She rapped on the door.
★
“Shit,” Kiyoshi said. He started to run faster. The screen grab Jun had just sent him floated in the corner of his eye.
It depicted a man running down a corridor. Derek Lorna.
~Where is he now?
“He came out of something called LT Compartment 938B. Long-term storage. Looks like a lot of people actually live down there. It’s in the same place as N-Space, on the East Side. But don’t bother going after him. He’s coming up.”
“He’s coming for Elfrida.”
“That’s a safe assumption.”
Kiyoshi jogged, ran, jogged. Jun knew better than to say anything about being careful. Kiyoshi blew past small factories, dirty little one-printer-and-a-bag-of-splart operations. Dinged-up scavenger bots collected scurf and sipped effluent from dripping pipes. People stared at him. What was there to run for on the Rocking Horse? He could only be running from something.
“Got him in real time,” Jun said. “Can you see the Kozmic Blue Jeans factory?”
~Yuh—hnnh, hnnh—yup.
“Right, then straight. See him?”
The screen in the corner of Kiyoshi’s eye changed to a live feed. Derek Lorna strolled beneath a static surveillance camera. He wasn’t hurrying anymore. He was being careful not to attract attention.
~Doesn’t even look like he’s carrying. But Kiyoshi figured he’d have some small but nasty weapon concealed under his loose, Luna-style shirt.
Rounding the corner of the Kozmic Blue Jeans factory, Kiyoshi wrenched his two PEPguns out of his waistband, and checked that the pulse intensity was set to “Make ‘Em Wish They Were Dead.”
★
“This is yummo,” Elfrida said, beaming at the owner of If Wurst Comes to Wurst.
The factory where they’d asked directions turned out to be a charcuterie. The owner-operator, a friendly, obese woman in an oil-splotched coverall, had not only told them exactly how to reach their destination, but offered them samples of her sausages. Chewing, Elfrida enthused, “I’m half- Austrian, so I’ve spent lots of time in Vienna, you know? The world capital of sausages? And this is easily as good as anything I’ve had there.”
The woman flushed in pleasure. “Can I put that in a customer testimonial?”
Mendoza yanked on Elfrida’s sleeve.
“It’s really only OK-ish,” Elfrida confessed as they walked on. “But I didn’t want to be rude.”
“I, for one, don’t want to know what they put in sausages on a space station 1.5 million klicks from the nearest pig farm.”
“Nutriblocks,” Elfrida said, but she dropped the end of her sausage on the street. A scavenger bot immediately scuttled over and grabbed it. “Anyway, you have to admit the lady didn’t seem like a spy for Derek Lorna. Or Hope Energy. Or whoever else is supposedly after us. And she did know where the Don Bosco building is.”
“Sigh. Yes, Elfrida. You were right. I was wrong.”
Mendoza meant the apology sincerely. He meant it as an apology for doing this the hard way, all because his recent experience of pursuit had conditioned him to see Derek Lorna’s spies behind every closed door. He had been overly cautious, and he was sorry for that. But his apology came out as a churlish grunt.
Elfrida giggled. She reached for his hand and swung it to and fro. “You’re such a guy,” she said.
Distracted by the warm pressure of her fingers, Mendoza did not think to look over his shoulder as they walked.
★
Kiyoshi ran down a long, crowded street. As he ran, he enabled the zoom function of his retinal implants.
He saw Elfrida and Mendoza first.They had no idea how much danger they were in. They were walking hand in hand. Elfrida still had her rucksack.
Derek Lorna was about twenty meters behind them, quickstepping, catching up.
Kiyoshi halted, gasping for breath. He raised his right-hand PEPgun and lined up the crosshairs. He fired.
The invisible energy pulse leapt across the distance between them. Contacting Lorna’s back, it produced a small cloud of exploding plasma. This created a pressure wave that knocked Lorna flat. It also knocked over a couple of passing cyborgs. Each assumed the other had sucker-punched him. They leapt to their feet, roaring in outrage, and swung at each other with augmented fists.
Elfrida and Mendoza glanced back at the fistfight and hurried on faster. A delivery truck backed out of a factory loading bay and hid them from view.
