The Credulity Nexus

by Graham Storrs

  “It's OK, Nephele, I'm dealing with it,” Carlotta said as she nudged her sister out of the way. “Look, mister, if he owes you money, get in line. If you want to shoot the bum, take a ticket. Otherwise, it's nothing to do with us any more.”

  “But I just–”

  The line went dead. Blake stared at the empty display in stunned silence, then gave a snort of amazement. Whatever had inspired Rik to get involved with those two – and the beautiful faces and glimpses of deep cleavage certainly provided clues – Blake could understand why his friend would want to be a long, long way away. They sure weren't anything like Maria!

  Blake had known Maria back in the old days, when Rik had been on the force and they'd all lived in the same neighbourhood. He'd always liked her. Hell, what was not to like? She was gorgeous, in a long-limbed, willowy kind of way. She was funny. She was smart. And she loved Rik to pieces. Loved him too much, maybe. Let herself hang on too long to a man hell bent on throwing away every good thing in his life, including her. Rik broke that woman's heart over and over until she just couldn't stand it any more, packed up, moved east and filed for divorce. And who could blame her?

  That's when Rik really went to pieces. Within a month of Maria leaving, Rik had his big row with the Captain and was out on his ear, snooping after cheating husbands for a living. One of the best cops Blake had ever known, too. One of the best friends. And now what was going on with Rik? He was back on Earth – in Europe for Chrissake! – and hiding out, else why kill his ID?

  The thought that his friend was in trouble gnawed at him. He owed a lot to Rik. He owed him his life. If Rik hadn't had his back, that day in Potrero... Brie didn’t understand that kind of debt.

  But what could he do? He should hang on to the package and wait for Rik to get in touch. He looked at the silver box on the seat beside him. This was serious shit. Biohazard could mean anything, but it sure didn't mean anything good. He couldn't keep the stuff at home, not around Brie. He couldn't keep it at the station. He could just put it in a locker at the bus depot or something, but what if it was stolen? What if there was some freak accident? A quake, maybe? A public place like that...

  He was almost at the station. He had to stop agonising about it and do something.

  “Pull over,” he told the car, and it started looking for a parking spot.

  Brie was right, of course. He should turn it in. But Brie didn't understand that he couldn't let Rik down. Rik would never have sent it if it wasn't important. And, with Rik lying low, maybe it was life and death for him. But he had to do something with the damned stuff.

  The car came to a halt and he looked out through the windscreen, searching for inspiration. And there it was, a big blue and white Post Office sign. He knew Maria's address. He could send it to her. She lived alone, as far as Blake knew. And if Rik came looking for his package, he could send him on to see Maria.

  Maybe it would be just what they needed to start talking again. Kill two birds with one stone. Whatever kind of hole Rik was in, Blake was sure his friend would benefit from seeing Maria again. He'd be doing both of them a favour, and the package had already survived a trip all the way from England. He'd wrap it up good in that new shock-absorbent wrap they sell. It would only be in transit for a few hours. Not a big risk at all.

  Pleased with himself, he picked up the package and set off for the Post Office.

  Chapter 7

  Rik caught the underground at East Ham station and had to change twice before he got onto the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow Airport. At East Ham the line was above ground, and he could watch the shabby suburbs rattle by as he passed one run-down little Victorian station after another. But after just a handful of stops, the line plunged steeply downwards into the black belly of the great city. From that point on, all he could do was watch his reflection in the window, eating the barely-palatable sandwiches he'd bought on his way to the station, and count off the stops to his next change.

  And go slowly crazy with boredom.

  When Heathrow tube station finally appeared, he almost knocked over a couple of backpacking Aussie kids in his eagerness to get off the train. If there was one thing he was starting to regret about this job, it was the travelling! The thought of another four hours on a hopper to LA, and then another hop to Mexico, and then twelve more hours climbing the so-called high-speed Guadalajara Spacebridge, had him knotted up and ready to scream.

  “Think about the money,” he told himself. “Keep thinking about the goddamn money.”

