Jake Carter’s hunt for his missing sentinel had taken him, by buggy and by mesh, in a wide arc around the Titan Quarantine Zone. Bobdog LaGrange had been missing for three days, and the trail Bobdog’d had his nose on wasn’t one that led anyplace good. Finally, Carter got a break. A traffic spime on a ditchstop spur of the M-4 had gotten a facial match on Bobdog, looking drugged in the back of a car.
He’d traced the car to a saloon at the end of the spur road and called in a favor from Sage Kim, Captain of the Elysium Rangers, to ride shotgun while he checked it out. She wasn’t Firewall, but Jake figured she wouldn’t be seeing anything too crazy on what oughta be a simple rescue mission. Kim knew him as Jae Park, terraforming worker and sometime-smuggler, and he meant to keep it that way for now.
Kim’s big gray Ranger flier circled the wide hollow at the end of the lonely highway once, then touched down near a dozen other vehicles, landing lights briefly illuminating the rusty Martian soil. The flier looked like the very mean lovechild of a large jeep and a fanjet VTOL plane. The front doors swung up, and Kim, Park, and a baboon hopped out, boots crunching on frost. Another baboon, masked against the thin atmosphere, pulled shut the doors and hopped to the front window of the flier, watching as the trio made their way across the landing lot.
“Cold enough to make dry ice tonight,” Kim said.
“CO2 doesn’t freeze in the Labyrinth anymore, lady.”
“Feels like it could tonight,” she said, “Let’s get inside.”
Even in the relative shelter of Noctis Labyrinthus, the canyon walls didn’t do much to stop the wind screaming across the Tharsis Plateau that night. They leaned in to the gusts, making a beeline from the prowler across the lot toward a lone building.
Both wore heavy boots, clothes made from drab fabric that looked like denim but acted like kevlar, well-worn sidearms, and rebreathers under dark balaklavas. Kim’s kit loosely followed the regulation uniform of the Tharsis League Rangers (which was how most rangers followed uniform regs—loosely). Both were Asian phenotypes with ruddy skin—rusters.
The baboon followed in the woman’s steps, stopping occasionally to scan the roof and windows of the building. Cape baboons weren’t the prettiest creatures to begin with, but with goggles and a full breather covering the muzzle, the big male—she called it Smoke—looked damned scary.
The building was stacked together from twenty or thirty boxy green shipping containers. The place was only dimly lit in realspace, but in augmented reality a big neon sign flickered over the buidling’s watchtower. It read, “Destino Verde.”
“Thanks for helping me come after Bobdog,” he said.
“If Bobdog didn’t feed me tips nice and regular, I’d have put his ass away long ago,” she said, “He’s an idiot.”
“Ain’t gonna argue.”
“And the less I know about what’s actually going on here, Park, the better.”
“Crystal.” He clicked off the safety on his piece, heard the whine of magnetic rails going hot as she did the same. “Get your game face on, Captain.”
“You’ve never seen it off.” An AR graphic of a badge—the Ranger star with the Chinese characters for “justice” at its center—dissolved in over the lapel of her duster as she pulled open the building’s outer door.
There was a gust of warm air. The place didn’t have a proper airlock, just a couple of counterweighted pressure doors. Cheap to maintain, and good for us, Park thought. If they needed to make a fast exit, an airlock was the worst option.
He turned on his t-ray emitter, shared what he was seeing with Kim through their tacnet, and scanned the room on the other side of the door. Front of the place looked like a typical roadhouse crowd, with someone pouring drinks and about a dozen other people either propping up the bar or scattered around the room. There was more than one way to the back; a little way down one of the passages was someone on a stool—probably a doorman.
“Got all that, Captain?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “Go time.” She pushed the inner door open and strode in, stopping next to the nearest table. The baboon hopped up next to her, pulled off its breather, grunted, and made a fist-smacking gesture that aped packing a box of cigarettes. She absently offered him a pack and a zippo while Park walked up to the bar. Style points for the lighter; self-igniting cigs were for spacers and dome dwellers.
“Hey there,” he started in Mandarin, but the pleasure pod tending bar, whose outfit consisted of little more than AR graphics, cut him off.
The pod had a fresh face but a mean sneer. “Get that monkey outta here,” she said to Kim, “This is a clean place.” She was speaking English with an Indian accent. Sounded weird coming out of a morph that looked Japanese, but Park’d heard weirder.
Kim chuckled once. “This monkey’s the Law. Get back to selling betel nuts, cupcake.”
Park looked over his shoulder to see Smoke light its cigarette and take a satisfied drag, smiling to show huge canines. Whoever said smart baboons couldn’t grok human insouciance was dead wrong, but Park also noticed the baboon had one hand on its shock baton.
The pod stood there a minute, palms planted on the bar, attempting to stare down the ranger. Kim ignored the girl completely, slowly walking around the table, sizing up the other customers along the way, until she’d done a full circle, whereon she kicked out a chair and planted herself, one boot up on the table. [Only ones who might be trouble are the pair closest to the back,] she messaged.
Park didn’t need to look their way; he was getting video from Kim in his tacs. He propped himself on his elbows and leaned on the bar like he was studying the beer taps, but his attention was on the little video window in the corner of his field of vision. Big blond guy and a stolid Japanese kid, both sipping their drinks slow and showing Yakuza nanotats. The blond guy was looking his way; his friend kept glancing at Kim.
[Some heavy citizens,] he messaged. He glanced at the bartender, [And where you figure they got the cred for a model like her in a dump like this?]
Conversation in the room started up again, and the girl finally said sideways to Park, “What do you want?”
“Sorry about my friend. She ain’t been feeling so great. Pint of Red Iron?”
The girl narrowed her eyes briefly at Kim, then looked back at him. “Your lover?” she asked. Jae felt a flutter in his chest when she locked eyes with him. Tailored pheromones?
“The captain? Nah, I just owe her a favor.” Yeah, definitely pheromones; he was fighting not to get distracted. “She’s due for some new genetic services packs; she’s got achy joints and all. She’s looking for a remedy ’til she can make the payments, wanted me along to make sure she didn’t get put over the barrel on the price.”
The girl finished pouring the beer and passed it over in a way that involved more bending and stretching than was strictly necessary. She said, “What’s a terraform-wallah know about being over a barrel?” She’d made him quick, but then his whole look screamed terraformer, even with his network profile in privacy mode.
“You ever worked as a line engineer, you’d know the answer, darlin’: plenty.” He took a long pull off the beer; it tasted like burnt rice and the girl’s perfume.
“Anyway, this is a bar … not a pharmacy.”
He slid some cred into an AR payment window, tipping generously. “Ain’t what I heard.”
She glanced toward the pair of yakuza. Through Kim’s video feed, he saw the young-looking one nod to her. “Why don’t you and your friend try in back?” She pointed to a hallway to her left marked, “EMPLOYEES ONLY.”
He abandoned the remaining beer. “Thanks, darlin’.” He turned to Kim and nodded toward the hallway, and the two of them headed back. Smoke stayed perched on its table, eyeing the two yakuza.
The back room opened up into four cargo containers whose innermost sides, bottoms, and tops had been cutting away, forming a big, mostly open space. At the back of it was a counter, and behind the counter was a tall stack of cases, drawers, cabinets, and hanging nets full of herbs, animal parts, and medicines in old-fashioned glass and plastic containers. The old guy behind the counter looked Japanese, but the labels on all of the containers and most of the AR graphics floating over items for sale were in Mandarin.
“What you need? Whatever it is, I got just the thing,” the old man said.
Park was suspicious as hell of anyone who chose to walk around in an old morph; meant you were either potent or desperate. “My lady friend’s GSPs’re up. She’s got some joint pain. Normal meds ain’t working. You got somethin’ to restore her chi flow or whatever all this stuff is supposed to do?”
“Chi’s serious business,” the old man scowled. “I got a reed and marrow rub for that, just the thing.”
Park said, “C’mon, oyabun. I know you got better.”
“Ah, I have just the thing … Houzi cream.” He started to take a tin from under the counter.
“Tinned? I could make that in a fabber. Quit trying to jerk me around, or we’re going somewhere else.”
The old man grunted, backed up and crossed his arms.
“You’re worried about the badge, paatno-san? C’mon, we know this is a yak place. We’re here for your merchandise, not to make a bust, or we’d have her monkey in here tearing your shit up already.”
The old man scowled. “I can make you up a Houzi cream, but it ain’t cheap.”
Park messaged her, [Ask to see the gibbon.]
Kim crossed her arms and looked around the shop like she was thinking about it. [Are you fucking serious, Park? You think—]
[Just do it!]
She looked at the shopkeeper. “I’m gonna need to see the gibbon. That ain’t a problem, right?”
The shopkeeper led them deeper into the maze of shipping containers.
[What’s going on with this operation?] Kim messaged, [I seen some weird shit, but … ]
Park messaged, [Traditional Chinese medicine. Old-timey, superstitious shit. It was mostly dead ’til the corps kicked in with the GSP racket and people couldn’t find any cure’d work on their pains and asthma. Some of the recipes call for ape parts. They lop off the pieces to make the meds, then throw ‘em in a healing vat, rinse, and repeat. People’ll try anything, and they think uplifts make stronger medicine. Surprised you never ran into this before.]
[Wait, so what are the yakuza into it for?] she messaged. She was mapping out all the twists and turns they’d followed on the tacnet.
They passed through a barrier of hanging plastic, and the reek of confined animals hit them. The hallway opened up into the harvesting room. In the gloom, he saw a neo-bonobo drugged in a cage. Park peered at him, but it wasn’t Bobdog—no dreadlocks. Unless he’d resleeved. Through another doorway, he could see a row of bear cages.
—
[Triads won’t touch it,] he messaged, [They think it’s a cultural embarrassment, if you can believe. But the demand’s there, so the yakuza got into it.]
The yakuza rolled out a cage with a gibbon in it. Jake really wanted to find Bobdog and get out of here before he was responsible for them cutting on this monkey but … well, here was some fucked up shit he hadn’t seen before.
The gibbon was hopping around in its cage freaking out, but it was also signing to him in Warlpiri. <Jake! Get me out of here!>
He signed from where the old man (hopefully) wouldn’t spot him while Kim made a show of walking around the cage inspecting the ape. <Bobdog? That you?>
The gibbon tried to hoot, its throat sack inflating, but only a sick croak came out. <Yes! Get me the fuck out of here now!>
Park could see where they’d shaved him and popped his stack; they’d burned out his mesh inserts, too.
[That’s a neo-gibbon. Bobdog’s sleeved in it,] he messaged Kim.
She glanced at him over the cage. [How do you know?] she messaged, [It doesn’t have a PAN.]
[Australian native sign language.]
She shot Park an incredulous look but didn’t say anything. “Okay, it looks good,” she told the yakuza.
