by Patty Jansen
“Go,” Jao said, his voice tense. “Just use the istel overalls and pretend he’s a client. If anyone asks, bullshit your way out of it, like you’re so good at doing. I’ll create a diversion.”
“But you . . .” Ari said. “How do you know me?”
“Let’s just say I do. And you’re full of bullshit.”
“Hey, watch what you’re saying—”
Jao took up position and levelled his gun at the end of the corridor. “Go! Now!”
They ran, Ari first and Melati behind him. At the back of the gym’s offices and change rooms, there was a narrow emergency stairwell. Opening the door would probably alert StatOp, but it was a risk they had to take. Ari went first. They were only halfway when shouts echoed from the lower level and then the discharge of a weapon.
The door at the bottom of the stairs came out into another corridor with offices on either side, and they were going down a second set of emergency stairs when Ari’s comm beeped. He looked at the screen and stopped.
“How does he know my ID?”
He held the screen up for Melati to see. It said, Stop and wait. The sender was Jao Kessler.
“What did you tell them, Melati?”
“Nothing. They were just . . .” along to protect me, but were they, really? She had thought that a Kessler made an unusual choice for a guard. Kesslers were tech specialists—and spies.
After a short wait, Jao came down the stairs, followed by Desi. He passed Melati and Ari without a word. A scent of ozone lingered in their wake.
Ari started to ask something, but Jao put a finger to his lips.
Melati met Desi’s eyes. She’d heard a gun discharge and Desi was a sharpshooter. There was no need for further explanation. She just hoped that Desi had used the stun setting.
God.
They continued down the stairs, back into JeJe, through the large door into the BC area. The enforcers took a look at Jao and Desi and let them all pass the checkpoint without a word. Melati wondered where they were going. Had Ari hidden this guy in the BC block?
The market hall was unusually empty, but the sound of many voices—and music—drifted from the main hall. The welcome party.
Ari bumped Melati’s side. “In here.” He turned into the doorway that led into the foyer of the dockside hotel. The business was owned by Li Wei’s family and his sister stood behind the counter looking terribly bored.
Under her sour-faced look, Ari went up to the door next to the counter and held his ID to the scanner. The screen said, No vacancies.
He said to the machine, “I’m here to see Meriam Alatam.”
The door clicked and Ari pushed it open.
The grey and featureless corridor brought back memories Melati would rather forget, of coming here with istel pilots, of waiting for the other girls in the corridor. Hearing the sounds of what was happening behind those doors.
They went up a flight of stairs—still with that horrible stained carpet—and then Ari stopped at a door with the number 645, held his hand up to the panel and pushed the door open.
The room was empty. A light was on above the bed, the bedding disturbed as if someone had just jumped off.
Ari crossed the room and tried the bathroom door. It wouldn’t open. He banged his fist on the door. “Open up. It’s me, Ari.”
There was no sound. Ari knocked again and listened.
Nothing.
Jao strode into the room. “You just hid a wanted man in a hotel room, huh?”
“Well, he was somewhere else first, but the enforcers were looking in all the emergency passages.”
“Huh.” Jao grunted. He pushed the bathroom door, but it remained closed.
“You need a handprint,” Ari said. “Only one person can get one if only one stays in the room.”
Now Melati also understood his need for money. In Li Wei’s business, no extra security measures came cheap.
“Silly handprint locks never stopped any criminals before. Stand back.” Jao unclipped the gun from his belt, changed the setting and fired at the lock.
The blinding flash made Melati’s eyes hurt. The door slid open and Jao went in. Melati’s eyes still showed purple blotches. A light above the door flashed red.
Jao came out not two seconds later. “Not here.”
“I swear he was here!” Ari said, his eyes wide.
Desi asked, “Where could he have gone?”
“Nowhere. He’s too scared.”
“So—who would have discovered him?”
“I don’t know!”
Jao froze. “What was that?”
He looked at the tiny clothes cupboard next to the bed. The door stood ajar. In one step, he reached for the handle and flung the door open, while raising his gun. “Don’t move.”
Squished inside the cupboard stood Li Wei. Desi dragged him out by the arm, while holding her gun in the other hand.
His desperate eyes met Melati’s. “Help me, I’ve done nothing!”
“Then why are you hiding in the cupboard?” Melati struggled to feel sympathy for Li Wei, but he was a lying cheat, who paid her cousins hideously low wages to work ridiculous hours in his shops that charged ridiculous prices for crappy shirts.
“I just wanted to check what they’d done to my room. I heard you at the door and I thought they were coming back—ow, you’re hurting me.” He bent as far as he could from Desi’s gun.
Melati asked in B3, “Who is they?”
“Some guys.”
“Where is the man who should be in this room?”
“I don’t know.”
“You better be honest,” Melati said. “This is not a game anymore.”
“I know it’s not a game. This is my room and my hotel. They threatened me and my family. Do you think I like it?”
Desi said, “We’ll leave you alone if you cooperate and give us the log records on the door.”
“Please. I don’t know who they were. They threatened me. Please, I have a family.”
“Were they strangers to the station?” Desi had a much better voice for interrogation than Melati did.
“I don’t know!”
