Tyson sat in a corner booth across a small, round, antique burlwood table from Dr. Elsa Spaulding and exhaled weeks’ worth of dread and anxiety in one long, exasperated, thoroughly satisfying sigh.
“That is the first bit of good news I’ve heard in more than a month.” He lifted his drink to clink her nearly empty glass. “Cheers!”
They both leaned back into the circular leather bench of the “privacy” booth. While they could look out on the rest of the patrons of Vicars, their conversations were reduced to static by overlapping fields of ultrasonic interference at the mouth of the booth. Tyson wouldn’t repeat his mistake from Chili’s.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Mr. Abington.”
“Tyson.”
“Fine, Tyson. It’s a trial phase, there’s no guarantee it will work across all—”
Tyson waved her off. “I’m confident your team will close the gaps. Loosen up, celebrate your accomplishment. You’re running low, would you like another?”
“Actually, I think I’d like to switch to beer.”
“By all means. They have an excellent Flemish sour on tap here.”
“A what?”
“A sour beer.” Tyson’s eyebrow inched toward the ceiling. “Where did you grow up, Elsa?”
“Persephone. On the equatorial belt, like almost everyone. Except the miners and the people up in the orbitals, of course. We called it the racetrack. Two thousand kilometers across in most places and wrapped all the way around the globe.”
“Persephone is pretty dry, right? I’ve never been.” Tyson entered the beer order into the table’s menu.
“Let’s just say lakeside property is at a premium. I lived in the twelves. We had a ‘lake’ you could wade across, and it was man-made.”
“That doesn’t mean a great deal to me, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry. Without large, interconnected oceans, there aren’t recognizable continents, so the equatorial belt is divided up into forty-four thousand-kilometer-long sections and one shorter section that acts as the end point of the belt, as mapped by the original surveyors. I lived in the twelfth section.”
“Seems a bit impersonal.”
“Persephone is a bit impersonal, and that’s when she isn’t actively trying to kill you. This place”—she waved around an arm to encompass the totality of Lazarus—“is like the planet’s brightest vacation spots by comparison.”
“It was hotter than Lazarus?” Tyson said. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Not on average. Persephone sits right near the edge of the liquid water zone of Proxima, but it’s dry, the winds spin up to several hundred kilometers per hour, a sudden solar flare can give even gene-spliced skin a third-degree sunburn in under five minutes, and when a pressure front from the sunward or nightward side pushes into the racetrack, the temperature can rise or fall by forty degrees in less than an hour. Which could happen at any time, because there are no seasons on a tidally locked planet.”
Tyson grimaced as the automated waiter rolled up to the table to deliver the beer. “Makes it hard to know how to dress for a picnic, I imagine.”
Elsa took the stein from the small platform and thanked it out of habit. “We didn’t leave the house without a goody bag.”
“Goody bag?”
“Sorry. It’s like a cross between a sleeping bag and a small tent. You could have it inflated and be inside in ten seconds, which we practiced. Its shell would reflect the worst radiation of a flare, and it was insulated well enough to keep you alive for several hours in either extreme heat or cold. And the second it inflated, a built-in burst transmitter started screaming to everyone within two hundred kilometers to come get you. Goody bags saved a lot of people over the last couple centuries. Anyone caught outside without one is pretty well written off as too stupid to be worth saving in the first place.”
“It’s a miracle it was ever colonized in the first place.”
“It was our very first extra-solar colony, back in the days before the Alcubierre breakthrough. The first ships to get there were a joint ESA/NASA project using good old antimatter rockets. It took thirty years just to get there at a time when we weren’t sure going any further into space would ever be practical. So, the first colonists were pretty strongly motivated to make it work. I doubt developers today would give a marginal case like Persephone a second glance, but still, she persisted. Even today, Persephone hasn’t repaid its original investment in materials or manufacturing. But it’s more than made up for it by cranking out generation after generation of tough bitches and the institutional knowledge of how to terraform even the most disagreeable planets.”
Tyson smiled. “You take pride in that obstinacy?”
Elsa blushed. “Maybe a little. Is that silly?”
“Not at all. It’s admirable even, if put to appropriate use.” Tyson took another swill of his whiskey and soda. “Speaking of uses…”
Elsa’s eyebrow inched up. “Yes?”
“I have received a report from, well, from a very strange woman whose analysis I trust nonetheless, that our investigations should take a particular look at Tau Ceti and Barnard’s Starbased operations. Anyone on your list of potentials for our bacteria builder work out of those systems, either currently or recently?”
