Undertow (14 page)

If Neil Schaffner had brought her in, Jefferson could probably trust her. Schaffner was old school, a college friend of Jefferson’s grandfather who had spent enough time relativistic that he’d already outlived the old man by fifty years. Family relationships got a little complicated when near-lightspeed travel got involved.

“The ranid health issue,” he said.

“Yes. And I’m a little unclear on what we’re going after here—”

“We have intelligence that a rogue splinter group of ELF called GreenWorld has been in contact with illegal biolabs offplanet,” he said. “We’re concerned for the health of our ranid workers. We’re dependent on them for our undersea mining operations. And there are humanitarian reasons.”

“Indeed,” she said. “How reliable is this…intelligence?”

“Cross-confirmed by three sources. And we know what ELF provided the lab.”

“GR-R seven twenty.”

The ranid pathogen that Jefferson had arranged for Schaffner to have access to. “Yes.”

“They’re a coolie-rights organization,” she protested, while he paced slowly back and forth, the index and middle fingers of his right hand pressed to the bone behind his ear as if they effected the slightest improvement in his hearing. “Do you believe they’d…introduce a weaponized pathogen to the native population simply to prevent them from working for Rim?”

He cleared his throat. “We don’t know,” he said. “We can’t take the risk that they might. Which is why I need you to tell me first of all, if it
can
be weaponized. And if it can, to tell me how virulent they could make it.”

“And to come up with a cure.”

“Right,” he confirmed. “A cure.”

Cricket swam with frantic concentration. The blast would be directed upward; everything was carefully shaped, both to protect bystanders and to prevent her own soft flesh from soaking up the side effects of the demolition. And the water would protect her from gunfire if the Rimmers decided that swimming away constituted a defensible assault upon a peace officer. But that wouldn’t prevent somebody with a spear gun from coming after her.

The explosion might, though, so when the water glared barred crimson and the shock wave thumped her solidly in the ribs but did not turn her inside out, she gave herself a half-second’s pause to enjoy the relief. The oxygen supply was functioning well; she bit down on the regulator and drew one careful breath, pacing herself. Then she kicked forward again, driving through the water.

She had some way to swim. Her closest safehouse was a mile east; she could not do that underwater on emergency air. But she wanted to put as much distance between herself and that swarm of Rimmers as feasible before she dragged her dripping, disheveled self up onto the street in the middle of the weeknight dinner crowd. Not that people didn’t slip off scoots all the time, but it was memorable.

And memorable…was bad.

The closest safehouse was probably a bad idea, too, simply by virtue of being closest. But it was well stocked and pleasanter than the other ones she could get to on foot, which were more along the lines of bolt holes. If she made it there she’d have dry clothes, additional changes of identity—there was one in the escape jacket, but only one, and she didn’t want to trust it unless she had to—and something to eat. She’d also have access to an uplink that wasn’t connected to the one inside her head.

She missed the connex already. Dead reckoning was a crude way to navigate; the global positioning coverage for Greene’s World was riddled with gaps, but it was better than this.

She dove low, grateful the tide was in, and sculled through water still turbid from the storm. The great checkerboard of the channels and barges made squares of light and dark overhead. The undersides of the barges were outlined with safety or running lights, waterproof strings of green or blue or gold, sometimes interrupted with an odd-colored bulb. The water, milky with silt, caught and diffused the glow so that Cricket thought she swam through clouds of rainbows.

The lights weren’t the only thing shining. The storm had borne along quantities of warm water. This made Cricket’s impromptu nighttime swim more pleasant, but it also meant that her arms and hands were outlined in eddying swirls of minute stinging jellies, though these were too small and immature to so much as raise a welt on even human skin. Shoals of long-bodied fish sharked through them, sweeping up mouthfuls, as innocent of Cricket as Cricket was of anyone who might still be hunting
her
.

