How could she finagle an information warrant? Well, first, she could train to become a proper licensed investigator, or, better yet, spend two extra years and become a cop of some kind. Then go through all the legal niceties involved, talk to a series of magistrates, follow all the local ordinances, too…
Or she could hack into Sky Control.
If she could hack worth spit. And with only ten credits, she couldn’t hire anyone from a commercial outfit on the Orbital. Maybe a desperate student training in those black arts might be persuaded to do it pro bono. Hmm.
It was starting to get a bit convoluted and desperate.
Lou picked up the end of Dog’s leash-string, got up from the chair—
—and moaned. Her stiff muscles had locked up after all the exertion. She forced herself upright and handed the chair back to the dataport before lurching off, holding the small of her back, muttering about vengeful gods.
Lou stopped in at Sheb’s to get Dog a bite to eat and something for herself. Sheb fixed the dog a cheese sandwich, the best he could offer, using some of the last of his frozen bread. It had been a long time since fresh deliveries, and it wasn’t worth it to make his own. A few months ago he’d started stockpiling stuff. Lou asked if he had any fruit or vegetables. “I figure my implant stores must be just about shot, so I need to start eating raw materials.”
“Oh yes,” Sheb said, shooting her a look that Lou immediately recognized.
She said, “All right, yes, I know I should have been stocking up so I’d be prepared for a crunch like this, I know that, all right? Should have been a clever squirrel or whatever, storing up acorns against…” She waved her hands around her, indicating the sheer vastness of crap that was her existence. “So, anyway, considering what’s done is done, can I possibly get a bit of fruit or veg?”
Sheb managed to find a pear, a bit past its prime. It was adequate. The juice dribbled down her chin in a delightful way. Lou giggled, feeling weird in this state of extreme fatigue, and wiped at her chin with a white paper napkin. Sheb raised his eyebrows at Lou’s extraordinary odor. “Go home and have a bloody bath!”
Chewing pear pulp, she smiled. “No running water, ‘member?” She sucked the delicious pear flesh. Her salivary glands ached, trying to make saliva.
Sheb scowled, “All right. Use my shower. But hurry the hell up! I’m on a two-minute timer.”
Lou glanced up at him, the smile gone from her face. Sheb had never offered her the use of his shower. With water in such short supply these days, Sheb was probably giving up his own shower for the day. “I can’t, it’s okay, Sheb. I’ll find a public place. Really.”
“The offer’s there. There if you want it. You look—” He wrinkled his nose. “—and smell, like nothin’ I ever saw and I hope I never see again.”
“Really. I’ll manage.”
Sheb shrugged and started polishing a tall soda glass. “In that case, don’t come back in ‘ere in the morning without having a bath.”
Lou took the hint. Dog had finished his sandwich in about three bites flat and was ready. She looked at Sheb, feeling damned awkward about refusing his offer, and wondered if she should try and accept it. Only that would look stupid, having just refused.
Sighing, she climbed down off her stool. “Come on, Dog. See ya, Sheb.”
“See ya, Lou. Hey, you find anything at that hotel?”
“Yeah,” she said. “A dead guy.”
Sheb grinned, and suddenly she felt okay again. He said, “You say hello to him?”
“Nah. He had a hot date with two mysterious females.”
“Oh well. You’re having more fun than me then.”
Fun, yeah, right. She and Dog left; they trudged back to the Metropol, all the way across town. Dusk was settling over the city, and it was getting chilly. Long dark shadows and angular blocks of vibrant amber sunset light were everywhere. The setting sun warmed her still-moist clothes. Sheb was right: she reeked like never before. Dog walked way ahead, upwind.
The city was quiet; most of the day’s refugee population would be inside the StalkPlex by now, jammed in one of the big hangars, Red Cross officers outprocessing them for their ride up to geosynch. Lou knew if she went by the StalkPlex gates now she’d find great mounds of dumped personal effects, wandering pets and livestock, all kinds of heartbreaking stuff. City sanitation systems used to take it all away, but no more. And tomorrow, yet more refugees will stumble into town around dawn, thousands more people from the farms and small towns out on the Plains and up in the Hills.
