Judging by her performance, I’d say the sensi world had lost nothing. If she couldn’t help sinking her claws into her stepdaughter the first chance she got, I doubted she had what it took.
After she left, I told just that to Nick, who pulsed his eye-lights at me. “Her claws?”
“With gossip,” I said.
“Well,” he said. “Yes. But it is very interesting, don’t you think so.”
I didn’t see what he thought was interesting in two women forced to live in closer proximity than they found comfortable hating each other, but then Nick was not someone I could really understand. Not having emotions, all his life had become very cerebral. Perhaps he thought that the way women behaved to each other was, in and of itself, interesting. There was no saying. Perhaps he didn’t remember what women were like, in real life? Or perhaps he saw us more clearly now.
“I think we’re going to call Cinzan to begin with. And then I might need you to break into some records that aren’t publicly held,” he said. “And find a few things. Would that be possible?”
It was possible. I’m no more a computer hacker than I am a gene designer. Of the two I probably could figure out the later easier, since I’d taken some biology courses in school. But in my five years doing this I’d acquired some contacts who could do my hacking for me and would. Some out of gratitude for Nick’s help in the past, some out of the memory of who he used to be. Or who I used to be.
I concentrated on the dialing codes to get an answer at Cinzan and after trading ID -- and explaining my business with two layers of functionaries -- was connected, by relay to the Do Drop In, the spaceship that had last touched down in Peura, before returning to Cinzan, and which was now en route to some place called Daisy Wheel.
“Well, hello,” the man who answered said with a grin. “Why you are a sight for sore eyes.”
His name was Richard Doyle. He and his team mate, Ignacio Fontes were the surviving crew members of the Do Drop In. For this trip they’d been joined by a third, Fernan Jones, who stayed in the background while his teammates answered Nick’s questions.
Nick had the privacy shield on, of course, which prompted Ignacio to say “Thank you for not just having the sight off on your end. Your secretary sure is good to see after a few months on an all-male route.”
They looked to be in the middle of our office, two of them sitting down, in chairs that looked like they were riveted to a bulkhead. The third moved in the background, going in and out of focus, depending on where he was.
Nick took them over the events of the night: they’d met with Narcis Peura, who was a nice guy, and they’d gone out and had some drinks.
“Old Peura is smarter than he looks,” Doyle said, with a grin. “He runs that world better than most. Instead of handing out rations, he hands out coupons and he has stores that work on the coupons, where they can buy what they want. That allows them to take wives, and believe they’re living independently. The lifers at least, those who will never be released. It’s better for them that way, I suppose, and Peura hasn’t had any of the rebellions that other worlds have had.”
“And people who are short-termers can also buy on credit,” Fontes put in. “So that when they leave, some of the poor sods are indebted to their eyeballs. And have to send him money, after they’re released.”
The rest was as had been described to us. They’d drunk with Narcis, and then said goodbye to him at the door, never to see him again.
“Then on the way back poor Mike got sick. And we weren’t sure what he had, or if it was contagious, and at any rate, we didn’t have the room in the freezer, so we spaced him.”
“Mike?” Nick said.
“Michael Argon,” he said. “Our former teammate. Good old Mike. But it’s the life of a spaceman, right? At any time, we could go too.”
And that was about all I got from them, which was nothing I couldn’t have got from records.
I told Nick that after they left and he said, “Sure, and it might end up with you going to Cinzan and looking at their records, to make sure they really didn’t smuggle Narcis there. Thing is, Stella, if they smuggled him anywhere, it was with him intending to go to pilot school, so if you can get into Peura’s accounts and see if there has been some unusual flow of money out, or some credit extended to someone who sounds like Narcis? I don’t think he would have left without taking the money to study. But if he did, it’s perhaps a good idea to also look into whether he’s been accepted at pilot school under an indenture arrangement?”
Having given his orders, he got up and left his desk, presumably to go to the kitchen to cook for me.
