Chris found an atrium and sat down to contemplate what he’d found. Whatever it was, it had to be important to warrant a large empty section on a station millions of miles from Earth. He felt dread at what he’d done, going into the area, treating it like a game, but what if it wasn’t? Would they fire him and undo all his years at VG?
When he returned to his quarters, Cinmei greeted him immediately.
“Welcome back,” she smiled. He half-smiled back inside his helmet, but his reaction to her was poisoned by his knowledge that it couldn’t be sincere.
“Thanks,” he said. Cinmei helped him remove his helmet and the plastic cuirass.
“Would you like massage? The gear is heavy.”
“Ah, uhm, sure.”
Cinmei pointed to one side of the room. She walked ahead of him and touched an invisible panel. A white massage cot slid out from the mirrored wall.
She has to use a touch control because she doesn’t have a link. Could I live like that? No. Surely, it would just be better to die, unless there was some hope of getting a link eventually.
Chris pulled off the rest of his gear and left it where it fell. He collapsed onto the white surface and immediately Cinmei’s hands began working on his back.
“How it go today?” she asked after a minute.
“Not good at first. But some good things came up later,” he said. “Some weird things.”
“What is weird? I mean … what things?” she said, flustered with her poor English.
“I found a strange place today. A place I wasn’t supposed to find. Or … maybe a place I was supposed to find, I’m not sure.”
“What place?”
“I don’t really know. It’s a big hangar with some kind of spacecraft, or missile or something. You haven’t heard anything?”
“No.”
“You may have been there and forgotten. I noticed that some of the people coming out of there had forgotten what they’d seen. Or pretended to anyway.”
“How is that?”
“I don’t know. Could be some gas or something. A security measure, maybe.”
Cinmei remained silent.
“Well they may come for me anytime now. I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
Cinmei massaged his shoulders for a few more seconds in silence.
“So you sneak around like spy? Very brave.”
“Oh, not really,” Chris said.
“You going to find out what the thing is … the missile?”
“I hope so.”
“How you find out what it is?”
“Hrm, I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
A suspicion arose about her questions. Was Cinmei reporting on him? Chris decided to get a little insurance.
“I only do it because I think that’s what VG expects of me,” he clarified. “I think this whole thing is a test, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.”
“I sure you right,” she said. “You are very smart. Must be, to come here.”
“Thanks.”
They finished the massage in silence. Chris got up and started preparing himself for sleep using the VG toiletries. He wondered where his stuff was. Probably drifting through the cold depths of space.
He considered Cinmei again. He found her beautiful and content. He envied her serenity and her ability to accept her role here so gracefully. An insistent need pestered him. Should he ask her to join him in the bedroom? If she served as his watchdog that could be a bad move. He struggled for a moment, and then decided to ask her politely. Surely, he wouldn’t be the first to explore the limits of her servitude in that direction.
He padded out to the edge of the carpet in the bedroom toward the marble floor of the central living area. A guilt offensive struggled to stop him, but he refused to consider it now that he’d set his idea in motion. He saw Cinmei across the room. He opened his mouth to speak, but something was wrong. She stared down at the wall, unmoving.
Damn.
Chris knew that look. Cinmei was focused on an internal interface. She had a link after all! She had to be reporting to VG at this very moment.
Shit.
Chris skittered back into the bedroom with a clumsy back step and whirl. His panicked retreat ended painfully when he smashed his toe against the bed.
“Goddamn!” he yelled.
Cinmei appeared in a second.
“What wrong?” she asked.
“Argh, my … toe,” Chris muttered. “Ah, nothing, I smashed the hell out of my toe, that’s all, no problem.”
“It is broken?”
“No. No, it’s fine, thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, good night.”
Chris slipped into the lavish bed, but couldn’t sleep. He waited for VG security to arrive. He rummaged through the files he’d downloaded from the restricted area. He couldn’t make sense of most of it. They looked to be conducting tests on other materials unrelated to the missile-thing. It seemed impossible that he could have totally missed any information related to it.
