Deucalion (14 page)

15

TAGGING THE HOPPER

Elokoi Reserve, Wieta Clan

Edison Sector (East Central)

15/11/101 Standard

JANE

‘I thought you might like to know, you've moved again.' Denny walked into the hut without knocking, and I jumped. He caught me every time.

‘You've got to stop doing that!' I was trying to sound angry, but it wasn't any use. There was no way I could ever be angry with him. Besides, I'd been with the Elokoi for about four months by that stage, so I'd almost forgotten how to get angry. But even if I hadn't, I couldn't imagine shouting at Denny and really meaning it. I gave up. ‘Where did I move to, this time?'

He smiled. ‘Roma. I took the shuttle up from New G the night before last, and used your mini-comm to call Hendriks' comm at the Facility. There was no answer, of course, but I heard the tracer cut in. I didn't break the connection for maybe ten seconds, so they had plenty of time to work out where you were calling from.'

I moved across the room and kissed him. ‘You've got to stop taking chances. Six moves in four months. You've got them looking all over for me—'

‘Everywhere except Edison. And here.' He reached up and brushed my hair away from my eyes. ‘As long as I keep leaving clues and moving you around from place to place, you're safe. If I stop, they might think you've come back, and start looking around here.'

‘But sooner or later they're going to catch you. Every time you go somewhere, you provide them with another clue. They have computers that can make the connection, you know. Travel records, cred receipts—'

‘I know. I work for Security, remember?' He sat down on Leani's bed-platform – a thing that only Denny could get away with. ‘But I never use real ID. One great thing about Security is the class of people you meet. Look.'

He reached into the pocket of his tunic and pulled out a small card-file, from which he selected a cred access-card. He handed it to me and waited. It looked genuine. It even had his face on it, and his thumbprint, digitally encoded. But the name on it was . . . Hans Albrecht.

‘Forgery.' He sounded proud of himself. ‘But you'd never pick it.'

‘But what about the “print”?' I asked. ‘As soon as you try to use a scanner on the card, it'll match the thumbprint with your real record, and they'll know it's you.'

Again he smiled. ‘Only if I forget to use this.' From a secret compartment in the back of the thin card-file, he withdrew a tiny piece of flexible plastic film and pressed it onto his thumb. The plastic moulded invisibly to his skin. He held it up for my inspection. Even though I had seen him put it on, I couldn't detect it.

‘New thumbprint. And it's linked to a whole file-identity on the Security computer. Birthday, ID number, blood type, DNA profile, the lot.' He looked up at me, and I sat down next to him. ‘As far as anyone in Security knew, I never left my room all the time Mr Hans Albrecht was taking the one-day guided tour of Roma.' He paused for a moment and took hold of my hand. ‘How are you holding up?'

I looked at him and attempted a smile. ‘Not bad. In a way, the last few months have been the best thing for me. Being here, having to stay out of sight, gives me a lot of time to think. I don't remember anything about what I was like before, but the few things I found out, I didn't like. Do you know what scares me the most?'

He shook his head.

‘It's wondering . . . If I hadn't developed Nixon's, if I hadn't forgotten everything, would I be hiding out here at all?'

He looked puzzled, so I pressed on. ‘I mean, maybe what I found wouldn't have shocked me. Maybe I would have actually tried to follow through on it. See where it led me. What if I was someone who was capable of approving of something like Icarus?'

He still had hold of my hand, and I felt him squeeze it gently. ‘I don't know what kind of person you were, and I don't care. It's like you said once, that person is dead. The person you are is the product of what you know and feel and believe – and remember – right now. That's the only person I know.' He hesitated slightly before continuing, ‘That's the person I love.'

He'd never said it before, and it was a moment before the words registered. I guess I'd known it for a while, but that's not the same as hearing it directly. I didn't know what to say. It's one thing to sit and think about it when you're alone. And I
had
thought about it. But faced with the fact, I couldn't bring to mind any of the replies I'd imagined making when the day finally arrived.

‘You do?' I managed to force the words out, and suddenly I found myself smiling.

