Shooting the Rift - eARC

by Alex Stewart

  And there were plenty of office drones on the streets, all soberly dressed, even the transgeners, in clothes of formal cut, no doubt intended to add an air of probity to whatever deals they were conducting. Many appeared to be transacting business in the street, meshed-in even as they scurried from meeting to meeting, or grabbed coffees and bun-wrapped sausages of dubious provenance from the street stalls and vending drones impeding their progress. Of course there were plenty of starfarers among them as well, easily identifiable by their more casual mode of dress and the ship’s patches on their sleeves. Most, though not all, wore Guild insignia, a few bore the symbols of a bewildering variety of shipping lines, and one or two had neither.

  “Freebooters?” I asked quietly, and Remington looked at me sharply.

  “What do you know about Freebooters?” he asked.

  “Just what Clio told me.” I shrugged. “Best avoided.”

  “Clio’s right. Follow her advice and you won’t be an apprentice for long.” He noticed my attention beginning to wander. “Someone you know?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  A photosynthesising transgener was approaching us from the other direction, weaving easily though the crowd, many of whom were turning to look after her as she passed. And not without reason. Though considerably older than me, almost double my age by my estimate, her muscles were trim, and her feminine attributes disdained gravity, as if it was something that only happened to other people. Typically for that type of transgener she’d dressed in the barest minimum required by public decency, then cut it by half, maximizing the area of skin through which to draw energy from the ambient light. I’d only caught the briefest of glimpses the previous evening, but she had a familiar-looking tattoo on her upper arm, and I was fairly certain that this was the woman who’d prompted Clio to opt for a different bar than the one she’d originally intended.

  “Wind your tongue in, lad,” Remington chuckled, misreading my interest completely, although under the circumstances I could hardly blame him for that. “She’d eat you alive.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” I felt my face reddening, from shirt collar to hair line.

  “Really?” Remington seemed honestly surprised. “I was.”

  The green woman seemed unaware of our scrutiny, however, which wasn’t that much of a surprise come to think of it, as she was attracting the attention of the majority of the men on the sidewalk—and a few women too. Not all of it welcome, either, as a few of her admirers made ribald remarks a kindergarten child with poor social skills might have considered witty, although she seemed to have selective deafness down to a fine art, giving no sign of having heard.

  “Hey, snotskin, I’m talking to you!” As she drew almost abreast of us, one of her interlocutors, whose good looks matched his mastery of sophisticated repartee, reached out and grabbed her arm, just below the tattooed ship’s patch—which I was now close enough to see was of three vaguely heart-shaped leaves growing in a cluster, above the name Poison 4, the number rendered in Roman numerals.

  I stepped forward instinctively to intervene—but before I could say or do anything the fellow let go, howling and grabbing his hand, which was erupting in angry, weeping blisters. He looked as if he’d taken hold of the wrong end of a welding torch, rather than a petite woman in her early middle years. Who was now regarding me with a distinct froideur, as though she suspected me of intending further incivilities.

  “What do you want?” she asked, in clipped, self-possessed tones, which would have sounded more at home in a drawing room.

  “I thought that ruffian was attacking you,” I said, with a contemptuous glance in his direction. Which may have redirected a little of his barrage of invective towards me, although his voice was so choked it was hard to be certain.

  “You thought right.” The transgener looked at me coolly. “But I don’t need a Guilder’s help. Can’t afford it. Shut up, you tiresome little man.” This last addressed to the ruffian who’d accosted her. He didn’t sound as though he was going to stop yelling any time soon, but suddenly did so abruptly, as she kicked out hard and accurately at the center of his groin.

  “No charge intended, I can assure you,” Remington cut in. “Simon here’s still young enough to believe in doing the right thing for its own sake.”

  “I’m sure you’ll knock that out of him soon enough.” She turned back to me, her expression softening almost imperceptibly. “Thank you for your concern. But you don’t go out looking like this without some defensive tweaks as well.”

  “You shouldn’t need them,” I said, with a venomous look at her would-be assailant, now curled up on the sidewalk making a noise like a sackful of small rodents, and impeding the progress of the passersby. None of whom seemed inclined to offer him assistance, or enquire politely of us what was going on. “I thought Numarkut was supposed to be a civilized world.”

  “Did you really?” She turned to Remington. “I’m surprised you let him out without a leash.” Then she turned, and strolled away without another word.

  “I see what you mean about Freebooters,” I said.

  “What?” Remington dragged himself away from the retreating view with a clear effort. “Yes, well. Most of them aren’t quite as sociable as that.”

  The offices of Farland Freight Forwarding were only a block or two from where we left the whimpering detritus of the altercation, and by the time we arrived, I was feeling about as well as I ever did: possibly because the jot of adrenalin I’d got while stepping forward thinking I was about to get into a fight was still sloshing around my system. The offices were larger than I’d expected, occupying an entire floor of one of the newest and ugliest of the modern blocks; although I suppose, since I already knew the brokerage was large enough to maintain its own riftcom, their size shouldn’t have come as all that big a surprise.

