by Watts Martin
Gail looks back out at the passenger cruiser. Then she frowns.
Somewhere past Keces’ reach.
“Kis,” she says slowly, “when does that ship leave?”
“The Starliner Supera departs for Earth at eighteen hundred forty-five, two hours and fifty-three minutes from now. Final boarding is two hours and twenty-three minutes from now.”
“Crap.” She gets up and hurries toward the ship’s door, grabbing her jacket on the way, throwing it on as the door closes behind her. “Send me a passenger list as soon as you can, filtering out anyone who’s mentioned the trip on any of their social feeds.”
“Yes, Gail.”
She’s not going through the terminal lobby so fast that she doesn’t catch sight of Suspicious Detective out of the corner of her eye. Other side of the open space, different clothes to look less obvious, not quite facing her direction, looking down at a smart paper in his lap as if it’s the most interesting thing in the solar system. It’s him, though. How long has he been there? Did he report on her going in? He’ll sure report on her leaving, running out of her ship like her tail’s on fire.
So far he’s staying interested in that paper, not so much as glancing toward her, no sign he might follow her out of the lobby. He’s just a casual random guy who comes to small craft spaceports to hang out and read.
Is it worth trying to lose him? If he tells her buddy Jason she’s going to the main spaceport, he’s going to start shitting kittens. But what’s he going to do? Order Mr. Detective to take her down? She’s not going to go to any ticket counters, not going to make an attempt to get on the cruiser. She doubts you can even do that on this short notice. She’s just following a hunch. A hunch she can’t turn into anything actionable besides “start profiling people waiting for the cruiser to see if they look like thieves,” but it’s the best hunch she has.
But Suspicious Detective is following a suspect, too: her. Even if she doesn’t try to get on board, she might try to hand the databox they think she has off to a partner in crime. Well, let him think what he wants. Losing him would be temporary anyway; the main spaceport is going to be full of public feed cameras. Hell, maybe he’s staking out Kismet, to see if anyone comes to meet her. She hopes he’s disappointed his life choices have brought him here.
Gail steps through the terminal’s exit doors and someone grabs her from the side.
“What the—” She can’t finish the curse before she gets slammed against the wall. Hard. It’s Guy Two, and this time he has his biomechanics engaged. Of course.
“Kind of in a hurry, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I kind of am,” she wheezes. If he’s got the typical cop package, she knows just how strong he is, how fast, and what other enhancements she’s facing. No guarantee he hasn’t gone a la carte, but he doesn’t come across as the creative type. Unfortunately, since he has the jump on her, she can’t strong-arm her way out of this.
“You wanna share where?”
No, of course not, you idiot. Well, no. Maybe she does. Sometimes honesty’s the most confusing policy. “To the main spaceport to try and catch the real thief.”
He sneers. “Yeah, sure you are. Nakimura’s already told us you wanna go there so you can run.”
“For God’s sake, use your head. If I was going there to run, I wouldn’t have just told you that’s where I’m going, would I?”
His brow furrows.
“I think someone’s going to run, but it’s not me. You can either let me go, or you can let somebody take your damn databox off the River entirely because you wanna butt heads with me. Which is it?”
He takes a very, very long time to consider that. “Okay, rat girl,” he finally says. “I’ll go check it out. You stay here.”
“You don’t—”
Something jabs her in the side. Her vision goes to static and she can feel things in her switching off. Everything turns to blue-white electric pain.
Chapter 5
“—something feel?”
The words are almost there, her ears are back on, but her eyes aren’t. Wait, they are. One is. The left one is. Maybe. The right one gets static.
“Something hear something? Lady? Something?”
She’s stuck to a wall. Somebody in front of her’s stuck to a wall. She can see their shoes. Gravity’s twice normal and sideways. They’re nice shoes.
Gail shakes her head and pain lances through her skull, a bunch of hot needles rattling around, but her vision clears. She pushes herself up into a sitting position and everything turns around the right way. She tries to say something floridly, beautifully profane, but all that comes out is a line of drool and “What.”
