Moonstrike 26

Apparently space piracy was pretty forgiving to beginners. That should have been pleasing in the circumstances.

She was in hell, actually. Ji Min was making arrangements to send her baby siblings off into space and she was grateful for it because the alternative was worse. This was actually hell.

“I can train them,” Issa reassured from the other end of a video call. She popped some gum. “You sure you don't wanna come? See some new places, eat untranslatable vegetables in the starlight?” She clearly saw Ji Min waver and Issa wheedled, “I heard they made a new root vegetable just last week. You don't want in on that?”

Ji Min very much wanted to come. But unless she was never going to come back to earth, she couldn't right now. She'd fuck up her life too badly by going M.I.A. from her new government job. That was the kind of thing that got you on lists you can't get back off of. Besides, if Mom came by, maybe they could work things out. Make another deal.

“Not right now,” she settled on. “There's a few things I need to sort out.”

Issa nodded amiably. “Alright. So we need to move up the timeline to get off planet. Do you have time to help me steal that rocket this weekend?”

“What?” Ari said from the background, aghast. “You said it was a NASA collaboration-”

At the same time Min Joon was trying to ask, “A rocket? Are those passenger vehicles?”

“I can make it work,” Ji Min said. She ignored her siblings. “What are the odds you could use two sets of untrained hands in the workshop starting today?”

The rocket they needed to take wasn't their transport. Issa just needed it for parts. She'd been fiddling on her new ship for a while but there was a lot to do when they had the last components. Ji Min knew enough to help when they actually had the damn thing, but surely there was prep to do.

Issa snorted. “I can pick ‘em up and give them some safety training,” she agreed. “You thinking your parents might be tracking you?”

“Yeah, but fuck if I know how.” Ji Min shrugged. “My banking?” She guessed hopelessly. “Maybe scouring security footage? I have no idea how they do it.”

It hadn't been tested in a really long time. She hadn't been a criminal at all and didn't know the tricks for hiding. Maybe she was better than them by now. But she didn't want to risk the kids on that optimism. Issa was totally off grid. If it was money or cameras that Mom tracked, Issa was a much better bet than Ji Min.

Issa snorted. “Good luck dodging them,” she said. She clanged the metal tool in her hand against something and then put it down. She wiped sweat off her forehead. “Alright. Ari? Min Joon?” She called cheerfully. “You wanna learn about interstellar transport? There's so many fun regulations!”

Ari groaned. Min Joon perched himself on the hotel desk and stared balefully at Ji Min. “Your friendship makes more sense now,” he said. “But yes. Thanks for the pick up.”

Issa smacked her lips in a sparkling kiss, gracefully acknowledging the gratitude. “Want me to come tonight or in the morning?”

“As soon as you can,” Ji Min said. Her stomach twisted. She felt like she was gonna cry. She could wait to do that until Issa took the kids. It felt like she was co-parenting after an amicable divorce.

“The morning would be fine,” Ari said, scrunching up her brow. “We're nowhere near home.”

M.J. made a wobbly hand gesture. “We have no idea when Mom left to find us,” he pointed out. “For all we know she's in the parking lot.”

Ji Min shuddered. She glared at him a moment late. He wasn't wrong but it was horrifying.

No. No, if they already knew where she was, Dad wouldn't have called. He was hoping she'd tell them where to go.

Issa blew out air, sending messy tendris of hair flying out. “I'll wash my hands and be there in maybe 40 minutes,” she estimated. “That alright?”

“Yeah, I'd appreciate that a lot,” M.J. said. He looked excited. Ari had a lot more reaservations, judging by the frown on her pretty face. She was keeping a pretty strong anti crime stance.

At least one of them was going to have a good time.

Issa came. Ji Min sent her siblings off with a fairly good approximate of stoicism. About five minutes after they left she realized that Min Joon had left a math textbook. She stuffed it in her bag and tried not to be maudlin about it being the only sign they'd been there.

The next morning she checked out and got a new hotel room somewhere cheaper. She didn't unpack. She'd change hotels daily for a while and see if Mom turned up.

The message from her informant was still waiting. Ji Min didn't care that much anymore. But she couldn't quite forget about it either. Listless, she pressed play on the sound file.

