by Jake Elwood
"Oh, shut up."
He smirked, opened his mouth to reply, then tensed, his eyes going to the vid displays on the dash. "Company vehicle coming up from behind."
Cassie fought the urge to turn her head and look. A compact hovervan coasted past, then stopped in the Elysian Acres parking lot. The van settled to the ground and a man and a robot climbed out. The bot wheeled itself over to a charging station while the man headed inside.
"It's coming up on five," Jerry said. "All their crews will be coming in."
Cassie twisted her head around, surveying the mostly-empty street. "We're a little exposed here."
"Just what I was thinking." Jerry started the engine, drove past the front of the Elysian Acres building, and turned left. "There's a pub," he said. "Hungry?"
As soon as the words were out of his mouth a wave of hunger hit her. She hated to take a break, but after all, what were they achieving? So she got out of the car and followed Jerry into the Moose and Nebula. It was a working-class neighborhood bar with sports from around the galaxy playing on vid screens along the walls. The cavernous interior was mostly empty. They took a table in a corner and brought up menu screens.
"We haven't had dinner out together in quite a while," Jerry said. "It's one of the things I miss the most when I'm on a job." He stroked his jaw. "Actually, there's a lot of things I miss. Hearing Lark tell me about school. She takes it all so seriously! I don't have the heart to tell her that none of it really matters."
"What? Of course it matters."
He shrugged. "When was the last time you used something you learned in school?" His forehead creased. "Oh, sorry. I forgot." She hadn't told him a whole lot about her childhood, but he knew she'd never darkened the doorway of a traditional school. "Anyway, take it from me. You didn't miss much."
"I think the things Lark learns are kind of neat," Cassie said. "Like how the Galactic Union chooses its members. And where cheese comes from. I had no idea."
Jerry gave her a strange look, then nodded. "I guess I've taken it for granted. Anyway, I miss Lark's school reports. And when you make breakfast for us, and we all eat in our pajamas." He smiled, a little wistfully. "That's awfully nice. Or when you and I go for a walk in the desert at night and we look at the stars. Sure, I know I can see the stars better from on a ship, but I like it better when I'm walking with you and we're looking up at the sky."
He looked so utterly sincere, like a little boy talking about Christmas. He melted Cassie's heart when he was like that, and she felt some of her tension melt away. Plenty remained, but she was able to stop fidgeting and give the menu her full attention.
There was beef taken from real cattle, she saw. It was triple the price of tube-grown beef and lower quality. After all, only the very best cuts were selected for tubes, and then the muscle fibers were tweaked for flavor and tenderness before they went into production. Butchered beef was a strange status symbol, appealing because it cost more. She ordered the tube-grown sirloin tip with potatoes and mixed vegetables on the side.
"I'm having a fizzler," Jerry said. "You want one?"
She started to shake her head. After all, she was in a pub not half a kilometer from the headquarters of Elysian Acres. Alcohol was the last thing she needed. But a warm sense of relaxation was stealing over her, and it tugged at her seductively. One drink wouldn't dull her wits to any appreciable degree, and the pub was empty.
She took a careful look around the room. No one wore an Elysian Acres uniform. No one looked familiar from their brief surveillance. No one was paying them the slightest attention.
Cassie shrugged and tapped an icon on the menu, ordering herself a strawberry fizzler.
"Game of Kaiju while we're waiting?"
"I'm not nearly drunk enough," she told him. His face fell, but he brightened a moment later when a server bot rolled up with their drinks on a tray.
Jerry grabbed both glasses, passed the pink one to her, and lifted his drink in a toast. "To interesting times," he said. "You can't tell me you haven't been a tiny bit bored these last few months."
She opened her mouth to deny it, and took a sip instead. Bubbles erupted across her tongue, the sour tang of alcohol overlaid by the sweetness of strawberry. She took a gulp, and the liquor traced a warm line from her throat to her stomach.
"I'm planting a splicer later," she told him, setting her glass down. "I'm tired of not knowing what's going on."
