“And you make plans.
“Good plans.
“You followed an enemy to gain information, you acted on what you learned to gain more, you built a mechanism to enable you to fight an unbeatable enemy, and when that enemy was dead you acted instantly and correctly to destroy another that proved even worse.
“My son of all sons:
“Choose your Name.”
“Harvey,” said the next Patriarch of Kzin.
Independent
Paul Chafe
I woke up disoriented in milky grey light. I got my eyes open and saw digits floating in front of my face, 1201. I was in a cube, a sleep cube, on a shelf of a bed barely big enough for the thin, firm mattress pressed gently against my back. The cube itself held the bed, a small desk/table and chair, room to stand up and get dressed, and no more. I pushed the stiff and cheap spinfiber blanket down around my waist. I was awake because the lights were on, the lights were on because I must have set them to come on at twelve. The digits blinked to 1202 and I tried to remember how I had gotten here, but there was just a big blank where last night should have been. Why wasn't I on Elektra?
“News,” I said. The numerals vanished, replaced by a program list. Ceres local was one of the news options. That squared with the barely perceptible gravity that held me against the mattress. I was on Ceres. So far so good. I pointed that channel up and was rewarded with a holo of some net flak on the business beat talking about the current crisis. The rockjacks were still striking against the Consortium, and the Belt economy was spiraling downhill fast. I didn't care about that, what drew my eye was the market ticker running at the bottom. It featured the time and date, twelve oh two, April fifteenth.
April. It was suppose to be March. What was going on? I stumbled to my feet and through the door. I found myself in a nondescript cube dorm in my underwear. Most of the other cubes were marked vacant. Everyone else had already got up and left, and it was too early for the incoming crowd. I felt bleary; however long I had slept it hadn't been enough. I went back in and hauled the blanket off the mattress and dumped it into the recycler by the door of the cube. The drawers beneath the narrow bed opened to my thumb and I hauled out my clothes. I went through the pockets for a clue as to what I had done last night, but there was nothing. I thumbed my beltcomp alive and checked it. It agreed the date was April 15th, but the entries since March 20th were blank. It wasn't just last night missing, it was better than three weeks. What was going on?
Nothing came to mind, the anonymous, identical cube doors looked back at me blankly. It was accomplishing nothing, and I could ponder the question in the shower. I resealed the drawers and padded down the hall, grabbing a towel on my way past the dispenser. My body knew where the shower was, so I'd been here before. I had a vague memory of checking in the previous night, but it was strangely hazy. I've gone on a few benders in my life, maybe a few more than normal recently, with little else to do but down cheap whiskey and skim for contracts at a booth in the Constellation. But three weeks?
The shower room wasn't overly clean, but the water was steaming hot and I let it stream over me, cascading off my body in lazy parabolas to slide down the walls to the pump-assisted drain. The dispenser spilled depilatory in my hand and I noticed words scrawled on my palm—opal stone in big red block letters. I looked at them for long moment through the translucent depilatory gel. The writing looked like mine, and I have a habit of jotting things down on my palm when I want to remember them. This time the trick wasn't helpful. I couldn't imagine what they referred to, I'm not into jewelry, and opals come from Mars, not something I'd likely be carrying, even as a smuggled cargo. What did that have to do with me? I smeared the gel over my face. The hairs that came away were four or five days' growth. What on earth had I been doing?
I came out of the shower and dried off, feeling better if not less confused. The letters were washed off my palm, but the words were burned into my brain. Opal stone. I'd go back to Elektra and ask her what was going on. Elektra is my ship, a singleship officially, although that's more due to me bribing the registrar than any virtue of her design; her class is built for a crew of three. I'd put in a lot of modifications to make her manageable on my own. We've come to know each other well, and she looks after me. I remembered docking at Ceres, some three months ago now. I hadn't had a contract in that long. Docking fees were eating my savings alive, while the rockjacks and the Consortium fought their dirty little war over the concession split. I'm an independent, like all singleship pilots, and sometimes that has its downsides. I went back to my tube to dress, then went out the front desk and thumbed out, nodding to the attendant. There was a Goldskin cop by the door, and he came up to me.
