I assumed only the management computer would monitor my data accesses for possible sales potential, but for the sake of anyone who might be able to hack whatever passed as hard encryption here and see what I'd done, I spent the first few minutes browsing local news. I followed an obviously purchased marketing puff piece on a local craftswoman through a series of ads to an auction for handmade boxes. I placed a low bid conditional on delivery tonight to this restaurant and a chance to speak to the artist about personalizing its outside with some engravings. I left the bid window open.
The data holo glided onto the wall to my right as a section of the table slid aside and my fish platter arrived—on an actual white platter. As the menu had promised, the slab of dark red fish was huge. A mountain of fried objects of different shapes and sizes surrounded it on three sides.
I cut a small piece of the fish and chewed it. The tender meat delivered a rich, strong taste. I sampled a few of the fried bits, and they proved to be a mixture of vegetables, starches, and small pieces of a white fish. They didn't go particularly well with the main attraction, but they were filling and I was starving, so I gobbled half of them and all of the surprisingly good red fish before I took a break.
The auction owner had responded to my conditional bid with a statement that he was interested in accommodating my request but had to consider what price to charge.
Good.
Now, I just had to wait.
I chewed a thumb-sized fried mystery vegetable and surveyed the interior. My watchers were still checking me out from time to time, but they were also eating, drinking, and having more of a good time at their two-person table than they should have permitted themselves. They were spending so much time focusing on each other that I could have slipped out of the booth and had as much as a minute's head start on them. Amateurs; no wonder Park was so interested in hiring me.
"I would have expected someplace a bit higher on the culinary ladder," Lobo said over the machine frequency.
I smiled in the darkness of the booth. "Took you a while," I said, using the same frequency. I wouldn't talk audibly; no point in giving the booth a chance to report on a particularly lonely guest.
"Excuse me?" he said. "I had to scan the location, plot a course low enough to let me drop the field-comm unit but high enough not to attract attention, and then shoot the thing into the ground in the narrow stretch of grass in the back of that lovely establishment you're visiting."
"Fine, fine," I said. "How long do we have?"
"It depends on how paranoid the owners are," he said. "I'm using the unit to amplify and relay every data stream coming out of that place, as well as a few I'm injecting, so nothing should point to you. I'm also encrypting every part of the flow except the bits between you and the comm, so unless they think to monitor all the machine frequency chatter—and there's a ton of it, those things never shut up—you should be safe."
Even so, on the off chance that some security freak decided to plow through all the machine talk, there was no point in making our conversation any easier to follow than we could avoid. "I'm where you'd expect me to be, left side, and I'd appreciate a visitor," I said, "an accidental one who looks nothing like herself, appears to want to spend only an hour with me, has a safe room, and isn't at all like my current two remote companions."
"In progress," he said.
"I'll be changing living arrangements for the next three days."
"Understood."
"Anything of note in your world?" I said.
"Only a profound desire for a roommate who talks less," he said.
"I understand," I said. "I'm out for now, but trash it only when I leave or you have to."
"Of course," he said, "or if someone tries to remove it. If that happens, it takes care of itself."
"Oh yeah," I said. "If I scream for help, come get me, and come hot."
"As if I wouldn't," he said, "but I'll never be so lucky. Out."
I pushed away the plate and had the table clear it. I took a few sips of the tart fruit juice and wondered both how long it would take Matahi to get here and what she would look like when she arrived. I hoped she could muster enough of a disguise that no one would recognize her.
"May I get you anything else tonight?" the holo waitress said. "Perhaps a full stomach has changed your outlook on love."
"Yes to the first question," I said, "and my stomach isn't full. Show me your dessert options."
The dishes that floated in miniature in front of me made me thankful that the nanomachines dispatched all the food I didn't need and thus stopped me from ever gaining weight, because every single one was a calorie bomb. I chose a slab of chocolate cake slathered in a foamy white whipped topping and a glass of water.
It arrived less than two minutes later, probably warmed from the freezer as it moved along the conveyor chutes to my table. I took a bite and nodded to myself; it wasn't bad, somewhere between the fried chunks and the fish in quality, a little better than I'd expected from this place. I ate slowly, chewing each bite completely and pausing between them to sip my water and browse other, real auction sites.
I was down to the last two bites when a blond woman almost my height leaned against the entrance to my booth. Her straight hair fell to the top of her butt. A purple, floor-length, latex dress clung to her body and revealed wide hips and unnaturally large breasts. Mirrorshade contacts covered her eyes.
"Mind if I join you?" she said in a very high but smooth voice.
"Waitress," I said. The holo server appeared. "I didn't ask for this service."
"Nor did we supply it," the holo said.
"What," the blonde said, her voice dropping and suddenly recognizable as Matahi's, "you don't like the look?"
Chapter 43
I stared at the woman standing next to me. If I worked hard at it, I could see Matahi's face under the make-up and lenses and hair, but how she'd managed to change her body so dramatically was beyond me.
"Non-house professional companions must pay a facilities usage fee," the server said, "or face immediate ejection."
