I didn’t just wander about the holding area. There wasn’t much of it in which to wander and I had it laid out in my mind after one circuit. There was a wide open hall in the middle that saw most of the foot traffic, fenced in by shops selling everything a traveler might need before boarding his next ship. From food to photo manipulation and recovery to a field medic center.
There were a number of bars where travelers could blow their money and while away their hold-over. I picked the one I thought would cause me the least number of hassles. It had no long term drinkers holding up the bar. The customers already in there had travel packs at their feet, and were mostly sitting at solo tables. There were two pairs, both couples looking relaxed and talking quietly, uninterested in who was coming in the door.
Then I realized what I was doing. I was choosing a bar that had the least chance of someone in it recognizing me as a serial.
That chilled me. I hadn’t done that since leaving Earth. Very few humans could tell I was a serial just by looking at me, but many of those who could had lived and worked where I had lived and worked and had resented serials trying to mix with them outside office hours.
I turned in the opposite direction and picked a different bar. This one happened to give me a good view of the gates at either end of the hall—the gate where I’d passed through nearly twenty hours ago, and the gate giving access to the Terran section of the spaceport. Plus a good slice of the main hall could be monitored from the table by the window that I chose.
The barman himself just jerked his chin. “Getcha?”
“Scotch?” I asked hopefully.
“Whiskey,” he offered, reaching for a bottle with a label I recognized despite not having seen it for nearly a hundred years.
“Not that one,” I said quickly, for it was a synthetic and an affront to any tastebuds. I glanced along the shelf. “Chulov Reserve.” It wasn’t a synthetic, at least.
The barman poured and brought my drink over, then held out his hand. I raised my brow.
“Cross my palm,” he said patiently.
I got it. He had a credit-processing chip in his palm. I waved my card over his palm, and he nodded and headed back to the bar.
I pulled out my terminal and checked what he’d charged me. The drink was nearly three times what it would have cost on Abbatangelo, and five times what a bottle was worth on Chulov itself.
The joys of travel.
I made the drink last as long as I could, then ordered another one, plus a big mug of coffee. I spun out a couple of hours, sitting at the table and watching MarsPort go by. No one else lingered in the hall for the entire time I was at the table. That didn’t mean I wasn’t being observed, though. There were at least two people in on this, apart from the joker at the top of the totem pole. There might be more than two. Two people I didn’t know could be spelling each other off, using different observation positions, in which case, I would miss that they were connected.
But on the whole, I was pretty sure I wasn’t being directly observed.
There was just all the CCTVs in the area, which they might have hacked into and been monitoring from a distance.
Or perhaps they were sitting back waiting for the security code they’d given me to use to pass into the service areas of the holding zone to trigger an alert for them.
So far, I hadn’t done anything that would alert them I had gone off their script. I hadn’t gone back to TAC customs for my visa, but they didn’t know when it would be ready, either.
But sooner or later they would become uneasy when I didn’t show up at the waiting ship with a baby in my arms. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to maneuver inside of.
Still, lack of direct observation was good. It gave me some wriggle room.
I went back to the hotel. They had a good quality restaurant in the foyer, that was also open on the hall side, so non-hotel-clients could dine there, too. Because the hotel was tucked away down a wide corridor off the main hall, travelers weren’t as thick here as they were in the main hall, but there were still too many people in the restaurant for me to want to sit at a table myself. I was growing allergic to crowds, after being abducted in the Sitania skyport right in the middle of one.
I went up to the room, fully expecting to have to move about quietly while Ninety-Nine snored. I would tap out a menu item on the service panel beside the coffee outlet instead of speaking to it, and try not to wince at the markup in price.
When I stepped in the door, though, I found Ninety-Nine at the little table, our packs on the floor behind him, and his heavy-duty terminal on its back, with two screens generated over the top of it.
Ninety-Nine didn’t quite bounce out of his chair, but I could see he’d found a dram more energy from somewhere. “Doc Lowry got back to me. Keran Carman’s sub-routine was designed to make her investigate you. She hacked your personal database, and asked a lot of questions about you around GT, before she died.”
“Which she passed on to the top dog,” I muttered. “Also before she died.” I turned back to the service panel and ordered two lux sandwiches, with all the side dishes, including ice cream to finish off, a giant pot of real coffee, and fruit. I could argue with the service panel over the details as Ninety-Nine wasn’t asleep.
Then I turned back to the table. “So what are you doing, then?” I pointed at the screens.
“I thought of something, right after reading Doc Lowry’s message,” Ninety-Nine said. “At dinner that night, with Carman. You and Georgina spoke about a man. Deniel Harlow.”
“An old friend,” I said evenly.
“Who is CEO of Etriedes Industries,” Ninety-Nine said. “I checked.”
“Right.” I said it heavily.
“He’s an exec, isn’t he? Just like you and Georgina.”
I tossed the bed covers back up the bed so they were sort-of straight and sat on the end of it. “You have a point you’re trying to make?”
Ninety-Nine grinned. “You don’t have to tell me. I know he is. That’s how he knows you are. You and Georgina. And that’s why he was hired by Etriedes to run the joint. Etriedes, which owns Memsoul, who sent Keran Carman out to Georgina’s Town to find a way to get you to Sitania.”
“You think Deniel Harlow is the top dog?” I laughed. Genuinely. “Kid, you are so far out to lunch on this you won’t even make it back for dinner.”
Ninety-Nine didn’t scowl or sulk. He just waited for me to recover.
I wiped my eyes. “Yes, Deniel is an exec. But that’s what makes this so damn funny. He would never do something like this. Not to me. Not to any serial.”
Ninety-Nine didn’t back down. I could see it in his eyes. He said, “Would it make a difference if I said Deniel Harlow wasn’t just the CEO of Etriedes, but the owner of it?”
