Disappearing Act

by Margaret Ball

  DISAPPEARING ACT

  Margaret Ball

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Margaret Ball

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-8853-9

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First printing, October 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ball, Margaret, 1947-

  Disappearing act / Margaret Ball.

  p. cm.

  "A Baen Books Original"—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 0-7434-8853-9 (hc)

  1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Political corruption—Fiction. 3. Space stations—Fiction. 4. Women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A45535D57 2004

  813'.54—dc22

  2004013801

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  BAEN BOOKS by MARGARET BALL

  Disappearing Act

  Brain Ships

  Omnibus with Anne McCaffrey and with Mercedes Lackey)

  Mathemagics

  The Shadow Gate

  Chapter One

  Tasman

  Maris idled along the broad walkway of Fourteen, admiring the window displays, admiring her own reflection in the windows, and keeping one eye on the target, several shops ahead of her. She really should have had all her attention on the target—but top-level ladies never moved that fast, and it wasn't as if Maris had all that many chances to sashay along the shopping aisles of Fourteen as if she were a toppie herself, somebody who belonged there. Johnivans had fitted her out good for this expedition, too, and she just couldn't pass up the chance to see herself looking like a real toppie. Her bodysuit was used, of course, but at least it fit proper and she'd insisted on passing it through the sonic cleaners until only a few indelible stains bore witness to its previous owner's life. The turquoise and fuchsia spiral stripes still had plenty of glitter to them. And over that she had draped a sarong of real pseudosilk, purple with a border of gold sequins, whose artfully careless knot had cost her half an hour's sweating concentration. If it weren't for the unruly dark curls held back with a twist of bright orange silk, Maris thought, she wouldn't know herself—and even those weren't half bad for the current job, one of the toppies' current fads was for "natural"-looking hair that they zapped with electrocurlers to get the effect of a careless mop. In fact, the target's hair looked very similar . . . though she probably shook the artificial curls out into sleek, shining folds at the end of the day instead of struggling through them with a comb. Maris glanced ahead to see if she could tell the difference between electrostimmed curls and her own messy hair, and saw only a gap where the target had been standing a moment ago.

  Her insides sank; she felt as dizzy as if the gravity had failed and sent them all into free fall. Losing a target while she mooned over hairstyles and the clothes in the shop windows . . . Johnivans would never forgive her! Worse, she'd never forgive herself for having failed him like this. After all he'd done for her, to screw up on her very first real important top-level assignment . . . Maris moved forward as quickly as she dared, trying to look like a toppiegal in a hurry instead of a panicked scumsucker who was way, way above her proper depth, glancing into each shop in search of a short, slender woman with black curls over a shiny silver bodysuit. Not in the candied fruit stall, not trying on sandals, not . . . she could have disappeared into the fitting rooms behind this display of resort sarongs, but the instinct that made Maris such a good lookout told her no, not there, this target wasn't here to shop for fancy clothes any more than Maris herself. She had been idling along, looking in the shop windows but not really interested . . . meeting someone? But where—ah, a narrow walkway opened to the left between two shops, probably a service passage, and a thread of silver had snagged on the decorative stucco of one wall. She must have ducked through there, must have had an assignation behind the shops; something funny there, exactly what Johnivans would be interested in. Maybe Maris could redeem her moment's lapse of attention and do even better, get close enough to overhear what they were saying; Johnivans had taught her that once people got into a conversation they stopped really looking. She sidled flat along the shop wall, stepping as delicately as a moth in case some sound betrayed her presence. She couldn't see anybody in the gap at the far end of the service walkway. Good, they weren't looking back for her—but something felt subtly wrong—and before she could figure out exactly what, she was flying through the air to land in the shadowy space beyond the walkway.

  "I might consider letting you go," said a quiet, amused voice somewhere above the weight that pressed her face down into the gridded surface of the walkway, "if you tell me a sufficiently interesting story."

  The fall had knocked the air out of her and the knee holding her down wouldn't let her get a decent breath, but Johnivans' patient training was there like internal steel to support her when all else failed. Stay in character, never stop watching for a break, don't waste energy kicking yourself over past mistakes. What would a real toppie think was happening?

  "Don't be a fool," Maris gasped. It was hard to sound haughty and sarcastic when you could barely breathe, but she gave it her best shot. "You can't mug people this close to the shops. Let me up now and I'll give you a break, I won't call the guards until you've had a few seconds to get away."

  The grinding pressure in the middle of her back eased. Could it be working? Small, strong hands gripped her shoulders and flipped her over. Maris stared up into a face eerily like hers—olive skin, black eyes, tangled mop of black curls—and worked on getting her first good breath of air in what seemed like forever. "You look as Sarossian as I am!" the woman exclaimed. "What— How . . . ?" She bit her lip, considering. "Well, even Saros breeds its traitors, I suppose. Right, then. If you really want to call Security," she said, "this is your best chance. You do that, and we'll both show ID, and I'll apologize for the unfortunate misunderstanding, and . . . well? You're not calling for help. Funny, I thought not—"

  Maris had used the unexpected breathing space to do something far more practical than calling for guards who would slap her into a holding cell just for being this far top-level without proper ID. Working one foot flat on the floor for balance, one hand under her for propulsion, she shot upward and sideways, banged her head into the other woman's nose, got extra leverage by planting an elbow in one of the soft curving breasts outlined by that slick silver bodysuit, and corkscrewed out of the target's hands. She was on her feet and headed for the maze of service tunnels behind the shops while the target was still cradling her aching breast, lost herself deeper in the tunnels than any toppie would venture, took long-unused maintenance ladders and dusty passages where the codes on the security doors hadn't been checked in years, and didn't stop to catch her breath until she was well down on Thirty, in a place nobody but Johnivans' people even knew about anymore.

