The Credulity Nexus

by Graham Storrs

  She laughed again, outraged but amused. “Do you always flirt like this with your clients?”

  “My client is a little weasel called McGregor. His client is probably some other middleman, and his client is most likely Titan Engineering Corporation – your husband's company. I'm not sure where you come into all this, Peth.”

  She smiled a tight smile. “Let me tell you where you come in, Rik. I'm going to take delivery of a small package. Something extremely valuable. Then I'm going to give it to you and you're going to take it to my husband. Which is where I come in too, I suppose. Without me there, they'd never hand it over to you. See?”

  “And why would you trust me to carry this extremely valuable package halfway across the system?” Newton Cordell famously lived in a remodelled asteroid in geosynchronous orbit.

  “Well, it's too dangerous for me to do it! Goodness, there are so many people out there who would kill to get hold of what's in that package. I have to trust somebody, Rik.” She gave a little one-shouldered shrug. Cute as a button. Then she leaned forward and scraped the back of his left hand with a fingernail. Rik snatched his hand away and glared at her as blood beaded on the scratch.

  “Insurance.” She showed him her nail. “It has a tiny hypo in it. I've just put a radio tag in your bloodstream. It'll broadcast as long as you're near a cogplus interface tower. Which, in this world, is everywhere. I trust you now, Rik.”

  Rik sat back and studied her for a moment. Motorway drabness streamed past the windows. The sky, the concrete high-rises, power lines and comms towers, the broad elevated road... Everything outside was cold and grey, drifting past in near silence. Inside, there was warmth, comfort, and a beautiful woman smiling complacently at him.

  “What's in the package?” he asked.

  “Need to know,” she said.

  “I need to know.”

  “No, you don't.”

  “Then the deal's off.”

  She smiled her indulgent smile. “Here, I want to show you something.” She leaned towards him again, and he drew away. “Big baby! I just want to exchange a file. Now, give me your hand.”

  Reluctantly, he held out his hand and she took hold of it briefly. A document passed from her cogplus to his, using their bodies' minute electric fields as a data channel. Normally, person-to-person communication was by radio, through the system-wide cogplus network, but if you wanted to keep your communications secure, direct contact was the best way.

  The file appeared in his public data space, and he put up a virtual display to read it.

  “My goodness, that's an antiquated piece of junk in your head, Rik. From the transaction log, I can see my own hardware had to dumb down its protocols by about half-a-dozen versions just to hand you a simple report.”

  Rik only half heard her as he scanned through the pages.

  “You really should get yourself something more up-to-date. Walking around with that in your head must be like living in the stone-age!”

  “This is a report about me,” he said, annoyed at just how thorough and accurate it was.

  Peth nodded. “You didn't think we wouldn't check you out, did you?”

  “All right, so you know my shirt size. So what?”

  “I'll double what your Mr. McGregor is paying you if you just do the job without asking any more questions.”

  “Greet-Greet is no Mister,” he grumbled, reading through his own psych assessment, flinching at some of the conclusions. “He's a slimy little Radionuclidian. You know? Creepy religious sect? All fundamentalist claptrap and the morals of an earthworm.”

  He put the file away and looked at her again. Had she just said she'd double his fee? Her expression was cold. Obviously playtime was over. Well, that was just fine. The report concluded that he was in so much trouble at the moment, he'd sell his own grandmother if the price was right. Well, who was he to disappoint them?

  “Treble it, and you won't get any more questions. OK?”

  She sneered so openly that it made him want to slap her. “It's a deal,” she said.

  They travelled the rest of the way in silence.

  Chapter 3

  Peth's Mercedes rolled to a halt in the car park of a low-rise, all-glass building with the word 'GeneWerken' in electric blue, holographic text across the front. The car park was almost empty, but the two black cars that crept in behind Peth's seemed to take up lots of space. Rik nodded towards them.

  “They're friends of yours, right?”

