Eclipse Phase- After the Fall

by Jaym Gates

  “Good,” said Kim, “I gotta talk to my people at the Ranger station.”

  Cagehopper scowled. “Hopefully not about me.”

  “Paranoia and egocentrism don’t go so good together, paatno-san,” she said, and left the room.

  Cagehopper snorted and went back to prepping Bobdog for new mesh inserts.

  “How you holding up, Bob?” Park asked, “Know it’s a lot to ask, but I need you solid, or you’re out.”

  “Can walk straight,” Bobdog signed.

  “What’s he say?” Cage asked.

  Park told him.

  “Remind me never to leave my burrow for you, Carter,” Cagehopper said.

  —

  “How you like the new morph?” Kim asked. They were flying back to the stop on the M5 where Park’d left his truck. The baboons hadn’t crapped the seats; Kim looked to be in a good mood about that.

  Bobdog was pretty animated for someone in a new morph, but then he’d had the benefit of Cagehopper having kept the engine warm for him instead of sleeving him into a morph that’d been packed in stasis gel. “All right. Not bad. Kind of, too human, you know? Clumsy toes.”

  “Yeah, I been in and then out of a bouncer,” Park said.

  They were making small talk, but they’d have to cut that off shortly and make with the planning. He’d gotten Eidolon, one of the crows, to analyze the data they’d grabbed from the yak front. The meat of it was an undecipherable record of shipping times and routing numbers. The rest was an operations manual for handling exsurgents and extracting bodily fluids from them without becoming contaminated oneself. The manual then went into how to store and package the fluids for shipment.

  [You got anything yet, E?] Park messaged.

  Eidolon’s response came slowly; they were an AGI inhabiting a massive art installation outside Locus, in the Jupiter Trojans. Park had plenty of contacts rimward. He liked using hackers outside Consortium jurisdiction when he could.

  [Yes, Jake. It is most distressing. The yakuza gang that Bobdog LaGrange discovered have been shipping their product to orbit, but I cannot deduce where. They are using combinatory routing codes.]

  Park did a mesh search on what that meant. Combinatory routing codes were a form of encryption used when sending physical goods—which meant they didn’t get used much. Parcels from multiple suppliers with combinatory codes on them would stack up at a routing center until all of them were there. Only by combining the codes on all parcels could you determine the final destination. Corps who didn’t want competitors finding out where large quantities of components were being sent used them in the dark ages before microfacturing. Now they were mostly used by criminals.

  Park patched Eidolon through the prowler’s speakers. “Y’all should hear this,” he said. “Eidolon, how do we figure out where the cylinders were going?”

  After a long pause, Eidolon said, “You must find all of the facilities from which they were originating. Or you could simply go to the routing center, and if there are enough parcels there, I might be able to deduce both their origin points and the final destination by decrypting the collected routing codes from them.”

  “You know where the routing center is?” Kim asked.

  After a long moment, Eidolon’s reply came, “Of course. I only hesitated to provide the location because I feared I might have made an error in decrypting the code, but I have re-checked my work and am quite sure. It is a disreputable drinking establishment in the Zhongguancun neighborhood of Olympus City, on Mars. Sending you the precise address now.”

  “That don’t sound like an error at all,” Park said. An AGI not grokking the idea of a front business didn’t surprise him. “Nice work, Eidolon. We’ll talk again soon.”

  “Good day, Jake.”

  Kim said, “I can’t do anything for you in Olympus, Carter.”

  “I can,” Bobdog said, “I’ll leave right away.”

  —

  Bobdog LaGrange knew some helluv angry monkeys, Kim thought. Correction: apes. Never call ‘em monkeys, especially not the ones Bobdog knew.

  She was sitting on the end of a motel bed eating the leftover half of a bibimbap burrito. Park was laying back against the headboard behind her, smoking a joint. They were watching a tacnet replay on a shared AR window of Bobdog’s friends in Olympus tearing up a speakeasy run by a local gang.

