Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
—the recovered files of Dragonfly Martim
—the recovered files of Dragonfly Martim
If there’s one thing that’s easy to procure in Tenacity Cityhab, it’s medical care.
The Founders knew their limited population might easily be wiped out by disease and infection, so even the lowliest deckhands on the Great Ships had access to free health care.
Health Services will never be a wealthy division, but it’s stable, safe, and insulated.
The Executive and the Board have never tampered with its budget.
Civilization on Aquilo is precarious. Wagemen who are sick or injured can’t work. Safety and health are paramount.
This does not apply to freelancers.
Isako has never given this fact much thought until now.
The intake nurse at the clinic scans Isako’s badge. “You’re far from home,” he notes.
She and Kob didn’t dare use either the hijacked car or the shadowcons’ trucks, in case the vehicles were being tracked. After staggering on foot to a main street, they summoned a different car to take them to the nearest medical center. Isako has no idea where they are.
When she doesn’t reply, the nurse doesn’t offer further comment, nor does he ask her how she came by her injuries or react to the bandages from the wounds she received last week.
Health care workers don’t ask those sorts of questions of contractors.
Someone important in the Company is paying the longkniveswoman to do work that gets her cut up and they will probably want her fixed. That’s all they need to know.
The nurse starts to lead the way to a patient room. Isako points to Kob, who’s slumped with exhaustion across three seats in the reception area. “Take care of my friend first,” she insists. “He’s hurt worse.”
“Our practice doesn’t accept offscrip. I can ask the front desk for a list of nearby charity clinics.”
“We’re not going to another clinic. Bill the cost to my scripline.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” A person’s level of access to medical care depends on which division they work for, seniority, age, status, and other factors, but in any case, it’s nontransferable.
“Just send everything to SatOps under my ID.”
“You’re going to claim you needed two body scans, two intravenous lines, two nanorepair injections, and twice the number of wounds sealed?”
“My client won’t audit the charges.” At least, not for a while. Once Minto’s people get around to questioning her, either the director will forgive her if she’s fulfilled her mission, or it won’t matter anymore.
“Isa,” Kob mumbles from his prone position. “It’s fine. We’ll go elsewhere.”
“No, we won’t. We’re here and we’re not leaving.
” She straightens to her full height and levels a you-do-not-want-to-test-me stare at the nurse.
“I don’t care what the rules are for other freels.
Treat him. Or we’ll both sit here bleeding all over your waiting room until you call Cityhab Security.
We’ve had a very bad evening so far and you don’t want to be the one to make it worse.
So patch him up, and we’ll be on our way. ”
It’s mostly a bluff. By now Uchi has likely sent people to confirm that the shadowcons did their job and that Isako and Kob are dead.
Once he finds out they’re not, they have to expect he’ll come after them again.
They can’t stay in one place if they’re being hunted; they need to leave as soon as possible. But the nurse doesn’t know that.
Thirty minutes later, they depart the clinic with their wounds patched, bodies loaded with painkillers and nanomeds to fight infection and speed healing.
It’s been a comically bad evening. Isako would like to go back to the hotel, strip out of her bloody clothes, and pass out in bed, but it’s not safe to return to SoCon GasPro.
She considers her apartment in Astrocom, over an hour away on the other side of Tenacity, although she can’t be sure that there won’t be assassins lying in wait there as well.
“My place,” Kob suggests. “Barely anyone knows where I live.”
One of the few advantages of being a ronin is that Kob has no badge or scripline that can be monitored.
He found the place he’s living in now through personal connections and he pays rent with offscrip and labor.
No doubt a dedicated assassin could track him down, but they’re unlikely to do so quickly.
By the time they get to Kob’s place, Isako’s dead on her feet.
From a distance, the front of Kob’s apartment appears undisturbed, but they approach cautiously, on guard for any sign of danger, any evidence that shadowcons were here.
The night’s as cold and black as Father Aquilo’s asscrack, and the street’s empty.
Even the freelancers she last saw occupying the curb have sought shelter elsewhere.
