Myra’s call caught Noo and Fari in the hub, one bubble-car ride from the home of Parma, the slain environmental-systems builder, whose family had consented to an interview. Noo opened her side audio only; visual distractions and maneuvering in microgravity didn’t mix as far as she was concerned. “M. Okereke. M. Loh asked me to pass on a new bit of information, and to ask a favor,” Myra said.
“Let’s hear it,” Noo said as she gauged her transition to the next towline. Fari, younger, more fit, and possessed of better gravity-transition adaptation, glided ahead of her with a grace belying her rugby-player physique. The younger woman coasted to a near stop as she reached the towline and slipped one hand into the grab-loop.
“There’s another party making inquiries outside official channels,” Myra said. Noo reached and grabbed for a pair of loops. Her legs kept traveling from the momentum of her initial push-off. “M. Loh believes it might be productive for you to meet her.”
“Who is this person?” Fari said.
“Another person we do business with,” Myra said smoothly, answering without answering. “She just left one of M. Loh’s associates. Thus, the favor. He asks if you could escort this person to him.”
“We’re not nursemaids,” Noo snapped as she wrestled her body into alignment with the towline.
Fari cut in smoothly. “What my colleague means to say, M. Obi, is that we’d be happy to act in a spirit of mutual assistance. But we expect our backs scratched in return.”
“M. Loh said he assumed you’d say that, and that he’d offer compensation when you all met together,” Myra said.
Fari glanced back at Noo and flashed a hand sign in the agency’s private code, not station-talk or spacer hand-speak. New plan. Noo, still gripping the towline with both hands, frowned but nodded. “Ogun’s tears, this gets more fucking messy as we go. Loh vouches for this person?”
“She’s done business with our organization before.” Again, answering without answering.
Noo glanced up at Fari again, and saw an arched eyebrow indicating her partner had caught the evasion too. “That’s a pretty thin endorsement, coming from Pericles.”
Myra’s shrug came through even over audio. “It’s what I can tell you at this time. Hopefully we can sort this out face to face shortly. Time is pressing. Are you willing?”
“All right. Send us the location.” Her djinn blipped with the incoming packet and Noo carefully slipped her right hand free to wave up wayfinder arrows.
Fari beat her to it. “We need to drop the towline at the next platform and catch a transit car. Thank you, Myra.” Noo finally wrangled the packet open and discovered the contact’s name and likeness. The image of Meriel Suzuki revealed a thin woman, medium-brown skin, short straight hair. Her high cheekbones and the shape of her eyes hinted at some East Asian ancestors, but that was true of something like a third of the Cluster.
Moments later, they debarked into the sort of industrial district Noo didn’t often visit, an area devoid of towlines. They were gliding along the path of their wayfinders when the infrastructure-compromise alarm went off nearby, three long rings followed by two short ones. Myra called at the same moment, and Noo accepted, once more audio only.
“Our mutual friend is in trouble,” Myra said without preamble. “She’s hit a panic button and reported that she’s being herded by unknown assailants.”
“Fuck.” Reflexively, Noo checked her weapons in their holsters and saw Fari do the same. “We’ve got a station services alarm here. That can’t be a coincidence.” She blinked up an area map, seeking their target, spotted the green glyph adjacent to the flashing red station alarm. “Shit, that’s her all right. How’d she break into a maintenance passage?”
“No data,” Myra said with a traffic controller’s calm. “She flashed a message that she was under attack. I have other assets en route but with the alarm I expect station people to beat mine.”
“Got it.” It was an even bet whether a rapid response team from Infrastructure would arrive before the Constabulary. Normally Noo found the inter-agency rivalry amusing, but she didn’t relish getting in between the responders and the alarm. She and Fari shot down the passageway. Fari effortlessly bounced off the far wall and changed course to sail down the cross-corridor their wayfinders now pointed. Noo gritted her teeth and followed her partner’s example with considerably more effort and less grace. The younger woman moved lightly, bounding from contact point to contact point with the strength and agility of youth and training. Noo trailed behind, struggling to keep up even as she drifted further back. “Not. Too. Old. For. Field. Work,” she huffed as she pulled herself along the grip bars.
Fari reached the next intersection and flung herself down the new passageway, drawing her stunner as she went. A brilliant scarlet AR tag appeared above her head, announcing she bore a licensed weapon. Noo banged her way roughly through the course change and drew her own stunner.
Two people hovered near a maintenance doorway, arguing in the light of the alarm flashers. Nearby, two robots clung to the wall clutching a mechanical assembly. “Stand down!” Fari called out, snatching a grip bar to arrest her forward motion while she trained her weapon on the pair.
The man sprung at Fari with explosive force, hands extended. Calmly, Fari lined her weapon up with her target, slipped her finger over the trigger, and fired.
Her shot caught the man squarely center-of-mass. He convulsed, arms and legs jerking wildly, putting him into a tumble. Deftly, she pushed off to her left and snagged the next grip bar around the passage’s circumference. Noo, still heading for the point Fari vacated, cursed as the burly man sailed into her track. She was going too fast to brake against the passage wall, but she twisted and got one hand down anyway. She pushed off as strongly as she could and missed the man by scant centimeters.
