“If they wanted the body found, why grab the person that found it?”
She shrugged. “Somebody made a mistake? The frog saw something it shouldn’t have? The body was supposed to be found by a human and not a ranid? It was found too soon? Could be a lot of reasons.” The water hissed. She poured. “If there’s information out there, I’ll find it.”
If the information was connex anywhere. But that went without saying.
She had learned a lot about net mining in fifteen years. She was good at it, knew roots and routes to old caches and layered backups and coredumps and virtual lockers from two hundred years ago. She had old ciphers and she had archives and she had backdoors into current data holds, too.
The more old information one could find in the warrens of connex, the more uncharted paths one knew from point A to point Q, the more new information one could get to that one wasn’t supposed to know about. And sometimes the old records were useful in themselves. For historical reasons, or—in a relativistic galaxy—sometimes for more present ones.
Cricket had never actually had to blackmail anyone. Not since she became an archinformist, anyway.
“You always do,” Jean said, bringing the tea that Cricket thought was still too hot to drink to his mouth. It was why he needed her. He might conjure, and she would bet he had the illegal coincidence engines to do it with. But he wouldn’t swallow wire, or live with it in his head.
She tapped fingers on the edge of her mug. “Do you think they’ll let a ranid person testify in a Core court?”
“Well, they would if they were a tech species. Of course, if they were a tech species, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”
Cricket hated him for a moment, hated the falseness of his pale, open gaze. “Like they’d let it make a difference.”
“They?”
“Core,” she said. And then qualified, “Charter Trade. They’d find a way around the law, even if the ranids had spaceflight, if there were something on Greene’s World that they wanted.” There was; she knew it, and she suspected Jean did, too. “They don’t care where the luxuries come from, or who suffers to pay the way.”
Jean looked down. She wondered if she had shamed him. “Find out, won’t we? I need you to step up your efforts regarding Closs and his cronies.”
There were a half-dozen stupid questions she could have asked, most of them the kind of contentless noises people made to reassure themselves that communication was taking place. If Jean didn’t think, or at least hope, that Closs was involved in something dirty enough to bring him down, he wouldn’t have asked her to keep looking. And Cricket knew the sorts of things that people who should know better got up to.
She drank off her tea. She’d been right; it was hot enough to break sweat across her forehead, and she mopped her face with her sleeve after she put the mug in the sink. “I’ll ask André to come see you when I blink him tonight. I’m going to go look at the vegetables.”
Jean laid a hand inside her elbow as she stepped past him. “What are you doing on a lump of mud like this, Cricket?”
“Instead of gnawing imported bonbons in the Core? Connex doesn’t take time, Jean. I can live anywhere. It’s cheaper to do it here.” Practically guileless, she smiled into his eyes.
“And here I was hoping that maybe you killed a man.”
She winked and drew her arm away. “Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid.”
André’s clients usually came to him, though for Rim he made exceptions. He still didn’t like to be seen entering their barge, however, so he skinned in the bathroom of a coffee shop (after he ordered a mug he would not drink) and walked into reception resembling himself only casually. Of course he flagged as altered in anyone’s headset, but cosmetic skins were more common than not.
Reception chipped him, verified that he was expected, and locked on a wristlet to guide him up. He didn’t need it—he knew where Timothy Closs worked—but Security would have its little games and this would get him past most of them.
Its plaintive beeping led him on.
Closs got up from the desk to greet him. One thing about Timothy; the ceremonies he stood on were all politeness. He extended his right hand, gave André’s larger but not much darker one a clasp, and handed him a drink without asking. “Good job last night, André.”
André took the seat Closs gestured him into and set the stubby glass on the arm. “Thank you, Major. I hope there’s not a problem.” He would prefer not to talk about old business under any circumstances. Like a leaf upon the water: let the current slide it by.
“Not with your work,” Closs replied, returning to his chair. Perched on the edge of it, he gave the impression of someone still in motion. A compact brown man in a navy and white suit, he seemed—to André—condensed. “No, it’s another problem entirely. One of the board made an unfortunate decision, and it’s left us a loose end.”
“This all sounds very euphemistic.”
“To put it mildly.” Speaking quickly, Closs outlined the problem: the scheduling conflict that had led to a ranid liaison discovering the body ahead of time, the site team’s errors in recovery, Jefferson Greene’s overreaction.
“He’s given it something to talk about,” André said, understanding.
Closs knuckled his eye and nodded. “It gets worse. The witness was liberated last night.”
“The explosion.”
“Unfortunately. We think it’s been taken by a ranid anticolonialist faction. You can appreciate the implications.”
“If they can get anyone to listen to them.”
“Connex is free,” Closs said. “There are humans on this planet who would be all too happy to foster a scandal, if it affected Rim. The savages aren’t the only Greens in the galaxy. Or the only enemies of Rim.”
“True enough.” But André’s hand gesture said, What do you want me to do about it?
Closs put his hands on the desk. “We want you to cover the contract, André. At something more than your ordinary fee.”
Jean Kroc poled his skiff upriver.