Isako takes up a covering position to Kob’s side, hand on her triggersheath as he cautiously unlocks the front door and pushes it in quietly.
Nothing happens. After Kob stands in the darkened entryway for a second, his shoulders come down and he walks across the threshold.
Isako relaxes slightly and follows after him.
Nothing escapes Kob’s keen sense of observation; if there was anything amiss about his residence, he would’ve noticed.
Once they’re inside, Kob closes the door and bolts it, then draws the shutters on the windows.
Isako doesn’t realize what an enormous relief it is to be back here until she feels herself sagging.
A sense of safety envelops the small apartment.
Everything here feels like it belongs to Kob—the tiny kitchen, the rack of free weights, the succulent houseplants, the shape of him infused into the sofa.
She falls across the length of the cushions and plants her face into a pillow, inhaling the pleasant sandalwood scent of the beard oil that Kob uses.
“We should take turns keeping watch, in case that one shadowcon decides to redeem himself,” she mumbles, right before she loses consciousness.
When she awakens, there’s bright sunlight bordering the shuttered windows. Shit. She slept straight through the night and didn’t take a turn keeping watch at all. Turns out the best cure for menopausal insomnia is the exhaustion of nearly dying.
She sits up, very slowly. Everything fucking hurts.
She feels unbearably grimy and her mouth tastes disgusting.
Kob is already awake, and apparently has been for a while, because he’s changed out of his blood-splattered clothes from last night into joggers and a clean T-shirt.
She was apparently so deeply unconscious that she didn’t hear him moving around at all.
Kob’s sitting on the edge of his single bed, apparently deep in thought, his triggersheath lying on the unmade bedspread beside him.
“Sorry,” she croaks. “I failed the whole keeping-watch plan.”
“We’re both still alive, so no harm done.”
“You should’ve woken me.”
“No need. There’s a motion and biomonitoring security perimeter around the apartment. I set it up months ago. Figured it was only a matter of time until someone decided to take a run at me.”
She’s relieved he’s thought ahead, but the reminder of the danger he’s in is sobering.
She puts her feet down, winces at the chill against her bare skin, and pulls the thick fleece blanket tight around her shoulders.
She doesn’t remember having a blanket when she fell onto the sofa last night and realizes Kob must’ve placed it on her when she was asleep.
Guiltily, she asks, “How are you doing? Did you manage to get some sleep?”
“A little. Enough.” He rubs his beard, which is starting to look unkempt. “I feel like ass, though.”
“Same.” She stands with a groan, dragging a hand through her neglected hair. “I know it’s a cliché, but we really are getting too old for this shit.”
“Use the shower first,” he suggests.
She hesitates. She desperately wants to wash off the blood and grime, but she feels bad that she’s used his stored water once already when she’s certain he budgets his supply for one person.
He’s as much a mess as she is, and this is his home that he’s offering as refuge, at the risk of his life.
“I’ll go after you,” she insists, then makes it easy for him to acquiesce by wrinkling her nose in mock offense at his smell. “You need it more.”
He sniffs under his own armpit and makes a distressed face. “Holler if anyone comes to kill us, so I have time to throw on some clothes. I’d hate to be termed while buck naked.”
They laugh weakly. Considering how close they came to being offed yesterday, the thought of such an inglorious death shouldn’t be funny, but contractors have a morbid sense of humor. Coping mechanism.
The sound of running water comes from the bathroom, accompanied by Kob’s remarkably on-tune humming. Isako gets up and peers through the slats of the window blinds. Everything looks quiet and unthreatening out there. So far.
She sits back down and tries to think clearly about the situation.
Sandbar Uchi met with her and claimed that Martim fatally overdosed after being fired for drug policy violations. After promising to file a delayed report with the Agency, he peremptorily sent her away with a warning to leave the division within a day.
What need was there to send shadowcons to kill her after that?
The only logical explanation is that he doesn’t want her asking any more questions or examining his story more closely. He already figures she was sent by his enemies to undermine him, and he knows she’s not going to give up so easily. Which means he’s got something else to hide.
