Startled, Nick recognized himself in the surrounding reflections, and momentarily thought that his disheveled appearance looked ridiculous in the dreamlike place. He shook his head, dismissing the optical illusions, and established that he was the only visitor here, a definite sign of the truly niche status of emergency treatment services. But his presence hadn’t gone unnoticed; a call was coming into his visual field.
Kir accepted the connection, and a young man behind a virtual counter gave Nick a look that projected bedside manners so earnestly that it was almost endearing.
“Welcome to our medical facility. Can you give your consent to use our cameras to establish two-way video interaction?”
“Sure … a wounded woman was just admitted here, from one of the Mirror Worlds …”
“One moment,” the hospital representative glanced aside. “I see,” he said right away, focusing on Nick with almost unprofessional curiosity. “And you are …”
Nick beamed him his ID, and the guy immediately nodded, “I thought so. You called the emergency transport. Congratulations, that was very close. How can we help you?”
“I want to visit her.”
“I am truly sorry, but that won’t be possible,” the man’s face displayed sincere regret. “She is being kept inside a sealed regeneration chamber. But the good news is that she’ll be completely fine by the end of the treatment.”
Nick didn’t move. Focus on breathing, he told himself, at least until this scratchy feeling in my throat goes away.
“The patient …” he finally managed to say, “she was wearing a necklace, a silver chain with a pendant. May I borrow that?”
“I’m sorry, we’re unable to release any belongings without a patient’s permission. Everything she was wearing is safely secured in our storage locker. She can pick her things up when she leaves.”
A stinging sensation in Nick’s eyes signaled a warning that he was starting to lose his grip.
“Thanks. Nothing else then,” he said through half-clenched teeth.
The man instantly disconnected, extinguishing his smile just a split second too early.
Nick raised his hands to his face and firmly pressed them against his eyelids. Bright fluorescent spots floated across his vision, and he blinked hard, trying to make them go away, but instead they changed into the red blotches on the meadow grass, and suddenly he was there again. The smell of burning trees was suffocating, and there were two bodies on the ground. He turned Remir over, but it wasn’t Remir, the body was too light. The head lifelessly rolled backwards, and Lita’s eyes blindly stared into the sky from her dead face. Nick gasped for air, and the smoke scorched his throat.
“Nick,” Kir’s voice was coming from far away, muffled and irrelevant. “You are experiencing psychological destabilization.”
Nick sharply exhaled, realizing that it had been a distorted flashback.
He was on Earth, in the hospital lobby, and Lita wasn’t dead on Beta Blue. She was still alive, somewhere in this building, but all the same she didn’t quite belong to the world of the living from the logical point of view.
“It is recommended that you rest for at least …” continued Kir, and then a beam of bright sunlight burst into the room, and a strangely recognizable silhouette appeared in the doorway.
“Kir, wait,” whispered Nick, instinctively stepping behind the closest elevator pillar. There was absolutely nothing Elisabeth should be doing in this medical center.
Unlike Nick, she didn’t hesitate at the entrance, and she didn’t check in with the virtual hospital staff either. Instead, she confidently approached an unmarked section of the wall, which suddenly parted, revealing the plain doors of a hidden elevator. They obediently opened too, letting her in.
Nick thought that the chance that he had accidentally run into Elisabeth in Lita’s hospital was equal to zero. He froze, trying to merge with a fancy lobby’s pillar.
After a few minutes, Elisabeth reemerged, and she looked all excited now, her face glowing with immense satisfaction.
He didn’t dare move until she disappeared behind the lobby doors, and when he finally followed her outside, she was almost lost in the thick crowd of the exhibition. He sped up, using the slowly milling people as cover, and noticed that she had started speaking as she walked.
“Kir, lip captioning,” he asked.
“No capacity.”
“Damn it,” Nick winced. The program was a part of his lost headhunter package.
Elisabeth’s flyer was parked on the pedestrian side of the holographic divider, completely blocking access to several pieces of art installations, but she apparently didn’t give the slightest damn about public convenience. She kept talking as she walked, and Nick thought that it was rather sloppy on her part. He guessed that she hadn’t expected to be watched, and decided that he could risk getting closer. Hurriedly working his way through the crowd, he managed to cut almost all of the distance between them, close enough to make out her sentence – “… these dimwits would sic secret services on me if they knew …”
Suddenly he was too close – he even accidentally brushed up against her shoulder, and he broke into a cold sweat, convinced that he would surely be discovered now. But she didn’t notice him at all, preoccupied by her conversation. “I have material, and it’s … well, you should see it for yourself. I will be leaving for Earth3 right away. Register my trip as a routine inspection …” and then her flyer door closed and she took off.
Nick stepped back into the crowd and watched her flyer pass over the exhibition area and disappear behind the holographic wall into the traffic zone. Important favors could be traded for important secrets, he thought calmly.
“Kir, what’s my ship’s status?” he asked.
“All repairs have been completed. Full functionality has been restored.”
“Good. Let’s go pick it up. We are going to Earth3, Kir.”