Her evasion came at the price of tumbling. This close to the wall, the usual starfish maneuver to stabilize herself in zero-g risked a broken limb, or at least a sprained joint. She managed to get a foot into contact with the wall and steadied herself just in time to hear Fari fire a second time.
“Dammit. She ducked inside,” Fari said. She glanced back at Noo, then at the first attacker, now hung up on one of the grip bars and still paralyzed by the stun shot. The alarm rang out relentlessly, woowoowoowahwah, woowoowoowahwah. “We follow?”
Noo got her legs under her and launched towards the hatch. She caught herself on its lip as Fari did the same. “Hot pursuit,” Noo said. The two women locked eyes, nodded at each other, and pulled themselves into the promise of danger.
A cluster of maintenance bots surrounded the inner side of the doorway as Meiko sailed through, waiting their turn to exit, or perhaps their next set of orders. A row of conduits a good quarter-meter wide took up one wall of the hexagonal corridor. A large pump projected out from the wall about ten meters to her right. Red lights flashed in a slow rhythm, three flashes, a pause, then two more, then the cycle repeated. She heard an audible alarm from outside, and angry AR tags sprang to life everywhere she looked: RESTRICTED ZONE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, ACCESS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, VIOLATORS WILL BE VIGOROUSLY APPREHENDED. She hoped that help of some kind would be inbound double-quick given warnings that strident.
She hit the far wall feet first, spun, and pushed off to her left.
The service way ran at an oblique angle relative to the regular passage she’d come from; she wasn’t sure where it led, but at this point, she didn’t care. Without a map for this non-public space she had to rely on her djinn’s inertial dead-reckoning system, which while certainly better than average, was hardly infallible. Still, she thought going left ought to take her to public spaces, if station people didn’t intercept her and her pursuers first.
She pushed down the monkey-brain fear that threatened to bubble up at the thought of being caught in a dead end and sought the calm of rhythm.
Her maneuver shook free the blood welling up from where the machine had sliced into her triceps. The oblong scarlet blob sailed towards the entry and hit the first of her pursuers, the big man, across the face. Startled, he jerked and twisted, which put him into a tumble. He cursed in one of the local languages as he slammed into the far wall and ricocheted off it towards the pump assembly.
Almost without thought, she grasped the opportunity hanging before her like a shiny apple. Her thighs screamed as she hit the wall and drove off it with all her strength, changing course to arrow straight at her pursuer. She rotated through another 180 and came at him feet first. Hard.
The man managed to arrest his headlong spinning progress by grabbing onto the pump. This meant his hands were firmly wrapped around the rigid metal assembly when Meiko’s feet slammed into them. She felt bones give way and heard a horrible crunching sound, which was immediately drowned out by his scream.
Contact made and damage done, it was time to make good her escape. She allowed her body to fold until her hands made contact with the pump housing and immediately launched herself from all fours, flying back down her original course before the man had drawn a second breath to continue screaming.
Her victim’s partner sailed through the doorway just as Meiko passed it. The woman’s outstretched hand bumped Meiko’s left thigh, causing Meiko to spin round and tumble off course herself. She felt the woman’s fingers scrabble in vain for a grip on her trousers but she scissored her legs, swinging them free. She tried to catch the attacker with a booted foot but missed.
The woman barked out to the screaming man to collect himself in that same local dialect. The linguistics module in Meiko’s djinn caught up and identified it, and now provided her with a running translation. She ignored her pursuers for the moment and focused instead on trying to convert her imminent collision with the wall into something more productive. Her kick exacerbated her spin and she couldn’t kill it in time. She hit the wall left arm first, gasping at the pain and leaving a bloody smear. She righted herself and pushed off with all fours again, skimming along the a few centimeters from the wall like an underwater swimmer gliding along the bottom of a pool.
She got herself moving forward, albeit much more slowly than she wished. Pain shot through her left arm with every reach for a grip bar, with every pull to send her body ever-faster down the passage, and the imbalance between her good and bad arms began to affect her course. She grunted as she wrestled herself back onto a straight path. She had no time to think or feel anything but the play of muscle, the bump of impact as she hit the grip bars.
The big man stopped screaming.
Kumar chose that moment to call. “Mother of the fucking Leap!” Meiko blurted out. A flick of thought opened the connection, audio only. But she gave Kumar access to her sensory inputs, letting the spymaster see what Meiko saw, hear what she heard.
“What the hell are you up to?” Kumar snapped as the link opened. “A restricted area? The locals are shitting themselves.”
“Got made.” She caught the next grip bar and flung herself forward. Slowly, she built up speed.
Something crashed into her back and she slammed into the wall, skidding down the passage. A hard object smacked her in the back and then pain ripped through her abdomen, every muscle spasming.
Fortunately for Kumar, the sensorium feed included neither tactile sensation nor pain replicators, but the spymaster drew the correct conclusion from the way the tunnel suddenly whirled. “Are you under attack?”
Meiko tried to say ‘Yes’, but only managed a pained hiss.
“What’s that?” asked a strange voice, as strong fingers slipped inside the waistband of her pants, yanking her to a stop.
