Law of Survival

by Kristine Smith

  “Gone gamblin’, did ya?” Steve’s brows arched. “Must’ve felt lucky—greens run five to ten thousand Comdollars, depending on the casino.”

  Jani held the marker directly up to the light source, squinting as she tried to see through it. “These things come loaded.”

  “With what? A chip?” Steve scooted down the couch, his clothes hissing against the polycanvas. “Might, since it’s a big denomination. Casino might register them.”

  “They do.” Jani lifted her duffel onto her lap. “Plastic this thick can be hard to scan.”

  “I can scan plastic. I used to have to log in equipment in Helier, so I had my ’pack source boosted.” Angevin rounded the couch and sat on the floor at Jani’s feet—she held a juice dispo in one hand and her scanpack in the other. “So how do you like my decorating?”

  “Nice.” Jani handed her the casino marker.

  “She misses the wide-open feel,” Steve added helpfully.

  “Blow.” Angevin worked through her ’pack start-up checks, then held out her hand for the marker. She passed her scanpack reading surface over one side, then the other. Once. Twice. Again. “It’s colony. Beyond that, I can’t tell anything.”

  “Too thick?” Jani took the marker from her and again held it under the lamplight.

  “I don’t think so.” Angevin glowered at the disc with the suspicious eye of a thwarted dexxie. “Could be the dye in the plastic. Some of them emit at wavelengths that interfere with scanmechs. I’d need a sheath that filters at just the right hairline of the spectrum in order to read further.”

  “Could be sending blocking signals, too.” Steve reached for the marker, but Jani batted his hand away.

  “Blocking dyes and signals are controlled out of Registry.” She held the marker by the edges and tried to flex it. “Legal casinos can’t use them and the illegal ones don’t bother. The only problem with this thing is it’s too thick.” She felt it bend, very slightly, and eased off. “It’s a marker—they’re never meant to leave the casino.” She held it up to the light again to see if she could spot the whitened stress cracks. “Bets are tracked by other means. All this should contain is the name of the casino and the pit registry code.” She gripped the edges again and flicked her wrists down. The marker snapped like an overbaked cookie.

  “What the hell ya do that for!” Steve pulled the nicstick out of his mouth—it had suddenly developed a distinct bend in the mouthpiece. “You just—gah!” His hand flew to his mouth. He ran into the kitchen.

  “Bit right through to the scent core.” Angevin watched her lover’s flight with a distinct lack of anxiety. “With his temper, he does that about once a week. Stings like hell for a few seconds, then his tongue goes numb. You’d think that would teach him not to smoke those damned clove things, but he’s got a memory like a stalk of celery.”

  Jani dug tweezers out of her tool kit and probed one of the marker’s newly exposed inside edges. “You don’t seem concerned.”

  “Shuts him up for hours. Sometimes I appreciate the peace and quiet.” Angevin grinned and hunched her shoulders as though she’d said something naughty. “But sometimes I ask him questions that he can’t answer with a yes or no, just to see that Guernsey glower.” She moved into a kneeling position and studied the marker half that Jani examined. “I hope you didn’t screw up the chip.”

  Jani used the sharp points of the tweezers to work a groove into the broken edge. “In a casino, you pay for everything with markers. Officially, purchases and bets are tracked with handprints, but as part of the tradition, you go through the motions of paying with markers. They’re made breakable so you can get change back. Because of that, the chips are offset in one of the quadrants, well away from the break-axes.” She eased up on the pressure as she poked into a miniscule open space. “Get that antistat out of my bag.”

  Angevin pulled out the square of charge-dissipating black cloth that sat atop the muddle and spread it across Jani’s knee. “Those chips don’t self-destruct like doc insets, I gather?”

  “No.” Jani removed the chip from its home and placed it on the cloth. “They can, in fact, be reused. Like I said, all they contain is the casino and the reg number.” She pulled her scanpack from her bag and activated it.

  “Why do you need to know where it comes from?” Angevin managed an expression of disinterest, but her hands betrayed her, fingers curled and clenching.