Jerry nodded. Then his eyes slid past her and he stiffened ever so slightly. Cassie started to turn, then stopped herself. He returned his gaze to her face, but his attention was clearly on something behind her. "A couple of guys in Elysian Acres shirts," he said. "But more importantly, here comes our food."
The serving bot reached their table and Cassie grabbed a plate, using the movement to disguise a quick peek over her shoulder. The pub was filling up as people left work. Against one wall she saw a pair of men in their twenties wearing green and white jerseys with the logo of the landscaping company.
Cassie turned her back to them, knowing Jerry would keep them in his peripheral vision. She gave her attention to the rest of the room, the parts he couldn't watch. If a strike team infiltrated the bar, she wanted to know.
"They don't look like pros," Jerry murmured.
She had to agree. One man was distinctly pudgy. Neither man had the alertness that came from a career on the left-hand path.
"George Hampstead was a thug," she said. "He was no pro. And the ones outside my house weren't too sharp, either."
"The Nightingale was a pro," Jerry said. "The team on the opera house roof was pretty sharp. They still overreacted. They should have exfiltrated when they saw me, instead of shooting up downtown and splattering a bike across the side of a building. But they had some training, at least."
"Elysian Acres must be a labor pool," Cassie said. "They hire ex-cons and thugs, mix in enough upright citizens that the landscaping work actually gets done, and spread the word every once in a while that you can earn a nice bonus doing something after hours."
"It explains one thing," Jerry said. "Why they were stupid enough to bring a company vehicle when they staked out your house. I bet the driver wasn't supposed to do that."
"So who are these two behind me?"
"Upright citizens, I'm guessing." Jerry cut a slice of chicken breast. "I'll go find out after dinner." He took a bite. "This chicken is really good."
At first Cassie ate because it helped her blend in. The steak was wonderful, though, and she enjoyed it in spite of herself. She watched the room over Jerry's shoulder, and he kept an eye on everything behind her, but neither of them saw anything suspicious.
They didn't talk about anything of consequence. If they'd been spotted, there could be spyders with microphones crawling under the table. They made small talk, commenting on the vectorball game on the screen behind the bar. It was nice, so nice that she had to remind herself a few times to stay alert. Jerry was back, and her old life of constant challenge and danger was back, and it felt good.
"Well," said Jerry, setting his fork down, "since you don't want to play Kaiju, I'm going to find someone who does." He rose and walked past her, heading directly for the table with the two men from Elysian Acres. A game projector bulged from the wall next to their table, and Cassie watched as Jerry ambled over and struck up a conversation.
When the game started, pretty much everyone in the bar turned to look, and Cassie found it easier to keep a discreet eye on the three men. Jerry and the pudgy man wore helmets that covered their eyes, along with gloves and sensor strips around their ankles. They stood close to the wall on either side of the game projector.
Beyond the table, a pair of giant holographic monsters appeared. The pudgy man controlled a massive lizard with scales along its back and a powerful-looking tail. Jerry's avatar was an ape that stood most of three meters tall. The lizard threw its head back and screamed, the sound emerging from wall speakers. The ape hooted and beat its chest with oversize fists. After tha
t, control reverted to the players and the match began.
The players stood with their backs to the wall, both facing the same way, but the holographic monsters faced each other. Jerry and his opponent moved a step or two out from the wall and the two monsters came together.
A ferocious battle erupted, the lizard sinking its teeth into the ape's arm, the ape using its free hand to pry at the lizard's lower jaw. A chorus of cheers went up from some of the spectators, and shouts of advice and encouragement echoed from the walls.
Cassie kept a close eye on Jerry, who was blind and vulnerable with the helmet on. She scanned the crowd as well. Those who weren't watching the kaiju match were watching sports on the wall screens or engrossed in conversation. No one paid her or Jerry the slightest attention.
In the end the ape pulled several of the jutting scales from the lizard's back, but lost the match when the lizard managed to rip the ape's arm right off. The two Elysian Acres men played against each other, and then Jerry played against the winner.