There was nothing but cold twilight when she got to the fire stair door at the Metropol. Her body felt like it was beyond aching and mere pain. Lou pulled open the door, shooed Dog inside, and stepped into the dark hallway. This should be entertaining, she thought, twelve flights of steps in the dark.
Lou fell three times going up. It was difficult to say which time hurt the most. All of them were scary. She tried to count the steps as she went, but kept losing her concentration. Cool breezes came down from the roof vents, setting off the background odor of mold and rat droppings. There were hollow noises in the walls.
“Gotta get me a new place to crash, Dog.”
“Why are you living on the twelfth floor anyway, Ms. Meagher?”
Lou felt a bitter smile. “At the time, a few months ago, I liked the exercise. Thought it was good to keep moving, maintain muscle tone. I never thought my body would crap out on me quite this fast.”
“Why not just use one of the rooms lower down for the rest of your time here?”
“I just might, you know. But I have to go see if Bloody Tom’s all right. He’s probably worried.” She hated having to factor his feelings into her movements. All her old frustrations and anger with him were coming back the closer she got to her place. Not helped by the strain of climbing … these … bloody … stairs…
She staggered through the twelfth level landing door into the lobby. There was still a little dim violet light coming through the atrium. She squinted, wheezing, and looked around. Dog took a moment to flop on the tile floor and pant. It was nice up here, but she couldn’t afford this kind of thing anymore. If her body was starting its terminal breakdown — and that’s what it felt like, dammit — she needed street-level accommodation, at least for the next few days. Then she could go join the refugees at the StalkPlex, and the handful of other corpses like her who were still around, and the Red Cross could shove her and the others into a freight shuttle, which was fine with her. Dignity was a luxury for the living.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there leaning against the doorjamb.
It was so quiet. She could hear Dog panting and scratching himself. In the distance, through the atrium glass, she heard a couple of cop-hovs whirr along, PA messages blaring.
Lou finally pushed open the doors to her place. She wished she could have a hot bath, maybe a massage — not that most masseurs would touch a person like her these days, at least not without NanoShield gloves, and that rather defeated the purpose.
Inside, it was indigo darkness, with only a handful of light leftover from sunset. Tom’s smell hung in the air. Strange how she recognized it after all these years. She felt herself bristling as she thought of it.
“Dog?” she said, softly, wishing now for a flashlight.
Dog paused. “Odd smell here, Ms. Meagher.”
“That’ll be Tom.”
“No, not Mr. Meagher. Someone else, too.”
Lou felt her stomach clench; the back of her neck tingled. “Explain.”
“Hard to explain. Exotic cologne; possibly an exotic tobacco scent, too.”
“Male or female cologne?”
“I don’t know.”
Lou called out, “Tom?” Her voice sounded hoarse; her throat hurt.
No answer.
She
said to Dog, “Anything on IR or UV?”
“Heat traces on the sofas, not too fresh, looks like three people were seated there. A small plate on one of the conversation tables there has some embers that are still a little warm.”
Lou was glad she’d decided to follow Dog’s advice to bring the gun back from the Raffles roof. It seemed, even to her exhausted mind, too “good” to simply throw away. It was probably bad news, and it was full of useless blanks, but she also reflected that she might yet either need it for some kind of self-defense — she could always clobber someone with the huge thing — or she could probably sell it for emergency money.
She drew the great white thing and held it out before her in both hands, and tried not to think about bad guys with night-vision gear woven into their optic nerves. Her mouth still felt dry.
She and Dog explored the whole suite, finding nothing — other than a suitcase belonging to Tom. It was on the bed in the main bedroom. Must have had it sent down, Lou thought.
