That was all, and I let the silence run for a moment.
“Why?” I asked, finally.
“I’m not sure I should tell you that,” it said.
“Then I’m damn sure I won’t agree to the change,” I replied.
It fizzed again, which could have meant almost anything, and then said, “You know that Mis’ Nakada is concerned about the integrity of the corporate software in use by Nakada Enterprises.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a nod. “So?”
“You are aware that Guohan Hsing is currently, by the terms of his lifetime entertainment and maintenance contract, legally incompetent, and a ward of the Seventh Heaven Neurosurgical Corporation. Legalities aside, he is also in an induced coma and kept comatose but alive by machinery owned and operated by Seventh Heaven.”
It paused, but I didn’t bother saying anything this time. I just stared at it.
“Removing a properly-contracted ward from the property of Seventh Heaven is not legal, except in a very few exceptional circumstances, none of which appear to apply in this case.”
“So?” I said. “Nakada knew that from the start.”
The floater ignored my objection. “Sebastian Hsing,” it said, “is employed by the Interstellar Resorts Corporation at the Ginza Casino Hotel. IRC has classed him as essential personnel. While he is still technically a free adult, if he chooses to leave his job he will be in breach of contract and subject to a fine of up to one million credits. He has not chosen to leave. Nakada Enterprises is forbidden by city regulations to pay his fine, should he choose to leave; to do so would leave Nakada open to lawsuit for employee piracy, and would have serious extra-legal consequences as well. Nakada could make an offer to buy out his contract, and in fact, such an offer has been made. The offer was refused; IRC is not willing to part with Sebastian Hsing’s services at any reasonable price, and to make an offer any higher would surely raise suspicions.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Are you recording?”
“No,” I said, which was a lie, but what the hell.
“I believe that Yoshio Nakada had every intention of circumventing these obstacles. However, he now has reason to believe that the corruption of the corporate software available to him is far more extensive than he had realized when he spoke to you last night.”
Last night? I’d been thinking of it as earlier today. Not relevant; I ignored that and asked, “What reason?”
“He is unsure whether he can get Guohan and Sebastian Hsing off Epimetheus safely, given the current means available to him,” it said, which did not answer my question.
It shut up, and I stared at it for a moment.
“That’s it?” I said at last.
“That’s it,” it agreed.
“But that’s stupid,” I protested. “Everything he’d need is on Epimetheus, not in the Nakada family compound. All he has to do is send one message to a trustworthy human on Epimetheus!”
“No,” the floater said.
“Why the bloody hell not?” I demanded.
“Because all supposedly-secure corporate communications between Prometheus and Epimetheus have been affected. While he has established that there has been interference, Mis’ Nakada is unable to determine the nature or extent of the meddling. He attempted to contact Epimetheus after you left last night, and discovered that he cannot tell whether he is, in fact, speaking to a human on Epimetheus, or to a digital simulation—his usual security tests have been compromised. This was not the case when he made his preparations; something has changed. He suspects that when he met with you, his absence from his usual routines was noted and prompted this action. It now appears that the conspiracy that... the conspiracy he is aware of is more extensive than he thought, and there is literally no one employed by Nakada Enterprises on Epimetheus he feels he can trust with the assignment.”
I felt a creeping uneasiness somewhere in my spine.
“It’s that bad?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Hsing,” the floater said, “but Mis’ Nakada thinks it is.”
The thing’s manner had changed. It had gone from formal and every centimeter a machine to its more familiar self. I guessed it was because it was back in its familiar groove, no longer stretching its instructions to the limit and telling me things it hadn’t been told to tell me.
“If the conspiracy, or whatever it is, is that extensive, how do I even know he sent you?”
“If you agree to continue on his revised terms, he will meet you in person to verify it.”
“Fine. How the hell does he expect me to stop it?”
“By finding the parties running it, of course.”
