First stared at the box and smiled so hard a pair of tears squeezed out of her eyes. Quarried had taken the threat someone carved into their flesh and sexed it up, made it their own to throw it back like a sling stone that had bounced off.
A hard one, her Grenic. First pushed the button to record a reply.
“Hello, Quarried. This place is amazing. I’m so glad you like it. I’m back from my trip now. I got to finish that season of Rocks in Hard Places. Still can’t believe Polished in a River was the killer—did not see that coming. Your tattoo is badass. I approve. Thanks for the milk and cookies. I’m going to go enjoy them now. Welcome to our new home.”
She slipped the recorder back into Quarried’s hand and headed for the kitchen. Real wood cabinets, a huge refrigerator, an island cooking surface in the middle, and pots and pans of all sizes and shapes hanging from a rack suspended from the ceiling that would likely remain untouched until the next tenants moved in.
And sitting on the counter, she found a two-ish liter container of milk next to a plate of cookies. One glance at the milk confirmed it had sat in place for the majority of the two weeks she’d been away, as it was more than halfway to cottage cheese. A brief inspection of the cookies returned similar results. They’d started out as oatmeal, probably, but had dried into a substance sharing more attributes with Formica.
First could only laugh as she disposed of the ruined offerings. It was indeed the thought that counted. She found her bedroom, characterized by a bed complete with soft mattress and sheets instead of a Grenic-shaped depression worn into a heated concrete slab set in the floor, disrobed, slipped into her pajamas, and, gently on account of her ribs, slipped under her fluffy comforter.
She was asleep in twelve seconds flat.
* * *
The morning came courtesy of an alarm First hadn’t set. Which, infuriatingly, also meant she had no idea how to turn it off.
She tried to bury her ears under pillows to drown it out, but the alarm took notice of the countermeasures she brought to bear against it and adapted, growing louder until it reached its original level even beneath her newly added layer of auditory insulation.
“The power of Christ compels you!” First impotently threw a pillow at the ceiling, hitting the fan and having no effect on the alarm, which continued to maddeningly push her to leave the warmth and comfort of the nest she’d made.
“Fine. Fine! You monster.” First poured herself out of bed and spotted slippers by the door, which had apparently come with the apartment. Her feet were instantly happy, in direct contradiction to the rest of her.
Standing there, she felt a slight, familiar queasiness in her stomach. For her first month aboard, First had mistaken it for an intermittent illness, until she realized it matched up with Quarried speaking in their infrasound language. The alarm still chiming incessantly, First walked out of her bedroom and down the hall to find, sure enough, Quarried holding the small recorder up to their mouth, speaking a reply to her message from the previous evening. She wouldn’t be able to listen for an hour or more. In the meantime, she could find wherever that damned alarm was coming from.
She found a wall-mounted user interface panel and touched it. “House, or Apartment, or whatever you’re called.”
“Yes, resident Lastname,” came the building’s VI. “How may I help?”
“First, call me First. Second, turn off that bloody alarm.”
“I’m sorry, resident First, but the alarm did not originate from my system. It is only being amplified through my entertainment system speakers, for maximum coverage.”
“How thoughtful of you. Mute the alarm on your entertainment system.”
“I’m sorry, resident First, but I can’t do that. The source is linked into my permissions and takes precedent.”
“Who the hell authorized that?”
“You did, resident First.”
“That’s ridiculous,” First said. “The only device I linked is my—” First stopped in midsentence and glared at her bedroom. “My handheld.”
She retrieved the unit from her bag, and after digging through a few settings and download history, sure enough, there it was, inserted via a totally innocuous-looking software update.
The alarm fell silent as First purged it from her handheld. As soon as she did, a call automatically connected to Loritt’s penthouse.
“You’re up!” he said. “And so soon after midday. The bed is ergonomically agreeable to your sleep cycle, then?”
“Quite,” First said into the screen. “The alarm, less so.”
“Sorry, but we have a job. And the timeline is tight, so I couldn’t afford to indulge your hibernation.”
“Do I have time to wash my clothes?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then don’t complain about the wrinkles or sweat-and-stale-tanning-oil funk.”
“Not a word.”
“Fine, meet you at the penthouse.”
Loritt brightened. “Actually, we’ve recently rented out a new space specifically for the business.”
“Fancy.”
“We’re moving up in the underworld,” Loritt quipped. “I’m sending you the address.”
First got a message alert and opened it, then frowned. “This is in my building.”
“Is it? What a coincidence. But that will make Quarried’s commute quite a bit easier, I should think.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll be down in a half.”
“Half an hour or half a larim?”
“Whichever’s longer.” First cut the connection.
Thirty-six minutes later, First found herself standing in front of a darkened office space on her tower’s eighth floor. The suite number was correct, but no one was home. Nor were the windows just set to opaque. Light from the hallway spilled through to illuminate the tiled floor beyond, an empty reception desk, and partition walls in ghostly outlines.
“Sorry I’m late.” Loritt’s voice startled First from her survey.
