I dumped myself into the pilot’s chair and belted in. “Are you all right, Mr. Peripart? Do you require medical attention? What is our situation?”
“Comply with Surabaya harbor flight control,” I said, “unless they try to move me toward captivity. Get us to the main landing area in Cholon, first available slot. Full auto. I trust you. Just get me there, quick.”
“Yes, Mr. Peripart.” There was a little warmth in the voice, I thought; like so many robots whose owners were do-it-yourself types, it probably didn’t get to exercise its full faculties as often as it wanted to.
A moment later the jets were thumping madly, and we were zigzagging across the harbor, dodging in and out of other traffic. The Skyjump must have gotten cleared for a high-priority exit— perhaps Iphwin’s influence, perhaps even Billie Beard’s. By that point I really did not care in the slightest. I reached forward and opened the medical kit, got myself a painkiller/mood elevator ampoule, loaded it in, and slapped the jector against my carotid— the fast way in for drugs when you’re really in need. I fired once and mostly stopped hurting, but the world still felt very urgent and frightening, so I fired a second time. Suddenly I didn’t hurt at all (at least until the euphoria wore off), I had just gotten the very best job in the whole world, and I was going to go spend an ecstatic weekend in bed with a beautiful woman I adored. I had that thought and just giggled myself to sleep; by then the waves were thundering against the hull as we made a fast run up to launch.
By the time I woke up the jump boat was circling down toward Cholon, the watery twin city that was the major jump boat port for Saigon. The old city of Saigon itself had not known war since the 1880s and was in most ways a Final Republic French city still; Cholon was a sort of twenty-first-century Chinese industrial Venice. Most people flew into Cholon for business and took a small boat into Saigon for pleasure.
Cholon had been reorganized and rebuilt around a series of wide Stillwater canals that acted as runways and harbors; the polders between held warehouses, factories, and residential districts, and on the roofs of the major buildings there were truck gardens. The result, from the air, was a grid of deep green squares, separated by broad brown water. The jump boat dropped out of the holding pattern and spiraled down to splash onto one of the canals; immediately, responding to orders from the tower, we made a hard left into a basin that cut into one of the polders, and swung from there into a mooring hangar.
I grabbed my bags, told the jump boat to order fuel and to shut down once it was delivered, and walked out the gangplank into the hangar. I was thoroughly jumpy between having had a beating and the come-down off the painkillers, which normally induces mild temporary paranoia. The anti-inflammatory and anti-traumal drugs had taken care of the basic damage Billie had done to my body, but the mood lifters weren’t even putting a dent in what had happened to my mind.
I hadn’t worried about being randomly attacked by strangers since I was about fourteen, when I had mustered up enough nerve to get into the last fistfight of my life and convinced the class bully to look for easier prey.
Now as I walked through the big, dark, empty hangar, I was looking for something or someone to spring from behind every fuel drum and post; my heart hammered at anything in the shadows I didn’t instantly recognize. The slap of waves against the pilings sounded like a man climbing out of the water with a knife. My own echoing footsteps seemed to betray my position and draw imaginary crosshairs onto the middle of my back. I hurried, but I was afraid that I was running toward the patient stalkers who were about to leave; I slowed to a snail’s pace, but I dreaded making it easy for the unseen followers in the shadows. The whole vast space of the hangar seemed to hold nothing but terrors. I was scared that there might be someone there, with all that room to hide. Probably there wasn’t one other person in there, and that frightened me too.
I don’t suppose it took me three minutes to walk down the dock, across the unloading area, toward the yellow glare of the archway, and out the arched door into the bright Cochin-Chinese sunlight, but in that walk I died a thousand times. My teeth ached again where I had been hit, from gritting them; I was breathing as fast as if I had run a couple of miles.
When I finally passed through the sunlit arch that I had been so desperate to reach, what was in front of me was a pleasant scene of utter ordinariness: the enclosing dike, with a wide flight of stairs up to the top, and a row of Chinese shops up above. I walked up the steps, still glancing back occasionally at the dark arch into the hangar. There was a bar right at the top, and I badly wanted a drink, but I was more than late enough already, so I flagged down a pinceur—a pedicab jockey whose whole job was to grab people coming into Cholon and get them to the watercab that paid him. I was happy to be grabbed, and a moment later my luggage and I were rolling along the top of the dike, headed around to one of the many watercab slips.
A paranoid thought struck—what if the pinceur was working for them? And who were they, anyway? The German Reich, the Political Offenses network, some other enemy of Iphwin’s? And what on earth had ever made me want to work for an employer with so many enemies?
I was on the point of flagging down some other pinceur at random, and transferring, just to throw them off my tail, when the small Asian man pedaling the cab leaned back and said, “I’m hearing through my earpiece that there’s no one following us.”
I started. “Was there anyone before?”
“No, but you can never be completely sure. Two of our tails have followed for a full kilometer now, and nothing has happened. The one watching your jump boat reports nothing, either. If you’re willing to give us your permission, we’re going to go in and sweep it for bugs or anything else that our friend Billie Beard might have left behind her.”
“You’re with ConTech?” I asked.
“You better hope I am! Yes. Now, relax, enjoy the view, and be aware that you’re under our eyes continuously for the rest of the trip. You can do whatever you like, and we’ve got you covered, or if we don’t chances are we’ll be in more trouble than you. Oh, and Mort at headquarters said specifically that he wanted to apologize for Beard having got through to you like she did. Those bastards really caught us flat-footed this time; it’s a lesson to us all. Now relax and enjoy the ride—your watercab jockey will be another one of us.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it with all my heart.
The ride took just a few more minutes, the transfer to the watercab was almost instant with the pinceur carrying the bags, and in no time we were making our way out of the tangle of Cholon and onto the Saigon River. It was wonderful to feel so safe.
I hadn’t been in Cochin-China in more than a year. The familiar pleasures were all around—the boats full of livestock, the quarreling and haggling from the floating shops, the soft blue and white of the sky against the deep green of the trees. I sat back and enjoyed the ride until we slipped through one of the watercourse tunnels for half a kilometer, then emerged from that into the bright sunlight of the interior boat pond of the Royal Saigon. The bellhops whisked my stuff up to the room, along with an apologetic bunch of flowers, as I went to see the hotel doctor and see what other repairs I might need.
“Curiously enough,” he said, after checking me over, “I believe every bit of your story because it’s completely consistent with the behavior of a Political Offenses cop, but she seems to have unusual control. I can tell by surface scan that your muscles probably ache, but she didn’t even break enough capillaries to give you any real bruises. I can spray you with some stuff to make you feel better, and we’ll squirt some gingival stabilizer in so that your teeth won’t wobble or get plaque down in there, but you’re in perfectly fine shape except for the pain itself. I suppose if you’re going to have something like this done to you it’s better to have it done by a pro.” I opened my jaws and let him run the filler around the base of my teeth; then he sprayed me all over with the painkiller. “Did she hit your groin?”