by C. Gockel
She turned left and walked under some clothes clipped to a line being rapidly pulled in by an inhabitant in the flats above. Her head jerked up at the plain white men’s shirts and women’s slips. They looked like things she had sewn at the camp. It was startling to see them out of the context of Taser-wielding guards and the drone of sewing machines. It was also strange to see them line-dried. She shook her head. Even simple devices had become ethernet dependent over the last few hundred years. She shouldn’t be too surprised that newer laundry machines no longer functioned.
Resuming her path, her eyebrows lifted as James ripped open another protein bar. “You’re unusually quiet,” he said, before practically inhaling the thing.
“I’m focusing,” Noa said, which was the truth … but not the complete truth. They had murdered a train worker. By the smell of the Root on his breath, he’d been in the cow car desperately sneaking a chew. He hadn’t deserved to die. There had been one civilian death in her revolution already. Her eyes slipped to James. She was certain he hadn’t meant to kill the man, but she thought of him ripping the lock from the cattle car’s metal door, and the way he’d peered down his perfect nose at it and suggested he’d been able to do it because it was rusted. He didn’t know his own capabilities … which made him dangerous, like a child with a loaded weapon. She closed her eyes. She’d have to deal with it later. They had perhaps an hour before the team in the train car would be discovered.
At last, she reached the place she had in mind. She guided James down a dark stairwell to a nondescript black door. She knocked a few times, keeping her chin down and her cap pulled low so the security camera didn’t get a clear view of her face.
For a too-long moment, nothing happened. “Does this place have a name?” James whispered.
“Hell’s Crater,” Noa muttered, keeping her chin dipped and her voice gruff.
“And I thought we were just going to hell in the figurative sense,” James muttered. Noa smirked, glanced up at him, and realized all of the dust had washed off his face in the rain—and probably off her face as well. Just as she realized that, the door swung open.
Adjusting her shoulders, trying to appear broader, Noa stepped in with James. She was briefly blinded by lights as bright as the Luddeccean interrogation room. As her eyes adjusted, Noa saw a burly guard she fortunately didn’t recognize. He was standing behind a podium with a thick open book, partially blocking a short hallway that led to some more stairs. Noa thought she made out mug shots on one side of the book’s pages and a list on the other. Her stomach sank. But she took the pack she was carrying off her back and put it in some lockers just before the podium. She motioned for James to do the same. In her pack were the stunners, and James’s pack contained his rifle, carefully disassembled. They’d be nearly defenseless, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Sorry, guys,” the guard barked. “I gotta see your IDs.”
Noa swallowed. This was not normally the sort of place where IDs were checked … and even if the dirt of their disguises hadn’t been washed away by the drizzle outside, they never would have passed muster in the bright light of the hallway. Her eyes flitted to James. His chin was dipped low, eyes on the security guard, and she could feel his readiness to fight.
Noa took a deep breath and made a leap of faith. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the billfold-like ID and handed it to the guard. Turning to James, she jerked her head in the guard’s direction. Thankfully, taking the hint, he handed his ID over. The guard looked at the pictures in his hand, looked at them, and down at the pictures again. He looked over at the book, and ran his fingers over the names.
“These IDs check out,” he said, head bent over the podium. Not lifting his eyes, he said, “The pictures look old.” He handed the IDs back, still not looking at them. “You might want to have them updated.” He coughed into his hand. “We get some slack for being a Fleet establishment, but sometimes, the Local Guard checks in here.”
Noa nodded, and said, “We understand. Thank you.” She wasn’t sure if the guard recognized her—but she was sure he knew the IDs were fake.
Turning to James, she said, “Come on,” and led him down the hallway to the dark descending stairwell beyond. She noticed that the hologlobe that usually played a Fleet recruitment recording in the hall was gone, as was the two-dimensional old time recruitment poster that used to hang on the ceiling above the stairs. A chill descended on her, even though the hallway was as hot and humid as it had been outside.
