by Watts Martin
Wait, that can’t be right. She has a lot of friends. Some of them must cook. Does she just never visit them?
“Hmm?”
Gail turns at Ansel’s questioning noise. “What?”
“You’re frowning. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, God, I love it. Your cooking is amazing.” She starts to add I should come over more often, but he already thinks she takes advantage of him, doesn’t he? And she kind of is right now. Again. She’d do the same for him if their situations were reversed, but he’s never going to be in a situation like this.
Okay, while he’s beaming, she should change the subject to something that won’t give her a chance to wallow in self-pity. She takes another bite of chicken, then waves the fork. “How’s your contract going?”
“It’s…I suppose it’s coming along splendidly, it’s just deathly boring. More marketing mining work.”
“That’s most of what you do, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. They’re the people who pay the most, because they’re the ones who need to keep adjusting the tuning all the time.”
That’s a war that started generations before either of them were born: finding new ways to get ads in front of people who keep finding new ways to stop ads from being put in front of them. Ansel’s worked both sides of the fence.
He gets through about two-thirds of his meal—he’s eating faster than she is—and then leans back, sipping his wine and looking thoughtful. “On the call with your contact, you said ‘Quanta.’ Quanta Biotechnics?”
She nods. “Yeah. You’ve heard of them?”
He laughs. “So have you. You’ve just forgotten the name. They were the original biomodification company.”
That was at least a century ago, around the time the unmanned asteroid mining that led to the River had just started. She thinks. It’s not like she’d ever been a good history student. She starts to reach for her viewcard, then remembers. Her eyes widen. “They transformed Mara.”
He nods. “It was about half surgery back then.” He shivers melodramatically.
“And effectively no surgery by our generation. I guess that’s why they lost out to Keces and others.”
He waggles a hand in a sort-of gesture. “They didn’t lose to Keces, they sold the business to them. And while Keces has made a lot of refinements, there haven’t been huge leaps in decades. Quanta’s still giant, but just in the inner system. Government contracts. Defense and medical.”
She frowns again, and sips her wine, mimicking the way Ansel does it, with the little swirl. He makes it look elegant, but she’s pretty sure she just looks goofy.
Finding you, specifically, involved after multiple attacks against Keces, all focused on this project…
Her, specifically, the daughter of a totemic rights activist. This project, with the two most important companies behind transformation technology fighting over it?
“This has something to do with us, Ansel. With totemics.”
Ansel gets a brooding expression. “Maybe. It doesn’t have to be that specific. There’s a lot of other ways the work that went into making us could be used. But none of the patents from back when they divested that group are still valid, even on Earth. Unless they’re licensing new work to Keces, they’re trying to get their hands on research that isn’t theirs.”
“Yeah.” She rubs the back of one of her ears, then her eyes widen. “Shit. And that’s what the Blue Notice is for.”
“The what?”
“Plan A was getting Randall on that ship back to Earth. Plan B is convincing Interpol that the databox belongs to Quanta and having them take it back to Earth.”
The fox raises his brows. “Huh. Or Interpol knows the truth and doesn’t care. Earth states are legendary for taking orders from big companies.”
“Either way, it’s a genius plan. Get the police to steal something for you.”
“You sound envious.”
She grunts. “It’s a brilliant con. It’s the part about it destroying my life I’m less thrilled by.” This all fits, but would Agent Squarejaw go along with it voluntarily? Wolfe said Thomas genuinely cares about his work. If he’s truly honest, he’s the key to turning it around. How can she convince him he’s being used as a patsy?
Now Ansel’s expression gets thoughtful-moody instead of broody-moody. He gets up and heads over to his desk. As he sits down, the curved holographic display flickers on, and his hands play over the control keyboard.
Gail follows him, carrying her wine glass. “What are you checking on?”
“I want to see if I can find anything recent that connects Quanta to either Keces or your friend Mr. Corbett. Meanwhile, you still haven’t talked to your bank about your account restrictions, have you?”
“I hate talking to my bank. Unless they call you, you just get an automated assistant.”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh, you have one of those banks.”
“There’s no fees!” That’s not true, strictly speaking. There’s a sliver of a percent charged by the bank for any transaction that involves currency conversion, and only about half the River’s adapted the Panorica dollar. But it happens so transparently nobody pays much attention.
“And this is why. Pull up a chair and use your own window if it’s easier.”
Sighing, she does so, using her viewcard to make the connection.
The bank’s expert system expands on the story she got from Officer Wolfe. Her old bank on Carmona reported her account as involved with fraudulent activity, but there’s no detail about whether they think she’s perpetrator or victim, so her bank’s limited access to “protect” her funds. Apparently her lack of judiciary hung the process until she got upset enough to follow up.
The resolution form is simple to fill out but tedious, filled with incorrect assumptions, starting with the notion that she’s either a Carmona resident or regularly does business there. She hasn’t been back in years, though, not since—
“Tom.” She groans, holding her head in her hands.
“Who?”