Meanwhile I dialed someone I used to know. James Brighton and I never dated, which in retrospect probably counts as sinfully wasted opportunity. Jim was a slim, dark man, who attended the same schools I did but didn’t come from the same class. In fact, while I was there on daddy’s money, he was there on a scholarship because of brains and native curiosity.
He’d studied electronics and social communication and… who knows?
What I knew is that on leaving school he’d become one of the news mediators. One of the real ones. The people who take any current event and dig and dig, until they find gold or muck and sometimes both.
Most people who get a name in that field, sooner or later decide the digging is too much work and start just making up stuff, until they’re found out and their career crashes and burns.
Not Jim. The average career in the field was three years, but he’d kept at it for eight. And of course, being where he was and what he was, he kept an excellent team of hackers at his disposal.
Nick had saved him from a stick situation. Well, not Nick, precisely, but the man Nick used to be. In memory of that man, and out of kindness for me and our old friendship, Jim did me what favors he could. Oh, he wanted payment, in the form of whatever we found at the end of the road, the real version of the events, which he could then add to a mind that must be like one of those multidimensional computers they’re supposed to be building: in layers and with infinite capacity. But he never pushed and was never grouchy about being asked. I could only imagine that sometimes the cost was onerous enough. I wondered sometimes if he knew what the real situation was, and that was why he kept doing us these favors. But even if that were true, I wouldn’t dare ask. There is knowledge so dangerous you don’t want even a well-intentioned friend to know. It would just endanger him to no purpose.
He materialized in the middle of the office, sitting at his desk in Haven, a town in New Oxford. He’d never left, saying a center of knowledge and investigation was just right for his sort of business.
He’d not visibly aged in the nine years since we’d been at school. There were some silver threads in his dark hair, and perhaps a few fine lines around the eyes, but he still looked slim and youthful as he had in college days.
His clothes were also much as in college days: a loose pair of pants, and a rumpled pullover top. He was sitting at a desk crowded with various coms and other tech I didn’t know the name of, and appeared to be typing on a different keyboard with each hand. There was a tall pot on his desk, and a cup by it. I knew both would contain coffee.
For a man known around the Human Worlds by reputation in one of the best paying and toughest jobs, you’d think he’d at least pay a secretary and someone to straighten for him.
Heck, he probably did. An army of them I should imagine. But I doubted any of them dared try to straighten his work space or moderate his work habits.
He looked up, right after accepting my call, and smiled, “Hello…” a brief hesitation. “Stella. Before you ask, yes, we’re private. What do you need?”
I told him where we were and whom our case concerned and asked him for everything he could find on the family, including any unusual money draws from Peura’s accounts that might be traced to Narcis. I also asked to find out if anyone of Narcis description had enrolled at piloting school, including under a false identity.
In these da
ys of retinal scans, it’s pretty hard to maintain a false identity, but it’s not impossible. The trick is to corrupt the records, not to change the retina.
On a whim, I tacked on a question, “Is it possible for you to find a pilot convicted of smuggling chocolate who was sent here and released in the last, oh, year or so?” I didn’t think either Analie’s or Reelen’s memory went further than that. Not as a fresh wound or grievance, at least. “I’d appreciate data on him.”
Jim grinned. “I’m sure I can get you that. You’ll let me know what really happened as soon as you can, right?”
“Of course,” I told him.
Just as I hung up, Nick buzzed from the kitchen to tell me dinner was ready. He sat across the little table from me, watching me eat. He’d done chicken in a cream sauce, with asparagus and these little red fruits that people say come from Earth and that have an almost but not quite sweet flavor. It was excellent as always.
My husband Joe liked to cook, but his efforts were more hit and miss, even with the benefit of the cooker. After all, our cooker was not top of the line, and it was necessary, often, to alter the programming on the fly. I’d guess Nick, being mostly machine, himself, had a special sensitivity for when things needed to be tweaked.
