My eyes were getting used to the lack of lumens so I was able to identify a blond head that I assumed must be Rosalind sitting at a table with a good view of the front entrance to the bar. She’d changed the cut of her hair to something shorter and the shade to something closer to honey than ash, but her posture unmistakably belonged to the woman who’d played me for a fool half a decade ago. I glanced around looking for Martin and spotted him drinking a beer at the mahogany-topped bar. He was tracking all the action in the large mirror on the wall in front of him.
I was about to walk over to Rosalind’s table and surprise her when a familiar-looking brunette carrying a Bloody Mary with a protruding celery stalk wobbled past me. She was wearing five inch heels and seemed unsteady on her feet. When we were only a step apart, she lost her balance and bumped into me without spilling her drink.
“Hey!” she said, staring at me. “Aren’t you the guy who stole my blimp?”
It was the woman who’d been piloting the dirigible I’d commandeered to chase Cornell. Last time I’d seen her she was doing yoga poses on top of an advertising kiosk near the entrance to GALTEX. Now she was dressed for a night out on the town and seemed to be with several other friends drinking pitchers of margaritas at a large table near Rosalind’s. I didn’t know what to say—my brain was caught up in analyzing the paths my upcoming confrontation might take—but my phone climbed up on my shoulder and came to my rescue. It extruded legs, arms, and something that vaguely resembled a head from its mutacase, then bowed at the blimp driver.
“Beautiful lady,” said my phone, “Blame not this man for your trials this morning. This communications device is at fault for separating you from your airship.”
Yoga Woman was somewhat tipsy and found my phone both strange and strangely charming.
“You talk funny, but you’re kinda cute,” she said.
“This unit is grateful for your compliment,” said my phone, bowing again. “Would it be possible to join you and your companions to share alcohol and conversation?”
The woman stared at my phone. I could see she was trying to figure out just how drunk she was.
“The next round is on this unit’s credit chip,” said my phone.
“Oh, what the heck,” said the woman.
My phone ran down from my shoulder to my hand. I gave it a boost and tossed it toward Blimp Driving Yoga Woman. I smiled as it executed aerobatic gymnastic maneuvers worth at least a seven from the Russian Federation judge and stuck its landing on the woman’s shoulder.
“See you, Jack,” said my phone. “Do what you need to do—this unit will be fine.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
Like a proper masochist, I had to glance toward the bar before proceeding. Martin’s face, holding back laughter, was clearly visible in the mirror. He patted his breast pocket, which I took to mean that’s where he was carrying his sweetener, to reassure me he had my back.
I shook my head ruefully and walked over to Rosalind’s table, standing close behind her.
“Is this seat taken?” I said in a low voice.
I could see the muscles in her neck bunch up, as if she was trying to decide to leave or brazen it out. The latter option won out.
“Join me, Jack,” she said, patting the table beside her. “How long has it been?”
I sat next to her in a classic bent-wood chair and kept my left hand casually near her right wrist so I could try to grab for it if she decided to bolt.
“Five years.”
“That long?”
“Uh huh.”
Use your words, Jack. Don’t let this woman fluster you. I put a five word sentence together.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” asked Rosalind. “Involve you in robbing the repository?”
“That, and seduce me in the process.”
“I needed a mutakey,” she said, “and it seemed like the best way to motivate you.”
“So none of it meant anything to you?”
“You still haven’t grown up, have you, Jack?”
I stared at Rosalind, trying to see if there was anything real at her core, underneath all the stratigraphic layers of masks. I couldn’t tell what was really inside her, but it seemed to be a struggle for her to maintain this particular disinterested facade.
Wishful thinking, Jack? Maybe. Maybe not.
“I have a question for you,” she said.
“What?”
“Why did you help me escape from the vault room?”
“I didn’t,” I protested.
“You did,” she responded. “You left the unconscious nymph and its razor sharp forearms just a few feet away from me. It only took me a few seconds to slice through the duct tape and get away.”
“Huh?”
Had my subconscious known that at the time? There had been so much happening all at once.
“Your chill-field mines immobilized the external guards, so it was easy to avoid them, make tracks, and call an autocab.”
“But you were broke!”
“Low on funds, Jack, but not broke. I’d also had just enough time to pocket a small fortune in precious gems before you hit me.”
That explained why nothing about the heist ever ended up in the media. The people who owned the repository wanted to keep the theft quiet so it wouldn’t ruin their business.
“Was any of it true? Do you even have a brother?”
“Yes, I have a brother. He’s the reason I was low on funds and stranded on Orish. It was part of an initiation ritual.”
“Initiation into what?”
“Now, now, Jack. Don’t expect me to tell you everything. A woman should be full of surprises.”
I was surprised at myself for letting myself get caught up in Rosalind’s spell again. I loved Poly, more than anything, but Rosalind had something like Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field and was still able to wrap me around her little finger, even when I thought I was psychologically armored against her.
