by Watts Martin
At once Taylor’s back in spitting livid mode. “You can’t just—”
Thomas folds his hands behind his back. “I believe they did just.”
When the raccoon speaks his tone remains pleasantly mild. “If you wish to appeal, you’re welcome to go through our embassy on Panorica.”
Taylor visibly forces his voice to be level. “We’ll see about that. And your role in all this will be highlighted, Agent Thomas.” He stomps out of the room, motioning Wolfe to follow.
Squarejaw and the Ring judiciary officials look at one another. Gail drops down into a seat and stares at the ceiling.
Chapter 14
When Gail slips out of the room it’s only a few minutes after Captain Spitty’s grand exit, but everyone else is too distracted by Sky giving orders—mostly to Ansel—to notice. Is it too early to drink? No, since she had a mimosa with breakfast. But she thinks she just wants a coffee. She gets one at the lounge, then takes a seat where she can look out over the river.
She’s barely taken a sip before Agent Squarejaw comes in and gets his own coffee. He approaches her table, then hesitates. “May I?”
“Sure. But shouldn’t you be working on your case?”
He sits down opposite her. “If it were still my case, yes. I’m feeling somewhat at a loss now that Bright Sky’s taken over.”
“Welcome to my teenage years.”
He smiles crookedly. “You know more of the legal system here than I do. What does a tribunal involve?”
“Let me think.” She drums her claws on the table, sifting school memories. “Every involved party in a case chooses one mediator as a representative, and the rest of the panel’s filled out by a pool of citizens a majority agrees to. You need at least five people on a tribunal and the neutral panelists have to be a number greater than half of the parties in the case. So if you and I were suing one another, we’d have to both agree on three others. Then together we all hear evidence and a four-fifths vote decides the resolution.”
He frowns. “Who are the parties in this case? Quanta, Keces, the PFS, Interpol, you, Mr. Corbett…?”
“Depends on who the RJC decides has standing.” She sips her coffee. “I hope to hell they get Keces in, because it might stop Nakimura’s damn destroy-Gail’s-life clock.”
“Do you still believe it’s theirs?”
“Yeah. Do you?”
“In part. I think Keces stole work from Quanta as a base for their projects. So they’re both guilty of theft. I don’t know where that leaves us.”
“I don’t, either.” She sets her mug down and leans back, staring at the ceiling. “Quanta’s version of Kali isn’t very good, though, and the databox is the only copy of Shakti.”
“Assuming Nakimura told you the truth.”
“Assuming Nakimura told me the truth.” She sighs.
“Here’s something interesting. We couldn’t find any evidence of payments to Mr. Corbett from Lantern or any group they fund.”
She straightens up. “So?”
“I’m trying to understand why he’s here. Purely for ideology? He said it was about the end of the human race.”
“That’s just old bullshit Purity arguments. They accuse us of setting ourselves up as new, improved humans, twist everything we say or do, and if any of us say ‘that’s not true,’ our denials are just proof of how deep the conspiracy runs.”
“So you think it’s solely irrational hatred.”
“Mom always said hate isn’t irrational, it’s childish. It’s pointing at something—a person, a company, a group, a government—and saying, ‘Everything would be better if it wasn’t for them.’”
He nods thoughtfully, and takes another sip of coffee. “But isn’t it about to be true?”
She stiffens. “What? No. What do you mean?”
“Shakti.”
Oh, come on, that’s—that’s—that’s correct. She stares into the distance, feeling sucker punched. “We’d turn into actual new subspecies of humans.”
“I think stopping that is what this operation’s about. At least from Mr. Corbett’s point of view.”
She nods, digesting that. “But it’s crazy to think they’ve gotten the company that created totemics on board with that.”
“Someone at one of these two companies had to get information to Mr. Corbett, and perhaps Purity, about Shakti. Quanta may have been driven by Burke’s anti-transformation stance in the past. It’s also possible they’re simply using Mr. Corbett to advance their own agenda, rather than sharing his.”
“Yeah, but this whole plan just seems so…so baroque if it’s only about getting Keces’s improvements to Kali.”
“Was anything else stolen from Keces?”
“The databox is all they asked about.” She shakes her head, then sips her coffee. “I’m impressed with your whole chain-of-reasoning detective thing.”
“That’s why they pay me the big dollars.”
“Do they pay you the big dollars?”
“No.”
Laughing, she sets down her drink again. Then yesterday’s conversation on Kismet drifts back to her. “Well, I guess they’re big dollars as long as you’re out here.”
“In a relative sense.”
“I’m sorry I’ve made your posting so interesting right out of the dock.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “I admit I expected things to be…quieter than they’ve been. From what I’ve heard they usually are at this station, at least for liaison officers.”
“We don’t have a lot of crime.”
“You don’t have a lot of crime that requires Interpol. Statistically, there’s more crime per capita across the River than there is on Earth.”
“Huh. I wouldn’t have honestly thought that.”
He shrugs. “I think it’s unavoidable. The median cost of living out here is higher than it is anywhere on Earth. Most of the costs are technically voluntary, but in practice you’re just choosing who you pay most of them to—choosing not to pay them isn’t viable.”
