by Steve Perry
Of course, she had to find him first.
As a freelancer, she didn’t have the contacts of a big news organization, but there were ways to tap into those. If you had been around a while, you learned how.
She commed the Freelancers Media Guild, gave them her ID, and asked for the Membership Secretary.
“This is Brinker. How may I help you?”
“I would like a list of Associate Members on Earth who are within twenty hours of Full Member Status.”
Brinker said, “Let me guess—not from around here, are you?”
“Nope.”
“And too cheap to hire a certified Researcher.”
Of course the Secretary would have heard this request a time or twelve before. He knew what she was up to. “Do I get the list?”
He sighed. “I’ll download it to your com.”
“Thank you.” It was a legitimate request, and she was a member in good standing; still, he could have been a slop-ass about it and made her come in and pick up a hard copy if he felt like busting her boobs.
Once she had the list, Sola would start making calls. Associates who were getting close to Full usually had work, else they wouldn’t be that close; still, there were always a few who weren’t getting there as quick as they wanted. As a Full herself, Sola had just enough clout to be useful to somebody trying to climb the ladder. She could sign off on their hours, up to twenty, and while the deal wasn’t technically legal, it was a fair trade for the right person. An AM who could find the information she wanted, whether it took twenty hours or twenty minutes, would get her signature for the full score of hours’ credit. No money, which was against the organization’s rules, but since FM status was right off the mark an automatic rate increase of 50 percent, a few hours of research time was a cheap price to pay for it.
Somewhere on the list that her com now held was a hungry young reporter with local sources who would hustle his or her ass off to find out where Zachary Bretton Weems was. The faster the AM could do it, the better for both of them.
She could hire five and give them four hours each—twenty hours being her limit for any three-month period.
Or if she felt like being a real bitch, she could take ten or fifteen names on the list and offer them all a whoever-finds-it-first deal, winner take all. That could be a fast turnaround, but it was an ugly way to do biz. She’d hustled a few of those deals herself when she’d been an AM, and for the one winner who was happy, you pissed off a bunch of reporters who might someday be in a position to fuck you over. Media workers had long memories. There were a couple of fairly well known ones that she would shove over a cliff, figuratively, at least, should she be given the chance, and she didn’t want to give anybody reason to want to do that to her. You made enough enemies along the way without working harder to do so.
No, the fair thing was to offer it to one, give them a shot at it, and if they scored, reward them. Yeah, it was cheap, but she didn’t have the stads, and for a young and ambitious media worker, it was a good deal. Nobody lost.
She said, “Com, display downloaded list from Freelancers Media Guild.”
The small holoproj lit with the names. She scanned them quickly, looking for some reason to choose one over the other.
“Com, call Rasha Llew Aileen.” Rasha needed twenty hours exactly. She’d likely be a little hungrier than somebody who needed only three or four. And she liked the sound of the name—as good a reason as any . . .
Shaw watched the recording again, with an eye to editing it. Blending the shots from the various angles was something he could have turned over to the cambot’s computer, which would have done a decent enough job, but he liked to do it himself; he fancied that he had a good eye, and that his editings were more dramatic than the bot’s.
It was not every day you killed a man with your hands and feet. You wanted to get the doing of it down as best you could—
“Sir,” came his secretary’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Your next appointment is here. The team from Portable Medical Systems.”
He frowned. Ah, well. He could do this later. It would keep.
He locked it away under his personal code.
“Send them in.”
“It looks like a suitcase somebody tipped onto its side,” Shaw said.
“Low center of gravity,” the CEO of PortMed said. “Henry?”
The R&D VP nodded. He was tall, lean, his hair shaved into a tight maze pattern. “Almost impossible to turn over, the wheelbase is so wide for the weight. If it does get flipped upside down . . .” He stuck his boot toe under the leading edge and heaved—it took some effort because the thing was apparently heavy—and the device landed on its “back.”
There was a high-pitched hum, and the device extruded a spring-loaded arm and flipped itself back onto its silicone treads, which looked a lot like those on a military tank.
“Self-righting,” the R&D guy said. “And the wheels are gyroscopic and on a frame, so if you come to some stairs, it can climb them as fast as you can, unless you are trying for some kind of record. On the flats, it can keep up with a jogger.”
Shaw nodded. It wouldn’t make any sense to have an emergency medical tracker called a “Vouch-Safe” that couldn’t follow you around.
The R&D guy said, “There are ceramic plates on the belly, and spidersilk softweave just under the shell, so the thing is pretty much bulletproof. Waterproof, too—you can leave it in the rain for a year and it’ll work just fine. Batteries are good for a month of normal use, and will automatically induce a recharge off any standard outlet; the fuel cell will last ten years, and you can switch it out in five minutes without tools, if you have the vault door codes. Same for loading RX.”
Shaw nodded again. “All right. Tell me about the biological end.”
The CEO said, “October?”
