REBOOTS

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Boggart threw his head back, breaking the nose of the man whom he’d taken a bite out of. He heard the man fall to the floor with a weighty thunk, and knew that one was out of the fight. Two more. One had dragged himself upright, meaning to come straight on to face the Boggart.

  Bad move. You should have waited for your pal to right himself.

  The Boggart spat the chunk of flesh still in his teeth; it flew right into the bodyguard’s face, causing him to throw his hands up in disgust to get the bit of gore out of his eyes. The Boggart kicked hard, driving his shin into the man’s stomach; he could feel as the air escaped the thrall’s lungs, bending him over double. The Boggart took a half step forward, bringing him abreast of the bodyguard; he brought his right elbow down on the man’s neck hard, sending him to the floor hard.

  And then there was one.

  The Boggart glanced at the lone conscious thrall, on his knees now from where he’d been knocked down. The Boggart glared murder at him. He could tell that the man was beaten.

  “Enough!” the thrall gasped. “Truce!”

  The Boggart simply walked past, shoving the man roughly down, not even sparing a backward glance.

  In a few strides, he was next to Claire; she gasped sharply; for the first time, her expression actually demonstrating something—a mingling of fear and uncertainty. She had no idea what was about to happen to her. She was a vampire, but only of some thirty years; not yet as terribly strong as the Elders. She could have fought him, and maybe won, but she didn’t move a single muscle. The Boggart brought his clawed hand up to her face…and took her chin between his fingers gently. “I’m not anybody’s pet, Claire. You keep making that mistake about me. We had a deal, darling.” He looked down for a moment before meeting her eyes again. “You know how I am about those. Like I said earlier.” At that moment, dozens of thralls burst into the room, all of them pointing very large guns directly at the Boggart’s head.

  The fear left her eyes, but not the uncertainty. It was hard to read a Fang, but he thought…just for a second, she looked like the old Claire, before she had become possessive and the fact that he was immortal and she wasn’t had started to make her a little crazy and he had to cut things short.

  He’d been told, hellfires, he knew, that anything but a casual fling between Fey and Norms just wouldn’t work. For his part, he’d tried to keep it light. Well…yeah, tried, that was the kicker. Maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to try hard enough. Maybe…he was no shrink, he didn’t know. All he did know was that it got messy, and sad.

  Thirty years ago…

  Just for a second, there was that old spark there. And it faded…but it didn’t entirely leave her eyes.

  And maybe if he’d been what he was back then…

  But that was a long time ago. And she wasn’t the old Claire. No matter what was underneath it all, she was a Fang now, and Fangs didn’t have lovers. Fangs only had drones and thralls, and the Boggart would become neither for anyone. That was her Hell now, he realized; she had become what she was, ultimately, to find him again. His immortality had driven them apart. Now hers would drive them away from each other yet again. It was heartbreaking, even for his old soul…but he had a job to do, and the Boggart always delivered.

  “You’re right, Boggie,” she said, quietly. “A deal’s a deal.” She traced another couple of circles on the top of the box; there was a hum, and the top irised open. “Go ahead. Take the watch.” She laughed a little, bitterly. “Don’t worry, you won’t lose any fingers.”

  He reached in gingerly, still staring at her eyes. They used to be a tender green like the forests he remembered from his homeland, in a face the soft pink of an apple blossom, but now they were cold emerald against ivory. He still saw something of her old fire there, though, behind it all.

  “Damned if we do, and damned if we don’t,” she said.

  “There might be another time, Claire…in another life. But it isn’t now. I’ve got my job, and you’ve got your life.” He smiled, reluctantly. “It’s a small galaxy, though. Doubtless I’ll run into you again.”

  “Not if I see you first,” she said, with a brittle laugh. “Time for you to go back to your leash-holder. I have a station to see to.”

  He could tell that she wanted nothing more than for him to take her into his arms, to erase the past thirty years in a single embrace…but that’s not who he was.

