“Sorry,” Nafti said again.
He stepped out of the suit and left it in a pile near the navigation controls.
“I need you to get back to work,” Yu said.
“Can I go to my quarters first? I’d like to change.”
And he’d probably shower and linger, making sure he hadn’t contracted anything from the flawed suit.
“No,” Yu said. “Get to the medical lab.”
“Why? They’re diagnosing her. She should be there for a while.”
“She should,” Yu said, “and so far as I can tell, she still is.”
“What do you mean so far as you can tell?”
“The lab isolated itself about fifteen minutes ago.”
“What does that mean, isolated itself?”
“Maybe the three medical programs we just bought overloaded the system. That’s what I hope it means.”
“You think she could’ve done something.”
“I doubt it,” Yu said.
Nafti squared his shoulders. He looked reluctant to leave.
“When you’re there,” Yu said, “you can have the medical system make sure you’re healthy, okay?”
Nafti brightened. “Okay.”
He kicked the suit aside and left the bridge.
Yu summoned one of the cleaning ʼbots, and gave it orders to pick up the suit and send it through the ship’s disintegration unit.
Then he tried the security monitor again—and waited.
Twenty-five
The first visitor was a comforter. Talia didn’t even let her in. Talia could see the comforter on the holopanel in front of the door, a doughy woman in flowing clothes who looked like a big pillow. The last thing Talia wanted was to talk to someone like her.
So Talia assured the woman that she was fine and wanted to be alone and thanked her and hoped she would go away, which she eventually did.
And Talia was glad.
Until she realized she had nothing to do for the next two hours. Oh, she looked at the various links and entertainment offerings, and while they were broad, they weren’t as broad as the ones her mom had invested in at home. Then Talia looked at the database, which was tiny, even compared to the one at school, and besides, no one had brought her homework yet.
Not that she had ever looked forward to doing her homework, but on this day, it would distract her. She wouldn’t have to think about the door or being trapped in her own closet or the way House had talked to her or the Recovery Man or Mom…
Talia flopped on the couch. It wasn’t as soft as the one at home. It was cheap and felt wobbly and the cushions were thin. So she was headed to the bedroom to try the bed when someone knocked on the door.
The knock all by itself made her jump. She suspected everything would make her jump for a while. Then she remembered that this place had more security than she’d ever seen, so whoever it was had some kind of approval, but still, she didn’t want to answer the door.
And if it were that comforter, then Talia would tell the woman exactly what she thought of comforters, which wasn’t good.
Even though she was wondering if she should have changed her mind already. Maybe talking to the comforter would have been entertaining.
Talia decided to treat this low-rent system like House. “Who’s at the door?”
No one answered her. The low-rent system didn’t have audio capabilities or it wasn’t set up to respond to her voice, or maybe a computer had to be linked to have some kind of AI capacity.
She didn’t know that, and she should, given all the other stuff she did know.
Maybe she’d take this low-rent system apart after whoever was at the door left, and then she’d see what she could make the low-rent system do. That would surprise everyone.
The knock came again and Talia jumped again. Then she grimaced. She hated feeling on edge like this. So she went to the door itself.
“Who’s there?”
“My name is Moira Aptheker. I’m your representative.”
Detective Zagrando must have had second thoughts. He got her a lawyer. Talia felt so relieved, tears threatened.
She pulled the door open.
The woman who stood there was tiny. She wore a gold lamé suit with matching shoes, a black blouse, and black jewelry. The entire outfit set off her black hair and weirdly gold skin. She was human, though. Her dark eyes looked unretouched and really cold.
She stuck out her hand. “Moira Aptheker.”
“You said that.” Talia didn’t stick her hand out or move away from the door or do anything to put this woman at ease. She automatically didn’t trust something about her. “You’re my lawyer?”
“I said I’m your representative. May I come in?”
“You’re fine there,” Talia said.
“Our conversation needs to be private. We cannot have privacy with an open door and a hallway.”
“We cannot have a conversation if you want to treat me like I’m six,” Talia said. “In fact, if you’re not my lawyer, I don’t want to talk to you. I didn’t hire any other kind of representative.”
“I represent your mother,” Moira Aptheker said, “which means I also represent you.”
Talia frowned. But she wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe this was something in case the lawyer didn’t show up. “What did my mother want you to do?”
“We look after people in trouble,” Moira Aptheker said. “May I come in?”
Talia didn’t know. She was making too many decisions today. She was tired and lonely and scared, and she’d never heard of this woman and she’d rather talk in the hall.
“No,” Talia said. “We can talk here.”
“Talia, child, you don’t understand—”
“Maybe you don’t understand,” Talia said. “I got attacked in my home this afternoon. I’m not letting some stranger in. And I’m not your child. Go away.”
She slammed the door closed. She was shaking. The tears were really close, and if they came, she’d be so mad at herself. She went to the crummy couch and fell on it, landing so hard she hurt her butt.
