Tails You Lose (11 page)

"I hear that you succeeded in recovering your package," Tiger Cat said. "I'm pleased. I assume I can expect my second payment momentarily?"

Alma
had already decided to be blunt. "There's a slight problem."

Tiger Cat's smile faded. "What do you mean?"

"I'm temporarily unable to access my corporate account."

"I thought we had a deal," Tiger Cat growled. "You owe me three thousand nuyen. What about your personal assets?"

"I don't have that much credit."

She listened to him swear softly in Cantonese and then completed her pilch. "There's only one way you're going to get your money."

"How?"

"I need an insider's look at the Vancouver shadowrun community. To get it, I'll have to pose as one of you. I want you to broker a contract for me. Find me a job that I can carry out in the next day or two, preferably one that will require minimal support from one or two other shadowrunners and that will let me do the bulk of the work. That will buy me the legitimacy I need to assemble a team of shadowrunners for a second, fictitious assignment. You can keep whatever payment the employer provides for the first assignment—even if the total is more than three thousand nuyen. Then my corporation's debt to you will be canceled."

Alma
waited, wondering if Tiger Cat was going to accept her offer. Her only other option was to pose as someone who'd heard of the PCI extraction and wanted to hire the team that had carried it out. But that wasn't likely to work. As soon as the woman heard that someone from the corporate sector was looking for her, she'd vanish.

Alma
needed to pose as a shadowrunner instead. The shadow community, however, was like a private party: you had to have an invitation to enter it. Tiger Cat could provide her with that invitation by hiring her for an illicit assignment. Alma would have her way in—and Tiger Cat would have a full credstick.

"I'll see what I can do for you," Tiger Cat said finally. "But I'll have to know a little bit more about your areas of expertise. That will let me know if I should be looking to find you a courier run, a structure hit, a datasteal . . . Can I assume that wetwork is out of the question?"

"You can." Alma considered a moment. "Try to find an extraction. That's the type of 'run' that I'd be best at."

"All right," Tiger Cat said. "I'll see what I can do."

Alma
thumbed the cell off. Once again, a message from her crank caller scrolled across the monitor screen. This time, Alma read it in its entirety.

HEY AL, JUST A THOUGHT. MAYBE IT'S TIME YOU RETIRED. I HEAR THAT THINGS AREN'T GOING TOO WELL FOR YOU AT PACIFIC CYBERNETICS, ESPECIALLY NOW THAT THINGS HAVE STARTED GOING MISSING. OH WELL. I NEVER DID LIKE THOSE FRAGGERS MUCH, ANYWAY.

As soon as she realized that the crank caller was talking about the extraction, Alma knew who the message was from: the shadowrunner who had killed Gray Squirrel. One of the other Superkids.

Alma
only realized that she was squeezing the cellphone too hard when she heard its plastic case crack. She hit the delete icon, and the message faded from the screen. She didn't need to keep it—the words were seared into her memory.

"Watch your step, you 'fragger,' " she whispered angrily. "I'm coming to get you."

* * *

Ajax
lived in an apartment in Metrotown, a sprawling mall surrounded by high-rise towers that was a twentieth-century precursor to the arcology. His suite was a studio unit on the twelfth floor, just large enough to hold his futon, an elegant folding rice-paper screen, a telecom, and some Moroccan rugs and throw pillows. Alma felt entirely at home here, amid the blank white walls and big windows. Even the smell in the air seemed right. Lemon-scented wind chimes hung over a small end table that held a holopic of a blond woman with pointed ears, wearing a UCAS military uniform. As Ajax went to the kitchen unit to warm some vitamin-enriched sake, Alma watched the elf in the holopic blow the viewer a kiss. She wondered if the woman was still alive—or if Ajax, too, had lost someone he loved to war.

