Chapter 5
EVEN ACCUSTOMED AS I AM to seeing the insides of lifers’ houses (and their occupants), downstairs is impressive.
Especially the floor. Clear glass in the centre of the room reveals an incredible aquatic spectacle beneath, replete with sand, rocks, seaweed, coral.
Vibrant schools of fish dart. Larger ones wander alone.
Retreating out of sight, I actually think I see the outline of a damned shark.
The majority of the illumination is from below, leaving rippling caustic curves drifting up onto everything in the room, myself and Old Woman included.
I crouch and rap it with my knuckles. “This isn’t digiglass, is it.” I’ve kept my cognitive revs active, otherwise I would have assumed the opposite.
“No. And don’t tap on it like that, please.”
Expensive. So expensive. The rest of the room is standard enough, for whatever top-fractional-percentage wealthy this woman is.
Smaller than the cavernous space upstairs.
Polished concrete pillars. Tastefully lit artwork in tastefully spaced alcoves along the walls.
Chic and clean, even if it still smells faintly of old person.
The source of the smell comes to a halt in the centre of the room. Gazes distractedly down into the water. The bright lines shifting across her face make her wrinkles crawl. A foot-long fish swims torpidly along the glass below, gills pulsing, ignorant of our presence.
“Are they real?”
Old Woman frowns at me. “The fish? Yes. I just said that.”
“No, I mean are they actual fish? Or Dupes?”
“What’s the difference?” Weirdly defensive. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” They’re Dupes, then. Cloned. Anyone who’d managed to source the real thing would be falling all over themselves to say so. I change the subject. “You said there were other ways in?”
She nods. Not taking her eyes from what’s below. “This is one.”
“The fish tank?”
“Aquarium,” she corrects sternly.
“Aquarium.” I join her. Crouch again and peer down. “Where?”
“East side of the house has an intake and outflow that goes to the river.” She makes a circular shape with her hands about a metre apart.
“Grates? Alarms?”
“Alarms on the intake purifiers, which would have to be removed for anyone to get through. Plenty of grates along the whole stretch.”
“How far to the river?”
“One and a half kilometres.”
I’m impressed. She’s right—someone like me could get in this way—but it’s not an ingress most people would think of. And she’s being precise. Surprisingly helpful. “How large is the… aquarium?”
“It spans most of the house.”
“How big’s that?”
“About forty thousand square metres. Give or take.”
Damn. Damn. “Alright. I’ll need you to show me exactly where those pipes are, later. But before that, where’s the other entrance?”
“Farther down.” She motions with her head for me to follow.
We walk down a long hallway, lit only by the two-metre-wide path of glass that ripples with the constant motion of aquatic life.
A lot of rooms branch off it. Many are sleeping quarters.
Lavish and enormous and still dominated by sleek, hovering mag-beds with black satin sheets. All are expectedly empty.
“So will the event be here, or off-site?”
“Pardon, dear?”
“You’ve contracted me for two weeks. When someone does that, it’s because something’s happening. They want to throw a party. Visit the city. Do something their regular security can’t account for.”
A wisp of frizzled white hair drifts over Old Woman’s eyes as she shakes her head. “No. No, that’s not why you’re here.”
“Alright.” I draw out the word. Make it a question, because it damned well is. I’m already uneasy enough about this job. Every time Old Woman opens her mouth, she manages to make me more so.
“Someone wants to kill me.”
“Broadly, I’d already assumed that much.”
“They’re trying to kill me. Actively. And I think they’re going to try again soon.”
“Again?”
“It’s been… an ongoing endeavour, I suppose you would say.
” There’s a shadow to her smile this time.
“First time was a hacked volo six months ago. Pure luck I wasn’t on board when it went down.
Then a few weeks later, the tech in my house had a really good go at trying to stab me.
You know how Automaid can cut your hair? ” I nod. “It aimed lower.”
Ah. Thus the lack of bots. “How’d you survive?”
“Emergency EMP killed the tech, and medi-gel lasted me until I could get to an off-net AID I’d had installed after the volo incident.
Wasn’t fun, though. I didn’t wake up for more than two weeks.
” A distant look as she says it, but she moves on briskly.
“After that, I came out here. Went dark. Thought that might be the end of it, but about a month ago, biosecurity stopped a team of three coming through the woods.”
Her tone remains light. As if people trying to murder her is par for the course. Hell, having met her, maybe it is. But assuming she’s not outright lying, what she’s describing sounds serious. Not just the usual lifer paranoia.
“You ID them?”
She gives me a disdainful look. “If I ran your DNA, would it come up with anything?”
Fair point. “But you must have at least a guess about who’s trying to kill you. Or why.” When she shakes her head, I sigh. “Then tell me about you. Your life. Your connections. Maybe we can—”
“That’s all rather personal, dear.” She smiles an infuriating smile. The kind that says she knows she could make my job easier, but won’t, and that’s my problem rather than hers.
“Yeah,” I mutter resignedly, massaging my temples.
