The Credulity Nexus (2 page)

The flight
from New York to Berlin would take two hours. Luckily, after a
short period of high-G, the flight was ballistic until the engines
came back on for the landing. His cogplus was linked to the hopper
and he used it to leave a message for his contact in Berlin, saying
when he'd arrive. He let the acceleration push him down into his
couch and began to drift off into sleep. No point regretting what
he'd done, he told himself. Just take it on the chin and move
on.

He saw his
mother and sister dressed in black, standing by his father's grave.
There were no other mourners. He was fourteen, already big and
bulking out. He looked at the dark brown coffin, thinking, “You
miserable old bastard, what did you have to die for? Another year,
maybe two, and I'd have been big enough to take you. Then you
wouldn't have hit none of us no more.”

Without it
seeming at all odd, he led his mother and sister from the graveside
to the car, the old, spluttering hybrid they had a few years later,
when he was nineteen. They all got in and he drove – really drove,
with gas pedal and steering wheel and SatNav, just like it was back
then. He drove them out onto the freeway and his mother was saying
something and laughing. And then a big robot semi swerved off the
other carriageway straight in front of them. He stamped on the
brake and tore at the wheel, but he knew it was no good. He turned
to his mother just as she turned to him, the smile still fading
from her face.

He woke up
with a jolt when the hopper’s engines fired. He shook his head,
trying to clear out the images. His doctor, when he asked her for
something to stop the dream, had said it was post-traumatic stress
disorder. She said he might have to relive that moment, over and
over, for the rest of his life. But he hadn't had the dream for
months now. Not until he saw Maria again.

He used his
cogplus to call up a clock and a map, both of which told him he was
landing at Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport. He checked the
weather – overcast – and thought about all the places he'd rather
be than right there, right then.

-oOo-

“You're late.”
The woman in the arrivals lounge had to be Peth. Not only was she
incredibly, stunningly beautiful – the way only the very rich can
afford to be – but she had that treating-you-like-snot attitude
that people like to adopt when they are paying for your services.
She looked about nineteen, but that didn't mean a thing these days.
He set a search running on his favourite face-recognition
service.

“You're
armed,” Rik replied, noticing the almost invisible bulge under her
tailored jacket.

She took a
better look at him. “You're good.”

Rik shrugged,
hefting his bag and following her. “Not so much. A woman with a
body like yours shouldn't hide her gun about her person. It's the
first place a man would look. In fact, in your case, it's the only
place he'd look.”

“Funny guy,”
she said, over her shoulder. “You should be on the stage.”

“Nah. Never
liked the stage. Too many lights and not enough shadow. You'd do
OK, though. You wouldn't even need an act. The way you look, people
would pay just to watch you standing there.”

Peth laughed.
“That's where you're wrong, tough guy. We all need an act.”

She led him
outside to where her car was waiting. He had expected a stretch
limo – something big and flashy, maybe in white – but she got into
a muscular, silver Mercedes sports car and popped the trunk for his
bag. He joined her inside, sitting opposite her on a white leather
bench seat. The car was fully automatic: no steering wheel, no
dash, nothing except the seats at each end and the deep-pile carpet
in between. She crossed her shapely legs and he took a moment to
enjoy the show.

The car
started up – Peth was obviously instructing it through her cogplus
– and moved smoothly and silently out into the traffic. Two other
cars moved out from the kerb at the same time. Rik hoped they were
just Peth's security.

“So you're
what?” she asked. “A professional bodyguard?”

Rik didn't
think for a minute that Peth was doing anything but teasing
him.

“PLEO,” he
told her, pronouncing it plee-oh, like everyone else did, not
spelling it out like other plee-ohs he knew. “This isn't the kind
of work I normally take on.” As a UN-licensed private law
enforcement operative, he was basically a PI, but with a permit
that covered most of SolSystem.

She smiled,
but not in a nice way. “Hard times, huh?”

“That's enough
about me,” Rik said. “Let's talk about you. You're not what I
expected when they said I'd be meeting someone at this end. It must
be a very valuable package.”

