A handshake and Noah palmed the small, innocuous-looking gadget and slipped it in his hip pack. He instructed his eVi to transfer the funds to Emilio’s account. And like that, the deal was done.
He patted Emilio’s shoulder. “Pleasure doing business with you, as always.”
“I’m gonna buy a top-shelf illusoire with the proceeds, man.”
“Enjoy, then!” He laughed as he slid out of the booth and back into the crowd.
The city which comprised Pandora’s inhabited region constituted a two hundred kilometer swath of gleaming metal and bright lights. There existed dark areas of Pandora, but they resided below even the Boulevard.
People assumed Pandora was unruled, out-of-control chaos, a patchwork of merchants and clubs and black markets. In truth, it had been constructed and continued to be overseen by a loose association of wealthy entertainment moguls. Which individuals participated in the association was a closely guarded secret, presumably because they held important positions in society.
They built out additional infrastructure when it became needed and ensured the power grid and transportation system continued to function. They kept the slums corralled in small, well-defined areas and made sure the criminal cartels didn’t gain too powerful of a foothold in the commerce of the planet. Agents of the cartels existed on Pandora without a doubt; some of them even had significant business ventures, but they ranked no higher than the successful independent entrepreneurs.
Pandora was a world where anything went, where you could buy anything and sell anything, where you could live out your wildest fantasy or spend forty years in a haze of parties and booze and chimerals and sex—or do both. And it was an illusion.
Oh, you could do all those things, to be sure. But the world was an artificial creation. A planet-sized theme park where the machinery of the rides was kept hidden from public view.
Noah knew this because his father acted as a minor player in the association which controlled Pandora. In the weeks before bailing on his father’s grand plan for his life, he had hacked and made copies of his father’s personal and business records. For insurance, for blackmail if necessary, and out of mild curiosity at what he would be leaving behind.
He’d never used the information to his advantage, at least not overtly. But simply being aware of the ‘men behind the curtain,’ as it were, gave his life here a certain unreal quality. Like he had been immersed in a nineteen-year-long deep-dive full-sensory head trip. It gave him freedom and, it could be argued, encouraged a level of recklessness and imprudent behavior he might not be inclined to engage in if any of this were real.
Still…it was all good, he thought as he stepped off the levtram and into The Approach.
Most of the districts on Pandora were named some variation of a thoroughfare; there was also The Channel, The Promenade, The Avenue, The Passage, and so on. Their names gave no clue as to their character or quality, however. Visitors arrived clueless, but enterprising street urchins stalked the spaceport, willing to size up what a visitor had come to find and what they could afford and send them in the right direction—for a few credits, of course.
His apartment was located in The Approach, which only meant it lay in the region between the transport hub and the most popular entertainment district. It actually did have a lot of character, inhabited by a chaotic jumble of artists, merchants and runaways who had decent funds in their account—which he supposed, even after nineteen years, included him.
He unlocked the door and slipped in his apartment, grateful for once no one frolicked in the hallway, as he did need to work this afternoon. His proffered excuse for not hanging out with Emilio hadn’t been a lie, as such. He did need to meet a client on the Prom in twenty; it happened to be in twenty hours, not minutes. Emilio was an okay guy, but his cohorts weren’t. And besides, he’d just as soon not loiter on The Boulevard any longer than he had to.
He grabbed a water from the fridge and stepped in his work room. A floor-to-ceiling cabinet lined the left wall, full to the brim with components, spare parts and pending orders. The far wall contained four shelves of equipment and tools. He sat down at the workbench along the right wall, spun around to retrieve the other components from the cabinet, then sat back and contemplated the pieces spread on the table in front of him.
The item he had picked up from Emilio represented the final component for a special order of custom equipment. Individually, each component was innocuous: a neck wrap, a contact pad to access the tiny fibers at the base of the neck which connected to a person’s cybernetics, a quantum data transmitter and a data buffer. Combined, they created an extremely powerful and quite illegal tool.
When worn by an individual, the item allowed the person to interface directly with a remote synthetic neural net (‘Artificial’ being the somewhat derogatory but widely used term). The buffer was a necessity because even a heavily cybernetically-enhanced human brain couldn’t begin to process the data streaming from a neural net in real time; absent one you risked frying your cybernetics from the overload of data.
Artificials were required to be registered and pre-approved by regulatory authorities, who certified the mandated security blocks were in place and sufficient. Even on the most free-wheeling independent worlds they were carefully monitored. And remotely interfacing with one—which thanks to quantum transmission might literally be halfway across settled space—was strictly forbidden. A person walking down the street, or more likely sitting in a corporate boardroom, sporting secret access to zettaFLOPs of mental power went several steps beyond the unfair advantages tolerated by society.
Seeing as it really was a dangerous tool, he wouldn’t normally be comfortable either constructing or selling it. In this case, however, he knew the client personally and felt certain she didn’t intend to use it for galactic domination. No, he suspected she simply wanted to see what it was like to effectively meld with the mind of an Artificial…and because she could.