Beside her, James whispered, “He lied … he lied for us. I can’t believe it. Although … there is a wonderful little-known account of a mixed-race man living in Nazi Germany, titled Destined to Witness. He was saved by purposeful acts of disambiguation by—”
“James,” Noa hissed as a man appeared at the foot of the steps, a wave of sound from the room following as he did. “Shhh ...”
“Ah, right,” James said, stepping to the side to let the man pass.
Noa could hear music thumping as they approached the bottom of the steps and the heavy metal door that separated the stairwell from the club. The humid smell of the hallway was replaced by a hint of Root and tobacco. James bumped Noa’s shoulder with his. “Have I ever entered a more wretched hive of scum and villainy?”
Noa snapped, “These are mostly former Fleet personnel!” There were a lot of veterans on Luddeccea. The planet may have been ambivalent about joining the Republic, but Luddecceans were over-represented in the military, and especially over-represented in the ranks of grunts. If you were a Luddeccean from a lesser family, Fleet was the way to go. Luddecceans made great spacers; they were used to hard work and doing without. And Luddeccea’s only recent conquest of native pathogens meant that Luddecceans were accustomed to living with the risk of death. She felt protective of her fellow “Luddie” veterans. They were her people, more than other spacers or Luddeccean civilians. She glared up at James.
His eyes narrowed, and his jaw twitched. “I was trying to lighten the mood.” One of his eyebrows lifted. “I was under the impression you liked that sort of thing.”
Noa squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the movie he’d mangled the line from. She’d missed the joke in his deadpan delivery. Timothy would have been blushing from hairline to neck, and biting a smile to keep from laughing aloud. He wasn’t Tim. She released a breath. Not meeting his eyes, she nudged him with her shoulder. “Yeah, thanks. It was funny.”
“Please, contain your mirth,” he said dryly.
The wryness of his tone made her smirk. Putting her hand on the door latch, she said, “Now let’s try and find someone I recognize, who can play programmer for us.” She swallowed. “Without us being recognized.”
Turning his head to her sharply, James said, “You said no one from Fleet would be likely to turn us in.”
Wincing, Noa looked up at the ceiling. “Well, almost no one.” Without waiting for a response, Noa opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.
Hell’s Crater was almost exactly as Noa remembered it. Smokey and badly lit, it smelled like too many bodies and spilled drinks. But when her eyes grazed the crowd, she saw that things were different. It wasn’t as full as usual. The hologlobe at the bar’s end wasn’t playing live sports; it was playing an old holodrama instead. And when she peered into cubbies and nooks, her eyes actually went wide with shock. Some of the patrons were linked to each other via cables. Hell’s Crater wasn’t stuffy, but it also wasn’t the sort of establishment where this sort of thing usually went on.
Normally, direct neural interface communication was achieved by ethernet; but, with the ethernet down, cables or “hard links” could substitute. Noa felt a near-constant desire to link, but she didn’t feel compelled to hard link. There was more risk involved in linking with hardware; it was easier to catch a bug of the biological or electronic variety. Also, the ethernet relay stations for thought transmissions had built-in gates to help keep errant thoughts and emotions from slipping through. With a hard link, the
nearly subconscious observation that your data partner had nice biceps would be transmitted straight to his brain. And the way human brains worked, that observation was likely to be followed with thoughts even more explicit. Sex was so often a result of a hard link that “hard linking” was a metaphor for sex. Noa had some Fleet apps installed to provide filtering for her own thought transmissions; however, the apps couldn’t shield her from a stranger’s musings.