  “Just a data point.” Jani held her scanpack over the chip, and watched the information scroll across her display. “Andalusia. That’s a high-end club in Felix Majora, Felix’s largest city.”

  “You’re speaking from experience?” Angevin tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth twitched.

  “I made a few business calls. Peeked through the trade entrance a couple of times.” Jani recalled the black and yellow uniformed waitstaff, the vast expanses of spotless stainless steel in the kitchen. Andalusia was the sort of place that ran a credit check before letting a customer in the door. “Steve would call it posh and full of nobbies.”

  “He wouldn’t call it much of anything at the moment.” Angevin uncurled to her feet and gazed down at Jani. Her skin was clear cream, untouched by worry and a stress-shortened night spent in a bedroll in a strange flat. Only her eyes, mossy green and large, held the dull light of concern. “You’re not going to tell us why you think this marker is important, are you?”

  “It’s just my curiosity.” Jani tucked the chip back into its slotted home, then enfolded the two marker halves in the antistat and tucked the bundle into her duffel.

  “You’re a real good liar,” Angevin snapped. “You’re as good as Evan van Reuter. Around Interior Doc Control, we used to say that he could sell a potluck dinner to the idomeni.”

  Jani’s head shot up. “Don’t ever compare me with him.”

  Angevin took a step backward. “I’m—I’m sorry, I—”

  “Just don’t.”

  “All right.” Angevin glanced over Jani’s head, and did a game job of wiping the upset from her face. “How are you feeling, darling?”

  “Mmph.” Steve circled around the couch and flopped back in his old seat. The skin around his mouth was reddened from scrubbing, the front of his pullover splattered with water.

  “Well, I should get going.” Jani stood and hoisted her duffel to her shoulder.

  “But you just got here!” Angevin threw her hands in the air. “You haven’t even seen the rest of the flat!”

  Jani made a show of checking her timepiece. “I need to get to Neoclona. Val told me I could visit Lucien this afternoon.”

  “Nrrm.” Steve got up just as Jani walked past him, bumping into her in the process.

  Jani felt his hand slip in her jacket pocket. She maintained her path to the door without breaking stride, and exited into the hallway two steps ahead of Angevin.

  “We need to go through your paper mail,” Angevin called after her, “and you’ve got fifteen comport messages and you’re going to miss a deadline on—”

  Jani stopped short and turned around. “Angevin, someone shot at me last night. Now whether they meant to hit Lucien, or me, I don’t know and I don’t care. Pulse packets discharged in my vicinity make me edgy, and I mean to find out who fired that particular one and why.”

  Angevin planted in the middle of the hall. “I have spent half the morning taking calls from people asking where you are, and what happened last night, and are you under suspicion of anything. One son of a bitch had the nerve to ask if your past had caught up with you.”

  “Devinham, probably. His report is sitting atop the far right-hand stack. Call NUVA-SCAN Courier and tell them to come pick it up.” Jani walked back to Angevin and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m caught up on my most pressing projects. I need to do some work tonight, which I will. And if any clients bail on me because they’re afraid my grubby little past will rub off on them, I will deal with it.” She walked backward toward the lift. “Right now, though, I’m going to visit someo
ne who had half the skin of his lower abdomen seared off, and who feels like a elephant stepped on his lower back. OK?”

  Angevin cringed at the description of Lucien’s injuries. “Tell him I said hello.”

  “I will.”

  “Steve doesn’t like him a bit.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “I’ll do what I can with the rest of your calendar.”

  “Thank you. I mean that.” Jani stepped aboard the lift; just as the door closed, she caught a glimpse of Steve in the entry, hands buried in his pockets, angry stare focused on her.

  Jani reached into her pocket and removed what Steve had stuffed there. It proved to be a folded piece of dispo towel. She opened it and read the hurried printing, made blurred by the way the stylus fluid bled through the cottony material.

  Why are you protecting that bastard when he tried to set you up?