The woman, who was a little on the chunky side but quite attractive, with blond streaks in her red hair, said, “Everything is state-of-the-art. The main tracker uses the subject’s brain pattern, via wireless pickups tuned to the subject’s implants, coded sig, with an effective range of three hundred meters under ideal conditions—a walk in the country, say, alone—half that in a city’s electronic flux.”
“Implants?”
“Standard EEG transmitters used in seizure treatment. A primary and a backup, inserted into the trapezius at the base of the neck via intramuscular injection. About the size of a fat grain of rice each. Old-tech, nothing complicated, just like the first credit card IDs and dog-finder chips.”
He nodded again. No problem with that.
“The main systems telemetry comes from another implant into the sternum that reads BP, heart rate, respiration, hormone levels, like that.
“In addition, the unit can do more extensive tests on blood, which it can draw either on command or automatically upon readings that are below normal limits.”
“If the subject passes out, the unit works on its own?”
“Yes. It will roll up, query aloud, and if there is no response to trigger the voxax circuit—which can be limited to the owner and any designated others—then the vouch does a hypo stick, draws blood, and runs a full SMA chem. It can detect three hundred poisons and administer antidotes for the most common ones. If the ECG shows cardiac illness, it will administer appropriate medications or electricity. It has antibiotics, analgesics, stimulants, relaxants, clot-busters, diuretics—treatments for the most common diseases. It can detect and orthostat a simple fracture. It will use its built-in communications gear to call for help from the nearest medical facility if it detects anything beyond its capability to repair immediately. It can also analyze urine, fecal, and tissue samples.”
Shaw smiled and shook his head. “A mechanical doctor that follows you around like a dog. What a great toy.”
The VP, R&D, and Medico all smiled in return.
“How much do you need to go into full production?”
The Sales VP said, “Tooling and sup
plies, labor, marketing, we’re thinking we could get by on eighteen million for the first year, though we’d be more comfortable with twenty. If we can get five from you, we believe we can get the rest from several other venture-capital parties who have shown interest.”
“No,” Shaw said.
He let them worry about that for a few seconds, just because it amused him. Before they could do more than frown and raise their eyebrows, he said, “I want to be the exclusive investor. I’ll put up twenty-five million—you can walk out of here with a transfer cube for the entire amount—provided you will sign a contract making me your sole angel.”
The CEO smiled, the three VPS looked stunned, and Shaw knew it was a done deal.
“One stipulation. How many prototypes do you have?”
“Half a dozen,” the R&D VP said. “Three at full capacity.”
“I want one.” It was a great toy.
“You got it,” the CEO said.
Shaw smiled again. It was good to be rich.
Azul rented a sleep kiosk, went inside, lit her confounder, and took out the info ball the op had tendered. She slipped it into her reader and watched the holoproj bloom over it.
ID CODE? blinked over and over in red.
Citizens had all kinds of codes—job numbers, communications numbers, travel and home addresses and medical codes, but there was no question but that the info ball wanted her Confed Operative Code. She used the keypad to input it—even with the confounder running to kill any electronic listeners, that wasn’t something she wanted spoken aloud. A confounder wouldn’t shut down a pair of human ears that might be at the keyhole.
The code was seventeen digits, and included numbers and letters. She changed it once a week. Chances of somebody figuring it out without a quantum computer dedicated to the task were between extremely slim and none. And if somebody wanted to bother wasting a QC unit on her? The code would be changed in a week anyhow.
Once she hit the return key, the three-dimensional holographic projection rippled, and she found herself looking at another set of numbers and words, no pictures:
4 SOUTH PARK NJIA YA MJI, SUITE 211, 1800 HOURS.
A street address, a room number, and a time. She memorized the screen. Ten seconds after she was done, the holoproj went blank, then shut down. The info ball ejected. She picked it up. It was warm. The data on it had been fried, it was just a little stainless-steel marble now, something you could present to the best computer recovery team out there and they’d find zip-zock if they tried to comb it. Whoever had sent this wasn’t taking any chances that it would reveal who he or she was. Cautious, but since there had been a watcher on her when she arrived at the port, apparently not cautious enough.
She looked at her ring chronometer. Almost 1500. She had three hours to find the address and scope it before she walked into whatever was waiting there for her. Should be plenty of time.
8
Rasha Llew Aileen earned her twenty hours in a little under three—maybe less, depending on how long she waited to call Sola back. The verbal contract they had recorded wasn’t technically enforceable, given Rasha’s status in the Guild, but it was binding generally as a legal document, and Rasha, who sounded as if she was about twenty and SoAfrican, from her accent, tendered the information fast enough.
“He’s at the Milner Hotel in New Orleans, NorAm, registered under the name ‘Miyamoto Cyrus Dexter Carliano. ’”
“Outstanding work. I am uploading the voucher right now. Thanks, F. Aileen.”
“Are you kidding? Twenty hours puts me into Full status. Thank you, F. Sola. You need anything else done while you are Earth, call me first. Professional discount, plus ten percent.”
“I will.”
