Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  The Paper’s sniffer had a lot to report. The first items were about the two guys she’d seen in Dog’s memory feed abducting Kid. The sniffer had found the names of the two would-be kidnappers. They were brothers: Michel and Marcel Tourignon, originally from French Mars but residents of Stalktown this past year. Apparently they were trying to establish themselves as brokers in the precious metals trade, which, from the look of things, wasn’t going well. The brothers had a string of prior arrests and convictions for petty crime, mostly info-crime, soft drug possession and minor civic violations.

  There was no mention of any involvement in DNA theft. Possibly that was something more recent they’d gotten into. There were no obvious links to org-crime or tissue dealers, either.

  The brothers Tourignon had hired a van from the city’s Department of Transportation. Paid cash, which put an end to any further snooping after their finances — unless she could finagle her way into the brothers’ bank records, the nearest access point of which would be up on the Orbital. They signed for the van using their real names: the signatures and biometrics checked out. Hmmm, she thought, the boys don’t look like genius material. Maybe it didn’t occur to them to try faking their identities. Lou shot off a note to the clerk, who supervised the transaction, to see if she recalled anything about these two guys.

  Next, she opened the file on her Paper containing the translation of Michel and Marcel’s dialogue as they took Kid back to their van. Skimming the material, she saw it was mostly Michel being angry with Marcel, and Marcel whining about how he was thinking of quitting all of this stupid being a crook crap and about getting a real job on the Orbital. Michel didn’t particularly care what Marcel did; Marcel was a useless parasite anyway and Michel was fed up with having to spend his life looking after him. There was a strong sense, Lou could see, that these guys had been bickering like this all their lives.

  Lou went over the dialogue again, line by line, looking for details. She wondered how the brothers had been tipped off to look for Kid in one of the most obscure parts of the StalkPlex, at the very particular time when Dog would not be around? She kept scrolling, mumbling the dialogue to herself, following each line with her finger. Lou noticed her fingers were looking more dried and pale than they had been yesterday; her fingernails looked longer; the skin had pulled back from the base of the nail.

  “Gonna fall apart before I figure all of this out!” she muttered.

  There! She jabbed her finger at the page: Marcel, between cheap shots at Michel, said something about wanting to talk to “Etienne” about the “arrangement”.

  Lou squinted at the page. “Who the hell is Etienne?”

  Reading on, she found two references to an “Uncle.” Michel had been grumbling about doing Uncle’s busywork, and at another point Marcel said Uncle was a desperate old fart out of his depth.

  Nobody else seemed to get a mention, either by name or by allusion, during the whole conversation. The dialogue was cut short when Dog passed out and his sense-recorders stopped.

  She scratched at her chin, thinking.

  “Suppose,” she said to herself, “Etienne is the Uncle. Keeps it simple.”

  She pulled up a White Pages sniffer and told it, “Find an individual possibly named Etienne Tourignon, or something similar. Search all human space.”

  The sniffer responded with address details for an individual matching that name, living on Ganymede, in Winter City.

  “Is that right?” she said, grinning. When she and Bloody Tom were married they had lived in an apartment in Winter City, not far from the North Aqueduct.

  “Okay,” she said, still smiling, “let’s see what I can find out about you, Uncle Etienne!” Lou set the sniffer to seek out everything they could find about one Etienne Tourignon of Winter City, Ganymede.

  Waiting, she wondered if Uncle Etienne would be wondering what had happened to his nephews?

  Which begged the larger question: where did Etienne get such precise information about the movements of a dog and a little boy on a world more than fifty light-years distant? Mail delivery via hypertube transport could take care of the sending of the orders and perhaps receiving of the reports, though, depending on hypertube weather, it could take a few hours or a few days for the round trip. There were countless hypertube entry and exit points drifting through space in a manner reminiscent of changing weather patterns.

  Lots more digging required yet, she thought. In the waiting silence, those grotesque sounds continued from Dog’s synth-box. Lou almost wished she could switch it off.

  Fresh mail arrived in her Paper’s message buffer. It was all public information relating to Etienne Charles Tourignon; straight from archives on the Orbital. Several megabytes of data, culled from hundreds of different databases. Lou skimmed through applications and pictures and news reports and licenses and corporate records and credit trails and entertainment and shopping profiles and eating preferences and public correspondence.

  “Bloody hell…” she muttered as she involuntarily stroked Dog’s back. “You really need a bath, sunshine!”

  Etienne was a busy man — and very long-lived. Birth records showed he had been born on Mars one hundred and nine years ago. Looking at Etienne in the pictures and vids running on her Paper, Lou wondered if this man, who appeared to be fit and strong, if not very handsome, would want to cheat entropy, and scam the universe itself?

  Lou checked for family and next-of-kin details. She found out Etienne enjoyed the love of two wives, Elyse and Claire-Marie. Etienne also had a brother Michel, who had three sons: Michel, Marcel and Roland.

  The ages matched. Pictures matched, too, more or less.

