The Peril of the Open Bar, thinks Ferdi. There ought to be an ordinance, a protocol, a fucking law.
The night before was colored with the realization (said realization gone from glorious to murderous with the light of day— a work day) that not only were the drinks free, they were being provided by the Local Taxation Authority. That's right. It was a limited-time offer to get back all duties, tariffs, and fees imposed upon Ferdi her whole life long.
The sole proviso, duly noted and observed: Ferdi Hansum had to roll this refund down her throat in liquid form(s), which, if plaintive memory served even partly, had included (but was not limited to) fifteen (15) liters of seized whiskey (originating from a small island on Terra), twenty-three (23) liters of pre-duty cask strength vodka (Paratean, and not yet watered down to match local taxable proof), and one hundred forty-five (145!) grams of psychotropic grade cannabis sativa (please declare all products of agricultural origin) all split between fifty (50) or so (+/-) partaking sad bastards.
Yes, last night had been the Revenuers' yearly fest for Related Services: Planetary Marshalls, Small Arms Control, Ministry of the Blockade and Immigration, and, of course, her own small contingent from the Malvir Customs Agency. It was the night when contraband is consumed by the enforcers, when no one watches the watchmen. When attending the aforementioned fest, please make sure that the next few days are duty-free.
Ferdi shakes her head, which is a mistake.
But the first shuttle off-loading from the Queen Favor has arrived, and among its passengers walks a giant. The rest are luxury-liner usuals: self-lifting luggage and valet drones bobbing in the breeze off the Minor, the craned necks of territory unfamiliar, ears plugged with translators and AI guides, and the squinty look of weeks without real sunlight. And of course, the sudden wary glaze of having departed a controlled and fully consumer-interactive environment for the certain culture shock of dusty Out-world charm, aka reality.
But the giant.
He strides almost a meter taller than the surrounding humans and artificials (and two Chiat Dai), face calm and purposeful among the sleepy and suspicious shuttleload. As the crowd splinters, self-organizing by group-size and citizenship, its constituents delayed by collisions and misreadings of signage, he moves straight to her platform.
Ferdi smiles weakly and nods, his documents are in a ready packet waiting for her direct interface request: Home Cluster citizenship; Expansion-wide professional visa (an art dealer); Signet-Mercator credit backing (snazzy); and nothing to declare except his weirdness.
"No luggage, sir?"
"None."
Halfway to the core, and no toothbrush.
Well, it makes her job easy. He's already standing in the red crosshairs, and he waves away the contraindications concerning the various radiations and nanos that will search, analyze, and delouse him prior to entry onto Malvir soil proper, so she hits the switch.
An amber wireframe version of the giant twirls in the airscreen before her, lazy as a musicbox ballerina.
The man is complex.
A fully distributed back-up memory, a carapace almost as hard as hullalloy, his Turing Quotient a mighty 3.9 (Ferdi knows her own must be at about 0.2 today). And the sensory array! Beautiful thinking whips of carbon (as if a mere element name could encompass their sheer complexity) that can sense, move, and do a lot of damage. But they're street-legaclass="underline" a treaty-guaranteed body choice, if an excessive one.
She blinks her eyes. Nothing to see here, folks.
"Move along."
And welcome to Malvir.
A second shuttle cracks the air.
The first load is almost through. The only trouble comes when a nano discovers some unusual intestinal parasites riding in the serpentine bowels of the older Chiat Dai. He/she/it claims they're prescription. Merely what the doctor ordered. He/she/it produces the medical code, but it's written in some hoary dialect that none of the local software can parse. Ferdi's boss takes over, leaving her to contemplate the growing slippery feeling in her own stomach, which seems to feel some resonant bowelly loyalty to the infected organ inside the grinning alien. But Ferdi decides that it's probably the just-remembered twenty-five (25) els of low-grade champagne with which she began her night of self-immo-latory revenge upon taxation.
Just as the second Queen Favor shuttle lands, the situation is resolved. The Planetary Environmental AI, intrigued by the unregistered species, onlines itself to her platform and declares the parasites to be sterile (in the sense of non-reproductive, not that of clean, surely). They can have the run of the planet.
Have a nice day.
The next group moves into the terminal, reenacting the rituals of confusion and discovery. A short, dark woman leads the pack, in the wake of a mercilessly aggressive luggage lifter.
Ferdi brings up the woman's documents: Home Cluster citizenship; Universal visa (diplomatic); Economically Disjunct. Ferdi's head pounds a little with this fairy-tale data. A life of guaranteed leisure, and all Ferdi wants is a bed, or perhaps for the sun to shine a little less brightly today.
The woman's declarations are extensive, a self-contained universe of servant drones, clothing synths, medical gimmicks, internal gravity kinks to exercise her body when she's not looking, and objets d'art to decorate her no doubt fabulous hotel suite. All of it exceeds personal use limits, but all the proper waivers are ready and willing to pay for the privilege, a generous ladle from that infinite sea of ED wealth.
Have a nice life.
"Please stand on the red crosshairs."
The woman smiles sweetly and scoots herself the requisite centimeters to her right. Her valet drone plays lawyer, acceding to the platform's contraindications, and Ferdi scans her. Nice internals, of course. If Ferdi could just borrow that medical end-oframe for a quick burst of O2 direct to the brain. Now, that would be enriching.
Next the luggage lifter. It moves with a surly whine onto the platform, and Ferdi flicks the switch. She doublechecks what the platform AI tells her, enumerating the various props of privilege.
Suddenly an alert flashes red: a weapons-grade violation!
Ferdi's eyes scan the airscreen for the offending object, the adrenalin in her system collides with leftover alcohol to syner-gize a kind of acidic bile which rises into her throat. Please, no terrorist attacks. Not today.
A small square canvas is packed among the luggage on the drone. It's listed as a piece of art with a value that makes Ferdi cringe. The platform's intelligence is fighting to understand it, overloading as it attempts to analyze the tremendous complexity of the piece's self-similiar, recursive structure. The images on the airscreen are almost hallucinatory, winding through potential reconfigurations, endless spirals of possibility like some Escher universe of badass contraband. The canvas holds: city-jamming code viruses, nerve-searing torture devices, core-drilling particle beams, hosts of anti-personel fraggers, mindwipers, anthraxers, and paralyzers, and to top things off, a continent-clearing self-destruct mechanism.
Ferdi doesn't know art, but she knows what she doesn't like.
The platform AI hangs and then snow-crashes as some measure of destructiveness exceeds its variable-type. Ferdi pulls her sidearm with an unsteady hand and points it at the woman.
"Please don't move," she pleads.