Snickering to himself, Kiyoshi sauntered up the street. The brawling cyborgs paid no attention to him, or to the frail human form sprawled nearby.
Which now stirred. Sat up. Rubbed its head.
Kiyoshi’s jaw dropped.
‘Make ‘Em Wish They Were Dead’ was obviously false advertising. Or maybe some black marketeer had sold the actors piece-of-shit guns.
“Hey,” Kiyoshi said.
Lorna twisted around. When he saw Kiyoshi, he smiled.
Kiyoshi drew his second PEPgun and fired, point blank, at the middle of Lorna’s shirt.
Quicker than a cockroach, Lorna ducked, wriggling away on his elbows, legs undulating, in a motion more insect-like than human.
The PEPgun’s pulse missed Lorna. It hit the cyborgs and knocked both of them down again. They howled.
Lorna had not let out a sound when he was hit.
Nor did he now.
With that shit-eating grin still plastered on his face, he bent slightly towards Kiyoshi from the shoulders, as if he were Japanese, bowing a greeting. The top of his head hinged back and up popped a stubby little gun.
Kiyoshi threw himself flat.
A lethal electrolaser bolt seared over his head, close enough that he could smell the dust in the air burning. He rolled, fired blindly. Another bolt scorched the ground. Goddammit goddammit. He had both PEPguns in his hands, fingers spasming on both triggers at once. He somersaulted upright and saw Lorna—scratch that, the phavatar masquerading as Lorna—tumbling head over heels. The bot might not feel pain but it could still get knocked over by a pressure wave.
He reeled after it. The cyborgs got there first. One of them sat on the phavatar’s legs, the other on its back.
Its head rotated 180 degrees. It was still grinning. Its skull-mounted electrolaser spat lightning at the ceiling. The closest UV ring went out, plunging the street into twilight.
“Rip its fucking head off,” Kiyoshi roared.
“Right,” said one of the cyborgs. He fastened his fists, which were actually four-pronged grabbers, onto the Lorna-bot’s jaw and left shoulder.
The bot spoke, indistinctly: “Don’t be fucking stupid. We can work together.”
“That’s what they all say,” Kiyoshi muttered. A wave of dizziness hit him. He knew what was going on: his blood pressure was too low for this gravity, and the exertion had drawn oxygen away from his brain. He leaned against a pillar and bent double to get the blood flowing back to his head.
The pillar was one of those that held up the roof. It was a solid thing in a hab full of flimsy prefab structures.
Which was why Kiyoshi survived the blast that obliterated the Lorna-bot, killed both cyborgs instantly, and blew a hole in the floor so big that a nanocarbon tube factory fell into the long-term storage area.
★
Mendoza and Elfrida heard the blast. But they were several streets away by then, and it didn’t sound all that different from the backdrop of industrial noise.
They had reached their destination.
The Don Bosco building proved to be a factory, externally similar to its neighbors. But this factory was neither a cave full of welding sparks, nor a hole in the wall where one person watched over a 3D printer. Mendoza and Elfrida followed the receptionist across a production floor crammed with workbenches. Teenagers crowded the benches, handcrafting religious objects: Buddha statues, Shiva wall hangings, Mormon tabernacles, Stars of David, rosaries, Muslim prayer rugs, crucifixes, and other doodads. The teens chattered and laughed as they worked.
Mendoza found his serene confidence soothing.
The consul escorted them into an office full of boxed-up religious merchandise waiting to be shipped. Behind his desk hung the flag of the NHRE. The consul took off his baseball cap and put on the violet biretta of a papal nuncio. “Now, what can I do for you?”
Mendoza sat down. Elfrida did not. She fumbled with the zip of her rucksack and took out a large, heavy object in a ziploc bag. They’d packed the rucksack full of freezegel sachets, but these had mostly defrosted by now, and Mendoza detected a faint, awful smell.
The consul recoiled. He reached under his desk.
Mendoza lunged, trapped the man’s hand before it could reach the hidden panic button.
“Please let me explain,” Elfrida said. Her voice was steady. “Yes, it’s a human head. I’ve brought it here because of what’s inside it: a BCI containing incriminating evidence against the director of one of Luna’s best-respected research institutes. This will prove that Derek Lorna, of the Leadership in Robotics Institute, intentionally released a version of the Heidegger program on Mercury, to commit mass murder.”
