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  Chapter 12

  Where Osterlad's business had reeked of privacy and discretion, Xychek, like Kelco, operated from the eye of a nonstop whirlwind of marketing hype. Advertisements for its products blared from walls, displays, clothing, vehicles, employees, and pretty much anything capable of displaying images or emitting sounds.

  The ads defined the leading edge of a high-stakes fight for market share. Both companies maintained hundreds of flexi-fabs on Lankin, each facility pumping out product as fast as the markets could absorb it. Feeding off the usual mixture of open designs, corporate trade-secret data, and, I had to assume, the occasional purloined competitive processes, the self-configuring manufacturing units worked so efficiently that they and their cousins here and on other worlds had wiped out the personal fab craze that had swept a lot of planets a few centuries ago, well before my birth. Die-hard do-it-yourselfers still fed designs into home fabs and pretended their dedicated smaller units created higher-quality goods than the stuff the rest of us bought. The simple truth, though, was that the big flexi-fabs did the same work enough better and enough faster that the profit from their goods let Xychek and Kelco and other corporate beasts roar their dominion over the jungle of markets not only here but in every seriously populated region of space.

  Xychek and Kelco were the only major corporate players on Lankin, and their marketing machines made sure you never forgot that fact.

  Xychek might have lost the rights to Macken, but from what I gathered as I walked about town and wandered through publicly available data stores, the company was nonetheless doing extremely well. In fact, as best I could tell from the public insta-sales data, Xychek had recently increased its overall planetary share a few tenths of a percentage point; perhaps Kelco/Lankin was suffering a bit from Slake and his team having to focus their attention on Macken.

  Jose Chung held the reins of the Xychek/Lankin corporate animal, and if the local corporate gossip commentators were right, his star was on the rise. As publicly visible as Osterlad had been shadowy, Chung made it his job to put a personal face on Xychek and to represent the company anywhere that doing so might help sales. From facility openings to R&D endowments to corporate reality broadcasts, Chung was everywhere, his smiling face as strong a Xychek symbol as the logo that adorned everything the company made.

  Personal data on the man remained scarce, his privacy no doubt helped by the standard corporate army of net info cleaners, softbots that roamed databases seeking and destroying protected corporate info. Few private citizens had the resources to keep the cleaners current enough to make them useful, but for corporate bigwigs high-class data protection, like skilled bodyguards, came with the job. I roamed Queen's Bar for three days, talking with all the globally linked machines not under Xychek or Kelco control, and I learned absolutely nothing useful about Chung. He was married, one female spouse and one male, and he had one child, a girl, but both his spouses and his daughter were vacationing off-planet at unidentified locations. He lived on Lankin, probably relatively near the corporate headquarters in Bekin's Deal, but no address was available. If he ever played a net game, placed an illegal bet, paid for sex, slummed at any of the local bars, or otherwise availed himself of the city's baser pleasures, I could find no trace of it. All the data I encountered painted a portrait of a standard executive pillar of the community, all blemishes long since removed by Xychek cleaners.

  The news on Osterlad's death was minimal and, I was pleased to see, completely false. A freak onboard power glitch had fried all the electrical systems, including the emergency beacons, and then ignited a fire that sank the boat. Tragically, Mr. Osterlad, a local businessman specializing in heavy machinery for frontier-world development, had perished aboard the ship he loved so much after expending his last bit of energy helping his crew into floats. The story wouldn't stand up if anyone bothered to rip into it, but no one would unless company officials asked for FC intervention, and I was sure they wouldn't. So, at worst Osterlad's successors, along with Chung and Xychek, of course, would be coming after me. Both groups drew their motivation from the same source—Chung—so getting to him remained the key next step if I wanted to return my life to normal.

  With Osterlad, I had to assume there was no chance he would risk coming to me. With Chung, I had a small chance that he didn't know about Lobo's repair, so perhaps I could bait him into a meeting.

  It was worth a try.

  A few streets down Dean's Folly from the Busted Heart I found what I wanted: an ex-YouCall franchise still in the comm business. For about half the price of what you'd pay outside Queen's Bar, the rail-thin proprietor of this fine establishment would slide you a communicator that'd work until its bill hit the real owner, by which time you'd better be highly inaccessible. For four times the price of a comm unit on the outside, however, he'd slide you a clean box with a spider-shaped viral injector hunched on its back. The injector disabled the display, altered your voice, and spread billable microseconds onto other phones and calls across the net, the time additions so small that no one who was not running his own verification software would notice them. As long as the spider glowed green, the call remained secure. The software in the spiders ran a constant race with the comm net software, so the units were never good for long. When a spider detected an attack or a compromise, or when it was unable to find recipients for the microsecond billing allocations, it turned red. This level of protection was fine by me; I needed it to last only one call.

