Cosmonaut Keep (8 page)

She walks straight past the Russki, who's pretending to examine a window display of dusty plumbing. Her gaze meets the reflection of his for a fraction of a second, then she's past him. He looks smart in that uniform, though he's less a soldier than she is; all the civil servants of the occupation wear military uniform. It's one of those Russki things.

He waits until her heels have metronomically ticked off five seconds, then whistles after her. She turns, swiveling shoulders and hips, clasping the soft leather of her handbag. She grins at him and glances over at a still-narrower alleyway. He nods imperceptibly and strides over and turns sharply into it; she follows, her gait now businesslike rather than professional.

She looks at Josif with a certain warmth and recognition that no caution can prevent. Over the months she has come to quite like the man. Even so, she is surprised when instead of their usual minute of pretended bargaining he catches her by the waist and draws her toward him. His mouth descends on hers. There's a moment of lip and tongue contact and then she hears, as much as feels, a small metallic object being pushed gently against her teeth. She almost swallows, which might not have been a bad idea, if messy in its long-run implications. Then she manages to tongue it between molars and cheek. It's about the size and shape of a small coin, with a rounded rim.

Josif moves his head back with a hushing breath. Jadey nods, almost as imperceptibly. Then his chest slams into hers and she hears a thump, feels an impact, and there's a horrible grating noise. As she takes a forced backward step Josif becomes deadweight in her arms and she has to let go of him. His mouth opens as if to scream. Only blood comes out, and then he's down on the wet paving, head and heels hammering, blood pooling and spurting, bowels voiding.

And she's two more steps back and in the firing position, the one-shot plastic Liberator in her locked hands in front of her.

There's a young man facing her, looking shocked, with a big bloody knife clutched in his right hand. Zip jerkin and jeans and gloves, enclosed from neck to sole in filmy isolation polymer: medical or murder gear.

She could have done with some of that herself. There's blood all down her blouse.

The young man's expression turns to annoyance and puzzlement. "You're not -- "

"What you expected?" Her mouth is dry; she tries not to bite the thing in her mouth, or her tongue.

"Not expecting me."

She doesn't look away from his eyes, or from the blade. Josif is terminal; not necessarily dead, yet, but it would take a crash medical team here in the next couple of minutes to save him, and she doubts that she can make this happen.

"Back off," she warns. He flinches, and she strains to keep her voice low. "No, I was bloody well not expecting you. Why should I have been?"

Then she realizes what the guy thinks has been going on.

"Oh, Christ, you thought I was on your team?"

The guy nods. In the dim light she can just about make out his buzz-cut hair, hooded eyes, thin face. She doubts if he's out of his teens. Exactly the sort of kid who gets involved in nationalist terrorist cells that think luring Russian soldiers into dark alleyways then killing them is a good way to build an arsenal for the Great Day. Kids like that are the bane of her fucking life.

"Thought it was all set up," he mumbles. His London accent is so thick she can barely follow it. "Shit."

She'll let the implications of that pass, for now.

"Run," she says, gesturing with the pistol.

"And then what did you do?"

"Ran in the opposite direction, down another alley. Just a minute later I'd circled back and crossed York Way again, farther up, and the cops were like flies on shit around the junction I'd been at. That's why I reckon your hardware's fucked. Decided not to go back to my place, headed for a safe house and found it wasn't. Door was getting the heavy boot just as I turned the corner, so I turned the other way pretty sharp. Back in the red-light area, I had a few stashes of spare clothes and ID and shit. Sealed containers spot-glued inside dump bins, places like that. So I used one of them to get changed and ditch the tarty gear. Went into my cover job -- it's deliberately a suspicious-looking job, American book import company -- phoned you at coffee break and got the midday train. And, like I said, the busies were giving me funny looks."