  Peth rolled her eyes and got out. Rik followed her over a bridge that crossed a sparkling water-feature and into a lobby that was all glass and chrome tubes at unsettling angles. A husky, disembodied voice whispered in Rik's ear, “Willkommen in GeneWerken,” as he crossed the threshold.

  Peth took two steps towards the reception desk and stopped. There was no-one there. A vase of flowers on the desk had fallen over.

  “Get your people in here,” Rik told her, taking her by the arm. He pulled her back to the doors, looking around the room, and drew his stunner. For the first time in their brief association, Peth looked off-balance and uncertain. “Call them now!”

  He dragged her into a corner, behind a chrome pillar. “Stay here,” he whispered and, running at a crouch, crossed the lobby to the reception desk. He peered round the edge of the long, frosted-glass counter, looking for cameras and doors. Two of Peth's security men rushed in. He waved them over to a door beside the reception desk, but they ignored him and positioned themselves close to their employer.

  Snarling curses at them, Rik left his cover and sprinted to the door. He stopped there briefly, glanced inside as fast as he could, then ran through into the corridor beyond.

  His heart was already hammering from the exertion of moving quickly in Earth's gravity, but he couldn't worry about that now.

  The corridor was broad and brightly-lit, with administrative offices down both sides. At the end, it opened into a wide atrium containing a café and three dead people. There were two more corridors leading off to the left and right beyond the tables and chairs.

  He ran to the nearest body and examined the wounds – a small, neat hole in the forehead and a huge, ragged void at the back of the skull. The victim was a woman, shot at close range by a high-calibre handgun. She stared up at Rik with pale-blue eyes set in a startled expression.

  He ran on and into the right-hand corridor. There were offices down one side and double doors on the other opening into a series of laboratories. In the second lab he came to, he found two dozen people. Four of them were dead. The rest were tied up in pairs and gagged. The door was unlocked, and he moved inside cautiously. Everyone watched him, wide-eyed with hope and fear.

  He was beginning to think that whatever had happened there was all over and he and Peth had arrived too late. Then he heard things being smashed in the room next door. Someone was ransacking the place. Quickly, he grabbed the nearest live body he could reach, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt, and pulled the gag off him. He had to slap a hand across the young man's mouth to prevent him bursting into animated jabber.

  “Just tell me how many there are and what they're looking for,” Rik said, panting heavily. He waited until the man had stopped struggling to speak before he let go of his mouth.

  “There's only one of them. We don't know what she wants. She's... She's...” But he was temporarily at a loss to explain whatever she was. “She's fucking scary. That's what she is.”

  Rik got up. “I'm going to leave you here, to keep you safe. Don't make a sound.” He fixed his eyes on the young man's until he saw him nod. Immediately, he went back to the door. At the end of the corridor he could see three of Peth's men crossing the atrium. He signed to them to join him, and this time, they came.

  He put his hand on the arm of the first one to arrive. Their bodies' electric fields merged and their cogplus implants did a quick handshake. “There's just one of them,” he said in his mind, the cogplus sending it directly to the bodyguard. He pointed to the door of the next la
b. “In there. A woman. Armed with a projectile weapon. She's already killed seven people to my knowledge. Go carefully.” The bodyguard nodded and Rik let go of his arm. His cogplus had the man's netID now, so they could communicate without actual contact.

  They all moved along the corridor to the lab doors, and Rik risked a quick peep through a window in the heavy door. As soon as he did, the glass exploded outward and a bullet slammed into the wall opposite. He flinched away, feeling the sting of tiny shards hitting his forehead. Whoever was in there was either extremely fast or had sensors set up at the door – or both.

  At the sound of the shot, two more of Peth's men appeared at the end of the corridor and came running to join their fellows. They took up positions around the door, calling to one another over the comm net and priming their weapons, ready for an assault.

  Rik kept low and kept his back pressed against the wall. Any assault on that lab would be suicide now they no longer had surprise on their side. A negotiation was the best they could do; try to get whoever was inside to surrender. But Peth's men were not listening when he attempted to explain. They had orders to get what they had come for and they had big bonuses riding on doing it fast, before the woman in the lab could destroy it or escape with it.

