by Mike Brooks
She was still taking the injustice of it all out on her chewing gum when she walked up the steps and through the front doors of the main Zhuchengshi security station, her cleaning tools under one arm, and headed for the reception desk. The officer who at there was somehow managing to look both bored and hassled at the same time as he explained to the white-haired man in front of him that, no, Sergeant Wu wasn’t on duty today, and no, he couldn’t be contacted on his day off, and no, there was no one else who had those details of the robbery case he was asking about. . . .
Jia sidled in the moment the old codger stormed off.
“Hey.”
Zhuchengshi’s residents mainly seemed to have speaking patterns reminiscent of the Beijing area back on Old Earth, but the city was diverse enough that she wasn’t worried she’d sound too out of place. The officer glanced up at her with the glassy smile of a public-facing representative, which turned into an uncertain frown when he saw her overalls. “Yes?”
Jia smiled back at him. “So, I’m, uh, cleaning here, and it’s my first day. Am I even in the right place?”
“Cleaners usually go in the side entrance,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in what had to be one of the least-accurate pieces of direction Jia had ever received.
“Yeah, but like I said, it’s my first day,” she reminded him. “I’ve got my rota and my stuff, but not the access code.” She glanced around, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “Also, between you and me, I’m a little late because my brother’s a moron, and I had to help him find his uniform for his stupid job down at the spacedocks. If Mr. Tse catches me coming in late, I don’t fancy my chances for still being here tomorrow, but if I come in this way, he won’t know exactly when I came in unless he bothers to come and check the sign-in logs, and—”
“Tse?” The officer rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him. I don’t know why he still has the contract, the shit he gives people like you.”
“Because he’s dirt cheap and your bosses are tight,” Jia snorted. She gestured at herself, taking in the ill-fitting overalls and the cleaning paraphernalia. “Think I want to be working on the breadline for him? I wanted to be a pilot! But a job’s a job, right?”
“Right.” He looked over her shoulder as the main doors swung open again, and she followed his glance to see an agitated-looking woman hurrying across the foyer with one child over her shoulder and another, older one scurrying along behind her. “You’re meant to go in the side door, though. . . .”
The woman reached the desk, and presumably, assuming that a cleaner wouldn’t actually be talking to the desk sergeant, immediately launched into a breathless diatribe about someone rear-ending her aircar but not stopping. Jia glanced down at the older kid who was looking up at her with the shameless curiosity of a child who hadn’t yet been told enough times that it was rude to stare.
She glared back at him. What you looking at, you little shit? Then she remembered that she still had a job to do and looked up at the desk sergeant again, who was already trying to calm the new arrival down and get the pertinent details from her. Jia pulled out her pad and brought up the dummy rota Jenna had created for her using the floor plans she’d gleaned from nefarious scouring of the Spine, then waved it at the officer with an imploring look on her face. He glanced over at her, hesitated in a moment of indecision, then waved a hand irritably at the terminal at the end of the counter.
“Okay, okay, just sign in for the fire records.”
“Thanks!” Jia said cheerily, not having to feign her relief as she tapped at the screen. She’d already decided to use the name Bao Jing Yan simply because the stuck-up bitch would have rather died than take a cleaning job, and Jia had never forgiven her for that stunt with the fish noodles in the playground at high school. That done, she waited for the desk sergeant to buzz the door release and slipped through into the station beyond.
Jia had to hand it to Jenna: The slicer might have been a prissy rich kid, but she was certainly good at her job, and the floor plan was right on the money. Of course, Jia could have walked through the side door as nice as you please with one of blondie’s slicing devices taking care of the access code, but that might have landed her in the same place as genuine cleaners who would know she wasn’t one of the crew. Coming in the front door might seem harder, but the crew of the Keiko had long since learned that most people were almost blind to you so long as you had the right uniform, or at least a close approximation of it.
The other advantage she’d had was that Muradov had been watching the station and seen the van of White Chrysanthemum Cleaners pulling in with their logo proudly displayed. Once Jenna had that particular detail, it had been easy for her to find out who the supervisor was, and if you had a uniform and the right name to drop, then the world was practically your vat-grown oyster.
Jia checked her pad and veered left. She didn’t want to go near the holding cells, or anywhere that might involve other security checks. Of course, she had no doubt that the cells got cleaned, but that wasn’t what she was here for. She called an elevator, trying not to fidget too much inside her uncomfortable overalls.
“Hey!”
She looked around to see three officers bearing down on her, two men and a woman. The one closest to her, one of the men, was short and stocky with a dark goatee, a mug of what was presumably coffee in his hand, and a broad grin on his face. The other man was taller, although still broad, and was eyeing his colleague with what seemed to Jia to be a mixture of misgiving and disapproval. The woman looked more Russian in ancestry, and had an odd shape to the left leg of her pants that suggested some form of augmentation.
Jia remained in place as the doors pinged open beside her. Oh, here we fucking go. She’d known she wasn’t in any trouble as soon as she’d seen their body language, but . . .