“No, but we can choose to pay less than you do for a worse service, or pay more for a better one, right? Even on Panorica and the Ring.”
“That doesn’t help people who can’t pay. The Ring’s the only settlement here with a true safety net.”
He’s right, but that still seems awfully reductive. “You think that’s responsible for a higher crime rate?”
“I’d be wary of drawing a simple straight line between the two, but I’m not the only one who’s asked that question.”
“I can see the correlation, sure. But, I mean, it’s not like you don’t have crime under your system, or you’d be out of a job.”
“We have crime. And a lot more bureaucracy.” He shakes his head. “Between the FBI, Interpol, and whatever foreign police agencies I’m working with, the only way I get anything done is finding mutually unacceptable compromises between everyone.”
She laughs. “I like that phrase. There’s a saying I’ve heard out here that runs something like, ‘Any political system works if everyone agrees to it, but you can’t make a political system everyone agrees to.’”
“That sounds like a folksy version of…what was the actual social science hypothesis? The Miller Paradox?”
“The Miller Limit. He studied the River and hypothesized there’s a point after which no society can be completely non-coercive. Sometimes people quote a number, but he just said it was when the second generation fully comes of age.”
Thomas furrows his brow, then has an oh, I get it look. “Because they weren’t a party to any of the implicit social contracts.”
“Right. If you grow up and agree with everything that your parents signed on for, great, but if you don’t, then either you have to leave, accept something you don’t like, or try to change a status quo that the older generation’s going to fight to keep. No matter how things shake out, somebody’s going to feel forced into a choice they didn’t want.”
“So after a few generations, you end up wit
h societies where most people agree with most things but almost no one agrees with everything.”
“Yeah, and they all change over time.” She chuckles. “So maybe not that far off from Earth after all, these days.”
“With magnitudes more people and centuries more time to argue, sometimes it feels like no one agrees with anything. You might wonder why everyone hasn’t moved out here.” He looks out the window, across the river.
She grins, looking out, too. As much as she hates to admit it, it really is a stunning view. “We don’t have the space.”
“No, and immigrating from Earth or Mars to anywhere on the River is tightly regulated. On this end, too, you know. It’s my understanding that the Ceres Ring gives priority to totemics.”
“Huh. Well, it is…” She trails off, surprised by the words she’s about to say, but they’re true. “It’s as close to a homeland as we have.”
“It’s a beautiful place.” He looks out the window again. “I’d love to be stationed here instead of Panorica. I could imagine Laurie here, swimming with the otters.”
“Laurie?”
“My daughter.”
Daughter? This is something Squarejaw hasn’t talked about before. Not that he’d have had reason to, but being sidelined seems to have made him chatty. “Huh. How old is she? And that river doesn’t have otters in it, does it?”
“She’s ten.” He points at a building across the river. “The otters run the canoe rental place over there.”
“Oh.” Right, that kind of otter. But if he has a kid, why the hell—that’s too personal a question to just throw at him. Dammit, she wants to know, though. Maybe she can put it delicately. “I didn’t know you had a family.”
“We really haven’t talked about anything but your case until…well, until now. And they’re a very long way away.”
“Are you still married?”
“We’re separated.”
She’s dancing around the question in her head, still. “That’s a long time for a daughter to be away from her dad. She understands you’re coming back, right?”
He gives her a sharp look. Okay, she’s not being as delicate as she hoped.
“Of course.” His brows sink rather than lift. “I hope she does. And I hope I am. That’s not entirely up to me.”
“So you’re not just…” No, don’t finish that with just walking out. Talk about being indelicate.
“Just?”
She shifts awkwardly in her seat and tries to pick a path out from the conversational minefield she’s led herself into. “Sorry. This is a tough topic for me. My dad left when I was ten and I haven’t seen him since.”
“I admit I’ve wondered how you ended up being adopted by your adopted sister. That’s very unusual.”
“Unusual, that’s our family.” She bites her lip. “I should have been sent to live with dad, you know? Wherever he was living on Earth. Somewhere in Europe. At least then. I think. They told me that he said he couldn’t take me, and I imagined it was some kind of emergency, some horrible situation, something temporary. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that Sky told me she didn’t know why. All she knew is he said no.”
Thomas looks shocked.
She takes a deep breath. “Even after that I kept looking for explanations that weren’t him just not wanting me. But I never found one and he never gave me one. So after a while I just stopped trying. He should be the one to reach out, to say why, you know? He never has. I don’t think he ever will.”
It takes him a few seconds to respond, voice getting softer but less studied, more direct. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugs, smiling awkwardly, not sure there’s a response. Neither his fault nor his problem.
He sips his coffee, letting the silence grow, then looks out the window again, speaking slowly. “I didn’t leave my family because I wanted to. I’d do anything for Laurie. I’d still do anything for Claudia. But what she asked me to do for her was to go away.”
“So that’s why you volunteered to come out here?”
He doesn’t turn to her, but he smiles faintly. “Are you imagining I might have had an argument with her that ended with me screaming, ‘You want me to give you space? How’s this for space?’”
