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The asteroid Sant’Arcangelo’s central commercial complex was visible through the panoramic window filling one wall of the shipping agent’s office. Vehicles slid constantly along cables slung across between the two sides of a mountainous crack cutting deep into the crust of the Shoal-boosted asteroid. Birds flew in dizzy flocks through air so thick and honeyed you could almost drink it, while trees sprouted from slopes as broken and jagged as they’d been on the day of creation. On either side, both slopes were festooned with buildings and shopping complexes that literally hung suspended from tens of thousands of unbreakable cables criss-crossing the enormous void.
Just a few hundred metres above this city of Roke’s Folly, the narrow wrapping of atmosphere ceased abruptly at the perimeter of the containment field wrapped around Sant’Arcangelo. Beyond that lay the cold wastes of the asteroid belt.
‘Dakota.’ When he spoke, Quill combined all the verbal qualities of a stern teacher and a favourite uncle. ‘There is no risk involved. What could be simpler? My client loads an unspecified cargo into your ship. You fly your ship to Bourdain’s Rock, where you then allow my client to retrieve his cargo and go on his way. Where’s the risk in that?’
Quill shook his head, apparently incredulous. ‘Look. If it weren’t for the fact I’m not a pilot with a reputation as good as yours used to be, I’d do the job myself.’ He moved over from where he’d been standing next to the window, and sat down opposite Dakota. ‘So tell me how it’s taking a chance.’
She stared at Quill and laughed. ‘For a start, you can stop pretending I don’t know that we’re talking about Alexander Bourdain himself. I know things about Bourdain that would make the hair stand up and creep off your head. I’ve dealt with him a couple of times before, and I’d rather take my chances stark naked in a cage full of hungry wolves. And, on top of that, I won’t even know what it is I’ll be delivering to him?’ Dakota shook her head. ‘Gangsters like Bourdain—’
‘Wrong,’ Quill interrupted. ‘He’s not a gangster.’ He glanced back towards the window, momentarily hiding his face from her. ‘All those charges were dropped, remember?’
She wanted to take Quill by the throat and ram his head against the window behind him. It took an extreme effort of will not to start shouting at him. ‘Well, I heard how one witness died mysteriously in an accident, and by remarkable coincidence all the others changed their testimony within a couple of days of that. Excuse me if I don’t feel totally convinced.’
Quill returned his gaze to her briefly. Then he walked over to the door of his office and opened it. ‘You, I think, need to get some trust into your life.’ He gestured her out of the door with his head. ‘Or are you telling me you don’t need this job so badly anymore?’
‘Shut the door. I haven’t changed my mind.’
Quill closed the door and went to stand over her, arms folded. Just then Dakota felt like she’d never hated anyone more in her whole life. ‘But it’s . . . it’s too much of a risk shipping something when I don’t even know what it is I’m delivering. That’s just asking for trouble!’
Quill pursed his lips. ‘You’ve still got some time to think about it: another eight hours before they need a definite answer. Though I should add, he’s . . . my client is in a hurry to finalize arrangements. Maybe I’d be better off getting someone else to—’
Dakota shook her head, suddenly weary. She was just making a fool of herself pretending to Quill she might have any choice. If she didn’t do this job for Quill, she’d forfeit her ship the Piri Reis to him. He’d been responsible for acquiring much of the highly illegal counter-surveillance and black ops devices now installed on the vessel, and Dakota still owed him for that equipment.
‘No. I’ll do it.’
‘Maybe I’ll—’
‘No.’
‘All right, then.’ Quill nodded and sat down again behind the low marble desk where he did much of his business. ‘We won’t need to worry too much about official channels, since I’ll be providing a manifest detailing something entirely innocuous—’
‘Don’t,’ she said sharply, cutting Quill off. ‘Just leave it. Load the cargo, tell the Consortium whatever you like, and just let me do the job. I don’t want to know anything more than I absolutely have to. I don’t even want to be having this conversation.’
Quill gazed at her blankly for a moment, then a small smile twitched at one corner of his mouth.
