by Steve Perry
She turned around, looked over her shoulder at her rear end. Definitely needed to drop a kilo and tighten that part up, though. You couldn’t let fat get ahead of you. She had been chubby as a little girl, and had worked hard to slim down. It was a lot easier to maintain shape than it was to get there in the first place. Well. When she got rich from selling her documentary, maybe she would hire a good-looking trainer to travel with her, to keep her fit. She grinned. Another pleasant fantasy.
She spent ten minutes enjoying the needle spray and emerged feeling much cleaner. She dried herself, wrapped the towel around her hips, and went to find some clean clothes.
She jumped and almost screamed when she saw the man sitting in the chair in front of her computer. The holoprojic image above the unit showed a pair of men facing each other with a jungle backdrop. Footage she had shot on Rift? Or was it Lee?
“Nice work, Fem Sola,” Lazlo Mourn said. He looked at her and smiled. “Nice shape, too.”
5
She was aware that she was bare from the waist up, but having him see her half-naked was the least of her worries.
“What are you doing here?”
“Watching part of your documentary,” he said. “Waiting for you to finish your shower so we could talk.”
She shook her head.
“You aren’t going to call security and have me thrown out?” He gave her a small grin. A smile that said he was very much aware that there wasn’t enough security in this hotel to remove him if he decided he didn’t want to go.
“Asshole,” she said under her breath. Louder, she said, “Wait right there.” She went to the closest, found a robe, slipped it on and crowed it shut, then wiggled out of the towel and came back to face him. Well. She wasn’t slow. He had spotted her, turned the tail around, and followed her, and he already knew who she was and what she was doing. Sola didn’t much like any of that, but it was what it was. You had to admire his skill.
“You wanted to put me in this?” He waved at the image, now frozen into small statues in the air.
“Yes.”
“I’m flattered.”
“I think maybe you’re not so easily flattered, M. Mourn.”
“Well, if truth must be told, no.”
She nodded.
“Generally, it’s not a good idea for players to be too well known. I’d hate, at my age, to have to start wearing a skinmask everywhere I went. Why would I want to be in your entcom?”
“I could pay you when it sells.”
He smiled again. Had a lot of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. No surgery to look younger that she could tell. He said, “I have a fair amount of stads tucked away I’m not using. See this?” He pulled a hand wand from his pocket and waved it. “The maker of this little toy pays me a couple thousand a month to endorse it. I also have armored clothes, slap-caps, blades, and a particular medical service I use when I can, all of whom also pay me so they can put my name in their ads. Just my name, not my face. There are a few big-time gamblers who cover the matches that like me enough to let me in on their action. I actually do real well. Probably a lot better than you.”
She knew that. “How about my undying gratitude?”
He laughed. “There was a time what an offer like that from a beautiful woman would have been irresistible.”
“Not now?”
“Not for a while, no.”
“What would it take?”
He smiled again. He stood, moving with the grace of a professional athlete.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes. I found out what I came for. Good luck on your project, fem.” He started for the door.
“Wait. Don’t go.”
He paused. Raised an eyebrow.
She looked at him. He was an attractive enough man, she was an adult. She started to make the offer: “What if I . . . ?” She stopped. Shook her head.
He chuckled.
“You knew what I was going to say?”
He shrugged. “I believe so. Why didn’t you finish it?”
“Would it have done any good? Offering to sleep with you?”
“I expect not.”
“That’s why I didn’t say it.”
He nodded. Started to turn away again. He didn’t need money or fame. A man like him wouldn’t have any trouble finding company for sex. He had traveled the galaxy, seen its wonders, pitted himself against men and women in hand-to-hand combat, won many times, and lost a few—so what could she offer him that he didn’t already have?
“I’ll tell your story,” she said.
He looked at her. “For your own ends.”
“Of course. But for yours, too.”
“Why?”
“Because it matters.”
He stood there for what seemed a long time. “You think?”
“Yes.” She smiled. She had him!
Then he laughed softly. “This one work for you a lot?”
She had to smile in return, despite herself. “Well. A couple times it has.”
He nodded. “You sounded almost sincere.”
“I almost was. You don’t think people would find your story interesting?”
“Actually, I expect that many would. I’m just not interested in telling it. Nice to have met you, F. Sola. Have a nice life.”
Aw, shit, she thought, as he left.
6
The trip to Wu’s orbit from Tatsu’s was fast and uneventful. Azul caught a boxcar for the drop from the orbital station, and that was just as dull. Half an hour later, she breezed through the checkpoint, courtesy of her priority alpha visa stamp. The ID was as real as anybody’s, given its source, but under a different name with a thick, fake background. She smiled as the clerk saw the shimmering hologram appear over his cube reader, watched him raise an eyebrow. They called it DFWM, the stamp. What that meant was, “Don’t Fuck With Me,” and they didn’t give it to you unless you had mondo clout, big stads in your wallet, or high Confederation connections. Sometimes all three. A small perk, and she enjoyed it. Not that she had any such desire, but if she wanted to smuggle sunstones or psycho-erotic drugs, she could, because no customs agent in his or her right mind would dare stop somebody with the stamp. Whoever you were, you had to be important to rate it, and fucking with important people could easily cost you your job. Or worse.
