Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Sometimes the reflections on the water were so bright that his eyes hurt. At least this time, he had known to buy sunglasses; his Moon-based eyes weren’t used to the variety and intensity of the actual light through the thick atmosphere.

  He also wasn’t used to the heat. Even with the environmental controls on in the air-car, he felt the humidity. The scanner at the port, a woman who double-checked every record as the person who owned it passed her desk, remarked that Flint might have been better off if he had come during the winter.

  “People from the Moon seem to hate our summers,” she said, as if she took it personally.

  People from the Moon didn’t suffer through seasons. Only changes in daylight, and a few variations in temperatures programmed into the domes for the sake of variety.

  New Orleans, at least, was familiar to him, only because he had spent a few days here while searching for Carolyn. The city sprawled in a bowl surrounded by water. The city was lower than the water, which Flint hadn’t found odd until someone explained the concept of flooding to him—something he’d only read about and never seen.

  He had no idea if the city had charm—people said it did, but he would have found it charming by its age alone. He’d never been anywhere so old, where most of the buildings had been standing for so many centuries that he couldn’t imagine the time in which they were built.

  The city had its own smell, too—a mixture of mildew and alcohol—a smell that somehow seemed lighter than it should, until he realized there was no dome to hold it in, and no inefficient air filter to try to screen the scents out.

  He landed the aircar on a specially designed pad in the mouth of the French Quarter. This section of the city had been famous for centuries before Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon. The first time Flint had been here, he had had to force himself to stop staring at the tiny plaques attached to each building stating when they were built, and follow the street signs to Carolyn’s bar.

  Now he walked the streets with a little less curiosity, although he kept his eyes open.

  The Quarter had its own smells—horse dung (they still had horse-drawn carriages here, for the tourists) combined with the fresh, doughy smell of beignets and a whiff of beer that seemed to come out of each and every open door.

  The Quarter had homes tucked behind wrought iron railings, but mostly it was a place of curiously small shops, restaurants, and dark, aromatic bars that promised sin as old as the city itself.

  Carolyn’s bar was like that. Up front, a mahogany bar had been built across one wall, with bottles of liquor stacked behind it, just like he’d seen in the old 2-D vids. The bar was polished and had a brass railing along the edge and another at the feet, so that it looked older than it was.

  Carolyn had given the bar to its manager, a hard-edged woman named Delilah. Delilah was thin and tattooed on every available patch of skin; her dark hair was braided tightly and fell flat against her beautifully shaped skull.

  It was late morning by the time Flint reached the bar, and Delilah was already inside, washing glasses by hand. He could see her through the dirty window. She wore a blue tank top, shorts, and sandals—not work attire by any measure he knew, but probably more comfortable than the clothes bartenders wore in Armstrong.

  Here, everyone seemed to have environmental controls cranked to frigid, but kept the doors open, letting in the god-awful heat.

  As he walked in, blinking to let his eyes adjust, Delilah said, “I never expected to see you again.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that. Being flip and witty wasn’t the right approach, but he also didn’t want to tell her about Carolyn.

  “Unfinished business,” he said, and slipped onto one of the bar stools.

  She set a glass on the pile behind her, then splayed her hands flat on the polished wood. “Get you something?”

  “Iced tea.” He’d developed a taste for it the last time he was here. On Earth, it was made with real tea leaves, as, theoretically, it was in Armstrong, but here the teas had a more robust flavor. Or perhaps it was the coolness slipping down his throat after a few minutes in that staggering heat.

  She poured from a large pitcher that she kept behind the bar. He’d watched Carolyn the first day he was here; they always kept making tea fresh, rather than pouring it out of machines the way that Moon restaurants did.

  The ice jingled in the glass as Delilah set it on a napkin in front of him. The napkin still had a musical note logo and the word Claire’s across the top. Carolyn had used the name Claire Taylor when she lived here.

  “She with you?” Delilah asked.

  Flint shook his head.

  “She coming back?” It made a difference to Delilah: Carolyn had left a clause in the contract that allowed her to take back the bar within the first six weeks, so long as she repaid the monies that Delilah had paid her.

  “No,” Flint said. “She’s not coming back.”

  He had to work to make that sound less ominous than it truly was.

  Delilah grunted, grabbed another glass, and stuck it into the water in the small sink. She rinsed the glass, wiped it dry, and set it on a rubber mat, just like bartenders had been doing in this place for centuries.

  Flint couldn’t touch his ice tea. “There’s a couple things I need to find out though.”

  “I thought you was done with your finding out.”

  He suppressed a sigh. He hadn’t thought this part through—explaining to people who had known Carolyn what he was doing back and why he needed the information.

  “I did too, when I left,” he said. “But I was wrong.”

  She nodded, rinsed another glass, and set it on the mat. “Her son’s been here, you know. Mad as a split pig that he didn’t get the bar.”

  “Her son?” Flint hadn’t expected that. For some reason, he had thought Carolyn’s son was still a child.

  “Had some lawyer look at the contract. Good thing it’s tight. He didn’t go to her, now, did he?”

