Against That Time

by Edward McKeown

  “Go, Jaelle. Down and to the corridor on your right as you reach the bottom,” I order

  She takes off in a sprint. I continue to direct her away while Croyzer shouts vainly for her troops but my attention refocuses on Croyzer as she stops yelling.

  “Sergeant, we’ve been hacked. Get to the building front. Take control. Bag what we’ve got then send anyone you can spare this way.”

  He is aghast. “Sir, you’re not running in without backup!”

  “Move, dammit. That diversion was designed to make a hole in this area.” She races for the spiral staircase ignoring his protestations. “I’ll be ok,” she shouts over her shoulder as she leaps down the stairs a weapon in either hand.

  This is bad. Croyzer is a dangerous adversary: intelligent and cunning. She has realized my strategy and countered almost immediately. “Jaelle, please continue making your best speed. Croyzer is chasing you.”

  “The TAMPD police chief, herself! Great.”

  “Yes. Take the stairs to the right. The green door is unlocked. Go through.”

  Croyzer is speeding along in Jaelle’s track, her police pass opening doors for her, with such accuracy that I check to see if there is a locator on Jaelle or her case. My scans detect nothing, but Croyzer continues to narrow the gap. Jaelle is faster than any human female but I must reroute the racing Jaelle away from any people who may see and describe her later. Croyzer merely charges. I realize belatedly that she knows the station on a level I would not have imagined a human mind could hold and is analyzing the most likely escape route in anticipation.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Croyzer says aloud between indrawn breaths, “but I suspect you can hear me.”

  Again I am startled. She is addressing me directly through the city net, assuming that I am watching her! That and her aerobic fitness are impressive.

  “You’re good, whoever you are. You must be directing Number Seven or I would have caught him by now. But when I’m through with both of you, you’ll wish you had taken that long swan dive into Cimer.”

  Far behind us the TAMPD have discovered the call for help was a diversion, but I further confuse them with contradictory orders in the voices of their superiors. The sergeant will arrive momentarily and restore order, but they are all too far out of position now to intervene. Croyzer is the only threat to Jaelle’s escape.

  Meanwhile, I follow Croyzer on any camera or electronic device in the area. The gap between the racing women continues to narrow. I realize that unless I can change things Jaelle will be caught.

  The corridor Jaelle is pounding down breaks three ways. One is useless to us for escape but perhaps not for what I plan.

  “Jaelle, Can you leap to the catwalk crossing above? Lie motionless on it.”

  She responds instantly in a move Croyzer, for all her strength, could not follow. There she lies. I feel the cold metal of it on her body as she pants frantically. Nekoans are faster than humans but do not have the same endurance. She is nearly played out.

  Croyzer appears in a blur of blue and races on without pausing until she reaches the junction of the corridor. There she skids to a stop. I had anticipated her immediately selecting a hall but she does not. She knows Jaelle slipped behind her once. If she looks back—

  I race through the city network, find a fire door at the top of the useless second corridor and open it remotely, then override the safety and slam it shut. A nearby woman cries out in alarm. The sound travels down the sloping corridor and Croyzer is on it like a predatory animal.

  “Now Jaelle, drop down. Take the left corridor. Slow at the top to look normal. Step into the street there is a robocab there that will only open to you. Get in it.”

  She responds, still clutching the suitcase.

  Croyzer has reached the door at the top that I open again. The woman who cried out has moved on. The chief leaps through the door to face a line of offices and one startled clerk. Before she can turn around I shut the door. She throws herself at it, fetching up painfully when her police badge will not open it. She cannot override the force of my programs. She steps back, growls, raises her weapons then looks at them, the fire door and lets her arms drop.

  Outside, an exhausted Jaelle exits the building, looking neither right nor left as she passes through a crowd, she hops into the cab, which immediately pulls away.

  “You will be released from the cab in 256 seconds,” I say, “proceed on foot from there. You should be safe.”

  “Thanks, Maauro. Maybe I do love you after all.”

  I refocus on Croyzer, as I drop my other cyberattacks with relief. I too am strained by the battle. The TAMP police chief has her head down, hair tumbling into one eye, apparently attempting to glare a hole in the door with the other. Unexpectedly she puts both hands on her hips, weapons still clutched in them and laughs. She looks about, apparently sees the surveillance camera I am using and turns to face it. Again, I am discomforted by her direct response to me. Did she merely know where the camera is likely to be, or does she have some power that I have not seen in humans before?

  “Well, Hacker,” she says smiling wolfishly at me, “well-played. You are good. But doubt it not, you will be mine.”

  I simply cannot help myself. I reactivate the tacnet for the two of us. “Be careful,” I whisper in her own voice. “You might get what you’re after.” I have fought Infesters, the Artifact, armored fighting vehicles and companies of Guild. I will not be menaced by a single human female. I am pleased by her startled expression.

  I cut out of the all the nets I have invaded, covering my tracks as best I can. In some cases I must destroy data and systems I cannot otherwise blank. Croyzer knows I was here, but she will find no evidence of who or what I am.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Has Jaelle checked in? Is she ok? Having any better luck than us?” Wrik says when he returns to the hotel after his dinner with Mysol and Fenster. He touches a screen and selects some of the ethereal and instrumental music that he finds relaxing.