"Of course," Matahi said, her voice high again. She held up her hands in surrender. "So, buddy, are you going to pay my tab and buy me a drink, or should I find another friend?"
I looked away from Matahi to collect myself. "Why not?" I said, more for the house's benefit than anything else. I faced the holo. "Please add her usage fee to my bill, bring us two more glasses of this juice, and tell me: What's the cost for a little privacy?"
"Private rooms are available upstairs for a variety of rates," the holo said. "Would you like to see the options?"
I waved my hands and said, "No, no. I'm not ready for that kind of privacy. I'd just like to keep our conversation here to ourselves."
The waitress disappeared. In her place, a lawyer straight from a holo show but with the same face as the waitress—cut-rate software at work—addressed me. "Turning off all house data gathering and providing a bonded booth privacy guarantee—with the customary Rainbow's End limitation of liability, of course—is available for a modest fee. We naturally accept no responsibility for the behavior of other patrons."
"Of course," I said. "Please proceed on that front, get us our drinks, and bill me."
I got out my wallet and watched the charge appear. I thumbed approval.
"After this message," the lawyer said, "you will, of course, have to find a human server to place additional orders."
"Of course," I said. "Now, privacy, please."
"Our pleasure," she said. The two glasses of juice slid up from the table's center, the table closed, and the holo vanished.
Matahi slid into the booth opposite me. She stopped in the center of the seat.
I waved her to her right, into the shadows; I wanted her all the way to the wall against which I also sat.
She didn't move. "I take it you didn't recognize me," she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper but definitely her own. "I'm not going to hide any deeper in the darkness, and you sh
ouldn't, either. Slide to the center, because that's where you would move if I were what I appear to be."
"Two people are watching me," I whispered.
"Yeah," she said, "the couple at the two-top thirty degrees off the outer edge of this booth and about six meters away."
"They're that obvious?" I said. "Even to you?"
She nodded.
"So why should I make it easy for them to watch me?"
"So they can see me seduce you into paying for the next hour or two of my time."
"Fine," I said. I slid to the middle of the booth. I could now clearly see my watchers, so they had a good line of sight on me.
Something brushed up my leg and settled against my crotch. It was hard and sharp. I glanced down. It was a spiked heel over ten centimeters high. I hadn't noticed it before because the dress fell all the way to the floor when she was standing.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"What you should expect me to be doing," she said. Her foot rubbed against me. "Have you looked at me? No one dressed like this is going to take the slow shuttle to love town." She leaned back, flipped her hair, crossed her arms under her breasts, and said, "This is strictly an express-ticket outfit."
"Is this part of what you normally do?" I said. I knew it was a mistake the moment I said it, but her comfort in her role had puzzled me.
Her eyes narrowed, and she leaned across the table as far as she could. Her foot kept rubbing my crotch. "This has as much to do with my normal behavior as leaving an egg in the sun to get warm has to do with being a great chef." She paused until I met her gaze. "As you should know."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I spoke without thinking. I didn't mean to upset you, and I should know better. I just can't get over the differences in your look and your behavior."
"You mandated that I wear a disguise. I agree that neither of us can afford for anyone to recognize me. You wanted to talk tonight. This outfit guarantees that no one will look real closely at my face, and even if someone studies the video captures they're unlikely to spot me under this hair, these lenses, and all the make-up." She leaned back and relaxed; her foot never stopped rubbing me. "Besides," she chuckled and then said, "it's pretty clear this outfit isn't hurting your interest."
I pushed her foot down and looked away. "I can't control everything."
"But you wish you could," she said. "You really do."
How did this keep happening to me? I needed to get back on turf I understood. "Can we focus on the problems at hand?" I said.
"Sure." She smiled. "What can I do for you?"
"I need a place to sleep tonight, and I need to make sure those watchers see me leave with a woman. I messed up and told one of the trainers that I was staying here because of a woman."
Her look grew more intense as she said, "Isn't that more or less true? I mean, you're working with Suli and trying to save her child."
There we went again! If only we were negotiating, I would understand how to proceed. This, though, was either a form of negotiation I'd never experienced or something else I couldn't recognize. I can never grow old with a woman, and I cannot tell anyone my secret, so for my entire life I've stayed as far from romantic relationships as I could manage. It's the only safe choice, but at times, like this one, it leaves me ill-prepared for dealing with women.
"If I don't spend tonight with a woman," I said, "I risk losing that job. If I lose the job, I also lose the best chance we've had so far of accomplishing the goal."
"Do you understand," she said, "that I'm not dressed for the part of the woman you come home to? Looking like this, I'm the woman you go out for."
"Yes," I said, "but I can work with that. Park—the trainer—already believes I was lying to him, but he doesn't quite know how. While I'm with you, he'll receive a report on my activities and then dig out the truth."
"If you say so," she said, "though with a little warning I could have dressed for the other role."
"I don't want you dressed like a permanent partner, and I don't want to go to some house with you. If I do that, your risk will increase, because you'll become another leverage point they could use on me. This approach is just fine."
