Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

Although…

  Jenny?

  “Yo!”

  I need a list of the former staff of Stalktown Sky Control, with all available contact modes. There should be a copy of the files involved somewhere on this Orbital.

  Jen reported back right away. “You mean this list? I’ll dump it into your Paper.”

  The file appeared in a separate window. Lou scrolled down the list. Impressive stuff, she thought. It even included the numerous disposables that had worked in Sky Control and their current assignments and status. Lou filtered through the several dozen names, and launched more searches to gain access to shift records, and thus determined who was on duty in Control on the night in question. Duty and Activity Logs, as expected, reported routine shuttle traffic, hov traffic. Nothing unusual. No record of concentrated cop-hov activity within the StalkPlex. Lou settled on two members of core management: the former Operations Manager, Mr. Michael Tan, and Freight Traffic Coordinator Mr. Martin Chapman. Both had mail and personal phone codes — and both were listed as in transit to new assignments.

  Which was where Lou’s plan hit a snag: these two were not only on the other side of various hypertubes, but in different parts of human space. And, since her skin was starting to dry out again as she lost that just-refreshed glow, she was reluctant to send anybody a picture of her face. “Damn,” she said, contemplating the hassle of having to record messages and send them off to the Kestrel System Mail Hub. Sooner or later a ship in this system would head off through a tube, and would receive an encrypted burst transmission of mail from the Hub before entering waveshift. It could take days or weeks for a message to reach its target. Lou knew there were still several scientific, religious and media groups in the Kestrel System studying the mystery of the world that didn’t get blown to slag, and each of these ships would be on constant relay for their host organizations.

  The sooner someone invented true faster-than-light communications and travel, the happier she’d be. In this state of annoyance, Lou dictated terse letters to the former Sky Control officers, revealing her awareness of the “incident” and the emission of all that “alpha radiation” and shot them off, muttering under her breath about lousy modern communications.

  Something thudded into the back of Lou’s head. “Ow!” she exclaimed, looking around, one hand feeling the impact point. Lou spotted a red BrainyBall bouncing, and laughing smugly to itself, back towards its owner, a little kid, dressed in good clothes, who looked guilty and amused, with one small hand over his smirking mouth.

  “Sorry, lady!” the kid said, waiting for his ball to return.

  Lou heard a distant voice yell, “You don’t have to apologize to disposables, Lukie. How many times do I have to tell you?” Lou felt a great temptation to march up to that woman and scream at her, “I’m not a bloody disposable! And even if I was, a bit of consideration goes a long way!” But, who’d believe her, looking the way she did? Lou wondered, again, if real disposables took notice of these things. She was beginning to suspect they might.

  A cool sea-breeze swept by. The back of her head tingled and ached a little. Her vision blurred for a moment, then cleared up.

  “Madame Meagher!” a throaty male voice called out, accented and familiar.

  Right behind her.

  “Uh-oh…” she breathed, recognizing the voice.

  She looked around and up. He was in understated wealthy mode: blue jeans, gold turtleneck, navy blazer, deck shoes. Nothing animated, no rendered textures. Genuine fabrics, made on a loom. Expensive dark-tinted eyeglasses. Bad news. Nobody wore glasses, at least not to fix their vision. He nodded to her, allowed a weary smile, and moved around to sit facing her. “Etienne Tourignon. As I live and breathe.”

  He said, “Well yes, so to speak, anyway, yes? I hope you won’t refuse my company for a short while.” He made himself comfortable, then, raising his left arm, snapped his fingers to call the waiter. To Lou, “Can I get you anything, Madame Meagher? Pernod? Coffee?”

  Lou stared. He smelled strange. No cologne. It took her a while before she realized he smelled of nano-tink. She thought about all the smooth private investigator moves she’d read about and seen in vid. Nothing helpful suggested itself. Jen was silent. Lou’s mouth was dry; she felt her right leg bouncing a little; nervous energy. She watched the waiter come over and take Tourignon’s order. He wanted Olympus Springs mineral water. He looked so smooth. Yet, this was the guy who, just a few days ago, wanted to kill her; who screamed and raged at her in a courtroom. Now, he looked affable, even genial.

