by Watts Martin
“No, I’ve made a life of not settling down. That’s a choice. It’s just not yours. Besides, I don’t see your spouse and one point three children, either.”
“That’s not a fair comparison.”
“Yeah, Sky, I think it is. You’re married to your noble calling and I’m married to my ship.” So do your noble job and get my ship out of prison. Please.
The wolf bares her teeth slightly again, but doesn’t look at Gail when she does so. She doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds. When she turns back to the camera her tone’s back to zen calm. “I’ll talk to my PFS liaison and, if I can, speak directly with Agent Thomas. And I want you to come here.”
Gail squeezes her eyes shut momentarily, trying to stave off wolf-induced headache. “I don’t have Kismet, remember?”
“There are other ships you can hire. I just think this is the safest place for you right now. If you’re here, it’s much easier to deal with Keces. The socius indignus threat goes away—”
“You know damn well I don’t get magic protection from being in New Coyoacán. They’ll file it no matter where I am. If I’m there it just means you get to deal with it.”
The temperature in Sky’s voice rises. “Since you don’t have a judiciary, it looks like I’ll be dealing with it no matter what.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t ask me to do exactly what the PFS and Agent Thomas have told me not to do, all right? I’m a suspect in an intersolar theft. I’d like to try not to do anything excessively suspicious, like running off somewhere outside the Panorica Federation’s jurisdiction.”
“I’m just trying to help you, which I remind you that you asked for.”
Gail clenches her fists, keeping them too low for the camera to see. Yes, she did, and if she demands Sky only help her on her own terms that kind of makes her a shit. But it’s been almost fifteen years since she bought her ship over Big Sister’s objections, and Big Sister can damn well get over it. “Sky. I am not leaving Kismet behind. That’s not an option. Got it?”
Sky turns away and growls loudly. It’s not a guttural groan, not a human voice doing a passable dog imitation. It’s a full-on, inhuman snarl. It’s the kind of noise that reminds you her normal speaking voice isn’t normal by any conventional definition; canid totemics don’t form sounds the way cisform humans and short-muzzled totemics do. It’s the kind of noise that, if it’s directed at you from right up close, might just make you pee yourself. Gail knows that noise well, and even she can’t stop her ears from pinning back.
“Yes,” Sky finally says, still looking off to the side. “I’ll do what I can to dig you out of your hole from here. Try not to dig any more in the meantime.”
“What’s that—”
The video abruptly returns to translucent blue nothingness. Sky’s ended the call.
Gail stares dully for a few seconds, then slides her viewcard back in her pocket and stomps out of the booth.
Milliaire Park’s always breezy. She’s never been sure if it’s a naturally occurring weather pattern—Panorica’s interior is big enough for systems to form, although she’s never seen more than a drizzle falling from a haze above—or if it’s artificial. She suspects it’s artificial, and she wishes they’d turn the damn wind down because her smartpaper keeps trying to blow out of her hands.
She’s scribbling down numbers, a quick budget for the next few days. Normally Kismet acts as her interface, but since that’s not an option now, she’s writing commands on the smartpaper itself. While her HUD could display the information, some things are easier to think about when they’re in front of you instead of imprinted on your retina.
The paper shows how much money she has on hand, and what the rates are for hotel rooms that are cheap but still in totemic-safe parts of the arcology. That’s most parts—nearly all parts—but not all of the safe parts are affordable parts. Hmm. The Martinson. She’s seen that one. Edge of the neighborhood Ansel lives in, so it’s safe, and at eighteen fifty a night not too expensive. Her budget says she shouldn’t go over seventeen hundred a night, but it looks like the rate includes a breakfast credit at a lobby autocafé.
She scribbles out a purchase order for three nights. After another second, DECLINED appears by it in red ink.
She stares at it. Declined? She has way more money than that. After a moment she scrawls “call” by the hotel name.
Beedle boop “Hello, Hotel Martinson, Tobias speaking. How may I help you?”
