by S. C. Jensen
“Congratulations.” The security official did a swell job of keeping the disappointment from his voice. “You have been cleared for shuttle access to board the Island Dreamer.”
“Is it supposed to hurt like that?” I inspected my real arm and was surprised to see healthy, pale-pink flesh instead of the blisters and boils of a radiation burn.
The officer gave me a blank look. “It’s new.”
I flexed my upgrade to make sure none of the joints had melted or seized. “It was like a trial by fire.”
“We do not encourage the use of cybernetic technologies aboard the fleet of Dreams.” He intoned officially. “Perhaps next time you will choose to forgo your enhancements for the duration of your stay with us.”
I marked a spot on his chin and balled up my fist. Then I laughed. “Tell that to the techheads in line behind me.”
“We look forward to the opportunity.” The second security officer handed me my jacket and backpack and stood with my umbrella tucked under his arm. “Please enjoy your time as an Island Dreamer.”
“What a way to start a vacation.” I snatched my gear and pushed between the two security guards toward the circular gate at the end of the white corridor. The door shushed open quietly and Whyte’s sunburned face greeted me.
“I figured out why you look like a stick of smoked meat,” I said. “Do you have to walk through the crucible of flame every time you board a shuttle?”
“That should not have been necessary.” He narrowed his icy-blue eyes, the weathered flesh around them hardened into a starburst of deeply carved lines. “The admiral granted you a security pass.”
“The sadistic duo in there failed to get the memo.” I pulled my jacket over my shoulders and kicked the door to the security check. My boot bounced off without leaving a mark. I cracked my knuckles against my metallic palm. “Want me to go back in and deliver it for you?”
“I will see to it,” Whyte said perfunctorily, his eyes peering at his reflection in the glass as if he could see through the mirrored surface.
“I don’t mind. Really.” A chill had settled over my skin after the heat of the tunnel. I shook out my arms and bounced on my toes. “I could use the warm up if we’re going to be sitting for… How long is the shuttle trip?”
“A few hours,” Whyte said. “Depending on where in its orbit the Island Dreamer is. But you will be able to move freely except during the take off and docking procedures.”
“And there will be food?”
“It is a catered flight.” Whyte led the way farther down the corridor through another set of mirrored doors. “You will be quite comfortable.”
“I’m flying with you?” I swung the umbrella around my hand once and then ditched it next to the doors. Not much rain on a space cruise, I figured. “How many cush rollers per bangtail?”
“We do not refer to our customers as ‘cush rollers.’”
“There’s got to be a lot of holocred pinging on a cruise like this,” I said. “I’m surprised the delicate upper crust allows themselves to be subjected to the tunnel treatment back there.”
“That scanner is a new feature,” Whyte said. “And it is meant to be used only in extreme cases. I’m afraid our officers may have been too eager to try out their new toy. Normally, on other voyages, such stringent procedures are not necessary at all. But we have a special guest aboard the Island Dreamer for this inaugural flight.”
The pieces clicked into place and my eyes widened. “Fade out, Whyte. You’re ribbing me up.”
He gave me a sideways look. “I don’t know what that means.”
“The dusty-pink robes, the anti-tech screening, the ‘person of import’…” I counted out my points on ragged nailed fingers. “You’re hosting the head weirdo of the Last Humanists on the Dreamer?”
“First of all, the head weirdo’s title is ‘The Rose.’” Whyte said. “Second, that would be most unlikely. Wouldn’t it?”
“Is he the one who’s interested in the silver lady?”
“I’m sure I have no idea.” Whyte keyed his code into a door so covered with touchscreens and buttons it was impossible to tell where it was going to open from. “Your job is to find out who she is, not who wants to keep her alive.”
I rolled my eyes behind his back. “The two could be related, you know.”
A crack opened horizontally through the centre of the door and the parts slid into the ceiling and floor, respectively. We stepped into a massive, open-hanger space, the air heavy with the high-octane brain buzz of rocket fuel and hot metal. Six shuttles the size of Biz District office towers cocked and loaded and ready for liftoff. Six doors like the one we just passed through opened and closed at intervals as customers made their way through security and into the hanger. Transparent fencing guided the guests toward their designated spacecraft in efficiently straight lines. Most of the clientele plugged their noses and picked up the pace as if trying to forget the grease and gears that powered the façade of the luxurious star-cruising lifestyles of the rich and famous.
I put a crick in my neck trying to see everything at once. “I’ve been known to get a glow-on in the past, but I never drifted into anything like this.”
Chief of Security Hank Whyte smiled his cracked leather smile. He guided me toward a bangtail shuttle worth a more cush than I could wrap my rocket-fuel fuzzed brain around. He said, “There is nothing else like this.”
“It’s a marvel of human ingenuity,” I said. “Space travel. I mean, I knew it. But I didn’t know it like this.”
“You have to see it to believe it.” Whyte stood aside to let me climb the white metal stairs up to the wide-open doors of the bangtail. The words Whippet 3 were in sharp relief against the cold, silver gleam of the shuttle in stark black paint.
“I must be the luckiest Grit in HoloCity”—I tripped on the first step and smashed my elbow on the handrail—“or this whole dizzy dream is going to come crashing down on my head.”