  Lou heard her mental voice swearing and felt herself wanting to run away, dive off the seawall and go splat against the waiting rocks. She was in nineteen kinds of trouble, and wanted only to get it over with.

  She looked around, checking escape routes, and glanced at the clock display on her Paper. It was coming up on five in the afternoon, Akane Time. One more hour before her meeting with Dog. She couldn’t help wondering where the little guy might be hiding while he waited.

  Tourignon opened, “You’re looking well, if a little … anxious.” He flashed a shark’s mouth grin.

  She spent a moment poring over this comment, looking for hints of a threat. Finding nothing obvious, but still suspicious, she said, “Healthy living. Vitamins.”

  Tourignon smiled. The waiter delivered Tourignon’s water. He tipped him; the waiter hurried away, as if sensing something nasty was about to happen.

  He sipped, made a face. “Damned stuff. Do you drink this stinking mud? It’s vile, absolutely vile. Doctors tell me, they tell me to drink it, for my health! At my age! So, I drink it. Does nothing for me. What is there in life to live for, if the most you have to look forward to is this slop!”

  Lou blurted, not knowing this statement was coming until it was gone from her mouth, irretrievable, “I’m incredibly sorry about your wife and your granddaughter, Mr. Tourignon. You have no idea how sorry I am. It’s just awful. I still see … Claire-Marie, that day in the courtroom. God, that must be awful to live with, your wife … your granddaughter. She, she … she was—” Tears flowed.

  Tourignon handed her a white linen handkerchief, something Lou had never seen before. She stared at it. “What … do I do … with that?”

  Surprised, he leaned across the table and dabbed at her eyes. He was gentle. He wiped at her nose.

  “Careful,” she said, surprising herself with an attempted bit of humor, “it might … come off in your hand.”

  Startled, he pulled his handkerchief away, folded it back in his blazer pocket. “I did not expect you to say that, Madame Meagher. About my wife. My granddaughter.”

  There was a difficult pause. Lou shrugged and sniffled. Her throat was tight. Not knowing how to proceed, Lou said, “I thought Giselle wanted to hurt me, interrogate me. I’d heard you wanted me killed for sniffing around your business, and, and…”

  He stared at her, astounded, for one second. “You thought that?” Then he burst out into great gusts of laughter, which declined into a coughing fit. Even as he coughed, he kept looking at Lou, then snorted with amusement all over again. Once he subsided, wiping at his own eyes behind his glasses, he said, “And that’s the reason you felt you had to kill Giselle? You’re not very good at this, are you, Madame?”

  Lou felt a need to defend her source. She said, “I was told you—”

  He waved at her to stop. “I know who told you, Madame. It was that despicable Otaru monstrosity. The abomination! Believe me, my fight is with Otaru, not with your charming self. And, in any case, please do not worry yourself. Giselle and Claire-Marie should be out of the clinic in a week’s time, almost as good as new. I had no idea such things could be done these days — or that they should be so hideously expensive!” He took another sip of his mineral water, pausing to wince. “Mon Dieu!”

  Lou stared, trying to think. So many things were going on in her
head. “They’re not dead? But they—”

  He shrugged, an elaborate gesture. “Gunshot trauma. Nothing to worry about. Giselle will have a small blank patch in her memory from brain damage the little machines cannot fix. Claire-Marie, she will be mostly fine. Pissed as hell at you, no doubt!” He laughed again, and laughed harder at the look on Lou’s face. “Ah Madame Meagher, such an expressive face!”

  “But they were dead, weren’t they?”

  “Oh yes, absolutely. Quite gone. But then, so were you, yes?” He peered at her. Lou felt his eyes seeing too much of her. Why did she feel such a sense of revulsion about Tourignon’s wife and granddaughter returning from death, yet not the same feeling about herself? She wanted to say it was different with her. But that didn’t feel convincing, not anymore.