“How do you
figure that, Mr. Drew?”

“Call me Rik.
I'll call you Peth, even though that's not your full name, Mrs.
Newton Cordell.”

“Wow, he can
run database searches too! I'm impressed.”

“So, what is
the wife of the system's richest man doing running little errands
in the company of strangers?”

“I'm just
taking you to pick up a little parcel.” She smiled to herself,
enjoying some private joke. “It belongs to my husband. It's
something I want to see delivered safely to him. His office did
some research and your name came up. I hope you're up to the job,
Rik.”

“It's going to
be tough, keeping my eye on you, but I think I'll manage.”

She laughed
again, outraged but amused. “Do you always flirt like this with
your clients?”

“My client is
a little weasel called McGregor. His client is probably some other
middleman, and his client is most likely Titan Engineering
Corporation – your husband's company. I'm not sure where you come
into all this, Peth.”

She smiled a tight smile. “Let me tell you
where
you
come in,
Rik. I'm going to take delivery of a small package. Something
extremely valuable. Then I'm going to give it to you and you're
going to take it to my husband. Which is where I come in too, I
suppose. Without me there, they'd never hand it over to you.
See?”

“And why would
you trust me to carry this extremely valuable package halfway
across the system?” Newton Cordell famously lived in a remodelled
asteroid in geosynchronous orbit.

“Well, it's
too dangerous for me to do it! Goodness, there are so many people
out there who would kill to get hold of what's in that package. I
have to trust somebody, Rik.” She gave a little one-shouldered
shrug. Cute as a button. Then she leaned forward and scraped the
back of his left hand with a fingernail. Rik snatched his hand away
and glared at her as blood beaded on the scratch.

“Insurance.”
She showed him her nail. “It has a tiny hypo in it. I've just put a
radio tag in your bloodstream. It'll broadcast as long as you're
near a cogplus interface tower. Which, in this world, is
everywhere. I trust you now, Rik.”

Rik sat back
and studied her for a moment. Motorway drabness streamed past the
windows. The sky, the concrete high-rises, power lines and comms
towers, the broad elevated road... Everything outside was cold and
grey, drifting past in near silence. Inside, there was warmth,
comfort, and a beautiful woman smiling complacently at him.

“What's in the
package?” he asked.

“Need to
know,” she said.

“I need to
know.”

“No, you
don't.”

“Then the
deal's off.”

She smiled her
indulgent smile. “Here, I want to show you something.” She leaned
towards him again, and he drew away. “Big baby! I just want to
exchange a file. Now, give me your hand.”

Reluctantly,
he held out his hand and she took hold of it briefly. A document
passed from her cogplus to his, using their bodies' minute electric
fields as a data channel. Normally, person-to-person communication
was by radio, through the system-wide cogplus network, but if you
wanted to keep your communications secure, direct contact was the
best way.

The file
appeared in his public data space, and he put up a virtual display
to read it.

“My goodness,
that's an antiquated piece of junk in your head, Rik. From the
transaction log, I can see my own hardware had to dumb down its
protocols by about half-a-dozen versions just to hand you a simple
report.”

Rik only half
heard her as he scanned through the pages.

“You really
should get yourself something more up-to-date. Walking around with
that in your head must be like living in the stone-age!”

“This is a
report about me,” he said, annoyed at just how thorough and
accurate it was.

Peth nodded.
“You didn't think we wouldn't check you out, did you?”

“All right, so
you know my shirt size. So what?”

“I'll double
what your Mr. McGregor is paying you if you just do the job without
asking any more questions.”

“Greet-Greet
is no Mister,” he grumbled, reading through his own psych
assessment, flinching at some of the conclusions. “He's a slimy
little Radionuclidian. You know? Creepy religious sect? All
fundamentalist claptrap and the morals of an earthworm.”

He put the
file away and looked at her again. Had she just said she'd double
his fee? Her expression was cold. Obviously playtime was over.
Well, that was just fine. The report concluded that he was in so
much trouble at the moment, he'd sell his own grandmother if the
price was right. Well, who was he to disappoint them?

