by S. C. Jensen
But it was only me, Gore, and a strange little man at the far end of the table.
Molly hadn’t shown yet.
The little man lifted a thin case onto the table, flipped open the lid, and removed a sheaf of e-film documents. He tapped them fastidiously against the table’s glossy black surface, and the sound reverberated through the silence like the crack of a pistol. He said, “Shall we begin?”
“Who are you?” I said. “Molly was supposed to meet me here.”
“Ms. Elless has been delayed.” The man’s clipped words set my teeth on edge. He had the nasal voice of a man used to speaking down his nose at people and the nose itself was long enough to do the job for two individuals. “It has been decided that the fewer people who know the details of our operation, the better. The two of you have been selected to be our operatives. You may call me Mr. Fen.”
I cracked the knuckles of my flesh hand on the edge of the table. “Decided by who?”
Mr. Fen set the documents in the middle of the table in front of him. They split neatly in half and slid down the length of the table as if on a conveyer belt, depositing themselves in front of Gore and me. He said, “This is your assignment.”
“Assignment?” I said.
Gore picked up the pages and shuffled through them, holding each film out to the side to view the illuminated data on the transparent documents against the black surface of the table. I watched him scan each page in the mirrored walls. His reflection wore a neutral, businesslike expression. When he was finished, he stacked the sheaf together, set it on the table before him, and nodded at the little man as if awaiting instruction.
“Well?” Irritation dripped from Mr. Fen’s nasally voice. The nostrils flared. “You can read, can’t you?”
I gritted my teeth and flicked through the pages. Against the black surface of the table, the transparent film seemed to disappear, leaving only images and the illuminated text behind. Grimy tile rooms smeared in black, brown, and red. Vats of liquid with floating fleshy bits.
The doughnut rebelled against my stomach. I dropped the pages back onto the table. I said, “These are the surveillance records of an illegal organ-harvesting clinic in the Grit District.”
“Oh, good.” Mr. Fen wrinkled his nose and sniffed as if something might have crawled up one of his nostrils and died. “She is literate.”
I turned in my chair and stared directly at the little man. His beady-eyed gaze held for a few seconds, then wavered. He frowned, lifted one hand, and inspected his fingernails with great interest. Behind me, Gore made a noise in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh.
I said, “We shut these guys down years ago.”
Mr. Fen shifted in his chair and brushed at his shoulders with a stiff hand. He took a deep breath and puffed up his lungs to make himself look bigger. I let him go through the ritual without interruption, but my gaze lingered on him. He didn’t like that much. He ran a finger under the collar of his shirt, and I saw a glint of silver there.
A chain, like the one Rae had been wearing.
The creeping feeling on my skin intensified.
“The HCPD doesn’t shut criminals down,” Mr. Fen said once he’d regained some of his composure. “They relocate them.”
I smiled the way I’d had to smile when a coroner made a tasteless joke over the body of somebody’s child. But it was hard to argue with his point. I pushed the documents away from me. “What’s it got to do with Rae?”
“Do you know who the biggest customer of illegally harvested organs in the HoloCity Trade Zone is?”
“Grinders,” I said. “Private clinics, basement biohackers, black-market chop shops . . . ”
“Petties,” the man said. “Small time. The lot of them.”
“Listen to the guy,” I said over my shoulder to Gore. “Must have been a king pin in a past life.”
The little man’s face burned red, and he narrowed his eyes at me. His gaze flicked to the mirror in front of him, and he tipped his head slightly. Who was pulling Mr. Fen’s strings from behind the glass? He jutted his pointy chin in my direction and raised his eyebrows.
“Look,” I said. “There’s no shortage of customers. That’s why the damned harvest rings are so hard to suppress.”
There were lots of reasons a person might disappear in HoloCity, but the meat market was one of the most insidious. I still had nightmares about the clinic Tom and I shut down years ago. Since being kicked off the force and starting my own private investigation practice, missing persons cases had become my least favourite kind of work.
