Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  Look at her now. Bloody chefs, for God’s sake, were sitting around downstairs waiting for her to order the most exotic dish in known space.

  Such luxury, such waste.

  For a while Lou thought about getting out of the couch, contacting Otaru and telling them all about this latest development, except somehow she figured those guys probably already knew about Kid. It was just a feeling she had.

  Now that Kid was dead she figured he’d be nanotomed, sliced down to individual cells, and perhaps into yet smaller pieces. It made her shudder, thinking about it. She looked at her hands, flexed the tendons, and studied the lines on her palms, wondering idly what a palm reader would make of her life line. But also she thought about how whole she felt, how indivisible. She didn’t feel like a creature made of trillions of tiny blocks of biological goo; she felt like … Lou. She supposed Kid had felt the same way, if he had ever stopped to think about stuff like that. Or, indeed, if he could.

  And while on the subject of weird things to think about, what was all that stuff Otaru asked about “souls”? Lou supposed, like most people, that she had one. But this thought was born more of convenience than of deep reflection. Everybody has a soul, same as they have all the rest of the usual equipment. The only difference was, she had died, though she remained conscious. Lou remembered getting a visit from the hospital chaplain a day or so after her transition to Stage One. A nice lady priest, she wanted to know if Louise had any questions that she might want to ask about the spiritual or religious aspects of what she had been through. Lou had sent her away, feeling creeped out at the idea of thinking about religion. It wasn’t her thing.

  But now, after her encounter with Otaru, and the business with Kid, she found herself thinking about it a lot. She found herself remembering the image of Kid that she had seen in the memory-feed from Dog on that first day.

  How can all this be about a sick little kid? And what will all those powerful types, who Otaru said were interested in the matter, do now that Kid is gone? Will they all just wash their hands of the affair and say a collective “well, too bad!” and go on with their murky existences?

  Will Dog forgive me? She was surprised by how much she felt this mattered to her.

  What the hell is the point of having a soul, anyway? Lou had always figured, when she bothered to think about it at all, that it was something like the appendix. Okay to have, but no great loss if you didn’t have it. Lou also didn’t worry much about the afterlife. She figured that when she eventually turned to dust, that would be that.

  It was too much to think about. Dammit, how could those bastards keep her fugued out when they knew she had a job to do?

  Okay, she figured that realistically, the night those spec-ops guys bagged her and Dog in the penthouse, she’d been nearly finished on her feet. Running on adrenaline and stress that day, she’d been too busy to simply lie down and break apart. But she had been closer then to finding the bloody kid than she was now.

  So, what was left to do? Tie up loose ends, she supposed. Try to see Etienne, maybe. See what he gets up to when he’s not running a flagging shipbuilding company.

  See what he knows about suddenly dead nephews.

  Which reminded her: there was no trace of Kid in the brothers’ rooms.

  It was troubling, now that she reflected on it. It opened up all kinds of nasty possibilities.

  On the other hand, maybe the brothers fought over who should keep the kid. One brother could have been somewhere in town with the kid, trying to scrounge up some kind of medical care, and the other could have been in the Raffles rooms, where someone else, lacking skill, did him in. Even Lou could see that that guy had been killed in the heat of some kind of rage. She paid enough attention to the media feeds to know professional killers were a lot tidier.

  She lay there, eyes half-open, feeling as lousy as ever. This whole thing was a thorough botch from end to bloody end.

  But her mind kept chewing on it all. Suppose, she thought, there is a third party involved who snatched the kid from the brothers that night?

  Her thoughts returned to the Stalktown cops. Low on funds, resources and supervision, they might jump at the chance to make some cash. “Cops!” she snorted, thinking she must be getting desperate to start thinking like this. The cops were much too busy killing looters and squatters and anybody who looked at them funny.

  Lou lay on the couch, the acceleration pressing on her like a hefty weight, a reminder of how she’d been a long time ago, before the nanovirus attacked. It was a bit eerie, feeling heavy, and experiencing no sense of movement. She let her mind drift, trying not to think about this crap. Her mind had other ideas, and she kept coming back to bizarre scenarios in which the cops hijacked the kid from the brothers and then offered to trade him back to the brothers at some huge cost, giving the cops a nice profit on the operation, and the only witnesses to the whole deal were two guys the cops could bust on some kind of abduction charge anyway. It was beautiful. It explained everything.

  Etienne sure would come running over that, Lou thought. She imagined the brothers contacting their uncle and explaining how they needed some colossal amount of money to buy back the kid they were meant to bag for him in the first place. She imagined Etienne being big-time unimpressed by the idea of his boys getting pirated and extorted. Word of the whole mess would have to get out to Etienne’s rivals. The embarrassment would be substantial.

  But where did Etienne find out about the precise whereabouts of the kid that night? She still hadn’t figured this out. Presumably, Lou figured, the wheels in her head turning despite herself, it was the same person who told him about the great commercial opportunity that awaited him if he bagged this innocuous, dying, disposable child, who nobody in human space would miss. I mean, his owner had already dumped the kid! How much trouble could it possibly be to snatch him?

