by Jake Elwood
When he gave up, the room shifted to become a seedy tavern. The bartender leaned a none-too-clean arm on the bar, winked at her, and said, "What'll it be?"
"I need information about a bounty on Cassandra Marx."
"Right." He winked again. "You've come to the right place, luv. Everything you need to know and no questions asked, 'cept by you, of course."
"We've attracted a bit of attention," Roger warned. "Automated sniffer. It's going to know what planet you're on. I doubt it can trace you much farther than that."
For sixty thousand creds there would be thugs and opportunists across half the galaxy making inquiries about the bounty on her. She nodded her thanks to Roger and forgot about it.
"Here y'go, luv." The bartender didn’t move, but a vertical rectangle of light appeared in front of him. Cassie tugged the rectangle closer and watched lines of text appear.
The bounty on her was not a legal one, but it was guaranteed by the Achilles Consortium, a semi-legal organization with an unimpeachable reputation for always paying its debts. Anyone at all could post a bond with the consortium, secure in the knowledge that Achilles would verify the capture, pay out the bounty, and never, ever reveal the source.
The price had gone up, she saw. There were files and photos of her and Lark. The bounty on Lark was smaller, but still considerable. The terms were similar, except there was no bounty on Lark's corpse. There were smaller bounties for information about Cassandra's or Lark's whereabouts or activities.
Cassie scrolled through the files on herself and the girl. The database had less information on Lark than Cassie had when she was planning her heist on Lark's father. Her own file was pretty lean as well, though it still held more information than she liked. She read through the file with some care, noting what a bounty hunter would and wouldn't know about her. She had no useful friends or contacts left who weren't in her list of 'known associates', she noted glumly.
The opposition knew more about her than she knew about them, and the Achilles Consortium was a dead end. Still, there were degrees of confidentiality and sources of information beyond the obvious. "Let's try Riker's," she said to Roger.
The bar vanished, replaced by a cubicle with a desk and a solemn-faced young man in a necktie and a pressed white shirt. "Help you?" he said.
"Achilles has a bounty on Cassandra Marx," she said. "I need to know who's behind it."
He nodded, paused for all of a second, and said, "I've found five correlations. Organizations that won't deal with Achilles, areas where the consortium is banned. The bounty has been guaranteed in those areas as well. Let me just see how far I can trace the source." The man peered at a monitor in front of him, his brow furrowing in concentration. It was a completely meaningless affectation generated by the network interface, and Cassie always found it irritating when she thought about it.
The man looked up and smiled. "Got it! Now, it's impossible to be completely certain when one is dealing with criminal organizations, you understand. But I estimate a probability in excess of eighty percent. The source of the bounty is an illegal organization known as the Cerulean Hand."
Organized crime. Great. All she'd discovered was another middleman. Still, she might be able to work with it. "Learn what you can about Cerulean Hand," she told Roger. "Let's get out of here."
He nodded and the virtual world disappeared. Cassie took off her headset, blinking as she adjusted to the return of reality. The odds of anyone tracking her to this booth in this hotel were vanishingly small, but she was tired of underestimating her shadowy opponents. She stood, disconnected Roger, and left the hotel.
Quinault Nine had a rapid rotation that gave it a short diurnal cycle. Cassie slept for a night and half a day, and woke to find Lark, freshly scrubbed and smiling, sitting in the suite's lounge waiting for her.
They called room service for dinner. It was the best way to keep out of sight. The food was good, but Lark kept sighing and glancing toward the windows. Cassie was getting annoyed until she realized just how long the girl had been cooped up on ships, in a hotel room, and in spaceports. She was getting a tour of the galaxy and seeing little more than walls.
"I need to go out this evening," Cassie said. "I don't like to ask, but I could really use your help." She had to swallow a grin as Lark looked up from her dinner, eyes lighting up. There was an undertone of suspicion there, too. Lark would be wondering if Cassie was going to ask her to stay behind.