‘I do,' he replied, looking directly into my eyes. A look that required a response.

‘Me too,' I managed, before Rael came in through the door and saved me from the embarrassment of crying like a baby.

‘Daenny!' He made a half-hearted attempt to act surprised, though we both knew he'd known of Denny's arrival well before I had. Nothing escaped Rael's attention. Except how to pronounce offworlder names.
‘Saliba
,
my truefriend. We were not . . . excepting you.'

‘Saliba
,
Rael—' Denny began, but I cut in.

‘That's “expecting”, Rael.'

‘Excepecting . . .' He experimented with the alien syllables, and gave the Elokoi equivalent of a shrug. ‘Too many sounds. Too damn . . . primitive.'

I smiled at Denny. The old fox was having his usual joke. During my four-month stay, Rael had taught me virtually all the Elokoi speechwords, and I was well on the way to mastering their complex grammar. In return, I was trying to tune up Rael's appalling use of Standard. I definitely had the harder job.

Elokoi wordspeech is really quite simple once you get over the fact that there are more grammatical rules than there are words. Most of their communication is mind to mind, so their words are pretty inefficient. I sometimes wondered why they developed wordspeech at all. Unless the telepathy came later. I asked Rael once, but he simply looked at me.

‘Just is. Offworlder ask too many question. Is just . . .
is
. Why ask why? Knowing why going to stop is?'

That was one of the many times I just gave up and shook my head. In the end, it was far easier for me to learn such a limited language than it was for Rael to master what is probably the most complicated one, even if he did make a joke of it.

I put on my stern look. ‘And don't say “damn”. You're quick enough picking up the cuss-words.'

He scratched behind his ear with a long finger and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Damn right,' he said.

16/11/101

DENNY

When the ether-link finally came to life, they were both sound asleep, and with the mini-comm sitting somewhere at the bottom of Denny's backpack, there was little chance of either of them hearing the muffled electronic bleep. In the first weeks after he'd installed the link, he had carried it almost everywhere, and slept with it on the desk beside his bed, or on the floor next to him when he spent the night with Leani's family. But as the months had passed, and the link had stayed silent, it sometimes slipped his mind.

It was Kieta who roused them. The young Elokoi was asleep, but her acute hearing picked up the faint sound, which was strange enough to rouse her. Moments later Denny was awake and so was Jane.

‘What is it?' The question was addressed to Denny, who held the mini-comm close to his ear. It was an audio link-up so the screen was dead.

‘Jackpot time.' He was whispering, as if the other people in the loop might hear if he spoke too loudly. There was no thought of trying to allow Leani's family to sleep. As soon as Kieta had awoken, so had the rest. They lay quietly on their bed-platforms, obeying the rules of Elokoi etiquette, waiting to be informed. The Elokoi asked very few questions.

‘Quick,' he said suddenly, ‘write this down.'

Jane found a pen, but with nothing to write on, she used the back of her hand. It was an address, a location actually. And a time. Nine fifty, half an hour to midnight.

‘They're talking about . . . another “pick-up”. And something about Gaston's goons and “a sting”.'

Suddenly the link went dead. Denny placed it carefully on the floor.

‘What does it mean?' Jane was watching the wheels begin to turn behind Denny's eyes as he planned. ‘Denny, what's going on? I don't think I like that look.'

He turned his attention to her and smiled. ‘It means we've got to get moving. We're going to tag them.' He stood up, walked across to the doorway and looked out at the night sky, before turning back into the room. ‘Do you feel up to an expedition into the lion's den?'

Jane looked up at him questioningly. He continued: ‘You see, it's much safer if two of us try. And you're the only one I can trust . . . apart from our friends here, and they would tend to be a touch . . . conspicuous.'

For a moment, Jane continued to look at him. Then she stood and moved towards him. ‘If you thought I was
ever
going to let you go on your own, you've got boulders in your head.' She paused for a moment, then took hold of his hand. ‘I've hidden away long enough. From now on, we fight back.'

Denny stepped back a pace and smiled. ‘My girl, the radical. I've got a present for you. I had a friend in Roma make it up for me while I was there.'