  “All of which,” she sighed, “proves not a damn thing.” All she had was speculation and a pretty theory that happened to explain the evidence she had, which she knew all too well was incomplete.

  It had not been like this when Lou first got into the investigating biz. When she got to Stalktown after fleeing the misery of Bloody Tom, she found it hard to find work, even in what was then a booming economy. And not only in Stalktown, either, but in all the outlying settlements across the continent. The whole place seemed like jobs would fall from the sky, like rain — if you were alive.

  And it wasn’t like she was a dummy, either. Lou’s parents were high-powered space engineers, and they’d paid huge money to buy their daughter the best education there was. What they couldn’t buy was her interest and dedication. Lou was bored in school, got into trouble, and became a bad influence on everyone else. She was either suspended or expelled from every school her parents packed her off to. By correspondence and virtual tutoring, she wound up with partial degrees in what she still thought of as pointless subjects. A few classes in immersive media, a couple in ancient philosophy, a class in hypertube physics, a few in premedicine.

  In the end, she found she was far more attracted by the idea of being a student than she was by actual study. What she really liked was partying, and, because of her rich and distracted parents, she had a terrific party budget.

  Then she inhaled a nanovirus installer particle one night at a dance party. The subsequent investigation showed that a group of known nano-hackers had released a new version of the accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus into a mist of flavored hallucinogenic party smoke. Twenty-four people inhaled their deaths that night and those twenty-four victims unwittingly spread it far and wide in the contagious days following their exposure. The hackers were never caught. Lou’s parents lost interest in her education once she transitioned to Stage One, and so did she.

  And almost immediately after she left the hospital, needing a cheap place to stay, needing a job, she met up with Tom Meagher who was working
for a nonprofit nanovirus support agency. He was good-looking, funny, and, slowly, made himself a friend. Over time he told her he had come to love her despite her condition, and promised he’d take care of her. Lou was naïve, desperate and scared enough about her future prospects to believe him.

  Flash-forward three miserable, painful years married to Bloody Tom. Lucky to have escaped him, Lou arrived at Kestrel with no real skills, no sense of discipline — and a very nasty “medical” condition that made her distinctly unpopular. For a long time she did degrading crap jobs for people who couldn’t afford disposables, until her condition got down to Stage Three, when her appearance and smell approximated a week-old corpse, only somehow still moving around and talking. People called her a zombie to what little was left of her face.

  Lou became homeless. Without money, she hit Stage Four. Her existence expectancy at this point was about one month, perhaps less. Key organs began to fail and weren’t repaired.

  The Stalktown homeless community took her in, many of whom also had the nanovirus, or one of its countless variants. It turned out they had all kinds of other problems, too, like losing things or having stuff stolen from them, getting hassled by the townsfolk and getting framed for local crimes. Lou helped out here and there, looking into things, sniffing around, asking questions. She did this in return for shelter and a few credits to put towards a tink top-up. She made a few friends, too, and started cautiously to feel like she belonged somewhere. It turned out she had a talent for this kind of low-energy investigating. Thinking about things in her own way, and, more often than not she found the missing items, exposed the lie behind the frame-up, and organized effective resistance against the creeps hassling her friends, often by threatening to come and stink up their place, or their vehicle, if they didn’t do the right thing. She never dipped below Stage Four, and, at times, scratched her way back up to Stage Two when people, sometimes even people from the Living, came asking for her to help them out, despite, or possibly because of, her problems.

  Lou had had a nice existence going, too, until the Bloody Bastard was discovered a couple of years ago, and people started bugging out of Stalktown.

  Until, of course, that one day this crazy dog came into her life.

  Now she wondered what to do. She couldn’t back out and still live with herself. But how could she possibly go on, mixing with the rich and powerful, who were not exactly Lou’s peer group?

  Otaru told her to reunite Dog with Kid. But Kid was gone. What now?

  A thought hit her. She asked Dog, “When you say Kid is no longer broadcasting, does that mean he must be dead, or what?”

  Dog, still snuggled next to her, shivering, distressed, said, “Why else would he stop sending?”

  Lou thought about this, feeling tired and hazy. “I suppose,” she said, remembering the sound of Kid choking. She imagined the child feeling brainstem-level helpless terror, unable to stop what must have felt like torture. The thought made her furious. A helpless little kid! It was bad enough he’d been dumped by his owner and left in the bush to die, like an unwanted puppy.

  A helpless disposable kid.

  It was so common to disregard the feelings and concerns of disposables. You wouldn’t have a relationship with a disposable. You simply used whatever service it was programmed to perform, and moved on. True, you might make pleasant chit-chat, but that didn’t mean anything. They were entities without a soul; that was the whole point. They were organic machines, albeit often with highly specialized equipment built-in.

  No soul, she thought. This resonated with all that stuff Otaru told her, about his people’s interest in matters of the soul.

  What the hell was going on here? Why was she giving a damn about a disposable kid getting hurt?

