As Dakota approached the gathered figures she heard the artificial tones of the priests’ voices, and noticed the bright lights of the corridor gleaming off their metallic skins. They moved on after a moment, having obviously satisfied the guards of the nature of their visit. The long dark vestments swished on the floor of the walkway as they headed towards the atrium beyond.
Dakota produced her credentials and handed them over. ‘Mala Oorthaus,’ one of them muttered, studying them. ‘What’s your business here?’
‘Real live humans?’ Dakota said in mock surprise, giving them each a grin. ‘What’s wrong with an ordinary scan-and-sweep?’
‘You’ll have heard about what happened at the Rock.’ The guard didn’t smile back as he replied. ‘What’re you here for?’
‘Independent shipping contractor.’ She held his gaze for a moment. ‘Just hoping to drum up some business here.’
She had used the cosmetic software in Piri’s surgical unit to puff out her cheeks a little. Her lips looked correspondingly thinner than usual, and her hair was shorter and darker than it had been. Her skin, too, was darker, and a couple of days in the medbox had swelled her hips, building up and slightly altering her skeletal structure while she lay in dreamless sleep. Her face itself was smaller, rounder, her eyes wider with a hint of epicanthic fold.
The guard glanced to one side, studying a report Dakota couldn’t see clearly from where she stood, but she caught a glimpse of an image of the inside of her skull displayed in real-time, as hidden devices analysed the interior of her body.
She tried not to moan with relief when she saw that her implants weren’t showing up.
After a moment he waved her on. Several steps on, and she remembered to start breathing again.
She found Josef Marados in a tall building whose uppermost floors pushed out through the thin envelope of atmosphere surrounding Mesa Verde. Judging by the size of his office, she figured he’d done well for himself in the years since Redstone.
‘God damn, even with the alterations, you’re still a sight for sore eyes,’ he began, coming over to her with a grin. There was a hint here of the effusive manner Dakota remembered from years ago, but this was otherwise an altogether much more sombre individual than the man she’d known.
‘How long, Dakota? How long has it been?’
‘Not so long,’ she replied, pulling him into a brief, tentative hug. He’d lost weight over the years, perhaps too much given his large frame. ‘It’s only been a few years since-’
‘Yeah, since.’ He nodded into her sudden silence. ‘Feels like a lifetime though, don’t it?’
Dakota nodded in return. It did.
The few illegal machine-heads still in existence in the home system had their own methods of staying in touch. Moreover, Ghost implants were designed to be mutually detectable-two machine-heads could sense each other’s presence once they were within several kilometres’ range of each other. So if Josef had still possessed his implants, she’d have sensed him at a considerable distance beforehand.
At first, Dakota thought Josef merely worked for Black Rock Ore. Instead, it turned out that he owned it.
Black Rock Ore had once specialized in the exploitation of carbonaceous asteroids. Nowadays, under Josef’s administration, they skipped doing the dirty work themselves by financing other small, independent contractors to mine the asteroid belt for its precious metals, and then raked in a very profitable percentage.
Now here she was, sitting on one of a pair of couches, facing the man who had been her sometime lover in those few, brief years before her previous life had ended.
He studied her and smiled. ‘So, Bourdain’s Rock. Care to tell me what happened back there?’
Dakota felt her jaw tighten.
‘Room’s clean,’ Josef assured her. ‘No bugs. Glass is one-way and tuned to randomize vibrations, so we can see out, but no one on the outside will be able to see or hear anything. The Aligned Worlds Federal Treaty gets a bit vague on business practices, so industrial espionage is just part of the landscape around here. But all that really means,’ he said, a grin spreading across his face, ‘is you need to make sure your counter-espionage is more effective than their snooping.’
‘I didn’t mention anything about the Rock. How did you know?’
‘Apart from the fact you just told me? Come on. First, a terrorist attack on a major populated asteroid so spectacular the footage’ll be bouncing around the Consortium networks until kingdom come. Then, on top of all that, you appear out of nowhere begging for my help.’
Josef leaned forward and poured her a cup of coffee, stained pink to denote the form and quantity of legalized narcotics it contained. Dakota glanced behind him and saw, to her distaste, a Freehold challenge blade had been mounted on the wall near the door.
She responded with silence.
‘Dak, this isn’t a set-up. Alexander Bourdain is a snake, a piece of shit. The entire outer system would be a lot better off with him dead. And I know you, you’re no mass murderer.’
‘He’s still alive?’
‘So I hear,’ Josef replied, noting the frightened expression on her face. ‘He’s lying low right now, my guess being that he’s taking the opportunity to arrange a fast escape out of the home system in case he needs it. So what happened there?’
‘Someone blew up Bourdain’s Rock, and I was made to look responsible. But it wasn’t me.’
Josef blinked. ‘Seriously?’
‘My shipping agent-my previous shipping agent -fixed me up with a no-questions-asked delivery job to the Rock. It should have gone smoothly, but there were some unforeseen problems with the cargo.’
Josef was staring at her like he’d never set eyes on her before. ‘I guess we’re not talking about a shipment of toilet paper, then, are we?’
Dakota looked at him askance. He merely shrugged, and she continued. ‘My ship suffered major systems failures the whole way there, sometimes even total shutdown of life-support systems. All I could figure out was it had something to do with the cargo I was carrying to Bourdain, but it was part of the arrangement that I wasn’t allowed to even know what I was actually carrying.’
‘You must have been pretty desperate, taking on a job like that.’
Dakota shook her head. ‘Don’t even ask. Every time this disruption happened, the systems always came back online eventually. To cut a long story short, it turned out I was fetching Bourdain a GiantKiller.’