  “She mindspoke to me while I was waiting for you to return from dinner,” I advise. I fill him in on the excitement of Jaelle’s escape, and then wait for him to calm down.

  “Her cargo has been sold at considerable profit,” I add when he has finally ceased cursing, “and is already being gleefully retailed by Hartain causing a minor crime wave in the City that is vexing the authorities. She is in very good with the local Guildmaster, but for once, we seem to know more of what is going on than the Guild. All they have is rumors of some big project nearby either in Tir-a-Mar, which seems unlikely or I would have surely found something, or at some substation floating below us. They have not penetrated city security save in the most venial ways.”

  “Great. Selling drugs, weapons and illegal pleasure software, plus being chased by the police,” Wrik grumbled. “Good thing we made so many verified copies of Candace’s letters of legal dispensation along with your new citizenship. Bet Candace hasn’t found even half of them.”

  “Not where I secured them, unless she wants to cause the collapse of Star Central’s economy. Still, I thought it quaint that the citizenship paper was actually a paper.”

  “Some old customs die hard,” he says with a yawn. “So what’s the program for tomorrow–continue poking around until we can provoke someone into trying to kill us?”

  I nod. “The usual. We have the medical facility for tomorrow’s agenda.”

  He nods. “Well at least if we are shot at we won’t have to go far to get patched up.”

  I was just taking my shoes off when the screen lit on the comp in my hotel room. I looked at Maauro.

  “Our scanning and security programs are functioning,” she said. “We will be discreet on our end. About the other end I will not be able to tell until the connection is established.

  I touched the screen to connect

  “Fels,”

/>   I instantly recognized the voice as Croyzer’s. “Here.”

  “An unofficial channel from a disposable com unit,” Maauro said in my mind. “There are no other connections. The Captain neither wants to be monitored, nor to have anyone know she called us.”

  “Meet me out back of the Star and Comet, there’s an alley to the right of the service exit. Meet me there as soon as you can. Leave the little princess behind.”

  I looked over at Maauro. She nodded.

  “See you in five minutes.”

  The line went dead.

  “Civilian clothes,” Maauro said. “Leave the sidearm here. Carry this small stunner in your pocket.” She handed me a small stun-derringer she must have manufactured in her body. “I will be on the roof top above you. If there is trouble I will leap down, but I do not look for it with Croyzer.”

  “Ok.” I threw on the replacement civilian clothes I’d purchased for such occasions. I didn’t expect to fool anyone who was assigned to watch me, but I would attract less attention this way.

  “Be careful anyway.”

  “I was born careful, Maauro.”

  We parted ways at the door. Maauro headed for the roof. I took the elevator down to the third floor, then came out and switched to the stairs. Once down, I walked to the service way. Servers and other people walked past me. The ones that didn’t know me didn’t look. The ones that did, glanced at me curiously, perhaps with veiled hostility, but they didn’t interfere. I slid out through the back doors, trying to look in all directions at the same time. I couldn’t see anything suspicious but it was late evening under the artificial moonlight, although the street was full of transports and pedestrians. I walked slowly until I reached a spot where I could lean against a wall opposite the alley, studying it. It was cleaner and less dank than its planetside equivalents, but boxes and trashcans still lined it. I caught a flash of bright blonde hair. With a sigh, I patted the pocket with the stunner and started for the alley. It took some effort not to look upward to see if a slender feminine figure was racing over the rooftops.

  I made my way into the alley, moving from cover to cover. I knew I’d come in further than the flash of blonde hair I’d spotted. I’d just about figured that my eyes had tricked me when she stepped out from behind a stack of boxes about a hundred feet away. She wore a light, black jacket and casual pants. Her right hand was in the jacket. She beckoned with her left.

  I nodded slowly and walked forward, stopping only a pace apart.

  “Captain Croyzer, you wanted to see me?”

  “Actually about now I’d like to see you safely leaving my station,” she said.

  “Not through with my work.”

  “Yeah. How did it go with Dok?”

  So much had happened since I saw her last that I had forgotten it had been on the day we were to see the Morok professor.

  “Pretty much as I imagine he told you after I left him. Not a whole lot. Although, as you noted, it’s curious how much changed here about two years ago when the Biogenetics project supposedly folded.”

  “I’ve been looking into that,” she said, her lips compressed into a line. “Using my own sources and finding out not a whole lot more. I’ve been concerned about it for a while. Your arrival and the attempt on your life brought it all into focus for me. Or rather, while there is a Confed warship around, I felt I had a chance of looking into this and keeping my skin intact.

  “You’re right. Something is being covered up here and it’s not Guild. It seems to be Ribisan in origin though clearly the top city people are aware of it – at least Fenster and Mysol.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because someone is trying to kill you and the trails I’ve found lead to places that aren’t safe for me to follow.”

  “Company cop?” I said.

  “That’s the job.”

  “Why should I trust you, Olivia?”

  “You got any other friends on this gasball?”

