I clear mine right back at the imago. “Would you mind getting to the point? I don’t have all day.” Stupid imago. Recording its Creator’s quirks is all very well, but replaying them ad nauseam is somewhat less amusing.
“Ah, yes! Well, indeed, that is to say, they told me to tell you to”— his face morphs into a stony mask, from which icy little pebble eyes glint like soulless cometary fragments—“keep your hands off the junior partners, minion, or we will be forced to withdraw our employment, just as one did with your elder sister.” For a moment his chilly gaze holds me transfixed, then something changes, and his expression collapses into helpless sorrow. “Um, I don’t know what I can add to that. I’m . . . oh dear.” He sniffs. “Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules, and that’s an end of it. Kate, what can I say?”
I shudder violently, take a deep breath, and try to throw off the memory of that cryogenic stare. “It’s alright, Jeeves. I get the message.” Well, truly, I don’t; I find it deeply baffling. Do Jeeveses exchange soul chips while they’re still alive? That might explain his extraordinary personality change. And also the similarity between them—they’re much closer than my sibs and I. A stab of remorse: I thought it was just harmless fun. Maybe extreme arousal lies outside Jeeves’s normal operational parameters? “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again. Oh dear. Um. What am I supposed to do now?”
Jeeves’s imago struggles to pull himself together. “Your next mission is to present yourself at your earliest convenience to our local office, at”—he rattles off an address—“where my senior partner will discuss your assignment with you. You should know”—he pauses; the stony-eyed expression is abruptly back—“that the Jeeves-in-Residence was transferred to Callisto under suspicion. We have now traced your incorrect orders to this office. We believe the Jeeves-in-Residence is the traitor responsible for betraying our organization, and we hereby instruct you to, ah, kill him.” Beads of oily biomimetic sweat stand out on his forehead. He stops abruptly. “That’s all I’m supposed to say to you. I’m s-sorry. Good-bye.”
“Hey, wait one . . . !” I shout, but the imago has autoerased itself, taking what’s left of his love-struck gaze with it, leaving only a faintly apologetic eyebrow to hover in my visual field for a moment longer.
“Idiot!” Baffled and fuming (and humiliated, and trying not to admit it to myself), I pace back and forth across the suite, giving in to agitation. Kill the Jeeves-in-Residence? Because he’s a mole? Transferred under suspicion? What in our Creator’s name is going on here? A nasty thought strikes me—how do I know that the Marsport Jeeves isn’t the traitor? I’ve got nothing but his unsupported word that this one’s the bad ’un, after all. “Fool!” I kick the side of the bed, cracking the icy sheet. Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules—as long as you don’t count fucking with their heads, it seems.
Let’s see. Jeeves is working against the Domina and her Black Talon friends, but he’s also colluding with her. Or one of him is. Which one? Who knows? The colluding one is using me to send messages—possibly in the form of my own neck—unless the noncolluding one is trying to convince me that . . .
I turn to the next message in my queue, hoping it’ll stop my brain melting. Instead, I realize only too late that it’s anonymous and there’s no imago—just a speech stream.
“Sister.” I hear heavy breathing, as if in a pressurized atmosphere with an oxidizing component. A metallic, hatefully familiar voice. “You should have kept your filthy claws off him. He’s mine.”
I recoil. The Domina? What’s she doing in my inbox? “What do you want?” I ask.
A breathy little chuckle. “You,” she says. And then the message runs out of branches and—damn it, just like Jeeves!—autoerases. One of these days, when I’m domina-of-dominas, I’ll issue a decree that bans self-erasing mail. Until then, all I can do is swear at my pad, and my empty queue, and my purposeless so-called life. And then, a brisk dry-cleaning shower being not at all appealing, it occurs to me that I might as well go forth and visit the Jeeves-in-Residence. At least I can ask him some questions before I make up my mind whether to kill him. The alternative is to lie here staring at the cracks in the ceiling and wonder if I’m going crazy; because while my poison caller sounded like the Domina, I’ve heard that breathy laugh before—in my very own throat, while I’ve been dreaming of Juliette.
