by Steve Perry
Or he could have been cooked robbing a casino. Or maybe in one of these revolutionary cells—maybe she had sicced the CATs on him herself?
She shook her head. Not likely, given the breadth of the galaxy, but possible. Did she want to know that if it was true?
Well. She didn’t have to decide today. First thing, she was going to go sit in a hot soak tub, have a stein of good beer, then go sleep for about thirty hours. Undercover work was stressful. Yeah, she was good at it, as good as anybody, but you never could truly relax when you were down in the trench—an offhand and thoughtless remark could get you chilled. That was part of the game, too. A caught spy didn’t fare well.
Rest, first. After that, she’d see.
She caught a hack, gave it directions, and leaned back in the seat. But before she was halfway to her kiosk, her com vibrated against her hip. Nobody had the code but her bosses, and there was no way not to answer the call—they’d have her on sat-track, would know where she was and that her com was on. She lit her confounder to scramble any electronic eavesdroppers and voxaxed the comm’s ear implant.
“What?” She kept it subvocal; even somebody sitting in the hack next to her would have had trouble hearing her.
“Chim City, on Tatsu,” the gravelly voice of Commander Pachel said without preamble. “An op will meet you at the boxcar station with details up when you get on-planet.”
“Fuck they will. I’m on vacation as of ten minutes ago. Send somebody else.”
“Can’t do it. You’re the only op in the system rated for this, and it’s just the next world over. There’s an e-ticket on file at the uplift station three klicks ahead of your hack.”
Yeah, they were tracking her. Knew to within half a meter exactly where she was.
“I quit.”
He laughed softly. “You can’t quit, girl. This is an A-DASH-ONE-SLASH-A directly from Wu’s PR Newman Randall Himself. All leaves are canceled, all excuses dust in the wind. You will catch the next boxcar up and hop over there and see what the Planet Rep wants, end of discussion.”
A-1/A. As high as things ever got in her biz, though that didn’t always scan. “Does this asshole have a clue what that kind of rating means? What is it about?”
“His family is rich enough to buy the planet you’re on, plus the one you’re going to, and burn them to warm their hands if they feel like it. It doesn’t matter if he can’t tell the difference between a top priority code and his left nut. You didn’t just fall off the vegetable hauler to town, Luna. When money calls, the Service answers. I don’t know what he wants, I don’t want to know. Go, see what it is, handle it, call me when you are done and tell me all about how clever you were fixing it. Take your vacation afterward.”
“This sucks.”
“Well, if it did, at least it would be useful for something. I didn’t write the game, I just move the pieces.”
Pachel cut the connection and the com shut off.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .
Wu. She’d only been there once or twice. Best she brush up on the place. She lit the com and called the Confed general information computer. “Wu,” she said. “Sixty-minute encap. Include history, politics, geography, sociology.”
“Wu,” the computer began. “First planet settled in the Haradali System . . .”
She leaned back and listened.
4
From the inside of a two-passenger fuel-cell hack directly behind her bus, Mourn watched the woman discover that he wasn’t on the pubtrans vehicle. The hack’s windshield was polarized so he could see her, but it was opaque from the other side. Even if she looked this way, she wouldn’t make him.
She was surprised and irritated that she’d lost him, he could see that much in her face and body language.
He smiled. She wasn’t bad, but you had to be very good to walk in his tracks without being seen. There were always a few stupid players who weren’t above backshooting a high rank and trying to claim they’d beaten him fairly. They thought they could beat the stress scanners or face readers, and, of course, nobody did, but you didn’t want to be the man they assassinated for their two-minute bragging rights. There were cools and Confed intel to worry about, and other legit players. You walked in a fog, didn’t pay attention, you wouldn’t survive long.
He was curious, though not particularly worried. The woman’s shadowing technique was good enough so he knew she had training. She could be some kind of terran or Confed agent, a local cool, maybe even private op, but somehow, it didn’t feel as if she were any of these.