  In the end, the apes found more cylinders and got the data. Whole back of the place had been set up for shipping and receiving. Trucks loaded with goods come in off the maglev railroad stopped at the front business on their way to the space elevator, left light some goods and heavy a batch of nondescript cylinders full of zombie plague. Rinse, repeat. The gang were contractors—knew fuck all about what they were really involved in. Just knew they were getting paid.

  Strictly speaking, as a deputized officer, she ought to be concerned, but she’d have been surprised if the Olympus police didn’t know about the place. That department had three priorities: the Space Elevator, ComEx property, and whomever was paying them bribes, in that order. Bobdog’s neo-primate gang friends had done the Olympus cops’ job better than the cops would’ve.

  As for Jake Carter–or Jae Park, which was about the most boring real name a guy could have–she glanced back at him. “How long you think Eidolon’ll take on that?”

  He smiled. “You got somewhere to be?”

  “I got a department to run, in case you’d forgot.” Although the truth of it was, she regularly went a week without setting foot in the station. Running things via mesh was easy enough. Rank of captain in the Rangers basically meant being a beat cop but having to answer a crap ton of mesh calls, too. Oh, and she got a better truck.

  As for Park … she wasn’t sure this was going to happen again, but he hadn’t been overly disappointing. Like all men, he needed to read the documentation; unlike the majority of them, he did what it said. She liked him. They were both Korean, they were donggap—born in the same year, they were both from agrodome families (from what she could get out of him about his history). And it’d been a while. She didn’t fool around with co-workers, and most other men she met, she arrested.

  “Hey, pause it and go back a couple seconds,” she said. She’d noticed something on Bobdog’s tacnet movie.

  “Here, have the controls,” Park said.

  She shuttled back about a second and a half. There. “Hello again, cupcake,” she muttered.

  She zoomed. Cowering in one corner of the frame, doing a good job of looking terrified, was a scantily clad pleasure pod. Almost a dead ringer for the one at El Destino Verde—probably the same model year. And again, high rent for the establishment they were looking at.

  Park let go a stream of musky smoke. “Well, shit.”

  “She ain’t just a party favor,” Kim said, “She’s a moving part.”

  He got up and started putting clothes on.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked. He stopped. “Shower,” she said. “And then shower again. Smoke smells me all over you, he’ll get jealous.”

  He laughed. “Serious?”

  She had not stuttered. “What’s your hurry, anyhow?”

  Park slipped off the jeans he’d started to put on. “Eidolon’s got their nose to the trail, but might be the pod girl’s a short cut.”

  “That feed’s from Olympus. Have Bobdog pick her up.”

  “Last message from Bobdog said he was going into psych,” Park said, “So count him out.”

  Reasonable. She wouldn’t want LaGrange having her back after what’d he’d been through. Anybody’s game’d have some stress fractures after getting cut on for folk medicine by a bunch of technical yakuza zombie farmers.

  “Finding her’ll be a good trick,” Kim said, “She’s gone to ground for sure. Just getting to Olympus’d take us hours.”

  “I’m thinking we go after the pod girl
from El Destino Verde. And I got a friend who’s good,” he said, smiling at her.

  “Me? Carter, I’ve tracked plenty of people, but this one’ll be cold. It’s been eighteen hours.”

  “I got her mesh ID when I tipped her.”

  She smiled. “All right, that’s different. But it could still take longer than it’ll take Eidolon to break the encryption on those cylinder routing codes.”

  He got up for that shower and sent her a mesh ID. “I got a friend who’ll help, name of Sedition. If you don’t mind working with someone else, that is.”

  “Why not, long as they don’t expect access to Ranger databases.” She pulled open an AR window and started a tracker search for the pod girl’s mesh ID on public spimes in the area.

  “I let him know you’d call. Use a VPN; he ain’t someone Captain Kim wants to be seen socializing with. I’m gonna make myself smell nice for your monkey now.” He closed the bathroom door.

  —

  Park’s friend, Sedition, was damned good. Said he was a journalist by trade; she didn’t say anything about what she did. He threw out a lot of unorthodox ideas about what kind of searches to run, stuff far afield of the cop playbook.