“Treble it,
and you won't get any more questions. OK?”

She sneered so
openly that it made him want to slap her. “It's a deal,” she
said.

They travelled
the rest of the way in silence.

Peth's
Mercedes rolled to a halt in the car park of a low-rise, all-glass
building with the word 'GeneWerken' in electric blue, holographic
text across the front. The car park was almost empty, but the two
black cars that crept in behind Peth's seemed to take up lots of
space. Rik nodded towards them.

“They're
friends of yours, right?”

Peth rolled
her eyes and got out. Rik followed her over a bridge that crossed a
sparkling water-feature and into a lobby that was all glass and
chrome tubes at unsettling angles. A husky, disembodied voice
whispered in Rik's ear, “
Willkommen in GeneWerken
,” as he
crossed the threshold.

Peth took two
steps towards the reception desk and stopped. There was no-one
there. A vase of flowers on the desk had fallen over.

“Get your
people in here,” Rik told her, taking her by the arm. He pulled her
back to the doors, looking around the room, and drew his stunner.
For the first time in their brief association, Peth looked
off-balance and uncertain. “Call them now!”

He dragged her
into a corner, behind a chrome pillar. “Stay here,” he whispered
and, running at a crouch, crossed the lobby to the reception desk.
He peered round the edge of the long, frosted-glass counter,
looking for cameras and doors. Two of Peth's security men rushed
in. He waved them over to a door beside the reception desk, but
they ignored him and positioned themselves close to their
employer.

Snarling
curses at them, Rik left his cover and sprinted to the door. He
stopped there briefly, glanced inside as fast as he could, then ran
through into the corridor beyond.

His heart was
already hammering from the exertion of moving quickly in Earth's
gravity, but he couldn't worry about that now.

The corridor
was broad and brightly-lit, with administrative offices down both
sides. At the end, it opened into a wide atrium containing a café
and three dead people. There were two more corridors leading off to
the left and right beyond the tables and chairs.

He ran to the
nearest body and examined the wounds – a small, neat hole in the
forehead and a huge, ragged void at the back of the skull. The
victim was a woman, shot at close range by a high-calibre handgun.
She stared up at Rik with pale-blue eyes set in a startled
expression.

He ran on and
into the right-hand corridor. There were offices down one side and
double doors on the other opening into a series of laboratories. In
the second lab he came to, he found two dozen people. Four of them
were dead. The rest were tied up in pairs and gagged. The door was
unlocked, and he moved inside cautiously. Everyone watched him,
wide-eyed with hope and fear.

He was
beginning to think that whatever had happened there was all over
and he and Peth had arrived too late. Then he heard things being
smashed in the room next door. Someone was ransacking the place.
Quickly, he grabbed the nearest live body he could reach, a young
man in jeans and a T-shirt, and pulled the gag off him. He had to
slap a hand across the young man's mouth to prevent him bursting
into animated jabber.

“Just tell me
how many there are and what they're looking for,” Rik said, panting
heavily. He waited until the man had stopped struggling to speak
before he let go of his mouth.

“There's only
one of them. We don't know what she wants. She's... She's...” But
he was temporarily at a loss to explain whatever she was. “She's
fucking scary. That's what she is.”

Rik got up.
“I'm going to leave you here, to keep you safe. Don't make a
sound.” He fixed his eyes on the young man's until he saw him nod.
Immediately, he went back to the door. At the end of the corridor
he could see three of Peth's men crossing the atrium. He signed to
them to join him, and this time, they came.

He put his
hand on the arm of the first one to arrive. Their bodies' electric
fields merged and their cogplus implants did a quick handshake.
“There's just one of them,” he said in his mind, the cogplus
sending it directly to the bodyguard. He pointed to the door of the
next lab. “In there. A woman. Armed with a projectile weapon. She's
already killed seven people to my knowledge. Go carefully.” The
bodyguard nodded and Rik let go of his arm. His cogplus had the
man's netID now, so they could communicate without actual
contact.