Alma
settled in a lotus position on a plush brown rug. Ajax joined her a moment later with two cups and a porcelain sake bottle on a tray. He sank gracefully into a cross-legged position that mirrored her own, placing the tray on the carpet between them. He poured steaming sake into one of the cups and then held it out to Alma. She noticed that he filled his cup to precisely the same level before lifting it to clink against her own. A love of tidiness and order was one of the personality traits that had been genetically selected for when the alpha batch of Superkids was created.

Alma
chatted with Ajax for a few minutes, filling in the blank between age eight and the current day, telling him about her foster parents, her training at the Justice Institute, and her years at PCI. They reminisced about the jokes they used to play on the technicians: swapping wrist badges and pretending to be one of the others in their batch was a favorite trick. Sometimes they even managed to fool each other. The one person at New Horizons who never fell for it, however, was the company's CEO. He never once got them mixed up; he got their names right every time, even without looking at their wrist badges.

To the research technicians and scientists at New Horizons, the CEO was Mr. Louberge, very formal in his suit and tie. But to the Superkids he was just Poppy, the man who tousled their hair and told them bedtime stories. Poppy had loved each of the Superkids individually and unconditionally, as a father should.

"It was sad that Poppy died," Alma said. "My foster parents told me it was a heart attack."

"A broken heart, you mean," Ajax said. "The stress of seeing New Horizons torn apart was what killed him."

Sake splashed out of her cup and onto Alma's fingers as her hand began to shake. She quickly set her cup down and folded her arms so that the hand was hidden under her right elbow. Thankfully the tremor was a light one that lasted only thirty-two seconds. Even though she didn't try to fight it this time, it left her with the same tired feeling she'd experienced before.

Ajax
didn't seem to have noticed. He was talking about Aaron—the "oldest" of their batch by virtue of being the first to be born to a surrogate mother. "Ironic, isn't it, that he was not only the first of the batch to be born, but also the first to die."

"I never understood how he could have fallen," Alma said. "What was he doing up there on the roof, all by himself? If he was showing off, who was supposed to applaud him? And why did he fall? Remember the 'floating stepping stone' test? Aaron was always the best at that one—he was as agile as a monkey in freefall."

"You didn't know?" Ajax asked, startled. "No—of course not. How could you? You've been out of the datastream."

"Couldn't know what?" Alma prompted.

"Aaron's fall wasn't accidental. He suicided—his death was what caused the Superkids program to be shut down."

Alma
gasped. "No! Why would he kill himself?"

"We'll never know. But Ahmed found something interesting when he hacked his way into one of the Superkids project files that the UCAS confiscated. Our batch—and the batches that followed us—weren't as perfect as they were made out to be. We were flawed. When New Horizons selected for the genes that gave Batch Alpha our unique immune systems and our high tolerance for cyberware, they also inadvertently selected for mental illness. In Aaron, it manifested as a bipolar disorder: manic depression. He was severely depressed when he jumped."

"What about the rest of the batch?" Alma asked. Ajax shrugged. "The data in the New Horizons report was inconclusive. The gene gave us a genetic predisposition toward mental illness, but Aaron seems to have been the only one who went crazy. There was some speculation among the researchers that the defect in the gene may have been balanced by a healthy counterpart, found only in the X chromosome, making you girls no more than carriers. The net effect would be that mental illness only showed up in the boys, in the same way as hemophilia or color blindness." Alma considered this information, searching her memories for anything that would constitute a mental illness. Aside from a slight tendency toward obsessive compulsiveness that all Batch Alpha Superkids shared—the meticulousness that Alma liked to think of as professionalism—she herself was more than stable. She'd survived every knockdown that life had thrown at her and come up swinging. Despite the disruption caused by the closure of the Superkids project and her relocation to a foster family halfway across the continent, she'd come through her childhood without any major depressions. She couldn't think of a single thing that would seem to indicate the onset of mental illness. She caught Ajax's eye. "How are
you
doing?"

Ajax
smiled. "No suicidal tendencies, if that's what you're asking. I've had a pretty happy life, on the whole. Just . . . minor glitches, that's all." His gaze strayed to the holopic of the elf woman as he spoke, and then he glanced away.

