One Jump Ahead-ARC Read online

  We had the location of Chung's house, but we needed a lot more data to be able to plan any kind of attack other than complete destruction of the place. I didn't consider that a viable option, both because of the attention it would attract and because without talking to Chung I couldn't know whether killing him would remove the bounty or only raise it.

  Getting more data wasn't going to be simple. The house predictably read IR-neutral to Lobo, its shielding more than Lobo could penetrate from orbit; he wasn't built for long-distance surveillance. So, we needed to find another way to take a closer look. On Macken I'd gotten lucky: Lobo had been deployed there as a local military reserve, so he had sat friends, and the Gardeners never noticed his surveillance drone because they were amateurs, bad amateurs. We knew no sats here, and I had great confidence that Chung's Xychek protection team was professional enough to immediately spot and shoot down any obviously military surveillance drone. Lobo's monitors had never tracked anything larger than birds flying over the place, so Chung and Xychek had probably paid local flight control to keep his airspace empty. I was also confident they possessed the weapons to make sure nothing flew too low over the house. On a transmission-heavy battlefield we could try a high-altitude flyover and dust the area with our own microsensor web, its activity sure to do no more than add to the electronic din that large-scale combat created. At Chung's estate, however, I had to assume his team had tracked and identified and was actively monitoring every transmission source in the area. Any change in the broadcast activity would trigger an alarm, an investigation, and possibly an evacuation.

  The estate was secure against every modern electronic approach—and that, I finally realized, provided the opening we needed. I'd been thinking of this as a battle, the estate as a battlefield, where up-to-the-second data frequently played a major role in keeping you alive, but this wasn't a battle, and Chung's home wasn't a battlefield. I wanted surveillance data, not transmissions; the distinction was everything.

  I told Lobo to keep us with the low-orbit sats and settled into a couch to sleep. In the morning, I'd send Lobo to rejoin the sats and continue his monitoring.

  While he was at it, I'd pay a visit to Strange Kitty.

  Chapter 14

  Organic tech has delivered all of the serious progress in human augmentation. Gene therapy, growth-center manipulation, vat-grown organs—you name the technique for making us better or barring death from the door a little longer, and the odds are it's organic. Nanotech petered out, at least as far as the rest of the universe was concerned, after the Aggro accident resulted in an entire solar system no ship had ever been able to return from. Human/hardware fusion never took off, because whatever metal or silicon could do to help a body, cells inevitably proved to be able to do better. Hardware augmentation maintained its fans, however: people who indulged in machine-based enhancement as often and as severely as their lives and budgets would permit, all in the deep belief that one day metal-tech would break through the barriers of its previous failures and elevate them into immortal meat/machine gods. Their extreme-edge bioengineering counterparts rode the same rush but on a different vehicle, pushing the limits of organic tech as they constantly altered their bodies.

  Queen's Bar attracted both fringes, of course, with shops where you could push your augmentation tech of choice not only to the legal limit, but beyond. The metal- and meat-tech shops predictably occupied different zones in the area, each zone's clients neither approving nor particularly accepting of the other's. For metal-tech, you wandered the southwest bits of the district; meat-tech clung to the northeast.

  Strange Kitty managed a rare trick: Both the serious metal crowd and the severely bioengineered shopped there, and both groups ranked it the top place to go for pets with more. Its storefront/warehouse two-building complex joined popular favorites like the Busted Heart in the center of Queen's Bar. It filled most of a block, with the retail space opening on one street and the warehouse loading docks facing directly onto the other. If you wanted an augmented animal, you headed for Strange Kitty. What it didn't have in stock, its bioengineers could probably produce, and if they couldn't manage it, odds are nothing outside of the top-drawer conglomerate labs could do it either.

  FC tech enforcers rousted the place on those occasions when some animal-rights group could grab enough public attention that the local government worried tax dollars might be slipping away. The raids never found anything outside the legal limits; for that, you had to know where to look or have the proper introductions. So, the unwanted attention never lasted long. The same groups would also sometimes make lackluster attempts at picketing the business, but protest rallies in Queen's Bar inevitably mutated quickly into parties, street fairs, or disorganized streams of fleeing ex-protesters, as vendors, pickpockets, and street hustlers of all types dive-bombed any crowd that would stand still long enough for them to catch it.

  I paused for a few minutes outside the store to make sure no one was following me. A guy with metal chest-shield implants strolled out of the shop, all of his attention focused on a lizard he was holding with his meat right hand and stroking with his metallic left, the lizard's skin coruscating in the light in time with the passes of the metal fingers. A tall, elegant woman with waist-length straight brown hair followed with her acquisition, an amphi-basset, its prominent gills and blue/teal coloring marking it as anything but an ordinary hound. A trio of fashion-victim girls sporting identical body mods—wispy waists made possible only by elevated organs, thickened spinal columns supporting broad and relatively flat chests, legs rippling with muscle—emerged guiding a flat- and metal-nosed hundred-kilo hound on three identical leads, the animal's detachable metal legs moving perfectly in custom sockets. Neither the creatures nor, for that matter, the people were to my taste, but they, like the rest of the Strange Kitty traffic, were extremely unlikely to be working for Osterlad or Xychek.

