Starhammer (11 page)

Jon looked around. Floating down on the air current was a small, highly unusual bubble—a silvery cube the size of a grape. It shimmered oddly on each face.

Fara reached for it, but Jon was faster and he gathered it into his hands and stared at it. It was light, and cool to the touch. The reflections were buried in a kind of moire pattern.

"Something has happened. I shall have to investigate it." Fara tried to take it from his hands.

"No, wait, I paid for it, I get to keep it," Jon protested.

And a fierce protective urge suddenly welled up in his heart. It was his cube! No one would touch it. He put it away and refused Fara's entreaties.

"But never before has the template produced anything more than spheres. This is the first cube! You must donate it to science." Her voice had become a wail.

But her complaint only stiffened Jon's determination to retain the cube. It was his, something told him that it was uniquely so and that no one else should have it. "I will consider your request, but for now I will retain possession of the cube."

Meg eyed him strangely as they walked on down the mall and across a wide lawn toward the Hyades Monument.

"It
is
mine. I paid for it!" he said fervently. She laughed then, much amused.

They parted at the monument and Jon headed for the Olde Shrub Bar and Grille, which was set in a dugout in a forested section of the park. It was one of his favorite haunts.

Although it was sunset hour and the long golden beams produced by the engineers were ricocheting through the habitat, the park was barely crowded. Too chill for sunworship so close to Winterfest, and with the shopping frenzy in full fury, all card colors were allowed entry and the card cops weren't even in view.

The cops were struggling instead with the mass of shoppers over in Octagon Seven, all in search of that unique something to enliven their winter outfit.

Being noncorporate and uninvolved in Masque rather left Jon out of the social life of Hyperion Grandee. Sometimes he found this an acute blessing.

Down the avenue of ancient hemlocks he walked with a cheerful stride despite the slight chill in the air. Sunbeams caromed through the trunks. Through some inscrutable foul-up in their own bureaucracy, the laowon had set him a problem, and he and Meg had neatly sidestepped the problem. He already had his next moves mapped out and was wondering if the case might be wrapped up before bedtime.

As soon as he'd eaten, had a chance to shower and put on clean clothes, he was going to the high-dorsal extender to look at the Elchite warehouse and docking bay.

A little breeze stirred a few fallen leaves across the path. He could almost feel 5,000 credit units sitting in his account. Meg, of course, would get her split.

He made a note to check in with Coptor Brine and discuss what might be landing on his plate the next morning, back at the squad.

Eventually the friendly red sign of the Shrub poked into view. A squeaking hinge tape played under the bushes and topiary masterpieces that clustered around the Shrub's low-slung structure, deep-bermed into the park ground. With stone floors, woodlook walls, and low ceilings, the place was modeled on a fourteenth-century English tavern.

Jon passed through the "Jolly Miller" linnet bush, a ten-meter-tall gesture of virtuosity on the part of the park staff, and swung into the Shrub. It was pleasantly empty. He ordered a hot freef sandwich, some salad, and a mug of ale.

The freef was done perfectly, and he always liked the Shrub's style of ale, dark and bitter.

He paid with his card in the table slot function box and tapped out a tip. In some contentment he leaned back in his booth and stared out the window illusion, on a panorama of ancient Earth. That week the Shrub was running a series called "Great Metros of Old Terra." Jon watched in fascination as vistas of romantic ancient cities—Vancouver, Miami, Glasgow—flitted by. He felt again the romance of Old Earth, by which was meant any time previous to the atomic age.

When he turned back to his beer, a very attractive young woman in a tight silk suit was standing close by. Her golden hair tumbled down her shoulders. She smiled, looked away. They were virtually alone.

"Hello," he said. She turned him a friendly glance. Something was decidedly strange: A prostitute of her caliber would not be working the Shrub Bar and Grille. He finished his ale, and she came closer.

"How nice to find someone who isn't out shopping tonight," she said gaily as she sat down opposite him. "What were you drinking?" She wrinkled her pretty little nose at his mug.

"The ale. Alas, I can't have more than one on this occasion, but thanks very much anyway. Do you come down to the old Shrub often?"