“Hey,” the smiler repeated, looking her up and down ostentatiously, “you grease yourself to get into that this morning?”
Don’t tell him to go fuck himself; don’t tell him to go fuck himself. . . .
“Officer,” she said instead, tucking her gum into her cheek and smiling sweetly as she stepped into the elevator, “I’d like to report a crime.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, someone’s stolen all the handsome right off your face!”
The doors swept closed, cutting her off from him, but she just had time to see delighted grins spreading across the faces of the other two officers as their colleague got served. She tapped the display and the elevator began to rise towards the third floor.
“Yeah, and go fuck yourself!” she yelled happily in a general downwards direction, making an obscene gesture, then eyed what looked like a camera lens in the corner. “Not you, if there’s anyone watching. Him.”
She supposed cleaners probably weren’t meant to swear at security officers, even from the other side of a door. Well, she didn’t need to pretend to be a good cleaner; she just needed to not be kicked out of the building before she did what she’d come here to do. To be on the safe side, she decided to behave from that moment as if all the officers in the building were Tamara Rourke with her murderface on. No lip, no cheek, just yes-ma’am-no-ma’am-leave-me-the-fuck-alone-ma’am.
Her short elevator ride terminated a few seconds later, and the doors opened onto an empty hallway identical in layout and décor to the one she’d just left. She stepped out and looked both ways, trying to orientate herself, then checked her pad and headed right. Of course, she had Rourke in her head now, and couldn’t help but wonder how the old girl was holding together.
Kuai had always maintained—quietly—that Rourke wasn’t actually as tough as she pretended to be. Jia had argued against him, and not just because he was her brother. It wasn’t purely a logical thing, she admitted. For her, having Tamara Rourke with you had always felt like being backed up by the biggest, baddest kid on the block. It wasn’t that Jia particularly liked Rourke—well, not that much—but she’d never wanted that rea
ssuring notion to be proved untrue. It was always comforting to think that no matter what problem faced them, they could call on Rourke to kick its ass.
Unless, of course, you need to sneak into a security headquarters like a motherfucking Chinese ninja. Then you need me.
Although she did kind of wish she could have brought her pilot hat.
She reached a room marked 311 and paused, checking her pad again. This was it, the room in which Jenna thought the security chief was shortly due to have her monthly meeting with a group of “concerned citizens” who were more than likely high-ranking Triax officers. Jia pulled out her antibac polisher and nudged the door open with her hip, then stepped through.
The room was a simple enough affair, nothing more than four freestanding tables that could be arranged as desired, surrounded by eight formfitting, soft chairs that would mould themselves to the shape of the occupants’ posteriors and spines. The large window looking out over the headquarters’ central quadrangle had a control that allowed it to be tinted into obscurity if required, and there was a refreshments machine in the corner that offered what seemed to Jia to be a ridiculously large range of drinks.
She pulled on her gloves and started working, humming under her breath as she swept the polisher back and forth over the tabletops, adding a thin veneer of antibacterial varnish as she did so. Then she got the extendable vacuum out and set to work on the carpet, crawling under the tables to reach the middle of the floor properly.
While under there, she hastily unfastened her overalls slightly and pulled three tiny electronic devices out from where they’d been nestling next to her skin. They were no larger than her thumbnail, and had been spliced together by Jenna out of commpieces bought from a local electronics store. Jia spat her gum into her hand, moulded it quickly between thumb and forefinger, then used it to attach their makeshift bugs to the underside of the tables. She took care not to cover either the tiny microphones or the slight bulge that housed the transmitters, but even so a casual glance might not have seen anything but a piece of discarded gum.
Not that anyone was likely to be casually glancing up at the underside of a table in a meeting room anyway. Which was sort of the idea. Still, every little helped.
She crawled out again, refastening her overalls so she wasn’t inadvertently exposing herself. Well, that was the hard part done. Now all she had to do was maintain her cover for long enough that it wasn’t completely obvious to anyone watching her on surveillance that she’d come in specifically to do something in this particular room.
Secret agent cleaner. As if I wasn’t awesome enough already.
Three rooms later, and she’d fallen into an almost trancelike state of entering, polishing, and vacuuming while her brain wandered off into wondering how she could persuade the Captain to spring for a new pilot’s chair. However, when she meandered out into the corridor to head for the next one she found herself face-to-face with an older woman, also in overalls and also carrying cleaning equipment. Jia’s immediate impression was that the woman looked like a koi carp. She even had some straggly whiskers a little bit like barbels on either side of her wide, lippy mouth.
Jia tried a friendly, noncommittal smile. “Hey.”
The other woman frowned. “Who’re you?”
“Bao Jing Yan,” Jia replied without missing a beat. “I’m new. Started today.”
Fishface’s frown deepened. “You didn’t come in with us.”
“Yeah, my brother made me late so I came in the front door, and—”
“You’d better come with me to see Mr. Tse,” Fishface told her sternly, turning away.