Maybe she was a player, though if she was, she wasn’t ranked in the Hundred. There were plenty of fems in the game, though only a few were in the Hundred; he knew most of the currents by sight, and most of those specialized in armed stuff. The ones who went bare tended to be fairly big and strong, they had to be. It wasn’t as if a woman couldn’t get the same skills as a man, she could, but small men didn’t fare that well in the top ranks, either. In hand-to-hand combat, just like it did with knives, size mattered. The toughest competitors tended to be in the light heavyweight class—big and strong enough to deliver power, not too big to move well. A featherweight might be fast, but his—or her—skill had to be extraordinary to keep up with somebody who was thirty or forty kilos heavier and much stronger. At the highest levels, everybody was well trained. There had been some little guys who were that good, so their skill could overcome the size disparity, couple of them fems, but only a relative handful. The odds were against it. Last time he’d looked, of the current Top Twenty players, thirteen were light heavies; there were four heavies, an ultraheavy, a middleweight, and only one lightweight. Two of the light heavies were women, one of them an HG mue. The lightweight, Tak Houghton Clar Besser, of Mti, was a master of weapons, and had cut his way into Eighteenth, last time Mourn checked.
As the woman made her way to the bus’s exit, he shook his head. No. She didn’t have the look of a player. She was young, reasonably fit, had red hair trimmed short, wore middle-class clothes—a loose green silk shirt over snug pants, flexsoles, and had a big carry bag on a shoulder strap. Attractive enough, midtwenties or so. He saw what he took to be the somewhat-disguised outline of a hand wand tucked into a back pocket, so she was armed, but a lot of cits carried in the big cities on the old worlds, even if it was against local laws. The thinking went that it was better to have explain your illegal weapon to the cools than it was for them to have to tell your family you were dead.
She didn’t move like a fighter, though.
A fan, maybe? There were plenty of those floating around, and more than a few had wanted to lie next to him. People who got off on what they thought was the danger of being with a player. Star-fuckers. He had bedded a few of those. Not any lately. It seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.
A lot of his life seemed more trouble than it was worth lately.
He sighed. Maybe he really should give serious consideration to retiring. Start a little school, train the wanna-bes, get drunk now and then, maybe find a comfortable woman . . .
She alighted from the bus and started walking back the way the vehicle had come, a tight anger in her moves. No, he decided, she wasn’t a fan who wanted to swap fluids. You don’t get invited into a man’s bed if you take great pains to keep him from seeing you, now do you?
There were other possibilities: A thief, stalking him? A relative, bent on vengeance for somebody he had taken out along the way?
He made it a point to look like everybody else, no flashy jewelry, no expensive clothes, nothing to draw attention to himself. Just Art Average on his way from nowhere to no place special. Not a target for the Confed, the cools, nor the bents.
Not an op, not a player, not a fan or a thief, he decided. Maybe somebody’s sib or kin or spouse, come to pay him back for her loss. But not a real threat if so, now that he had marked her. And, somehow, the wounded spouse didn’t feel right, either.
Did he really care enough to worry about it?
He directed the hack driver to the curb, paid him with a couple of hardcurry coins, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He watched the woman walk away and decided: Yes, he did care—at least enough to tail her and find out who she was. It had been a while since anything had made him really curious.
Shaw would have spent a few minutes in the spa, with the mint-scented hot water swirling over his tired body, stuck a pain patch on his deltoid, and gone to bed after his lesson with Baba. The old man had thumped the hell out of him today, and he was physically spent and sore, but he couldn’t relax yet. His secretary called to tell him that the Confederation Planet Representative, Newman Randall, was waiting in his office, and you didn’t just tell the Confed Rep to go home and come back tomorrow, even if the sucker showed up unannounced. Not a man who could shut down your business on this world with a wave of his hand, were he so disposed. Not that he would—big money didn’t fuck with other big money, generally speaking, but he could, so power respected power.