Hey, have a great day, Citizen, and enjoy your trip!
She was ten meters past the checkpoint when an op approached her. He was tall, handsome, probably her age, and built like a gymnast. Nice.
He handed her a marble-sized info ball, smiled, and walked away. Never said a word.
She pocketed the ball. Soon as she found a private spot, she’d pop it into her reader and see what was so fucking important.
But: She saw something that gave her pause. There was a thin, small woman to her left, trying to be invisible.
You couldn’t really be invisible, not even in one of the state-of-the-art shiftsuits—in those, you could blend into the background pretty damned well, but somebody really looking could spot you, and any decent LOS motion sensor would point right at you. With the right mind-set, however, you could become effectively harder to notice. People’s gazes would slide past—sure, they’d see you, but they wouldn’t pay any attention to you, and that was almost as good as being invisible, at least in some circumstances.
The little woman was trying to project that energy, and Azul knew it because it was one of her own tricks.
Now, maybe the little woman didn’t have anything to do with her; maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe she had been set to collect somebody else, but Azul didn’t put much stock in coincidence. A top UO blows into port, and there’s somebody who is, if you know how to look, a watcher, just standing there?
You might not get to go home if you let one like that slide more than once or twice in your career.
So, assume the little woman was here for her. Okay, no problem, she’d been tailed before, and probably would be again, but the bigger question w
as, who had sent her?
Not her people. Pachel was a dickhead, but he knew that if he got caught spying on his own, it would be bad. In her case, she might not be able to pack it in and walk away, but she damn sure could drag her heels on whatever assignment she was on and do it in such a way they’d never be able to prove it for sure without a brain strain. At this point, she was worth more to the Confed with her mind intact, and she knew it, so past a certain point, they wouldn’t fuck with her.
So. Who had sent the surveillance? And why? Get one, she’d get the other, but she needed to figure that out before she moved too far along in her assignment.
Could be the watcher was from the Confed’s Planetary Representative, though that didn’t make any sense either. Why bother? She was here by his call, it wasn’t as if she was gonna turn around and walk away. The handsome op who’d delivered the info ball was enough. He could have crooked his finger, and she’d have gone with him.
Who did that leave?
Nobody else on this world ought to know who she was. None of the six names for which she had IDs were more than a couple days old, and the newest one she was using for herself? She’d never spoken that one aloud. She was a nonperson to anybody outside CI, and none of her tags should draw any interest at all.
What made sense was, the watcher was connected to the reason the PR had called her here. Maybe somebody had figured out that he’d put out a sig for an undercover op, and they wanted to see who it was.
If that was the case, if she was burned before she ever got out of the fucking groundport, then she might as well turn around and get back on the next boxcar up to the orbital, because the only way she could effectively work was if nobody here knew who she was. Hard to be a sub-rosa op if you are carrying around a big flashing sign that says “Spy!” in glowing letters.
The watcher had probably attached herself to the pretty boy who had come to give Azul the info ball, and if that was the case, then the little woman who was trying to be invisible now knew who she was, and it was game over.
Azul kept walking as she considered all this, trying to look unconcerned. Abruptly, the solution to this last problem welled up in her thoughts. If there was but one watcher set to find her, if there wasn’t another one dogging her tracks, then maybe things could be . . . repaired.
First, she had to determine what the situation was, vis-à-vis being shadowed. If the woman was alone, then she had an option.
Okay. Let’s see who you are and what you got, flo’man . . .
Mourn smiled at the encounter again as he exited the hotel. It wasn’t as if he didn’t do that fairly frequently—smile—but it was rare these days that there was any real amusement in those expressions. Long ago and far away, there had been much more of that, but not lately. He had liked Sola. The woman had nerve. Of course, she was young and ambitious, and with her beauty, that was a dangerous combination.
He spent thirty minutes making sure he wasn’t followed, including a check for hidden transmitters in his clothes. He hadn’t brushed up against anybody, nor had he felt the tap of a blowgun burr hitting him, but it was always better safe than sorry.
When he was sure he was clean, he worked his way back to his primary house. He always rented two places whenever he moved to a new city, under different names. They were usually close enough so he could walk from one to the other, and sometimes in the middle of the night, he would arise and do just that.
Caution was automatic after all the years.
The primary residence was a small single-family condo with a yard, in the suburbs of the city, with the secondary being a room in a megaplex a couple of blocks away. Whenever he could, he liked to get a place with a yard, preferably one with a tall privacy fence. He liked to train outside.
A quick transponder check of his bioelectronic telltales showed that nobody had come calling—the locked gate for the everplast fence had not been opened, unless the person who did it was an electronics genius. Once inside with the gate locked, he did a scan of the yard, in case somebody had managed to make it over the two-and-a-half-meter-high fence. Apparently nobody had. Then he checked the house. He was alone.
