by Watts Martin
“Oh. Thank you.” She smiles at Gail. “I’ve heard it’s a very good museum.”
“It is. It’s almost worth a visit just for the building itself.”
“Why doesn’t your tail have fur?” the daughter asks. She has limp brown hair, too, and looks like she’s about six. Mom pales visibly.
Gail grins. “Because I’m a rat.”
“Why are you a rat?”
“Jennifer,” the mother hisses, now looking mortified.
“You’ve been on a spaceship, haven’t you?”
The girl nods. “Uh huh.”
“I live on a spaceship.” Gail spreads her hands. “All ships need rats.”
Jennifer falls silent at that, blinking slowly twice. Mom laughs, then looks self-conscious about it.
The music swells as the elevator platform comes to a stop and the doors open. Gail—and Catboy—wait for the tourists to exit first, the kids bouncing out toward the observation deck, giggling madly. The adults wobblejump their way after them, yelling admonishments. Then Catboy heads off across the polished stone floor, not jumping in his steps but gliding, perfect athletic poise. She’s so distracted by the way he moves—the way he looks moving—it takes her a couple seconds to realize he’s going the same way she is.
This is the middle floor, above the hotel and under the observation deck, and it’s where most of the shops are, the restaurants and bars and tacky souvenir kiosks surrounded by padded railings. The walls are padded, too, although you have to look closely or smack into one to notice. Her path takes her close to one of the cafés; as she passes by, the menu board highlights the pumpkin cheesecake. She hasn’t had dinner yet and it’s pitching her a favorite dessert? She’s not sure what that says about her eating habits, but it isn’t good.
The warm grey patterned tiles end at a sunken floor along one wall, glossy black over shifting patterns of glowing light. As she steps down on it, the colors ripple. They flow toward the pitch black doorway at the far end, and as the stream gets closer to the entrance they pulse in time with a driving beat you feel more than hear. Small symbols to the right of the door glow bright white, pulsing in time with the music.
Δv ÷ Δt
A full transform tiger, decked out in formal black shirt, jacket and kilt, stands to the left of the doorway. He looks like a polite striped mountain. As she approaches, he nods. “Gail.”
“Hey, Carl.” He could just be reading her name off a HUD in his eye, but she doesn’t think he is. She isn’t, either. She remembers him. “No line yet?”
“It’s early.” He waves her in with a sweep of an arm.
The glowing floor is the entrance hall’s only light source, the lacquered walls and ceiling reflecting the stream’s turbulent dance. Two steps in and she’s past the noise cancellation barrier, and the music jumps from conversational volume to bone-shaking.
The hall’s just another six slow-long-stride steps long. Then it turns to the left, and all at once you’re there. The walls and ceiling and floor go matte black rather than shiny and the ceiling bubbles into a huge dome, and nothing but air remains between you and the speakers. The main floor rotates, a disc about twenty-five meters across, and the club has a projection system like the one in Kismet’s cockpit. Look in any direction and you see the stars that surround Panorica. You dance floating in space.
Gail slots people on the floor into three categories: the nervous, the nutbars and the magicians. The nervous step onto the disc and realize they don’t have a single clue how to dance in low gravity, and make tiny little petrified moves, not always in time with the rhythm. The nutbars are the ones who have grievously miscounted the number of clues they have. The results range from amusing to dangerous.
Right now there are only five people on the dance floor, three totemics and one who’s gone more xeno, iridescent green skin and silver eyes. She’s never figured out the xenos. Totemics have a history, a philosophy, even a spirituality, and you might think the spirituality is bullshit but it’s there. As much as she tries to give xenos the benefit of the doubt, she’s pretty sure they’re just about looking alien. Xeno guy’s a nutbar. Surprise. The cisform woman is nervous, barely moving; her partner’s not bad, and the silver vixen moves decently. Maybe the wrong word given the outfit she’s barely wearing.
Catboy, though: he’s a magician. Whirling in midair, spinning end over end, dancing sideways against the wall, always aware of where that meter-and-a-half tail is, tattoos as much of a light show as the pulsing spotlights swinging around the dome. She stops at the railing by the dance floor and just watches. He’s lost in the music, and she lets herself be lost by proxy for a few minutes. When the track changes, one percussion line smoothly melding into the next, she follows the railing up to the second level bar.
The tabletops and the bar itself are high-gloss, reflecting the stars and lights from the dance floor. The underside of the bar glows and flows like the entranceway. It’s an oval bar, most of the tables on the side overlooking the club, some on the opposite side with windows looking down at the city. It’s still loud, but less than it looks like it should be.
Right where she expects him to be, at “his” table, Ansel’s turned to watch the dancers. He’s almost certainly watching the catboy—he’s cute, and he’s the only dancer worth watching anyway. Ansel’s a fox, full transform. Every time she sees him he’s varied his color scheme. Tonight he’s mostly just fox-colored, but the hair sticking out from under his tan driving cap is vivid green, and his claws are copper, glittering when a spotlight catches them. The drink sitting in front of him matches the hair almost perfectly, a snifter full of lime green something on the rocks, garnished with a slice of orange and a paper parasol changing color in time with the music.