“I’m getting a bit tired of this. I don’t believe that you don’t know anything. Answer us now. What did these guys look like?” Desi poked the gun in Li Wei’s neck.
Li Wei bent away as far from the gun as he could. “Please. Keep that thing pointed somewhere else. I don’t know what they look like.”
“What nonsense is that? If they threatened you, you know.
But Melati understood. “They’re hypertechs. They were wearing facemasks. That’s why he doesn’t know.”
“You let them in?” Ari yelled. “After I told you not to?”
Li Wei squeaked. “They threatened me. They would have killed me.”
Jao said, “Does anyone know where they would have taken him?”
Everyone looked at him. Li Wei whimpered in Desi’s grip while she searched him.
She said, “They’re not leaving the station, so we’ll find them.”
“I might know . . .” Ari said. “But you’ll need more people than just us. They might have taken him to the hypertech den and that’s where Pandyakhar and his guys hang out. Those people are dangerous.”
“Tell me something new.” By God, she felt like slapping him in his smug face. If Ari had tried to help Rina, why hadn’t he let her know about his refugee immediately after Rina was killed, instead of waiting for this mess to develop?
“We’ll have backup soon,” Jao said, putting his comm in his belt pouch.
“Do we know where this den is?” Desi asked. The way she used the word we hummed with implications.
“No,” Ari said.
At the same time Melati said, “Yes.”
Ari gaped at her. Melati gave the most innocent smile she could muster. For once, she had more information than Ari. “I don’t know where it is myself, but I know someone who does.”
“Who is this person?” Desi said.
&n
bsp; Melati told her about Troy Grimshaw. “I don’t have a contact number, though.”
“Doesn’t matter. Jao can get that information.”
“I thought StatOp didn’t share their database?”
“I didn’t say he was going to get it legally.”
Jao grinned. Yes, he was a Kessler spy.
“Let’s get out of here first,” Desi said. “Before his reinforcements turn up.” She nodded at Li Wei still in Jao’s grip.
“What are you going to do about him?” Ari asked.
“We’ll make sure he doesn’t talk,” Desi said.
Li Wei’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth, but Jao clamped his glove over it and no more than a muffled scream came out.
Desi grabbed a pouch from her belt from which she extracted an injector gun. She pushed up the sleeve of Li Wei’s overalls, pressed the end to his arm and squeezed the trigger. Melati recognised the label on the ampoule—the same stuff Dr Chee had used on Keb.
Li Wei relaxed and his vision became distant, and Jao deemed it safe to release his grip on Li Wei’s mouth. He sat there, staring, with the impression of Jao’s glove still on his face.
Desi slid the door open again and poked her head out. She slid the door further open.
“There is no one out there now. Let’s go before anyone comes and finds him.”
By the time Melati was in the corridor with the others and Ari slid the door shut, Li Wei had slumped on the bed.
Chapter 25
* * *
MELATI AND ARI followed Jao and Desi along the corridor, into the lift and down to the main foyer of the hotel. A few people came the other way but none questioned or seemed to give the group a second thought, oddly-dressed though they were.
The front office was empty—which meant no questions from Li Wei’s sister about where he was—and from there they melted into the steady stream of people going to and from the docks. Miners lined up for work. A construct was leading a group of older women, all small, black-haired and dressed in loose trousers. A couple of them met Melati’s eyes as she passed. They looked tired and sad and reminded her of the stories Grandma told about arriving at New Jakarta, frightened and weak from travel in weightlessness.
Jao sat down on one of the benches in front of the New Jakarta Information Office with his comm.
“Troy Grimshaw?” he said, meeting Melati’s eyes while she sat next to him.
She nodded.
He punched. “Grimshaw 129?” He punched again.
“Couldn’t you just ask StatOp for the information?”
“I’d need a warrant.” He didn’t look up from his screen.
“Would they refuse?”
“To piss us off, yes. Anything is possible where Bassanti is concerned. For all I know they’re secretly trying to snatch the guy for their own aims.”
He punched some more. Then waited, watching the screen.
The group of refugees walked past, following their guide, a barang-barang man who was talking in broken Standard. “. . . and here are shops, and if you have problem with finding where you are, you come here. . . .” The guide gestured at the Information Office and most of the women in the group looked in Melati’s direction. Curious black eyes met hers.
Next to her, Jao put his comm down, saying, “He’s coming.”
Behind the group of women, four men walked out of one of Li Wei’s hotel’s other entrances.
They were all non-locals, dark-skinned, and one had a beard. Melati had seen three of them before. Two of them had been in Uncle’s rumak, and one of those was Pandyakhar. The third one she had seen in the teahouse at the checkpoint.
She glanced at Desi. “That’s them,” she said in a low voice, gesturing with her eyes.
Desi, who stood facing her, used her pocket comm to look over her shoulder. Jao was looking, too. Ari must have already seen them, because he was pretending not to notice them.
The men strolled past at a relaxed pace while talking to each other. They stopped a bit further down the passage and browsed through the overpriced wares in Li Wei’s tourist shop. None of them spoke, and none of them looked in Melati’s direction, but Pandyakhar held a pocket screen as if he were reading something. The eye of the camera pointed towards her and the others.
