by Horizons
“And we appreciate the butts you kiss, believe me.” Dane’s earnest tone brought more laughter. “But we need to talk about this new tariff. I don’t know about you, but a bunch of folk I’ve talked to, the ones who still have to boost stuff up here, are really hurting. We’re on a thin enough margin already. What does the NAA want? Is it out to bankrupt us all, repo the can?”
Cheers erupted, some whistles, but not that many. The crowd buzzed, anger and agreement sweeping his senses like a hot wind. He blinked into the Con for a few seconds, did a quick surf. Yep, it mimicked the townplaza tone pretty closely. Little less enthusiasm from the skinside merchants who depended on downside traffic, more from the service level folk who had local businesses on the side, like the juice seller.
“Yeah, they probably wouldn’t mind if they could repo this place.” Laif raised his voice. “We’re a pain in the butt up here. They’d love to do away with the lifetime leases they handed out back when nobody wanted to live long-term up here. Then they could stick a bunch of nice obedient tenant-farmers up here, like New Singapore has.” His face grew grim as the crowd quieted. “But I don’t plan to go along with that. I’ve been pressuring them to let us impose that tariff on the refined metals and spider silk they’re so hungry for down there?collect on all that stuff going down the Ellevators. Told ‘em it’s to pay for more rock jocks out scouring the skies for falling stones that might mess up the cities down there.” He waited for the applause and clapping to fade. “They’re listening. Falling rocks scare ‘em.”
”What do we use as a lever next time, Admin?” Dane crossed his arms, his body language challenging, despite the smile on his face. “And the time after that? It’s gotta stop some day. If we ever want to start expanding on our own, we gotta stop hemorrhaging raw materials and credit down there!”
Cheers bigtime, solid enthusiasm, only a couple of whistles, but then the ones who didn’t want independence for the orbitals mostly didn’t show up in person at the townplazas. It’s in your court, Laif , Dane thought. We need a good slam here.
“Jeeze, Nilsson, I don’t know what game plan I’m going to run until I know what the game is.” Laif shook his head tolerantly, but anger flashed in his dark eyes, bright as the emerald. “Why don’t you get yourself appointed to my job for awhile. See how well you walk this tightrope, huh?”
“I’d rather stand down here and ask the questions.” Not good enough , Dane thought. Come on, Laif.
Cancel that percentage we’re seeing.
“I got a question for you, Admin.” A small taut man appeared as the crowd gave him space. “Why walk that tightrope of yours, huh? You’re right. It’s gotta be a tough job. Gets you a paycheck, sure. But that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of payoff for a tough job.” The crowd fell silent. The man was a stranger, small and mixedeuro with a narrow face and a fanatic’s eyes. Fringer? Dane watched him, senses alert.
One of the extremes who were ready to go to war with the planet? Dane didn’t recognize him from the NOW meett:ngs. New here?
”We pay the tariffs on stuff we haul up and they make sure we have to haul it up, so it’s a sweet deal.”
He turned his back on the Admin, his voice rising, body swaying with the cadence of his words. “Only way out, I see, is to tell the heavyweights the rules instead of saying ‘yessir’ and standing around in crowds like this, blowing air. Wow, our Administrator might get us some credit on a few pounds of metal going downside. Who cares? They own us and they know it!” He turned and pointed at Laif -the rude gesture eliciting a murmur of disapproval. “I think you’re getting paid to help ‘em own us.”
The crowd erupted again. Some whistles, too much applause, the anger back, just like that. Damn.
“Now hold on.” Laif strode to the edge of the podium, his anger radiating, real this time. “You walk in here and accuse me of being on their downsider team, then you better be ready to back it up,” he boomed. “You want to do that?”
“You bet, mister Administrator.” The small fringer stood alonein a wide space now and the crowd fell instantly silent. “What about those investments you made this week? Downsider companies. I’ve been watching for that sort of sneaky backdoor type of deal, and hey ho, Mister On Our Side, I sure found it.
You bought a nice slice of a pretty profitable sea farm off China. Profits go into a downside bank, and they’re nice profits. Retirement fund? Pretty sweet deal, boss man. Don’t want all your eggs up here in the basket with us, huh? They sure must pay you a good salary if you can buy something that pricey.”