"Not much, just now and then."

It was like something out of his favorite sex fantasy. The lovely girl from nowhere. They were alone—well, virtually—and she was eager to talk to him. Eager to get to know him, and he felt his cheeks harden as he nodded slowly to himself. Superior Buro at work. "Subtle they are not," as Meg always said.

He opened his psi sense out as much as was possible under the influence of a pint of ale. There wasn't much happening. Perhaps she'd had training in psi suppression.

She was so beautiful, he felt a surge of disgust. She'd sold herself to the aliens. How many men had she approached for the blues? She was astonishingly glamorous; most men would find it hard to refuse her.

He stood up and leaned across and quickly kissed her on the lips. She didn't slap him, or protest more than mildly, confirming his suspicions.

"You're lovely. I just had to steal one kiss," he said in a calm voice. "I'd love to stay and get acquainted, but as you probably read in your brief on me, I have good psi sense."

Her face registered a pout of disappointment. "What do you mean?" she said rather plaintively.

"Sorry, but I have to go now." He headed out and back across the park to his home ramp.

When he reached his apartment door his neighbor Onliki popped out of his own door calling Jon's name. Surprised, he looked up to find Onliki wearing an unprecedented smile. Onliki, it seemed, wanted Iehard to come to his next party, to be held on the upcoming festival weekend. A realgoodtime, interesting sex people would attend. Iehard boggled. He and Onliki had barely exchanged words except when Jon complained about Onliki's loud and vulgar audio excesses.

"Onliki!" he said sharply, cutting through the exhaust.

"Whad?"

"Tell the Buro that I don't buy this kind of stuff. I'm not interested, all right?"

Onliki was downcast.

"I sympathize with the loss of this source of easy credit, Onliki, but you will have to explain it to them yourself." But before Jon could escape, the cover had evaporated and the little eyes were narrowed and vicious. "Look, Iehard, I know what you do! So like I intend to get the ramp association together and have you evicted, laoman. You're not the kind of person we want living on this ramp. You shouldn't be living with normal people, you stink of blood. Killing innocent people..."

Jon shut the door, then leaned against it. Sometimes it was good to see the hatred out in the open; it made him feel perversely better. But now he would have to move; the apartment would be dangerous.

A message was waiting on his computer screen. A call from Coptor. The big man's face was creased with a certain amount of real concern. "Jon, I got a complaint here, full pink docket, come down from the Center Court. Names you as defense in a suit for an awful lot of credit. The Baltitude Gas Company wants your hide, baby. Call me tomorrow about it." Coptor blinked out.

The vindictive oaf Baltitude! Just what he needed, a big lawsuit from a paranoid megabuck.

He slipped off his jacket and took out the silver cube, which he set down on the small sidetable.

The cube shimmered most strangely, moire patterns disrupting whatever images might be forming on those faces, but the shimmering appeared at odds with the surrounding light patterns as well. He weighed it again in his hand, squeezed it lightly to no effect. Recalling Fara's efforts with blowtorch and drill, he squeezed it harder between two hands. No effect whatsoever could be detected.

What in the heavens was it? Fara claimed the material was inert and had so far resisted all attempts at investigation.

He set it down and went in and showered and shaved. Later, with a clean shirt and a black top coat and a pair of shoes with adjustable magnets in the soles that he'd purchased for a low-grav pursuit years before, he set out.

He headed for the up platform, paused briefly on the platform and then, as a train came in, he turned and jogged lightly back the way he'd come and down onto the other platform. On the way he passed a plump little man whose expression and strong fear signal marked him as a Superior Buro agent. Jon rode the next train to Octagon Seven and took a roundabout route through the dense crowds until he could get to the back service corridor and then down to Meg's.

"Well, look who's so cheerful," Meg remarked when he walked in. "What did you do, come to your senses and drop this horrible job?" She was working with Daisy.

"No, I think we might see an early conclusion to the case and a check for ten thousand in the morning. Will five thousand credits help?"

"Bah! Sha3 is in the hospital. He will cost five hundred to rebrain, with nothing for all that personality I poured into him." She gestured savagely at the door.