Mr. Fen glanced at the mirror again and sighed. Then he straightened his spine and frowned as if he was about to have to do something unpleasant. He said, “Libra buys more illegally harvested organs than all the small time operations combined.”
“Why would they need black-market meat?” I said, and was gratified to see him flinch. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back in the chair. “Libra grows their own organs.”
Mr. Fen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between a neatly manicured thumb and forefinger. “Do you have any concept of how expensive it is to grow organs in a lab?”
“Sure,” I said. “And I also have a concept of the number of highbinders in HoloCity who are willing to spew cush from every orifice in order to get them. Everybody wants to live forever. Easier to do if you have a subscription service for replacement parts.”
“Take a look at the documents again,” Mr. Fen said. The surly attitude seemed to melt away, and he relaxed a bit. I must have passed some kind of test. Maybe someone behind the screen had told him to ease up. “The charts on page three. The fact is, the demand for fresh organs far outstrips even Libra’s—or anyone’s—ability to grow them.”
I humoured him and lifted a page covered in pie charts, bar graphs, and parabolic curves. The human body—thousands of human bodies—sliced, diced, and neatly served up in easily digestible data bytes, perfectly clean and sterile. Perfectly impossible. “Where do they find the stiffs? Even in the Grit we’d notice if people were disappearing in these kinds of numbers.”
The little man grimaced and said nothing.
“And why?” I said. “Everybody wants to live forever, so long as they don’t have to live clean. That about right?”
“It’s not just lifestyles of excess,” Mr. Fen said. “As life expectancy grows, so too do the disease of old age.”
“You sound like you’re defending them,” I said. “Defending this.”
I dropped the film back on the table.
“It is a statement of fact.”
“So Libra’s buying up the back-alley meat market and selling it as the fresh goods?” I laughed, and it felt like an animal gnawing at my insides. “Can’t say it surprises me. But what do you want us to do with this information?”
“It’s our ticket inside,” Gore said, his voice rolling around in his chest like a barrelful of grinding balls.
“At least one of you can pick up a hint.” The little man sneered. It was a good sneer. He must have had lots of practice. Then he remembered he was being nice and let it drop off his face like mud sliding down a wall.
“Alright.” I turned to the SecurIntel goon. “Enlighten me. Libra is a fortress. I got in once on a guest pass, with Rae. They made me wear blinders just to walk into her boss’ office.”
“You won’t have to wear blinders if you’re dead.”
Great. My partner in crime was ugly and cryptic. This operation was bound to be silk. I drummed the fingers of my upgrade on the underside of the table and stared at my own eyes in the mirrored walls. I said, “You watched the video?”
Mr. Fen wriggled in his chair as if he were sitting on something uncomfortable. Shadows seemed to shift behind the glass. His eyes twitched to the mirror again, and he made a noise that might have been an assent.
“Who was that bastard?” The memory of the message filled my mouth with dust. “Does he work for Libra?”
The man moved his head vaguely. “Nathanial Price.”
“I’m not sure he can be said to work for anybody,” Gore said. “He plays very near the top of their organization and doesn’t play nicely.”
“What do you know about it?” I spun toward him, remembering why I’d asked Molly to make sure he was at this meeting. “You were working for Tom the whole time, weren’t you? I thought you were contracted to that vetch, Captain Urqhart.”
“You were supposed to think I was contracted to her,” Gore said. “And so was she. I did keep an eye on her, but not in the way she assumed. She made the mistake of trusting LunAstro to protect her interests.”
I scoffed. Mr. Fen was looking more and more uncomfortable. I said, “If LunAstro is anything like Libra—and I’d bet my last holocreds that they are—their only interests are their own. Which makes me wonder exactly what this operation is going to entail. I want to rescue Tom. What is it that you think we are going to do for you?”
