Chapter 2
The gravel-voiced, gray-skinned officer with the fashionable blood-red predator eyes shoved a display across the battered interrogation room table toward Arco. “Sign your statement. Then you can go.” The officer’s glare probably intimidated people who weren’t as wrung out as Arco.
Wamduea, one of Novo Granica Media’s lawyers, intercepted the display and scooped it off the table to read. His welcome presence was one of the benefits of her contract with Novo G.
Acrid cleaning chemicals and stale sweat vied for the title of most objectionable smell in the stuffy blue room.
Arco had already awarded her chair the prize for least comfortable.
The clock display in the room lied, so she surreptitiously glanced at the display on Wamduea’s necklace-style percomp.
Dawn would be breaking in thirty-five minutes.
Ringo and Jaffasso were dead. Marcan’s biometal-reinforced spine — a legacy of her days as a gunnin in the CGC Air Div military service — had saved her life, but she’d need weeks of reintegration therapy once the medics regenerated the nerves in her neck.
Wamduea handed the display to Arco and gave her the barest of nods. She confirmed that the digital transcript matched her memory of what she’d said, then signed it with two biometrics and put the display on the table.
She’d already provided raw segments from her camera recordings to the police analysts. They might get around to reviewing them sometime this decade.
Too many in the Ridderth Police privately considered assassinations of journalists to be a community service.
If they’d known she was also a minder, even just a filer, they’d have detained her for a week on general suspicion.
If they thought she was a member of a criminal crew, or from the slums known as the Canals, they’d probably have charged her with littering the station with the dead and sent her to work on the garbage landfill moon while awaiting trial.
Justice in Ridderth had many variations.
Arco and Wamduea stood and walked to the door. When it didn’t open, Arco turned and raised an eyebrow at both Wamduea and the officer.
Wamduea’s lips thinned as he turned the full force of his quelling stare on the woman. The officer gave them both an insolent smile, clearly enjoying the moment, then slowly keyed a sequence on her police gauntlet. The door slid open.
Arco inventoried her belongings at the intake desk, relieved to find that only a couple of low-value cashflow chips had gone missing.
Her surviving flying cameras were all accounted for, probably because she’d told the clerk the cameras were designed to record thefts and send the holo to the planet-wide public net.
She and Wamduea took a lift up and waited silently in the rooftop lobby until the Novo G flitter landed on the airpad and pinged with the prearranged code. Walking fast through the drizzle, they splashed through the small lake on the roof and climbed into the back of the flitter.
Arco nodded to the pilot and was surprised to see Devanesh, Novo G’s security chief, sitting in the back. Devanesh’s smooth, dark skin and customary black clothing made her look like a specter in the dim light of the flitter’s cabin.
Arco dropped her backpack at her feet and webbed herself into the padded seat as Wamduea did the same.
Somehow, he still looked as if he’d just stepped out of a high-end body parlor, even after hours of riding herd on surly, overreaching police.
He’d stopped them from illegally using a telepath to interrogate her, and enforced it using his own minder talent for shielding both himself and her.
From her reflection in the window, she looked like a half-drowned, banged-up Canals rat. Felt like it, too. Still, she was alive. Blood-soaked memories reminded her that others weren’t.
Devanesh eyed her. “Office or hotel?”
Arco resolutely pushed away a tempting image of her own warm bed. “Office.”
Novo G’s fortress of a building had lumpy pull-down cots and banks of freshers for staff to stay overnight. A secure hotel in Ridderth that could be trusted not to sell its guest list to the highest bidder cost more than a pharma exec’s ransom.
Devanesh tapped her wrist-style percomp. “I sent a couple of Tapio’s staff to check your apartment and bring some clothes, but you’ll have to move.”
Tapio, Novo G’s preeminent senior journalist and majority-owner of the media company, had security staff to spare for quick tasks. Arco, a barely mid-rank journalist on a limited contract, was down to zero.
“Thanks.” She took a measured breath and let it out, trying to rise above the sadness threatening to engulf her and the tears stinging her eyes. Ringo and Marcan hadn’t been just replaceable commodities. They were friends. She found a great many people fascinating, but she trusted damn few of them.
Devanesh leaned forward. “What didn’t you tell the police that I should know?”
Arco rubbed her temples. “The holos the police showed me of Herlo Jaffasso aren’t the same man who’s been on my security team for the last week.
The ears and nose bridge were wrong, and the shoulders were too narrow.
Probably a rush job at a tourist bodyshop.
The real Jaffasso was a mid-level teke, but this asshole was high-level and galaxy-class smooth. ”
Wamduea raised an artfully sculpted eyebrow. “What do you think that means?”
He knew perfectly well, but she said it anyway.
“Minder Corps covert agent. Either officially sent by the Citizen Protection Service, or he took contracts on the side. The CPS’s reputation is sinking to new lows.