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when I landed in Nerrivik, which is on the equator, and it’s edging slowly toward dusk as I step out. (Callisto’s diurnal period is more than sixteen standard days long.) Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky—it covers almost as wide an angle as Earth, seen from the Lunar equator—while the sun, a shrunken, glaring button, sinks slowly toward the horizon. There is never a truly dark night on Callisto, although total solar eclipses are not uncommon and bring an eerie twilight to the crumpled desolation.
It’s chilly outside, and I’m very glad for the cold-weather mods I installed on Mars. Out beyond the edge of town, distant flecks of light inch across the broken horizon. I can’t tell if they’re bulk carriers crawling along the ground or more distant freight buckets riding the magnetic catapult up to their parking orbit. In the opposite direction, the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows. My map-fu is loaded, and I let it guide me toward a paraboloid structure that claims to be a run-down office complex occupied by a variety of mining-support businesses and body shops. JeevesCo supposedly maintains a presence there, although I can’t for the life of me see why—this isn’t exactly a high-class joint. There are gambling dens and juice joints and whorehouses galore, for even mining overseers have needs, but there’s precious little market for a gentleman’s gentleman. Still, I suppose he has his reasons ...
I wait impatiently for the air lock to cycle and flush me with warm carbon dioxide. The sooner I can get off this ball of mucky ice, the better. Hopefully this particular Jeeves simply wants me to carry something back to the fleshpots of the inner system. There’s a reception desk at the front of the atrium, and it tracks me with beady eyes as I cross the rough aggregate floor. “Where’s Jeeves?” I ask.
The reception desk blinks at me. “Fourth floor,” it says. “But there’s a visit—”
“Never mind; he’s expecting me.” I head for the elevators.
I step out of the elevator into a drab vestibule. It’s completely empty but for two doors at either end. One of them has a discreet plaque, brass untarnished by exposure to oxygen. Facilitators Unlimited. I approach it and electrospeak the lock: “Freya, to see Jeeves.”
“Come in.”
The lock clicks and the door opens before me and hands close around my wrists and drag me inside. And in a split-second instant of crystalline clarity, I realize I’ve been very, very stupid.
“Please—be—seated,” croaks the thing they’ve made of the Jeeves-in -Residence. He’s sitting behind the trademark desk, but his arms end in complicated stumps at the shoulder, one of his eyes is a splashed iridescent mess hanging half out of its socket, and something about his posture tells me that they’ve hacked his legs off too, leaving a pitifully immobile cognitive stump to talk to me.
I’ve been grabbed by two spiny horrors, bigger than I am and far stronger, their humaniform arms and legs sculpted in strange geometric surfaces. I yank hard with my right hand and begin to bring my leg up, heel extending, but my captor just glares at me and gives my wrist a tug, and I realize it’s not a hand that’s gripping me—his wrists terminate in great scissorlike shears. His carapace is armored, too. I’d break a heel and he’d snip clean through my wrist and I’d be no nearer escape. I wriggle and tug like a ductcleaner that’s fallen on dry ground, but they’re not having any of it, and that’s an end of the matter. So after a few seconds I give up and hang loose between them, biting back hysteria as I stare at Jeeves.
“That—is—better,” says Jeeves, as if reading from a script. “She— will—arrive�
��shortly.” He sounds like that staple of drama, the robot, soulless and grim. Someone’s stripped out everything I found attractive about his kind, leaving an object of horror and sympathy.
I glance around surreptitiously. The signs of struggle are everywhere, from the trashed inner door frame to the wreckage of his arms lying discarded behind a plinth bearing an antique urn—I swallow, aghast. “What happened?” I ask.
“My—mistress—came—for—me.” His remaining eye is as expressionless as a stone embedded in a gray silicone rubber mask. “If—you— don’t—remember—She—will—explain.”
My. The definite article. He’s speaking for himself, not for One, the collective Jeeves. So whatever’s happening here is personal. I very nearly lose it and start struggling again, but a quick glance reminds me that resistance is futile. These things—what are they, some kind of soldier line?—are big and wickedly fast. Two of them grabbed me the instant I walked in the door, and there are two more standing behind Jeeves. By the look of things they’ve had him in their snicker-snack hands for some time . . . “Jeeves,” I say slowly, “who owns you?”