"So let me see if I have this right," she said. "You had me dress up like the kind of companion who frequents this place just to protect me?"
"You make it sound like a bad thing," I said, "but, yes, that's right."
She chuckled again. "Well, that's a first." She crossed her arms under her breasts again and winked at me. "So, what would you like to do with me now?"
"Nothing," I said, "except go to your room at the SleepSafe."
She smiled. "I thought you'd never ask."
Chapter 44
I'd overnighted in a SleepSafe on many occasions on many worlds, but I'd always opted for the most barebones room available. When I was the only occupant and seeking safety for a day or two, I saw no point in wasting money on amenities I wouldn't stay long enough to enjoy. I'd told Matahi to get a suite so I could have privacy, a room of my own.
I had no idea how nice the suites were.
Like all SleepSafe rooms, it provided a full complement of security displays—scans of every aspect of the perimeter, with both visual light and IR options, the ability to zoom on command, and so on—but here they were available in large holos that you could summon in every room. (In the bottom-rung singles I'd always rented, the security feeds appeared in a single large display on the wall opposite the bed.) Matahi and I had stopped to register me on the way in, so I was now an approved caller for her. I hadn't even known you could register visitors, because I never had any.
I loved this place's security.
"This is great!" I said to Matahi.
"You have no idea. The bed linens—"
I didn't mean to cut her off, but even the quality of the displays was better than the ones I'd experienced. "You can get every external angle in any room you want! I love this."
"The master bath is extraordinary," she said.
I walked back and forth in front of the holo in the smaller bedroom, the one Matahi had indicated was mine. "And there they are." I pointed at a feed from a front-side camera; my watchers from The Rainbow's End stood on the opposite corner and did a poor job of pretending to kiss each other. "Do you see any others? I can't believe these two think they're fooling anybody."
"The spa amenities are also quite lovely," she said. "I have to admit it: Though I wasn't pleased at the thought of staying in a hotel whose main emphasis is security, the SleepSafe folks know how to outfit a suite."
I stared at all the camera feeds again, working my way through them one by one, surveying the entire exterior. No one else was stationary. No one appeared to be watching us. "They really must not have a very strong team," I said, "or they wouldn't send these two losers. Fortunately for us, they did, so we're good for now."
"The master bed is amazingly comfortable," she said.
I wiped my hand across the holo, and it disappeared. I turned to face Matahi. "Yeah, we're safe."
"Have you even listened to anything I said?" She stood with her hands on her hips, her displeasure clear. "I'm going to take a shower!"
She stomped into the bathroom. The door snicked shut behind her.
"What did I do this time?" I said.
I shook my head, went into my room, and sat on the bed as the door closed behind me. I was doing my job, making sure we were safe. How could that be wrong?
I got up. I couldn't focus on Matahi now. She was distracting me. I had to talk to Lobo, update Pri, and get some sleep.
The field comm I'd given Matahi sat in the exact center of the top of the dresser, as if it were an alien artifact she was afraid to handle. Nothing was within a meter of it. I grabbed it, pulled a chair in front of the room's desk, and put the comm on the desk. I engaged the desk, then opened the comm and told it to link to the desk's data stream. The comm would use the external connections of the desk to send a video stream of the room's ceiling to a sat relay Lob
o had set up. The sat would respond with footage of whatever section of Heaven was below it at the time. Woven within each video would be a lower-res, highly encrypted secondary data thread: my communications with Lobo. Anyone who cared enough to look could detect easily that we were hiding our real data, but cracking the encryption would, Lobo assured me, take more days than we were likely to be on Heaven for anything without his level of computing power. SleepSafe hotels treated your data as securely as they housed you, but I still felt a lot more comfortable communicating with Lobo when we provided our own security.
I started the comm session.
A second later, an array of sandwiches and drinks appeared above the comm, and Lobo's voice filled the silence. "May I take your order?" he said.
"What the hell?" I said. "It's Jon, I'm tired, I'm alone, and I'm calling from the SleepSafe."
The food images disappeared.
"One can never be too careful," he said, "as I'm sure you would agree."
"You know it's the comm from its protocol stream," I said, "and you've already matched my voiceprint."
"You might have been under coercion," he said.
"Yeah, right."
"And, you have to admit it: It was pretty funny."
Maybe at another time I would have laughed, but right then I was frustrated with Matahi, exhausted and ready to rest, so I ignored his comment. "I'm in."
"As if you'd fail," Lobo said.
"One of the two training exercises was in a huge hangar. If I can find a way to mark it for you, when the time comes that I need you to fly in hot, you should be able to blow its top and get me."
"When we reach that point," he said, "I hope you plan to head straight off this world."
"We won't have a choice," I said. "Unless I get lucky and can smuggle out Wei, we're going to make a lot of noise extracting him. So, you might as well plot the fastest way to the jump gate."
"As if I didn't do that the moment we started on this mission," he said. "What else do you need?"
"Are you close enough to be able to monitor the streets around me without anyone noticing you?"
Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 29