“I work out on the Rim. We got better stuff than the fools who think they’re running Eden.”
Brown eyes went wide. “The Rim! You been in space?”
“It ain’t all the stories crack it up to be.”
“What part of the Rim you from?” a young man’s voice asked, cracking on “Rim.” He was a head taller than his girlfriend. Maybe a shade cleaner, at least his elbows weren’t scabbed. His eyes were an intense blue that seemed to overflow with questions.
“Wardhaven,” Abby said. “And other places.”
“Didn’t they just have a big space battle around Wardhaven?” the youth asked.
“I wasn’t in that fight. Some of my friends were. Some of them died.”
The two youths seemed to put their heads together over that one. Now, seeing two samples together, Abby figured the boy for thirteen, fourteen. The girl for maybe twelve, tops.
“What kind of work you do?” Bronc finally asked.
“Interesting stuff,” Abby said. “A little of this. A little of that. The less said about it the more I like it.”
“And you’re from here?”
“Not in the last fifteen years.”
“It would be nice to be fifteen years away from here,” the boy muttered.
“And she wants to find her ‘mother,’” the girl added.
“Everyone’s got a mother. You get away from yours for fifteen years and even you might want to see her again. Maybe even your gram.”
“I’d be happy if I never saw Granny Ganna ever again.”
Abby let herself blink twice at that name. She also made a point of not skipping a breath. “You two want a drink? What’s her name asked for a grape soda. What do you want, Bronc?”
“I’ll have a beer,” he said, pulling himself up to his full height.
“He likes a strawberry soda,” Uncle Joe snapped from two rows over. “And that’s all he’ll have from my place.”
“Auntie Mong would sell me a beer,” the boy said in not quite a whine.
“Over her cold, dead body. Don’t you kids think us gray heads talk to each other?”
Grateful for the distraction, Abby pulled a grape and a strawberry soda from the cooler, and headed her two, ah, unreliable information sources to the counter. Business done, and more deposits made, Abby quick marched the youngsters to a couple of chairs around a dusty space heater.
The bottles were half empty before Abby asked. “What’s your name, dirty face.”
“Cara,” the girl answered. “And don’t you go telling me to wash. You want me to look like I’m ready to sell something I don’t see no reason to part with just yet.” That was said with a glare Bronc’s way.
“What’s you mother’s name?” Abby tried to slip that in gently, softly.
It didn’t work. “None of your business. Who you hunting for, anyway? Bronc’s the one that knows everyone. He’s the one that wants to earn a ’puter like the one on your wrist. And he told me you’d never give him that one. Were you lying to me? People never give away a ’puter with their own stuff on it.”
“Let’s say I got ahead of myself,” Abby said, and turned her attention to the boy. Interrogating a fourteen-year-old boy ought to be easy. He had hormones. She didn’t. Although on closer examination, the boy seemed to have eyes only for the unit on her wrist.
“So, Bronc, does Cara’s mom have light hair? Some call it platinum blond. Others call it white or something like that.”
He glanced up from the computer. “Yeah, only it’s starting to get browner now. If you wash that mess on Cara’s head, it would look like that. Real pretty.”
The girl stuck her tongue out. “You and what army.”
“No, really, Cara, you’d look real hot, like your mom.”
“And what did that get her?”
That was not something Abby would ask. With luck, she’d see Myra in a few minutes and make her own assessment. Daughters were never a reliable judge of their elders.
“Is her mom named Myra?”
“She goes by Ruby now,” Bronc said, “but my momma says she’s just putting on airs. She had a real name before that.”
“Yeah, my mom used to be Myra,” Cara whispered.
“And you just mentioned Granny Ganna.” Abby shot the last words out.
Cara fidgeted. “I guess so.”
“She’s about as tall as me. Pretty in an old-fashion kind of way.” Abby knew it for classical beauty. But what do you say to an angry twelve-year-old?
“She’s old and fat and, and she ought to behave like a gramma-ma.”
“She’s still hot?” Abby asked Bronc.
“If you’re an old man and like old women, I guess so.”
“I’m, ah…” Even now, Abby had problems getting her tongue around that old name. She tried a different tact. “Ganna or Myra ever talk about another daughter?”
Both kids shook their head.
Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Abby. Still, it was a kick in the gut. Apparently, they’d dusted her dirt from their shoes just as completely as she’d washed them out of her hair.
Abby took in a deep breath. “I think your folks are who I’ve come looking for. Could you take me home?”
17
“Well look what the cat done brung in,” was Momma Ganna’s greeting for her long lost daughter. Why was Abby not surprised.
“She followed me home,” Cara said, grin stretching from ear to ear as she enjoyed the scene. “Can I keep her?”
Momma Ganna snorted at Abby, the old disapproving snort the teenager in Abby remembered so well. “You keep her, she’ll break your heart, like she breaks any heart that lets her in.”
Abby had been surprised at the house Cara led them to. The block was solid row houses, stone and brick, three-or four-stories tall. None were abandoned. Yep, Momma was coming up in the world. Two blocks over and she’d be in Hepner neighborhood. It’d been gated once, to keep the riffraff of Five Corners out.
