Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  All the business on Triton, and most of the leisure, happened at Delany, where a comfortable one-gee of spin could be counted on. That was also where you found all the ghastly overpriced restaurants and the shrieking crowds spilling out onto the walkway from the thousand-peace-coin-a-ticket nightclubs. Consequently Mark preferred the surface, despite the feeble gravity. Sadly, there weren’t many places to visit at the bottom end of the space elevator, but of all of them, Cantaloupe was undoubtedly his favourite.

  The weird maze of ridges and bumps that made up Triton’s cantaloupe terrain lay just beyond the window-wall, lit by the frail light of the distant sun. The deep shadows and oddly organic twists and knobbles of pinkish ice make the place look like a world-sized exercise in surrealist art. The light was amplified, of course, otherwise the place would have looked like midnight in a tar-pit. But then, even the best bits of Triton were, in Mark’s opinion, slightly fake.

  He sat there for hours drinking whisky out of a bulb, staring at the ghostly landscape and trying to figure out where his job on Earth had gone wrong. His blood-engines could fix the booze later.

  Leaving New York had been hard. He’d gone there to make a point, to connect with his roots and to try his hand at something that was really his own. After a lifetime of being groomed to fit the needs of the Fleet, Earth had felt incredibly honest and refreshing. New York actually needed him, and he was happy to share his talents with them. With time, though, the place started to feel as much like straitjacket as the one he’d left behind.

  The core problem was his lack of freedom. Without the rights to his own interface, he was only half a man. Every decision he made or job he took had to be run past a committee of bureaucrats – people he’d never met who nevertheless felt they deserved a piece of him. When ordinary people were treated like that they called it slavery.

  A polite cough from behind interrupted his brooding. He turned around to find a guy in a gold jacket smiling unctuously at him.

  ‘Hi!’ said the man. ‘My employer would like to use the table you’re seated at. Would you mind moving? We’ll pay, of course.’ He pulled a gaudy transaction stub from his pocket.

  Mark glanced around at the rest of the bar. It was mostly empty, which was precisely why he’d chosen it. There were dozens of empty tables.

  ‘Can’t he sit somewhere else?’

  ‘My employer thinks you have the best view in the house,’ said the man jovially. ‘Well chosen, my friend! How much would you need? Fifty? A hundred?’

  ‘I don’t want to move, thanks,’ said Mark.

  ‘My employer would be disappointed by that. He’s a very powerful man. And he’s asking you to name your price, that’s all.’

  Mark glowered at him. ‘I don’t have a fucking price.’

  ‘You’re FiveClan, right?’ said the man, knowingly. ‘Don’t make a choice you’ll regret later.’

  Mark looked down at the branded one-piece he was wearing. Was this guy assuming things about him because he was dressed like a working Earther? Was he assuming that Mark could be ordered about just because he hadn’t been born into the Leading class?

  ‘This conversation is finished,’ said Mark.

  The man looked disappointed and more than a little confused. ‘That’s one expensive seat you’ve got there, my friend. Enjoy your evening.’

  ‘I’m not your fucking friend,’ Mark muttered at the man’s departing back.

  Mark hated Triton. It had only two kinds of people: Fleeties and the Leading crowd – billionaires in from their private worlds with their entourages. It made the place as hypocritical as it was polished. Clean-cut types with blue uniforms and high-handed morals rubbed shoulders with drugged harem girls artificially re-aged to a subjective twelve. Mark wasn’t sure which group he liked least. Earth’s Leading were the ones sucking it dry, in his opinion. They gave the planet a bad name. When most people from the Colonies looked at Earth, they saw only idle Flags and the rich scumbuckets who funded them. They didn’t look any deeper. On the other hand, at least the Leading weren’t hypocrites.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Mark turned again and found himself looking at a young Adonis. He was seven feet tall, perfectly muscled and dressed in gold velc pantaloons. His eyes were the icy blue of glacial meltwater. Or, more likely, a numbered option from the premium range of a New Angeles surgical catalogue. On his arm hung a girl with a flatly unrealistic physique and slow, doe-like eyes. She had a bland, empty smile parked on her exquisite lips.

