Grantville Gazette, Volume 73

by Bjorn Hasseler

  Drugs and lowered inhibitions be damned, I had to out-and-out lie. "Knockout gas of some kind?"

  "And you say there was something like dust at the bottom of the jar?"

  My confirmation again pleased him. That dust, somehow, was a clue. Though its meaning eluded me, I knew I needed to get the information out to the company.

  "So, what's the company's reaction to all this? I mean, beyond so recklessly sending you to nose about?"

  "They're pissed."

  Darin laughed. "Why was the device put there to begin with?"

  "You must already know."

  "Why do you think the device was put there? Why does the company?"

  "Well . . ." With the exoskeleton inert I couldn't even squirm. "Do my uninformed speculations matter?"

  "You must have some theory," he coaxed.

  "Extortion." Suppressed inhibitions be damned, I had to choose my next words with special care. At least if I hoped to get out of here alive. "The company is incredibly, obscenely rich. I understand wanting a piece of that. Honest, I do. After tax evasion, the Belter national pastime is trying to put one over on the company.

  "Knocking a platinum mine out of production blew a huge gaping hole in their forecasted cash flow. I'm an accountant. I know how that hurts them. I assume the plan was to incapacitate the miners on the one rock, demonstrating that something worse could have been done. And having shown it could be done once? Then other crew members, on other asteroids, could likely be coerced to take down even more production. I expect your people will demand a payoff to ensure that doesn't happen on any company rock."

  He sat silently for a while, smugly stroking his chin.

  The extortion part? That I believed, one hundred percent. What I didn't get was why the conspirators had been so cold-blooded. Knockout gas would have made their point. But the vile stuff that had been released? If the device had gone undiscovered until it went off, the men and women of the relief crew would have been trapped. For the short term, perhaps, they would have been fine (Les's gerbil in its cage had seemed unaffected—at least till its water bottle dissolved). But they could forget about the long term. Once the contagion found its way into the synthesizers, dissolving an internal gasket or two, food production would have ceased.

  "That's why . . ." I trailed off, mid-blurt. Damn whatever inhibition-lowering drug he had given me.

  His eyes narrowed. "Why what?"

  Why he was so interested in the dust settled to the bottom of the bomb bottle? Until Darin had asked, the dust had made zero impression on me. I'd never mentioned it to company debriefers. Anyway, dust was my term. Darin had said, "something like dust."

  How had the rubber-eating stuff been synthed? Or, rather, how had it been synthed without revealing itself by eating gaskets inside one of the base printers? Before I'd headed Earthward, these questions had been driving company engineers nuts.

  For lack of any answer, a witch-hunt had been ongoing as I left. Never mind that smuggling contraband aboard a company ship would have involved bypassing two independent automated surveillance systems and corrupting an entire four-person team hand-inspecting everything. No matter that company Security in the main looked for disassembled radio transmitters, a seemingly empty but sealed glass bottle would surely have triggered a closer look.

  And if inspectors had opened a plague bottle on Ceres? I shuddered, just to think of the devastation . . .

  "Why what?" Darin repeated.

  "I don't know," I answered shakily. "You know how an idea will just pop into your head? And be gone even before you can grasp it?"

  "We'll just have to bring that thought back, won't we?" He took a deep breath. "Once more then, from the top . . ."

  ****

  Slumped against the sofa back, struggling for breath, I wheezed, "I've got to have a break."

  "No, you don't," Darin said. "You're just sitting there."

  Conveying exhaustion took no great acting skill. Or any. "I weigh like thirty times what I'm used to, jaw included. Talking is hard. Just breathing is wearing me out."

  From astride his chair, its back still toward me, he watched my chest heave. "I suppose we could take five."

  "No," I insisted, panting. "Not ‘take five.' I need another bathroom break. I need something to eat"—about then, even soy-cheese nachos would do—"and more to drink. And I need sleep."

  "And if I say no?"

  Beats me, I almost said, but a beating wasn't the notion to put into his head. I let my eyes fall shut, my head tip forward.

  "Fine," Darin said.

  "Steak, medium rare, and a loaded baked potato would be nice."

  "Beef?" he barked. "You want beef?"