The old man pulled out a metal pole with a wire snare on one end and started trying to catch Bobdog’s hand with it, cursing under his breath as the neo-gibbon freaked out in the cage.
“I haven’t got all day,” Kim said, then messaged, [What’s he doing?]
[If he gets a hold on Bobdog’s hand, he’s gonna slice it off with that vibroknife in his belt and use it to make your Houzi cream. Game time,] Park messaged, [How you wanna play this?]
She answered by breaking the old man’s face with the butt of her pistol.
He fell back, screaming and clutching his broken nose. “What the fuck? You think that badge means you gonna walk out of here alive?”
There was a crash and screams from somewhere outside. On his tacnet feed, Jae saw the big blond yakuza looking terrified for a split second as Smoke turned over the table onto his companion and came at him with its shock baton.
Kim kicked the old man to the floor and pointed her gun at his head. “Open the cage now, and I might not shoot you.”
The cage door swung open, and Park lifted Bobdog out and stood him on top of the cage. <Can you run?> He signed.
The neo-gibbon shook its head, signed, <Weak.>
Park lifted him. “All right, arms around my neck, pal. We’re Althauser 5000.”
<Not yet,> Bobdog signed, <You need to see what’s in back.>
There was a gunshot from somewhere down the hall. The old yakuza cackled sickeningly from the floor. “Stupid fucking garlic eaters,” he said, “When my boys get done with you, I’m gonna sleeve you up like that one and use you all for fucking monkey parts.”
Kim shot him three times, the railgun almost silent except for the crack of the slugs.
Park looked over in time to see the old man slump over. “Damn,” he said.
Park lifted the neo-gibbon just as the doorman from out front came tearing into the room. Park spun and leveled his pistol at the man. Bobdog was clinging to him like a baby; kid was gonna need some serious time in psych after this. “Hold it!” he shouted.
The guy hesitated for a second but kept coming, pistol out. Then the baboon took him down. Smoke leapt at him out of the gloom of the hallway, grabbing him around the neck and swinging its weight forward so that the gangster tumbled and fell to the ground. Smoke landed in front of the guy, then swung its baton hard into the wrist of his gun arm. Bone cracked wetly.
The yakuza grunted and sat up, holding his wrist. Smoke howled in his face, showing two huge canines. Smoke had been grazed by a shot, though its flak jacket had stopped most of the damage. The baboon looked pissed.
Park motioned with his gun. “C’mon, Toshi. Get in the cage.”
The guy stumbled to his feet, the baboon circling him. “Name ain’t Toshi.”
“Toshi, Fu, Iggins, whatever; get in the damned cage.”
He got in. Park put down Bobdog, pulled out his COT, and made a neat row of nanotack welds between the bars and the lock.
“Those’re illegal, terraform-wallah,” Kim said.
He looked up for a second. “So’s shootin’ technical old yak pharmacists for calling Koreans names.”
“I like monkeys and garlic. He messed with both in one breath. He needed killin’.” She looked none too penitent.
“Arright,” Park said, “This one ain’t following us. Now let’s see what all else they got hidden in here.” He picked up Bobdog again; the neo-gibbon pointed toward the bear cages.
She stayed put as he headed for the bears. “You’re kidding, right Park? We should go. Now. I’ll come back later with a tac squad and clean this place out.”
“They didn’t seem too afraid of cops. Whose jurisdiction is this, anyhow?”
“Gray area. My force doesn’t come down this way much. It’s on the line between me and the Noctis Rangers.”
“Who you know damn well got termites in the frame. Bobdog here’s down a cortical stack, mesh inserts, and a set of vocal cords over what they’re hiding in here.”
The neo-gibbon signed something in Warlpiri.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Kim asked.
“Uh, rough translation? ‘Cowgirl up.’” He shifted Bobdog to his back and headed into the bear cage room, gun first.
“Well, fuck. C’mon, Smoke.” She caught up, then took point, with the baboon bringing up the rear. [Gloria,] she messaged the other baboon, [Strap in,] and then to the AI in her prowler, [Dust off and circle high.] A few seconds later, the truck was a moving blip on their tacnet.
A few black bears looked up sadly as they crossed the room. They were stunted and weak, their wire cages barely allowing movement. A neatly attached catheter dangled from the belly of each—for milking their bile, if Park recalled rightly. Beyond that was a room with more primates—gibbons, monkeys, and another drugged out neo-hominid. The whole place smelt of sickly caged animals, and Smoke was getting edgy, sweeping the backs of his hands nervously over the floor whenever they paused. Kim gave him another cig to cool him down.
Kim came to a pressure door with a tiny window. Instead of peering through, she angled her gun so that she could look through its smartlink. Through his tacnet feed, Park could see the room beyond as she slowly panned. It was a lab set up: bunch of steel tables, equipment cabinets, industrial gear for filling up some small, heavily shielded cylinders—for gas or liquid, he wasn’t sure. There was a batch of a dozen cylinders racked up on the table.
All these details he took in after the back wall, though. In one corner was a heavily shielded incinerator—the kind that used magnetic containment and a blast of plasma to vaporize whatever was in it and then vaporize it some more. Next to that was a bio-containment chamber: a wide, white-lit, glass-fronted enclosure about five meters wide and three deep. There were three figures—or rather two figures, and a … thing—secured to the back wall of the enclosure with a multitude of heavy straps and room for two more.
One was Bobdog’s morph, a tall bonobo with dreadlocks. It was horribly emaciated but still breathing. Tumescent lumps studded its waist. The second figure was human, probably a ruster, but its skin had gone dead, nearly translucent white. Around its midsection writhed a double ring of stumpy tentacles surrounded by puckered scar tissue.
The third thing had only the vague outline of a humanoid shape. The legs had fused into a barrel of muscle ending in a wet surface like the belly of a gastropod, and the head and arms had disappeared into the trunk of the body. The tentacles on this one were more active but similarly stumpy and scarred; looked like its keepers’d been trimming them back as they grew.
Kim sucked in a breath. “Damn it, Park, I don’t know why I do favors for you. You get me into the weirdest shit. Is that radioactive?”
Park looked at the exsurgent. “No. And ain’t your job patrolling a zombie graveyard for robot monsters?”
“That’s got nothing on the kind of stuff happens every time I go on one of these runs with you. And this takes the cake. What the hell is this?”
“Stuff nobody oughta see.” He edged up to the door and opened it, “Should be safe enough behind an enclosure like that, though.” He went inside, and she followed, Smoke in tow.
“I hope you’re right. What kind of operation you think this is? They’re not cooking up tabs of hither in a setup like this.”
Park said, “Trying to improve on bear bile, you want my guess. Mind watchin’ the door, Captain?”
He put Bobdog down on a lab table. <Maintaining?> he signed.
Bobdog pointed at his morph, signed, <Fork of me. Infected. Kill it.>
<You got it,> he signed, but this was a bad scene. The Bobdog strapped to the wall was pretty far gone and infected with something; if he had a stack, better to destroy it. But he couldn’t be too sure about the Bobdog he’d been carrying around the last few minutes, either. When he got out of here, their first stop would be a genehacker kettle in the tablelands about twenty klicks north. He had a friend who could give them a clean bill of health … or not. Park tried not to think about the “not.”
He tapped at the window separating the room. “Hab window glass. Ideal.” There was an airlock with a decontamination shower leading into the enclosure and a few clean suits on a rack. The set up was basic but looked like it’d work.
“Ideal for what?” Kim asked.
He walked once around the enclosure, estimating its strength. “Blast containment.”
He started poking around, found a workstation with a rack of tiny quantum computers next to some of the lab equipment. [GiGi,] he asked his muse, [Can you get into this?]
[Mais oui,] the AI messaged, and started throwing exploits at it.
The baboon was having another cigarette. Thank goodness for bad habits, Park thought. There was another door leading farther back. If the schematic they built up on their flyover was any good, it lead to an exit.
Kim checked the back hall for herself, then asked, “I really need some answers about what’s going on in here, Park.”
Park started pulling on a clean suit. “You ain’t seen enough illegal activity yet?”
“Human trafficking, animal cruelty, assaulting a ranger, possession of a biohazardous substance, possession of TITAN relics … Yeah, sure, I can throw the book at that old man if I pop his stack and take it in.”
“Doubt it.” Jake buckled on the boots and started checking the seals. “Bet you his stack’s wiped. He’s the type’ll have a dead switch on a throwaway body like that. Or he wasn’t that important.”
“Then so it goes,” Kim said, “But whatever’s going on here, it’s the low end of the food chain.”
Jake sealed the helmet and ran the clean suit’s diagnostics. [Probably true. I figure they’re working on a way to infect more people. Can you do a visual inspection on the seals on this suit?]
[OK.] She went behind him, checking seals, then came around and gave him a thumbs up. [You think someone’s trying to weaponize it?]
He dragged the storage cylinders into the airlock with him. Frost came away where his gloves touched them; they were self-refrigerating. [Maybe. Gotta look for the big fish now.]
Bobdog’s clone tried to look up at him as he cycled the lock and entered the enclosure. He looked away; he couldn’t meet the neo-primate’s eyes. He suction cupped an incendiary charge to the window in front of Bobdog, then in front of the human. Finally, he set one up in front of the whipper, giving it a wide berth.
He squirted scrapper’s gel on the storage cylinders. He stepped away as the gel burned through and blood began oozing from the cylinders. Three incendiaries would be plenty in a chamber this size.
When he glanced out, Kim was smoking, too. He’d thought the cigs were just for the monkey. [Shit, Park. We can’t help him?]
He cycled the airlock. The chemicals from a decontamination shower hissed off the suit before the outer door opened. [You want to try? You know TQZ containment procedure.]
Park got out of the suit, letting the pieces drop to the floor, and found the atmosphere controls for the bio-containment enclosure. He adjusted the mix to hypersaturate the chamber with oxygen.
“What now?” Kim asked.
“I’ll be done here in a few. We burn the stuff in there so it doesn’t infect anybody else, and after that you can do whatever cop stuff you want to this bar.” The exsurgent in the enclosure had grown restive in the oxygen-rich chamber; it squirmed and whipped its stubby tentacles around. He sealed the oxygen line to the chamber; didn’t want too big an explosion.
Kim said, “I still want more answers. They got infected by a TITAN virus, I take it?”
GiGi reported her intrusion complete. He spread out an AR window on the lab table next to Bobdog and showed her. “Thing farthest left we call a whipper,” he said as he scanned the text, “Used to be a person; ain’t anymore.”
The chemical and biological data was mostly over his head, but what they were doing with it wasn’t too hard to suss out. The yakuza were intentionally creating exsurgents, milking them for bile and other fluids, then shipping the goop somewhere for processing.
“Who’s ‘we,’ Park?”