The person with the shoes crouches down. Cisform girl, barely seventeen. Wait, not cisform: she has cat ears. Other people stand nearby, helpfully pointing and watching. “You had some kind of seizure. Your friend said he was running for a paramedic. I don’t know why he didn’t just call—”
“Because he’s not my friend. He hit me with a stunner.” Gail wipes off her muzzle. “You see which way he went?”
“Oh, God.” The girl looks stricken, and points at the main spaceport.
“Terrific.” Gail wobbles to a stand. No more pain in her head. Instead it’s just the dull, burning sensation in her side where Guy Two shocked her. “Uh. Thanks.” She takes a deep breath. It hurts a little, so she takes another one, then another, until she can tell herself it’s not hurting. “Do you know how long I was down for? I’m still coming back online.”
The girl looks confused. “Uh, just a few seconds. You were opening your eyes already when I ran over.”
“Good.” Her HUD switches back on. Catgirl’s right—she was down a total of thirty-six seconds. If he hadn’t attracted attention, would he have dragged her off, or just kept zapping long enough to do serious damage? She’s damn lucky Nakimura hires idiots. Of course, she’s one of them, isn’t she? Ha ha.
“I’m so sorry—I didn’t see he’d attacked you.” She lowers her voice to a scared whisper. “This isn’t some kind of anti-totemic attack, is it?”
“Huh?” She shakes her head. “No. Being an asshole is just his job.”
“Gail?” Kismet’s voice sounds in her ear. “Are you all right?”
“Mostly.”
Her quasi-feline friend looks puzzled again. “Mostly?”
Gail points to her ear. “Sorry, I was talking to my ship.”
That gets Catgirl’s eyes to go even wider. Gail can’t help but grin, but she manages to suppress a laugh that wouldn’t be taken kindly. She takes the younger woman’s hand in both of hers for a moment. “Thanks again. I have to get going.”
“If you’re sure you’re okay. Uh, say hi to your ship!”
“She says hi back.” Gail starts jogging away. “Kis, did you get that passenger list?”
“Yes. Visual matching will be available through your in-eye display. After filtering there are seventy-nine people left.”
Groan. “Thanks.” Couldn’t it have been just two or three?
As she breaks into a run toward the gleaming white palace of Port Panorica, she pushes graphic but entertaining thoughts about what she could do to Guy Two if she got the drop on him out of her head. She’s had to get threatening with people more in the last twenty hours than the previous twenty months, and she might be about to face both Guy Two and Suspicious Detective and, if she’s exceptionally lucky, the actual thief.
The parts of the spaceport she’s been in before have been repainted since her last visit, but not remodeled, so she knows where she’s going. Unlike the small craft terminal, this is anything but spartan: three stories high, panoramic windows affording sweeping views of both the arcology interior and, on the outside wall, space. At least they finally covered the floor with claw-friendly carpet. Most places don’t; that’s why she wears sandals everywhere. She hurries through it, path cutting across two of the three main concourses, then takes an elevator up to the Intersolar Concourse.
; It’s smaller than she imagined it would be, but ritzier: wood trim, warm ambient lighting, plush seating in waiting areas. The central plaza has a food court and café, a coffee bar and a few travel shops. There are only two docking bays in the concourse, one locked and gated. They’re almost never in use simultaneously.
The other one is well lit but cordoned off, since it’s not boarding time yet—but boarding starts sooner than she’d like, in only twenty minutes. A spiral escalator past the bay’s entrance heads up to the cruiser’s gangway, with a secondary elevator for passengers who need it. While she has free roam outside, she’s not going to get into the bay without being a paying passenger, so she needs to stop the thief from getting in. If she can find the thief. If the thief is actually here.
The security here doesn’t look tighter than the rest of the port, but that’s an illusion. The visible cameras doing automatic sweeps? Those are the ones you’re supposed to know about. But those vents there, that doorway, the main information display? Sensors there, too, ones that skirt around the public feed requirements. And there are sensors she can’t pick up and probably won’t guess, as well as counter-measures against people with biomods like hers. Like stunners.
