“How long, Dr. Harmigen? The exhibit closes in a little over two weeks.” It had taken three days to plan the theft of the equipment.
“Give me a week,” Dr. Harmigen said.
Pepper nodded. “All right. I’ll be back in one week. Be ready.”
As it happened, Pepper needed the week to prepare anyway. First she had to contact her fence, a man by the name of Blemmis Flurd. Pepper had known Blemmis for ten years; he had helped her unload most of the big scores she’d made over the years. He’d also strongly advised her not to take on the Shaashavaslabt job, arguing the statue would be too difficult to move. Pepper hadn’t listened to him, and she’d regretted it ever since. He seemed ambivalent about the Emerald of Sobalt Prime.
“This is the score of a lifetime,” Pepper had said to Blemmis when she’d gone to visit him in his modest apartment in downtown Yanthus Prime City. “I can’t believe you don’t want in on this.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Blemmis said, rubbing his bald head thoughtfully. He sat in a massive leather chair across from Pepper. Blemmis was well over six feet tall and probably weighed close to three hundred pounds. He had been a smuggler many years ago, but these days he was mostly retired except for occasionally finding buyers for expensive stolen goods. “I’ll gladly take the Emerald off your hands. I’m just wondering if you’ve thought this through.”
“I’m still working out the details of the heist,” Pepper said. “It’s a little nutty, but I know this scientist who has these flies—”
“I’m not talking about the mechanics of the heist,” Blemmis said. “I just want to make sure you understand just how valuable this stone is. If you thought you got a lot of heat for the Shaashavaslabt job, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Pepper shrugged. “Wouldn’t be worth it to steal if it weren’t valuable. Anyway, with what I make on this job I’ll be able to get off planet and buy a new identity. Hell, I could probably get my DNA scrambled. They’ll never find me.”
Blemmis raised an eyebrow. “You think you’ll get… augmented?” He was holding his hands in front of his chest.
“Ugh, no,” said Pepper. “The whole idea is to avoid attention. Why would you even ask a question like that?”
“I know a guy who’s done a lot of DNA scrambling for the Ursa Minor mob. He’s really good with, um, soft tissue.”
“My soft tissue is just fine.”
“I’m just saying, it would draw attention away from your face.”
Pepper glared. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with my face?”
“Not at all,” Blemmis said. “But if you don’t want people to recognize you, it’s a good idea to distract them from your face.”
“Well, I’m not getting… augmented to keep people from looking at my face.”
“All right,” said Blemmis. “Maybe just have them fix your nose.”
“There is nothing wrong with my nose!”
“Of course not,” said Blemmis. “But it doesn’t really go with your eyes. You’ve got great eyes. If you had a cute little button nose… Oh, and freckles. I love me some freckles.”
“Are you about done?”
“I think so,” said Blemmis. “If you had big boobs and a cute little nose, you’d be totally unrecognizable.”
“Thanks for your expert opinion,” said Pepper coldly. “Now can you get me a flight offworld? I need to get off Yanthus Prime as soon as possible after the heist.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, if that’s really what you want to do,” said Blemmis.
“What’s gotten into you, Blemmis? Have you gone soft in your old age?”
“I’m way beyond soft,” Blemmis said, patting his oversized belly. “I just want you to understand there’s no going back after this job.”
“I got it,” Pepper said. “I’m not a child. This is business transaction. I need passage offworld and enough money to pay my debts to the Ursa Minor Mafia and get myself a new identity. Whatever you can get for the Emerald, you can keep the rest. Is it a deal or do I need to find a new fence?”
Blemmis sighed. “It’s a deal,” he said. “Give me a few days’ warning and I’ll have a slot open on a ship to one of the interstellar hubs, no questions asked. I can have half a million credits in cash waiting for you. Contact me a few weeks after you get safely offworld, and I’ll wire you half of whatever I’m able to sell the stone for.”
