Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Bar
The girl in the corner had not touched her drink in nineteen days, and no one had noticed, because no one ever looked at her twice. This was by design. Filth was a more reliable camouflage than any stealth coating the Coalition's shipyards had ever pressed into a hull, and a great deal cheaper. The rags helped. The smell helped more.
Her name, on the few documents that still bore it, was Helen Ioannidis, and at the moment she was seeing the room through the bartender's left eye.
It was not a good eye. The man's implant was a Kestrel-VII, a budget optical package three hardware generations out of date, and its color response had drifted so far toward magenta over the years that the cheap amber lighting of the bar registered to him as a sort of bruised rose. Helen had grown used to it. She had been wearing his eyes, and the eyes of everyone else in the room, for the better part of three weeks, and she had reached the point where she found his particular shade of rose almost restful. From his vantage behind the bar she could watch herself: a hunched smudge of a girl in a refugee's castoffs, hair lank, a synthetic sandwich going stale in front of her, a drink she lifted to her mouth at irregular intervals and never actually swallowed.
She thought, not for the first time, that she made a very convincing piece of garbage.
The colonists who drank here ran old implants — Kestrels, a few Boreas units, one ancient Halcyon so obsolete its encryption was less a lock than a polite suggestion. Cracking kits for all of them shipped standard in any hacker's loadout, the way a plumber carried wrenches. She had owned the room within an hour of arriving. Now she lay across all of it at once: forty-one nervous systems threaded onto her co-processor like beads, forty-one channels of vision and hearing she could open and close at will, a packet sniffer running quietly on the traffic between every implant and the bar's single overworked router. She heard what they heard. She saw what they saw. When the man two stools down belched, she felt the small animal satisfaction of it bloom in his interoceptive feed a quarter-second before the sound reached the air.
People assumed, when they thought about it at all, that this kind of thing required genius. It did not. It required patience and a complete absence of anything better to do, and Helen had a surplus of both. The genius — if that was even the word, and she was privately certain it wasn't — was something else, something she didn't have a name for and didn't examine too closely, the way you don't stare directly at the sun even though you know perfectly well what it is. Things that took other people an afternoon of trial and error simply arrived in her, finished, as though she were remembering them rather than working them out. She had decided long ago that this was a property of her training and not of herself, and she had decided it with the particular firmness people reserve for conclusions they would rather not test.
She had come a very long way to sit in this bar and be ignored.
Sigma Serpentis was the kind of system public transit pretended did not exist — the scheduled routes terminated light-years short of it, at a tidy little waystation where respectable people changed ships and went somewhere else. Getting the rest of the way had been a matter of money, and money had been a matter of one of her father's credit accounts and the elementary discovery that you could withdraw a fortune in total so long as you never withdrew a fortune at once. Ten million credits, extracted over eleven months in increments small enough to read as a careless rich man's lifestyle. She had felt nothing about it. There was no love in that account to spend along with the money.
That was the thought, more or less, that her mind reached for whenever it wanted a reason she was here, and it was a serviceable thought, and it was true. Her father was a monster of a specific and bloodless kind. She had run. She was clever and angry and eighteen and she had run as far as a stolen fortune would carry her, which was here, to the literal edge of charted space, to a bar that smelled of recycler exhaust and the inside of other people's sinuses.
It held together. It had always held together. It was only at the seams — in the half-second between deciding to remember her childhood and actually remembering it — that something occasionally felt wrong, the way a word feels wrong when you've written it too many times and the letters stop meaning anything. Her earliest memory was a garden under the Promethean dome, very green, very warm, her father's hand enormous around her small one. It was a good memory. It was, she sometimes thought, a suspiciously good memory, lit and composed like a thing built rather than lived, every edge in focus, no smell to it at all —
She let that go. She always let that go. There were more interesting things in the room.
The most interesting thing in the room had walked in nine days ago, and he was about to walk in again.
He came in exactly as he had every day, and as on the first day he failed completely to belong. The colonists wore the soft, practical clothing of people who lived under a dome and never expected to leave it. He wore a pilot's cybernetic armor — interlocked ceramic plate, ghost-pale, the kind of rig that cost more than this entire establishment and was worn only by people who flew the sort of ships that did not land. He carried a metal suitcase. He set it on a table, set his drink on top of the case, and sat behind it with the patient, scanning stillness of a man waiting for someone he had never met.
He was not drinking. Helen knew this because she had taken the liberty, on day two, of opening his implant as well — a far better unit than the colonists wore, military issue, properly hardened, which had cost her most of a night and a measure of genuine respect — and she had watched through his own eyes as he lifted the glass to his lips and tipped exactly nothing into his mouth, again and again, a man performing the idea of a drink. On day five he had cracked the case to check its contents and she had been riding his optic nerve at the time, and a freeze-frame off his own retina had told her what she was looking at: corporate documents. Promethean documents. Her father's house, in a stranger's suitcase, on the wrong edge of the galaxy.
She had a number of thoughts about that, and all of them ended in the same place, which was that whatever was in the case would be worth a great deal the next time she needed leverage on the man who had built her.
The courier — she was nearly certain that was what he was, a courier waiting on a buyer to bring his payment — had a problem, and the problem was that he had begun to look at her.
It is a strange thing to watch yourself be looked at through the eyes of the person doing the looking. The first time it happened she had nearly given the whole game away, the wrongness of it jolting up her spine: his gaze swinging across the room and snagging on the smudge of a girl in the corner, and the smudge being her, seen from outside, smaller and more pathetic than she carried herself in her own head. He did it again on day seven. And day eight. By day nine she had worked out why, and the why was almost funny.