“I’m beginning to like you, Ms. Marlowe.” Whyte helped me back up to my feet with his ruddy face close to mine. “But the dream is already crashing, and unless you can help us, not even the admiral will be able to stop the pot from boiling over.”
The blur of the last few hours took a toll on me and after I had been fed and watered—real, filtered, lunar water, blissfully tasteless, in clear blue recyclable bottles that each cost more than I made in a month—I stretched out in my fully adjustable seat, grabbed a complimentary blanket, and waited for sleep to take me away on the best trip money can’t buy.
Whyte’s cryptic remark as we boarded the bangtail barely registered in my awe at seeing the interior of the shuttle. Pearlescent white and pastels seemed to be the fashion of the day. Blocks of seats were arranged like private sitting rooms. White chairs and loungers in melting geometric shapes clustered around glass tables. As the last passengers boarded the shuttle, people settled into the groups they were travelling with. Smaller pods joined with others that looked like suitable companions for the journey, the way the extroverted tended to do when away from their usual sets, and the introverted were dragged along with them.
Whyte had deposited me in an empty block before he’d faded away to attend to some professional duty or other. He’d explained it to me, but the words flew straight by on the fast bird while my over-stimulated Grit-scrub brain sat there like a lump of primordial ooze. I think I nodded to him before I let the dream world of the space shuttle fly me to the stars.
In my white jumpsuit I laid back, flipped down my glasses, and did my best to look like another piece of furniture. For a while, I listened to the buzz of conversation around me and admired the way the cush set talked about absolutely nothing in such excruciating detail. It didn’t take me long to decide there was nothing to be gained by keeping my eyes peeled, so I closed them and let the buzz slip away beneath the white noise in my shades.
&nbs
p; I didn’t know what woke me, but I killed the sound in the tubes and opened my ears. My neck ached from where the girl in silver had stung me with the sleeper drug. I rubbed at it absently. Still swollen. I kept the glasses on. A drunken couple had stumbled into the block of seats I had had to myself. They fumbled at one another awkwardly, forgetting the privacy screen or too far gone to care about discretion. I kept my glasses on, killed the white noise, and listened. A sharp, hissing whisper cut through the grunts and moans of the groping pair. I focused my attention that way.
“—can’t be. How could he, with the warrant plastered all over the feeds?” said a woman’s voice, coming from the block behind my seat.
“Don’t ask me,” a lilting male voice replied in hushed urgency. “I don’t invent the gossip, I just spread it.”
“There’s a reward, you know,” she said. “For information. You could make a quick stack with a tip like that.”
“I have enough cush to choke a highbinder politician,” he said primly. “I’m not interested in any rewards. What I want is a crack at that punch, the real stuff. Not the cut batch that’s circulating right now.”
The woman forgot their secrecy and laughed like a trained seal. “So what, you’re going to suss him out and throw a pile of holocred in his lap?”
“Shut your sausage hole, Lindy!” A dainty slapping sound and more giggling. “You want to blow it for me before I even have a chance? I’d share the glow with you.”
“You’re serious?” The whisper was back. “You’d slide up to Punch Blanco and make an offer like that?”
“Why not? Now that he’s been made by the HCPD, he’s got to be hard for cush. Maybe he needs a friend with a fat roll?”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you,” she teased, but her voice had tightened around the edges.
“I won’t have to talk to him if my sources are on the level,” he said. “It’s the drops. Perfectly safe.”
“Safe, my Holy Origin. They’ll find your fish-nibbled corpse in the harbour, you dizzy vetch.”
“I take it back, I’m not sharing with you.” Petulant now. “Forget I said anything.”
“Don’t do it, Ted,” she implored. “We can have a good time with what we brought along. Security let me keep the uppers and we have—”
“Forget it, I said.” He stood up noisily. “Let’s go get a drink.”
They moved away from the block as I peered between the seats, but they disappeared into a cloud of milling socialites before I got a good look. I flipped up my visilenses and folded my blanket. The grunting couple had fallen into a stupor on the floor, hands still half-heartedly grabbing bits of flesh but no longer knowing what to do with it. I shook the blanket out again and spread it over them, hoping to ease the flood of anxiety they’d wake with as their bodies flushed out whatever poisons they’d ingested. It was hard to feel too sorry for wastrels with more cred than sense, but I hoped for their sakes that they would at least remember where they were and knew the person they were with when they woke. No amount of cush can ease the existential dread of sobriety after a hard roll in the glow.
“How have you found the trip so far?” Hank Whyte’s low baritone rumbled behind me. I turned, and his neat, blue suit was like an anchor in the surrounding sea of pastel, white, and chrome.
“I slept.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. I wanted to show you the viewing deck before we dock up to Island Dreamer. Would you like something to drink?”
I held up my water bottle. “Don’t they have viewing decks on the cruiser?”
“Not like on the shuttle.” Whyte polished a silver button on his wrist with the cuff on his other arm, his eyes sliding across the room with the casual attentiveness of a professional observer. “Some of the cushier suites have private viewing areas, but most passengers don’t cruise for the views. They get their fill of that on the bangtail and then spend the rest of their trip hopping from holobeach to dance club.”