“Huh?” He stopped reading.
“You said, ‘What we call it.’ Who’s ‘we?’ Are you a fucking Oversight spook or something?”
Park laughed, “Nah. I work for the good guys. Least, that’s what I think most days. I was kinda hoping you’d sign up.”
GiGi messaged, [J’ai tous les données,] into the AR window.
She raised an eyebrow. “Your muse speaks … is that French?”
He grinned, closed the AR window, picked up Bobdog, and made for the door. “What? It’s sexy. She’s got all the data. C’mon, I can explain the rest when we’re safe in the air.”
They put a breathing mask on Bobdog, wrapped him in a heavy blanket, and walked right out the front door. The yak in the cage cursed at them as they passed, but they let him be. The pleasure pod bartender and bar patrons had fled the front of the bar, so they weren’t around to hear the muffled explosion from far back in the maze of shipping containers. The camera Park had left in the room showed that the containment unit held; inside was nothing but ash.
Kim’s prowler touched down, Gloria peering at them out the front windows. Park wasn’t sure whether a yakuza cleanup crew or Kim’s ranger buddies would get there first, but in the scheme of things, that wasn’t so important. They were in the air, and headed for the hills.
—
“So you ain’t surprised, guy we’re going to see knows me by Jake Carter,” Jae Park said.
“I don’t care if he calls you Sun Mi Hee,” Kim said, “As long as when we’re done there we get a clean bill of health. Anyway, I like ‘Jake’ better. My grandpa was named ‘Jae.’”
They were flying over the Noctis tablelands, heading for an off-grid genehacker facility. The badlands spread out invisible below them, but an AR topo display showing their position hovered over the central instrument panel. Rank of captain meant Sage Kim could requisition better engines than most Ranger prowlers had. They were cutting up sky; wouldn’t take long to get there.
It was hours ’til dawn, but Cagehopper would be awake; the genehacker didn’t sleep much. Even when he did, he kept a fork up to tend to his living experiments.
“What do you care if Bobdog and I get a clean bill?” Park asked, “You going all soft on me, Captain Kim?”
“No,” she said, “But I wouldn’t want to have to shoot you for coming up zombie, all the same.” Her tone measured zero-percent sardonic wit.
“Wouldn’t worry,” Park said, “This is containment protocol. Pretty standard. Just a precaution.” He said that, but he was covering. He had that itch in his neck, that crawling feeling in his stomach he always got after facing an exposure risk. The fear never went away, and that was a damned good thing. He’d seen more than a few researchers who got stupid about the exovirus shot into red smears on Firewall turn-and-burn ops. Hell, he’d done for a few himself, though he didn’t savor it any.
“How you doing back there, Bobdog?” Park craned his head to check on the neo-primate. Bob huddled in the acceleration couch, breathing normally but looking gray.
Bobdog made the Warlpiri sign for “shit.”
“Hang in there, man. We’ll be at Cagehopper’s soon.”
Kim had locked her police baboons, Gloria and Smoke, in the back cabin. Too much chance of Smoke throwing a nicotine fit and tearing one of Bobdog’s long, spindly neo-bonobo arms off. Park didn’t like the baboons much, but they’d come in handy dealing with the yakuza back at El Destino Verde.
“Be interesting to finally meet Cagehopper,” Kim said, real casual.
Well, shit, Park thought. “You know him?” he asked, keeping casual himself. He’d thought “Cagehopper” was a name the genehacker only used with Firewall. That she knew it set him on edge, but of more worry was the simple fact of a Ranger and a black-kettle genehacker being in the same room.
“Tried to arrest him a few times, sure.”
“Complicates things,” he said.
She reached over the center console and play punched his shoulder. Bit more than a play punch, point of fact, but probably not intentional. Kim was a ruster, but her body was heavy on the augments. He’d give her even odds against your average fury. “Don’t fret, Jake. I don’t give so much as a rat’s tail about this guy, so long as when we’re done he tells me I’m not gonna end up a barrel-shaped mass of mucus membrane with tentacles for a tutu.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
He believed her, for now. Cagehopper was well outside her jurisdiction, but the guy got around. She probably knew him from his dealings with the Arsia Mons smugglers. Didn’t matter, anyway; he had to bring her to Cagehopper one way or another.
—
Cagehopper’s place was dug deep into a gorge in the tablelands. Kim’s flying truck had to squeeze onto a landing pad that was way too close to the gorge walls for comfort. There were no trails, but there was a space between some rocks just big enough for a buggy to crawl out. The outer garage door blended into the surroundings almost perfectly thanks to a programmed coating of chameleon materials. He’d never have found the place by visual.
They were probably being watched already, not that you could spot any sensors. Cagehopper would have microdrones scattered around, and he might be hip to the Maker trick of using lizards as camera platforms.
An AR alert flashed up in Park’s peripheral vision. Telefono.
[Carter? What the fuck, citizen? You’re heavy a few bodies.]
[Heavy a few on account of we all got coughed on during the last run. Need you to take a look,] Park messaged.
[And you show up in a cop truck?]
Park messaged, [Look, you’re not gonna like this, but my shotgun on this ride’s a Ranger.]
[Perceptive, Carter. You’re fucking right I don’t like it. Not at all.]
[Look, Cage, I got Bobdog LaGrange here in a bad way, and we’re all several of us exposure risks, right down to the baboo—]
[Baboons! Carter, you rock lizard’s cloaca, I desire no fucking police baboons in my place of establishment.]
This reaction was cantankerous even for Cagehopper.
“Problem?” Kim asked.
“He doesn’t like baboons. I didn’t know.”
She sighed. “They can stay in the prowler, long as we don’t take too long.”
Park thought about that. All in all, Kim’d been too acquiescing by half. Helping bust a yakuza front, sure, all in a day’s work. She was the law, right? But agreeing to go in and meet a guy who’d have a list of felonies for unlicensed genemods a klick long on his rap sheet without her monkeys … It was too even-handed, even for a Ranger like Kim. He’d have to watch her close.
[Cagehopper, how about this: the baboons’ll stay in the prowler. They’ll make nary a peep, unless it turns out we’re infected. Then we need you to check them, too.]
A long chunk of dead air followed, but then the camouflaged garage door scrolled up into the rock face, letting a gust of warm humidity out to briefly fog the chill, dry Martian air.
Inside was a dimly lit loading bay. Cagehopper had a flying car and a buggy parked inside, leaving only a little space for the big Ranger flyer. The place was clean and orderly. Park saw a few rats, probably smart animals, scurry away as the garage door closed and he stepped out.
Park got Bobdog from the back seat, carrying the neo-bonobo again. Bobdog looked even weaker than before; he shivered in the cold air of the garage. Couldn’t Cagehopper afford an airlock? But space was at a premium. Looked like it’d been part of an underwater cave system, formed back in the time when the Noctis tablelands were at the heart of a great, winding alluvial system. As they would be again, if Park and the rest of the TTO’s army of terraforming workers had their way about it.
Kim got out and made cop eyes at the cave. “Not much for sensors in here,” she observed.
“I think he figures anyone gets in the front door, he’s already screwed,” Park said.
“Public AR,” Kim said, and started walking toward the back of the garage. Park flipped over to the lab’s public AR channel himself. A trail of red dots led in the direction Kim was headed, so he followed.
[Stay on the path,] Cagehopper messaged.
After going through a decontamination airlock, they followed the red dots through a maze of narrow corridors cut into the rock. Cramped as the garage’d been, the rest of the place sprawled. They crossed dozens of silent, unlit intersecting passages and an equal number of heavily reinforced doors. The stone, rather than echoing, drank up their footsteps. Lot bigger than he’d expected after the cramped garage.
[What’s he need all this space for?] Kim asked.
[Never wanted to know,] Park messaged back.
The dots ended at a heavy metal door that slid open to reveal a sparsely furnished octagonal chamber. In a circle of light cast by an overhead surgical fixture, several metal tables gleamed. A doctor bot stood motionless at the head of one, and several rolling tables of diagnostic equipment stood by the other two. Other than the tables, there was no place to sit.
Cagehopper came out of a sliding door on the far wall. “Sit on the tables,” he said, and they did. His neo-neanderthal morph was shorter than Park or Kim, thick-browed, with a barrel chest and hands that looked like they could bust rock. Cage went to work, injecting Park with what he figured must be diagnostic nanomachines to do blood work, then took throat swabs and dropped them into a sequencer.
[What’s he doing?] Kim asked Park.
[He’ll work with all the displays visible only to him,] he messaged. [You can’t risk someone with an advanced infection knowing you’re on to them.]
Cagehopper took a swab from Bobdog, frowning at the treatment Bob’s morph had taken, then dropped that swab in the sequencer, too.
“The hell happened to him, Jake?” Cagehopper asked.
Park said, “Yakuza using neoprimate parts for traditional Chinese medicine.”
“I don’t want to hear more.” Cagehopper went back to work.
[Why’s he even in the room with us?] she asked.
[Ain’t his real morph. He’s put up a different face every time I been here.]
“What kind of tests are you doing?” Kim asked.
Cage’d been scowling at an AR window. The outline of it was visible so that they could see he was reading, but to anyone but him, the contents were a misty blur. Without turning, he said, “Tossing your junk DNA, looking for jabberwockies. For starters.”
Cagehopper got a bunch of tests running, then fixed up Bobdog a little. Once Cage’d put nanobandages on the worst of it, Bobdog put his hand to his throat and looked at the neanderthal. Park wondered how long severed vocal cords took to heal.
“I don’t have a quick fix for that,” Cagehopper said. “I can put you in a healing vat for a few days, or I can drill in some new implants and resleeve you.”
Bobdog looked at Park and signed, “New body,” in Warlpiri. Cagehopper glanced over at Park.
“Says he wants a resleeve,” Park said.
“I’ll trade you this one,” Cagehopper said, patting his chest. “By the way … you’re all clean.”
“Good,” said Kim, “I gotta talk to my people at the Ranger station.”
Cagehopper scowled. “Hopefully not about me.”
“Paranoia and egocentrism don’t go so good together, paatno-san,” she said, and left the room.
Cagehopper snorted and went back to prepping Bobdog for new mesh inserts.
“How you holding up, Bob?” Park asked, “Know it’s a lot to ask, but I need you solid, or you’re out.”
“Can walk straight,” Bobdog signed.
“What’s he say?” Cage asked.
Park told him.
“Remind me never to leave my burrow for you, Carter,” Cagehopper said.
—
“How you like the new morph?” Kim asked. They were flying back to the stop on the M5 where Park’d left his truck. The baboons hadn’t crapped the seats; Kim looked to be in a good mood about that.
Bobdog was pretty animated for someone in a new morph, but then he’d had the benefit of Cagehopper having kept the engine warm for him instead of sleeving him into a morph that’d been packed in stasis gel. “All right. Not bad. Kind of, too human, you know? Clumsy toes.”