  Flint frowned, wondering what exactly Carolyn had told Delilah about her departure. Obviously not the truth.

  “No,” Flint said. “He hasn’t seen her.”

  “Okay, good. Because my lawyer said the only one who can break up the contract is her.”

  “You’re safe,” Flint said. “I thought her son lived with his father.”

  “Years ago, yeah. But kids, they grow like everyone else. He’s been on his own for a long time now. He still thinks she owes him though. Money. That’s what he’s about.”

  Flint took all that in, but didn’t push. He finally picked up the tea, took a sip, and closed his eyes, savoring the sharp flavor. Everything seemed more vivid here, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. Almost overwhelming.

  And yet, he felt like he could get used to it.

  “About the time I was looking for Claire,” Flint said, “did some other man come in here looking for her?”

  “Not the same time,” Delilah said. “Just after, though. Ugly cuss. Something wrong with his face. Not just off—enhanced bad or something. Was real glad when he was gone.”

  Flint slid her a flat picture of Hank Mosby. “Him?”

  “Sure thing. What’s with him anyway? Barely could have a civil conversation. Damn near got into a fight with one of my customers.”

  “He’s dangerous,” Flint said. “If you see him again, you send for the police through your emergency links.”

  “Even if he didn’t do nothing?”

  “Even if,” Flint said. “You’re right about enhancements. Only his are illegal.”

  “Real brass knuckles, huh?”

  “What?”

  She smiled, shook off the glasses that had been drying beside the sink and set them behind her. “Gangs here got into trouble few years back. Had their knuckles enhanced so that they was hard as brass. You know, like that weapon old timers used to use?”

  He wasn’t familiar with the weapon but he pretended he was. “A little more dangerous than that, but the same principle.�
�

  “Great.” She dried off her hands. “I’ll do that. Anything to keep him out of the bar again. What’s his tie to Claire?”

  “I’m not sure it is to Claire,” Flint said. “He’s looking for someone, and I’m pretty sure he thought Claire knew who that person was.”

  “Too late now, though, huh?” Delilah said.

  “Maybe,” Flint said. “I figure if I can figure out who that person is, then maybe I’ll find him.”

  She looked at the flat picture one last time, then slid it back to him. “Don’t know why anyone outside the norm who’s a friend of Claire’s. She stayed pretty straight and narrow, which is strange, considering this town and her business. Usually you gotta have your hands in someone’s pockets, you know?”

  Carolyn had told him a bit about New Orleans’ fabled corruption. She had laughed about it, saying it was as normal here as the mildew and the humidity, and just about as old.

  “No one asking questions since she’s been gone?” Flint asked.

  “No one ‘cept Ugly Puss there, and her kid,” Delilah said. “And Ugly Puss left right fast, and the kid…well, my lawyer’s got his number.”

  Maybe the family would know something. “May I have it too?”

  “You wanna find the kid?” Delilah asked. “Won’t do you no good. They’ve been estranged since she run out on her husband. Her kid won’t know nothing.”

  “Except whatever it was that made her leave,” Flint said.

  “You thinking maybe it’s tied into Ugly Puss?” Delilah asked.

  Flint shrugged. “You never know until you ask.”

  “Don’t tell him I sent you,” Delilah said. “I want him to forget about me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Flint said. “I’ll keep your name out of it.”

  Delilah rewarded him with a wide smile, and then she gave him instructions on how to find Carolyn Lahiri’s adult son.

  Forty-three

  They put her in a hotel called the Lunar Lander and posted a guard outside her door “for her protection.” Anatolya Döbryn didn’t feel protected. She felt imprisoned, which was what she had been from the moment she arrived at this awful city.

  She sat on the edge of the king-size bed, which was too soft for her tastes. Of course, the bed wasn’t why she hadn’t slept all night. She hadn’t slept because she kept trying her links, hoping to contact her team, and getting no response—not static, not bounced messages—just nothing at all.

  That had never happened before, and it frightened her. It frightened her even more to discover that on the paneled wall, the public links were wide-open just like they would be if she weren’t a prisoner.

  She had become so desperate, she tried her team on the public links, hoping that someone would respond. No one did.

  She knew that the Armstrong authorities were monitoring her, and she didn’t care. Her people might be dead out there or in hiding or injured. The media wasn’t making any reports about Etaens, and the liaisons from the Executive Committee claimed they didn’t know what had happened to her team.

  All the Alliance’s almighty Executive Committee would tell her was that they had decided that she would meet with them later, give them the speech she’d been planning all along, as if nothing had changed.

  Of course, everything had changed. She wasn’t stupid enough to fall for their games. She just didn’t know what games they were playing any longer. The Old Universe had its tricks, and they were wily, even compared to hers.

  Part of her didn’t want to speak to them, and part of her knew her people, all of them back on Etae, needed this chance.

  Even though it wasn’t really a chance any more.

