by Sean Platt
Chapter Eight
Kate entered the police station, feeling uneasy. She’d been in this very station three times as Doc, on petty crimes and nuisance accusations, and it was hard to believe the station’s canvas — being a cop canvas — had no idea who she really was. She (back when she’d been he) had spent her life savings on the refurb, but even the best modifications didn’t erase memory and self-image.
She still swaggered when she walked.
She’d been unable to cure herself of leering at attractive women, and she’d similarly been unable to keep from winking lecherously at most of them.
Interestingly, the responses she got from women these days were far more encouraging than those she’d earned as Doc. His scoring record had always been about numbers, even after he’d made himself rich and grown into his looks. Getting a night’s company never really stopped being like cracking a code by trying all the permutations. If he approached enough hot women, eventually he found one who’d go home with him. But winking as Kate was different. Straight women sometimes frowned awkwardly, sometimes smiled as if thinking they were sharing a joke that only one of them got. None ran. None rushed to the nearest Beam surface to request rescue from a creep.
And now, as Kate swaggered and leered through Dominic Long’s police station, she couldn’t help but be Doc in another way: specifically, sweating the surety that she’d be spotted and stopped.
As Doc, she wasn’t quite an official criminal but was definitely persona non grata — or persona au gratin, as Kai liked to say in her dumb way.
As Kate, she was a Lunis smuggler.
As Kate, she was a murderer. She’d never learned what happened with Lunar Inspector Levy’s body and hadn’t been bold enough to run a search and find out. Maybe Sector 7 — whatever that was — had managed to erase Levy the same way it had erased (or at least hidden) Kate’s moon visit from searchable records. Thinking about it now, she could imagine something disposing of Levy before his body was found. There were supposedly nanobots that could consume flesh like bacteria decaying organic matter in fast-forward.
Poor Levy. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to put his dick where it didn’t belong.
But despite Kate’s nerves, none of the officers looked up as she passed. Kate had to check in at the front desk, but the officer there had merely tapped his console and pointed her toward the back. He’d even offered to pass an overlay guide to her ocular implants, if she had them, but Kate had told the flirtatious young man that she could find her way through a room to a door without assistance, thank you very much.
Nobody cared that she was here. It was as if she were just a normal woman who’d killed nobody and smuggled nothing, wanted by no relentless pursuers.
Kate reached the door with the brass plate reading CAPTAIN and paused.
She waited. When nothing happened, she said, “You in there?”
The voice of the police captain came back: “Who is it?”
“The fucking Pied Piper.”
“No, really.”
“Really. The Pied Fucking Piper.”
The door opened. Kate saw Dominic behind it, his hand on the knob.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I thought you were one of my officers.”
Kate looked around. There must be female cops here somewhere, but she couldn’t see any, and that meant Captain Long had taken her voice for a dude’s. She reminded herself to work on her feminine articulation. What did girls talk about? Flowers and shit. Makeup. Tampons and long walks on the beach.
“Come in, come in.” He stepped aside to let Kate enter then closed the door behind her.
He nodded to a hard-looking wooden chair in front of a battered desk.
“Have a seat.”
Kate sat and crossed her legs. She reminded herself to stop wearing skirts because they meant you always had to shield your cooch, but Doc had never had that particular add-on, and the sensation of open air down there was still new enough to be interesting.
“I thought this was the central precinct in Manhattan,” Kate said, looking around. It looked a bit like a museum of mediocrity.
“It is.”
“Do you not have Beam access?”
“Of course we do,” said Dominic, sitting and trying not to attempt a look up Kate’s skirt, or a glance at her ample assets.
Kate thought of the door that hadn’t opened when it saw her coming and the antiquated equipment she’d seen crossing the room beyond. She eyed the freestanding screen on Dominic’s desk, which looked like a kid’s toy. She decided not to elaborate.
“So,” Kate said. “Conspiracy right here at the police station. Nice.”
Dominic’s eyes darted to the door.