He went to the com. He seldom carried a personal unit, it was too easy to locate somebody who was tied into a planetary communications net. Some planets were not above bugging personal coms so that they would send out a position sig even when the thing was ostensibly turned off. Could make for a nasty surprise if somebody got globesat codes and decided to pay you an unannounced visit. Yeah, he ran below the Confed’s Doppler, at least most of the time, but it was a big dog, and if it got on your trail, you’d be hard-pressed to outrun it. Why open yourself to any more risk than you had to?
The com unit he had in the house wore a scrambler and a detector to tell him in case somebody tried to tap into it. He set it for vox-only and instructed it to access the number he had memorized. He didn’t bother to rascal his voice.
“Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Theo Popper.”
There was a pause. That would be Popper running Mourn’s voice through his ID program. “Mourn,” he said. “I thought that was you. Nice to hear from you.”
“Always my pleasure,” Mourn said.
Popper made some money as an information broker, but mostly he was a handicapper, a bookie for those who wanted to bet on Flex matches. For this reason, he kept track of ranked players who showed up in his sector.
“What can I do for you, Mourn?”
“Just checking in. Anybody in the sector I should know about?”
“Not really. Been fairly slow here on the homeworld the last few months. You’re the only Top Twenty guy still alive on-planet. Well. Except for Weems.”
Weems? Jesu!
“You just loved dropping that on me, didn’t you?”
Popper laughed, a rough, ragged sound caused by too many flickstiks smoked over too many years. Man always had one lit.
Z. B. Weems was the top of the heap—the Number One Ranked Player in the Musashi Flex, El Primero. A man who could kill with either hand—or a foot or elbow or a head butt—without bothering to resort to his favorite weapon, a plain old carbon-fiber cane. With that in hand, he pretty much could beat the crap out of everybody—at least he had so far—nobody could touch him with anything short of a firearm, and even that would be iffy if he was within ten meters when they reached for their weapon. Weems was a light heavy, but as fast as a flyweight, unnaturally fast, and as hard as a leather sack full of granite. He had been the best for more than a year, and that was impressive these days.
“I don’t suppose you want to have a go at him?” Popper said.
Mourn laughed. “You don’t suppose right. I couldn’t anyway.”
“Yeah, you could. After Harnett, you made it to Ten.”
Interesting. Among the convoluted rules of the Flex and its intricate scoring were several that laid out who could challenge whom. Basically, you could theoretically go up against anybody who was ranked lower, but you didn’t get any points unless you beat somebody who was within ten of your own rank, and even then only a few points, if you were lucky. Going the other way, you couldn’t challenge anybody in the top hundred who was more than ten ranks above you without a dispensation from the Rules Committee. As a practical matter, the RC didn’t give those out. This was to keep the high ranks from having to deal with every dim-brained kid who thought he had a hand that was better than his rank. If you tried to jump too many levels, the higher-ranked player was allowed to stop you by whatever means possible, and even if he didn’t, and you somehow won, you wouldn’t get the victory. If you were stupid enough to try, the Enforcers would chill you. That tended to keep the fool count in the game down somewhat. He’d made it to Ten once before, briefly, but that had been a couple years back.
“I’ll pass,” Mourn said.
“Too bad. I could have made some stads.”
“Really? Who’d bet on me?”
“Give high enough odds, they come,” Popper said. “
Always some dweeb who’s got a system.”
“Anybody else?”
“Nobody who can challenge you. And unless Weems is bored, he probably won’t go looking for you.”
“He knows I’m here.”
“I might have mentioned it. He wasn’t impressed.”
Mourn laughed. “Thanks for the info, Popper.”
“Hey, it’s what I do. Let me know if you mean to thump somebody I might have missed.”
“I will.”
Business concluded, Mourn shut off the com and went to the yard to begin his workout.
Luna Azul was certain that she had but a single watcher as she left the port and began to walk. Unlike the last world she’d been on, it was warm. Different hemisphere, different season. Not unduly hot, but enough so that a brisk walk quickly caused a sweat to break. At least it wasn’t so humid that the sweat didn’t evaporate. She hated climates like that, where the perspiration soaked your clothes and kept them wet, and when it pooled in your shoes . . .
If the watcher was surprised that she didn’t catch a commercial transport, she gave no sign of it. The little woman immediately crossed the street and began a side tail, staying out of Azul’s peripheral vision. If she hadn’t known who the woman was, she would have picked her up eventually, but the tail was good enough so it might have taken a little while.
It didn’t take long to find a place she liked. A cut-through from this street to the next, not really an alley, but not really a road, either, more like a wide driveway.
Azul took the turn, and as soon as she was out of her watcher’s sight, she began a sprint. A hundred meters in, she spotted a trash bin. It was sealed, a truck-lock on it, so people too cheap to pay for haulers couldn’t dump their garbage into it. But it was also far enough from the building wall so that somebody could slip behind the heavy, dark green plastcast container, which was two meters tall and twice that wide, set upon four squat wheels.
