Disappearing Act Read online

  "Scanner!"

  Nyx had the equipment ready before the word was out. Johnivans fanned out the cards and ran them through the scanner slot one at a time, barely pausing to read the information that flashed on the screen. He stopped when the screen showed a face. "Little Makusu! This look like her?"

  "That's her," Little Makusu confirmed with a glum stare. Curly black hair, black eyes, olive skin—like Maris, almost, only a Maris who was cleaned up and older and more confident.

  Johnivans sighed and let forth a string of expletives in Hongko, more chilling for being uttered without apparent expression. With the same dead-calm voice he summarized, "So you've kidnapped a Diplo and let Daeman torture her. Diplos don't just go missing; when this one doesn't report in there'll be an almighty stink. Got any bright ideas how to fix it?"

  "If she's found dead," Little Makusu said slowly, watching Johnivans' face. The Man didn't seem to be getting any angrier, at least. " . . . dead of natural causes . . ."

  "How much damage did Daeman do?"

  "Only a broken finger," Little Makusu said proudly. "I kept him under control."

  "Brilliant. Any suggestions on how we make a broken finger into a wholly unsuspicious natural death?"

  "The woman was nosing around where she shouldn't have been. An accident. An accident in Engineering—something that mangles her hand—or Maintenance, any kind of conveyor system ought to do it—something around a loading dock; she was too damn interested in how stuff gets on and off Tasman," Little Makusu improvised, feeling happier as Johnivans seemed to relax. "We'll work out something."

  "Okay, get on with it, make a plan, let me know when you're ready. And fast! I want her found before she's reported missing, get me?"

  "Uh—where'll you be, boss?"

  Johnivans rolled his eyes upward. "Having a little chat with the lady. Now we really need to know what she's here for."

  "Want Daeman?"

  Another roll of the eyes. "And to think you're one of my brighter people. This whole enterprise must be under the special care of the God of Minor Fuckups. No, I don't want Daeman, he has no self-control. We can't leave any more marks on her until you've figured out how to arrange her accidental death. I'll have to find other ways of persuading her to talk."

  * * *

  God of Trouble sends by threes, Johnivans' grandmother used to say. So okay, they had a nosy stranger asking about smuggling pro-tech onto Kalapriya, that was one; after they'd shown their hand by kidnapping her, the woman turned out not to be a freelance smuggler who could disappear but a bunu Diplo traveling incog, that was two. Johnivans refused to be superstitious; but when he found the cell where Daeman and Makusu had stashed the woman empty, and the parcels stored there cut open, somehow he was not surprised. "I was wrong," he muttered. "We've been upgraded. We are getting the special attention of the God of Major Fuckups."

  How had she gotten out? Not the way she came; she'd have had to get past his people, and they weren't that incompetent. He didn't think. Then again, anybody stupid enough to leave their catch in a corridor section with the far partition door unlocked . . .

  "It wasn't unlocked," Little Makusu protested.

  Johnivans gave him a bone-chilling glance. "You checked, of course."

  "It's never unlocked. Nobody goes that way. Look, it's closed now, isn't it?"

  On inspection, the door was not only locked; it flashed red warnings every time Johnivans touched the key pad. The door sensors reported vacuum on the other side; the airlock doors leading to the damaged loading bay must have been opened.

  "It was left unlocked," Johnivans said flatly. "She went through into the next partition, but that door was locked. So . . . what exactly did you idiots do to her, that she preferred spacing herself to a little talk with me?"

  It probably wouldn't be a good idea to point out that most people who knew Johnivans would make the same choice. Nor would it help to remind Johnivans that he'd wanted them to scare the woman before leaving her alone, for fear and imagination to weaken her defenses.

  "Vacuum'll get Maintenance down here," Keito the Fingers said gloomily, and Makusu mentally blessed him for changing the subject.

  "So? One thing's for sure, they won't find anything." Johnivans frowned and drummed his fingers on the door panel. "That gives me an idea . . . no, it wouldn't work . . . Get some of the boys to shift the rest of those crates, just in case Maintenance checks past the breach to look in here . . . Not that it'll help. We need to get them off-station; when a Diplo's reported missing, they'll look everywhere."

  "Not the Hideaway," Keito said. "Nyx took it off the data maps; the maint-bots don't even know it exists now."

