The Luna Deception Page 20

Kiyoshi raised his foot enough for the phavatar to roll onto its back.

  “This was a stupid idea to begin with,” it said in its synthetic voice. Then a square of its torso hinged away. Out peered the face of a man with an orange goatee and bad acne.

  Kiyoshi laughed aloud, he couldn’t help himself.

  “Don’t shoot, OK?” The man spoke in a normal human voice. “I’m coming out.”

  The lower half of the fake phavatar’s torso concertinaed open. The man wriggled out. It took him quite some time to free his legs from the legs of his costume.

  “So,” Kiyoshi said, “I’m repeating myself, but who do you work for?”

  “It was just a job,” said Orange Goatee. He sat down on the hollow shell of his phavatar costume. “I don’t know, OK? We answered an ad on Talent.cloud. The customer chose to be anonymous. You can’t hurt us. We didn’t hurt you.”

  Kiyoshi already guessed who the customer was. Derek Lorna, or someone else associated with the Mercury rebellion. But he needed to know more. He needed to know if worse was to come.

  By now, the other impersonators had opened the hatches of their costumes. Kiyoshi looked at the one who seemed least scared. “Where’d you get the costumes?”

  “We already had them. We fabbed them for Richard III.”

  “Richard who?”

  “A play,” the woman said contemptuously. “Shakespeare. It was a modern production. Got great reviews.”

  “But you can’t live on reviews,” said Orange Goatee, his voice shakier than ever. “So I’m like, well, I know this is prostituting my gift. I mean, pretending to be a security phavatar, it’s not exactly Hamlet, is it? But you can’t argue with S2K each for a couple of hours’ work.”

  “Not that we’ll ever see the money now,” another of the actors added bitterly.

  Kiyoshi juggled the PEPguns he had collected. He wondered what to do with them. Not wanting to take his eyes off the actors for too long, he squatted and shovelled the weapons into the mini-fridge. As he did so, a few specks of silver glitter floated out. Probably paint that had flaked off the actors’ costumes.

  “The guns are real,” he said. “Where’d you get those?”

  Orange Goatee turned wet eyes to him. “Man, you’re new on station, huh? This is Midway. You can buy anything here.”

  Kiyoshi nodded. “And if you’d successfully arrested me?”

  “That’s where improv skills come into play, man. We got an update to the job just now. Like just now. They said, change of plan, we want to talk to him, so come up with some ploy to get him out of the ship and escort him to long-term storage.”

  “Long-term storage! Where’s that?”

  “Underneath the East Side.”

  ★

  “You know, I wonder if any of these people have ever been to the real East Side,” Elfrida said.

  Mendoza did not like the look of ‘these people’ at all. He and Elfrida were sharing the street with cyborgs, metal-eyed, their hands augmented with precision machine tool attachments. Some wore hazmat suits, which was not reassuring. Big-headed children perched on the edges of roofs like pigeons.

  The East Side, the Rocking Horse’s other ‘rocker,’ had an uncompleted feel to it. Big-box fabberies dominated. Street names seemed to be arbitrary. Painted on the sides of the buildings, they were hard to distinguish from the abundant graffiti. Which was how Mendoza had gotten them lost.

  He hadn’t yet told Elfrida about that. He was going to get them un-lost before she guessed.

  They’d elected not to connect their contacts to the Midway network, so they couldn’t be easily tracked. But that meant Mendoza had to rely on his eyes and his sense of direction. Another ironic reminder of how much he’d depended on his BCI.

  “What was that?” he said.

  Elfrida raised her voice over the tumult from the factory they were passing. “I was just thinking, the West Side? The East Side? They’re riffing off the names of New York neighborhoods, so I was wondering if any of them have ever been there, to see what a real city looks like. Or maybe it’s an aspirational thing. Oh, just ignore me. I get silly when I’m tired.”

  “Let me carry that.”

  “I’m OK, really.” She half-turned her body, putting the rucksack out of his reach.

  “Let’s take a taxi,” he said.

  She smiled wanly. “When was the last time you saw one?”

  The West Side had been full of yellow pedicabs. But they’d refrained from hailing one, for fear that it would somehow make them visible to the network. Mendoza now realized that Elfrida was right—he hadn’t seen a single taxi since they rode the Nodetrak to the East Side.

