Realms of Light (11 page)

Mis’ Hirata didn’t waste any time; he reached
out for the card, and as I handed it over he said, “So it
is
you. What the hell are you doing back here?”

“Working,” I said. “Investigators who know
anything about Nightside City are scarce on Prometheus. Guy in
American City hired me to check out a few things.”

“And he paid your fare?”

“Fares are cheap right now, if you’re coming
from Prometheus.” Which was true, even if it didn’t apply in my
case. I didn’t want good old George getting any clever ideas if he
found out my client was rich enough to have his own yacht.

“I’ve heard that,” Hirata grudgingly
admitted, as his reader accepted my card. “They sure aren’t cheap
leaving, though.” He looked up from the reader. “You said half a
month’s rent?”

“Let’s put that in credits,” I said warily. I
glanced at the cops, who had yet to say a word; one of them was
pointing a stunner at me, and the other had a hand on the butt of
his gun, though it was still more or less in its holster. “I don’t
want any misunderstandings.”

“Four kilocredits?”

I stared. “That’s
half
a month’s rent?
Since when?”

“Since the tourist rush drove up prices.”

“That’s grit, Hirata, and you know it—if you
could get anything like that kind of money, this place wouldn’t
have been empty since I left.”

He sighed. “Fine. Two?”

“It’s still robbery, but that’s the national
sport around here, so what the hell. Two kilocredits, not a byte
more.”

“Hey, I’ve got expenses, Hsing.” He kept
looking at me, but he moved one shoulder, and I got the
message—he’d have to pay off the cops.

Two kilocredits ought to more than cover
that, though. “Life’s tough all around,” I said.

He tabbed the reader, then pulled out my card
and handed it back. I was tempted to run a balance check right
there, but decided there was no reason to piss him off. And after
all, it wasn’t
my
money.

“Next time,” he said, “beep me if you want a
short-term rental.”

“Next time,” I replied, “you might want to
change the door codes when a tenant moves out.”

“I’ll do that, Hsing. In fact, I’ll do it
right now, as soon as you get out of here.” He glared.

“Then I’ll let you get on with it.” I lowered
my hands and headed for the door. The cops stepped aside; the taser
was lowered. I nodded to them. “Good to see you, boys. Hope you’ll
have a lucky night.” I glanced back over my shoulder at Hirata.
“Enjoy your credits, George. I hear the New York has the best
pay-outs in the Trap.”

I trotted down the stairs and out onto the
street, where the wind whipped my hair into my eyes. I’d let it
grow out some back on Prometheus; they don’t have the same winds
there that Nightside City has. Hell, they don’t have anything
close
—half the time you can walk down an open street in
Alderstadt and there’s no more wind than there is indoors. Maybe
less, if “indoors” includes a decent ventilation system. Prometheus
doesn’t have the planetary convection cycle Epimetheus does. I
turned my back to the wind and tapped my wrist for a cab.

I was still waiting when Hirata and his cops
came out of the building; they barely glanced at me as they turned
and marched away down Juarez. They had just turned the corner when
my ride finally swooped down.

“The port,” I told it.

“There’s a surcharge from Westside,” the cab
replied.

“Since when?”

It didn’t answer audibly. Instead a display
lit up with a notice that the city hereby accepted the petition of
the Transit Association for higher fares between low-traffic areas.
It was dated nine days ago.

“The port’s a low-traffic area?” I asked.

“That’s what the regulations say.”

“I didn’t pay a surcharge on the way
out.”

“It doesn’t apply if you start or end in the
Trap.”

“Fine.” I slid my card in the slot. “Take me
to the port.”

“Yes, Mis’.”

Wind and cops and high prices—I was feeling a
good bit less nostalgic about Nightside City as the cab lifted off
and swung around to the south.

Hirata had interrupted me before I had really
had a chance to look at what was actually in Grandfather Nakada’s
ITEOD files, or do anything to identify whatever it was that had
chased me away in the middle of my download. I wanted to get on
with that; the sooner I knew whether I had any chance of doing
Nakada’s job, the better.