  ‘You’re in my seat,’ said the young god, an impatient frown creasing his chiselled features. ‘I always sit here.’

  Mark looked around at the almost empty cafe. ‘I didn’t hear the cafe SAP complaining,’ he said.

  The god looked bored. ‘This isn’t a formal request. It’s a polite one.’

  ‘Sorry, but it doesn’t sound that polite,’ said Mark, his anger mounting. ‘Why don’t you try a different spot tonight? You might like it.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ said the rich kid.

  Mark couldn’t believe someone had pulled that line on him for real.

  ‘No fucking idea,’ he said. He launched a background search to find out and kept talking. ‘But whoever the hell you are, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. Asking for special privileges in an IPSO park? Do you imagine you’ve got extra rights based on whichever trophy wife happened to squirt you out into the world? It’s people like you—’

  The youth shrugged and wheeled his girlfriend away before Mark could finish. Mark seethed and considered calling the man back as he drifted off elegantly in the low gravity. He mentally glanced at the results of the search request. He’d apparently just insulted the first son of some high-profile sect baron. Whatever. He’d be in Fleet hands as soon as he finished his drink.

  However, in the wake of the altercation, Mark found himself unable to relax. His already sour mood worsened. People weren’t allowed to get away with that kind of shit in the New York towers, so why should they be able to here?

  He downed the rest of the bulb and shoved it into the table-slot along with his other empties. He got up to leave, unclipping himself from the chair. However, navigating to the pod bank at the back of the room proved challenging. He’d grown unused to low-gravity conditions over the last year or so and the whisky wasn’t helping. He bumped the ceiling a few times on his way over.

  Once there, Mark asked the transit SAP to take him to his room, picked a pod and leaned himself against the wall inside as the vehicle raced up towards Delany Station. The increased gravity felt good, but his head – not so much. His interface connection remained muted and slippery. He’d clearly drunk more than he’d meant to. That had been happening a lot since he moved to Earth.

  He pinged the pod’s SAP for an arrival check. It wouldn’t do for him to show up at a Fleet dorm with his blood chemistry all messed up. He’d need a little time to self-scrub before arriving. But the transit SAP didn’t respond. Mark frowned in confusion. Was he sending bad packets? Was he too fuzzy to frame his requests properly? He started a metabolic cleaning program to straighten his head out and pinged the pod again. This time he asked for a basic protocol check and looked over the message for flaws before sending it.

  Still nothing came back – not even a repair apology. Mark suddenly got the sense that something was wrong. Someone had co-opted his ride. Who’d bother to do that, though? It was the sort of prank he and his friends used to play on each other back in the Omega dorm.

  His self-scrub had barely started when the pod pivoted and dropped him down a gravity well to somewhere in Delany – one of the lower rings, at a rough guess. The doors slid open to reveal two large men with thick necks and folded arms.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Mark.

  ‘You were rude to someone important today,’ said the one on the left. ‘That’s not how we do things on Triton. We’re here to
teach you some manners.’

  Mark gazed at them in disbelief. What century did they think they were living in?

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding, right?’

  What kind of cretin sent in human enforcement? He dumped a third of his submind bandwidth on cybernetic liver assist, a third on breaking the security wall they’d locked around the pod, and the rest on combat readiness.

  [Warning,] said his nanny-SAP. [Exposing the extent of your abilities jeopardises Fleet security …]

  ‘Whatever,’ Mark muttered.

  From the beige, soundproofed walls behind the men, he could tell he had to be on a level with privacy suites. Triton had plenty. A lot of the business the billionaires did wasn’t exactly Fleet-kosher.

  ‘Step out of the pod, please,’ said the man on the left. ‘We don’t want to make a mess of a public facility and it’s not going anywhere until you do.’