Her air ran thin after fifteen minutes. She might have a breath or three left, but she’d rather save it for another crisis. She let herself float to the surface, almost motionless, arms angled out to stabilize. When her head broke the water she gritted her teeth to breathe slowly, saltwater drooling from her nostrils on ropes of mucus. She dared not cough. There wasn’t much water down her throat anyway. It had all gone up her nose. All she could smell was ocean, as if her sinuses had been misted with a spray bottle. It stung the inside of her head, the back of her eyes, grit coating her teeth as she expectorated. A head full of muddy ocean: that was asking for a sinus infection.

If she was lucky enough to live long enough to be spitting out green snot, she decided, she’d endure it cheerfully.

More hazard lights outlined a dangling ladder. Not far. She drifted toward it, the lap of wavelets bumping her shoulder against the crusty waterline of the nearest barge. She heard voices but not close, maybe inside, behind open windows. They didn’t seem to notice when she slithered up the rope ladder, though it seemed she banged and thumped with every rung. There was music, too, though, and secondary voices. An attenuated explosion made her shake her head.

They were indoors watching the news.

Like most of Novo Haven would be, if she’d stopped to think about it. There was more than a primary distraction provided by a pretty good boom.

The streets would be half empty.

A disadvantage, too: no crowds for Cricket to get herself lost in. But she wouldn’t have to worry about absolute crowds of people remembering a dripping woman with seaweed in her hair.

Sirens sounded. It was a moment before she realized they did not come from the news feed. She tucked herself against the barge’s external bulkhead in the shadow of a fire escape. Her jacket had autocamo, unless she turned it off. She blended into the white walls and dappled shadows as if she were part of the wall.

Two flashboats sizzled past, narrow and hissing, both of them in Rimmer livery with the blue-mauve-gold flashing on the prows. What she caught of the news story blamed the blast on terrorists, perhaps the same ones responsible for the destruction of a ranid recruitment center and a security barge earlier in the week.
No group has yet taken responsibility,
Cricket mouthed along with the feed. She raked her hair back with her fingers, trying to make the sodden curls seem intentional, and moved away from the wall.

Her first safehouse was six blocks on, and if she hadn’t already been on knife-edge and shaking with adrenaline, she might have missed the nondescript white scoot parked at the dock, the Rimmer plain-paint flashboat half concealed behind the usual gaggle of water taxis. But she was wary and watching, and after putting herself against a low wall—to break her human silhouette—and peering over, she found two other watchers on nearby roofs.

This, too, was closed to her. Which was a quandary. She was cold and disregarded, had no dry clothes, and the cash cards in her pocket might be compromised. If she connexed, they might find her. And if she didn’t connex, she had no resources at all.

She could try to get to Jean Kroc, but as Lucienne was dead and Cricket was being hunted, his house would be hotter than anyplace else on Greene’s World she might try, short of walking into Rim and snapping the cuffs on herself. Dammit.

Cricket had made a practice of never limiting her options, and here she was with none. She needed a dry place to sit, first off, a warm corner out of the wind, and someplace to finish cracking Lucienne’s message and find a way to get it to Jean. Because if Rim got her, she wasn’t going to let them do it while she still had that in her head.

She stepped back out of the streetlights and headed for Bayside, away from land—away from where Rim would expect her to run. Toward them; their headquarters. Their strength.

And just the sort of place, among the docks facing open water, to find a nice cabin cruiser to break into for the night.

The first thing Cricket did after reactivating the security system was steam herself pink in the shower. Subverting the cruiser’s expert system had consumed a timed forty-two seconds. A strictly mechanical alarm would have withstood her longer.

Thank God for the stupidity of smart machines
.

She scrubbed at salt and filth, angling her face this way and that to try and clear her vision with the moisture from the steam. She didn’t need her eyes for Lucienne’s documents; she flicked through those as fast as she could parse them into hard memory. She didn’t slow to consider the content; if she started thinking about what she was ripping, she’d—

She didn’t know what she would do. Her hair clutched her fingers as she shoved it back from her temples, working stolen conditioner through. Sand gritted her scalp, wedged her nails. If she didn’t grease the rat’s-nest up and comb through it before she washed, she’d set the salty tangles into knots.