My amusement chopped off. I glanced at the two screens hovering above his pad. “You don’t know that.”
“I used to track company ownerships for a living, on Earth,” Ninety-Nine said.
“Where the companies are registered, the share-holders monitored and monopolies squashed flat the moment they try to form. Share transactions are all armored and serialized, and tracked to death. Out here in the fringes, to start a company, you put up a shingle and display your wares. Thumping a tub to draw attention is optional.”
“There are ways to track business interests, even out here,” Ninety-Nine said. “Shareholders are intangible assets, here. They create trust in a company. A business is smart to advertise who’s sitting at the controls, if they want to build up goodwill.”
Ninety-Nine’s tone, his posture and his whole attitude had changed. He was speaking with the air of authority that someone gained from long years of experience. Right at the moment he wasn’t the wet-behind the ears human bumbling around in blind ignorance, that he’d been since he’d arrived on Abbatangelo.
“You tracked Etriedes shareholders?”
“Memsoul has virtually the same shareholders.”
“That doesn’t tell you Deniel Harlow owns the damn company.”
“He’s the majority shareholder.”
“They publish that?” I was astonished.
“He’s listed at the top of the shareholder list.”
“Because he’s the CEO,” I said patiently.
Ninety-Nine shook his head. “Etriedes Industries just held their annual shareholder ball.”
“Ball?” I could feel my eyes bugging out. “Please tell me you’re joking?”
Ninety-Nine grinned. “I can show you the pictures. White ties. Tailcoats. Lots of lace and poofy stuff.” He waved his hand. “I found one of the invitations. Gold ink on cardstock. No electronics at all. It was being sold at a collectibles auction on Thasauria.”
“Yeah, so?”
“The address on the invitation.”
“What about it?”
“It’s a fancy suburb on Achora Etriedes.”
So Etriedes wasn’t based on Livira the way every other self-respecting company in the fringes was. Apparently, they didn’t need to be. Their subsidiaries, all of them, were on Livira. “That makes sense,” I said with a touch of impatience.
“It’s the same address as Deniel Harlow’s residence,” Ninety-Nine finished. “He has a private security firm contract for domestic security—and it’s not one of Etriedes’ subs, either. The address is the same.”
“And from that you’ve decided he owns the company?” I said. I tried to inject disbelief in my voice, but the kid had done his homework. It looked pretty damning. Which was why I was trying to deny it, I guess. While Deniel was just a company flunky, I could live with it.
But owning one of the largest companies in the fringes? That put Deniel into a different category. That wasn’t managing and directing people to meet someone else’s vision. That was having visions of your own and pursuing them and that wasn’t… “It doesn’t make sense,” I said finally. “Serials—any serials—haven’t the drive and self-direction to build up a company the size you’re talking about.”
“Someone did,” Ninety-Nine pointed out.
“Serials don’t know how to get along with each other and cooperate, not in the way that building a corporation like this would require.”
Ninety-Nine didn’t blink. “But someone did,” he repeated.
“It can’t be Deniel. He was even less ambitious than me. He’d rather drink a good Scotch down to the last drop and discuss philosophy than stir himself to inspiring others. He was allergic to hard work.” I shook my head. “Etriedes got where it was because of sheer happenstance. The corporation has had the greatest good luck and grew to the size it was by accident. Because the shareholders made dumb decisions that actually turned out for the best. And that’s all.”
Ninety-Nine considered me for a long moment.
Before he could open his mouth to speak, the door chimed. Lunch was here. I took the big tray from the autocart and shut the door with my heel, harder than I needed to.
I needed calories.
I dumped the tray on the table behind Ninety-Nine’s terminal and screens, then pulled the table over to the bed, so I could sit and eat at the table, too.
Silently, Ninety-Nine picked up the chair and moved it over to the table once more. He shut down the terminal and took his plates without a word.
We ate, and let the silence extend. I wasn’t in a rush to fill it.
Ninety-Nine wolfed down half his sandwich, then most of a mug of coffee, then said, “I thought it was just humans you couldn’t stand. But you don’t think much about serials, either.”
“I like humans. Some of them. I like plenty of serials, too.”
“But you don’t respect them. Any of them.”
I opened my mouth. Then scowled and ate another mouthful of the sandwich. Rye bread, crusty on the outside, soft inside. Pastrami, cheese, tomatoes that were perfectly ripe, mayonnaise that dripped flavor…food on Mars had improved since I’d been through last.
Or maybe it was just this hotel that aspired to luxury.
I chewed thoughtfully. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Deniel does own the whole shooting match. That just makes him top dog of the corporation. It doesn’t make him the guy I’m looking for. That could be anyone, still.”
“But Deniel Harlow would be a place to start, right?” Ninety-Nine said. “One of his employees died on the job, because someone screwed with her coding. He’d want to know about that, wouldn’t he?”
“That someone had stolen her free will?” I nodded. “Yeah, that would stick in Deniel’s craw. He was big on freedom and self-determination. He’d be pissed on her behalf.”
Which was why I couldn’t see him creating a mammoth corporation that would box him in with a mountain of obligations and responsibilities. Not even the seventy-plus years that had passed since I last saw him would explain it away. People didn’t change. Humans rarely managed it and it usually didn’t last long. Serials flat out couldn’t change. It wasn’t in their programming. So what was Deniel really doing with his pet corporation?
And that mystery, more than anything Ninety-Nine said, made up my mind. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go talk to Deniel. See what that gets us.”
At the very least, it would get us the hell off Mars before the unguessable deadline passed and the people behind the grimy subroutine in my skull came looking for me and the baby I had been sent here to steal.