“Talia.” The knocking came again. “Talia, you can’t ignore me. If you do, the police won’t help you, and even if they find your mother, she won’t be able to get back to Valhalla Basin.”
Talia brought her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Then she started to rock.
“Talia. Talia! Let me in.”
Detective Zagrando said there was a way to contact him. A button or a screen that went directly to his office.
Talia wiped her eyes. She was shaking really bad.
The woman was pounding even harder. The whole door was banging.
Talia grabbed a chair and pushed it against the door, but it didn’t look like it would do anything, so she moved the chair and put a low table there. If this woman broke in, then she’d trip over the table, and maybe she would hurt herself.
Except that she was tiny. She was too tiny to trip on anything.
“Talia. I can get the police to open this. You won’t like the result.”
Talia scanned the room for a button or whatever it was that Detective Zagrando told her about. Then she went into the bedroom. The pounding was quieter here.
The button was really a flat panel on the wall next to the bed. The panel actually had a 2-D picture of Detective Zagrando that would fade and then get replaced by a 2-D picture of Detective Bozeman.
Talia put her hand on the screen. It went dark, and she started shaking.
Maybe she broke it. Maybe she just opened the stupid front door. She couldn’t hear that Moira Aptheker pounding any more.
Then Detective Zagrando’s face appeared. Only it was his real face, with the bags under the eyes, and the weird blotchy skin near his nose.
“Talia? Is everything all right?”
It was pretty obvious that he could see her. She blinked really hard, but that only made one of the tears fall. She wiped at it, wishing it didn’t exist.
“There’s a scary
woman here.”
“In the complex?” He sounded surprised.
“She says she’s my representative.”
“Did you hire a lawyer?”
“No,” Talia said. “And she says she’s not my lawyer, she’s my representative, but she wouldn’t tell me what that is.”
“Is she inside the apartment?”
“I wouldn’t let her in.”
“Good for you, Talia. I’ll be right there.”
“She’s pounding on the door. I think she’s going to get in.”
“I’ll take care of it. You’ll be all right.” Then his image faded.
Talia didn’t think she was going to be all right. That woman was pounding out there and the door was rattling and this place wasn’t half as safe as her house and some guy broke into her house and hurt her and stole her mother.
Talia pushed the bedroom door closed, then leaned on it, and hoped Detective Zagrando would hurry.
Twenty-six
Celestine Gonzalez stood in a registration line in Valhalla Basin’s main Port. She clutched her bag to her side and tried to remain patient.
Martin Oberholst had gone right through. People he didn’t know had greeted him by name. The old man looked quite spry after his nap and the chewing out he’d given her. As he went around the barriers, he waved at her and signaled that he’d met her on the other side.
Yeah, if they made it to the same other side. Right now, she was the one in hell.
Gonzalez shook her head slightly. She hated having her religious upbringing surface. Although she found, as she got older, that she agreed more and more with some of the precepts her Christian parents had taught her: there had to be an afterlife, and it had to be divided between the goods and the bads.
The problem came in the definitions. Some bad was easy—murderers, for example—but what about people who accidentally harmed someone else? What about people who made entire careers out of protecting people who had deliberately harmed someone else?
She shuddered. It had to be the name of this place that had her thinking of hell. Valhalla was, in Norse mythology, the great hall where heroes killed in battle spent the afterlife. She used to torture her parents with visions of other cultures’ afterlives. When she learned that her parents didn’t believe any alien had a soul, she returned to human mythology, and tried to show her parents where their beliefs came from.
That hadn’t worked, any more than their indoctrinating her had worked.
If she truly believed what they believed, she wouldn’t be a lawyer. But she was enough of her parents’ daughter to feel guilty about the way she’d treated that child. She didn’t need Oberholst to yell at her for that. She was doing enough browbeating herself.
The line moved forward incrementally. It curved around a pillar and vanished through a door. Supposedly, she had to state her name and purpose, show identification, and get some kind of pass that would allow her to travel in the city.
But, Oberholst had told her, she had to ask for a lawyer when she got inside. She thought that would make her seem like a criminal, but he assured her it would get her through the process faster.
She needed a temporary license to practice in Valhalla Basin, and requesting a lawyer now was the only way to do so.
“Celestine Gonzalez?” A man wearing a gray suit with white piping stopped beside her. His shoes, white with gray stripes, matched perfectly. He looked like some kind of entertainer.
She hadn’t identified herself yet. She hadn’t asked for anything yet. The authorities were probably taking readings off each person’s links. She’d heard that links gave off some kind of signal even when they were shut down—which hers were, as per the signage that floated around every single doorway.
“Yes?” she said.
“You are to come with me.”
He didn’t look official. He seemed a bit too healthy to be working in here. Everyone else, in their little blue uniforms, looked like they hadn’t exercised in years—and had certainly never heard of fitness enhancers.
“And who are you?”
“I’m Tejumola Kazin. Your boss sent me. He’s getting tired of waiting.”