“Tom Laurel. An amp dealer who used to come into the coffee shop back on Carmona. I hadn’t seen the guy in years, not until breakfast yesterday morning when he spotted me and tried to get in on the scam he thinks I’m running. I blew him off, he really wasn’t happy about that, and this block comes up a day later based on reports from a bank where?”
“Carmona.” He shakes his head. “Does he really have that kind of pull?”
“He ‘knows people in the banking system.’” She makes air quotes with her fingers. “He probably dealt to somebody in the fraud department. On top of everything else going wrong over the last two days, a guy I barely know is screwing with me because I hurt his little drug-addled feelings. Jesus.”
“I know you don’t have a judiciary on retainer anymore, but there are charity ones who can take this on for you, especially if you can make the case this is based on prejudice.” His ears perk. “Call the RTEA. They’d bend over backwards for you.”
They’d try, but this is out of their bailiwick. She could ask Sky, because that will go well. “I’ll see who I can find. Have you got anything on Quanta we can use?”
He looks back at his windows. “Not yet, honestly. There’s nothing public that connects them to Corbett. He doesn’t work for one of their subsidiaries or affiliates.”
“There’s got to be one. What company does he pilot for?”
He swipes through a few windows. “He’s not a pilot at all. He’s an antique furniture restorer on Solera.”
She feels her face blank out. “He moved to the platform our mothers were killed on.”
“It could just be a coincidence.” Ansel’s bushy tail droops.
“No.” She shakes her head. ”Solera’s always been one of Purity’s biggest strongholds. Sky was right—he blames my mom for the bomb. And me. That’s why he dragged me into this.”
Ansel snorts. “Well, that hasn’t worked out for him too well yet, has it? But so far I can�
�t connect him to Quanta, and I don’t see anything that connects him to Purity, either.”
“It’s there, trust me. They’re mostly quiet under their own name, but front groups pop up.”
He tilts his head. “I thought you made a point not to keep up with this.”
“I make a point not to be involved with the politics, but I also make a point not to be a target. That hasn’t been working out for me too well, either.”
He grins wryly, and keeps scanning. “Hmm. Corbett keeps his privacy mirrors pretty open, but there’s nothing obvious here. He attends a church that isn’t known for being anti-totemic, he’s a regular at a bar that must be near his home, he volunteers with the Lantern Foundation.”
“Which is?”
“Hold on.” More swiping and scrolling. “A charity. They give out grants on historical preservation, medical research, and social welfare.”
“Dig into them.” What else is she missing? “And I want to find out more about the courier company. Somebody working with Quanta got on that ship and got the databox to Randall.”
“What’s your ‘friend’ at Keces told you about that operation?”
“Almost nothing. But I don’t think he’s lying when he said they didn’t own the ship. They just hired it.”
“So he can tell you the courier company.”
“If he knew it, he wouldn’t have agreed to let me help.”
“How could he not—”
“Pay through a laundry relay, transfer the databox using a dead drop somewhere with no public feeds. It’s all set up so that nobody ever has to meet in person or do anything that leaves a verifiable data trail.”
“I don’t want to know how you know this, do I?”
She grins. “I’ll spare your delicate vulpine sensibilities.”
“Ha ha. If it’s all set up so neatly, what’s there to take a look at?”
Good question. What else…hmm. “Physical evidence. We have the wreck itself, right? So maybe we start there.” She calls up the video and telemetry info from her data store—accessible from anywhere, since she’s not paranoid enough to use a databox. She wonders if she will be before much longer.
As Ansel scans the data, his expression grows exasperated. “There’s no identifying information here.”
“Kind of the point of an unflagged courier.”
He sighs exaggeratedly. “Yes. Thanks.” He flips through other windows from her data. “Now this might be identifying information. The pilots.”
She frowns, looking over his shoulder. Shit, why didn’t she think of them? She never even looked up the taxi service one worked for. “So what can we connect them to?”
“First, see if we can connect them to one another.” His fingers start flying over control panels, windows whizzing around. Sometimes she thinks he does that more to show off than to be useful. “This ship had to have been berthed somewhere. If we can put them near one another and near it, we can correlate them with possible candidates for our inside man. But how do we find a dark courier’s home port, Ms. Salvor? Look for reports of ships with no registration showing up at docks?”
“Maybe, yeah. Only a few ports would be willing to handle that, it won’t be an operator that has offices in Panorica, and it’s sure as hell not going to be a Keces-run port. And you only need to look for SC71s.”
He types out a few commands, leans back, and waits. And waits. Just as she gets antsy enough to think about saying something, he shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“Okay, that means they have their own private port. I kind of expected that.”
“So what now? Trace every single SC71 built from the day they left the factory to today?”
“Can you do that?”
Ansel grimaces. “I was being sarcastic. But let’s see.” He taps on his keyboard, swipes more windows around with his hands. “This will take time. They’ve been making the SC71 for over four decades and they’ve made over two thousand.”
She gets up and looks over his shoulder. “No, you’re looking at the total for the whole SC7x line.” She points. “Don’t look at the SC70 or SC75, and this one was built for River use rather than inner system, so it’s an SC71-200.”
