come they would; he was certain of that. The question was with how much force? One, maybe two operatives he could handle. More than that would be a problem.

Of course that was only if they sent someone in his current timeline.

If Limbus was smart, they’d send someone back to an earlier point in his life and wipe him out before he even had a chance to become who he was today. That was the safest and most logical bet. It was what he would do, if he were in charge.

Given that possibility, running didn’t make much sense. They wouldn’t have to figure out where he was going, just find some place he’d already been. There were more than enough points in time where his presence had been public knowledge, like the time he’d been arrested for petty larceny when he was eleven or the date of his discharge from the armed forces, and either one of those would do.

He could drop off the face of the planet tomorrow and they’d still find him.

So running was out.

Nate didn’t mind that so much, truth to tell. He hadn’t run from anything in his life and hadn’t liked the idea of starting now.

Fine, then. He’d stick around. Work from the inside and see what he could learn.

Starting with this very assignment.

He dressed quickly, left his spacious new apartment behind, and headed downtown for the second time in twenty-four hours.

His recruiter was waiting for him in the prep room.

“Right on time, as usual,” the man said, smiling at Nate.

Nate didn’t find the expression, nor the man’s presence, reassuring in the least.

“No need to change today,” his recruiter told him. “It’s a quick in and out job. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour.”

Nate nodded. Tried to look at ease. Just do the job, he told himself.

He turned toward the farcaster, intending to get inside, when he heard his recruiter clear his throat. Looking back he found the other man watching him closely.

“Forgetting something?”

For a moment Nate didn’t know what he was talking about, but then his gaze fell on his open locker and the hypo sitting on the top shelf.

“Oh, damn! Thanks for reminding me,” he said, trying to appear earnest. “Guess I’m not quite awake yet.”

His recruiter smiled. “I understand. I’m not much of a morning person myself. That’s why I thought I’d be here to see you off this morning. Here, let me help.”

He picked up the hypo and walked over to Nate. “Give me your arm.”

Nate had no choice. He rolled up his sleeve and presented the underside of his left arm to the other man. The hypo was pressed against his flesh and there was a quick hiss and the mild sensation of something passing into his system — then it was done.

For a moment, he almost panicked. If they wanted to get rid of him, the injection would be the perfect opportunity. One quick shot and it was all over.

“There,” said the other man, “all set.” He glanced at the clock, saw that there were only a few minutes left to the deadline. “You’d better get going.”

Not trusting himself to speak, Nate simply nodded. He walked over to the farcaster, rolling his sleeve back down as he went, then he stepped inside the device and tried to get comfortable.

Outside, his recruiter pushed the door shut and waited for the locks to engage. Nate could see the man through the porthole, watched as he lifted a hand and waved.

“Good hunting,” his recruiter said, smiling.

Nate nodded—what the hell was that all about? — and then hit the green button.

He arrived in an empty apartment in a run-down tenement building, the farcaster set up in a back bedroom with peeling wallpaper and the smell of mold. A hard black case stood on the floor nearby.

Nate recognized the weapons case the minute he saw it. He set it flat on the floor and then used one hand on either side to trigger the latches. Inside was a disassembled Mark 56 sniper rifle, the exact weapon he’d carried while point man for his recon unit. It was capable of both single and burst fire, with a maximum range of just over one thousand meters. It had been designed for one thing and one thing only — killing people at a distance.

He should know; he’d killed more than his fair share with a weapon just like it.

A white card had been slipped into the case alongside the rifle. Nate pulled it out, read it.

The card listed a set of coordinates and below that, four simple words.

Terminate with extreme prejudice.

“You have got to be shitting me,” he said to the empty room around him.

It seemed that his journeyman days were over and he’d just graduated to the big time. First surveillance photographs, then breaking and entering, and now assassination. He wondered how much of that had to do with what he’d seen the day before. Did they trust him with the bigger jobs now that he had a sense of what was going on or were they just setting him up for a fall? Getting ready to hang him out to dry after he pulled the trigger?

He didn’t know.

To his surprise, he realized he didn’t care either. All he wanted to do was get the job over with and get home again.

He pulled out his PCD and checked his current location against the coordinates he’d been given, only to discover that the target was practically next door. He should be able to get a decent look at the place from the roof of the building he was in.

He picked up the case, exited the apartment, and made his way up onto the roof of the building via the rear stairwell. The tenement building was three stories high and built on the edge of a residential area. His target was in a ramshackle two-story house about a block down the street. It looked familiar and for a moment he hesitated, but then he swept his hesitation aside by telling himself that all slums looked familiar. From where he stood, he could see through several of the windows and into the rooms beyond.

He couldn’t have picked a better firing position himself.

A low wall ran around the edge of the rooftop, just high enough to act as support for his weapon. It was as good a spot as any and Nate settled down, prepared to do the job and be done with it. Assassination wasn’t anything new for him; he had fifteen confirmed kills on his military record. It was the first time he’d ever taken out a civilian, he had to admit, but that wouldn’t matter. Killing was killing in his view.

Do the job, go home, and figure out how you’re going to get out of this mess, he told himself.

