Nemesis (13 page)

‘Whatever,’ Mark muttered.

From the beige, soundproofed walls behind the men, he could tell he had to be on a level with privacy suites. Triton had plenty. A lot of the business the billionaires did wasn’t exactly Fleet-kosher.

‘Step out of the pod, please,’ said the man on the left. ‘We don’t want to make a mess of a public facility and it’s not going anywhere until you do.’

Mark stayed put, waiting for his moment. His unarmed-combat program, bleating a little from being woken after years with no updates, nevertheless fed him a barrage of tactical data. Right Thug stood slightly asymmetrically, suggesting weakness in his left arm. Left Thug showed trace signs of a former neck injury, indicating a potential weak spot. And so on.

The man on the left reached into the pod to grab Mark by his shirt. Mark sidestepped, swivelled and pushed, using the man’s momentum to send his face crashing into the back of the pod.

‘Are we really going to do this?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you guys look me up first? Didn’t you spot that I’m a Fleet roboteer?’

Mark had more gravity-support modifications in his body than most people even knew existed. He realised with a groan that his identity had probably been shielded since arrival for mission-security reasons. Most likely, the thugs had no idea who they were dealing with. Unfortunately, the security hold on the pod was
really
tight.

‘I don’t want to have to hurt you,’ said Mark, though it looked like he’d already failed on that count. The man picking himself out of the pod wall had a broken nose. He’d have to chalk that up to the booze. He was still too fuzzy to fight properly.

While the first man grasped his face and groaned, the second lunged for him. Mark twisted and dragged Thug Two into the pod, tripping him as he entered. The thug went sprawling to the floor.

Mark stepped around both of them into the privacy suite behind. The men came after him, breaking out stim-sticks from their jackets.

Mark regarded the weapons with disbelief. ‘Come on, guys. What is this, junior hoodlum night?’

The first thug, the one with the bloody nose, now looked unprofessionally angry as he dropped into a fighter’s crouch. Mark’s combat SAP pointed out the veins on his neck showing that he’d just got a bump of reinforced heart function. Probably some heavy stimulants, too. It recommended a twenty per cent improvement in response times to compensate. Mark obliged, despite the strain on his already struggling metabolism.

The thug came at him, stim-stick slashing for his chest. Mark chose his microsecond, dived in following the arm-sweep and drove his fingers into the man’s exposed shoulder pressure point. He followed up with an elbow to the man’s jaw, sending it cracking upwards. The thug toppled back.

Thug Two saw his opportunity and sprang. Mark adapted his spin, sidestepped and used it to propel the man forward again, this time at the suite doors. They dutifully opened for him and he landed on his chin in the corridor beyond.

‘This has been nice, guys,’ said Mark. ‘A special moment, really. But I have to be going.’

He jumped over Thug Two, avoiding the man’s swipe for his ankle, and walked quickly down the hall, checking behind him as he went.

Now that he’d left the suite, the habitat guarantee of zero surveillance did not apply. However, Mark found he still couldn’t get a handle on the network. Was it possible that the entire corridor was on some kind of lockdown, or even the entire ring, maybe? The thought made him nervous. He looked back to check on his pursuers. As he did so, he bumped into a young woman emerging from the door next to him. She yelped in surprise. She had short purple hair and a look in her eye halfway between panic and outraged affront.

‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ she said, rubbing her elbow.

‘My apologies,’ said Mark. ‘My fault entirely. I was distracted.’

He glanced back again and this time saw the two thugs rapidly approaching, stim-sticks in hand. Both men now looked scared and angry. He could see them assessing the risk involved with a witness. Mark knew he needed to shut this down quickly or someone innocent was going to get hurt.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ he told the woman.

‘Go away, please, miss,’ said Thug One. ‘You don’t want to be involved in this.’

Mark strode up to meet them. The first jabbed wildly with his stim-stick. Mark swapped his weight to his back foot, stepping out of range and swinging his front leg up to kick. The stick sailed out of the man’s hand. He grunted in pain. Mark followed up with a second kick to the man’s chest as his leg descended, sending him toppling back towards Thug Two. As Thug Two darted sideways to avoid the collision, Mark took the opportunity and turned in while his assailant was unbalanced. He drove a fist into the man’s sternum, knocking the wind out of him, and followed up with a jab to the pressure point on his neck. Thug Two crumpled. Mark turned back and kicked Thug One in the head before he could stand.