Gail hurries over, and as he’s turning she’s dropping into the seat opposite him. “Ansel!”
His violet eyes—that’s natural, or at least it’s never changed in the years she’s known him—focus on her in surprise. He’s not much younger than she is, but still looks like he’s barely into his twenties. The guarded expression falling over his face makes him look older, though. “Gail.”
“How’ve you been? It’s been a while.”
“I’ve been fine, thanks. I’m not about to wish it’d been a while longer, am I?”
She feels her smile slip. “I hope not.”
“Sorry.” He holds up his hands. “But when you show up out of the black here without sending me a message first, you usually want something and you figure it’ll be harder for me to say no if you’re pleading in person.”
That doesn’t sound either right or fair to her, but it’s right this time, isn’t it? She laughs self-consciously, looking at the table. “That’s not always true.”
“I didn’t say always, I said usually.” Ansel takes a long sip of his drink and pushes the glass aside. “Okay, talk to me.”
“I’ve got a quick job and I need advice from someone who’s more technical, and you’re the best I know.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“So. I’m trying to track down a lost databox. I have some information on it—appearance, serial number—and I know roughly when and where it went missing…”
She trails off. The fox’s eyes have widened in a deeply unsettling way, as if she’d said I just need you to help me hide a body. “A databox. You’re tangled up in something that involves finding a databox.”
Her ears lower. “Is that bad?”
“Oh, Gail.” He rubs his forehead. “Do you know what the payload is?”
“I’m not sure I even know what a databox is, beyond an educated guess. It’s a physical data backup, right?”
He wiggles his hand in a sort of gesture. “It’s not backup storage, it’s singular storage. You keep the data from being anywhere but in the box, so you need physical possession of it for access.”
She tries to make sense of that. “Data doesn’t have a location.”
“It depends on the data.” He waves his hands around. “Some data stays localiz
ed, like your spaceship’s ‘personality.’” (She can hear the air quotes.) “Most data gets replicated across hundreds of storage nodes. But if you’re paranoid, you keep all the copies of critical data physically isolated. That minimizes the chance of unauthorized access, but it makes it possible to lose the data forever. If you want backups, you need more databoxes.”
“So how do I find it?”
“You don’t. That’s part of the point.” He leans back and crosses his arms, looking at the ceiling. “Since the databox’s owner didn’t go to a judiciary, this is something they don’t want to attract any attention to. Have you talked with Sky?”
“Why would I do that?”
He drops his head back to look at her. “When you’re trying to investigate a crime, why would you talk to your sister the police officer? You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She rolls her eyes. “C’mon, you just said it yourself—my client doesn’t want a judiciary involved. How do you think they’d feel about bringing in the Ring Judicial Cooperative?”
“I didn’t say give her the case, I said ask her for advice. I can’t give you some kind of magic databox-finding algorithm. You need a thief-finding algorithm, and that’s her department, not mine. And why did they hire you to find this?”
“I was kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time. Look, can’t you give me any help here?”
“Yes. I’m going to go to the bar and buy you a drink. What do you want?”
“I don’t know.” She glances at the drink special menu on the table. “A mezcal sour.”
“Got it.” He gets up.
She doesn’t consciously slump as much as let herself go, sliding down in her seat. What had she expected Ansel to say? “Oh, sure, Gail, let’s just bring up a map and show you where the thief is.” Of course not. But kind of. That’s not exactly what an algorithmist does but it’s almost what one does, just with data instead of crooks, and she knows he’s damn good at his job. Find the data, find the crook. Except databoxes don’t work that way.
Her plummeting mood—not that it had far to fall—keeps her occupied enough that she doesn’t notice Ansel’s return until he sets her glass down in front of her with a firm bang against the tabletop. He has another one of whatever it was he had before, too. “What you need,” he says, “is to narrow down where the thief could be. You can’t look everywhere on the River at once.”
“Yeah.” She sits up and takes a sip of the drink, and grimaces. “This tastes like a barbecued lime marinated in tequila.”
“Isn’t that what a mezcal sour is supposed to taste like?”
“Maybe.” After a vigorous stir the drink is better. A little. “I just don’t have a clue where to start looking.”
“You still haven’t answered the big question. Why you?”
“Because I found the wreck the databox was supposed to be on, and they think I stole it.”
He lifts his brows inquiringly.
“I didn’t!”
Ansel lifts his hands. “I didn’t think you would. But you don’t just come across shipwrecks randomly.”
“I got a tip from a kid I knew growing up who’s a yacht captain now.” She takes a longer sip of the drink. Maybe it’s not so bad. “If I don’t get the databox back to them in three days they’re going to report me as socius indignus. I could lose Kismet.”
“Wow.” He rests his muzzle in a hand and exhales. “All right. You don’t know what’s on the databox, but a company’s trying to keep attention away from the theft. Maybe secrets they’ve stolen from another company.” He sits up and scratches the back of one ear. “Or secrets they’re afraid another company will steal. Who are their competitors?”
She lowers her voice. “It’s Keces.”
“So their competitors are everyone. You do know how to pick your enemies.” He drums his fingers on the table. “I’d bet this involves the energy or transportation divisions.”