“Yeah, I been in and then out of a bouncer,” Park said.
They were making small talk, but they’d have to cut that off shortly and make with the planning. He’d gotten Eidolon, one of the crows, to analyze the data they’d grabbed from the yak front. The meat of it was an undecipherable record of shipping times and routing numbers. The rest was an operations manual for handling exsurgents and extracting bodily fluids from them without becoming contaminated oneself. The manual then went into how to store and package the fluids for shipment.
[You got anything yet, E?] Park messaged.
Eidolon’s response came slowly; they were an AGI inhabiting a massive art installation outside Locus, in the Jupiter Trojans. Park had plenty of contacts rimward. He liked using hackers outside Consortium jurisdiction when he could.
[Yes, Jake. It is most distressing. The yakuza gang that Bobdog LaGrange discovered have been shipping their product to orbit, but I cannot deduce where. They are using combinatory routing codes.]
Park did a mesh search on what that meant. Combinatory routing codes were a form of encryption used when sending physical goods—which meant they didn’t get used much. Parcels from multiple suppliers with combinatory codes on them would stack up at a routing center until all of them were there. Only by combining the codes on all parcels could you determine the final destination. Corps who didn’t want competitors finding out where large quantities of components were being sent used them in the dark ages before microfacturing. Now they were mostly used by criminals.
Park patched Eidolon through the prowler’s speakers. “Y’all should hear this,” he said. “Eidolon, how do we figure out where the cylinders were going?”
After a long pause, Eidolon said, “You must find all of the facilities from which they were originating. Or you could simply go to the routing center, and if there are enough parcels there, I might be able to deduce both their origin points and the final destination by decrypting the collected routing codes from them.”
“You know where the routing center is?” Kim asked.
After a long moment, Eidolon’s reply came, “Of course. I only hesitated to provide the location because I feared I might have made an error in decrypting the code, but I have re-checked my work and am quite sure. It is a disreputable drinking establishment in the Zhongguancun neighborhood of Olympus City, on Mars. Sending you the precise address now.”
“That don’t sound like an error at all,” Park said. An AGI not grokking the idea of a front business didn’t surprise him. “Nice work, Eidolon. We’ll talk again soon.”
“Good day, Jake.”
Kim said, “I can’t do anything for you in Olympus, Carter.”
“I can,” Bobdog said, “I’ll leave right away.”
—
Bobdog LaGrange knew some helluv angry monkeys, Kim thought. Correction: apes. Never call ‘em monkeys, especially not the ones Bobdog knew.
She was sitting on the end of a motel bed eating the leftover half of a bibimbap burrito. Park was laying back against the headboard behind her, smoking a joint. They were watching a tacnet replay on a shared AR window of Bobdog’s friends in Olympus tearing up a speakeasy run by a local gang.
In the end, the apes found more cylinders and got the data. Whole back of the place had been set up for shipping and receiving. Trucks loaded with goods come in off the maglev railroad stopped at the front business on their way to the space elevator, left light some goods and heavy a batch of nondescript cylinders full of zombie plague. Rinse, repeat. The gang were contractors—knew fuck all about what they were really involved in. Just knew they were getting paid.
Strictly speaking, as a deputized officer, she ought to be concerned, but she’d have been surprised if the Olympus police didn’t know about the place. That department had three priorities: the Space Elevator, ComEx property, and whomever was paying them bribes, in that order. Bobdog’s neo-primate gang friends had done the Olympus cops’ job better than the cops would’ve.
As for Jake Carter–or Jae Park, which was about the most boring real name a guy could have–she glanced back at him. “How long you think Eidolon’ll take on that?”
He smiled. “You got somewhere to be?”
“I got a department to run, in case you’d forgot.” Although the truth of it was, she regularly went a week without setting foot in the station. Running things via mesh was easy enough. Rank of captain in the Rangers basically meant being a beat cop but having to answer a crap ton of mesh calls, too. Oh, and she got a better truck.
As for Park … she wasn’t sure this was going to happen again, but he hadn’t been overly disappointing. Like all men, he needed to read the documentation; unlike the majority of them, he did what it said. She liked him. They were both Korean, they were donggap—born in the same year, they were both from agrodome families (from what she could get out of him about his history). And it’d been a while. She didn’t fool around with co-workers, and most other men she met, she arrested.
“Hey, pause it and go back a couple seconds,” she said. She’d noticed something on Bobdog’s tacnet movie.
“Here, have the controls,” Park said.
She shuttled back about a second and a half. There. “Hello again, cupcake,” she muttered.
She zoomed. Cowering in one corner of the frame, doing a good job of looking terrified, was a scantily clad pleasure pod. Almost a dead ringer for the one at El Destino Verde—probably the same model year. And again, high rent for the establishment they were looking at.
Park let go a stream of musky smoke. “Well, shit.”
“She ain’t just a party favor,” Kim said, “She’s a moving part.”
He got up and started putting clothes on.
“What’re you doing?” she asked. He stopped. “Shower,” she said. “And then shower again. Smoke smells me all over you, he’ll get jealous.”
He laughed. “Serious?”
She had not stuttered. “What’s your hurry, anyhow?”
Park slipped off the jeans he’d started to put on. “Eidolon’s got their nose to the trail, but might be the pod girl’s a short cut.”
“That feed’s from Olympus. Have Bobdog pick her up.”
“Last message from Bobdog said he was going into psych,” Park said, “So count him out.”
Reasonable. She wouldn’t want LaGrange having her back after what’d he’d been through. Anybody’s game’d have some stress fractures after getting cut on for folk medicine by a bunch of technical yakuza zombie farmers.
“Finding her’ll be a good trick,” Kim said, “She’s gone to ground for sure. Just getting to Olympus’d take us hours.”
“I’m thinking we go after the pod girl from El Destino Verde. And I got a friend who’s good,” he said, smiling at her.
“Me? Carter, I’ve tracked plenty of people, but this one’ll be cold. It’s been eighteen hours.”
“I got her mesh ID when I tipped her.”
She smiled. “All right, that’s different. But it could still take longer than it’ll take Eidolon to break the encryption on those cylinder routing codes.”
He got up for that shower and sent her a mesh ID. “I got a friend who’ll help, name of Sedition. If you don’t mind working with someone else, that is.”
“Why not, long as they don’t expect access to Ranger databases.” She pulled open an AR window and started a tracker search for the pod girl’s mesh ID on public spimes in the area.
“I let him know you’d call. Use a VPN; he ain’t someone Captain Kim wants to be seen socializing with. I’m gonna make myself smell nice for your monkey now.” He closed the bathroom door.
—
Park’s friend, Sedition, was damned good. Said he was a journalist by trade; she didn’t say anything about what she did. He threw out a lot of unorthodox ideas about what kind of searches to run, stuff far afield of the cop playbook.
Cupcake didn’t take long to track down, once they put their heads together. The pod girl’d been careful, had probably used a bunch of fake IDs, but she made the mistake of buying a ticket to orbit out of the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport. Sedition suggested not bothering trying to draw a line between her real mesh ID and any fakes she might be using. Instead, they had their muses stake out some likely (and, to her, not-so-likely spots) where her real ID might show up.
Turned out the pod girl didn’t trust her fake IDs far enough. She dropped the masquerade in spaceport security, probably gambling that her real ID would be more likely to get her through, and then she’d be on a rocket, beyond reach.
“Heo-jeob, Cupcake,” Kim muttered. Bad math thinking she could get away with that with a Ranger on her trail. One fugitive bulletin to the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport cops was all it took from there.
She thanked Sedition, leaned back, and re-lit the joint Park’d left on the nightstand. She got a mesh call reporting the pod girl was in the clink by the time Park got out of the shower.
He looked at her funny. “Go-go-ssing,” he said, pulling on his cap. This struck her as funny, that he’d put that on before anything else, and she laughed a little. He raised an eyebrow. “What’re you doing hitting that?”
She leaned forward and took his wrist. “Ain’t no hurry, Carter. I got our girl. How about helping me finish this?”
“Serious? Strong work, Captain.” He gave her a butterflies in the stomach smile and accepted the joint.
She watched him inhale; she liked how he looked with his eyes closed. So Kim’d made up her mind about having another helping of Park, but even as she yanked him back onto the bed, there was one thing she was going technical trying to figure out: why’d Cupcake need to escape in her body? Wasn’t like back-country Mars lacked for shady egocasting facilities.
She decided she’d hold that thought.
—
Park hadn’t liked being left in the prowler with Smoke and Gloria, but the baboons were meshed. Kim could call them off from afar. And anyhow, looked to be he was now part of the pack. Gloria kept trying to groom him, while Smoke lounged in the back seat idly jerking off. Neither of them went anywhere near Kim’s seat.
They were parked on the shoulder of the covered service road that looped past the spaceport terminals, waiting for Kim to bring back Cupcake. Every so often a Qianjiao spaceport cop rolled by and gave the ranger vehicle the stink eye, but no one bothered them. Eidolon hadn’t gotten back to him except to say the decryption was taking longer than expected.
[Be there in a sec,] Kim messaged, [Soon’s I ditch the local jjab-sae.]
Park shooed Gloria way for the fourth time. [Ain’t a nice thing to call another cop, Captain.]
[I hate spaceport cops. Rangers get imaged and frisked like everybody else when we fly.]
Kim emerged from the terminal with Cupcake. The name on her mesh ID was Janu Vaidyar. Flanking her were two spaceport cops; the ranking one was gesticulating and talking to Kim’s back.
Vaidyar’d ditched her bartending outfit—which hadn’t been much more than go-go boots, AR graphics, and hair extensions—for a short, asymmetrical haircut and severe suit. She looked more like an intellectual property lawyer for a Lunar design house than a bar trixie in a yakuza dive, and it wasn’t just the clothes. Park was disappointed with himself for not making her sooner.
Park cracked the window as they got closer to the prowler. Even in the tunnel, there was a cold desert breeze cutting through the smell of monkey.
The airport cop’s words got clearer as they approached the truck. They were speaking Mandarin. “… with Director Cheng’s sign-off, which is fine, even if it’s not standard procedure. But we don’t want to lose face over this prisoner.” He stopped for a second when he noticed Park. “And who’s this guy?”
“TTO,” she said, “They’ve got an interest in this case. He’s an observer.” Which was sort of true.
Park hopped out and opened the back door of the prowler.
The airport cops eyed him. “He doesn’t look like an official,” one said.
“We don’t wear suits in Operations,” Park said, watching Janu Vaidyar as Kim bundled her into the truck and cuffed her to a heavy ring set in the seat behind her. Smoke huffed at the pod but didn’t do anything else.
He didn’t like this. Vaidyar was an exposure risk, too. He made sure to get the names of the two cops. They might need to be checked up on later after physical contact with her.