“You scared me.”
“It’s still that easy?” Loritt passed a card through the door. “Anyway, welcome to our new office.”
The door slid open, the overhead lights answering a moment later. Two things became immediately apparent to First from the dust and detritus strewn about the space: whomever had occupied it last had left in a hurry, and it had sat empty for quite a long time.
Loritt stepped through and retrieved the card from the other side of the doorframe, then handed it off to First. “That’s your copy. Keep it close.”
“Can’t I just merge it with my room card?”
“And give a lucky pickpocket a two-for-one? Absolutely not.”
First nodded approval. “Someday, you’re going to tell me where you got so street-smart.”
“Am I? Anyway, the job is simple. Clean this place up and get our various networks integrated. We’ve been wasting effort not having a central operational hub. It’s time we stop duplicating work and bring everything together.”
“Here? Now?” First asked, then pointed at the floor and a dark stain and a white powder silhouette in the shape of a Turemok in obvious discomfort. “And is that a chalk outline?”
Loritt waved a hand dismissively. “The leasing agent assured me it’s childish graffiti.”
“And you believe them?” First said. “That looks like dried blood.”
“I believe the steep discount on the first six months’ rent we were granted was part of the leasing agreement,” Loritt said. “Regardless, that was the end of someone else’s story. This is the beginning of ours. Aren’t you excited?”
“Sick with anticipation,” First responded with calculated ambiguity.
“Excellent!” Loritt stepped behind the reception desk and pulled the chair out from the divots worn into the underlying masonry and offered it to her. “I trust you’ll have us up and running by week’s end, then?”
“Me?” First blurted out. “I thought you said ‘we’ had a job.”
“And ‘we�
�� do as a team, in the collective sense. However…” Loritt began to count off on his fingers. “Sheer is currently in the hospital being prematurely cracked out of her shell with hammers, Jrill is providing security for our recovered assets still awaiting auction, Hashin is quite occupied coordinating … things, and Fenax doesn’t have hands. So that leaves you, our most junior member.”
“I would remind you,” First interjected, “that by seniority, Quarried Themselves is our most junior member.”
“That is true,” Loritt allowed. “But if I relied on them to complete the job, I could reasonably expect it to be finished some months after the heat death of the universe.”
“What about you?” First demanded. “Why can’t you do it?”
Loritt smiled and rested a gentle hand on First’s shoulder. “Oh, little one, I love you all the more that you would even dare to ask. So two days, then?”
First looked around the ruined space. “Two weeks.”
“Six days.”
“Four!”
“Deal,” Loritt said. “Should’ve said five; that was my breaking point.”
“Five!”
Loritt smiled. “You know it’s too late.”
“You fucking suck,” First barked.
“Karking suck, little one. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“I’ve never been to Kansas.”
“Who has?” Loritt ran a finger over the reception desk and ground away the dust that followed. “I recognize this work is beneath you, but it’s beneath all of us, and literally everyone else either has something more important to do in this moment or is physically incapable of doing it. We’re in a credit pinch until the Monarch and Matron sell at auction, but neither can we afford to keep presenting to the rest of the galaxy as a company running out of my apartment if we’re to be taken seriously beyond Junktion’s sphere of influence.”
Loritt leaned hard against the creaking wood of the abandoned reception desk. “I’m sorry, First, but these are the calls I have to make as the boss. It doesn’t reflect on you or your position in our weird little family. It’s only out of necessity.”
“Five days,” First held firm. “Full-time pay.”
“Five days, and your full-time pay is already all going into the lovely apartment you are currently enjoying on my credits.”
First’s mouth opened, but before replying, her brain froze everything to run a rough calculation of exactly what that apartment must be costing him monthly. Her jaw promptly closed again.
“Good choice,” Loritt said. “That wasn’t a threat, by the way. You’re ambitious. That’s one reason I recruited you. Just a reminder you have a way to go yet.”
First sat down in the receptionist’s chair with a squeak. It didn’t give her much in the way of bounce, obviously last calibrated for a being of greater mass than an eighteen-year-old human woman.
“How I get there matters,” she said into the desktop.
“Does it? That’s new.” Loritt sat down in the seat opposite her with scarcely any more impact. He was lighter than he looked. Maybe the open space between his parts? “What troubles you?”
First spun around on her pedestal once, twice, before answering. “You roped me into this promising me we were going to hurt rich people. People who could afford it. People who hadn’t earned it in the first place.”
“As I remember, I roped you into this with a threat to turn you over to station security for stealing my Proteus.”
“That was the stick; I’m talking about the carrot.”
“I don’t know what a ‘carrot’ is,” Loritt said. “But I think I follow the metaphor. Please, continue.”
First spun around again, only just then realizing her seat rose higher with each rotation. Still, she didn’t feel like stopping. “We hit that Sulican, and he was kind of a dick, so that was cool. Then we took that human trafficker—sorry, I mean, um, I don’t know what I mean, just that he was a real piece of shit. But then the Wolverines, they were just some confused kids from karking Michigan, for God’s sake. They didn’t know what their manager was up to.”
