Cats of War

by Carol Van Natta

  He blinked. He started to tell her she was wrong, but his brain engaged at the last second and stopped him.

  First, she obviously knew a lot more about tech than she let on, as evidenced by her trick with the perimeter fence. Second, she had nothing to gain from telling him, and had gone to the trouble of bringing him to a safe place to talk. Damn cleverly, too.

  Lastly, he wouldn’t put it past the military theft investigators to have installed the surveillance. More than one had doubted his innocence and ethics.

  He tilted his head to look up at her. “How do you know what my record says?”

  She raised an eyebrow and waved toward the whole wall full of percomps, deskcomps, and pieces of more comps, then put her hand back in her pocket.

  Okay, it had been a stupid question. “Can you remove the surveillance?”

  She leaned her hip on the counter. “Are you sure you want me to? It’ll alert the watchers that you’re aware of them.” She glanced at the deskcomp on the cart. “Some of the tech looks old, some new. Maybe you have multiple watchers, which would explain the redundancies.”

  He tapped his fingers on his thigh. “The CRIO contract forbids Argint d’Apa’s security from monitoring the government staff, but all that means is, ‘don’t get caught doing it.’”

  She shook her head. “It’s not standard company equipment. They monitor your office door, but that’s likely emergency safety protocol.”

  “I wonder if I’m really the target. How far does it go? The CRIO or the CPS offices? My quarters? The whole government wing?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t see anything in the CRIO deskcomps that got thrashed this morning, but I wasn’t looking. Break something else, and I will.” She snorted. “Better yet, break that stupid CPS testing equipment so what’s-her-name doesn’t keep re-testing the non-minder indenturees every month.”

  “She does?” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He considered the array of comps and tools on the long counter. “If I request a general tech assessment of the government wing in anticipation of an infrastructure upgrade, can you check for surveillance?”

  “Sure, but my boss will probably assign one of the staff techs. I’m not allowed to do important stuff alone.”

  He thought a moment. “Do they work after hours? On call, like you?”

  She laughed derisively. “You’re kidding, right? Regular tech staff won’t do shift work in the middle of a swamp. They all commute from Magloviti City. Even brilliant pay doesn’t make up for the location. That’s why Argint d’Apa applied for a CRIO partnership.” She pointed to the wide, fluorescent green stripe on her uniform that clearly identified her as an indenturee. “They get cheap labor who can’t leave. The CGC buys the rare metals the plant filters out of the runoff so they can build more interstellar ships. And if the scientists patent something from the swamp, the company makes a killing.” Her expression turned sheepish, and her hands fluttered. “Sorry, I’ll get off the bandwidth now.”

  “You don’t approve of the CRIO system?” He’d never given it much thought until he’d been assigned as liaison.

  She shrugged. “It’s better than being sent as slave labor on the stellar flux-particle collector stations, like the old Central League used to do, but CRIO is too much like pre-flight debtor’s prison. ‘Debt to society’ should be more than numbers on a balance sheet.” One of her eyebrows raised. “You don’t see rich folk working for restitution fair wage or hunting for cleaning bots for the promise of a bounty.”

  “True enough.” He happened to agree with her, but he needed to get back to the subject at hand. “I’ll require the tech assessment to be done after hours.”

  “Better say ‘preliminary’ or something that sounds inconsequential. I’m not certified.”

  Steady beeping sounded. She turned and expanded a holo display on one of the counter deskcomps. “Show us what’s ailin’ ya’, leannan.” He didn’t recognize the word, but her accent had a tinge of rural British Isles. Given her space-station origins, she probably picked up an eclectic vocabulary from all the major languages.

  As she rotated the holo, he counted nine blinking red indicators. She brought up another holo and synced it with the first, so it rotated in tandem.