Three cycles of lather and rinse later, she was still pinching sharp quartz from the strands, but she didn’t think she was likely to get any cleaner. And she’d finished the first crash-pass on the data. From here on in, she could read as well in a hammock as in the shower.

Under other circumstances, she would have scorned the clothes she’d swum here wearing. But she didn’t have the luxury of fastidiousness, so she borrowed the cruiser owner’s bathrobe while she ran shirt and trousers through a cleaning cycle. The jacket wasn’t home-washable, but the waterproofing had held up; she hung it in front of a fan. In the morning, with luck, she’d be able to beat the salt crust off and go.

She heated soup—she’d run a DNA scrub through the whole place before she left—and ate it while she listened to the ghost of Lucienne. The implications of even the fragmentary data were profound enough that her spoon was clicking on the mug before she realized she didn’t know what soup she’d eaten.

Rim kept secrets from the Core. The Core kept secrets from Rim: no surprises there. One of the stranger benefits of having once been someone else was that the someone she had been
knew
how much was concealed. And sometimes even had a general idea of what not to ask about in order to ensure everyone’s comfort and continued peace of mind.

Or, in this case, where exactly to shine the light.

The mere existence of omelite itself was classified. Rim and Core ran the Slides; the technology was unpatented and tightly held, the secret enforced by loyalty oaths backed with wet viruses. That the stuff occurred naturally—that it was
mined
on Greene’s World—was a bit of information that it had taken
Cricket
ten years to unearth, and she was generally unrivaled when it came to finding things out.

What Lucienne had transmitted, to Cricket’s unscientific but educated eye, was a series of documents regarding mining practices at Charter Trade tanglestone bores. The stuff was innocuous, found laced through crumbly shales that were as often as not also oil-bearing. And it was more precious than any other substance known.

Patterns were Cricket’s stock in trade, and as she sorted files, she found patterns emerging. Patterns of injuries, disappearances, safety failures. Strings of shocking accidents, unreported to the Miners’ Union or that laughable body, the Rim safety commission, because the victims were not human.

And odder things. Coincidences, sidelong references, sly jokes in e-mails about elves and hauntings. Or of inexplicable happenstance and random chance, déjà vu and double vision. Things got a little weird near the Slides, and near coincidence engineers in general. She’d seen it happen around Jean.

But this seemed more concentrated.

There was more—enough callous safety violations that even Rim’s emasculated media might not be able to resist the story. But what really caught her attention was a sine wave pattern of duplicated events; a compressor piston arm breaking, for example, and then three weeks later the replacement breaking in the same place and manner.

Another pattern, and she guessed she knew the cause of this one. A pattern of sabotage.

Which led her to another conclusion; that Lucienne
had
been somehow involved in the recruiting facility bombing.

Cricket stood and carried her mug to the sink, washed it—by hand—dried it and put it away. She left the spoon on the counter; she didn’t mean to hide her presence, merely display politeness.

Maybe it would encourage the owners to put in a decent security system.

This—was a quandary. She held in her hands—or her head—a friend’s dying bequest. A stolen gift, one tangled up in an uncomfortable moral netting of extremist politics and radical actions. But it was also exactly what Jean Kroc needed: the evidence of cascading coincidence, of disregard for life and limb, of cover-ups and concealment of the environmental cost of the tanglestone mines. And even if Lucienne had painted a target on Cricket with this information, it had cost Lucienne her life. Cricket owed a friend something for that kind of commitment, too. Whatever her life was now, Cricket had made her own mistakes in the past—was still making them, if André Deschênes was any indication—and frankly, she’d class some of them as mistakes only because she got caught.

Cricket had done worse than anything Lucienne and Jean might have committed. The fact that it had almost all been perfectly legal—

—well, that was beside the point, wasn’t it?

She would find a way to get the file to Jean. Anything else was cowardice. And then she’d figure out if she had a chance to restart her life just once more, or if the cat had drowned for the last time.