When this is all over, said a small voice. He did not think it was God’s.
A wedge of security phavatars trudged towards the ship. Their 2.5-meter bodies were painted high-gloss UN blue. Their headparts looked like the heads of beetles. As they moved through the parking bay, hustlers, panhandlers, and trekkies melted out of their way. Trays of dubious mineral supplements and knock-off software disappeared from sight.
Kiyoshi took a long draw on his cigarette.
As he expected, the phavatars stopped at the foot of the Superlifter’s steps. “Are you the owner of this vessel?” said their leader in a buzzy synthetic voice.
“Depends who you ask.”
The phavatars regarded him blankly. Kiyoshi figured they were being operated in real time by minimum-wage local hires.
“We need to inspect this vessel for contraband,” said Phavatar #1.
“I’ve been cleared by the ISA,” Kiyoshi said. “If that’s not good enough for you, take it up with them.”
More blank stares. Just because there were humans operating these things, didn’t mean they were intelligent.
“Not that kind of contraband. Like, coffee. Spirits. Cheese. Meat.”
“My last stop was Mercury.”
“Are you refusing to cooperate?”
Suddenly, the phavatars were pointing PEPguns at him. Well, not exactly at him. But definitely in his direction.
PEPguns were not lethal, but delivered plasma pulses so intense that victims famously wished they were dead. There had to be humans operating the phavatars. The Midway authorities wouldn’t let a bunch of unsupervised MIs loose with PEPguns. Would they?
“OK,” Kiyoshi said, raising his hands a few centimeters. “Do what you have to do.”
He remotely unlocked the cargo hold. Three of the phavatars went around to inspect it. He stood inside the airlock to let the other two phavatars into the cockpit.
“Did you clean out the fridge?” said Jun, from the Monster’s parking orbit. He could see what was happening via the Superlifter’s internal and external cameras.
~Yup. There’s nothing for them to find. At worst, they’ll confiscate my stash of coffee beans.
The two phavatars poked around the cockpit. Presently one of them opened the mini-fridge.
Kiyoshi felt a spike of anxiety. But over the phavatar’s shoulder, he could see that the fridge was empty. Sparkling clean. The only thing anyone might remark on was that the screen in its door had been disabled.
The phavatar closed it without comment.
★
At the same time, seated in his garden in Shackleton City, Derek Lorna watched a 3D representation of the Wakizashi’s cockpit take shape. The false-colored image on his screen was not what the phavatars saw. In addition to the visible spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared added a wealth of information.
Mostly, they added the information that the Superlifter’s owner never threw anything away and was allergic to doing laundry.
God, what a slob.
Lorna pinched the bridge of his nose. Breathed in the subtle scents of grass and sun(lamp)-warmed leaves. He looked up at the canopy of bamboo above his head, but he did not see it. He saw the collapse of everything he’d worked for, paid for, gambled his career to achieve. He saw humanity itself sinking in a welter of radioactive flames.
One last chance to stave off defeat.
One last gamble.
A phavatar opened the mini-fridge beside the pilot’s couch. Its interior rapidly filled in on the screen.
The fridge might have looked clean to Kiyoshi, but ultraviolet inspection revealed smears of organic matter in the cracks at the sides of the shelves.
Lorna sent the spectrographic results for analysis. Might as well cover all the bases.
Moments later, he tensed.
Natto.
Nutriblocks.
Generic starch molecules.
Blood.
Reconfirm analysis.
Blood.
Lorna leaned forward and spoke into a separate, dedicated comms unit.
5.5 seconds later, on the Rocking Horse, in the long-term storage facility where you could rent trunk rooms by the month, year, or decade, a hatch slid open, and something climbed out.
★
“Your ship appears to be free of contraband,” Phavatar #1 buzzed.
Kiyoshi nodded and smiled. Get gone. Once they were out of the way, he was going to leave the ship for a while, take a stroll around the market. See what there was to buy.
“Thank you for your—”
The phavatar broke off. It stood immobile for a long moment. Then it pointed its PEPgun at his face. So did its colleague.