And Momma had aged well. Cara was wrong about her being fat; Momma was pleasantly round with hardly a sag or wrinkle. Wonder who’s paying for the body work? was Abby’s professional question.
“What kind of name you going by?” Ganna asked.
“Nightingale. Abby Nightingale. Who are you, Momma?”
“Topaz. A nice name, isn’t it? Expensive name.”
“A hard name, but one that can be broken,” Abby said.
“Momma, what’s all the racket?” came from the shadows at the top of the stairs. But it couldn’t hide the slender form of Myra, not from Abby’s hungry eyes.
But Sis wasn’t right. Whereas Abby remembered a willowy figure, what she saw today seemed more out of focus. The way she leaned against the wall…
“Myra, are you using?” Abby snapped before she thought.
“No,” she said, but the scowl on Cara’s face gave it a lie.
Abby turned on her mother. “Your own daughter!”
“It’s either that or she eats all the time. A hippo ain’t no use to me.”
“And you couldn’t bring in some kid from the streets to handle your customers?”
“I got clients now, baby ducks. Clients that want their privacy. Got to keep things in the family now.”
“You’re even more disgusting than you were when I left.”
“To empty bedpans at that fancy home. Bedpans better than what your momma does to put food on the table.”
“There was more of a future there.” Abby bit off that line. If she let it all out, she’d have to march out the door.
And she did want to see more of Myra.
“Yeah. Now you’re working for that princess. What you doing for her and all those pretty boys around her?”
Abby was about to fire back a “Nothing!” when the full impact of what Momma just said hit her.
“How do you know who I’m working for?”
Momma’s laugh was more a cackle. “Got you there. Look around some time at one of your fancy balls
. You may just see your mamma on some well-turned-out guy’s elbow. Topaz has lots of surprises for you.”
And alarm bells went off all through that part of Abby that was a trained operative.
“I can see I’m not welcome here. It’s been nice seeing you again. Myra, hope we get to spend some time together while I’m here. It was good meeting you Cara, Bronc.” Abby turned to beat a well-ordered retreat.
Abby half expected a butler, or small tactical team, to try to stop her. She was relieved when she made it out the door.
Bronc was at her elbow. Cara had been halted with a “Where do you think you’re going, young lady.”
Abby would miss the little imp, but she kept walking.
Walking her anger out, Abby wanted to quick march for the trolley. Bronc, however, had gotten a bad case of the slows.
And Abby kicked herself as she quickly reacquired the situation she was in. There were guys—in threes and fours—on a lot of street corners.
“This place suddenly popular or is this the normal crowd?” Abby said, under her breath.
“There’s too many dudes here, and I think some of them are hot,” Bronc said.
Was that why he was slowing down?
The real reason for his delay arrived a moment later. “Hi, Auntie,” Cara said.
“What took you so long?” was Bronc’s greeting. “You gonna get in trouble?” was Abby’s.
A stuck-out tongue was all that Bronc got. “Momma’s going out tonight. I’ll sneak back in when she’s gone. She won’t remember nothing by tomorrow.”
“Ruby going out, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Why am I getting all this attention?” Abby asked. The guys were closing in.
“A couple of nights ago, your princess got jumped,” Bronc whispered. “Some of the folks she put down were from here. I think they figure you owe them.”
“Now wouldn’t that be a terrible end for me, paying for Kris Longknife’s doings while I was home in bed.”
“You didn’t do nothing?” Cara said.
“I swear it’s so. On my mother’s grave.”
Cara giggled at the image, and took off, half running, half skipping for one of the clumps. This one had a tall dude in white wearing a belt with a huge gold buckle.
Cara talked to him. He listened. Then he shook his head.
It looked like Abby was about to get whopped for that damn Longknife’s good luck.
No use wasting time getting it on, Abby thought.
With one swift motion, her automatic was in her hand. She sighted it on the big fellow Cara had talked with, cycled a dart into the chamber, but reduced the charge. Then lowered her aim.
A second later, the dart was sticking out of the big dudes belt-buckle.
“I could have aimed for an eye,” Abby said in a voice that carried. “How much you willing to pay for your fun?”
The big guy eyed his buckle, then Abby. Around him, gangers had started to go for heat. Now they waited for his signal.
Abby was glad Cara was out of the line of fire. Bronc had taken the time to back away from her. He looked ready to hit the ground at the slightest hint that the call was against Abby.
Then the big fellow laughed.
It wasn’t a nice laugh, but it was full. Suddenly the gangers were all laughing.
Abby allowed herself a chuckle.
“Cara says you weren’t out that night our boys got wasted.”
“Home in bed where I belong.”
“I hope with a nice guy?”
Abby gave that a noncommittal shrug.
“You be sure and stay away from that princess girl.”
“I’m just her maid. I only wash her hair.”
“Why don’t you wash Cara’s hair. She’d be some looker if she just cleaned up.”
Cara was trotting back to Abby. She answered that with a raspberry. That got a second laugh. Little girls could get away with what would get the head slapped off a woman a few months older.
They got to the trolley with no further surprises.
18
The tram was in the station. Abby risked running, but it pulled out before they got to it. That left Abby with an awkward twenty minutes for dudes to reconsider.