Her HUD’s displaying his name already, of course, just like his display—probably in front of him rather than in him—shows hers. “Hey. I just tried to make a reservation for three nights and got declined.”
“Yes, I see that, Ms. Simmons. Hold on a moment and I’ll see if I can find out what happened.” A pause for about five seconds. “It looks like there’s a restriction on your bank account limiting the transaction amount we can run.”
“What? Who put it there?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”
“Can you run it as three separate transactions? One for each night?”
“I can try.” Tobias sounds dubious. After another couple of seconds pass she can just about hear him shaking his head. “No, a single night doesn’t work, either.”
“Can you break it into smaller transactions somehow? I have the money.”
“I don’t have a way to do that, Ms. Simmons. I’m sorry. Do you have a different line of credit?”
Her credit right now might buy her a sandwich if she doesn’t go wild with the condiments. “I’ll check and get back to you.” She cuts the call off before Tobias says anything else polite, then starts another one, interrupting the voice prompt almost before it starts. “PFS office, Interpol agent Jack Thomas.”
Beedle boop “Ms. Simmons,” Agent Squarejaw says. “How can I—”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing with this block?”
Momentary silence. “What block?”
“The block on my spending account. How am I going to book a hotel room if I can’t spend eighteen-fifty at once? I don’t even know how low it is. Can I book a flophouse? Can I buy a soda?”
“Hold on.” She hears muted voices as he talks to someone else. “I don’t have the authority to block your accounts myself, Ms. Simmons, and I haven’t put in such a request. Officer Wolfe hasn’t, either. Have you tried contacting your bank?”
Wolfe cuts into the conversation. “It looks like it’s a hold initiated at the request of a judiciary. You’ve got a one thousand per-diem limit, and a holder-present requirement for any purchase over two hundred. You don’t have any outstanding warrants or judicial cooperation requests, do you?”
“No. No.” She tugs on her ears with both hands until it hurts. “It’s got to be Keces, then.”
“Ms. Simmons,” Thomas says, “can I let Officer Wolfe handle this with you? I’ve got to take an ansible call with my Interpol supervisor.”
“Yeah. Sure.” While she’d like to yell at him more, an ansible call means serious business; a five-minute voice call costs about as much as a night at the Martinson. If they’d let her book one.
Wolfe speaks again after another couple seconds. “I’ve pulled up the details on the hold and your account’s been flagged for possible fraud. That doesn’t mean you’re being accused of fraud, it means—”
“I know what it means. It means Keces is screwing with me.”
“Restricting outflow is a standard way of handing possible account compromises.”
She gestures angrily with her hands, even knowing he can’t see it. “My account isn’t compromised! It was just fine this morning!”
“Have you tried to buy anything over one thousand dollars recently?”
“I don’t know. Not for a few days. But fixing this sort of thing doesn’t take a few days. It’s hours. Come on.”
“Usually, but not always.” The leopard sounds genuinely apologetic. “I wish I could do more, but this isn’t related to any of our ac
tions and you’re not even using a Panorican bank.”
She isn’t using one for the same reason a lot of people don’t, because other platforms aren’t subject to Panorican banking oversight and offer higher interest rates and bonuses. On the flip side, it might be harder for a Panorica bank to put this kind of hold on her money.
“So I have to find a hotel with rooms under one thousand a night? How?”
“There’s some out there.” He’s clearly doing his best to sound encouraging. “The Travelers’ Inn right by the spaceport usually runs a special for nine hundred a night.”
The misery in her voice grates on her own ears, but damn it, things are miserable and she’s miserable and that’s that. “Great. I’m sure their rooms are fantastic.” She cuts the call.
Yes. Great. What now? She can call Nakimura and yell at him, but if he’s responsible for this he’s not going to start playing nice no matter what she says. If he isn’t responsible, she’ll just be antagonizing him unnecessarily. Granted, it’s not like they’re on one another’s good sides now anyway.