“We understand your desire to rescue your friend,” Mr. Fen said as if he had heard the word friend once but had no reason to understand it. “So we have designed a strategy that will appease both your needs and LunAstro’s.”
I spun to Gore. “Have you signed up for this already? Are you on their payroll? Or are you still working for Tom?”
The big man rolled his shoulders like a mountain shifting. He said, “I’ve agreed to do the job, but this is the first time I’ve heard the details.”
“You agreed without knowing what they want you to do?”
His wide, flat gorilla face turned to me, and he blinked his colourless eyes in my direction. He said, “What difference does it make? They pay, I do the job.”
“Mercenaries,” I muttered under my breath. To Mr. Fen, I said, “Alright, out with it. What is it that we are doing for you?”
Mr. Fen’s head lifted, and he stared me directly in the eye for the first time since we’d started talking. Something red glinted in the hole of his shirt between the top two buttons. My skin broke out in gooseflesh at the cold hunger in his gaze. A smile spread slowly across his face, like an egg sizzling in a pan. He said, “You are going to eliminate Libra once and for all.”
Gore and I rode across the asteroid in a plume of grey dust, as the driverless hovercar sped over the rocks and rubble of the colourless landscape with nothing for us to do but stare out the windows. The dark tower receded into the distance, disappearing against the perpetually black and starry sky of the horizon. Some kind of dome, mostly invisible, kept our breathing air from floating off into space. I didn’t understand the mechanics of it. Thinking about it made my heart lodge in my throat like a lump of dry bread. I cracked my knuckles and drummed my fingers and bounced my foot and shifted in my seat until Gore couldn’t take it anymore.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, as if that was all it should take to ease my fears.
“I’m not worried,” I said, reaching into the inner pocket of my jacket—a custom number I’d torn the sleeve off of on the left side so I could still use the upgrade—to make sure Hammett’s sphere was still there. At least I got to bring it with me on the home trip. “Why should I be worried? I’m just going to die. It rates, right? Pure silk.”
He spread his big, white hands over the knees of his navy-blue suit and grinned at me. The gorilla DNA that had been spliced into his genes in the experimental chimerism process was most evident when he smiled. It didn’t make me like him any more. Nobody likes being laughed at by a monkey. He said, “It’s only temporary.”
“Why me?” I said. The words snapped off my tongue like little firecrackers. “I don’t see why I have to be the one to die. Why not you?”
“The meat-cart uniform didn’t come in your size.” He kept grinning.
“If SecurIntel can just add you to the roster of whatever company they like and procure all the necessary equipment, why can’t they do it for me? We could both be employees.”
Gore shrugged his massive shoulders and leaned back in his seat, taking up the entire three-person bench. “Somebody’s gotta be the stiff.”
“Why can’t we be custodians or something,” I said. “I don’t mind cleaning toilets. I’ve had lots of practice.”
He stopped grinning and looked out the window. “I think you don’t want to see what’s in Libra’s toilets.”
I crossed my arms and stared at the ceiling of the hovercar. There was nothing to see there. I sighed and shifted and kicked at the side of the door. I said, “You seem very relaxed about all of this. Do you do this kind of thing often? Inter-corporation espionage. How in Terra Firma did Tom Weiland, a lowly HCPD detective, manage to stack enough creds together to pay you to even look in his direction? I mean, I know he’s a tightwad, but he’d have to have been saving up since before he was born.”
Gore pursed his thick, bloodless lips and frowned at me. “You talk a lot.”
“Okay,” I said. “I lied. I’m worried. You happy? Now, I’ll cut you a deal. You talk and I’ll shut up.”
I made a zipping motion with my fingers across my lips and waved for him to say something.
He grunted.
I unzipped my lips and said, “The deal is, you have to talk, though. Because I’ve got a lot of things I need to work through right now in my head, and I think better when I’ve got someone to be the sounding board. I’m not allowed to turn on Hammett until we’re on board the shuttle, so until then, it’s gotta be you. Unless you want to save me the trouble of straining my brain—”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “You’ve got enough words in there to choke a politician. Zip it.”