After an hour, he decided security wasn’t going to show up. He started to think that meant he was on the right track after all. Now, excitement replaced the dread, and he still couldn’t sleep. Finally, he took a sleeping pill and drifted off while trying to figure out what he’d missed.
Six
Aldriena searched for a glimpse of the kids below her through an opening in the leaves. She saw Verlerie clearly. Part of Dad’je danced in and out of her view. There had to be others in the group, but she couldn’t spot them from her perch in the tree. The Brazilian teenagers inevitably ventured outside at the end of the month, searching for stimulation in the face of their prematurely expended VR quotas. Most of the kids never had the discipline to budget their hours correctly.
The voices filtered up to her aerie. At sixteen years, she massed only forty-five kilos, barely enough to bend the scaly branch she balanced on. She strained to catch the conversation.
“Did you see that guy Volare? The water director’s kid from Europe. He’s so … well, he’s jammin’!”
Verlerie smiled. “I’d snark him. Would you?”
Dad’je nodded. “Snark him? I’d do more than that!”
Laughter came from below, competing with the sound of rustling leaves. She lost track of the conversation for a moment.
“He’s waiting for Aldriena,” Dad’je was saying. Aldriena couldn’t see whom Dad’je meant.
“Give it up,” Verlerie said. “Aldriena won’t. She don’t.”
“We snarked it out fine before,” said Garnite. “Twice.”
Garnite was a boy who tolerated Aldriena on occasion because of his own low social ranking. He had been nicer to her lately.
“Virtual doesn’t count. I mean for real. She don’t jack boys for real,” Verlerie said.
Yavon’s voice joined the conversation. “Aldriena don’t jack girls for real either. Like Verl said, she just don’t.”
“She’s only a Jap,” another male voice said. “But I’d do it with her. Just to see what it’d be like.”
More laughter.
“Yeah, me too! Why not?”
The hot trickle of a tear tickled her cheek. She swiped it away with her fingertips. They had all hated her when she and her father had moved here from Japan as refugees. She always stood out and they had made her pay for it dozens of times.
At first, she had convinced herself that if she spoke their language, they would accept her. She had studied hard, brought her accent into line, and dressed to the Brazilian norm. She had tried her best to correct every aberration of her Asian behavior. It didn’t make any difference. They had still made her the butt of their jokes, ignored her in line, and avoided her company.
Finally, when she saw that they wouldn’t accept her as an equal, she had reverted to previous course and embraced her differences. She stopped trying to hide her eyes behind long bangs of straight black hair and started speaking Japanese with her father again. Her rebellious side grew u
ntil she acted different simply to spite them.
She had not realized the other kids noticed she remained a grind virgin, although she had done it on the net a few times. She’d also had no idea that Garnite seemed interested in her as something more than a one-shot virtual partner. It sounded like a couple of the boys had noticed her transformation from a flat-chested tomboy into a sleek teenage girl with a few curves in the right places. The other girls in her class with soft bodies and slow minds were little more than slugs, but Aldriena had stayed wiry and strong by spending as much time in the real world as the virtual ones.
So now the boys wanted her because she had grown into a beautiful woman? The corner of Aldriena’s tight set mouth twitched as more tears welled in her eyes. She swore she would learn to use their interest against them.
***
Aldriena watched the space station approach through an external camera view piped into her link. She played a role even more tenuous than usual. She often watched while a computer controlled the landing sequence as she did now, but this time, it wasn’t even the Silvado’s computer. Her courier nestled in a cargo bay of a slow barge, bringing hydrogen from the outer solar system to the power-hungry station named Xanadu.
Black Core operatives on the station covered her approach. She didn’t want to attract the attention of the local authorities … yet. They’d gone through such trouble to get her here in secret. A mix-up in the command and control center causing a delayed surveillance order. A convenient software glitch in the nearest deep space radar pod. Now, a stealth insert into Xanadu, purchased at great cost from another corporation.
