Chapter 7 #2
A bright orange aircar high above and to the right caught his attention.
No automated traffic control system flew that recklessly, meaning a live human, probably chemmed to high orbit, was at the controls.
Three speeders — single flyers with little more than an amped-up engine and a rain canopy — rounded the corner of a tall building at high speed, weaving like swifts through the controlled traffic.
The aircar overreacted to avoid the first speeder and clipped the second and third, sending them plummeting toward the Novo Granica roof.
Instinct had Renner pulling Charrascos backward through the roof entrance and into the fire-glass vestibule. He shot tendrils of talent to the aircar and the speeder that smashed into the kiosk of the flitter stacker, twenty meters from where they’d been standing.
“No occupants.”
His former boss would have been mad and blamed him.
Charrascos opened her bag and pulled out her tablet.
Her eyes narrowed in concentration as her fingers flew through the holographic interface.
A dozen thumb-sized spheres flew out of her satchel.
She swung a booted foot at the sensor to iris open the vestibule doors, and the spheres flew out to swarm over the destruction.
She caught him staring at her. “What?”
“You carry a fleet of spy eyes?” The woman continued to perplex him.
She smiled briefly as she went back to directing the flying cameras. “Doesn’t everyone?” She tapped her left earwire and began subvocalizing.
He replayed the accident in his mind. In his younger days, he and his street-rat crew used ground vehicles to go after vulnerable storefronts that could be easily looted, but the principle was the same.
The remote-hijacked aircar and speeders were the easy one-two setup, and the bullseye was the stacker or the kiosk.
The true target was Novo Granica, and maybe Charrascos herself.
She opened the vestibule doors again. The flying cameras flew in and landed with tiny thumps in her open bag.
She sidestepped twice to stand a meter away from him. The tablet displayed rapid-time vids, and her fingers flew even faster as she subvocalized again. Seconds later, the colorful holo flattened and winked out.
She put the tablet back in her bag and sealed it, then turned to look at him. “I published it as free-to-read breaking news under a throwaway avatar. Let’s see if anyone trackable has an untoward interest in a minor traffic incident with zero casualties.”
Her gaze turned to the flitter stacker. “We’ll have to wait for Devanesh’s investigators and the facilities team to unload our ride.” Her shoulders slumped. “Damn, but I’m tired of this.”
He gathered she meant more than just being stuck in the Novo G building. “Call a secure autocab.”
She shook her head. “Can’t trust them in Ridderth.
About half a year ago, a wetwork crew cracked the encryption using intel they bought from an insider with money troubles.
Until the regional government implements the new cryptogon, anyone who buys the code can crack it in about five minutes flat.
Half of Novo G’s staff have rewards on their heads from people with grudges.
Even Z’Dann, because she sometimes publishes negative reviews.
” She pointed a thumb toward the debris outside.
“It’s like flushing a flock of pheasants and netting them as they take wing. ”
That security vulnerability was new. Renner made a mental note to find out what else had gotten worse in Ridderth since he’d been gone. Charrascos’s life and his own might depend on it.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Come on, let’s snag the good chairs in the eighth-floor lounge before anyone else does. We can track the trends from there.”
Hours later, at Charrascos’s townhouse, he set up the security sensors. After they’d finally made it back well after dark, he’d thought she’d go to bed. Instead, despite how tired she looked, she went straight to her attic office and immersed herself in work.
He spread out the new security equipment on the kitchen counter.
It took an hour to hide the sensors outside at the complex’s access points and throughout her townhouse.
When he put them in her office, she didn’t appear to notice.
It wouldn’t surprise him if even a full-scale riot wouldn’t distract her while she was manipulating multiple display holos and muttering to herself or subvocalizing.
Her intense focus reminded him of Davidro’s prize forecaster, Georgie.
Except Davidro hadn’t permanently warped Charrascos’s cognitive functions by dosing her with experimental minder control drugs.
Annoyingly, Charrascos refused to tell him what had happened to Georgie and the rest of Davidro’s staff, in case it interfered with his memory recovery.
After seeing how easily Charrascos traced specific reader interest in her anonymously published traffic accident article, he was glad he hadn’t searched for public data or stories about them.
Or about himself, for that matter. The CPS had high-powered data-mining algos and expert data divers to interpret them.
The agency would kill him instantly if they found him.
Renner checked that the townhouse’s front door was sealed, then checked the feeds from all the sensors.
He’d decided to sync them to the controller that came with the system rather than his own percomp.
He only connected his percomp to the net when he wanted to read. One less thing for enemies to track.
Which reminded him, he needed to find out who the top crews were in Ridderth these days. He’d been avoiding them all because it’d be too easy to fall back into the only life he’d known before Davidro. But he couldn’t do his job if he didn’t recognize trouble when it scuttled in.
He folded the controller screen and slid it into his pocket, so if it alerted, he’d both hear and feel it with his talent. He liked tech and figuring out how it worked, but his talent tended to be hard on it.
The percomp Charrascos had given him was only still alive because it was shock-resistant, and because he’d only used tiny trickles of talent since becoming Faraday Brenner. His looks had changed drastically, but his unique talent hadn’t, and people might remember him.
He needed to get the hell off the fucking planet and find a better way to damage the CPS. Would Charrascos take him with her when she left?
With nothing better to do, he stripped off his clothes and cleaned up in the tiny fresher connected to his bedroom.
He enjoyed the luxury of not having to share the shower as he did in the tenement in the Canals, where he rented a room, and of having a working solardry unit.
Being cold and wet in Ridderth could be deadly.
He could have afforded a better living space, but that would have meant spending more of the cashflow chip Charrascos had gifted him.
Even after buying blackmarket biometrics changes, he still had more than half left and wanted to keep it that way.
Besides, bartering kept him off transaction trackers.
What the government didn’t know, they couldn’t tax or trace.
While he put on his exercise clothes, which doubled as sleepwear, he synced his percomp to the net. Two messages at once — a record for him.
After reading them, he climbed the stairs to Charrascos’s office. He liked the exercise and disliked the townhouse’s musty-smelling lift.
She’d changed into a green loose-knit shirt and dark pants printed with famous galaxy patterns, but she was still awake, curled up in the townhouse’s only padded chair, reading her pink-rimmed tablet at lightning speed.
She smiled and paused the feed when she noticed him.
“Want to be a subject-matter expert on electrical theory for me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know any.”
She blinked. “None at all? I’d have thought that with your unique talent…” she trailed off with a frown. “Sorry, that was rude.”