Nemesis (12 page)

‘So you’d like his legs broken.’

Ann feigned a shudder. ‘Nothing so drastic. Just teach him a lesson, that’s all. Some bruises will do.’

‘Do you want to leave a message for him?’ said the fixer.

She shook her head and adopted a wistful expression. ‘No. I don’t want him back. Not now. It’s too late. He mustn’t even know it was me. My family shouldn’t be involved.’ She glanced out through the false window to her left. ‘If he comes back to me afterwards, I won’t even have him. It’s that much over.’

The fixer scrutinised her for a moment, trying to conceal a smile. ‘Okay, miss. You’ve got it. The fee will be sent to the Made account in your message packet. After that, we’ll never have contact again. Do you understand?’

Ann nodded quickly. ‘Daddy already said that.’

‘Your daddy is a smart man. Let him know we took good care of you, okay?’

She nodded.

‘When you see him, I want you to give him this.’ The fixer pressed a memory bead into her hand.

Ann tried not to look too shocked. This wasn’t part of the script.

‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘It’s for your dad. He’s a hard man to reach. He’ll know what it is. Tell him from me that we’ve been trying to get hold of him for months. He needs to install this or he’s going to get both of us in trouble and that would be bad for everyone. Do you understand?’

Ann nodded mutely.

‘Good girl.’

As the shuttle slowed on its approach to the next orbital, the man unclipped.

‘Bye now,’ he said. ‘Hope you find a decent boyfriend. You can’t trust Colonials, you know. They’re all the same.’ He winked a huge eye at her as he pushed off towards the airlock.

Ann turned the awful crosbystep back on and tried not to look concerned. She slipped the memory bead into her party-pack and watched out of the corner of her eye until the fixer had disappeared through the airlock.

She exhaled deeply as the hatch cycled shut. Her job was done, thank Gal. Sam could rest easy. However, Ann knew she wouldn’t be able to call it a night until she’d taken a careful look at that bead. If it contained tracerware, she’d have to find some in-character way of disposing of it before dropping her cover.

She waited until the next stop before disembarking and boarding a return flight. Getting back took twice as long, with more waiting in lounges and more tedious advances from idle young men. Ann endured it all, counting down the minutes until she reached Delany.

Once there, she used a public study-booth to scan the bead. It came up blank – there was no active code in it at all, or at least none the public booth could detect. It contained a single passive file encrypted using a standard FiveClan protocol. Ann sucked air over her teeth. She was either facing a serious professional-level threat or none at all. She saw no choice but to take a risk and head for home.

It was another hour and several route-laundering episodes later before she made it back to her privacy suite. By then, her whole body craved release from the disguise. She wanted nothing more than to rip off the dress, relax the awful machines in her nose and settle in for a nice long kickboxing workout at the Fleet gym.

She ignored her body’s protests and instead sat down at the tactronic desk. Using the same code package that had sealed off the privacy suite from the public network, Ann rigged up a sandbox-harness for the file. It wouldn’t protect her from the worst species of malware, but she’d be safe from all the mundane varieties of soft assault. With her heart in her mouth, she transferred the file to the desk’s processor web and used the Made account Sam had given her to open it.

Inside lay a string of perfectly ordinary-looking software patches. From the file names and interface keys, they appeared to be for pharmaceutical industry code. Closer examination using the harness’s analytical tools revealed tidy packets of audit-screened liarware bolted into otherwise entirely vanilla statistical packages. It was the kind of code that corrupt middle managers in sect businesses used to lie on their quarterly reports – hardly super-spy material.

Ann squinted at them in confusion. What in Gal’s name would Sam want with code like this? The League’s own stealthware could achieve exactly the same results effortlessly without needing attention as old-fashioned as a hand-written upgrade. Sam, or one of his agents, must have acquired the software the patches belonged to, because otherwise the fixer would never have chased him with them. The poor guy had obviously been concerned that his earlier version might fall foul of a security scrape and wanted to keep them both out of prison.

Was Sam involved in black-market drug production? It seemed insanely unlikely. The best explanation she could think of was that Sam’s previous agent on Triton had been running some kind of business on the side without the League’s knowledge. However, given the do-or-die loyalty the Rumfoord League demanded, that answer felt ridiculous, too.