She detours to the coffee bar to pick up a latte, then meanders closer to the cruiser’s loading area, noting anyone who seems to be paying attention to her. So far, that’s zero, which is the number she wants.
If her hunch is right, then whoever took the box needed a salvor as a decoy, someone who’d hold Keces’ attention for as long as it took the thief to get away. And it means Randall Corbett, a boy she’s only thought of a handful of times in the last twenty years, hates her. Does she just remind him about his mother’s death? He reminds her of that day, too, but it’s not his—
Oh, shit, he’s not one of the ones who thinks the bomb was her mother’s, is he?
Christ, no time to think about that now. Focus on the passengers.
Focusing on the passengers is boring. They’re doing passenger things: sitting, talking with one another, staring at smartpaper, a few just staring off into space—probably focusing on displays within their eyes much like hers. Some sit on benches, hunched over boxes of fast food dinners. That’s nuts. They have enough time to at least go to the quick-service place, and it’s not like they can’t afford it—they have enough money to get a ticket to Earth.
She starts scanning for image matches against the seventy-nine people Kismet filtered the passenger list down to, and switches on a couple visual systems which scan for biomods, the same thing that spotted Guy Two’s cop package. Maybe she can pick up the databox. Somehow.
Matches highlight in her vision, green outlines around faces. Businessman with fashion model haircut. Woman with red dress and artificially lavender eyes. Scruffy young man, cisform except for his sharp, glassy claws. Full transform cheetah with black suit and black sunglasses.
Mara’s Blood, where is she going with this? She’s getting hits, but it’d have been nice if she’d had enough time to come up with a plan beyond drinking coffee and hoping for inspiration. She could stand up and yell “I know you set me up and took the databox and I’m coming for you, asshole!” and hope somebody starts running, so she can tackle them and hope spaceport security brings them both down instead of just her.
That’s a terrible idea. She rubs the back of her ear.
Wait. Someone is paying attention to her, and not someone on her suspect list. Cisform, one-point-nine meters high, white but tanned, short brown hair. Square jaw. Grey suit, snappy white shirt, kinda conservative look. He’s staring right at her. For just a moment. Does he recognize her, or is she standing out? Shit. Plain clothes security, maybe? The belt holster that his suit doesn’t quite hide puts another notch in that column; you can carry anywhere on the River, but it’s not too common on Panorica.
She keeps doing what she’s doing, not looking at him directly but sweeping her gaze around in a way that happens to include him. Yep, tell-tale signatures of the cop package. But he’s not looking at her anymore; instead he’s heading toward the food pavilions. She’s being paranoid. Maybe. Keeping on her best disinterested look should he happen to glance her way again, she calls up public records on him.
Nothing. Oh, terrific. If he’s connected to all this, where can she dig, quick? There’s got to be something. “Kis,” she murmurs under her breath, “see if you can find this guy in Earth or Mars records. Check Earth first.” You can’t get complete records from the inner planets out here without putting in a request, but basic criminal and public employee information tends to be readily available. Even though the search requires an ansible link it shouldn’t be too expensive; it’s just one request out and another back.
Meanwhile, keep walking. No, sit down, so she doesn’t look like she’s pacing. She navigates to a chair roughly in the middle of the waiting area and sits down. She can’t see everything from here—not without constantly twisting around—but it’s as good as view as she’s going to find. Oh, look, there’s Guy Two. She flips him off.
Kismet chimes in her ear. “Based on image matching, the person whose background you requested has the highest correlation to Jack Thomas, an FBI field agent assigned to Interpol.”
What? Interpol? The Panorica Federation has a Compact of Free Association with a bunch of inner system governments. But that doesn’t give Interpol agents the power to arrest people here, does it? Now that she thinks about it she doesn’t think they have the power to arrest people anywhere—they leave that to local law enforcement. He has to be working with Panorica Federation Security.
