Another child’s feedback couldn’t hurt, so I said, “Go ahead and unwrap her.” I glanced at the product leaflet taped to the underside of the crate lid. “She walks, talks, cries, and closes her eyes when she goes to sleep. Now with MORE!! realistic functions.”
Mia was too busy tearing at the bubble wrap to respond. Irene snapped, “Mia! Say thank you for letting me play with the dolly!”
“Thank you for letting me play with the dolly,” Mia parroted. She might be boisterous, but Irene had her well trained. She skipped down the hall, fighting with the bubble wrap.
“Sorry about that,” Irene said, brushing loose wisps of hair out of her eyes and transferring the baby to her other hip. “She loves that kind of thing. Like that show? Lil’ Hellraisers? She adores that.”
“So does my daughter,” I said, and stopped myself. “Never mind.”
Irene finally seemed amused. “You have a daughter?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I involuntarily touched my face. Because I’d just got beat up by a 250-pound thug, that was why. Family guys aren’t supposed to do that. I wondered how bad the damage looked.
Fortunately, Irene didn’t ask where I came by it. In Shiftertown, you don’t. “No reason.” A sparkle forced itself through the tired distraction in her eyes. “How old is your daughter?”
“Four.”
I hadn’t intended to use Lucy as an icebreaker, but that’s how it panned out. Within the next five minutes, I’d told Irene that I was raising Lucy on my own, and that my ex was offworld. I’m well aware, thank you, that the single-dad thing is a surefire sympathy play with women. I won’t even pretend I have never used it. But this time, I wasn’t trying to charm Irene. I was in shock from the whole Risk thing and my encounter with McThuggy, more so than I’d realized. I even told this stranger that we lived uptown, in Majesta Gardens, safely away—although I retained enough sense not to put it like that—from the dirt, frequent flooding, and hoodlum-haunted streets of Shiftertown. I wanted a better life for my little girl.
I knew I shouldn’t be chatting with this woman. But I never usually got to talk about Lucy, and Irene seemed more relaxed with each piece of information she pried out.
I drew the line, however, at the mug of tea she made for me. It was that disgusting herbal stuff. After lunch hour, my body is trained to only accept bourbon, or beer in an emergency.
Irene sat with the baby on her lap, giving him a bottle. “So what does your daughter want to be when she grows up?”
Irene would be aware that I was a Shifter, although I hadn’t said so, and nothing visibly distinguishes us from mainstream humans. I also knew she and her kids were Shifters, for the same reasons. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. Simple as that.
All the same, the question represented a first acknowledgement of our shared heritage, and it would’ve killed the increasingly friendly ambiance if I had deflected it. I laughed. “She changes her mind twice a day on average, but as of this morning, she wants to be a cheetah.”
“A cheetah! That’s ambitious. Mia wants to be a fox.”
I thought of the old dog fox lying downstairs, encased in cryonite.
“She got the idea from your friend downstairs,” Irene added, as if reading my thoughts. Her eyes were blue, rather large, and she had skin so perfect it looked nano-fixed—although there was no way she could have afforded that. Wisps of pale blonde hair escaped from her tight mom-braid. She had baby dribble on the shoulder of her t-shirt, but it did not detract from her uncommon aura of self-possession.
I wondered what she knew. Call it paranoia, but I had a feeling she was hiding something.
She’d given me an opening, so I asked, “Do you know Risk well?”
“Is that his name?” she responded.
So much for that.
“We say hello. What I mean is, Mia says hello. But that’s about it.”
“Guess she must have seen him going in and out in his fox form, huh?”
“Yeah. She’s always out on the balcony, talking to whoever comes by.”
At that moment Mia’s voice pealed from the living-room, “No! Stop it!”
A deep-pitched, threatening growl answered her.
I was down that hall so fast, I practically broke the sound barrier. I had a clear picture in my head of this sweet little child peeking down from her balcony last night, when she should have been in bed, and seeing the rest of the fox-cubing crew. Had those villains now come back to silence her? Not while I was around—
I skidded into the living-room. The balcony doors stood open. Thin curtains blew into the room, splashing sunlight over a floor littered with toys … and over a seven-foot male lion sprawled on the couch, watching a horde of wee rugby players tussling amidst the clutter.