“Don’t tell me this room isn’t private,” Kate said.
“No, no. Of course it is.”
But now Kate was wondering. With that wooden door? With these blinds that looked a hundred years old covering normal-looking glass?
“It just looks like hell. It’s electronically sound-cancelled with echo-backs that fill the gaps in the doorframe and walls. Here, see?” He turned the child’s toy to show Kate a large green privacy seal verification on what passed for a police console.
“There are gaps in the walls?”
“Don’t ask.”
Kate sighed. “Okay. Then why am I here?”
“It’s too risky to smuggle the shell out of this room. I don’t understand what’s on here — ” Dominic tapped a small slip drive, which Kate assumed contained Doc Stahl’s digital corpse, “ — but I don’t trust Omar any farther than I can throw him. Even though he’s pretty small and wouldn’t be hard to throw.”
Dominic smiled. Kate resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the captain’s eager-to-please expression and settled on a look of indifference.
“Anyway,” Dominic continued awkwardly, now looking at papers on his desk, “there’s some stuff I saw going into this dossier that raises my eyebrows. I don’t know why Omar didn’t choose someone boring, like a dead accountant who’d never stepped a toe over the line, but he was insistent. It had to be this spook, down to the Beam ID. The way it assembled, it might present as a person. If the station canvas detects a dead guy walking out of here in your purse, it might raise questions we don’t want to answer.”
“You want me to upload it now?”
“Just into storage. Your perimeter will hide it. Expand it later, assuming you trust your Beam connection.”
“I have plenty of protection.” But then again, she’d made that assumption before, and Xenia (or whoever Xenia reported to, be it Micah Ryan or someone higher up) had still found her even through Ryu’s anonymized router. Although it’s possible they’d just ID’d Doc. She didn’t know for sure that they’d snooped her connection.
It was a toss-up. She nodded again, figuring what the hell.
“You don’t think it’s a risk for us to be doing this here?” Kate looked around. “Right in the police station?”
“It was the only way to get the shell out undetected.”
“You could have uploaded it. Into storage.”
“I don’t trust this data.” He practically whistled as he said it, like the slip drive was hot and he wanted it gone. “I don’t want it in me.” He seemed to realize what he was saying and held up a hand. “I’m sure it’s fine for you.”
Now Kate wanted to be offended on principle. “Fine for the criminal’s head, but not for the good cop. Is that it?”
“No, no…”
Kate sighed and snatched the drive. There was no point in arguing. She knew what needed to be done, and that she’d need Doc to do it. Arguing that Dominic should take the shell was her own stubbornness. All the objections Dominic had raised during Omar’s proposal went away once you realized the disembodied Doc Stahl and the new and improved Kate Rigby were strangely compatible.
“Whatever. Let’s just get this over with. I don’t have a port, though.” She turned
the drive over in her hands. It wasn’t a good idea for smugglers to have discoverable openings other than the natural ones.
“It’s contained inductive.”
“So I don’t need Fi.”
Dominic shook his head. “I took the liberty of keying it to you already. Just hold it close and bring up your dashboard. It’ll prompt you.”
“How did you key it to me already?”
Dominic seemed to wince. “I took a hair from Omar’s chair after you left.”
“You don’t think that’s a little creepy?”
“I thought it was creepy when the ID in it began to degrade halfway through the key sequence,” Dominic countered, trying to pretend that harvesting a girl’s hair wasn’t a step above beating off in her panty drawer.
“Well then,” said Kate, eyeing the police captain. “I guess we both have secrets.”
She held the drive beside her head, brought up her dashboard, and authorized the transfer. A moment later, Doc Stahl was inside her, and she had to repress a laugh at the idea that she’d finally found a way to literally fuck herself.
“Done?” Dominic said.
Kate held up the drive. “Yeah. You need this?”
“It’s Gaussed. Trash.”
