“Can we get there?” Tai asked, and leaned forward to study the displays.
“Yeh.” Jaantje flipped a couple of switches, lifting the damaged tire so that it was taking the minimum load. “It’s, what, half a kilometer? Tires are expensive, that’s all.”
We actually made it to the Nighthawk before the tire went completely flat. This late, between shifts, there wasn’t too much traffic; we were able to make the turn onto the commerical strip that paralleled Condaraxis at a reasonable speed, and then Jaantje eased the carrier up the ramp onto the parking deck. The Nighthawk bulged out of the cavern wall above us, a squat poured-stone cylinder with a single long window ringed in red-and-white light tubing. Then Jaantje pulled the carrier into one of the self-service bays and we all climbed out and stood around while he worked the manual controls and brought the tire farther up off the ground. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, no cuts or bits of glass, but Jaantje prodded at it and then straightened, glaring at us. “Look, why don’t you go get something to eat, or something?”
“But we want to help,” Shadha began, grinning, and Timin caught her shoulder.
“We’ll do that,” he said firmly, overriding her. “You want us to bring you something when we’re finished?”
Jaantje took a deep breath. “I have to get the patch kit, but after that, it shouldn’t take long. I’ll meet you in the food bar.”
The Nighthawks are an old chain that started at The Moorings and along the western haulage, and moved into Landage about twenty years ago. They cater mostly to long-haul drivers, so that the interior is a weird mix of spare-parts shelves, trip supplies, food machines and a live-service counter, and a heavily armored corner office that deals in pawn. The lights are all brighter than the day-lights, and nearly everything has the red-and-white Nighthawks glyph plastered somewhere on it, including the live staff. We pushed through the double doors, shivering at air cooler than most places in Heaven, and Jaantje split off for the parts section. The rest of us moved on to the food bar in the back corner well away from the pawnshop. There were maybe a dozen molded-fiber tables with attached stools—red and white like everything else, with the glyph embossed in the center of the tabletop and each stool—in the middle of a white square of flooring, but at this hour they were empty except for a pair of drivers sitting in the corner, sand suits tossed over the backs of their chairs. The live bar was open, and I glanced at the menu, considering real food, but the prices that flickered on the display over the head of the cook were enough to discourage me. I rooted in my pocket instead for money chips, and followed Timin to the wall of machines. The choices were a weird mix of yanqui food—exotic to most of the people who drive, and easy to adapt to the machines—and cheap standard coolie fare, but I managed to find a machine that sold a decent brand of sausage rolls and another with beans and rice, and carried that and a bottle of water back to a table. Tai followed me, a neatly packaged binty box tucked under her arm so she could balance the double carafe of sente, but before she could sit down someone called her name. I turned, recognizing the voice, and saw a familiar trio threading their way through the display of water jugs. We’d known the Commandos for years—never as competition, though Shadha had been their drummer for a while before she joined us—and they’d been the ones to introduce us to the Nighthawks; I wasn’t really surprised to see at least three of them here. No, it was four of them after all: Meonothai Vaughn, who was both some distant kind of cousin of mine and the Commandos’ second guitar, appeared behind the others, stretching his legs to catch up. The rest of them, Kebe and Mosi Niall and their current drummer—they had the worst luck with drummers—sat down at the next table, and Mosi punched the menu to order coffee from the live service. I couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at that—you could get twice as much from the machines for the same price—and the drummer said, “You got to admit, the machine coffee is pretty bad.”
Not bad enough to make live service worth the price, I thought, but then, coffee wasn’t my particular indulgence. Kebe leaned forward, planting both elbows on the table.
“So where’s Jaantje? I wanted to talk to him about a gig.” Both he and Mosi had recently grown beards, probably to prove they were yanquis despite their tilted midworld eyes. It made them look more like stock villains in a bad videomanga, and Mosi in particular looked like an ax murderer.
“Out fixing a tire,” Tai answered, and Meonothai tapped me on the shoulder.
“So what do you want with Crazy Imre?”
“Who?” I said, leaning back to look at him, and Meonothai gave me a look.
“Crazy Imre—you know, my cousin, the one who works in FTL. He said you were looking for him.”
