I stood, set a final twenty-mark bill on the table. “Thanks, friend.”
“Any time, sister.”
The mech was rolling toward him before I’d reached the door.
* * *
I walked back toward the library, paused a minute in the busy farcaster plaza, and stood there a minute. Scenario so far: Johnny had met the Templar or been approached by him, either in the library or outside when he arrived in midmorning. They went somewhere private to talk, the bar, and something the Templar said surprised Johnny. A man with a queue—possibly a Lusian—showed up and took over the conversation. Johnny and Queue left together. Sometime after that, Johnny farcast to TC2 and then farcast from there with one other person—possibly Queue or the Templar—to Madhya where someone tried to kill him. Did kill him.
Too many gaps. Too many “someones.” Not a hell of a lot to show for a day’s work.
I was debating whether to ’cast back to Lusus when my comlog chirped on the restricted comm frequency I’d given to Johnny.
His voice was raw. “M. Lamia. Come quickly, please. I think they’ve just tried again. To kill me.” The coordinates which followed were for the East Bergson Hive.
I ran for the farcaster.
The door to Johnny’s cubby was open a crack. There was no one in the corridor, no sounds from the apartment. Whatever had happened hadn’t brought the authorities yet.
I brought out Dad’s automatic pistol from my coat pocket, jacked a round into the chamber, and clicked on the laser targeting beam with a single motion.
I went in low, both arms extended, the red dot sliding across the dark walls, a cheap print on the far wall, a darker hall leading into the cubby. The foyer was empty. The living room and media pit were empty.
Johnny lay on the floor of the bedroom, his head against the bed. Blood soaked the sheet. He struggled to prop himself up, fell back. The sliding door behind him was open and a dank industrial wind blew in from the open mall beyond.
I checked the single closet, short hall, kitchen niche, and came back to step out on the balcony. The view was spectacular from the perch two hundred or so meters up the curved Hive wall, looking down the ten or twenty kilometers of the Trench Mall. The roof of the Hive was a dark mass of girders another hundred or so meters above. Thousands of lights, commercial holos, and neon lights glowed from the mall, joining in the haze of distance to a brilliant, throbbing electric blur.
There were hundreds of similar balconies on this wall of the Hive, all deserted. The nearest was twenty meters away. They were the kind of thing rental agents like to point to as a plus—God knows that Johnny probably paid plenty extra for an outside room—but the balconies were totally impractical because of the strong wind rushing up toward the ventilators, carrying the usual grit and debris as well as the eternal Hive scent of oil and ozone.
I put my pistol away and went back to check on Johnny.
The cut ran from his hairline to his eyebrow, superficial but messy. He was sitting up as I returned from the bathroom with a sterile drypad and pressed it against the cut. “What happened?” I said.
“Two men … were waiting in the bedroom when I came in. They’d bypassed the alarms on the balcony door.”
“You deserve a refund on your security tax,” I said. “What happened next?”
“We struggled. They seemed to be dragging me toward the door. One of them had an injector but I managed to knock it out of his hand.”
“What made them leave?”
“I activated the in-house alarms.”
“But not Hive security?”
“No. I didn’t want them involved.”
“Who hit you?”
Johnny smiled sheepishly. “I did. They released me, I went after them. I managed to trip and fall against the nightstand.”
“Not a very graceful brawl on either side,” I said. I switched on a lamp and checked the carpet until I found the injection ampule where it had rolled under the bed.
Johnny eyed it as if it were a viper.
“What’s your guess?” I said. “More AIDS II?”
He shook his head.
“I know a place where we can get it analyzed,” I said. “My guess is that it’s just a hypnotic trank. They just wanted you to come along … not to kill you.”
Johnny moved the drypad and grimaced. The blood was still flowing. “Why would anyone want to kidnap a cybrid?”
“You tell me. I’m beginning to think that the so-called murder was just a botched kidnapping attempt.”
Johnny shook his head again.
I said, “Did one of the men wear a queue?”
“I don’t know. They wore caps and osmosis masks.”
“Was either one tall enough to be a Templar or strong enough to be a Lusian?”
“A Templar?” Johnny was surprised. “No. One was about average Web height. The one with the ampule could have been Lusian. Strong enough.”
“So you went after a Lusian thug with your bare hands. Do you have some bioprocessors or augmentation implants I don’t know about?”
“No. I was just mad.”
I helped him to his feet. “So AIs get angry?”
“I do.”
“Come on,” I said, “I know an automated med clinic that’s discount. Then you’ll be staying with me for a while.”
“With you? Why?”
“Because you’ve graduated from just needing a detective,” I said. “Now you need a bodyguard.”
My cubby wasn’t registered in the Hive zoning schematic as an apartment; I’d taken over a renovated warehouse loft from a friend of mine who’d run afoul of loan sharks. My friend had decided late in life to emigrate to one of the Outback colonies and I’d gotten a good deal on a place just a klick down the corridor from my office. The environment was a little rough and sometimes the noise from the loading docks could drown out conversation, but it gave me ten times the room of a normal cubby and I could use my weights and workout equipment right at home.
Johnny honestly seemed intrigued by the place and I had to kick myself for being pleased. Next thing you knew, I’d be putting on lipstick and body rouge for this cybrid.
“So why do you live on Lusus?” I asked him. “Most offworlders find the gravity a pain and the scenery monotonous. Plus your research material’s at the library on Renaissance V. Why here?”
I found myself looking and listening very carefully as he answered. His hair was straight on top, parted in the middle, and fell in reddish-brown curls to his collar. He had the habit of resting his cheek on his fist as he spoke. It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it. And beneath that there was a hint of lilt that brought back the overtones of a cat burglar I’d known who had grown up on Asquith, a quiet, backwater Web world settled by First Expansion immigrants from what had once been the British Isles.
“I have lived on many worlds,” he said. “My purpose is to observe.”
“As a poet?”
He shook his head, winced, and gingerly touched the stitches. “No. I’m not a poet. He was.”
Despite the circumstances, there was an energy and vitality to Johnny that I’d found in too few men. It was hard to describe, but I’d seen rooms fulls of more important personages rearrange themselves to orbit around personalities like his. It was not merely his reticence and sensitivity, it was an intensity that he emanated even when merely observing.
“Why do you live here?” he asked.
“I was born here.”
“Yes, but you spent your childhood years on Tau Ceti Center. Your father was a senator.”