  Etienne was listed as being the owner and proprietor of a ship construction and chandlery business based on Ganymede. Public company records suggested he was barely scraping by, perhaps even taking losses some years. Space elevators had done away with the need for expensive and complex boosters and re-entry vehicles. The discovery of countless natural hypertubes drifting through the Great Dark had brought about a revolution in interstellar travel. He just could not compete with the new spacecraft made from components grown in nanofabrication chambers, weird-looking ships boasting powerplants ten times smaller than anything previously available and at least five times more powerful — starships, in fact.

  Lou read all this and went, “Hmm…”

  Then she thought about Etienne’s nephew calling him a desperate old fart.

  Desperate!

  Lou looked at the pictures of Etienne, too. He was a short, stocky man, well-anchored to the ground, with a weak chin, riveting dark eyes and a high, receding hairline. Coarse, steel-gray hair swept back from his broad face. He didn’t look like one of the world’s greatest smilers.

  He appeared at all times as a sour old man, regardless of youth treatments. His wives were shown in some of the videos: one, Claire-Marie, looked about his age, blonde and severe; Elyse looked young and shrewd, stiletto beautiful. None of them looked like people Lou wanted anything to do with.

  Sitting back, idly stroking Dog through the blanket, she looked at all this material about the Tourignons. It was too much information, she decided, and swept it all into storage for the moment. She drummed her fingers, and looked out through the bedroom door into the living area, wondered what to do, and thought about Kid, wherever the hell he was.

  She saw shafts of afternoon sunlight slanting down onto the balcony. Her hydroponic vegetables were thriving: the only things in this whole sorry city that showed signs of life. They struggled daily to ripen, mature, and propagate genetic material to the next generation.

  “Where,” she wondered aloud, “did Michel and Marcel go that night?” The recording of Dog’s perceptions got to the point of that weird glitch, and when everything cleared again, Kid was gone from the bag, the van was on fire, and the two guys nowhere in sight.

&n
bsp; What if that glitch was something going wrong with the kidnap? The guys might have grabbed the kid and gone off to hide in the StalkPlex somewhere and were now waiting for their contact.

  How could I find out for sure?

  I could try phoning them, she thought, but that meant a trip downstairs to see the dataport guys again. For a moment she fantasized about buying a high-end piece of Active Paper, with phone access built-in. Her cheap stuff was good, but had limitations.

  Maybe I should just wander over and knock on the door. That’s as good a plan as any. It’s important to find out if the brothers are still here. Would they be silly enough to stay in their own home? Right now it looks like another outfit foiled their kidnapping attempt. If the brothers still had the kid, the other outfit might still want to find them.

  Lou’s mind flashed back on the sounds of Kid’s torture. She shut her eyes, trying to squeeze out the choking sound, trying not to think of those bastards hurting the kid.

  “I’m never gonna find him…” she whispered, staring at the floor.

  She checked Dog. He was still breathing regularly, apparently dreaming, and he had a good temperature. That was something.

  Lou got up and wandered into the main room, restless and wondering what to do. The cops knew something about that night, but denied everything — and she didn’t have any cozy allies inside the Police Authority with whom she could have a discreet word about the true story.

  She thought about the cops’ possible involvement. They were up to some damn thing that night. But the only reason the cops might be willing to look the other way during a kidnap attempt would be if they were getting a cut of some payoff. Lou couldn’t see why the cops would get involved if there was nothing in it for them, and she couldn’t see what Kid might have that would be worth spit.

  Except maybe an encrypted tissue virus.

  Say you’re an evil bastard of an owner wanting to spread some havoc. Plant some nasty data in the genome-lock of some poor disposable kid, and dump him. Everybody thinks the kid is strictly surplus, only good for organ harvest and crap like that — except the kid’s carrying some Trojan Horse monster encrypted in the nucleotides of that one special cell — or maybe in more than that one special cell. Lou had heard of people doing evil things with the junk DNA between genes, and doing it in every cell of a body. You could receive an organ transplant from a Trojan Horsed body and never know what hit you.

  That was something to consider.

  Chapter 7

  Lou heard a vigorous knocking on the door.

  She turned, surprised, and crept into the main room, thinking it might be the damn cops. They’ve come to bust me after all, even if just for the hell of it, because who gave a rat’s ass if you messed with a dead person? Lou popped the flap on her trouser-pocket and hauled out the Bausch and Franke. She thumbed the mode over to ready and disabled the gyros.

  “Who is it?” she yelled in her least welcoming voice.

  There was a fraction of a pause. Then, “Your husband. It’s me, Tom.”

  Tom? Bloody Tom? Here at my place?

  “What the hell do you want?” she yelled, her voice not quite as unaffected as she would like.

  “What do I want? I want to come in! I want to see you, Louise!”

  “I said I wasn’t going to accept your invite, you know. You forgot that?”

  “You never quite actually said that. You said you’d think about it.”

  “Well, I meant I wasn’t going to.”

  Another pause. “I feel rather hurt, Louise. I’ve come all this way down from the hotel, and it’s quite a long ride. Plus, I stopped off and bought you some rather lovely flowers in a range of the kind of garish colors you used to like, and I’ve even picked up some tasty food and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to go with it. I mean to say, I’ve gone to a bit of trouble here, Louise.”