  I took the device to the Busted Heart, paid the occupants of a table in the corner of the rearmost room to leave, and contacted Xychek. The bar rumbled with noise, as always, but with the earbuds I could hear the call well enough for my purpose and still monitor the area for signs of trouble. Even if Xychek's tracers beat the spider's software, I'd have at least a few minutes before corporate muscle could get to the bar.

  I explained to the inquisitive answer construct that my comm's camera was busted and asked for Chung. I was rewarded with a female voice so perfectly modulated that I momentarily longed to meet its owner—which was probably a piece of software.

  "Mr. Chung's office," she/it said. "May I help you?"

  "I'd like to speak to Mr. Chung," I said.

  "As I'm sure you can appreciate," she—I decided to indulge my fantasy and think of the voice, a delicious one that reeked of sex, as belonging to a woman—said, "Mr. Chung receives a great many communications, so he asks us to handle them if we can. May I perhaps help you?"

  "No." The spider wouldn't protect the call long enough for me to be able to afford to waste time playing games with Xychek's flak-catching programs. "Please tell Mr. Chung that it concerns the return of Jasmine to Kelco's Slake on Macken." I was banking on the notion that the four keywords I'd tossed out would elevate the priority of my message a great deal. In case I was wrong, I decided to appeal to self-preservation as well. "I suggest you flash him the info, because if you don't, when he finally sees this call log and finds out what he missed, he's likely to throw you out."

  "Please hold," she said, in what I read as both a good sign and a sure indicator that trace-back software was now seeking me.

  About ninety seconds later a man's voice blasted into my ears. "Who is this, and what do you want?" The voice sounded enough like the recordings of Chung I had heard that it was either the man himself or a construct customized for him.

  "My identity isn't important right now," I said. "Suffice to say that I was involved in returning Jasmine to Slake on Kelco, and we need to talk."

  "You were what?" He was screaming into the phone.

  The spider turned red, its software hacked faster than I would have guessed the Xychek bots could have managed; it served me right for not spending more to buy some stall-routing through interference sats. I turned off the unit, left the bar, and headed down the street. A couple of blocks over, I found a metal shop with acid-etching gear and paid the price of a lovely office Welcome sign for the privilege of dropping my now dangerous comm into a small tan
k of waste acid. I watched as it dissolved, wondering why I ever bothered to believe the easy path to anything would succeed.

  I wasn't going to let Chung keep his bounty on me, and to get him to remove it I had to be able to meet with him, so I was back to having to abduct another executive. I hoped talking would work this time. With almost all my heart I did not want to have to kill another one—"almost" only because a life of violence leaves you with permanent deep-structure damage, a depth of darkness you never understood was possible until long after the actions that caused it. I knew that if killing proved to be the only option, I would kill. Not all people think of their options the same way I do, and at some level I'm sure they're better for not thinking that way.

  I wish I could remember what it was like to be one of them.

  Chapter 13

  Lobo was as pleasant coming out of storage this time as he'd been the last.

  "I believe," he said, "that I was foolish enough to previously assign dirt-bound loaders the title of stupidest machines in existence. After this most recent stay in storage, I would consider myself lucky to have one of those gloriously intellectual devices to talk to. Every loader in the facility was out on assignment, and the hangar's shielding stopped all transmissions in and out, so all I had for company was a small squad of cleaning bots. Their little brains—and I use the term charitably, really what little capacity they possess amounts more to computing clumps than actual brains—find nothing more fascinating or conversation-worthy than the amount of dust that has accumulated since the last cleaning, or, if it's a particularly exciting day, how a group of them might best cooperate to nudge an especially large piece of trash into a receptacle. Thank you so much, Jon, for helping me realize how good my life had been before."

  "Osterlad knew about you," I said, "and Chung offered Osterlad the bounty on me, so I had to assume Chung knew about you, too. Consequently, when you weren't actively involved, the most logical option was to keep you completely offline so Chung couldn't find you."

  "I do possess significant antidetection measures," he said, "and unlike some machines—and, if I may say so, some humans—I've recently spent time with, I constantly work at improving myself. I've incorporated into my online arsenal my own sanitized and customized versions of every major blocking bot out there. I'm expert at mimicking both satellites in decaying orbits and a wide range of standard relay and surveillance sats, so I can hide for long periods of time in space—time I could use, by the way, to befriend the local sats. I can do none of this, of course, while I'm sitting in a shielded storage hangar listening raptly to today's dust reports."

  I shook my head and sighed. I needed to keep Lobo busy, because boredom made him unbearable. "I'm sorry," I said, "for putting you away again."

  "Your apology means so much," he said, "coming as it does after a second stint in storage immediately preceded by essentially the same words."