He opened up the case and swiftly assembled the rifle, barely having to look at it as he did so. He kept his eye on the house down the block, watching for movement in any of the rooms. It was still early, just before dawn, so he might be sitting here awhile, but he didn’t want to take the chance of missing his target. Maybe the guy was an early riser, like he was. If he could get him before the street around him began to wake up, so much the better.

A thought occurred to him. What if it’s a woman? The note hadn’t given any indication one way or the other just who his target was, never mind whether it was a male or a female. He thought about it for a moment and then realized it didn’t make much difference to him. He’d killed female fighters during the Faith War; was this any different? Given what he’d seen yesterday in regard to what happened to an operative who failed an assignment, he was as much fighting for his life now as he had been back on the battlefield. If he didn’t do the job, his recruiter would “flip his switch,” as he’d said, and turn him, quite literally, inside out.

Rifle assembled, he settled into position, kneeling in front of the low wall at the edge of the roof with his rifle braced over the top. He brought the scope to his eye and began scanning the windows for movement.

A few of the lights were on, indicating someone was likely up and about, so he concentrated his attention on those rooms. He could see what looked to be a kitchen and a living room on the lower floor and possibly a bedroom, though it might be a bathroom, on the upper.

There!

A man’s upper body came into view, framed in the window, and Nate’s body acted almost without conscious thought. He had the sight picture settled on a point just to the right of the target’s nose and was pulling the trigger when the man turned his face into the light and Nate recognized him.

Too late! His mind screamed, but he jerked his hands to the left as the gun went off, hoping it was enough.

The bullet left the muzzle of his weapon, shot across the space between them in the blink of an eye, and slammed into the wood along the windowsill instead of striking his target as planned.

Nate breathed a sigh of relief and slumped down against the wall he’d been kneeling against. His heart was pounding and sweat was pooling in the small of his back as the adrenaline dump washed through his system. He didn’t want to think about how close he’d just come to wiping himself out of existence.

The man he’d been sent here to kill was… himself.

Fuck!

He sat there, his back against the wall, rifle in hand, and wanted to hit himself for being so stupid. How could he have missed this?

Clearly he’d seen something yesterday that he shouldn’t have. That had made someone back at Limbus nervous enough to order not just his death, but the complete elimination of everything he’d done in the last several years, judging from the age of his other self. They weren’t just trying to kill him; they were trying to wipe the last several years of his life completely!

That pissed him off.

The question was what he was going to do about it.

He couldn’t just go back and claim that he’d done the job; the very act of doing so would make it obvious that he hadn’t. Going back would also put him in range of whatever it was the recruiter had used to turn the other agent inside out and Nate had no desire to see what that felt like up close and personal.

There was just as much risk in staying here, however. What was it that sonofabitch had said? Something about the little bastards in his bloodstream? Nate glanced down at the spot on his arm where he’d received the hypo shot less than an hour ago. What if the trigger for his punishment was already inside him, just waiting to be activated? Or worse, would turn itself on when the seventy-two hour mission deadline passed?

The second injection was designed to neutralize the effects of the first, he realized, in a moment of stunning clarity. Without it, the operative would essentially self-destruct. It was a fail-safe mechanism; it kept the operative from remaining in the past and fucking things up in the future.

Nor could he simply hire someone to go and waste his recruiter. If the bit about the farcaster being keyed to his personal DNA signature was correct, he was the only person who could use it.

Unless…

He glanced over the edge of the roof and back toward his target. He could see the other him moving around in the kitchen, oblivious to the twist of fate that had very nearly ended both their lives only seconds before. Aside from himself, he was the only other person he could think of that might have an interest in how all this turned out.

You’re nuts, he told himself, but given the situation, that was hardly a reason not to do what he had in mind.

Five minutes later he was standing on the front steps of the target house, gun case in hand, knocking loudly on the front door.

After a few minutes the overhead light went on and he heard the sounds of someone fumbling with the locks on the other side. Then the door was thrown open and the figure of a man filled the doorway.

“Do you have any idea…”

That was as far as he got. There was a pause as the man standing in the doorway finally got a good look at him and tried to come to grips with what he was seeing. After a moment there was a whispered, “What the fuck?”

Nate knew exactly how he felt.

He felt a smile stretch across his face as he said, “Hello, Nate. I’m Nate. We have a few things to talk about. Do you mind if I come in?”

Another pause, longer this time, and then the other man held the door open and beckoned him inside.

Just as Nate knew he would.

Recruiter 46795 sat behind his desk, alternating between watching the mission clock on the wall and the red folder sitting atop his desk, next to a handheld device that contained a single switch. Personally he was betting on the folder disappearing before the clock ran out. Operator Benson didn’t appear to be the smartest apple in the bunch. Clever, and curious as well, too curious actually, but smart? Not so much.

More than likely he’d carry out the mission assigned to him, never even realizing until it was too late that he’d just gunned down his younger self, thereby erasing every future event from that point in his timeline, wiping out both versions of himself, the past and the future, with the simple act of pulling the trigger.

