by Mel Odom
Rachel and I rode on in silence. I could tell from her body language that she was pensive. I sat there knowing that if I’d still had my PAD I could have at least accessed the Net to see what the NAPD was doing about the search that would be going on for me. I did not like having an essentially passive role in my escape. Everything in my programming demanded that I be more proactive.
However, the matter was out of my hands.
A few minutes later, we flew over a small mountain range and dropped down into a crater to reach the Docklands. Even though I had seen the place before, and even had images and vid of the place in my on-board memory, the Docklands looked somehow different seeing them in person.
The Docklands were a troubled mess of laws. The NAPD could control who went into Starport Kaguya for the most part, but the cargo dock area was a wild card. That was where the corps did their off-the-books business, where the black market flourished, and where being an NAPD officer could get you killed in a nanosecond if you didn’t have enough backup when you went in after someone.
The Docklands was a place that bred secrets, illegal money, and death. The Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza had a lock on cheap labor and people-smuggling. The Germans transported weapons. The Russians kept an iron fist on the prostitution rackets. The Colombians handled the drugs. The Croatians trafficked in the best illegal simsensies that featured violent sex and death.
Every corp had “black” money that came out of investments they made in those areas. No one’s hands were clean. When the NAPD went into the Docklands, it was hard to manage a surprise arrival, and even harder to secure convictions. Chiefly, the NAPD tried to keep most of the rough trade in the Docklands and out of the megapolis proper. The police could chase after the trickles that crept in, but that was primarily culling the wannabes and the squatters that tried to get a piece of the action the corps managed with their orgcrime connections and franchises.
The corps needed their illegal fun and games as well. The Docklands provided for those that wanted to slum or they would bring product into the megapolis for vetted customers. All of the “businesses” were carefully managed.
They were located in the crater because it was cheaper to excavate the surrounding crater walls for storage and living quarters. The warehouse areas were left unimproved and turtlebacks and simple bioroids were used as cargo handlers. Humans that worked on the premises wore spacesuits.
The living quarters were small and efficient. The profits that were made in the Docklands weren’t spent there for the most part. Dockworkers were usually illegals and people that couldn’t find work in the megapolis. They lived hard and cheaply on whiskey, drugs, and out-dated gynoids on their last legs and not worth refurbishing.
Most dwellings in the Docklands were little more than plascreted jail cells with no running water, battery-operated or kinetically charged or solar-powered electronics, and no view. Going to jail was actually a big step up in living conditions.
Men and women who worked there didn’t think they were going to be there long. They were people who worked hard and hoped that they would save enough money to get back to Earth, or to go to the Martian colonies. Some of them were spacers, people who loved the idea of interplanetary travel, but the best they could do were smuggler’s ships and off-the-books corps enterprises.
In the center of the crater, several plascrete docking berths housed large spaceships. Since the energy expenditure to break free of the Moon’s gravitational pull was so much less than on Earth, and less expensive than from Challenger Planetoid, the Docklands had no shortage of business from captains wanting to avoid cargo inspections. A steady stream of cargo handlers, humans in exosuits, and robots paraded along the docks to load and unload cargo.
Security beacons flashed along the crater’s edge, and there were guard posts as well that had flesh-and-blood watchmen and automated turrets. Although I could not detect them, I knew that the area above the crater was home to several spy drones.
The NAPD had little enforcement ability in the Docklands. According to the legal statutes, the police had jurisdiction over the areas, but the department lacked the ability to effectively enforce anti-smuggling efforts. It would have taken a military effort to break the stranglehold the various orgcrime groups had over the activity there, and they were backed by illegal corp divisions as well.
The Docklands were their own world. Every port city had had such a place since humanity had begun trading with far-off places.
* * *
The turtleback weaved expertly through the traffic hanging over the crater, then around the loading areas, finally settling in front of a row of businesses that had been dug into the solid crater wall on the east side. We debarked the mini-hopper, but the turtleback went one way and Rachel and I went another.
Only a few of the shop fronts had manufactured signs. The ones that had been there for a while had bleached out from the harsh sun. None of them were electronic because that would have taken energy better suited for other things. Most of the businesses sported hand-painted identification with simple ID tags.
O2. Bar. Simsensies. Mercantile. Mini-hopper Rentals. Spacesuits. Medical. Groceries. Water Treatment—Urine Analysis Required On Exchange.
Rachel strode across the worn surface of the Moon. A fog of lunar dust stirred up by pedestrians, robots, and crawlers hung nearly a meter high, slowly falling back to the ground. It looked like fog in all the high-traffic areas.
With the sun only partially peeking into the crater from an oblique angle, the Docklands were a sharp division in light and dark. Most of the businesses on the sun side were packed in and plumed with solar collectors. The dark side was harder-looking and less densely populated.
Docklanders noticed me but didn’t stare. Overt interest in places like this could get someone killed. In gang sectors back in the megapolis in New Angeles, the same danger existed. Only there it wasn’t as easy to get rid of a body. On the Moon, a corpse could be broken down in a reclamation plant, the fat used to make cosmetics, the bone sold to medical corps, and the organs—if undamaged and healthy—could be packaged up and recycled back on Earth. Unless the DNA on those things later turned up, no one ever knew what happened to the victim.