By the time Jerry's T-Rex put a waddling dragon out of its misery the bar was alive with light and noise. An open area in the center of the room turned out to be a massive holo tank, and it lit up with an almost-live projection of a vectorball match. Knee-high athletes leaped and dove, pursuing a marble-sized ball around the tank. The actual match would have happened several hours earlier. The live transmission was only just arriving on Zemoth. The match was clearly taking place on a space station. The players made low-gravity leaps and twists, and drifted several centimeters to the side as they dropped back down. She could even see a faint curve to the projected floor. The game was on a ring station, then.
Elsewhere in the room, a life-size holo showed zero-gee martial arts. Horses the size of mice raced around a track that encircled the vectorball pitch, and a drunk amused himself by swatting the miniature jockeys as they galloped past. His fingers passed through the holograms, and he roared with laughter each time.
The T-Rex and dragon faded away as Jerry pulled his helmet off and waved Cassie over. She crossed the room, ducking reflexively as a holographic fighter from the zero-gee match flew toward her. She reached Jerry's side and leaned in close to hear him over the surrounding racket.
"Kate, this is Mike," he nodded to the pudgy man, "and Manny." He nodded to the second landscaper, who gave Cassie a shy smile. Jerry leaned closer and murmured, "I'm Jake."
The table had a privacy field, more to make conversation possible than to make it private. The four of them sat down and Jerry turned the field on. Immediately the clamor in the rest of the room faded to a murmur. "Oh, that's better," he said.
"Jake here says you're a bartender," Manny said.
Cassie smiled, feeling an unexpected rush of pleasure as she once again assumed a role. Her year of respectability had stifled her more than she'd realized. "It's a tough line of work," she said. "Machines can do my job faster. Still, there are always people who value the human touch."
"Oh, yeah, absolutely," Manny said. "Same with landscaping. We got bots to do the heavy work, but there's an aesthetic element, you know what I mean? A robot don't know what looks good, am I right?"
"It sounds nice," Jerry said, a wistful note in his voice. "You work outside all day, and you take care of plants. And it's all about making things look nice, right?"
Manny and Mike nodded.
"That's job satisfaction," Jerry said. "You don't get that in an office. Not the same way."
"I hear that," Mike said. "We're hiring, if you're interested."
Jerry said, "Actually, we're from Zemlya City. We're here on vacation."
Mike nodded. "I thought you had a bit of an accent. Well, they're hiring in Zemlya. Just lost a couple of people."
"Really?" Cassie said, hiding a grin. "What happened?"
"Driving a company car after work without permission."
That was just about the last useful thing they learned from Manny and Mike, who seemed depressingly honest. The little group broke up after one more round of Kaiju, the two men heading home. Cassie and Jerry stayed for a few more minutes at the table, finishing a couple of fizzlers, then strolled outside, doing their best to look casual.
The sun was just setting, the first streetlights coming on. The very best time for urban prowling, when a person on foot wouldn't attract too much notice, but the light was bad enough to obscure details.
Cassie took Jerry's arm and they ambled along side by side, just two lovers out for a stroll. Nothing in her posture or his betrayed the tension they were both feeling. She could feel it in the rigidity of his arm under her hand. He would be scanning the street around them, missing nothing. As was she.
It didn't take long to reach Elysian Acres. The building stood dark in its plot of grass and exotic trees, just a few security lights playing on the walls. The roof would be entirely dark, Cassie noted. Someone up there would be completely hidden from the street. They didn't have a grav belt with them, but the building was only one story. She was willing to bet they could make it onto the roof.
They walked along, and she scanned the grounds from the corner of her eye, looking for a stretch of wall with enough shadow to hide two people scrambling onto the roof.
"That looks like it might be a possibility," Jerry said.
"The roof?"
"No, the shed."
Cassie looked again. As they neared the east corner of the main building a large shed came into view. Set a dozen or so meters from the back wall of the larger structure, the shed was a low structure about four meters on a side.