“And you returned their tour bus to them,” Loritt observed.
“By random chance. That’s no excuse. Now the cruise ships? We ruined a lot of people’s vacations. Normal people. I saw them, talked to a lot of them by the pool while I was working on my tan. Some of them saved up for years to go on that cruise, did you know that? It was the one luxury they’d planned for,” First pleaded. “One lady—I think she was a lady—she did her whole thesis paper on the burgeron herd migration, had some really exciting ideas about their evolutionary process. She’d never gotten approved for a grant to study them in person, so she scrimped every penny or whatever for the chance to see them in person. Did we take that chance away from her? Do you even care?”
Loritt considered her for quite a while before answering. “I do, believe it or not. But we didn’t take anything from them, her. The operators of the cruise line did, through mismanagement, graft, skimming overtime pay, laundering credits for shady people, or a hundred other shortcuts people take to the fortune their greed demands the universe owes them.”
Loritt leaned back in his own chair as its disused joints popped and creaked with trickling dust. “We see it most often with new money. Young money, either inherited unexpectedly and spent foolishly, or earned unexpectedly and spent the same. In both cases, the recipients of the windfall come to believe very quickly that their newfound status is the result of an inalienable and divine right built into the very fabric of the universe.”
He paused, spun his fingers, then continued. “Old money, the sort that survives for generations, doesn’t operate on such assumptions. Not exactly. It still believes in the preordained strata of the universe, mind you, but it is more conservative, more cautious, more refined, and sets itself far apart from the sorts of risks new money takes. Which, on balance, only makes sense, as the creation of old money is removed from the kind of risks new money had to endure by many generations. And after a time, they tell themselves the comfortable lie that it had always been so. Your people have a phrase for it. Survivorship bias, is that right?”
First, rapt in attention, took a rakim to reply. “Sounds right.”
Loritt put a hand on her wrist and squeezed. “People like us, First. We’re allowed to come from nothing, work very hard, and knock on the doors of young money as a reminder and a warning to the upstarts and rebels among the rulers of the universe of the proper order of things. The owners of the banks who hold the billion-credit loans against the toys or hobbies of the already-rich employ us as Gomeltics to fight for table scraps from a very big table. But I believe we can do some good in the process, under their noses, as it were.”
“Yeah?” First said bitterly. “What good have you done recently to balance out those scales?”
“I found a child on the verge of being lost to the sooty corridors of Junktion and gave her a position worthy of her natural talents.”
First slumped back in her chair. “Fine, so I’m my own worst blind spot. I’m just not used to anyone else giving a damn about me.”
Loritt laced his hands behind his head. “Four days, then?”
“Still five.”
“Deal.”
CHAPTER 17
Quarried was delivered to the office for their first work shift on the third day. By then, First had finished most of the physical cleaning and moved on to the real dirty work; setting up a computer network and merging half a dozen different databases and operating systems. It was like trying to get six people who’d never met, didn’t speak the same language, and didn’t know how to sing all harmonizing a song none of them had ever heard before.
Quarried cut an imposing figure arching over the office’s front door. Not that First expected company—they wouldn’t be open for two more days—but it was unexpected guests the Grenic was there to guard against, and anyone who did feel so motivated would almost certainly be aware of the jellied end that had be
fallen the last person to try.
Which was why First felt comfortable enough to push those concerns aside and focus on the pile of work still ahead of her. A pile which, paradoxically, only seemed to grow larger the more she shoveled it. The newest snag was integrating the Goes Where I’m Towed’s mainframe remotely between the office and its berth. It would be a simple matter to do over the local net, not so simple to do securely without running a dedicated hard line.
After wasting an hour trying to finagle permissions and modify scripts from a virtual desktop that kept crashing with an error code she’d never seen before, First threw in the towel and called Sheer. No one knew the Towed’s systems better than her chief engineer.
“Hello, First,” Sheer said from her living room nest. She’d been discharged the day before to convalesce in the comfort of her own home.
First smiled broadly. “Sheer, how’s the recovery going?”
“Shell’s still a little squishy, but the legs and arms are mostly done hardening—the remaining ones, that is.”
“How long will the missing leg take to grow back?”
“Three, four molts. Can’t rush it. I lost half of one when I was just a little clicker. Wasn’t so bad. What are you up to?”
“Cleaning stables. Listen, I’m trying to link the ship’s computer with our new office up here, but my overlay keeps crashing.”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised. Towed’s OS is patched together like a quilt. Getting that many aftermarket and custom components to work together was no small job, believe me.”
“Can you log in and walk me through some of this? I’ll send you the access codes to the office network.”
Sheer’s eyestalks bobbed in negation. “It’ll be a lot easier at the source. I’ll meet you at the ship in half a larim.”
First’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure you’re up for that?”
“Told you I’ve got legs under me. I’ve been on nest rest since Matron. It’ll do me good to get out of the apartment.”
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