“They could do that in HoloCity.”
Whyte’s sunburned face cracked ruefully. “Yes, but it wouldn’t cost as much.”
“Show me.” I stretched out the tight spots and then grabbed my things. “I might spend most of my time on a holobeach too.”
“You’re more likely to find the admiral’s woman in question in the clubs and gambling rooms.” Whyte strode out of the common area and down a hallway at the outer edge of the shuttle.
“He doesn’t expect me to work 24/7, does he?” I run my fingers along the smooth white wall of the corridor. “I’m supposed to be on vacation.”
“The admiral is the kind of man who works day and night with little rest.” Whyte said. “He knows better than to hold others to his own standard. Still, I suggest you don’t disappoint him.”
“Sweet Potato Swain. I remember.”
Round doors, each with an expansive key code system out front, lined the hallway to our right. To my left, with only a few feet of metal and wires and whatever else makes up a spacecraft’s shell between us and it, was the great empty space that had fascinated human beings for as long as our primitive brains could fathom worlds beyond our own. Even without being able to see it, a feeling like vertigo hit me. With artificial gravity and no earth or sky to tell the difference, we could have been flying upside down and I wouldn’t know. There was no upside down unless some goon held you by the ankles before he beat you.
At the end of the corridor, we came to a glass door like the ones at the bangtail station. Whyte did his little dance with the security system, and the circular door made a hissing noise as it broke into triangular pieces and twisted away from the centre, widening like the pupil of a pinch on the glow. Inside was outer space.
The walls, some synthetic material as clear as glass, wrapped us in a bubble of breathable air that seemed to protrude from the side of the shuttle with nothing above or below us. A handful of observers floated through the stars ahead of us with small sweep-and-buff bots zipped across the surface behind them, ensuring that no smudge or smears would interfere with the guest’s viewing experience.
“The deck is closing for maintenance.” Whyte’s deep voice resonated strangely in the open space. “Please avail yourselves of the refreshments in the commons. We will dock within the hour.”
The passengers filed out obediently, with Whyte and I standing on either side of the round door like sentinels. Once they were gone, he stepped out onto the deck and held out an elbow for me, like an old-fashioned gentleman. I didn’t normally go for that kind of thing, but it was surprisingly reassuring in that void-like space. My heart hammered in my ears as my boot hovered above the transparent floor and the stars gleamed below.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Whyte assured me. Just like getting punched by Blanco’s best.
I closed my eyes and let my foot drop. Vertigo surged in my chest and then my boot connected with the floor and I stepped out toward Whyte. The door shushed closed behind me and the mechanical locks engaged with a click. I took his elbow and tried not to bruise his arm. Once I was firmly attached and more or less convinced I wouldn’t float off into the ether, we moved toward the outer edge of the viewing bubble.
Below us a streak of orange and gold marked an edge of Tigris, the spiral galaxy that our Terra Firma called home. “There’s so much colour,” I said when I finally had words to speak. “From the surface it all looks black and white. Nothing is ever that simple, I guess.”
“Galaxies, like the hoary breath of long-dead gods,” Whyte said as if he were quoting something.
Movement caught my eye in the blackness above Tigris’ stripe. Blinking white and red lights, dull and lifeless compared to the natural competition of their surroundings, trailed through the stars just ahead of us. “What is that?”
“The Island Dreamer.”
“It’s running away from us.”
; “The shuttles use most of their power to get themselves close to the same orbit as the cruiser,” Whyte explained. “Then we use the last of the fuel to catch the dock.”
“What if you miss?”
He laughed, but grimly. “We never miss.”
“If you say so.” I got brave and touched the surface of the viewing lens with the tips of my fingers. “This rates, Whyte. But I’m still looking forward to the holobeaches. I’ve never been to one, real or virtual.”
“You don’t get many vacations in your line of work?”
“I don’t get much money in my line of work,” I said. “This kind of thing is way outside my pay grade. I’m only here because I won the Lucky Bastard Sweepstakes.”
“I see.” Whyte took a thin, black cigar out of his pocket and lit it with a sulphur match. Yellow-grey haze spiralled up from the end of it and dissipated as if into the stars. “How fortunate, for the Dream fleet as well as for you.”
“What’s the smoke, Whyte?” I asked. “Why’d you really bring me here?”
Whyte’s calm professionalism hardened into something else, something cold and brittle. “The universe is both simple and complex, and never exactly what it seems.”
I flexed my upgrade against my thigh and watched him from my peripheral vision. “If there’s something you want to say to me, then say it. Earlier you wanted to talk about something. The dream was crashing down, you said. What did you mean, and what does any of this have to do with me?”
“You tell me.” Whyte blew twin streams of smoke out of his cracked terracotta nostrils and curled his lip. “Because something about this stinks, and you’re the monkey in the middle of it all.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” The acrid smog burned the back of my throat. I took out a piece of gum, peeled it, and popped it into my mouth. “If you want to hear my version, I’ll give it to you. See if you can make sense of it.”
“Don’t leave out the funny bits.”