Something other than Martim’s death. Something worse than the Field 93 cover-up. Something he fears could actually jeopardize his confirmation to the Board.
Every director has a skeleton or two, but some have entire graveyards.
Or maybe she’s misunderstanding his motives. He could simply be a vindictive bastard with enough money to spare to preemptively wipe out a nosy contractor and send a message to all his opponents that pissing him off has serious consequences.
In any case, she’s not getting anywhere near SoCon GasPro now.
Uchi rules his fiefdom absolutely and she and Kob would be walking around with targets on their backs.
Even if she could get back into SoCon GasPro, she’s running out of time.
The Board votes in sixteen days. Minto’s timeline seemed entirely unreasonable from the start, and now it’s practically impossible.
The sober realization that her assignment’s just about fucked doesn’t upset her as much as she thought it would.
She’s going to end her career on an epic low note, probably unable to resign with the bonus she’s rightfully due—and that’s a very shitty feeling.
But what really pisses her off is knowing that Uchi’s going to get away with it all.
Martim will stay dead. Questions about Field 93 will remain unanswered.
The director’s sins against his people will be swept away by the winds of success carrying him inexorably higher and higher over mere mortals.
It’s not fucking right.
Kob emerges, a towel wrapped around his waist and his hair wet and slicked back. “Your turn,” he says. “I’ll make us something to eat.”
The small bathroom is pleasantly steamy.
Isako breathes in the warmth as she undresses.
She wipes clear a circle on the fogged mirror and examines her sealed wounds and myriad of bruises.
Her hair is messy and lank, and there are dark circles under her eyes that make her look even older and more haggard than she feels.
How the hell did I end up like this?
She asks herself the question almost wonderingly. At what point did the image she once had of herself diverge so sharply from reality?
She sets the water timer for three minutes, turns the heat up, and flinches as the spray hits her skin, a shock that becomes a welcome relief, easing her sore and tense muscles, washing away some of the awfulness of last night.
She rubs a glob of shampoo into her scalp and rinses it out as quickly as she can; she can’t take the time or water to wash her hair properly and comb it out under the weak spray, so she does the best she can for now.
She hastily scrubs herself clean, and when the timer goes off, she sighs with disappointment and steps out, wrapping a towel around herself and another around her hair.
She’s used up the last of Kob’s soap, so she opens the bathroom cabinet, looking to replace it.
She finds an extra bar on the bottom shelf.
The top shelf is packed with a long row of prescription pill bottles, an alarmingly large number of them, lined up like a shot glass collection.
She spots a bottle of the big white pills she’s seen Kob swallowing with his meals, along with a variety of common pharmaceuticals she recognizes from having them in her own cabinet—painkillers, antianxiety drugs, sleeping aids.
The rest are unfamiliar, their long, convoluted names inviting speculation as to their function. Why does Kob have so many medications? Except for his occasional migraines, he seems the picture of health.
No, that’s not true. She’s been pretending he’s unchanged by overlooking the little differences, not wanting to take any of them seriously. The brief tremble in his hand the other day when he was lifting a fork. The way he squints at the screen when he’s reading, as if it hurts his eyes.
Kob’s getting old, just like her. She’s got a litany of complaints she could start in on—chronically sore joints, insomnia, forgetfulness, dry skin, just for starters.
But her medicine cabinet doesn’t look like a whole vastblasted pharmacy.
She shouldn’t be invading her friend’s privacy like this, even accidentally. Guiltily, she takes the soap and starts to close the cabinet, but one last thing catches her eye and she freezes with the bathroom cabinet door ajar.
She didn’t notice them at first amid all the pill bottles: a couple of injection pens.
Not generic sleepstims either. Thin white cylinders that she’s seen before.
With trembling fingers, she picks one of them up.
Unlike the empty one she found on Martim’s nightstand, these pens are unused, the injection tabs still intact.
Sudexatrine 02.