  We entered through a lobby consisting mainly of glass and unhappy-looking plants, carpeted in some kind of transgene moss that felt uncomfortably springy underfoot. Several yards in, we found a reception desk manned by a pale little fellow who clearly didn’t get out much, and who looked at us suspiciously as we approached.

  “Captain Remington, to see the senior logistics manager,” the skipper announced. He glanced briefly in my direction, in case I’d somehow escaped notice. “And an apprentice from my crew.”

  “Have you got an appointment?” the receptionist asked, and Remington nodded, a little curtly.

  “Of course I’ve got a bloody appointment. You don’t think I’d just turn up, do you?”

  “You’d be surprised who does.” A prissy little sniff of disapproval, then the receptionist’s eyes unfocussed as he meshed with the building’s datanode. Remington shot me another quick glance, tilted his head almost imperceptibly, and I suddenly realized why he’d been so keen to bring me along.

  To think was to act, and within a heartbeat I was meshing in too, integrating the sneakware as I did so. There were several subnodes in the immediate vicinity, each heavily protected by antibodies which would have stripped the datanomes out of my ‘ware in nanos if I went anywhere near them without a lot of preliminary work I didn’t have time for, but the receptionist’s desk was bulging with fresh data, so I had a quick trawl through that instead.

  Lot of other skippers on the appointments list, I told Remington. Looks like they’re trying to shift a bottleneck, and bringing in anyone they can. An item suddenly jumped out at me, an appointment a little earlier that morning: not the name itself, Captain Ertica, which meant nothing to me, but the ship it was attached to. The Poison 4. Interesting. Even Freebooters.

  They really must be desperate. Remington suppressed a sudden smile. We’ll get a good deal on this. Well done.

  Buoyed by the unexpected praise, I debated trying to crack one of the shielded subnodes, but, perhaps fortunately, the receptionist forestalled me, looking up as a fresh message arrived in his ‘sphere. “She’s expecting you,” he told us, as though mortally offended at the idea. A floor plan sudd
enly appeared in our shared dataspace. “You go—”

  “I know the way,” Remington said, moving off before the receptionist had finished speaking. He glanced back at me, urging me to follow with a tilt of the head. “I’ve been here often enough.”

  “I suppose you must have,” I said, falling into place at his shoulder.

  Despite Remington’s confidence I kept the floor plan near the front of my ‘sphere, so I could keep track of our progress for myself. I might need to come here alone some time, if I ever found a particularly juicy nugget of information to pass on to my contact, and under those circumstances I wouldn’t want to be wasting any time trying to find the way to where he worked.

  Which wouldn’t be all that difficult, according to the map. The riftcom suite was at the center of the floor, as close as possible to the greatest number of offices. Not that the actual equipment was there, of course, just a lot of data-handling kit, where clerks like Mallow would encode the outgoing messages into a form suitable for transmission: the actual hardware would be somewhere in orbit, where it could direct the resulting modulated graviton beams into the mouth of whichever rift led to the intended recipient. Incoming messages would be cleaned up, and rendered into something electronic or neuroware compatible, before being passed on to whichever Farland employees needed to know; either directly, or, in the case of particularly commercially sensitive information, in single-use memory units like the one Mallow had slipped into my pocket, delivered directly to their offices.

  The mossy corridors were full of employees hurrying about their business, most of them so engrossed in actual or virtual conversation I could probably have walked through the place in Tinkie’s orbital deployment armor without any of them noticing. Certainly none of them gave a couple of Guilders a second glance, which was fine by me; I was too busy being mildly surprised at my surroundings to take much notice of them either.

  The walls were made of living wood, transgened to grow rapidly in place then simply stop once the ceiling had been reached; a technique, I gathered from a quick dip into the datastore I’d purloined from the reception desk, that was quite common on League worlds, and was becoming fashionable on Numarkut for those who could afford it. The effect was a little creepy, as though someone had ironed a couple of trees flat and plonked them down on either side of us. Crevices in the bark had been colonized by small, brightly colored orchids, and a few equally garish butterflies flapped about the place, feeding on them presumably, if they weren’t being blown off-course by the air conditioning. At least the ceiling looked relatively normal, what I could see of it between the lianas coiled around the light fittings.

  “It’s like being in a hothouse,” I grumbled. The effect was supposed to be relaxing, bringing a touch of the outdoors indoors, but, paradoxically, I found it claustrophobic, in a way the much narrower corridors of the Stacked Deck had never been.

  Remington shrugged. “Dirtwalkers. Go figure.” Which I found mildly flattering, as it implied that I’d moved out of that category, at least in his mind.

  Before I had time to formulate a suitable reply he stopped outside a door, which looked, to me, no different from any of the others lining the passageway, rapped once on the milled and polished wood (which jarred hideously with the bark surrounding it, like a lump of scar tissue), and pushed it open.

  “John.” A plump, middle-aged woman, looking vaguely like a well-groomed version of my aunt, rose from behind a desk, smiling an insincere welcome. “It’s been ages.”

  “Ellie. It certainly has.” Remington returned the smile, with every bit as much feeling as had gone into the original. The room was large, with an outside window, which went some way towards relieving the sensation of having got lost in the woods, although the rest of the decor was of a piece with the corridors outside.

