Untouchable (LGBT - SciFi - Romance)

Chapter 47

A man dressed all in black, took a long narrow-bladed knife from the belt around his waist. He paused to listen carefully, once again checking there were no unexpected sounds from the garden behind him, only the murmur of the sea in the distance. There was just enough light from the moons to see what he was doing and he leant forward and carefully inserted the blade into the tiny gap between the window and the sill. He gently twisted the blade until the catch popped open, then slowly raised the window pane until the space was big enough for him to climb in. Although he was confident he had already disabled the alarm, he hesitated a second before committing himself.

He knew the owner was away, off planet attending to business on Capella, but he couldn't afford to take anything for granted. He had already disposed of two guards, but for all he knew, there might be more, actually inside the house. He exchanged the knife for a stunner from his belt, holding it ready in his left hand and climbed quickly in through the window. He left it open in case he needed to leave that way and waited for a moment, listening and letting his eyes adjust to the darker light. There was a faint glow coming from various appliances around the room. He was in the kitchen as he had expected, kneeling on the kitchen table in fact. He stepped down to the floor and took a couple of valuable minutes to open the door of each room in the house, and there were ten of them, confirming that he was alone. He also unlocked all the doors to the outside, ready for a quick exit if needed.

Without allowing himself the false luxury of relaxing even a fraction, he returned to the room he had identified as the study, or office. He went straight to the console unit and powered it up as far as he could without being the credited user, and squirted an invisible mist of nanobots into every aperture that he could see. The tiny tube had cost him a fortune but worth every credit if it did as it was supposed to. The nanobots should penetrate the unit, carrying their program-corrupting virus with them. It was absolutely the latest thing in console hackware. Not only would it corrupt all the information and programs in this particular unit but also in every other device this one was networked to.

He could have smashed the unit in front of him, he supposed, there were several large rocks in the garden that could have come in handy for the purpose; but this was the only way he could both be certain all the information on it would be destroyed, and take out the entire network in one hit.

He took one last look around the room, a matter of habit as much as anything. The room was in the centre of the house with no outside-facing walls and no windows. A large skylight in the ceiling would allow natural light to fill the room in the daytime, an exotic concept to anyone raised on a space station. He took another look at the skylight. Was part of it missing? Surely that was the night sky he was looking at, without the thin plas coating to protect the room from the elements. A cold shiver went down the back of his neck. Something was wrong. The only part of the room he couldn't see was the area behind the desk and he made himself walk around to check it out, just to put that momentary fear to rest. And found his instincts had not betrayed him.

There was absolutely no way the man on the floor could still be alive. His head was at right angles to his body.

He couldn't be a hundred per cent certain of the man's identity in the dim light, but he didn't wait around any longer to find out. The room was now a trap, intentional or not, and he had to get out. In mere seconds, he was through the house and out the nearest door. He circled round through the gardens, every sense screamingly alert, until he reached the hoverski, still tied against the quay where he had left it. One quick scan with the heat sensor confirmed nobody was hiding nearby, waiting for his return, and he climbed onto the machine, automatically adjusting the setting to its quietest. He kept close to shore until he was sufficiently far enough away from the house to risk heading out into open sea, then set it skimming across the water as fast as it would go.