“You are under arrest,” it buzzed.
“Oh, hell, no. You didn’t find anything! There wasn’t anything to find!”
“I can smell coffee,” said Phavatar #1. The other one nudged it. “Ahem. Anyway, like I said, you’re under arrest.” It gestured at the airlock with its PEPgun. “Move it.”
But Kiyoshi had been scrutinizing the phavatars. He’d noticed that their UN-blue paint jobs were a bit … streaky. Hadn’t thought much of it, until Phavatar #1 had said …
“Sub-geminoid phavatars can’t smell,” Jun said, voicing Kiyoshi’s own thoughts. “Also, they aren’t moving right. They’re too clumsy, even for low-end bots.”
~My thoughts exactly.
As Phavatar #1 gestured with its PEPgun, Kiyoshi body-slammed it. In this gravity, his mass actually made a difference. The phavatar dropped its PEPgun—confirming that it lacked a machine’s flawless reflexes. Kiyoshi dived for the weapon, grabbed it, and staggered upright. The phavatar bellyflopped into the space where he’d been a second ago, and banged its face on the sushi machine. “Ow,” it yelled.
Kiyoshi planted one foot on its back. He pointed the PEPgun at the other phavatar. Slowly, it raised its hands.
“Drop the gun. Kick it over here.”
The other three phavatars piled into the airlock. Kiyoshi grabbed #2’s PEPgun. Now he had two. He pointed one at #2 and one at the rest of the gang. “Who are you working for? Don’t tell me the blue berets. The UN peacekeepers’ standards of professionalism may be low, but they don’t actually fake ship inspections, or try to arrest people on false pretexts.”
Phavatar #1 stirred under his foot. Kiyoshi stomped on its back.
“Ow! You win! Just let me turn over, OK?”
Kiyoshi raised his foot enough for the phavatar to roll onto its back.
“This was a stupid idea to begin with,” it said in its synthetic voice. Then a square of its torso hinged away. Out peered the face of a man with an orange goatee and bad acne.
Kiyoshi laughed aloud. Couldn’t help himself.
“Don’t shoot, OK?” The man spoke in a normal human voice. “I’m coming out.”
The lower half of the fake phavatar’s torso concertinaed open. The man wriggled out. It took him quite some time to free his legs from the legs of his costume.
“So,” Kiyoshi said, “I’m repeating myself, but who do you work for?”
“It was just a job,” said Orange Goatee. He sat down on the hollow shell of his phavatar costume. “I don’t know, OK? We answered an ad on Talent.cloud. The customer chose to be anonymous. You can’t hurt us. We didn’t hurt you.”
Kiyoshi already guessed who the customer was. Derek Lorna, or someone else associated with the Mercury rebellion. But he needed to know more. He needed to know if worse was to come.
By now, the other impersonators had opened the hatches of their costumes. Kiyoshi looked at the one who seemed least scared. “Where’d you get the costumes?”
“We already had them. We fabbed them for Richard III.”
“Richard who?”
“A play,” the woman said. “Shakespeare. It was a modern production. Got great reviews.”
“But you can’t live on reviews,” said Orange Goatee, his voice shakier than ever. “So I’m like, well, I know this is prostituting my gift. I
mean, pretending to be a security phavatar, it’s not exactly Hamlet, is it? But you can’t argue with S2K each for a couple of hours’ work.”
“Not that we’ll ever see the money now,” another of the actors added bitterly.
Kiyoshi juggled the PEPguns he had collected. He wondered what to do with them. Not wanting to take his eyes off the actors for too long, he squatted and shovelled the weapons into the mini-fridge. As he did so, a few specks of silver glitter floated out. Probably paint that had flaked off the actors’ costumes.
“The guns are real,” he said. “Where’d you get those?”
Orange Goatee turned wet eyes to him. “Man, you’re new on station, huh? This is Midway. You can buy anything here.”
Kiyoshi nodded. “And if you’d successfully arrested me?”
“That’s where improv skills come into play, man. We got an update to the job just now. Like just now. They said, change of plan, we want to talk to him, so come up with some ploy to get him out of the ship and escort him to long-term storage.”