So she almost certainly does have an idea of who’s behind all this, but is concerned about a potential…
conflict of interest, for the Keres, once this contract’s up in a couple of weeks.
Probably why she’s already gone to more effort than most to maintain her privacy.
It’s not an uncommon worry. And not, I admit, entirely unwarranted.
“Alright. So you chose me for this job, specifically, because you think that having something to hold over me will make me more motivated.” I’m not sure whether to be more annoyed at the professional slight, or the fact she’s probably right.
“Why do you think these people will try again while I’m here? ”
“I have information to that extent.”
“From?” I wave my hand wearily before she can open her mouth. “Let me guess. It’s personal.”
“But reliable,” she assures me cheerfully.
“Fine. Then what happens once my two weeks is up?”
She chuckles. “If we reach that point, I suppose I’ll look at extending your contract.”
Not exactly an enthusing idea as far as I’m concerned, but a reasonable approach. I’m expensive. I probably wouldn’t hire me for more than two weeks at a time either.
Our footsteps echo as we reach another stairwell and descend. The walls on either side of the way down are transparent, fish with glinting scales shimmering their way through long seagrass to our left and right.
“What’s down here?” We reach the bottom, and it’s clear this isn’t more living space. One wall showcases the base of the aquarium—partly just sand pressed up against the glass, at this depth—and otherwise, there’s only a short utilitarian passageway ahead.
“Maintenance access for some of the house systems. Air scrubbers, recyclers.” Old Woman stops after only a couple of steps and places her hand against a pillar. A hidden panel slides away to reveal a keypad. A few soft beeps later, and part of the wall swings open. “And this.”
I follow her onto a narrow concrete strip. Fluorescents blink to life, lining the roof of both the platform and the four-metre-wide, transparent tube that runs alongside it. The glaring white is a harsh contrast to the placid warmth of the aquarium lighting behind us.
“An old Loop station?” The curved glass door to the cylinder ahead reflects my surprise back at me. I thought these things were all abandoned.
“Not that old.” She presses her thumb against another pad on the wall; there’s a whirring of machinery, and I step back as a reflective, bullet-shaped pod discharges itself from a hidden storage area at the end of the tube, sliding to a stop in front of us.
There’s an audible hissing of air as it makes a seal with the door, which slides open.
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say. Loop tech’s been obsolete for decades.
“I had it built a few years ago. It was a discreet way of bringing supplies out from the city. And me, too, sometimes. No tracking, not like the volos. Nobody had to know anyone was out here.”
The city. I assume she means Themis. “Nobody knew you dug five hundred kilometres of tunnel between your house and the city?”
“I did let bots do most of the work, dear.” I open my mouth but she preempts.
“I’m joking. Most of the track was already complete and still useable; I bought this place partly because I knew it was under here.
The rest was done with bots I owned, designed by an off-net neural I owned, printed and assembled on-site. All of it scrapped after the fact.”
I don’t say anything for a bit. Trying to fathom the cost of such an enterprise, of keeping infrastructure like this a secret, hurts my head. “How long ago?”
“A couple of years.”
So nothing to do with the attempts on her life. Or not a direct reaction to them, anyway. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why?” I’ve never heard of even a lifer going this far—and the fluorescent lights in here are really reminding me that she’s not one.
“I like my privacy, dear.” Explanation and reminder, all rolled into one.
Damn, but I hate not having Atti in my ear.
Every protection job is legally meant to be anonymous—if the client’s also a Ten-O-Ten, there’s nothing stopping the Keres from shopping their services to whoever’s trying to do the killing, once the contract’s up—but Atti would take all of three seconds to tell me who Old Woman is anyway.
A few words for a voiceprint and she’d have a name, history, probably exactly who wants her dead and why.
Not that it would usually matter. In fact, both from professional courtesy and disinterest, I usually wouldn’t bother. But this entire job is off. Old Woman knows about me, requested me personally. And she knows something about my past. Something not even the Keres have been able to find.
Old Woman’s pressing more buttons on the panel, starting some tangential anecdote about why having her own private Loop system is so useful. There’s movement behind the security glass as the hidden compartment slides opens again, and the pod begins its return to storage.
My cognitive revs prickle.
I filter out whatever Old Woman’s blathering on about. Focus on the other sounds, which are what my cogs are screaming for me to pay attention to. There’s the hollow rush of air meeting vacuum behind the glass. The blinking buzz of the lights. Magnetic locks shifting into place as the pod retreats.
And a dissonant whine. Building. Barely audible, even to me.
No time to shout a warning.
I activate my somatics; as strength courses through me I grab Old Woman and pivot, throwing her five metres through the still-open doorway to the house.
She doesn’t do more than let out a shriek of disbelief—and pain, probably pain, given how she lands on the concrete and slides—as I dive after her, bad leg protesting.
An orange bloom. The splintering of glass. Heat, and the sensation of being jerked backward as the vac seal shatters.
The door seals just before I’m sucked back through.
The klaxons start.