I snorted. “Sure, that’s all,” I said. “Finding the people responsible for infiltrating one of the most powerful corporations in the galaxy, and exposing them—that’s easy, right? Hell, maybe it is easy, I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.” I grinned at the floater. “But you know what must be pretty tricky? Staying alive while I do it. That’s got to be tough!”
“But Hsing,” it said, “you’re good at that.”
“Good at what?”
“At staying alive. You’re tough, Hsing—people have tried to kill you, IRC tried to break you, but here you are.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “The old man’s stayed alive six times as long as I have—he’s the one who’s good at it!” I shook my head. “And besides, if he can’t get ’Chan and my father off Epimetheus, why should I work for him?”
“For the money?” the floater asked, as I paused for breath.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Money’s nice, but so’s maintaining decent odds of living to enjoy it. No family, no deal. That was what we recorded.” I reached up and signaled the privacy seal off; I didn’t see that we had anything more to talk about. “Guess I’ll be buzzing back to Alderstadt,” I said. “Good luck to your boss.”
“Hsing, wait,” the floater said.
I didn’t answer, I just headed for the door of the booth.
“Hsing, please,” it said. “I’m talking to him now. Could you wait? He may have an offer to make.”
“What can he offer?” I asked, my hand on the door.
“Hsing,” the floater said, “he does have an offer.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“You will,” it stated flatly.
I hesitated, then turned back.
“All right,” I said. “Boot it up. What’s the offer?”
“You get an unlimited expense account,” it said. “The corporation will pay any fines, bail you out, anything. You investigate the infiltration, conspiracy, whatever it is—on Epimetheus. There has definitely been covert activity there. And while you’re there...”
“I get them out myself,” I finished.
I stared at the machine while I thought it over, stared at the metal that gleamed pink in the booth’s light, and the blue plastic that looked almost as black as the plastic streets of Trap Under.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said at last.
Chapter Five
I’d never seen Epimetheus from space before; when I’d left I hadn’t bothered to look.
I looked this time, and decided I hadn’t missed much.
The ship I was in was Grandfather Nakada’s private yacht; the old man had personally escorted me aboard to hand over command. It had all the luxuries, including a live pilot, just in case the old man wanted something the software couldn’t handle. The pilot was a redheaded roundeye, tall, with a face I could live with that wouldn’t win any awards, 100% natural as far as I could tell. When I asked, the ship told me his name was Colby Perkins.
Wasn’t sure I’d heard it right at first, and since the man himself wandered in just then I asked, “Your name’s Pickens?”
“It’s Perkins,” he told me, blinking those pale blue eyes of his—strange how many colors eyes can come in, but usually don’t. “Colby Perkins.”
“Perkins,” I said. “Got it. I knew someone named Pickens once, wo
ndered if you were any relation.”
“No, Mis’, it’s not the same name at all.” He seemed a little uneasy about something, wouldn’t keep his eyes on me, but it didn’t look serious. Maybe he just wasn’t used to passengers.
Or maybe I’m uglier than I thought.
At least he wasn’t family to Zar Pickens, who welshed on me back on Epimetheus; I wouldn’t want anyone who shared ancestors with that human gritware to be piloting any ship I was on.
Whatever, I didn’t need to make him uncomfortable, so I looked out the window, and he went away.
Yes, window. Nakada’s yacht had big, fancy windows in the lounge, not just vid or holo. I could watch realtime, direct and live, as we came in across the nightside and headed for the field in Nightside City.
There wasn’t much to see. Just a lot of darkness, and a seething mass of silver-gray clouds in a gigantic ring at the storm line. If you get out further and look straight down at the midnight pole the planet must look like a practice target, with the pale slushcap at the pole, and then the dark stone around it, and then the circle of clouds where everything precipitates out of the upper-level air currents, and then dark stone again, and finally the bright line of the dayside at the edge. I suppose there would be occasional pixels of light at the various settlements, too.
