by J. S. Morin
Shoni was busy in the kitchen, fiddling with the food processor in an effort to construct a palatable snack.
Yomin and Rai Kub were transfixed by a bunch of human twigs in tutus, tiptoeing around to stuffy music.
Everyone else had the good sense to be elsewhere, and the temptation to join them proved too much for Roddy to bear. Taking his half-empty beer, he ambled down the corridor to the cockpit.
“Yo,” Roddy greeted Carl as he plopped himself down in the copilot’s seat.
Carl looked accusingly at the beer in Roddy’s hand. “What? None for me?”
“You’re flying,” Roddy replied with a shrug.
“We’re parked planetside,” Carl argued. “I just came up here to think.”
“Yeah, I just escaped the Bolshoi black hole myself. It’s like watching an idle screen, but people take it seriously. But that’s not why I came here.”
Carl sighed and threw his feet up on the console. “Well, it wasn’t to bring me a beer, so what’s eating you?”
“That job you turned down,” Roddy replied. He tried not to slurp as he sipped his beer.
“Thinking I’m going soft?”
Roddy chuckled. “I know you’re going soft. Got no issue that way. But… well, what happened to working every angle? It’s one thing to get a little religion, even if it’s mostly the scent of it rubbing off from hanging around Esper and now Rai Kub. But you dropped that job like it was going to bite.”
On his face, Carl wore that perplexed expression that could have been caused by anything from working through a problem to a case of indigestion. “Where you going with this?”
“What’s the one glaringly obvious part of that job staring you in the face like a holovid beer advert?” Roddy asked, wincing as he remembered he shouldn’t keep mentioning beer when he hadn’t brought any.
“The fact the guy didn’t want to give details but caved the minute I got pushy about it? Doesn’t bode well for operational security.”
There was that. An employer who kept a job close to the vest was one who wasn’t going to blab the details over drinks to every girl he tries to pick up.
Roddy wagged a hand. “Nah. Bigger than that.”
“Um, that he was an exploitative fuck-weasel pillaging primitives?”
Roddy snorted. “Now you sound like some college-age planet-polisher. Think like a smuggler. Or, more importantly, like a thief.”
Carl’s eyes grew distant for a moment. His lips tightened.
Roddy let his friend’s engines perform a slow burn to reorient. Playing the hero was making Carl’s mind a little dull at the edges.
Carl snapped his fingers. “Hardcoin. Up front. We could have taken the job and given the artifact back.” With a wistful sigh, Carl slouched lower in his chair. In doing the right thing, he’d overlooked the quick profit taking the iffy middle road. “Too bad I hammered that guy’s offer back in his face so hard. But I can’t call him back now. Hell, I’d have to sic Yomin on it just to find the guy’s comm ID; he was using an obvious fake.”
This was the part Roddy had been waiting for—that elusive detail tugging on the sleeve of his mind like an annoying preschooler. “What if Yomin did backtrack the guy’s ID?”
“You thinking we fake being a different ship, take the job under fake IDs, and play it like I just said?”
“No,” Roddy replied. “I think we go find this bastard of yours in person and do a little negotiating. I mean, roll this one over in your mind: we act like the lawmen. We’ve all watched enough cops-and-robbers holo to know the ins and outs, plus we’ve got real-world experience on the other side. We can bust this smuggling ring, turn the enemies we’d make over to the authorities, return the religious tchotchke, and pocket the hardcoin.”
“That’s…” Carl visibly struggled for the word he wanted to follow. “Convoluted. Besides, everyone says that the stuff on the holo isn’t how real police work.”
“Right. They can’t tap people’s comms without a warrant, rough up suspects, or steal shit.”
That put things in a different light. Carl perked up instantly. “You’re right. Cops could get some serious shit done if they didn’t have to obey the law.”
“You up for getting some serious shit done?” Roddy asked.
“I think I could be persuaded for the getting done of some serious shit,” Carl said, nodding slowly. He fixed Roddy with a level glare. “If you go grab me a beer.”
