by Alex Lamb
Pari turned to face him, her eyes wide. ‘Will! I’m not sure you meant that. Why don’t we all just take stock and think this over for a moment?’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘The man gets what he wants. I’m bored of fucking about.’
‘Works for me,’ said Zeke. His grin threatened to split his face apart.
Will leaned forward and fixed Zeke with a cold look. ‘And now here’s a threat for a threat,’ he said. ‘You get what you want today, and the information about Mark goes away for ever. If it leaks any further, I will personally seek out you and every member of your committee and remove all of you from the human race, by hand. Do you understand me?’
Zeke’s smile evaporated.
‘Will,’ said Pari.
‘Do you get me?’ said Will.
Zeke nodded. ‘Very clearly.’
‘Good,’ said Will. He stood up from the table. ‘Thank you for having us over. It was a long way for a short chat, but I’m glad we’ve ironed that out.’
He nodded his respects and headed for the transit pod with Pari trailing after him. On the way back up to the lifter, her mouth was a thin, bloodless line. As soon as they headed south, she spoke up.
‘I had that under control,’ she said curtly.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I know I lost it. I don’t care.’ His patience had burned out.
‘Now what are we supposed to do?’ said Pari. ‘You’ll be leaving Mark on a ship run by your public enemy. Yunus will screw you over the moment he gets a chance.’
‘Mark will manage. And if Yunus finds out about him, then the good Professor and I will have words.’
‘But what if something goes wrong?’ said Pari. ‘Yunus will have all of the overrides. So long as he’s on that ship, it’ll belong to him.’
‘I said, Mark will manage. Look, I’m sorry, Pari. I know you’re doing your best for me, but this is my limit. Mark gets that captaincy and the next person who tries to block it has to go through me.’ He hoped the tiredness in his voice would make her realise how serious he was.
Pari rubbed her temples. ‘You can be an asshole sometimes, you know that? In case you didn’t notice, making sure the sects don’t screw this mission up is in my best interests, too. We’re supposed to be on the same team, remember – the one that wants the human race not to burn itself to a cinder?’
They didn’t talk for the rest of the flight. Will thought about apologising a dozen times but lacked the energy. He just wanted to get the hell off Earth as fast as he could.
3.2: ANN
Ann’s clipper got her to the home system just forty hours before she was due to head back out. That barely gave her enough time to follow through on Sam’s request. So, as soon as she’d arrived at Triton’s Delany Station and checked in with Local HQ, she got to work. From her bland little room in the officers’ dorm, she used the League toolkit Sam had provided to set up a web of silent proxies in Delany’s public network. With untraceable routing in place, she sent a message to the contractor Sam had picked out using a security weave borrowed from NoreCorr’s FiveClan sect. Ten minutes later, an equally anonymous reply arrived with a rendezvous attached.
10 p.m. Ocean Magic Shuttle. Alone. Reuse this message as ident match.
Ann leaned back in her chair, surveying the reply with a mix of anticipation and dismay. The job was on. She had no excuse not to act.
The details of the ‘favour’ Sam wanted had come as a disappointing surprise. It wasn’t that the task itself would be difficult, per se – simply that Sam had set her up with the kind of persona she found uncomfortable. According to her briefing, she was supposed to be a Leading-class Earther heiress and the daughter of the contractor’s previous point of contact. Whether that was Sam or one of his other underlings, she had no idea. In any case, she needed a look that was dressed-up and dumbed-down – not her forte.
She left her room and stopped off at the undercover police desk two floors below, where her League chip convinced the wardrobe octobot to part with a shoulder-carry and a few simple props. With her equipment assembled, she strode out through the drab, bustling corridors of the Fleet Headquarters and boarded the next available private transit heading hab-south.
The pod took her down through the stack of rings towards the end of the station where the space elevator connected. She got off at R3 – the privacy area. As she marched along the empty carpeted corridors, Ann used her contacts and subvocal mic to rent a high-end space nearby. A destination icon appeared in her heads-up map.