She checks out information on the Travelers’ Inn. Even the photos that come up on the paper look grey and sad. If that’s the best they could come up with for a glamor shot, it doesn’t bode well. After another moment, though, she sees it’s immaterial: the place is sold out tonight.
This just gets better and better, doesn’t it? She groans, slumping back on the park bench and closing her eyes.
The smartpaper blows free from her hands.
“Fuck,” she says aloud, without moving.
Has this elevator always made that hum? She doesn’t think so. But as it traverses the five floors between the lobby and Ansel’s apartment, she picks up a definite soft buzz, kind of a low “C” note, maybe a hundred-thirty hertz. How could she have missed it before? It makes her grind her teeth the whole way up.
The door slides open and she strides down the hallway, hoping that moving with forceful purpose will keep her nerves settled. It doesn’t. By the time she reaches his door she’s trembling. It takes her two tries to touch her fingers to the calling panel.
A couple seconds pass before the little green camera light, tastefully invisible unless recording, switches on. Ansel’s voice comes over the speaker. “Gail? What—” His voice clips sharply enough she can’t tell if it’s an audio glitch.
“Ansel?”
The door slides open, and Ansel’s there, a one-piece turquoise wrap draped over his form in a way only a fashion model should be able to get away with, unfeigned dismay creeping over his face. Before she can say anything he’s got his arm around her, guiding her into his living room. It looks like it belongs in a fashion ad, too, straw-blond polished stone floor, color-splash throw rugs, modern furniture that somehow manages to look minimal and plush simultaneously. “What happened?”
Mara’s Blood, she must look worse than she’d thought. She thought she’d been holding it together better than that. “They locked down my ship and I can barely get any money out of my bank account and I can’t get a hotel room and I almost had the databox but I lost it.”
The fox gets her to sit down on the couch. “Slow down, dear. Start over.”
Squeezing her eyes shut and forcing herself to take a steady breath, Gail runs through the last twenty hours or so. Ansel looks sympathetic at the right points, although he looks reproachful when she talks about the fight with Sky. Fortunately he’s tactful enough not to say anything. Yet.
“All right.” Ansel rocks back and forth on the sofa by her, looking at the ceiling as he thinks. “You didn’t mention calling your contact with Keces.”
“God, what am I supposed to tell him? His damn databox is with the police now. It’s not like he doesn’t know, anyway. He was having me watched and he’s got to have trackers on public feeds searching for me, too.”
“First, that’s out of your control. Second, for all we know he’s the one who called the PFS on you, because he thought you were running. If he’s not happy they have the box, it’s on his head, not yours. You did a much better job than the guys he actually hired, didn’t you?”
She runs a hand through her hair. “I guess.”
“So call him. Get out of this deal.”
She starts to ask Kis to place the call, then remembers. Jesus, she’s been through this already once today. Come on. The viewcard gets fumbled back out of her pocket. After it lights up, she gathers her resolve and swipes through her contacts, tapping the voice-only connect button by his name.
It takes longer than usual for Nakimura to answer. He doesn’t sound angry this time. He sounds subdued. “Ms. Simmons. I’ve just finished a conversation with Agent Thomas.”
“Since he was there waiting for me at the spaceport, I’m guessing it wasn’t your first one. I know you don’t trust me, Jason, but today might have gone a lot better for both of us if you had.”
“In point of fact, that was my first conversation with Agent Thomas. Interpol is involved because a company on Earth claims the databox was stolen from them.”
Oh, terrific. Squarejaw’s crazy suspicions might be right. “So was it?”
He sighs, long and drawn out. “No, it was not. Quanta Biotechnics has made a claim on the data set the box contains.”
“So the data was stolen from them.”
Ansel tilts his head. He’s only hearing her side of the conversation, so this has to be mysterious.
“Again, no. The matter is…complex.”