She immediately knew what Jerry meant. The shed might not be as secure as the main building. After all, it would contain fewer items of value, and staff might need to access it at odd hours. But there was an excellent chance that the shed held a node networked to the rest of the office.
Cassie knelt to adjust her shoe, and Jerry turned to watch her. That gave both of them a chance to scan the neighborhood in every direction. The only people in sight were a cluster of barflies a block away, stumbling along in the opposite direction.
They were unobserved.
She rose and they trotted across the grass. Cassie put a hand up to obscure her face from any cameras on the grounds, and Jerry did the same. They moved into deep shadow between the shed and the main building, and Jerry took out his PAD.
"I don't really have any good lock breaking software these days," Cassie whispered.
"That's all right. I'm all up to date." He unspooled a cable from his PAD and plugged it into a port beside the shed door. For him, lock breaking programs would be, if not exactly legal, at least not the immediate trip to prison that it would be for Cassie.
The door clicked and slid open. Jerry disconnected the cable and they slipped inside.
Enough light came in through the grubby windows to show her clothing on pegs lining one wall. There was everything from winter coats to protective suits for applying toxic chemicals. Cassie grabbed a baggy set of coveralls and pulled them on.
"What are you doing?"
"Sowing confusion," she told him. The outline of her body and the details of her gait would be harder to identify now, and there was even a chance a security-minded AI or a late-arriving employee would ignore her. She added a cap with a wide brim. If she kept her head down it would block her face from a lot of cameras.
Jerry thought for a moment, then copied her.
They found the hub mounted to one wall, half buried by bundles of potting soil. Jerry examined the case, then swung it open to reveal blinking lights and glowing diodes. Cassie handed him a splicer and he laid it on top of the node case, then drew out a cable and connected the splicer directly to a port on the hub.
The lights in the shed came on, bright enough to make Cassie squint. A cheerful mechanical voice said, "Please identify yourselves."
"Maintenance," said Jerry. "Just checking the hub."
The light began to strobe, and a siren wailed. Jerry swore, unhooked the splicer, and followed Cassie as th
ey left the shed at a dead run.
The car was two blocks from the pub when Cassie caught her breath enough to start laughing. Jerry gaped at her as if she'd gone mad, but when she kept laughing he joined in too.
"Have I ever lost my edge," she said at last. "Oh, my. What a debacle."
Jerry snorted and wiped his eyes. "That was pretty bad. What now?"
"Pull in there," she said, pointing at a nightclub parking lot. "The last thing we need is to be seen driving away from an alarm." They never should have left the parking lot of the Moose and Nebula. She really was losing her edge.
They parked and she took out her PAD. "We still have one line of inquiry." She brought up a log from when she'd put the splicer outside the King's Head. "Smiling Charlie. I didn't know who he called. All I got was the hash of the other caller. No way to tell who it was."
"There's still no way to tell who it was," Jerry pointed out.
"Not directly," she said. "But we know there's someone at Elysian Acres who's involved. I'm going to start calling managers and bosses one at a time."
Jerry nodded, his eyes lighting up with understanding. "And check the hash to see if it matches."
"Right." She spent a couple of minutes fiddling with the PAD. Showing the encrypted identity of the person on the other end of a call wasn't exactly a standard function, after all. She got things set up, then called Jerry's PAD to test it. A dozen lines of scrambled letters and numbers appeared on her screen, not the PAD's actual serial number but the encrypted version.
"Okay, it's working." She spent another minute instructing her PAD to compare every encrypted ID it saw to the recorded ID from Smiling Charlie's call. "Now, who's first?"
Jerry peered into his own PAD. "It's a small company, comparatively speaking. One owner and CEO, Dorienne Slan. Five managers, one for every city on Zemoth. Two junior managers at every location except Cranston. That branch is too small."
"We're looking for a woman," Cassie said. "Let's start with this Dorienne Slan."
In the end she didn't need the hashed ID. A woman's voice said, "Dorienne Slan speaking," and Cassie knew it was her. She said, "Sorry, wrong code," and broke the connection, then turned to Jerry. "Same voice."