"We're going to a remote bot place," Cassie continued. "I need you to keep watch over me while I'm in the bot. It won't be very interesting." She gave Lark a serious, girl-to-girl look. "I understand if you'd rather stay here."
"No!" Lark almost shot out of her chair in her urgency. "No, I'll come. I'll do a good job. You can count on me."
Cassie let the smile break through. "I know I can, Lark."
Lark turned pink and fell silent.
They walked several blocks, then took a moving sidewalk through the center of the city. Lark gaped around her, eyes wide, and Cassie did a little discreet gawking as well. There were twenty or thirty great cities in the galaxy, and Archambault was one of them. The heart of the city was a forest of gleaming towers, impossibly tall, each one different from the next. There were gentle spirals, rectangles, octagons, and cylinders. Many of them tapered at the top. A few tapered at the bottom. They leaned or curved or waved gently back and forth.
At ground level the city was more pragmatic. No place at street level was very far from a glass door. The only open plazas were one or two levels up, with hatches set into the floor in case a strong wind sent pedestrians scrambling inside.
The plazas were beautiful in their own way, with great drooping trees growing in pots and huge metal sculptures surrounded by benches and flowerbeds. Fountains burbled and songbirds flitted among the trees. The difference from Bruma was striking and extreme.
The bot shop was in a blocky four-story building full of specialty stores. Cassie showed a different ID than the one she'd used in Customs. Anything to muddy the trail. A salesman showed them a catalog of humanoid robots, then led them down long rows of bots in racks.
The variety was dizzying. There were androgynous, industrial machines, metallic and only vaguely humanlike. There were bots that could have passed for real people at a range of several meters, and bots that could have passed for human at arm's length. There were male and female avatars, made to resemble every race and a variety of body types. Not a huge variety, of course. There were no short male bots, and few short female bots. None of the bots looked fat, or elderly. Everyone wanted a good-looking avatar.
Cassie chose a mid-range model, a vaguely masculine robot clad in a jumpsuit. It wore a dark wig and had a metal face painted in a flesh-tone. At close range it was unmistakably a bot, but it could blend into a crowd.
She and Lark retired to a little booth with a padded couch, and Cassie waited for the salesman to leave. When they were alone she took out her shoulder bag and opened a sealed case in the bottom. The plain-looking case was hideously expensive, and it was worth every penny. It was impervious to scanning. She drew out her pistol and the last of the disk bombs she'd used on Bruma.
"I'm going to add your handprint to my gun," she told Lark, then closed her eyes to navigate the gun's interface via her implants. "Okay, here you go. Hold it in your right hand." Lark held the pistol, a nervous look on her face, and a green check mark appeared on the lens in Cassie's right eye. "Good. Now the other hand."
When the gun knew who Lark was, Cassie took it back and showed the girl the basics. "I don't think I need to tell you that this is for emergencies only. I'll be completely helpless and unreachable while I'm driving the bot. You'll be the only one watching my back."
Lark nodded, looking scared but determined.
Cassie smiled in spite of herself. "Relax. I'm almost certain that nothing will happen. But stay alert, just the same. Now. This is the safety." She took Lark through the basics of using the gun. There were many, many settings.
She limited the lesson to four weapons: stun, shock, laser, and exploding slugs.
"Always try the stun shot first," she said. "It saves you from so much trouble later on. Use shock mode for bots. You don't get many shots, so don't screw around. Laser is better for anything but bots. You can use laser all day. If they're wearing mesh armor, switch to exploding slugs."
Lark took the gun from her and turned it over in her hands. "How will I know if they're wearing mesh armor?"
"When you shoot them with laser beams and they don't fall down."
She got Lark to repeat all the basic instructions back to her, and made her demonstrate all four settings. "Don't forget the safety," Cassie said at last. "And for heaven's sake don't use the gun if you can possibly help it. And relax. You're going to be completely bored by the time I get back. I guarantee it."
