by Watts Martin
“Mara’s Wounds, I don’t even know what the hell this ‘project’ is!” She wants to throw her hands in the air and just walk out, or to leap up and pound the desk, maybe just pace. She gets as far as starting to stand. The Unsmiling Duo shove her back in the chair and keep their hands on her shoulders. “Hey.” She can hear the nerves jangling in her voice.
Nakimura leans back. “You have no history of involvement with your mother’s politics, her ‘Totemic Equality Association,’ as an adult. But you have no history of involvement with…” He shrugs fractionally. “With anything.”
“I don’t like entanglements.” She squirms; they press down harder on her shoulders. “Come on. Do I have the ‘history’ of someone who’d arrange to wreck a ship and kill people just to steal something off it? Look. Maybe I can help you find whatever’s gone missing.”
Suspicious Detective snorts. “You seriously think you’re going to scam a job out of this?”
She gives him a glare, then looks back to Nakimura. “You hired this ship to transport something, and you didn’t want any records.” She closes her eyes, concentrating. The puzzle’s sliding together. “Until you took possession of the wreck, it couldn’t be connected to you at all, and since you own the port operations here that’ll be easy to make look normal.” Her eyes open. “Now, though, somebody’s stolen whatever was on that ship, and you don’t want to let this crime get to a judicial market. So you’re going to need someone who’s good at finding things and keeping it all quiet.”
“It’s pretty easy to find something if you’ve taken it, and he’s already got someone who’s good at finding things. Me.” Suspicious Detective jabs a thumb at himself.
Nakimura’s voice shows edges of exasperation. “This is ludicrous, Ms. Simmons. Just return the databox.”
“What’s a databox?”
The detective leans down, his eyes as cold as New Coyoacán’s sky. “Tell us where it is.”
“I don’t know what the hell—”
He straightens up and slams his fist into Gail’s stomach.
She’s still in the chair, still held by the other two, so she can’t even double over. Her vision goes black for a moment as she gasps, unable to draw in enough air.
“Where’s the databox?”
She can’t get enough breath to speak. He raises his fist and she puts up her hands, hoping he’ll wait. She could power up her biomods, but Guy Two might pick it up if she does. Fortunately, he waits.
She wipes spittle off her muzzle. Okay, if this is how she has to play it, she’ll play. “Three things. Please.”
Nakimura motions with a hand in a go on gesture.
“Okay.” She takes another ragged breath, steadying herself. “One. I’m betting these three are unofficial contractors, too, just like that ship, right? Mister Detective here apparently missed the part about me being able to record anything I see. I’ve been doing that since before I followed you in here.” She subvocalizes Kis’s name so she takes the next sentence as a command. “Let me share a few seconds of video with you featuring you sitting there watching your thugs beat me up.”
Nakimura looks at his notepad display, frowning, then pales visibly.
“We can either leave this between me and you, or make it between me, you and my judiciary. Do we understand each other?”
He nods stiffly.
“Good.” Since she stopped paying their retainer she doesn’t have a judiciary, but Keces might not know that. She moves to stand up; this time the Unsmiling Guys let her. “Two, biomods are a big thing to miss. So think long and hard about what that says about the guys you’ve hired. I don’t think they’re as good as I am, and I can work with people who are better than me.”
The detective tightens his fists. “I told you we ran into security walls searching her background.”
“The fact remains that your work has put us in an unexpectedly precarious position, Mr. Nelson.” He nods to Gail. “And three?”
“I told this guy if he hits me I’d hit him back.” She engages her biomods and slugs Suspicious Detective’s jaw hard enough to spin him to the side, knocking him right into Guy Two.
Guy One’s going for his gun, but she’s darting behind Guy Two fast enough to be a blur, knowing he’ll engage his own biomechanics when he recovers. So she doesn’t give him the chance, grabbing his arm and twisting it behind him. “Power down or I’ll break it.” The detective slides to the floor, blood leaking out of his mouth. She probably fractured his jaw, but he’s lucky she pulled the punch.
“Let go, bitch!”
“Power down.” She glances at Guy One. “And put that gun away now.” Guy One swallows audibly, and does as ordered.
Suspicious Detective—Nelson, evidently—touches his jaw, wincing, and shoots her another glare. “Animal senses don’t make you better enough than us prims? You gotta add biomods, too?”
“I don’t use the ‘p’ word.”
“Enough.” Nakimura rubs his face with both hands. “You’ve made your point, Ms. Simmons. Let him go.”
“When I do, you and I talk alone for a bit.”
Guy Two protests. “We can’t protect you if—”
Gail twists his arm again and he yelps.
“You’re not protecting me now,” Nakimura says.
She waits until she senses him disengaging his biomods, then lets go. He storms out of the room. Guy One helps Suspicious Detective on out.
After Gail closes the door, Nakimura says, “Turn off your recording.”
“No.” She powers down her biomods, though, before they start to hurt. “What do I do to clear this up and go on my way?”
He drums his fingers on the desk. “You are, at this point, not just a person of interest in the theft, but the only person of interest. Why didn’t you let my men onto your ship when you docked?”
“Because it’s my home and you didn’t have any business asking.”