  “Two of those”—she pointed to the blinking holo—“are simple soft-logic faults, but the rest are unauthorized add-ons, including a full data intercept. Which reminds me, your trouble reports never got seen or logged because they were marked as already completed. I think a previous staffer set up the routine to avoid the workload. If it makes you feel any better, yours weren’t the only reports that got lost.” She made a rude noise. “My boss is seriously torqued. You should see our queue now. Twenty months of backlog.”

  “Is my deskcomp worth cleaning up, or should I requisition a new one?”

  “It’s up to you.” Her mouth twisted sideways. “The watcher obviously has free access to your office, so they may re-infect the deskcomp as soon as it comes back.” She crossed her arms. “Yours has a military shell, but the internals are straight commercial. Our inventory says it came in with a previous liaison six years ago.”

  Guilt pinched him for not doing a security audit when he’d first been posted to Argint d’Apa. To be honest, he’d been going through the motions and feeling sorry for himself for two years, wondering what he could have done differently to save his career.

  “Fix it for now. I’ll tell the new liaison to order a replacement.” An idea struck. He pointed to the military gauntlet on his arm. “Can you add tech that will alert my percomp if someone breaches the shell?”

  “Maybe.” Her eyes darted away. “Before this gig, I was just a hobbyist doing favors for friends.”

  He suspected that statement left out volumes of interesting truth, but he had no desire to interrogate or judge her. “It’s okay. I’ll just be happy to have tech that actually works.”

  “I sync that.” She pointed out the window toward a battered workstation with a huge display. “If you want to kill time while I fix this, that has a direct uplink to the galactic net.” Her irrepressible humor peeked through in her smile. “Leaves even the plant manager’s pretty and pricey comp in the dust as far as speed.”

  He’d been planning to be suave and clever about returning the yellow crate to her, letting her figure out how he’d found it, but now it just seemed mean. She’d taken a huge chance, telling him about the surveillance, instead of turning a blind eye.

  He cleared his throat. “Since we’re in the place for delivering private news, I saw what you did at the fence last night.” He waved toward the yellow crate. “I took the, er, contents farther away from the perimeter.”

  Her stricken look made him want to hug her. He shoved his hands under his thighs. “I only saw you because my window faces that direction, but it was a risky thing to do.”

  “I thought I’d be safe because of the lockdown.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I’ll find a different way, but I’m not leaving critters like that in the compound.”

  Even though he was just warning her, he felt like a heel. “Indenturee activities aren’t my jurisdiction, and neither the plant nor the CRIO staff wants my input.” He flicked his eyes toward the crate. “Rescue as many animals as you want.”

  “Thanks.” She blinked her tears away. “Chaos, but I hate crying. Never does any good.”

  “If you don’t mind telling me, how did you lift the fence?”

  She pulled a multitool from her vest pocket. “I modified this to exploit a design flaw.” She put the tool back. “Argint d’Apa and CRIO know about it, but they think no one else does, so they’re in no hurry to spend the funds to replace it.” Her mouth twisted. “Good thing Lambru and his sticky-fingered crew can’t use it, or anything of value not fastened down would be on its way to every no-questions-asked market on the planet.”

  It was his day for surprises. “Marazzo Lambru? He’s one of my current ex-military charges. I wouldn’t have tagged him as a leader of anything.�
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  Her expression hardened as she picked up a probe from the counter and bent over the guts of his deskcomp. “He’s good at that. Likes to keep his hands clean.”

  While he waited on the bench, secretly entertained by the little conversations she had with parts of his deskcomp, he used his gauntlet percomp to look up Lambru’s record. The high restitution debt resulting from his conviction as a blackmarket lab employee should have made him ineligible for a level-two facility like Argint d’Apa. However, the blackmarket pharma industry was awash with untraceable cashflow. It wouldn’t be the first time that untraceable cashflow funds had changed hands to give an indenturee an easy-glide ride.

  Kedron added Lambru to his private list of people who might want to know what he and the government staff were doing. He had the feeling it was going to be a depressingly long list.

  6

  Ferra wiped the mist off her face and handed certified technician Yolalo the R-685 module he’d asked for.

