Empire of Dust
Page 4
“A million credits, a fast cruiser, and a pony.”
“Yeah, right. Let’s start again. What do you want to drink?” He turned to his countertop and waved at the hot- and cold-water spigots.
“Spoilsport.”
His face lit up, crow’s feet crinkling. “I’m having caff.”
She spotted three empty caff cartons on the table.
“No wonder you never sleep properly.”
He wrenched the top off a carton and shoved it under the hot spigot, but then reached for a glass, filled it from the cold and handed it to her.
She sipped cautiously. “Water?”
“I saw you pop a tranq earlier today. Figured that might be safest.”
She colored.
“Thought you could fool me, huh?”
Maybe Jussaro wasn’t that far gone.
“Just ’cause I’m . . .” He circled his index finger to his temple. “It doesn’t mean to say I don’t see things. See things and know things.”
She gaped at him now, wondering just how insane he might be.
“Oh, I know, anyone who’s been through Neural isn’t supposed to recall much. When the shrinks ask—and they do ask—I can’t remember a fucking thing about life before being a half-wit, but let me tell you there’s only so much they can do if you’re determined not to lose it all. There’s your underlying ability. They can’t take that away.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re a psi-tech. You’re out on your own . . . and you’ve got problems.”
“Me? No.”
He snorted. “It’s the middle of the night, Carlinni, and you’re on my doorstep looking like you’ve had sex. You’re either on a deep-cover job, or you’re on the run. You’re popping tranqs because your implant is powered down. That means someone is looking for you.”
She gaped at him.
“Yeah, I’m not as fried as they think I am.”
For a second she wondered if she’d been transmitting and him receiving, but that was impossible. Doubly impossible.
He sipped the carton of caff. “Well, maybe I am . . . fried, I mean, but I had an implant for twenty-four years before I . . . well, let’s not go there. Short of taking my brain apart, synapse by synapse, they can’t cut me off from it completely.”
He leaned back against the countertop. “Ever wonder what life would have been like if you hadn’t tested positive for psi-skills?”
Sometimes she wished she’d never been tested, but it was a fast track to a fully funded education and offered an irresistible opportunity to be completely independent of her mother and to see the galaxy. At the age of fourteen she hadn’t appreciated that the guaranteed job for life was part of the deal whether you wanted it or not. If the company paid for your implant and trained you, then the company owned you. Sure, the leash was diamond-studded, but it was still a leash. Step out of line, and they could choke you with it.
When she didn’t answer, Jussaro went on. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a veterinarian, then I got tested and it turned out I was too valuable a resource to let me have my own way. It’s supposed to be a grand thing. Free education, dream job, but look what we lose. What price freedom, Carlinni?”
“I knew, even before they tested me. I wanted it. Seemed so much better than the alternative. My mom was . . . well, let’s just say we didn’t get on.”
“I knew, too. I tried to hide it, but they got me anyway. And look what trouble it brought. I never wanted it and now I can’t live without it. And you . . . you got big trouble.”
“Who says I’m in trouble?” She took a pull at her water, hoping it would hide the fact that she wanted to heave at the notion of anyone playing with her brain.
“You’ve been in trouble since the day you arrived.”
“How do you know?”
He laughed, a strange barking sound. “We know our own, don’t we?”
She had a sudden urge to ’fess up. It would be a relief. Troubles shared, troubles halved. Ha! If only. Anyone she talked to would end up on Ari’s hit list, too.
“You ever been in NR?” Jussaro asked.
“Neural Readjustment? Me? No. No way.” The edge of her vision clouded. She stood up so fast the glass bounced across the tiles and the armchair skidded backward. Her heart pounded. Her pulse thudded in her ears. She felt her throat constrict and heard her voice rise in pitch. “And I don’t like it when you talk dirty.”
“Sit down, Carlinni. There’s only me here. No one to impress.” He picked up the glass and looked at her from under his heavy brows as if trying to read her. “Believe me, I’m no one.”