  The hopper pads were way over the far side of the international terminals. They'd tacked the pads on forty years before, when sub-orbital flight was new and shiny. In all that time, they hadn't got round to rebuilding the airport, even though flight by any other means was now as rare as rainforest.

  Rik grumbled to himself about it all the way across the airport. At least, he promised himself, he'd be able to get a shower and pick up some clean clothes when he got to Blake's house. The luggage he arrived on Earth with was still in Berlin, and he didn't expect to see it again. He'd had to dump his gun in a litter bin back in East Ham. Without his identity as a PLEO and the license that went with it, he'd be stopped trying to carry a weapon into the airport. Until he reached LA, then, he was relying on body odour and a bad attitude to keep the bad guys away.

  He bought a coffee and a disposable reader and flopped into a hard plastic seat in the departure lounge. He downloaded a novel from the airport net and tried to read it. Big displays, spaced around the lounge, were showing non-stop news and entertainment shows. They blared out a constant, manic jabber that made it impossible to concentrate or relax, but which was nevertheless unintelligible.

  Rik ground his teeth and switched to audio. The reader began speaking the book into his aural implants through his cogplus. It wasn't a great success; the dodgy cogplus and the cheap reader couldn't quite communicate properly, and between them they managed to lose several words in every paragraph. It created some interesting sentences and forced an unnatural level of concentration. So much, in fact, that Rik didn't notice the young man standing beside him until he felt a touch on his shoulder.

  Immediately Rik was on his feet, his hand reaching for his absent weapon.

  “Excuse me,” the man said in a suave English accent. “I didn't mean to startle you. My name is Rajan Shah. I'm with the security services.” He didn't show a badge or exchange any ID. Rik knew full well that 'security services' didn't mean the airport rent-a-cops. It almost certainly meant MI5, and that could only mean trouble.

  “I'm sorry,” Rik said, stalling. “I don't understand.”

  The young man smiled politely. "I'm sure you do, Mr. Drew." He stepped back a pace and indicated the route back towards the main buildings. “We'd just like to ask you a few questions.”

  Rik did a quick scan of the area. There was a tough-looking guy waiting along the route Shah wanted him to go. There were also at least two others standing back and trying to look inconspicuous. He looked wistfully at the big windows that opened out onto the hopper pads and the tall, white VTOL aircraft standing outside like monuments to the Space Age. He'd probably save the spooks the job and kill himself if he tried jumping through those great slabs of glass.

  He turned back to the young man beside him. Shah was a slender man, tall and rather elegant. But you could never tell, these days, what kind of cybernetic or genetic augmentations a man had. Accepting that they had him in a corner, Rik nodded his acquiescence and let Shah lead him away.

  They had barely gone two paces when there was a scream from within the lounge. Everyone turned to look at the screamer, then at the window she was pointing at.

  A black female figure hung upside-down outside the window, poised like a diver in mid air. In a breathless moment as everyone gaped, the woman drew back her fist and punched the glass. The huge pane exploded into a million pieces, and the woman swung in through the curtain of shards, scattering them over the panicking crowd.

  “You're going to need
your gun,” Rik growled at Shah, who was staring, mesmerised, at the upload. “She's after me.”

  The upload turned a neat, twisting somersault and landed on her feet, facing Rik. Glass rained down all around her like a sudden spring rain. It bounced harmlessly off her hairless, artificial body. Her skin, lips and fingernails were as black as soot. Her eyes gleamed like black marbles behind black eyelids. Even the nine millimetre automatic in her hand was black. It was impossible to read her expression. All Rik saw in that pretty face was focus and intent.

  Shah was in motion at last, shouting to his troops, shouting at the crowd. He pushed past Rik to stand between him and the upload, gun in hand.

  The woman was perfectly still, holding the position she had landed in, balanced on her toes as if ready to dance. Only her head moved as she glanced around the room, picking out Shah's men, so obvious now as they converged on her.

  When she moved, so did Rik.

