Page 40

A fter we say goodbye to the doc, I lead Kez back inside and into the lounge.

This is the room I used most before I met Kez, and least since.

She calls it the man-cave . I like dark wood and soft fabrics and that’s nowhere more evident than the lounge, with its heavy furnishings, window-walls set to wood-panel mode, and thick carpet.

I make it even more cave-like when I tap up the window-walls, switching them to black-out.

I seat Kez on one of the deep, soft couches, then collect a pair of skullcaps.

There’s an old myth that humans only use ten percent of their brains.

At least, I was told it was a myth. Spending time with Kez’s brother has made me wonder.

Truth is, humans use all of their brains, just not all at the same time.

Head-sheds in MI, they thought ‘all brain, all the time’ was a great idea.

They called it expansion . Gave me nose-bleeds.

But I learned how to datalink, and while it still ain’t my favorite thing, it has its uses.

Especially when you’re facing Myhre’s fucking endless reports.

I hand Kez a skullcap, pop mine on and settle down on the couch next to her.

In training, we did datalinking in SD-pods.

No other sensory input. Helps avoid some of the nasty potential side-effects of expansion, like schizophrenia.

But Kez and I aren’t absorbing terabytes of technical data.

Just a couple meg of analytics. Kez has only datalinked twice, so I shut off her feed at the end of Myhre’s reports.

Keep my feed open for a few more seconds while I absorb the twenty-seven minutes of vid Payton has sent me.

Then I shut it all down, push off my skullcap and stretch out next to Kez.

She turns over, so she’s lying along my side, and puts her head on my chest. I slide my arms around her.

Stroke her soft head. Nothing nicer than feeling my kitten close to my heart.

We’re both quiet for a while, processing the information that’s been fed directly into our cerebellums. Myhre’s reports are pretty dry, and I’m glad I won’t have to use the looping techniques I learned in MI to transfer the streamed data into long-term memories.

I might die of boredom before Jaxon and his buddies manage to take us out.

Kez sighs and shifts on my shoulder. “I’ve always hated numbers, and that was before I met Myhre.”

“She really is a bean-counter at heart.” I chuckle.

“With everything else that’s going on, she’s prioritized this thing in Jielt?”

I pull up that report. A bunch of Jielt diggies want to meet with Chi and Kez about leakage from a bunch of underground methane pools. Myhre’s prioritized it for Kez and flagged it as a security concern for me.

“They’re not even Tyng property,” Kez grumbles.

She’s right. The caves are govvie property, and the pressurized methane pools in them are a govvie problem, left over from last-century’s dirty terraforming.

But Jielt is a company town. Tyng employs more than half the population. The govvies are using Tyng-tech to process the methane into useable fuel. So if the pools are leaking, I guess that makes it a Tyng problem.

“Stinker of a situation,” I say.

Kez knocks my shoulder with her forehead. “You didn’t. ”

I chuckle. “Yeah. I’ll go down there with you.” Because I’m not letting her out of my sight. Particularly after what Doc Gray had to say. “Kitten, Doc’s worried about you.”

She scoots up on my chest so she’s looking down into my face. “Is that what he wanted to talk with you about?”

“Yeah, and you nearly tore my dick off.”

“What?”

I grin at her reaction, smooth my hand over her head and tuck her down against my chest again. “Doc’s given me some goo. It’ll be fine. If you’d stop jumpin’ me every half-hour.”

“Hale, I am so sorry.”

I love the earnest dismay on her little face. It makes me grin so wide my cheeks ache. “It’ll be fine. Let’s talk about you. Doc says you’re stressed.”

She shrugs and buries her face in my shoulder. No avoidance there.

I stroke her back for a while in silence. Give her the comfort of touch. Let her relax into my skin. When her breathing is even, I say, “I’ll promise you somethin’.”

She stirs. “Wha—?” she asks. She sounds extremely sleepy.

“Whatever happens, you ain’t gonna be alone. I’ll be with you every step.”

She rubs her face against me, yawns, and kisses my shoulder. “I know that. I’ve never doubted that.” Another yawn. Datalinking can be exhausting, although we didn’t do it for very long. I think back over her previous sessions with Doc Gray. She was sleepy after a couple of them.

“Good.” I settle us into a better position on the couch. We’ve got an hour before Kez needs to meet Chi to pick out fucking plates or whatever they’re doing, so she can have a nap.

“Hale?” she whispers sleepily. “I love spending time with you. Whatever’s happening.”

I kiss her forehead. I’ve thought it before and I’ll probably think it again. My kitten is a complex woman, but her happiness is not complex. Her happiness is sweet and simple. All I have to do is keep us both alive to enjoy it.

While Kez naps, I parse through Myhre’s fucking interminable reports, and twenty-seven minutes of vid from the skimmer crash.

Myhre’s been busy chasing the dragon, as she calls it.