"Ahmed also thinks he found out why they scattered us," he added a moment later. "He said it had nothing to do with our well-being—we went to the highest bidders."

"What do you mean?" Alma wasn't certain that she'd heard him correctly.

"It's speculation on Ahmed's part, of course," Ajax added quickly. "But when he was compiling the data on the four of us who managed to stay in touch, Ahmed noticed a peculiar pattern: each of us was placed with a foster family that had links—albeit only distant ones, in some cases—to a corporation that was active in bionetic or cybernetic research. My own foster father was a cousin of the head of Ares Macrotechnology's cybernetics division; Agatha's foster mother was the ex-wife of a prominent shareholder in Saeder-Krupp; Ahmed's foster father's sister was . . ."

Alma
had stopped listening. Ahmed's "data" sounded like wild speculation. She found it a stretch that the UCAS government would auction the Superkids off like so much pirated tech—if ulterior motives were behind the foster-home placements, it was much more likely that whoever was responsible would keep the Superkids within the UCAS.

"Everyone in the world is linked to a major corporation, if you look hard enough," Alma countered.

"And every corporation on the planet is involved with cybertech and bionetics."

Ajax
took a sip of his sake. "You may be right," he said. "Ahmed's theory sounded a little far-fetched to me, too. But think of the possibilities: if someone else wanted a Superkid, having access to one of us would provide them with all of the tissue samples they needed."

"But would they bother to clone us, if we weren't perfect?" Alma asked. She found the thought that she might be "flawed" irritating. She didn't really believe it, herself. Something other than mere genetics must have caused Aaron to jump.

The possibility that the Superkids might have been cloned, however, made her pause. What if the shadow-runner who had extracted Gray Squirrel was a Superkid clone? But then Alma realized that the full-chromosome DNA scan that Hu had done on the saliva would have picked up one crucial difference between Alma and a clone: the length of their respective telomeres.

As humans age, biological markers on DNA called telomeres shorten. The older the cell, the shorter its telomeres. When cloning was first attempted in the 1990s, researchers noticed that the telomeres of the sheep they had cloned were just as short as those of the sheep they had obtained the genetic material from. When the resulting clone was born, "Dolly" the sheep had cells that appeared to be three years old.

This problem had been solved in the decades since. Today's clones were born with full-length telomeres. And since any clone of Alma would have to have been made after the breakup of the Superkids project, the woman who resulted would be twenty-two years old, at most. Her telomeres would be appreciably longer than Alma's.

The more Alma thought about it, the more she was convinced it had been one of her batch mates who had infiltrated PCI and extracted Gray Squirrel. Spitting on the PCI drone was no mere gesture of defiance. Given the precision the woman had shown in carrying out the extraction, the gesture had to have been a deliberate attempt to frame Alma. Whoever the shadowrunner was, her motivation was personal.

Which, once again, didn't make sense. Alma and her batch mates had been closer than siblings: they'd loved one another. There had been the usual rivalry and petty spats, but Alma couldn't remember a single significant fight in all of the eight years they'd been together. Not one.

Certainly not one that would cause someone to hold a grudge for twenty-two years.

Alma
cleared her throat. "We're not the only Superkids in Vancouver," she said, choosing her words carefully. "There's another one of us here from the Batch Alpha: one of the girls. She's been seen around town by people who said she looked enough like me to be my twin. It wouldn't be Aimee or Agatha, would it?"

Ajax
shook his head. "Aimee's in space with Zurich-Orbital, and Agatha's on active duty with her unit. She hasn't left the German Alliance in years."

"And Aella—how certain is Ahmed that she's dead?"

"The address he tracked down for her in Chicago was at ground zero. I doubt that she made it."

"Whoever this other Superkid is, I need to find her," Alma continued. "I need to speak to her about something. It's a . . . PCI security matter that I can't tell you much about."