  I slipped inside in a seam in the outgoing crowd, air-break fans ruffling my hair as I moved through the semipressurized doorway. The smell crashed into my sinuses the moment I cleared the threshold. The odors of animal fur, feathers, urine, dung, and sex recombined dynamically as I moved through the room, an olfactory organism in rapid multidirectional mutation. The doorway kept the neighbors from complaining, but inside there was no escape. Here and there I spotted nasal fetishists pretending to shop for as long as the management would let them linger, their noses flared and eyes glazed. Most of the customers, however, were focused, serious shoppers, thickets of them standing in the midst of the creatures that reflected their taste. Mammals, perennial human favorites, owned the display space and most of the front, where prospective buyers made unnatural cute noises over cats, dogs, ferrets, various local rodents, and other animals I didn't recognize, each one a designer's custom work. I made my way past them and into the reptile section, pausing for a moment to admire plexi containers of lizards with metal-barbed tails and snakes with additional eyes—probably not functional but definitely decorative—scoring their sides from the original pair backward for half a meter or more.

  After the reptiles, the room darkened a bit as I entered the aquatic area. Filling this part of the store were tanks of all sizes, from a few liters up to several huge containers whose capacity I couldn't easily estimate, plexi enclosures that looked to be at least three meters deep, five long, and three high. Everything from tiny, purely decorative fish, to predators, to serious open-ocean racing rays swam in the tanks lining the walls all around me. The riotous colors and sheer variety of the fish and other water creatures on display made the mammals and reptiles appear tame by comparison.

  I finally made it to the back of the retail section, where the store blended into the warehouse as the ceiling rose and the amount of customer activity dropped. In cages at eye level and in enclosed aeries that climbed from barely over my head all the way to the seven-meter-high unfinished ceiling, birds of all types perched, slept, flew, chattered, ate, and defecated. I've never been a bird fan, but that wasn't a pro
blem; I wasn't shopping for a pet. Salespeople were scarce here, but that was fine, too; getting the help I needed would be easy. I stepped past the edge of the retail area and into what appeared to be a reception space fronting the vastly larger work and storage rooms behind it. I paused, knowing security was on the way, because with a quick IR scan I'd spotted some too-cool temperature-detection wall and floor sections, as well as a few failing motion sensors that shined as hot pinpricks; the owners needed to run physical-level maintenance checks on their security gear more often.

  First to reach me was a short, thin fellow who moved with the precise jumpy motions of the over-stimmed, a man with neurochemical augmentations that rendered him deadlier than he appeared. Obvious security guys, hands on holstered weapons, followed a couple of seconds later. I stood very still, hands out from my sides.

  "I'd like to make a significant purchase," I said.

  "All our currently available merchandise is behind you," the short man said. He spoke like he moved: words clipped, phrases staccato, each sound precise.

  "What I need is custom," I said.

  "We strictly obey all customization laws," he said.

  I laughed. "I couldn't care less. Nothing in the customization I want is, to the best of my knowledge, illegal for you to perform." I didn't have time to meet the right people in town, so I'd have to speed my way through this with brute conversational force. "What I do with my purchases is not your business. What is your business is what I'm willing to pay, which is well above your going rates." I pointed at my pocket. "I'm going to get my wallet."

  He nodded his approval.

  I pulled out the wallet and thumbed a link to my local bank. I'd priced the canine versions earlier, added a sizable premium, and set up an account that contained the result. I brought up the account balance, obscured the account's number but left the bank's logo visible, and turned the wallet toward him. "This account's balance is ready to move to your local bank," I said, "once I have the animals I want—as long as I get them quickly."

  He glanced at the screen, then at me. "What exactly do you want?"

  "You engineer monitor dogs, right?" I said.

  "Yes, of course," he said, "and cats and snakes and pretty much anything else you might like. It's generally standard stuff—organic fluid-drop-lens cameras bound into the eyes, transmitters feeding off the optic nerves—though it tends to lead to short lives for the pets." He shook his head. "What you showed me is way too much for monitors, even a herd of them."

  "No," I said, "it's not. I need monitor birds—"

  He cut me off. "Again, standard. What are you really—"

  I returned the favor. "I need a flock of them," I said, "local, something common in the woods northwest of the city, plus enough controls to force them to follow a course I'll describe, and a wrangler to take them up and bring them back." I paused for breath, and this time he let me finish. "And I need it all without any transmissions of any sort, not for control, not for what they monitor. I need the absolute minimum amount of metal possible, onboard silicon or other nonmetal recorders, and all the recordings in my hands afterward; no one else sees the data."

  "Pre-jump organic recorders?" he asked. "Why not simply transmit—" He stopped and waved his hand, stopping me before I could speak. "Not my concern, of course. After you're done with the birds?"

