Carnival-SA (44 page)

He’d put one needle into her back, wait for her to go down, approach with caution, and download her hard memory for Closs—as instructed, just to be sure. Then he’d capsize her boat, lose the body someplace where it shouldn’t be recovered for at least a day (long enough for the hemorragine to break down and for her hard memory to wipe), and pretend, in the morning, to be shocked when he heard the news.

The scoot purred forward. André extended the telescope rest and slid the weapon-mount onto the peg. He squinted through the sight, focusing down through the scope because only an idiot would use connex for this, and took a sighting.

Lucienne Spivak was sitting upright in the pilot’s chair, her braid whipping behind her, her shoulders square and facing him. Easy. The only way he could miss was by divine intervention. He measured his breathing, matched it to the regular rise and fall of the swells, tugged his glove off with his teeth, slid his finger under the trigger guard. He waited for the moment when his breath would pause naturally just as the scoot topped one of the gentle waves.

The moment came. He squeezed the trigger. A jet of cool, grease-scented air stroked his cheek. There was no sound.

The sun wasn’t up yet when someone hammered on Cricket’s doorframe. No doorbell, no chime of connex and the name of the importunate visitor, just the thumping of fist on paramangrove paneling.

“Oh, fuck,” Cricket murmured, twisting her legs into the cool air. She slept nude; she dragged the robe she kept on the bedpost over chilled skin and stumbled barefoot across a morphing rug that this morning was off-white and shaggily looped. Her toes curled as she stepped onto the decking, as if she could somehow protect the tender instep of her foot from the crawling chill. “Fuck, who is it?”

“Kroc,” came the voice from the other side of the door, which answered the question of why he was knocking. No connex to ring her chimes. His voice shivered, high and sharp, almost shrill. “Is Lucienne with you?”

“Shit,” Cricket said, and palmed the lock plate faster than she should have. “She left me around one hundred and one. She was going to get a drink and go home.”

“She didn’t make it,” Kroc said, unnecessarily, because sometimes it was better making a noise. He ducked under her arm into the flat, and she locked up behind him. “Check your messages. If she sent anything—”

It would have been to Cricket, because Jean was not connected. She tightened her robe and scrubbed her eyes on the sleeve. “One second.”

She dropped her connex at night, except for the flat security and a couple of emergency codes. If it had been really important, Lucienne would have spared the couple of extra keystrokes and sent to one of those.

But there were messages waiting. The one from André, which she hadn’t answered. One or two from connex acquaintances, people she knew from online groups. And one from Lucienne. She looked at Jean, so he would know. His face paled under his stubble, but he didn’t speak. Cricket opened the message.

And would have fallen if Jean had not caught her.

It was a sense-dump, night water and darkness, the smell of lubricant and the texture of the flashboat’s controls in her hands, all subsumed by a hypodermic stab to the left of her spine, the building pressure of a migraine like the handle of a knife pressed to her eye. She gasped but couldn’t make her diaphragm work. Jean’s hands on her shoulders guided her back, cushioning her until she slumped against a chair. The robe was everywhere, he must have been getting an eyeful, but he caught her under the chin and made her look into his eyes. “You need EMS.”

“No,” Cricket said, a shrill, spasming whine. She couldn’t lift her hand to push at him, so she thumped the heel on the deck for emphasis. She felt him jump. “No doctor. Just…a minute.”

Dying. Cricket—no, Lucienne was dying. Lucienne knew she was dying, and she knew why. And there was no time to explain.

So she showed.

The file was encoded, and Cricket’s breath came back into her with a rush as the flood of numbers washed away the swelling pain in her head. Lucienne had swamped her connex, a massive core-dump—

Corrupt. Corrupt. Corrupt.

“Shit!” The word of the day, apparently. Cricket scrambled to save, to back up, to dump what Lucienne had sent her into a protected hold. Cricket was an archinformist. She had better security protocols than most governments. And she knew how to sling data, and how to repair it—

She went after it, the bones in Jean’s wrists creaking as she clenched her hands. But the file was incomplete. And a non-holographic transmission, so what she had was a chunk of data, but not the sort of chunk that could give her a fuzzy picture of the whole. This was a linear string. And Cricket was pretty sure she could find the key, because Lucienne would have wanted her—or Jean—to crack the code. But she only had part of it…

A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2006

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Bear

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90304-1

eISBN-10: 0-553-90304-7

www.bantamdell.com

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