Shouts of outrage, applause, and whistles filled the plaza. Laif was saying something, yelling. Dane hopped lightly down from his
perch, merging with the throng, nodding, shrugging, agreeing, shaking his head as he worked his way toward the fringer. He caught a
hard thread of a cold, calculating satisfaction as he neared the site where he’d seen the man last, but if the emotion belonged to the agitator, he couldn’t tell, couldn’t spot him in the surging crowd.
“Do you believe him?” A woman stepped front of him, her chest heaving with anger, her euro-latino face pale. “Laif ‘s on our side, he wouldn’t sell out.”
“Why say it if it’s not true?” A smaller mixed afroamerican-asian man pushed between them. “We can check and—” his gaze went vacant as he checked the Con—”Oh, gods, it is true. It’s all over the Con.
He bought the shares, he’s selling us out, can you believe it?”
Danefroze just for an instant. Bad. He glanced toward the
podium, but Laif was no longer there, was down on the floor, gesticulating, not losing his cool but danm busy right now. They weren’t giving him much space, either. The afro—asian wasn’t the only one who had checked the Con
Dane made his way through the crowd,watching for the agitator. He wasgoo d. He was a stranger.
Might be a smart idea to invite him to the next little get together of NOW, get a handle on where he came from, what he was up to. He blinked into the Con. Yeah, a few hundred people had found the new purchase made by Laif or at least by someone with credit registered to Laif Jones Egret and hidden just enough to make it believable. If you didn’t think about it too hard.
Dane skipped across a half dozen Con threads, dropping cormmentsinto the raging torrent of words.
Dumb move for someone as smart as Laif. Pretty easy to really hide your tracks. Stupid to leave the evidence just sitting there, waiting for some fool to stumble over. Dane skipped here and there, using the various solid personas that Noah had hacked up for him, slick enough to fool even Con security. Bit by bit, his planted questions began to ripple through the outcry.
Without warning, his implanted link buzzed, tickling the skinon his shoulder. An alarm. He blinked his link open. Someone was trying to get past the security lock on Elevator 3B.
Which wouldn’t be a big concern except that Koi lay locked into the med-unit in the core, and 3B was the closest elevator to the core. Which suggested that someone was after Koi.
Good luck, Laif,Dane thought as he headed fast for the corridors and the nearest elevator bay. You’re on your own. As he reached the corridor he felt someone’s pointed attention on him, but when he looked around, the corridor was empty.
Damn.
This had the feel of a very well-planned set-up.
Dane pushed himself into a skimming run, taking the long flatstrid es that lowG allowed. He took the closest service elevator, thumbed in manual control and sent the bare unit up at max speed. He shot out of the door as it opened, pulling goggles from his belt clip, even as he soared through the aisles of ‘ponic tubes. A couple of Koi’s people flanked him, worrying. Hide, he told them silently. Just in case. They vanished instantly. He slowed as he neared the control room, checking his link. According to his security system, the intruder hadn’t managed to disable the lock on 3B yet. Dane kolled hismo mentum on the side of the control center, slung himself intothe lock and eyeballed the inner door open. He glanced
at Koi’s glazed and dreaming face, then opened the main control field,one toe tucked under the grab bar in front oh the main console as the icons blinked to life.
Nothing. Dane stared for a long moment at the security readout, then shut down the field, pried loose an access panel in the conntrol wall, and slid his hand in behind a tangle of wires. Removed a small lethal-grade stunner. For a moment he stared down at the palm-sized gray oblong, then he slipped it into his singlesuit, and grim faced, let himself out through the lock.
Salad vegetables surrounded Elevator 3B, spirals of red, green, and yellow lettuces and leafy plants, herbs, tomato vines trained around the ‘ponic tubes. Dane slowed, drifting to a halt at the elevator entry, eyeballed the control scanner and paused, his eyes on the door.
If Li Zhen opened the door?