I never saw it from that angle, though; we came in low so it was just black and grey, no details anywhere until the lights of Nightside City sparkled on the horizon, and an instant later the light of day spread across behind the city in a long, widening arc like a cadcam construction, hot and golden.
I don’t like daylight, so I didn’t look any more after that. I let Perkins, or maybe the ship, take us into port, and when we were down I hit the ground. I wanted to move fast. The old familiar gravity made me feel light on my feet, ready to run.
One thing about the Wheeler Drive—it’s so fast that I hadn’t had time to plan much on the way. I’d taken in some data on Nakada’s immediate family, but that was about it. I came out of the port without any very clear idea of just what I was going to do.
I could eat and sleep on the ship, if I wanted to—I’d made sure that was understood. I didn’t have to worry about finding somewhere to park myself.
All I had to do was find ’Chan and my father and get them out of there, and if I happened to learn anything about the conspiracy against Grandfather Nakada while the program was running, that was fine and smooth. I was supposed to investigate the conspiracy, sure, but all I really intended to do was take a quick look, because the odds were way the hell up there that the important stuff was back on Prometheus. As far as I was concerned, I’d just come for my family.
So where to start?
My father was in a Seventh Heaven dreamtank somewhere in Trap Under. ’Chan was at the Ginza, working for IRC. Neither one was all that easy to pull loose.
But ’Chan would be faster—all I had to do there was convince him to make a run to the ship, and get him off-planet before IRC stopped us. Once we were off Epimetheus, Nakada could debug whatever IRC might want to do.
My father I had to find first. And getting him aboard the ship would be easier without ’Chan trailing along.
That meant starting in Trap Under. Do the hard part first. I waved, and a cab zipped up, door opening.
I got in, and the cab asked, “Where to, Mis’?”
I didn’t have an answer for that right there and ready to run.
Most of Trap Under isn’t exactly open to the public; they don’t want the tourists wandering in, getting in the way. The tourists are supposed to stay up top, where everyone can skim off their money, not get down there in the maintenance corridors. I couldn’t just walk in.
The obvious way into the Seventh Heaven dreamtank was through the Seventh Heaven sales office in Trap Over, wherever it was, but that didn’t look as if it was going to work too well—if it were that easy, Nakada could have done it and at least presented me with half the deal. Sure, Nakada was a competitor and I was family—but I wasn’t legally family any more, not since my parents did the dump on me more than twenty years back, and competitors on Epimetheus weren’t all armed camps. Doing a favor for Grandfather Nakada wasn’t unthinkable.
So I wasn’t going to be able to do this the easy way. I’d have to get into Trap Under somehow, and either scam or bribe or threaten my way to my father.
I tried to remember where the dreamtank was. I’d never visited it—there’s no point in visiting dreamers—but I’d had a pretty good map of Nightside City in my head once.
And I’d lost it. Oh, I still had my natural memory, but I hadn’t kept it up, hadn’t thought about Trap Under in a year or so, and the old artificial-memory back-up had gotten fried when I took a little unscheduled vacation on the dayside, courtesy of the walking gritware who’d been conning Sayuri Nakada.
But the dreamtanks were mostly right under the casinos, to make it easy for big-time losers to cash out permanently; I remembered that much. And maybe I could beep ’Chan, let him know I was back on Epimetheus for the moment.
So maybe I wasn’t going to start with my father after all. Maybe my brother did come first.
“The Ginza,” I said. “Service entrance.”
The cab didn’t bother to answer, it just zipped up into traffic, headed for Trap Over. I sat back, thinking, and hoping the cab didn’t decide to get chatty.
I hadn’t really planned anything out; I had wanted to see the situation first-hand before I hit enter. Now I had to decide what I would run at the Ginza. I looked out the window, hoping for inspiration, but just saw twenty-meter ads for nude dancing at the Jade Club.
There was something oddly comforting about those glimmering holographic ecdysiasts glowing against the dark sky. I couldn’t have told you just how they were any different from some of the ads in Alderstadt or American City, but they were. They meant I was home.