He sat across the small table from me, his eyes glowing duller and brighter, which usually meant he was thinking.
I know I said cyborgs neither eat nor excrete, but that’s not precisely the whole truth. There was a maintenance routine that Nick performed, I’d guess at night, while I slept. There is synthetic cerebrospinal fluid and also a kind of synthetic blood that is used only in extremely rare instances for human patients, and more commonly for cyborgs. To buy that in the quantities needed to replace what is lost to routine cleaning is not… easy, though we’d managed so far.
The process he undergoes every night puts the fluids through a machine that removes the impurities, and reinjects it into the body, with nutrients and whatever replacement is needed to keep his brain going.
I was glad he did that out of my sight, as I imagined it would be rather disturbing to watch. But maybe not. Maybe he just lay down, and hooked himself up, and processed random thoughts while the machine worked.
But he always watched me eat, and though he never asked me how I liked it, he must catalogue my expressions well enough to make my favorites again more often than not, while never repeating the things I’d enjoyed less.
After eating, I processed the dirty dishes. When we returned to the office, he asked me if I could bring up an image of Michael Argon. I wished he’d reminded me to ask Jim about him, but of course, I also didn’t think it would be that hard to find a picture.
It wasn’t. Minutes later I brought up a hologram of the late Mike Argon. Like Narcis, he was tall and slim, with an unruly shock of blondish hair. The resemblance ended there. It was obvious that Mike Argon had grown up in a rough neighborhood. He had a scarred face, which meant he both fought a lot and lacked the money to regen. He also had a tattoo on his left arm, from wrist to shoulder, which showed a spaceship in full flight. It was so detailed, you could read the name of the spaceship as the Never Late.
Shortly after, Jim called back.
There was no sign of any extraordinary money outflow from Peura accounts, and he would bet money – he said, and Jim never bet money – that Narcis had not been in the Do Drop In when it took off from the spaceport at which we currently sat.
I said, “Maybe another ship, then? I mean, they have an entire spaceport. They must have more traffic than one ship at a time.”
“I don’t think so,” Jim said cheerfully. “Not from anything I can trace. I think that spaceport exists to bring in ore from the asteroids and send whatever supplies are needed there.”
“That is odd,” I said. “As none have taken off or landed since we’ve been here.”
The other thing that Jim had found was the pilot who had been convicted of smuggling chocolate. His name was Mars Rosen, and he’d finished his sentence six months ago.
“But here’s the funny thing,” Jim said. “He has never returned to his favorite haunts. The family got a letter from him, but that was all. He said he was going to take a crew job on the By Your Leave out of Cinzan, but they never heard of him. Your Reelen has looked extensively for him, but he hasn’t been found.
Later when I reported to Nick, I mentioned that it was weird we’d seen no shuttles.
“Maybe,” he said, “or perhaps Peura doesn’t want us knowing about his business.”
And then he asked me to look up Doyle and Fontes and tell him if they were only children.
As it happened, they weren’t, and I whistled under my breath as I found out both of them had had brothers who were convicted of drug infractions on two different planets and had been put into the rental system. It was harder to find out to whom their services had been rented, but when I reported to Nick, I said, “Do you think that’s it? They had some vendetta against Argon? Maybe he was dealing drugs.”
Nick shrugged, which is an embarrassing habit for a creature who isn’t human. “Unlikely. After all, Cinzan deals in drugs. You just have to be careful where you take them, and I’m sure they are.”
Then he gave me instructions. This case had been unusual in that I’d not left the ship much. Normally I am Nick’s legs. My husband would have made a joke about what fine legs they are too, but Nick, of course, never does. What I mean is that normally I go out and see and hear and find the things he can’t know. I suspected in this case he’d been protecting me from what was obviously a rough neighborhood. He shouldn’t have been. While I’d started out not very good with weapons, I could hold my own with anyone now.