  We should have hailed one when we had a chance. She can’t walk much further.

  “So what’s the real New York like?” he said.

  “Oh. Watery.”

  “I’ve never been there, either. Tell you what: when this is all over, and we’re back on Earth, let’s go to New York for the weekend or something. I think we both deserve a vacation.”

  She felt for his hand, squeezed it. “That would be awesome.”

  Mondeleez. Yakult. Cisco.

  At the sight of that last one, Mendoza realized the ‘street signs’ were no such thing. They were just the names of companies.

  Fluorescent ring-lights dotted the roof. There was no sun-tube to navigate by. Nothing to do except walk in a straight line until they bumped into the wall.

  “John?”

  “Hmm?”

  “We’re not lost or anything, are we?”

  “Lost? Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

  ★

  Kiyoshi ran. Half a gravity! He felt heavy, slow, and his knees twinged like he was eighty. But he ran through the parking lot, through the market, and lunged up a few steps of the climbway before halting, gasping for breath.

  He should have made Mendoza and Elfrida connect to the network. That had been a misplaced precaution. Now Lorna was going to find them anyway, and Kiyoshi couldn’t even warn them.

  “I’m looking at the central surveillance vid cache right now,” Jun said. He sounded faint and far away, or maybe that was the blood singing in Kiyoshi’s ears.

  ~Was it easy to get in?

  “Medium-hard.”

  That did not reassure Kiyoshi. He figured Derek Lorna was bound to have access to the Rocking Horse’ surveillance cameras. Or another troupe of actors dressed up as security phavatars. Or both. Or worse.

  ~Can you see Elfrida and Mendoza?

  “I’m going to run a facial recognition search. It might take a few minutes. I’ve got to be careful I don’t get red-flagged.”

  Kiyoshi said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t rub it in: Jun was doing something illegal, crossing one of the lines he’d said he would never cross. Breaking into someone else’s system, stealing proprietary data. Kiyoshi thought, One step closer to robbing banks.

  The climbway topped out. Kiyoshi panted through N-Space, his face so dour that the sales force left him alone. Up again. This escalator was shorter, rising through a tangle of water mains and power lines. Stepping into the false sunlight of a local day, he reached for his sunglasses, but he’d left them on the Superlifter.

  “OK, I’ve got Mendoza looking up at a camera on the Nodetrak, 41 minutes ago. Here he is again, 37 minutes ago. Sending you the coordinates.”

  ~Elfrida?

  ~Look: that’s her, beside Mendoza. I’m just not getting any hits because she’s not looking up at the cameras.

  In the screen grab Jun sent him, Elfrida had the hood of her sweatshirt pulled all the way forward, her head lowered.

  ~Someone must have taught her the basics of evading surveillance, Kiyoshi subvocalized, amused.

  “Her mother, I think.”

  Kiyoshi shambled into the Nodetrak station. The Nodetrak sounded like it should have been a spiffy commuter rail network, and maybe that had been the plan, but only a short section of line existed, bridging the gap between the Rocking Horse’s
“rockers.” The single-carriage train had a transparent floor. Kiyoshi peered down at an intestinal tangle of coolant pipes. It was hot in the carriage, a miasma of body odor sticking his shirt to his back. He thought about the fearsome problem of heat in space. Not enough and you froze, but then you had to get rid of it, because heat built up like a toxin in steel bubbles insulated by the vacuum.

  He thought about the specs of those medium-haul shuttles they’d been building on Mercury.

  He thought about the Ghost.

  And then there was no more time for amateur scientific musings, because the Nodetrak had docked on the East Side, and he was off, jogging.

  ~Where are they now?

  “Coverage is spotty over here. Got a couple of hits, 10 and 6 minutes ago. Looks like they’re going round in circles.”

  ~Great.

  “Hang on.” Jun’s voice was a sharp tack in Kiyoshi’s eardrum, and then he went silent.

  Kiyoshi walked, jogged, walked past factories that made everything from crackers to O-rings. The place had an Earthish vibe, he thought, but he was wrong about that. No one manufactured anything on Earth anymore. The movies Kiyoshi had seen were misleading.

  He brushed his fingers across the small of his back, where he’d stashed a couple of the phavatar impersonators’ PEPguns.

