Slurping his noodles, he watched passersby. A young father brought his child through, the girl nearly lost inside a suit at least two sizes too big, and was helping her navigate the central bar through the concourse. He was quizzing her on how to find the emergency exits.
Not long after, a pair of adults came through with a dozen children the same age all holding hands in a long line, singing. A school? The concourse had become quieter; some people watched them pass, smiles on their faces, and more than one was quietly singing along. An unfathomable number of light-years from Earth, and yet wherever there were humans, there was and would always be the equivalent of the town square.
Twice, men in the yellow-striped black suits of Authority passed down the bar. If they were looking for something in particular, nothing they saw seemed to be it, because they moved through without stopping. Whether it was just in his own mind or a combination of news and crowd dynamics muddling together in his subconscious, things felt restless, uncertain. Not, though, he decided with relief, dangerous. Not yet, anyway.
The noodles were spicy enough to make his eyes water. He ordered a second bag to go and bought one of the café’s T-shirts to replace the one he’d ripped in the cable car explosion. The human race had come hundreds of years and tens of thousands of light-years from the humble origins of the T-shirt, but it clung on like some sort of stubborn, cultural appendix across it all, an indelible personal currency of experience.
Who knew? Maybe Bil’s Bugrot Firebowl would be his new lucky shirt. He tucked it and the takeaway into his shoulder bag and disentangled himself from the café’s nets before pushing off back out into the hall. Glancing back, he noticed someone had pried the L off the end of “Firebowl” and wedged it back in between the B and O. He laughed, shook his head, and hoped it wasn’t meant as a warning.
Back at his rent-a-room, he tossed his noodles into the smartfridge, pulled himself into the hammock, looped it closed, and tried to settle his mind into a more constructive, relaxed place. Instead his thoughts drifted off once again to Mother Vahn and her family. Mari’s parting words, his conversations with Mauda, and visions of Gilger’s security perimeter danced through his attempts to think like a drunken marching band crashing a funeral wake. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyelids, he groaned. How was he ever going to line up all the pieces and players in just the right way so that he could do his job and get out of here if he kept getting distracted?
Eventually he fell into a fitful doze.
He woke with a start, trying to sit up and getting a faceful of hammock netting for his efforts. The seed of an idea had blinked into life. Crap, he thought. Would that work?
The rent-a-room’s doorchime sounded for what he guessed was not the first time. He propelled himself out of the hammock and slid the door open with an almost manic fury.
Mari was out there. She opened her mouth to speak, but he just reached out, grabbed her, and pulled her into the room. “I have an idea!” he said, too loud, still feeling the dream sloughing off him like a summer rain.
“Are you even awake?” she asked. “You look like shit.”
“Yes, mostly,” he said. “And thanks a lot.”
“Okay. Calm down,” she said. She slid the door closed and made herself a bulb of coffee, then another one for him. “Think it through. Dream ideas don’t usually make a lot of sense in the real world.”
He put his face in his hands, squeezing his eyes shut hard, trying to focus. Then he reached out and took the bulb from her and drank it down. “You’re right,” he said. “Damn. Although . . .”
Mari waited, her expression not a study in patience.
“I think it could still work,” he said at last, “but I’m going to need some help.”
“Told you. Now go through the whole idea with me, and if it doesn’t sound completely crazy, I’ll help you,” she said. “Maybe.”
Fergus pushed across the room and snagged the doorkey from the small cloud of stuff he’d left there before falling asleep. “I need to get close enough to Venetia’s Sword to use this,” he said. “It’s a doorkey, keyed to just me and just that one ship.”
She gaped at him. “Seriously? You’ve got a key to the fucking thing, and you’re still moping about how to pull off stealing it?” She reached out and took it out of his hand. “Are you the worst thief ever?”
Fergus snagged it back. “I’m a finder. The thieving part is incidental. And it’s not that simple,” he said. “If one physical key was all it took, every pirate this side of the galaxy would have keys, and no one else would have ships anymore.”
“So explain.”
“If I can get close enough to shine the doorkey on the security interface outside one of the airlocks, it’ll send a special coded signal to the ship’s computer—”
“You said Gilger killed the computer,” she interrupted.
“The computer system has layers,” he said. “He has to have damaged it enough to be able to override and/or shut down the ship’s higher intelligence functions—its mindsystem—or it would never have let itself be taken outside Earth’s solar system. However, if he’d damaged it too much, he’d have left himself with a paperweight in space. Since he got it here and it’s still flying, the underlying operational systems must still be functional. So the doorkey will talk to it. It sends a signal straight into the hardwired security subsystem, coded by the Shipmakers specifically for this ship and this ship alone. Once received, it’ll send back a coded reply. That’s called a handshake.”
“And what does that do?”
“It initiates a security override sequence, but it won’t be implemented until I return the correct response to the ship’s code.”
“And you’ve got that from the builders, too?”
“No. I have to crack the code myself and send it back to the ship within forty-eight hours or the ship will give an alert that a failed handshake attempt was made and then change the code. And at that point Gilger will know someone is here to take his ship.”