He paused to breathe and looked up to see the woman staring at him, appalled. This looked terrible, he realised. He was supposed to participate in a high-stakes mission tomorrow and here he was beating up two local heavies in a public corridor. He checked the network again – still no surveillance, thank God. A chance remained of him cleaning this up.

‘Would you be okay with not talking to anyone about this?’ he said to the woman, trying for a winning smile.

She looked disgusted by the offer. ‘This is a privacy deck,’ she said levelly. ‘I don’t have to notice the men you assaulted, the booze on your breath or the pain you inflicted on my elbow. We don’t have to notice that either of us was here
at all
.’

Mark couldn’t help but notice a catch in her phrasing.

‘I could pay you,’ he suggested.

She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘No, thank you. I want
nothing
to do with this. Frankly, I assume this is how most Earther business gets done so it’s all part of the local colour as far as I’m concerned. Let’s just pretend we never saw each other here.’

Mark bit back a riposte. There was no point in picking on her prejudice.

‘That sounds ideal,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’ He hoisted one of the thugs over his shoulders. ‘I’ll be back for the other one shortly.’

‘No matter,’ said the woman. ‘I won’t be staying to watch.’

Mark declined to make a remark. Instead he retraced his steps with the hoodlum dangling across his back and deposited him in the privacy suite. By the time he returned for the other, the woman had left.

Mark felt slightly relieved. Her company had been uncomfortable. His mood dived again, though, when he turned the second man over. His eyes lay open and staring. Foam filled his mouth and his fingers and face kept convulsing. He must have fallen on his stim-stick. Mark groaned. He checked the man’s pulse and found an erratic mess.

It was a disaster. If this got out, he’d be without a job in New York and no Fleet gig, either. Mark hefted the twitching man and dumped him down next to the first. Then he shut the door to the privacy suite and spoke to the door SAP.

‘I know you’re awake because you’re still running,’ he told the little program, ‘so give me your command chain.’

The SAP began the process of polite refusal. Mark reached out via his interface to the SAP’s public API and wedged self-opening commands right up its primary comms channel. The SAP squawked as Mark prised open a path to its central command listing. He grabbed a link to the command chain and used it to iterate up until he hit the governing intelligence for the entire level. While smarter and more slippery than its tiny minion, it soon succumbed to the same blunt intrusion. With access rights in his virtual hand, Mark reluctantly called Will.

A very surprised Will Monet appeared in the home node of Mark’s sensorium. He looked exactly as he always had – tall and awkward, with weirdly intense eyes and a shock of badly behaved hair that he’d artificially greyed at the temples in a vague attempt to look distinguished. The light-lag was nil, meaning Will was already on the station. He glanced around.

What Will always used to say when he visited Mark’s home node was, ‘Why don’t you clean up around here?’ To which Mark would always reply, ‘It’s not a mess, it’s a hashing function.’

The grey, granite cave Mark used still looked the same. The splatter of floating icons was, if anything, bigger and messier. This time, though, Will made no comment about that.

‘What’s up?’ he said simply.

Mark didn’t feel like talking. And because they were both roboteers, he didn’t have to. He just sent Will a memory dump instead. Will’s brows rose in surprise.

‘Still drinking, I see,’ he said.

‘I didn’t fucking call you for judgement,’ Mark snapped. ‘I called you to see if you were prepared to help.’ He immediately felt like a child again. Amazing how Will could do that to him with a single sentence. What was the issue, anyway? Mark could drink enough to kill a horse and be sober again within an hour. The involuntary augs he’d received as a child had made sure of that.

‘Of course,’ said Will. ‘I’ll send robots to handle the two men.’

Will scowled suddenly. For a moment, his virtual form split into an army of shadowy figures and recongealed. Weird shit like that happened a lot with Will.

‘Odd,’ he said. ‘The security here is badly compromised. But you’d guessed that already. I’ll look into it.’