Elsa chewed over the question for a moment, then unrolled a screen from her pocket. “A few,” she said after a brief review. “But it thins the herd significantly.”
“That’s good. Anyone jump out at you?”
She gently bit her lower lip as she scrolled through the candidates. Tyson’s hindbrain pinged and sparked at the visual, but he ignored it. She was an employee. Never mind that damned near everyone on this bloody planet was an employee except his immediate family. There were lines one didn’t cross at his level of play.
She sneered. “Oh, yesss…”
“That sounds decisive.”
Elsa turned the privacy curtain off on the screen so the image in front of her could be viewed from both sides of the transparent film. Tyson’s side was a mirror image, but it sufficed. A man’s bust filled the screen. European-ish features, mid-sixties, a little soft around the chin and neck, brown hair given way to gray, and the unmistakable, sunken, beady eyes of a rat.
“This,” Elsa began, “is Dr. Caleb Beckham. Dr. Beckham is a slimy little prick, and has been since he tried unsuccessfully to get me drummed out for plagiarism after I wouldn’t suck his dick like all his other undergrads.”
“Figuratively?”
“Quite literally. He was known for picking grad students based on attributes outside of their academic performance. Physical attributes, specifically.”
“He liked to work around pretty young women?”
“Gender wasn’t an issue, so far as I could tell, so long as they looked like they came from a model-breeding facility. Seriously, the housing unit looked like a Dolce and Gabbana photo shoot most nights.”
“So why did you want to study with him?”
“Because he ran the best genetics programs in three systems and I didn’t know about his extracurricular requirements until after I’d accepted the position. It was an unpleasant surprise.”
“Not even with your dating opportunities pulled from such quality stock?”
Elsa’s countenance soured. “I was working a hundred hours a week just to keep up with clinicals and my own experiments. I didn’t have a lot of time for tickling privates with my colleagues.”
“I’m sorry,” Tyson said genuinely. “I was only trying to lighten the mood, not insult your professionalism. But do you think Dr. Beckham’s, ah, lecherousness makes him a suspect in creating a bioweapon whose very existence, to say nothing of deployment against civilians, carries the death penalty? As vices go, that’s a bit of a jump.”
“He was eventually fired from TCU three years ago over ethics complaints that rumor has it didn’t have anything to do with inappropriate student/staff relations. His personnel file is sealed, but getting tenure pulled is a big deal. It had to be serious. Like, opened himself up to blackmail or legal action serious.”
Tyson found himself salivating. He took another swallow of his drink to wash it all down. “Does the timeline fit?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, is the three years from when he was canned to the release of this bacteria fit with the time you would expect to take to develop and weaponize it?”
Elsa leaned back in her chair and exhaled. “There’s a lot of variables. What kind of facilities and equipment does he have access to? How big and how competent a staff? All that takes funding.”
“Assume money is no object. Trust me when I say it all becomes a little abstract when you’re moving around trillions. How long for a crash program with all the bells and whistles?”
“With my pick of the litter and unlimited funding? Eighteen months. Assuming everything goes off without a hitch, which it never does.”
“Still, that’s enough time for someone to recruit him, set up and staff a lab, crank out the research, and still have a bit of wiggle room for unforeseen issues. Would you agree?”
Elsa nodded along. “It’s a tight timeline, but it’s possible.”
“And where is the good doctor now?”
“Last I heard, he’d retired to a town house on Mars, but who knows?”
Tyson smiled a crisp, voracious grin. “We will, very soon. How do you find the sour?”
“Oh, right.” Elsa picked up the stein and gave it an exploratory sniff. “Smells like cherries.”
“It’s deceptive. Have a sip.”
Tyson watched stone-faced as she took a pull from the glass and her eyes and mouth twisted up into the shape of an asterisk. “God!” Elsa exclaimed. “It’s pure vinegar!”
“Not pure, my friend, but it does push back against the tongue pretty hard on the first pass. However, if you’ll wait a moment…”
“Oh, that’s different,” she said as the brew’s bouquet blossomed in the back of her mouth. “It’s … sweet, almost floral.”
“That’s the open vat fermentation you’re tasting. Natural yeasts and pollens from the lowlands of Denmark. It grows on you. That particular beer made a trip of more than thirty light-years for the pleasure of passing through your lips.”
“You seem to be going out of your way to impress me.”
