Disappearing Act Read online

  Logic insisted they had to be there. In general: No place with so much wealth, tangible and intangible, pouring through it could be immune from crime; and history taught that excessive tolls and customs always generated smuggling. In particular: Kalapriya bacteriomats that didn't pass through the Federation's rationing and control system were coming from somewhere—and Tasman was at the only singularity point reachable from Kalapriya. However the black-market bacteriomats were being distributed, they had to pass through Tasman, and somebody there had to know how it was done.

  Somebody who was already unethical, or he wouldn't be distributing black-market bacteriomats; somebody with the power to divert and conceal shipments of things that had to be moved in special climate-controlled, airtight containers; somebody who already had contacts on Kalapriya; somebody, in short, who could be expected to leap on the offer of a partnership smuggling prohibited technological luxuries onto Kalapriya.

  The only trouble was, you couldn't look up "Smuggling—Tasman/Kalapriya" on the netbase and expect to find an informative entry; nor could you insert an offer of partnership into the ceaseless stream of public service announcements and commercial advertisements that clogged Tasman's main info channel. You had to be subtle, come at it sideways, think like a criminal. Drop hints, let it be known in the right quarters that she just might have certain devices that would be guaranteed to sell for a high price on Kalapriya if only she had a way of bypassing the Barents Trading Society's checks on all incoming cargos. And who knew what were the "right quarters"? Calandra had reasoned that there must be an underworld to Tasman and that the bacteriomats must be coming through that way, because all her boss's extremely discreet audits of Tasman's records showed no hint of any fiddling with the data. But in the last few days of bar-hopping and casual chatting and dropping hints Calandra had begun to wonder if Fru Silvan's delicate computer inquiries had missed something, if they should be checking out the highest levels of Tasman rather than the lowest.

  And she really didn't want to go on to Kalapriya without the slightest hint of where to look.

  So it had been a great relief when the girl started following her, some time that morning, and an even greater one when she passed up several perfectly good chances to steal Calandra's shopping bag. Even a credit chip left carelessly on the countertop while she turned her back and haggled with the jeweler hadn't attracted her shadowy follower. The girl had to be from the unknown gang she was trying to make contact with; there was simply no other logical explanation.

  And she'd gotten away.

  But that didn't matter, Calandra reassured herself. At last she had some progress to report! If her carefully casual inquiries had attracted somebody to investigate her, then logic was right and there was at least one strand of the web she was seeking here on Tasman. Pull on that strand, and she might find out enough to guide her investigation on Kalapriya itself . . .

  Mulling over her next move, she forgot to check her proximity sensors—they were mostly a nuisance in a crowded public area anyway, she'd had to pay the closest attention to pick out the one faint blip that showed a repeated pattern behind her and gave that girl's presence away. And she hardly noticed when a sharp angle of joined corridors took her out of the main stream of foot traffic for a moment.

  A sharp push between her shoulders made her stumble forward, putting her arms up to protect her head from hitting the tiled wall—but the wall fell open before her, and just before the world went black Calandra registered, too late, the red flashing lights of her sensors screaming Attention, watch out, somebody's getting much too close.

  * * *

  The first thing she knew was that it was cold; the second, that her head was exploding. No. It just wanted to explode, to get away from the pain, little shreds of Calandra flying out away from the aching center into the cold . . .

  "She's awake," said someone. "I told you I din' hit her no harder'n I had to."

  "Shouldn'a hit her at all," said a different voice in the same slurred accent Calandra had learned to associate with Tasman lifers, the ones who came and stayed and generally held the worst crew positions. Staffers had their leaves on their home worlds, their three- and five- and ten-year rotations, kept ties with home. Lifers . . . her brain was wandering.

  "Doesn't matter, she'll be plenty awake for Johnivans to talk to." There was a nasty laughter behind that voice, a mocking accent on talk that made Calandra shiver despite her pretense of unconsciousness.