  That was easy, at least. It was because he was a kid. The torture of an adult disposable wouldn’t bother me, she thought.

  Would it? Were they sufficiently human for that kind of concern to bleed over to the likes of these machines? Was humanity analog or digital — was it either/or, were there degrees of being human?

  But they weren’t human. They were…

  She couldn’t quite articulate the reasons. She decided that university study had a lot to answer for.

  In any case, she could not ignore her feelings. Disposable or not, she was outraged and horrified at what had happened to the kid — or at least, what she thought had happened to him. It was possible, of course, she had misunderstood what she heard.

  As if gagging, choking noises could somehow be indicative of a good experience.

  Damn!

  The natural impulse she felt was to exact revenge, if not justice. If she couldn’t get Kid back alive, then she could at least avenge the kid’s suffering. That was a satisfying thought.

  But useless. If her information was correct, any move she made against those involved would result in decades of litigation. The lawyers could make her rue the day she was conceived and every day thereafter. And worse, they could make sure she always had just enough tink to keep her going indefinitely in a miserable but viable state, working off her enormous penalties. With the right treatments, she could live hundreds of years, all of it in indentured service, paying an endless fine, plus legal fees and court costs.

  Which left her where, exactly?

  She closed her eyes, feeling the weight of defeat pressing her down.

  After allowing herself a few long minutes to soak in self-pity she pulled herself out of the couch, rubbed at her eyes, and stared around the cabin.

  I should at least get dressed, I suppose. She got up, changed into her clean camo gear, pulled on her boots, enjoying the smell of renewed leather and clean fabric. Patting her back pocket, she found her two pieces of Active Paper, or, rather, she found her own piece of crap Paper as well as the data card she stole from Tom’s luggage. She sat there fiddling with it, running her thumbs over the surface, trying to make something happen, knowing nothing would. Turning it over, she saw the ZenData logo. Like before, it winked at her, as if amused. She slipped it into her shirt pocket.

  Next, Lou opened up the bottom compartment of the black valise, revealing the gleaming white ceramic edges and curves of the Bausch and Franke, as well as the more sinister transparency of the NP-2. Thinking about it, she unclipped the phage launcher and stowed it in her right trouser pocket; the other gun, she knew, would be too dangerous to use, even in a structure the size of the Orbital with adaptive sealants in the hull. She set the Otaru valise down next to her acceleration couch.

  Dog looked up at her. The anguish in his face was hard to bear. “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure, to be honest.” She stroked his head, feeling bad.

  “Your smell’s improved,” he said, “if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  Sighing, she said, “Thanks. Listen. You’re my client. Everything else that’s going on is just noise. You’re in charge.”

  “Ms. Meagher?” He cocked his head to one side, and his ears twitched.

  “What do I do from here? You want me to keep lookin’ for Kid? You think he’s dead, or what?”

  The dog bobbed his head, rested his snout on his front paws, and sighed. “The whole time I was with Kid, he sent me feelings and pictures. It’s how he talked to me. He showed me how scared he was, confused… He remembered things from when he was with his owner, bad things he couldn’t help remembering over and over, like in a loop.”

  “Like what?”

  Dog thought a long time. “He had been kept in a room that was all dark, and cold. Sometimes … the owner would come in and put lights on, and he’d put some kind of heavy machine on Kid’s head, and Kid felt a lot of pain and confusion. Whatever it was never seemed to work. Sometimes the owner would give Kid injections that made his head hurt for days. Kid remembered his owner yelling at him, hitting him…”
<
br />   “Kid remember what this owner was saying? Anything like that?”

  “Kid has no language ability. He just remembered screaming and pain and being sick.”

  “Being sick?”

  “He had cancers all through his body, maybe in his brain, too.”

  Lou supposed that these cancers would have affected Kid’s brain to the point where he lost his ability to perform in his designed capacity.

  “Dog, do you have recorded memories of these flashes from Kid? Are there any pics of this owner guy, for instance?”

  Dog glanced up at her. “Things in my head feel strange, Ms. Meagher, different from before.”

  Lou felt a surge of complicated feelings inside her. Hostility, gratitude, curiosity, sick disgust… “You were out cold for a few days. Some people did some work on your head machines. They … improved you a bit.”

  He asked if they were the same people who owned this shuttle; Lou nodded and said, “They want me to help you find Kid. I suppose if you’re aware Kid’s stopped sending, maybe they are, too. I haven’t received any instructions telling me not to bother anymore. So I suppose…” She stared off across the room, feeling lousy.

  At length Dog said, “Ms. Meagher, I have looked around in my machines, but I can’t find any pictures of Kid’s owner. I thought I had some stored, but things have been moved around and changed. It’s quite confusing.”

  Lou stared at the dog and shivered as she thought about the things they must have done to the animal. It’s not right, she thought. Even though Dog has some useful capabilities, dogs should have the opportunity just to be dogs.

  And, thinking about things that weren’t right, why had the kid been commissioned in the first place? What was his intended mission? If she knew that, she might know something about why he was snatched.