After they discommed, Sola called up a map on the room’s computer and booked a boxcar for New Orleans. It was a city near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, straddling a crescent-shaped loop of a large river, not far from the mouth. If she made the next connection, she could be there in a couple of hours. She grinned. Yes!
Mourn looked at the curve of the planet as the boxcar dropped from its high parabola toward the port. Earth was the bluest of all the worlds he had visited. There were a few others with more water-to-land ratios, but something in the atmosphere or the oceans made it a cooler color than those worlds.
He looked at his chronometer. They’d be down in another few minutes. He had never been to this particular city, in the southern section of NorAm, though he had done a search on its history and geography as part of the background check. A river port on alluvial soil, flat and mostly sea level, the place had changed hands more often than a demistad coin in the early years of its existence. Natives, Spanish, French, American Colonial, Confederate States, United States, World Union, Confederation. Even before space travel, the place had been a mélange of cultures and peoples. The place had been inundated a few times, drowning a lot of folks and destroying a lot of property, but had been rebuilt after each flood. Now, it was only a few miles from a large offworld port in a local gulf, which gave it more diversity.
He had but one reason to go there, and that was basic self-defense. While Weems had told Theo Popper that he wasn’t interested in a match with Mourn, only a fool would accept such a statement at face value. You didn’t get to be the top fighter in the galaxy without learning how to be devious. Maybe Weems was just taking a vacation and seeing the sights, sampling the native foods, whatever. Or maybe he was looking to get a little workout by hammering Mourn into the ground with his cane. If you just sat around and waited to find out which was true, you could wind up dead. It only made sense strategically and tactically to check things out. If you had a potential enemy about, knowing where he was and what he was doing was basic.
He’d have to be very careful—if Weems spotted him, whatever he’d had planned might be affected. You looked up and saw a contender stalking you, you wanted to bring it to him on your terms rather than waiting for his. In this game, at this level, any and every advantage you could gain was to your benefit. Terrain, time of day or night, space, any or all of these might be the edge you’d need to walk away a winner. Put the sun in your opponent’s eyes, take the high ground—or the low ground, if that was your preference—make the ring small if you were an infighter, larger if you liked to stand back—whatever. Like Go or chess, a move made early enough could influence the outcome a long way down the line. The fight, players liked to say, was not under your glove but under your hat.
Not that Mourn intended to challenge Weems. He was too good. Mourn had seen the recordings, he knew the stats. With a blade against a blade, maybe ai-uchi, mutual slaying, was possible, but that wasn’t high on his list of ways to end a match. With a blade against that solid and heavy carbon-fiber cane Weems favored, Weems would win. He was a magician with that stick and hook. Bare? That was tricky. Weems was fast, and the new art Mourn had been studying gave him a positional advantage, wherein speed could be somewhat negated. But Mourn wasn’t deep enough in it yet; he had the basics, especially with the short knives, but the basics weren’t going to be enough to take out a man like Weems. Of course, he had other arts, but so did Number One, and he had beaten fighters who had beaten Mourn, and decisively. No, he wasn’t quite ready to go head-to-head with Weems, bare or armed, not without a cheat, and of course, that would make it pointless.
Was it a fair match?
That would be the first question the showrunners asked—it was always the first question they asked, and if you couldn’t answer it correctly—and the stress analyzers and face readers and the brain strainers used were damned hard to beat—then you didn’t get the victory. If you cheated, you were subject to immediate expulsion from the Flex. And if you killed or even seriously injured the other player using a cheat? The showrunners could zap you right there and then for making it an unfair contest. No judge, no appeal, game, set, match, and final chill. Those were the rules you agreed to when you entered the game. If you didn’t play by the rules, there was no point.
Below, the city of New Orleans grew in size as the ship fell.
He wasn’t going to challenge Weems. He was just going to check him out. It was the prudent thing to do.
“We got a live one!” the medico Bevins said over the comlink.
It took a second for Shaw to comprehend it. “Excuse me?”
“Barry. Barry made it past the cutoff!”
Shaw was on his feet and heading for his office door before the tech spoke another word. He could be at the lab in five minutes if he took the tram, less than that if he ran.
He ran. Didn’t take the elevator, but ran down the stairs, out the exit, and across the compound, sprinting. Cervo would be behind him, even though they were in the protected compound.
“Barry” was one of the latest batch of rock apes. The term was not technically correct—the test animals were not apes, though once upon a time their ancestors had lived in a rocky environment. What they were in fact was a kind of creature more akin to lemurs, if somewhat larger, whose immune systems were a lot closer to humans than anything but H-DNA chimpanzees or revised bushmonks, both of which were hard to come by out here. That one of the animals had survived might be the breakthrough they had been hoping for.
The lab’s door recognized and admitted him fast enough to keep him from smacking his nose into the denscris. Bevins, the Medico Team Leader, waited in the first positive-pressure room two locks in. Bevins wore sterile skins and held a second set. Shaw stripped to underwear and slipped into the skins. The white material covered everything from the head to the feet, and would protect the lab and its animals—and the people wearing the suits—from cross-contamination.