“Okay, captain.” After a moment he leans back, frowning at a window. “That’s still a little under five hundred ships, and there’s three hundred fifty-four in service.” He pauses and looks at Gail. “But it’s going to be one of the ones that isn’t listed in service, right?”
“Right. And not documented as definitively sent for scrap. You need to find the ones in limbo.”
“Documents can be faked, so I’d need to look for anomalies.”
She nods, leaning over his shoulder again.
Ansel reaches up and touches his finger to her nose. “This isn’t just pressing a button, dear. I’m going to have to build a data constraint set and keep fine tuning it as I go.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and if you weren’t a friend I’d be charging four thousand an hour for it. This is going to run late, and I’ll warn you that I am going to go to sleep in”—he looks up at a circle on the wall over the desk—“two and a half hours.”
She looks at the circle, too. She’s seen it before but she’s never looked at it. “That’s a clock?”
“You’ve never seen an analog clock? The short needle points at the hour and goes around twice, the long needle—”
“I know how they work.” She still has to study it a few seconds to figure out what it’s telling her. “That’s a really imprecise way to say it’s twenty thirty-five.”
“Sometimes imprecision is just what you need. You’re welcome to go watch a video or something to pass the time.”
That’s Ansel-ese for please stop sitting here bothering me while I work. Got it. “Okay, thanks.” She gets up and heads back to the sofa.
Buzzbeep
Gail’s eyes drag open. Is that an alarm, something wrong with the ship she needs to tend to? No, she’s not on her ship. It’s not an alarm.
At least, it’s not an alarm she’s used to. That doesn’t mean it isn’t one.
She sits up. She’d fallen asleep on Ansel’s couch after watching the most recent episode of Other Suns, and the mild annoyance that his sofa feels more comfortable than her bunk on the ship returns. When this is all over she’ll buy a new mattress.
Buzzbeep
She can’t tell if they’re coming at regular intervals, but she doesn’t think so. That’s the third alarm chirp she’s heard, and the first two were closer together than the second and third. So these are individual events.
Ansel’s not at the desk anymore, but he’s walking out of his room, wearing a bathrobe and a worried expression. He glances up at the wall clock, and she follows his gaze. It’s… six… eleven… six fifty-five? No, the short needle moves continuously, just really slowly, right? So five minutes until six. That is such a stupid way to tell time.
He glances at her now, and she keeps her voice low. “What is that?”
“Someone’s trying to physically break in. Each of those beeps is a vulnerability probe against the lock software.” He heads past her toward the desk and sits down. After a few seconds of his fingers flying over the control surface, a display window flickers on, showing the view of the hallway outside. Empty. “Hmm. They’ve got to be somewhere close by, or have someone working with them who is.” The camera view changes to other angles on the hallway, then the ground level elevator foyer, just as empty.
Buzzbeep
Ansel types something. The light in the room changes; it takes her a second to realize the indicator lamp by the door has shifted from red to green. Oh crap oh crap. “They just unlocked the door!”
“No, I did. But hopefully they think they did.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“So do I.” He brings up four of the camera view windows in a two-by-two grid. “I’m glad I have you here to protect me.”
Before she can
figure out an appropriately caustic response, she sees in his expression that he’s not kidding. He really does expect she can protect him. So she just takes a deep breath and nods.
Someone appears on one of the cameras, hurrying out of a stairwell she didn’t know existed. They’re wearing a black hoodie and looking down, so she doesn’t get a chance to see the face, but they look—familiar.
Ansel’s hands swipe over the surface. The green light flickers to red again.
Barely two seconds later, he’s in front of the apartment door, reaching out to put a hand on the lock panel. He doesn’t look directly ahead, but enough of his face is visible for her to make an ID.
“That’s Randall!”
“What? Isn’t he still being held?”
Corbett tries the touch sensor several times, getting visibly angrier, less careful. His full face is visible for a second when he raises his fist like he’s about to pound on the door, thinking better of it at the last moment.
“He should be.” This can’t—Agent Squarejaw knows Corbett’s with the real thieves. He knows that. Does that mean Squarejaw’s with the real thieves? Was he just lying about it all? But if that’s the case, he could have found an excuse to just keep holding her. Even though you can’t do that in Panorica, there’s got to be some kind of damn Earth law he could—
The touch on her shoulder makes her jump, but of course it’s just Ansel. “He’s gone.”
“But he’s out and he was here. What the hell is he coming after me for? How did he find me here?” She’s standing up, voice rising. “You have your privacy mirrors wide open, don’t you?”
Ansel’s ears lower. “Compared to you, yes, but I don’t broadcast who’s sleeping over. Anyone doing a search on you might find you in my history at Acceleration last night, and if they’re searching for you they might be watching me. Or put a watch for you on publicly accessible cameras around this area.”
“He’s not smart enough to figure that out on his own.” Is he?
“That’s only one level of association. I can think of a dozen off-the-shelf trackers that can do that. And I hate to point this out, but you haven’t seen him since you were both teenagers. You don’t know how smart he is.”