“Dylan Thurmond?” He had his official voice on.
I nodded, not wanting to admit I was me, but if I denied it his next step would be to demand my thumbprint. No point in making him work for it. What had I done? My record isn't exactly spotless. I'm a singleship pilot, and it's a tribute to my skill that I have far fewer than the average number of smuggling convictions. Unfortunately that isn't the same as zero.
“I'd like you to come with me.” His voice brooked no argument.
“What's this about?”
“They'll tell you at headquarters.” He led me down to the tube station and invited me to share a tube car with him. He sat in stoic silence while I sweated out the twenty minute tube ride, trying to rack my brain for details, any details, but what I remembered wasn't going to help my case any. At headquarters he spoke briefly to the desk cop, and I heard a word that made my blood run cold. Murder. I told myself I had to be a witness, killing isn't in my nature, but my persistent amnesia wasn't reassuring. He took me into a small, unadorned room and turned me over to a tough-looking officer, Lieutenant Neels. Neels' voice was calm, inviting cooperation, but his manner was rock hard beneath the soft exterior. He didn't need to emphasize what would happen if I chose to be difficult.
“I'm not trying to be evasive, Lieutenant,” I told him. “I woke up this morning with no idea where I was.”
He nodded. “Just think back, and go over what you do remember.”
Police stations look the same on any world. I looked up at the grey ceiling and worn sprayfoam walls and as I cast my mind back I suddenly understood where my memory had gone. It all started in the Constellation, I remembered that much. I told him what I knew.
It was an average night, March 20th, though if you'd asked me on the day I would have had to guess at the date. On the vid wall Reston Jameson was being interviewed about the violence between the Consortium and the rockjacks, and the economic disaster the strike was for the whole Belt. The sound was down, but I knew what he was talking about because it was all anyone was talking about. To an underemployed singleship pilot the resulting slump had a very personal impact. Maybe I should have sold out and gone to fly for Canexco or Nakamura Lines, but I'm an independent and flying for someone else would be one step above life in a cage for me. Jameson ran the Consortium, though you'd find other names over his on the directorship list, everyone knew the difference between the figureheads and the controlling mind. He had been quoted as saying he'd break the rockjacks and the Belt with them if that's what it took to keep the Consortium in control of metal mining, and of course he'd denied ever saying it. I was interested in hearing what he was saying, and was about to ask Joe to private me the audio when they came in.
I noticed the kzin first, two meters of orange fur and fangs. He walked in like he owned the bar, and hardened rockjacks made way for him. Beyond getting the space he wanted his presence didn't cause too much of a stir. There aren't that many kzinti on Ceres, but if you're going to see one, you're going to see him in the Constellation. The woman with him was striking, tall and slender as only a Belter can be. More than that she was beautiful, heartbreakingly beautiful, and I couldn't take my eyes off her, like a predator locked on a prey animal.
Prey animal. I'd been spending too much time with the kzinti out in Alpha
Centauri's Serpent Swarm. There's a lot more of them there, and a lot of them run with the smugglers. She was my own species, homo sapiens sapiens, and we don't go in for cannibalism—at least not much, in recent history. I kept watching her with hunger of a different sort, my responses entirely in line with those of a human male presented with a fertile female. Her dress was stunning, concealing everything but designed to show off her figure, so I kept right on not taking my eyes off her until her companion got in my way. He was a lot less beautiful and he carried himself in a way that said dangerous, even more than simply being a quarter-ton carnivore said dangerous. His eyes scanned the crowd until they intercepted mine, and then he started in my direction. I felt a rush of adrenaline, though I knew he wasn't about to call me out for looking at his woman. He was looking for me before he knew I was looking at her, and now he'd found me. He had some business with me, and I might as well wait and find out what it was. He took the bar stool next to mine, overwhelming it with his bulk.