“I—am—property of—no—” He begins to shudder. The eyelid contracts; a thick bead of something like moisture slides down his cheek. Icy terror clutches at me as behind my back the door slides open. “Mistress!” His face clears.
“Hello, Kate,” says a familiar voice, setting spidery chills racing up and down the skin in the small of my back. I lose track of who and where I am for a moment, imagining myself back on my eleventh birthday. When my head clears I’m lying facedown on the floor, arms and legs spread-eagled, a searing pain cutting into each wrist and ankle. “Stop that!” she shouts, her voice ringing in my ears. “Stop that at once, you bad, bad girl!”
“I—I—” I’m choking back panic. I remember her bed on the Pygmalion . Granita’s got me in her web again, hasn’t she? My fingers scrabble, then I feel the floor through them, and I begin to collect my scattered selves. I’m being held down by the two soldiers, but they haven’t snipped off my—yet—“What do you want?”
“That’s better,” she soothes. “You’ve got something of mine.” Her voice drops a notch. “Where is it?” Her dress rustles loudly as she kneels beside me, and I feel her fingers parting my hair. I begin to buck and spasm again as her painted claws dig into the skin at the nape of my neck.
“No, Granita—” But she’s not listening, and everything goes black and tastes of electric roses and blue ice for an infinite instant.
I come to slowly, dully aware of a conversation flowing around me. “—him to the operational center and have them box him up for transport.” She’s talking to someone else, obviously, and I’m still lying on my face, but the sharp, crushing sensation in my wrists and ankles has gone—the scissor-hand soldiers have let go of me with their terrible shears. My limbs are tingling painfully, but I can still feel my fingers and toes. I try to move an arm—slowly, in case it’s damaged, control runs severed, muscles crushed, or bones bent. I have some vague idea that I can scuttle away and hide behind the planter while she’s giving her minions instructions about Jeeves. The back of my neck aches where she ripped a chip out, but it doesn’t feel empty. Some nerve damage for sure, I decide. Why did she want my soul chip?
There’s a dripping noise coming from somewhere near me. I open Katherine Sorico’s too-large eyes and see a viscous puddle of blue fluid spreading beside my nose. It’s hydraulic fluid, riddled with Marrow techné. Somebody is bleeding out. Is it me? I wonder, spreading the fingers of my left hand and pushing against the floor very gently. No: good. I twitch underused muscles, and my heels extend a couple of centimeters before I pull them back in. That’s something I remember from Juliette—the solid crunch of a chest plate or a skull beneath my flying kick. As long as my legs work, I’m not disarmed. And I’m still intact, I think, embracing the realization like a lover’s body.
“You can sit up now, dear,” Granita says lightly, and taps me on the shoulder with a cane. “Be calm.”
Shit. She must have seen me move. I push myself sideways and bring my knees up, and begin to roll to my feet. I could run for it—but no, the soldiers are still there, lurching crazily across my field of view as I turn over. How did she get here? I wonder, as some of the stickyweb that seems to have engulfed me begins to peel back from my mind. “Yes?” I ask cautiously, the full gravity of my situation finally sinking in. This is bad, very bad . . .
“Can you stand?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. I stare at her in her fairy-tale-princess finery, white and silver to suit the climate, an elven ice queen with sapphire hair, dressed for a winter ball in the dark of a Jovian moon.
“I think so.” I gather my strength, then lurch unsteadily to my feet. The soldiers watch me incuriously. You’d think they’d stay between me and their mistress. But I’m not close enough to her to be certain I’d subdue her before they could move—and something tells me they’re not her only defense.
“Good.” Granita smiles at me impishly, as if sharing a secret joke. “There’s a sleigh outside. You and I are going to leave by the front door; then we’re going to go for a little ride together. I suppose later you can tell Jeeves that you fulfilled your mission? Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll enjoy where we’re going.”
