Queen of Nowhere

by Jaine Fenn

  The news from elsewhere was largely positive. She noted with interest that the Ylonis shipyards were laying people off due to a shortage of transit-kernels. This supported Captain Reen’s claim that he had cut off the supply of those particular items at source.

  Or someone had, anyway.

  She also received the expected datapacket from Sestine. On sifting through the news digest, she discovered why BetaI6 had failed to answer her ping. Buried among police statistics she found a report of an aircar accident. Only one vehicle was involved, and foul play was suspected. The aircar’s only passenger was in a coma from which he was unlikely to recover.

  Bez’s first thought was to blame the Enemy, but this was not their style: why arrange a suspicious accident when you can induce an apparently natural heart attack or aneurysm?

  No, she had a good idea who was behind her agent’s ‘accident’.

  She was not the only person paying BetaI6 to carry out shady activities. She had some evidence (held in reserve as blackmail material) that he was involved with one of the criminal cartels that operated in the Sestine system. Arranging an aircar accident was their style. Back when she first set out on her mission of righteous vengeance, Bez had contemplated dealing with such organisations herself, although they tended to be single-system and have little influence in the hubs. They would, however, pay well for false IDs and had access to the kind of people she might need to hunt down and kill the Enemy. On balance, she had decided that getting entangled with such blatant criminality was too risky.

  She dug a little deeper into the news digest and managed to piece together the likely series of events: BetaI6 had fallen foul of his dubious associates; they had responded predictably; as a result of the botched assassination-disguised-as-accident, the authorities took an interest in BetaI6’s activities; thus, his role maintaining the Yolson identity, and laundering the associated funds, had come to light. The Yolson ID was a resurrectee, and the Church, who were powerful in that system - they often were on lawless worlds - had taken exception to a dead holy man being imperson-ated in the cause of criminal behaviour. They had gone after the only lead - ‘Oloria Estrante’.

  The end result was that the Estrante persona was defunct, and all associated funds were inaccessible.

  Working out this chain of events took most of a day. The next morning she was awoken by a com message from a freetrader offering a reasonably priced ride to Kotane. After checking out her intel on his outfit, she accepted. To her relief, his ship did have a spare comabox.

  CONTRADICTORY INPUT

  Beevee is a problem. The Sidhe use beevee, just like everyone else. In fact, it’s one of the areas where they have most influence. It’s even possible they have secret channels, although experience leads me to doubt this. Still: be careful.

  Encrypt, encode, and, if possible, distribute your data via dataspikes transported by trusted carriers. Some of you will soon be receiving additional information to this data burst via that very route.

 

  Kotane was built into a crater on a small planetoid, a fairly common configuration for hub stations; however, unlike most stations, the builders had used clear roofing material. They had also neglected to fit ceilings in most public areas, including dockside. The Kotane system’s dim, phase-locked sun shone down perpetually on gently sloping artificial chasms walled with shops and bars, bathing every space not filled by holos or artificial lighting in a red glow. The locals appeared to like the subdued ambience, but Bez thought the combination of long-wavelength light and open vistas gave the station a disquieting atmosphere, making it low on her list of preferred stopovers.

  After assuming her new persona, she booked appropriate accommodation and then went for a walk. She stopped outside a homeware store, sitting on one of the benches provided for tired shoppers. She closed her eyes and tuned into Kotane’s public com system, spoofing off the shop’s signal. She queried a certain shipping company to find out if they had received a delivery for her.

  They hadn’t, which was worrying: Alpha83’s dataspike should have been here several days ago.

  She made a non-spoofed call to the station’s labour exchange, during which she turned down a job in a bar but accepted a week of poorly paid eight-hour shifts in the kitchen of a family restaurant off the main drag. It was credit and it was cover, and it distracted her from fretting.

  The work consisted of loading and unloading dish washing machines and involved almost no human contact. Bez had had worse jobs.

  She barely considered the irony of regularly taking on such menial labour when, should all the resources she had used over the last twenty years be taken into account, she was one of the wealthi-est individuals in human-space. She was stuck with whatever funds a given persona had at a given time; and as long as she had a safe place to sleep and enough food to eat, she was loathe to waste credit that might be useful to her mission. Having said that, since getting hold of the Setting Sun data, she had considered in passing the sort of life she might have when - if - her mission succeeded.

  Perhaps she would consolidate any remaining funds into a stable persona, and live out her life as that one person. An odd thought, and not one she felt inclined to dwell on at this stage.

  She checked for the dataspike again after her first shift. Still nothing. She spent her free time concentrating on other leads, and on the housekeeping necessary to maintain her hyperweb, using some of her earnings to cultivate a couple of new contacts via ongoing beevee discussions.

  By the fourth day she was worried enough to ping Alpha83.

  She considered informing the agent that she, Bez, had decided to remain in the agreed datadrop location, but dismissed the idea of transmitting such information, even with multiple encodings, as too risky.

  Another day passed. Bez found herself checking for a ping-back every few hours. It would be a single word, the second half a two-word phrase both Bez and Alpha83 knew. There were several correct responses: the exact word Alpha83 chose would indicate her situation.