  Two more men were covering the outside of the lab, in case the intruder tried to get out through the high windows at the back. That left one guarding Peth.

  The head bodyguard was doing a silent three-two-one before they charged the doors, when an explosion blew both doors off their hinges. A hand-grenade. Rik rolled away, blinded, singed and deafened by the wall of flame that barged past him. The bodyguards were all caught in the blast, and were scattered. The two caught between the doors and the opposite wall were smashed to a bloody pulp. One went flying past Rik, his arms and legs flailing and his chest on fire.

  Through the smoke and flying debris, an astonishing figure leapt out of the lab. It was a woman, bald and naked and jet black from head to toe. She was small and trim and moved with blinding speed. In each hand she held a nine millimetre, semi-automatic handgun.

  One of Peth's men, a vague outline to Rik on the other side of the smoke, opened fire on her with his own semi-automatic, but the man must have been off balance or stunned, because his shots went wild, making Rik cringe against the wall for fear of being hit.

  The woman turned a gun towards the man with barely a backward glance as she set off down the corridor, and fired a rapid burst of shots. She took out the bodyguard with the first bullet, but what really impressed Rik was the fact that she ran up and along the wall of the corridor, and then onto the ceiling. When she reached the atrium she flipped back to the ground and sprinted towards the exit. There was another brief exchange of gunshots when she reached the foyer, and then there was silence.

  Rik got to his feet and stumbled into the lab. His ears were ringing and his vision was full of dark after-images. The room was still full of stinking smoke. He could see that the grenade had shattered glassware and other equipment right across the large room, but that was the least of the damage. Cupboards and fridges had been opened, locks snapped and hinges torn off, and their contents strewn across the tiled floors. The woman had been searching for something, and it hadn't been easy to find.

  There was a body in one corner of the room, a middle-aged man in a lab coat. He looked like a life-sized doll that had been tossed aside by the intruder. A blood-soaked mess glistened where his stomach should have been.

  Rik went over and touched his neck to feel for a pulse. The man's eyes opened.

  “Did she get it?” the man asked through his cogplus. His voice in Rik's head sounded distant and weak.

  “I don't think so. I'm here with Elspeth Cordell, Newton Cordell's wife. Where is it?”

  The man's hand moved feebly. For a moment Rik thought he was trying to point to something, but the man was reaching for his pocket. Rik patted him down and found a small, flat box in an inside pocket of his lab coat. It was about the size of a book reader and as fat as a finger. He flipped open the lid and saw half-a-dozen small glass phials neatly laid out inside. He snapped it shut again.

  “I'll bring help,” he said, rising to leave.

  The man opened his eyes again with a start, as if he'd dozed off. For an instant he looked alarmed and confused. Then he saw the case in Rik's hand and sighed with relief. He looked earnestly into Rik's eyes, managing to raise his head a little. “For we must needs die,” he gasped, and slumped back, unconscious or dead; it was hard to tell.

  Rik looked down at him and then at the destruction all about them, and shook his head. “So it seems,” he said, and went in search of Peth.

  He found her out in the car park, alone. She looked angry and maybe a little scared. Apart from that, she hardly had a hair out of place.

  “You took your time coming to find me,” she snapped.

  “Figured you were OK, or you were dead. Either way there was no rush. Where are the boys?”

  She glared at him. “Tidying up, what's left of them. Making sure there are no records of our visit for when the police arrive.”

  “The cops are going to love this one. I'm fine, by the way. A couple of bruises, a few scratches. Nothing for you to worry about. Who was the upload?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the black-skinned cutie who almost stole your package. You must remember her; walks on ceilings, shoots people, bald head, bad attitude. Ring any bells?”

  Peth was suddenly interested. “Almost stole my package? You mean, it's still here?”

