Sin Nombre
It wasn't that he had any fondness for the syndicate - far from it - he was under no illusions as to the nature of society, and what that meant for the rights of the individual. He lived in as much fear of the midnight call, of the irate enforcer, of disappearing as anyone else that he knew, but to him the idea of violent revolt had always been just as bad - a cure more terrible then the disease.
Besides, even if he had been so inclined, fighting the syndicate was madness. Total, utter and unimaginable madness. It wasn't even a point of debate. It was just insane to try and take on the syndicate. Even as well armed and supplied as the media made the resistance fighters seem, it was still comparable to fighting heavy armor with thrown rocks; a heroic gesture, sure, but hard on the health.
These were all things he reflected on as he sat there floor of the corridor with his back to the wall. He could certainly appreciate the irony of it all; he supposed that he had always wanted to be well known, he just hadn't ever considered the lengths that he would have to go to to achieve that dream.
Not that it had ended up being a conscious choice in the end. It was just something that he'd stumbled into, but, listening to the syndicate chatter, on the com he had stolen from the dead fox at the security check-point, he was quite sure that the response troops weren't really interested in a discussion on the metaphysics of choice. No, really the only way he had of making a point anymore was the rifle he had clutched to his chest.
The poor guard had never even seen it coming. Even now he could still see the fox if he closed his eyes - see the expression on his face, the dull complacency that comes from long hours of monotonous work and how it changed so quickly to alertness, unbelief, and outright terror as he found himself staring down the muzzle of a pistol. He shuddered now to think of it - he had never actually shot a firearm before that moment, and now...
No, the people who had given him that pistol had only given him a few words of advice as the issued it to him and hurried him on to the next section. It was too dangerous to actually shoot the thing, they had said, with all the roving patrols and listening stations the syndicate ran any more. They might as well run up a big yellow flag advertising their presence as run a shooting range, they said.
It was to be a common theme in his sort experience with the resistance; as he thought about it, he realized that it had only been four or maybe five days since he had followed the vixen into that east-end warehouse.
Even now he wasn't sure what why he did it. It's not that she was anything memorable - certainly no Helen to launch ships for. But, in a way, that was where her beauty lay.
She hadn't any of the usual enhancements that you might see on a female her age and caste, none of the latest augmentations that you would need to get into the hottest soma spots in the city - no reflective iris implants, no obvious cybernetics to flaunt what wealth she might possess, no figure enhancers, not even any designer pheromones. He was sure now that was what got him - he had a deep and abiding respect for the traditionalist movement; even though he had gotten himself a couple of memory augmentations (you really can't get by in university any more without them - his parents had even paid for the procedure) he still felt a deep kinship with the movement. And here she was, talking with him on the public transport, talking about things that interested him, while his words seemed to strike a chord in her as well. The way she smiled when he expressed his opinion, the way her brilliant green eyes held his own as she replied, it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go with her.
They had said that the short training time was necessary to keep the syndicate from getting too suspicious; if you just dropped off the face of the earth for a month or so, you couldn't just reappear on the grid somewhere at random. It set off all sorts of alarm bells as all the wrong people started asking all the wrong sorts of questions about what you had been doing all that time away, and who you had been doing it with. No, don't worry, a couple of days was absolutely fine.
He'd believed them too. He'd seen what had happened to classmates who had missed too much of their course work. There wasn't ever anything threatening in the questions they asked sure, but, questions from the syndicate were really the last thing he wanted to be answering at the moment.
They had given him a place to sleep and food to eat, and she had come to him there by night in the common dorm, shedding layers of hiply square work clothes and army surplus, silhouetted in the moonlight that filtered in through the window-wells, young, shapely, perfect.
Of course, there had been other females in the past, others that he had pledged his undying love to, but never like this; as he lay with her there, cradling her soft warmth against his body, as she looked up to him with those eyes of hers, all the outside world faded away and he knew he would follow her anywhere.
Every night he stayed there she would come to him, tipping on silent paws, and every night she would leave sometime before sunrise, as quiet as a cat. She never woke him in her departure, leaving him to awake with the lingering memory of her touch, and the dusky scent of her musk still in his nose.
After all that, it was only natural that they would end up working together. He had been told to go back to his life and await the call, and he didn't have long to wait.
The briefing was the most time he had ever spent in one place with the resistance, the most detail he had heard from any single mouth, and he was thankful for his memory augmentations. Maps had to be memorized, key codes, provisions and escape routes. Their contact had finally gotten them what they were looking for and they may not get any further opportunity. They couldn't screw this up.
He had thought the syndicate jump-suits they were issued were frightfully clichéd, but the pass-cards they were given were valid enough; the guards at the gates didn't even look up from their list of scheduled arrivals as they waved them through.
Strictly speaking, what came next wasn't supposed to happen, but, it wasn't completely unexpected. His vixen, playing the part of his syndicate section head, was asked to come and answer some questions about the manifest on their delivery. It wasn't in the plans, but there was a provision for this. There was a provision for everything. He was to deliver the package to the agreed on destination, and return to meet her at another agreed upon destination, points on a memorised map where they would advance upon their objective.
Simple enough. The delivery didn't take but five minutes, and he was on his way back when the message came through his ear-piece, the three, slow, evenly spaced clicks of a transmit button being depressed and released. The signal to abort.
It was the bit of the briefing that dealt with the provisions for an aborted mission that was one of his more lucid memories, and he reacted perfectly. He didn't pause to wonder what had happened, didn't wonder who had screwed up, he only knew that he needed to reach the extract point as soon as possible.
And he would have made it too, if it wasn't for that pesky guard. Though he couldn't really blame the guy, he was only doing his job, just a spindly, raggedly little fox, apologizing for the inconvenience, but he would have to check his papers. There had been an attempted infiltration you see, and everyone had to be re-checked, wouldn't take a minute, terrible bother.
Plugging the pass-card into his computer, the fox turned back to the stack of paperwork on the other side of his desk and continued talking, not really noticing or caring that his words weren't being attended too. Glancing from the fox to the computer he felt the pistol in his pocket, heavy against his hand, and frowned. The fox's voice had dropped to an almost inaudible level by now, talking more to himself then then anyone else; grumbling about his increased work hours, the tightened security measures, and the state of the weather.
It couldn't have been more then ten seconds, but glancing from the fox to the computer as it ran though its unknowable permutations and he grumbled on about everything grumble-able under the sun, it felt like an age to be standing there with the self-consious weight of his pistol in his right hand, an age before the computer made an unpleasant sound and spat the card back out and another age as the guard sighed and put down his pen, turning to examine what the computer had to tell him.
Well that's what he would have done had he not had a pistol shoved into his face.
If there had been more distance between the pistol and the guard, the fox would have survived. It was the first thing he had been told about shooting, squeeze the trigger, don't jerk it, smashing the trigger makes the pistol shift in your hand, and that shifts the aim too, see. And he had most certainly jerked when he shot that poor fox, thrusting the pistol forward towards him in his panic, his index finger mashing down the trigger.
The incorrect trigger pull, combined with his over anticipation of the recoil lifted the pistol's muzzle a good three inches off target and were he standing a foot further back, the bullet would have passed clean over the foxes head and burried itself into the wall, but at this range he couldn't miss.
Instead of the hoped for center of mass shot, the bullet caught the fox in his left eye. Just as effective, but not quite as tidy.
He was still trembling from the experience as he sat there in the hall, clutching his rifle, no longer needing the dead guard's ear piece to hear the syndicate response troops getting nearer.
It was just as well they were coming for him, after all, he had always wanted to be famous, hadn't he.