Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (20 page)

She exhaled an exaggerated breath, rolled her eyes and strolled past him. “Want some breakfast?”

She contemplated him over a buttered croissant. Having shed the environment suit, he wore a faded slate-hued Henley, soft black utility pants and an air of calm self-assurance. He casually nibbled on a slice of grapefruit, having taken only a single bite of his own croissant.

Puzzled—by more than one thing concerning him, but currently his lack of an appetite—she frowned at him. “I expected you to be hungrier, seeing as you didn’t eat anything last night.”

His lips tweaked up. “I, uh, sort of did eat last night.”

Her eyes widened in indignation as realization dawned. “You
didn’t
.”

The smirk broadened to an easy smile. “Forgive me, I really
was
hungry. After I finally broke the encryption on the restraints, I might have opened a few of the kitchen cabinets until I found the energy bars. And helped myself to a few.”

The idea of him wandering around her ship in the middle of the night, getting into whatever he cared to and probably brandishing his damnable smirk while he did…. Ugh, she wanted to strangle him, and only the likelihood of him killing her for the effort stopped her.
It’s only the kitchen, Alex.
But it didn’t have to be only the kitchen. And that wasn’t the
point
.

His expression and demeanor projected an affable, nonthreatening persona. His actions a mere few minutes ago told another story. Her brain struggled to process the discordant information, to reconcile what she knew to be true with the man sitting across the table from her.

“I swear, I should have just shot you again.”

“I know, I touched something. But it was before your warning, so you can’t fairly hold it against me.” He shrugged and traded the grapefruit for the croissant.

“You were
physically restrained
. I would have thought my wishes had been made clear.” She pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation. “Fine. Whatever. So here’s the deal. I need to keep an eye on you, but I also need to be below doing repairs. Therefo—”

“What damage could I do up here? You know I can’t access any of the controls.”

Her response was a harsh laugh. “If it’s all the same to you, after your magic trick on the restraints—and the fact you spent last night running rampant all over my ship—I’m going to err on the side of caution. I’m sure you understand.
Therefore
, you’re going to come down to the engineering well with me, sit in the corner and not bother me while I work.”

“Okay.”

“
Okay?
That’s all I get?”

He relaxed back in the chair and began licking excess butter off his fingers. “I think you’ll find I’m rather easygoing when I’m not tied up.”

“I’ll be sure and remember that—”

It was all she could do to keep from slapping a hand over her mouth. She had been momentarily distracted by…things, and the words had simply slipped out. She stuffed the last of her croissant in her mouth and studied the crumbs adorning her plate, trying to ignore how the statement might have
arguably
sounded. And it didn’t really, not unless you thought about—
no
.

Seconds ticked by, and the moment mercifully passed.

She looked up to find him regarding her…mildly? Displaying slight curiosity perhaps? Even bearing a relaxed posture and amiable expression, the intensity of his gaze unnerved her. She gave him a tight smile and busied herself gathering their plates.

She carried the plates to the counter and stowed them in the sanitizer, then glanced back over her shoulder. A splash of water to the face and a hand through the hair had improved his appearance a surprising amount, but had done nothing to remedy the darkening bruise beneath his right eye.

With a quiet sigh she went to a cabinet in the starboard wall. Beneath the medical station was a drawer containing basic first aid supplies; she removed the wrapper on a small gel pad.

“Here.”

He barely looked up in time to catch it before it whacked him in the face. She stifled a cringe.

The pad suspended in the air between two fingers, he tilted his head curiously and raised an eyebrow the tiniest bit.

“For your eye.”

“Ahh.” He grinned. “You did nail me pretty good.”

She made an effort to not appear amused, though she kind of was. “Stick it on for five minutes and be done with it already. Or don’t. Makes no difference to me.”

16

PANDORA

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

“
H
EY
N
OAH, OVER
here, man!”

Noah Terrage picked his way through the crowd in the direction of the voice. Twice he had to maneuver past slumped bodies, kids zoned out on head trips and oblivious to the world around them. Those people who remained upright were shopping, often for the same.

“Dude, you got any Skies?”

He ignored the beggar, other than to surreptitiously nudge him to the left and into the crowd.

The Boulevard was not his favorite place on Pandora. To anyone visiting it for the first time, the name would be taken as an ironic joke. Booths and fabs lined both sides, stacked at least eight deep. The open way through no longer ran down the middle; instead it veered left, then right, in a seemingly random pattern resembling a path of one of the trippers who frequented it. Multi-sensory signs and giant screens blaring out jarring, discordant rhythms jammed the overhead space to entirely obscure Pandora’s rather nice sky.

Yet beneath the chaos did exist an actual boulevard, stretching fifty meters in width and paved with marbled stone. At least, that was the rumor. No one had seen it in thirty years.

So, no, The Boulevard was not his favorite place. Still, occasionally his business necessitated a visit. He didn’t deal in chimerals, but there was a lot more for sale here than merely chimerals. More to the point, there were dealers here who dealt in a lot more than merely chimerals.

He slid in around the storefront to where his contact rested on a lounge stool and leaned in close so as to be heard over the raucous din. “Emilio, my man. How’s business?”

Emilio shook his head, sending long, glittering green braids swooshing through the air. “Same old. Want a beer?”

“Ah, wish I could, but I’m tight on time. Got to gather with a needy client on the Prom in twenty. Next time?” It never hurt to remind Emilio he had a diverse and well-paying clientele.

“I hear ya. Hang on a sec, I’ll get your gear.” Emilio slipped behind the shimmering barrier which separated the ‘store’ front from the supply area, but returned in seconds.

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 and grinned. “Pleasure doing business with you, as always.”

“I’m gonna buy a top-shelf
illusoire
with the proceeds, man.”

“Enjoy, then!” He chuckled 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.