“Well, don’t say NQSPD never did anything for you,” said the port cop.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Kim said.
Once they were in the air, she said, “Cagehopper’s.”
Wasn’t a question. “Yeah,” he said, looking back at the pod girl. Vaidyar stared out the window, silent. “This one’s gonna need special handling.”
—
[Go away, Carter!]
Cage was gonna need some talking down. They were staring at the outside of the camouflaged garage door in Cagehopper’s ravine, trying to remain patient. Park glanced back at Vaidyar—he’d angled the rear view mirror on his side so’s he could watch her—and caught her smiling before she noticed and fixed her face back into a stare.
[Cage, man, this is bad news. Serious. I got a potential widespread infection risk, and you’re gonna dick me around because you don’t like my cop friend and her monkeys?]
Kim shot him a “c’mon” look across the seat; he was sharing Cagehopper’s messages with her. [I’ll make threats if you won’t,] she said.
[Bad cop?] He thought about whether he was up for some potential bridge burning and decided yes. [Fine… go.]
[Cagehopper,] she messaged, [This is Kim.]
[What the hell, Jake? Did I say you could give her my mesh ID?]
Park didn’t respond, just kept his eye on Janu Vaidyar. She was pretty calm for someone getting taken to an off-the-grid cave in a ravine instead of into Ranger custody.
[Listen, Cage,] she continued, [I ain’t making this offer twice. Let us in, check this prisoner out for us, and I’ll pretend I never been to the notorious Cagehopper’s black kettle. Hell, I might even ignore it next time you move dubious wetware through my beat. Turn us away, and my memory might get sharper.]
Cagehopper messaged back, [Why do you even care?]
[My beat’s the TQZ. I take this shit seriously.]
There was a long pause. [A diamond could start out a lump of dinosaur shit, I guess.] The door started sliding open.
[Thanks,] she messaged, but she was mouthing something else.
Same drill as last time. They weaved through the garage, following a path marked by Cage on AR, leading Vaidyar. They were four turns into Cagehopper’s maze when Park’s dorsal spinocerebellar tract went technical on him.
It was as if his extremities were suddenly boats, unmoored from him, drifting away in a slow current. He could feel his legs but couldn’t feel where they were in relation to each other, so that when Vaidyar jerked away from Kim and threw a shoulder into him, Park went down ass over tit. Vaidyar was making a run for it, headed back toward the garage.
Kim’d fallen on him, babbling in a way that might have been an attempt at cursing. Then she rolled off him; he could see the back of her head and her limbs flailing.
[Don’t try to move,] he messaged, [Real easy to overextend a muscle.]
[What the fuck is this?] she came back.
[Cupcake’s an async.]
[Those’re just stories,] she messaged. But she stopped trying to move. [I’m setting the monkeys on her.]
[Do it.]
She unlocked the prowler and messaged the baboons. [Gloria. Smoke. Kill.] Then she sent a command to their flak jackets. The jackets obliged, pumping the baboons full of aggression drugs.
[What’s going on?] messaged Cagehopper.
[Lock all your doors, Cage. Prisoner’s an async. Just fed our proprioception centers kimchi and did a runner.]
[Noob mistake. How the fuck did you make proxy again?] Cage left out the dry cackle, which was fine by Park.
[Occupational hazard, Cage. Somebody’s gotta get dirt under their nails.] He tried moving. It was no better.
[How long will this last?] Kim messaged.
[Minute or two, tops.]
An animal scream echoed from a distant corridor, followed quickly by a human one.
[That was Gloria.] She tried to move again, made it to her knees, but then put her arm in the wrong place and face planted.
Vaidyar gave a short scream that cut off quickly, but the baboons made no further sound.
[You’re gonna hurt yourself; then you can’t help anybody,] he messaged.
“Gloria’s flatlined. And I can take plenty of hurt, Jake.” She slurred bad, but managed to get the words out. She tried standing again, keeping all of her limbs where she could see them, and managed to make it to her feet.
Meantime, Park could feel his own limbs drifting back together. Kim was staggering toward the noise, so he decided to try crawling. The first time he took his eyes off his hands he ended up fumbling and banging his chin on the floor, but he could feel the effects fading.
[She’s down,] Cagehopper messaged, [I got a drone to the scene. Ugliness.]
Park regained his feet, and Kim was walking almost normal now. They followed the breadcrumb trail back. Cage shared a map of the hallways with them and highlighted Smoke’s location. As they got closer, they heard a wet smacking sound.
They rounded a corner. Vaidyar’s corpse lay in a mess of gore. Smoke stopped beating her with his baton as they came closer. He trotted up to Kim, sweeping his hands against the floor nervously, and hugged her leg, grunting.
Kim ruffled his fur, said, “Good guy,” and gave him a cigarette. Smoke took it, lit it, and then hopped over to Gloria’s body. Her eyes bulged, and one hand was limp over her muzzle. “Damn it,” Kim said.
Gloria’s face was darkened with spreading masses of subcutaneous blood flow. “Internal hemorrhaging,” Park said, “Some of ‘em can do that.” He looked back to Vaidyar’s body. Something was wrong. Pleasure pods had cyberbrains, which meant pod morphs were rubbish at using async powers. So either Vaidyar was incredibly potent with psi, or this pleasure pod was no pod at all.
“Jake, let’s get this done. I just lost one of my monkeys. Ain’t good for me.” She was still studying Gloria, stroking the baboon’s head.
Park wanted to take her hand or hug her, but he was feeling that weird day-after-out-in-public distance that sometimes follows casual sex. So instead, he messaged Cage. [Cagehopper, area’s secured. Gonna need a gurney and some cleaner swarms here.]
A few minutes later Bobdog—scratch that, Cagehopper—rolled up, perched on a gurney pushed by a featureless bipedal servitor bot. The morph that had been Bobdog’s had glossier fur and healthier skin than the last time they’d seen it.
“You never fail to keep me entertained, Carter,” the neo-bonobo said.
Kim’s eyebrows creased up nasty, but she held her tongue. Together, she and Park swung Vaidyar’s limp form onto the gurney, trying to avoid the blood. Then she picked up Gloria, stroked her head, and put the small body on the gurney, too. Another foot trail appeared when they were done.
“Follow that trail to the guest rooms. Get cleaned up, and leave the male baboon there when you’re done,” Cagehopper said, “I’ll examine our guest … and take care of your unfortunate friend. Shouldn’t take long.” He loped off into the dim passageways; the servitor turned the gurney around and followed him.
[You trust him?] Kim asked Park.
[Well enough.] He started along the trail. [The unkindly disposition’s an act. He’s down with the cause.]
“Yeah, speaking of that …” she said. She looked back. “C’mon, Smoke.”
“What’re you thinking?” he asked. They took another turn. Except for the occasional security door, the corridors were almost featureless. He’d had GiGi, his muse, mapping it for him as they went.
“That I like how your friends are dealing with this shit instead of just trying to rope it off and hope it stays contained,” she said, “I want to know more.”
“Org’s called Firewall,” he said, “Ain’t government, though it’s got allies in a few of them.”
The AR tracks ran to a door at the end of a passage. They went inside and found themselves in a spartan living area. She said, “I requested the TQZ periphery as my beat. We oughta be clearing that land of the machines, but instead we’re ordered to patrol and watch. It’s stupid.” She started looking for a way to clean up Smoke.
“So you down for helping out some more? Because my next stop’s wherever they were shipping that exsurgent gunk.” He turned a chair around and sat on it.
She’d stood Smoke on a counter next to a sink and was toweling blood off of him. “Yeah. I have some questions. But if you’re not just a bunch of nutjobs, I want in.”
—
They stood in Cagehopper’s lab, trying not to look too often at Janu Vaidyar’s morph. Cranium’d been peeled, and Cage hadn’t bothered covering it up after he went through it for goodies. Some of the augments in her head needed more juice than could be drawn off a corpse. Her cortical stack glittered amid large droplets of blood in a shiny polymer tray.
Autopsy’d been done by a doctor bot with Cagehopper supervising. Still presenting himself in the neo-bonobo, he perched at the foot of the operating table. He shared a medical data AR channel with them; graphics poured over her body and some severed pieces of it as he began.
“She wasn’t a pod, just cosmetically modded to look like one,” he said. The neo-bonobo’s voice was rich and musical.
“Kinda figured that,” Park said, “What else you got?”
“Blood work.” Cagehopper gestured to a stream of data on blood borne pathogens. “Confirms Watts-MacLeod infection, but then you’d already worked that out.”
“Watts-MacLeod?” Kim asked.
Park shot her the entry-level EyeWiki write-up on asyncs. “What else?”
“Implanted QE comm,” Cagehopper said; the AR graphics flashed on an exposed area of her thoracic cavity sporting a piece of hardware that looked uncomfortably large to be carrying in one’s gut, “That’s the qubit reservoir.”
“Now that’s helluv weird,” he said, “Who gets one of those?”
“Human commlink,” Kim said, “Seen it. Once. Guy had it was a Consortium agent infiltrating a real paranoid Guangxi outfit.”
“Why would Cupcake’ve needed it?” Park asked.
Kim looked at him like he was slow. “Gangs probably thought she was just a gift, something to seal the deal, not an agent set to watch them with an implanted FTL comm unit.”
“That’s not so good,” Cage said.
“Nah, it ain’t,” Park said, “Means they for sure know we’re coming.”
—
Park had an incoming message. Long, long distance. It was Eidolon. [Jake Carter, I’ve finished decrypting the routing information from the cylinders Bobdog LaGrange found.] The AGI followed that with a stream of locational data.
[That’s good news, Eidolon. Thanks much.] He shared the data with Kim, and they started looking it over.
“Never heard of this hypercorp before,” she said.
“Panacea. They’re a fly-by-night, most like.” He messaged his muse, [GiGi, dossier à propos de Panacea Corporation, s’il te plaît.]
They were back in the guest quarters at Cagehopper’s complex. Place smelled a little like wet stone dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Kim’d collected a gene sequence of Gloria from Cage, then she let the genehacker recycle the remains. Maybe she could get her cloned, one day. Smoke paced the long, narrow room nervously while she and Park sat on a bunk poking at AR windows of Eidolon’s findings.
The picture got clearer. Panacea was shipping the exsurgent goop to orbit after collection. All of it was going to a single orbital factory in the cloud of satellites and smaller habitats trailing Progress, the Planetary Consortium’s largest orbital. It still wasn’t clear what Panacea did with the stuff.
[Recherche terminée,] GiGi messaged. He pulled up the file and shared it with Kim. [Aw, hell. They’re a nanopharm manufacturer. That orbital’s their main plant.]
“So you figure they’re putting the virus in drugs. What I don’t get, who the fuck does this kind of thing?” she asked. “There’s no money here.”