He could have used his motors, sure, and the caterpillars weren’t even too noisy. But the birds could hear them, and the ranids, and it never hurt to show a little courtesy. Besides, there were enough powered craft on Greene’s to affect the natives’ long-distance communications. Like Earth’s cetaceans, the ranids took advantage of the sound-conducting properties of water to hold conversations with friends and relatives they might never have swum side by side with. The advent of mechanized transportation had been unkind to their culture, their art, their discourse, and their science.
And in any case, there was something to be said for slipping over the brown water in the heat of afternoon, his shirt rubbing sweat from his shoulders as he threaded the channels of the delta. Four-winged insects so like an Earth darning-needle that they bore the same common name slipped over the water, leaving chains of ripples like the paths of skipped stones. With a quicksilver twist one rocketed upward, the drone of straining wings rising in pitch. It clutched something that twisted in muscular panic; Jean winced, but it was just a fish or a tadpole—too small for an eggling, and anyway no endoparent would let an infant out of its pouch. Fat drops of water scattered, and the darning-needle settled on the flat prow of Jean’s skiff to sever its dinner’s spine with a scissoring bite.
He could not actually hear the crunching.
Green reeds rose up around him, reflected smoothly in flat water. Their heads nodded, heavy with pollen in feather-duster flowers. A red flannel rag off to port marked his channel. It was an odd-numbered rag and the knot was at the top; he turned away from it.
Even Jean Kroc needed a little aide-mémoire to find his way around the bayou.
The yellow sun rode behind haze, swarms of no-seeums zooming among the tassels. Greene’s World was better than Earth that way; about half of the local biting insectoid life had no use for mammal blood. The leeches, however, weren’t so particular. And the ragweed equivalents could have choked an ele
phant.
The air felt primitive. The rich scent of fermenting vegetation bubbled from beneath the water, and Jean’s salt stung his cracked lip and his eyes, dried itchy among his stubble. Even to the profusion of alien flowers—mauve and white silverling with its feet wet and its belled heads shaded beneath taller plants, parasitic cutthroat weed threading from reed to reed, its waxy paraorchids dripping treacle-sweet beads of sap with which to trap small unwary creatures—the New Nile Delta could have been Earth in the Upper Cretaceous. Jean could imagine a Dryptosaurus slipping along the shallow waterways, barely ruffling a leaf in passing—eyeing him like the also-extinct tiger from between concealing reeds.
His hands sweated inside his fingerless gloves as he dragged the pole from the sucking mud of the channel bed and swung it forward. The strain caught him first along the biceps and across the shoulders, and as he leaned into the push, he felt it in his chest, triceps, latissimus dorsi, hamstrings, calves. He tugged the pole again, let the momentum of the skiff draw it from the bottom, swung it up. The name of the game was control. He glanced over his shoulder, as if a dinosaur might in fact be considering him for its supper, and almost missed the blue rag with the knot tied downward that marked the next turn.
He poled toward this one, moving farther from the New Nile’s dredged main channel and closer to the paramangroves that made a thunderhead darkness off to the east when he got a glimpse at them up a channel that headed in that direction.
The sun stood another hand higher and he was picking up ranid chatter on the underwater microphones when he slid the skiff underneath a moldy thermocamouflage netting strung between paramangroves. He moored the skiff against the aerial roots of the nearest tree, drove the pole in deep to wedge it, and tied that off as well. The tender water-brown skin of the roots was polished shiny where he stepped; he frowned when he noticed. Time to move the mooring.
Or maybe he should bring André here, and move afterward. Once a site was contaminated there was no point in rushing to burn another if the first could still be used in the short term. And he was more concerned with satellite imaging than with some bayou boy or mud-puppy skipper tripping over his facility. There were ways to ensure that that would remain unlikely.
The paramangroves grew knotted together, branches interlaced like the fan vaults of a cathedral, roots like the tentacles of angry octopods. Jean Kroc skipped along them all but silently, rubber soles tacky enough that his feet did not skid from the algae-hung bark. Animals zipped about his head. The Greene’s World “birds” were awfully birdy, as such things went, though they tended to beaks fenced in whiskery feathers. The air under the paramangroves was a soup of insects; easier to sweep them up en masse than grab just one or two.
The door in the trunk was hard to see. Jean found the nub that fit just between his thumb and forefinger and pressed his palm through the holographic bark. Not even a fog; just an image. But you had to know where to touch, and in the dim green light beneath the leaves like broad-palmed hands, huddled into the gap between umbrella branches and spreading roots, on one big tree of a million, it was unlikely that it would be stumbled upon. And Jean could make it more unlikely as he chose.
The plate beneath was warm and smooth. It recognized Jean’s palm and depressed slightly, soundlessly into the trunk. The door eased open—popped up and slid aside—and Jean Kroc stepped within, entering the lair of a mad scientist.
The room was somewhat smaller than the diameter of the great tree, carved from deadwood only. One worn swivel chair commanded the scuffed floor, the upholstery patched with tape. Around it, granting just enough room for his knees, was a series of pitted panels topped by an eclectic assortment of display and interface hardware—holographic projectors, screen monitors, an old 3-D hand-interface that looked like the ears of a theremin and operated on more or less the same principles. There were also three keyboards and a holoface; none of them matched.
