One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  Another display window opened in front of me. On it two shuttles sat side by side on a pad. A few seconds later they burst in an explosion I could watch but not hear.

  "Pulse weapons check," Lobo said. "I'm good to go." The gunnery displays winked out. "Thank you."

  "You're welcome." I stood and headed for my bunk. If Osterlad demanded daily courier updates, we were in trouble no matter what. Even with a bounty, however, the value of getting Lobo and me could not be large enough to make us a major transaction for him, so he shouldn't expect an update until the two-week window was over. We had to get to him before then. "I'm going to rest. Take us to the jump station, jump at least five times, and file different destination schedules each time."

  "Where do you want to go?" Lobo asked.

  "Back to Lankin," I said, "as quickly as we safely can. Those other jumps will make it hard for anyone who might be watching to trace us. And, for the last jump I want to book us as freight on a carrier heading to the other side of the planet."

  "Not that you seem to feel it's my business," Lobo said, with a petulance in his voice that scratched at my nerves like a live current flowing under my skin, "but generally my teams have kept me up to date on their plans. Why Lankin? Why—"

  I cut him off. The image of Johns' dissolving head would not leave me. My own head throbbed and my stomach churned, both paying the price of dealing with the adrenaline dregs coursing through me and the emotional hangover of conflict. Still, Lobo was right: We were a team, and he deserved to know such plan as I had.

  "We're going to see Osterlad," I said. "We're going to find out who put the bounty on me, get them to retract it, and convince Osterlad to leave us alone." I stretched out on my bunk. Yeah, that's the plan, I thought.

  After I slept, I'd have to figure out how to make it work.

  Chapter 10

  Two days later, the freighter in which we'd booked passage touched down in a cargo and low-rent passenger terminal on the edge of the industrial sector of Bekin's Deal, about as far away from Osterlad's office as you could get and still claim to be in the city. I'd stopped briefly between jumps to pick up a different wallet and load it with money from another of my accounts. I hadn't used the Ashland identity in a long time, so with any luck Osterlad's team wouldn't flag the name if they were monitoring passenger lists, as I had to assume they were. Ashland dealt in curios from neighboring planets, gift-shop stuff for souvenir buyers and unskilled bargain hunters, so in his business large shipping containers routinely sat in storage houses while he negotiated with retailers. Lobo certainly wasn't pleased that I was leaving him alone in such a container, but I needed to keep him out of sight for now. I didn't cut him out entirely: I carried comm gear and a small video feed, so I could relay him mission intel as I developed it.

  Asking for a meeting with Osterlad was out of the question, so my only real option was a snatch. No one succeeds for long in Osterlad's business without being extremely careful, so I'd have to accumulate a lot of information about his movements if I was going to have a prayer of taking him.

  First stop in my data quest was Queen's Bar, a city within a city, a part of Bekin's Deal that filled a role every urban area requires but none wants to admit: the dealer's haven, the place where everything is for sale and rules, if they exist at all, are fluid. The arms purchases that kept the residents of Queen's Bar fortified and at each other's throats wouldn't individually attract Osterlad's attention, but collectively they almost certainly registered on his bottom line.

  I grabbed a surface shuttle from the terminal to the nearest edge of Queen's Bar, where an unofficial but easily visible line separated it from the rest of Bekin's Deal.

  Businesses on the city side presented happy faces to the dividing street. Bright signs trolled for customers by flashing expensive advertisements for gourmet meals, spa treatments, designer clothing, and art objects of all types. Strong but tasteful lighting, heavy on slowly mutating color washes, danced across a wide array of architectural features kept clean daily by unobtrusive robotic crawlers and dedicated staffers. Small, perfectly manicured gardens separated each business from its neighbors. No two buildings followed exactly the same style, but no two clashed either, the cumulative effect one of carefully calculated casualness. Patrons, their clothing reeking of either money or artistic background, came and went with packages and occasionally stopped to chat. Every now and then, a few huddled shoppers would look across the street, perhaps point a finger, and discuss that other place, the one they all decried—but might visit later, perhaps in a group as long as it hadn't gotten too late.

  The buildings on the Queen's Bar side, by contrast, turned their rear ends to the city, with nothing visible from outside the district except reinforced metal doors and windows fortified with crosshatched bars and thick, light-distorting plexi. Nothing about their nature was evident from the city side; if you wanted to know what they sold, you had to enter Queen's Bar. Each building squatted on the pavement like a pressed-board box left in the sun far too long, its walls faded from whatever color they'd once sported into a uniform sand/gray blend only a few shades lighter than the best local soil. Where each city-side business stood alone, these Queen's Bar barrier buildings shared walls and ran together, giving the impression of a single man-made creature with a flat bottom, a flat back, and a top undulating from the different heights of the adjoining rooftops. Here and there, at intervals with no apparent plan or purpose, small tunnels led to the front of the buildings and the inside of Queen's Bar, each tunnel lit only at the ends, the center a dark place you had to be willing to cross to enter the district.