Going into the room, swinging the gun around to check behind doors and inside closets, Lou noticed a familiar smell, strong enough she didn’t need Dog to tell her about it.
“He’s been screwing someone!”
Dog confirmed it, and reported that, in addition to the smell of semen and sweat on the hastily straightened bedsheets, the heat-traces in the bed were as fresh as the ones in the main room.
Lou, at first, did not know what to do or what to say. She stood there, frozen with shock, and dropped the gun. It felt like her brain needed a jump-start. Tom? In her bed? She felt rage and cold anger. A sense of betrayal. Let him come into my home, and while I’m out he…
Suddenly she found the will to move. Lou tore the sheets off the bed and found his disgusting stains and stinks. Wanting to tear the sheets into tiny pieces, she found she could only hurl the wadded bedclothes at the wall. The suitcase, she flung at the wall mirror; she screamed so much it hurt, but it also felt good to release that kind of feeling. The mirror shattered; the thousands of shards jangleclanged to the floor, where they dissolved into the carpet. The suitcase tumbled to the floor and landed on its side. Lou wanted to kick the bed to bits, too, but it was too tough. She screamed at the top of her dry lungs, and made a gagging, retching noise that was as close to crying as she could get.
“What the bloody hell does he think he’s doing? Eh? The bastard! The bloody bastard!” She wound up sitting on the bed, holding her head in her hands, her body trying to sob. Why couldn’t he just have stayed out of my life?
Dog, hiding in the doorway, keeping out of trouble, said, “He’s marking territory. Challenging your ownership.”
She looked at Dog. Her face was blotchy and starting to peel. “Well, he’s welcome to it. He’s bloody welcome to it.”
“What do you propose to do now, Ms. Meagher?”
She thought for a while, coughing, getting her breath back. At last, she got up and grabbed Tom’s suitcase. “Complain to the staff that we want another room! Come on, Dog!”
Dog saw the look on her face, and didn’t want to argue. He asked, following behind, “Do you need to take the bag?”
She said, not turning her head as she strode through the main room, “I’m going to dump it in one of the garbage piles.”
“But you don’t know what’s in the bag.”
“So?” She was almost at the double doors now.
“Ms. Meagher!”
Lou stopped and spun around. She was at the door. “What the hell do you want now, Dog?”
Dog could not bear to see her face in its present state. “Well, there might be some money in there or something that would be worth having.”
She could hardly see the pooch, but she could hear him. And she could hear her ragged breathing, and feel the ache in the small of her back where her adrenal glands were trying to crank out adrenaline to match the demand. Standing there, seething about Tom, she thought about how he was ruining even this wretched life she had going here, how it wasn’t enough that he screwed her over twelve years ago, he had to ruin even these last weeks of her existence. She thought about getting back at him, even though he was doomed anyway. It was hard to think straight. It always got hard to think when Tom was around. He brought out the irrational part of her, and she hated that as much as anything. She hated not being in control of herself.
Lou wanted to spit.
She felt her breath coming back to normal. Her body felt cold, as always, and it ached everywhere, and not just from muscle fatigue.
She slumped against the door, wheezing, hurting. “God, what a bitch of a day!”
Dog asked, quietly, “Do you have lamps or some kind of light source here?”
“Yeah, in the kitchen. Come on. Let’s find out Tom’s secrets.”
Lou sat at the counter with the bag before her. Dog had jumped up onto the counter from a chair, and he was nosing at the security panel on the bag. “Do you recognize this kind of device, Ms. Meagher?”
She was tired and held her head up with one hand as she peered at the panel. It was a small flat rectangle, bluish gray in color, with a thin gold border. The whole thing was only about two centimeters by five centimeters. She said, “I only know one way around this kind of lock, Dog.”
“Ms. Meagher? Um, what are you planning?” He looked at her, anxious.
Lou got up and grabbed a big ceramic knife from a rack by the disposal. She always kept it close at hand in case of trouble.