  “Well, gee, Tom, I don’t know if my mother will let me date you.” She swore under her breath.

  “Why must this be so difficult? Huh? Why is that?”

  She yelled, “Because, you moron, we’re divorced! Because I hate your stupid weaselly guts!”

  For a long time she heard nothing other than Tom’s breathing. He sounded annoyed and fed up. Good. She kept the gun out, though.

  “I just want to talk, Louise. All right? Is that so awful?”

  The gun sure was heavy. “What about? I’m very busy.”

  “Just … stuff. Nothing huge. Conversation. Just ordinary conversation.”

  “I thought with all your money you could hire people for conversation.”

  She heard him swear. This was a good sign; it meant she was winning.

  “Besides,” she added, “it’s never just conversation with you, Tom. I’d rather not wake up tomorrow with a broken collar-bone and a black eye, you know? I’m kinda fragile these days.”

  He said nothing to this, but she could hear his breathing. He always insisted that he had never actually hit her. She had imagined it. He would never hurt her. How could he ever hurt her when he loved her so much? Or so he had said.

  “Louise,” he managed at last, “I came forty thousand k’s just to see you.”

  “So, traveling a long way somehow adds up to rights to visit your ex? If you’d come all the way from the Home System does that mean I couldn’t even keep this door closed?”

  “Louise! Anyway — that divorce was never made final. Remember?”

  She crossed her arms, still holding the gun, and scowled. “It’s final enough for me. Now state your damn business or get out of my hotel!”

  “Your hotel? Your hotel?”

  “It’s mine by right of squat.”

  She could almost hear him thinking. “Louise, I figured you wouldn’t come up and see me, so I’ve come down to see you. I don’t have long—”

  “Then you’re wasting the time you do have,” she interjected, smiling.

  “I need to talk to you, Louise.”

  That was a change of tone she didn’t like. “Why, what’s wrong?” Even as she said that, though, a part of her was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. Something was still not quite right. But then, Tom had always been like that; it had just taken her some time and pain to see it.

  “Just let me in and I’ll explain.”

  “You can explain right there.”

  Tom took a long time answering. Then, in a small voice, he muttered, “I had to sell my ship.”

  Lou was momentarily confused. “How could you sell a ship that you said you leased?”

  “Look, will you just let me in, please?”

  Lou knew something wasn’t right here. “You’re trying to tell me you’re broke, Tom? Is that it? You’re broke?”

  “I’m not … broke. Okay? I’m not broke. I’m just not all that liquid.”

  “Aw, bloody hell, Tom. This is just like before. This is just like it.”

  “Louise, I swear on my life it’s nothing to do with gambling or any of that. I just needed some cash in a hurry.”

  “Well, why come to me? I’ve got nothing you could want.”

  “You have a place I could stay.”

  “Tom, there’s over a thousand other rooms in this hotel! Leave me the hell alone!”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Go bug somebody else!”

  He said nothing for a while. She heard him thump the wall. Then, sounding defeated, he said, “Louise, I caught that damned necrosis virus thing. I needed the money for my first tink infusion.”

  Lou stood gasping on her side of the door, not sure what to say. She was shocked but suspicious. Would Tom be scum enough to lie about something like that — to her? She thought probably not. Tom had, in his own twisted little world, always meant well. There was something resembling a good hear
t trapped in there with all the machinery of deceit and dickheadedness. Which meant—

  “Tom?” Crazy scary feelings twisted in her gut.

  “I was diagnosed a couple of weeks ago.”

  Lou dropped her gun hand and gasped, leaning her back against the door, wanting to cry. “Why didn’t you just say that, you stupid bastard? Why all the pissing about lying to me? Tom…”

  “I didn’t honestly know what you might say or even how you were, what you were doing. I just…” She heard him sigh. His voice sounded wobbly.

  Lou turned, took a deep breath, and unlatched her primitive mechanical security devices. She opened the door and let Tom into her living death of a life. “Please,” she said, quietly, “come in.” It was hard to look at him.

  In person Tom Meagher was not all that tall. He had a slight bony frame and a wiry build. Somehow he always managed to look like a starving artist. He was gaunt, more gaunt than he’d looked on the phone, and he was dressed in a fine blue spiderweave suit that hung on him like clothes tossed over the back of a chair. The collar stud was done up, but she reckoned she could get three fingers between the shirt and his dried skin.

  Getting the tink early was helping fight the worst effects, she saw, remembering how she had looked like a mountaineering horror story by the time the docs figured out what to do for her. Her whole body had been breaking apart, cracking open, rotting before her own dying eyes. And that was all before the docs sent her into a coma, to spare her the agony of “transition”. She had never expected to wake up — let alone to a doctor explaining that she was now technically dead, and on an interesting kind of machine life-support. That had been her parents’ doing. They couldn’t accept the death of their only child. Maybe it was the guilt of absentee parents that led them to it, but since the treatment was available, they had insisted she be put on the program, which at least would keep her going, eking out some sort of existence even while the nanovirus continued to ravage her tissues. There was nebulous talk, she remembered, of a cure perhaps only ten years away. She had been waiting ever since her initial diagnosis.