One massive paw trapped Mia against the couch. She was wriggling, squealing, and beating on the lion’s leg with the Barbie. “Lemme go, Daddy!”
The doll echoed her in its tiny, but very shrill, voice. “Let me go!”
“Owww!” Mia whined.
“Not letting you go until you turn that doll off,” the lion rumbled.
“Oh. Ha ha,” I said. “Hello. I’m responsible for the doll.”
“What’s it called, the Headache Generator Mark 2?” said the lion. “Like it’s not enough to have those shows playin’ all the time …” He lashed his tail once against the back of the couch. Thump. “You gotta be quiet when your mom has guests, Mia,” he admonished her, over the noise of the rugby game.
I could have taken his side against all things noisy (that weren’t rugby) and cultivated another potential witness, but I don’t like lions. They tend to be, well, lazy. And let their women do all the work for them.
Besides, by now I was fairly sure the family hadn’t seen anything. King of the Beasts here obviously had little interest in the world outside of his holovision projector, and Irene had her hands full with the kids. If she was hiding something, it was something mundane, such as that they were behind on the rent—not unlikely given that neither of them was at work, on a weekday afternoon. I felt sorry for her, but it was none of my business. I needed to quit wasting time here and do what I could for Risk.
“Well, I’d better be going,” I said. “I can see you’re busy.”
“Not a problem, man,” the lion yawned. He scooped his squealing daughter up, rolled over on the couch, and deposited her on his pale-furred chest. She cuddled down with the Barbie in her arms.
“Give that back to the man, Mia,” said Irene. I jumped. I hadn’t heard her coming up behind me.
“Can I keep it? Pleeeeease?”
“Of course,” I said warmly. “It’s yours.” I packed up the crate and left, foreseeing hours of shrill torment for King of the Beasts. You have to get your satisfaction where you find it in this world.
*
Dolph was waiting for me on the stoop, eating a venison on rye. He looked up and waved to Irene, who’d come out on the balcony again. Then we went into Risk’s apartment. “Who was that chick?” Dolph said.
“Upstairs neighbor. Married with kids,” I added, before he could get any ideas. “Pretty sure they didn’t see anything.”
“Naw,” he said. “They wouldn’t have. These guys were professionals.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you said it on the phone.”
We went into the kitchen. The pathetic sight of comatose Risk dismissed Irene and her family from my mind. I remembered why I had concluded that this was a professional job. “Number one, they got the drop on Risk.”
We agreed this would not have been easy. Although in his sixties, Risk was no slouch in the self-defense department. He had not been in the army, much less in the special forces like Dolph and me, but he had grown up right here in Shiftertown, Mag-Ingat, Ponce de Leon. That’s an education in situational awareness and the use of weapons, rolled into one.
“Number two?” Dolph said.
“Number two? There is no number two.”
“Oh.”
We ate our sandwiches at the kitchen table. It felt a bit wrong, when Risk was lying there on the floor. However, I was hungry, and Haughey’s venison is the best this side of San Damiano.
Dolph finished his sandwich first. He mooched around the kitchen. He checked the catch on the small window above the sink, as I had done. Then he got a herbal beer out of Risk’s fridge, tried it, and made a face.
I balled up the foil wrapping of my sandwich and put it in my pocket. “Number three,” I said, “the total absence of any clues.”
“Total absence?”
“This is where you whip out your portable DNA scanner,” I said, hopefully.
“That’s on my wish list, right after a flying bike.”
I was starting to think we might have to call the cops after all, and that my delay in reporting the crime was not going to look good, when Dolph had one of his occasional flashes of brilliance. “Clues? His living-room is full of ’‘em.”