An ambiguous voice came through. Not high, not low. Rat City accent, maybe. It didn't sound electronically modified.

“I hope that this helps as a show of faith,” they said. “Some identifying information for you, a recording you could play back in court if it came to that.” They had the gall to sound amused that she wanted some kind of guarantee. “I'll be in the facility tomorrow night, 10pm. Be there or don't.”

Shit. The message ended. Ji Min scowled and stood up to pace.

She should have listened to it  earlier. She would have had more time to think it through. She had today, of course, but that wasn't a lot of time when she didn't know who this person was.

‘Not that an extra 8 hours would have helped me find them.’

Charitably, she could assume they were impatient and wanted to make a move on what they were sure was a human trafficking ring.

Less charitably, it was an attempt to pressure her into acting recklessly. She'd told them what she needed to feel comfortable working with them, and they hadn't provided it. She really should stay by her guns and out of it.

But what if this situation went sideways? She did think the tipster was right. They hadn't been falsifying all those documents. Her gut said caution, but when she thought it through it didn't seem like she was a target. They probably already knew her name and where she was, judging by how creepy they'd been. If they'd wanted to report her for something they would have. They genuinely needed her help-

Oh. Oh, hello.

Ji Min unzipped her biggest piece of luggage and started laying out equipment. This was going to be her first field test with the forearm shield that the costume technicians had dreamed up. She wasn't totally sure that was a good idea but she wanted, more than anything, to get out of this alive and be able to take care of her family obligations.

She was going out to meet the investigator. This person was obviously a techno creep of the highest order. They would probably be able to figure out how her parents had been able to track her. If she had a good working relationship, then they'd help her.

At the right time Ji Min found herself outside the building she'd cased. She waited a while to see if her contact was going to show.

Either they were late, they were even earlier than she'd been, or they had found another way in.

Fine. Time to go.

She came down the chute into a dark hallway. Her shoes tapping on the laminate were the only sound aside from her breathing.

The whole place smelled like industrial cleaners. Ji Min went fox-still and actively listened for long, tense seconds in the dark.

If there was anyone living in the facility, they were being really quiet about it.

Well. She fished out her light. Ji Min paused a moment before turning it on, heart pounding a bit too hard. If someone was in here with a gun, it would be really easy to just shoot at the only point of light.

She steeled herself and clicked it on. It was a cold white light and illuminated the hallway- empty in both directions. She was almost to the end, so Ji Min backtracked to the last door and cautiously slipped into some sort of office. Her light swept over bolted file cabinets, a generous desk, and a full wall of screens. They were dark. Off. Probably still being recorded.

"Wow," she said quietly. "That seems normal and fine. It's probably just a gaming set up." She ran her light over it. She was trying really hard not to think about why someone might have a room full of security cameras and then not actively monitor them. She didn't want to fight a security team, but it would have been much less unsettling if there'd been someone watching the cameras. This was a record for later perusal.

So. Who was watching the feed from ten cameras in this office, and who were they creeping on?

The least grim option was that this facility was totally deserted. Hope springs eternal and all that shit, but she didn't feel too confident in it.

Ji Min swept the room for anything obviously interesting and came up with very little. She took pictures of a few things that Alex might be able to look up, and then went back out into the hallway.

The next room was more of a standard workplace. An open office had a huge white workspace cluttered with laptops. There was a counter along the far wall. The inner wall in the dark direction from the head office reflected the dark interior back at her. She almost dismissed it as unimportant, turning to leave the room when she saw something dark on the floor out of the corner of her eye. She glanced back into the workspace, searching the floor for whatever it is that should be laid out there.

There was nothing there, because the wall wasn't a mirror. It was a glass observation wall. There were three consoles built into the wall next to it, each steadily displaying a string of numbers on an unlit screen.

…she had a really bad feeling in her stomach about this.

Every latent instinct and helpful ancestor told her to turn around and leave the way she'd come. But Ji Min's feet carried her to what she realized was a glass wall into a sleek white room- 3 of them. There were three rooms separated out by 6 inch thick walls.

Inside each room, there was something long and lumpy crumpled on the floor.