  Jun said, “You’d better look at this.”

  ★

  Contrary to Kiyoshi’s fears, Derek Lorna had no access to the Rocking Horse’s surveillance system. He was no hacker. Buying access was his way, and he had never bothered to cultivate any friends in that deep-space ghetto.

  But now it didn’t matter.

  Sitting cross-legged in his back garden, he wore a headset and gloves, as if he were immersed in some game. His hands fluttered. But these gloves provided no sensory feedback. They were purely for transmitting command gestures.

  Through the wonky grid of the Rocking Horse’s East Side, an invisible swirl of dust dispersed on a non-existent wind. It re-coalesced on a street called (on the map) Neil Armstrong Boulevard. It settled to ground level, dogging the footsteps of a husky Filipino and his companion, a woman carrying a rucksack.

  They would not have noticed the trace of dust at their heels, even if they hadn’t been busy arguing.

  “Gotcha,” Derek Lorna whispered, a tortured smile forming on his lips.

  ★

  “I think we ought to stop and ask directions,” Elfrida said.

  “I know where I’m going,” Mendoza said. They’d found the sidewall of the East Side and were now walking parallel to it. Keep on in a straight line and they’d have to get somewhere.

  “Yeah, but what if …”

  “We’re almost there, I promise.”

  She drank from a pouch of fruit juice, keeping her head lowered, always lowered. She must be so tired. He hated himself for putting her through this.

  “Maybe we don’t even have the right address,” she said.

  “It’s on the map.”

  “I mean, this is an industrial zone.” She spoke the last words as if they meant gates of hell, reflecting the sensibilities of Europe. In the Philippines, there were still some factories. But Mendoza wasn’t loving these noxious chemical odors and bursts of noise, either. Every bang made him jump. Elfrida persisted, “All the official stuff is back on the West Side. What if we’re in the completely wrong place?”

  “The map—”

  “Oh, screw the map! I want to ask directions.”

  “There’s no one to ask them from.”

  There were cyborgs passing, but not even Elfrida had the guts to stop one of them. She turned and strode towards the factory they were passing. A mural on the wall depicted a dead pig hanging by its rear trotters. Vents exuded a smell of burnt fat.

  “No! Elfrida!” Mendoza ran after her.

  She rapped on the door.

  ★

  “Shit,” Kiyoshi said. He started to run faster. The screen grab Jun had just sent him floated in the corner of his eye.

  It depicted a man running down a corridor. Derek Lorna.

  ~Where is he now?

  “He came out of something called LT Compartment 938B. Long-term storage. Looks like a lot of people actually live down there. It’s in the same place as N-Space, on the East Side. But don’t bother going after him. He’s coming up.”

  “He’s coming for Elfrida.”

  “That’s a safe assumption.”

  Kiyoshi jogged, ran, jogged. Jun knew better than to say anything about being careful, the kind of thing their mother used to say. Kiyoshi blew past small factories, dirty little one-printer-and-a-bag-of-splart operations. Dinged-up scavenger bots collected scurf and sipped effluent from dripping pipes. People stared at him. What was there to run for on the Rocking Horse? He could only be running from something.

  “Got him in real time.” Jun sounded excited. “Can you see the Kozmic Blue Jeans factory?”

  ~Yuh—hnnh, hnnh—yup.

  “Right, then straight. See him?”

  The screen in the corner of Kiyoshi’s eye changed to a live feed. Derek Lorna strolled beneath a static surveillance camera. He wasn’t hurrying anymore. He was being careful not to attract attention.

  ~Doesn’t even look like he’s carrying. But Kiyoshi figured he’d have some small but nasty weapon concealed under his loose, Luna-style shirt.

  Rounding the corner of the Kozmic Blue Jeans factory, Kiyoshi wrenched his two PEPguns out of his waistband, and checked that the pulse intensity was set to “Make ‘Em Wish They Were Dead.”

  ★

  “This is yummo,” Elfrida said, beaming at the owner of If Wurst Comes to Wurst.