  Gunfire erupted all around. The upload was firing at Shah's men, scattering terrified travellers as she raced to and fro at superhuman speeds. The MI5 agents were firing back at her, dodging around the screaming, yelling people, trying to get a clear shot.

  Rik kept low and ran for the boarding gate. He was almost there when a plastic chair beside him twanged like a rubber band as a bullet went through it. He threw himself sideways and turned to see the upload clinging to the ceiling, tracking him with her gun. Bullets smashed into the plaster panels around her. One hit her in the thigh. She twitched but ignored it; a small grey patch on her perfect, ebony skin was the only mark it left on her.

  An MI5 agent threw himself down on one knee beside Rik, covering the upload with a snub-nosed sub-machine gun. It didn't make Rik feel the slightest bit safer.

  The woman dropped to the ground, landing on her feet like a big, black cat. She fired two shots into Rik's would-be protector before she leapt aside to avoid a storm of gun-fire. The agent slumped to the ground, blood pouring from two chest-wounds. Rik didn't waste time checking if he was alive. He grabbed the man's gun and set off for the boarding gate again.

  This time he made it, slamming through the double doors and into a long, curving corridor. At the end would be the connecting walkway to the aircraft and, since the hopper hadn't arrived yet, a long drop to the landing pad below. Rik hadn't quite worked out what he was going to do about that. His only thought had been to get out of that slaughter-house by the fastest route.

  The corridor was suspended high in the air, and it shook and boomed as Rik raced along it, but not so much that he didn't hear the sound of pursuit when it came.

  He turned a corner, and there was the walkway just metres away, the escape he'd been desperate for blocked by a solid door. He crashed into it, but it didn't yield. He could hear the upload's light footfalls just around the corner. With a yell of frustration he turned and fell to one knee, aiming his weapon back along the corridor.

  Above and around him, he realised, the walls were a thin, flexible fabric on a concertinaed framework. If he could rip a hole in it and squeeze between the metal hoops of the frame, he could get outside. But there was no time. The upload was here.

  As soon as she saw him, she slowed from a dead run to a slow walk. She moved with an athletic grace, the human mind inside her android body imbuing her movements with a disturbingly feminine sensuality.

  “Turn around and leave, or I shoot,” Rik said, as calmly as he could. He didn't know much about these nanite bodies, but he knew they were almost invulnerable. Any damage was almost instantly repaired as the surrounding nanites flowed in to fix it up, restructuring and reprogramming themselves in real time. He recalled there was one weakness though.

  “Give yourself up, Rik,” the woman said. Her voice was as slinky as the rest of her, smooth and rich, with no sign of stress or emotion. “I don't need to hurt you. All I want is the box you took from GeneWerken. I'll get you out of here and then you can tell me where it is.”

  She kept coming as she spoke, leaving Rik no time to think. Somewhere inside that tough robotic body was the woman's mind – her 'brain box', in the jargon of the off-world construction sites, where uploads were as common as human workers. It would be a small processor unit, an armoured quantum computer that held the whole of the woman's mind. It wouldn't be in her skull. It would be somewhere with more body-mass around it, somewhere like her chest or abdomen. He aimed at the woman's stomach and fired three rapid shots.

  The upload stopped and clutched at herself, her eyes widening with surprise and alarm – the first emotions Rik had seen in her. He'd obviously guessed right, even if he'd missed.

  “Even uploads can die,” he said, and switched the weapon to automatic.

  The upload leapt to the wall, then the ceiling, then charged at him. Rik squeezed the trigger and threw himself aside. The weapon roared, rasping out ten rounds a second in an ear-splitting scream. A stream of bullets thudded into the woman's body, seeking out her vulnerable belly no matter how she bent and twisted. The closer she got, the better was Rik's aim, but she wouldn't stop. Even when he could see the gun flash mirrored in her obsidian eyes, she came on.

  With a swipe of her slender hand, she knocked the gun aside, almost breaking Rik's fingers and silencing the racket that had engulfed them. She looked down at him with what he took to be a kind of horror at what she had risked and survived. Her pockmarked torso was grey with dead, pulverised nanites, gobs of hot lead still embedded in her. She raised her hand again to strike him across the head, and the sounds of gunfire erupted again in the narrow corridor.