“C’mon, Peachfuzz. Let’s go pitch this hero plan to the ballet audience.”
# # #
Esper squinted at the tiny brush at the end of the screw-on cap. A dab of pink paint on the end matched her favorite sweatshirt. Biting her lip in concentration, she gently swiped it down the length of one fingernail, leaving a trail of the color behind.
In the corner of the room, a scruffy wizard in a stained gray sweatshirt looked on, arms crossed. “My Cassie could do that when she was three,” Mort grumbled.
Esper ignored him.
The brush was an awkward tool, but she was getting the hang of it. Dipping the brush in its little glass jar, Esper applied a few more strokes of the nail polish, smoothing out the uneven texture and trying to get all the way to the edges without painting the surrounding skin in the process.
“Never paid much heed to how you always got yours all colored up,” Mort continued. “I assumed, since you went in for the feminine arts, that this was something you’d known all your life. Well, since the age of three or four anyway—which is a larger percentage of your life than mine, I suppose.”
“Go. Away,” Esper muttered without looking up.
“Not until you rethink this whole tightrope walk with Johnny-Lawman,” Mort replied. “We went years at a time without getting in trouble with the law. Sure, we got customs aboard now and then; you can fool those droop-eyed nincompoops well enough not to worry. But you don’t want the law enforcement profession investigating. It’s one thing pulling the cap over some poor workday slob’s eyes; he just wants to go home to dinner. But the investigators are single-minded alligators. Once they get a notion in their heads, there’s no prying their jaws loose.”
“You don’t get a vote,” Esper said softly, continuing the paint job on her nails.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Mort replied indignantly. “Just because I currently lack a corporeal form? Temporary inconvenience, I assure you.”
“That sounded like a good enough reason to me,” Esper countered, trying to keep her voice down. The last thing she needed was the rest of the crew knowing that not only was Mort semi-alive and sealed inside her head but that he could break free as a hallucination as well. “Your only concern is making peace with all those poor wizards you murdered and imprisoned.”
Mort cleared his throat. “One could argue that you are now guilty of the same offense. I’m cooped up in here against my will. I demand—that is, I’d very much appreciate—if you’d spend a little less time on your manicure and a little more on figuring out a way to get me a new body.”
Esper slid the brush into the jar and twisted the cap shut. Holding up both hands, she gently blew across the backs to speed the drying. Her insta-polisher had finally given out after surviving more magical run-ins than most personal grooming appliances ever had to suffer. Learning to paint her nails by hand felt somehow more personal and intimate.
There were just some little pleasures that a wizardess shouldn’t trust to a handheld device. This was just the latest of Esper’s technological habits to fall by the wayside.
“You think this is a game, don’t you?” Esper asked. She kept her fingers spread wide and waved them through the air. “Just biding your time before the triumphant return of Mordecai The Brown, Reader of Forbidden Books and Thumber of Noses at the Convocation.”
“Seems natural,” Mort said, raising his stubbly chin. “There’s been a certain narrative flow to my life that screams for a triumphant return, as you put it. It’s a little… well, awkward doesn’t quite put the fence aroun
d the pasture on this one. I killed everyone in here, and they all have rather vivid memories of the event.”
“Well, you can well imagine what it’s like having a head full of murderers and would-be murderers,” Esper countered. She set her hands on her knees to keep from brushing them against anything until the paint had finished hardening. “I’ve got one more than you ever had, and the extra murderer I’ve got to wrangle is a doozy.”
“I don’t need much,” Mort argued. “Hey. Maybe if this guy you’re after is young enough and in good health, we can take a crack at moving me over to his mind. I don’t think he’d put up much of a fight.”
Esper sighed. “Yes, probably not much of a wizard if he spends his days manipulating people into wrongdoing.”
“Doubt he’s a wizard at—hey, that was a low blow.”
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Mort was in purgatory. Esper was guarding him, keeping him from trouble and harm at the same time, forcing him to make amends. If Esper could have transferred him to another mind, she still wouldn’t have done it. Even having read the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts and absorbing its secrets, it was all she could do to hold in check the awesome power of Mordecai The Brown’s mind.