  Mark stayed put, waiting for his moment. His unarmed-combat program, bleating a little from being woken after years with no updates, nevertheless fed him a barrage of tactical data. Right Thug stood slightly asymmetrically, suggesting weakness in his left arm. Left Thug showed trace signs of a former neck injury, indicating a potential weak spot. And so on.

  The man on the left reached into the pod to grab Mark by his shirt. Mark sidestepped, swivelled and pushed, using the man’s momentum to send his face crashing into the back of the pod.

  ‘Are we really going to do this?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you guys look me up first? Didn’t you spot that I’m a Fleet roboteer?’

  Mark had more gravity-support modifications in his body than most people even knew existed. He realised with a groan that his identity had probably been shielded since arrival for mission-security reasons. Most likely, the thugs had no idea who they were dealing with. Unfortunately, the security hold on the pod was really tight.

  ‘I don’t want to have to hurt you,’ said Mark, though it looked like he’d already failed on that count. The man picking himself out of the pod wall had a broken nose. He’d have to chalk that up to the booze. He was still too fuzzy to fight properly.

  While the first man grasped his face and groaned, the second lunged for him. Mark twisted and dragged Thug Two into the pod, tripping him as he entered. The thug went sprawling to the floor.

  Mark stepped around both of them into the privacy suite behind. The men came after him, breaking out stim-sticks from their jackets.

  Mark regarded the weapons with disbelief. ‘Come on, guys. What is this, junior hoodlum night?’

  The first thug, the one with the bloody nose, now looked unprofessionally angry as he dropped into a fighter’s crouch. Mark’s combat SAP pointed out the veins on his neck showing that he’d just got a bump of reinforced heart function. Probably some heavy stimulants, too. It recommended a twenty per cent improvement in response times to compensate. Mark obliged, despite the strain on his already struggling metabolism.

  The thug came at him, stim-stick slashing for his chest. Mark chose his microsecond, dived in following the arm-sweep and drove his fingers into the man’s exposed shoulder pressure point. He followed up with an elbow to the man’s jaw, sending it cracking upwards. The thug toppled back.

  Thug Two saw his opportunity and sprang. Mark adapted his spin, sidestepped and used it to propel the man forward again, this time at the suite doors. They dutifully opened for him and he landed on his chin in the corridor beyond.

  ‘This has been nice, guys,’ said Mark. ‘A special moment, really. But I have to be going.’

  He jumped over Thug Two, avoiding the man’s swipe for his ankle, and walked quickly down the hall, checking behind him as he went.

  Now that he’d left the suite, the habitat guarantee of zero surveillance did not apply. However, Mark found he still couldn’t get a handle on the network. Was it possible that the entire corridor was on some kind of lockdown, or even the entire ring, maybe? The thought made him nervous. He looked back to check on his pursuers. As he did so, he bumped into a young woman emerging from the door next to him. She yelped in surprise. She had short purple hair and a look in her eye halfway between panic and outraged affront.

  ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ she said, rubbing her elbow.

  ‘My apologies,’ said Mark. ‘My fault entirely. I was distracted.’

  He glanced back again and this time saw the two thugs rapidly approaching, stim-sticks in hand. Both men now looked scared and angry. He could see them assessing the risk involved with a witness. Mark knew he needed to shut this down quickly or someone innocent was going to get hurt.

  ‘Excuse me a minute,’ he told the woman.

  ‘Go away, please, miss,’ said Thug One. ‘You don’t want to be involved in this.’

  Mark strode up to meet them. The first jabbed wildly with his stim-stick. Mark swapped his weight to his back foot, stepping out of range and swinging his front leg up to kick. The stick sailed out of the man’s hand. He grunted in pain. Mark followed up with a second kick to the man’s chest as his leg descended, sending him toppling back towards Thug Two. As Thug Two darted sideways to avoid the collision, Mark took the opportunity and turned in while his assailant was unbalanced. He drove a fist into the man’s sternum, knocking the wind out of him, and followed up with a jab to the pressure point on his neck. Thug Two crumpled. Mark turned back and kicked Thug One in the head before he could stand.