“Hey, I’ve, like, got a rota,” Jia protested to her back, “I don’t have time to play follow-the-leader with you.”
Fishface looked around and shot Jia a glare, her generous mouth curving downwards in undisguised displeasure. “You come with me right now, and maybe Mr. Tse won’t fire you on the spot.”
“Shit, fine,” Jia groaned, setting off after the other woman. “Hey, you treat all the new girls like this, or just the pretty ones?”
If silences could kill, Jia would have been leaving in a casket. As it was, Fishface was putting extra effort into pulling the doors open as they reached them. Jia was well aware of her multitude of talents, and she knew that one of them was making people angry.
Okay, most people didn’t think it was a talent as such, but that was because they had limited thinking.
What Jia truly didn’t want to happen was to get to Mr. Tse, who would instantly denounce her as an imposter. That would probably get her locked up, and Jia’s one night in jail all those years ago before Drift and Rourke had bailed her out and recruited her to be their pilot had been quite enough for her. And her idiot brother had said that joyriding that shuttle would be a stupid idea! It had impressed a starship captain who’d seen it and had got her a steady job, so that showed what he knew. Anyway, she didn’t trust her ability to talk her way out of trouble with Mr. Tse, so it was time to fall back on what she knew.
Starting a fight.
As soon as there were a couple of cops visible in the corridor with them, she stepped up alongside Fishface as the older woman pulled another door open. There was enough force on it to hit Jia square in the face, and she fell to the floor clutching her head.
“Arrgh! Watch it, you fucking cow!”
She could see Fishface’s expression through her fingers: anger mixed with consternation. The other woman knew that Jia was milking this for an audience, and furious embarrassment made her lean down and grab Jia’s overalls.
“Get up, you little bitch!” Fishface hissed, trying to haul Jia upright. She hadn’t counted on the fasteners on the front of Jia’s overalls giving way to her tug, ripping it open practically to the waist and revealing the underwear that was all Jia had worn beneath due to the damn thing being so tight.
Well, now.
“You perverted old hag!” Jia raged, springing back to her feet and slapping the other woman’s hand away. She put a little extra spittle into her words as she leaned in. “Get your filthy fucking hands off me or I’ll—”
Fishface wasn’t dumb and knew she’d been played, but despite this—or perhaps because of it—she apparently couldn’t restrain her rage enough to prevent herself from lashing out with a slap to Jia’s jaw. Well, it was actually half-slap and half-punch, but either way it was enough for Jia to sprawl convincingly sideways again just before the two officers thundered in and grabbed Fishface, hauling her away from her poor, abused victim.
“You know what?” Jia screamed, scrambling up and setting off at a furious walk that was just shy of a run. “You can shove this job! I’m going back to the agency!”
“We need you to give a statement!” one of the officers shouted after her.
“Fuck it!” Jia yelled, not looking back. “You saw what happened! I’m having nothing more to do with her!”
It turned out that even security officers would get out of the way of a cleaner with a face like a thundercloud storming down the middle of a corridor. Jia wasn’t sure if this was at least partially because her face felt like it was already bruising, but she didn’t care: Most people’s reaction to a furious-looking stranger was to quietly step aside and let them happen to someone else, and that seemed to hold true even here.
“You didn’t take long,” the desk sergeant commented as he buzzed her out.
“Never should’ve come here,” Jia snapped, hastily scrolling through the fire records and signing Bao Jing Yan out. “One of the other girls just went for me! I ain’t working here.” She marched out of the front doors into the sweltering desert heat, leaving a startled-looked officer and a slightly bewildered foyer of civilians behind her.
Fucking flawless.
She put her commpiece in and called the Captain, swearing at an aircar buzzing along at street level as it nearly clipped her when she dodged across the road.
+Yes?+
“Done,” she told him in English, just in case a
nyone was close enough to overhear.
+Any problems?+
“One girl thought I didn’t belong,” Jia admitted. “Had to start a fight to get out.”
+Oh, very subtle. Well done.+
She sighed. “If you wanted subtle, why the fuck did you send me?”
IDLE HANDS
Tamara Rourke had been sitting in a hotel room doing virtually nothing for three weeks, and she was getting thoroughly sick of it.
She’d stretched properly as soon as she’d been left alone, to get the last kinks out of her muscles, although she’d had to strip down in front of Sacha, Andrei, and the bald man (whom she’d later learned was called Leon) before they’d given her any privacy. Once they were satisfied that she wasn’t concealing any weapons or other equipment separately to her bodysuit, they’d taken it away and provided her with loose shirts and pants, all of which were too big for her.
She’d tied things up as best she could, but although she could roll up sleeves and legs, there was nothing to be done about the waists. They wouldn’t give her a belt, which was sensible of them, and hadn’t provided her with any underwear, which didn’t really bother her. They also wouldn’t give her shoes, which was no problem considering the room’s carpet but which would undoubtedly cause her difficulties outside. That, of course, was almost certainly the idea: The trio weren’t exactly geniuses, but they weren’t stupid either.