Moving across to his backpack, he rummaged around for a few moments, then drew out another small card-file. Opening it, he produced an ID similar to the one he had shown her earlier. Except that when she looked at this one, she was surprised to see a holo of her own face looking back. She looked at the name, and gave a small laugh.
Jane Leani
.

‘I figured that seeing as you needed a new family name, what was wrong with the family you already had?' Then, to stop the tears that he saw beginning in her eyes, he slid open the secret compartment at the back of the file. ‘Here, you'll need this too. Wear it whenever you carry the card. You can never tell when you'll be asked for ID, and you don't want to have to fiddle around putting it on. It tends to look a little obvious.'

Wiping her eyes, Jane applied the bogus thumbprint. Denny continued: ‘We hacked into the Security mainframe and opened a file for you. Oh, and we “borrowed” a hundred thousand creds from the Facility's Research budget account. Consider it a “termination payment”. You
have
retired, haven't you?'

‘Denny, you're a crook. And you never told me.'

He shook his head. ‘Never done it before. Besides, they won't miss it. We rigged the transfer so that if they do an audit, the money's still there. It's not really money at all. It's just a few bytes of information on a computer file. It doesn't affect the economy and no one's going to starve because of it. Least of all you. How do you think the hackers pay for all their hi-tech equipment? They've been at it for centuries and no one's ever been able to stop them. Besides, they have a couple of unwritten rules: Never create more credit than you absolutely need, and never mess around with the account of anyone who'll notice. So for the authorities, it's never been worth the expense of trying to catch them. It's a sort of unofficial compromise.'

‘And I'll “absolutely need” a hundred thousand creds?'

‘Not personally, but if we're going to play amateur Security agents, we'll be up for some major expenses. There's only so much I can liberate from Security stores, and nothing comes cheap on the Black Market.' He dug deep into the backpack. ‘I did manage to liberate this, though.' He stood up, holding out a tiny black disk about the size of a thumbnail. ‘It's a satellite location beacon.' In his other hand he held a small vid-screen. ‘It's ether-linked to this. Security designed it for long-distance surveillance. It doesn't send out a constant signal for the target to detect. Until it's activated, it just sits there like a . . . piece of plastic, but it's digitally encoded to respond to this unit. Press this button and the signal is activated for a hundred milliseconds. Just long enough to read a satellite triangulation and transmit it. Because it's ether-linked to the navigation satellite and to this unit, transmission is instantaneous. In less than a second, I can pinpoint the target anywhere on the planet. To the nearest ten metres.'

Jane nodded, suitably impressed. ‘But why do we need it?'

‘Because I don't think the people we're after are from around here.' He paused, and she waited for him to go on. ‘I've been checking around. And there's a couple of odd things . . . I didn't make the connection at first. I was too tied up in our own problem. Do you remember, a couple of days after you started hiding out at my place, there was a news report of two people “disappearing” from the Base Hospital in the middle of the night?'

Jane nodded, not really remembering, but unwilling to stop the flow.

‘It turns out that not only were they the only survivors from the crash of Johannsen's flyer – the two who miraculously walked out of the Ranges alive – but one was a Security operative, which made them news around the Corps. Rumour was that there was something “special” about the girl, that a request had come down to the New G office a couple of weeks earlier for information about her and her mother.'

‘Down?' Jane interrupted, trying to get the situation clear in her mind.

‘Down. From the Council. From Councillor Gaston's office. Gaston, our new esteemed President-elect. It set me thinking. The flyer is sabotaged, taking out Gaston's only rival – who was, incidentally, streets ahead of Gaston in all the polls. And on board, for no good reason, are two people Gaston is tagging. Then the girl and the other survivor disappear. By the way, just to add to the mystery, they found enough DTX in the girl's drip to stop an elephant. If it had got into the girl's system it would have killed her and left no trace. But that wasn't what got me hooked.' Unconsciously, he pressed a button on the box in his hand, and the screen lit up with a set of coordinates. He switched it off again. ‘A routine Security report from outside the hospital at about the time they disappeared mentioned a hopper.'