by S. C. Jensen
“That depends on what you think I can do for you.”
He caressed the smooth pink casing on my upgrade. His upper lip trembled. “Do you know how to use this thing?”
“It’s not the vibrating model if that’s what you mean.”
“No.” He licked his lips and sighed. “What I need is slightly more … primitive.”
“It grabs, it climbs, it lifts heavy things. Makes big holes when I need it to.” I made a fist. “The whole Pleistocene package.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going, exactly?”
“We’re going to make a big hole.” He batted his eyelashes over his shoulder at me again. “And I don’t mean the fun kind.”
“I never use holomaps.” Cosmo tapped his temple with a carefully filed fingernail, so bare in comparison to the rest of his outfit that it evoked embarrassment to notice, like accidently walking in on your mother getting out of the tub. “Dulls the mind. No booze. No drugs. No feed access on weekends. I’m no Last Humanist, but creativity requires capital P Purity in order to stretch its wings and fly like a glittery space eagle, you know?”
I told him I knew, and followed him as he followed some kind of invisible sparkle trail out of the casino, through endless corridors, and into an elevator hidden behind another holoscreen. We went down.
“Those Valentia vetches couldn’t even feel the rainbow. That’s the problem with pinches and drunks. Emotional extremophiles. There’s no subtlety. Divine radiance has to burn so bright to get through the light of the glow-up or the dark of the burn out they only really comprehend sentiment by spackle knife. I mean, how is a Grit District gutter punk going to blow the cockwomble off the fashion industry when he’s glowing so hot he thinks every back-alley peep show is the Erotic Ballet of Ganymede and Zeus? If you can’t feel the rainbow, you can only reflect the bright lights and colours given off by the truly inspired, you know? Radiant as a dented chrome plate.”
The inside of the elevator hummed in the silence that followed. Rounded, pearlescent walls, like the inside of a fish egg, absorbed the sound of his voice and held it, as if to spit it out at the first poor sap to step within its walls carrying a knockoff handbag.
“Yeah.” I scratched my head. “Okay. I think I know what you mean. Where are we going again?”
The elevator made a pinging noise and Cosmo spread his iridescent space wings open with the door and flew out into a dazzlingly white corridor. Simple neon signs declared things like “Hangar 2B” and “Cargo III” along the right-hand walls. Various side passages branched off of the left like stray hairs left behind by a dull razor.
The self-proclaimed Gutter Queen of Cosmetics strode into the storage facility level like an artists approaching a blank canvas. “We are going to find my merchandise.”
He swept past overhead hangar doors and code-locked jettison portals, inspecting each one and then abandoning it with a flourish of his thin black wrists. I hung back. “Your merchandise?”
“I don’t know who she paid off.” Cosmo stomped down the hallway like he was strutting the catwalk. “But I will find out. And I will use them as the before photo in my next Popup campaign.”
“Valentia?”
“You think it’s a coincidence that she booked the opening of her Stargazer lineup on the same luxury cruise as my Big Bang extravaganza? That third-rate skirt didn’t even know about Island Dreamer’s maiden voyage until she found out I had it booked.”
Who knew the cosmetics industry was as cut-throat as the drug syndicates? “If she’s willing to sabotage you like that, what’s to stop her from jettisoning your cargo at the corner of Tigris and Leonine?”
Cosmo put his hands on his hips and whipped around to face me with a visage like the enraged God of Stardust. “And miss out on the opportunity to scrape my pallets and rebrand my formula as her own? The woman is a snake, I tell you. The depths of her depravity are impossible to underestimate.”
“You mean, over—”
“Shut up, Pinky. Bring your useful bits over here and help me blast this door into the next dimension.”
“That sounds entirely unlawful.”
“What are you talking about?” Cosmo bent at the hip so that his mostly exposed chest was perfectly parallel to the floor, and inspected the seal behind the locker. “I can’t steal my own merchandise. It shouldn’t take much, I don’t think. Just a little tap with that blushing beaut of yours and we’ll be back in business. I will, anyway.”