Lark looked skeptical, but she nodded and set the pistol on a low table beside the couch. Cassie stretched out, got comfortable, and reached for a metal half-circle designed to fit over her head. "I'll be back in a minute as the bot," she said. "After that, I don't know. Half an hour at least. Maybe longer. Don’t get worried. Nothing that happens to me out there matters. All you have to do is wait here until I wake up. Just keep waiting. However long it takes."
"I will," Lark said. "You can count on me."
"That's why I keep you around," Cassie said, and grinned at Lark's proud smile. "Okay. Here I go." She slid the metal band around the back of her head.
The room immediately swam out of focus. She felt cold all over, but in a distant way. She lowered her arms, and the world faded away and disappeared.
Everything was different. The world was dark. She was paralyzed. A sense of panic welled up in her mind, but the usual physical feedback was missing. Her heart rate didn't increase. Her muscles didn't tense. She had no pulse, and it made her panic strangely abstract. She quickly composed herself and took stock.
I'm in the bot. I just have to figure out how…. Vision came flooding in, and she tried hard to blink. The bot had no eyelids, and she stared, overwhelmed, at the back of the skull of the next bot in the rack. The paralysis persisted, but more sensory data was coming in. She could feel pressure against her shoulders and hips. There was no heat, no cold. This bot only did the sense of touch.
The electronic brain would be pinging her brain through the remote connection, she realized. The salesman had explained everything, and Cassie belatedly wished she'd paid more attention. Her senses would come online first, and then she ought to gain muscle control.
Her left leg twitched, her foot hit the thigh of the bot in front of her, and she heard the rustle of cloth against metal. That was when she knew her hearing worked. How long has that been online? Her other leg twitched, then her arms. The twitching stopped, and she hung there, unmoving.
I guess it's my turn. This is supposed to be easy. Let's see… She tried to turn her head, and nothing happened. She was trying to turn her whole upper body when her head suddenly snapped to one side. She straightened it, then set about making her arms move.
The process felt interminable, but a little clock readout in the corner of her eye told her it had been less than two minutes by the time she was able to wriggle her way off the rack and stand upright. Just standing was shockingly difficult. She was a head taller than her real body, and her new body with its metal components weighed considerably more. Her center of gravity was lower than it seemed it ought to be, owing to the smaller mass of her head.
Her first few steps nearly sent her toppling to the floor. She put a hand on the wall for support, stumbled back and forth, and finally let go of the wall. Her balance was becoming automatic, so long as she didn't think about it too much.
Cassie found her way back to the little booth where she'd left her body. Only when she saw Lark did she realize how different her vision was. The girl looked washed-out, the colors of her hair and skin muted. There was sharp detail in the center of Cassie's field of vision, much sharper than she was used to, but it faded to a blur away from the center.
"Cassie? Is it you?"
She tried to give the girl a reassuring smile and discovered that the bot's face was basically immobile. She nodded instead. "It's me." She could barely feel her mouth moving, but the words sounded clear enough. Her voice surprised her, a deep masculine rumble. "It's me," she repeated. "This is interesting. I don't think I recommend it."
Her body lay slack on the couch, and she gazed down at herself, marveling at the strangeness of the experience. She looked small from the outside, she decided. Much shorter than she felt. Less substantial. Unconsciousness made her body look fragile, and she was suddenly glad she had Lark to watch over her. Even pulling the metal band from her head wouldn’t awaken her. She would have to return the robot or destroy it to wake herself up. The robot shop could break the connection, but they wouldn't want to lose an expensive robot. Lark would have a hard time persuading them to act.
"Maybe you should take the gun," Lark said.
Cassie shook her head. "It's my body I'm worried about, not my avatar. And you, of course. Besides, the people I'm going to see would just take the gun away." She drew the disk bomb from the bottom of her bag. "I will take this, though."