Realizing she probably looked like a kid who’d just found porn playing on her grandmother’s hologlobe, she smoothed her expression. Squinting in the gloom, looking for someone she recognized, she saw a few hard linkers were smiling a little too broadly, eyes rolled back in their heads. A hard linked woman in one of the booths began to visibly moan, her mouth agape and eyes glazed. Her partner grunted, his hand beneath the table, his arm moving furiously. Noa had seen more explicit antics on some of her shore leaves, but nothing like it at Hell’s Crater. She shook her head—so why now? The security guard’s words came back to her. “We get some slack for being a Fleet establishment.” She sighed. They were here because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. She looked around the bar to see how the other patrons reacted. Some of them were laughing and pointing; others were shaking their heads. She noticed a man at a table directly across from the couple; he took credits from a man and then handed him a hard link. Noa’s eyebrows shot up. Apparently this was where people came to buy hardware; that would explain the festivities. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected the seller. He was wearing a glowing necklace. The necklace lit Eurasian features that were more perfect than James’s. He’d definitely had work done ... also not typical of this place. Fleet people were more likely than Luddecceans to have plastic surgery for major scars—but “pretty” wasn’t an ideal. Just before she turned away from the man, he caught her gaze. His eyes widened a fraction, and he lifted his glass in her direction and leered. Noa’s stomach churned.
Beside her, James whispered, “You know him?”
Noa stepped toward an empty booth in the corner. “No, but he makes my creep detector buzz.”
“Is that an app?” James whispered in her ear.
Noa had no idea if he was joking, which made it funnier. Covering what had to be a goofy grin with a cough, she slid into the booth and tried to observe everyone discreetly. James had just taken a seat across from her when the door flew open. The guy they’d passed on the way up the stairs lunged in, eyes wide, shouting something into the din. Noa couldn’t hear the words, but she could read his lips: “Patrol!”
The holo went silent, but the noise in the room increased. There were a few cries, a few shouts, and around them people started yanking cables from their ports. James lurched to his feet, and Noa did, too. Other patrons were already ahead of them, running to the back door, but before Noa had slid out of the booth, the door in the back burst open and men in Luddeccean Green blocked their exit.
Noa’s eyes darted across the room, looking for a place to hide. There had been a time when alcohol was prohibited on Luddeccea. Maybe there was a hideaway behind the bar?
“Noa,” James hissed. Her eyes snapped to him—he was staring at someone not two steps from the table.
Chapter Seven
James’s muscles tensed. He heard shouting and saw people dropping hard links to the ground as they pressed in a mob toward the exits. A part of his mind noted the anomaly of it—hard linking wasn’t illegal in the Republic. It was necessary for psychotherapy or neural interface repair. It was, however, typically found to be in poor taste in public places. He remembered half-seriously suggesting to a girlfriend that they hard link in the backroom during a particularly tedious event. She’d suggested he go hard link himself.
At the same time his mind processed these thoughts, his eyes remained fixed on the “creep.” The man blocked their exit from the table—fortunately, he also effectively blocked the Guard’s view of Noa and James. Hands in the pockets of a long trench coat, the stranger looked James up and down without ever meeting his eyes, and then he looked at Noa and smiled.
Her eyes narrowed at the man. “Do I know you?”
James heard footsteps on the stairs, and shouts of, “This is an ID check, stay calm!” James’s eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape, but he heard the Guard at both exits. For a brief moment his vision went black. They’d run through a blizzard, fallen into a gorge, crashed into a canyon wall, hidden in a magni-freight car … this couldn’t be their end … not in a bar. But of course it could be; it was magical thinking to suppose otherwise.
There were whispers and screams, and someone cried, “Dear God, dear God.”
More magical thinking. But what was the alternative? James told himself they would get out of this. His vision returned, and he was once more staring at the stranger, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen in place, his mind scrambling for a viable course of action and finding none.
Chuckling despite the chaos, the stranger slid into the booth across from James, blocking Noa’s escape. Pulling his hand from his pocket, the stranger put a stiff plastic necklace on the table. “Sit down and put this on, Noa.”
James looked to her, surprised the man knew her name. Realizing the man’s frame was no longer blocking the view to others in the room, James sat down and leaned as far as he could in his seat. Noa followed James’s lead, but didn't take the necklace. “Who are you?” she demanded.