Ji Min didn't know why she had the thought she had. Maybe it was intuition, the cumulation of all the bad feelings she'd had in this place. Maybe it was paranoia and imagination. She really wanted it to be an overactive imagination.

She didn't want to see this. She didn't want to know. But Ji Min had come all this way. So she lifted her light and directed it into each cell so that she could see for certain that there were three human bodies lying on the floor.

Time stopped for her. It might have been a dissociative fugue. She was swaying in place.

The sterile environment made it hard to truly appreciate what she was looking at. She was about a foot away from a dead person, and all she could smell was lemon scented cleaner. That was some really solid room sealing.

They were in different states of dec- of breakdown. The one on the left was hard to identify as a person. The middle was a mostly intact woman with a severely broken skull gaping upwards in horror, dried blood all around. The one on the right was… oddly flat.

She didn't quite know how she knew. But Ji Min directed her flashlight up.

In each cell, the ceiling was a corrugated steel that winked reflected light back at her, except for where it was covered in dried blood.

Jesus fucking Christ.

There was a moan. Ji Min jumped before she realized it was coming from her. She untwisted her fingers from her shirt front. She didn't remember grabbing onto herself.

She felt trapped. She was a rat in a laboratory. Ji Min cast a wild look around the innocuous workspace, seeing it in a different light. This was a laboratory and they were conducting human experiments that either ended or began with crushing the subjects.

Began. Couldn't be the end of it. They'd clean up the body if it was just about disposal.

She bit down hard on her lip to keep in the horrible keening sound that wanted to come out. Blood bloomed- and holy shit, she sucked her lip into her mouth, suddenly frantic at the realization that she did not want to leave her DNA here. She didn't want these people to know anything about her. She didn't want anyone to know she'd been here.

Her heart was thumping painfully loud. It took all the discipline that she could muster to use her light in one shaking hand and camera in the other to photograph the bodies and the unlit screen that matches each of them.

She went back into the hallway. With dread, she counted the doors.

Seven more.

For a wild moment, she was ready to run. Her legs tensed for movement and she raised a hand to the grate. She could just climb back up. If this was a trap, it hadn't sprung shut yet. She could go.

But what if her contact was here?

He could have been luring her here. Maybe there was never really an investigator at all, and this was a trap for her.

But what if that wasn't it. What if there was some other poor fucker in this nightmare facility, and the scientists found them first? Ji Min was a brute, but the person who'd been giving her information drops was probably some normal ass person.

'I am going to be sick when I get out.'

But not here, because of DNA. Ji Min screwed up what passed for courage from a criminal and ghosted down the hallway to check each room. She started turning the light off as she approached so that any ambient light from inside a room would alert her.

The next two rooms were just like the first lab. The next one was a break room with sofas and a refrigerator. The next one was the same as the other labs. And then the next one was exactly the same, except it didn't have any bodies in it.

Ji Min stood there a little too long, breathing unevenly. She could feel that her eyes were too wide.

The glass walls weren't there. When she looked up, she could see the faint hint of the seam where they would slam down. So far as an inexpert examination of the room would show, it was just a laboratory with a slightly wide open space off to one side.

If she'd come the other way, she would have stepped in there. She would have. Would the door have slammed shut if she had?

She had to crouch down in a recovery position and breathe for a while, smothering the gasps by pressing her face between her knees. Fuck.

After a while, she stood up. She turned and left the room, feeling distant from the horror. She might as well have been possessed. She would have been grateful if that was what was happening.

She had two more rooms to check. If her contact hadn't made it here, then they just weren't going to meet.

She turned off her light. She approached the next door. She stopped and wondered if she was hallucinating the faint light coming from inside.

Well. Fuck. Ji Min ran her fingers over the prototype shield on her left arm, checking that it was still there. She curled her right hand into a fist around her flashlight and then forcibly relaxed it.

She took a breath. She turned the doorknob, and the light inside turned off as she swung it open.

Well, fuck. She ducked instinctively below the attack she expected.

Nothing happened.

She turned on the flashlight and swept the room fast. Laptop, the worktable she'd need to check the opposite side of, the gleam of light reflecting off glass, and the dark silhouette of a man standing inside one of the observation chambers.