  God, I really am a zombie, she thought, a freak. It was a difficult thing to think about yourself. I’ve spent my whole life denying it. Or, at best, making a joke of it.

  She gripped the edge of the table, feeling her world tilt. A sick, vertiginous moment. Her throat tightened more, her skin went clammy. Could a person feel so revolted at herself, so disgusted?

  She had another memory-flash: the days after her first awakening, after making the euphemistic ‘transition’. The doctors, sealed in their NanoHazard suits, telling her the facts of her new life. And young Louise saying, “But I feel fine, just kinda cold.” In denial already. Only later, seeing her parents’ revulsion with what they had wrought, did she begin to sense her own monstrosity, and begin tearing at her own body, to kill herself over again. How could she have forgotten that frenzy of flesh tearing, of shrieking beyond the point of hoarse painful silence?

  And not seeing blood seep from her wounds, but the gray ooze of nano-tink, healing her flesh as fast as she could rip it asunder.

  Lou, wide-eyed, terrified, she stared into the distance. “Oh … God…”

  Tourignon leaned across the table, placed his big hot hand on her left hand, and held her. “Louise, are you quite all right?”

  “Oh. Uh, I … don’t know.” She felt weird. So much was going on in her head. And most weird was that Tourignon was being kind to her. It was too much. Where did she belong now? Why had she never thought about all this before? She had been too busy trying to eke out a living, she thought, in immediate response. I needed a home, I needed money. Now that she was Otaru property, she had time to stop and really think about what had happened to her.

  The whole world seemed to shift around her, taking up a new configuration to reflect the truth of her condition. Half her life ago, she’d been a teenage girl who liked parties too much. Now, she was a tool of great powers, no longer even her own person.

  Otaru. Tourignon. She looked up, still feeling weird, and stared hard at Tourignon. Breathing evenly, she tried to stay calm. The man sitting next to her, she realized was over one hundred years old; though he looked middle-aged and not all that disgusting, despite the bad chin and the steel-gray hair. And she wanted now, more than ever before, to know what he was up to.

  “Can I ask you what might sound like a personal question, Mr. Tourignon?”

  He smiled, and made an expansive gesture. “I am at your disposal.”

  That in itself felt strange. Why should he be so open to questions? Had his thirst for vengeance been eased by the return of his family? And, if he was getting his family back, where did that leave her status as a murderer? She frowned, wondering if murder still counted if the victim later gets up and walks away. You still caused the person’s death, right? So… Lou worked her jaw, thinking, and almost got distracted. She said, “What’s going on between you and Otaru, then?”

  Tourignon looked amused. “To have the nerve to ask an old man a question like that, such forthrightness, Madame Meagher!”

  She wore a sour expression, not interested in being clever and witty. “I’m just trying to figure stuff out. That’s all. And stay alive, sort of.”

  “You cannot simply ask me about my feud with that monster Otaru, though. Not without some … some lead-up, some interplay.” He was doing his best to charm her.

  Lou had little trouble resisting his charm. “All right. Why would Otaru tell me you wanted me dead?”

  The old man leaned back, looked around, and patted his generous belly. The late afternoon sun looked great on his tanned skin. Lou could scarcely believe this was the same man she had seen at the trial. He said to her, leaning in close now, narrowing his eyes behind his glasses, “What do you know about Otaru? I mean, really know, besides what he has told you.”

  Lou thought about this. “Not bloody much, to be quite honest. He and his creepy minions have gone out of their way to help me, saving my skin on at least two occasions. They tell me I must keep this missing child away from you. That you’re up to something which involves this kid, something probably unwholesome.”

  “All right,” he said, getting comfortable, “let me tell you this. In one respect there is truth to what the machine says. I am trying to find that child. He is extremely important to my future plans.”

  “Ah-ha!” Lou said, still feeling lousy, voice full of sarcasm.

  He went on. “But I will tell you also that I mean him no harm at all. None. And why should I harm a child? He will be my partner.”