It was an elegant solution and one Recruiter 46795 was particularly pleased to have crafted. Eliminating all traces of Benson would also eliminate the failure to control Benson from the recruiter’s record, thereby solving that problem as well.

An hour passed.

Then two.

With each passing moment his frown deepened and his anxiety rose. He was confident the nanobites would do the trick when the mission deadline passed, but he hated to be forced to rely on them. It was such an incomplete…

“Did you really think you’d get rid of me that easily?” Nate Benson’s voice asked from the darkness just beyond the doorway.

Recruiter 46795 didn’t hesitate. His hand shot out and slammed palm down on the device, triggering the switch, suddenly thrilled that he was going to personally be able to resolve the problem and avoid any lingering doubts.

His triumphed shout died stillborn in his throat, however, as the younger Nate Benson stepped, unharmed, out of the darkness and into the light.

The gun in his hand loomed very large.

“You can stop that now,” Nate said, nodding toward the desktop, where Recruiter 46795’s hand was repeatedly slamming itself down on the switch.

He jerked his hand back and put it in his lap, unable to believe what was happening.

“How?” was all he managed to get out.

Benson smiled.

“Syncing the farcaster to the operator’s DNA is a pretty neat trick; keeps the average citizen from stumbling on it and mucking things all up, I’d guess. But when the shooter and the victim happen to have the same DNA, as well as the same desire for self-preservation, well, there you’ve got a problem.”

The gun in Benson’s hand rose slightly to point directly at Recruiter 46795’s face and then he knew no more.

The farcaster whined, shook, and then seemed to shimmer before his very eyes before going still. Nate Benson walked over and looked inside the porthole. Frowning, he punched the buttons on the keypad to open up the door and looked inside. On the floor of the farcaster was a padded envelope, the kind you might mail things in.

Nate reached inside and picked it up. Opening it, he found a single sheet of paper and a full hypo spray.

He glanced at the note as he readied the hypo.

Dear Nate,

Sorry I had to do this, but you really didn’t expect me to come back there, did you? Not after all that crap you told me about the war and life afterwards? Thanks but you can keep that shit. Oh, and don’t try to use this farcaster again; I’ve reprogrammed it to send whoever uses it to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Nate

Nate laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was just like him to take advantage of a situation. Hell, he’d been doing it for years.

Still smiling, he picked up the hypo and injected himself with it, imagining he could feel the nanobites in his bloodstreams dying off as the antidote washed through his system.

Let the kid have his fun, he thought. In about another six months the farcaster he’d used on his second mission was going to show up in a warehouse outside of Philadelphia and he could always use that one to go home if he chose to do so.

For now though, he’d hang around here. With all the information in his head about what was coming over the next several years, he was in position to make a good deal of money.

That wouldn’t be so bad, now would it?

Whistling to himself, Nate left the apartment behind and headed out to live this day over for the second time.

The streets were silent by the time Matthew turned the final page on the astonishing life of Nate Benson. Evening revelers had long since gone to whatever destination would hold them for the night, and the streets were empty of all but shadows. In the silence, Matthew sat wishing he had a fire so that he might consign the manuscript to the flames. But somehow he knew that even if he had the opportunity, he could never follow through. No, he had to know more. Picking up the phone, he dialed his friend Charlie. He just hoped he was working the night shift.

The phone rang three times before Charlie answered.

“Fifth precinct.”

“Charlie,” Matthew said, and he shuddered as he heard the tremor in his own voice, “it’s Matthew.” There was silence on the other end.

“Matthew? Man, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Look, Charlie, I’ve got a question I need to ask you. Do you know anything about a girl named Angela Endicott?”

There was laughing on the other end of the line. “Angela Endicott? Of course I know her. Her uncle’s one of the biggest players in the city. Why do you ask? Matthew? You there? Hello?”

Matthew had thought that the call would make things better. Charlie was a detective, one of Boston’s finest. And if he had never heard of Angela Endicott, then she simply did not exist. And not existing would make the book that sat before him nothing more than fiction, and fiction can’t hurt you. Not normally, at least.

But Angela did exist. And a girl like Angela Endicott simply could not be, not in Matthew’s world. Not in a world of order. A girl like Angela Endicott was chaos personified.

“Matthew!”

It was the concern in his friend’s voice — and oh, if only he knew — that finally shook Matthew from his stupor. “Do you know if she’s ever been kidnapped?” he blurted out.

“Kidnapped?” Charlie said, laughing. “Of course not.”

Matthew should have taken comfort there, but there was something off in Charlie’s voice. A hitch. A pause. A singular moment of shock.

“Charlie,” Matthew began, trying to stay as calm and even as possible, “have you ever heard of a company called Limbus?”

For a long moment, Charlie said nothing. Then, in a voice that Matthew had never before heard from his old friend, he spoke.

“Matthew, I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, but you’ve got to get out of it. Get out of it right now.”

Before Matthew could say a word, the line went silent. He put the phone on his desk next to the book. For a moment, he couldn’t bring himself to look at it, but then he couldn’t bring himself not to. Before he knew what he was doing, the book was open, and the next story began.