Mari nodded. “No problem. Central has a good SI—”
“Can’t do it with another computer,” Fergus said. “The handshake return is a number of coded items for which the correct answers are nonlogical referential associations.”
“Nonlogical referential associations? What the hell does that mean?”
“If I said to you, ‘One Star,’ what’s the first thing that pops into your head?”
“‘Bright and Distant,’” she said. “But—”
“But if we weren’t here on Cernee but on, say, Mars or Beenjai, or in one of the domed cities of the Zjan System, do you think that’s the answer you’d come up with?”
“Not unless people all over the galaxy are watching our show,” she said, “and that’s a scary thought.”
“So that’s a nonlogical referential association for you.”
“And the builders have given you all of them?”
“Oh, hell no,” Fergus said. “They have a system, a complete blackbox into which vast quantities of cultural, historical, scientific, and social information is constantly being fed. Its sole purpose is to produce seed chips for the security system with a selection of random associations.”
“That’s impossible, then,” she said.
“It’s not if you’ve got an excellent memory, a head for trivia, and you’ve spent enough time with the Shipmakers,” he said. “And I have all three.” He even had his own small room in the Shipyard, though he rarely stayed long for fear of wearing out his welcome.
He pushed aside a few drifting knickknacks and snagged a cube out of the air, hooking it up to the confuddler. When the holographic interface popped up mid-room, he used his fingers to start quickly tracing out a design in pencil-thin blue light.
“What is that?” Mari asked.
“Breaking the handshake code is one problem, but it’s not the
first problem. The first one is getting it in the first place. And the way to do that is this. This is my idea.”
Mari squinted at the diagram. “What is it?”
“It’s something I need help to build,” Fergus said. “There are parts that I can’t get. But you know someone who can.”
“I do? Who?”
“Your neighbor. Mr. Harcourt. You seem to be friends?”
She tilted her head to one side, raised an eyebrow in suspicion. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s like an uncle.”
“Can you introduce me?”
“Can I? Yes. Will I? Not unless you tell me what this thing is supposed to do.”
“It’s bait,” Fergus said, “and I need to have it built before the public hearing on the cable disaster. Gilger is going to be at that hearing.”
“He can’t bring the ship into Central. It’s too big.”
“I only need him.”
“He won’t be alone. He likes strutting around with his pack of enforcers like he’s untouchable. You won’t get anywhere near him, and certainly not with that thing. He’ll be on his guard.”
“It’s not his enforcers I’m worried about,” he said, then had a thought. “You’re not planning to go after him, are you?”
“. . . No.” The answer was slow in coming.
“Look, Gilger has made a lot of enemies all over Cernee and probably beyond. When his shiny new spaceship gets stolen right out from under him, first of all, he loses face. A lot of it. Second, he looks vulnerable. Everyone starts seeing opportunities. He won’t last long.”
“And what if you fail?”
Fergus shrugged. “I won’t.”
“With the right weapon, I could turn Gilger and everyone and everything within a hundred meters of him into paste before he ever sets foot in that meeting. Then you won’t have any problem stealing his stupid ship no matter where he parks it.”
“I’m not interested in any plan that involves destroying part of a space station, nor one that would get innocent people hurt. And that includes you,” Fergus snapped.
“You’re an asshole.” Mari floated near the wall, arms crossed over her chest, glaring at him.
“True. But that doesn’t make me wrong.”
She threw up her hands. “Fine! So how is this . . . ridiculous-looking thing supposed to work?”
“I’m going to tell you, and you’re not going to like it.”
“I already know I won’t like it, because I don’t like you,” she said. “I’m going to make more coffee, and then you can do your best to convince me it’s a better idea than mine.”
He touched the display cube, had it break out the component schematics, and started furiously adding and updating. “Okay, but try not to kill me before I’m done explaining.”
Chapter 6
Mari insisted that he change exosuits. His own was perfectly fine, but she was worried that the other Vahns might recognize it when they headed back into the Wheel Collective to see Mr. Harcourt. So he spent too much cred to rent the tallest suit he could find in Bugrot, which was still determined to ride as far up his backside as it possibly could. “This is not comfortable,” he complained, bending one knee and trying to pull the offending suit material back out into neutral territory.
Mari snickered. “What about your suit?” he griped, irritated.
“My own suit is back at Mr. Harcourt’s,” she said. “I swap it for one of his spares whenever I go out on the lines.”
“And he doesn’t mind?”
“We have an arrangement,” she said. “I don’t go out that often, but without Arelyn around—”
“Arelyn?” he asked. The little girl in the Wheels cafeteria had mentioned that name too.
“My best friend. Arelyn Harcourt. She went off to university on Mars six weeks ago. Mother knew, but Mauda doesn’t yet. When she finds out . . . I don’t know what she’ll do. I can’t go back to living my entire life inside the Wheels.” Mari met his eyes. “You have something judgmental to say about that?”