  “But you’re not going to tell me what you’re planning to do when you find the boy, right?”

  A broad, mischievous grin split his face. “Madame Meagher. You think so little of me. I am here to answer all your questions, since clearly you have questions you want to ask me. That was obvious at that mockery of a trial we all attended. But, and I do hope you will forgive me, I have already arranged things so you cannot report anything I say to Otaru.”

  “Er, what do you…?” She felt chilled and clammy, all over again.

  He gestured to indicate a trifling thing. “A small matter for my staff. A boy. A ball. A little coating on the ball consisting of certain nanobots keyed to your tissues. These little machines dug through your head, into your brain, attaching to particular pieces of machinery in there, particular neurons and structures.” He mimed with his hands all the digging and assembling moves, to give her the idea, as he explained.

  She felt a flash of panic. Lou reached around to the back of her smooth head, as if she could feel traces of this invasion. The panic started coming to a boil.

  Tourignon added, “Quite harmless, I assure you. And temporary, too. The bots will dissolve into your tissues in about one hour; you will perspire the breakdown products, which will evaporate from your skin. But they will last while I tell you a story. You’ll remember what I say, certainly, but should you try to communicate it, your whole body will lock up, immobile, as long as you keep trying to access those memories. Meanwhile, your recollection of this meeting will begin to degrade.”

  She could hardly hear him. All she could think of was this violation. Her whole body felt cold and foreign. She thought about bot infection. Not again. Her memory flashed back to that night at Dark Attractors, the nightclub in Winter City where she happened to inhale nano-laden party mist. Oh, God. Not again. She found herself rubbing her arms, her eyes huge. She shivered, trying to control the panic, and unable to speak for the rage.

  She sat, staring at him, feeling sick, suppressing her retch response, and wishing with every cell of her rewritten body that she could kill him.

  Chapter 22

  “Bastard!” she managed, trembling. “You … bastard!”

  “Oh, now, this is no way to treat a guest!” He was enjoying her shock. Tourignon went on, “You are upset with me. I understand. Your whole life is a study in other people screwing with your body, is it not? I am but the latest horse at the trough. My profound apologies. I seek only to protect my interests, as indeed should you. Otaru plays for keeps. More even than I.”

  She swore, her voice hoarse, and fought to keep
tears at bay, trying, despite everything, to keep things professional.

  He suddenly said, “Do you, Madame Meagher, believe in time-travel?”

  Lou stared at him, surprised despite herself. The shock was such that she almost laughed out loud at the sheer absurdity of it.

  Etienne kept talking, as if she were his rapt audience. “I met a man, not long ago, who came from one of our futures.”

  Lou was grinding her teeth, and made herself stop. She wanted out of here, but she suspected this bastard would find her anywhere she went. He was showing off; a blunt display of power disguised as avuncular charm.

  “I was retired, living in the family compound in Winter City. Trying to grow roses. Trying to live down my business failures. Spacecraft built one molecule at a time! And these, these blasted hypertubes!” He looked disgusted. “All that time I’m telling the rest of the company there’s nothing in all this. Telling government purchasing bodies, regulatory authorities, insurance firms. Telling them all the same thing. The old way of building ships is the tried and true way. These nanobuilt ships — they are too risky! A bad dream from which we would all wake up one day in bleak regret.”

  “I’m familiar with the general scenario.”

  “Of course, of course. The diligent investigator, yes. Indulge an old man a little, Madame.”

  “Get to the point or I’m out of here,” Lou told him, flexing her fingers. She noticed they felt stiff and sore.

  Tourignon shrugged off her demand. And why not? He looked fantastic, like he could afford to sit around reminiscing about the bad old days. Lou remembered the old vid she had seen of him, how he looked so damn grim and humorless, like he’d never smiled once in his life. And now, he looked like an old-time movie star!

  He said, “Then this man appeared in my life. He told me that where — or rather, when — he came from, I was some big important historical figure. Or at least he told me that some of the time. At other times, he said I was only remembered as a washed-up industrialist. He seemed confused, disoriented.”