Esper squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her jaw. “Get. Back. Inside.”
“No.”
Tears welled in the corners of Esper’s eyes. She didn’t think Mort wanted to intentionally hurt her, but it was a constant struggle to smother his attempts to break free of his prison. In wiping away her tears, Esper discovered, to her relief, that her nails had dried. She hadn’t smudged the pink polish across her face.
As she unscrewed the cap, Esper brought her bare feet up on the bed and started to paint her toes to match.
“Oh, for the love of—who’s going to see your toenails?” Mort exclaimed. “It’s not like the common room floor’s been cleaned since Kubu left, and—”
“You’re free to stop watching whenever you like. But if this is bothering you, I’m sure I can find a lot more embarrassing personal things to do in front of you, Mordecai The Prude.”
It had been an uncomfortable adjustment period, having Mort living inside her head. But she’d learned more about the wizard in the short months of his residence than in the previous years she’d known him, even her time in Mortania.
“Fine,” More grumbled. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you about getting involved with the law.”
Then, thankfully, the wizard retreated, vanishing into thin air. If only Esper hadn’t known that he was still there, waiting, watching, never gone from the prison, her mind had become. The only question she had was: which of them was the inmate, and which the jailer?
# # #
Data spirited across the galaxy, drifting at syrupy speeds out of the New Garrelon relay sector and accelerating the instant it hit ARGO space and the Galactic Omni Services main trunk.
This was what Yomin signed on for. This was real data warfare. Carl had handed over his datapad and provided a target, one shrouded in mystery and cloaked in paranoia. Everything Yomin needed was contained inside the harmless-looking plastic housing, battered and scuffed from frequent use and haphazard care.
“Let’s do this,” Yomin said to herself.
From the other side of their shared quarters, Archie couldn’t help commenting. “I don’t approve.” His voice modulator was working, at least. Yomin no longer had to listen to the forced artificial warble that Harmony Bay had inflicted on him.
“Got it the first four times,” Yomin replied.
“Found myself in with vigilante sorts once,” Archie continued. “Ended up with a rap sheet as long as Merlin’s beard and an aversion to potato salad that haunts me to this day. Took my parents weeks to get the former sorted out and hours at a bathhouse to scrub away the latter.”
Yomin could have played racquetball with Archie all day on the issue. But he’d refused to help her track down Carl’s mystery job broker, and right now, that was all that mattered.
“How about you go watch the holo with Rai Kub and the laakus?” Yomin suggested. At the moment, his presence was just a distraction she didn’t need.
Data whirled in Yomin’s eyepiece. Most of it was for show, a little visual candy to go along with the boring waits as her algorithms crawled the omni. But nestled within were helpful updates and status notifications.
The eye that wasn’t absorbing data caught a glimpse of Archie leaving in a huff. With a sigh of relief, Yomin lost herself in the omni.
Data wasn’t a thing. It was a substance bereft of mass, but so multidimensional in form that it defied Euclidean geometry.
Yomin wasn’t the brute force sort who’d intercept a false-ID message like Carl’s and try to strip it to the quantum states, reverse engineer the encryption key, and put it back together. That was for university thesis work and for showing off how brilliant you were. This problem was a whodunnit mystery and that meant eliminating suspects.
There were, at present, nearly half a trillion suspects.
That was where clues came in handy. Yomin knew the point of delivery for Carl’s message: New Garrelon. That actually narrowed the search down far more than most techsters would have imagined. ARGO data traffic to the refugee world was limited, and few legitimate business or government interests were at stake.
Still, there were too many senders of messages to New Garrelon for Yomin’s search to end there. She also knew the time of delivery on the message, which, with some variables thrown in for transit times, would narrow down the time the message was sent.
Since Carl kept the conversation going in real time, Yomin could use those same transmission delay rates to narrow down the maximum distance between Carl’s contact and New Garrelon at the time the negotiation took place.