She dropped back into the chair, palms flat on the arms for stability, eyes down. Eventually, she dragged her gaze away from the floor and stared at him, still trying to get her breathing under control. Like all psi-techs, Neural Readjustment was her most deep-seated dread. She’d escaped it so narrowly. . . .
• • •
She’s waking from cryo. It’s that moment of seeing everything in a kaleidoscope of scents, hearing everything in color, smelling sounds, and tasting the feel of the restraints. The medic’s light is blinding and smells like lemon. As they pull out the catheter and unplumb her, there’s salt on her tongue. Even experienced travelers panic. Some go mad, start screaming and never stop; others just die. Once her brain starts working again, she realizes that it’s not her screaming. She’s not one of the acceptable 0.3% of losses, three in a thousand. This time, anyway.
Then she wants to scream because she realizes that she’s not back home on Earth. This isn’t Alphacorp’s resuscitation wing. Alarms sound in her head. The Felcon mission has been a fucking fiasco. It should be over.
But it isn’t.
This is the aftermath.
She reads the label on the med-tech’s coverall and adrenaline surges, but she’s strapped down and can’t go anywhere. She’s in Facility 197, Alphacorp’s Neural Readjustment Center on Sentier-4. The fear factor kicks in, right as it’s meant to do. ’Course it does. Donida McLellan and Facility 197 are notorious among psi-techs.
• • •
Jussaro was still talking. He didn’t seem to notice she’d been elsewhere for a moment. “You really can tell me, Carlinni. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like. The first time they figured they’d fixed me, brought me back into the fold. The second time . . . that’s when they killed the implant. Permanently.”
Shit! That was heavy. Bearing in mind how many times decommissioning resulted in suicide or, at best, a lifetime in an institution, Jussaro must have been—and probably still was—heroically determined not to lose himself.
“But they didn’t factor in my natural psi talent. I don’t know how much others have retained, but I can still receive.” He raised one eyebrow and gave her a lopsided grin. “It’s not easy, but I can. So, come on, tell me. Have you ever done Neural?”
“Quit pushing, Jussaro, I’ve never done Neural, right? Never. Ever. Do I seem like a nut?” Her mouth seemed to say the words of its own accord. That wasn’t very tactful. She saw the look on his face. She scrubbed at her eyes with her hand to cover her confusion. “Sorry. I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No, that’s all right. I just thought—you know—maybe you had and you needed to talk. Why else come here at this hour?”
Cara found herself shaking. She’d powered down her implant because she was scared that they’d use it to track her down. She was like Jussaro—a psi-tech disconnected from that enormous sense of belonging—of family. But it had been her choice. Her choice! It was only temporary, dammit. Temporary!
She took a deep breath. “You’re way off target, Jussaro, but thanks anyway.”
“So how do you need my help?”
“I need a place to stay for a few hours, and a red company coverall. And if anyone comes sniffing around, you haven’t seen me, right?”
“Right. You’re getting out?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe.”
“Time was I could have helped with that.” He shrugged and touched his forehead.
“I came to Mirrimar looking for help.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Time was I could have helped with that, too.”
“You could? All this time and it was right under my nose?”
“Was.” Jussaro shrugged again. “Whatever we had is long gone. What do you think got me busted?”
“I hoped . . .”
“What? That there was a place where the corporations couldn’t get you? Ha! Nice thought, but no. There were a few small cells hiding in plain sight, not even connected. If one cell was taken, they couldn’t betray anyone beyond their own small group. That was the theory anyway. The day they came for us, they took out a dozen groups like ours—or maybe that’s what they wanted us to believe. Anyhow, my contacts all disappeared at the same time.”
“What were you doing to attract so much attention?”
“Just being. No one likes the idea of rogue psi-techs.”
“Oh, I so needed that place to be real.”