So Shaw had settled for a quick shower and clean clothes and headed back to his office.
It was a beautiful late-spring afternoon. A big thunder-storm gathered itself a few miles out from Chim City, flashing and grumbling, working its way toward the metroplex. The air was warm, but not overly hot, and the smell of mtawbi blossoms, that cedar-trunk-and-musk scent, wafted over him as he walked across the company courtyard. The gardeners did a good job here; everything was trimmed and neat, a man-made and -maintained riot of color and pleasing odors.
His staff knew he was coming, and the security cams made certain they knew when he’d reached the building. Everybody was alert, doing their jobs, attentive. They smiled and nodded as he passed.
Being the boss did have its perks.
He met Randall as he entered the outer office.
“Ah, Newman. Good to see you again.”
“And you, Ellis.”
Of course they were on a first-name basis, the richest man on-planet and the Confed’s highest-ranked rep on this world, who was also considerably well off. Randall’s family was old money, and he had gone into the diplomatic corps as had his father, uncles, aunts, and sibs before him; it was part of what one did if one didn’t have to take over the family business. One served.
“Come in, come in,” Shaw said. “Lillie has offered you a drink, some smoke or dust?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“Not to worry. I should have called for an appointment. I just happened to be in the area and thought I’d stop in.”
Shaw fought the urge to smile. Just happened to be in the area? There would be a cold day in the tropical regions of Hell.
Once they were in the inner office and his assistant had come and gone with tea and silver trays bearing tiny spirals of kick-dust, a legal version made in his own labs, Shaw smiled and they made small talk. How were Newman’s spouses and children?—he was in a group marriage, five men and three women—matters of Confederation concern, the state of business and the markets. He did not look at his chrono, but Shaw knew that this chitchat would last four minutes. That was enough to be polite, not so much as to waste time.
When the niceties had been covered, Shaw got to it: “So, what can I do for you, Newman?”
“Sorry to hear about the rock apes,” he said.
Shaw’s smile didn’t falter. He inclined his head in a slow nod. “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate your concern.”
To admit surprise at Randall’s knowledge or his revelation thereof would have been a weak move. To pretend he didn’t know what the man was talking about would have been impolite—and useless anyhow. If you are caught, his father had taught him, at least have the good grace to acknowledge it like a man.
Inwardly, he cursed. Randall was adept at diplo-speak, a kind of verbal fugue in which much was meant while little was actually said. His comment about the apes spoke volumes. The research involving those creatures was secret—nobody outside of the labs was supposed to know anything about it, save for Cervo and Shaw himself. It was his private project. So Newman Randall had a spy in the labs, possibly bioelectronic, but more likely one of Shaw’s employees had been socially engineered.
That Randall knew of the project and what it was meant also that the Confederation was interested in it, and not just because Shaw’s particular line of research was technically not quite legal. Such an interest of course, Shaw would expect. A drug that would speed human reaction time and physical movement without major side effects? The Confed military would drool. A well-trained soldier who was a third or half again as fast as an enemy? That would be worth enough to put it on a restricted schedule and limit production for official Confederation uses only. Not that such a thing would be a problem; nor would it keep the opposition from eventually getting its hands on it, either. Shaw hadn’t been working on the stuff to make stads anyway. If he went up and down the streets shoveling thousandstad notes out of the back of a van all day every day forever, he’d still be making more in interest on his principal than he could get rid of shoveling it into the street. At his level, you didn’t even need to keep score any longer; that much money was a force unto itself.
That Randall had given up his spy by speaking of the apes meant that either he thought the man—or woman—was untouchable, or that he didn’t care if Shaw removed him or her. Mazes within mazes, gears meshing with gears, this was how the game went at this level, though none of it was a threat to his own purpose. Still, he would have to root out and eliminate the spy. Traitors couldn’t be brooked.