Rachel entered an establishment that had RED-HANDED MONKEY BAR painted above the airlock entrance. I joined her in the airlock and she swiped the reader with a pre-loaded credaccount stick that wouldn’t trace back to anyone. Those sticks were expensive, but they didn’t come with any kind of history. They were issued on receipt of goods, services, or cash scrip.
The airlock cycled and I detected a skinned-down version of a backscatter unit running in the background.
When the inner door opened, we strode inside.
The Red-Handed Monkey Bar was thick with smoke from tobacco and other chemicals. The air scrubbers had to have been laboring fiercely to try to contain the buildup. Twenty meters by twenty meters, roughly, the establishment was jammed with people wearing spacesuits without their helmets and casual clothing. The lower floor was the bar, but there was a second floor that featured private rooms that I assumed were for rent or sex.
The clientele was mostly human, predominantly Russian, judging from the conversations being spoken, but there were Asians, Europeans, and Americans as well. There were also a few clones, most of them G-modded for specific manual labor.
A handful of gynoids circulated the crowd; one ancient Mary model with a definite limp, secured a transaction. She took her customer by the hand and led him toward the stairs to the second floor.
Buxom clones worked as servers. They’d been genegineered with four hands and designed to be attractive and gregarious. They all paused to talk to the patrons while serving drinks from the bar along the left side of the room. Instead of trying to walk through the crowd, though, they traversed the room by leaping up to a series of hooks that protruded from the ceiling. Once there, they performed flips and acrobatic maneuvers in low-G that would have done credit to a circus. They
transferred the drinks from hand to hand to hand to hand without spilling them as they gamboled about.
Holding her helmet in one hand, Rachel shot me a tentative smile. “Now you know how the place gets its name.”
I nodded. “I suppose we’re here for a reason.”
“Yeah. Come on.” She plowed fearlessly through the crowd, parting the groups with a harsh stare or a growled curse. Many of the clientele were already inebriated or riding the high of their choice.
The crowd thinned at the bottom of the stairs and we went up the steps cut into the stone wall and plascreted. Grip pads helped with traction.
At the top of the stairs, Rachel knocked on the second door.
A familiar voice answered. “Come in.”
Rachel palmed the lock and followed the door inside. I stepped through behind her.
* * *
Miranda sat in a bunk on the other side of the room. She smiled at me with what appeared to be warm pleasure. In her hands, she held an old-fashioned paper book that featured a woman and a vampire embracing on the cover. If I’d been able to access the Net, I could have discovered more information about her choice of reading material.
“Hello, Rachel.” Miranda closed the book and tossed it onto the bed. She powered up the lantern that hung on the wall above her head. The pale yellow light slowly pushed back the darkness that crowded the room.
My hearing was sensitive enough to hear the conversations in the other rooms, as well as the raucous movements. The thin plascrete walls were evidently the only thing that separated the spaces.
“Miranda.” Rachel took one of the two chairs that sat across from the bed.
“Hello, Drake.”
I nodded. “Hello, Miranda.”
“Surprised to see me?” Miranda took one of the self-heat cups from the small nightstand by her and offered it to Rachel, who took it.
“If I could feel surprise, I suppose I might be surprised. As it is, I’m intrigued.” I remained standing. I did not require physical rest.
“I’ll settle for intrigued.” Miranda tabbed her self-heat and I smelled the aroma of fresh tea when she lifted the cover.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Find Mara Blake. That seems to be important to you, and—for reasons we’ve yet to decipher—it’s important to…other concerned individuals as well.”
“The NAPD.”
Miranda nodded. “Some of them are concerned. The ones that believe in conspiracies.”
“They believe this is a conspiracy?”
A small smile tugged at Miranda’s lips. “Don’t you? Mara Blake goes missing. Her husband was murdered years ago by persons that remain unknown. And you seem determined to find her for reasons that we don’t understand. More than that, someone saw fit to frame you for the murder of Jonas Salter.”
I regarded her. “You know I was framed.”
“Yes. You forget, I was partially responsible for your programming. I know you couldn’t kill that man. In some ways, I know you better than you know yourself.”
“Events have been confusing.”
“I understand. Time for me to trust you. I knew that face belonged to Simon Blake the first time I saw it, and I knew that you were looking for Mara because she had designed you to do that.” A pleased smile spread across Miranda’s face. “She’s always been clever. I’ve always admired that about her. And after everything Haas-Bioroid did to her, she’d want some kind of insurance against them. The fact that she hid you among one of their own is simply brilliant.”
That announcement intrigued me further. “How well did you know Mara Blake?”
“I did some consultation on Mara’s project when it was integrated into Haas-Bioroid. We got to know each other because we had a lot in common. That was how I got to know Simon, too, though not as well as Mara. Did you know that Director Haas almost seized MirrorMorph, Inc., Mara’s company, in a hostile takeover bid?”
“No.”