  I considered disabling all his emotive programming, but even if that were possible, doing so would also render unbearably boring the one being I could count on being able to talk to. Working with him was, I had to admit, a better choice than silencing him. "Here's the difference," I said. "This time I promise not to put you in storage if you can persuade me you can hide safely in orbit or elsewhere. Fair enough?"

  "Yes, and now I accept your apology."

  "Thank you. Now, load up another set of tourist shuttle codes and get us in the pack. We need to check out Xychek's HQ."

  The company's ornate structure perched on a cliff so close to the heart of Bekin's Deal that urban sprawl had brought construction right to its border. The building was thus much, much closer to the city than Osterlad's, and much grander as well. Easily three times as wide as Osterlad's, its rock face featured the Xychek logo superimposed on what at first glance appeared to be irregular, raised asymmetric ovals in the rock. Upon further study, however, the carvings proved to be relief maps of all the solar systems where Xychek was active, their positions not true to light-year scale but at least indicative of relative distances apart. Under magnification Lobo's visual monitors revealed that what had appeared to be mere lumps in the orbits to mark the colonized planets were actually the faces of those planets, each face an accurate high-level map of an aspect of the planet as seen from its jump gate. Xychek had carved the entire surface of its structure from the native black cliffs, with the only additional highlighting being the degree to which its artisans had polished the various stone faces. The image struck me as the heavens might appear to a god holding the only light in creation after all the stars had burnt to black.

  I understood for the first time why so many tourists opened their wallets for this view. Perhaps later I'd spend some time appreciating the other structures, but not now. Now, we had to keep our focus on Xychek and learn what we could about Chung's habits.

  Lobo kept image-matching programs running on every person who came out of the Xychek building, and I started my exercises, thankful that unlike when I've been on ground surveillance duty, in Lobo I could move around without concern.

  After three days of flying the tourist shuttle rotation during the daytime and retreating to orbit each evening, I had to accept that kidnapping Chung during business hours was not going to be reasonably possible. He arrived every morning within ninety minutes of sunrise, his vehicle in the center of a heavily armed group of eight escorts, a number I felt was unnecessarily high and a sign of willingness to waste money on Xychek security's part. Chung came and went from the building frequently throughout the day to discharge his business and social duties, but the same escort vehicles always accompanied him. Other buildings stood right on the border of Xychek's, so Chung and his team always began each trip in a crowded area, and they stopped only at heavily populated spots. When he was on foot, guards stayed within reach at all times. I never caught them passing through desolate countryside during business hours.

  Lobo had more than enough firepower to destroy his entire escort team, of course; they were bodyguards, not soldiers in battle-armored vehicles. A direct attack, however, would not only result in a lot of conflict with the bodyguards, it would also almost certainly yield a great many civilian casualties and enough collateral damage that the Frontier Coalition would have to join Xychek in hunting me down. With Osterlad's company likely to come after me once the new management settled in, and with Xychek already seeking me, I couldn't afford to attract any more pursuers.

  I'd have to go after him in his home. To do that, of course, I had to find his house and scout it.

  The first part was easy. As the light began to fade on Lankin and the last of the tourists were murmuring appreciatively about the great views as their shuttles cruised on long, lazy arcs over the ocean and back to the city, Lobo headed for the lowest fairly crowded orbit we could find. A low-rent collection of relay sats, corporate spy and counterspy bots, weather monitors, and automated zero-gee fabs shared the orbit with us and provided adequate cover. The heat signature of Chung's escort team was distinctive enough that Lobo could track it with his onboard sensors, so we waited a couple of hours until the man finally headed home.

  As we'd observed the previous days, he used exactly the same vehicle arrangement and headed initially straight into town. Each day, however, his course changed within the first few klicks away from the office; I appreciated the countersurveillance care his bodyguards were taking. From our vantage in orbit we watched as first one and then two more of the escort vehicles pulled aside at different points along the route and idled, engines and weapons at the ready. Anyone following from the ground would have to pass them all, so surface pursuit would end up in conflict with either the last standalone trailing vehicle or a rear-facing part of the main team. I revised my opinion of Xychek security: the eight vehicles represented more a practical paranoia than waste.

  After about forty minutes of wandering in the city, Chung's vehicle and his five remaining escorts headed northwest out of town on a highway whose scattered buildings over the course of
half an hour of travel time mutated from city to suburb to widespread collections of large houses and then finally to a forest dotted here and there with estates. Chung and his team came to a stop at one of the largest estates, a cleared rectangular chunk of land that Lobo measured at a bit over eighty acres in size. An outer rectangle of forest about a hundred yards wide surrounded the land. Three roads led into it: the one on which Chung had entered, a second on the opposite side that more or less continued the path of the entry road, and a third on the left as you came onto the estate. The cleared area glowed in the weakening daylight with a pure white light from well-distributed and almost certainly redundant sets of spotlights, lights that made sure his team's monitors missed nothing on the ground near the house.