  Rik ignored her. “I've met quite a few uploads over the past couple of years. lunar cities like Heinlein are full of them. Not so popular down here, though. Android bodies with uploaded, human brains. Of course, they usually mass about ten times what she did, so they can do the heavy lifting work on hard vacuum construction sites, but for those guys, size is just a matter of adding or subtracting a few litres of nanite paste.”

  “Where is it, Rik?”

  “It's safe. Now, you tell me why an upload would care about whatever you guys have been cooking up in this gene lab.”

  She shook her head. “No. Just get me the package and do your job.”

  Rik heard a footfall behind him and turned to see two of Peth's bodyguards standing there, weapons drawn. One of them was white-faced and had blood dripping from his arm.

  “You know, I just saved your ass and got you your precious package.” He took it out of his pocket and handed it over. She grabbed it and opened it, relaxing when she saw the phials inside were intact. “I think the least you could do is tell me what I'm up against.”

  She handed the case back to Rik. “I have no idea what we're up against. I certainly didn't expect... that. This was supposed to be very low-key. That's why we chose you – a nobody from nowhere. We thought if we hired a small army to move the package, it would draw too much attention.” She looked away. “I wish we had, now. No-one was supposed to know it was here. This whole operation was secret.”

  Rik shrugged. None of this was his problem. “Look, if you want to pay out my contract and call in an army, be my guest. Just do it quickly, 'cause I don't feel safe standing around here. That upload is likely out there somewhere, watching us.”

  She glared at him again. “No. We stick to the plan. We all go our separate ways from here. You disappear. It's a big planet. Go lose yourself. Just make sure the package gets to my husband.”

  Rik thought about arguing until he remembered his fee had been tripled. Getting lost was something he could do.

  “I'm taking one of the cars,” he said, nodding towards one of the big, black security vehicles.

  “Sure,” said Peth, and without another word, she got into her Mercedes.

  One of the bodyguards reached out to touch Rik and passed him the car's security code. Then another emerged from the building, carrying a wounded colleague, and deposited him in the other vehicle. Peth drove away as if none of it was her concern.

  Chapt
er 4

  Rik hit the Autobahn and headed west towards the English Channel. It was raining that light, persistent rain he always associated with northern Europe. Visibility was low, and the car's rain-speckled windows turned the dim afternoon murk into a multi-coloured light-show of headlamps and tail-lights.

  He'd already driven hundreds of kilometres out of his way and changed cars twice in the hope that he could confuse anyone trying to track his movements. Now he was in a little rental and thrashing it at its top speed. He was heading for CT2, the new Channel Tunnel, and should emerge at Southend on the UK side in – he glanced at the car's virtual dashboard – in six hours. From the number of vehicles hissing past him, he reckoned he'd go faster if he got out and walked.

  Still, it gave him time to take stock.

  As jobs went, this one was shaping up to be one of the strangest – and scariest. Certainly the body count was already higher than his last twenty jobs added together. He still couldn't quite accept Peth's explanation as to why she had been waiting for him in Berlin. She and Cordell must have known how dangerous that would be. And then, having risked her life to get him the package – unnecessarily, as it turned out – she had simply walked away and left him to deliver it. Surely it would have been more secure to put it in her armour-plated Mercedes, whistle up another convoy of security guards, and drive it to the nearest airport?

  But then what?

  He peered into the murky distance and imagined her taking a private hopper to – where was the nearest space bridge? – Saudi Arabia, probably. But if she was going that far, why not go all the way to Florida, or to the high-speed Clarke Bridge in Sri Lanka? Then she could have taken a gondola up to the orbital station and a Titan Engineering corporate space buggy on to her husband's asteroid.

  The most dangerous segment in Peth's whole journey would have been the gondola ride up the space bridge. Everywhere else, she would have been in private vehicles with plenty of security. But even Newton Cordell couldn't afford his own private space bridge. On the gondola, even in first class, she would have been too exposed. Her security couldn't have protected her. That's why she didn't do it herself, then. Her safety couldn't have been guaranteed all the way.