Nightside City

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  He didn't argue with that. "So what do you think is happening? Is this all just a front, and they tried to kill you before you found out what's really going on?"

  I nodded. He'd hit my little idea pretty squarely- maybe it was obvious, and I'd been too close to the case to see it before. "I think that just might be it, yeah. But you're getting off the track again. It's the city I'm worried about."

  "Go on," he said.

  "Look," I said. "Just because the fusion charge can't work, just because it's probably going to leave the whole city flat as that desert you found me on, that doesn't mean these people aren't going to try it, and try it while there are still people here. Or even if they do wait until the city's been evacuated, there are still going to be miners scattered all over the nightside who could get killed." I didn't mention the possibility of a meltdown. That seemed too damn melodramatic; I didn't think Mishima was the kind of person who thought in those terms. He'd just about said he wasn't.

  That didn't mean I thought a meltdown was impossible; it just meant I didn't think Mishima would take it seriously.

  Overkill from a botched fusion charge, though,-that he could accept.

  "Yeah," he said. "I see that."

  I nodded. "So, I have got to find out what they're really doing. And if they're really going to flatten the city, I've got to stop them. That's more important than anything."

  "I see that, too," he said.

  I waited, and he went on. "Hsing, you were right. I'm out of my depth here. I came in in the middle, and I don't know a damn thing about all this fusion-charge stuff. You handle it, you do it all your way, and I'll back you up. You need muscle, I've got three good people on retainer. You need com service, I've got some nice stuff. You need an in anywhere, I'll see what I can do. You just keep me updated, and I won't interfere. And when it's done, we're partners, all right?"

  "Either that," I said, "or you can try and collect what I owe you from my estate."

  I was joking, but I was also puzzled. Did Mishima really think I was that valuable? Why was he going along with all this? Why was he so eager to take me on as a partner?

  But as I'd just told him, Nightside City was the important thing. I would worry about just what the Ipsy was really planning for the city, and when that was settled I could try and figure out Big Jim's program. Once I knew whether the city was about to be reduced to radioactive debris or not I could worry about loose ends like Orchid and Rigmus.

  I was tired of talk. I was ready to get back to work.

  Chapter Eighteen

  the hospital let me go without an argument, and I got a cab home. I'd borrowed a couple of hundred credits from Mishima to make sure my card would keep working. That put me a notch deeper into the hole, but I couldn't see any way around it.

  My Sony-Remington was still lying on my desk where Orchid had dropped it, and the holster was somewhere on the dayside; I got an old shoulderbag and put the gun in that. Then I sat down at my desk and got the com up and running.

  The first step was to kick all my security into high, and to hell with the cost. The next step was worse.

  I stopped for a minute to fight down trembling before I plugged myself back in, but I knew I'd need to run on wire for what I had to do next, so I held myself still and jacked in. I wasn't expecting any more horses. I just had to hope that Mishima was playing straight, and that he'd sent the protection he'd promised. The high eye was back overhead, another normal-field spy-eye was on its way, and tracer microintelligences were all over the area-but not on me, because without a symbiote the damn things might kill me if I picked up enough to clog an artery. The hospital had given me a little anti-invasive treatment that was supposed to last a week or so-one more item on the bill Mishima was paying-but I was still eagerly avoiding micros of any description as much as I could. It could have been my mind playing tricks, but I had a constant reminder of my unprotected status-I itched, and I hadn't really itched since I was a little girl. Even the cheap symbiote I'd had had taken care of itches.

  I didn't let that distract me. I knew what I was after. Money leaves a trail. If the people at the Ipsy were working for Nakada, she had to be paying them. I wanted to know where that money was going and what they were buying with it. I had a theory I wanted to check out.

  If they were planting fusion charges, they had to be buying them, or buying materials for them, or at the very least buying the building programs for their microassemblers. If they were planning anything at all, they'd have expenses of some sort. I intended to take a look at those expenses.

  I wasn't expecting trouble. After all, Lee's bunch thought I was dead-or at least they were supposed to think that. They shouldn't have been on guard.