  Jani touched her left shoulder, still bruised and tender from Lucien’s grip. It seemed to be taking a longer than normal time to heal. As though the damage was worse than she thought. As though it believed she needed a reminder.

  The main branch of the Capital Library loomed over its neighbor buildings like an overbearing professor, its stern stone and metal lines and forbidding entry inviting the information seeker while promising them a difficult search. Jani didn’t know whether the stacks really were as daunting as their shelter made them appear—she had acquired a membership in order to access the free workstations reserved by the Library for the use of its patrons.

  She entered the lift. Since she was the only occupant, she hit the pad for all twelve floors and got off at the fourth. She stalked the aisles until she found an unused carrel, and fed her rental card into the entry reader. An anonymous card, paid for with an anonymous vend token. What she lost in a business expense tax deduction, she gained in privacy.

  She locked the carrel door and activated the privacy shading in the doorside window. Then she opened her duffel and removed all the things she needed to initiate a proper search. Notepad. Stylus. Dispo of lemon tonic. Anti-trace jig. She activated the palm-sized jig and attached to the workstation core, so that no one would be able to monitor her search.

  Jani sat at the desk. She ratcheted the touchboard into a more comfortable position, then hesitated just as she made ready to initiate systems. “Would I feel better if I didn’t know?” Maybe. “Would I feel safer?” There was only one answer to that question—she gave it by activating the station and wading through the Library’s arcane search driver to the vast reaches of Colonial Archives.

  Casinos—Felix Majora.

  The Felicianos had a well-earned reputation for enjoying life. Felix Majora contained forty-seven casinos within its metro limits, with Andalusia topping the alphabetical list. Jani, however, didn’t zone in on that target immediately. Instead, she keyed into the archives of the Vox Nacional, Felix Colony’s most popular newssheet. She pondered the keyword request, entered death and accident, set the time limits to the months Lucien spent in the colonies earlier that year, and initiated the search.

  She sipped her tonic as the display faded and the device went about its business. After a few seconds, it brightened to active blue, then darkened to the deep gold background and red arabesques of the Vox Nacional screens. A flicker, then a flood of print as a formidable list filled the display.

  Five hundred eighty-seven names. Jani didn’t know whether that number was high or low, incorrect or skewed by her search terms. She entered various and sundry codes and passwords she had acquired by means fair and foul during her years living “out.” Then she entered the reg code she had gleaned from Andalusia’s chip and initiated a cross-sort of credit checks requested by Andalusia against the names of the deceased.

  Within minutes, she had sifted out fourteen names. She whittled it by more than two-thirds after she discarded net worths below one hundred fifty thousand. No casino manager wanted to gut a new customer on the first go-round, therefore they never approved a credit line greater than ten percent of the customer’s net worth. Steve had guessed low—green markers in Felix Majora signified a fifteen thousand Comdollar investment, therefore everyone worth less than one hundred fifty thousand fell by the wayside.

  And then there were four…

  Four names. Jani discarded that of the woman who choked on a sandwich at her family reunion. She also tossed out the man in his twenties who had decided to raid the Fort Constanza ordnance depot for Dia Felicia fireworks and fried himself on the security fence that ringed the Service base’s outer perimeter.

  And then there were two…

  After a little more thought, she rejected the ninety-four-year-old man who had fallen in his bathroom and struck his head with killing force against the corner of his marble bath. He had been a cornerstone of the Majoran import-export cartel, which made his exclusion difficult. But it was the wrong sort of death. The wrong manner, wrong method.

  And then there was one…

  Etienne Palia. Killed when the racing-class skimmer he drove veered off Felix Majora’s infamous Camino Loco and slammed into a scancrete abutment. Massive systems failure, according to the on-site investigator. A rare occurrence with that particular model skimmer, but not unheard of. Accidents did, after all, happen.

  “The article says Palia was a businessman.” No particular business mentioned, not even something vague like import-export. A businessman. Well, they all were, weren’t they? No one ever admitted to an inquiring reporter, yes, I am a high-level soldier in a brand-new Commonwealth-spanning criminal organization. It was always, I am a businessman, said with a cool smile as unblinking eyes gazed directly into the holocam.