I blinked, confused, and then wondered if it might have something to do with Red. Even if he didn’t want to deal with me anymore, he might still pass my name along—in fact, that was probably the way he would handle it, given the way he’d treated me at Motosha. “Well, yeh,” I began, not wanting to ask directly if this Crazy Imre was a hard-hacker, and Meonothai pointed vaguely into the racks of parts.
“He’s out back, I ran into him on my way in.”
“Excuse me,” I said, to the rest of the tables. They ignored me, except for Mosi, who gave me one of his looks, the ones that make you brace yourself for whatever it is he’s going to say. This time, though, he didn’t follow through, and I climbed past Timin and headed for the back of the store.
Despite the brilliant lights overhead, the parts aisles were heavily shadowed. I stopped at a cross aisle, looking over my shoulder, but didn’t see anyone among the rows of kits and machinery. That left the public Persephonet console, a battered machine snugged up against the back wall, and the Nighthawk’s toilets and pay showers. I hesitated, not really wanting to go looking for someone called Crazy Imre in the toilets, and someone touched my shoulder. I turned, startled, and he was already well out of reach, his hands buried in his jacket pockets.
“You were looking for Red.”
He was unmistakably a Vaughn, shorter and not as skinny as Meonothai, but with the same curly hair and vivid hazel eyes. I decided that discretion was the wiser course, and said, “You’re Imre?”
He nodded. “What do you want with Red, sunshine?”
I looked at his hands again, balled in the jacket pockets, or maybe holding something I didn’t want to know about. “I wanted to talk to him,” I said, carefully. “I used to know him, a long time ago.”
Imre’s mouth curled in an unpleasant, knowing smile. “I bet you did.”
There wasn’t any point in answering that. I couldn’t tell what I’d walked into, if it was personal or business jealousy, and I didn’t want to annoy him further by guessing wrong.
After a moment, he said, “So what is it, sunshine, business or pleasure?”
“My business,” I said, and looked sideways for something to hit him with if I had to. The closest rack was full of foam-wrapped coil-mount semiliners about half a meter square, not much use even if I’d been able to lift them.
“His business is my business,” Imre said.
Before I could think how to answer that, or how and where to run, a soft voice behind me said, “No.”
I started, banging my shoulder on one of the semiliners, and Red walked past me without seeming to see me. It was unmistakably him, just as it had been in Motosha—there was never any mistaking his looks, not yanqui or midworld or coolie, but some combination of them all. He’d never worn his hair this long before; it hung in a ragged mane well past his shoulders, looking like liquid flame against his black shirt. A woman was following him, the same big woman I’d seen with him at Motosha—taller than me, I realized, and midworld-dressed, but with watchful yanqui eyes.
“Fucking right it’s my business, bach,” Imre said. His eyes slipped from Red to the woman, fixed on Red again. “You fucking well went to jail the last time you played this game—remember Avelin? You might not find something so nice in your cell this time.”
I reme
mbered Avelin myself, one of the reasons I’d dropped out of touch with Red, and couldn’t suppress a shiver. This was the reason I’d never wanted to get involved in hard-hacking, exactly this kind of meeting, and Red shook his head.
“No,” he said again, still quiet, without much apparent emotion, but Imre closed his mouth over whatever else he would have said. Red extended his hand to touch Imre’s face, an ambiguous gesture, threat and caress and plain raw sex all at once, so that I shivered again, seeing it. “It’s my business, Imre.”
Imre stood frozen for an instant, then shook himself, and swung abruptly away. He stamped up the aisle past me, turning only to call over his shoulder, “Fine, but don’t expect me to bail you, sunshine.”
Red didn’t answer, but the woman pulled herself up from the shelf where she’d been leaning, the metal creaking slightly as she released it. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said to Red, and started after Imre.
I looked at Red, and he looked back at me for a long moment, until the leashed passion in his stare made me look away. “Hey,” I said, a feeble greeting if ever there was one, and he lowered his eyes to hide any answer, the lashes veiling their dark blue. I heard someone in the cross aisle to my left, and turned, wondering what it was going to be this time, and heard Jaantje call my name.
