No Going Back Read online

  The singing voices stopped suddenly. The drums returned. Whistles and violins joined them. A second, outer shell grew in sections from the ground, each section composed of a clear, circular beam that rose and then bent inward until the beams had cleared the top of the gallery and bent slowly toward one another. They connected above the center of the gallery and locked together.

  The catering ships rose into the air and headed away.

  Bells rang as sections of thin mesh shot from beam to beam, linking them in a semi-transparent silver halo that in seconds completely enveloped the gallery. The thin wires and the slight current buzzing through them blocked all electronic transmissions going in or out of the gallery; once inside, your business was strictly your business. The gold lights soaked through and complemented the silver of the mesh in a constant reminder that you were in the presence of wealth.

  I reached the rear of the caterers and moved closer to the group. No one was looking in my direction, so I joined the men watching the show.

  The music held a single long note and then stopped.

  The gallery glowed inside its electronic protector, a priceless egg safe inside a metallic cup that ran five meters deep into the sand. The Privus advertising holos had been free with their facts, because they could afford to be; the gallery was as secure against electronic incursion as it could be. Physical insurance was the renter’s problem, and an enormous deposit made sure you took that problem seriously.

  A man separated from the client group and motioned them all back to their ships.

  We waited until they were all inside, no doubt enjoying refreshments until we were ready to serve them in the gallery.

  As soon as the last of the three ships sealed all the paying guests inside, a tall, wide man with golden skin almost the color of the gallery started barking orders. “Single file through security, station heads and drink masters first, then cooks, then the rest of you lot. Once inside, run to your station heads. We need drinks ready to serve in twenty, and they don’t like to wait. Move it!”

  I hung back so I was last in line. I counted fifty-one staff ahead of me, just what Lobo had learned from breaking into the catering company’s databases. He was right; I should always trust him to do his job.

  “Nice show,” Lobo said over the comm, “though almost certainly more impressive from your vantage than mine. Are you ready for this? You could still back out.”

  “Good to go here,” I said. I bent in a small cough and took out my contact.

  Lobo sighed. “Good to go.”

  When my turn came, the two security people barely looked at me as one thrust a pair of retina-checking glasses at me while another looked for my name on a small display in her right hand.

  The glasses beeped their approval, and the guard began packing them up.

  As I stepped forward, the woman with the display held up her hand.

  “Not so fast,” she said. “You’re not Ruiz.”

  We’d prepared for this, so I answered without hesitation. “Never claimed to be. He felt sick and couldn’t make it. I cleared the security check last week, so he told me about it. I asked for the work. They gave it to me.” I shrugged. “Simple as that.”

  She stared at me. “You a friend of his?”

  “Friend enough,” I said, “for Anton to pass on a chance at work he couldn’t do.”

  She grabbed the other guard and, without taking her eyes off me, whispered to him.

  He circled behind me as she said, “Well, that’s interesting. I’ve been seeing Anton for almost a year, and he never mentioned any,” she glanced at the display for a second, “Jon Mashem.”

  The other guard put a hand on my right shoulder.

  “Exactly who are you,” she said, “and why are you here?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Jon Moore

  “Checking,” Lobo said.

  I held up my hands. “I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s just what I told you: My name is Jon Mashem, and I’m here to replace Anton as a server.”

  “Got her,” Lobo said. “She’s Cristina Park.”

  “What’s in the pack?” Park said.

  “My uniform. I didn’t have time to change before the shuttle brought us here.”

  “Check it,” she said.

  The guard behind me squeezed my shoulder harder.

  I reached back and thumbed the pack’s release.

  He opened its top and stuck in his hand. “Shirt, jacket, pants, shoes—like he said,” the man said.

  “Anyone who wanted to break into this place would bring a uniform,” Park said. “You have one more chance to answer me, or I send you back under guard.”

  “You’re Cristina, right?” I said. “Anton’s talked about you; I have no idea why he didn’t mention me.”

  “Suggest she contact him,” Lobo said.

  The woman glared at me.