I zipped it.
“Tom and I go way back,” Gore said. He locked his fingers together and stretched the palms toward me. His knuckles popped like a scatter of distant gunfire. Then he put his hands behind his head and got comfortable, expanding to take up more than his fair share of the breathing room. “He’s a . . . personal acquaintance. Watching you and your friend was more of a favour than a traditional contract.”
I was dying to ask how Gore and Tom knew one another. Tom had never mentioned anything about SecurIntel to me. I had never even heard of them until Rae explained about the genetically engineered mercenaries and bodyguards who only worked for the highest bidder. Mostly, I had assumed, they ended up as security contracts for the rich and famous. None of which explained a connection to Tom. Gore watched me struggle with my imaginary zipper and, seemingly convinced that it would hold, he continued.
“As for espionage, sure. Inter-corp, inter-zone, inter-whatever. I’m a button man.”
“You kill people for money,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow at me. Or, it would have been an eyebrow if he’d had any hair. Instead, he had two thick rolls of muscle above his eye sockets. One of them twitched, and I mimed closing the zipper again.
“I push buttons,” he said. “Sometimes those buttons are triggers. It’s not all gunning for fat cats at fancy dinner parties, though. Most of the work is pretty low-key. This job’ll be no problem. In and out. Top Nathanial Price”—he pulled an imaginary trigger at me—“plant LunAstro’s little seed, grab Tom, get out. Nothin’ to it.”
The hovercar came to a sudden stop outside the shuttle launch, and I lurched forward, almost landing face first in the gorilla’s lap.
He flicked me back into my seat with two fingers, as if my body was no more than a spec of asteroid dusk on his standard-issue assassin-suit. He said, “You’ll have to buy me a drink first, lady.”
“You wish, monkey breath,” I said. Then I kicked the door open and fell out of the car, taking in a lungful of stale, recirculated atmosphere.
“Wouldn’t mind getting to know that friend of yours, though.” Gore squeezed out of the car behind
me like an oversized albino grub popping out of a piece of rotten meat. “She’s not your twist, is she?”
“Rae?” I shoved my way past the turnstile. “She’s not my girl. She and Jimi Ng had a thing before LunAstro snatched him up and faked his death. I don’t know where they’ll stand once she . . . well, if she . . .”
“So all I gotta do is get rid of wheelchair boy, huh?”
I tripped on the curb and spun around to face him. Gore heaved a black, body-sized duffle bag out of the storage compartment of the hovercar. His big, moony head floated above the dark suit like a pale, wrinkly balloon. He grinned again.
“Relax,” he said. “Hit-man humour.”
“Hilarious,” I said. “Especially when you’re lugging around a body bag.”
“No bodies,” he said. “Just supplies.”
He pushed through the turnstile, and we walked into the empty station. There was no building. The asteroid didn’t have weather to worry about. The shuttle launch was more like a free-standing metal skeleton of a building with a smooth grey awning stretched across the front of it in an attempt to keep up appearances. Beneath the awning, the dusty gravel surface of the asteroid gave way to a sheet of black biorubber with lines painted on its surface, indicating where to line up to catch each bangtail. But there were no other shuttles at the station. We huffed across the empty space toward a small, private rocket, about a third of the size of the one we had arrived on. A wall of thick, glassy material separated the main station from the rockets, with airlock doors before each launch pad.
“Where is everybody?” I craned my neck to look around the cavernous space, like a highbinder sightseer rubbernecking at a Grit District hockmarket.
“Stickin’ their heads in the sand.” He grunted and shifted the bag to his other shoulder. “What they don’t know can’t come back to bite ’em in the butt.”
“What about our butts?”
“Yours is cuter, mine’s cushier,” he said. “They’re both disposable.”