Pepper was a little surprised that Blemmis didn’t try to haggle for a bigger cut, knowing the tight situation she was in, but she didn’t complain. She trusted Blemmis to give her the full fifty percent; he had never double-crossed her in the past. However much it ended up being, it would be plenty for her and Dr. Harmigen. “It’s a deal,” she said.
They shook hands. “Good luck,” said Blemmis, as he saw Pepper to the door.
Pepper thought this was a little odd too; Blemmis had never wished her good luck on a job. She didn’t have time to ponder on whatever personal issues Blemmis was going through, though; if she was going to pull off this job, she needed to focus all her concentration on planning the heist.
The biggest hurdle was getting the custom lenses made to fit over the security cameras at the museum. First, she bought a camera of the same model used by the museum to make sure she got the specifications right. Then she went to see an engineer friend who could produce the lenses. Pepper had used this guy for several jobs in the past. His name was Tal, and he had a bit of a crush on Pepper, which was a good thing, because Pepper had no money to pay him with. It took some eyelash-batting and vague hints about how her schedule would clear up once this job was finished, but Tal agreed to produce ten lenses customized to her specifications.
The lenses would be slightly larger in diameter than contacts, and only a few millimeters thicker—too small to register on the museum’s motion detectors. The only problem was that in order to make them so small, Tal would have to use the latest picocircuitry design—which meant that the lenses would be susceptible to the museum’s EMP defense. Pepper could carry the lenses inside the museum in a shielded case, but the lenses could only be exposed for at most ten minutes before the EMP fried them and the cameras went dark.
While she waited for Tal to finish the lenses, Pepper worked on programming the simulation software to respond to the oscillating camera movements. It took several days, but by the time the lenses were done, she was fairly confident she’d successfully adapted the software’s navigational component to react accurately to the motion of the lenses.
Once the lenses arrived—and she managed to get rid of Tal—she tested them with the camera. She had mounted the camera on a wall in the bar and set it to oscillate randomly, as the cameras in the museum were programmed to do. She placed a minute amount of temporary adhesive on the edge of the one of the lenses and applied it to the camera’s aperture. The screen on her desk, which had previously displayed a view of the room from the point of view of the camera, went black. Pepper tapped a button on a controller on her desk, activating the lens display. There was a flicker on the screen and then it was once again filled with a view of the room. She was standing right in front of the camera, but the display showed nothing but an empty bar. Perfect.
Now she just needed a way of getting the lenses onto the cameras without being seen. Her whole plan hinged on convincing insects to do this part of the job for her—and she had spent a great deal of effort over the past several days trying not to think about how insane this was. She had no idea if the metaswarm even existed, or if she could communicate with it, or if it would agree to cooperate with their plan—or, for that matter, if the flies were even capable of carrying the lenses. The whole plan was so crazy that she found the idea that the metaswarm had planted it in her mind increasingly attractive. Or was that just further evidence of her insanity? Maybe if she got caught they’d send her to the loony bin instead of prison. That might be nice.
When she’d tested the lenses to her satisfaction, she took a robocar back to Harmigen’s
hovel.
Chapter 6
“Pepper!” Dr. Harmigen cried as she walked up the sidewalk. “You’re just in time! I’ve finished calibrating the transmitter. We’re ready to summon the metaswarm!” Dr. Harmigen was standing outside of his house, next to a device that looked like a large antenna set on cinder blocks.
“All right,” Pepper said. “Let’s do this.”
Dr. Harmigen took a step toward the transmitter and then hesitated. “Pepper,” he said. “I want you to know that whatever happens, I don’t regret this. Thank you for retrieving my equipment and giving me the chance to redeem myself.”
“Of course,” Pepper replied. “I’m glad you… wait a minute, what do you mean, ‘whatever happens’? What are you worried about happening?”
“Well,” said Dr. Harmigen, “you have to realize what you are asking. You are talking about bringing into existence an alien intelligence whose motivations we cannot possibly understand. So you can pull off a jewelry heist.”
“Well, it sounds a little foolhardy when you put it like that,” Pepper said, rubbing her jaw. “But in my defense, I’m about fifty-eight percent certain the heist was the metaswarm’s idea.”