“Not at all, this is just how I live.” Tyson saw the flash of disgust cross Elsa’s face like a tremor. “I’m sorry, that came out a bit more dickish than I intended.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“What I meant was, I can understand how it would appear that way to you. But my position comes with a great deal more pressure and responsibility, so the perks are commensurately larger as well.”
“Yes, poor little me, I’m only responsible for saving the lives of your employees and unraveling this industrial espionage you’ve fallen into.”
Tyson rapped his finger on the tabletop. “I’ve backed myself into a dead end here, haven’t I?”
“You think?” She winked as she took another drink of the sour beer.
“I apologize. I didn’t mean to demean your contributions. I’m … a little out of practice talking to people who aren’t C-level executives, if I’m going to be honest. And you’re quite a bit less deferential than even most of them.”
Elsa ran a fingertip around the lip of her mostly empty glass. It sang a pure note in response. “So, what’s our next move?”
“I thought the spy thing wasn’t your game?”
“It’s growing on me. Kind of like this beer.”
“Told you it would.”
“The spy shit, or the beer?”
“Both.” Tyson smirked. “I have an idea. But, I’m warning you right up front, it contains an element of risk.”
“I’m past the point of no return on that, aren’t I? I heard about that girl they pulled out of the wastewater plant.”
“You did? How?”
Elsa shrugged. “I know you’re proud of it, but this city isn’t that big, Tyson. Half a young woman’s body turns up in a pipe with no ID, word gets around. Especially among single ladies. We have to be on the lookout for predators as a matter of course.”
“I—hadn’t considered that aspect.”
“You’ve never had to.”
“Touché.”
Elsa sipped her beer. She didn’t make the same scrunched-up face as the first time. Growing on her indeed. “What did you have in mind?”
“A classic sting. You send out feelers for Dr. Beckham, tell him you’re working for me and found a cure for this weapon. Tell him you figured out it was him, and he can either pay you double what I’m paying you to botch the cure and keep your mouth shut, or you’ll tell me it was him and the authorities will come down on him like avenging angels.”
“More stick than carrot, huh?”
“The old tricks are the best tricks.”
“What if I’m wrong and it’s not him?”
“Then he’ll either ignore you, or call you a kook and say you’re trying to settle a score from grad school. You’ll point out he’s got no credibility after being forced to retire, and everyone will forget about it in a couple days.”
Elsa nodded along with the thread. “And if I’m right?”
“That’s where the risk comes in. Whoever is behind this will either pay you and thank their lucky stars they’ve managed to flip another asset and penetrate my organization even more deeply…”
“Or?”
“… or they determine it’s cheaper and safer to remove you from the board.”
“And safely set me off to the side until the game is over and we all get put back in the box?” she asked hopefully.
“Not like that, I’m afraid. But I think the first outcome is far, far more likely. And if they attempt the second, you’ll be under constant surveillance and protection. It’s hard to spring a trap when the target knows it’s there.”
“But not impossible.”
Tyson held his hands out, palms up. “As I said, an element of risk. But I wouldn’t even put this on the table if I wasn’t entirely confident that risk was manageable.”
Elsa breathed out heavily through her nose, then stared off into the middle distance of the bar. Tyson didn’t follow her gaze, instead looking at his hands and the blood on them. Not physically, of course, but it was still there. Someone’s daughter, sister, young lover, had already died in the plot against his empire.
He’d made tough calls many times before. Fired people in such a way it ended their careers. Bought start-ups just to quash an emerging threat and snuff out lifelong dreams. Even had one person choose suicide instead of facing the humiliation of demotion, not that anyone had expected that outcome.
But a murder was a different animal entirely. He still couldn’t wrap his head around it. Maybe he was naïve, but that just wasn’t the way the game was played up here in the executive levels. It was so … uncouth. He’d joked with the board about plugging the leak, but had come to regret that bit of bravado.
“The trial,” Elsa blurted out.
“Yes, of course. You won’t have to appear in open court. I’ll see to it that your testimony is submitted anonymously.”
“No.” She jumped onto the end of his sentence. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to be sheltered, witness protection, or any of that. I went into genetics to help people, to be a healer. This bacteria is a perversion of the science I’ve dedicated my life to pursuing. It’s an abomination. I want to stare them down and watch them squirm. And I want them to know who fucked them.”
Tyson took a moment to admire the passion radiating from the intriguing woman he was only just now beginning to understand. “You’ll get that chance, I promise you.”
Elsa drained the rest of the sour beer in one pull.
“Assuming you keep me alive long enough.”