18
SIYANE
METIS NEBULA, UNCHARTED PLANET
* * *
CALEB SAT ON THE BOTTOM RUNG of the ladder, arms draped over his knees and hands clasped loosely together.
She lay half-subsumed beneath the tear in the wall, working to re-secure a long strip of threaded cabling in the narrow space between the interior wall and exterior hull. She hadn’t said more than two words since they had come downstairs, the two words having been ‘stay there.’
He had already analyzed what he could see of the hold. Though the rather significant damage muddled matters somewhat, he had quickly classified the engineering section as an advanced but mostly standard layout for a ship of this size, albeit featuring several unusual customizations.
This conclusion he had come to in the first two minutes; thirty-seven minutes later, there was only one thing left in the hold for him to analyze.
“So you’re a treasure hunter.”
It was the most rational conclusion. The instruments and panel readouts on the main deck were geared toward measurement and detection of element concentrations, spectrum spikes and notable astronomical phenomena. They covered too broad a range for a purely scientific expedition; and besides, a double Masters in mechanical engineering and stellar astronomy yet no doctorate suggested she was far too practical to be a scientist.
The ship displayed a complete lack of corporate branding anywhere, and the last employer listed in her file was from eight years earlier. Taken together with the fair number of personal extravagances, it meant she had to be independent.
The muffled response came from within the aperture. “I’m an explorer.”
“That’s what I said—a treasure hunter.”
She grunted in exertion and a section of cabling snapped snugly against the wall. “And I said for you not to bother me.”
He gave an exaggerated shrug, though he doubted she was able to see it. “Right, my bad.”
A few seconds passed. She groaned and slid into the open to glare at him in obvious an
noyance. “I find undiscovered planets, resources, astronomical events, other anomalies, and sell the information to whoever can make the best use of it.”
“To the highest bidder.”
“If they’re legitimate and meet the correct profile? Usually, yes.”
“That’s cold. Ruthless even.”
She exhaled. It was less a sigh and more a forceful expulsion of air from the lungs. He took note of the way the firm muscles in her stomach expanded then contracted beneath the thin, pliant fabric of her shirt, but decided it would be best to ignore the smooth rise then fall of her chest.
“No, it’s not. Everyone is better off as a result. Without my work, no one knows about the resource. With it, others are able to develop new tech, new materials, even new worlds. I’m merely improving civilization.”
He burst out laughing. It was genuine and unplanned and he just couldn’t help it.
She straightened her arms behind her and sat up, the better to direct the full power of her glare at him. “What.”
The white-blue light of the screens hovering in the otherwise dark hold transformed her irises to liquid silver. He blinked and tried to ignore the startling effect—which was somewhat difficult if he was to continue meeting her gaze. Ignoring every attractive quirk of hers might be harder than first thought.
But he wasn’t here to get laid; he was here to get off this planet in one piece. Building an amicable relationship furthered his goal, but he suspected coming on to her would result in another elbow to the face. For starters.
Of course, he probably shouldn’t tease her either. Ah well, too late now. “You are not out here, on this very unique ship, to ‘improve civilization.’”
Her eyes widened in offense. But he merely regarded her with amusement, and the severe countenance melted away.
She rolled her eyes at the low ceiling, but her shoulders snapped straight into a proud posture. “I sleep well at night, comforted by the knowledge what I do helps rather than hurts. But…no, perhaps it’s not my primary purpose.”
Then she frowned, and it occurred to him maybe she hadn’t intended to say so much—which meant she thought she had revealed something about herself she hadn’t wanted to.
She dropped to the floor and slid back under the wall. “Now would you please shut up?”
He needed some time to ponder what the accidental reveal meant, anyway. “Certainly.”
She was eyeing him over her sandwich—roasted penzine, which his data cache told him was a small fowl native to Erisen, and Swiss cheese on dark rye bread. “Why are you out here?”
His lips pursed together, his own sandwich poised in midair. Damn she was persistent. “I still can’t tell you, except to say it wasn’t supposed to involve violence.”
“How comforting.”
He shrugged, annoyed she doubted him, then annoyed at himself for being annoyed. He should really be more in control of the situation than this. “What do you want me to say?”
“What you’re doing out here.”
He dropped the remains of his sandwich to the plate in frustration. She raised an eyebrow in response, which only made things considerably worse. He looked around the cabin, eager to change the topic of conversation. “So do I get to sleep in the chair again tonight?”
She shook her head in the negative, then jerked it in the direction of the starboard wall. “There’s a guest cot, pulls out of the wall. There’s even a privacy screen. You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.”
He chuckled at the odd, quaint-sounding idiom. “A what?”
“It’s just something my—” Her eyes darkened and she practically leapt out of the chair to carry her plate to the sink. “Never mind.”
He frowned, as much at her abrupt change of mood as his unexpected desire to make it better. No, it was the proper reaction; a cheerful mood meant harmonious interaction and the absence of guns and hand-to-hand combat. “Thank you, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Not quite the luxurious nest you have downstairs but—”
The loud clang of a plate against the sink’s surface cut him off. His frown deepened; he made sure his voice sounded neutral and nonthreatening. “Is everything okay?”