We spent the next hour going through Risk’s inventory. It was a grueling exercise that challenged my faith in humanity. Instant muscle-building leech pads, still half-alive. Kits for dyeing flowers black. Invisible beach towels. Artificial self-licking ant-eater tongues. Knockoff designer fanny packs. Ground-up Yuriops horns (for enhanced sexual performance). Diamond-encrusted ear scrapers for the neo-Victorian Shifter in your life. Artificial diamond paperweights. Wireless jammers. A travel cage full of live fuzzy-wuzzies from Kabath Noor, which Dolph and I released out of the bedroom window, committing a minor crime against the ecological conservation laws of Ponce de Leon. Ecological integrity is a joke on a hub world like PdL, anyway. May the most invasive species win.
Some people think the title of most invasive human species should go to the Shifters, although we have no interest in conquering anyone, even if we had what it takes. Which we mostly don’t. Risk was a good example.
He bought this stuff cheap from his contacts in the shipping industry, and tried to sell it for a hefty markup to the tourist tat emporia on Shoreside. It was the inverse of my potential Barbie export business, with the minor difference that Risk and his contacts thought taxes were for losers. Sometimes he made bank. The rest of the time, the goods ended up cluttering his living-room.
He had smuggled his crap aboard my ship a couple of times, until I caught him at it and had the first of what would turn out to be multiple serious chats with him. If I’m caught dodging customs, I could lose my landing license for the PdL, I’d explained. Sorry, Mike, he’d said. It won’t happen again.
I surveyed the worthless junk spread out across the living-room, the sum total of his life.
Damn straight it won’t happen again, Risk, not with you frozen stiff. Poor dumb fox.
I could sigh, throw up my hands, and move on to the next crisis—as an independent freighter captain, I’m rarely short on them. Dolph was silent, reading the fine print on the bottle of ground-up Yuriops horn. He was waiting for the captain’s decision on this.
My old commanding officer came to my mind, and this time, for a change, he was here to help. You are responsible for every blanking blankety-blank under your blanking command!
Risk was my crew, for better or for worse. Even when he was frozen in cryonite. I’d get to the bottom of this. Righteously.
“Well, no one iced him for this crap, anyway,” I said.
The corners of Dolph’s mouth ticked up a millimeter. We’ve known each other long enough that we can settle the important stuff without talking about it. He knew the decision I’d made, and he agreed. “Oh, I dunno,” he said, holding up the bottle of ground-up Yuriops horn.
“That stuff doesn’t work,” I said.
“Why, have you tried it?”
“Who me? Never.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
I sighed. “This would be a pretty nice apartment if it wasn’t so …”
“Filthy? Old? Turquoise?” He was referring to the color of the living-room walls. The bedroom was terracotta and the kitchen was yellow. A typical Shifter color scheme. Irene’s apartment upstairs had been green, hot pink, and baby-blue. “It might be nice if it wasn’t in Shiftertown.”
“Right,” I said, snapping my fingers. “That’s the word I was looking for. Shiftertown.”
Dolph tried out an exercise band, which sproinged back and wrapped around his forearm. “Ow. Maybe they did kill him for some of this crap … but the crap in question is now gone, because they took it.”
That did seem likely, tying in with the fact that the front door had been unlocked. Risk had known his assailants, and let them in.
If only you could talk, I thought, back in the kitchen. It was now unnaturally cool in here, as the cryonite achieved its minimum temperature of 14 Kelvin. Some people use cryonite for air-conditioning. Paradoxically, the surface of the slab now felt slick but no colder than your average freezer.
“Those Urush definitely knew their shit,” Dolph sighed, grabbing the beer he had set down on Risk to keep it cold.
His remark gave me an idea. I got down on my hands and knees and heaved at the slab.
“What are you doing?”
“Help me turn it over.”
It wasn’t that much heavier than Risk himself would have been. Now the old fox lay face-down. I peered closely at the back pocket of his jeans. “Aha!” I exulted.
“What?”
“Look.”
A slim metal tag stuck out of Risk’s jeans pocket.
“You can deactivate cryonite, if it’s keyed to a nanonic defroster,” I said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be much use as a preservative, would it? So whoever did this was planning to defrost him at some point.”
“But?”