  I couldn't stop myself flinching. "Just trying to lighten the mood. Except the part about needing something to eat."

  "Fine." He stood and strode from the room. In the short while he left the door ajar, I heard the pretentious tones of a 3V talking head—and a man with a nasal voice yelling back at it. Who gets worked up over some local zoning board approving a high-rise complex? The man was still ranting ("Packing them in like cattle!") when Darin returned with a couple sandwiches on a cardboard plate, a bag of whole-grain chips, another water bottle—and my fuel cell.

  Pathetic weakness, or perhaps it was the PBJ mess my first clumsy bite squeezed onto my shirt, got the tape around my wrists snipped and a rickety folding table to support the snack. Carrying in the table (was that bamboo?) required both hands, and Darin didn't close the door behind him. After he sat, I got my first unobstructed pictures of the room beyond, in which the luggage pile seemed to have grown, and, twice, profile shots of bearded men walking past the doorway. Good data about my captors. A bad omen for my prospects. After maybe two minutes, responding to a complaint from that next room, Darin closed the door.

  Mid-meal, I dropped my left hand into my lap, below the tabletop. Soon after, the Charging LED flipped from yellow to green: I had approximated the reserve-battery charging time about right. Beneath the table, the tiny lamp was not in sight of Darin or the unblinking webcam, but the table might not be staying. I turned that arm to palm up, control panel and its status LEDs down.

  Either my yawning was contagious, or Darin was also tired. He stood, mouth briefly agape. "Get settled. I'll be back soon to unplug you. We'll finish this in the morning."

  I did not much care for the sound of finish. "How about some kind of blanket?"

  He paused by the exit, a hand on the knob. The camera, in its motorized mount above the door, continued to sweep from side to side. "What else, Princess? Silk jammies? Hot cocoa? Shall I send for a masseuse?"

  "The blanket is to put over my head, so I can get some sleep. Unless you care to turn off the lights?"

  "Or, you could close your eyes."

  By the time he returned with a blanket, I had maneuvered myself into a sleeping position: lying on my left side, knees raised until the short sofa supported my feet. My left arm rested palm-side up—putting the exoskeleton control panel, with its glowing LEDs, down. My face was to the back of the sofa, and my back to the ceiling camera. Darin dropped the folded blanket, stinking of mothballs and stale sweat, on my head and shoulder. As he groped for and removed the fuel cell on my exoleg, I managed to tug an edge of the blanket down to waist level.

  I heard the soft pad of Darin striding away, hinges squeaking, the click of a door latch, and the thud of a deadbolt slamming into place. I heard a man with a gravelly voice greet Darin, and then, at an almost imperceptible level, indistinguishable conversation. The occasional word or phrase I might have made out—midway, pizza, socks, plastic, carrying capacity, starve the beast—told me nothing. Unless that had been Sox, not socks, which could mean I remained on the south side of Chicago. Somehow, I promised myself, I'd live to make it to a ballgame. And have pizza.

  I rotated my left arm to palm down. Cautiously, so as not to dislodge the tented blanket, I slid my right hand to the control panel. I had scarcely roused the virtual keypad when the Char
ging LED reverted to yellow. Type fast, I told myself. But lest I run out of time, I used a few precious seconds of panel glow to smear the status LEDs with PBJ drippings scraped from my shirtfront.

  Plan A was to reactivate comm and then activate the "I'm fallen and I can't get up" service. Once an operator came online, he, she, or it could connect me to 911. In theory, Plan A was easy to put into effect. No matter that the Panic button itself had been ripped out, whatever software the button invoked should still be available. Tapping feverishly, working by the soft glow of the control panel, I enrolled in the service—and found I still couldn't trigger a distress call. Those scorches I'd noticed? A critical chip or two had indeed fried.

  On to Plan B, and the tracking software Maureen Rogers had tried to plant on me. I'd deleted it and all her other shady software from my comp—not that I had my comp anymore. But I did have the disabled copies I'd saved, just in case, in spare memory of the exoskeleton controller. With a few hurried taps I installed the tracker, spliced Help! Prisoner! into the app's output format, and linked the program to the exo's wireless capability.

