Hammered (9 page)

He laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll come back to Marsport to tell me about it, won’t you?”

Leah gave Tuva a coy glance, which made him laugh harder. She twisted her toe on the decking and grinned. “If you buy me another drink when I come back.”

“Mercenary. All right. You’re on. Have they told you yet what the training entails?”

Words tumbled over each other like moths struggling to get at a light. He was still laughing at her, and she didn’t mind. Some people tried for
years
to get into pilot training and never made it. “There’s simulator training first. Navigational stuff, although they tell me it’s weird. And then I get to fly a real starship!” She paused. “Well, a real virtual starship. But it’s supposed to be
great.
It’ll kind of suck, because I don’t have neural and my dad wouldn’t let me get it even if he could afford it, but you can do the training even without. There’s this guy on one of my web-groups … oh, you don’t care about that.”

Tuva nodded. “You bet I do. Come on, let’s go get a make-believe burger and you can tell me all about it.”

Richard Feynman deemphasized the task running in the Avatar Gamespace when Leah Castaign reluctantly checked the time and derezzed, leaving a computer-run proxy in her place. Despite his increasing interest in the girl, Feynman’s presence in the game was only a subroutine. His emphasis and his core personality—what he thought of as
himself
—remained “where” it had been: focused on circumventing Unitek’s security.

A high and daunting wall.

Fortunately, I was always a pretty good hand with a lock pick
, Feynman thought, generating another tendril of code with which to caress Unitek’s firewall.
If this doesn’t work, I might have an easier time getting through the military route.
If he had been possessed of flesh and bone, he would have chuckled at the irony of that.

Feynman had always found a complicated joy in his ability to outwit, outfox, and out-multitask the general run of humanity. He delighted in playing tricks, and coming back from the dead after seventy years was too good a trick to pass up. He didn’t pretend to understand the universe, although some would say he’d come closer than anyone. He didn’t worry about superstition or souls. He had Feynman’s memories—more or less—and he deemed it reasonably demonstrated that
he approximated the original in personality, logic, and inductive reasoning.

He was gifted, and he knew it.

And, addictive as a drug to a man who had—even within human limitations—trained himself to perform mental gymnastics on three or four levels at once, who had comprehended the puissance of questioning assumptions, the new and not-so-human version of Feynman had
processing power.

He also had nearly instantaneous access to the world’s unprotected data. Including the information that a recently released female convict he was personally interested in had taken employment with Unitek, working alongside the father of a rather charming young girl. If Feynman had had a physical body, he would have settled back in his chair and stared at the wall, the tip of one loafered foot flipping rhythmically. As it was, he freed a few more of his widely appropriated resources, and continued his siege of Unitek systems.

What on earth do you keep behind a firewall like that?

Feynman wasn’t limited to a single focus of awareness. Thus, even as he worked, a traffic camera in Hartford pivoted on its post, following the course of a motorcycle hissing through a darkness defined by shattered streetlamps, southbound on Asylum Avenue.

If you live long enough, you eventually put a real fine point on what you’re willing to do to stay alive—and what you’re willing to sell. The first thing I sold was my body—first on the street, then to the army once I got old enough.
Later on, I graduated to selling the intangibles. I like to think I stayed loyal to my friends, though. That was something. Something to hang on to when I’d parceled out flesh and bone and honor and innocence alike.

The music is still rolling out onto the street when I put my kickstand down in front of the Federal, locking the fork and arming the antitheft system. I’m lucky enough to find a spot under an unshattered streetlamp in front of the weathered brown building, but it never hurts to be sure.

Trust Bobbi Yee to leave me an urgent message and then fail to check her hip to see if I got back to her. I knew she’d be at the Federal—she always is, weeknights. It might as well be her front office.

