Maybe he can finally begin to be sure, for good, about the emotions that are emerging inside him. Maybe he can be sure of his instincts as a spy, a killer, a man of secrets.
Maybe he can trap this “woman.”
Yes, his deepest intuition tells him. You can trap this “woman.”
And trap her he does. At the very moment when his jaws snap shut on her—like the bee caught in the juices that will devour her despite how much she wants to devour them—he understands the nature of the trap he has set.
She explains that androids like her are manufactured in orbit, but their use there is very regulated. She was manufactured in a weightless embryocell but, unlike androids created for the space industry, she was soon sent to Earth, where, for twelve years (the maximum time allowed by new UHU ethics laws for sexed androids) she worked for a Chinese escort company that had custom-ordered her from Venux Corp. For the last two or three years, she has worked solo.
She’s lying, Plotkin tells himself, while listening with an outward air of interest. She’s lying; she isn’t a prostitute anymore. She’s been operated on; her sexual instruction programs have been erased. They even cut her neural circuits and took out her specialized microcomponents.
She isn’t a whore anymore. She can never be one again. She’s lying to him. Why?
“With my resume,” she is saying, “I’ll probably never have the chance to get my hands on a Golden Track, even if I do have the money. I’m not even on any of the waiting lists.”
Okay, okay, Plotkin says to himself. So she isn’t here to go to the Ring, and she isn’t here to be a hooker.
Then why?
His mind whirling, his intuition crackling like an electric spark at this android who watches him in silence while drinking her coffee, Plotkin changes the subject. It is a verbal move of desperation as he grasps for the time he needs to deal with the adrenaline coursing through him.
“Can you drink alcohol?”
Of course she can; he has known that since his night with the other android on the strip—but he didn’t really ask the question hoping for an answer, just to gain some time.
“Yes,” she says, chuckling lightly. “I’m a Venux. We’re almost human. Really.”
He smiles. The trap closes again, slowly. Impressions as precise and hard as knives assail him.
She isn’t here to go to the Ring. She isn’t here to be a whore.
Then what is she here to do? And how the hell is she living, anyway?
Knives, hard and hot, in his head.
The “girl” is, he must admit, very pretty. Long brown hair, firm body, oval face, fine, slightly upturned nose, violet eyes, and an astonishingly natural mouth—more natural than most of the puffed-up orifices on “authentic” women. The bionic engineers at Venux are incontestable masters of the feminine aesthetic; their reputation is impeccable. Next to her, any other make of android, even the new ones like Vega 2501, looks like a Japanese experimental biped from the turn of the century.
Who are you, SS-Nova 280?
Who are you, made-in-space Sexydoll?
Half an hour of observation, barely half an hour of conversation, plus everything he already knows—and these are the hard, hot knives penetrating his cortex.
An enigma. He is face-to-face with an enigma. His “trap” has caught a mystery he doesn’t understand.
Nakashima/Hawkwind, the dealer: a problem.
The brother-sister duo in Capsule 081: potentially dangerous.
The android-technician from space: a pigeon.
But Nova 280: an enigma. And this enigma is still completely impenetrable as he goes back to his room.
The trap, it seems, is closing on him.
> MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
If such a thing as chance existed, Plotkin would never have come to Grand Junction.
If such a thing as chance existed, he would not be staying at the Hotel Laika.
If such a thing as chance existed, the conversation wouldn’t have ended at the same time as the blizzard.
If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t have taken the elevator back to his floor at precisely twelve o’clock noon.
If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t have met the manager as he left the nacelle, while the fat man was carefully closing the magnetic door of the service staircase leading to the loft in the antiradiation protection dome.
If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t be questioning the manager about his presence here now, in such a deliberately casual way:
“Have you been fixing the cracks in the dome?”
The man gives him a measuring look and slings a cloned-leather bag over his shoulder with a curt movement. “What cracks? You should mind your own business. If there were cracks, the security systems would raise the alarm about it soon enough.”
Nearly nauseated by such blatant dishonesty, Plotkin gazes back at the bloated toad. Sure, he says to himself, unless you regularly fuck with the sensors, which is exactly what you were just doing here. “Ah—excuse me,” he says almost humbly. “It’s just that I have a pocket scanner that detected a few anomalies in your dome.”
The man stares him down, a very unpleasant look in his baleful eyes.
“Is that so? Well, I’ve done a little research of my own, and that insurance company of yours is a piece of shit. Don’t try to stick your nose in my business. You’ve got no right.”
“I just wanted to help, that’s all. Don’t get excited,” Plotkin retorts, shouldering his way past the man and going toward his room.
The manager smirks in a way that completely lacks mirth. “Don’t try to help—it’s a good way to get yourself in trouble. I came to repair the satellite antenna; the fucking blizzard damaged it. That’s all. Have a good day, Mr. Plotkin.”
The man is swallowed up by the nacelle as Plotkin slides his magnetic keycard in the lock of his capsule door.
Liar.
Cheat.
Snitch.