Kate tossed the thing into Dominic’s trash can — a metal basket, without so much as a reclaim filter. She wondered why she’d always been afraid of the cops, if this was the most important station in the entire city.
“Now what?” Kate said.
“Go home. I assume Omar told you what to do with it?”
“I know what to do with it.”
“You know it’s worthless, right? No different from a folder of vacation images.”
“Omar wants me to wear it like a disguise. In a manner of speaking. Once we’re in, obviously.”
“It won’t work. Set aside the fact that this guy Stahl wouldn’t have any more luck getting into Braemon’s business than we would; you can’t just pretend to be him.”
“I can do more than you think. As for Doc, I know why Omar chose him. Part of it, anyway. He’s dead but not dead. He may have got lost in the shuffle.”
“Omar said he was a ghost. He said, ‘They can’t catch ghosts.’”
Kate nodded. There was much here that she didn’t want Dominic to know, but she could explain enough to soothe his mind, seeing as his compliance (assigning the right security, accepting police commissioner’s access) was necessary to making everything work.
“That’s the idea. If Doc had died, The Beam would have made him a nonperson. The AI would have closed his box, so to speak. He wouldn’t have any access at all if he came back surprisingly alive because The Beam doesn’t pander to the dead once they’ve been neatly packed away. It wouldn’t even treat him like someone without an ID or an unknown because flyby nanos would match his ID to Doc and know he didn’t exist. Or at least that someone should be pinged to sort him out, as a mistake.”
“Okay.”
“But he didn’t die, so it’s not like that,” Kate explained.
“The real Stahl will leave conflicting traces. The system will be alerted to a discontinuity.”
“He’s not alive, either. It’s not a stolen ID. It’s a nowhere ID.”
“What is he, a cleric?”
“No. He’s nothing.”
“So he’s like SerenityBlue?”
Kate laughed. “Yeah. Her and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” When Dominic didn’t laugh back, Kate went on. “Trust me. Doc is clean for use. His lack of…of anything…makes Omar think he just got lost when he…well, I guess he sort of skipped town without leaving a forwarding address, and now the Amazon drones won’t deliver his packages.”
“You’re expecting a package?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Figuratively speaking.”
“Even so, and even if you think you can somehow impersonate him to Braemon’s canvas, why would Stahl have more access than anyone else? Was he a hacker? An adept?”
“He was something, all right.” And although she herself didn’t totally understand this part of the plan, Kate’s mind spooled off affectionate adjectives to describe her former self: Wily. Conniving. Slippery. Scrappy.
Dominic squinted. “Did you know this guy or something?”
“Who?”
“Stahl. You keep calling him Doc.”
“He went by Doc.”
“And you talk like he was a friend of yours.”
Kate swallowed, pretending to cough as a cover. “We ran in some of the same circles.”
Dominic seemed skeptical. To soften his contemplations, Kate smiled a transparently flirtatious smile. Like a stupid puppy, he melted.
“Look,” Dominic said. “Captain’s Beam access gives me the ability to see metadata that’s normally hidden for privacy reasons.”
“Good for you.”
“This guy Stahl. Seems he’s connected to Isaac Ryan.”
Kate’s eyebrows raised. She, even as Doc, had never met Isaac.
“Through someone close to Ryan. Nicolai Costa?”
“Never heard of him,” Kate lied. “Why?”
Dominic watched her, skepticism returning to his face. It was probably second nature to the police captain, like flinching from a fake punch.
“I know Isaac Ryan,” Dominic said.
“Do you know this Nicolai guy?”
“No. But I know about him. He just defected. I looked it up. It’s big Beam gossip. So did Isaac’s wife, Natasha.”
“Okay,” said Kate.
“Looks like Costa is on the guest roster for Braemon’s Respero fundraiser too.”
“I hope he’s a party animal,” Kate said.
Dominic’s tongue moved into his cheek as if searching for leftover food. Then, with an air of conferring a secret, he said, “I don’t trust Omar. I guess you’ve figured that out.”