  The Boggart always kept his word.

  Without saying anything else, he turned away from her, striding past the guards and the mess and out the door.

  Sometimes…he really hated his job.

  As much as I wish it wasn’t, this is one of those times, the Boggart reflected as he made his way to his skiff.

  Home Service was probably not going to be entirely happy about the bill they were going to get from “Bert’s Men’s Outfitters.” On the other hand, if they bothered to look at what the bill might have been from the upper fifty percent of the stores on Claire’s station, they’d figure out that it could have been much worse. The Boggart got a kind of melancholy pleasure out of his new duds; it seemed that Retro was In for this decade, and he was outfitted in classic film noir style.

  Only fitting, you dirty rotten sentimentalist. If he was going to walk out on the dame, he might as well look the part. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat, and pulled the completely useless fedora down over his eyes, and slouched into that piece of crap the Púca had rented for him.

  Of course what the Púca didn’t know was that he’d hocked one of the knickknacks he’d purloined from the pirate, and there was some very nice single malt indeed that was going to help him ease his sorrows and discomfort. As the skiff pulled away from the station, he cracked the first bottle, never bothering with a glass.

  To Claire: what could’ve been, what will never come to pass.

  The Boggart passed the time in silence, drifting towards his next destination—one he hoped would wrap this case up. He was tired. And that little pissant Pete had better have given him the straight dope. He wasn’t at all sure he had the steam to tail-chase this Fred much further. Vampires, talking Reboots, a freakin’ Wendigo, and one wily Werewolf. It sure can be a strange universe, sometimes. He had time and then some to contemplate all of those mysteries; the station he was bound for was another backwater, and even worse it was a Norm-run backwater. It was also his last shot; it was going to take him days to get out there, and once there he had no more moves or clues to go on.

  On the other hand, where else would Fred go? It would be one thing if he still had Pack connections, but he didn’t, no Pack would trust a Lone from another Pack even creeping in like a Zeta with his tail between his legs, and he probably didn’t even know where to contact any of his bloodline to see if his old Pack would take him in.

  And unless I miss my guess, he’s running out of money. He knows he can’t tap his owed wages, not after pulling the stunt he did, so all he’s got is whatever he scrounged up on the first station. In fact…wonder if he didn’t work his way over there on a freighter…which means.…

  Ha. Fred’s gonna have to find a job. Running was easy when you had time, credits, and friends. Time Fred had had. He certainly didn’t have any friends anymore, and the last the Boggart had already guessed the truth of.

  This might be the first decent break he was going to have in this case.

  This was a working station; none of the flash of the first tourist trap the Boggart had visited, and none of the polish of Claire’s station, which catered to a much higher clientele. The thing was huge. It had to be. Entire arms were leased by various companies. It might be a backwater as far as the tourist trade was concerned, but as far as the mercantile and industrial trade went it was a hotspot. Right in the “sweet spot” where several sorts of raw materials could come together for manufacturing, and positioned perfectly as a refueling depot for short-run transports. Ninety percent of the traffic here was commercial, not tourist, with the odd
smattering of colonists, researchers, and religious pilgrims from every and any faith.

  But it was a lot higher on the food chain than the mining colony had been. Pretty much everyone here was skilled labor, even the stevedores. Operating transfer equipment took a lot more brains and better reflexes than digging and blasting rock. This translated to better pay and more safety. Still what in the old, old days would have been called “blue-collar” work, but skilled and specialized.

  And it took tough creatures to do it. Every time you worked industrial, things went wrong, and they usually required brute force to put them right, which is why it was even stranger that this was mostly a Norm facility.

  The Boggart got the vibe as soon as he disembarked. There was no effort here to make things sleek, or shiny, or pretty—but they were military-clean, big, and hard to break. Solid. As a tiny little boat, he got put as far in towards the hub as they could get him, which suited him just fine. Berths far out on the arm were reserved for huge transports. And the berths on this section of the docks were as physically close together as they could be and still dock safely. There was a wide variety of little, working ships crowded in here. Tugs, short-haul messengers and delivery service for small, extremely expensive things, a few skiffs like his, probably owned by wildcatter explorers, even a couple military and Home Service couriers.