  He paused to breathe and looked up to see the woman staring at him, appalled. This looked terrible, he realised. He was supposed to participate in a high-stakes mission tomorrow and here he was beating up two local heavies in a public corridor. He checked the network again – still no surveillance, thank God. A chance remained of him cleaning this up.

  ‘Would you be okay with not talking to anyone about this?’ he said to the woman, trying for a winning smile.

  She looked disgusted by the offer. ‘This is a privacy deck,’ she said levelly. ‘I don’t have to notice the men you assaulted, the booze on your breath or the pain you inflicted on my elbow. We don’t have to notice that either of us was here at all.’

  Mark couldn’t help but notice a catch in her phrasing.

  ‘I could pay you,’ he suggested.

  She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘No, thank you. I want nothing to do with this. Frankly, I assume this is how most Earther business gets done so it’s all part of the local colour as far as I’m concerned. Let’s just pretend we never saw each other here.’

  Mark bit back a riposte. There was no point in picking on her prejudice.

  ‘That sounds ideal,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’ He hoisted one of the thugs over his shoulders. ‘I’ll be back for the other one shortly.’

  ‘No matter,’ said the woman. ‘I won’t be staying to watch.’

  Mark declined to make a remark. Instead he retraced his steps with the hoodlum dangling across his back and deposited him in the privacy suite. By the time he returned for the other, the woman had left.

  Mark felt slightly relieved. Her company had been uncomfortable. His mood dived again, though, when he turned the second man over. His eyes lay open and staring. Foam filled his mouth and his fingers and face kept convulsing. He must have fallen on his stim-stick. Mark groaned. He checked the man’s pulse and found an erratic mess.

  It was a disaster. If this got out, he’d be without a job in New York and no Fleet gig, either. Mark hefted the twitching man and dumped him down next to the first. Then he shut the door to the privacy suite and spoke to the door SAP.

  ‘I know you’re awake because you’re still running,’ he told the little program, ‘so give me your command chain.’

  The SAP began the process of polite refusal. Mark reached out via his interface to the SAP’s public API and wedged self-opening commands right up its primary comms channel. The SAP squawked as Mark prised open a path to its central command listing. H
e grabbed a link to the command chain and used it to iterate up until he hit the governing intelligence for the entire level. While smarter and more slippery than its tiny minion, it soon succumbed to the same blunt intrusion. With access rights in his virtual hand, Mark reluctantly called Will.

  A very surprised Will Monet appeared in the home node of Mark’s sensorium. He looked exactly as he always had – tall and awkward, with weirdly intense eyes and a shock of badly behaved hair that he’d artificially greyed at the temples in a vague attempt to look distinguished. The light-lag was nil, meaning Will was already on the station. He glanced around.

  What Will always used to say when he visited Mark’s home node was, ‘Why don’t you clean up around here?’ To which Mark would always reply, ‘It’s not a mess, it’s a hashing function.’

  The grey, granite cave Mark used still looked the same. The splatter of floating icons was, if anything, bigger and messier. This time, though, Will made no comment about that.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said simply.

  Mark didn’t feel like talking. And because they were both roboteers, he didn’t have to. He just sent Will a memory dump instead. Will’s brows rose in surprise.

  ‘Still drinking, I see,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t fucking call you for judgement,’ Mark snapped. ‘I called you to see if you were prepared to help.’ He immediately felt like a child again. Amazing how Will could do that to him with a single sentence. What was the issue, anyway? Mark could drink enough to kill a horse and be sober again within an hour. The involuntary augs he’d received as a child had made sure of that.

  ‘Of course,’ said Will. ‘I’ll send robots to handle the two men.’

  Will scowled suddenly. For a moment, his virtual form split into an army of shadowy figures and recongealed. Weird shit like that happened a lot with Will.

  ‘Odd,’ he said. ‘The security here is badly compromised. But you’d guessed that already. I’ll look into it.’