I open the neon-washed glass door with the faded green-and-gold lettering—complete with a “founded” date in the early part of the previous century—and walk into the tavern. Essentially a single long dark hallway with an old wooden bar on the right wall and a few tables on the left, it hooks around to the right before opening out somewhat. The music is too loud to hear how the wood floor creaks under my boots. Like most of New England, Connecticut still has blue laws about the hours an establishment serving liquor may keep. The police don’t enforce anything this far north of downtown, however; the party is just getting warm.

The Federal sits on the boundary between
their
turf and
ours
—the
haves
and the
have-nots
, if you will. A line only they can cross, into the world of we who have a use for every bit of trash they pitched because it doesn’t match the decor. Should they find that
they
have any use for
us.

They live in another world. A cleaner world.

I walk around to the back, to the corner near the pool table. Bobbi Yee is acceptable to the haves. Even as they skulk into our part of the city to hire her for the sort of tasks they don’t dare carry out themselves, they prefer to
find somebody who doesn’t
look
too much different from them. And Bobbi—Bobbi fits the decor.

Dragon ladies are supposed to be tall and thin and deadly, with long ebony hair and expensive cigarettes in ivory holders. Bobbi is one of the above. And, as usual, she’s surrounded by a half-dozen good-looking young men, jostling each other for position. I lean across the shoulder of the shortest one and wave my hand to catch her attention. The boy recoils, glimpsing me from the corner of his eye.
If he thinks I’m rough trade, he ought to take a better look at what he’s chasing.

Bobbi looks up from the boy standing at the head of the line to court her. She tosses an iridescent violet lock over her shoulder, grinning.

“Maker!” She moves with the predatory grace of a praying mantis, tapping the shoulder of the little boy who was startled by my profile. She wears a sleeveless white shirt and a chrysanthemum-embroidered vest, showing the rippling muscle in her arms. For Bobbi, she is lightly armed—I see only the one handgun, and a knife on her other thigh. “Peter, let the lady have a seat. She and I need to talk shop.”

He gives me a surly look and offers me his stool, which I accept with a nod that might be misconstrued as thanks if he’s feeling generous. In effortless dismissal, she brushes the rest of her coterie aside. “Cute,” I say as he sulks away.

Bobbi grins, wryly angling perfect dark eyes.
Not more than twenty. I hope she lasts. Ronin usually don’t.
I know she’s wired, too—much newer tech than mine. There are still problems with it. So what, right? You break something, you throw it out. Get a new one, break that, too.

But what if you break something you can’t replace with a credit card? A heart, a life, a city? What about your word?

“You want him?” Her voice has a delicate timbre—at odds with her personality, but not her slender frame.

“I got my own problems, eh?”

Bobbi waves the bartender over and points to her mug, then to me. “Problems, sure.” She laughs like chiming bells. “Problems, men, what’s the difference? You’ve maybe got problems you don’t know about.”

“Is that why you called me?”

Two Irish coffees arrive and I spend a moment figuring out how to sip mine without getting whipped cream up my nose. She uses that time to chew over her answer and then nods, smiling. Her lips are tattooed slick shiny red. “Somebody wanted to hire me to find you,” she says.

I drain my coffee in a single long, scalding pull, feel it hit my stomach like roofing tar, wave for another. “What sort of a someone?”

Bobbi shakes her head, sipping her own coffee delicately. “Maker, you’re a fucking lush.”

I let my smile widen. “In twenty years, so shall you be, too. So who was looking for me?”

“Funny thing. She looked a bit like you. Tall, thin, jet-black hair, and a very determined nose. Long-lost sister?”

“I don’t have any sisters.”
Not anymore, I don’t.
“She was looking for me? Maker? Or somebody answering my description?”

“You. And she had another name for you. Is it really Genevieve?”

I fix her with a look. “Is yours really Bobbi Yee?”

“It’s Yin Bobao, actually. Don’t go spreading that around.” Her dark eyes sparkle, wet and sharp, and she quirks a sculptured eyebrow and smiles at me. “I didn’t trust her, Maker. She said you were a deserter from the Canadian military, and there was a good bounty on you. S’at true?”