He stood up and stretched. “Someone trying to finish the TITAN’s work for them.”
Smoke padded up. She dispensed a cigarette automatically. “Like who?”
“I got a hunch, but I don’t wanna get anyone else thinking on the wrong track. I need to check out the Panacea facility. You riding along?”
Kim ruffled Smoke’s fur and shook a leg. “Riding along? Eff that, Carter. I’m driving.” She put in a call to her station. [Deng, this is Kim. I’m coming by in four hours. Gas up the Skink.] She packed up her kit. “You ever ridden in a Ranger cutter before?”
He chuckled. “Only in handcuffs.”
“I’m going to leave that one alone. See you in the garage.” She pecked him on the cheek and made for her prowler.
Park watched her go.
[Are you trying to bring her in or date her?] Cagehopper messaged him.
The room was empty now, and Park knew Cage had everything in here miked, so he said out loud, “Won’t lie. I ain’t excited about putting her through the loyalty tests.”
Cagehopper messaged, [Only a dumb redneck like you would recruit a high-value asset like her and then fuck it up with feelings.] The baboon might not have smelled what he and Kim were up to earlier, but Cage sure had.
“We were just passing time.”
[You know Carter, I’ve got implants that could make you not a completely shitty liar.]
“I’ll keep that in mind. For when we get back.”
“We?” Cagehopper’s voice shrilled over the room’s speakers. “I don’t think I heard that right.”
But Park had not stuttered.
—
“So what’re you proposing?” Park asked.
It was a ground-to-orbit call, so a long second went by before Das Frettchen replied, “Liquidation.” There was some heavy sun spot activity happening that week, and his voice came through scratchy despite the comm software’s attempts to correct for it. “These people are exsurgents, Carter. We’re sparing them the pain of metamorphosis if we kill them now.”
“You’ve gone fucking technical.”
“Your first real containment action, and you don’t have the stomach for it. We’re lucky such choices weren’t up to you during the Fall.”
“This ain’t the same.”
“You think your heroes”—Das Frettchen spat the word—”in the outer system flinched from their duty? Magnus Ming has sent more people than this to die in his day.”
“We can fix these people. Your plan: it’s insane.”
“If you think I lack the resources to make 1,000 people disappear from Valles-New Shanghai, Carter, you’re mistaken.”
—
Park floated in the airlock of a Fa Jing U-Facture (Location #0138, District Manager Zhu Lai Leong, according to the AR text and smiling portrait next to the inner lock door). Park was waiting for the security AI inside to finish scrutinizing his false Fa Jing corporate ID and the registration (also fake) on the ship docked behind him. He’d thrown on smart clothing that reshaped itself into a Fa Jing uniform, hung some tools from it, and brought along an automech bot, which clung to the wall near him.
Through the airlock windows, he could see the rest of Captain Sage Kim’s Martian Ranger customs cutter, the Skink. The ship had erased its Tharsis League and Ranger markings and extruded a random assortment of dummy manipulator arms, conduits, and equipment lockers from its hull. Now it was a dead ringer for the boxy, antiquated old tender vessels that made up the bottom rung of Fa Jing’s immense fleet.
Beyond the ship, the U-Facture station stretched out behind and ahead of him, an orderly cylinder of pie slice-shaped rented manufacturing modules connected by trusswork and an enclosed central floatway that ran the length of the station. The cylindrical form factor was for convenience, not gravity; clients rented on U-Facture when they needed microgravity manufacturing space. The Skink clung to the end of a docking arm roughly midway along the length of the cylinder.
The AI inside was taking its time—it’d been almost five seconds—but Park kept it cool. The IDs had been forged by Eidolon, a much smarter AGI, a fork of whom was waiting in the ship to save Park’s bacon if needed. And Park was good at looking like a bored, impatient service engineer—because when he wasn’t on Firewall business, that’s what he was.
“What’s takin’ so fucking long?” he asked the empty airlock.
“Verifying,” the security AI said, “Fa Jing Internal Security thanks you for your patience.”
He hadn’t wanted a response. While he waited some more for the recalcitrant airlock, he messaged the ship. [Eidolon. How’s it shaking out?]
[I’ve subverted surveillance on the station’s hull, Jake Carter. Captain Kim and Cagehopper have begun their EVA.]
—
Sage Kim gulped. Vertigo. The red expanse of Mars filled the upper half of her field of vision. Damned if the planet weren’t never anything but lovely, but at this angle … Kim threw up a little bit in the back of her mouth and swallowed it, again.
Cagehopper, clinging to her back, must’ve heard it over the comms. “Are you vomiting?” he asked, “I thought you were trained in this.”
She couldn’t look back at the hypergibbon; helmet didn’t have enough peripheral vision. All she could see were his long, thin arms wrapped around her shoulders. “I did one month of micrograv combat training during academy,” she said. She knew how to use the grip pads on her vacsuit without falling off into space and dying, and that was about it.
“I should never have left my burrow,” Cagehopper said.
From the outside, the U-Facture station looked like a stack of discs on a dowel. There were sixteen modules, each five meters thick and one hundred meters wide, with a meter of floatway between each disc. They all connected to the central corridor by a single airlock. Only one of the discs, near the center, spun for gravity. That one would contain the manager’s quarters and several partitions of 1g space for renters that needed them.
Augmented reality graphics showed her a path across the station’s hull. A multitude of wide, plant-packed windows looked out from the hull; a path was highlighted in green so that she could avoid giving anyone inside visual on her. It would have been a simple walk across the station’s skin, but the meter-wide gaps between modules were just wide enough to be unnerving. Rather than leaping the gaps, she played it safe, crawling slightly between each module at each gap so that she always had at least two grip pads against the hull.
Their objective was a service airlock leading into the section of the U-Facture station rented by Panacea Corporation, a company specializing in zero-g boutique manufacturing of exotic pharmaceuticals. Some of Panacea’s business was legit. And some of it, Park and Kim suspected, involved lacing drugs with the exsurgent virus and delivering them to unsuspecting patients.
—
“You wanna talk containment, Frettchen? We got this contained.”
“Really, Carter? And you’ve taken steps to do so. In Valles-New Shanghai. My city. How thoughtful of you.”
“Panacea runs the groundside supply chain. Meanin’ they route the drugs direct to the patients. They’re delivering them to asyncs.”
“Oh, this gets better and better.”
“Nah, look: the refined exsurgent goop Panacea laced the drugs with is inert until activated. Cagehopper isolated the trigger protein. Feed these people nanopharm that eradicates all instances of that protein in their systems, and the infection’ll never get triggered.”
“You’re asking me to put a great deal of faith in the work of a black kettle genetics monkey with an extensive rap sheet, Carter. I don’t think that’s going to fly.”
—
Manager Leong didn’t like the look of him, and the feeling, Park decided, was mutual. The Fall’d only made the class divide between Chinese managers and Korean rusters worse, and Leong was all about letting Park know whose status was higher. Which was fine—meant Leong was too busy demanding face to really scrutinize him. Park let Leong float higher than him and pretended he could only speak Korean, letting Leong’s muse translate to Mandarin.
Eventually Leong let him through with a final admonition not to make anything on the station worse. Park suppressed the urge to smirk. No telling what kind of sensors the manager had allocated to keep tabs on him.
Park kicked off from Leong’s office and floated down the station’s huge central corridor. He didn’t like microgravity much, but inside, maneuvering down a big, straight corridor, it wasn’t so bad. Eidolon now owned the station’s primary surveillance systems. The plan was for Eidolon to feed the system footage of Park and the automech opening up a life support conduit and going to work inside it. In reality, Park would keep going and enter Panacea’s module through the front door. If Leong stayed in his office—which he probably would—they’d be five by five.
[Sage, grandmaster E, how we lookin’?] Park messaged.
Eidolon messaged, [Jake Carter, Captain Kim. Panacea’s system resists my best efforts. I cannot unlock the doors to their module for you.]
Kim messaged, [I’m almost at the hatch. What’s the problem?]
[Unorthodox system design. I am uncertain which systems to subvert. Choosing the wrong ones might put them on alert.]
[Well the emperor of this little piece of heaven thinks I’m here for four hours to fix some CO2 scrubbers. We ain’t budgeted for overtime on this run.]
[I recommend manual subversion,] Eidolon said.
[Well at least I didn’t carry this thing for nothing,] Kim said.
—
“This thing” was a hull wart. From her back, Cagehopper handed her the pieces of it, one by one. Disassembled, the wart comprised eight curved lengths of smooth metal. Stuck to the hull, end to end, each formed forty-five degrees of a circle three-and-a-half meters across centered over what Eidolon had identified as a relatively thin section of hull. Kim activated it, and the wart began extruding a dome of clear polymer that soon enclosed them in a hemisphere 1.75-meters high at its center.
Cagehopper got off her back and clung to the hull while Kim took out a covert ops tool and began cutting. First she drilled a pilot hole. A plume of air, visible as the water vapor in it crystallized, began filling the dome with atmosphere. Then she went to work cutting a circle in the hull.
—
Inside, Park pried loose an access panel and got to work jimmying the bulkhead door leading into the Panacea Corp module.
Almost as soon as he got to work, Eidolon messaged him. [Someone in the module is attempting to alert station security. I’ve intercepted the message and am spoofing a response from the station.]
[Damn,] he messaged, [That ain’t gonna work for too long.]
[No. I recommend you hurry.]
—
“Here’s how it is, Frettchen: I got the station, I got the data, and I ain’t signing off on killing all these people.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Das Frettchen said, “You’re hurting our working relationship here, Carter. We’ve always worked well together in the past.”
“No, we haven’t. And you know if we take this to the other proxies, you’re gonna be in the minority.”
“Fine, Carter. But don’t ever ask me for any favors.”
—
With the automech acting as an extra pair of hands, bypassing the bulkhead door was kid’s stuff. Kim was still hacking at the outer lock. Probably a minute or so until she got through. Park couldn’t wait. Eidolon had had to start jamming mesh calls from inside the Panacea module. That kind of activity inside the confines of the station would get noticed quick.
He jerked one more time on his utilitool, the end of which was locked onto a regulator valve in the door’s pneumatics. There was an almost imperceptible hiss of pistons, and the door irised open. He pulled himself through, and the automech followed him with a few puffs from its gas thrusters.
Soon as he was clear of the hallway, he sent a mesh command to the automech. A panel with two pistols racked beneath it extended from the side of the bot. Park stuck the smaller pistol to his belt and linked in to the bigger one. The minute whine of induction coils going hot, that was music. On the tacnet video in the corner of his vision he could see Kim was almost through the back door.
[I’m in,] he messaged.
[Here is a map of the typical module layout,] Eidolon messaged. [Interior partitioning will vary, but the bulkheads will definitely be as shown here.]