Squealer.
Informer.
Bastard.
Prick.
Nothing you say is true. Nothing about you is real. You are just you, in all your horror. You make me want to puke, Plotkin thinks, as he goes into his room.
Seated at his desk, he orders green tea and vitamin-enhanced medibiscuits to be delivered by the room-service robots. He is beginning to get a sense of the overall plan, an outline of the plot of this play, in which the final act will end with the Death of the Mayor of This City.
El señor Metatron chooses that moment to make his appearance, blaring with light like an ultraviolet flame smack in the center of the room. “There are anomalies under the dome. A lot more of them than we thought,” he says.
“What kind of anomalies?”
“I’ll show the sequences registered on the hotel’s central disk—and what I’ve been able to see in the internal surveillance camera network. Or maybe I should say what I haven’t been able to see.”
“Okay. What do you mean?”
“It’s very repetitive and boring, actually. Before I explain, I should tell you a couple of things. One, the manager sometimes goes inside the dome, often at night. He uses the secure service staircase. Two, the local network of cameras and sensors that are supposed to be monitoring this part of the hotel has been fucked with, to the point that whole parts of the dome and its loft are no longer visible.”
Plotkin nods. That prick of a manager, that dirty snitch, is regularly sabotaging the sensors and cameras using some pirated technology so he isn’t detected by the hotel’s AI.
“But why?” asks his guardian angel. “For what reason?”
Plotkin chuckles at the candor that even these highly sophisticated neuroquantum machines use on occasion. “For the only reason anyone does anything here. Capital. Scratch. Bones. Scrilla. Money.”
Now it is el señor Metatron’s turn to laugh at such typically human shortsightedness.
“No, you’re wrong. First of all, in Grand Junction, money,
as you call it, is only an accessory. What counts is the Golden Track. Error number two: no one would risk getting caught by the Laika’s owner and being fired by UManHome just to save a couple of measly dollars. Especially in a hotel where, remember, he’s just a lowly manager.”
Plotkin is ready to argue. “He wants to scam the insurance company. He must have something shady up his sleeve.”
It is nearly impossible to describe the laugh of a digital guardian angel. Something like the whirring of radiation nearing critical mass, maybe.
“He’s scheming at something, Plotkin, but it has nothing to do with insurance.”
“Then what?”
“I have no idea. That’s why he sabotaged the entire internal surveillance network of the dome. So nobody can figure out what he’s up to. At least I can’t do it with the electro-optic resources I have.”
Plotkin doesn’t say anything. He retrieves the orange plate room service has just deposited in the wall slot, pours himself a cup of tea, and nibbles a biscuit reflectively.
Then he asks his guardian angel to show him the images contained on the hotel’s disk.
“If I understand correctly, only a human with the magnetic key to the service staircase can really know what’s going on up there.”
El señor Metatron doesn’t answer. He hovers like a shimmering fountain of light above the center of the bed. His silence is enough to swallow up the whole world.
Undoubtedly, Clovis Drummond is hiding tons of illegal products in the gables of the dome. He takes delivery of them at night, stores them temporarily in his private office, then hides them in the most inaccessible part of the hotel.
No…that can’t be it. According to the images on the hotel disk, he always goes upstairs with very little in his hands, sometimes nothing at all, and rarely even the small faux-leather backpack. Usually he takes the elevator to the tenth floor and goes directly to the highest section of the service staircase.
Watching the sequences from beyond the secure service staircase proves difficult; the images are blurry, since the cameras up there are only in use half of the time—often they are pointed aimlessly or mechanically blocked by some procedure or another. El señor Metatron detects the presence of a nanovirus in the sensor system, which has prevented the anomaly from being reported to the AI.
If the manager isn’t hiding marijuana, or illegal cigarettes, or black-market neurotoys, what is he doing under the dome two or three times every week? Apparently there is now a sixth name to add to the list of “suspicious” residents in the hotel.
The next forty-eight hours are filled with intense planning.
First, they need to create a neuroencrypted zone that will continuously fool the private surveillance camera. El señor Metatron will execute a simulation routine each time Plotkin works on his plan.
The latter is taking form, in all senses of the world. Plotkin has food containing legal amphetamines delivered to his room and spends two days and nights at the console, configuring a three-dimensional model of the city: each of its neighborhoods, particularly Korolev Plaza, the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium building on Korolev-1, and all the surrounding buildings, each one corresponding to one of the specialized branches of the organization that manages the county and its resources. Thanks to the data secretly gathered by el señor Metatron, he is able to create an animated statistical reconstruction in real time of human movement in the city—in particular, the specific movements of the members of the Consortium.
Including those of Mr. Blackburn, the mayor of the city.
The mayor he has come to kill.
Any time, any day, any type of meeting or movement or security procedure—he now knows the real city well enough to be able to duplicate them easily in the false one. He knows the territory well enough to make a map of it.
And destroy it.
Only kill when it’s a sure shot, says an Order maxim that comes out of nowhere to mingle with the curious mixture of English, Russian, and Argentine memories that are whirling at any given time in his brain.