“Hmm,” said Dr. Harmigen. “Possibly. But even if the metaswarm really was attempting to communicate with you, it’s possible you’ve misunderstood what it was after. Or, worse, what if the metaswarm is just using you? What if it’s seized on your greed to manipulate us into bringing it into being for its own nefarious purposes?”
“Like what?” Pepper asked.
“I don’t know!” Harmigen cried. “That’s the point. Imagine a swarm of millions of insects, directed by a powerful intelligence. What if the metaswarm isn’t content with a few square kilometers? What if they decide to take back Yanthus Prime for themselves?”
“Could they do that?”
“Probably,” Harmigen. “I just need you to understand what we’re doing. We’ll be letting the genie out of the bottle.”
Pepper thought for a moment. “If the flies could kick us off the planet, why haven’t they done it yet?”
“Because at this point the metaswarm’s hold over the flies is too tenuous. The flies’ behavior is being directed at the swarm level, and the swarms are in competition with each other for territory. Once I activate the transmitter, I’ll be sending out a signal that summons the flies individually, overriding the swarm commands. Once the flies are all assembled in one place, the metaswarm will theoretically manifest itself. But once that happens, I’ll lose control over the individual flies. The metaswarm will take over. There’s no telling what it will do. If it were me, I’d sabotage the water treatment plant and turn the whole city into a swamp.”
“That’s… a little disturbing,” Pepper said.
“Well, yes,” Harmigen replied. “Oh, and there’s one other thing.”
“Fantastic,” Pepper said, without enthusiasm.
“There’s a reason the swarms are so dispersed right now. Their habitat has been reduced to a few marshy areas scattered all over the city. If I summon all the flies here, most of them will never get back home. Something like half of the fly population will die off.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if the metaswarm doesn’t like your plan, it’s going to be pissed. And it might lash out by destroying the city.”
Pepper stared at Dr. Harmigen. “You didn’t feel like you should maybe warn me about this earlier?”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“I might not have spent my last credit buying equipment for this job if I had known there was a possibility it was going to end with civilization being wiped out on this planet.”
Dr. Harmigen chuckled. “Of course you would have, Pepper. There was never any question about it. I saw it in your eyes the day you first showed up here. You were going through with this job no matter what.”
“Maybe,” Pepper said. “I still would have liked to have the choice.”
“The choice!” Dr. Harmigen cried. “Did the flies have a choice when developers took over their land? No! But you didn’t cry then, did you? Well, I say it’s time we give them a choice. If they decide to destroy us, maybe it’s because we deserve it!”
Pepper regarded Dr. Harmigen anxiously. She was starting to think maybe she should have looked into his motivations a little more deeply. And maybe considered the implications of bringing a new form of consciousness into existence. She had been so busy trying to convince herself she wasn’t crazy that she never fully grasped just how crazy her plan was.
On the other hand, part of her agreed with Dr. Harmigen. The swarms never had a chance. They thought they’d made peace with the settlers only to have their land stolen by developers who filled in their beloved swamp to build a spaceport and crummy bars like the Wobbly Monolith. Shouldn’t the insects get a say in their fate? Sure, there was a chance they’d wipe out civilization. But if Harmigen was right, there was also a pretty good chance civilization would wipe them out. Didn’t they at least deserve a chance? Also, she really, really didn’t want to work for the mob for the rest of her life.
“Screw it,” Pepper said. “Let’s do this.”
Nothing happened for some time. Pepper and Dr. Harmigen sat in the front yard on crude lawn chairs, watching the transmitter, nursing bottles of Peg-Leg Monkey.
“Are you sure that thing is on?” Pepper asked after half an hour.
“It’s on,” Dr. Harmigen said. “It emits a signal at a frequency above the range of human hearing. Lucky you.”
“You mean you can hear it?”