Ann leaned back in the chair and stared at the code diagrams hovering over the desk. She realised then, with some discomfort, how little she actually understood about Sam’s operation. The League hinged on his work, and all their lives with it. She dearly hoped that somewhere on the other side of all that subterfuge and secrecy, he knew what he was doing.

3.3: MARK

After clearing out his New York appartment, Mark took the interplanetary shuttle to Triton. He registered with the Fleet admin SAP at Delany Station and checked into the dorm remotely. It was still afternoon, local time, so he found himself with a few hours to kill before he effectively became part of the Fleet again. He was in no hurry to put a uniform back on, so instead he went to the squeeze-bar at Cantaloupe National Park.

All the business on Triton, and most of the leisure, happened at Delany, where a comfortable one-gee of spin could be counted on. That was also where you found all the ghastly overpriced restaurants and the shrieking crowds spilling out onto the walkway from the thousand-peace-coin-a-ticket nightclubs. Consequently Mark preferred the surface, despite the feeble gravity. Sadly, there weren’t many places to visit at the bottom end of the space elevator, but of all of them, Cantaloupe was undoubtedly his favourite.

The weird maze of ridges and bumps that made up Triton’s cantaloupe terrain lay just beyond the window-wall, lit by the frail light of the distant sun. The deep shadows and oddly organic twists and knobbles of pinkish ice make the place look like a world-sized exercise in surrealist art. The light was amplified, of course, otherwise the place would have looked like midnight in a tar-pit. But then, even the best bits of Triton were, in Mark’s opinion, slightly fake.

He sat there for hours drinking whisky out of a bulb, staring at the ghostly landscape and trying to figure out where his job on Earth had gone wrong. His blood-engines could fix the booze later.

Leaving New York had been hard. He’d gone there to make a point, to connect with his roots and to try his hand at something that was really his own. After a lifetime of being groomed to fit the needs of the Fleet, Earth had felt incredibly honest and refreshing. New York actually needed him, and he was happy to share his talents with them. With time, though, the place started to feel as much like straitjacket as the one he’d left behind.

The core problem was his lack of freedom. Without the rights to his own interface, he was only half a man. Every decision he made or job he took had to be run past a committee of bureaucrats – people he’d never met who nevertheless felt they deserved a piece of him. When ordinary people were treated like that they called it slavery.

A polite cough from behind interrupted his brooding. He turned around to find a guy in a gold jacket smiling unctuously at him.

‘Hi!’ said the man. ‘My employer would like to use the table you’re seated at. Would you mind moving? We’ll pay, of course.’ He pulled a gaudy transaction stub from his pocket.

Mark glanced around at the rest of the bar. It was mostly empty, which was precisely why he’d chosen it. There were dozens of empty tables.

‘Can’t he sit somewhere else?’

‘My employer thinks you have the best view in the house,’ said the man jovially. ‘Well chosen, my friend! How much would you need? Fifty? A hundred?’

‘I don’t want to move, thanks,’ said Mark.

‘My employer would be disappointed by that. He’s a very powerful man. And he’s asking you to name your price, that’s all.’

Mark glowered at him. ‘I don’t have a fucking price.’

‘You’re FiveClan, right?’ said the man, knowingly. ‘Don’t make a choice you’ll regret later.’

Mark looked down at the branded one-piece he was wearing. Was this guy assuming things about him because he was dressed like a working Earther? Was he assuming that Mark could be ordered about just because he hadn’t been born into the Leading class?

‘This conversation is finished,’ said Mark.

The man looked disappointed and more than a little confused. ‘That’s one expensive seat you’ve got there, my friend. Enjoy your evening.’

‘I’m not your fucking friend,’ Mark muttered at the man’s departing back.