My eyebrows knotted together in such a twist I think I pulled neuron. “You brought me all the way down here because you want me to vandalize a multi-billion-dollar space craft.”
“Big Bang should be splattering the faces of every cush-drunk vetch on this space ship right now. Since when is it illegal to make dreams come true?”
“Uh … Do you want a list?”
“It’s this one, right here. Just make a big hole in this general vicinity and I will prance in and rescue my razzle dazzles and la-dee-dahs. Then I’ll take you to your room where we can—”
“This is the downside to sobriety.” I ran my tongue over my teeth. “An intergalactic glitter fairy asks me to punch a hole in a rocket ship and here I am thinking about legal ramifications.”
“Mmmhmm.” Cosmo pursed his shimmering pink lips at me. “That’s your problem right there. You’re thinking again. True artists don’t think. They react. I never think. My entire existences is a spontaneous reaction to the relentless stimulation of the universe, you know? I don’t need drugs because I’m on a perma-glow from the inexorable potential of my own artistic expression.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I do feel like punching something.”
“You’re offline. I’m offline. No one will ever know.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You don’t think an outfit like this has security cameras?”
“Nope.” Cosmo swung his head back and forth like a seductive cobra. “The cameras are on the fritz. I ribbed up a few security guards to get the juice on Valencia because I know that lisping inferiority complex did it, but I can’t prove anything, of course. They’ve got nothing in this section. It’s all very hush-hush because who wants to admit a brand -cruiser like this one has electrical gremlins, you know? Maybe we’re all going to die, but I am going to get my merch if it’s the last thing I do.”
“And you’re sure it’s this one?”
“Sure, I’m sure.” Cosmo closed his eyes and massaged his temples, tapping his foot like the beat of a snare drum. “I was here when they loaded it. I remember.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I hadn’t already punched through a door that day. The first was in the name of self-preservation. The second in the name of my favourite red-glitter lip product. It’s not all that different when you’re from the Grit.
I said, “To the Blood of my Enemies.”
My upgrade hit the seam of the door just below the holoscreen keypad and my fist went straight through to the other side. I extended the piston in my wrist and pulled back with a kick from the hydraulics. The left side of the door tore off of its hinges and dangled there like a loose tooth.
Cosmo squealed and clapped his hands, then lifted a long, iridescent-white leg through the mangled opening and pushed his way into the cargo bay beyond. Somewhere inside the bay a high-pitched whining sounded out like the keening wail of a D-list lounge singer. A flawless plan. I was proud to be a part of it.
“Son of a motherless goat,” he muttered. One of the diaphanous glitter wings snagged on a bit of twisted metal and tore in two.
“Move it.” I unhooked his wing and pushed him the rest of the way through so I could follow him inside. “Let’s get your goods and get out of here before the boys in blue show up. I’m already on the naughty list.”
Cosmo’s white lidded eyes widened, and he stared at me
with eyes like black holes. His lips trembled. “You’re a criminal?”
“Well, I am now.” I shoved him forward. “Get your stuff. Let’s go. It smells like a black-market dumpster in here.”
The long-limbed glitter fairy took a few more steps inside and stopped dead. The pearly second skin on his right buttock twitched.
“Nope!” He spun on his heels with his hands over his eyes and stalked blindly back to the door. “Wrong one. This isn’t my bay. I didn’t see anything, though. Let’s go.”
Cosmo clawed his way past me, looking grey beneath his face paint, and shoved himself back through the hole to the hallway outside. I stumbled out of his way. “What are you—?”