“Nope. I ran away from home at fifteen. Mauda should just be happy you come home again. And at least your family would miss you if you didn’t.” He made one last futile attempt at a suitectomy. “Let’s go before this thing cuts off all circulation to the lower half of my body.”
They took the central passage down to the end of Bugrot, rented a pair of ’sticks at the flystick kiosk, and flew directly to Blackcans.
“Harcourt doesn’t like to have visitors coming at him from free fall,” she’d explained when he’d suggested they just go around and skip Blackcans entirely. “It makes him twitchy.” A twitchy arms dealer was a convincing argument. They turned in their ’sticks and made the trek through Blackcans to pick up the Wheels line on the far side.
Landing at the Wheels, Mari swiped an ID at the main airlock and cycled them both into Mr. Harcourt’s side of the collective. There were two very large men waiting for them. Briefly Fergus wondered if he would have any chance of stealing one of their exosuits in a fight. You’d have better odds of heading back out into space with no suit at all, he told himself.
A third, more Cernee-sized man appeared and stepped forward. He was about Fergus’s age, thickly built, and dressed in a simple black tunic and pants that were too unwrinkled to seem casual. “Mari,” the man said.
“Bale,” she answered, matching him cool for cool. “This is Fergus. He has a proposal for Mr. Harcourt.”
Bale tilted his head to one side, revealing the jagged line of a scar running along the underside of his chin. “Fergus, eh?” he said at last. “What’s your business here?” Still not friendly.
“I wish to purchase some parts and equipment.”
“For what?”
“It’s complicated,” Fergus said.
“You hot?”
“Um . . .”
“Bale means are you carrying any weapons,” Mari said.
“Not on me.”
“Take your exosuit off.”
Fergus couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to do more, so he unfastened all the seals and, grunting with the effort, managed to peel the clingy exosuit down and off.
The two hulking enforcers patted him down and wanded him from head to toe. One found his databall and held it up for Bale, who shook his head. The enforcer handed it back to Fergus.
“The Fireblow, eh?” Bale asked, eyeing his new T-shirt. “You ate there?”
“I did.”
“Did you finish it?”
“I did.”
“Regret it?”
“Not yet. I got a second bowl for takeaway.”
Bale nodded. “You may be all right,” he said. “Pick up your suit and follow me.”
Mr. Harcourt’s part of the Wheel Collective was a whole different world from the Vahn farm. They walked over plush carpeting, and brass handholds and paintings adorned the walls. Fergus tried not to tally the value of the art—Here as a guest, need his help, not here to repo anything—as he followed Bale and Mari up along the curving corridor to a medium-sized room.
It was a study of some sort. There was a large sofa and two armchairs, a console, bookcases containing remarkably book-like items, and on the far wall, a gas fireplace behind thick glass. Fergus stared for a moment until a man unfolded himself from one of the armchairs and stood. He was almost as tall as Fergus and dressed in an impeccable business suit, his skin a rich brown, black hair trimmed close. Following Fergus’s gaze to the fireplace, the man shrugged. “It burns off excess gases from our reclamation furnaces,” he said. “Pretty enough, but stinks like hell if you open the seals. Now who are you?”
“Fergus Ferguson,” he said, and the man chuckled.
“I’d make a comment about your mother having a sense of humor, but . . .”
“But Myrtle already made it,” Mari said from the doorw
ay.
“That figures. So, if you’ve met Myrtle, you must be the man who rode in on the lichen crate?”
“Mari’s told you?”
“I keep a close eye on my front yard.”
Mr. Harcourt seemed entirely relaxed, and something about the confidence that radiated from him shook Fergus’s own; he had to force himself not to fidget. He’d dealt here and there with any number of rebels, black-marketeers, assorted con men, and more than a few petty criminals, but men of power? Professional arms dealers? He didn’t like not being just another anonymous face.
“Fergus has a plan,” Mari spoke up.
“A plan to do what? What’s your business?”
“He’s a finder,” Mari chimed in again before Fergus could speak.
“Oh? And you are here to find something?”
Again Mari beat him to it. “Gilger’s spaceship.”
“Oh.” Harcourt’s eyebrows went up. “Is this so?”
“Yes,” Fergus said.
Mari held up her wrist, where a small light on her comm was flashing. “I guess recess is over,” she said. “Mauda wants me home. Do you mind?”
“No, certainly not, Mari,” Harcourt said. “Give my best to the aunt flock.”
“Will do.” She looked at Fergus. “And you?”
“Give them my best as well?”
Mari shook her head. “No, I mean, do you think you can explain your extraordinarily idiotic plan in such a way that it makes any sense?”
“I’ll try my idiot best,” he said. “Can I assume you’ll be in touch?”
“I know where you live,” she said, and left the room.
Harcourt contemplated Fergus for a moment, then nodded slightly. That must have been a signal, because the enforcers left, and Bale followed after a moment. They were alone in the room.
“Not too many people Mari trusts,” Harcourt said, “much less likes.”
“I don’t think she trusts me,” Fergus answered, “and I’m entirely certain she doesn’t like me.”
Finder Page 7