As he gets in line for coffee, she moves to another bench, this one as close to the boarding checkpoint as she can get. Only eight minutes to the start of loading, and passengers have started to line up, even though they’re only in line to move to the seats past the checkpoint—it’ll take a full ninety minutes to get everyone on board.
Okay, the real question is why Thomas is here. Is he here because of strings Keces pulled? Is he here to stop her, because Keces thinks she’s about to run to Earth, or do a handoff to a partner? Could he be investigating this entirely independently, and have come to the same conclusions she did about where to catch the thief?
Could he be here for something that has nothing to do with the theft whatsoever?
Gail sighs, leaning back and sipping her own coffee, scanning the crowd. She can see more matches highlighted in the group lined up. Middle-aged woman, frustrated, standing with small crying child. Another businessman with fashion model haircut.
Beedle boop “You have a call from Jason Nakimura of Keces.”
Oh, for—
“Connect,” she snaps.
“You’re at Panorica Spaceport,” Nakimura says.
“Yeah. I’m at Panorica Spaceport. Are you monitoring the cameras, or did the asshole who assaulted me report back to you?”
“If you’re planning to run, Ms. Simmons, I assure you that—”
“No, you idiot, what I’m planning to do is see if I can stop someone else from running, with your databox. Tell your goons to either help me or back off.”
“You’re asking me to extend an unwarranted amount of trust, Ms. Simmons.”
“If it makes you feel better, I don’t trust you, either. Look, I’m really pressed for time.”
“If I find out—”
“Let’s just agree that I feel properly threatened and I’ll get on with doing your job for you. I’ll try to sound more fearful next call, but could you hold off for at least—” She looks at the boarding time indicator. “—seven minutes?” She cuts the connection before he can respond, and goes back to her quick, fruitless scanning.
A teenager. More businessmen. A young couple oozing newlywed—what, they hadn’t announced their honeymoon on social feeds? Weird.
She sees Suspicious Detective enter, far off to her right.
Another businessman.
Thomas is visible off to her left again, now with a cup of coffee. He’s not loo
king at her.
A cisform human, about her age, pale skin, scruffy hair, burnt orange faux-leather jacket zipped up like he’s cold.
Gail furrows her brow. Something about him—she knows him. She calls up the record that goes with the image match, just name and residence.
Randall Corbett.
She feels the blood drain out of her ears. Setting down her latte, she gets up, walking toward the crowd. Walking toward him.
He hasn’t seen her yet, hasn’t turned in her direction. Even when his gaze sweeps over her he doesn’t register who she must be. Not at first. Then his eyes widen and he bolts out of line toward the main concourse.
Gail sprints after him, zigzagging through the crowd, then when the path between him and her gets clear she ramps her speed up. She can’t run on overdrive like this for more than a few seconds, but bursting from twenty-five kilometers an hour to seventy closes gaps real fast.
She’s only doing the high-speed trick for two seconds tops, and she powers off the biomods before hurtling into him like a furry cannonball. They both skid along the carpet a good four meters. Since she’s on top that’s worse for him than it is for her. He’s in too much pain to resist as she gets her hands around his wrists and pins them against the carpet, straddling him.
“Get off me, you animal bitch!”
She slaps him, restraining herself from ramping it up with biomods. “What the hell have you gotten me into?”
“All I did was give you a tip!”
“Then why’d you run?” Her brain’s spinning so fast it’s hard to form words. “You saw me and ran because I wasn’t supposed to have figured out this much this fast.” Or lucked into it this fast. Same effect.
He clenches his jaw, but doesn’t say anything.
There are shouts, people running toward them. They’re making a scene, aren’t they? Time’s just about out. She leans down, baring her teeth. “Hand it over. Now.”
He flinches, then narrows his eyes and spits on her.
She can tell someone’s about to grab her the moment before the arms go around her. As she’s hauled to her feet she resists the urge to fight; it’s probably someone from PFS. She’s right. Those arms have a dark red uniform covering them. Another PFS officer, a leopard, is grabbing Corbett.