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah, watch this—" and a burst of pain flared up Calandra's right arm, coming from the hand, the middle finger bent impossibly far back until there was a snap and her stomach lurched. She moaned then, couldn't help it, and gave up the pretense of unconsciousness. Had to look, anyway, to see if her finger was still there—it was, but the angle made her feel sick again. Better not to look, then.

  "Bright girl," said the man with the cold, mocking voice. Calandra studied him through half-closed lids, pretending to be dazed from the blow. Maybe not pretending, I'm not functioning all that well. Dark golden skin, black eyes with a hint of an oriental fold, broad shoulders. Not too big to tackle, if he were alone. He wasn't; the owners of the other two voices were looking over his shoulder. "See, it's not a good idea to lie to us."

  "Didn't—" Calandra managed in a voice whose wobble dismayed her. She sat up slowly, hissing with pain when she accidentally moved her right hand.

  "Oh, yes. Pretending to be out when you're not, that's a lie, that's no bunu good. Don't need another lesson, do you? Thought not. Learn fast, do you?"

  "Daeman, Johnivans said not to question her till he was ready," protested one of the others, a slender youth with bright green hair in a fashionable topknot.

  "D'I ask her anything, Little M? I'm not bunu questioning her. Just getting her ready. Want her in the right mood, don't we?" The broad-shouldered man—Daeman?—smiled down at Calandra with a mad sweetness in his eyes that terrified her. Sane criminals I can maybe talk my way around. This one's not sane. "In case you're wond'ring, lady, the right mood is cooperative. Totally bunu cooperative. I gotta tell Johnivans you're a quick learner, don't I, that you don't need no more lessons in how to talk to the boss? Or do I?" he mused. "See, I like teaching, and seems like you'd be a good student. What do you think?"

  "I think you started right, but you're making a mistake with the threats," Calandra said, looking at Daeman but pitching her voice toward the two behind him, who might possibly be sane. "Your boss and I have mutual interests. We need to talk."

  Daeman giggled. "Oh, yes. You'll talk! You'll sing if we ask you real bunu nice, won't you, toppie lady? You know how nicely I c'n ask? You wanna demonstration?"

  "Daeman." The boy with the green topknot touched the big man's arm. "Let her wait here, think it over. You scared her enough, Daeman. You're scared, aren't you, lady?" His eyes fixed on hers, sending some message. What? Never cower to bullies, it only encourages them. But did that hold for madmen? Probably not.

  Calandra lowered her eyes and blinked rapidly, as if trying to blink away tears. "Y-yes," she said, and it wasn't hard to sound weak and scared. "Please don't hurt me again."

  "Not before Johnivans gets here," Daeman said with that high-pitched, frightening giggle. "He likes to be sure, know what I mean? You think about that now, toppie slut. We'll have us a party when Johnivans is ready."

  And on that, unbelievably, they left. The door hissed shut behind them and Calandra drew a long breath that shook with grateful relief. With those three watching her, the only advantage she could get over them was pretending to be weak and hurt and too scared to resist, waiting for them to relax so she could make a move. Alone, she had a lot more advantages. Start by getting out of this place? She briefly considered staying for the promised meeting with their boss, what had they called him? Johnivans? Not worth the risk. She did want to talk to him—but not on his territory, with him thinking she was his prisoner, and certainly not with that mad Daeman anywhere around. All right th
en. No telling how long she had, and there could be cameras hidden even in this barren, steel-walled cell. What was it, anyway—part of a corridor? Leaning against a cold wall, head lolling as if she were half unconscious, Calandra closed her eyes, thanked the land spirits of Saros for the Diplomatic Sector's tradition of thoroughness, and called up the implanted database that held maps of Tasman. Using a recent implant like this always gave her a headache; spikes of pain flared between her eyes, vanished and recurred while she scanned sectional maps of the outer layers. Yes, a corridor leading to one of the disused loading docks. Of course, an area neglected like that was a natural breeding ground for a criminal underclass. And the partition doors originally built in as barriers against accidental breaches of the skin still worked; she'd just seen Daeman and Little M and their friend leave through the one to her left. Probably a better idea to take the one to her right, then, assuming it didn't open on deep space. No, that was all right; the maps showed that none of the corridor partitions led directly to a loading dock. Two sets of double doors with an air space between, that was what she had to look out for—avoid those and she'd be all right. With the maps in her head, she didn't need to worry about being spaced—only about avoiding Johnivans and his friends. Especially his friends.