  Alas, the restored app would not give Maureen much to go on—even assuming she hadn't given up on tracking me. Disabling the "I've fallen" service had also disabled its underlying GPS service. Without GPS, the spyware could only locate me to the vicinity of the nearest cell tower. That wasn't nothing. It should suffice to get Maureen on her way here from DC. Better yet, it might get her to start some associate or hireling already in Chicago to hunting for me.

  If she hadn't given up.

  Poking around deep within the menu system, in a race against the rapidly draining battery, I found and enabled the exo's embedded GPS service. It, of course, had no idea where I was. Yet.

  Back in Manhattan, meandering about Central Park, my comp had taken about twenty minutes to find enough satellites and download enough detailed orbital data to initialize its own GPS service. The little reserve battery was only sized for five, and I guesstimated I'd already burned through at least three of those. I might eke out a few extra seconds by lying still—the motors must draw more power than did the electronics—and maybe I'd be lucky. Maybe, before the battery ran dry, I'd get a precise lat-long readout. Then, so would Maureen's spyware.

  It was a nice idea, anyway. The exoskeleton's GPS chip was still initializing when, beneath the blanket, everything went dark. My right forearm and hand flopped to the sofa, dragging my elbow from my side.

  Eventually, somehow, I drifted off to sleep . . . .

  ****

  Somewhere among the impaling stakes, torture racks, thumbscrews, red-hot pincers, and trays of glittering surgical instruments, in one of the rare moments when I wasn't plummeting, or suffocating beneath my own gargantuan weight, or wilting beneath the penetrating gaze of dead miners, my wife came to me.

  Bea starring in my dreams was in no way unusual, especially when I was far from home. Black attire was common enough, too—but of the peek-a-boo, lacy variety. Not in black from head to toe. Not veiled. Not (when she lifted the veil) with tear-stained cheeks. Not, once she met my eyes, so angry.

  "You went away for the damned company," she said. "For the crumbs they condescended to throw your way. So, you got them to name you a junior assistant deputy associate minion. What good will that stake do you now?"

  "Do us," I corrected. "Worst case, do you. However this turns out."

  "Did you honestly think I'd want their damned blood money?"

  "It's not like that." My voice trailed off even as Bea's image morphed into . . . an iron maiden. Forever, side by side, it and I fell. As it faded away, I came down, splat, in a deep oubliette. The walls began to dissolve, and I realized they weren't stone and mortar, but plastic. The floor gave way beneath me—

  Once more, I was falling . . .

  ****

  I shuddered awake, blinking at the sudden bright light, as the blanket went flying.

  "Rise and shine, Princess." I couldn't see Darin, but I knew the voice. Grabbing my shoulder, he rolled me onto my back, then slapped a fuel cell into its socket on the exoskeleton's left thigh.

  That was the moment, as he crouched over my legs, to knee him in the head. To make a run for it. For a nanosecond, I even considered it. The three, maybe four, loud voices in the next room (did these people ever not argue?) dissuaded me. They would have been upon me faster than I could unbind my ankles or hobble to the door.

  Darin stood. The opportunity, such as it was, had passed. "Hands," he commanded. I raised them, and he wrapped my wrists with layer upon layer of fresh tape. I was glad to see a peanut-butter smear still masked the controller LEDs. "Five minutes for your morning ablutions."

  I took my time. With power restored, the exo's GPS would be trying to initialize.

  Eventually, I was back on the sofa, behind the restored rickety table, gnawing on a gravel-and-twigs energy bar. Maybe my morning water bottle was also drugged; I was too parched to leave it untouched and too keyed up to judge. We went through everything again. My arrival at the rock where his father worked. Discovery of the device. Evacuation. What the company thought, and I thought, of all this. The rehash took more than enough time for GPS to have initialized. To have localized me. More than long enough for my reserve battery to have finished recharging.

  No sign yet of the cavalry.

  Through the closed door, I heard a flurry of footsteps. Thumping. Rustling. "Time to wrap it up," a woman called out.

  I can't say I cared for the sound of that.

  "I'll be right along," Darin yelled back.

  "Hurry it up," the same woman shouted.

  "In a minute." In a lower voice, Darin continued, "And Dad dead."