“And you’re not at liberty to get into it. Which is fine, because I really don’t want to know.” She rubs the back of her head. “Look, I did my best, and I’d say I did better than your people did.”
“My ‘people,’ Ms. Simmons, did not start a fight in front of an Interpol agent that resulted in the PFS taking possession of the databox.”
Her ears lower. “And if they hadn’t been harassing me every step of the way, I might have been able to get the box before Thomas did.”
“I fail to see how.”
“Look, I’m sorry about the box, but you’ve got enough information to know I wasn’t part of the theft and to know there’s nothing else I can do. Are we good now? I go about my life, you remove my account block?”
“Account block?”
“The spending restriction order with my bank.”
“Any difficulties with your financial institution are not our doing. Despite what you may think, I would prefer the quixotic mission you profess to be undertaking to be successful. And no, we are not ‘good.’ You’ve not only failed to fulfill your contract, you’ve turned this from an internal affair into a multi-agency law enforcement investigation.”
“They were already investigating you!”
“My assessment stands. You have twenty-two more hours.”
“Jesus—” Don’t panic. Think. “Look. Give me more time. Two or three more days. I’ve been set up and so have you. And from what you’re saying, Quanta’s a prime suspect, right? Someone wanted you to focus all your attention on me while the real thief got away. You know that, and Agent Thomas knows that. We just have to get to the bottom of this.”
He remains silent.
“At this point what do you have to lose? Wrecking my life doesn’t get you any closer to getting your data back, and Thomas has more reason to deal with me than he does with you, because he knows I’ve been telling the truth.” Mostly.
The time between when she finishes speaking and he finally answers stretches out like space between the stars. “An additional two days, then, Ms. Simmons. Understand that if you don’t deliver the databox by then, you’ll have failed to deliver on this contract twice, and that will be documented when we file the socius indignus order.” He disconnects.
Ansel’s staring at her, expression shocked, incredulous. “Did you just promise to get the databox back from the PFS and delivered to Keces within two days?”
She musters a wan smile. “That’s the extension, so I think I have a full three.”
He
looks up at the ceiling. “Mara’s Wounds, Gail.”
She covers her face in her hands.
Chapter 8
“How did you learn to do any of this?” Gail’s leaning on the countertop that separates Ansel’s living room from his kitchen, watching him splash golden wine over chicken and mushrooms and trying not to drool at the scent billowing up with the steam. She’d forgotten his apartment had a full, real kitchen, although she recalls—now—that she’s had the same oh my God, your apartment has a kitchen? reaction each time she’s noticed before.
Ansel looks up from the stove. “Haven’t we had this conversation before? Your house on New Coyoacán had a kitchen? How much you loved your mother’s, what was it, Pasta Aztec?”
“Pastel Azteca. Yeah, although at this point I barely remember much more than the name. Still never saw it on a menu out here, Sky never learned to cook it, and once we moved we just had your standard little kitchenette.”
He wrinkles his muzzle as he stirs the chicken. “With just a combochef, yes.” He holds up a hand. “And they’re fine if you’re going to live just on prepared meals, and I’m sure they’re a step up from whatever cartridge-based monstrosity you have on your ship. But you need a real meal.”
“Hey, those prepared meals are real.” She sags. “And I need a real drink.”
“I’m going to pour you a nice glass of wine to go with your chicken marsala and you’re going to enjoy both of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waves his stirring spoon at her. “Sit.” She does.
In a few more minutes he’s got two plates on the counter, the marsala over pasta, broccoli on the side. Even the broccoli smells delicious and she hates broccoli. Either Ansel should be running a restaurant, or she’s so starving she’d eat cardboard. A glass of white wine gets set down next to her plate, another by Ansel’s. Then he sits down on the stool next to hers.
She takes a sip of the wine; it’s good, fruity and a little caramelly without being candy sweet, but she doesn’t have a very educated palate. The chicken, though, is good beyond words. She hasn’t been able to afford food like this in months herself, and she doesn’t have any friends who cook.