Fascinating as the theory was, the implementation was boring. As she waited for the distance calculator to route its way through the Galactic Omni Services network, Yomin found some music.
Standing, stretching, and clearing a patch of space in the laundry scattered across the floor, Yomin shook and shimmied to the beat of La Guerre du Coeur, the latest hit band from Orion. By the time the search ran, Yomin was singing along.
“Tu me blesses,” Yomin sang. “Tu me tues presque… avec ton coeur froid.”
A chime broke the rhythm of the beat.
“Yo, little sis. What you got for me, girl?” Yomin asked the datalens.
What the datapad had was a map containing roughly 12% of ARGO space.
“Seriously?” Yomin asked incredulously. Galactic Omni Services had been improving their data rates, dropping deeper and deeper astral buoys for their relays. Six years ago, before her ill-fated tour on the Odysseus, she would have seen a latency map with those delays grab about 3% of ARGO space.
With a quiet snarl, Yomin started the next phase of her investigation. The messages had a size measurable in transmitted qubits. Carl’s datapad contained the raw messages. Even if someone on the other end had tinkered with the size of their comm files—which Yomin might have done, but most non-professionals wouldn’t have considered—she could still trace Carl’s responses.
Closing her non-datalens eye, Yomin lost herself in the comparative analysis as La Guerre du Coeur played on, exhausting their catalog and looping around for a second play-through.
Yomin swayed as she worked in a secondary file, modifying the parameters of her search and guiding and prioritizing the analysis based on personal information. This adjustment to the tap-foot-and-wait method was what set top data analysts apart.
“Where are you hiding, buddy-boy?” Yomin breathed.
Setlyk system? Black security rating. A few criminal interests. She kept it on the list.
Keller IX? Nothing there but a penal colony. There was an off chance that someone on staff did a little brokering on the side, but she bumped it down the priority list. Way down.
Feishfarnargan? Yomin couldn’t even pronounce it. It was the site of a cultural that had emigrated from various
ARGO-aligned worlds to live together in communal—blah, blah, blah. Yomin stopped reading when she realized it was a Utopian post-scarcity colony. The odds of a criminal broker putting up with living there—even if it would have been a brilliant front—were too long to calculate.
Yomin kept on winnowing down her list, lightening the load on her computer core and speeding toward a single set of transmissions that matched the pattern of Carl’s conversation.
All in all, Yomin mused, she’d pored through more data than had been transmitted in the entire binary era.
Pwink!
A cheerful pop-up announced a match. With a grin, Yomin bounced across the room and hit the comm panel.
# # #
It felt good to have the flight yoke in hand again, not just as a reminder, but as an active, responsive part of the ship’s control system. Amy eased through orbital maneuvers, just enjoying the feel of the Mobius at her command. The freighter was still sluggish for her tastes, but it was a sort of sluggish she was growing fond of—a petting zoo horse, not a racer.
Stuunji-controlled space was pleasantly sparse. The colonies on the surface were mere dots in the landscape, like metal rivets holding civilization in place on the untamed world. Orbital traffic had a horse-and-buggy feel to it, just a scattering of ships operating on mutual collision avoidance. No defensive satellites, orbiting shipyards, or high-rent habitation encircled the planet as they did on most major population centers.
Amy eyed the cockpit console, wondering if she dared turn on a little music.
Music was a battlefield on the Mobius. Amy liked Carl’s old-timey rock music well enough, but it wasn’t her favorite. If she had the cockpit all to herself, she’d have preferred something a little more modern, maybe even something synthetically designed to level out mood and steady cerebrocortical balance. But if anyone else wandered in—and the cockpit practically needed a turnstile to count visitors—there would be trouble.
Mort had considered Amy’s music barbarous, an attempt at mind control. Esper had inherited that opinion, along with Mort’s job. Roddy claimed to be able to hear the artifice behind the programming. The mood-enhancers had no effect on Archie, but he and Rai Kub both agreed that the sounds themselves were grating.