I stared at her, somewhat shaken by this account -- for its implied sex as much as its explicit violence. How long had I known her? A couple of years, at the outside. She'd wandered into a codeshop down Leith Walk, where I was working between contracts -- this was before I'd achieved my current high rep as a manager, I hasten to add -- dropped a set of Calvin Klein eyewear on the counter and asked for a few interesting modifications.
Serious
warranty-voiding and copyright-violating stuff, and the kind of thing that there really was no legitimate use for: as blatant and illegal as sawing off a shotgun. I took it on, without asking questions, and gave her back the kit a day later. Repeat business was assured, and she'd started turning up in the sort of places I hung out in. We'd chat, maybe have a coffee or do some drugs, but nothing more came of it than that. I wasn't too sure, now, when I'd first become aware that she was involved in the English resistance; she must have told me explicitly at some point, but I couldn't remember when. We'd never actually discussed it.

"Do you still have the thing the Russian guy passed to you?"

"Of course." An object appeared in her uncurling palm like a conjuring effect. I picked it up and turned it over.

"It's a datadisk," I said, not surprised but vaguely disappointed, as though I'd been subconsciously expecting it to be a new secret weapon.

"Tell me something I don't know!"

"Maybe I can," I said. "I can tell you what's
on
it."

She shook her head. "I ran it in my reader on the train. It's garbage, or encrypted."

"Feh." I took my own reader from my pocket, patched it to my phone, and slid the disk in. "It's probably not one of the commercial codes, but I doubt it's the latest mil-spec or there wouldn't have been much point in passing it on, would there?"

"You got a point there." Her voice sounded sad. "Josif wouldn't have had access to real hard secrets anyway -- this must be important more because it's current than because it's restricted."

I called up my file of thousands of keys and set them to work throwing themselves at it. This wasn't code-breaking as such, just matching the code to keys which, legally speaking, I had no business having, which is why I kept them stashed on a server far away. On the side of the screen a little red line shrank slowly as the program ran.

"Doesn't seem like enough to die for."

"He didn't know he was risking that," she said.

"Or to kill for."

"You think he was set up?" She made a sour mouth. "It's possible."

Ding,
went the reader.

"Wah-hey!"

I started paging through the decoded text. Jadey leaned in to look, murmuring interest and appreciation. I paged faster, suddenly suspecting that it all looked familiar. It was.

"This is an ESA spec. Remember -- the space station stuff?"

"Can you check it out?"

"Yeah, sure. Can't
do
very much with it on this thing, but ... " I patched it over to the big screen so we could both follow it comfortably, and resumed clicking through the pages, more or less at random. Some of them were text, with the elaborate numbering system of tech spec -- some individual lines within paragraphs had their own version numbers -- and some, which took just a fraction of a second longer to resolve onscreen, were deep three-dimensional diagrams and schematics optimized for looking at, and through, with VR glasses or contacts. Most of these were matched either to a photograph or an indistinguishably hyperrealististic rendering of the final object.

"Y'know," Jadey pondered aloud, "I can't claim to be an expert on asteroid mining, let alone whatever equipment you'd need to talk to an alien hive-mind or whatever, but that sure doesn't look like mining equipment, or a scientific research establishment either."

I snorted. "You're right, there. You do need something like a refinery for asteroid mining, but this is more than that. Looks to me like some kind of automated factory cannibalized out of parts that might have passed muster for either that or a research station. They're
building
something out there, or planning to."

"Any indication what it might be?"

"Could be in there," I said with a shrug, "but it would be a devil of a job to find it. There's more data here than in the
Encyclopedia Britannica."

"Well." She gave me a funny look. "I don't think it's for us to try and figure this out." Scratched her head. "Like, I don't think we should even be looking at it."

"Oh." I clicked it off. "Especially not me, huh?"

"Especially not you. For your own peace of mind."

"That is one way of looking at it." I somewhat resented the idea that I had less business rummaging through possible state secrets than she had, but I realized this was irrational -- the E.U. was no more "my" state than it was hers, and I was in my own way as much its enemy. Just not as well-trained an enemy. Not that we had torture to worry about -- this was Scotland, a happy little Socialist Democracy, after all, not some Third World client-state of either side -- but we both knew what the Federal Security Bureau's truth-drugs could do, and the less we knew, the less trouble we were likely to be in if we were caught.