The pause for these thoughts was short, broken by Randall: “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “We are willing to overlook, um, the irregularities concerning the CDA protocols of this new pharmaceutical. But we would like to be kept up to speed on its development.”
“You don’t slap me on the hand and you get first shot at it,” Shaw said.
“Just so.”
“And when it is perfected, if you like what you see, you will grab it for the Confed military in an exclusive run.”
Randall smiled, leaned back in the form-chair, and sipped at his tea.
For the sake of form, Shaw knew he had to protest. Such was expected. He was rich and powerful, and if he didn’t kick, Randall would be quick to wonder why. “This drug could be worth a great deal of money to my company.”
“If it works, it certainly shall be. But you won’t miss a meal if it never turned a demistad. And we would want to keep the production limited to those who would not misuse it.”
“Which, of course, the Confed would never do.”
“Oh, of course not.”
They both smiled at that one.
“And if I decide to stand up for my rights to the free market, I suppose my CDA approval might be particularly taxing. Might not be forthcoming at all?”
“It is always a pleasure to deal with a man of the galaxy about such matters.” He sipped more tea. “What are you calling it again? The drug?”
If he knew about the rock apes, he fucking well knew the name, but there was no point in being ungracious. Randall thought he had the upper hand; let him continue to think so. “Well. We haven’t decided on a marketing strategy, it’s much too soon. We’ve been calling it ‘Reflex,’ though that’s just a working name.”
Randall nodded. Nothing new to him. “My. Look at the time. I must be off, my spouses will be wondering where I am. So good to see you, as always, Ellis.” He stood.
Shaw stood and gave the man his best fake high-wattage smile. “And it’s good to see you again, Newman. My best to the family.”
After he was gone, Shaw said, “Cervo.”
The bodyguard seemed to materialize from nowhere, though he had actually been watching through a one-way panel from a hidden room behind Shaw’s desk. “Sir?”
“You heard about the spy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Find out who it is. Don’t do anything to them yet, just find out.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cervo left, a human tank in whose path you did not want to step.
He had to do that, it would be expected, and the fucking Confed would try to slip somebody else in to replace the spy, even though there was no real need. Besides, he might get some good use from the spy, whoever it was.
As for the Confed, it could take all the Reflex it wanted. He’d still make a profit, and all he needed was a personal supply and exclusive use of it for long enough to achieve his goal. That wasn’t going to be a problem. He owned more than half of the company. When he said “Jump,” there was a thundering chorus of “How high?” in return. This was as it should be.
He would have his drug. The Confed wouldn’t start bleeding it all over the galaxy until human protocols were finished, at least a couple of years, so that was plenty of time. Assuming, of course, the rock apes stopped dying. And that the humans brought in for the next round of tests didn’t themselves start dying.
The Confed could be a pain in the ass, but for men like Shaw, the balm of great monies could soothe things. What the poor people did when the Confederation slapped them? Well, life was unfair. That wasn’t his worry.
Sola, feeling hot and irritated, made it back to her hotel room and fell on the bed. She was sure Mourn hadn’t spotted her. It was just bad luck she had lost him. Damn! That was twice now she had fuzzed an opportunity to get material that would focus her project. She might be able to cast around and find Mourn again—it was a big city, but she might be able to run him down.
Or not. If she couldn’t, something else would turn up. She was too close to victory to lose. Something would turn up.
But before she did anything else, a cool shower would be good. Fresh clothes, something to eat, a glass of wine, and she would be a new woman, ready to kick the planet’s ass, by Jesu!
She stripped, chucking the sweaty shirt and pants into the hamper for the maid, and headed for the shower. They had pretty good water pressure here.
She passed in front of the mirror and took a critical look at her nude body. Not too bad, she decided. She could lose a kilo or two from her hips, which had always been a trifle wide. She did enough walking and gym work to keep pretty toned. She was a little taller than average, maybe 170 centimeters, and probably went fifty-eight, fifty-nine kilograms, and none of it too jiggly.