He thought she was his contact.
It made a kind of sense, if you were paranoid enough and had been waiting long enough. Nobody legitimate came to a place like this. A buyer running this kind of deal would want to look like exactly what Helen looked like: nothing. Garbage in the corner. The longer she sat, the more she fit the only profile he had.
She turned the situation over the way she turned over a circuit she meant to reroute, and found it elegant. He wanted to give a suitcase to a stranger he'd never met, in exchange for payment, by a protocol he'd been told to follow. She wanted the suitcase. She did not have the payment, of course, but she had read about the protocol — there was a forum, there was always a forum — and the protocol, like most things built by careful criminals, assumed that the dangerous part was being caught by the authorities and not being cheated by your own counterparty.
She would simply be the contact.
The next day she made her move.
She gathered her rags around her with the unhurried economy of someone who has rehearsed a thing forty times in the privacy of her own skull, crossed the floor, and set her own case on the table across from his. It was a good case. She had bought it for precisely this and scuffed it herself to match the wear on his. She placed it down at the angle the forum specified, hinges toward him, and she felt — through eleven different pairs of eyes at once, because she could not help herself, because she wanted to see it from every side — the entire room turn to look.
Forty-one nervous systems sharpened in the same instant. She felt it as a single coordinated intake of breath that no one actually took. Every regular in the place had just understood that a deal was happening, and every one of them was, in the privacy of an old cheap implant Helen happened to own, calculating whether there was a way to come out of the next ninety seconds richer.
The courier laid a gloved hand flat over her case. A scanner pulse — she watched its little spike cross the router traffic — and a frown crossed his face, there and gone. For one cold second she thought she had misjudged the protocol, that the case was supposed to contain something she hadn't thought to fake, that the whole structure was about to come down on the wrongness of an empty box.
Then he lifted his drink off his own case, and pushed the case across the line that divided his half of the table from hers.
She mirrored him. She slid her case to him and drew his to her, and the weight of it came into her hands — real weight, the dense particular heft of a thing that mattered — and she did not let her face do anything at all.
He opened her case, glanced inside, and was satisfied with a payment that was not there, which told her something useful about how badly he wanted to be done. He closed it. He gathered himself to stand.
She had time, before everything went wrong, to think: that was easy.
The door came apart.
It did not open. The only door into the bar was struck from the outside with a force that converted it instantly from a door into a spray of composite shrapnel and a hole, and standing in the hole, filling it, was a six-legged ground assault drone. Helen knew the model the way she knew everything: a Mayatantra Automation quadruped chassis up-armored to six and fitted for boarding actions, optical camouflage shimmering off as it committed to the room, and the long ugly line of a railgun unfolding from its dorsal mount, easily two meters, a weapon built to punch holes in ships.
Around her, hands went up. Not in panic — in routine. The regulars of this bar put their hands in the air with the weary competence of people for whom this was not the first raid and would not be the last, and somewhere in the back of forty-one borrowed minds Helen caught the flat little thought, more than once, another damn bust.
She did the only thing she was. She threw herself at the drone — not her body, her body sat frozen in its rags, but everything else, the whole of her, every cracking routine she had, straight down the drone's wireless handshake and into its hardware.
She hit a wall that hit back.
It was not a colonist's Kestrel. It was not even the courier's hardened military unit, which she had opened in a night and been proud of. The countermeasure that met her was a different category of thing — vast, fast, and utterly without the seams that every system she had ever touched had eventually shown her. It did not lock her out. It reached back down the channel she had opened, calmly, the way an adult takes a dangerous object out of a child's hand, and it touched something in her co-processor, and the bruised-rose light of the bar went white and then went nothing at all.
Her last clear thought, before the nothing, was not fear. It was offended professional interest. She had never met a system she couldn't open. She had time to think what are you —
and then she didn't.
She did not see the rest, and would have to be told it later, badly, by a man she had not yet met and was going to dislike intensely.
She did not see the second drone settle into the ruined doorway to cover the room. She did not see the courier — the armored stranger, the one who'd looked at her like she was a contact and been so completely correct and so completely wrong — turn to face the muzzle of the railgun and raise his hands with an air less of surrender than of profound personal grievance.
"And I was just about to have an acceptable day," he said, to no one, to the drone, to the indifferent machinery of a universe that had clearly decided to single him out. "What do you want?"
"Take her," the drone said, in the flat synthesized courtesy such machines used when they wished to be understood as a threat, "and come with us."
She did not see him grunt and bend and gather up the smelly, unconscious heap of her as gently as the situation allowed, or hear him mutter about the indignity of carrying a complete stranger a full kilometer under the guns of half a dozen drones. She did not see the machine reach past him with a concealed manipulator and lift both suitcases — his, and hers, and the documents that had brought her to the edge of charted space — out of the equation entirely, with a final, "We will take these. Have a good day."
She was, by every external measure, garbage in the corner, lifted and carried out into the dark.
She would wake furious, hours later and a planet's distance higher, in the belly of a ship that showed less on sensors than a belt buckle did, and the first thing she would do upon waking was complain. But that was later.
For now there was only the white, and then the nothing, and somewhere in the nothing — she would not remember this, and could not have explained it if she had — a garden under a dome, very green, very warm, a hand enormous around her small one, every edge in perfect focus, and no smell to it at all.