  The news already had spread the word of her presence through a million links. They called her the Terror of Etae, the Butcher of Etae, the Crown Princess of Murder. They called her the Pretend Sovereign of a Dying World, a woman who had come to share power with a group of rebels who proved themselves more corrupt than the government they had replaced.

  The subtext was there, subtle and yet so important: it was okay for humans to kill aliens—particularly aliens like the Idonae—but it wasn’t okay to kill other humans, particularly not for power.

  Not even to save millions of lives.

  Anatolya rocked back on the bed and covered her eyes with her arm. She had come here as a supplicant, yes. She had known she would be without power—a new position for her—but she had the strength of the new government behind her.

  “New” only in terms of the Old Universe, of course. A decade of changes, improvements, of doing everything possible to see that a people survived against a devastated landscape—ruined by the Idonae and years of war.

  The known universe had supported her rebellion, particularly after the Child Martyr incident, and she had gained sympathy. Gianni had urged coming to the Alliance then, but it would have been premature—before the government really got set up, before they had a chance to prove themselves.

  Then she had made no real slipups, even pardoned the war criminals and the Disappeareds, and finally, she had approached various races, asking them if the time was right. Even the humans—Pilar Restrepo in particular—assured her it was.

  And Anatolya had come. She had come with her team, and made a few mistakes, but certainly hadn’t planned to be branded a terrorist. Nor had she planned on that riot outside—the attack on them: someone had known the Idonae would set off any human who had grown up on Etae, particularly a human who, like Gianni—like Anatolya—had been a victim of Idonae cruelty.

  Gianni. He had to be somewhere. He wasn’t the kind of man who just vanished.

  Unless they killed him. How ironic would that be? They killed him here—in the civilized part of the universe—when no one had been able to kill him in the Outlying Colonies. Where people had seen the folly of continuing to try.

  She blinked hard. Her eyes ached, but they were dry. Sixty people wounded and a dozen killed; names, of course, not to be released until next of kin were notified—if they ever got notified. No nationalities, no identifiers at all.

  She had a hunch—more than a hunch really, damn near a certainty—that her team was part of that dozen, maybe one or two left alive as part of the sixty to be a scapegoat come trial.

  Or she would be the scapegoat.

  She had to get herself out of this bed. She had to eat something, maybe get a real nap, and plan what she was going to say in front of the committee.

  She knew what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell them off, to look at their high-and-mighty faces and remind each and every one of them of the horrors in their own worlds’ pasts, the fact that none of their hands—if they had hands—were clean.

  But she wouldn’t do that. Gianni would have argued against it. So would the others. And she owed it, not just to them, but to all those people her “rebel government” was trying to care for, to give them a chance at being part of the intergalactic corporate system, to get technology to rebuild their land and to remove the mines left by the Idonae, and to help the children survive.

  For it was the children that caught her the most. Their big eyes, their dark faces too thin with want, their bellies round as their stomachs consumed themselves.

  All the medical technology in the universe couldn’t stop that. It came down to something as old as time: people had to be able to feed themselves before they could care for themselves. But in order to feed themselves, they had to have some kind of income. Which usually came only from caring for themselves.

  Anatolya sat up. That was what she would argue, as forcefully as she could.

  She would throw out the carefully prepared speech and tell them all the truth about Etae.

  Her planet was inhospitable over two-thirds of its surface. The remaining third had been poisoned in war, first by the Idonae as they stripped the northern most continent after defeating the Ynnels; then by the original human government as it slaughtered the Idonae—who were so tied to the land that the land had to be destroyed to dest
roy them; and then by her own government as it fought a ground-based war with an equivalent enemy. An enemy that remained equivalent until Gianni and his doctor perfected the military enhancements, the ones that the Alliance was interested in purchasing, the ones that came from once-condemned studies of Idonae physiology.

  Yes, most of what she had to tell the Alliance were stories of horror. But they were also stories of survival, just like her speech was. And now, her people had moved away from war, and the only thing they had to offer was the very thing the news was condemning her people for.

  The elongated arms. The fingers like blades. The body as a weapon more potent than any other. One that could slip through any form of detection used in the Alliance. One that was lethal because it looked so very innocent.

  The Alliance had exposed her when they had promised her anonymity in Armstrong. They had allowed this attack to happen; they had allowed the loss of her people.

  She would make certain that the Alliance lost the same amount of face. She would make sure the people who heard about the Butcher of Etae would also hear about the fact that the Alliance—the pristine, pure Alliance—wanted assassin technology as the price for letting Etae into the club.

  She knew how to play this game. She simply hadn’t wanted to.

  But the Alliance was leaving her no choice.

  Forty-four

  Noelle DeRicci needed coffee.

  She staggered out of her office and went to the communal food table. The coffee sitting in the pot was at least a day old, thick as sludge, and covered with a film. But it was hot, and it had caffeine.

  Someone kind had brought donuts—which she had sworn off a year ago—but as of this moment, she was back on them. She took a glazed and a napkin, planning to make it back to her office, but the donut was gone before she had even turned around, the buttery sweetness perfect against her tongue.