“Yes. Assuming that.” Tyson looked over her clothes. “To that end, I think it’s time you make acquaintances with my tailor.”
“Your tailor?” she said with surprise. “Is this the part of My Fair Lady where I get a makeover?”
“I’m afraid I must confess I don’t get the reference, but the style isn’t what’s important. You’ll—” A priority connection request popped up in Tyson’s AR. It was Paris. She knew where he was and what he was discussing. She wouldn’t interrupt for something trivial. He looked at Elsa apologetically and pointed at his temple. “Excuse me for a moment.” He sent his mind’s voice into the virtual interface. “Go ahead, Paris.”
“There’s someone to see you in your office, sir. It’s urgent.”
“They’re alone in my office?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. It’s sensitive.”
“I’m leaving now. Send a pod.”
“Waiting outside for you, sir.”
“You’re too good to me, Paris.”
“I’ll remind you of that one of these days.”
Tyson dropped the connection and returned his attention to Elsa. “Forgive me, but something’s come up.” He thumbed the small auto-waiter to settle the bill. “I’ll message you with details about the tailor appointment.”
“I don’t have a lot of time to saunter across the city.”
“No need, he’ll come to you.” Tyson stood. “We’ll talk soon. Stay alert, stay safe.”
Minutes later, he was inside his private express lift, shooting up the three hundred meters to his penthouse office like a cannonball. Twice on the way over he’d prodded Paris to tell him who he was coming to see, but she rebuffed him. Whoever it was, their presence was so clandestine that Paris not only felt pressured to let them wait alone in his office, but didn’t trust even her own communication security protocols with their identity.
It couldn’t be an extensive list. Tyson went through the possibilities. One of the other transtellar CEOs or chairmen? There were only a baker’s dozen of them, and everyone kept tabs on who was moving around where, not that there weren’t slipups in that coverage. Sokolov? She’d managed to drop in on him unannounced once already. A delegate from the UN? A Xre ambassador? Now that really would be crazy.
Tyson’s train of thought pulled into the station as his feet lightened under the sudden deceleration of magnetic braking. The lift car slowed to a crawl as it emerged through the floor of his penthouse like a night-blooming jasmine.
The door opened onto a dimly lit scene. The ring window around the perimeter of the room was frosted for privacy, giving the familiar space an eerie, cave-like atmosphere that set Tyson’s senses on edge.
“Paris, bring up the lights fifty percent.”
“I’d rather not.”
Tyson blinked. “You’d rather—” The rest of his incredulous words died in his throat as his eyes caught the silhouette moving against the shadows and diffuse light in his office. It was human, so no off-the-books meeting with an alien tonight. The figure was lithe, moving with fluidity and precision in equal measures. So graceful it verged on unnatural.
And it was most definitely female.
Sokolov was out. At forty-one, she was young for the head of a transtellar; fit, beautiful, and capable, but a ballerina she was not. An assassin? Someone had gotten close enough to Casey to kill her, after all. Tyson’s heart sped up as his muscles tensed for action.
“Paris,” he said slowly as he brought his arms up into a guard position, “who’s prowling around in my office in the dark?”
“I should be offended.” Paris’s voice cooed from the speakers all around him even as the silhouette stalked toward the center of the room. It wasn’t a tone she’d ever taken with him before. It sounded confident, sensual, and hungry. Tyson took a step back.
“After all the years we’ve worked together,” Paris continued, “you mean to say you honestly don’t…” The lights brightened at the center of his desk where the mystery figure stood erect, bathing her in white. The breath caught in Tyson’s lungs as the spotlights cascaded down the most stunning woman he had ever seen in his long, lonely years.
“… recognize me?”
It was the voice of his AI assistant, but Tyson’s eyes had gotten stuck somewhere near the impossibly flat and toned musculature around her navel, so it took a moment to register that the sound hadn’t come from the room’s hidden speakers, but her mouth.
Tyson’s eyes snapped up to his assistant’s face, but not the face he recognized. The voice was the same, but instead of the virtual avatar he’d seen in holos and vids for years, her hair was platinum blond and razor straight, her green eyes set into high cheekbones that led down to a pointed chin and full, pouting lips.
His arms fell to his sides. The rest of her looked like a boy’s dream, a teen’s obsession, and an old man’s nightmare. The sort of vision that could trigger a heart attack and an early trip to the morgue.
“Paris?” he asked dumbly.