“Long-term storage! Where’s that?”
“Underneath the East Side.”
★
“You know, I wonder if any of these people have ever been to the real East Side,” Elfrida said.
Mendoza did not like the look of ‘these people’ at all. He and Elfrida were sharing the street with cyborgs, metal-eyed, their hands augmented with precision machine tool attachments. Some wore hazmat suits, which was not reassuring. Big-headed children perched on the edges of roofs like pigeons.
The East Side, the Rocking Horse’s other ‘rocker,’ had an uncompleted feel to it. Big-box fabberies dominated. Street names seemed to be arbitrary. Painted on the sides of the buildings, they were hard to distinguish from the abundant graffiti. Which was how Mendoza had gotten them lost.
He hadn’t yet told Elfrida about that. He was going to get them un-lost before she guessed.
They’d elected not to connect their contacts to the Midway network, so they couldn’t be easily tracked. But that meant Mendoza had to rely on his eyes and his sense of direction. Another ironic reminder of how much he’d depended on his BCI.
“What was that?” he said.
Elfrida raised her voice over the tumult from the factory they were passing. “I was just thinking, the West Side? The East Side? They’re riffing off the names of New York neighborhoods, so I was wondering if any of them have ever been there, to see what a real city looks like. Or maybe it’s an aspirational thing. Oh, just ignore me. I get silly when I’m tired.”
“Let me carry that.”
“I’m OK.” She half-turned her body, putting the rucksack out of his reach.
“Let’s take a taxi.”
She smiled wanly. “When was the last time you saw one?”
The West Side had been full of yellow pedicabs. But they’d refrained from hailing one, for fear that it would somehow make them visible to the network. Mendoza now realized that Elfrida was right—he hadn’t seen a single taxi since they rode the Nodetrak to the East Side.
We should have hailed one when we had a chance. She can’t walk much further.
“So what’s the real New York like?” he said.
“Oh. Watery.”
“I’ve never been there, either. Tell you what: when this is all over, and we’re back on Earth, let’s go to New York for the weekend or something. I think we both deserve a vacation.”
She felt for his hand, squeezed it. “That would be awesome.”
Mondeleez. Yakult. Cisco.
At the sight of that last one, Mendoza realized the ‘street signs’ were no such thing. They were just the names of companies.
Fluorescent ring-lights dotted the roof. There was no sun-tube to navigate by. Nothing to do except walk in a straight line until they bumped into the wall.
“John?”
“Hmm?”
“We’re not lost or anything, are we?”
“Lost? Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
★
Kiyoshi ran. Half a gravity! He felt heavy, slow, and his knees twinged like he was eighty. But he ran through the parking lot, through the market, and lunged up a few steps of the climbway before halting, gasping for breath.
He should have made Mendoza and Elfrida connect to the network. That had been a misplaced precaution. Now Lorna was going to find them anyway, and Kiyoshi couldn’t even warn them.
“I’m looking at the central surveillance vid cache right now,” Jun said. He sounded faint and far away, or maybe that was the blood singing in Kiyoshi’s ears.
~Was it easy to get in?
“Medium-hard.”
That did not reassure Kiyoshi. He figured Derek Lorna was bound to have access to the Rocking Horse’ surveillance cameras. Or another troupe of actors dressed up as security phavatars. Or both. Or worse.
~Can you see Elfrida and Mendoza?
“I’m going to run a facial recognition search. It might take a few minutes. I’ve got to be careful I don’t get red-flagged.”
Kiyoshi said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t rub it in: Jun was doing something illegal, crossing one of the lines he’d said he would never cross. Breaking into someone else’s system, stealing proprietary data. Kiyoshi thought, One step closer to robbing banks.
The climbway topped out. Kiyoshi panted through N-Space, his face so dour that the sales force left him alone. Up again. This escalator was shorter, rising through a tangle of water mains and power lines. Stepping into the false sunlight of a local day, he reached for his sunglasses, but he’d left them on the Superlifter.