Jadey fetched more coffee and we sat for a few moments warming our hands on the mugs and not saying anything.

"So," I said at last, "what do we do now? You still want to go to America?"

Jadey stroked her lower lip with the upper teeth, put down the mug and shoved her hands under her armpits, rocking back and forth a little. "Oh shit, I don't know," she said. "If it wasn't for the suspicion that all our codes are crackable in real time now, I'd just zap that lot through on the fast pipe and make my way home clean. Hell, if they pulled me at the airport or wherever I'd still be out in a few weeks."

"A spy-swap? But you're not -- "

"Ah, some kinda analogous deal. The private sector has its ways too, okay? But as it is, I have to get that thing back physically, and it has to go separately from me. And you know what? I don't think we can rely on the mail."

"Take it to the U.S. consulate?" I suggested brightly. "Diplomatic bag?"

"I don't know if I want the statists to have it either," she said gloomily. "I don't think my friends in the Russki apparat down south wanted that. They wanted this sent to the people in the U.S. who could make the most use of it. And that means
our
people, not the spooks."

I refrained from asking further who "our people" were, and not just for security reasons. Not having been born yesterday, I already had a shrewd suspicion. One of the arguable advantages of living under the Right-Wing Communist variant of state capitalism was that the official media carried quite sensible materialist analyses, of other countries' affairs, anyway. The split in the U.S. capitalist class was a staple of
Europa Pravda
punditry. At the bottom of it, beneath all the talk about Yankees and Cowboys, Globalists and Isolationists, Old Money and New, lay a material interest that was almost embarrassingly crude -- oil.

The U.S. domestic oil producers fueled the New Money forces, and the overseas oil investors lubricated the Old. The latter had taken a bloody nose in the Ural-Caspian Oil War, and the Isolationists had enjoyed a brief triumph with the hasty troop withdrawal and an opportunistic settling of old scores in the "who lost Europe?" / "Greens in the machine" witch-hunts of the early 2030s, but it hadn't taken long for Old Money to rise again to the top. Long-festering hatreds and fresh grievances were now being fought out in a low-level civil war -- an assassination here, a bombing there, an angry demo against the posthumous rehabilitation of Janet Reno somewhere else.

Jadey had as much as admitted she was a New Money girl, but probably had no more idea than I had of who -- behind multiple facades of funds, fronts, and foundations -- was ultimately pulling her strings.

She stood up, as if having come to some decision.

"Okay," she said. "Let's do the job right here."

"What,
'here'?"
I looked around the bare room, baffled.

"Here in
Scotland.
You've got the kit and the connections to suss out that thing, whatever it is, right?"

"Well, maybe," I said, dubiously. "I'd have to bring some other people in on it ... "

"What I said -- 'connections.' I suspect part of what's going on is a faction fight somewhere high up in the apparat, which means that one side is giving covering fire to our side, at least tactically. Moves and countermoves, you know? Don't know if whoever is behind it knows we're connected, or if someone's just stringing us along in the hope of pulling in bigger fish. But I get the feeling that to panic and run would just land us, or me, and the data, in the hands of the FSB, which in the way of things is likely to be on the wrong side, from my point of view."

"And how do you know that
my
connections aren't the bigger fish they're trolling for?"

She laughed. "I don't. But, come on. You guys. They could just raid the Darwin's Arms if they wanted your connections."

"Hah!" I said. "That's just the old geeks and a few cardsharps.
I'm
talking about Webblies."

"Guns?" she asked, sounding alarmed.

"No, the union. Information Workers of the World Wide Web -- the IWWWW."

She looked dubious. "I've heard about that. It was big in the twenties."

"The Global Strike, yeah, glory days. Twenty twenty-six and all that. You should hear the old bros-and-sis talk about how they nearly brought down Big Iron." I chuckled. "And you will."

"You're telling me it's still around?"

"Not as big as it used to be, but yeah. Down to a hard core of aging anarchos and impossibilists and a few young head-cases. Like me."