“Fan? Everything all right?” He had his hands in his pockets just the way Imre had had them, and Kebe and Timin and it looked like the rest of both bands were behind him, crowding the aisle. I looked back at Red, and thought I caught him smiling, before he dropped his eyes again.
“Everything’s fine,” I said, still looking at him, and this time I was sure I saw him smile.
There was a little pause, and Jaantje said, “Haya. But your food’s getting cold.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, and heard them moving away. I really didn’t know what to say to Red, whether to mention Motosha or not, and cleared my throat. “I didn’t know you were back in business,” I said finally, and Red shrugged one shoulder.
“I’m not, exactly.”
So why are you doing this? The question hung between us, almost as though he was daring me to ask; I said instead, “I didn’t expect to see you the other day.”
He looked away. “No.” I waited, and he went on, reluctantly, “I was doing someone a favor—Reverdy, the woman who was here.”
“Haya,” I said, drawing the word out to let him know I wanted more, but he’d closed down again. “Did Loes Murong tell you what I wanted?”
He nodded. “Did you want it legal?”
That was one question I actually hadn’t asked Fortune. “Preferably,” I said. “But it doesn’t have to be, as long as it has a reasonable provenance.”
Red nodded again. “There’s an out-bazaar happening 390 kilometers southwest on the Whitesands Haul. A guy named Newcat Garay, he’ll have what you want. We—I just sold him one myself.” He reached into the pocket of his workcloth trousers, pulled out a dulled datadisk. “Give him this, say I sent you. The exact coordinates are on it, too.”
“Thanks,” I said, and he turned away as though everything was finished. “Red?”
He stopped, looked back at me, the red hair shifting, falling to frame his face, making him at once a stranger and the man I’d known. I realized I didn’t quite know what I wanted to ask him—are you all right, are you happy, have you forgiven me, even, though, I don’t know for what—or even if I could ask any questions anymore. I said instead, “Will it be legal? Fortune will want to know.”
He shrugged. “Your choice,” he said, and walked away.
I watched him go, wishing I’d had the balls to ask my real questions, but at least I had a name, and a contact point. The out-bazaars were a hard-hacker’s paradise, where the sand-divers traded the minerals they’d harvested from the deep desert for the equipment that let them survive their job. What they did was technically legal—the Conglomerate courts have consistently refused to sanction the Cartel Companies’ blanket claims in Whitesands and the northern deserts—but strongly discouraged, to the point of costing more than a few divers their lives. The Cartel Companies don’t actively defend their turf—that would give the FPG a possible excuse to bring the Peacekeepers into the picture—but they don’t respond to distress signals from sand-divers, despite all the conventions and codes that say they have to. Rumor and sand-diver legend says they actively block those signals, but no one has ever been able to prove it if they do. And since most sand-divers are Aussys, with their love-hate relationship with the Cartels, it’s hard to know what to think. But the out-bazaars are some of the best places on the planet to buy odd bits of equipment.
I called Fortune with the news the next morning, after I’d opened Red’s disk and checked the coordinates and the asking prices. Everybody else was still asleep—and so would I have been, if I hadn’t had to work the second half of the day shift—so I spread the file displays out on the big media screens in the main room, where I could see everything at once. One of Fortune’s constructs answered, dulcet ungendered voice, and then Fortune herself appeared in the screen.
“I’ve got a source for you,” I said, and she blinked once, as though I’d waked her.
“Excellent. Who and where—and is there a price?”
“A range,” I answered. “Are you encrypting?”
She nodded. “Peri matched your system.”
“There’s an out-bazaar on the Whitesands Haul. The person you want will be there for the next four days, according to what—according to what I have.” I’d been about to mention Red’s name, not a good idea even with encryption. “The prices run from 1500 wu to 2500.”
Fortune made a face, light rippling on the silk of her loose coat. “At that price, they’d better be legal.”
“As far as I know, they are.”
“Haya.” Fortune stared at the screen, obviously reading something in her own displays. “How far out?”
“Twelve hours round-trip.” At least an hour of that would be cross-sand, getting to the out-bazaar itself, but I probably didn’t need to mention that. “I know someplace we can rent a half-track, though.”
“We?”
“I’m the contact,” I said. “I’m who people know.”