Li Wei’s son came up to one of the other men rummaging aimlessly in a bin of shirts. The man shook his head and left the shop. His colleagues followed in the direction of the docking hall.
“What were they trying to do?” Ari asked. “It’s not as if we could have missed seeing them.”
“They’re keeping an eye on us,” Melati said.
Jao shook his head. “No, they’re trying to lure us away, maybe making us think that they’re about to leave. Or distract us. Pretending to be stupid. If you want to make yourself useful, I’ll give you your first lesson about spying, young man: don’t, ever, assume that your charge is stupid.”
Ari grinned.
“But there is a ban on ships leaving the station,” Melati said.
“Anything can be bought for money.” That was Ari, of course.
Jao said, “I like your thinking.”
Desi’s eyes narrowed. “If they’re going to bribe the authorities, and if the authorities are bribeable, and they’re trying to make a run for it, both of them will be soooo incredibly sorry.”
Jao gave Ari and Melati a see, even my colleague falls for it look. “They aren’t going anywhere. They’re making us think they are. That’s the diversion tactic.”
Desi rolled her eyes.
They waited. Desi stood with her back facing the thoroughfare checking the passersby on her pocket comm streamed through the camera she wore on her shoulder. She kept glancing towards the docks, Jao kept an eye on the other side.
Ari fidgeted. Melati didn’t dare speak for the fear that Desi or Jao might miss something.
Groups of barang-barang youths walked towards the hall, talking and yelling in drunken voices. To Melati’s dismay there were even a couple of flamboyantly-dressed and brightly-painted sekong amongst the partygoers. Was Harto starting to appeal to them? Could be, because Wahid and his religious leaders had never figured out what to think of them.
After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only five minutes, Melati spotted Troy coming towards them from the direction of the market hall. He wore his enforcer uniform, and someone was with him.
Ari glanced at Melati; there was a flicker of concern in his expression. She nodded as if saying that it was all right, but she didn’t know if it was all right. How much trouble would Ari be in with the enforcers if it came out that he had hidden this man?
Troy had brought Elko, the brother who looked a lot like Esse. Both of them nodded at Jao and Desi, but raised their eyebrows at Melati and Ari.
Troy held a pocket comm out to Jao who looked at the screen, squinting. All this went on without a word in the way only constructs would act. Troy pointed at a couple of places on the screen. “. . . There is access here . . .” He pointed. “. . . and here.” He moved his finger. “With a group this size, it’s hard to stay concealed. It might be better if just a few of us went in—”
Jao said, “They are not likely to be armed?”
Troy glared at him, letting the implications hang in the air: that StatOp wasn’t doing its job properly, that they were incompetent, that they had lost control of the station’s security and that there had been arms smuggling.
Jao glared back. “You want to get him, or do you want to risk losing him? We don’t know what we’re going to find there, and we may need as many people as we can get. We all come or we don’t come at all. Desi here is—”
“I wanted her.”
Desi grinned.
“Melati is the teacher of the cohort where your brother is now. Ari is—”
“We’re familiar with him.” Not in a good way, by the sound of his voice.
“He is the last person to have seen the man we’re looking for, and may be the only person Paul
Ormerod will trust. He comes.”
Troy and Ari glared at each other. Troy held up his fingers and counted off one by one. “He is actively involved in embezzlement, theft from the stores, lying, smuggling of prohibited foodstuffs—”
“Enough.” Melati pushed herself between them. “We have someone to find. Worry about all that when we’ve got our scientist.”
Troy snorted.
Desi made a face. She put a hand on Ari’s shoulder. She was almost two heads taller than him and glared clear over Ari’s head at Troy, who shrugged and turned away.
Ari grinned and mouthed awesome to Melati in B3.
“Let’s go,” Desi said in a decisive voice.
Jao led the way into a side alley, while holding his pocket comm in one hand.
Once out of sight of the main passage, he took off at a run and everyone else followed.
Around the corner, Jao came to a sudden stop. They were in one of the service passages behind the businesses. Melati had been here before and did not remember the metal plate bolted across what looked like a service entry.
A sign said, Maintenance Staff Use Other Door.
Jao leaned against a wall while looking at his pocket comm. Ari caught up and looked over his shoulder.
“Problems?”
“I had planned to get in there.” Jao pointed at the metal plate.
“Oh, there’s an access point to that maintenance tunnel on the other side.” Ari pointed. He sounded so much more confident. Now that Jao and Desi stood behind him, would he consider signing up?
The passage where he pointed, of course, was on the other side of the alley that led off the main thoroughfare.
In the two seconds it took Melati to run across, she spotted a few people in enforcer uniform standing at the end, looking into the passage.
Troy had his pocket comm out, squinting at the screen.
“Anyone reporting in this area?” Elko asked him.
Troy shook his head.
Desi said, “Uh-oh. I think we’ve got a tail already.”
“Come on, come on, go, go,” Jao said.
Desi set off into the corridor, a long passage with gleaming linoleum floor that curved towards the ceiling.
“It’s this way.” Ari turned left into a narrow corridor. This was a service passage with banks of power boxes along the right-hand wall.