Their new budget is up for review, and they’re lobbying hard to add mandatory minder testing for all twenty-one-year-olds across the galaxy.
My Charisma stories from earlier this year are still riding the top trends, reminding the High Council how the CPS burns through gargantuan black-hole budgets on illegal projects. ”
Arco wished she liked alcohol or chems, because maybe they’d silence her spiking finder talent.
“Which means there’s more to that horrific project than kidnapping minders from their own agency to experiment on them, and they’re afraid I’ll find it.
Otherwise, I’m not worth the cost. A public bombing plus a follow-up kill brings even more negative media attention, not less. ”
Wamduea made a rude noise and brought up a list on his percomp.
“You underestimate your charm. It could just as easily be any of a dozen elected officials who don’t want you exposing their self-enrichment activities as you did with the continental governor and the security crypto companies.
Or any of a hundred crews who don’t want you exposing another corruption scandal that kills their rackets.
Or your where-are-they-now stories on the CPS Jumper squadron are making the CPS nervous because they’re afraid you’ll uncover Buddha only knows what.
And that’s not counting any other hornet’s nests you’ve poked that you haven’t yet added to the story register.
” He primly closed the percomp’s display.
“Not to mention the regular death threats from the Minder Foundation Rights’ militants who think you’re a purist who hates all minders, or the radical Naturalists who think you hate all non-minders.
Then there are your thousands of demented, obsessive fans who wouldn’t know a boundary if it bit them. ”
Arco ducked her head, too tired to argue. She knew the CPS’s Charisma project was exposed because her finder talent sparked, so it was up to her to figure out what else they were hiding and how to get it. One last story, and then she’d leave Mabingion for good.
Devanesh drummed long fingers on the arm of her seat.
“You’ll have to camp in the office until we can find out where our screening process failed and acquire a new team for you.
” Her lips thinned, and her hands stiffened with tension.
“We will not lose another team member on my watch. Or a journalist.”
Arco shook her head. “I appreciate your position, but I can’t do my job if I turtle in at Novo G.”
“And I can’t protect you if you don’t,” Devanesh snapped. “You insist on selecting all minders for your team, not just shielders, which makes you vulnerable to Minder Corps-style attacks. Two people died tonight. Three, if you count the real Jaffasso, whose grave is probably the landfill moon.”
Anger flared and commandeered Arco’s tongue. “Find me a non-minder team that can do better against an incompetently placed Kem-X bomb and a telekinetic assassin, and I’ll fucking hire them myself.”
Devanesh started to speak, but stopped herself, then averted her gaze.
Arco turned to the fogged window that framed the rain-shrouded cityscape. It was stupid to make an enemy of the security chief, whose skill she respected. “Sorry. It’s been a hard night.”
Devanesh nodded, apparently mollified. “We need candidates with personal security team experience, but who can’t be bought.
That disqualifies mercs and anyone with a pharma security background.
They also need to be immune to influence by the CPS, which lets out anyone who worked for them or who has vulnerable family.
And preferably someone who knows Ridderth.
” She leaned back in her seat. “You have friends all over the planet. You probably have better contacts than I do.”
Arco shrugged one shoulder. “Not really. People just like to talk to me.” Frustration rose. She couldn’t afford to get grounded, waiting for Devanesh’s screening. The CPS would patch its vulnerability fast.
Devanesh sat forward. “If you think of any candidates, send them my way. I’ll get them sorted.” She entered something in the percomp on her wrist. “Tapio’s staff can help in a pinch if you really need to go out.” She snorted. “Even a trained guard dog would be better than the… uhm, kind you hire.”
The security chief had never said anything directly against minders, but she continued to make her prejudice known in a hundred little ways.
Arco’s finder talent reminded her she knew someone who fit her own qualifications. Well, some of them. He was a powerful minder with a unique talent, he had no family, and he hated the CPS. He also half-hated her, but it was worth a spin.
She’d planned to be done with the dank, dirty city of Ridderth a hundred days ago, but every time she tried to move on like she always did, seemingly random threads scattered her plans and pulled her back.
She hadn’t been in one place for this long since she’d been holed up in a one-room hostel, finishing the final demonstration project for her B-level university certificate.
This time, she vowed, it really would be one last story and then she’d be gone.
She was no forecaster, able to predict the future based on hidden patterns in seemingly disparate data, but her nagging finder talent kept discovering hidden truths. And rising investigative journalist Arco Charrascos had built a loyal audience. She owed them.
Instinct told her Ridderth was a spark ready to ignite.
Bigger than the Mabingion Purge five years ago.
Maybe even bigger than the multi-city riots thirty years ago that heralded the birth of Ayorinn’s Legacy.
As the legendary promises of freedom and equality for minders kept resurging, so had the riots.
She’d rather not be even in the same solar system when they happened again, but it was her job.