In addition to the marks of hand-welding evident where sheet steel had been bent and fixed together, the slots through which readouts protruded were more often taped to fit than cut. The chamber was barely big enough for two if one was standing. Or willing to perch on the commode, tucked into a cutout niche, because the chamber did not have corners. The control panels followed the arc of the hollowed-out paramangrove, the tree’s weakened structure reinforced by the plascrete sealant bonding the external wall.
He’d moved his home plenty in the last thirty years: apartments, minifabs, a clamshell hut on stilts in the bayou for a while. This was eternal. This was what he couldn’t afford to rebuild, and so he hid it well, changed his routes, came here erratically, and rarely showed the way to anyone. Cricket didn’t know how to find this place, though she had to suspect it existed. The bayou and the mangrove stand themselves were protection, as they shifted and rechanneled and never twice looked the same.
Lucienne knew it, though, and how to find it. Somebody had to, in case something happened to Jean.
Jean gave it a moment to power up, using stored solar from concealed panels and fuel cells buried far enough underwater that they shouldn’t emit to space. A planet was a big place for complete sat-coverage on a colonial corporation’s budget.
It all seemed to be humming. He dusted the moss stains from his hands and closed the door, sealing himself into the blue-lit coolness of the most illegal thing on Greene’s World.
Vengeance wasn’t his metier. But he was here to make some black magic happen.
A little red flannel bag, that weren’t nothing.
6
“HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT FINDING ONE NAKED AMPHIBIAN on a whole muddy goddamn world?” André shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “It’s not as if I can go around DNA-typing every frog I meet. And the insurgents use disguises, don’t they? If I were your ranid, Tim, frankly I’d dig in deep in the swamp and go seven kinds of native. You don’t need me; you need a good old boy from back in the delta.”
“We can make sure you find the ranid,” Closs answered. He wasn’t pacing. Instead, he stood before his wide windows, hands folded, watching the light glint off the water. The bay lay pellucid beyond the polarized display glass, water limpid enough that André could make out shells and stones on the pale sand bottom. The water might run down the New Nile muddy and rich, but most of its sediment dropped out in the broad wandering delta, and what flowed into the sea was almost polished.
Beyond the zone of riverine admixture, where the brackish water clouded, in good weather the bay was clear as quartz. The sleek pewter outline of a long-necked animal glided past, sunning itself just below the surface. André caught a glimpse of its creamy belly and snaggle teeth as it banked down and away, curving in sudden pursuit. A nessie. They usually haunted deeper water and avoided industry, as shy as they were toothy, but this one looked young. And there were bigger predators in the deeps.
“If you can find the ranid, then I don’t see why you’d be willing to pay my fee.”
“You misapprehend me.” Closs turned around, beckoned André with two curving fingers. André stood, leaving behind his untouched glass. When he was an arm’s length away, Closs continued. “We can make sure you find it, though. The capabilities of Rim—”
“You’re talking about running a manip.”
Closs didn’t answer.
“A manip. On me.” A probability manipulation might bring him right down on the missing coolie’s doorstep. And it also meant staff, and Rim personnel, and processor time, and paperwork.
Met with continuing silence, André tried again. “I don’t want that kind of a data trail—”
Closs shook his head. “There won’t be one.”
Still. André had a bad feeling about this. Too far outside of his usual line of work. Too many ways to get killed, chasing ghosts through the bayou. “I can’t take it.”
Closs stepped forward and caught his forearm. André paused. The grip was not restraining or sharp; a request rather than a grab. “Do me one favor.”
André d
id not answer. But he also did not pull away.
Closs let him go, first giving his forearm a quick friendly squeeze. “Wait until tomorrow to refuse. Sleep on it.”
“I don’t need the money, Tim.”
Closs smiled, showing whitened teeth. “I know you don’t. But the thing is, I need the help.”
A hell of an offer. Jefferson Greene’s first mate—and, everybody knew, the brains of the Greene’s World Rim operation—acknowledging a personal debt. That was the sort of thing careers rose and fell on. And nobody was more aware than André that he wasn’t going to stay young forever.
On the other hand, very few people were more aware than André that once he let Rim plant its hooks, he would not be working for himself anymore. Operating under the occasional contract was one thing. Assisting them in conjuring his future—allowing himself to be entangled—well.
André wasn’t a superstitious man. But if he wanted to learn from Jean Gris, it would be an unwise thing to let Rim rule his fate. And the whole prospect reminded him uncomfortably of his mother’s tactics. Not that Zoë Deschênes could have backed up any threat of ruining his luck.
But Charter Trade could.
“I’ll think about it,” André said. He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets. “Don’t worry. I can show myself out.”
Out in the sun again, he gasped sharply. He dropped his elbows on the railing and put his head down, let the light bake his scalp and neck muscles. The sun picked darker scars out in heat until he shielded his skull with his palms. His blinked-up sunshield helped ameliorate the glare off the water. One more breath, then he shuddered and drew himself up, shoulders square.
He’d wanted to learn. He’d placed a loaded pistol on his tongue and pulled the trigger. That was a commitment.
But instant death was easy. Killing people—painlessly, efficiently—was what he did. Who should not matter.
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