“How long have you been stealing design secrets from GalCon Systems?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”
Rosalind smiled at me, as if daring me to push harder. I took the bait.
“How long?”
“It’s over now, so it doesn’t matter. Eighteen months.”
“Is anyone else working with you inside the company?”
“A woman should also be full of secrets, Jack.”
“Yeah, right. Tell it to the judge.”
“This little matter will never go to trial, you know. Not civil and definitely not criminal.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The same reason you never read anything about the Mulbiri City repository break-in on Orish. GalCon Systems doesn’t want the bad publicity.”
She had a point.
“How do you know GalCon Systems didn’t hire me to give you what’s coming to you, unofficially?”
Rosalind laughed. I felt like my bluff had been called. She knew me too well. To be cruel, she used her most seductive tone.
“Are you tired of being a Boy Scout? Do you want to give me what’s coming to me, Jack? And give it to me, and…”
That might have worked a year ago, but now I was older, hopefully wiser, and definitely in love with Poly.
“Stop trying to manipulate me, Rosalind—if that’s even your name.”
“It is, for all practical purposes. What now, Jack? Are you going to arrest me, or have that handsome man at the bar do it?”
Then she laughed at me.
“You never understood the whole damn thing.”
For some reason I couldn’t understand, Rosalind put special emphasis on the next to last word an
d waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx telling the “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas” joke. I was clearly missing some sort of important signal.
While I was mentally distracted, Rosalind glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the bar. Like an idiot, I turned my head to follow her gaze. Once my attention shifted, she pulled a miniature sweetener from a small purse on her lap and zapped me in the knees. Martin couldn’t see what happened but my friend could tell from my panicked expression that something was wrong. With his own hand on the sweetener in his breast pocket, he was ready to chill Rosalind. As he got closer to guarantee an effective shot, Blimp Driver Yoga Lady stuck out her foot, tripping him.
I heard a muffled Soooo-eeeeet! from beneath Martin, then a surprising string of inventive almost-curse words issued from his mouth.
“You okay?” I said.
“Fine, except for chilling a portion of my anatomy that should never be chilled,” said Martin.
That meant he’d be out of commission for at least an hour, probably longer. I winced, reflexively, glad that Rosalind’s aim had been lower. I’d take a sweetener shot to the knees over one to the groin any day.
“You two boys be cool,” said Rosalind, revealing a hint of a grin. She got up and started toward the exit. “Come on, Sally.”
Rosalind gestured to Yoga Lady Blimp Driver.
“Just a second,” said the woman, now sounding not the least bit drunk. The women she’d been sitting with looked puzzled when Sally the Yoga Lady picked up my phone—it was in the middle of telling a funny story at my expense—and dropped it into a pitcher of margaritas on the table.
As she left, Sally bent down and kissed my cheek. She whispered in my ear.
“Ommmmmm, sucker!”
Then her voice became nearly as seductive as Rosalind’s.
“Next time, it’ll be more than twenty galcreds.”
She accompanied Rosalind out of the bar and I wasn’t in any shape to follow. I tried recalculating my dignity points in light of what had just happened, but realized no matter how low a number I assigned myself, Martin’s score would be lower.
I hoped Poly and Chit were having more luck with Cornell at the Big Dam Lodge and wondered how long it would be before I could feel my knees.
Chapter 18
“We came back licking our wounds…”
— John Fotenos
The K Street Bar’s staff was great. I was much happier dealing with solicitous servers and benevolent bartenders than with hotel security or the Las Vegas city police. The bar’s personnel clearly had experience handling drunks that easily transferred to those of us who were just “chilled out.” We were lucky that the noise level in the bar had been high enough that no one heard the sound of Martin or Rosalind’s hand-held sweeteners. That meant other patrons weren’t annoyed, beyond seeing Martin frozen on the floor, grimacing in agony. Under the circumstances, I was impressed that the bar’s staff efficiently identified our problems and took the steps necessary to resolve them.
One bartender found a stack of laundered bar towels four-inches high and put it on the chair Rosalind had recently occupied. Another bartender, and someone I took to be a bouncer, lifted Martin off the floor and gently placed him in the chair on top of the towels. I was impressed by their consideration and wondered how many other times they’d had to deal with similar accidents. Martin sat at an awkward angle initially, since his self-inflicted sweetener blast had also affected his hip joints, but with a little judicious bending by the bouncer and bartender, he was manipulated into something more like a standard sitting position.
Behind me, the women at the table where Sally had been sitting were buzzing about her abrupt departure. It sounded like she had invited herself to join them and said my phone was paying for a round of drinks, so she’d been welcomed. One of the women was complaining to their waitress about the ruined pitcher of margaritas. From their accents, it sounded like the women were visiting from the Twin Cities. I turned my head and told them in my best upper-Midwestern accent that I’d pay for two new pitchers if a server would bring their current pitcher to my table. They were glad to accept—Minnesota nice and all that.