  The corridors were strictly segregated: people on two narrow walkways on either side, middle reserved for a light rail system that zipped heavy and bulky items to the ships. Compared to the meandering throngs of tourists on the last two stations, these corridors of industrial-beige bulkheads and floors seemed sparsely populated. And everyone in them was very purposefully going somewhere. This was no place to meander.

  Good thing the Boggart had a destination. Another transient hostel. There were plenty of them: for crewmen of ships waiting to be loaded or unloaded, for laborers that weren’t in company quarters. From there, he figured his next option would be to pick up short, casual jobs from the pool if he needed to, and meanwhile, sniff around without being obvious. He had the skills, he had the brawn, and most importantly, he had the Union card. There were times when that came in handy, and this was going to be one of them. Since this was a working station, he didn’t have to wait very long for an “application process” at any of the jobs he took up there; out this far, there’s always a labor shortage, so if your credentials check out and you show up, you can start working immediately in most places. And that’s just what the Boggart did.

  And of course the PI work went on too. Most of it simply involved showing up and listening to people, just as he’d done in the mine-colony bar. He’d found out early on in his profession that most people will spill their entire life story with very little prompting; everyone wanted to be heard, to be recognized for who they were and what they’d done. It was when you started getting too probing and pushy that they all clammed up. The Boggart also took in a lot of gossip: who was going where, doing what to whom, birthday plans and vacation trips, torrid romances and crushes. The first job he took was as a one-shot unloading/reloading gig for a transport that had just docked; get the goods off, don’t drop any of them, and put new goods on. These were jobs that moved things like his crate, only heavier; too heavy for an unassisted human, not bulky enough for an AI assist mass-loader or a powered exoskeleton. Luckily, he was a rated power-exo driver, which is what he moved up to after the first job. The Union card said “longshoreman,” which covered a lot of jobs like that; kind of funny when you came to think about it, since there wasn’t a shore to be seen around here. He almost dropped a crate on the deck supervisor’s foot when he laughed at the memory of the Reboot he had found on the beach planet, wearing its grass skirt and coconut bra.

  The creds had been plentiful for the gig, comparatively, but that’s not what he was here for. He needed information, a lead to follow, and using a power-exo on a landing deck bustling with activity wasn’t exactly the best way to dredge up information, so he quickly dropped it. Now, the good thing about having a “longshoreman” card on a station like this, especially one that was still a bit understaffed, was that both the union and the bosses were pretty loose about just what a “longshoreman” could do. He was pretty certain after the first couple of gigs that wherever Fred was, it wasn’t on the dock crews. So when a maintenance job showed up in the work detail pool, he applied for it and got it. More hot, heavy work, stuff bots were just not good at and Reboots would break trying to do, nevermind that the profusion of Norms made Reboots unviable for most of the station. The bots with an AI robust enough to be able to discriminate between “piece of debris” and “slightly misplaced piece of vital equipment” were either too large or too fragile for the environment in the Jeffries Tubes, whereas a sentient organic would recognize in an instant that a damn power cable had come loose and was dangling on the floor waiting to fry him, or the critical circuit junction had spontaneously jumped out of its slot and was now in that pile of miscellaneous flotsam that had collected in the corner. Despite the gremlin sensors, the damn things were still periodically reinfesting the station every time someone whose protocol was less than up to par docked.

  In between jobs, he always made a point of hitting the cafeterias and local watering holes whenever they were the most crowded, usually on shift change. A station like this one worked around the clock, so there was always a shift coming on and going off, depending on which job he was focusing on. It played merry hell with his already abused sleep schedule, but he toughed it out, adjusting so that he got to as many different points on the station as he could with the largest variety of crowds. He had to admit one thing; whoever had bankrolled this outfit was one of the best overall employers he’d ever seen. The pay was decent, the food at the company-owned cafeterias wasn’t big on variety but it was nutritious and cheap, and even his bunk at the hostel was the size of a walk-in closet and not just the standard eight-by-four bunk. From what he heard on the grapevine the benefits were good, too. And as a result, people worked well, and hard, and more quickly than they would have if there’d been supers busting their asses all the time.