  “Who’s this?” Ellie looked at me, and raised an immaculate eyebrow. Her tone was cordial, but her body language unmistakable. I was most definitely an unwelcome surprise.

  “Simon Forrester.” Remington waved a perfunctory hand in my direction. “New apprentice. Thought it would do him good to sit in and see how a deal’s made.”

  “An excellent idea. Let me know how it went when you’ve tried it.” She glanced at me again, and waved dismissively. “Now you are here, do something useful. There’s a staff room in the next corridor, with a kettle. Cherry tea, and whatever it is he wants.” This last with a nod to Remington.

  Sorry, Si. Better luck next time. Remington pretended to consider for a moment, before adding, “Coffee. You know how I like it,” verbally.

  “Coming right up,” I said, masking my real feelings with an ease born of a lifetime spent being bossed about by most of the women I’d ever encountered; although having got used to being taken seriously by the female crew members of the Stacked Deck, it seemed particularly galling in this instance. The kitchen was clear enough on the floor plan still floating in my ‘sphere, so I strolled to the door without any further hesitation.

  The flash of peevishness I’d felt at being so summarily dismissed evaporated the moment I was back in the corridor, however, as I suddenly realized I’d just been handed a golden opportunity to go and look for Mallow, without having to come up with some excuse to get away from Remington first. The comms center wasn’t far from here, and if I headed on down to it I was sure I’d be able to invent some spurious errand allowing me access. And if I couldn’t, I ought to be able to mesh in and pass him a message. All right, the system would have been secured against unauthorized access, but I was pretty sure I could deal with that somehow—it certainly hadn’t stopped me at Summerhall, or the Naval Academy back on Avalon. (And look how well they turned out, a voice I was determined to ignore whispered in the back of my head.)

  But first things first. Ellie and Remington would be expecting me back with the drinks they’d asked for in about ten minutes—which I could probably stretch to fifteen by acting dumb and pretending I’d got lost, but any more than that and they might start asking questions. So, find the kitchen and put the kettle on, then start looking for Mallow. Not much of a plan, but it was the only one I had.

  With the floor plan to guide me I made my way into the next corridor, which was just as faux sylvan as the one I’d left behind. The doors lining it were of noticeably lower quality timber, however, indicating that this was the region where more of the actual work got done, and fewer decisions were made. This time I got a few curious glances from the clerks I passed, there being no other ships’ crew about, but no one seemed concerned enough to challenge me. The kitchen was about halfway along, the door slightly open; as I approached it a young woman came out carrying a steaming mug of something, and walked off in the opposite direction.

  I pushed the door open, and found myself alone in a utilitarian room, once again carpeted by the ubiquitous moss. Here, however, it seemed a bit the worse for wear, a few brown patches marking the sites of old spillages of stuff it couldn’t readily metabolize. A couple of cheap plastic tables, surrounded by cheap plastic chairs, stood in the middle, one of them holding a couple of grubby plates, an empty sandwich wrapping, and a trio of mugs containing nothing but dregs. More plates and mugs were stacked in the sink, which was half full of dirty water.

  The kettle was still warm, and more than half full, so I set it boiling again and began rummaging in the cupboards above the work surface, unearthing a cache of mugs and an assortment of beverages. Great. As soon as I made the drinks I’d been sent for I could head off in search of Mallow.

  But I didn’t have to. As I turned away from the cupboard, the door to the corridor swung open, to reveal the transgener standing on the threshold gawping at me, his face, so far as I could tell under its covering of particolored fur, a picture of stunned astonishment.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” He recovered quickly, I’ll say that for him, pushing the door closed, and advancing into the room, an empty coffee mug held out in a faintly defensive posture.

  “My skipper’s got a
meeting with—” I realized I didn’t know the woman’s full name. “Ellie something, over in the next corridor. He asked me to sit in, for the experience. She sent me out for tea.”

  “She would.” He looked at me, with what seemed like genuine sympathy. “And she won’t thank you for it either.”

  Which didn’t surprise me, given what I’d seen of her. “I was just on my way to find you,” I said.

  “What for?” He placed the mug he’d been carrying on the uncluttered table, and looked at me searchingly, his tail waving in the air behind him. It began to dawn on me that he wasn’t quite as self-assured as he looked.

  “I found something. Not sure if it’s significant, but as I was here I thought I’d pass it on.” The kettle boiled at last, and I made the drinks I’d been sent for.

  “Lucky coincidence,” Mallow said, sounding as if he thought it was anything but.

  I nodded, unable to see how it could be anything else. Remington had contacts out all over the city; it was just my good luck that Farland had called him in today. “Guess so.” I held out the kettle. “Want a refill?”

  “You have no idea,” Mallow said, sounding a little less suspicious. “I always need one around this time.” He busied himself with the routine of caffeine production. “So, what’s this possibly significant thing you’ve got?”

  “There’s a League ship a couple of cradles from ours.” Or there had been: for all I knew, the activity I’d seen in the small hours had been a prelude to departure. “The Eddie Fitz. It’s an old fleet auxiliary, sold on to the Toniden Line.” I kicked across the information I’d gathered to his ‘sphere.