Dog watched her come back to the bag. “What if it’s rigged to explode or something? Isn’t this dangerous?”
She smiled in a way Dog didn’t like. “I’m already dead, so where’s the problem? You better jump down, though, just for the moment.”
Dog complied and hid by the kitchen doorway, looking worried, tail down. “Be careful. I still need your help!”
Lou waved a hand towards the pooch. “It’ll be fine. Trust me.” She plunged the knife into the bag, then braced it with one arm as she sliced an L-shaped opening.
Nothing exploded.
Silent alarm, she thought, going off on Tom’s person right now. Or, a timer is counting down to doing something nasty. Or both, possibly. It wasn’t a particularly expensive bag, nor was the lock device all that fancy. But she knew Tom was cheap about non-essentials. And besides, obviously expensive bags with similarly exotic security devices were all the more tempting to thieves.
“Dog,” Lou said, starting to rummage through layers of simple clothing, “we probably don’t have long, so I suggest you get back up here and help.”
There was no trace of the cologne or tobacco scent that Dog had detected earlier.
Dog resumed his position, but behaved as if he expected the whole thing to spray him, at any moment, with riot gas. It was Dog, in the end, who detected the weapon.
It was a Hawkworth Bioarms NP-2 nanophage launcher, bullpup-format, with a folding stock and a fifty-ampoule magazine. The readout indicated there were nineteen rounds left, and that it was last fired two days ago, and that it had been three days since its last strip and clean.
“Good God!” Lou gasped, as Dog pulled the clothes and toiletries aside to expose the launcher. Lou picked it up, handling the thing with care. Very light, cold to the touch, the weapon looked like it was made of glass. She could see the nineteen small NanoShielded eggs of destruction curled in the magazine. “Now this,” Lou said, “might explode on us!” For all she knew the thing’s outer skin was designed to squirt a nasty bioform of some kind into unauthorized users.
Dog was backing away from it. “Are you sure you should be handling it?”
“To be honest,” she smiled, “no, I’m not sure. I’d love to know what Bloody Tom is doing with it, though.”
“I think you better put it down now, Ms. Meagher.”
But she grinned instead. “I hav
e a better idea.” She folded the gun and dropped it into a pocket in her other trouser leg.
“Ms. Meagher! I wish you hadn’t done that!”
Rummaging about some more, she found a small folded card of Active Paper, its surface in excellent condition, despite the many foldings. She tried touching it all over to make it start, and only got as far as the blue default screen. No control pads surfaced.
More bloody security to crack. She pocketed this, too. If she ever cracked the security, she could probably dump her files into the new Paper. It looked a lot slicker than her own brand X piece of crap. Tom’s small card had a ZenData logo on the back; the logo winked at her and smiled when she looked at it, and it seemed to follow her eyes. Probably came with about twenty different customizable Friends, too, maybe a few of the really rare ones.
Which was all very interesting, and God knew she could use even a virtual social life, but the thing Lou kept wondering about was what the hell Tom was into that he should have gear like this. The gun, for instance. That was counterinsurgency/counterterror military gear designed for soldiers traveling incognito on commercial passenger craft. The first thing that popped into her head, though, was not professional soldier, but terrorist.
Or maybe some kind of high-end thief. She could believe that. She could imagine Tom enjoying researching something like that for a book, and getting caught up in it to the point of getting lost in it.
But why leave it all here for her to find?
Lou wondered about this. “He must have thought I wasn’t coming back before he got back. Or, he figured I wouldn’t snoop into his stuff.”
Also, she wondered, if Tom’s not just a writer these days, could she trust anything else in his story? Did he really have the nanovirus?
The thought of Tom lying to her again and again made her ill, just like always. What was worse, was that she kept buying his damned stories. She took the gun out of her pocket and hefted it, admiring the lethal gleam of its curved, glassy body. This, she thought, is not just a story.
Orbital Burn Page 11