“OK, I’ve got Mendoza looking up at a camera on the Nodetrak, 41 minutes ago. Here he is again, 37 minutes ago. Sending you the coordinates.”
~Elfrida?
~Look: that’s her, beside Mendoza. I’m just not getting any hits because she’s not looking up at the cameras.
In the screen grab Jun sent him, Elfrida had the hood of her sweatshirt pulled all the way forward, her head lowered.
~Someone must have taught her the basics of evading surveillance, Kiyoshi subvocalized.
“Her mother, I think.”
Kiyoshi shambled into the Nodetrak station. The Nodetrak sounded like it should have been a spiffy commuter rail network, and maybe that had been the plan, but only a short section of line existed, bridging the gap between the Rocking Horse’s “rockers.” The single-carriage train had a transparent floor. Kiyoshi peered down at an intestinal tangle of coolant pipes. It was hot in the carriage. His shirt stuck to his back. He thought about the fearsome problem of heat in space. Not enough and you froze, but then you had to get rid of it, because heat built up like a toxin in steel bubbles insulated by the vacuum.
He thought about the specs of those medium-haul shuttles they’d been building on Mercury.
He thought about the Ghost.
And then there was no more time for amateur scientific musings, because the Nodetrak had docked on the East Side, and he was off, jogging.
~Where are they now?
“Coverage is spotty over here. Got a couple of hits, 10 and 6 minutes ago. Looks like they’re going round in circles.”
~Great.
“Hang on.” Jun’s voice was a sharp tack in Kiyoshi’s eardrum, and then he went silent.
Kiyoshi walked, jogged, walked past factories that made everything from crackers to O-rings. The place had an Earthish vibe, he thought, but he was wrong about that. No one manufactured anything on Earth anymore. The movies Kiyoshi had seen were misleading.
He brushed his fingers across the small of his back, where he’d stashed a couple of the phavatar impersonators’ PEPguns.
Jun said, “You’d better look at this.”
★
Contrary to Kiyoshi’s fears, Derek Lorna had no access to the Rocking Horse’s surveillance system. He was no hacker. Buying access was his way, and he had never bothered to cultivate any friends in that deep-space ghetto.
But now it didn’t
matter.
Sitting cross-legged in his back garden, he wore a headset and gloves, as if he were immersed in some game. His hands fluttered. But these gloves provided no sensory feedback. They were purely for transmitting command gestures.
Through the wonky grid of the Rocking Horse’s East Side, an invisible swirl of dust dispersed on a non-existent wind. It re-coalesced on a street called (on the map) Neil Armstrong Boulevard. It settled to ground level, dogging the footsteps of a husky Filipino and his companion, a woman carrying a rucksack.
They would not have noticed the trace of dust at their heels, even if they hadn’t been busy arguing.
“Gotcha,” Derek Lorna whispered, a tortured smile forming on his lips.
★
“I think we ought to stop and ask directions,” Elfrida said.
“I know where I’m going,” Mendoza said. They’d found the sidewall of the East Side and were now walking parallel to it. Keep on in a straight line and they’d have to get somewhere.
“Yeah, but what if …”
“We’re almost there, I promise.”
She drank from a pouch of fruit juice, keeping her head lowered, always lowered. She must be so tired. He hated himself for putting her through this.
“Maybe we don’t even have the right address,” she said.
“It’s on the map.”
“I mean, this is an industrial zone.” She spoke the last words as if they meant gates of hell, reflecting the sensibilities of Europe. In the Philippines, there were still some factories. But Mendoza wasn’t loving these noxious chemical odors and bursts of noise, either. Every bang made him jump. Elfrida persisted, “All the official stuff is back on the West Side. What if we’re in the completely wrong place?”
“The map—”
“Oh, screw the map! I want to ask directions.”
“There’s no one to ask them from.”
There were cyborgs passing, but not even Elfrida had the guts to stop one of them. She turned and strode towards the factory they were passing. A mural on the wall depicted a dead pig hanging by its rear trotters. Vents exuded a smell of burnt fat.
“No! Elfrida!” Mendoza ran after her.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 113