  I found a tunnel barely wide enough to let me pass without turning my body to the side, stepped into it, cranked my vision to IR to make sure I wouldn't encounter unwanted company in the passage's black center, and headed inside.

  The world exploded with color as I stepped out of the tunnel and into the perpetual carnivale that was Queen's Bar. The fronts of the businesses within the district screamed at your eyes for attention, their colors the loudest and boldest the merchants could manage, brighter by far than the displays on the city side. Displays of brilliant reds warred with amplified perfect-sky blues, electrified kelp greens, and hot yellows the color of midlife stars. Giant wall displays stood next to active-fabric tapestries depicting scenes from their owners' services, and projected ads and lights covered every visible surface of every business.

  The products and services those businesses offered were also rather different from those of the tasteful boutiques that sat both across the street and in another world from Queen's Bar. Sex clubs struggling to look safer and cleaner than they were grabbed for your attention, while gadget sellers trying hard to appear both black-market cheap and tourist safe screamed the virtues of their wares. The shouts of drunken and over-stimmed partygoers in the bars that occupied almost every other building on the street caused their neighbors to amplify their pitches further in a never-ending sonic war for tourist money. Barkers prowled the front of each establishment, their patter nonstop as their hard eyes scanned the passing crowd for fish to hook.

  Anyone who understood the way Queen's Bar really worked avoided all the perimeter merchants, because everything they sold—including the sex—was less current, less interesting, and more expensive than what you could get if you plunged deeper into the district. Most visitors, though, were thrill seekers who wanted to say they'd visited a suspect area of the city. Such people provided the nutrients that made the overpriced, watered-down merchants on the barrier streets into some of the fattest successes in the area.

  I hadn't visited Queen's Bar in a long time, so I stood still too long as I basked in the energetic commercial weirdness that swirled around me. A barker wearing a formal black suit over an inappropriate red-striped shirt took advantage of my stupidity by grabbing my right arm and trying to gently head me toward the business to my right.

  "Don't listen to 'em, brother," he said. "Oh, they'll tell you all about how many sex sh
ows they have, a new one every half hour they'll say, but do you really want to see the same four people doing it all day long?" He didn't wait for me to answer, his head bobbing up and down with the drug-fueled ready confidence of someone who already knows the answer, who's known it for some time. "Of course you don't! Now you step into the Teaser, yessir, right here, just a few meters, and you'll catch your first glimpse of the treats that await you within. You'll see a new cast every show, all eight shows. Fresh skin each and every time!"

  I shook him off, turned left, and walked quickly toward a small hotel I spotted at the end of the street. I was drawn to it by the guards at its door and by the fact that a few men in Saw off-duty coveralls were coming out. If Saw troops were willing to use it, even by the hour, its security had to be at least passable and probably better. If I was going to sleep anywhere outside Lobo while on Lankin, I wanted it to be a secure place where Osterlad didn't own part of the staff; the presence of the Saw troops vouched for this one.

  An old woman the color and texture of sunbaked driftwood eased out of a tunnel near me and ambled my way. I picked up speed. When she realized she couldn't keep up, she yelled at me, with a voice stronger than her obviously decaying body suggested should be possible, "How about a little lip love, fella?"

  I kept moving, knowing any change in my stride or, worse, eye contact, would only encourage her.

  She was determined. She ran until she was clearly in my field of vision, moving faster than I would have guessed she could, took out her teeth, held them aloft, and said, "How about now?"

  I had no idea how to reply. I hadn't been in a place like Queen's Bar for over a year, so it was a jarring change from the time alone in Lobo and in the beach resort of Glen's Garden. I didn't want to see what the woman might do next, but I got lucky: She fell back as I turned to cross the street to the hotel.

  I didn't understand her caution, because the streetwalkers in Queen's Bar, like all the other business owners, typically act without fear. As I drew closer to the hotel, however, both her behavior and the presence of the Saw troops made sense: It was a SleepSafe, the only sign of its name a small plaque over the door that provided all the information any of its target audience needed. I knew this chain, had used it on other planets from time to time. Minimalist but comfortable rooms were more than adequate for its customers, who came for the security for which it was justly famous. With no weapons allowed, no surveillance on the inside, a full complement of exterior sensors whose audio and video feeds were piped into a wall of monitors in each room, and escape chutes leading from panels beside each bed to underground portholes that would pop open only in emergencies, SleepSafe hotels were the lodging of choice for the paranoid and the hunted.

