Dismantle The Sun

Chapter 13

Gwen slumped back in her chair looking despondently at her console. Sighing deeply she massaged her temples where a headache was forming and threw a dark look across at her colleague Stebe who sat at the next console eating a large bag of crisps, chewing with his mouth open as he loudly and incorrectly explained the data their team was looking at. Her friend, Suki, threw her a sympathetic look from across the room and the same, very impolite, thought crossed both of their minds. Motherfucker.

The room they sat in was dark and bustling, the console screens glowing gently with the familiar yellow glow of spreadsheets. It seemed that time didn't move.

"The inconsistencies in these two data sets means that there's a mistake somewhere" Stebe continued. Gwen smiled her sweetest smile.

"The data was collected on different days, that explains it" she said, patiently. Stebe looked confused.

"No..." he started, before turning to another colleague, James."There's an error in this data... I just can't see where." He explained. James frowned, looking at the screen for a moment before answering.

"Oh, no, it's just different because it was collected on different days-" he said. Stebe turned back to Gwen.

"Well, it was collected on different days. Data sets collected on different days will be different." he explained to her, slowly and loudly. Gwen considered stabbing out his eyes. With her fingers. She admired her glittering nail polish.

Slwoly, the day ticked by and away until Gwen sat alone in the office, protesting with a kind smile and joke as her colleagues trooped out insisting she worked too hard. Immediately once everyone had gone, she sprang to life. She pulled a terra-nova drive out of her bag and, keeping one eye on the door, started uploading the data she'd been working- an analyses of previous attack sites for War Minister Cendred- to the drive.

Gwen had joined the government analysis team years ago, when she was young and freshed faced and full of pep at her sureness that she could change the system; make it better for the hoards of intergalaltic poor, only to realise very quickly that noone wanted it fixed. Her bosses had set it up to keep the lower classes lower and the riff firmly raffed. She eyed the data transfer, willing it to move faster, weary of the way the light flickered from under her manager's office door. It was a risk, stealing the attack plan data to send out encrypted warnings to charities helping the victims and anyone who opposed the government, but it was all she could do, all she had been doing for these long years, with the constant nagging feeling that all she was doing still wasn't enough. The data transfer completed and she slipped the terra-nova back into her bag.

Just then, suddenly and without any warning, the office door swung open. Gwen's blood turned from a trunculent 37 degreee to an icy blast of plasma in her veins and arteries. Her heart was suspended: frozen. She began rapidly typing on her screen trying very hard to look busy and distracted and not paying attention to the figures at the door.

Into the office walked six shadowy figures, clad in black cloaks, hoods pulled high over their mysterious and invisible heads, as if they we shrouded in the very darkness itself. The stalked, like lithe jaguars through the dimmness of the the empty office, made of stealth, they didn't even make a sound. Gwen tucked herself up small under the footwell of her desk, knowing that being found in the office now would be a fatal mistake. Her heart unfroze and pounded in her ears.

With a smooth south the door to Cenred's office opened, and all the figures transited within, the door sealing again behind them. Gwen paused, torn between sneaking closer to drop eaves and hear want transpired in the Minister's office and staying safely under the desk, or creeping out back to the cosy safeness of her flat. The sudden noise of footprints by her desk made her jump and smack her head on its underside.

"James!" she gasped, whispering, her eyes checking the door to Cenred's office, her ears pricked up to hear anything she could. He stood there with a small case in his hands.

"Gwen? What are you doing under your desk?" James smiled, loud and oblivious. Gwen rued internally.

"...I dropped my pen." she said, brandishing one.

"You're here late."James said chummily. Gwen smiled as warmly as she could, sure she could hear a sudden lack of sounds from behind the closed door.

"Oh you know me, that midnight oil won't burn itself! Cenred got you running ragged too?" She asked, more politely than she felt.

"Well" James whispered conspirationally leaning close to Gwen"I heard that Cenred's expecting a visit from the High Order with a Black Ordinance!"

"No! Whoever that's for must have done something seriously wrong" she answered, her eyes wide in surprise, he voice still little more than a whisper.

"I heard it was from the Regent himself" James murmered.

"Agravaine?" she queried.

"The very same." James confirmed, his eyes wide.

"Who's it for?" Gwen gossiped.

"No-one knows... I'm just the delivery boy, they've asked me to deliver this to the tracking lab." James indicated. He lifted the case in his hands. Gwen knew what the tracking lab meant.

"I've never seen a Black Ordinance Marque....what are they like?" she asked curiously batting her doe like eyes at him.

"See for yourself" with a snap James opened the sleek case and lisfted the lid -inside were rows of neatly nestled ter-novas in slim cases affixed to small translucent black vials. Gwen was wrong - she had seen that before, pulled from the pocket of a clone in a ballroom who had just tried to assassinate....Arthur. Oh.

"What are these thingys?" she smiled her brightest, dumbest smile. Reaching out for them with wide eyes, shining with shammed innocents.

"Oh no, you cannt touch" James smiled zooming the box out of the reach of Gwen's outstretched hands. As he moved it, the precarious case slipped from his hands, clattering to the floor and spilling its contents like a gutted fish. Quicker than a flash Gwen crouched down to help, palming one of the nefarious vials and slipping it into her pocket.

"Oh, gosh, thanks Gwen. You're a lifesaver. I don't know what they'd do if I lost or broke these." James smiled.

"I have to go now!" Gwen suddenly blurted out."I'm tired and, it's late. And work tomorrow... you know what the boos is like.. Ahahah" She said. James chuckled in agreement.

"All work, no play... it's made Cenred a very dull boy." He joked. Gwen laughed politely while packing up her things and, taking a deep breath of calming she turned to JAmes again.

"I'll see you tomorrow, don't let him make you work too late. Bye!" she smiled and waved slightly on her way out of the door. James attempted to wave in return before realising he was still holding the still open case of vials and thought better of it. Shutting the case up, he headed into his bosses office, while Gwen left the building as briskly and as calmly as she could. She still had work to do.