The suite turned out to be a pleasant one with furnishings in soft, neutral beige and a modern tactronic desk. She dumped her bag on the floor and used the chip in her arm to put a freeze on the local security. Then, with the suite running on passive, she configured one wall as a digital mirror and stripped.
Ann had no body-image issues. She looked like what she was: tough. Hard planes defined her face and she made no effort to soften them. She kept her hair pragmatically short. Most men, she knew, found her more off-putting than attractive. However, Ann liked being that way. To her mind, her body was exceedingly functional. When she asked it to do something, it responded efficiently. What more could she want?
She synced the touchboard on the wall to her subdermal augs and initiated the undercover program she’d picked out. She started with the easy part and dropped the pigment in her skin by several shades, toning it fashionably retro-cauc, the way the Leading-class women liked it these days. As soon as she had it right, she fired off a program of physical adjustments. This always hurt like hell but never failed to confuse surveillance SAPs. The contractor Sam had chosen would never be able to trace the job back to her, or to the Rumfoord League. Even if he snooped for skin DNA, he’d draw a blank. Ann’s augs had tools for that, too.
She breathed through the pain as her nose reshaped itself and her lips plumped. Her chest ached like fury as her body’s fluids rebalanced. She’d contemplated pain-suppressors, but they always left her groggy and she had work to do. Over agonising minutes, the machines inside her remade her as a woman for whom personal appearance was a priority.
Outside the Fleet, nobody had augs like these. The public tended to be extremely wary of implanted tech for the simple reason that it could be hacked, usually with unpleasant consequences. The soft assaults on roboteers after the war had made that pretty clear. Consequently, the closest most people came to sticking machines in their bodies these days was a pair of smart-contacts and an ident in their hand. For many years, the Fleet had been even warier and gone as far as refusing to use contacts on military flights, opting instead for easily replaceable visors. But eventually the security became solid enough to make the risks worth taking.
Ann tested her voice as her vocal cords reconfigured, getting squeakier by the second.
‘Wreck a nice beach,’ she said. ‘Bah bah bah.’
To her own ears she sounded ludicrous, but apparently neo-girlish was all the rage. She pulled a dress and an organic wig from her bag. Some swiftly programmed instructions to her chromatophores removed the need for cosmetics. As she donned the heels that went with the disguise, she gave thanks for the muscular support her augs provided. She hated heels. They were for idiots. Who voluntarily wore torture devices on their feet?
Five minutes later, Ann looked very convincingly like a Leading-class Earther princess from Triton’s private orbital estates in town for a little partying. She fluffed her hair and tried a few facial stretches, getting used to the peculiar tightness of her new features.
With the transformation complete, Ann altered the privacy suite’s records to show it as still in use and stepped out, locking it behind her. She took another private transit to the shuttle waiting lounge, via some route-laundering detours, then sat in a cafe to kill time until her flight out.
Like many of Triton’s watering holes, the cafe had been decorated with high-class glitz for Earth’s r
ich, most of whom had never set foot on the planet where their money came from. Instead of ordinary chairs and tables they had mismatched Surplus Age antiques made of non-biodegradable plastic, all artfully battered. Static physical prints made of tree-pulp paper hung on the walls. Table service came in the form of human staff dressed in coquettishly robot-themed attire. The lighting was low, gold-toned and constantly shifting.
While Ann found the ostentatious styling objectionable, she could hardly avoid it without dropping character. Since the war, the home system’s outer planets had become the playground of the Leading class. These days people even talked about them as ‘greater Earth’ without a hint of irony. Her role required her to breathe that privilege like air without even noticing.
She had over an hour to burn, but that suited her just fine. She was probably under observation already and the extra chance to snoop would just put her contractor’s mind at rest. She ordered a glass of bubl-brite, then brought up a fashion magazine on the table in front of her and pretended to read.