The smell hit me first, like cheap jewellery held in sweaty palms. I crept forward slowly. The whining noise pierced my eardrums and reverberated off the walls and the towers of boxes that filled the cargo bay. Crates stacked up against every wall in the bay like silver building bricks. One tower leaned precariously, and another had toppled, as if it had been upset during a struggle. A crate with an open lid spilled its glittering contents across the floor. Hundreds of choker-style necklaces with drop pendants littered the ground at my feet. A few had landed, not on the sterilely clean corrugated metal flooring, but in a thick pool of viscous black-cherry liquid that had been smeared across the floor as if by a mop-wielding maniac. Bright red splatters painted the walls and the door to the airlock. A high-pitched hissing sound escaped from the door where it was attempting to seal around a lump of mangled flesh and hair.
I stumbled backward, and crunched a necklace beneath the heal of my boot. A thin pink fluid oozed out between the crystalline shards of glass. “Let’s get out of here before that alarm brings half the fleet security down here. I need to find the Chief of Security.”
I climbed through the hole after Cosmo. He stood there, snivelling and trembling with his hands shaking at the ceiling. “It wasn’t us, officer. We just found her. We just—”
“Get the cuffs on him.” The tall blonde security guard snapped. She had the same smushed face, and the same quick eyes. But she looked meaner now. Madder.
“So, uh… I know we got off on the wrong foot before,” I said. “But we both work for Whyte. Right? Let’s not do anything too crazy. We need to call this in to the admiral, immediately.”
“What a coincidence.” She held a small, deadly looking pistol in her right hand and motioned to the others with her left, pointing at me. “It was the admiral who sent us down here to pick you up. Looks like you bet on the wrong horse.”
“I always put my money on the lame ones,” I said. “Nothing like the threat of the glue factory to put a little pep in your step.”
“And tase the pink one.” The blonde gestured with her pistol. I flinched. “She’s looks like she’s about to resist arrest.”
The skinny little rat-faced man stepped forward and grinned at me with his crooked yellow teeth. He held something small and black in his right hand. This time, I was the one without backup.
“I’m not—” The words died in my throat as a pulse of nerve-exploding pain shot through my body and I dropped, twitching, to the floor. Neither I, nor Cosmo, nor the powder-blue uniforms ever learned what it was I had been about to deny. And by the time I regained consciousness, I didn’t remember what it was I had wanted to say in the first place.
I came to in a cold, white cell. I rolled over and glared between my eyelashes at a smear of painfully bright lights, groaned, and sat up. My balance felt off. A low shelf, moulded out of and extending from one of the walls, became both a bed and a sitting area. I planted my bare feet on the white floor. My head throbbed. Cold oozed up the soles of my feet and into my legs. A hole in the corner with a grab bar made the toilet. A semi-transparent privacy screen was afforded in the toilet area, but it only provided enough coverage to add a little titillation for the unseen observed. I vowed not to use the thing if I didn’t have to.
I wore a loose jumpsuit in a shocking shade of something that might have been orange or green and managed to land somewhere in the vicinity of “upset stomach.” My left shoulder ached. I tried to move my arm but it wasn’t there. The puke-coloured prison uniform had been neatly pinned up over my stump. The nerves felt raw, like whoever had removed the upgrade had done so with more fervour than finesse. I lifted my right hand and felt around my ears. The visilens glasses and the tubes were gone. At least they’d left me the plate that held my guts in. That would have been a mess.
I stood up carefully. My head did a poor imitation of a waltz before it had spun itself in enough circles to settle down and sit the next dance out. I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I tested a step or two and decided I probably wasn’t under the influence of whatever sedative they’d hit me with after they’d tased me. One wall of the cell appeared to be made of mirrored glass. There I was. My bubble-gum-pink hair clashed horrendously with the prison jumpsuit, which was probably why they’d picked that colour. Vomit looks pretty bad on everything. At least my lipstick had stayed in place. Cosmo would be proud, wherever he was.
