Page 78 of Throwing Fire

While Kez naps,I parse through Myhre’s fucking interminable reports, and twenty-seven minutes of vid from the skimmer crash.

Myhre’s been busy chasing the dragon, as she calls it. Following the credits. The case against Payton is damning, I have to admit. She’s fed a lot of credits to the NoBos and into the E.C. over the last two years. Either funding someone’s plush lifestyle, or building up a war chest, which is now aimed at Kez’s head. But I notice there haven’t been any credit transfers between Kimpler’s Cloud accounts and the mainland in the last five-day. Payton started thinking for herself and stopped funding our enemies. She wasn’t lying.

Payton turns out to be the link between Jaxon and Duncan, too. She’s made two transfers to Duncan. Both in the week after Old Man Tyng’s death. Totaling less than a thousand credits. That was the price for betraying Kez. Less than a thousand hard. Motherfucker.

Myhre hasn’t gotten as far with the K-net code we got from Alb. All K-net addresses have to be tied to a real-world datapoint. So the govvies can track your ass down when they find you doing something illegal. Naturally, that’s led to a nice cottage industry in hard-line fronts. ‘J-nox’ leads to one of them. VMV9181, Tonlye. Tonlye’s an inland, industrial city, tucked into the long valley between Hemos and Kuus, nowhere near Ykimo or the north shore. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. Didn’t mean anything to Myhre.

But it means something to me.

Before I met Kez, when I was still smuggling, I did some work for a pair of small-timers, Vazilly and Mikhael Vark. I hit some unexpected expenses on one of their runs – their shipment of nanoized zinc oxide leaked out of its supposedly sealed containers all over my ship and cost me a small fortune to have cleaned, since that shit is toxic as hell once it’s been nanoized. The Vark Brothers were soembarrassed about the damage, they offered me a free year on one of their hard-line fronts. I’ve used it from time to time when I really needed to cover my tracks. I know the address well. VMV9181, Tonlye.

I adjust Kez on my shoulder. Smile to myself. I know the Vark brothers pretty well. All they care about is credits. Whatever Jaxon’s paying them, I can pay more.

I move on to the vid from Payton.

It’s in the third segment of vid. From a stationary security monitor on a shop we were passing. Eight seconds before our skimmer erupts into flame, there’s a shadow. I slow it down, way, way, down, until I can see the details within that dark blur. A white-furred hand, patches of pink skin showing like the fucker’s got mange. The flash of a black thumb-claw. The rounded blue edge of a weapon I recognize, because it was one the military’s favorite weapons for urban pacification. A Gaudde mag-gun. Perfect against civvie vehicles, which lack military-grade shielding. Hand-held. No ammo. Just a targeted electro-magnetic pulse. Lightning in a bottle. Mag-guns have barely any range and are notoriously inexact. But when you’re frying a neg cell on a skimmer from twenty meters, you don’t need range or precision. Just a clear shot, and that’s what Dom Fox had standing in the doorway of the shop, waiting for us to go by on the way to the spaceport.

I squeeze my eyes closed. I was a paranoid bastard before I met Kez. The last three weeks have not sweetened my disposition. Could be coincidence that Dom Fox was on the Clouds, in the Deeps, the same night we were. His talk about how the Foxes didn’t have to bother with Kez because of the tag on her head was piss and wind, designed to distract us. He coulda done it all – followed us, connected the dots when we rented the skimmer, and waited in the path to the spaceport – just because the Fox Clan has an axe to grind with Kez. Or the Foxes could be working with Jaxon, and Dom was a plant, left behind when the ‘Big Man’ visited the island the day before.

Or the people who knew we were going to be out on the Clouds could have given us up. Payton. Tiancha. Acker.

Just ‘cause you’re paranoid, don’t mean they ain’t all out to get you.