“Will you let us on board now?”
“Will that prove I don’t have this…”
“Databox.”
“This databox, or will you just think I’ve hidden it really well?”
He purses his lips, turning away and falling silent. When he speaks again, he’s still looking at the wall. “The only way to ‘clear this up,’ Ms. Simmons, is to return our property. If you do that, I won’t ask further questions about its provenance. If our analysts determine the data has not been compromised, we’ll honor our previously proposed payment agreement for the wreck.”
Her ears raise. He’s going to go for it, isn’t he? “Deal.”
“Finish signing over your salvage claim to Keces. The contract will explicitly stipulate that any property belonging to Keces must be returned within seventy-two hours of the transfer. If you have taken the databox, consider this a grace period to return it. Otherwise consider that your deadline for playing finder.”
What? Seventy-two…? “Look, I can’t promise—”
“If the databox is not returned, your fee will be forfeit, and you will be reported to our judiciary as socius indignus and be sued for damages.”
Her eyes widen. If the judiciary accepts the designation of Gail as an “untrustworthy partner,” then all of their other clients might stop doing business with her. As a major company, Keces would use a major judiciary. That would mean she’d almost certainly lose the lawsuit. And lose about half the places she does business with now.
And, more than likely, lose Kismet.
“That won’t hold up.” Her voice shakes.
“Given that any counter-argument will be backed up by evidence that only you can provide and no one else can authenticate, I have confidence it will.”
“I can’t do this in three days!”
“If you or an associate of yours is the thief, you can do it in far less. If you are not, three days may frankly be too generous.” He sets his notebook on the table in front of her, a signature line ready for her, and holds out the pen.
“You’d better at
least tell me what this thing is.”
“The keys to heaven and hell.”
She stares at him blankly.
“Sharing details would put both of us at even greater risk. Just understand that Keces Industries is not the most dangerous party with an interest in recovering the databox.”
“Yeah, you sure look like the good guys so far.” Gail yanks the pen from his hand.
“When a complex situation appears black and white, Ms. Simmons, it’s almost always an illusion.”
She closes her eyes, feeling like she’s volunteered to climb into a sealed airlock with walls slowly sliding together. After taking a deep, steadying breath, she opens her eyes and signs.
“I’ll transfer serial information to your ship that will make identifying and tracking the databox as easy as possible. I trust you can find your own way out.”
She marches out of the office, switching her biomods on again, primed in case someone’s stuck around to make more trouble for her. Nobody’s waiting, though, either in the lobby or outside. In case they come back, she won’t stick around, either.
The ambient light has deepened to a jaundiced yellow. Her sensors tell her the temperature’s only dropped half a degree, but it feels colder.
Closing her eyes, she allows herself one slow, shuddering breath and soft whine, then hurries back toward Kismet. She has no idea what to do next, but she’s got no time to lose doing it.
Chapter 3
If you don’t count the Ceres Ring, Panorica is the largest arcology in terms of both population and sheer size. It’s a cylindrical design like Kingston, but a vast, slow-spinning behemoth. You can dock either at the stationary center or at the rim, where you berth in gravity, start out much closer to wherever it is you’re planning to go, and pay twice as much in fees. She can’t afford to tie up there but she does anyway, because she’s on a schedule. She’s here for an appointment with her friend Ansel.
He doesn’t know she has an appointment to keep with him yet. But as he would say, that’s just an implementation detail.
Keces has a presence on Panorica, but the station enforces strict “public charter” restrictions on companies they contract for services with—she doesn’t have to worry about them literally owning the police like they would on Molinar. However, those corporations are required to make video feeds from common areas, like the spartan lobby of the small craft terminal she’s hurrying through, publicly available in the name of transparency. If Keces doesn’t already know she’s here, they will within the hour. Well, screw ’em. She’s doing their job. Or trying to.
“Kis, where’s Ansel at?”
“His last reported location is Club Acceleration.” Of course it is. She knows just which table he’s sitting at. She steps out onto the plaza.
Panorica’s interior layout forgoes the stultifying squared-off precision of Molinar or the manicured arrangements of Kingston. Instead, it embraces the magnificent ordered chaos of varying city blocks, curved throughways and contrasting neighborhoods. Even when it had been built generations ago, its designers employed most of their artifice to hide just how much artifice a giant arcology entailed. In the intervening years, buildings have been redesigned, repurposed, demolished and replaced, just like—she assumes—a historical Earth city. And the light on Panorica is nothing like other stations, not one uniform ambient glow slowly shifting color. Instead, a yellow-white “sun” moves through the central core, fore to aft, through the daylight period. The sun’s almost all the way to the aft end; she docked at the fore, so she stands in deep twilight. Street lamps and business signs and lamps in countless windows glitter before her like docking beacons.
She jogs spinward, toward the personal transport lot. Since she only wants a one-person unit she shouldn’t have a wait. And she doesn’t—she has a choice between a dozen standing scooters. She hops on one, just a platform between two wheels and a semicircular rail to hang onto. The display lights up to confirm her ID information and the usage charges.
She taps the command button. The display changes to a map, but she doesn’t have to look at it. “Take me to the Deck.”