His rented flyer had the lowest traffic priority, and the navigation system assigned to it had the most circuitous back route to a public hangar where Nick’s ship had been towed from Headhunter headquarters.
“Kir, let’s not panic about the lead time we are giving Elisabeth. Let’s use the time wisely. Run the fastest options to get to Earth3.”
Kir summarized the available options as precisely one.
Apparently, there was no setup for private ships to cross the border into the Earth3 Mirror Sector. It was a provincial Mirror Earth in a remote corner of the Commonwealth, solely used as a manufacturing hub, and there was not enough tourist traffic to justify the transit operation. In particular, the Mirror Border towing service, a fleet of “tugs” with navigation software, wasn’t available. However, professional cargo transports, constantly shuffling back and forth between the two worlds offered to ferry passenger ships across the Mirror borders for a modest fee. The next one was leaving Earth in several hours. Nick checked his bank balance. The remaining chunk of his payment was still enough, even if barely, for a one-way toll.
He told Kir to take care of the logistics, and his ship took off towards the mega-transporters loading zone on Orbit.
Watching Earth’s surface become farther and farther away, Nick thought that it was funny how the difference between no hope at all and having a smidge of an improbable chance that it wasn’t over yet, made such an unreasonably huge difference in his mental condition. He still could fight. She wasn’t dead.
Earth3 was a very strange place. Headhunters knew much more about it than the general population because in addition to being a standard “offshore” manufacturing center, it had a strange reputation of being the Dark Triads’ “special” place. There was no official record of it, but Nick knew that most of his former outlier clients had visited it for some time. Some even stayed there, their government stipend making them independent of employment concerns. He didn’t know more than that, and Kir’s sear
ch didn’t bring up more either. Whatever it was, it wasn’t official.
“I guess we’ll find out, Kir,” said Nick. “Take over.” He was dead tired and hadn’t slept since he manually navigated the ship from Y-3. He stumbled to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
Earth3
Watching the approaching blue sphere through the external cameras, Nick suddenly had a weird feeling that he was about to start a regular headhunter mission on a Mirror colony; unlike any Commonwealth planet he had ever visited in the past, this place had neither orbit structures nor the glowing light grids of the densely populated cities. At that moment, however, a dispatcher from Earth3 requested his ship credentials, and the illusion was over.
The check-in process happened to be a mere formality here, so Nick received landing permission and full access to the infospace without the slightest delay.
“Okay, Kir,” he said, “Time to find out where Elisabeth is and what she is up to, which, let’s face it, will be somewhat challenging given your handicapped condition.”
His casual chatter with Kir was a part of the mental technique he had developed in order to block any thoughts of Lita. By the end of this trip, he had become rather good at it, learning not to cringe at his phony cheerful tone. It worked just fine, except that it always required a certain amount of background effort, never allowing him to fully relax.
“Your civilian limitations are a real pain, Kir, but there is nothing we can do about it, is there? So let’s focus on the bright side. And the bright side, of course, is that she’s picked quite the planet for our purposes – the locals here don’t give a damn about the precious Commonwealth Criminal Code. Well, it’s going to play in our favor quite a bit because those pesky privacy laws can be circumvented. Otherwise, how are we going to find our Elisabeth friend? Of course, that does come with some drawbacks – this place seems just a bit unsafe, doesn’t it? But getting back to the bright side, we have a rather non-trivial chance of digging something up. Anyway, let’s land, for starters.”
“Nick, non-commercial parking is located inside the main residential campus.”
“Sure. Let’s go straight into the center of things.”
The ship started descending towards the eastern coastline of the North American continent, and Nick again focused on the external camera feed. It was late in the evening there, and the skies were clear, giving him an unobstructed view of the ground, which looked like a torn sheet of polka dot fabric from his current altitude. Identical bright spots uniformly stretched across the flat surface, endlessly expanding to the west and abruptly stopping at the rugged edge of the dark ocean. The only thing that broke the uncanny symmetry of their monotonous pattern was Nick’s destination, a huge irregular patch of lights slightly inland from the shore, the so-called Hub, from which every industrial unit on the planet was remotely managed.
Nick refocused on the cyberspace and it definitely looked strange; publicly available data was completely sterile, even by Earth’s conservative standards, Security walls were all over the place, and Nick was locked out of everything except for a handful of government portals.
“Ok, Kir, boots on the ground it is then,” he whispered. He expected that it would be a bit harder than his usual missions.
As the ship dropped elevation, the dots began to resolve into unexpectedly formidable aggregations of plants and shipping facilities, and the Hub turned into a dense concentration of urban structures.
Nick expanded the external view, and Kir highlighted a constellation of egg-shaped hangars on the inner edge of the Hub. As they got close, one of the roofs folded, letting the ship in, and Nick got up from his seat.
“We’ve arrived at the destination,” informed Kir. The ship was already hovering next to one of the holding cells attached to the wall of the giant underground lot. Nick gave the system his credentials, and the round gates opened, accepting his ship. “And remember, Kir – a positive attitude is the only helpful mode of operation. Kir, release the shuttle,” he said. “Let’s go cruising.”