A mini-map popped up in Park’s field of vision. Four bulkhead walls radiated from the station’s central floatway corridor, dividing the disc into quadrants. The quadrants ran thirty meters from central corridor to outer edge. Ringing all four quadrants was an outer corridor five meters wide. The outer corridors of almost all of the modules, including this one, were visible from outside due to wide windows. They were packed with plants, which probably provided a lot of the station’s oxygen. What was in each quadrant, though, was anybody’s guess.
Inside, the module was hot and humid as a kleptocrat’s steam bath during an orgy. Condensation clung to the walls, which were all glossy white panels with harsh violet-tinged lighting strips at regular intervals. Mist hanging in the air made visibility crap, and the heat messed with IR, so he did a quick t-ray scan of his surroundings. This wasn’t a place where he wanted to be surprised.
[Ain’t what I expected,] Kim messaged, [Who microfactures drugs in a sauna?] Park could see from her video feed that the dome of the hull wart over her was icing up as the water vapor hissing out of the module settled on it.
Around him in the mist he was able to resolve the shapes of several cornucopia machines, reserves of nanofab feeder stock, three-dimensional cargo palettes, and a few small cargo-handling bots. A boutique pharma manufacturer didn’t need much more than that for shipping and receiving. This section of the module was otherwise a big, empty pie slice with the U-Facture station’s central corridor at the tip. The room took up a quarter of the disc of the module, less the wide corridor ringing the module’s outer edge.
[I should’ve sent Smoke in with you,] Kim messaged, [You should have back up.]
They’d left Smoke aboard the Skink. Park messaged back, [Fa Jing techs don’t show up with police baboons. Keep on cuttin’. I got this for now.]
[You’ll be looking for an actual manufactory,] Cagehopper messaged. [The equipment in that room looks optimized for making boxes. Eidolon, can’t you get a schematic?]
Eidolon messaged, [Jamming them is occupying much of my attention, Cagehopper. Their security AI is of very high quality, and subverting systems while it’s on alert is difficult at best. The best I can do right now is keep it from alerting the rest of the station.]
Park searched for power conduits, feeder stock lines, or anything else that would hint at where the microfacturing equipment might be in relation to his current position. He didn’t find anything, so he kicked off from the airlock toward a bulkhead door that opened on the next quadrant of the module. The automech bot followed him.
[Mech,] he messaged it, [Start building a detailed schematic of this module. Highlight all exposed power, data, and feed lines. Share with the users on my general comm channel. Visual inspection; local systems aren’t going to talk to you. Start with this room.] If they ended up having to destroy the module, he’d need to know how.
[KK, boss,] the bot said. It hovered off into the mist, staying close to the wall.
[Don’t touch anything, and don’t interface with anything without asking me,] he messaged after it.
[KK, boss.]
He did a bypass on the controls for the bulkhead door. When he was almost done, Kim messaged that she’d gotten through the hull and was casing the outer ring corridor.
Park finished the bypass. The bulkhead door slid open, and a strong smell of jasmine wafted out. Park’d expected an office or something, but instead he was looking into a Hindu temple centered around the blunt, phallic shape of a huge stone Shiva linga.
[Well, fuck,] he messaged everyone, [Think I know who we’re dealing with now.]
—
“You realize that you’ve severely damaged our working relationship, Carter?” Das Frettchen asked.
“What do you want me to do?” Park asked.
“Cooperate. You’ll find the peace of mind that comes with knowing a situation has been thoroughly dealt with does you more good in the long run than thinking you’ve saved some lives but wondering if one day the people you’ve saved will turn on the rest of us.”
“Your shit ain’t worth the methane in it.”
Park cut the call.
—
Kim and Cagehopper drew guns and pulled themselves through the hole she’d cut in the hull. They cased the module’s verdant outer ring corridor. Wide windows let thin sunlight in from outside. The walls of the corridor were slick, reflective white regularly interrupted by glaring UV light strips. The light bounced off the hanging water vapor, having more the effect of high beams in a fog bank than improving visibility. That made her edgy, so she deactivated the helmet on her suit. The helmet melted away, receding into the ring of her collar.
[That’s not wise,] Cagehopper messaged. He’d kept his helmet up. [You don’t know what’s in all this mist.] He took an instrument for sampling the air from a pocket in his suit and stuck it to his shoulder. A shared stream of atmospheric data announced itself on their tacnet.
For now, she didn’t look at it. [Tell me if I need to cover up,] she said, [For now, I want peripheral vision.]
The dense foliage in the outer ring and the stifling heat made seeing anything on visual or IR tough, so she amped up her hearing. Nothing but the quiet hum of recyclers and ventilation, so far.
Based on Eidolon’s schematic, a door to the disc-shaped Panacea module’s large, inner quadrants passed through the bulkhead that formed the inner wall of the ring corridor they were exploring about twenty meters ahead of them. Even with the curve of the corridor, she should’ve been able to see the door, but the riotous plant growth obscured the opening.
They pulled themselves toward the door. Kim used the grab loops mounted between windows on the outer wall, moving somewhat clumsily. She envied Cagehopper, who brachiated between grab points with ease on long, gibbon arms.
They reached the bulkhead door and studied it. [You any good with this stuff?] she messaged Cage.
[I do organisms, not machines.]
She didn’t want to spend ten minutes cutting through another bulkhead with her covert ops tool, not with Park already inside. She could see the temple he’d discovered through the tacnet feed, and she didn’t like the look of it. Religion weren’t never good news.
[Eidolon,] she messaged, [I need a door hacked.]
[I am—]
[Fuck it, man, they know we’re here,] Park messaged.
A brief pause, then Eidolon messaged, [True. Proceeding. Captain Kim, if you are able to pry away the panel to the left of the door and run a cable from your suit interface to the datajack underneath, it would aid me greatly.]
Kim morphed her utilitool into a short pry bar and pushed off the outer ring wall toward the door. Eidolon already knew where the panel was based on Park’s earlier intrusion; he overlaid a rectangle to the right of the door with an AR graphic. Arrows pointed to the edge where she need to pry.
When she was less than a meter from the door, something rustled in the foliage. She’d couldn’t stop herself; she wasn’t close enough to any of the walls. A dark green tendril covered in glossy, three-inch-long thorns whipped out from a plant near the door and wrapped itself around her leg. Seeing more tentacles emerging from the leaves, she ordered her suit to extrude its helmet again. The clear bubble closed over her face just in time for another tendril’s thorns to glance off the helmet.
“Warned you,” Cage said. He’d switched to voice comm. Not much point in sticking with messaging over the VPN any longer; they’d clearly been noticed.
Kim growled and squeezed off several shots toward where she thought the center of the plant might be. No effect, and another tendril had gotten a hold on her left arm. She struggled with it, trying to reach the stunner on her belt. “Little help?” she said to Cage.
The hypergibbon was prepping … something. As she struggled with the plant, she saw him swapping his shredder for a small pistol, ejecting the clip, and fumbling to insert a different clip. “Keep it occupied,” he said.
Occupied. Yeah. The plant had four tendrils on her now. She’d imagined being pulled toward some kind of toothy maw, but instead they were constricting, trying to push their thorns through her vacsuit. It was holding for the moment, but she could feel the hard points of the thorns through the skin of the suit. Kim finally managed to get to her stunner. She contorted in the tentacles’ grasp, trying to bend her body so that she had a clear shot between the stunner and the plant’s center.
The tendrils tightened as she struggled. Finally, she jerked one leg to spin herself into the right position. Through the gun’s sight she saw the plant’s center. She fired, the air between her and the plant distorting and crackling with electricity, but at the same time she felt the suit fabric finally give. A thorn pierced her leg; the area around it immediately went numb. The tentacles stopped jerking her around, but they didn’t loosen their grip at all.
[Fuck,] she messaged, [Cagehopper, I’m stung.]
Cage drew a careful bead on the center of the plant and fired a single shot. The bullet went in with a wet sound, and the knot of muscle-like cellulose immediately began to convulse, then shrivel. The tentacles started to loosen their grip.
“What was that?” she asked.
Cagehopper was at her side, running a medical scanner over her. “Splash ammo. Sorry I didn’t have it ready, didn’t think I’d need herbicide. Does your body have toxin filter, medichines, or any other anti-toxic countermeasures?”
“No.”
[Talk to me, guys,] Park messaged.
[Kim’s been stung by a Referium dulcamara. It’s a carnivorous plant from Echo IV. Nasty sumbitch, but I’ve got an anti-toxin swarm I can key to go after it.] He looked up at Kim. “Sorry, but I’m not sure about that leg.”
“Meaning?”
“Tissue necrosis sets in fast with this toxin.” He injected her with something, using the hole in the suit left by the thorn.
“Who the hell has carnivorous plants from a xenoplanet for security?” she asked.
—
Park had finished casing the temple. Nothing there but flower bouquets, suggestive statues, and a giant stone penis. Kim was cussing up a storm as Cagehopper treated her leg. She’ll make it through, he thought, She’s ruster tough, and Cage knows his trade. He was regretting splitting up, though. The module wasn’t that big; breaching it at two points and meeting up in the middle hadn’t looked that hard.
He pushed off for the door to the outer ring corridor. Best plan at this point was to meet up with Kim and Cagehopper, then tackle whatever was left in here as a unit.
[Eidolon, how’s it going?] he messaged the AGI.
[I am helping Cagehopper and Captain Kim get through the bulkhead door here.] Eidolon highlighted their position on the minimap. [The station’s occupants have ceased attempting outside comm calls.]
Park was halfway through bypassing the bulkhead door to the outer ring when the automech bot winked off the network. No damage report, just gone.
[Y’all see that?] he messaged, [Eidolon, what’s happening?]
[The signal from den autobomb est gurbufrixfra**{{>--]
Park smelled a hand touching the back of his neck. His mesh inserts were outside his body somewhere. He stretched but couldn’t touch them. His body grew, his skin whitened, and the temple grew as well, taking on cavernous dimensions. He felt the cool stone of the floor against his back and felt heaviness in his limbs—gravity. Had the module begun to spin? But no, then down would be the outer wall of the temple, but he was laying on the same plane as the enormous Shivalinga at the temple’s center. His clothes and gear were gone, except for some kind of animal skin wrapped around his waist.
What in hell was this? Park tried to clear his head, but it wasn’t going away. He thought around for controls, but it wasn’t a simulspace.
He felt strong, smooth toes, and then the ball of a foot on his chest. The toes stroked from his solar plexus down to his groin, and he could taste their skin on his tongue as they moved over him. He found he could move his eyes. Janu Vaidyar, their quarry, stood over him. She stepped onto him, planting one foot on his belly just above his groin, the other on his chest. Throbbing percussion music and jasmine scent pulsed through his ears, nose, and eyes. Vaidyar’s skin had turned blue, and she was naked but for a few pieces of jewelry, most prominent among them a belt and necklace made of small skulls.