  I considered. I wanted to trust her but after my discussion with Maauro I wasn’t sure if my judgment was sound regarding her. “I usually know more about my friends. Maybe you can tell me why someone with all those Marine decorations on her uniform is a company cop in an outpost in the backend of nowhere.”

  The sensuous lips twisted into a bitter expression. “I used to do honest work, Confed Marines, Military Police. Guess I might as well tell you the rest and save you looking it up in the Confed Military database.

  “There was a killing in an off port – promising young officer – whose father had a lot of friends. Whose father I owed a lot to. She was just a prostitute, a drug addict, human trash. Story was that she tried to rob him and that there was an accomplice with a knife. It happens all the time in such places. I arranged for it to look like he was on duty at the time. Gave him an alibi.

  “Then he did it again. This time there was no covering it up. No pretending that it wasn’t anything other than a murder. And the first case got reopened. The powerful friends did what they could. But the best they could do for me was make it look like incompetence. I was dishonorable discharged. A disgrace to everyone who knew me. I deserved it of course, that second prostitute’s death is on me. Can you imagine what that was like?”

  My mouth was dry and my heart hammered. “Better,” I whispered, “better than just about anyone else you could ever meet.”

  She looked at me dry-eyed, this was a woman who didn’t cry, but I could see pain on the arctic fields of her eyes for a thousand miles.

  “You want to tell me your sad story?” she asked.

  I hung my head. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I will tell you that it was worse, far worse.”

  A startled look crept into her expression, and worse, the shade of doubt that I knew would follow. “I find that hard to believe,” she said, finally looking away.

  “Believe it,” I said harshly. “Like you, I’m trying to do something with what’s left of my life.”

  There was a long silence. She sighed. “So now I’m a company cop, on the edge of something that isn’t right again. You and I don’t have a lot of time to decide if we can or should help or even trust each other.”

  “What can you tell me?” I said.

  She considered me for a long moment and I began to wonder if she would just leave. Then, “All I can tell you is one word that seemed associated with the project: Predictor.”

  “Predictor?” I repeated.

  “That was all. No context, no other hints. Predicting what, I have no idea.”

  I looked at Croyzer’s sculpted face; her lips so full and sensuous under the arctic-blue eyes, softened by the mass of blonde hair that hung over her shoulders and her right eye. I found it difficult to pull my eyes off her and grateful that she didn’t seem to notice.

  Why was I so fascinated by her? The answer crept up on me and I wasn’t happy about it. Maauro had been right.

  Croyzer was a human woman and not just any woman. She was intelligent and striking. In another time she’d have been a queen somewhere. Jaelle had told me that being consorts wasn’t exclusive; she needed one of her kind for children. She thought I might just need one of my own kind, either for children or just to be with. I found myself wondering what it would be like to be with Croyzer and beyond that, wondering in traitorous thought, how Jaelle stacked up against a beautiful woman of my own kind. Would I still find Jaelle so attractive if Croyzer had been an option?

  I’d told Jaelle that I wasn’t interested in human women, that she would always be enough. Had I been telling the truth? Did I even know? Our relationship had started in and been welded by shared dangers in wild circumstances. Could it have started any other way? When Jaelle looked at me did she ever see something she was occasionally ashamed of? Something that wasn’t quite right? I surely looked strange next to a male Nekoan.

  While Ja
elle looked very like a human female, that was only a first impression, just like the feline impression that struck one looking at any Nekoan. Could the exotic always exceed the traditionally beautiful?

  I vacillated between disgust with myself and belief that this was something I seriously needed to consider. I’d promised something. Could I deliver on it? I thought suddenly of the link that I had with Maauro and hoped to God none of the confusion running through my brain was crossing to her. I knew that strong emotion leaked across sometimes and I didn’t want her to know that I had thoughts like this.

  Yet even she came into question in this. Maauro was a factor, sometimes perhaps a threat to my relationship to Jaelle. Because of her lack of actual gender, it had never really matured into a rivalry. Jaelle was my lover. Maauro, well the word friend seemed inadequate, but it was a relationship rooted in love that detoured around sex. There really seemed no word for what she was to me. But she too was not a human woman, merely the appearance of one grafted over a war-fighting machine made be an unknown species.

  Didn’t like cling to like? Would my life be incomplete without the love of a woman of my own kind?

  God, I thought wearily. I don’t want to even have these thoughts. I want them to go away. I want to open up my skull and let this pour out of me, never to return.

  “You look lost in thought, Fels.”

  I looked up startled. Croyzer stood only a foot away, giving me a quizzical almost gentle look. Her beauty and the scent of her caught me off guard, hitting me in places I hadn’t been aware of. I felt a pull toward her that was almost physical.

  Her lip’s quirked as if she had some idea of what was running through my mind.

  “I was thinking,” I nodded, “wondering about being far from home. Wondering, if sometimes you can voyage so far and so fast that you lose your way back.”

  Her eyes widened. “Strange thoughts for the captain of a scoutship?”

  I shook my head. “Who better to think so? I’ve been in places where no human has ever set foot. Seen things few would credit. Strangeness has been so much part of my life that it has ceased to be strange.”