Following the credits. The case against Payton is damning, I have to admit.

She’s fed a lot of credits to the NoBos and into the E.C.

over the last two years. Either funding someone’s plush lifestyle, or building up a war chest, which is now aimed at Kez’s head.

But I notice there haven’t been any credit transfers between Kimpler’s Cloud accounts and the mainland in the last five-day.

Payton started thinking for herself and stopped funding our enemies. She wasn’t lying.

Payton turns out to be the link between Jaxon and Duncan, too. She’s made two transfers to Duncan. Both in the week after Old Man Tyng’s death. Totaling less than a thousand credits. That was the price for betraying Kez. Less than a thousand hard. Motherfucker.

Myhre hasn’t gotten as far with the K-net code we got from Alb.

All K-net addresses have to be tied to a real-world datapoint.

So the govvies can track your ass down when they find you doing something illegal.

Naturally, that’s led to a nice cottage industry in hard-line fronts.

‘J-nox’ leads to one of them. VMV9181, Tonlye.

Tonlye’s an inland, industrial city, tucked into the long valley between Hemos and Kuus, nowhere near Ykimo or the north shore.

It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. Didn’t mean anything to Myhre.

But it means something to me.

Before I met Kez, when I was still smuggling, I did some work for a pair of small-timers, Vazilly and Mikhael Vark.

I hit some unexpected expenses on one of their runs – their shipment of nanoized zinc oxide leaked out of its supposedly sealed containers all over my ship and cost me a small fortune to have cleaned, since that shit is toxic as hell once it’s been nanoized.

The Vark Brothers were so embarrassed about the damage, they offered me a free year on one of their hard-line fronts.

I’ve used it from time to time when I really needed to cover my tracks.

I know the address well. VMV9181, Tonlye.

I adjust Kez on my shoulder. Smile to myself. I know the Vark brothers pretty well. All they care about is credits. Whatever Jaxon’s paying them, I can pay more.

I move on to the vid from Payton.

It’s in the third segment of vid. From a stationary security monitor on a shop we were passing.

Eight seconds before our skimmer erupts into flame, there’s a shadow.

I slow it down, way, way, down, until I can see the details within that dark blur.

A white-furred hand, patches of pink skin showing like the fucker’s got mange.

The flash of a black thumb-claw. The rounded blue edge of a weapon I recognize, because it was one the military’s favorite weapons for urban pacification.

A Gaudde mag-gun. Perfect against civvie vehicles, which lack military-grade shielding.

Hand-held. No ammo. Just a targeted electro-magnetic pulse.

Lightning in a bottle. Mag-guns have barely any range and are notoriously inexact.

But when you’re frying a neg cell on a skimmer from twenty meters, you don’t need range or precision.

Just a clear shot, and that’s what Dom Fox had standing in the doorway of the shop, waiting for us to go by on the way to the spaceport.

I squeeze my eyes closed. I was a paranoid bastard before I met Kez.

The last three weeks have not sweetened my disposition.

Could be coincidence that Dom Fox was on the Clouds, in the Deeps, the same night we were.

His talk about how the Foxes didn’t have to bother with Kez because of the tag on her head was piss and wind, designed to distract us.

He coulda done it all – followed us, connected the dots when we rented the skimmer, and waited in the path to the spaceport – just because the Fox Clan has an axe to grind with Kez.

Or the Foxes could be working with Jaxon, and Dom was a plant, left behind when the ‘Big Man’ visited the island the day before .

Or the people who knew we were going to be out on the Clouds could have given us up. Payton. Tiancha. Acker.

Just ‘cause you’re paranoid, don’t mean they ain’t all out to get you.

A Gaudde mag-gun isn’t a terribly expensive weapon, but it is unusual outside of military circles.

Civvies don’t usually go disrupting each other’s neg cells.

Probably because they’re afraid of it coming back and biting them in the ass: what you use to fry your neighbor’s hover today can be used to fry yours tomorrow.

I haven’t seen a mag-gun in a decade. Myhre said the Blue Foxes weren’t well funded, and a mag-gun ain’t something you buy with a few spare creds from your local gun shop.

I’m not a huge fan of guns – probably because I’ve had too many of them pointed at me over the years – which is why I stick to my knives.

But even if I was, I’d have a hard time getting my hands on one on Kuseros.

The official policy is zero-tolerance. C.P.

don’t carry guns, and they don’t take kindly to people who do.

In my two years on Kuseros, I’ve only smuggled guns once, into New Brunny, where they were probably used in the water riots.

So there’s at least one arms dealer floating around Kuseros, but they lie pretty damn low.

That run was so heavily fronted, I wouldn’t know where to start to track back to the dealer.

In fact, the only place I could readily get my hand on a gun is Tyng Tower, which has a small armory in one of the sub-basements.

I wonder if there are any mag-guns in the collection.

And then I wonder if one of them is missing.