  "I'll use them only once, and then they're yours—but the data is, as I said, exclusively mine."

  He smiled for the first time. "The payment makes more sense. We've helped with similar work, of course, but nothing with tech this old. We also, as you might expect, want nothing to do with the end product of your . . . project, though as I think about it not having the data flow in realtime is only good for us."

  "Yes," I said, "and I don't want you involved. It's a one-time run, then we're done. You take away the birds and do what you want with them."

  "Fair enough," he said. "We can do business. Got a particular bird in mind?"

  "No," I said. "As long as whatever you choose is common enough that no one tracking the flock will think twice about it flying overhead, I'll be happy."

  He thought for a few seconds. "Blue-beaked moseys. They're everywhere outside the city, they move around frequently—a loud noise will send a flock flapping to a new location—and they fly at all times from first light until fairly late at night. They move relatively slowly, so the images should be clear. They'll home for multiple klicks after only a couple of feedings, so training is quick and range is good. Plus, they're easy to work on, with heads large enough that laser and cellular quick-heal techniques all work."

  "Fine," I said. "One last complication: I need full-spectrum recording, visible and IR."

  He smiled again. "You're new to working with animals. Of course you do; that's standard on this type of augmentation. When do you need all this?"

  "This evening," I said, half statement and half question.

  "Not a chance," he said. "A day to prepare and heal the flock, plus a day for the wrangler to work out his approach and do the homing training once you identify the start and end points."

  I hated the delay, but he was right; it was never going to happen today. Maybe I'd get lucky in the interim and Chung would change his habits and give me an open shot at him. Unlikely, but I could hope.

  "Okay," I said. "A quarter now, another quarter when they take off, and the remaining half when I have all the recordings."

  "A third now," he said, "to help with up-front costs. Then take us to half when the wrangler's in position, and pay the balance when he hands you all the recordings."

  He agreed so quickly that I realized I should have started with a lower offer and haggled, but the money pain was still tolerable. I needed Xychek to lift the bounty on me, and getting to Chung was the only way I knew to make that happen. I nodded my agreement, thumbed up a transfer of a third, and opened my wallet to accepting a destination account code from his. "Done," I said. "Give me the account to transfer to, then we'll work out our communication protocols, and you can get me some birds."

  Over the next three days, Chung kept to his routine, and Lobo and I clung to ours. We spent the nights in a variety of geosync low-orbit positions, Lobo maintaining transmission cover by echoing weather data or acting as a free public-data sat repeater, his sensors trained on Chung's house on the off chance that our target would surprise us with an easy opportunity. Chung didn't. In the days we flew with the tourist shuttle crowd, up and down the coastal cliff and outlying forest tour routes, Lobo's camo washing him with a different set of corporate colors every few hours. Chung's security team kept to its proven practices, and we never even came close to a low-collateral-damage shot at him. As the time wore on, the beauty of the cliff structures faded into unseen background, then eventually decayed into visual annoyance. Choose to look at a piece of art a thousand times, and each glance may reveal new beauty. Let a job force you to study it when you're aching to move on to the next task, and only those rare pieces that touch you most deeply will remain lovely.

  I invested part of each evening in studying Lobo's low-orbit recon images of a fifteen-kilometer-diameter circle centered on Chung's estate, trying to balance my conflicting desires. For the obvious safety reasons, I wanted starting and ending coordinates that were as deserted as reasonably possible, but I also needed a flight line that passed over as many homes and businesses as possible. Should the Strange Kitty team be tempted to double-dip by offering intel about me to the possible targets, I wanted them to have to wonder which of many options I was scanning. Alerting all the possibilities would, I hoped, open them to more exposure than they'd like.

  I finally settled on a not-quite-ten-kilometer path that started a couple of klicks off the road in a light-density forest and ran over three small business concentrations and five estates roughly on par with Chung's. The endpoint was the far edge of the warehouse portion of one of the business areas—not ideal, but acceptable given that we'd be launching in the dying light of the day, when
Chung would most likely be home.

  I stretched out the route choice to maintain my focus on the task. I've never enjoyed waiting for a job to start. Waiting is fine when I can use the time to gather new intel. It can also be a pleasurable activity when I'm not working. I love idle time and can while away weeks observing a new starscape or ocean, as I'd been doing on Macken before all this started, but such lazy days are fun only when what I've chosen to do is be idle. I was on my first run up the coast one morning and way past ready to get to work when the Strange Kitty folks posted the signal my birds were ready: an advertisement for a one-day, limited-quantity price reduction on mini-dragons with self-regulating homeostatic systems that would work in anything from a blizzard to a heat wave. I'd suggested a protocol that wouldn't risk costing them money, but my salesman had assured me that they'd overstocked the mini-dragons and would love it if the special offer boosted sales. To avoid attracting undue attention, Lobo and I finished the tour route we were running, called Strange Kitty, and worked our way cautiously to a location where Lobo could safely drop me.