  Cupcake didn’t take long to track down, once they put their heads together. The pod girl’d been careful, had probably used a bunch of fake IDs, but she made the mistake of buying a ticket to orbit out of the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport. Sedition suggested not bothering trying to draw a line between her real mesh ID and any fakes she might be using. Instead, they had their muses stake out some likely (and, to her, not-so-likely spots) where her real ID might show up.

  Turned out the pod girl didn’t trust her fake IDs far enough. She dropped the masquerade in spaceport security, probably gambling that her real ID would be more likely to get her through, and then she’d be on a rocket, beyond reach.

  “Heo-jeob, Cupcake,” Kim muttered. Bad math thinking she could get away with that with a Ranger on her trail. One fugitive bulletin to the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport cops was all it took from there.

  She thanked Sedition, leaned back, and re-lit the joint Park’d left on the nightstand. She got a mesh call reporting the pod girl was in the clink by the time Park got out of the shower.

  He looked at her funny. “Go-go-ssing,” he said, pulling on his cap. This struck her as funny, that he’d put that on before anything else, and she laughed a little. He raised an eyebrow. “What’re you doing hitting that?”

  She leaned forward and took his wrist. “Ain’t no hurry, Carter. I got our girl. How about helping me finish this?”

  “Serious? Strong work, Captain.” He gave her a butterflies in the stomach smile and accepted the joint.

  She watched him inhale; she liked how he looked with his eyes closed. So Kim’d made up her mind about having another helping of Park, but even as she yanked him back onto the bed, there was one thing she was going technical trying to figure out: why’d Cupcake need to escape in her body? Wasn’t like back-country Mars lacked for shady egocasting facilities.

  She decided she’d hold that thought.

  —

  Park hadn’t liked being left in the prowler with Smoke and Gloria, but the baboons were meshed. Kim could call them off from afar. And anyhow, looked to be he was now part of the pack. Gloria kept trying to groom him, while Smoke lounged in the back seat idly jerking off. Neither of them went anywhere near Kim’s seat.

  They were parked on the shoulder of the covered service road that looped past the spaceport terminals, waiting for Kim to bring back Cupcake. Every so often a Qianjiao spaceport cop rolled by and gave the ranger vehicle the stink eye, but no one bothered them. Eidolon hadn’t gotten back to him except to say the decryption was taking longer than expected.

  [Be there in a sec,] Kim messaged, [Soon’s I ditch the local jjab-sae.]

  Park shooed Gloria way for the fourth time. [Ain’t a nice thing to call another cop, Captain.]

  [I hate spaceport cops. Rangers get imaged and frisked like everybody else when we fly.]

  Kim emerged from the terminal with Cupcake. The name on her mesh ID was Janu Vaidyar. Flanking her were two spaceport cops; the ranking one was gesticulating and talking to Kim’s back.

  Vaidyar’d ditched her bartending outfit—which hadn’t been much more than go-go boots, AR graphics, and hair extensions—for a short, asymmetrical haircut and severe suit. She looked more like an intellectual property lawyer for a Lunar design house than a bar trixie in a yakuza dive, and it wasn’t just the clothes. Park was disappointed with himself for not making her sooner.

  Park cracked the window as they got closer to the prowler. Even in the tunnel, there was a cold desert breeze cutting through the smell of monkey.

  The airport cop’s words got clearer as they approached the truck. They were speaking Mandarin. “… with Director Cheng’s sign-off, which is fine, even if it’s not standard procedure. But we don’t want to lose face over this prisoner.” He stopped for a second when he noticed Park. “And who’s this guy?”

  “TTO,” she said, “They’ve got an interest in this case. He’s an observer.” Which was sort of true.

  Park hopped out and opened the back door of the prowler.

  The airport cops eyed him. “He doesn’t look like an official,” one said.

  “We don’t wear suits in Operations,” Park said, watching Janu Vaidyar as Kim bundled her into the truck and cuffed her to a heavy ring set in the seat behind her. Smoke huffed at the pod but didn’t do anything else.

  He didn’t like this. Vaidyar was an exposure risk, too. He made sure to get the names of the two cops. They might need to be checked up on later after physical contact with her.

