Meta-Analysis (In Progress)
What could that be? I touched the icon and confronted a wall of text, sorted into columns and rows.
In Vivo Studies.
Case Histories.
Symptoms.
Potential Treatments.
A cold shock travelled through my gut as I realized what I was looking at.
“Don’t touch my computer!” Dolph seized my shoulder to pull me away.
I grabbed his wrist, flung his hand off my shoulder. The motion spun both of us into the air. I found the wall with one heel and came back. “What’s that? Case Histories?”
I thought maybe he’d really found something. Hope feels like fear when it shoots through you all of a sudden. It’s the same uncontrollable adrenal spike.
“It’s data,” Dolph said. “I’m analyzing it. Comparing the efficiency of the various treatments they’ve tried. They’ve tried a lot of things. Yesanyase Skont is one big n+30,000 study in treating IVK. You never hear about it—”
My hopes evaporated. This was just the same old, same old. “Because none of it works.”
“Maybe it does, but no one’s ever done a meta-analysis to separate the facts from the noise. I’m not a specialist. I’m going to pass it on to Dr. Zeb. Maybe Dr. Tierney as well. He might could do something with it.”
“Oh, fuck that.” I caught the holobook, pulled it off its velcro, and tossed it at his bunk. It bounced off.
“My fucking computer!” Dolph turned his shoulder into me, hard, reaching for the holobook. His hair got in my mouth. I spat it out and kicked him away.
“Where’d you get the data?”
“Sales tech for an AI services provider. They crunch data for the do-gooders. It was true about walking around the lake. The company was on the far side, beyond the jehoulas. Bunker with its own microwave power source in orbit, couple of losers monitoring the stacks, wishing they were home. They sold it to me.”
“You said it wasn’t you!” I yelled.
Complete perplexity blanked his face for a moment. Then understanding dawned, followed by outrage. “I did not take our money! Fuck’s sake, I can’t believe you think I would do that?”
“How much was the data?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“A hundred.”
“Jesus Christ, Dolph, nothing’s worth that much.”
“Not even your life?”
“I would pay anything for a cure. Anything.” The words felt like coughing up barbed wire. “If there was one. But there isn’t. You got ripped off.”
“My money, my problem.”
“Your money? You don’t have that kind of money.”
“You’ve been paying me a good salary for twenty years now. My rent is cheap, and even I can’t spend that much on guns.”
“I thought you sent it home to your family.”
“I quit doing that after Sara died. Tom ain’t getting my hard-earned.” Sara had been his elder sister. Tom was his younger brother. The relationship was strained. “So I got savings.”
“OK, but Jesus, Dolph, don’t spend it all on me …”
“You think this is about you?” His voice suddenly rose. “You think I give a shit about you, asshole? You don’t even give a shit about yourself. This is about the company we built together. It’s about the people we’re responsible to, the suppliers we support, the customers who count on us—”
“Oh, bullshit, man. We ain’t Star Trax. We’re just mercs.” I normally never used that word. Now I threw it at him like a stone.
“Have you forgotten we set out to help human beings? We wanted to give something back to the Cluster.”
“And that’s why you fucked up the whole run by getting high.” I was furious about what he’d done to himself. It had been simmering for days.
“I can handle myself,” he gritted, but I saw the flash of defensiveness.
“You cannot. Don’t start lying to yourself again. Don’t do it. That shit killed Artie. Don’t let it get its claws into you again.”
“Lying to yourself?” He let out a high, jackally laugh. “Listen to the expert. Have you taken a look in the mirror lately, Mike?”
Irene looked in at the door.
“Everything OK, guys?”
I spun to face her, bumping into Dolph, and pushed him away. “Everything’s fine.”
“Well, OK.”
“I’ll take over on the bridge,” I said. “I can’t sleep, anyway.”
The bridge was my lair. I floated amidst the familiar, comforting readouts and licked my psychic wounds.
The vodka dispenser was there, too.
Shipboard time is elastic, with no external sensory inputs to mark the minutes and hours. At this speed, there wasn’t even anything to see outside. A few candles in the dark were the stars of the Cluster, dimmed by a factor of 1,980.