She spun around to lean on the counter, an indecipherable look on her face. “Look, I’m not used to having someone out here with me, in my space and asking questions and—particularly a suspicious and dangerous spy who tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t try to kill you.” At her dubious glare he grimaced. “Okay, I might have tried to shoot you down. But you did shoot me down, and you don’t see me holding a grudge. Second ship blown up in two months, but whatever, it’s fine, they’re only ships.”
“To you, maybe.”
For the briefest moment, her expression became totally unguarded and open. Until this instant, he hadn’t realized the cold, hard demeanor was a mask she had donned for him, or possibly for everyone. This though…this was beautiful.
He smiled with what he hoped conveyed sincerity. “Your ship’s important to you, I imagine.”
“You could say that.” The unguarded, beautiful expression lingered for another breath before fading away behind the mask.
He stood, plate in hand, and headed over to the sink as well. “You’ve obviously put a lot of time and money into it.” He leaned in to stow his plate right as she reached across to grab the hand towel.
For a solid two seconds they both froze in place, shoulders touching and faces centimeters apart, too close to even focus on the other. He was suddenly consumed by the thought of how damned hot the air felt for a supposedly climate-controlled room.
She snatched the towel off its hook and stepped back, and the spell broke. He busied himself with stowing his plate…and slowing a racing pulse.
As the afternoon faded into evening, she gradually started talking, responding to his casual inquiries in a more conversational tone and even volunteering information from time to time. What she was doing and why, details on the mechanics in the engineering well and other parts of the ship.
He responded by sharing where appropriate. He talked about what his experiences had and hadn’t taught him about ships, some of the more interesting designs he’d seen and so on. Building rapport with his captor.
It was late in the evening ship-time when she sank against an undamaged section of the wall and looked at him. Damp strands of hair had glued themselves to flush cheeks; grease had smudged along her neck.
“Can you cook?”
He shrugged in careful nonchalance. “I’ve been told I’m not half bad at it, yeah. Why?”
She climbed to her feet and wiped her hands on by now filthy pants. “I’m going to take a shower. You can cook dinner.”
“You realize in order to cook I’ll have to touch something.”
“I grant you a specific, limited exception.”
“Fair enough. But how do I know how to work the stove, or where the food is?”
She shot him an odd look as she passed him and climbed up the ladder. “You’re a smart guy, and seeing as you’re apparently already familiar with my kitchen, I assume you’ll figure it out.”
And he did figure it out, because he was a smart guy…and was already familiar with her kitchen. By the time she came up the stairwell the aroma of steaming vegetables and roasting potatoes filled the cabin.
He glanced over upon her arrival and nearly dropped the wok mid-toss.
She wore flimsy little gray shorts and a black tank top. The tiny straps exposed a sculpted collarbone and delicate hollow at the base of her throat. She was toweling dry her hair, which turned out to be quite long when it wasn’t tied up in a ponytail or knot or whatever she did to it. Burgundy locks fell in soft waves to frame those remarkable cheekbones, then down along her neck to tease alabaster shoulders before draping midway down her back. Beneath the shorts slender but toned legs seemed to go on forever.
He swallowed and promptly gave up on ignoring any and all attractive traits of hers; it was far too much work. It had been some
time since a woman had legitimately taken his breath away.
“Um, stir-fry okay? I wasn’t sure….”
She smiled, and for yet another moment her expression was genuine and unguarded and easily as beautiful as before. She appeared completely unaware of the effect she was having on him. “Definitely. It smells delicious.”
He tried to match the tenor of her smile. “Excellent.” The steam started stinging his eyes; he returned his attention to the stove and hurried to make sure the potatoes didn’t burn while mentally berating himself for getting all goo-goo eyed and flustered like he was fourteen.
He sprinkled pepper on his vegetables. Thanks to the flash freezing they had retained much of their flavor, but Senecan dishes tended toward spicy, and he had acquired the taste. “Caleb.”
Her fork paused at her lips. “Hmm?”
“My name. It’s Caleb.” Why was he telling her?
The corners of her mouth rose a fraction. “Better.”
That was why. Shit.
She took a sip of water. “I knew a Samuel in elementary school. He was a bully, tried to beat my friend up.”
“What happened?”
“I beat him up instead.”
“Naturally.”
She shrugged. “It worked. He left us alone from then on. Caleb what?”
“Marano.”
Surprise flashed across her face. “You’re just telling me?”
Apparently. “I could be lying again.”
“True. But you’re not.”
Was it painted in neon letters on his forehead? “No, I’m not. You fancy yourself good at reading people?”
“Hell, no. I’m terrible at it.” She continued eating, but her motions slowed as her eyes unfocused. “Caleb Marano: Born June 3, 2283, Cavare, Seneca. Father: engineer for the Senecan Civil Development Agency. Mother: freelance industrial architect. Younger sister Isabela, age thirty-two: professor of biochemistry. Parents divorced in 2301. It says you’re an assembly line manager for Terrestrial Avionics—which is a lie, of course.”
Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One Page 15