‘You know, you wouldn’t be stuck like this if you hadn’t messed up that job out at Corkscrew. Way I heard it, you were lucky the Bandati didn’t dump you in a hive and feed you to their grubs. They like doing that kind of thing, I hear.’
‘I delivered—but the people I was delivering to tried to kill me rather than pay me.’ Dakota’s voice rose in pitch. ‘I’m a machine-head, yes, but I’m not a fucking psychic. I didn’t know what they were going to try.’
‘Shame Bourdain’s now got you running jobs like this as penance, I guess.’ Quill smiled, watching Dakota rage in impotent silence, then gave her the details.
‘Okay, you’re going to have to rendezvous with another ship at these coordinates . . .’
—
A few minutes after the Piri Reis’s systems had ceased functioning, Dakota stepped into space and secured herself using intelligent lanyards. These snaked out of a belt she wore around her waist, and embedded themselves in the hull, constantly retracting and shooting out again to attach to a new point as she pushed herself on around the hull in the direction of the cargo bay.
She was still getting used to the filmsuit she’d stolen from the Bandati during her visit to Corkscrew. It coated her naked flesh just like a thick layer of dark chocolate, protecting her from the vacuum and radiation just millimetres from her skin. It smoothed out her features, making her appear, to any potential observer, like an animated doll. Her lungs were stilled, their function temporarily taken over by microscopic battery units she’d had implanted in her spinal column. She was, in effect, a one-woman spaceship, though there was a clear limit to just how long the suit would keep functioning before the batteries needed recharging.
But if by some miracle this trip to the Rock worked out, it would have been worth the deception—and worth her botching the Corkscrew delivery.
The vibrations had faded by the time Dakota exited the ship. But when her Ghost suddenly fired a pulse of nervous attentiveness into the middle of her thoughts, she braced automatically, and a moment later the ship had jerked hard enough to propel her away from the hull. She drifted a couple of metres away before the lanyards roughly yanked her back.
That’s it, she thought. Screw Quill, and screw Bourdain. I’m going in to look.
She found her way to the cargo bay’s external airlock. The crew of the ship she’d rendezvoused with for the pickup had spent a busy hour installing security devices inside the cargo bay, while she herself waited inside the command module.
Dakota reached up and pulled the manual override key, which she wasn’t supposed to possess, off the narrow wire she’d loosely strung around her neck. Bourdain’s installed security was good—the best money could buy—but it was off-the-shelf, and could be circumvented.
She adjusted her position, tightening the lanyard until her feet were firmly planted on the hull, and with one hand took hold of one of the hand-grips extending from the airlock door, still clutching the key in her other hand. She held this position for a minute, recalling her conversation with Quill, thinking about the risk she was about to put herself at.
If I do this and Bourdain finds out, losing the money and the Piri’ll be the least of my problems. Maybe it’s not worth it.
She reached out with the override key, and paused again.
But then again, I have no idea what it is I’m transporting. What if those vibrations get worse? What if it’s something that could destroy the Piri itself?
She tried to imagine a new life without the Piri Reis, her only home for several years now, and found she couldn’t.
&n
bsp; Once more she reached out with the key. Once more she paused.
On the other hand, with the life-support apparently irretrievably down, she couldn’t even hide in the Piri’s medbox until she made it to the Rock, nor would her filmsuit last long enough to keep her alive in the meantime. Her only other option was the tiny one-man lifeboat she always kept on board, but it also had limited air and battery power.
Fuck that, she thought, and started to insert the key, just as she felt a familiar tingling at the top of her spine.
Piri?!
She froze, the key still poised in one hand. For a moment she thought she’d only imagined the ship’s voice inside her mind. A wave of exhausted relief flooded through her.
Piri, what happened to you? You were out of contact for, for—
Dakota let go of the key. Then her eyes closed for several moments behind their slippery film, and she sent out a fervent prayer to no one in particular. It was over.