The drink tasted as revolting as Ann had known it would. Children and halfwits with sugar addictions drank bubl-brite. She ignored the craving for a decent cup of green tea to wash the syrup down with and tried her best to look like a bored debutante.
The minutes passed slowly. By the time her boarding announcement appeared, she’d fended off a couple of attempts to hit on her and shooed away a robot selling garish transgenic flowers. Relieved, she made her way to the docking pod and held on tight to the handles as the gees fell away. A quarter of an hour of dull embarkation protocols later, she found herself reclining in a pink-furred shuttle interior listening to crosbystep remixes, on her way to Ocean Magic – one of Neptune’s less popular public-access pleasure palaces. The cabin was almost deserted.
Twenty minutes after the craft untethered, a boy floated over and hovered next to her. At the same time, an icon appeared in her display. This was her guy. Animated tattoos writhed on his cheeks and his unnaturally huge brown eyes were like something out of a children’s interactive. Wavy blond hair hovered around his face. He looked more like a soft rich kid on his way to pick up girls at a float-party than a professional criminal. But then, that was the point.
‘Mind if I sit here?’ he said smoothly.
‘Please do,’ she replied in a carefully modulated NoreCorr accent. As he sat, she swapped the local privacy settings to full.
‘I got your message,’ he said. ‘You need a job done?’
‘Yes. The details were all in the packet. Did you receive it?’
‘Sure. You want my people to find this guy and rough him up a little. That’s easy to arrange. Mind if I ask why, though?’ He looked her up and down, his eyes stalling on her augmented chest. ‘I mean, girls like you don’t often resort to buying a fixer, you know? What did he do that made you want to take such extreme action?’
This was where the acting came in. Ann arranged her features in a furious pout. She blushed.
‘Do you really need to know? I thought your kind of people didn’t care.’
‘We have to ask, miss. Got to be careful in this business, so we always check out a job before we take it.’
‘Why? Aren’t my FiveClan credentials good enough for you? Daddy said they should be enough for anything. He said you know him.’
‘And I do. Your daddy’s been an excellent client. But still, I’d like to understand.’
‘It’s private,’ she said weakly.
The man waited.
Ann squeezed her hands into fists, being careful of her overdecorated nails.
‘He left me, if you must know. That Fleetie bastard left me. He thinks I’m just some little Earther ditz he can use as he pleases and then vanish on the next shuttle out. But that’s not how it works. Nobody treats my family that way. It’s like he doesn’t have the first idea who he’s dealing with.’
The man nodded. ‘I get it. He’s a Colonial, I take it?’
She snorted. ‘Of course. He calls himself Earther, but he doesn’t understand anything. He didn’t grow up here. He’s got no sense of class. He isn’t even affiliated. I should have known what that meant right from the start. He thinks he’s some kind of handsome flyboy and that girls will fall all over him, just like that. With no consequences.’
‘So you’d like his legs broken.’
Ann feigned a shudder. ‘Nothing so drastic. Just teach him a lesson, that’s all. Some bruises will do.’
‘Do you want to leave a message for him?’ said the fixer.
She shook her head and adopted a wistful expression. ‘No. I don’t want him back. Not now. It’s too late. He mustn’t even know it was me. My family shouldn’t be involved.’ She glanced out through the false window to her left. ‘If he comes back to me afterwards, I won’t even have him. It’s that much over.’
The fixer scrutinised her for a moment, trying to conceal a smile. ‘Okay, miss. You’ve got it. The fee will be sent to the Made account in your message packet. After that, we’ll never have contact again. Do you understand?’
Ann nodded quickly. ‘Daddy already said that.’
‘Your daddy is a smart man. Let him know we took good care of you, okay?’
She nodded.
‘When you see him, I want you to give him this.’ The fixer pressed a memory bead into her hand.