It was a home I could never live in again, I knew that, but it was still home.
Once we were in the Trap I spotted the Ginza, with its distinctive bronze-green tower and dragon banners, but the cab didn’t head for the fancy overhang; I’d told it the service entrance, so it looped around and dived down through the traffic, almost hitting a knot of giggling pedestrians as it veered into a tunnel mouth and jigged its way down.
When the cab finally settled to the plastic flooring I still hadn’t debugged anything, but I paid the fare and a fat tip—it was Nakada’s money, not mine, and the cab hadn’t bothered me—and I got out.
The Ginza’s service entrance was one level below the streets—technically, the top level of Trap Under. For all I knew, my father might have been just the other side of a wall, though it was more likely he was somewhere deep down, a hundred meters or more below anywhere open to the public.
I still hadn’t come up with anything but the obvious, so I walked up to the door and told it, “I’m here to see one of your employees, Sebastian Hsing. It’s family business.”
“You know you aren’t welcome here, Mis’ Hsing.”
I should have realized it would recognize me. I’d known from my treatment back on Prometheus that IRC still hadn’t forgiven me for my moment of folly a few years back, when I’d given a welsher a chance to get away from them, and of course they’d keep everything in the system up to date. Their software wasn’t inclined to be helpful where I was concerned.
“I’m not here to play or solicit customers,” I said. “I just need to talk to my brother. It’s a private matter.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I haven’t been able to reach him by com.”
I hadn’t actually tried, since I assumed IRC was monitoring everything he saw or heard.
“I can give him a message,” the door said.
That was probably the best I could hope for, so I said, “Tell him Carlie needs to talk to him about an urgent family matter.”
“He will receive the message at his next break.”
“I’ll
wait.” Human croupiers only did half-hour shifts—the casino didn’t want them getting distracted, thinking about the hot player a few seats down, or when dinner might be, or a full bladder. Even more important, they didn’t want them watching enough play to start noticing bias in the equipment, so every table changed staff every thirty minutes, and ’Chan would have ten minutes to play his messages and get a drink and whatever before heading to his next position. I could wait that long.
The door didn’t say anything. “Should I wait, Mis’?” the cab asked from behind me.
“No,” I told it. I almost started to explain that I didn’t know how long I’d be there, but then I remembered it was a cab. It didn’t care why.
“Thank you,” it said, and then it was gone, swooping away at an acceleration that would have been nasty for a human passenger.
I leaned against the wall by the door; the plastic was warm against my back.
I didn’t like that I hadn’t done any planning. I should have skimmed background from the nets before I landed. I hadn’t because I was used to having the data I needed right there waiting any time I bothered to ask for it, but this time I couldn’t trust everything I pulled down. I didn’t have my old office com that knew everything about Nightside City anymore. I didn’t have my new office com from Alderstadt, either. All I had was the public nets and what I carried with me. I wasn’t carrying much, and if Grandfather Nakada was right, I shouldn’t believe everything I found on the public nets. So I was scrolling blind, seeing what came up the screen.
As I said, I wasn’t really looking for Nakada’s conspiracy of assassins. I had to assume that if they’d gotten at the old man’s dreamware, they were smart enough to spot anyone who went poking around after them. I was just running my own errands, and keeping all ports open for data about the Nakada clan. If anything beeped, I’d take a look. If it all looked smooth, then I’d go back to Prometheus and work that end.
For now, though, it was all family. With Mis’ Perkins waiting for me on the ship I could get ’Chan and our father off-planet without any tickets—if I could get them to the port. ’Chan shouldn’t be too much trouble, but pulling a wirehead out of the dreamtanks was another program entirely. The only way I had ever heard of a wirehead coming out of the tank alive was if the cops needed her as a witness—city cops or casino cops, either one. If the wirehead survived, she went back in the tank afterward.
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