In my memory, MF quacked about quantum errors induced by too high of a Lorentz factor. But MF wasn’t here. I ran a series of vodka-infused calculations, triple-checked them, and took the multiplier up to 2,000.
Jolt.
Startled cries from aft.
The last few remaining star-glints winked out.
I patted the console in front of me. “Knew you could do it, baby,” I murmured.
“Mike?”
Light shone from the corridor behind me. Irene’s shadow stretched over the consoles.
“Mike?”
Her voice sounded odd. I turned, squinting.
Her face was red, her eyes wet. Lips pressed together tightly.
“What? What?”
“Why did everyone know except me?”
I followed her into the lounge.
Dolph and Martin were there. Martin was in human form for once. Dolph floated spreadeagled in the air.
“I fucking begged you not to tell her,” I yelled at Dolph.
“I didn’t,” he yelled.
“I did,” Martin said. “She asked me why you were being such a dick. That was my best guess.”
“How could you keep something like this to yourself?” Irene said. “You’re dying!”
“He’s got five years to live,” Dolph said. “That’s long enough to—”
“It only sounds like a long time to you because you haven’t got a child!” Irene floated over to me, touched my arm. “Mike, if there’s anything I can do. Anything. I know Rex would say the same, although I won’t tell him without your permission ...”
“Go ahead and tell him,” I said wearily. “What does it matter?”
The St. Clare pitched forward hard. The bulkheads executed a malevolent sneak attack on my body. My nose and cheek crunched against the big screen. The lights blazed up midday bright, and a tone blared from the speakers, deliberately off-key and alarming. “Resetting flight systems now. Please validate navigation parameters. Resetting flight systems now.”
I peeled off from the wall. What I feared was silence. That’s the sound of ship failure. The sound of death.
“Resetting flight systems now. Please validate navigation parameters. Resetting flight systems now.”
As long as I could still hear that, and the fans, and the rapid ticking of the skip field generator, we were alive, with a chance of staying that way. I hurtled up the trunk corridor, trailing blood from my nose and mouth.
“All systems look nominal,” Dolph grunted. He and Irene dived into their couches, crammed their headsets on. “We ain’t hit. We’re in the goddamn field. Something’s glitching. Gotta find the error—”
JOLT.
I’d pulled my straps over my shoulders, but hadn’t yet sealed them. The car-crash force carved welts in my bare shoulders.
JOLT.
Hatches popped loose on the aft bulkhead. Irene, her straps not secured, pitched forward into the console, caught herself with her hands. Hot water and vodka bubbled into the air. Drops of blood from my nose collided with the clear globules, turning them red.
“Resetting flight systems
now. Please validate navigation parameters. Resetting flight systems now.”
Numbers flickered in the FTL display in my headset: 1900, 2000.
“It’s the skip genny,” I yelled. “Lower the multiplier!”
MF had warned us, but I hadn’t listened. Too high a value of tau, also known as the Lorentz factor, can induce spontaneous quantum errors. The skip field generator was crashing, because it couldn’t tolerate that level of errors, and rebooting automatically, and every reboot functioned as a massive deceleration jolt.
The St. Clare groaned around us. Martin called in burst pipes and short-circuits in the crew quarters, primarily in the area already damaged by the Travellers’ missile. We raced to drop the multiplier before the system crashed again.
Jolt.
“One nine ninety,” I yelled.
“One nine ninety.”
“Marty, stop messing with the pipes and strap in!”
Jolt.
“One nine eighty.”
Dolph was out of his seat, mopping the air before the spilled liquids could get into the consoles. He took the jolt on bended knees, bare feet slapping the aft bulkhead.
“One nine seventy …”
I lowered the multiplier, in safe increments of ten, to 1,900 c.
“If we go any lower, we’ll suffocate before we get there.” I shoved my AR headset up. It brushed the bridge of my nose, igniting a flare of agony. I touched my nose carefully. Hallelujah, it wasn’t broken.
“Quantum errors, huh,” Dolph said. “What’s that grinding noise?”
“Just a broken fan,” I said.