“I don’t trust Omar either. But I think that what he wants, in this case, is what I want. And if I trust one thing about that slippery bastard, it’s that he’ll always do what’s best for himself.”
Across the desk, Dominic’s jaw was still working, still pensive. “I have a hard time believing that Omar selected this Stahl guy at random.”
“I told you. He’s undead. It’s the only way any of this works.”
“Yes, but how did Omar know that?” Dominic tapped the desk blotter with drumming fingers. “Turns out, Stahl’s circle overlaps a lot with his own. Doesn’t that seem convenient that Omar has us shelling a lowlife who, if I had to guess, he’s been working with all along? Someone I never knew about, even though I’ve been working with Omar for quite some time, too?”
“So what?” Kate said, trying not to bristle at Dominic’s “lowlife” assessment.
“I’ve just learned to never give Omar the benefit of the doubt. He’s turned on me once already in a very big way. I keep getting sucked in because working with him is always, conveniently, the only way things ever seem like they might work. Stahl mysteriously vanishes, and no one knows how or why. Except Omar, who’s kept tabs on him and knows — or pretends to know — that this guy’s access will magically open doors that can’t be opened.”
“You think Omar is lying?”
“I know he’s not telling us the whole story; he pretty much said so to my face, like he wanted to surprise me. But what if he’s planning a double-cross?”
Kate, who knew exactly why and how Omar knew about Doc Stahl, kept her face neutral.
“I don’t like it, Kate. Maybe he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Maybe this will somehow work: You’ll be able to get to Braemon as you then manage to get into his system as Doc. Maybe there’s more here than Omar is saying, and it’ll actually help all of us. But I don’t want to be fooled twice. And I know he must have fooled you at least once, too; I can see it in the way you talk to him. So maybe we need an agreement.”
Kate watched Dominic, wondering if his preferred agreement involved his tongue going down Kate’s throat.
“Oka
y,” said Kate.
“Braemon is Enterprise. Very powerful and rich guy with a lot of pull. Costa, until recently, was Directorate. But that’s not even what bugs me. What bugs me is Isaac Ryan.”
“What about Micah Ryan? He’s Enterprise.”
Dominic looked around, seeming again to decide to share a secret. “I don’t want to go into detail, but I happen to know about some internal stuff between the Ryans.”
“Isaac and Micah?”
“And their mother,” Dominic said, nodding. He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know how to explain it, but something about this Shift has bothered me for a while. Ever since the big riot at Natasha Ryan’s concert. There’s been more unrest than ’91. The air feels different. And now this shakeup with Carter Vale talking about that Mindbender bullshit. I’ve been watching the Ryans for a while, on the down-low, and I know that bombshell shocked a lot of people. Maybe this is policeman’s intuition and maybe it’s crap, but I can’t shake the feeling that something big is brewing. Add a connection of Isaac Ryan’s to this party we’re supposed to be infiltrating ‘for the good of all of us’ with Omar’s not-subtle political ambitions, and it feels like a bomb. Does that seem like the kind of environment you want to be in the middle of, trying to get away with ID-jacking and West knows what else — using one of Omar’s old buddies as a tool?”
“Coincidence,” said Kate. But she’d grown up with a life of trusting her instincts same as Dominic, and a lot of what he said rung true.
“Maybe,” Dominic said, shrugging. “But what a lot of people don’t know is that Braemon did something other than currency manipulation, though it was never proven.”
“What?”
“Just rumors,” Dominic said, “but there’s a lot of buzz that back in ’91, Braemon was involved in Shift-tampering. Just go into some of the Deep Beam forums sometime and search. People there, they think that Braemon and his crew missed their chance in ’91 and have been gearing up to try again since. Pitting the Ryans against each other might not be a bad way to play puppeteer.”
Kate shifted in her chair. She was about to say something — anything, really — when Dominic’s connection pinged. He looked at his shitty console screen, seemed to read something, then looked up.