Ann tried not to look too shocked. This wasn’t part of the script.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
‘It’s for your dad. He’s a hard man to reach. He’ll know what it is. Tell him from me that we’ve been trying to get hold of him for months. He needs to install this or he’s going to get both of us in trouble and that would be bad for everyone. Do you understand?’
Ann nodded mutely.
‘Good girl.’
As the shuttle slowed on its approach to the next orbital, the man unclipped.
‘Bye now,’ he said. ‘Hope you find a decent boyfriend. You can’t trust Colonials, you know. They’re all the same.’ He winked a huge eye at her as he pushed off towards the airlock.
Ann turned the awful crosbystep back on and tried not to look concerned. She slipped the memory bead into her party-pack and watched out of the corner of her eye until the fixer had disappeared through the airlock.
She exhaled deeply as the hatch cycled shut. Her job was done, thank Gal. Sam could rest easy. However, Ann knew she wouldn’t be able to call it a night until she’d taken a careful look at that bead. If it contained tracerware, she’d have to find some in-character way of disposing of it before dropping her cover.
She waited until the next stop before disembarking and boarding a return flight. Getting back took twice as long, with more waiting in lounges and more tedious advances from idle young men. Ann endured it all, counting down the minutes until she reached Delany.
Once there, she used a public study-booth to scan the bead. It came up blank – there was no active code in it at all, or at least none the public booth could detect. It contained a single passive file encrypted using a standard FiveClan protocol. Ann sucked air over her teeth. She was either facing a serious professional-level threat or none at all. She saw no choice but to take a risk and head for home.
It was another hour and several route-laundering episodes later before she made it back to her privacy suite. By then, her whole body craved release from the disguise. She wanted nothing more than to rip off the dress, relax the awful machines in her nose and settle in for a nice long kickboxing workout at the Fleet gym.
She ignored her body’s protests and instead sat down at the tactronic desk. Using the same code package that had sealed off the privacy suite from the public network, Ann rigged up a sandbox-harness for the file. It wouldn’t protect her from the worst species of malware, but she’d be safe from all the mundane varieties of soft assault. With her heart in her mouth, she transferred the file to the des
k’s processor web and used the Made account Sam had given her to open it.
Inside lay a string of perfectly ordinary-looking software patches. From the file names and interface keys, they appeared to be for pharmaceutical industry code. Closer examination using the harness’s analytical tools revealed tidy packets of audit-screened liarware bolted into otherwise entirely vanilla statistical packages. It was the kind of code that corrupt middle managers in sect businesses used to lie on their quarterly reports – hardly super-spy material.
Ann squinted at them in confusion. What in Gal’s name would Sam want with code like this? The League’s own stealthware could achieve exactly the same results effortlessly without needing attention as old-fashioned as a hand-written upgrade. Sam, or one of his agents, must have acquired the software the patches belonged to, because otherwise the fixer would never have chased him with them. The poor guy had obviously been concerned that his earlier version might fall foul of a security scrape and wanted to keep them both out of prison.
Was Sam involved in black-market drug production? It seemed insanely unlikely. The best explanation she could think of was that Sam’s previous agent on Triton had been running some kind of business on the side without the League’s knowledge. However, given the do-or-die loyalty the Rumfoord League demanded, that answer felt ridiculous, too.
Ann leaned back in the chair and stared at the code diagrams hovering over the desk. She realised then, with some discomfort, how little she actually understood about Sam’s operation. The League hinged on his work, and all their lives with it. She dearly hoped that somewhere on the other side of all that subterfuge and secrecy, he knew what he was doing.
3.3: MARK
After clearing out his New York appartment, Mark took the interplanetary shuttle to Triton. He registered with the Fleet admin SAP at Delany Station and checked into the dorm remotely. It was still afternoon, local time, so he found himself with a few hours to kill before he effectively became part of the Fleet again. He was in no hurry to put a uniform back on, so instead he went to the squeeze-bar at Cantaloupe National Park.