The man’s smile widened, but he didn’t show teeth. “It will hide you from the patrol.” The smile lasted too long without changing, and was too symmetrical.
Sliding toward him in her seat, Noa said, “Get out of my way … ”
The man frowned. The necklace he wore went dark. Halting, Noa gaped. James did, too. Where an instant before there had been a handsome if artificial-looking face, what appeared now was the face of a man who was pudgy and overweight. He had a thin unkempt beard, above which his cheeks and forehead glistened with sweat. His nose was long, pointed and European, but his eyes were narrow and red-rimmed. He lacked a distinct chin.
“I’m only trying to help you, Noa,” he said, his lower lip quivering.
“Dan Chow,” said Noa. James’s eyes slid to her. Her jaw was hard, and her eyes were narrowed. She didn’t look overjoyed to see “Dan.” Her eyes darted to the necklace. Dipping her chin toward James, she said, “If you’re going to help me, you’ve got to help my friend.”
“We don’t have time for games,” Dan said. Around the table the crowd was being pushed backward. James heard shouts from the patrol, “Take out your IDs!”
“Lizzar dung. You’ve been playing a game since we came in,” Noa hissed back.
Dan’s eyes slipped to the crowd and back to Noa. He looked down his too-long nose at James and sniffed. “Fine, Noa. Keep your toys.” James felt heat flash beneath his skin, but instead of sweating, he shivered.
“My friend,” Noa said, and the heat cooled.
The man’s lips quirked up in a small smile. He snorted. “Really?” Pulling out another necklace, he slid it across the table to James. Leaning back, Dan said, “And he looks like a throwback, too ...” James raised an eyebrow. He remembered, in his past, getting into shouting matches with people who used that slur. Now … it might have been the circumstances forcing him to keep a level head, but he didn't feel outrage. The slur didn't feel denigrating, it felt like his name, an incorrect label, a jumble of syllables.
Taking the necklace proffered to her, Noa slid it on her neck—and she vanished. In her place was a woman with paler skin, straight black hair that cut off just above her shoulders, eyes that were narrower and lips that weren’t as full. Her face looked perfectly made up with makeup that was sophisticated, but not too heavy. The tiny scars above and below her eye were gone.
It was a look he normally would like, but now it set him on edge. Noa was the only thing that felt real to him. The hologram—he was sure that was what it was—took away his one tether to reality. He gave his head a tiny shake. Picking up his
own necklace, he inspected it briefly. It looked and felt like a slender band of lightweight plastic. Slipping it on, his mind whirred. To work, holographic projections required smoke at the very least. In the hologlobes, rapidly oscillating beads reflected cyan, magenta, and yellow depending on the holographic data received. The necklace had no such medium to operate in.
As the latch at the back of James’s necklace clicked, Dan said, “Now you’re both more attractive.” Dan’s necklace was on again, his face once again artificially handsome.
Noa—or the hologram she wore—rolled her eyes. James had a sudden inkling of what he looked like.
“Hide your hands,” Dan commanded.
Glancing down, James saw Noa’s hands were still dark and his were still light. They both slipped their hands beneath the table as Dan pushed some ID billfolds out on the tabletop.
At that moment, a Luddeccean patrolman sidled up to the table. “IDs please!”
Dan nodded at the ID billfolds. “Right there, Sir.”
Beneath the table, Noa’s hand went to James’s arm, and he could feel her tension in her fingers.
The guard picked up the billfolds. As he flipped through them, James had the distinct impression that time was slowing. He cast furtive glances around the room, and noted there were no less than fifteen other Guardsmen. All were armed with stunners, and more lethally, phaser pistols.
The Guard’s eyes went to James and then to Noa, and back again. James’s muscles coiled, ready to fight. Noa’s fingers tightened even more. Tipping his helmet, the Guard gave a wink to James and a smile to Noa. Nodding to Dan, the guard put the IDs back on the table. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, and strode away.
Dan chuckled. “I wonder if I should feel jealous or proud that he found you two ladies interesting.”