Mark hated Triton. It had only two kinds of people: Fleeties and the Leading crowd – billionaires in from their private worlds with their entourages. It made the place as hypocritical as it was polished. Clean-cut types with blue uniforms and high-handed morals rubbed shoulders with drugged harem girls artificially re-aged to a subjective twelve. Mark wasn’t sure which group he liked least. Earth’s Leading were the ones sucking it dry, in his opinion. They gave the planet a bad name. When most people from the Colonies looked at Earth, they saw only idle Flags and the rich scumbuckets who funded them. They didn’t look any deeper. On the other hand, at least the Leading weren’t hypocrites.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Mark turned again and found himself looking at a young Adonis. He was seven feet tall, perfectly muscled and dressed in gold velc pantaloons. His eyes were the icy blue of glacial meltwater. Or, more likely, a numbered option from the premium range of a New Angeles surgical catalogue. On his arm hung a girl with a flatly unrealistic physique and slow, doe-like eyes. She had a bland, empty smile parked on her exquisite lips.

‘You’re in my seat,’ said the young god, an impatient frown creasing his chiselled features. ‘I always sit here.’

Mark looked around at the almost empty cafe. ‘I didn’t hear the cafe SAP complaining,’ he said.

The god looked bored. ‘This isn’t a formal request. It’s a polite one.’

‘Sorry, but it doesn’t sound that polite,’ said Mark, his anger mounting. ‘Why don’t you try a different spot tonight? You might like it.’

‘Do you know who I am?’ said the rich kid.

Mark couldn’t believe someone had pulled that line on him for real.

‘No fucking idea,’ he said. He launched a background search to find out and kept talking. ‘But whoever the hell you are, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. Asking for special privileges in an IPSO park? Do you imagine you’ve got extra rights based on whichever trophy wife happened to squirt you out into the world? It’s people like you—’

The youth shrugged and wheeled his girlfriend away before Mark could finish. Mark seethed and considered calling the man back as he drifted off elegantly in the low gravity. He mentally glanced at the results of the search request. He’d apparently just insulted the first son of some high-profile sect baron. Whatever. He’d be in Fleet hands as soon as he finished his drink.

However, in the wake of the altercation, Mark found himself unable to relax. His already sour mood worsened. People weren’t allowed to get away with that kind of shit in the New York towers, so why should they be able to here?

He downed the rest of the bulb and shoved it into the table-slot along with his other empties. He got up to leave, unclipping himself from the chair. However, navigating to the pod bank at the back of the room proved challenging. He’d grown unused to low-gravity conditions over the last year or so and the whisky wasn’t helping. He bumped the ceiling a few times on his way over.

Once there, Mark asked the transit SAP to take him to his room, picked a pod and leaned himself against the wall inside as the vehicle raced up towards Delany Station. The increased gravity felt good, but his head – not so much. His interface connection remained muted and slippery. He’d clearly drunk more than he’d meant to. That had been happening a lot since he moved to Earth.

He pinged the pod’s SAP for an arrival check. It wouldn’t do for him to show up at a Fleet dorm with his blood chemistry all messed up. He’d need a little time to self-scrub before arriving. But the transit SAP didn’t respond. Mark frowned in confusion. Was he sending bad packets? Was he too fuzzy to frame his requests properly? He started a metabolic cleaning program to straighten his head out and pinged the pod again. This time he asked for a basic protocol check and looked over the message for flaws before sending it.

Still nothing came back – not even a repair apology. Mark suddenly got the sense that something was wrong. Someone had co-opted his ride. Who’d bother to do that, though? It was the sort of prank he and his friends used to play on each other back in the Omega dorm.

His self-scrub had barely started when the pod pivoted and dropped him down a gravity well to somewhere in Delany – one of the lower rings, at a rough guess. The doors slid open to reveal two large men with thick necks and folded arms.

‘What’s going on?’ said Mark.

‘You were rude to someone important today,’ said the one on the left. ‘That’s not how we do things on Triton. We’re here to teach you some manners.’

Mark gazed at them in disbelief. What century did they think they were living in?

‘You’ve got to be kidding, right?’

What kind of cretin sent in
human
enforcement? He dumped a third of his submind bandwidth on cybernetic liver assist, a third on breaking the security wall they’d locked around the pod, and the rest on combat readiness.

[
Warning,
] said his nanny-SAP. [
Exposing the extent of your abilities jeopardises Fleet security …
]