Aw, fuck. Was he about to get sexually assaulted by someone’s religious beliefs? Park wasn’t able to hold a rational thought for long, though. Vaidyar’d hooked her async talents deep into some primal shit, deep enough his lizard brain didn’t want to hear about how relenting would be a bad plan. Vaidyar plunged onto his erection and began riding him. Their bodies expanded beyond the bounds of the room, out into space, beyond the bonds of the solar system, until the universe spun above him. It drifted apart, growing diffuse, and then contracted into a point of infinite density, suspended in its terrible potential even as Park now hung on the cusp of orgasm.
“Help me finish the cycle,” she said, stroking his belly playfully, “The universe needs its rebirth. Lord Shiva’s work must finish.” She squeezed him inside of her. She was holding a tiny cup of soma, offering it to him.
Park groaned, which’d have to pass for a “fuck you.” He wondered why mindfucking him was preferable to just injecting him with exsurgent goop, if that was her plan.
“Because.” She twisted her hips, making him gasp involuntarily. “I desire your assent, your aid. You’ve killed my cats’ paws and put my forks on the run. I want to know who’s hunting us.”
—
[Eidolon, open that damned door, I don’t care what else you gotta let slip.]
Kim floated outside the bulkhead door. Her leg burned where it wasn’t numb; she’d ordered the vacsuit to go rigid around the leg to keep it immobile. Park’s minimap blip was only a few meters from the other side of the door. They’d hustled around the outer ring to his location when he dropped off the tacnet and stopped answering mesh calls. Cagehopper hung on some foliage next to her, splash gun still trained on the wilted remains of another carnivorous plant.
The door hissed open. In the gloom beyond, Janu Vaidyar floated before Kim. She was wearing a plain black second skin, and the weird ripple of an invisibility cloak distorted the air to one side of her. Her legs were wrapped around Park’s waist. She had one hand on his temple and the other wrist, oozing blood from a shallow cut, poised near his mouth.
She turned with one eyebrow raised and smirked at Kim. Kim drew a careful bead and shot her in the head.
As Vaidyar drifted away, Park convulsed. Was he—was that an erection in his trousers? She looked at Vaidyar’s morph, its head wreathed in drifting blood droplets. Seriously, im-ma? Next time don’t bring psychic sex powers to a gunfight. Cagehopper swung into the room to check on Park. She pushed off from the door frame and went to help.
—
They swept the rest of the module and found no one else. The remaining space was taken up by posh living quarters, a medical facility growing backup futura morphs cut to look like pleasure pods, and a pharmaceutical factory. Cagehopper set to work figuring out what they’d been making while Eidolon cracked their records.
Park and Kim were in the medical bay; the module’s doctor bot was working on her leg.
She said, “Before we came here, you said you had a hunch who Cupcake was working with. Now that you, uh, got to know her, any idea?”
Park grimaced, feeling a little embarrassed. “Yeah. Cult of the Destroyer. They’re a corrupt Hindu sect, believe the TITANs got sent by Shiva to destroy us so the next cycle of creation could start.”
“Never heard of ‘em.”
“That’s because Firewall destroyed them, or any rate was supposed to have. On Luna, four or five years back. Looks like Cupcake and a few others copied themselves and kept the dream alive.” Park winced as he watched the doctor bot excise a strip of necrotized flesh from Kim’s leg and spray more medical nanobots on it.
“I’ve had worse,” she said. “So what now?”
“Let Cagehopper take that factory apart, and find out what they’re up to. Meantime, heal up.”
Cage didn’t take long. The drug Vaidyar’d been producing was designed to enhance the abilities of asyncs—and all of the people being prescribed the drug were asyncs. According to Vaidyar’s notes, it would make all of the asyncs nodes in a network that she could use to employ psychic sleights on a massively amplified scale, potentially killing or taking control of hundreds of thousands of people. Not quite an apocalypse—but a nice start.
Fortunately, the mutation the drug triggered in the Watts-MacLeod virus was easily reversible. Cagehopper could rearrange a few molecules in the next shipment of the drug, and the patients could all go back to being garden-variety neurotic, socially stigmatized psychic freaks instead of walking brain bombs.
The only problem now was jurisdiction. All of the patients were in Valles-New Shanghai, which wasn’t Park’s beat. And his counterpart there, Das Frettchen, was a paranoid, scorched-earth-lovin’ sumbitch.
Park braced himself, and gave Das Frettchen a call.
—
Park cut the mesh call a few minutes later. It hadn’t gone well. The team, including a hologram of Eidolon, had assembled in the medical bay. The air was clearer and cooler; they’d tweaked some parameters on the station’s life support.
“Das Frettchen ain’t playing ball,” he said.
“Who is this asshole, anyway?” Kim asked.
“He does my job, but he’s in charge of Valles-New Shanghai.”
“I still don’t know what your job is,” Kim said.
Cagehopper chuckled. “Membership equals privileges.”
She snarled a little, the asked Park, “So?”
“We move Cagehopper’s plan to inoculate the victims forward anyhow. Cage, how long you need?”
“About six hours to get a shipment sent out. Then we can bug out and scorch this place.”
“I want y’all alert. Frettchen gets extreme sometimes when he don’t get his way.”
“What was that you said to me a few days back about the Rangers having termites in the frame?” Kim asked.
Park shook his head. “No comment, ma’am.”
—
Das Frettchen inhaled the delicate aroma from the cup of white tea and waited for his old friend across the table to weigh the information he’d just shared. The tea room was private—very private—and they’d been speaking freely.
“Searle,” said Cheng at length—he and Cheng had known each other too long for pseudonyms—”You do realize that a liquidation on this scale will be challenging, even with my resources.”
“Pangs of conscience?” Searle asked.
Cheng’s face remained neutral. “No, of commerce. You’ll have to share your findings with me.”
Searle considered this. The Cult of the Destroyer had eluded Carter; Cheng’s friends would capture one of them and learn their secrets sooner or later, whatever Firewall did. “Of course, old friend. Gentlemen shouldn’t keep secrets from one another.”
Cheng smiled; he’d always enjoyed irony. “Done, then. Ozma will clean up here on the ground. And their orbital factory?”
“Leave that to Firewall,” Searle said.
—
Manager Leong looked at the small, elegantly dressed man in the airlock, still unsure how he should be treated. His credentials, which were very much in order, said he was Mr. Searle, here to investigate an insurance claim by one of the U-Facture’s clients on behalf of Llewellyn’s Offworld.
Leong’s uncertainty in dealing with the man stemmed from his inability to learn anything about Searle’s reputation. This suggested that he was either a complete nobody or someone very important indeed. Leong had not risen to management by being incautious, and so he decided to give the elegant man face.
Yes, clearly someone important. Leong let him inside with repeated insurances of offering every assistance.
—
Searle’s hacker reported back within a minute of Searle’s gaining access to the U-Facture.
[I have their AGI; it’s sleeved in the ranger shuttle. Scorch it?]
Searle messaged, [Stand by.]
On the tacnet feed, he could see that the trio of Guangxi cleaners he’d hired were in position.
[Go,] he messaged.
He watched the stream of status messages with interest as Eidolon’s consciousness was burned from the ranger shuttle’s computer systems.
—
“How much longer?” Kim asked, “Smoke’s been in the Skink all this time. There’s a limit to monkey housebreaking.”
[We’re almost done,] Cagehopper messaged, [Maybe half an—oh , fuck.]
“Eidolon’s offline,” Park said, “We got company.” He enlarged the tacnet feeds of security sensors in the module that Eidolon had created; several had gone dark. The rest were winking out, one by one.
“Shuttle’s still online, Eidolon just isn’t there anymore,” Kim said.
They were still in the med bay. Through the open bulkhead door to the manufacturing quadrant, they heard coughs of gunfire.
[Cage?] Park messaged.
[Hiding. One shooter, helluv professional.]
Park and Kim drew guns and made for the bulkhead. They flanked the doorway, sizing things up. Park went to t-ray vision and looked through the wall. He could see Cage huddled behind some equipment and the shooter stalking him, moving cover to cover.
Kim, watching the room behind him, said, “Behind us!”
Park whipped around. There was nothing there but a slight distortion of light on visual, but the t-rays showed the outline of another assassin—throwing something.
Three marble-sized objects flew toward them as the assassin took cover behind the doctor bot. Grenades.
They both tried to swing themselves around the bulkhead into cover, but they were too slow.
Last effin’ time I call that bastard, Park thought.
The grenades exploded in a blast of white plasma. It didn’t last long enough to hurt much.
—
Searle’s hacker didn’t take long extracting the necessary data. He’d review it before sharing it with Cheng, of course. The leader of the Guangxi killers approached him after they’d planted the explosives and visited the front office to dispose of Manager Leong.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Outstanding work, as always,” he said, “That will be all.”
The assassin cocked an eyebrow. “The ranger ship?” she asked.
“I’ll dispose of it,” he said.
The assassins left him there in the module’s outer ring with the three bodies.
Searle put the agonizer to the base of Kim’s skull, flipped it to roast mode, switched to t-ray vision to make sure he didn’t miss, and burned out her stack. This was a slow operation with an agonizer, and he held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose as hair and flesh burned under the beam. If the rangers followed policy, she’d hit her life timeout in about a week and be re-instanced from backup, none the wiser.
He sawed Cagehopper and Carter’s stacks out next. He considered simply discarding the monkey; he disliked uplifts and saw little use for this one. But he pocketed both stacks anyway before spacing the bodies.
He left the U-Facture module, went to the Skink, and powered it up. Piece of junk. Smelled like ape and stale cigarettes, but it would get him back to Mars quickly enough.
Unlike his companions, Jake Carter would be a problem. Searle would have no difficulty justifying the ranger and the ape as necessary information containment. The AGI had been a fork; the original would know nothing. But Carter was a proxy. Ming and those other fools rimward would demand Carter be re-instanced and briefed on the mission outcome.
Searle would probably have to claim that Carter’s stack had been unrecoverable, but doing so would call into question both Searle’s competence and his reliability. He didn’t see a better option; Carter had enough pull with the Eye that a memory wipe was out of the question.
As he was finishing the pre-flight check, something flew through the cabin and hit the windshield, bouncing toward him. Searle caught it; it was an empty, crumpled-up cigarette package.
He heard noise and turned around. There was a police baboon floating a few meters behind him, feet holding the rim of the cockpit door. It was rhythmically flipping open, flicking, and closing a lighter. It closed the lighter a final time, let go of it so that it hung in front of the baboon, and growled.
“Er, sorry,” said Searle, “I don’t smoke.”
The baboon launched itself at Searle, howling jaws opening to fill his field of vision.