  The factory where they’d asked directions turned out to be a charcuterie. The owner-operator, a friendly, obese woman in an oil-splotched coverall, had not only told them exactly how to reach their destination, but offered them samples of her sausages. Chewing, Elfrida enthused, “I’m half- Austrian, so I’ve spent lots of time in Vienna, you know? The world capital of sausages? And this is easily as good as anything I’ve had there.”

  The woman flushed in pleasure. “Can I put that in a customer testimonial?”

  Mendoza yanked on Elfrida’s sleeve.

  “It’s really only OK-ish,” Elfrida confessed as they walked on. “But I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “I, for one, don’t want to know what they put in sausages on a space station 1.5 million klicks from the nearest pig farm.”

  “Nutriblocks,” Elfrida said, but she dropped the end of her sausage on the street. A scavenger bot immediately scuttled over and grabbed it. “Anyway, you have to admit the lady didn’t seem like a spy for Derek Lorna. Or Hope Energy. Or whoever else is supposedly after us. And she did know where the Don Bosco building is.”

  “Sigh. Yes, Elfrida. You were right. I was wrong.”

  Mendoza meant the apology sincerely. He meant it as an apology for doing this the hard way, all because his recent experience of pursuit had conditioned him to see Derek Lorna’s spies behind every closed door. He had been overly cautious, and he was sorry for that. But his apology came out as a churlish grunt.

  Elfrida giggled. She reached for his hand and swung it to and fro. “You’re such a guy,” she said.

  Distracted by the warm pressure of her fingers, Mendoza did not think to look over his shoulder as they walked.

  ★

  Kiyoshi ran down a long, crowded street. As he ran, he enabled the zoom function of his retinal implants.

  He saw Elfrida and Mendoza first.They had no idea how much danger they were in. They were walking hand in hand. Elfrida still had her rucksack.

  Derek Lorna was about twenty meters behind them, quickstepping, catching up.

  Kiyoshi halted, gasping for breath. He raised his right-hand PEPgun and lined up the crosshairs. He fired.

  The invisible energy pulse leapt across the distance between them. Contacting Lorna’s back, it produced a small cloud of exploding plasma. This created a pressure wave that
knocked Lorna flat. It also knocked over a couple of passing cyborgs. Each assumed the other had sucker-punched him. They leapt to their feet, roaring in outrage, and swung at each other with augmented fists.

  Elfrida and Mendoza glanced back at the fistfight and hurried on faster. A delivery truck backed out of a factory loading bay and hid them from view.

  Snickering to himself, Kiyoshi sauntered up the street. The brawling cyborgs paid no attention to him, or to the frail human form sprawled nearby.

  Which now stirred. Sat up. Rubbed its head.

  Kiyoshi’s jaw dropped.

  ‘Make ‘Em Wish They Were Dead’ was obviously false advertising. Or maybe some black marketeer had sold the actors piece-of-shit guns.

  “Hey,” Kiyoshi said.

  Lorna twisted around. When he saw Kiyoshi, he smiled.

  Kiyoshi drew his second PEPgun and fired, point blank, at the middle of Lorna’s shirt.

  Quicker than a cockroach, Lorna ducked, wriggling away on his elbows, legs undulating, in a motion more insect-like than human.

  The PEPgun’s pulse missed Lorna. It hit the cyborgs and knocked both of them down again. They howled.

  Lorna had not let out a sound when he was hit.

  Nor did he now.

  With that shit-eating grin still plastered on his face, he bent slightly towards Kiyoshi from the shoulders, as if he were Japanese, bowing a greeting. The top of his head hinged back and up popped a stubby little gun.

  Kiyoshi threw himself flat.

  A lethal electrolaser bolt seared over his head, close enough that he could smell the dust in the air burning. He rolled, fired blindly. Another bolt scorched the ground. Goddammit goddammit. He had both PEPguns in his hands, fingers spasming on both triggers at once. He somersaulted upright and saw Lorna—scratch that, the phavatar masquerading as Lorna—tumbling head over heels. The bot might not feel pain but it could still get knocked over by a pressure wave.

  He reeled after it. The cyborgs got there first. One of them sat on the phavatar’s legs, the other on its back.

  Its head rotated 180 degrees. It was still grinning. Its skull-mounted electrolaser spat lightning at the ceiling. The closest UV ring went out, plunging the street into twilight.

  “Rip its fucking head off,” Kiyoshi roared.