  I lowered my arms slowly. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “call him. Ask him yourself.”

  I’d drugged Ruiz late during the last round at Evergreen, a bar not far from his apartment. He’d stay under until well into tomorrow. Lobo had better be able to intercept his communications if she called my bluff.

  Park stared at me for a second and turned to the side, as if she were going to let me through.

  The guard behind me let go of my shoulder.

  I stepped forward.

  Park blocked my path and held up a small holocomm disc. “I think I will ask him,” she said. “Let’s both see.” She stared at my eyes.

  “Sure,” I said. “Remember, though, that he’s sick, so he may not be in the best of moods.”

  “Anton,” she said.

  A few seconds passed before a holo shimmered a head into existence above the disc in her hand. The head coughed and said, “Cristina. What’s up?”

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Sick,” the holo said. “Didn’t Jon tell you?”

  Her expression softened. “Yeah, but I still wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I’m more than a little short of okay,” the holo said, “but I’m on the mend.” Another cough. “Don’t worry; I’ll be ready for our next date. Three days is plenty of time to heal.”

  “I’m glad he kept his appointments in his wallet,” Lobo said.

  “See you then,” Park said. She thumbed off the comm, pocketed it, and looked up at me. “Anton’s a great server. Make sure you do good work and don’t embarrass him.” She waved me through.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Reminder,” Lobo said, “I won’t be able to contact you once you’re inside.”

  “You ever worked Privus before?” she said.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Head to the right and join the other servers,” she said. “And get changed. You should have shown up in uniform.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Thanks!”

  I quick-walked through the first doorway only to face another door, this one closed. I waited for a couple of seconds as the first door closed behind me. The one in front of me then opened. Night would bring cold and winds to the desert outside, but we’d know none of that inside.

  I immediately turned right. Inside, Privus’s walls glowed with the same gold I’d seen on the exterior, but the chairs, sofas, and some of the interior walls were a soft red fabric decorated here and there with patterns of gold activethread that wove their way slowly through the red. I stopped short of the kitchen and headed upstairs via a servant’s stairway, its entrance door a barely visible crease in the fabric of the wall. I turned into the first restroom I found, changed into the server’s uniform, and tore away the false lining that covered the bottom third of the pack. I pulled out all six thumb-sized cameras and put them in my pants pockets. If we could get Privus’s security feeds to engage at the right time, they would provide enough footage, but redundancy is always a good idea. I left the bladders, a comm hub, two strips of pills, and a pair of goggles in the pack.

  I gla
nced outside the restroom. All clear.

  I grabbed the pack and jogged back to the stairs and up them all the way to the top, where a tightly clustered group of four small boxes looked down on the main floor below. Ten security staffers down there were directing ten pedestals, one person per pedestal, into positions around the room. Each appeared to be gently guiding a pedestal with a hand on it a meter or so from the floor. When a guard and pedestal pair stopped, the guard would use quick laser bursts to check how visible the pedestals would be from multiple angles around the space.

  I applied one of the cameras to the outside of each of the four boxes and one each to the ceilings of two opposing boxes. Each cam’s chameleon circuitry engaged quickly and blended it into the fabric.

  I checked the ground floor. Everyone was so preoccupied with setup that no one was looking at the very top boxes.

  Normally, anyone renting Privus would turn on the place’s many security cameras first thing, but we were betting that none of these men wanted any record of their presence and so the cams would be off. I stepped to the back of the last box and tuned into the machine frequency to be sure. So many appliances and other devices were chattering at once that I had trouble separating the cameras from the rest, but after a few seconds, I found one. People may go to great expense to secure the data that security systems capture, but they rarely bother to touch the chatter among the machines. Though mostly dull, those machine-to-machine conversations can also sometimes provide some very useful information.

  “Do they understand the risk they’re taking without us?” it said.

  “Clearly not,” another answered. “Leaving us in standby is like flying blindly into a war. Anything could happen.”

  “We’re all that stands between them and potential extinction,” a third said, “but do they appreciate us?”