“You are Dylan Thurmond?” he asked.
Like when the Goldskin collared me, there's always that split-second decision to be made at a moment like this. Was it a good thing to be me right now, or a bad thing, and if it was a bad thing, would denying it make my situation better or worse? He couldn't thumb me like a Goldskin, but he might be a bounty hunter. Singleship pilots are by nature cautious, because the bold ones don't live long, and the good ones carry a lot of skills with them, just in case. Situational awareness is the same skill in a bar as it is on board ship, it's only the situation that's different.
But he clearly knew who I was so I gave up on denying it. Whether that would turn out to be bad or good remained to be seen.
I nodded. “I am.”
He offered his hand and I shook it. So far so good.
“You're the pilot of the singleship Elektra?”
“Yes.”
The woman slipped past me and sat on the other side of me; she wore a stylish slingback and she slipped it off and put it on the bar. The Constellation was a good place for her. The lighting is kept low to so you can see through the dome to the stars spinning overhead. Ceres goes around once every nine hours, and the Constellation is right on its equator, which means you can see every star in the sky if you stay there long enough. The view is breathtaking. You can see the ships coming in to the main hangar ship locks, because the Constellation is under the main approach funnel, and if you look carefully just off the zenith you can see Watchbird Alpha in its Ceres-synchronous orbit, a single bright star that stays fixed while the rest of the starfield spins, relaying signals, listening for distress calls, watching the barren surface with its unblinking high-resolution eye. Joe Retroni runs the Constellation and he'd gambled a lot of money getting the dome put in. His bet was that tunnel-happy rockjacks would pay high for the view. He was wrong about that, rockjacks won't pay high for anything, but given that he charged what everyone else charged they definitely preferred to drink at his place. That was enough to pay for the dome. The decor was a little lacking otherwise, laser-cut stone, glossy and cheap. No one cared about that. It only made the woman more eye-catching, like a diamond ring glinting in a dirty back alley.
“And you are?” I invited the kzin.
“You may call me Bodyguard, Dylan Thurmond. May I buy you a drink?”
Bodyguard. I looked at the woman, and she certainly had a lot of body to guard. Her manner was monofilm smooth, not giving the players an opening to game her up on. “Anyone can buy me a drink,” I said, and beckoned Joe over. “Whiskey, straight up.” He nodded and squirted me a bulb. His house brand is Glencannon, which tastes exactly like fine Glenlivet would taste if instead of being made of pure barley and Highland spring water, carefully fermented and aged thirty years in charred oak casks according to a time-honored recipe, it was made yesterday out of raw ethyl alcohol and the thousand-times-recycled blood, sweat, and tears of Ceres' close-crowded millions, mixed with a healthy dose of bioengineered flavoring agents.
I say blood, sweat, and tears as a poetic euphemism. Most of the fluids that get processed through the asteroid's ecocycle are, well, you know… They say the water is safe to drink. I say adding alcohol kills the aftertaste. I'm used to recycling systems, and Ceres has the worst I've ever experienced. Glencannon is pretty rough going down, but then the original distillers of the Scottish Highlands were more interested in producing cheap alcohol and avoiding English taxation than maturing a fine whiskey, so I claim the experience is still authentic.
I drained my bulb and turned to Bodyguard. “So what can I do for you, other than drink on your tab?”
“I may have a contract for you.”
“A contract?” That got my interest, though I had suspected that was what he was after, once it became clear he didn't intend to arrest me or kill me. “I'll listen to that.”
“It's simple enough. I have a package that needs delivering.”
I nodded and took his meaning. I'd sworn off smuggling, but at the moment I was desperate enough to take any cargo anywhere. “Where is it going?”
“You find out after you take the contract, when and if you take the contract.”