  They weren't. I got back to that numbered account, the one Nakada had used for her real estate purchases, without any problems at all. Getting a list of all outgoing payments wasn't too difficult, either.

  Besides that one, I tracked down and checked out every other account Nakada had used for her real estate buys. I went back to my old list of property transactions and traced every one of them back to Nakada-sometimes directly, sometimes through blinds, sometimes through Orchid- and then I traced forward on every account.

  Just as I figured, she'd paid one hell of a lot of money to Paulie Orchid. I couldn't find anything directed to Lee or Rigmus or anyone else at the Ipsy, but there was plenty that had gone to Orchid, and I set out to trace that.

  That was easier than I had any right to expect. Orchid was an idiot. He had no security at all on any of his accounts, and he generally used his right name.

  Once the money came in, it went nine ways. A little of each deposit got shunted off to a numbered account; I figured that was either expense money, or Orchid skimming a little before his friends got their fingers into the pot. The rest got divided into eight even shares.

  One share went off-planet, as negotiable securities on every ship outbound for Prometheus. My guess was that that was Orchid's own cut, being tucked away safely out of sight.

  Another share went to an account for Beauregard Rigmus, at Epimethean Commerce.

  Another went to Mahendra Dhuc Lee.

  The others went to five other people at the Ipsy, all human.

  I noted all their names and numbers, and then I dropped that line for the time being and went at the Ipsy's financial records.

  What I was after was simple enough. I wanted information on everything that the Ipsy, or anyone working there, had bought lately, or had delivered anywhere, with special attention paid to Doc Lee and the five others on my list.

  I wanted to see if they were really assembling a monster fusion charge, or some huge tractor to pull the crater westward, or any other device that might have a shot at saving the city.

  I'll save you all the details. It took me six hours, and you don't want to hear it all, so I'll just tell you what I found.

  They weren't.

  All the money from Sayuri Nakada was going straight into personal accounts, and then being sent on to more personal accounts on Prometheus, and it was staying there. No money from the Ipsy's regular accounts was going into fusion charges or any other sort of heavy equipment that might conceivably be used to stop a planet's rotation or move an entire city. In fact, no money from the Ipsy was going anywhere; except for my six little darlings, the Institute was effectively shut down and bankrupt. Its funding had dried up about two years back, when its best people had decided to beat the rush and emigrate.

  My guess was right. The city was safe from any glitching rescue attempts. The whole thing was a fraud, a scam, a way to pry enough money out of Nakada for those eight people to get off Epimetheus and live comfortably on Prometheus.

  Except, of course, the city was still going to fry on schedule. That was why these eight wanted off.

  I unplugged myself and stared at the screen for a moment, at the list of the eight names. Then I leaned back, touching keys without thinking about it, and watched as the big holo across the room lit up wit
h a scene of robot beasts in spikes and armor churning up an alien landscape and each other in some sort of competition.

  I was at the bottom of the puzzle, I was pretty sure. I had it all. And I was disappointed.

  It was all a cheap little swindle. Nightside City would not get a last-minute reprieve.

  It wouldn't go out in a sudden blaze of glory, taking the entire planet with it, either. It would slowly cook away and wind up an empty ruin out on the dayside, just the way we'd all thought it would all along.

  It was often that way, in my line of work. The big cases don't turn out as big as you think they will. Sordid little details don't lead to criminal masterminds, or big breaks in vast schemes-they just lead to more sordid little details.

  These eight people, desperate to get off-planet without winding up broke, had put together a con and picked Sayuri Nakada as their mark. They had tried to kill me when I came looking at it, not because they were afraid I'd tell the cops, or ruin Nakada's profits, but because they didn't want me to uncover the fraud and tell Nakada she was being swindled.

  And that was all there was to it.

  Except that their little scheme had started affecting other people. The squatters were going to be evicted. The real estate market in the city was probably going to be all screwed up. Sayuri Nakada was probably running on family credit, and when the plot failed and the sun rose she might drag the entire Nakada family down with her-at least, I thought so for a minute or two, but then I changed my mind. The Nakadas wouldn't be stupid enough to let Sayuri get at that much money. They could lose a few hundred megabucks and never notice it.