My biomimetic reflexes kick in, and I take a deep breath, nostrils flaring. After a moment I nod at her. “Yes.” If she wants to go for a ride, I can live with that. It’s better than having her tame thugs chop my hands and feet off, like poor Regin—I blink. Jeeves, surely? Why did I think he was called Reginald? I glance at the soldiers. “Did you get tired of Stone and his brothers?”
Granita doesn’t answer, but turns and strides toward the door in a swirl of heavy skirts. After a moment I follow her. There doesn’t seem to be anything else I can do. Two of the scissor soldiers follow us, brooding-nightmare statues that cast long shadows.
We ride the elevator down to the lobby in silence. I don’t want to risk provoking her. She was always hard to read, and I’m sure there’ll be an opportunity to get away later. My mind’s spinning. Why did she do that to Jeeves? I wonder. The main players in this little game have exercised discretion in attacking one another so far. I find myself shaking as I remember the sight of him, flaccid and dead-looking in the chair, arms and legs piled haphazard and broken in a corner of the room. Something about the sight fills me with more than horror; there’s grief hidden in the mix that is me. And frustration, a feeling that things could have been different. Did she slave-chip him? I think, morbidly aware that if that’s the case, the game is up; she knows everything he’s got access to. Did she—my hand goes to the nape of my neck instinctively.
“Don’t fidget,” Granita says sharply, and I whip my hands behind my back, to rub my sore wrists together where she can’t see them. “Calm down, there’s nothing to get worked up about.” The elevator doors open. “Follow me.”
There’s a sleigh in silver-and-blue livery sitting on its skids outside the air lock, bubble canopy gleaming gold beneath the ominous stare of Jupiter. Ice crunches beneath my heels as I follow Granita over to it. She climbs aboard, and motions me to the jump seat opposite her. The two scissor soldiers of her escort take up position on the running boards and latch on to external hard points. As I strap myself down, the canopy closes, and the sleigh spews chilly air across my feet. She gestures at a microfiber rug. “You might as well tuck yourself in,” she says. “We’ve got a long way to fly, and it’s going to be a cold night.”
I humor her as the sleigh’s rocket motors begin to howl distantly and the antisound cuts in, relegating it to a low moan and a faint vibration underfoot. I sit still—don’t fidget, I recall—as we rise quickly and accelerate, heading west across the icy rubble-strewn bull’s-eye of the Valhalla Basin, directly toward the sunset.
After a couple of minutes, Granita deigns to break the silence. “You’re probably wondering why I had you taken,” she says hesitantly. “And what I’m doing with that Jee
ves.” She sounds almost troubled— a far cry from her usual self. What kind of game can she he playing? I wonder.
“Yes,” I say, cautiously. It seems like the right thing to do.
“Well. Aside from reclaiming my misplaced and misused property, we share a common . . . purpose.” She puts a strange emphasis on the final word and looks at me significantly. “Don’t move.”
I freeze, apprehension clinging to me like an icy, damp dress.
“Very good. I was wondering if they’d damaged you back at that greasy turd-bag’s office. I told them to take care, but . . . from now on, you’re going to leave your cranial sockets alone unless I tell you to touch them. Do you understand?”
Not understanding, I nod.
Something about the set of her shoulders relaxes infinitesimally. “Good.” Her lips quirk in something not unlike a smile. “The Supreme Jeeves wanted you in position here because Jupiter system is the gateway to the outer darkness. You may think he’s a nice guy, but he isn’t, really; he was going to have you chipped and reprogrammed as an assassin, Kate. Use you as an impersonator aimed at me. That’s what the, the property of mine that he stole is all about. Then he was going to send you on a suicide mission to Eris with a bomb in your abdomen.”
Huh? If she thinks that, she obviously doesn’t know Jeeves. Although something tells me that there is more than one Jeeves that we are talking about—possibly more than two. I open my mouth to protest, but she holds up a hand. “Silence, Kate. Don’t interrupt me when I’m telling you what you need to know to survive.”
I shut my mouth again, and she continues. “I’m guessing you’re Freya. If not Freya, then you’re either Samantha or Paloma. Jeeves was aiming to get his claws into all of—don’t look so surprised, you’re all targets—all of us. I had to have you all declared illiquid and seized— in your case, personally. Which are you, by the way?”
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