Dane slipped the stunner from his suit, thumbed the control to non-lethal. Killed the security lock. Then he pushed off, drifting away from the light, fading into the leafy vines of a tomato’s sprawl where the heavy crop of orange, ripening fruit would camouflage his NYUp uniform. The elevator whispered to a stop. Dane drew a slow breath, relaxed his muscles, stunner aimed at the door.
It sighed open.
The empty compartment yawned at him.
With a shrug, Dane pushed over to the elevator and sent the car back down. Frowning, he headed back to the control center to up the security levels for all access points. It would be a nuisance beecause he’d have to okay every shipment going down, but that was his only option right now.
Thoughtfully, Dane kicked his way back to the control center. There, he reset security, okayed the shipments scheduled to go out in the next shift, then turned to Koi. He touched the boy’s face and for an instant, Koi’s glazed stare sharpened into focus. He tried to smile.
“You’re just about finished here,” Dane murmured. “I think I’m going to let you out a little early. You can finish the job on your own, okay?” The fractures were 90 percent solid and the organ damage had already finished healing. He’d be okay kicking around and a whole lot safer than he was tied down here.
Dane overrode the med-unit’s program and ended the healing protocol.
Drifting, he watched Koi’s eyes brighten as the unit sent drugs down The microtubing implanted in his veins, banishing the heavy soporifics that kept him immobile for the enhanced healing, shutting off the stimulation protocol that kept muscles and tissues healthy and toned while healing progressed. Koi blinked as the microtubes and catheters withdrew and the unit opened to release him. He moved a shoulder and drifted upward with perfect control. Yawned and stretched, without drifting a hair.
“Did she come back?” Koi’s cloudy eyes glowed with memory. “The pretty one?”
“Ahni?” Dane shook his head. “I hope she’s safe.” His smile disappeared. “The people who took you tried to come back up here.”
Koi shivered. “It hurts down there. I can’t breathe.” He pushed himself off with one toe, drifted toward the refreshment panel. “The ones who took me … they hurt me. But the one down there, he looked at me for a long time. Took blood out of my arm, but he didn’t hurt me, like they did.”
“I think it was Li Zhen, the Chairman of Dragon Home. I sure wonder how he fits into this.” Dane closed his hand gently around Koi’s fragile arm. “You need to stay invisible. It’s really important.”
“We will.” Koi gave him a sideways look. “How come we scare them?”
“You scare them, because you’re different.” Dane let his breath out in exasperation. “The downsiders, I mean. The people up here … they’ll get used to you. Later. When the downsiders can’t do anything about you.”
“Stupid.” Koi pushed off delicately with one toe, arching into a slow and perfect back somersault, his body supple as an Earth-ocean dolphin. “I don’t want to live down there anyway.”
“You’re right, it is stupid, and it’s really a downsider fear,” Dane said patiently. “Right now, we’ve got some other things to fix.”
“Uh oh, is Laif in trouble again?” Koi rolled an eye at him. “He’s always in trouble isn’t he?”
”Not really.” But Dane had to smile. “It’s a tough job, trying to run the orbital from our end of the Elevator and from the North American Alliance’s side at the same time. But we need him.”
“Okay.” Koi pushed off harder this time, arching into another perfect somersault.
The chip in Dane’s shoulder tickled, and he pushed over to the control desk, brought up the field. “Laif’s on his way up. Let’s go meet him.” He snagged an extra pair of goggles from a gear hammmock, pushed off for the lock. Koi drifted along beside him.
“You take it easy,” Dane told him sternly. “I let you out early. Get wild and those bones might crack again.”
“I’m not going to get wild,” Koi said loftily.
“Noah’s going to need your help,” Dane told him. “Somebody bought an expensive aqua culture farm Earthside. They did it with credit registered to Laif. It’s a frame, but we need to know who did it and how, and Noah’s stuck downside for a few days.”
“No problem.” Koi spun effortlessly, his trajectory wobbling not at all. “That why you woke me up early?” He smirked at Dane as he shot ahead of him.
“I woke you up so you wouldn’t be a gift-wrapped prize for someone walking through Security,” Dane snapped after him.
“Sorry, Dane.” Koi slowed his momentum with a complex shiver of limbs. “If somebody made that downside buy so easy, I bet I can track ‘em back, if Noah’s busy. He says I’m almost as good as he is, now.”
