Red Queen Hypothesis
The glowing line that connected earth and sky rose endlessly toward the uppermost level of the still-unfinished orbital elevator. Inside the car that climbed without pause, I muttered to myself.
I hadn't been looking for a reply, but Eileen answered anyway.
"Huh."
It was a weekday, yet no work was being done. This was a flagship project the contractor had thrown every resource at, so money troubles seemed unlikely. Something smelled off. Still, I had no solid guesses, so I kept my face neutral.
Does it have anything to do with those guys loitering near the entrance?
I'd assumed the suits meant corporate security and shaken them off without much trouble. Looking back, they might not have been legitimate guards at all. Not that it mattered to our job.
The altitude readout had already passed two thousand meters. Even unfinished, the structure was already this high. I found myself quietly curious about what it would look like when complete. Our client, however, had no intention of letting it reach that point.
The company building the orbital elevator was a direct rival. They couldn't just sit back and watch them succeed. Classic corporate sabotage. The request we'd received was simple: disrupt construction. Total destruction would have been ideal, but the facility was engineered to withstand the stresses of an orbital tether. Realistically, it was impossible. Delaying the project by taking out the upper levels would have to be enough.
With that thought in mind, I glanced at JL sharing the elevator with me. He was still killing time, cloudy eyes fixed on his rifle. This kind of work didn't seem to affect him much. Then again, corporate wars weren't exactly new. With more experience than me, he'd probably run ops like this more times than he could count.
Familiar work for me, too.
Looked at another way, it was the same kind of mission I'd carried out often as a Hound. Striking enemy infrastructure. The only real difference was that the target wasn't a military installation this time.
After what felt like an endless stretch of waiting, the elevator finally reached the top. The doors opened to a desolate rooftop whipped by fierce wind. Skeletal steel beams jutted upward in chaotic clusters. We grabbed our gear and prepared to begin.
"...?"
But soon after, voices drifted across the rooftop that was supposed to be empty. I stopped JL with a hand signal and quickly ducked behind a nearby support structure. He caught on immediately and took cover beside me.
We held our breath. The voices became clear. Carefully, we peered out toward the source.
At the edge of the roof, two men stood talking.
Who the hell are they?
The construction schedule was empty. There shouldn't be any workers. So what were these two doing here?
So this is the stink I smelled.
It made sense now—why an entire weekday shift had been cleared. I pushed the stray thoughts aside and observed them calmly.
One wore a neat suit. The other had on a dark jacket. A briefcase was being exchanged between them. Some kind of deal, clearly.
Suddenly I heard JL swallow hard. The reaction was so unlike him that I glanced over without thinking. Our eyes met. He shut his mouth and looked down. A moment later, his voice came through the comm, low and careful.
So he was one of JL's old war buddies. A regular army soldier who'd fought against the corporations.
"I see."
While listening, I peeked out again. The man in the dark jacket was accepting yet another briefcase from the one in the suit. I'd seen enough scenes like this to guess what was happening.
Payment for a traitor.
Once a man betrays, you never fully trust him again. Not only had he defected from the regular army to a megacorp, now he was apparently selling out the very company that had taken him in.
The data Eileen sent a moment later confirmed it.
Just as I'd suspected. We'd come to finish one job and stumbled onto something far more valuable. As a bonus, I got to see what kind of man JL's old comrade had become.
After a quick discussion over comms, we decided to stay hidden, observe, and begin our work once the two men left. No point getting dragged into someone else's mess and creating unnecessary enemies.
But events quickly spiraled in a direction we hadn't anticipated.
The man in the suit suddenly received a message. He panicked, fumbling in confusion, then drew a pistol and aimed it at Jude. The howling wind made their voices impossible to hear clearly, so I fine-tuned the auditory receptors in my ears and amplified the frequency.
The argument came through sharp and raw.
"You fucked us! How stupid do you have to be to let them catch your tail?"
"What the hell are you talking about?! I checked behind me the whole way here!"
"Save the excuses. This deal never happened. You were never here."
"You son of a—"
A sharp gunshot cracked across the rooftop. The two men opened fire on each other. At the same time, five elevators behind us powered up simultaneously and began their ascent to the top floor.
We split up instantly, finding new cover.
The firefight on the roof lasted only a short time. The man in the suit fled first. He seemed to have lost the briefcase in the chaos—his hands were empty. He sprinted for the external emergency stairs.
Jude rose to his feet as well. He scanned the area desperately, but the bag was nowhere to be found.
"Goddammit!"
With enemies closing in, he chose survival over money and ran.
The troops who poured out of the elevators found an empty rooftop. Realizing everyone had already fled, they quickly headed back down.
In a single moment the roof had erupted into chaos. In the next, it fell silent again.
We remained hidden a while longer, watching, before finally stepping out.
"Things got messy," I said.
JL gave a silent nod. We shrugged and returned to work.
I pulled a charge with the right yield from the bag at my hip and got on with the job. While planting explosives among the steel framework, I noticed something odd.
A large briefcase was wedged between two bare girders. When I stood and looked around, I realized it was near the spot where Jude and the suited man had been shooting at each other. Both had fled in such a hurry that neither had noticed the bag drop.
I lay flat, stretched my arm down through the beams, and carefully caught the handle before the case could slip and fall. JL, who'd been watching from a distance, walked over as I hauled it up.
"What is that?"
"About to find out."
I attached a small breaching charge to the lock and detonated it. Black smoke puffed out as the mechanism clicked open.
When I lifted the lid, a rush of pure white preservative gas poured out like a waterfall.
"This is..."
Inside were transparent tubes. Fifteen small vials, each about the width of my finger, arranged in three neat rows of five.
"Drugs?"
Violet Science was a military contractor. Drugs didn't fit their profile. Most combat stimulants came out of pharmaceutical firms, not arms manufacturers.
I held one of the vials up to the light. The red liquid inside caught the sun, staining it crimson. Unnatural bubbles drifted lazily within.
"Hmm..."
"What are you going to do with it?" JL asked.
I slid the vial back into the case and sealed it, then tossed the whole thing to him.
"Might come in handy someday."
"That's pretty impulsive."
"Suit yourself."
JL shrugged and secured the briefcase. We finished our work as planned, brought the top of the orbital elevator down in a satisfying symphony of explosions and collapsing steel, and headed home.
Fortunately there was no unwanted commotion. And we returned with an unexpected prize.