  "Two dead." I'd gotten careless, or worn down, or there had been drugs in the latest water, and I'd succumbed to them. Maybe all three. Whatever the reason, the words just popped out.

  "Two people took cyanide?"

  I hadn't killed anyone, but there was no disguising my guilty shiver. "If I could identify the bomber, or so I reasoned back there on the rock, I could get him or her to disarm the device. Auditing gave me an excuse to interview everyone—not asking about the bomb, of course, but in general. What I did uncover was an inventory discrepancy, somebody having diverted several kilos of platinum. More likely two somebodies, one distrusting the other to keep quiet. Soon after I'd begun poking around, one of the crew vanished." Pretty little Anisha Chatterjee, turned to . . .

  "The morning after her disappearance, I spotted an unexplained spike in organic feedstock for the printers." Also, after I'd synthed and eaten breakfast. My gorge rising, I forced myself to continue. "An increase that came to about her body mass."

  Darin chewed on his lower lip. "You don't suppose Dad . . .?"

  More thumping and stomping noises from the next room. Doors, each fainter than the last, slamming. And then, silence. If the unseen among my captors had left, what did that bode for me?

  Nothing good, especially if I didn't keep my wits about me.

  I said, "Les didn't seem like the homicidal type. Anyway, what with the vid of you, he had plenty else on his mind." Then more truth slipped out. "But if I hadn't gone digging, hadn't been trying to identify the bomber, I wouldn't have rattled whoever did kill Anisha. Who gives a good goddamn if she planned to rip off the company a little?"

  "Who gives a good goddamn if someone rips off the company for a lot?" Glancing at his wrist-clock tattoo, then at me, Darin stood. He managed to look apologetic. "The thing is . . ."

  The thing was, he and his cronies had planned to trap and kill off a crew of five. Why would he balk at eliminating the witness already bound hand and foot? The extent just then of my offensive potential was leaping to my feet—while somehow not falling—and lunging across the table to head-butt him. After which, without doubt, I would crash to the floor.

  What good is money to you now? Bea chided. Of course, she wasn't here. Besides, I'd never shared with her my deal with the company. If this was guilt, well, then
fair enough. But maybe it was my subconscious making a suggestion . . . .

  "You know," I whispered, leaning over the table, "you can get a bit extra out of the company. And in return, I get to walk out of here. What do you say?"

  "Go on."

  I dropped my hands into my lap. "The company set me up with a slush fund. For expenses."

  "How much are we talking about?"

  What I had left wasn't bribe-worthy. I lied.

  He whistled.

  "Do we have a deal?" I pressed.

  He laughed unpleasantly. "So you can use a duress code, or so the funds you transfer can be traced? I don't think so."

  "No. Cryptocash. Anonymous. Untraceable. Untaxable." Also, for those reasons, beloved of organized crime and money launderers. Illegal for decades in the USNA, of course, and most other Earther jurisdictions. Kidnappers and extortionists would not quibble over that detail.

  Darin was silent, but clearly tempted.

  I said, "The funds are in a standard wallet on my comp. I'll transfer it all. Just promise you'll let me go."

  "Uh-huh. I power up your comp, and it broadcasts your location. Oh, I'd still walk away before anyone got here, but I don't need anyone to come looking for me. Pass."

  He wasn't wrong. To make a transfer required being online. A cryptocash transaction was a bookkeeping entry, no more and no less, in a digital ledger distributed, and replicated, on computers across the planet. That had been the basic architecture going back to the mother of all cryptocurrencies, bitcoin. No communication with that ledger? No transfer. For this to work, my comp had to go onto the net.

  "Hear me out," I said. "Open up my comp. Pull the GPS chip before turning it on. It can't reveal where I am when it doesn't know." I didn't volunteer the presence of an active GPS chip in my exoskeleton.

  He mulled it over. Went into the next room, returning with what looked like my comp. (Also with a bulge in his pants, and I doubted he had become happy to see me.) Sat. Unfolded the comp face down on the table, and exposed the guts of it. Surfed awhile on his own comp, I presumed to identify the GPS chip used in mine. Finally, he pried loose a chip, closed my comp, turned it over, powered it up, and slid it toward me across the wobbly table. "Do it."