Kethran was an artificial ecology. A hundred thousand details of the environmental balance had to be constantly monitored, maintained, and replenished. A population surge coupled with an unexplained drought had the Senate screaming for help. The Vitae had quietly offered to take over the administration of the ecology for a comparatively reasonable trade and land contract. They'd moved the majority of the government employees into labs and farms they themselves subsidized, and in three years they had made themselves indispensable.
With that kind of power, they could make more than a few demands without the official power base getting upset. They could, for example, ask for rigid enforcement of some of the legal codes.
Never mind that the Vitae were the largest purchasers and purveyors of contraband bodies in the Quarter Galaxy. It was only one of the areas where they had a low tolerance for competition.
Perivar had sometimes wondered what the Vitae were looking for. They had the most sophisticated gene-engineering methods in the Quarter Galaxy, and yet they bought body after body. It was a clumsy, risky, expensive way of acquiring new genetic patterns. Tasa Ad and Kessa, the heads of the runner team Perivar had been part of, had survived by selling their…acquisitions…exclusively to the Vitae, or the Vitae's clients.
Perivar remembered the cargo hold on the runner's ship then. Double racks of anesthetized bodies in support capsules. No sound, except for the weird harmony that came from so many support systems droning on together.
What do you think I am? asked Eric's voice from memory.
I think…I think I didn't think.
"Perivar?" Kiv's hail sounded through his translator disk.
"Here." Perivar straightened up. "Open up. It's all right."
The membrane housing slid back. Perivar looked through the threshold to see the slightly wobbly scene of Kiv and his family. All five of the kids were in evidence, swarming up and down the poles, working on the control pads, delving under the map table. Kiv held all his eyes and hands open.
"We need to…" began Kiv.
"Go over the…" Dene scuttled out from under the map table and vanished under the communications counter.
"Shipment of packet 73—1511." Ere took her place of pride on her parent's shoulders, hands out and ready to work.
"Now!" added Ka, as she slithered halfway up her parent's back. Ka hated to be left out.
Perivar nodded, understanding what he saw as a mark of trust. Kiv had nothing precious hidden. Nothing more needed to be said. Perivar leaned over his map table and touched the slave key to synch the two tables together. Ri slid into the capsule and shot across the cables to dangle above him as his map lit up.
The map showed a representation of one-tenth of the Quarter Galaxy from a communicator's point of view. Suns shone as pinpricks of gold; inhabited stations were green and drone stations were blue. The chaos of the communications networks stretched between them as a series of glowing white line segments. Solid lines showed the beam connections. Dotted lines showed the places only a ship could reach. A red grid overlay the entire arrangement, measuring everything out in hundred-light-year squares.
The network had no organization. It was several million shifting threads, made up of everything from cavernous, public databases, to hard-wired private lines, to rented AIs like Brain.
Perivar accessed packet 73-1511 's shipment plan. The map displayed the work in progress by turning a series of the white lines orange.
Calling what they were organizing a "packet" was a convenient shorthand. 73-1511 was actually a data transfer from a research station to a third stage colony. A library's worth of specialized manufacturing information needed to be copied across ten thousand light-years' worth of network. It was a complicated process, especially since "simultaneous transmission" was a meaningless concept across the distances the map represented. Even quantum transfers took time. Without careful planning, the channels, even if they were reserved with solid credit, shifted and blurred. The pathway, and all the information, could be lost in a heartbeat.
That much-disliked fact gave Perivar and Kiv their living. They found clients who needed a specific kind of information, found a source for that information, and then, most importantly, found a way to get the information from the source to the client. Each shipment took hours of planning and sometimes more insurance than their combined accounts could afford.
"The K-12 band is going to be open for a station to groundside datadump. That'll take us from Averand to Cole's Spot." Perivar traced a new path on the map table with his finger. The sensors on the surface responded by marking a new orange line on the display.
"Could we piggyback in on a Vitae download from there to Haron?" Kiv dotted in another segment.
"What're they charging?" Ri whistled from the capsule.
"For pickup and delivery through there?" Ere got in belatedly.
Perivar considered the idea. "We can get the rates off Brain. Save that as plan B, though; I don't want to have to depend on the Vitae right now."
"Whee." Kiv's whistle did not translate so the disk simply transmitted the syllable. "That is a thought."
Brain's chime sounded over their heads. "Sar Eric Born and Sar Aria Stone are waiting in the lobby."
Perivar glanced across at Kiv. "Brain. Open the doors and let them up."
"Do you want us to close the housing?" asked Kiv, his secondary hands reaching toward the membrane.
"Only if you want to."
Kiv's whole body rippled. "I think we would rather see what is coming. Ri, come back here."
Perivar caught the heightened pitch and speed of the whistle under the translator's flat voice. Ri obeyed without comment.
As soon as the capsule was safely on Kiv's side, Perivar got to his feet and swung the door to the outer hallway open. Leaving a door closed when a guest was on the way was an insult where Perivar came from, and Eric knew that. Perivar blinked a bit in the hallway light, which was supposed to simulate a sunny day. The lift door opened. Perivar watched as Eric and his…companion stepped off.
She looked a lot like Eric had when Perivar first saw him, handmade clothes, hair hidden under a twist of cloth, and hands covered with tattoos, except that hers were stark white lines, as opposed to Eric's colorful swirls. She shared Eric's warm skin tones and black eyes. For a brief moment, Perivar wondered if they were related.
"Thanks for the open door, Perivar." Eric, Perivar knew, expended his small stock of Eshhii words on the greeting.
"Your accent is going." Perivar stood back to let them inside.
The woman, Aria Stone, hesitated, until Eric said something in their own language to her. Perivar tapped his translator reflexively. At one time, he'd had Eric help him set it for the Realm's jaw-breaking language. Since they had parted ways, though, Perivar hadn't needed that particular information and the disk's assembly time was going slow.
The woman walked across the threshold, blinked at the lighting change, got a look at Kiv and the kids, and froze.
The translator finally had the file reconfigured and Perivar heard Eric mutter, "I warned you."
So she's straight out of the woods. Wonderful. Perivar strangled a fresh sigh.
Kiv responded to her stare by uncoiling himself until his scalp brushed the ceiling so she could get a really good look. Sha, Ka, and Dene scrambled up on their parent's back, whistling and draping themselves across his shoulders and his lower arms. They wanted to be looked at, too. The other two kept themselves still. Having been raised with humans, all the kids could read the difference between a stare of wonder and a stare of fear. The motionless two chose to acknowledge that difference.
"I wish well-come to you and yours Eric Born and Aria Stone," announced Kiv politely, although Perivar figured he must have been getting the hint by now. Kiv could be willfully dense some days.