I laugh in surprise.
How like her.
“Nope. Not even a little.” Somebody turns up the music. It thumps in my ears, loud enough to hurt.

That intelligent gaze, piercing and hard. She leans toward me and shouts into the intimacy created by the anonymous crowd, the rising noise level. “Then what are you hiding from? Go home to Canada. Things are still okay there. The U.S. is a war zone, and it isn’t going to get any better.”

“The dikes are still holding around New York City.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, and people are starving in the streets.”

“It’s too cold in Canada, Bobbi.”

“Not for long.” She grins at her own wit. “You know you’re getting too old for this game.”

She’s so very young, so very deadly. It breaks my heart. I want to tell her the truth: that you think you have it under control and then one day you wake up and discover that you hurt all the time and everybody you love is dead or won’t return your calls. You wake up one morning and discover you’ve become a brutal old woman, and pain makes you nasty company.

If you’re lucky enough to live that long.

A smaller population was a mixed blessing during the real bad years, a quarter century or so ago. Canada’s stayed a little more civilized than most of the world—in part by selling itself to the highest bidder—but it also means that my generation went almost entirely to the military, and our historic freedoms went out the window with the Military Powers Act of 2035, following our little altercation with China over PanMalaysian trade when the beanstalk went in.

I got into some real trouble regarding that act when I was young and foolish. I’m still not exactly what you would call proud of what I did then, but I’m alive to talk about it. And Gabe Castaign is alive and out of jail as well.

Somebody else isn’t. But that’s a story for another day.

I signed up at sixteen, two years before they could have drafted me. They were kind enough to keep me out of frontline combat for those two years. That was when I learned to be
a grease monkey. Once the economic and then the religious troubles in the U.S. closed what was once the longest unguarded border in the world, Canada retreated into something like an armed camp, as aware as the United States used to be of just how desperate our neighbors to the south might be.

The summers got hot and the winters got cold. The U.S. was awfully hungry for a while, too—especially when the Gulf Stream quit from Antarctic meltwater and the climate shift gave them searing droughts in the summer and winters like cold hell on earth. I didn’t even like to think about Britain and Ireland.

The population is still dropping, but the food riots and the Christian Fascist regime are largely a thing of the past. My U.N. unit was at Buffalo before we shipped to South Africa—we made it as far south as Hartford, and it was bad here, but after that I was on a plane to Cape Town and missed out on the peacekeeping action in New York City.
Merci à Dieu.

So, why did I retire to the United States, I hear a low voice asking? Well, that relates back to what I said earlier, about Canada selling things. There’s a multinational—an interplanetary, they like to call themselves, since they sponsor Canada’s extraterrestrial bases—called Unitek. That company has been a real high bidder for a while now.

I was one of the things that got sold.

I want to tell Bobbi all of this. Half of it, the part about how the world works, she knows better than I do. The other half wouldn’t mean anything to her. Yet.

“So what are you doing here?” I gesture around the Federal.

She shrugs. “I have family back home. If I save enough, I can get them over the border into Russia or the Ukraine. Things are better there. No crop failures yet.”
And the
government is less interested in starving the population to feed its off-planet projects
, she doesn’t say.

I nod. The historically cold countries are still better off; although the winters are worse, a hotter growing season hasn’t hurt them any, and they can use the water they get. “Me, I’m just more comfortable in a war zone. Did your would-be customer happen to leave a name or contact codes?”

“No name,” she says, reaching down to unclip her HCD. She lays the green plastic oblong, half the size of her palm, on the bar and holds her hand out for mine. “I’ll transfer the data.”

I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out my own hip. I usually carry mine turned off, which explains why Bobbi had to leave a message for me at home, cautioning me to meet her in person. I blink twice to activate the data stream in my prosthetic eye. Glancing at Bobbi, I spot the almost microscopic blue readouts crawling across her contact as I give her authorization. She transfers the codes.