  “Palia—member of L’araignée?” Jani doodled a looping question mark on the top page of the notepad. That’s what she kept the writing materials for—any pertinent facts she would store in her head and her head only. She backed out of the search driver and powered down the workstation. Disengaged the anti-trace jig and tucked it away, along with the pad and stylus. Tossed back the last swallow of tonic, consigned the dispo to the sparky maw of the trashzap, and departed the carrel. Her stomach growled as she hit the walkway. She dug a meal bar out of her bag and consumed it in a few untasted bites.

  Massive systems failure. The right sort of death. An assassination that a professional adept at gadgetry might pull off.

  CHAPTER 19

  As Jani negotiated the final turn leading to Lucien’s hospital room, the sounds of a familiar voice raised in anger reached her. She opened the door slowly, poised to back away and flee around the nearest corner if the occasion demanded. Val Parini didn’t often lose his temper. When he did, it paid to be elsewhere.

  Unfortunately for Jani, Val also possessed the hearing of a nervous cat—he turned as soon as he heard the door mech. “Damn it, Jan—you talk to him!” He stood at the foot of Lucien’s bed, recording board in one hand, stylus in the other. The stylus performed double-duty as a weapon—Val used it to stab the air with malice aforethought. “Only a certifiable idiot would sign himself out of here in the condition he’s in!”

  “I’m fine, really.” Lucien stood bedside, looking as far from fine as Jani had ever seen him. He wore winter base casuals—grey pull-on pants and a loose blue pullover that hung untucked. His faded tan looked sallow, the overhead illumination highlighting the sheen of sweat that coated his forehead. He packed a plastic sack with the few items of clothing that had come through the shooting unscathed—his lid, his tietops, and socks. He moved in slow motion, turning with his whole body to avoid bending or flexing at the waist.

  Jani saw him wince as he leaned forward to insert a sock into the bag. “Lucien, I think you should listen to Val.”

  “Damned right he should listen to Val. Now get back into bed before you pass out.” Val circled to Lucien’s side of the bed and reached for the sack, but Lucien stuck his arm straight out to the side to stop him.

  “I’ve signed myself out. I’m not your problem anymore.” He lowered his
arm, then resumed folding his other sock with a slowness that was maddening to watch. “Leave me alone.”

  Jani edged closer. “Do your superiors know you’ve done this?”

  Lucien smiled as she approached, but exhaustion damped the usual four-alarm blaze to a dying ember. “It’s easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.” He closed the bag, tried to lift it, then gasped and let it drop back to the bed.

  “This is bullshit!” Val headed for the door, open medcoat flapping. He stopped long enough to make a hurried entry into the board. “I’m countermanding that release right now.” He pointed the stylus at Jani. “Don’t you dare take him out of this room. I’m getting John. Maybe he can talk some sense into him.” The stylus swung around toward Lucien. “Then I’m calling your CO.”

  Lucien waited for the door to close before speaking. “Jani, please get me out of here.”

  Jani hesitated. Then she walked around the bed to his side because she knew he expected her to come close and he’d wonder why if she didn’t. “You can’t even stand.” As soon as she drew near, he leaned toward her and tried to kiss her, but she ducked him easily and grabbed his arm so she could steer him back to the bed. “And you sure as hell can’t do that, so lie down.”

  “I love it when you order me around.” Lucien slipped his arm around her waist and lay his head on her shoulder. Then he groaned. His weight shifted.

  Jani widened her stance for stability and helped him lower onto the bed. She hoisted his legs, then supported his shoulders as he lay back, felt the sweat soak through the thin pullover knit as she held him. His face had paled to chalky ochre. “Asking if it hurts is a dumb question, isn’t it?”

  Lucien shook his head. “They implanted a pain med diffuser. I just feel pressure. Weight. Like I’ve got a cannonball lodged against my hip. But I’m so goddamned weak!” He gripped her wrist as soon as she let go of him. “I have to get out of here. Shroud does not like me.”