Their server delivered the offending pitcher of margaritas to my table. I used a couple of forks to lift my phone out of the bottom and put it on a napkin to dry out. It smelled like lime and tequila and was trying to brush salt off its back with a couple of bushy extruded pseudopods. I wasn’t going anywhere soon—my knees didn’t work—and Martin would need a wheelchair and one of those donut pillows used by women right after giving birth if he was going to leave the bar in the next half hour. My phone wasn’t in better shape. It looked like it needed a shower and a couple of days in a plastic bag with a pound of uncooked rice.
“How are you doing, buddy?”
“Not bad,” my phone replied, “though it’s going to take weeks to get rid of the smell of triple-sec.”
“I assumed your mutacase was watertight.”
“Mostly watertight,” said my phone.
“Which doesn’t matter unless you’re submerged in liquid,” I mused.
“Bingo!” said my phone. “Getting out without help wasn’t an option because extending pseudopods increases mutacase permeability.”
“At least you don’t need to breathe.”
“But being inorganic also meant no chance of trying to drink the contents of the pitcher to escape.”
“Just as well,” I said. “You don’t have the body mass to handle that much alcohol.”
“It might have been fun to try,” said my phone. “Hic!”
The device seemed to be in better spirits than I was, if you’ll pardon the pun.
I sat, frozen in place, and thought about what to do next. I wasn’t interested in any sort of discussion with Martin to review what had gone wrong. It was obvious we’d been outmatched. I hated losing, and rehashing recent events wouldn’t be particularly productive, but we didn’t have anything better to do. Martin suggested a more appealing alternative.
“Hey, Jack. I didn’t eat much on the plane coming out here. Do you mind if I order some dinner?”
I’d had an amazing Thai feast a few hours ago, but the adrenaline I’d expended since Terrhi’s knock on my suite’s door had taken a lot out of me and left me feeling empty. Contemplating this evening’s ignominious defeat had a similar effect. I was reminded of the old joke about eating Pâkk-Chinese food—half an hour later you were hungry for power.
“Dinner sounds good for me, too,” I said.
We ordered a couple of Nueva Pâkkjuk ubercow burgers with Wisconsin cheddar and agreed to share an order of the Nicósn version of onion rings where the battered delicacy came in spirals, not circles. When our food arrived, I filled Martin in on the non-personal parts of my conversation with RSVP and told him about how I’d first encountered Sally piloting an advertising blimp.
“Sally was operating the GalCon Systems dirigible, right?” said Martin. “RSVP probably got her the job, which explains their connection.”
“Huh,” I said, biting off an inch of spicy-battered spiral onion.
That made sense. They were clearly working as a team. I thought about all the extra electronics on the blimp’s control console and wondered if Sally might have been doing some aerial cybernetic snooping on GALTEX vendors while she was promoting Galcon Systems. Corporate security was probably easier to penetrate at trade shows than at hardened permanent offices.
I told Martin what I was thinking and asked my phone—currently swabbing itself with hand sanitizing wipes—to contact the Obi-Yu siblings and let them know RSVP was their mole and their advertising blimp was probably a Trojan horse.
By the time I’d eaten the last bite of my burger I could sense feeling returning to my knees. Pins and needles jabbed at my lower extremities like they had both fal
len asleep and were now waking themselves up—painfully.
I glanced over at Martin and saw he was holding an onion spiral in front of his mouth but appeared frozen in place. I looked up from his hands and saw his face. His eyes were crossed and his mouth was changing position from ready to bite to ready to scream. Then beads of sweat broke out on Martin’s forehead and the onion spiral fell from his fingers. His eyes closed and I watched my friend exercise supreme self-control, willing himself not to release the cries of pain he was holding inside. I moved his silverware—especially his knife—over to my side of the table. Given his expression, it seemed smart not to take chances.
“Walk it off?” I suggested, ready to run on my own unsteady legs if Martin reacted poorly.
“Let’s get out of here,” said my friend through clenched teeth.
I told my phone to pay the bill and and tried to stand. My legs worked, and moving helped moderate the pins and needles. I gave Martin a hand, helping him rise. He grimaced but shuffled forward like an arthritic octogenarian, heading for the bar’s exit. I waved to the helpful staff members as we left. Slowly, we crossed the hotel lobby and stepped outside, where a liveried Tigrammath doorman hailed us an autocab.
“Where are you staying?” I asked my friend after helping him into the vehicle.
“The Grand Pyridian.”
That made logistics easier. I had my phone contact the hotel to arrange for a wheelchair. One of the doormen helped me get Martin into the chair when we arrived and I rolled my friend to the elevator and up to his junior suite on the thirty-ninth floor of the four-sided tower. Once inside, I turned on the hot water and started filling the oversized spa tub. I was glad there were grab bars for the convenience of guests getting in and out.
Xenotech What Happens: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 3) Page 15