  The upload turned to face Shah and two others as they took up firing positions.

  “Aim for the stomach,” Rik yelled.

  The woman turned quickly to him and snarled. Black teeth in black gums. She fired a short volley at the agents, killing another one, and before they could return fire, she tore her way through the wall of the corridor and was gone.

  Chapter 8

  To Rik's surprise, Heathrow had its own police station, a big, busy place with armoured vehicles parked in the yard. Shah took Rik in through a side entrance and up two flights of stairs to a small interview room.

  The MI5 agent fetched Rik and himself a mug of coffee. He had barely spoken since they left the bloody wreckage of the departure lounge. Now he sat opposite Rik and held his mug close to him, shaken and angry. Rik kept quiet, letting the younger man calm himself and collect his thoughts. When Shah finally spoke, it was in a subdued voice.

  “The Berlin police told us there had been a lot of deaths at GeneWerken, and reports of a superhuman killer. Was it the same woman?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “Some kind of transhuman, right? I've never seen one in the...” He stopped and swallowed.

  “I'm pretty sure it was the same one. Look, I'm sorry... about your colleagues.” Two officers dead and two more critically injured. Rik had been there, done that. He knew how it felt.

  Shah nodded absently. He clearly didn't want to deal with that now. “Tell me what happened in Berlin. From the beginning.”

  Rik obliged. He told the whole story, leaving out only the package he'd collected. Shah made no notes, but Rik was pretty sure the man's cogplus would be recording sight and sound.

  “So everybody fled the crime scene,” Shah said. “And you came to London for a new identity.”

  Rik winced at the construction Shah had put on it. It made him look guilty as hell, but he let the agent go on thinking it.

  “The upload was already there when we arrived,” he said in his defence. “Most of the killing had already happened. I was practically a bystander.”

  “Tell me what you picked up for Mrs. Cordell at the lab.”

  “I was supposed to pick up a package and courier it to her husband, as I said. But the upload was there. It didn't go as planned.”

  Shah chose to ignore the evasion. “What was in the package?”

  “I was never told. Perhaps the Berlin police could tell you. They must
have interviewed everybody who worked at the lab by now. Someone there must know.”

  Shah shook his head minutely. “No-one who might have known is still alive. The upload either shot them or tortured them to death. The lab itself has been destroyed.”

  “She went back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were plenty of people still alive and well when I left. She'd ransacked the lab. We disturbed her while she was ripping the place up and she ran.” He pretended to think about it for a moment. “She didn't get the package when she went back, that's pretty certain, otherwise she wouldn't be chasing me.”

  Shah got to his feet and paced the room. It looked like an attempt at keeping himself under control. “You are so full of shit,” he told Rik. He sounded more weary than angry, but the anger was there, below the surface. “You brought that damned thing here. You knew it would be hunting you because you know exactly where the package is.”

  “Have you got any aspirin? My head's killing me. I got this cut-price deal on a cogplus upgrade and–”

  “Just tell me where the package is.”

  “Look, a lot of people don't like me. This upload chick might just be an enforcer for the Turgu or someone – my wives, maybe.”

  With a heavy sigh, Shah sat down again. “OK. Fine. You don't want to tell me. Let's move on. Elspeth Cordell. How do you know her?”

  “I don't. We met that one time in Berlin. She's my client. It was all arranged through a scum-sucking, dickhead middle-man. I didn't even know what the job was until she told me on the way to the lab.”

  “And what was the job?”

  “I'm sorry, that's confidential information.”

  “What's your relationship to Rodney Preston?”

  “Who?”

  “The boy you visited in East Ham.”

  “You mean Skiver?”

  “If you keep messing me about like this, I'm going to have to change tactics.”

  Despite the man's quiet tone, Rik did not take the threat lightly. “Honest, I don't know the kid's real name. I don't know the kid at all. He was squatting in my friend's house. I just needed to get some stuff I'd left there.”