  He placed it the socket, then used his tablet to tell the filter controller to connect to it. Before coming to Argint d’Apa, Ferra hadn’t known water filters could be the size of a four-story building. A lucky quirk of geography meant the swamp collected runoff from the nearby mountains, where an ancient meteor strike had left exotic debris. By extracting the valuable rare metals, the plant made the swamp healthier, meaning downstream cities got more potable water.

  Yolalo turned to Inzaya, the senior certified technician who watched the filter’s readout. They both wore company-issue red rain slickers. Ferra only had her indenturee uniform. It felt like she was standing in a fog bank. If the water had been cascading down as usual, she’d have been drenched from the spray inside two minutes.

  “I heard it was an interstellar escape pod.” His accent hinted at Afro-French, and he affected an all-over gold skin tone, making him look like an illegally sentient android from a science-fiction serial. He collected sex partners the way some people collected novelty liquor bottles.

  Inzaya, with her enviable dexterity and beautiful mahogany skin, shook her head. “Sensor is still flatlined. Try tracing the upline. I heard it was just a downed high-low flitter.”

  The whole compound buzzed with the news. The hunters and hellhounds hadn’t yet found Healey, the escapee, but they had discovered wreckage and a body, the latter of which they’d managed to save from the icy spring runoff that flooded the swamp.

  Yolalo opened a bigger panel, exposing more of the filter’s tech systems. “Two longwires, gate class.”

  Ferra opened the tool cart’s top drawer, found the correct compartment, and put the two longwires in Yolalo’s waiting hand.

  “Well, I saw what was left of the body after the swamp rats had been chewing on it for a week or two.” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “You don’t wear a space exosuit to fly a flitter.”

  Ferra dropped her head to hide her frustration. She was only supposed to have delivered the cart, not stand around and hand out parts like she was a pastry vendor.

  Inzaya must have seen her. “Someplace else to be, indenturee?”

  Ferra ordinarily would have kept her head down, but her work queue had doubled that morning.

  Despite the dormo patch the night before, dreams of flying and being lost continued to plague her. During one of her waking periods, it occurred to her that she might be able to get a head start on Tauceti’s project by combing through the newly unearthed trouble reports to look for tech failure patterns similar to those in his office. She couldn’t work on the big plant equipment alone, but most of the trouble was in the staff and indenturee wings. The repair manager agreed to give her a restitution bonus for each backlog ticket she cleared.

  “Yes, sir.” Ferra gave her the military honorific. Inzaya had been in CGC Water Division decades ago and still used her former title from time to time. “The staff cafeteria payment kiosk, the security chief’s receiving office, the staff immersion theatre, the military flitter stacker, the guard desk at the front gate, the—”

  “All right, you’ve made your point,” said Inzaya sourly. “Dismissed.”

  Ferra turned and walked quickly but carefully along the damp suspended walkway that led to the open-air lift to take her back to the ground floor. Good thing she’d never been afraid of heights, big turbines, or waterfalls of massive amounts of swamp water.

  The pervasive humidity throughout the complex doomed her to perpetually frizzy hair for the duration of her indenture. The nearest body parlor or body shop was a hundred kilometers south, in Magloviti City. Indenturees were stuck with whatever mods they’d come in with, so she was glad her look was now all natural. None of her friends would recognize her. More importantly, none of her enemies would, either.

  Of the first seven trouble spots on her list, one was a failed node, one was the result of a small bot trying to clean an electrical power bar, and five had the same surveillance tech infestation.

  Someone had spent lavishly, but not wisely, and hired an incompetent person to install it. She made an executive decision to leave the tech in place unless it completely broke the system in which it was installed. No sense being the common denominator in the surveillance disruptions.

  After Tauceti had gone away with his deskcomp, leaving the yellow crate with her, she’d spent the rest of her evening diving through Argint d’Apa data, which had surprisingly lax security. Maybe their physical isolation made them feel immune. No local company records mentioned the surveillance, or Tauceti by name.