I also wanted to see if I could find just
where my father was stashed, and I wanted to talk to Captain
Perkins about getting ’Chan off-planet. I decided there was no
reason to hold off on that conversation, and used my wrist com to
beep the good captain.

He answered instantly, as if he’d been
waiting for my call. “Mis’ Hsing,” he said. “Something very strange
is going on.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. But I don’t think I should talk about
it on the air.”

“Then don’t. I’m on my way there now.”

“Good! Is there anything I need to have
ready? Will we be lifting off?”

“No, I still have more to do here,” I said.
“We won’t be going anywhere for awhile. If you could have something
ready to eat, though, I haven’t had a bite since I left the
ship.”

“Of course. I’ll have supper waiting. Just
for you?”

“Just for me.”

“I’ll see you, then.” He ended the call.

I stared at my wrist for a moment, trying to
guess just what sort of strangeness had Perkins worried. Had that
thing that chased me off the net followed my transmission back to
the ship? Had one of the Nakadas planted something aboard? The ship
wasn’t fully sentient, but it was pretty bright, bright enough to
fly itself if it had to, and that meant there were a million ways
to sabotage it.

Or maybe it was nothing to do with the case.
It occurred to me that someone might have noticed a dead man’s
yacht turning up on Epimetheus. Were a bunch of floaters hanging
around, asking Perkins for interviews? Were the cops demanding to
know how he got the ship?

“If you can hurry,” I told the cab, “do
it.”

“Yes, Mis’.”

I didn’t notice much of a change, but we
reached the port a little more quickly than I’d expected, so when I
tabbed the fare I added a juicy tip.

“Thank you for using Midnight Cab and Limo,”
the cab said. “Shall I wait?”

“No.” I waved it off.

The cab closed up and buzzed away, and I
marched across the field to Grandfather Nakada’s little
playtoy.

I’d been at least partly right, I saw—there
were
floaters hovering around the ship, about half a dozen
of them. I wished I had my gun. I pretended to ignore them as I
walked up the steps and into the airlock.

They didn’t ignore
me
, though. Two of
them swooped down to barely-legal distance and began haranguing me.
Since they were both talking at once, and each one kept cranking up
the volume in an attempt to drown the other one out, I didn’t catch
everything they said, but one was demanding to know who I am and
who had authorized me to board the
Ukiba
, while the other
was asking questions about Yoshio Nakada’s private life.

The others were watching me, too; one of them
positioned itself ahead and above me for a good shot of my face. I
really
wished I had my gun.

The outer door had opened as I approached;
once I stepped through it slid closed, locking the floaters out and
cutting off the shouting of the two that had been questioning me. I
expected the inner door to open, but it didn’t; instead there was a
hum, and my symbiote informed me that I was being scanned.

“That your idea, Perkins?” I asked the
air.

“I’m afraid so, Mis’ Hsing,” his voice
answered. “I think I need to be very careful right now.”

I couldn’t disagree. “Well, hurry it up,” I
said.

Perkins didn’t reply, but the green light
came on and the inner door slid aside. I stepped aboard.

Perkins wasn’t in the entry. I went on up to
the main lounge and found him there, jacked into the pilot console.
He turned to look at me, but didn’t unplug.

“Mis’ Hsing,” he said. “Do you know what’s
going on?”

“It depends how you mean that,” I
answered.

“That data you sent—that’s Yoshio Nakada’s
death files,” he said. “And all the nets here say he’s dead.”

“I know,” I said.

“But they say he died a couple of days before
we left Prometheus, and I
saw
him alive in American City. He
brought you aboard the ship. Did he die while we were en route, and
the reports have the date wrong?”

“He isn’t dead,” I said. “At least, I don’t
think he is.”

“But they
all
say he is, and you have
the death files.”

“Someone faked the reports from Prometheus to
get
those files,” I said—which I didn’t know to be fact, but
it was definitely a promising theory.

Perkins still looked troubled. “Are you
sure
?”

“Reasonably.”

“You don’t think that could have been an
imposter we saw in American City? A simulation, maybe?”