My stomach clenched at the empty space below my left shoulder. I had never gotten used to the fact that I was missing the arm. Rae had had me patched up with a cybernetic enhancement before I even knew I’d survived the blast that had been meant to kill me. The image in the mirror was an unfinished sketch of the way I saw myself in my head. All smudges and broken lines and identifying features rubbed out with a dirty eraser. I approached the reflection, studied this new incarnation. My nerves pulsed and twitched as I flexed fingers that weren’t there. If I’d had my upgrade, I’d have punched a hole in something. My hair was a mess, the outfit was a travesty, but my eyes were clear and sharp. I took a deep breath. This was a class pile, but it could be worse. I put my flesh hand against the glass and pushed.
A door slammed open, so close to me that it almost took my elbow with it. Whyte stalked into the room with his pepperoni face peeking out the top of the dark-blue uniform. He didn’t look so funny to me now. The sadistic little rat-faced guard stuck to Whyte’s heels, shorter and even skinnier, like a diluted shadow. He held a plasma taser pointed carefully at my chest and twitched his raw, pink nose.
“You were supposed to watch her.” Whyte’s face contorted into a grotesque caricature of human features like rage had been carved into a hunk of old leather.
“At 1900.” I said. “I checked on her at the beach and then hit the admiral’s detail.”
I glanced at the security guard behind Whyte, unsure how much he was supposed to know about any of this. Then I realized it wasn’t my problem anymore. I’d be sent back down to the surface and handed to Swain on a silver platter at this rate.
“Did you kill her?”
That brought me up short. “Me? Are you kidding?”
“The cameras have been down since we left Terra Firma. I checked up on your so-called spacewalker and couldn’t find a damned thing. Then I send a team in to do a physical sweep and what do we find? You and some poncey little man, returning to the scene of the crime. Thought you could go back and clean up before we got there, did you? See how far that got you?”
“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. I’m the one who told you to go check down there. Why would I do that before I had cleaned up? Besides, Blondie said the admiral—”
“You’re good.” A malicious smile stretched across the Chief of Security’s face, and there was no joy in it. Only a twisted kind of anticipatory pleasure. “You almost had me. You thought you could make a quick buck on me, eh? As soon as I asked you to check up on my wife, I saw the gears turning behind those gutter-punk eyes of yours. I know how people like you operate. The admiral was a fool to trust you on the word of a …”
“Sir,” the little man behind him sneered. “You want me to hit her again?”
“Not yet,” Whyte cracked his knuckles and stepped toward me. “I
want to hear it from her own mouth. You thought you’d follow her, maybe put a little pressure on, make some fast cash. But she wasn’t putting up with it, was she? She wouldn’t. I know her. Things got ugly and you lost your cool. It happens all the time, eh? Little better than animals down in the Grits. Isn’t that right? But I’ll tell you this. It doesn’t happen on my ship. You’re going to tell me what happened, and I’m going to make sure it never happens again.”
I backed away from him with my hands up. One hand and a stump of fabric, anyway. “Did you look at her body yourself?”
“There is no body!”
“What’s left of it, I mean,” I said, keeping my voice calm. It was like talking down a raging pincher on the glow-down. “Did you see her face?”
“I’ll say my goodbyes after the coroner has—” His voice cracked. “Goddamn you, Marlowe. How could you?”
“I’m sorry, Hank.” I flinched as I said it, anticipating a blow. But it never came. The hard line of Whyte’s navy-blue shoulders sagged and his face crumpled. “Your wife is dead. But it’s not her in the cargo bay.”
His eyes snapped to my face. “What?”
“I can’t prove it yet, but I think she’s been dead for a couple of days now,” I said. “And she was missing for weeks before that.”
Whyte’s face twisted in another knot and he clenched his fists. “I just spoke to her this morning.”
“Spoke to her, sure,” I said. “But when’s the last time you touched her?”
A long breath seeped out of Whyte’s mouth and his shoulders sagged even farther, like he was deflating. “I should snap your neck. Who would care?”
“Listen to me, Hank. Your wife wasn’t who you thought she was. You suspected as much yourself when you came to me. Well, it’s true. But not in the way you thought. You promised me you wouldn’t go crazy if I told you the truth.”