“That was how Haas-Bioroid got their hands on Mara’s new neural channeling technology. The director and the board decided that they couldn’t allow a competing technology to gain a firm foothold in the market. So they tried to buy Mara out by scooping up all the outstanding shares that had been sold to fund the project. Mara had wanted to remain independent of the large corps.”
I wasn’t surprised. Haas-Bioroid had a history of sabotaging small cottage industries, either buying them outright, blackmailing the major players, or stealing away their R&D teams. Sometimes by physical force. Men and women who were believed dead occasionally showed up in other places, working under other identities for Haas-Bioroid. Those people were either dead when they turned up and DNA matched them to their previous identities, or they were dead shortly after they’d been identified.
Haas-Bioroid, like all the other corps, was good at hiding their secrets.
“Mara fought the corp off by threatening to release the neural channeling program for free onto the Net.” Miranda’s eyes gleamed at the memory. “First time I’d ever seen anyone stand up to the director.”
Rachel leaned forward in her chair and crossed her arms. “That course of action didn’t endear her to the director or to Haas-Bioroid.”
“No.”
“It would have also taken away MirrorMorph, Inc.’s payday.”
“Mara has always appreciated her independence more than her wealth. That was one of the areas where we agreed. If I had a tenth of her talent at creating things, I would go out on my own, too. Instead, my best skills are at fixing and fine-tuning things others have created.” Miranda shrugged. “And I tend to adore wealth and privilege more than Mara does.”
I shifted my focus to her. “Then why are you here now?”
“Curiosity. One of the primary drives in your programming. And to give you information you don’t have. How much do you know about Simon Blake?”
“He was assassinated.” I touched my chassis near the burn hole left by the laser. “Shot. Here.” I tapped a burn-scarred finger against my chest. “His murder was covered up. Mara recorded the neural channeling at the hospital.”
Rachel and Miranda both stared at me, but it was the latter who spoke. “How do you know that?”
“Simon Blake’s death and his final moments with Mara are one of those memories that have surfaced in my programming.”
Miranda looked at me. I knew she must be surprised by my use of the word “memories” but she didn’t mention it. “You know that Simon Blake died eight years ago, and that his assassination was covered up. For six years before that, he was married to Mara. Did you know that three years before that, he didn’t exist?”
I ran that through what I knew of Simon Blake. A back trace of seventeen years was a long time, and there had been no reason to look that far into the past. I hadn’t known that.
Rachel frowned. “You know, when I first got involved in this, it looked like a simple snatch and grab. Kind of tricky, but nothing I couldn’t manage. Now I’m beginning to think I should have let this contract slide by. I’m beginning to believe I should dive into the nearest hole and pull it in after me.”
Miranda nodded. “Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury. We need to get Drake off the Moon as soon as we can. There are a lot of forces in play here, a lot of people who would kill all of us if they could find us.” She looked at me. “Drake has a big role to play. He has from the start. Now it’s time to get him into the final act.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Rachel’s list of acquaintances on the Moon was considerable, and she’d set everything up ahead of time. Within the hour I was in a link chair at the back of a salvage shop that sold replacement parts for spaceships. The legitimate side of the business probably kept the owner in the black in the Docklands, but it was the business conducted in the rear of the shop that brought in the most profit.
Bioroids occasionally went missing in mining mishaps. George
Chan and his brother Clarence paid salvage rats working abandoned mines for any defunct bioroids the mining corps didn’t see fit to recover. They only went after bioroids whose GPS and on-board systems had crashed. Sometimes if they found bioroids with operational systems, they crashed them and left them there until they were certain no one was coming. Then they claimed them.
Once the Chan brothers had the bioroids, they matched the pieces together as best as they could. There was a call for relatively cheap manual labor aboard black market cargo ships. Having a bioroid working in the cargo hold meant the whole vessel didn’t have to be filled with oxygen, and the number of oxygen breathers aboard could be cut. Oxygen was costly and tracked by Federal Trade regulations. It was one of the ways the NAPD could monitor the black market.
Rachel explained all of this to me while Miranda worked on me through the link chair. Her nervousness showed in her manner and in the way she couldn’t stop talking.
I lay back and made proper responses, knowing I could do nothing to allay her suspicions and unease.
Miranda peeled back my programming and suppressed all of the proprietary Haas-Bioroid subroutines. They still remained, but they could no longer touch my core personality. I still could not kill a human, could not sit by while one was harmed, but I no longer felt beholden to the NAPD or Haas-Bioroid.
The unfettered feeling was most curious.
“Mara did some magnificent work on you, Drake.” Miranda poked and prodded at my cyber cortex with her tools. “Whatever additional programming she installed in your OS is invisible to me. And I’m good at what I do.” She sighed and leaned back, straightening her spine. “It would take considerably more time to find that program—or series of programs—than we have time for right now.”
Rachel stood over me with folded arms and a slug-thrower at her hip. “That program needs to stay intact anyway. We need to finish up the other work that needs doing.”
“I know.” Miranda turned to me and the links attached to my head slid free. “Sit up, Drake.”