  Johnivans sighed. Deeply. Why were all his boys such fuckups? "For a missing Diplo," he said evenly, "it won't be maint-bots, it'll be human beings. And not all humans being as dumb as you lot, it's just remotely possible that one of them will notice some discrepancies between the space used in the database and the recorded volume of Tasman." He could see the work of years going down the drain; his organization scattered, no place to gather, no safe place to relax, nowhere to stash the goods he moved to and from Kalapriya. Ask the Consortium for help? Better not—they weren't the kind of people who responded well to a show of weakness.

  "If the Diplo weren't missing they wouldn't search the whole station," Keito mused.

  "If wishing were oxygen, I'd be able to breathe between the stars!"

  "Maris looks a lot like that Diplo," Makusu commented, beginning to see a ray of hope.

  "Yeah, but she'd never be able to pull it off. Diplos are schooled. They know everything there is to know—and all Maris knows is the underside of Tasman. They've got all those brain implants and mysterious powers, too," Keito pointed out.

  "Oh yeah? That little lady didn't work no mysterious powers on yours truly," Makusu swaggered. "She was as scared of Daeman as anybody else would have been. You ask me, it's just a load of holocrap about the Diplos. They're just another kind of toppies, that's all, and Maris already passed for a toppie."

  "Yeah? When?"

  "When she was following this Diplo."

  "Who caught her, may I point out!"

  "Shurrup, both of you!" Johnivans growled. "A man can't think with your bickering going on—not that either of you would know anything about that. We might just pull it off. We've got the Diplo's cards; Nyx can change the prints and retina scans to match Maris, even put in Maris's picture. She's faked enough IDs for us, even a Diplo's can't be all that different."

  "Yeah, but Maris can't possibly fool anybody that she's . . ." Keito's voice trailed off under Johnivans' withering stare.

  "She is perfectly bunu qualified," Johnivans said slowly, "to pass for a dead Diplo. And that's all we really need—a corpse that matches the specs, to stop them searching."

  "But Maris . . ."

  "Failed us all, when she let that Diplo catch her. I don't have room in my organization for fuckups."

  Makusu thought about the unchecked partition door and stopped protesting before Johnivans could think of some use for his corpse.

  "But don't tell Nyx why we want the IDs faked. She likes Maris."

  "So did I," said Keito, sadly, but accepting the inevitable. Better to lose one girl than to see the entire Organization go out the airlock.

  * * *

  "I wish you'd stop hanging over my shoulder while I work," Nyx told Maris. "You're getting on my nerves."

  "You asked me into your luxurious closet," Maris pointed out. The workroom was actually a little bigger than a closet, but the specialized—and highly illegal—equipment lining the walls left about enough free room for one woman and a can of cold fizz. "And you didn't even tell me why you wanted samples. Trying something new for Johnivans, are you?"

  Nyx hunched over her console, tapping the screen here and there with a long platinum fingernail to adjust parameters that were invisible from Maris's angle of vision. "I'm not supposed to talk about it."

  "C'mon. He can't expect
that you'll take finger and palm prints, retina scans, hair and blood and skin samples, and I won't even notice. Do you have to go through with this for everybody in the Organization? Are we all getting proper IDs or what?" Maris didn't really want to give Nyx a hard time—but she was nervous, waiting to hear what Johnivans had done to her assigned target . . . and what he was going to do to her for screwing up. That there would be a punishment she accepted without question; she just wished she knew what it was.

  And she hoped, without too much hope, that he wasn't hurting the other woman too much. Of course if she was a smuggler from some rival off-station gang, trying to muscle into the Organization's business, she deserved whatever she got . . . but . . . she hadn't seemed like that bad a sort.

  And thinking about any of this was unprofitable. Johnivans would do what he had to do and she'd have to be crazy to question him. He'd befriended her when she was just a kid barely old enough to be recruited by a pimp and sent out to work the corridors. If she weren't part of the Organization that's where she'd be now, doing one crewman after another and handing over her credits to a boss who slapped her around if they weren't enough or if he was in a bad mood. Johnivans asked her to do some hard things sometimes, but nothing demeaning, and he was fair, and he looked after his people. She felt like a total jerk for even thinking of questioning whatever he had to do with that woman.

  It was much, much less upsetting to hang over Nyx's workstation and try to figure out her special top-secret project.

  "If you have to get samples from everybody in the Organization, there'll be no way of keeping the project quiet," she pointed out. "You really think somebody like Little Makusu is going to give you scans and cell samples without asking questions? Or Daeman?"

  "Fortunately," Nyx said while she tapped the screen in a rapid tattoo that brought up flashing arcs of colored lines in constantly changing patterns, "I don't have to sample Daeman or anybody else. Just you."