  The door scanned me on the way in, then the isolation chamber outside reception scanned me again, this time in more detail. When I passed both checks, a payment drawer opened in the wall. I thumbed some currency from my wallet into the SleepSafe coffers; the business was strictly pay-in-advance, of course. I paid the premium for a corner room with both roof access and a rear-facing escape chute.

  Before I allowed myself to relax, I checked the monitors and was pleased to see no signs of anyone following me. I hadn't expected to find anyone, but most of the ways I've made my living since my escape from Aggro have involved risk, so countersurveillance measures were my norm when I was working—and I was almost always working. If I'd been smart enough to employ them when I was vacationing as well, I reminded myself, I might not have been in this mess in the first place.

  The kind of information I wanted was most likely to emerge at night, when Queen's Bar hit its stride and mental lubricants flowed molten and bubbling through its streets and its residents, so I stretched out on the bed and hoped sleep would follow.

  Squatting at the intersection of Dean's Folly and Laura's Lament, in almost exactly the geographical center of Queen's Bar, the Busted Heart bristled with activity in the fading light of the early evening. Pieced together from a jumble of semi-domes of mold-melted native rock, the Busted Heart typified the hard-hustler chic in vogue among the well-heeled and the heavily armed. Restaurant, bar, and brothel, it was strong enough to bear direct hits from a broad range of individual weapons without requiring management to burn credit on repairs. From the scorch strips adorning parts of the exterior and the occasional pockmarks dotting the walls around the entrance, customers and their enemies had put the building to the test, and it had passed.

  Though I'd intentionally arrived early, business was already brisk. Customers exiting the place laughed and shouted with intoxicated glee. The smells of basic bar food drifted outside each time someone opened the door. I was lucky enough to land a corner table in the rear of the main room. I ordered a melano drink and a stew-and-bread dinner, tipped the waitress enough to wipe away the sneer my beverage order earned, and settled in to watch and listen.

  What I could hear of the human chatter was of no help. A few Saw soldiers on leave, all young enough not to know better than to risk being in a place like this, sipped drinks at the bar and were as guarded in their conversations as I hoped they would be; I'd hate to think my old company had grown too lax. All I could pick up was how much they hated corporate militia and weapons inspections, a standard complaint of merc troops everywhere and one I'd voiced myself. Armed conglomerates existed everywhere after they became legal as part of the resolution of the corporate-government wars of over a century ago, but no military group—merc or even any of the few remaining government forces—liked inspecting them. Fighting them was fine, certainly preferable to taking on other merc groups, but inspections annoyed all involved and served no real purpose; any organization large enough to legally establish a militia was competent enough to hide weapons. No news there.

  Elsewhere around the large room, hands exchanged fixed-credit chips, wallets chirped the happy jingle of money in motion, and pills and wires surfed waves of human hands, but nobody mentioned Osterlad within my hearing.

  Human sources were a bust.

  The machines proved to be a bit more useful, but only a bit. The gaming tables maintained nonstop critiques of their players. Unimaginative devices coupled with gaming-level processing power, they were the idiot-savant conversational geniuses of the consumer machine world: Able to talk brilliantly about their games, completely full of themselves, but unable to focus for more than a sentence or two on anything else, game boxes were useful but difficult sources. They all communicated, because they had to do so to maintain the up-to-date city- and planet-wide records that serious gamers expected to be able to access for score comparisons.

  I tuned in to the two nearest to me, a pair of almost identical holo-splatter stellar revolution war gamers, the only visible difference between them their chassis colors, one gaping-wound red and the other screaming blue. The cluster of cheering bodies and the cylinders of mayhem flickering in the air above them made them the current centers of attention, their vigorous networked eight-player game sucking credit at high speed from the wallets of the men and women engaged in it.

  "Do these players—and I use the term loosely and generously—have any brains at all?" Red Case asked Blue.

  "Apparently not," Blue said. "They're missing fifty-seven percent of their shots, ignoring the value of the high ground, walking right over buried weapons that could turn the tide, making more mistakes than the waitresses when they're off duty—and I thought they were bad."

  "They are bad," Red said. "These guys are just worse. If they continue to play for another hour and consume alcohol at the current rate, my projection is that they will have a real chance at setting a new planetary low score per minute."

  "They well and truly reek," Blue said, "but my simulation suggests a planetary low is too much to hope for. Of course, my processor complex is running newer firmware than yours, so it's only natural you would make this sort of error."

  "As if the firmware matters for sims," Red said. "If you would update—"

  I cut in, afraid the
ir argument would take them so far off topic I'd never be able to bring them back. "So who are the good players?" I said.

  "Excuse me?" they said in unison.

  "Surely systems of your intelligence have dealt with human talkers before," I said.

  "Well," said Red.

  "Not recently," said Blue, "but of course I'm familiar with the phenomenon."