  “Well, don’t say NQSPD never did anything for you,” said the port cop.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Kim said.

  Once they were in the air, she said, “Cagehopper’s.”

  Wasn’t a question. “Yeah,” he said, looking back at the pod girl. Vaidyar stared out the window, silent. “This one’s gonna need special handling.”

  —

  [Go away, Carter!]

  Cage was gonna need some talking down. They were staring at the outside of the camouflaged garage door in Cagehopper’s ravine, trying to remain patient. Park glanced back at Vaidyar—he’d angled the rear view mirror on his side so’s he could watch her—and caught her smiling before she noticed and fixed her face back into a stare.

  [Cage, man, this is bad news. Serious. I got a potential widespread infection risk, and you’re gonna dick me around because you don’t like my cop friend and her monkeys?]

  Kim shot him a “c’mon” look across the seat; he was sharing Cagehopper’s messages with her. [I’ll make threats if you won’t,] she said.

  [Bad cop?] He thought about whether he was up for some potential bridge burning and decided yes. [Fine… go.]

  [Cagehopper,] she messaged, [This is Kim.]

  [What the hell, Jake? Did I say you could give her my mesh ID?]

  Park didn’t respond, just kept his eye on Janu Vaidyar. She was pretty calm for someone getting taken to an off-the-grid cave in a ravine instead of into Ranger custody.

  [Listen, Cage,] she continued, [I ain’t making this offer twice. Let us in, check this prisoner out for us, and I’ll pretend I never been to the notorious Cagehopper’s black kettle. Hell, I might even ignore it next time you move dubious wetware through my beat. Turn us away, and my memory might get sharper.]

  Cagehopper messaged back, [Why do you even care?]

  [My beat’s the TQZ. I take this shit seriously.]

  There was a long pause. [A diamond could start out a lump of dinosaur shit, I guess.] The door started sliding open.

  [Thanks,] she messaged, but she was mouthing something else.

  Same drill as last time. They weaved through the garage, following a path mar
ked by Cage on AR, leading Vaidyar. They were four turns into Cagehopper’s maze when Park’s dorsal spinocerebellar tract went technical on him.

  It was as if his extremities were suddenly boats, unmoored from him, drifting away in a slow current. He could feel his legs but couldn’t feel where they were in relation to each other, so that when Vaidyar jerked away from Kim and threw a shoulder into him, Park went down ass over tit. Vaidyar was making a run for it, headed back toward the garage.

  Kim’d fallen on him, babbling in a way that might have been an attempt at cursing. Then she rolled off him; he could see the back of her head and her limbs flailing.

  [Don’t try to move,] he messaged, [Real easy to overextend a muscle.]

  [What the fuck is this?] she came back.

  [Cupcake’s an async.]

  [Those’re just stories,] she messaged. But she stopped trying to move. [I’m setting the monkeys on her.]

  [Do it.]

  She unlocked the prowler and messaged the baboons. [Gloria. Smoke. Kill.] Then she sent a command to their flak jackets. The jackets obliged, pumping the baboons full of aggression drugs.

  [What’s going on?] messaged Cagehopper.

  [Lock all your doors, Cage. Prisoner’s an async. Just fed our proprioception centers kimchi and did a runner.]

  [Noob mistake. How the fuck did you make proxy again?] Cage left out the dry cackle, which was fine by Park.

  [Occupational hazard, Cage. Somebody’s gotta get dirt under their nails.] He tried moving. It was no better.

  [How long will this last?] Kim messaged.

  [Minute or two, tops.]

  An animal scream echoed from a distant corridor, followed quickly by a human one.

  [That was Gloria.] She tried to move again, made it to her knees, but then put her arm in the wrong place and face planted.

  Vaidyar gave a short scream that cut off quickly, but the baboons made no further sound.

  [You’re gonna hurt yourself; then you can’t help anybody,] he messaged.

  “Gloria’s flatlined. And I can take plenty of hurt, Jake.” She slurred bad, but managed to get the words out. She tried standing again, keeping all of her limbs where she could see them, and managed to make it to her feet.