Only kill when it’s a sure shot. That means that a true professional assassin does not have the right to make a mistake. To kill properly, you must succeed with the first blow. The only blow.
It must be conducted like the launch of an orbital rocket. There is a takeoff window, a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. There are hundreds of security measures to implement. Everything must be studied to the tiniest detail, like the bolts in a shuttle. No right to error. No glitches.
A priori, there are very few holes in the security system surrounding Mr. Blackburn. He has to admit it. There really aren’t any at all—certainly none he can exploit. On this point, el señor Metatron and he are in complete agreement.
That is why they pick October 4, the date of the Sputnik Centennial and Grand Junction’s huge Starnival.
On that day, there will be a hole.
On that day, Blackburn and all the members of the Consortium will be present on a code-red-protected panoramic dais to watch the takeoff of a large Brazilian rocket and a fairly new jumbo Chinese capsule carrying twelve occupants. They will be just above the control center buildings, and just below Centaur City.
But to get to this high-security area, they must cross a yellow zone alongside Stardust Alley. It will take them a few minutes.
For those few minutes, they will be vulnerable.
Those few minutes will be his takeoff window.
It appears that his assassin’s intuition, despite his faulty memory, is to be trusted. The instruction neuroprogram, it seems, is useless except for maintaining a few basic routines.
It seems to him that everything is pointing to this decision; everything is in perfect alignment toward this plan: the Hotel Laika, from where he overlooks the eastern part of the cosmodrome, the access path to Platform 3 and the fallow lands that lie below Monolith North. The area is unobstructed enough that he can see to the western hills, to Centaur City and the control center, and all the way to the observation gallery the Consortium bigwigs are having built. He can see the bustle of construction-site activity already.
El señor Metatron provides him with detailed plans of the gallery, with its Securimax™ windows that can deflect 20 mm light-uranium bullets and its firebrick roof that can resist temperatures up to 1,000 degrees centigrade.
The gallery itself will be untouchable. Besides, he is only supposed to kill Blackburn. Maybe his escorts, but not all the members of the Consortium. It is even probable that one of them actually ordered the assassination.
The gallery will be untouchable, but there is the small “yellow” portion of the route, below Centaur City.
There is also the fact that Blackburn will cross it in an armored presidential Lincoln that belonged to the White House in the 1970s.
The 1970s!
This is the ransom for glory; the ransom for being king of Grand Junction—Grand Junction, where the entire twentieth century is trying to exist in a condensed form, postmortem, to avoid being lost altogether. Blackburn will be riding in an armored Lincoln from the 1970s. With a few modifications, no doubt, but in the yellow zone it will not be enough.
Plotkin asks the console to display a few scenarios in the model city. The virtual human masses obligingly move in their various chaotic ways among the replicated towers. Black cars whose doors bear the official emblem of the independent Mohawk territory drive along the electronic streets, while el señor Metatron reproduces, thanks to information gleaned from the local initiative union, the various spectacles and street parades planned for October 4.
The cars come together every time toward the yellow zone.
There is an error in their security system.
There is, it turns out, a very good-size takeoff window.
He will have at least thirty seconds to Kill the Mayor of This City.
He will need something like an Oerlikon electromag rocket launcher, with its high-speed missiles that fly at five thousand meters per second.
The projectile should not be detected by the city’s urban surveillance systems as it rockets toward the reduced-security zone, not at five kilometers per second. At that speed, and thanks to the special chemical components contained in its polymetallic alloys, the 13 mm minirocket will be in a state of superfusion and will be literally enveloped in plasma. Upon impact, a fireball equivalent to the explosion of a propane tank will erupt instantaneously. According to the initiative union’s data, the yellow zone in question, bordering the cosmodrome’s west fences, will be less populated than the city’s large arteries or Stardust Alley, but there will be people there who have come from Centaur City and Novapolis.
Some collateral damage, though, will only reinforce the terrorist-attack theory.
He will blow up Blackburn’s presidential Lincoln, and it will take part of his city with it.
He falls asleep in the morning just after dawn, while the model endlessly replays the trajectory of the digital rocket above the city’s towers, until the moment when the ball of fire caps off the smoky line it traces for a brief instant in the replica’s simulated sky. Then, during the night that follows, when he finally awakes from his long diurnal sleep and unfolds the collapsible bathroom to take a shower with an expensive extra ration of water, el señor Metatron appears in a corner of the room.
“Mr. Drummond has just graced us with his little nocturnal visit under the dome,” he says.
> UNDER THE CARBON SKY
There, too, they have only one takeoff window. For just a second or two, Drummond’s personal magnetic key will be inserted into the reader in the service staircase door. In that brief span of time, the data will be read, sent to an AI microcircuit, verified by an iterative component, then retransmitted with a positive access code to its sender. It will be el señor Metatron’s opportunity to connect to the circuit, steal the card’s code, and copy it onto Plotkin’s keycard.
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