  "Just me?" Maris could practically hear the sound of her teeth hitting the floor as her jaw dropped open. She knew her place—about the lowest form of life in the Organization, even before she'd failed Johnivans in this assignment. "Girl, there's too much monoxide in your air mix! No way am I important enough to justify this much of your work. Even before I screwed up."

  Nyx's elaborately painted face showed a small, secretive smile under the masklike decorations of green and platinum spirals. "Well, maybe you're not as much in disgrace as you thought. Listen, if anybody else finds out, I'll be the one in big trouble . . . but Johnivans can't have meant I can't tell you, seeing it's all for your benefit. Just don't let anybody else know, okay?"

  Maris swore on the integrity of Tasman's outer hull, then spat on her hands and swore by the God of Minor Fuckups that she wouldn't reveal what Nyx told her to a living soul.

  "Okay . . . I'm about done, anyway; just have to wait for all that data to process and print." Nyx pushed her stool away from the console and half turned to look up at Maris. The smile was dancing in her eyes now. "Looks like Johnivans has a real special assignment in mind just for you, lady. Know what I've just been doing? Know who that woman is you were following, the one Daeman and Makusu had to snatch after she rumbled you?"

  "Don't remind me," Maris pleaded. "Way I fucked that one up, there's no way Johnivans would trust me with any solo project again."

  Nyx's lips curved. "She's a Diplo. Name of Calandra Vissi, originally from Saros, in transit to assignment on Kalapriya. And you may have noticed that she looks a lot like you . . . You're going to take her place, Maris."

  "Me! She doesn't look that much like me . . . I can't fake being a Diplo . . . the scans will show . . . arrghh. That's what you wanted all my data for." Maris gulped and shut up, her thoughts racing.

  Nyx nodded. "First I had to set up the ID cards, then I hacked into the station records to make everything consistent. In a few minutes you'll have all of Calandra Vissi's ID—but with your picture, prints, and cellular specs. And they'll match what Tasman Central Authority think they recorded when she came on-station."

  "There'll be other records, won't there? From her home world, from Diplo Central. You can't hack into all those . . . can you?"

  "I might, given time," Nyx said with a brief scowl. "Never say can't! But Johni didn't tell me to go that far. It's a rush job, and the data only has to be consistent on-station, that's all I know . . . so whatever he's got in mind for you to do, it must be here on Tasman. Maybe he wants you to impersonate her with Tasman Central Authority and find out what she's been sent here for."

  "Maybe . . ." Maris agreed. She should feel excited. Instead of punishment, this looked like a promotion! Only . . . too many things didn't make sense. She sidled to the door. "Thanks a million, Nyx. And I promise I won't tell anybody. Only, I need to be alone for a bit now. Think. You know? It's a lot to absorb."

  "Okay, but don't go far. Your new cards should be popping out any minute now . . . in fact, here they come. You want to take them up to Johnivans yourself?"

  * * *

  The path from Nyx's workstation to the Hideout led through a series of narrow, unused maintenance corridors with partition doors rekeyed to codes only Johnivans' gang knew. Maris tapped out the codes automatically, her mind racing. Impersonating a Diplo? How could she ever pull it off?

  "Johnivans?"

  "What's the matter, Maris? You look upset."

  "Nyx told me," she blurted out. "About—"

  Johnivans' face became momentarily a cold and chilling mask, and Maris took a step backward, frightened of him as she'd never been before.

  "What, exactly, did Nyx tell you?"

  "That you want me to impersonate this Diplo, maybe even go to Kalapriya in her place. Don't be mad at Nyx," Maris pleaded. "I—I kind of wormed it out of her, like."

  Johnivans smiled and Maris thought she could actually feel her heart resume beating. If she'd known Nyx telling her would make him that kind of angry—but he wasn't angry now, he looked like an indulgent uncle who's had his surprise present given away. "I would have broken it to you more gently. Scared?"

  "I can't do it," Maris said flatly.

  "If I tell you to, you will."

  "I didn't mean— Of course I'll do anything you want, Johnivans, but—a Diplo? How can I possibly pull it off? How could anybody?" Maris tried to collect her thoughts, to explain. Diplos were—they knew everything, and what they didn't know, they had magic chips implanted in their brains to tell them. They could kill people by looking at them and transport themselves without ships and, and . . .

  "Easy, kid," Johnivans said with his slow, warm smile when Maris babbled out what was on her mind. "Most of that talk about Diplos is mushroom feed. Hey, if they were some kind of superpeople, think we'd have been able to snatch this one so easy? They're just another kind of snob toppie, that's all. Trust me, you won't encounter any problems trying to pass for Calandra Vissi. Why don't you go up to her quarters now and try on some of her outfits? If they don't fit right we'll have to get them altered."