The shuttle flew at a relatively low altitude, and, looking at the rows upon rows of simple identical buildings, Nick was reminded of Y-3. The resemblance, however, faded as the cityscape abruptly changed, showing feeble but recognizable attempts at replicating Earth’s architecture.
“Hold on. Let’s see what we have here,” said Nick.
The area directly below doubtlessly was a local center of some sort. Despite the late hour, there were a good number of people outside, and the streets seemed rather lively, due in part to the festive glow of their fluorescent surfaces.
“Drop me off here,” said Nick. Kir landed the shuttle in a parking lot just off the busiest intersection, and Nick got out.
A mild fragrance in the air hinted at the existence of a blooming garden nearby, reminding Nick that it was early spring in this part of the world. But his first look around confirmed that the scent had to have been artificial; every patch of exposed ground was monolithically covered by the same illuminating material.
He assumed a sullenly preoccupied look, joined the pedestrian flow and began meticulously checking the area, street after street. Admittedly, this task was trivial in comparison to the challenges of his Mirror colony infiltrations. Here, at least in most places, he easily recognized the functional purpose of Commonwealth-like places. But there were differences still. Individual outfits of those in the crowd were nondescript. The paranoia about accidentally brushing against someone’s personal space seemed to be less intense. Even more notably, not a single person seemed to carry the expression of unshakable confidence in the unconditional benevolence of life that so much annoyed Nick back home. All in all, he had to admit that he felt quite comfortable here in spite of the place’s shady reputation.
Suddenly recognizing the logo of his favorite Berlin hangout, he slowed and took a closer look through the windows. It was just a rough imitation of the real thing, but he still felt a nostalgic tug at his heart. He thought that stopping in wouldn’t be a total waste of time – it was a perfect way to initiate a direct contact, and then take it from there.
The interior, indeed, was rather approximately replicated, but the atmosphere was surprisingly right. Some people were comfortably seated at tables watching entertainment programs via synchronized inputs, and others gathered in open spaces chatting over drinks while busy waiters scurried between the groups with their orders. Just like the original bar on Earth, somewhat loud music blared in the room, boldly competing with the internal audio feeds of the patrons.
As Nick made his way to the bar area, nobody paid attention to his appearance, and it felt like a welcome contrast with the usual challenge of blending with the physically inferior inhabitants of the cut-off planets.
Nick sat down at the counter several stools away from the next person and glanced at the virtual menu, promptly beamed to him by a passing server. He didn’t recognize anything and simply asked for the first drink on the list.
Several people turned in his direction.
Of course, it was his accent, thought Nick, annoyed at his blunder. Linguistic programs made his pronunciation impeccable on quarantined colonies, but thinking that the entire Commonwealth shared the same language, he forgot about the local dialects, and it hadn’t occurred to him that he would need to make an adjustment.
People returned to their conversations.
A young woman, sitting alone in the corner got up, and the very moment she started walking in his direction he knew that she was from Earth; she moved with that unique smooth rhythm in her stride as she glided through the crowd without ever touching another person.
She stopped a couple of steps away, tilted her head and looked at him with lively interest. Her overall appearance was a typical product of standard DNA filtering, but at the same time she wasn’t bland, by any means. Her bone structure carried a hint of Northern European ancestry, and it created a
piquant dissonance with the golden hue of her brown eyes and the olive tone of her skin. But of course, he guessed, these could simply have been a nod to the latest fashion trend, just like the rich chocolate color of her luxurious hair.
“May I?” he noticed that she hadn’t bothered to change her accent either.
He was in luck, he told himself, she was a shortcut. Nothing would be lost in the cross-cultural translation.
“Most certainly,” Nick nodded towards the bar chair next to him.
“Eve,” she said, sitting down, and upon closer inspection her impeccable gentility became even more obvious. Her clothes and make-up were designed to blend in, and they did, except that their exaggerated simplicity referenced something edgy, he just didn’t have a clue what. He fully appreciated, however, that she projected Earth’s chic full blast. A typical girl next door from home, he thought, except … there was no belief in the benevolence of life in her eyes.
“Nick,” he gave her the charming smile prepared for such occasions.
“You just arrived, you’re brand new here. Welcome,” she put her drink on the counter and changed angles to get a better look at him.
He noted that the bar stools were positioned a bit too close by Earth’s standards, but she didn’t bother to slide her chair back.
“What are you doing here, Nick?” she asked, studying him with open curiosity.
“Just visiting,” he shrugged vaguely, “taking a break between jobs and decided to take a look around.”
“Sure,” she said, not concealing the soft irony in her voice, “only … good reasons never bring people from Earth to this place … with the exception of the Dark Triads, of course. Those do whatever they please, and visiting this shithole is for some reason one of their favorites.”
Her looks eliminated any chance that she was an outlier from a Mirror World. But she still could be a rare case of Earth-born Dark Triad, like himself.
“Don’t want to talk to strangers about yourself, do you? I am not with the police, Nick. Expats never work for the police. But you don’t know that yet, so you won’t believe me. Fair enough. You’ll learn a lot of things soon. It’s different here.”
Fire of the Dark Triad Page 20