Yet, she visited solely to be seen. She begrudgingly gave her superiors credit this time—they had devised a skillful deception. She felt the barge docking at the central hub of the triple pinwheel of Xanadu. Wearing an ultralight vac suit, she exited the Silvado into a pressurized section of the barge. She followed the familiar ephemeral green line from her link through a maze of piping and tanks. Her hands and feet stuck to the floor and walls as necessary to keep her from drifting away in the absence of acceleration.
She entered a sterile room of red and white. A panel of manual valve controls lined one wall, and a bank of repair equipment dominated another. A dark-haired man waited for her there with a fat red suitcase opened up on the floor. He wore a blue maintenance worker’s uniform, a single-piece vac suit much thicker and stronger than Aldriena’s thin temporary one.
“Niachi,” the man said. He looked at her with gentle eyes. She realized his face was perfect. Not a single errant strand wandered from his clean-cut hair. His skin stretched smooth and flawless across the pleasing lines of his face.
Aldriena nodded. He gestured to a magnetically mounted swivel chair, so she dropped down into it.
He took a translucent sac of fluid from the suitcase and affixed a spray applicator to it. She saw a lot of cosmetic supplies in the suitcase, a collection of high-tech disguise knickknacks.
“This’ll feel weird for a sec, but no pain, I promise,” he said.
She felt a crawling sensation on her scalp for a moment. He pulled down one of her eyelids and put a drop into it, then repeated the procedure with her other eye. His hands were quick. He had to have done this before.
“Put these tabs on the insides of your cheeks, right at the center. Your face is a little round for a European,” he said.
He looked at her face openly. She felt comfortable under his honest scrutiny. Most of the time she garnered the nervous glances of men who assessed her beauty but didn’t want to be caught staring.
“How do I look?” she said, smiling.
“Stunning as ever, my dear,” he said in a subdued voice, holding out a cheap plastic mirror for her. She figured his distraction probably came from chatter through his link with the Black Core team on Xanadu. She knew the team had at least four or five members.
Aldriena stared into the crappy mirror and smiled. Despite the damaged edges of the mirror, she saw his handiwork. He’d changed her into a blue-eyed blonde. Her epicanthal fold was no longer visible; her eyes looked European inside and out.
“Looks good,” she said, although she didn’t like it. She preferred her real countenance.
“You were more beautiful before,” the man said. His eyes animated again, an indication that he’d concluded his link activity for the moment. He said it calmly and didn’t look at her for a reaction, which meant he wasn’t trying to earn points with her.
He pulled a green roll from his case.
“You’ll blend in more with this,” he said. “It isn’t much in a scrap, but it will short a taser at least.”
“Got it,” she said, taking the clothes roll.
“Follow me to the door. I’ll send you a green line.”
They walked awkwardly through the engineering module toward an airlock connected to Xanadu. Using the sticky hand and feet attachments, they moved like bugs crawling across a vertical surface, attaching themselves with a limb whenever they could. Aldriena picked up a pointer on her link and the familiar green line overlaid her vision to guide her.
“Thanks for the setup,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Martin.”
Aldriena stepped through the lock.
“Good luck,” he called after her.
As the lock started to cycle her through, she took the dark green roll and pulled a tab. The fabric released, popping out into the free form of a summer dress. She changed into the outfit in seconds, discarding her light vac suit. Once the thin fabric had detected her body heat, a pattern shifter snapped on and sent white lines streaming across the fabric, moving across her body in a steady, soothing migration, like a wandering spider web that couldn’t find an anchor point. It fit quite snug to her figure, but didn’t show a lot of skin.
The lock door opened into a tiny lift atrium. Aldriena paused to grab some chewing gum out of the vac suit and stash it into a hidden pocket of the dress.