“Transportation?”
“Moving anything between stations is still expensive.”
“It sounded like something more…serious. Cheap freight can’t be worth killing over.”
“Anything’s worth killing over if there’s enough profit involved.”
“Mmm.” She stirs the drink again. “So any other ideas?”
Ansel takes a long sip of his drink, which looks much smoother and sweeter. She wishes she’d asked for one of those. “Figure out where the ship was coming from and where it was going, see what Keces divisions match up with those, figure out their competitors.” He empties the glass. “And for Christ’s sake, call Sky. She may come up with some defense against the socius indignus by tangling everything up with the Ring’s crazy communist legal shenanigans.”
“They’re not communists.” It’s almost a reflexive response.
“You know what I mean.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Look, I’ve got to get going. I’m on a tight deadline for my current contract and I’m planning to work through the night.” He stands up.
That’s probably a half-truth: it’s likely he has his portable display with him and could work here just fine. She’s seen him do it. But she won’t press; she’s made him prickly enough tonight as it is. Maybe she should have brought a gift, not that she could afford one. “Okay. Thanks for the help you could give.” She hopes she made that sound credibly sincere.
Ansel leans over and gives her a hug. “Take care, Gail. Try not to get in any more trouble before we meet again, hmm?”
She grins wryly. “I never try to get in trouble, Ansel.”
He laughs. Then he’s gone.
Gail slumps back in her seat, eyes closed for a few seconds, then gets up with her glass and heads to sit at the bar. It takes her another ten minutes to finish as much of the sour as she can stand, and she’s about to order something else when Catboy sits down next to her. He’s still breathing hard from his dancing. That looks good on him, too.
When the bartender approaches, he orders something called a “Livingston Swizzle.” The bartender nods and looks at Gail.
“I’ll have what he just ordered.”
He grins at her, the same grin as he had back in the elevator. “You’re not dancing.” His smile shows pointed feline teeth.
“I’m not much of a dancer. I came here to meet someone.”
“But you’re alone now.”
“Yeah, we already met. He just left.”
“Then you don’t have a reason not to come back on the dance floor with me.”
She laughs. “Other than the part about me not being much of a dancer? I saw you move. Compared to you I’d feel like a brick.” She looks behind him at the huge tail; he’s looped it around the stool several times. “Is your tail prehensile?”
“Yes.”
The bartender brings both drinks. She takes a sip of hers. It’s got citrus and ginger and she can’t tell what else, but she’s sure it’s stronger than it tastes. That’s good.
She tilts her head and grins. “So what can you do with a prehensile tail?”
He laughs, and meets her eyes with his as he takes a sip of his own drink.
Chapter 4
When she wakes up there’s a moment of disorientation until she realizes Catboy—she did learn his name, didn’t she?—is taking up slightly more than half of her bunk. For a single person it’s more than big enough, but not for two. Why did they come back here instead of his place?
Oh, right: because here is her own private spaceship. That’s still a hell of a pickup line.
He stays asleep even as she carefully unwinds that amazing tail from around her leg and slips out of bed. It takes her longer than it should to locate her clothes, given how small the cabin is. After she’s dressed she walks to the beverage station and punches up some coffee.
“Mmm?” Catboy sits up, rubbing his eyes. “Morning, Gail.”
Dammit, he knows her name. She hurriedly calls up her contact manager, hoping she’d remembered to activate it. Yes! Maybe.
She gives the cockpit a glare, since the ship doesn’t have a face to glare at. “Hey, Adrian.”
He stretches, then twists around, pulling his pants off the floor and over his legs. “There’s a café just a half a block away if you’re looking for breakfast.”
“Yeah. Well, a coffee and a donut or something, at least. Gonna be a busy day.” It’d better be one—as nice as last night was, she’s wasting time. And she doesn’t have anything more to go on than she did when she left Molinar.
“Is salvage work that regular?”
“No, it isn’t. Sometimes I take odd jobs.”
“I guess you don’t volunteer for the River Totemic Equality Association.”
That’s a hell of a weird—oh. She flashes him a wry smile. “When did you get a chance to look me up?”
“After you fell asleep. I didn’t know you were from a famous family when we met.” There’s an anxious edge in his voice, like he wants to reassure her that he didn’t try to pick her up because of her name. That’s happened before; it’s common to do a quick search on people you want to hook up with.
It’s ludicrous to give her family celebrity status, let alone her, though. “Only mom was famous and I’ve been a lot happier staying off that radar. Working with the RTEA didn’t work out too well for her.”
His ears flick. “I’m sorry.”
“Long time ago.”
“In a sense she’s won, though. Maybe there’s more active prejudice out on the far fringe platforms, but in the Panorica Federation? I’ve been transform for five years and never had a problem.”
“It’s better now. Uh, since I didn’t look you up, did I ask what you do?”
He grins, moving in front of her and running his claw tips along her sides. She wriggles reflexively. “Work-study program at the university.”
About what she’d guessed. So all the time he’s been transform, he’s been a student, and probably only on Panorica or a platform allied with it. A Panorican college might be the most totemic-friendly environment off the Ring you could find. He’ll hit turbulence soon enough. “What’s your major?”