  The other problem with new implants was their slowness to respond; it took time to grow the neuronal connections that let the hint of a thought of moving a small muscle trigger the right commands in the silicon part of her brain. Calandra had to blink twice, hard, to get the cross-sectional maps floating through her vision to change to a 3-D walkthrough beginning just where she thought she might be. And then it was a crummy threedie, jerky, lacking any of the detail that would allow her to select this particular corridor partition from any of the others in the dead area of Level Thirty. There was only one way to test her guess, and it would give her away if anyone was scanning. She would just have to hope that underworld criminals weren't as efficient as Diplomatic Authority.

  Standing wasn't quite as easy as it should have been; that knock on the head? No matter, a little sway and stumble was quite artistic really, should convince anybody watching the hypothetical hidden camera that she was merely moving aimlessly about. Three hesitant steps took her nearly to the right-hand partition door, the one Daeman and his friends hadn't used. Calandra leaned against the door as though the effort of moving had exhausted her. Hell—her body hid one hand from view, but it was the right hand, which she didn't particularly want to use just now. No help for it; turning in a circle to put her left hand between her body and the security keypad would definitely look purposeful and alert a watcher. What am I complaining about? I've still got four perfectly good fingers on that hand. Okay, so using even one finger awakened pain demons that flew up the nerves of her arm keening and wailing disaster. Tough. The pain wouldn't kill her, wouldn't maim her, couldn't even keep her from accessing her new implants. She couldn't be sure that would be true of whatever Johnivans and Daeman might be planning to do to her.

  A roll of her eyes upward and a twitch of her right eyebrow got the damned threedie walkthrough unstuck, let her scan through codes until she spotted the list she wanted, the corridor codes for Level Thirty. Earthlady of Saros, if ever I poured wine from my cup for you, let it be the first one I try!

  Third code out of ten; not enough to make her feel securely under the Earthlady's protection, but not bad. And knowing which code worked also told her exactly where on Thirty she had to be. Just two more corridor cells and an inconspicuous ladder door could get her to Twenty-nine, then to Twenty-eight and higher, where there would be legitimate crew. Could the smugglers actually have been careless enough to leave that way out unguarded? Probably—after all, they don't know I carry all Tasman's security codes in the top left corner of my forehead. Not that the new chip was literally there, but that was where the headache had centered.

  Diplomatic School emphasized, over and over, that probably wasn't good enough if you had any way to improve your odds. Calandra wiggled her right foot and felt the comforting thickness of the very slightly raised heel. Slip the dazer out now, to have in her hand when she went through the door? Or take her chances on this door, and hope she had time on the other side to get her weapon out?

  She might be able to get at it now without alerting anybody. Calandra let herself slide down the wall, careful not to put any weight on the now unlocked door, and tucked her feet under her as she sat. The heel had been designed to let an agile woman casually finger the recessed print-pad and slip the dazer out with a single gesture that looked as if she was just easing a tight shoe.

  An agile woman with a fully functioning right hand.

  Oh well—in three seconds, when she went through that door, anybody watching her would already know something was off. Calandra wriggled to cross her legs in front of her, pressed her right thumb into the print-pad, and awkwardly slipped the catch and pulled out the dazer left-handed; stood up in a smooth flowing motion that she owed not to Diplo School but to Madame Petropolous's Dance Class for Preteens; and pushed the door open with her right elbow, holding the tiny dazer in the palm of her left hand with the nozzle just peeking between two fingers and her thumb on the firing pad.