“Do
you
?”

“I don’t know,” he said unhappily. “I’ve
never seen a hologram that realistic before.”

“You still haven’t,” I assured him. “That was
the real Yoshio Nakada.”

“You’re sure?”

“I could
smell
him,” I said. “Couldn’t
you? I’ve never heard of a simulation
that
good.”

Of course, I had only spoken to him face to
face in a heavily-shielded secure room where it would have been
easy to set up a projection with vid, audio,
and
smell, and
then very briefly on the ship, another controlled environment. I
didn’t mention that; I didn’t think it would be a positive
contribution to the conversation. I was fairly sure, though, that
if that had been a projection I spoke to, either time, something
would have shown up on my recordings as being off, and nothing
had.

Not to mention that I had never yet seen a
holographic projection that was
completely
convincing. For
that you needed a feed over wire, not just visual input.

I was not
totally
ruling out the
possibility that Yoshio really had been dead all along and I had
been hired by an impostor, but I didn’t think it was likely. Why
would anyone bother? Those interplanetary transmissions would have
been much easier to fake than our face-to-face meeting.

It wasn’t something I wanted to argue about
with Perkins, though, so I spoke as if I was absolutely
certain.

“So he’s still alive?”

“He was when we left, anyway. Now, what are
those floaters doing outside?”

“They’re reporters,” he said. “I’ve been
telling them I couldn’t talk to them, but they won’t go away.”

“Why are they there in the first place?”

He looked astonished, as if I had just said
something so spamming stupid he couldn’t believe it. “Mis’ Hsing,
they think Mis’ Nakada is dead.”

“Yes, I got that.”

“This is his private yacht. It’s registered
in his name, and our flight path is on record. So far as they know,
we took off in a dead man’s ship. They want to know why.”

I blinked.

“Oh,” I said, feeling slightly foolish. “Of
course they do.”

I should have thought of that. I should have thought
of it the instant ’Chan told me that Grandfather Nakada had gone to
join his ancestors. I hadn’t. The thought that the ship would be
noticed had simply never occurred to me.

So now I was trying to conduct a sensitive
private investigation from a home base that was under the intense
scrutiny of half a dozen newsfeeds, at least one of which had
undoubtedly recognized me by now. I had more or less shown the
entire Eta Cassiopeia system that I was working for Yoshio Nakada
or his heirs.

Lovely. Running smooth, wasn’t I?

“Right,” I said. “You haven’t talked to
them?”

“No,” Perkins said. “I haven’t let the ship
talk to them, either. They’ve been asking me who sent us, and who
else was aboard, and what we were doing here, and I just told them
I was not at liberty to answer questions.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good. You did the
right thing. Keep doing it.”

“Your supper is over there,” he said,
pointing across the lounge.

I’d forgotten that I had asked for it, but
now that I knew it was there I was hungry.

“I’m monitoring the situation,” he said,
pointing at the wire below his ear. “You can eat, and I’ll keep an
eye on things.”

“Thanks,” I said. I turned and went to fill
my belly—and to think.

As I ate the soba Perkins had prepared, and
drank lukewarm jasmine tea, I considered the situation.

I had intended to do my best to stay below
the radar, to quietly poke around and see whether I could find
anything that might relate to the case. Then I was going to grab my
brother and father, load them aboard the ship, and get the hell off
Epimetheus before anyone even noticed I was there. I could figure
out the next step when I was back on Prometheus.

That wasn’t going to happen. The radar had me
painted. If I set foot outside the ship again I’d probably have a
squadron of newsies cruising behind me everywhere I went.

That meant a change of plans. I wasn’t sure
just how drastic a change I would need; it depended largely on
whether I actually needed to set foot outside the ship again. To
determine that I needed to see just what I had here.

I had access to most of Nightside City’s
nets, of course, but riding wire from here would be risky; the
newsies could trace it. I could pull up public information, but
serious digging might be difficult.

I had everything I had sent to the ship from
my old office, including 93% of the old man’s ITEOD file. That was
the obvious place to start; just what did he have in there?