She nodded. “Haya. I don’t mind, but matching our schedules is likely to be a pain.”
“The Empire’s closed for three more days,” I said, “and we don’t have any bookings then, either. So the sooner the better.”
“Tell me about the rental.”
“Jaantje’s father owns a haulage firm. They’ve got stuff we can rent, probably at a discount.”
“Haya,” Fortune said again, staring into the distance. “All right, see what you can set up, and I’ll get the cash together. I’d like to do it Third-day, if you can get the half-track by then.”
That was the day after tomorrow. “I’ll try,” I said, and meant Fortune to hear the uncertainty in my voice.
If she did, she ignored it. “I’ve gotten in the new karakuri—the humaniform one. Want to see?”
Before I could answer, she lifted a hand, ran it through an invisible control space. The screen image fuzzed for a minute, refocusing to include more of the room, and the shape that had been lying on the worktable suddenly jerked upright. It looked almost exactly like the other three, except that its skin was pink, the metallic pink of new copper that still somehow suggested white-yanqui skin. It swung itself off the table, the movements awkward, and I saw the tip of Fortune’s tongue between her teeth as she concentrated on controlling it with almost invisible movements of her fingers. It had her face, but the old version, the one she’d been using on her humaniform karakuri for the last three years, and as it came to stand at her side I had a weird vision of her younger sister in its face. It laid an arm gracelessly across Fortune’s shoulder, and she put her arm affectionately around its waist. “I’m calling it Celeste,” she said.
“Celeste?” I echoed, stupidly. She hated her sister—no, I r
ealized, not that Celeste, but the first Celeste, the real Celeste, as Fortune once said to me, Fortune’s dead twin. I couldn’t help remembering that the arm she laid so casually around the machine’s waist had been harvested from that first Celeste’s body.
“So what do you think?” Fortune said.
“It’s creepy as hell,” I said, flatly, and she smiled.
“Good.”
“I’ll get back to you,” I said, and broke the connection.
Jaantje was willing to talk to his father, and once we got the price down, volunteered to drive us himself, at journeyman pay. That made the rental fee more than reasonable, which made Fortune happy, and meant Jaantje was getting paid, which made him happy. It also meant that I knew I could trust the driver: a good solution all around. Fortune paid for the supplies, per regulations, but Jaantje did the shopping, so that we managed to get not only the required emergency reserves but a decent larder for the trip itself, which meant we’d only have to play the depots’ inflated prices for fuel. We left Tai to deal with arranging a gig at Ino’s—the manager was blowing hot and cold, yes and no—and loaded the last supplies into the half-track’s sealed cabin. That included the Celeste-karakuri: Fortune said she wanted to be sure that any construct she bought would be compatible with the basic design.
Most of the time, karakuri can load themselves, but this one was so new that the internal programming still hadn’t finished fine-tuning itself, so that it was easier just to shut down its systems and load it in like any other piece of machinery. Fortune had packed it well—she has padded sleeves for each of her karakuri that make them look like mummified bodies—and the three of us managed to wrestle it into the back of the half-track. Jaantje and I collapsed then, me leaning against the top of the still-open loading ramp, Jaantje sitting on the cabin floor, and I glanced out across the trafficway. Fortune’s neighbors were watching—she didn’t have a service alley, the only real drawback to the workshop-flat—not even bothering to hide their curiosity, and I glanced at Fortune, to see her smiling the way she does in her act. She stooped over the karakuri, unfastening the top of the sleeve to reactivate the basic systems and unlock the frozen limbs; the padded fabric fell away, and by a fluke her face and the karakuri’s were momentarily side by side. I heard Jaantje catch his breath, saw one of the neighbors sketch-sign a curse, and look hastily away when he saw me watching. Fortune leaned over the karakuri’s shoulder, fumbling with something beneath a back panel, and the karakuri suddenly straightened, then sat down on one of the jump seats. The padding fell to its waist, exposing more of the gleaming pink skin, but Fortune ignored it, concentrating on pulling the safety straps into place around it. I glanced at Jaantje, saw him shaking his head. He didn’t say anything, though, for which I was grateful, and we finished loading the supplies under the Celeste-karakuri’s blind gaze.
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