“Your head’s your own, Carlinni. The megacorps may try, but they don’t have the power to control you unless you let them. There are plenty of places a psi-tech can find to call home. All you have to do is look. There are more than you think living off the grid.”
She resisted the temptation to get up and drop a kiss on top of his bald head.
• • •
Once away from Jussaro’s place, Cara changed in the washroom on the edge of the go-flow concourse and with a sigh of regret dropped her dress into the recycler. Then she excised the station tracer chip from her handpad and stuck it to a tiny piece of tape from her carryall, now strapped round her middle.
That done, she stepped out into the throng of busy people.
They stank of stress. It wasn’t an aroma, it was a state of being. Shift change on Mirrimar-14 was always the worst; bodies crammed together in featureless gray walkways not designed to cope with a rush hour. This time, though, the chaos should prove useful.
The go-flow buzzed like a hive with the noise of conversation, the accumulated whirr of flow-ways, and the whine of antigravs. Too many bodies and not enough air. Cara was surprised no one choked.
People shouldered her out of the way for seats on the trolleys, and eager hands snatched up the one-man rafts as soon as they became vacant. In the crush to get one, Cara stumbled against a blonde woman, close to her own build and age. She apologized, putting out her hands to prevent the woman from falling and, as she did so, stuck the tracer chip neatly to the sleeve of the woman’s standard-issue red coverall. That should keep security occupied for a while if anyone put out a call on her.
Mumbled apologies over, they separated again. Cara’s look-alike claimed a raft and flipped neatly into the stream of traffic, leaving her behind. By edging out a young Monitor cadet, Cara grabbed a ride and made for the fast lane, heartbeat thumping in her ears. So far, so good.
Without the tracer chip, she couldn’t pass through any regular checkpoints, but she wouldn’t need to if everything went according to plan. She’d face getting through the last security gate when she came to it.
The distinctive rhythm of the go-flow etched itself in Cara’s brain, as she dipped into a series of underpasses close to the interchange for the port. The acoustic baffles sliced through the noise as she passed through compartments of sound. Whoosh. Shift. Whoosh. Shift. She wove between lanes, keeping her head down. This was her best chance, before anyone realized that her tracer chip was tagged to a decoy.
She turned onto the slipway for the port, irritated by the traffic delays through the go-flow that connected the two halves of the dumbbell-shaped way station. At the other end she emerged briefly into the open again, this time into an area of warehousing and commerce, its uniform gray broken only by garish logos. She avoided the heavily guarded access road to the platinum vaults and took the throughway. When the next tunnel swallowed her, she dropped her raft down, almost to dismounting speed. Better not break an ankle. She breathed deeply, checked the position of the traffic eyes, punched the auto, and leaped off, letting the raft go on by itself. Her legs impacted on the floor with jarring suddenness. Fuck! That hurt! She straightened both legs and tested her full weight on each in turn, but there was no damage done.
So far, so good. She had to keep going.
Away from the traffic, the sounds receded eerily. Ducking into a maintenance refuge, she retrieved a small multipurpose tool from her belt pouch and forced the catch on the door leading to an access corridor. A broad-shouldered man would have to walk sideways, but she was able to walk forward, taking care not to catch her head on the conduit that ran above. Third right, second left, through the access hatch, down the ladder. She’d checked the schematics, knew where she was going, followed the cryptic guides that prevented the maintenance crew from losing themselves in the maze. The wall itself sensed her presence and glowed as she passed, giving her a working light.
But the heavy silence ate at her nerves.
Did Ari already have operatives on Mirrimar-14? Maybe Craike’s passengers had connected with someone local. She was pretty sure Alphacorp had operatives, sleepers mostly, spread all over the galaxy—as fast as colonies sprang up and hub stations deployed, they sent in fact finders—but she didn’t know to what extent Ari could call on the whole of Alphacorp’s network. How complicit was the Alphacorp hierarchy in Ari’s unsavory activity?