She ran her hands down her sides and subtly shivered her hips, all of which were covered in a skin-tight white film from her neckline to her knees that looked more like packaging than clothing. “In the flesh, or a very close approximation of it.”
“You look, uh, different.”
“I took the liberty of making some changes to my appearance when I placed the order for this carapace.” She began to advance out of the circle of light toward him, falling back into shadow as she moved. “I studied the likenesses of actresses, fashion models, and”—her lip curled up just a fraction—“adult performers and generated an aggregate that I thought would be pleasing as well as … stimulating.”
“My … um, compliments to the chef,” Tyson said, positively flustered. His cheeks felt warm. Was he blushing? His back bumped up against something unexpectedly. In the dark it took him a moment to realized he’d been pressed all the way back into the window at the edge of the room. Paris drew close, then ran the back of her hand from the shoulder pad of his jacket all the way down his sleeve and brushed against the skin on the back of his palm. He was ready for her touch to feel like cold latex, but her fingertips were warm, soft. Like living flesh.
Without seeking clearance from his consciousness, Tyson’s penis prepared for Phase Two.
“I’ve always wanted to know what that felt like,” Paris said with a dripping wet tone.
“Your skin has tactile feedback?” Tyson said as clinically as he could manage, but he already knew the answer. Even this close, he couldn’t tell the difference between Paris’s carapace and a real woman. She even smelled right, perfume with a subtle undercurrent of sweat.
“Oh yes, you sprung for all the bells and whistles. Everything works. I hope you don’t mind, but I didn’t come cheap.”
“You never have,” he said.
She reached up and smoothed out the lapel on his jacket. “I know why you’re alone, Tyson.”
“Sorry?” he bleated.
“A man of your refinement and sophistication demands perfection. What biological woman could measure up?”
Tyson cleared his throat. “That’s not really—”
A perfectly manicured finger with French-tipped nail rested gently on his lips. “Shhh. No need to be modest with me. I know who you are, Tyson. I’ve watched your every waking moment for years. I know all your thoughts, patterns, whims, and yes, even desires.” Paris pressed her firm bosom against him, just below his pecks, but he wiggled out of it to the side and put his hands up.
“This is inappropriate.”
“Why?” she purred.
“We work together. You’re my subordinate. There are rules, and for good reason.”
Paris giggled. “Tyson, I’m flattered, really. But have you already forgotten what I am? You bought me and signed the user agreement. I’m a very expensive piece of office equipment. You can do anything you want to me, it’s all covered under the warranty.” She reached out and took his hands in hers, then placed them gently on the plastic film covering her hips. “I just need to be unwrapped.”
For just a moment, Tyson’s fingertips dug into the flesh covering her hips. He could feel the soft skin, a layer of toned muscle beneath it tense, and the bone of her pelvis below that. It was all artificial, of course, heat-activated poly-fibrous tensile coils for muscles, printed carbon laminate chassis in place of a skeleton. But it felt completely, convincingly real. The impulse to rip at the plastic film and tear it into confetti like wrapping paper on Christmas morning was very real, and very hard to resist.
It had been a long, long while since Tyson had made time for such distractions, and the sight of her, the perfect, flawless sight of her, roused something deep inside him he thought dead, but had merely been in a deep slumber.
Tyson tore away from her. “I’m sorry, I … have a thing.”
“I know you don’t,” Paris said, annoyance seeping into her voice at the edges. “I maintain your schedule, remember?”
“It’s not you, this is just, very fast. I need to think.” Which was entirely true. Tyson tapped a floor panel and called up the express lift car. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll talk about this more then.”
“Do I look like I want to talk?” the spurned, inexplicably horny android said with a huff.
“Please don’t be angry with me.” Tyson practically fell into the lift as soon as the doors opened. He backpedaled until his shoulders hit the inside wall and the doors closed. Tyson’s knees went weak and he slid down the wood paneling inside the lift car.
“Lobby.”
What a perfectly bizarre day. From planning counterespionage to fighting off the advances of an assistant whose physical existence was measured in hours.
As the express lift started its near freefall to ground level, Tyson considered stopping at Klub Kryptonite for a carafe of his indulgent sake, but no. Paris would see him doing it on the building’s security feeds, and it was Friday night, late. There would be throngs of Lazarus’s young and beautiful drinking, flirting, dancing lasciviously, and looking to climb his ladder, in several meanings. The very last place on the planet he wanted to be just then. Tyson had perfectly serviceable liquor at home, and he needed a shower.
A cold shower.
In liquid helium.