He didn’t name her boss. He didn’t mention what sort of business she was in. He didn’t look like someone who should even be contacting her.
“I’ll stay here, thanks,” she said.
“You stay there, you stay there for the next twelve hours. By then, that kid you’re supposed to help could be anywhere. You want that?”
Now he sounded like someone who had some connections.
“Who did you say you were?” she asked.
“I told you. I’m Tejumola—”
“I got your name. What do you do?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention that? I’m an immigration lawyer.”
“I like the Moon, thanks. I’m just visiting Valhalla Basin.”
“But,” he said as he moved closer to her, “you want to do some work here over the next few days, right?”
He hadn’t lowered his voice. People around her were staring. But the authorities hadn’t moved him, so either they were used to him or solicitors were allowed to solicit in this section of the Port.
That wouldn’t surprise her, given the number of ads she’d had to suffer through while the ship landed.
“Look,” she said, thinking maybe he’d overheard Oberholst talk to some authority outside this cavernous room. “I don’t know you. I’ve never heard of you, and unless you can prove to me that you have some business with me, I want you to leave me alone.”
He sighed, as if he’d gone through this before. “No links in this section, remember? You’ll have to trust me.”
She snorted. “Mr. Kazin, I’m a lawyer. I don’t trust anyone.”
The man behind her in line laughed. Gonzalez stared at him.
“Are we entertaining you?” she snapped.
“I’m sorry,” the man said, and looked down. But he was still smiling. So were people behind him. A few even met Gonzalez’s gaze.
Kazin touched her arm and she decided to use the stare on him. He didn’t flinch, which was a point in his favor. Most people flinched when she looked at them like that.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said softly. “You can stay if you want, but you really will miss the opportunity you came for. Mr. Oberholst is old, and while he’s good, he has limited stamina. He’ll need a second, which he’ll have to hire locally—and I must tell you, Ms. Gonzalez, the local attorneys here are not of your caliber.”
“You’re telling me this so that I’ll trust you? A local attorney?”
The man behind her laughed again, then immediately apologized. This time, Gonzalez ignored him.
“Attorneys here specialize in two things,” he said. “Entry issues, visa issues, immunity issues—”
“That’s three,” Gonzalez said. “Obviously you don’t specialize in math.”
“All those things fall under the purview of immigration,” he said. “We have good immigration lawyers, and good company lawyers. Everyone else couldn’t quite hack the entry exams.”
“Entry exams?”
“Into Aleyd,” he said. “They test their newly minted lawyers before hiring them.”
Aleyd was the corporation Rhonda Shindo/Flint had worked for. Now Gonzalez was beginning to understand.
“You promise me you’ll get me out of here in the next ten minutes?” she asked. “Because I’m not getting back in this line.”
“And I’m not saving your place,” said the man behind her.
“I can’t guarantee ten minutes,” Kazin said. “I can guarantee that you’ll leave here with a special license granting you the right to practice in this particular case, and a week-long visa so that you can stay on Valhalla as long as you need to.”
“A week is not as long as I need,” she said. “A week is a limited period of time.”
“If you’re not done by the end of the day,” Kazin said, “then something’s wrong.”
Something was already wrong. That was why she was here. Oberholst had offered her this opportunity—if he had—and she should take it.
“All right,” she said, and stepped out of the line. “But you better not be scamming me.”
“Believe me,” he said with a smile. “If I were into scams, I wouldn’t pick you.”
Then he looked pointedly at the man behind her. Gonzalez finally smiled.
Maybe this Kazin could do something for her after all.
Twenty-seven
Zagrando ran to the apartment complex. He had already sent building security ahead, but he still ran. Something worried him about this “representative,” something he couldn’t quite name.
The woman had to be an official or she wouldn’t have gotten into the building. But officials could be bought, and he hadn’t done enough research into Talia’s family to know if they had enough money for that.
Or if they had enemies capable of that.
Bozeman didn’t have any information, either. He was still scouring the Port, trying to figure out if this so-called Recovery Man was already off Callisto.
Zagrando would bet his entire salary that the Recovery Man and Rhonda Shindo were long gone.
But this representative worried him.
He was gasping for air by the time he reached the elevators. He waved his hand over the identification palm, but nothing happened, so he cursed it, then headed for the stairs.
As the stairway door closed, he put his hand on it. “Police,” he growled. “Stay open.”
It did. It had to, even without his verbal threat. That was the nice thing about the stairwells here; they were keyed to every single police officer in Valhalla Basin’s force.
He took the stairs as fast as he could, his heart racing, his shirt drenched in sweat. He needed more time in the department workout facilities and less time buying enhancements. He’d always thought the damn things were fake, but he’d hoped the hype was right.
Of course, it wasn’t.
By the time he reached Talia’s floor, he was so winded that he was dizzy. He had to put a hand on that door to open it, and while he waited, he rested, trying to catch his breath. It wouldn’t do the girl any good for him to arrive, breathless and exhausted, and have to do some sort of physical rescue.
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