  All that was from the con, but the con wasn't all these people had done. They had tried to kill me. What's more, they had cost Mishima a good chunk of money, in the expenses he'd paid for me. I felt I owed him that money, so they hadn't just tried to kill me, they'd driven me a long way into debt.

  I hate being in debt!

  They owed me for this.

  I still had a client, too, and that meant I still had work to do.

  They owed me, and they were going to pay.

  I wanted to start with Sayuri Nakada. She was the one with the money, after all, the one who was stupid enough to fall for the scheme. I wanted to start with her, but I didn't. After a little thought I decided to save her for later.

  I was going to start with Paulie Orchid. Unless I was bending data, he was the one who had put it all together. The fact that he was the one doling out the money proved that. He'd needed some scientists to shill for him, so he'd found Doc Lee and his team at the Ipsy, all of them desperate for money; that wouldn't have been beyond even Orchid's talents. The idea of Rigmus or Lee organizing the plot just didn't fit; it had to be Orchid.

  So he was the mastermind, and he was also the one who had tried to kill me. He was the most dangerous of the whole array. I'd underestimated him when I thought he was nothing but a bit of gritware; he was stupid in a lot of ways, but not in every way. He was too stupid to put any security on his bank accounts, but he'd been smart enough to play a pretty damn good con. He'd dropped out of sight for a long time before he'd come up with this scheme; maybe he'd had some modification done, and I don't just mean the wire job. You can buy just about any sort of add-on you want, for either brain or body, and he might have bought anything. I didn't know just what he was capable of, and I wanted to have surprise on my side when I went after him.

  So Orchid came first.

  I called Mishima at his office. He was cheerful, giving me the whole routine about being glad to hear from me.

  I wasn't in the mood to chat. I cut through the banter and told him I wanted the muscle he'd offered me. I didn't tell him anything about con games, didn't give him any names; I just said I was going to pay Orchid a visit and needed some backup. Armed backup.

  He dropped the friendship display. He nodded and agreed, and we broke the connection.

  I called a cab, and half an hour later I met the muscle Mishima had sent me on the street at the entrance to Orchid's apartment tower-three of them, all big. Any one of them must have weighed over twice what I did, and they all wore slick armor, the transparent tight-bond monomolecular stuff. The woman had retractable claws. The bigger, darker man had fangs that gleamed as bright as the wires in his face. The smaller man was heavily cyborged, half his face rebuilt with chrome. Serious muscle. You don't go in for the surgical stuff for fun.

  Maybe the cyborg had gone into it because he had to be rebuilt anyway, but the other two, they'd done it just for business.

  They were all armed with light little pieces, street-legal in the city.

  They were perfect.

  Using a voice distorter and no image, I called up to Orchid's apartment, saying I was collecting contributions for a campaign to outlaw gambling on Epimetheus. Rigmus answered.

  I gave him my story, and he told me to eat wire and die. I was polite; I asked if anyone else was around who might be more generous.

  He offered to feed the wire up my ass personally.

  I asked if there was anyone else there I could talk to, more generous or not, and said I'd been told Paulie Orchid lived there. I made it sound like Orchid had been sold to me as the savior of the downtrodden.

  Yeah, Rigmus told me, Orchid was in, but he was busy, and of course he wasn't interested.

  I just needed to know he was there. I shut up and exited the call.

  The four of us went up the tower together, the muscle and me, and I stood back with my gun in my hand while the cyborg took out the door security.

  But the cyborg wasn't the first one in. The instant the door opened I was through and into the room.

  It was a big apartment, and a good address, but those two hadn't done it justice. The place was all done in maroon and red, with flat golden walls and no holos anywhere except a cheap vidset hanging in one corner. The furniture was strictly inert-no color shifts, legs holding everything up-and there wasn't much of it. What there was didn't look new, either. I figured Orchid and Rigmus had blown away all the juice they could spare in getting the place, with nothing left to furnish it decently.