  The less accessible, but not totally crypto government records netted the same result, except the CRIO office copied Tauceti on every daily report, memo, and meeting recording they produced, regardless of how trivial. He dutifully copied them on every mind-numbing report and memo he produced. No wonder he looked forward to leaving.

  As she restocked her bag and logged the completion of her last task for the shift, she decided to wait until morning to turn in the two small cleaning bots she’d found that day. She also contemplated skipping the evening meal and going straight to bed. Memories of her nightly dreams had invaded her thoughts all day, insinuating themselves into her idle moments.

  Two distinct voices were scared and lonely, and desperately needed her help. She knew she had a weakness for being wanted and needed—her twisty brother had often taken advantage of that—but this felt different. And now that she finally had quiet time in the lab suitable for contemplation, it had a direction. South. And a persistent image to go with it, of posts, trees, and stacks of boxes.

  Her job kept her busy all day, so she hadn’t spent much time outside, but the trees in the image reminded her of the tall, droopy ones in the staff recreation yard, next to the tall fence that separated staff and indenturees. She’d heard complaints about them blocking the spring sunlight for the indenturee container gardens.

  Despite her growing compulsion to go check, she couldn’t just wander out to confirm her hallucination. She didn’t know the area, so she’d be vulnerable if Lambru’s remoras cornered her.

  Too bad the gardens didn’t have tech for her to fix, because they wouldn’t bother her while she was on official business. She’d given them the impression that while on duty, a constant monitor listened to every word she said and tracked every location she visited. Both were true, but her work tablet did the listening, and the pass-tracker cuff got her past checkpoints and only actively reported her location when queried. As far as she knew, the repair lab manager hadn’t looked at the logs in two months.

  She put her tech bag on the shelf, then dimmed the lights to half. One of the two bots she’d found had been charred, and its warning light blinked. “Yes, poor thing. I don’t know how you got up on that counter, but maintenance will fix you up in the morning.” And she’d get the bounty for returning them both.

  Inspiration struck. She’d be on official business if she tracked an errant bot that just happened to go to the southeastern corner of the indenturee yard, near the trees.

  She raised th
e lights to full and pulled one of the heavy, disused mobile repair bots out of the cabinet. They didn’t do well in water, so the techs couldn’t use them in the filtration plant, and they were too big for the smaller jobs typically assigned to her.

  She named it Oran Mòr, because of its stylish orange stripes, and directed it to stick to the indenturee side, avoid people, and go to the southeast corner of the perimeter fence. Remembering the trick the maintenance tech had used, she added an asset tag under the maintenance door so she could use an inventory scanner to track it, in the event it got lost or waylaid. Some enterprising indenturee might mistake it for a cleaning bot and kidnap it for the bounty.

  From the cabinets, she pulled out the large company-logo backpack and snugged the bot into it. She about fell over when she put the backpack on and tried to stand up. Wilderness hikers carried heavier packs, which meant they were even more warped than she’d thought.

  The bot’s little climbing feet dug into her back as she trudged down the corridor to the indenturee dining hall. She had to show the backpack’s contents to the guard to prove it wasn’t contraband.

  She paid for her mealpack, then took it out to the long, curving patio that overlooked the weedy indenturee courtyard. The landscaping looked half-finished to her, but what did she know? In space stations, plants grew in densely planned and orderly hydroponic gardens, and massive walls of moss supplemented the oxygen exchangers. Wherever she was going after her penance, it would be on a planet. She wasn’t ever going back to living in space.

  Luckily, none of Lambru’s crew had followed her outside. Twilight brought chilly spring breezes. She put her mealpack on the farthest table, then set her backpack behind her on the ground, with the opening facing the grass. She put her tablet on the table, so she’d look busy, and dawdled over her meal of mixed meat and vegetable bits in a spicy sauce, covered in a layered pastry. She’d had worse growing up, but she’d since grown to love real food at real restaurants with happy people around her.