  For all the sixteen-or-so years of Maris's memory this quarter of Thirty had been ignored by the toppies. Once, years ago, she'd been told that a chance meteorite strike smashed the loading dock beyond repair. These days, newbies credited Johnivans with personally bombing the dock to create a "useless" space inside Tasman for the Hideaway, but Maris had doubts she would never express.
Not that it mattered, one way or the other. Whether or not Johnivans had caused the original destruction, who else would have been clever enough to take advantage of it the way he did? His hackercrackers had twiddled Tasman's database so that half the level was no longer on anybody's clean-and-check rota, changed a few security codes on the outer doors to discourage anybody wandering by, and—within the space that was left, Johnivans had made a home for his people.

  Most of Thirty had been left the way Maintenance abandoned it: comfortless bare stockrooms and loading stations, chill with the knowledge of the deep, black, infinite coldness that was just the other side of the airlocks and walls. Anybody doing a routine check would trip a dozen alarms in this outer area before they got to the chambers where Johnivans stashed the good stuff; they'd die in the traps he'd had set long before they could penetrate to the heart of the Hideaway, the long room where Johnivans housed and fed his people.

  Even dreading the confession of her failure, Maris felt her heart lift as she entered the Hideaway. Topside was new and exciting, but everything here spelled home: the cavernous spaces walled and floored in a patchwork of mats and carpeting and spoiled silks from rich men's baggage, the sharp motes of dreamdust floating like a blue cloud in the air, the rich scent of food being heated on the warmers that Johnivans had placed everywhere to ward off the chill of Outside.

  The usual crowd was there: Herc and Little Makusu sharing a glowing tube of dreamdust, Nyx posing in yet another fantastic garment pieced from fragments of damaged brocade and velvet, Ice Eyes and Keito the Fingers playing with one of Keito's fantastic constructions of mirrors and holograms. The usual huddle of skeletal bodies, gang buddies who'd dreamdusted themselves to the point they no longer bothered to eat and would shortly die with those dreamy smiles on their thin faces, moved languidly on a pile of cushions in the far end of the space. Johnivans never stopped anybody killing himself with dreamdust or poptoys; he said those who chose to do that stuff weren't worth saving.

  But Johnivans himself wasn't there.

  "Look at this, Maris!" Keito hailed her. "I fixed the glitch, now the Thief and the Lady orbit each other, like so." He pushed a movable panel and glass changed to mirror; hidden wires clanged together, and two figures sculpted of light appeared in the center of the ragged sphere and began a stately dance around each other.

  "It's wonderful, Fingers," Maris said with sincere appreciation. "You could be a toppie artist—your pieces are better than anything I saw in those snobby stores on Fourteen."

  Ice Eyes raised his eyebrows. "I'm the artist here," he announced, "an artist of the Light Touch. This stuff of Keito's is just play. Here's your scarf back."

  Maris put a hand to her head, then joined in the laughter as Ice Eyes bowed and handed the wisp of bright silk back to her with a flourish. "But, Ice, it's cheating to distract me with Keito's holotoys! You don't have those when you go collecting."

  "Don't need 'em," Ice Eyes protested, "toppies are slow and stupid."

  "Not all of them," Maris said, remembering what she'd come to report. "Where's Johnivans?"

  "The question," said a slow, cold voice behind her, "is, where's the target you were supposed to be following? Did you lose her, or just decide to take a little vacation from your assignment?"

  Maris turned and dropped to one knee. If groveling and contrition would save her from the worst of Johnivans' wrath, she didn't mind. She deserved it. "Worse," she admitted with her eyes fixed on the pointed red toes of his boots.

  "There's something worse than disobeying me? You never cease to surprise me, girl."

  Maris lowered her head until her forehead touched the top layers of carpet scraps. Dust tickled her nose, made her want to sneeze, and the acrid hint of Little Makusu's dreamdust tempted her with the promise of oblivion. "She tumbled to me following her."

  "Get careless?"

  "I must have—but I don't know how! I'm the best at follow-me-target, Johni, you know that, we've played it all my life, even you can't tell when I'm tracing you . . ."

  "Hmm. So that makes you the best?"

  "Nobody else here could track you through from Twenty-four to Twenty-one when you tried us, could they?"

  "So if you're so good, who persuaded you to be not so good at it this time? Hmm?" A foot on Maris's head underlined the question.