I raised my eyebrows. There was more going on here than met the eye, but one of the prerequisites for getting a job like this is not asking too many questions. I asked the important one. “What's the pay?”
“Half a million stars.”
I raised my eyebrows. “For a destination in Known Space?”
He nodded. “Jinx.”
“That seems high.”
“The cargo is secret. That pays for you, your ship, and a hole in your memory when you come back.” He held up a paw and made a motion like he was triggering a sprayjector.
My eyebrows went higher. There were a bunch of drugs that would prevent short-term memory from getting stored to long-term memory. The new ones don't cause brain damage, or so they claim. “Why me?”
“Because you need the money and you have a ship of the required performance.”
Bodyguard had been doing his homework. I squeezed the last drops of Glencannon down my throat, then spun the bulb into the disposal behind the bar. “Okay, I'll do it.” It didn't sound like a healthy job to take on, but anything beat hanging around the Constellation watching my bank account swirl down the drain. Every singleship pilot smuggles when he thinks he can get away with it. Elektra and I hadn't had a contract in months, and the bank was going to call the mortgage on her. When the Consortium went to war with the rockjacks the demand for pilots went through the floor. No prospecting, no shipping, nobody could afford to go anywhere. I wasn't the only one in trouble. Even Nakamura Lines was running in the red, though they denied it officially.
He nodded. “We will talk in privacy.” He gestured to Joe, who in turn motioned to another bartender. The bartender came around counter and led us into the back. Joe has some private tables there with privacy fields. They're available to anyone who asks, but it seemed my new friend had his space prearranged. The woman came with us, and the busy background noise of the bar suddenly vanished as we came under the sound damper. We sat down to business. She unsealed her slingback and reached inside. Suddenly even the sounds at our table became muted, the way everything sounds faraway when your ears can't equalize to a pressure change. She had a portable damper in the bag and she'd switched that on too. I took it in stride. If they were willing to drop half a million stars to convince me to take a brain blank then doubling up on the privacy field only made sense.
Bodyguard nodded to her and she pulled out a sprayjector. She held it up. Her eyes asked the question. Ready?
My eyes widened involuntarily. Those drugs are restricted, not easy to come by, and I somehow hadn't expected them quite this soon in the game. It was the moment of truth. “I'd like to see the money first.” They could have had anything in that sprayjector, the whole thing could be a setup. Making them flash the cash wasn't a guarantee of safety, but at least it would ensure I wouldn't fall for some small-time scam.
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Wordlessly the woman pulled a credit chip out of her pocket, thumbed it and handed it over. Why is she the one carrying everything? So she could run while he fought, if it came to that. This pair knew what they were doing. I verified the numbers on the front of the chip, thumbed it myself, and then slid it into my beltcomp. I tapped the keys like I was dumping the funds to my account, but I miskeyed the entry on purpose. When I put the comp down I slid the chip out with my thumb and palmed it. Another quick sleight of hand and it was in the little hidden pocket cut into the back side of my belt. That would make it a little harder for them to get their money back, just in case it was a scam after all. Singleship pilots need a lot of odd skills to survive. I can key a com laser in Morse code when the modulation fails, I can rig a fuel coolant system to scrub CO2 out of the air, and I can spot a dirty setup nine times out of ten on body language alone.
I met the girl's eyes, read them and saw nothing dangerous. “Okay,” I said, and held out my arm with my sleeve pulled back, hoping that this wasn't the tenth time. She pressed the sprayjector against my skin and triggered it. I felt the quick burn as the drugs went in, and the deal was done. I didn't feel any different, but the macromolecular labels from the sprayjector were now busy hooking up to binding sites in my synapses. The anticatalyst mixed with them would keep them from metabolizing for as long as it held out. My synapses would adapt to form memories normally during that time, but once the anticatalyst ran out the labels would attack the adaptations and undo any changes that had occurred since they were bound in the first place. A big chunk of experience would simply cease to exist for me.
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