“No.” She keeps her eyes on him, though, letting the but did you? hang unspoken.
“I didn’t, but I thought it. I was just smart enough to keep it to myself.” He takes a long sip, enough of a slurp to make Gail’s ears twitch. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to think better of it until I was already on the ship out here.”
“Oh.”
He gives his own shrug. “Now I’m out here, and they’re still there. I told Claudia she and Laurie could come out for a visit, but they can’t. I know that. Ten to fourteen weeks each way, only during launch windows. You don’t visit here, you move here temporarily, and Claudia doesn’t have the kind of work that would let her do that even if she wanted to.”
Most kinds of work wouldn’t let you do that, she guesses—keeping in touch with the inner system gets either very slow or very expensive. And Claudia wouldn’t want to even if she could, not for Jack, would she? Not right now.
What leads a couple to a point where one of them thinks it’s a good idea to go halfway across the solar system and the other agrees? Did he cheat on her? Did she cheat on him? There’s nothing she can add to the conversation and apparently nothing else Jack wants to volunteer. She finishes her coffee in silence.
Kismet chimes in her ear unexpectedly. “Kingsolver Repair would like you to come by their facility to check on my progress and arrange payment.”
Payment. A really big payment. Which her bank will still block. “Terrific.”
She’s alone enough of the time that she forgets talking to Kis looks like talking to herself. Jack can tell she’s not addressing him, so he just looks confused. “Uh, I need to go check on how Kismet is coming along.” She stands up.
“They didn’t give you bad news, did they? You look worried.”
“I’m still having that, ah, issue with my bank. I sent them the info they need to clear it up this morning but I haven’t heard back.”
“I hope it goes smoothly. I’m going to get another cup of coffee, and maybe go see if I can impress Sky with my chain-of-reasoning detective thing.”
She chuckles. “Good luck.”
Gail picked Kingsolver Repair for Kismet because they did the initial inspection for her when she bought the ship, and also because she doesn’t know any other repair shop here by name. New Coyoacán and Panorica are two of only three ports on the River with privately-owned repair bays by the docking facility. Anywhere else, you either pay to have a crew come to you or drag into one of a few dozen free-floating stations, mostly ones that double as salvage yards. She knows all of them by reputation and most of them through direct business.
Her regular mechanic’s damn good, but his place always looks like the aftermath of a comet strike. By comparison, Kingsolver’s bay looks supernaturally neat. Every tool has its assigned place, all of them are in good shape, and judging by the display she’s looking at—an overlay that stays perfectly matched to Kismet while she’s looking through a physical window at the real craft—they’re state of the art. None of this bodes well for her bank account.
“So we’ve melded in new inner hull sections here and here,” a mechanic’s telling her. The mechanic is a coyote totemic, lithe and beautifully androgynous. Tan and warm gray fur pairs with an iridescent red undercoat that shifts and shimmers mesmerizingly as they move. They move an awful lot. Is the red natural, or a dye? Probably not appropriate to ask, and definitely not appropriate to keep staring.
The coyote points at the appropriate areas of the overlay as they speak, each section lighting up when their claw tip touches the virtual space. “The new plates for the outer hull have been printed, but they’re not out of verification yet.” Their voice is a melodious alto. Walking to the rear side of the display/ship, the mechanic touches near the exhau
st port. “And, we found fractures in the exit cones of nozzles two and three. We’ve taken care of those already.” Despite being in overalls laced with the scent of machine oil, there’s faint undertones of lavender and some other herb, like they’ve used a nicely perfumed cleaning powder.
“What caused them?”
“Might be just a mix of normal wear and tear and the banging up that you took on your way here. You know, I’ve never worked on a ship that was attacked by pirates before.”
“I’ve never piloted a ship attacked by pirates before.”
“Did they know who you were?”
What? They knew her ship had the databox on it, but—right, that’s not what the coyote means. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have mattered. They weren’t after me, they were after my cargo.” And from the way things are looking, if they did know, that would just have been more of a reason to attack, not less.
“Still. That’s…that’s so…” The coyote shakes their head. “I shouldn’t expect pirates to have much of a conscience, huh?”
“No, they’re with whatever gets them the biggest payout.” She shrugs. “And, look, I’m just the daughter of somebody who’s famous here. And famous on Solera for the opposite reason. Go anywhere else on the River, though, and they won’t have heard of my mom, much less me.”
The coyote stops and looks at her directly. Those are the most beautiful green eyes Gail thinks she’s ever seen. “You’re wrong, Ms. Simmons. Go anywhere in the solar system there are totemics, and they’ll have heard of you.”
“Not me. My mom. They’ll have heard of Judith Simmons. Maybe.” She taps her chest. “But not of me.”
The mechanic walks out past the display onto the dry dock floor, motioning Gail to follow. “Well, we’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you. And I know I said this already, but it’s really an honor to meet you.”
“I kinda wish people would stop saying things like that.”
“Sorry.” Their ears fold down and they flash a sheepish, disarming grin. As far as Gail knows every coyote she’s met has been perfectly trustworthy, but this is still the first coyote smile she remembers that hasn’t made her want to check her pockets.