  He was wearing a different human face whenever he went in to a new job, but he kept all of the faces vaguely similar so they more or less matched the ID; it helped for people to recognize him from being around without really being able to place where they had seen him last. Whenever he was questioned, which was rarely, he allowed others to fill in the blanks for him.

  “Hey, you’re that guy that just came over from admin, right? Been down on the docks for a few days? Pull up a chair, man; we’ve always got space at this table.”

  “Not as much space as you have between your ears, Jack.” The second worker pointed a fork at the Boggart. “Obviously it’s what’s-his-name from electrical. He can grab a seat all the same, just don’t insult the man, huh?”

  “Hell, it’s okay. I get mistook for that admin guy all the time. Name’s Skip. Skip Morgan.” And that was usually all it took to get in. This bunch was particularly chatty; all of them were older Norms, and seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the station. He didn’t blame them; as places to live in the wide galaxy went, this was above average for regular joes. And for his purposes, this was exactly the group he needed to get closer to. Regulars noticed the new guys. They treated him like an old friend, which meant sharing all of the gossip; they didn’t mind that he didn’t put in his own opinion at all. It just gave them more of a chance to air their own.

  “And what about those pilgrims that just got in a couple of cycles ago? You know, the ones with the bells and the chanting? They’re just sitting in the corridor in Section 3…waiting.” The third member of the group was the one that had spoken up. “They creep me out,” he said, giving a theatrical shiver.

  “Everything creeps you out, Jeff. Being creeped out is your natural state of being.”

  “Yeah, well…I don’t know, man. Bells and chanting…”

  That was how the conversations went; Jeff
, Jack and Monty, the Boggart found, actually had a great deal of knowledge about the goings-on in the station at any one time. They were some of the “oldest” workers here; they’d been here since the station went live twenty years ago. Naturally, he had to wade through seas of bullshit to find anything, but he liked listening to them all the same. Unfortunately, work had to come before leisure, so he continued to pick up different jobs. After he was sure that he was blending in well enough to be invisible with his regular set of faces—excluding the one he always wore when around his new “lunch and a beer” buddies—he set off around the station to deal with some of the grittier aspects of detective work. Mostly it involved greasing palms. A few creds here to take a look at a work log, a handful more there to see employee files, and so on. It was all taken out of the expense account, of course, but nothing that the Boggart found seemed to be of any use. If Fred was on the station, he had done just as good of a job of staying inconspicuous as the Boggart had. The Boggart was beginning to lose hope of resolving the case when his next big break came.

  Almost literally.

  Every place where there were sentient beings, there was gambling. No matter how you tried to make it illegal, gamblers found a way around it. The best you could hope to do was keep it under control. Like drinking. The brains behind this station realized that, so there were bars, and in the bars, there was official entertainment in some of the bars, and in others, if someone wanted to start a craps or card game, or bet on something, well, that was fine. They even had tables set up for it, but no staff manning them; the bigwigs left that up to whoever wanted to play. In theory, it worked well.

  In practice, of course…well, there is always someone willing to prey on the unsuspecting. The Boggart found one such instance as he was making his way back to his room in the hostel from the bar that Jeff, Jack, and Monty frequented the most. He was walking his usual route when he took a different corridor on a whim. The bars around this station had more imaginative names than the one on the mining colony; his usual watering hole was “The Library.” He noticed this one because it was a variation on the theme of “places I tell the wife/partner/parents where I’m going that don’t sound like a bar.” This one was “The Laundry.” He chuckled a little; then, because he’d never been here before, decided to check it out.