  The silence from Gracen dragged on. Bez’s casual contract finished. She almost missed the comfortable monotony of im posing order and cleanliness on other people’s dirt. The labour exchange had nothing else appropriate but said they would keep her on their books.

  The next day she received, along with her expected messages, one from Tarset. The agent she had engaged to search for images of the helpful stranger had got a match. His name was Imbarin Tierce, and he was a troubleshooter for the station’s Board of Directors; he was not publically acknowledged or listed, but was rumoured to deal with situations where the Board could not be seen to act. He was, for example, said to be the person who negoti-ated with a hab-rat gang whose petty pilfering was endangering property and possibly life; if the Board had sent in the law, things could have got nasty, but Sirrah Tierce had met with representatives from the station’s underclass. Not long after that, the thefts had stopped - although only after a shipment of the kind of building materials ideal for use in Tarset’s dead spaces had mysteriously gone mlsslllg.

  So, he was someone important, if shadowy, on Tarset hub. That did not explain his interest in her, and raised all sorts of other questions.

  Bez slept on the news. In the morning, the labour exchange cammed her, offering more work. She told them, politely, that she had made other arrangements.

  Actually finalising those arrangements turned out to be harder than expected. Although freetraders travelling between hubs often carried paying passengers, getting a lift to a planetary system was far harder. And a planetary system belonging to a society that eschewed excess material wealth would be lucky if it saw three trade birds in a year. Fortunately Gracen, thanks to one particular aspect of its culture, was on the standard tourist trail. But that meant using a starliner to get there.

  She could have paid one of her secondary agents in the sector to travel to Gracen on her behalf, but that would have taken time; with the intel Alpha83 had unearthed looking i
ncreasingly like the best option for bringing the Enemy down, Bez wanted to act swiftly and deal with this personally. Besides, Alpha83’S message had implied that databreaking skills might be required to get hold of hard evidence of the Sidhe I D fraud. She herself was the logical person to follow this up.

  All these rationalisations would not have mattered one bit if, somewhere deep inside, she had not wanted to make an uncharacteristic move out of the hubs. The last few weeks had brought too many close calls and nasty shocks, and though her natural inclination was to worry at their significance and possible interconnectedness, sometimes the best way to make sense of an excess of contradictory input was to let it lie.

  She activated a little-used tourist ID and shunted around sufficient locally stored funds to pay for a return trip to Gracen. When she got back into the hubs, she would need to do some serious databreaking to restore the credit lost in the BetaI6 fiasco. She arranged forwarding for her permanent datadrop, and informed those of her agents who needed to know that there might be a slight delay in normal communications.

  The journey to Gracen included one change of liner and three stopovers.

  Tourists tended to assume that being rich enough to travel the stars made them members of the same exclusive club, which argu-ably it did, but it was not a club to which Bez belonged, and once she had made it clear she was not looking for sex or companion-ship, she was actively snubbed by her fellow passengers. This was fine by her. She spent most of her time on the liner in her cabin, researching her eventual destination. She left the liner only long enough to check her datadrops at each stopover, in order to head off any issues that looked like they might arise while she was outside the hub network.

  She had to acknowledge the possibility, however remote, that she was walking into a trap. If the Enemy had captured Alpha83 and read the agent’s mind, they would know that she had been investigating ID fraud on behalf of a third party. But the name by which Alpha83 knew Bez had no connection to the one she was currently travelling under, and there was no active Sidhe presence in the Gracen system. Those involved in the ID fraud would be human, and most likely have no idea whom they really worked for. Besides, there was always the possibility that any new situation was a set-up. Hence the need for the best-case principle.

  The system’s one inhabited world was painted in muddled shades of brown and hazed with the thin veil of atmosphere. As she watched it on final approach, Bez marvelled at how big the planet was. All that mass, most of it wasted.

  A soft-spoken announcement over the ship’s com suggested that any passengers who had not already done so might wish to change into local attire. Bez was already wearing one of the ubiquitous robes, which, once on-planet, would not only protect against the environment but also declare the wearer’s place in the world, though not with anything as subtle as tags. While the hoi os she had viewed showed Graceni natives swathed in colours apparently denoting everything from a person’s age to their favourite style of food, tourist robes were primarily black, with a thin line of decoration down the central fastening and around the bottom hem. The main message a tourist’s robes conveyed was the wearer’s sexual preferences. Given why people came to Gracen, Bez knew she would not find a robe whose patterning broadcast the silent message, No thanks. She ended up settling for clothes that labelled her as H etero, single partner, do not initiate contact.

  She unwrapped the second part of the ‘local attire’, a set of photo-reactive glasses, which the guidebooks referred to as comshades.

  Outdoors on Gracen such eye coverings were a necessity; indoors they were a social convention. The glasses gave access to Gracen’s infoscape: although the locals avoided implants on religious grounds, Gracen had a sophisticated information culture. The shades were oddly retro compared to the contacts or flip-monocles other info-savvy religious cultures employed, but Bez was happy to have her eyes hidden from strangers.