Still I dressed to disguise the fact that I was obviously female, slim and young by putting on a padded suit and boots and a helmet.
“Peura wanted me to send you with an escort,” Nick said. “Meaning someone who’d follow you everywhere. But I told him no. Which means he’ll probably have you followed. You know what to do.”
I knew what to do. The area outside was paved with concrete. There were warehouses in the far southern quadrant. I wondered what they contained. Food for the miners in the asteroids? They must be starving without their regular shipment. What could Peura be hiding?
It’s not easy to lose a tail in a miner town with one street. It’s also not easy to tail someone. I spotted him long before I got to the outskirts of the town. Mostly because it’s really hard to tail someone on flat ground. His attempts to meld with the trees didn’t work. He was a tall, well-built man. Which meant I was going to have to do something he’d regret.
I did it before I got to the bar that was the last known location of Narcis. I turned down a blind alley and waited long enough he couldn’t help following me. And then I’d jumped him and injected him with a heavy soporific that would give him a headache in the morning.
It wasn’t something I liked to do, but it would only give him a mild hangover. And I couldn’t have him tail me as I headed back to the spaceport from the bar.
I kept in mind what Nick had told me to look for and found it in the vast wilderness, with the low trees. It was a large reservoir, low to the ground, hidden among the trees. I wouldn’t have noticed it had I not been looking. It was probably used to collect infrequent rain for watering. I thought if it were for drinking water, it would be guarded, and the cover on it would be tighter.
Climbing to where I could pry the cover off wasn’t easy, but shining a light in there revealed exactly what Nick had said. Let’s say Argon was none the better for the wear. But his tattoo was visible, and Never Late was still readable.
I beat it to the spaceport, but once there, having gen-identified myself past the automatic gates, the curiosity about those warehouses came again.
I heard no sound from them and saw no movement or light, so I headed that way, at a fast clip, keeping to the shadows.
There are instruments that detect and disable security systems, and the systems on those w
arehouses weren’t… well, they weren’t what you’d have in a more heavily populated world.
The first one I got in was filled with barrels. It took a little prybar work to figure out they contained synthetic cerebrospinal fluid and synthetic blood, of the exact kind we used. My first thought is that one of those barrels would avoid the dangerous business of securing it for a year. My second thought wasn’t a thought, but something that made my hair stand on end at the back of my neck.
The second warehouse contained parts. I knew those parts. The third warehouse was an operating theater. There were tables, and what looked like an automated crematorium.
To say I beat all speed records back to the ship was to say little. I got in and secured the door, and told Nick all I’d found.
“Borgers,” I said. “There’s borgers operating in those warehouses.”
“Of course,” Nick said. “I figured as much. Not every prisoner, but some of them, perhaps the ones he knows won’t be missed, or have family that can be fobbed off with letters and some remittances will be borged and sent to the asteroids to mine.”
“He being Peura?”
“None other.”
“But you can’t think he borged his own son.”
“Oh, no, not him. That would be Doyle and Fontes. My guess is that both their brothers were borged and they figured it out somehow. I don’t think the borging operation runs around the clock. In fact, I’m fairly sure he gets people to come in from outside and do that. Perhaps the two pilots heard rumors. Perhaps Narcis found out and talked. At any rate, what they did was kill their third team mate, and somehow fake his data, so that Narcis read as him going back into the spaceport.”
“Corrupting stored data isn’t that hard.”
“No, it’s just one outdated scanner, I understand. They probably disposed of Argon, and went back, got Narcis and convinced him they could take him with them, so he’d go willingly.”
“And they borged him?”
“They probably tried. It’s not an unskilled job. I think they just killed him. I don’t think they made a borg, because if they had they’d have sent him back into the streets, to denounce his father with his presence, and perhaps his words. I doubt a shipment has gone to the asteroids since he disappeared. If it has, then maybe the borging was successful, and maybe he’s there. But I bet you they will find traces of his DNA in that operating theater.”
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 3