“I hope so.” Dane killed his momentum on a tube planted to Asian eggplant, placing his hand carefully between the narrow, black fruits. What had Noah said of Koi? A pain to teach, but really creative . A shred of blossom drifted away from the tube and one of his frog-flies darted out to seize it, ricocheted off the next tube, vannished back into its sheltered niche on the eggplant tube. The small creatures he had created had adapted so effortlessly to microG. Within a single generation, many of them - phenotypes shifting radically, genes expressing in surprising ways.
Like Koi and his family.
The elevator doors opened and Laif drifted out, squinting in the brilliant light. He looked … battered.
Dane pushed off. “Here.” He shoved the spare set of goggles into Laif’s hand. “Sorry I had to cut out. I had an intruder down here, and not an accidental one either.”
“That’s all we need.” Laif pulled the goggles into place, his voice weary. “A legal fuss about Koi’s folk would be the last straw right now.”
“I sort of thought of that,” Dane drawled.
“You know, you and your family are a great big pain, kid.” Laif had drifted clear of the tubes, stalled now, out of reach of anything to push off of. “Damn, I’m bad at this. Koi, gimme a hand.” He , eld out one of his long-fingered hands. It engulfed Koi’s but instead of pulling Laif in closer to a tube, Koi pushed off, gave Laif’s arm a sharp downward jerk and spun the tall Administrator into an ungainly somersault.
Laif yelled.
Doing a neat somersault turn off another tube … without bruising a leaf … Koi snagged Laif by one wrist and stilled his spin with impressive precision, then shoved the Admin face first into a rube planted with tomato vines–just hard enough to squash the fruit–and arrowed away into the green light.
“Damn!” Laif sputtered, wiping red tomato juice from his face . A cloud of frog-flies darted about him, scooping up the drifting droplets and fragments of pulp. “Double damn.” Laif waived at them. “Good thing you didn’t make them bite. Everything up here is better than I am in microG. What did I say to piss him off?” Laif wiped his face on his arm. ”You got a towel somewhere? I need you to find out who planted that fake purchase. I had hell’s own time getting up here without anyone seeing. Everybody wants to ask me personally about that. If I ever get hold of the SOB who did it, he’s airlocked.”
”You called Koi’s family a pain in th
e butt, Laif. And whoever that was down there today, he sure stuck it to us.” Dane regarded the Administrator thoughtfully. “Come along and clean up. Tell me how bad it got after I left. I did manage to seed some questions about that ‘sale’ into the Con. Dunno if it did any good. Haven’t had time to drop in again. Noah’ll tell me.”
“I guess it worked. Last time I sampled – on the way down here – people were wondering just when I got so stupid. Something I wonder almost daily, but we won’t tell anyone.” Laif’s laugh sounded loud, even down here in the vastness of the garden.
Dane smiled. “Only you could laugh right now.”
“Beats screaming and crying and tearing my hair … which I don’t have. Slow down will you?” Panting he caught up to Dane, leaving a trail of damage behind him about as bad as Ahni had done. “So where did that asshole come from? Is he one of your crowd?”
”No, he’s not a member of NOW. Not yet.” Dane slowed as they approached his home, waited for Laif to catch up to him. “I think I’ll invite him though. If I can find him. He’s an outsider. New to me. Makes me wonder.”
Laif grunted, made his way through the twined tubes that made up the shell of Dane’s living space. “We need to know who holds his leash. According to his entry data, he’s an NAA citizen, recently employed as a contract code writer for some little manufacturing. That’s crap. Made up story.”
“I thought so, too.” Dane pushed across the spherical space, reetrieved a towel from a storage hammock, sailed it toward Laif. “I think he’s a pro, doing a job. Did you get my forward of Noah’s report?”
“Yes.” Laif snagged the towel, scrubbed his face. “Two percent is bad. We can’t go to the Council yet.
That pricey synthesist we hired downside tells me it’s a ninety-two percent certainty that an autonomy motion on behalf of the platforms would go down. I don’t get it. People up here have been getting increasingly unhappy with NAA control, but it’s been a steady curve. How come it’s heatting up now?”