  Another barren corridor section, this one with shipping crates piled along the inside wall. No shouts, no alarms—dared she take time to investigate even one of those tempting crates? By the time she got free and could come back with station authorities, any bacteriomats concealed in those crates could have been spaced—there to her right were the double doors leading to the defunct Loading Bay B7, plastered with faded stickers bearing the usual warnings: No Exit, Danger, Unsecured Area, Authorized Personnel Only, Vacuum-Rated Protective Gear Absolutely Required. All of which might or might not mean that the second, exterior set of doors to the loading bay had been damaged in the collision that wrecked B7; if Tasman Civil Authority was like any other set of bureaucrats Calandra had encountered, they would rather slap warning tapes all over the doors than actually test or fix anything. The one thing she felt sure of was that the smugglers would be well equipped to dump anything incriminating on a moment's warning.

  If there was a sealed bacteriomat transport canister in one of those crates, and if she could get it to—not to Tasman Central Authority, they might be involved, unlikely as it seemed—back to her boss on Rezerval, then she would have more than redeemed the carelessness that allowed the smugglers to trap her. Calandra squeezed the dazer, resetting it to separate metal from metal rather than neuronal connections, and cut a careful seam round the four sides of the topmost crate. She caught the toppling metal side with her right forearm, just managed to get it to the floor without a betraying clang, set her dazer on top of the crate and rummaged through the packing pearls one-handed. Little pink and green and blue packing pearls flew out with every motion and swirled around her head, too light to succumb to Tasman's artificial grav fields. Somebody was going to have fun cleaning those damned pearls up; she hoped, viciously, that Daeman would be given the chore of recapturing them. With his bare hands. One at a time.

  Metal and plastic, square-edged shapes, recessed print-pads . . . a rounded shape under her palms that felt right, a short tube about three inches in diameter. Aha! She pulled it out, congratulating herself as she recognized the cool white outer insulation of a biosample freezetube . . . and stared in frustration at the black-and-white dot code in the address space.

  No name, no address, just a dot code. Calandra stared at the code until the dots swelled and shrank and spiraled before her eyes. No, she wasn't going to be able to memorize it, and yes, she was sorry now that she hadn't let "Doc" Ovsami at Diplo Central give her the latest in retinal camera implants, but so what? All she had to do was take the actual canister to any sorting and delivery substation to get the dot code translated into an address. And she needed to take the canister with her anyway, to a microbiology lab that could open it under approved protocols and identify the fragile cells in stasis within.

 
And with this information, it should be ten times easier to track down the source of the black-market bacteriomats. Calandra tucked the freezetube under her arm and headed confidently toward the next corridor partition door, the one that should lead to her way uplevel.

  The listed code didn't work.

  Could the list have been scrambled for some reason, so that the code for this partition didn't come immediately after the code for the previous? Not bloody likely. Try the one before, then, maybe she'd been reading the list in reverse order.

  That one didn't work either.

  And even as she was tapping in the other seven possibilities she knew they wouldn't work; either the damned smugglers had hacked into the system and recoded the doors or the list was out of date.

  There was one other way out of this partition, though. They just might not have recoded the double airlock doors.

  It wasn't a pretty exit, but anybody would think it beat hanging around to let Daeman torture her at his leisure.

  Timing would be all-important.

  Calandra took a deep breath of stale, recycled station air, appreciated it with every living cell of her body, and moved over to test the airlock doors leading to the absolute cold of space.

  * * *

  "She's what? Don't give me that? Bunu Diplos travel in style—she'd have been staying right up on Two or Three, not in some Level Five transit cubicle!"

  "Maybe she's a Diplo, maybe she isn't," Keito the Fingers said. "We found the cards tucked into the lining of her travel bag. Maybe she stole them. Maybe they're forged. Maybe . . ."