—
Aboard the Piri, she lowered the lights and crawled exhausted into her sleeping space. She’d have to clean up before disembarking on the Rock. That meant goodbye to now familiar body odour: regular hygiene was easy to forget in the long, lonely weeks between departure and arrival. She barely noticed the random detritus of her hermetical existence that now floated in freefall throughout the living space, even drawing a kind of comfort from it.
As so often these days, loneliness and depression swept over Dakota, lying alone in the dark. The ship’s soft fur felt warm under her skin, yet something was missing.
It didn’t take long for the Piri to respond to her unspoken need.
She was facing the wrong way to see a familiar shape detach itself from one wall, but she could imagine it easily. A tall, warm-bodied effigy of a man, its face as smooth and bland as its artificial flesh, its machine eyes imbued with fake emotion.
In the dim red light seeping through from the command module, she saw the silhouette of its smooth curved buttocks as it kneeled over her, soft moist lips kissing her gently on her naked belly.
‘Dakota?’
Her ship spoke to her through the lips of the effigy. It had soft brown hair, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Cables like umbilicals ran from its spine and into the wall-slot where it spent most of its existence—her ship made flesh.
She was so used to it now, it was beginning to feel natural.
‘Dakota, your nervous system is again flooded with high-grade Samadhi neural boosters. Perhaps you are over-indulging—’
‘Don’t lecture me, Piri.’ Dakota smiled, both her thoughts and body warm and fuzzy.
‘Yes, Dakota. However, it does concern me that—’
That I’m not dealing properly with my past. Dakota felt a surge of anger, but it was soon gone under a flood of neurochem that washed the bad feelings away. If you were really intelligent and not just doing a remarkable imitation of sentience, I’d—
Dakota wasn’t sure what she would do, but it would be mean. Mean and nasty. She smiled as she felt the effigy press down on her, smooth and soft and almost indistinguishable from the real thing in the warm dark.
—
Bourdain’s Rock measured fifteen kilometres along its widest axis, eight along its narrowest. Before Concorrant Industries had drilled out the asteroid’s core and plugged a planet engine into its empty centre, it had drifted for the better part of a billion years on a looping elliptical orbit, taking it close to the edge of the heliosphere before circling back in past Jupiter and Saturn. Several years before, Concorrant-built fusion jets had manoeuvred the asteroid into a permanent, stable orbit out beyond the most remote of Jupiter’s native moons.
Dakota had seen pictures of the asteroid before Alexander Bourdain had paid the Shoal to work their magic on it. The images had then reminded her of a fossilized turd she had once seen on display in a museum. To some extent it still looked like a fossilized turd, but one that had been sculpted with explosive nuclear chisels until its shape approximated that of a rough-edged flattened sphere. Its surface was still cratered with deep cracks running along one side, but had now been transformed into a chiaroscuro of blues and greens, like a child’s drawing of a tiny world with exaggerated people and buildings towering over its minuscule surface area.
The planet engine created a field of gravity by some arcane trick of physics that still baffled those human scientists who took it upon themselves to try and figure out the Shoal super-science behind it. The engine also generated a series of shaped fields that surrounded the asteroid, containing a pressurized atmosphere that extended no more than a few hundred metres beyond the asteroid’s surface while also filtering out radiation and retaining heat. It was a grand, baroque gesture on the part of a man who had inherited a fortune reaped from the helium-three mining operations at the heart of Jovian industry. More, it was a demonstration of the power the outer-system civilizations now wielded.
Once the gravity field and atmosphere were in place—the latter drawn from the substance of the asteroid itself—Bourdain had clearly spared little expense furnishing his new world with a complete flora and fauna, all prevented by Shoal magic from spontaneously floating away into interplanetary space.
Like Sant’Arcangelo, Bourdain’s Rock looked like a god’s discarded toy. Some of the buildings on the asteroid were tall enough to push through the atmosphere-containment fields like fingers poked through a soap bubble.