Kumar’s voice went flat as she went into crisis-management mode. “Hold on. Security is scrambling. How many hostiles?”
Meiko struggled to remember how many chased her, to find the breath to vocalize. She was about to twitch out a text message when hands grasped her left arm and slammed it backwards against the grip bar. She screamed as her elbow gave way.
The motion spun her around and she forced her eyes open so Kumar could see her attackers. The woman who’d chased her down didn’t look like a typical bruiser, but then again, neither did Meiko. But her captor was wearing a shock palm, and that explained how she’d incapacitated Meiko with one hit. A man who she thought was the first one she’d spotted came flying up the passageway towards them. She heard shouting from the hatchway and saw two more people sail through it.
The woman grabbed Meiko by the collar with her left hand, and raised her right, palm open. The charging indicator on the shock palm flipped from red to green, the woman slammed her hand into Meiko’s solar plexus, and the world went away for a time.
Noo and Fari came through together, stunners drawn, searching for targets. “Stun everything and let the constables sort them out afterwards,” she growled.
They found themselves in a service passage and automatically rotated, one facing each way to cover both directions.
This brought Noo practically face to face with a heavily built man hanging curled in a ball like an infant, his hands tucked protectively against his stomach. Her djinn mapped a targeting reticle as soon as she’d drawn her weapon, and now it swung across him as she lined it up with her target. Noo’s finger slipped over the trigger, squeezed once, and was rewarded with the sight of the man’s body rippling as the charge took him. Finding no more targets she called out, “One down, clear this way.” Her voice was steady and dispassionate as if she were describing the color of the wall. She pulled herself clear of her flailing quarry and turned in time to see her partner shoot the woman they’d chased inside.
“One down, three targets,” Fari said, her own voice steady. “Twenty meters.”
“Understood.” Too long a shot for a hand stunner; they weren’t terribly accurate past ten meters or so. But they won’t have guns, and we do.
Or do they? An image of bloody corpses not even a full day dead flashed in her mind.
From ahead she heard the distinctive SNAP of a shock palm discharging, and Noo decided they probably still had the advantage. These people were out in public. Security would have caught unlicensed weapons. She hoped that was true.
“Correction, two targets.” Fari said, and pushed off hard to glide down the passageway, weapon trained on their quarry. “Stand down!” she shouted. “You’re in a restricted area! Disarm yourselves and move away from the woman.” Not that they really had authority here, but most people didn’t realize anyone besides the Constabulary and the station Army garrison were authorized to carry weapons; barely two dozen, in fact, and half of them worked for Noo and Fathya.
Noo trained her own weapon on the pair and pushed off to follow her partner.
The man launched himself at Fari when she was perhaps ten meters away. Both Noo and Fari fired at the same time but he twisted and their shots both missed. He crashed into the younger woman and they bounced against the wall. Fari’s stunner went flying as the pair grappled, and the fourth attacker sprang for it, hands outstretched.
Noo worked her way around the passage, away from where Fari and her opponent spun, and tracked the flying woman as she snatched the errant weapon, keeping her own stunner fixed squarely on target. The woman spun around to hit the passage wall with her feet, collapsing perfectly to absorb the shock of her landing. She pointed Fari’s stunner at Noo and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. A look of puzzlement came across her face as she tried to fire again.
“Biometric lock,” Noo said, and fired twice herself. Both shots hit and the woman spasmed like a snapped rubber band.
Noo spun in place to see how Fari was doing. Her opponent out-massed her slightly, but Fari trained regularly in zero-g combat. Both her legs wrapped around his, pinning them, which freed both her hands. The man clawed for her face, but she jerked her head back and jabbed a sword-strike into his left armpit with one hand while her other grasped his collar. Their spin brought her feet into contact with one of the grip bars and she hooked a foot under it, opening her legs to let the man swing free. His exultant cry was cut short as she clamped her free hand on his belt, spun him around, and slammed him head first into the passage wall once, twice, then a third time, before releasing him to float free.
Noo shot him anyway, just to be sure.
Fari, breathing just a little heavily, pulled a set of restraints from her jacket pocket and looped them around the man’s arms and ankles without any visible consideration for his comfort. “You are hereby apprehended under the Covenants of the Ileri Republic,” she intoned, yanking the ankle band tight. “In other words, you’re clipped, son.”
Noo swapped magazines before holstering her own weapon and tossing her own restraints to Fari, who went to work on the other attackers. She pushed over to the shock-palm victim who still floated where the goons had left her. She checked the image. “Meiko Ogawa,” she said as her djinn grabbed the woman’s ID and social profile. “Who was Meriel Suzuki just a few minutes ago, if this picture our mutual friend provided is any indicator.” She could tell the pictures of Meiko and Meriel were of the same woman, but she had to look closely, beyond the differences in skin and hair color.
Ogawa/Suzuki’s eyes fluttered, but she made no other response.
Noo examined her from head to toe, taking in the bloody shoulder, the left arm hanging limply and wrong. “Got in over your head,” Noo murmured, as a pair of constables sailed through the hatchway from the main corridor, followed closely by a team of Infrastructure Services people in softsuits, and things became official.