  She put on the glasses, adjusting the mic stub to sit snugly on her cheek. The shades flashed up a message asking if she wished them to be initialised to her ID. She sub-vocced ‘Yes’ and waited.

  After about ten seconds she got a message saying she was now fully connected. She shut down the glasses and blinked her headware online. Her tech took less than a second to interface with the local comnet. Good: both methods worked. She would need to be careful, though: the guidebooks warned against tuning in fully; Gracen’s infoscape manifested largely as overlays, with few coherent virtualities.

  The next announcement stated that landing was imminent, and passengers should proceed to the departure lounge. Starliners usually sent shuttles down to planets, but although Gracen only had one attraction it was an eternally popular one and the ship would be landing to allow everyone to sample it.

  Disembarkation occurred with the unctuous efficiency typical of starliner service. As she stepped into the egress tube, Bez experienced the first incontrovertible evidence of landing on an alien world: the air was too dry and smelled wrong. It also made her mildly light-headed. She knew this was no illusion; the guidebooks stated there was a slightly above average 02 level in Gracen’s arid atmosphere, inducing a feeling of (they claimed) mild wellbeing.

  Bez only hoped the addendum, that one adjusted to the rich atmosphere within a few hours, was true.

  The customs hall was full but the formalities were simple and well handled. Bez was quickly reunited with her minimal luggage and directed to her appointed guide, one of about a dozen who waited, hoods modestly raised, just beyond the barrier. Aside from the guides and the tourists, the room beyond was empty, the adverts playing on the walls subdued and relatively tasteful. No broadcasts tried to insinuate themselves into her eyewear; another contrast to the hubs, where anyone not running the latest ad-blockers was liable to get a visual cortex full of unwanted product placement.

  In an hour or so the starport would be full of people travelling the other way, mainly tourists returning sated from their trip, but perhaps also some locals. Graceni were free to leave their world, but those that did so were considered apostate, and not permitted to return. Several thousand people - mainly women - chose to 86

  leave every year, cutting all ties to their former home. This emigration policy made this world ideal as a source of long-term false identities.

  She raised her hood before leaving customs; chill air puffed across the nape of her neck as the robe’s cooling unit activated.

  Her allocated guide already had nine people with her; Bez knew the guide was female because of social conventions rather than appearance, for the peak of her hood combined with her shades to hide most of her face. She braced herself for the local greeting, holding her breath when the woman kissed her lightly on the lips, with a murmured, ‘Welcome, sister.’ Fighting the waft of pheromone-laden perfume, she muttered the correct response, ‘I greet thee sister,’ and pulled back hastily.

  While they waited for the last few women to join the party, their guide passed around cigrenes, another local vice. The aromatic smoking sticks were a social lubricant rather than an intoxicant, and Bez had already spent time in the starliner’s smoking lounge getting used to this dirtborn vice. She found it distasteful but, thanks to her earlier practice, was able to smoke successfully without having a coughing fit or setting fire to herself. She took the pale yellow tube and let her guide lean across to set fire to the end with a stick lighter. While her charges enveloped themselves in sweet smoke, the woman pointed out the kiosks where the visitors could buy cigrenes for themselves.

  As the wait for the last few tourists stretched and the hubbub grew, Bez found herself becoming increasingly uneasy. On the starliner she had enjoyed an impressive level of social exclusion, but down here, with everyone crowded together and eager to sample the local entertainments, the atmosphere had changed.

  Conversations were breaking out all over, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to include her in one.

  Bez edged up to the guide and said, ‘Excuse me, but I just want to get
to my hotel. Is it all right iflleave?’

  The guide turned to her, shades flickering, ‘Oh, aye, Medame Shiqua. Thy accommodation, ‘tis done for thee.’

  It took Bez a moment to identify the response as a question. ‘Er, yes, I’ve pre-booked. I just need a cab. 1 believe 1 can pick one up from outside?’

  ‘Thou surely may. Thy choice is a tanyen hotel. Thou art familiar with tanyen.’

  Tanyen was the term for lone women who were visiting family or working in the city. ‘I understand it is acceptable for female offworld visitors who want to experience the real Gracen to stay in tanyen establishments.’ Her choice made her conspicuous, but it was a risk worth taking when balanced against the kind of attention she would receive in mainstream tourist accommodation.

  ‘Aye, ‘tis so, sister. I merely desired certainty that thy choice was with forethought.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Thy visit is not for the purifying congress.’

  ‘No,’ said Bez shortly. ‘It’s not. I’m an anthropologist.’ People did occasionally come to Gracen for reasons other than sex.

  ‘Then make thy way as thou wilt, sister.’ The guide turned to greet another arrival.

  Bez pressed through the crowd, heading for the exit. As the doors opened she winced at the blast of heat on her face, then walked forward into the thick, hot air. Her robes ramped up their cooling but they could do nothing for the burning sensation on her cheeks, chin and the backs of her hands: A naked star is radiating directly onto my skin!

  She felt a crippling sense of cultural vertigo. Although each hub had a distinctive flavour, they belonged to the same, space-bound society. Yet here she was, on a planet, for the first time in two decades.