The Piri Reis had been decelerating for half an hour now, its engines pointing towards the asteroid in a braking manoeuvre. Strapped into an acceleration couch, Dakota looked up at a viewscreen showing densely wooded forests that fell away into deep crevasses. A herd of deer moved past grey cliffs, while the distant face of Jupiter was reflected in the crystal waters of a lake.
Light came from incandescent fusion units mounted on poles that also extended out above the thin cladding of air. She watched the Rock turn before the ever-watching eye of Jupiter, banks of lights strung along the asteroid’s longitude winked out to create a simulated night across one misshapen hemisphere.
It was utterly beautiful.
—
It took Dakota a while to find her way from the docking bays, across the asteroid surface and into the Great Hall. Enormous deerhounds ran past as she entered its vast space, their claws skittering and slipping on the polished mirror-like sheen of the marble flooring. The Rock’s gravity had been set to about two-thirds Earth-normal. Beyond, in the distance, the sound of revelry echoed from the curved stone buttresses of a cathedral-like ceiling that looked at least a thousand years old, but had actually been in place less than five.
In the distance she saw two Shoal-members, each floating in their separate water-filled containment fields, each bubble supported by tiny anti-grav units. A retinue of Consortium bodyguards accompanied each of the creatures at a distance. Long tables held food and drink, all served by human waiting staff.
Dakota had dressed quickly, in loose light multi-pocketed trousers, and the one clean t-shirt she’d been able to find in a frenzied search through the zero-gravity maelstrom of her ship in the moments prior to docking.
She’d waited for several minutes in the antechamber that led into the main hall itself, composing herself and trying to quell the hammering in her chest. She had nothing to worry about, not really. Bourdain would be busy throwing endless parties in order to attract new investors, but she hadn’t expected to find herself attending any of these lavish dos.
All she wanted to do was sort out her payment, then leave immediately, and start a new life somewhere very far away.
Nothing could be simpler.
‘Piri, can you hear me?’ Dakota asked the air, unnecessarily.
The computer’s voice was sha
rp and masculine, and Dakota had a mental flash of Piri’s effigy. Piri wasn’t really intelligent, of course, any more than her Ghost implants: that latter technology had been created in response to humanity’s failure to yet develop anything close to true artificial intelligence. But, even so, there were times when it felt close enough.
None, Dakota sub-vocalized, stepping forward into the noise and light of the party. Just keep an eye on things.
Sheets of transparent crystal allowed her to look up between the vast stone buttresses of the hall towards the black sky above. For the next few hours, it would be night on Bourdain’s Rock. Beyond the windows she could see where a sheet of rock rose sharply to a knife-edge peak, its vertiginous incline dripping with mosses and blue flowers. Everything she saw had been designed for maximum impact.
There must have been several hundred people at this particular gathering, but even they managed to look a little lost in such a vast interior space. She was very conscious of the clack of her boot heels as she crossed the marble floor.
The noise of the party grew louder, with a full-blown live orchestra, positioned on a raised dais, playing light classical music. Parakeets and finches flew overhead, darting towards nests built in carefully sculpted twists of ivy that grew up the walls. Unlike the Sant’Arcangelo asteroid, which had been designed as a financial centre for the outer-systems mining industry, Bourdain’s Rock was developed solely as a theme park for the obscenely rich.
Apart from the two Shoal-members, almost all the guests present were human. A couple of dark-furred Bandati had settled down on various perches just above the milling heads of the guests below, their vast roseate wings twitching above their tiny bodies while they conversed, via translator devices, with a group of men and women who had the hard-faced look of deep-space miners.
Dakota felt a small thrill of nerves when she saw the Bandati, but the chances they might have any idea who she was, or that she had stolen something from them, were vanishingly tiny . . .
‘Miss Merrick?’
She turned to see a gaunt-faced man in a formal suit, his hands clasped in front of him. She’d met Hugh Moss before on previous trips to the Rock, yet every time she managed to forget how badly he creeped her out. He had, as ever, the demeanour of a bloodless corpse that had been resurrected on a mortuary slab less than five minutes before and already regarded the experience with a warm nostalgic glow.