“No significant damage back here,” Martin said. “Have I ever mentioned I love this ship?”
“Yes,” Irene said, “but it bears repeating.”
In a moment of relief and exuberance, I planted a kiss on the skip drive console. “Thanks for saving our lives again, baby.”
“Aw, put a sock in it,” Dolph said. “You’re going to sell her when we get home, anyway.”
31
I set the St. Clare down on the crosshairs of Freight Terminal 1028 as lightly as a bird landing in its nest. Dolph and I stayed on the bridge for another couple of minutes, powering down the flight systems. Every switch I threw felt like goodbye. “Figure I’ll get an easy fifteen million for her,” I said. My no-longer-secret plan had destroyed morale. I kept trying to cheer the others up with visions of seven-figure severance payments, and it kept not working.
Dolph said, “I’ll look after Lucy, Mike! Have I ever given you the impression I wouldn’t?”
“I’m counting on you,” I said. “When she comes home on holiday from St. Anne’s, she’ll need a home to come to.”
Dolph suddenly leaned forward, distracted. “Huh?” The vapor from our auxiliaries had blown away. Our hangar was closed. The door should have rolled up automatically on touchdown. A chain crossed it.
We all got out and went to look.
The air tasted gloriously fresh after our weeks of oxygen rationing. It was good to be home. But a seal covered the door’s manual controls. When I touched it, the seal displayed a Spaceport Authority avatar, which droned: “These premises have been repossessed due to your failure to pay 12 KGCs by the date of September 8th, 3419. If payment is not received in full by September 20th, all contents of this hangar will be sold at auction.” I grabbed the edge of the seal. “Unauthorized removal of this seal is a felony,” the avatar added.
There’s this persistent illusion, for those who work in space, that you’ll get home to find everything the same as when you left. But 37 days is a long time. The seal on the hangar controls had absorbed rainwater and peeled away at one corner. It had been here a while.
“How did the rent not get paid?” I wasn’t that broke. I thumbed my phone, pulling up the EkBank portal.
“We can’t leave the ship out here,” Martin said. “We need to sleep the AM ring, dump the sewage, connect the power lines, safe the pressurized gas tanks …”
“I know.” I showed my phone my red-veined, gritty eyes. It was nine o’clock in the morning, a degree or two cooler than it had been when we left Ponce de Leon a month ago. The sky glowed as blue as an oversaturated holo, but our bodies thought it was midnight. The sea breeze blew steadily across the giant tarmac checkerboard of the spaceport. Dolph picked strands of hair out of his mouth and said to his phone, “Mary.”
I accessed the Uni-Ex Shipping account.
Well, that explained it.
Hard fucking vacuum in there.
It wasn’t just 75 KGCs missing anymore. At some point since we left Yesanyase Skont, every last penny of Uni-Ex’s cash and cash equivalents had been withdrawn.
“Mary, hey.” Dolph mustered a smile. “We’re back, and …”
I crowded beside him as Mary began to speak. She was our office manager, but she was not at the office. She stood in a neat, bright kitchen which I took to be her own, wearing jeans, a sight approximately as incongruous as if I had put on a tutu. “Mike, Dolph, my goodness, you’re tanned. Isn’t it supposed to rain all the time on Mittel Trevoyvox? Guys, I am so sorry. We’ve been evicted. It’s outrageous. I saved all our office furniture and electronics, which you can see here.” Plastikretes stood on the narrow balcony outside her kitchen windows. “I did v-mail you, but you won’t have seen that yet. Have you had a chance to check the corporate bank account?”
“It’s empty,” I broke in. The shock was still travelling through my body, delivering shivers to my extremities.
“Yes.” Mary took a deep breath. “Robbie emptied it.”
“Robbie?!” Dolph, Martin, and I said together.
A jaguar padded into Mary’s kitchen. Putting its forepaws on the counter where Mary must have set her phone, it said in the voice of a teenage boy, “Are you talking to those jerkwads, Mom? Don’t. You didn’t do anything.” The screen went black.
I turned my back to the sunlight. Hoping against hope, I pulled up my personal EkBank account.
Empty.