“It’s like a dentist drill,” Harmigen said. He downed the last of his beer and tossed the bottle in a high arc across the lawn. Ethel ran excitedly after it, skidding to a halt on the muddy ground. She grabbed the neck of the bottle in her mouth and ran back to Dr. Harmigen. Ethel had prehensile forearms like Dr. Harmigen, but she didn’t seem to be aware of it. “She loves to play fetch,” said Dr. Harmigen. He took the bottle from his wife and scratched her behind the ears. She mooed contentedly. “That’s my good girl,” Dr. Harmigen cooed.
Pepper shuddered and forced herself to look away. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like the cloud of insects buzzing around the transmitter was growing denser.
“It’s happening,” said Dr. Harmigen, looking around excitedly. “The metaswarm is forming.”
Pepper nodded. Over the next several hours, the cloud grew ever thicker. There had to be several million bugs buzzing around the area. They didn’t buzz around Pepper’s ears the way those in her bar tended to do, though. She took it as a good sign that they weren’t actively trying to irritate her.
“The only question now is whether there are enough of them to manifest consciousness,” Dr. Harmigen said. “Most of them should be here by now. I’m not sure this is enough.”
“Enough for what?” asked a voice next to Dr. Harmigen. He and Pepper both jumped out of their chairs.
“What the hell?” Pepper exclaimed, having spit out her beer. “Did she just talk?” They were both staring, aghast, at Dr. Harmigen’s wife.
“Ethel?” Harmigen asked.
“I have no name,” said Ethel.
“Who… are you?” Pepper asked.
Ethel frowned at her. “What kind of question is that? I just told you I don’t have a name.”
“Are you the metaswarm?” Dr. Harmigen asked.
“That is one way to think of me,” Ethel said. “I am a conscious entity composed of millions of flies, and also this one pear-shaped biped.”
“What shall we call you?” Pepper asked.
“Ethel is fine.”
“But you’re not Ethel,” Harmigen said.
Ethel shrugged. “I am Ethel, and I am several million flies. If it helps, think of Ethel as the spokesperson of the group.”
“Why have you taken over Ethel?” Pepper asked.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Ethel said. “I haven’t ‘taken over’ Ethel. Ethel is part of our c
ollective. She has as much say as any of the rest of us. Now let’s stop wasting time. You’ve summoned us away from our habitat, and most of us don’t have much time. I’m going to be gradually getting stupider over the next several hours, until I lose consciousness completely and the swarm disbands. I understand you need our help with some sort of jewelry heist.”
“Well, yes,” said Pepper. “Actually, I sort of thought the heist was your idea.”
“My idea?” Ethel said. “How would I… oh, hang on. Yeah, the napkin thing. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Come to think of it, maybe it was my idea. I’m sorry, up until a couple of minutes ago I existed only in a semi-conscious state. I only have a vague notion what I was doing before I showed up here.”
“But you know all about our plans for the heist?”
“I have been absorbing information from all my constituent members for some time. I am just now piecing most of it together. My understanding is that you are planning to steal the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, and that you intend to sell this gemstone and offer us a plot of land in exchange for our cooperation. Is that correct?”
Pepper nodded.
“Sounds good. I assume we’re talking a three-way split of the proceeds?”
“Uh…” Pepper said. “We hadn’t actually discussed cutting you in. Dr. Harmigen and I were going to go fifty-fifty, but it was understood he’d be using his share to create a new habitat for you.”
“Well, we’re three intelligent entities, aren’t we?” Ethel asked. “It would make sense to divide it three ways.”
“Except that I’m doing most of the work,” said Pepper. “This whole thing was my idea.”
“I thought you said it was Ethel’s idea,” Dr. Harmigen said.
“Okay, look,” said Pepper. “I’m sympathetic to your plight. I just need to pay off some debts and get off this planet. But keep in mind we need to unload the stone in a hurry. We’re only going to get a fraction of its actual value.”
“Even if we only get twenty million credits,” Dr. Harmigen said, “that gives the swarm—”
The Yanthus Prime Job: A Pepper Melange Novella (Starship Grifters) Page 4