The hands and face of the bot were meticulously crafted to look and behave like flesh. When Cassie unzipped the jumpsuit she saw that her torso was much less finely crafted. Her chest was steel grey, and her stomach was mostly empty space. There were bands of metal like ribs running from her steel spine around to encircle her abdomen and give a human-like shape to her stomach, but there were gaps between the rings and open space inside. It made it easier for her to curl her body forward, but it was disconcerting to look at. A more expensive bot would have a layer of artificial skin covering the rings.
The disk bomb fit nicely between the abdomen rings. She leaned to one side to increase the gap and attached the magnet to her spine, inside the rings. Then she zipped up the jumpsuit.
"What are you going to do with that?" Lark asked.
"Nothing, I hope." Cassie checked herself over and made sure she could move around without dislodging the bomb. "But it's good to have options. A good team could immobilize the bot while they come hunting for me."
She left the shop, waving to the salesman, and headed out through the shopping center, gaining confidence rapidly as she walked. Movement still felt unnatural, but she was able to trot down a flight of stairs and navigate a sliding sidewalk without stumbling.
A few people glanced at her and did a double-take as they realized she was a bot. Most people either didn't notice or didn't react. She saw one other bot in the street, an industrial-looking humanoid shape painted yellow and black and carrying a toolbox. If there were high-end bots around her, she didn't spot them.
A taxi dropped her in an entertainment district as the sun was setting. Young couples hurried past her as she loitered on a street corner, men in bright shirts and women in dresses that showed off their legs, all of them looking strangely short from her new perspective as a tall bot.
Tucked in among upscale nightclubs and swanky restaurants she found the building she was looking for, a seedy-looking bar called The Silicone Heart. She pushed the door open and was reminded of the tavern she'd visited in cyberspace. A handful of weary-looking men lined the bar or sat at a couple of tables. Others played holographic games along the back wall. There were no women.
A section of wall near the bathrooms seemed to flicker and flash when she looked at it. She stared until she figured out that she was seeing a holographic screen, poorly rendered through her robotic eyes. To live eyes it might have been any flat surface, from a studded oak door to a billboard advertising pretzels. It wouldn't be convincing enough to fool anyone. Holographic screens were for privacy, not deception.
There was an illegal gambling club somewhere on the premises, according to Roger's research. This looked like the entrance. Cassie walked through the screen.
On the far side was a grubby, industria
l-looking corridor only a bit more plain than the tavern. A steel door blocked the end of the corridor, and a tall Asian man with the casual arrogance of a street thug stood guard. He wore a tailored suit, but lumpy knuckles and rings of scar tissue around his eyes marked him as an experienced fighter. He looked Cassie up and down and said, "Password?"
"I need to see Wo," she said.
He sneered. "Who are you?"
"John Smith. I have information he needs."
The gangster shook his head. "Got a card? You can leave a message."
"It's about Cassandra Marx."
The man stared at her in silence for a long moment. Then his lips moved as he sub-vocalized. A moment later, the steel door slid up into the ceiling.
The man on the other side was similar enough to the first thug to be a clone, except he held a crater gun in his hands. He levelled it at her. Cassie found it difficult to remember that he was pointing the gun at a robot, that she was across the city, and safe.
The first gangster stepped in close and frisked her. "Clean," he said.
The steel door slid shut behind Cassie as she followed the man with the crater gun down a staircase and into the basement of the building. Here she found the casino, a sprawling room a bit more flashy than the tavern above but still fairly bleak and depressing. Girls in tiny sequined outfits moved among the tables serving drinks, but most of the patrons paid no attention. Men and women stared at cards or holo displays, looking up only long enough to shoot distrustful glances at the other players.
Wo's office was in the back corner, a glass-walled room with a view of the high-stakes tables. The gangster himself was a chubby short man with cold dark eyes who stood gazing through the glass, ignoring Cassie as she entered the office. She stood silent, aware of the muzzle of the crater gun an inch from her side. Wo wasn't looking at anything in particular, as far as she could tell. He was simply demonstrating that he had the power to make her wait.