He held out a hand and an icon appeared. It shimmered and juddered in a way that icons weren’t supposed to. Whatever it was, it was lousy with the dubious alien software that Will ran on.

‘Here are some security enhancements for you, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

Mark waved the offer away. ‘Thanks, but I don’t need them. I’m going straight to my room anyway.’

‘Mark,’ said Will, ‘do you think it was a coincidence that this shitty little sect scion happened to descend on you like that? You’re being watched. This was someone’s best attempt to take you out of the mission without tipping their hand. I’ll lay you any money that the social profile you saw for that guy is about an inch deep. And that crappy hooch you were drinking – they were doubles, I notice, on special. Ever stop to wonder why the price was so low? Did it never occur to you that someone might have actually
wanted
you to get drunk? Someone doesn’t want you to fly, Mark, and chances are they’re coming with you on that ship.’

Mark realised with a sinking feeling that Will might be right. The man moved in a world where paranoia took on a life of its own. He’d forgotten what it was like.

‘If you want to keep the job, please accept this,’ said Will. ‘The Fleet will be all over you tomorrow, insisting on upgrades, and they’ll want to see recent memory logs. This will save you time and make sure that this episode never sees the light of day.’

‘Fine,’ said Mark.

He snatched up the icon and tossed it back like a piece of cake. He could feel the program crawling through his memory stacks like a spider, delicately inserting itself. He shuddered, but could tell Will was relieved.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Will. ‘Please don’t leave the suite until the robots show.’

‘Of course not,’ said Mark sharply.

Will winked out.

Mark returned to his physical body and slumped against the wall. He felt like a teenager again and hated it as much as he hated the fact that Will’s assessment was undoubtedly right. The straitjacket angst of being locked in a former version of himself was one thing. The growing sense that this entire decision had been a huge, horrible mistake was quite another.

3.4: WILL

As Will slid back into his body, a sense of quiet victory hummed in his veins. His luck finally appeared to be turning. The mission had come together despite the political and logistical obstacles that everyone had been so keen to throw in front of it. And now he had Mark on board, too.

He opened his eyes in his private lounge at the other end of Delany Station. Pari and Nelson were still sitting there, watching him intently. Nelson stared with earnest concern while Pari regarded him with barely concealed anticipation. The mission plans from the meeting they’d been having before Mark’s call had all been cleared away. As he took in the looks on their faces, Will’s sense of achievement began to fade.

‘You’re back,’ said Pari. ‘What happened? Where did you go?’

‘Two thugs came after Mark,’ said Will. ‘It was a set-up. Someone wanted him to look violent and unreliable just before the mission. It didn’t pan out that way. I’ve got two unconscious bullies to clean up but other than that, we’re in the clear.’

He dumped a summary of the experience into the room’s blackboard space for them to pore over.

Nelson shook his head as the data scrolled up in his contacts.

‘This is bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re incredibly lucky this didn’t go public. If he hadn’t called you when he did—’

‘I know,’ said Will. ‘It would have made for a very effective smear. As it is, we’re golden.’

Pari lurched to her feet and started pacing. ‘Golden, my ass. This isn’t a near miss,’ she said. ‘It’s the tip of the iceberg.’

Nelson crooked an eyebrow. ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘If the sects are resorting to mission sabotage at this late stage, we’re already in trouble. Specifically, Mark is in trouble – he’s clearly the target. I know you didn’t mean to put him at risk, Will, but that’s what you’re doing. Do you honestly believe that Yunus wasn’t aware of this? And by this time tomorrow, that bastard will have full control over the
Gulliver
, and Mark along with it. That could be a death sentence. And a screwed-up mission to boot.’

‘Are we completely wedded to the idea of Mark as captain at this point?’ said Nelson. ‘Couldn’t we just make him sub and slide him out of the hot seat before something worse happens?’

‘Don’t even go there,’ said Pari. ‘Will and I have had this conversation. Will isn’t keen on compromise.’

‘You’re dead right I’m not keen,’ said Will, his anger bubbling back up. ‘And we can drop that line of reasoning right now.’

Pari shot him a hurt look. ‘Excuse me, Will,’ she said, ‘but did you just issue me with an
order
? I’d rather you didn’t treat me like an adversary or a minion, please. I find it hurtful.’