The consul found his voice. “Why … here? Why not take this … evidence … to the peacekeepers?”
“Well,” Elfrida said, “it was my mother’s idea. She works for the NHRE, in an unofficial capacity. Her name’s Ingrid Haller. She asked some people at the Vatican what we should do. And they told her to tell me to bring it to you, that you’d get it where it needs to go.”
The consul nodded slowly. “Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “for his mercy is infinite.”
★
Kiyoshi picked up the pieces.
He found one head, two feet, one grabber, four steel-reinforced ulnas and wrist joints, and a lot of less easily identifiable bits.
In a space station, as on a spaceship, an explosion was a code-red emergency. Within a minute and a half, a wave of repair bots arrived. They boiled out of the hole in the floor and began to sort through the debris.
Soon after that, two vans full of peacekeepers screamed up to secure the area.
Kiyoshi pointed out the bits he’d collected. “These are the casualties. You can run DNA tests, notify their families.”
“Who are you?”
“Tell them it wasn’t an accident. Those guys died in a war.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Forget it.” Kiyoshi walked away. The peacekeepers let him go; they were busy arresting the trunk-room dwellers below for living in a non-designated area.
★
Mendoza and Elfrida went out to dinner with the NHRE consul. They ate vat-raised shrimp and hydroponic kale and quinoa salad. They drank white wine. The consul proposed a toast to “Peace and justice.” After parting from him, they wandered through the West Side, stopping now and again to kiss.
Mendoza was not sure why Elfrida had changed her mind about him. Was she just grateful to him for saving her life? It felt like more than that. It felt real. But he wasn’t about to spoil it by questioning her feelings.
★
“Well, that went OK, except for those guys getting blown up,” Kiyoshi said. He was speaking aloud rather than subvocalizing, but who cared? No one understood Japanese, anyway. “Funny. It was like a battle of the phavatars. He had a selfie. You had me … What a dumbshit to use a selfie, though. If he’d just used a maintenance bot or something, we wouldn’t have spotted him.”
“It was probably all he had,” Jun said, his voice almost drowned out by the noise of the Nodetrak.
“It was vanity,” Kiyoshi said with the severity of an inquisitor. “Sheer vanity. Jesus, the auto-destruct thing, too.” He smiled, and had to force himself to stop smiling, because people were looking at him oddly.
By the time he got back to the parking bay, the blues had set in. He booked a departure time, and then had to cancel and rebook because Elfrida and Mendoza weren’t back yet. He sat on the steps of the Superlifter, same as before. Strummed idly on the strings of his new guitar. He’d bought it on a whim, walking back through the market, thinking of Brainrape. At least they hadn’t shown up yet. The guitar was an acoustic whose warm sound got lost in the ambient noise.
“You keep buying stuff,” Jun said.
Kiyoshi thought, It was either this or something else, but he didn’t say that. He said, “If Elfrida and Mendoza don’t show in the next half-hour, we’re leaving them.”
“We should probably leave them anyway.”
Kiyoshi raised his eyebrows; he hadn’t expected that. “The boss-man wants to talk to them.”
“I don’t think we should drag them into this.”
“They’re already in it,” Kiyoshi said, noticing to his irritation that he was now arguing against himself. He also noticed that Jun sounded strangely remote. He had been quieter than normal since Lorna’s phavatar self-destructed. He’d seen it all through the surveillance cameras. Maybe even he had been shocked to learn what they were dealing with. It was one thing to know that Derek Lorna would not scruple to kill innocent bystanders. It was another thing to see it for yourself.
Well, Lorna would soon be explaining his crimes to the International Court of Justice. Mendoza had called to say they had succeeded. He and Elfrida were probably out celebrating.
They wobbled up at last, drunk and giggly. Elfrida vanished into the cockpit, to pee, she said. Mendoza sat down beside Kiyoshi on the steps. “Sorry we took so long getting back.”
“No problem.”
“We went out to eat with the papal nuncio. He’s a stand-up guy.” Without asking, Mendoza picked up Kiyoshi’s cigarette, which was lying on the steps, and took a drag. He coughed. “What’s in this?”