  Or maybe they figured it wasn't worth the trouble, since it was temporary. They were both bound for Prometheus when their little scam had played out.

  The best piece there was a big maroon sofa, pushed back hard against one wall. Rigmus was sitting on it, holding a jackbox.

  I dove for him. He dropped the jackbox and dodged, leaning awkwardly sideways, and I twisted around and took him in the throat with the side of the hand holding the gun.

  He grunted and then grabbed for me. I think he figured he'd just break me in half, small as I am.

  I don't break that easy.

  I got him under the jaw, bent his head back, and rammed it against the wall. Hard.

  He got an arm around my waist and tried to pull me away, and I rammed his head back against the wall again, then drove the butt of the HG-2 into his larynx. I felt something give. His stomach growled, which seemed weirdly inappropriate, and I wondered whether it had anything to do with my blow.

  The cyborg was coming up behind me, but I waved him back. This was personal. Rigmus had tried to kill me.

  He was flailing about, not connecting. I put a finger into his left eye and pressed down.

  He was lucky my fingernails hadn't really grown back yet.

  He tried to scream, but he couldn't because of what I'd done to his throat and because I was stuffing a hand into his mouth, choking him with my fist.

  He didn't even have the wits to try and bite me, and I just pounded his head back against the wall until he collapsed.

  I'll tell you, it was pretty damn satisfying to finally be able to do something that simple and direct and to have it work. I have some pretty serious moral reservations about using any more violence than necessary-but I forget them sometimes. I shouldn't, but I do.

  When he slumped I got off him and let him fall. He landed sprawled across a corner of the couch, which managed to reshape i
tself enough to keep him from falling to the floor.

  He lay there, less than half conscious, and his stomach growled again. I almost laughed.

  The female muscle took over with him, sitting on him with a claw at his throat, while the cyborg opened the bedroom doors.

  The first bedroom was empty, just a white bed floating in the center unmade and a wardrobe dispenser in one corner-nothing else.

  Orchid was in the second. This one was done in red and gold, and any juice he'd saved on the rest of the place he'd blown here. The walls were holos, running erotic vids on all four sides, but I didn't let the movement distract me. I knew holos from real, and I knew Orchid when I saw him.

  He was on the bed, with a woman and his pants down, and a privacy field up so he hadn't heard us coming. I ran in and grabbed him before he saw us.

  He was too surprised to resist. I shoved him over onto the floor, and when he opened his mouth to protest I stuck the muzzle of the HG-2 in it and flicked the power switch.

  I felt the gun tick to life. Orchid saw the pilot light glow red, then green.

  The woman started to scream, but Mishima's muscle pulled her off, and one of them, the one with the fangs, held her quiet in the corner while I negotiated with Mis' Orchid. He let her straighten her outfit, a mess of frills and drifting colors that could have hidden almost anything, but he kept his gun at her throat.

  The cyborg took the apartment door for his post, first watching out, then watching in, in quick, steady alternation; good, solid work.

  "Now, Mis' Paul Orchid," I said. "We have a few things to get straight."

  He didn't say anything. He couldn't, with the gun where it was. His eyes widened a little, though, and I think it was only then, when he heard my voice, that he recognized me. I looked pretty different with just a thin fuzz on the top of my head, instead of real hair, and with hardly any eyebrows.

  Besides, he'd thought I was dead.

  "First off," I said, "I know why you tried to kill me. I know all about the scam you're running on Sayuri Nakada. I know you wanted to keep me from telling her it was a con. But you screwed up, grithead. It wasn't any of my business; I don't owe Nakada anything. If you hadn't tried to kill me, you fucking idiot, I wouldn't have cared, but you-you made it my business by dumping me on the dayside. That makes it very personal." I shifted the gun, so he could hear the mechanism working as it compensated for my movement. An HG-2 hasn't got room for soundproofing, which was fine with me-it added a bit to the effect.