  "Nobody! I swear it. She's just—better than anybody we tracked before—or maybe she's got better tech. You said she was asking Little Makusu about smuggling pro-tech onto Kalapriya—well, wouldn't it make sense that a tech smuggler would have the best equipment for herself?"

  She could tell Johnivans was considering this point seriously when the weight of his foot quit grinding her face into the carpet. Maris dared a glance upward and saw him frowning, but no longer angry. Not at her, anyway. She'd become expert at reading the signs.

  "Nobody could pay me enough to dub on you, Johni," she insisted. "You know that. I owe you everything—do you think I've forgotten so easily? If I'm not one of Johnivans' people, I'm working the corridors, I'm nobody, I'm dead. You saved me from that and I'd never dub on you. Not to save my own life, certainly not for anything a damned toppie could wave at me!"

  Johnivans' frown of concentration smoothed out into the broad smile that lit up her universe. " 'Course you wouldn't, Maris. I know that—I was just testing you, see? Now stop rolling on the carpet, you'll get your nice outfit dirty!" Strong hands lifted her up. Maris felt safe and protected again inside the strength of those arms, the warmth of Johnivans' smile. If he forgave her, if she was still one of his mates, then nothing else mattered. Sure, she'd blown the assignment, and she'd do whatever dirty, boring job he gave her as penance—but it didn't really matter. The tech smuggler might have outsmarted her, but Johnivans would outsmart the smuggler in turn. He always did.

  * * *

  "Do you think the target turned Maris?"

  "No chance! Maris is yours. I think this woman outsmarted her, just like she admitted." But a slight frown lingered on Little Makusu's face.

  "Maris," Johnivans remarked, apparently to the empty space in the middle of his private chambers, "is good. Bunu good; I trained her myself. So . . . either the toppie turned her, or . . . Maybe she's smarter than she looks."

  "Maris?"

  "No, moron, this wannabe tech smuggler. At first I thought she was bunu dumb, trying to start her own racket without paying her specs to me first, but now I'm wondering. Maybe she's got serious backing, just wants to ID who's running the game here so she can have us taken out. We need to know more."

  "Want me to bring her here?"

  "No. Take her to the Maus-hole. If you can."

  "If I can!"

  The warm smile lit up Johnivans' face. "Just kidding, Little M. But seriously now . . . take some help. Keito the Fingers, maybe Daeman if he's not too crazy today. Remember, she got round Maris. I don't want any of my people approaching her alone. And after you've stashed her," he added, "find out where she's bunking, and send Fingers to check out her quarters. I want as much background as we can get before I start questioning her. And one other thing . . ."

  "Don't mention the op to Maris," Little Makusu said. "Just in case."

  "Bunu right!"

  * * *

  Calandra Vissi could hardly wait until she got back to her suite on Five to compose and code her message back. Strictly speaking she shouldn't be sending anything at all, since what she had at this point was hardly vital information—but it was something, after all these days of dropping hints and broadcasting suggestions until she began to doubt there actually was a smuggling organization on Tasman for her to check out. But logic said there had to be. Tasman was an artifact of FTL travel, a miniature artificial world created at a point where converging singularities in the geometry of space made it extremely inconvenient not to have a nearby world for docking and refueling and transshipping passengers and cargo. Hence, Tasman—expensive, with its thirty levels of living and working quarters, its inability to produce anything fo
r itself beyond the most basic hydroponics required to keep the air healthy. Expensive beyond words, when you considered the cost of shipping every single component, foodstuff, and other necessity from some distant world.

  The only thing more expensive would have been not having Tasman, being unable to use this marvelous area of converging singularities except by laboriously docking two ships together for cargo exchanges.

  That debate had been argued out in Calandra's great-grandparents' time, and Tasman had paid for itself—with docking and toll charges that everybody complained about, but everybody paid—within a generation.

  Almost everybody, anyway.

  In the early, bare-bones days Tasman could not possibly have housed a smuggling operation (unless it was run by the officials in charge of customs and excise, Calandra noted, having been trained to consider all possibilities). Now, four generations after the world had first been placed here, it had been added onto and improved beyond recognition. The core levels, One through Three, comprised a luxury world with every comfort that could be imagined to keep staff happy and slow down turnover, because it was much more expensive to train new maintenance and customs staff and ship them out than it was to provide the existing workers with synthetic lobster dinners, the latest holos, virtual tours by the current holostars, and anything else that could amuse people stuck on a world with no open spaces. The levels immediately around the core were equally luxurious, resembling nothing so much as a huge shopping mall that radiated out from Four's top-level stores with plush carpeting and discreet fountains all the way down to the crowded walkways and mass-market chain stores of Fourteen. Nothing cheap, of course; it didn't pay to import cheap goods to Tasman. Still, Fourteen didn't hold much to appeal to someone like Calandra. But it was nearly the lowest level open to the public—Fifteen and Sixteen were drab service areas frequented mostly by staff members bent on saving every penny of their salaries for the future, and from Seventeen down to the outer skin, the only comfortable areas were the lift tubes that led directly to the passenger bays, surrounded by dull and chilly storage and maintenance areas. So Fourteen was the best place, Calandra figured, for her to troll for contacts with the smugglers that had to be operating on Tasman by now.