I did an Ekschelatan voice. Ekschelatans, or Eks, are reputed to be super-intelligent. “Deactivation key we have not. Bust the encryption we cannot.”
“No problem,” Dolph said. “We’ll find the bad guys, kick them in the face until they give us the key, and then restore Foxy to his unsavory old self.”
The thing about Dolph? When he says something like that, he means it. I really did wish this hadn’t happened.
“Then you can fire him,” he added, draining his beer.
“Worth a try,” I said, pushing away my uneasy thoughts.
There was just one hitch: we still had no idea who’d done this, or why, nor did we have any clues … apart from the restaurant receipt I’d found in Risk’s coat pocket.
2
We split up outside Risk’s place. Dolph went back to the office. At least he said that’s where he was going.
I called my truck. While I waited for it, I glanced up at Irene’s balcony. Nothing was there except their laundry carousel.
“Yo, Mike,” my truck shouted, double-parking in front of the building. “Hurry up, bro, I don’t wanna get ticketed.”
I keep meaning to give the truck a new personality module.
It was the company truck, which we normally use for picking up smaller cargoes, so it had a mini-forklift slaved to the onboard AI. I coaxed the forklift up the steps. It wouldn’t fit through Risk’s front door. I had foreseen this. Before Dolph left, he’d helped me move Risk into the hall. We’d packaged him neatly in some of those invisible beach towels.
They weren’t really invisible, of course. They just changed color to match whatever was wrapped in them. So they now appeared to have a pattern of a large fox’s butt on one side, and his face on the other. It was not ideal, but the bedsheets had been too damn nasty. Anyway, the towels’ photoreceptors overloaded and whited out as I pushed Risk onto the waiting tines of the forklift, into the sultry afternoon light.
No one gave me a second look as I transferred the slab into the back of the truck, although I did hear some laughter from the sidewalk when the truck cussed me out for not securing the load properly. Honestly. Shiftertown.
I instructed the truck to drive away from this traffic-choked, malarial tangle of streets, up into the cool breezes a
nd tasteful glass-and-concrete canyons of upper Mag-Ingat.
I freely admit that uptown isn’t to everyone’s taste. Some folks say that hundred-storey shopping malls, mid-air pedestrian throughfares garlanded with flowering vines, streams of flying cars swooping under and over the topside streets, and stacked apartment buildings shaped like ice cream cones, are not their thing.
They aren’t mine either, really.
But Majesta Gardens is not like that. It’s an apartment complex way up on Cabrera Hill, with sensational views of the sea and the spaceport. The grounds are sealed with an electric fence and two rows of caltrops, thank you. Residential buildings arranged in a C enclose shrubbery, playground equipment, and a community barbecue area.
Home is where the heart is, they say. I’ll never be entirely at home on Ponce de Leon, but my heart was definitely in Majesta Gardens. Because that’s where Lucy was.
She was playing by herself on the jungle gym. A pang of familiar anxiety melted into the equally familiar joy of just seeing her. Lucy has wavy oak-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a sturdy, long-limbed build. She looks more like me than like her mother, in my own opinion.
Instructing the forklift to go ahead of me, I jogged to her and lifted her down. “Hello, sweetie-pie.”
“I almost made it to the top,” she told me seriously.
“Well done. Guess what? I’ve got a present for you.”
This sent even my solemn little girl into overdrive. “Where? What is it?”
I pointed to the forklift, which was vanishing into the foyer with the crate of Barbies balanced on top of Risk.
Nanny B toddled after us as we followed it. Nanny B is my daughter’s live-in nanny. She’s not human, she’s a bot. Robot caregivers are not uncommon uptown, so our fellow residents didn’t blink at the tubby, four-foot, royal blue humanoid with a screen on its tummy and antennas bobbling on its head.
“Aren’t you home early, Mike?” she quacked guilelessly. I gave her a dirty look.
Upstairs, Lucy ignored the plastikrete crate and pounced on Risk. She pulled at the outermost towel. “I love this towel, Daddy! It’s exactly what I wanted!”
The Cryonite Caper Page 2