I should get back to Earth one of these days. While it’s still there.
She took the lift down toward the gravity-simulated part of the station. For a moment, she felt dizzy as the lift descended. She cursed.
The doctors told me they’d fixed that. Black Core paid a lot of money for my space prep. I should complain about it.
She arrived at the station proper and exited the lift. The area beyond exhibited the opulence to which Aldriena had grown accustomed. The floor looked like polished stone. She saw three art prints on the corridor wall depicting peaceful nature scenes. The air smelled fresh, lacking the machine smells of the maintenance area.
She fished into her pocket, brought out some chewing gum, and popped it into her mouth. She started to chew and then realized the gum might tangle with her cheek implants. She frowned but kept chewing. Just another risk to factor into her growing daily regimen of danger.
She walked through into an open area dotted with people and ferns. Xanadu looked the same as she remembered it: colorful and relaxed without any of the crazy freak suits. Aldriena stopped to look through a skylight that gave a view of the outside of the station. Sometimes she had to remind herself how far behind she’d left Brazil. She resumed her walk.
Men and women in the corridors met her gaze curiously but without suspicion.
This was her chance to relax. Ironically, it was also one of the most dangerous parts of the plan. Even with the facial camouflage, if some scanner program or link monitor noticed that she was actually Aldriena Niachi, the Aldriena Niachi, Black Core associate currently wanted for questioning for her suspected involvement with the Thermopylae incident, then things could be screwed up fast.
Not that Black Core didn’t want her to be noticed. They did. But they needed to control when and how.
Aldriena picked her green line back up and followed it. The indicator twisted left and right down two corridors until turning into a walk-in closet with a rack of cleaning robots dominating one wall. Thick pipes routed across the ceiling.
Her green line wound its way up a desk and through a large metal grille. Some kind of maintenance crawlway or air duct. A pulsing red dot appeared on her pathway.
Pause, it insisted.
Aldriena slipped onto the desk and sat with her legs dangling. She could hear the hiss of something moving through the pipes in the room and a rattle of a worn compressor.
She took out her chewing gum and stuck it under the edge of the desk.
“Isto é para você, Marcelo,” she said.
Years ago, a boy named Marcelo had been flirting with the girls in her class. He had offered gum to every one of them except Aldriena. Gum wasn’t for Japs he had explained, and spat at her instead. After school, Aldriena snuck back into the classroom to take the gum out of his desk. She hid under the desktop and chewed his gum, sticking each wad under the desk until all the gum was gone. Once the teacher discovered it, Marcelo had been forbidden to chew gum for the rest of the year.
Aldriena smiled. She always got even.
A message came through her Cascavel.
Everything’s set. I’m switching you over now.
Aldriena bent forward and ruffled her hair. A shower of tiny yellow strands fell out onto the bare metal floor. Her vision went blurry for a second, but she blinked and everything cleared. She bit the pads off the insides of her cheeks and spat them out. Her face felt puffy for a moment.
An interesting sensation. Aldriena the space chipmunk.
She felt a rush of confidence knowing her countenance had reverted. Her first, most familiar weapon was available again. She rescanned the room. No one here to recognize her yet.
Aldriena moved over to the air duct. The plastic grille had a locking mechanism on its frame. She brought out a liquid key. The key looked like a block of silver, smooth and shiny. She adjusted the current running through the key and it softened in her hand. She slapped it into the keyhole and let the key flow into the mechanism. Then she adjusted the current again and took a snapshot of the inner workings of the lock.
Aldriena removed a second liquid key and downloaded the snapshot into it. The software analyzed the data and formed the second key into the necessary shape to actuate the lock. She slipped it in and it fit perfectly. She figured that the key also sent an electronic signature stolen by her Black Core comrades, since the grille door opened. Her face screwed up in annoyance at a puff of dust from the opening. So there was dust even here. Probably shed human skin, she thought.
Insidious Page 11