  "Am I really going on to Kalapriya? That's her next assignment station."

  Johnivans studied his fingernails. "Yeah. You're going exactly where she was going, Maris. And since the ID's done, I wish you'd get started. Know where her quarters are?"

  Maris glanced at the handful of flimsies Nyx had handed her along with the cards. Level Five, corridor sixty-seven, room K. "Yes. But what if she shows up there?"

  "I can personally guarantee you that will not happen."

  "And can't you at least get me some Kalapriyan language plugs and an info-vid about the place? She'd be expected to know all that."

  "You think you can fake a Diplo's language-learning implants with a few days cramming language plugs?"

  "Can't hurt, might help," Maris said with more confidence than she felt. "And I can't be seen buying them, or order them off her account. It would look funny—she's supposed to already know that stuff. Please, Johnivans?"

  "Sure, sure, I'll have Fin
gers get right on it."

  That probably meant the plugs and vids would be gently lifted from store stock or from some legitimate traveler's baggage, which seemed to Maris a silly risk to take when it would be easy enough to buy them—but she'd pushed Johnivans far enough already, and after all it was his decision. "And I'll go try on some of the Diplo's clothes," she said cheerily. "Just have Keito bring the plugs to her quarters, okay?"

  * * *

  Maris put on her "toppie" disguise just to make the journey up to Calandra's quarters. She'd never been this close to Center before—and from the looks the real toppies gave her in the public lift tube, the shiny bodysuit and pseudosilk sarong that had enabled her to pass on Fourteen were barely acceptable on Five. Maris couldn't exactly define the difference between her appearance and that of the toppies around her, but they looked somehow polished. As if somebody had put in long careful hours on arranging each strand of hair, buffing each gleaming nail, placing each beauty jewel in just the right place to bring out the best features of each smooth, confident face. She tried not to catch anybody's eyes as she hurried along the softly carpeted corridors of Five, glancing at tube and cross-corridor numbers out of the corner of her eye. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-eight, that couldn't be right, what happened to sixty-seven, mustn't look lost or somebody would for sure stop her and ask what she was doing here, oh, bunu remodelers, sixty-seven had been bent around a lift tube to come out on the wrong side of seventy. Letters now, A–J this way, L–M that way, oh lovely, where was K, didn't toppies use the same alphabet as normal folks or—oh. Sixty-seven K was right in front of her, that was why there weren't any arrows pointing the way to it. With shaking fingers Maris inserted the key card Nyx had given her into the slot, placed her palm on the pad beside it. Now the alarms would go off, shrieking unauthorized access—

  The door slid open so quietly Maris hardly heard the quiet swoosh of buffers across the deep-piled carpet. She took one wondering step inside, then another. And she'd thought Fourteen was luxurious—it was nothing to compare with this! How did you close the doors? She didn't want to risk a voice command. Oh, wave your hand over this sensor pad, the one with a picture of an oval door slit down the middle, and the iris closed. Wave again, and it opened. Maris waved a third time and told herself to stop playing with the room controls. Calandra Vissi wouldn't be fascinated by these controls, she'd be used to things like this or better—though what could be better was beyond Maris to imagine. In her head she started thinking how she'd describe the place to Nyx, how she'd convey the sense of luxury and safety executed in such an understated manner. Nothing like the bright patchwork of colors and textures in the Hideout; instead, soft blue-grey furnishings that seemed to grow naturally out of the soft grey-blue carpet. She dropped down on a sofa, half afraid her cheap sarong with its gaudy border of silver threads would stain or scratch the perfectly skin-soft upholstery. Chairs you could go to sleep in, she'd tell Nyx, the way they molded themselves to fit and support your body. Light that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, somehow following the direction of your eyes so that whatever you looked at was gently illuminated and nothing glared. A full wall fitted with a flat-screen viewer set to create the impression of a deep forest glade stretching out into the distance. And another room opening off this one—no, two of them! A flimsy notice on one door invited the traveler to take advantage of the amenities in the Personal Care Suite. Maris glanced through the door and saw a gleaming array of faucets and mirrors and cosmetic toys. No wonder toppies had that polished look! Now she knew where they kept the polishers. Those would be fun to play with. Perhaps she'd get Nyx up here and the two of them could experiment with everything until they made themselves up into proper toppies from head to toe.