Something snatched at her sleeve and she half-turned, ready to lash out, but it was only a loose cable-tie. She hissed a curse under her breath. She had the jitters. Confined spaces could play nasty tricks on otherwise perfectly normal minds. . . .
Confinement.
The memory of the abortive final mission on Felcon flooded back: waking from cryo in Facility 197, Alphacorp’s Neural Readjustment Center, knowing it would be her word against Craike’s.
She tasted the terror once again.
But despite her fears, they’d left her alone—completely alone—for weeks, her brain so fogged with Reisercaine that she couldn’t access her implant. They did her one favor, though; they taught her that it was possible to exist cut off from the thought buzz of everyday living.
She mustn’t let herself think about that now.
She stopped. Was that a sound behind? She listened hard, butterflies in her stomach.
Nothing. It was just her overwrought imagination. Breathe. Keep going.
She counted the hatches as she passed. Eight; this was it. It swung open silently, and she stepped through into a broad cargo tunnel. There was the usual security camera system with an eye directly above this door and she needed to put it out of action before she could move out of its blind spot. She’d requisitioned a reel of thin trilene line from stores and had picked up a pebble from one of the precious plant tubs in the concourse. The pebble’s weight was enough to give the end of the line some stability. She threw it above the eye-mounting and the line snaked over the top of the flexible stalk. Then holding both ends of the line, she swung on it and bent the stalk so that the lens pointed at the wall. An eye out of place was less noticeable than one malfunctioning.
She freed it with a shake, coiled the line and pebble and pushed it into her pocket, then turned and padded off in the direction of the port, surrounded by silence. Far ahead, she could hear the dull noise of the cargo go-flow, but behind, it was as quiet as a tomb. She could hear nothing . . . or could she?
She turned at the sound of metal scraping behind her. Light as a cat, a gray-suited figure emerged from the hatch. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were cold. He was the one from the concourse. Oh, shit. The butterflies turned into snakes roiling in her belly.
He stepped forward, menace in every line of his body, eyes narrowed.
“Thought you’d fooled me, huh?”
“Obviously not.”
He was a talker. Ke
ep him talking.
“You’re worth a lot of credits.”
“Sharing them with Craike and your friends?”
The flicker in his eyes told her he wasn’t. Hopefully that meant he was working alone.
“Craike, pah!” He made a spitting gesture. “Amateur.”
Fucketty fuck!
“I can pay more.” Lie. Say anything.
This guy had a fighter’s stance, and he thought Craike was an amateur. She’d never been able to beat Craike in a training session and had carried the bruises to prove it.
The man didn’t waste any more time. He came in hard and fast.
Adrenaline surged. She dropped, pushed sideways and slid, lashing out toward him in a move that should break his kneecap, except he wasn’t there. He was a pace away, coming in on her blind spot. He struck like a snake. She rolled to her feet and skipped out of reach, barely avoiding contact. They circled. The bare corridor offered nothing she could use as a weapon and no getaway route. If she ran, she’d be betting she was faster than him. Plus, it would put them both into the camera zone, and security would be here to grab the winner. That was no consolation either way.
Breathe. Think!
He was taller and heavier than she was, but she was light, fast, and supple.
At least he hadn’t pulled a weapon. Maybe he was confident that he wouldn’t need one. Think again, bastard! A surge of anger subdued the snakes a little.
“Craike’s an amateur, is he?” She tried to distract him. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
His mouth twitched in disdain, but he didn’t waste words.
“Better than you,” she said.
No reaction. A pro. She was in real trouble.
Who was she kidding? She was in real trouble anyway.
They circled, each waiting for an opening. She watched closely for a flicker of intent. There! They both moved at the same time. She darted in, twisting away from a disabling kick and striking toward the exposed area of his crotch. Her stiff fingers connected with a light box protector and jarred her knuckles. She whirled away and took half the force of the blow intended for her throat on her left shoulder before they spun apart again.