And two very quiet kids that wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“What’s going on? Cara wouldn’t shut up when I first met her. Now you two look like someone stole your allocation of nouns for the rest of the month?”
Cara didn’t meet Abby’s eyes as she mumbled. “You going to go away and never come back. You did for fifteen years,” she blurted out. And locked eyes with Abby.
“I did that. But I’m here now, and my employer is like to be here for a while. I’ll be coming back. Besides. I owe Bronc a computer.”
The relief on his face showed he figured her to stiff him.
Abby tried to show her commitment without letting him know she’d seen the doubt. “Let me see what you’re using for a ’puter. That doesn’t look like anything more than a reader like you see in the doctor’s office.”
“I wouldn’t know. Never been to one,” the boy said, but offered her the unit.
The thing didn’t look to be more than a reader, but its screen was blank. Then Bronc said, “’Puter, what’s the name of the princess visiting from Wardhaven?”
“Princess Kristine Longknife,” a voice that sounded a lot like Cara’s said. “She recently commanded several squadrons at the Battle of Wardhaven and…”
“End that,” Abby said. If the kids wanted to know more about her employer, they could do that on their own time. And without Abby at their elbow to be asked, with those big, truth-demanding eyes, if that was all true.
“What do you have in there?” Abby demanded.
Bronc had the cover off his darling in a second, and Abby was looking at the most convoluted spaghetti that she’d ever seen under a computer hood. Barely visible under all kinds of stuff was the standard innards of a ten-year-old magazine reader. Jacked into that were what looked like a main processor that might have been top of the line fifteen years ago. And several memory units that might have been taken from used washing machines or who knows what.
There were other chips and boards that didn’t immediately declare their purpose, but Bronc had identified noise coming from Abby’s unit, and that couldn’t have been easy.
“I thought I passed a Ryes on the way in here,” Abby said.
“All the time he likes to go and look,” Cara snorted. “They frisk him every time to make sure he’s not walking out with the store. They don’t dare frisk me.”
“So you walk out with the store?” Abby said to her niece.
“No,” Bronc snapped. “I’m gonna get a job there. I can’t have a record. Or even be near a record.”
“Lot of dumb kids from Five Corners have a hard time remembering things like that,” Abby said softly. “Glad to know Cara’s with a smart one.”
“Cara’s pretty smart, too.”
Cara seemed to like that. At least she didn’t stick her tongue out at it.
“And how did you come to learn so much about computers?” Abby said. The next tram was in sight. Maybe it was early, or maybe the one they missed had been a really late one. Around Five Corners, schedules meant nothing.
“Mick and Trang have been kind of teaching me. Not everything they know. Some of what they know would get me in jail. But I’ve learned a lot. A whole lot.”
Cara nodded proud agreement with him.
Abby paid for them. The kids tried not to stare as she just slipped her palm over the pay scale and it took her at her word. From the way she’d had to use coins to buy the sodas, Abby was pretty sure the hood was still on the cash system.
They settled into seats far from the snoozing eye of the cop, an old man so oversize he hardly fit on the provided stool. Only then did Abby question her computer. “Any bugs here.”
Before her own computer had a chance to reply, Bronc was talking. “There’s an eye, own
ership unidentified. And an ear. Same on the ID. You want them dead or just out for a while?”
“What’s legal here?”
“Actually, bugs are illegal, so there’s no rules against burning them,” Cara said.
“But it’s considered bad form to burn them unless they’re really obnoxious. Or if you want people to know your gang owns this territory.”
“Make them go to sleep,” Abby said.
There was a static discharge near them, another a bit farther back. Impressive for “just a reader.”
“Computer, how many bugs in Momma Ganna’s house?” Abby asked her own computer the question she’d been wanting answered since she stomped out of there.
“None,” Bronc said. “She keeps it real clean. You can’t get any cleaner than Granny’s place, not even the gang hangs.”
“And you know that because…” Abby said, eyeing Bronc.
“The Bones, the folks you just met, and the Rockets pay Mick and Trong to keep their places clean,” Cara cut in. “You know, the places they eat. Where they hang. They don’t want any breakers eyeing them or listening in. Or some other gang, either. So they pay Mick, and Bronc does the actual cleaning.”
“They trust Mick?” Abby asked.
“I also get something extra to do my own checks. They paid for some of the extra stuff in my reader.”
“You good?”
“They think so,” Bronc said. “And I think so, too.”
“Me, too,” Cara said. And, since they’d ended up on the same seat, gave him a bit of a hug. He actually reddened.
Which made it a good time to change the topic. “Tell me about what happened back there. How’d the guys from the hood get mixed up with my princess?”
Bronc shrugged. “Word came down from somewhere that there was going to be a big hit. No one usual, some guy from off planet. None of the usual clans were taking the hit, not at least with their own shooters. You got to understand, ma’am, this was a big chance for some of the best heat in the hood. Make a good showing and you might get tapped by a real security guild for a job. That don’t happen a whole lot around here.”
“And anyone that turned up facedown on the street would have no tracks back to anyone respectable,” Abby added.
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