A Gaudde mag-gun isn’t a terribly expensive weapon, but it is unusual outside of military circles. Civvies don’t usually go disrupting each other’s neg cells. Probably because they’re afraid of it coming back and biting them in the ass: what you use to fry your neighbor’s hover today can be used to fry yours tomorrow. I haven’t seen a mag-gun in a decade. Myhre said the Blue Foxes weren’t well funded, and a mag-gun ain’t something you buy with a few spare creds from your local gun shop.

I’m not a huge fan of guns – probably because I’ve had too many of them pointed at me over the years – which is why I stick to my knives. But even if I was, I’d have a hard time getting my hands on one on Kuseros. The official policy is zero-tolerance. C.P. don’t carry guns, and they don’t take kindly to people who do. In my two years on Kuseros, I’ve only smuggled guns once, into New Brunny, where they were probably used in the water riots. So there’s at least one arms dealer floating around Kuseros, but they lie pretty damn low. That run was so heavily fronted, I wouldn’t know where to start to track back to the dealer. In fact, the only place I could readily get my hand on a gun is Tyng Tower, which has a small armory in one of the sub-basements.

I wonder if there are any mag-guns in the collection.

And then I wonder if one of them is missing.

CHAPTER 30

There mighta been a time when I hated bein’ a Mod.

Maybe while I was in that series of dumping grounds on Paggen. Maybe during my first month in SAWL while I was getting hazed like every other new recruit. But those times have always been brief.

Mostly I’ve appreciated the genetic fuckery my parents passed on to me; I would have modified myself even more heavily if it had been allowed in SAWL. A direct, permanent link to the hyper-net would’ve come in all kinds of useful over the years. But those kinds of modifications are banned in the military, just like they are in the Core System. Makes the grunts too vulnerable to outside interference, the heads said. Too bad, I would have liked a socket.

Without one, I patch in to Mother Jo through the eskey built into the skullcap. It’s a clumsy, clunky interface, dependent on voice commands. Still better than a public patch, where I’d have to be careful to cover my tracks to avoid leaving a blazing trail across the K-net. Unlike Chiara, I’m not a public face of Tyng Enterprises, and I don’t want to be.

The entry menu overlays my darkened surroundings like a digitalveil, growing more solid as I work through the Tyng-net’s security toward the AI. By the time Mother Jo’s face appears, that’s all I see. I can still feel Kez’s warm weight against me. The solid press of the couch beneath me. But my sight is taken up by Mother Jo’s warm eyes and round, brown, wrinkly face.

Why their designers gave the AIs faces, I’ll never know. Must give the AI a complex to look like an octogenarian. Or maybe the AI doesn’t care. Mother Jo smiles at me but grows somber when I begin giving her security handshakes. I work my way up to the highest level. “Come live with me and be my love,” I tell her in a whisper, to avoid waking Kez.

“And we will some new pleasures prove,” Mother Jo responds, her black eyes like wormholes.

“Of golden sands and crystal brooks,” I say.

“With silken lines and silver hooks,” she finishes.

That’s all I can remember of the poem, but it’s enough. The likelihood that even those goggle-eyed little creepers in R-and-D could break my voice and passcode security is forty billion to one, according to Mother Jo. ‘Specially since I change the sequence every week. I’ll take those odds.

“Weapons inventory, Tyng Tower,” I say.

A green display immediately scrolls beside Mother Jo’s face. It’s a long inventory. Longer than I thought, given the size of the armory. “Search, Gaudde mag-gun,” I tell her.

I keep the search command simple. Mother Jo is not a real AI. She hasn’t achieved true sentience, and what little independence she has is limited by her TYE. Her physical systems are hard-wired into some poor fucker who roams around Tyng Tower in his skivvies late at night. Kez and I stumbled on him one night after a quickie in my office. Surprised the hell out of all of us. Particularly when Mother Jo’s voice came out of his mouth. Having her systems tied to a human mind – one that ain’t got all its marbles – keeps Mother Jo from becoming truly free.

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