I didn’t have a single GC left to scratch a lottery ticket with.
Uni-Ex Shipping sometimes had cash flow problems. I had, therefore, hooked up my personal account to feed into the corporate account if it ever hit zero, so we wouldn’t incur overdraft penalties.
Dumb move, I guess.
But an even dumber move had been hiring a punk wolf off the streets and teaching him accounting and bookkeeping.
I had never thought he would steal … nearly half a million GCs … from me.
Dolph said, “Yes, authorize, for fuck’s sake.”
The seal over the hangar door controls turned green. “Thank you! This seal may now be removed. Please keep it for your records.”
“You paid the rent?” I said.
“I told you, I’ve got savings.”
Dolph ripped off the seal, tossed it on the ground, punched buttons. The hangar door clattered up.
A terrible thought hit me. I dialed the ShifterKids Summer Experience!! at Lagos del Mar.
If both accounts were empty, how had Lucy’s summer camp fees been getting paid? 5 KGCs a week, to be paid in weekly installments. If my auto-payments had failed …
“I’m sorry, sir, we have no student by that name.”
I froze. Everything around me took on sharp, clear edges, unreal. “Put me through to Christy Day. Yes, she works at the ShifterKids Summer Experience. Yes.”
Christy came on the phone. She was in an airy office with trees outside the window. “Mike?”
She looked stunning, but I didn’t even greet her. “Where’s Lucy?”
Christy stared at me from the screen. “Don’t you know? I thought—”
“No, I do not fucking know! I just got back. She’s supposed to be there!”
“She isn’t. Rex Seagrave removed her from camp. You listed him as her emergency contact, so I thought—”
“When?”
“On September fourth.”
Two weeks ago. When we were leaving Mittel
Trevoyvox.
“Mike, is everything OK?”
“I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.”
“I have some stuff of hers,” Christy said, diving under her desk. “You could pick it up from here, or I can take it home …”
A ship thundered into the air, drowning out Christy’s voice. I hung up on her. The spaceport seemed to gape around me like a concrete gulf. Treacherous normality, as fake as a holo. Why, why had I thought it would be OK to go away for a whole month?
“I can’t get through to Rex,” Irene said. She held her phone up for me to hear the recorded voice: “The number you have dialed is not in the service area …” She cut it off. “Not in the service area. Where’s he gone?”
“I’ll do the post-flight with Marty,” Dolph said.
I nodded, grabbed my kitbag, and sprinted to the garage at the back of the hangar with Irene at my heels.
Driving in the Hurtworlds had given me a new appreciation for the possibilities of human control. I set my truck to manual mode and threw it along the intraport roads like I was trying to outrun Travellers. Irene kept dialing Rex, and getting the same recorded message. My mind made unwanted connections. Rex and Robbie were friends. Robbie had stolen all my money. Rex had removed Lucy from summer camp and gone … where?
As we queued in front of the customs building, Irene gave up on Rex and dialed her mother. “Hi Mom … What? What? Why would he do that?”
“What?” I said urgently, as we descended into the scanning zone, and Irene’s call got cut off.
“She says he moved out. ” Her voice sounded peculiar. Thin and wobbly. “And he … he took the kids with him.”
“Thank you, and have a nice day,” the customs AI droned through my truck’s speakers. The portcullis ahead of us rose. I gunned the truck onto Space Bridge.
“Hello? Yeah, it’s me, we’re back … Um, my mom says Rex moved out …” Now Irene was talking to Rex’s father. “You don’t know? Please, Leo, come on! You gotta tell me—”
“—your fault,” I distinctly heard Leo Seagrave’s gruff voice say, and then a click.
“He hung up on me. He fucking hung up on me.” Irene started to call back. I reached over and snatched her phone. It wouldn’t improve the situation to start a fight with her in-laws. I felt a watery, conditional sense of relief. Moved out was far different from dead. If that’s all that had happened, we would find them. Irene fought me for her phone. I fended her off, keeping one hand on the wheel. As I accelerated onto Space Highway, she won the scuffle. She started calling friends, family, anyone who might have information.
Dirty Job Page 18