“Please hold on,” a tinny male voice responds, and the scooter starts rolling forward.
Some streets on Panorica take only pedestrians or transports this size, but this is a wide central avenue with faster, heavier vehicles. The scooter stays to its own lane, quickly hitting its top speed of twenty-five kilometers per hour. Growing up, she didn’t understand the Trans-Ring Railway, at four hundred eighty KPH, was sui generis. It wasn’t until she began exploring the rest of the River that she realized none of the platform arcologies, even Panorica, were big enough to need anything that went much faster than this.
At least this speed lets her see the city, measure what’s changed since she was last here…when was it, eight months ago? Most of the buildings hold apartments, restaurants and the occasional office for companies that need—or just want—separate physical space for their work. Her favorite sidewalk café is still open, she sees, but the little crafts boutique next door has shuttered. Nothing’s higher than four stories; much taller and you start noticing the drop in gravity.
And then there’s the Deck.
It’s a three-story inverted pyramid of a building hung at the top of a metal tripod, about four hundred meters over the floor. It’s high enough you can see just all of Panorica—at least all the populated side, as the “top” half of the cylinder is devoted to agricultural and industrial use. Gravity in the pyramid is about point-six g. In addition to the observation deck that gives it its name, there are four bars, three restaurants, and one boutique hotel. All have reputations for being fabulously overpriced and kept in business by tourists (and, in the case of the hotel, honeymooners). Where she’s going also gets tourists, but it’s none of the above. She’s going to what is, as far as she knows, the only low-gravity dance club in the universe.
The Deck wasn’t built with the rest of Panorica, but it’s at least fifty years old—the architectural flourishes of faux cantilever beams and tall, thin triangular columns along the edges of each level didn’t turn out to look so timeless. Yet it’s impossible not to be impressed, even as many times as she’s seen it before. From an engineering standpoint, it’s Panorica itself—hell, the River itself—that’s the true marvel, but it’s background wonder. The Deck is sheer celebratory hubris made manifest.
Gail hops off the scooter before it comes to a complete stop in the parking lot, earning her a reproachful buzz, and hurries along the short path to the elevator. It runs up one of the legs, enclosed on all sides but the floor by glass. Sometimes she’s been able to wangle a ride on the service elevator inside a different leg, which makes the trip in a third the time, but she doesn’t see any employees she knows nearby. So she gets in with the tourists—ten total, nine of them cisform—and waits for it to start moving. At least there’s only a couple of young kids to enthusiastically smash themselves into other passengers as the gravity drops.
The countdown clock on the wall shows it’s not leaving for another two and a half minutes. She leans against the railing. “Kis, Ansel’s still in the Club, right?”
“No subsequent locations are recorded.” She didn’t expect a different answer—Ansel usually stays there late, and while he could have left without leaving a track, he usually leaves his privacy mirror set to share any public stops he makes with friends.
The transform kid flashes her a suspicious look, trying to decide if she’s got a communication mod or is just crazy. His body is mostly unmodified human, but he has big cat ears and a tail, both electric blue, matching his mane-like hair. Tattoos cover his arms, abstract patterns in faintly reflective ink. The tail moves all the time, too, and it’s nearly as long as he is. She wonders how often it gets caught in doors. He’s kind of hot, though. The black pants and half-shirt, both tighter than a fully furred totemic would be comfortable in, don’t hurt, either.
Gail nods to him with a slight smile. He relaxes and smi
les back, folding his arms loosely over his chest. Okay, more than kind of hot. Also barely twenty. One of the cisform women is paying far more attention to Catboy’s butt than she should be. Oh, tailchasers. Her boyfriend’s oblivious.
Finally the countdown hits zero, music starts playing, and the elevator starts rising. A recorded voice begins narrating the history of the Deck—right, it’s closer to sixty years old than fifty—and warning people to hang onto the railing, which no one does. The ride up takes a full three minutes, which the recording extols as a virtue.
As much as she wants to mimic Catboy’s too-cool-for-this disaffection, the view of Panorica slowly unfolding below always catches and holds her attention. Most tourists ride up here during daylight, but that’s wrong. Nighttime has magic. The colors mute, streetlights creating bursts of contrast and shadow. The curve of the station comes into sharp focus, making the little world seem impossible, surreal, beautiful. Buildings jut out parallel to the horizon, people walk sideways, creeks flow up into the huge linear parks on either side of the city. Gail has never set foot on Earth or Mars, but she’s seen images. Nothing on a planet compares to this.
Soon the recording runs out, and the trip proceeds without narration except from the family with the kids. The mother, a stocky woman with limp brown hair and tired eyes, tries to point out landmarks to them, but they seem more interested in bouncing around in the slowly diminishing gravity. Her eyesight isn’t good enough to pick them out at night and it doesn’t sound like she’s been here before, so she doesn’t have a clue what she’s looking at. “That’s Peters Park,” she’s saying, pointing at one of the linear parks. Can’t get that one wrong. “Pay attention. And that big hexagon building is… uh…”
Gail walks over, with long, pillowy low gravity strides. “The Davison Museum of Art. It’s a dodecahedron.”