“Bit of THC, some nicotine, herbal flavorings, and a dash of vitamin K.”
“Dude, are you a junkie or something? Ha, ha. I’m just kidding. But seriously, what’s up with the pastries?”
Kiyoshi moved the box of donuts he had also bought in the market to his other side, out of Mendoza’s line of sight. Carefully keeping details to a minimum, he relayed the boss-man’s invitation.
Mendoza’s dark eyes grew huge. “Out to the Belt?”
“Yes. I can’t tell you where at this time. You’ll understand that.”
Mendoza hesitated. Then he shook his head. “I can’t. I have to go home and see my mother.”
Kiyoshi smiled. It was touching that the guy cared about his mother. But Mendoza misinterpreted his expression. He seemed to think Kiyoshi was laughing at him.
“I’m all she’s got, man. My sister was killed by the freaking PLAN. Ten years ago. It just about killed Mom. too.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And I understand. Of course you should go home. You’re Earthborn, after all.”
Elfrida stumbled out of the airlock. Her eyes were swollen, her nose pink. Mendoza, drunk, did not notice; he put his arm around her and grinned goofily. But Kiyoshi saw how subdued she was. He subvocalized: ~Did you say something to her?
Jun’s voice, when at last it came, sounded exhausted. “She asked to come with us.”
~Oh. So I guess she’s crying because she’ll be separated from Mendoza?
“No. She’s crying because I said no.”
~Why? The boss-man …
“Think about what she’s been through. She needs to go home and recuperate. They both do. They’re gutsy kids, but our universe is no place for them.”
~Agreed, Kiyoshi subvocalized.
It should have been liberating to know he wouldn’t be encumbered with extra passengers. But in fact, he felt kind of sad.
xxi.
Mendoza went home.
His mother welcomed him joyfully. She made fried steak, kakanin butsi, pinoy-style spicy pork, and all the unhealthy desserts he’d loved as a boy. He
went with her to Mass and answered people’s questions as politely as he could.
It was mid-summer; the temperature in Manila was stifling. People dashed from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned church to air-conditioned shopping center. Mendoza tried sitting out in his mother’s pocket-sized garden, but the heat drove him indoors. He locked himself in the bathroom to talk to Elfrida.
His mother wanted to know what he had to be so secretive about. When he explained about Elfrida, she burst into tears of joy. Did he think Elfrida was The One? Would they live in Manila? She could evict her subletters to make room for them. John and Elfrida wouldn’t be going back into space, surely, after all they’d been through?
Mendoza forestalled his mother before she actually began to plan the wedding. It was all up in the air, he said.
In fact, Elfrida had seemed worryingly distant ever since they got back to Earth. The Interplanetary Court of Justice had placed her under supervision as a key witness in the case against Derek Lorna. And she was having mother issues, too.
Mendoza lay under the air-conditioner’s tepid breeze, while his mother prayed her three daily rosaries, with the television going, and the subletters yukking it up on the other side of a thin wall. He thought: I had more privacy when I was living on the moon.
★
“So,” Kiyoshi concluded, “we’re coming home.”
He leaned back on the comms couch and bit into one of the donuts he’d bought on the Rocking Horse. Powdered sugar coated his lips.
Twenty-three and a half minutes later, the comms screen burst into light. The silhouette of a shaggy-bearded man said, “No, you’re not.”
“What?” Kiyoshi squawked.
427,000,000 kilometers away, the boss-man continued, “I don’t care about Mendoza and Goto. I mean, they want to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime, fuck ‘em.”
The boss-man did not know that Jun had put Elfrida off out of concern for her spiritual health. Kiyoshi had not told him. He was protecting Jun, as he had all his life.
“But it’s insane to come back all that way with an empty ship. That old truck of yours has plenty of room for cargo. And now you have a decent drive, right? So I want you to pick up some stuff on Midway or wherever. Pharmaceuticals, memory crystals. Basic materials: printer liquid, biostrate, liquid nitrogen. Elements: bromine, phosphorus—we’re having soil issues again. Splart, we always need splart. I’m attaching a shopping list.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 114