"Since I've been back here the Superior Buro has tried three times to load us with bugs. First it was a fake team from Compubiopsy.
Daisy
wouldn't let them in, that's how bad they were. Then there was a biodisk salesman—a heavenly-looking young man—and then there was a goddamn Newchurcher. 'Let us beseech the Prophet!' he started wailing outside the door. While he was doing it they tried to drill through from the airshaft. Daisy took that out with a voltage surge, burned somebody's blueskin fingers, I hope. We heard stuff falling down the shaft."

"They're on the case all right." He told her of his own brushes with the Buro. "'Subtle they are not!'"

They laughed bitterly.

"Come on, Meg—five thousand in the morning. You'll have Sha3 back eventually, and that's easy money, wouldn't you agree, for what? Twelve hours we've spent on this case."

She grew more serious. "I don't know, Jon, it makes me uneasy. It's blood money. We ought to let him go, leave him be. Why should we catch him and send him to die for the laowon?"

He shrugged. "We have no idea what he may have done. It may have been a senseless slaughter. What difference does it make anyway? If the Superior Buro wants someone they're going to find him in the end. They didn't want us to find Eblis Bey, but we know where he's bound to be hiding. We found out despite them and we found out really easily. So, we have to balance it out."

"It's still blood money. Let the old man go. You don't need the money."

"That's news to me. I have to move again. That means another bribe to another landlord who won't want to have a laoman operative for the Mass Murder Squad in his or her property. I'm afraid I do need the money, besides, he could just as easily have killed them for money himself."

She turned away, a disappointed expression on her face.

After a moment he frowned, put his hands in his pockets. "But I do agree that working around the Superior Buro is getting incredibly tedious. Always the heavy hand with them, always being tailed and bugged. I'm not going to accept any more jobs that involve them."

She smiled then. "Thank you, Jon. I appreciate that." She seemed to brush away a tear. "By the way, here's a little precaution of my own." And she showed him a purple Masque module. "Our Elchite information is now hidden in here. Just in case something breaks in here when I'm not around."

A chime came on and Meg hurriedly set up her Masque entry for a late-evening game, a new challenger for the prime-time entry slot, before "Hidden Notebook." The game was called "Louis Quatorze" and was set in a remote time in Old Earth. All historical details had to be correct for entries to get on the main screen. Meg had entered a serving girl/hunchback duo. Her opening that evening involved an effort by her serving girl, Danielle Lebrun, to entice the elderly Comte D'Aillou into his four-poster bed, where a faction would murder him, thus prompting a change in the keeper of the king's chocolate provision.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she picked up a lot of the telling little details that the DAex Ram was just too slow to handle. Fortunately these were group scenes. Meg was responsible only for the image and dialogue of Danielle, a saucy trollop of quite traditional mode. With the Bioram, of course, things would have been much easier.

But with judges and audience watching critically, every nuance had to be perfect if the action was to get much play on people's main screens. A competing scene was set in the winecellar and another in the queen's bedroom. Meg's fingers drummed the keyboard.

She had won control of the scene lighting now. She tightened focus on Danielle's face, noble peasant of French stock. There was an appealing graininess in her lighting. Now came a long steady shot of her cleavage, then her breasts moving inside her fresh white blouse.

Meg had main screen in more than 50 percent of viewer screens now. The Comte D'Aillou was removing his breeches and indicating the four-poster with considerable excitement on his rouged and powdered features.

Danielle's skirts came down and she bent over seductively for the comte's twitching fingers.

"Wow!" Jon said. "Seventy percent now, Meg."

It was true, Meg was pulling the whole audience of "Louis Quatorze" over to her hot little seduction scene. The much more genteel posturing in the queen's bedroom was down to a mere 15 percent while the spanking of a cellarmaid was holding a calculated 15 percent share of mostly male viewers.

Danielle went to work inside the four-poster and the curtains were drawn over the rest, leaving Meg with 72 percent share and a complete triumph over the opposition.

The game switched focus. The king was returning from the hunt with the court in train. A grand tableau scene was coming up in which Meg had no part. She rose for a cup of instacaf.