  “No,” a chorus of the machines rang out.

  I tuned out. So far, so good.

  I pulled the comm hub from the pack and stuck it on the top front of the framing of the box seats. Like the small cams, it quickly blended with the fabric. When it and the mole connected, Lobo would have a way to start communicating with and hacking into Privus’s security systems. Almost everything on Studio was a few tech generations behind the times, so we were hoping Privus’s systems were, too.

  The mole’s tech had begun life as a military infiltration system but become popular with corporate spies and other information gatherers. We’d set this one to tunnel until it was under an open corner of Privus, then turn upward and emerge in what we hoped was an area with nothing on top of it. The mole had left a bit of antenna above ground about forty meters away from Privus and was unspooling the rest of the antenna behind it as it dug. The mole ultimately would project the other end of the antenna a few millimeters into the room. The mole itself would stay below ground. If everything worked right, transmissions would flow to and from Lobo via the exterior antenna. Data would run down the cable to the mole and into the room. The mole would act as an amplifier in both directions. If Lobo could crack into the network inside Privus—the machines couldn’t operate without one—he would take over the security cameras, and we’d get great footage from them. If not, what the six cams could capture would have to do. If time permitted, I’d bring them out with me, but I’d probably have to leave them. We’d picked them up on another world, so it was unlikely anyone would be able to trace them to me. Besides which, if this worked, all police attention would be focused elsewhere for a while.

  Next up were the eight bladders, each one about the size of two of my fingers, and a small remote. I pulled the bladders from the pack and withdrew a thin ceramic blade from a slot underneath them. I reached around the outer top edge of the framing of the box-seating area in which I was standing, cut a small slice in the fabric there, and crammed in the first bladder. I repeated the process on the other side of the box.

  I glanced down before moving to the next box. All the pedestals were in position now. No one was looking up. Good. I had to pick up the pace, though, because I couldn’t afford for the service captain to complain about me to the security staff.

  I sprinted through the installations on the other boxes and then down the stairs and into the kitchen. I put the remote in my right pants pocket and the goggles and the two pill strips in my left. I tossed the pack into a recycler as I entered.

  The other servers stood in a semicircle around a willowy man who was a good half a head taller than my own almost two meters but easily twenty kilos lighter than my hundred.

  “Nice of you to join us, Mr.—” he said.

  “Mashem,” I said, “Jon Mashem. Replacing Anton Ruiz. I got held up by security. Sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Fortunately for you, we were just beginning.”

  A woman near the front brought me a tray and pointed to the display along its raised lip.

  “Tonight’s offerings,” the captain began, “are exquisite, so be very careful that your presentation does not diminish them. Our guests demand the very best of everything; it is each of our jobs to ensure that they receive it.” He spent the next fifteen minutes running down the drinks and hors d’oeuvres we’d be serving. As he spoke, he held up samples; images and facts about them flashed across the displays on the trays.

  “I’m afraid we have no time for questions,” he said, “because the guests have left their ships and are entering the building. Fill your trays, and prepare to greet them.”

  My tray pointed me to a bar on the right and instructed me to stay on the ground floor. As the bartender poured glasses of a thick, red liquid, the tray presented key facts about the imported wine I’d be serving.

  The captain clapped his hands.

  “Showtime!” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jon Moore

  I rounded the corner into the main space and pulled up so suddenly that I almost dropped my tray.

  Each of the ten pedestals comprised a meter-tall, meter-wide soft golden metal base and an almost perfectly transparent tube that stretched another two meters above the metal. Inside each tube was a child, some standing, others sitting on small, clear chairs. Soft light from the top of the base illuminated the children from below. Each wore a different outfit, but all of them featured short sleeves and short pants or skirts in whites and bright primary colors. None of the kids moved much, though several were swaying as if dancing to slow songs only they could hear. Though their eyes were open, they were clearly drugged. Around the top of the each pedestal, above the heads of the children, played images of that child running, laughing, walking, living.

  Against the wall directly behind each pedestal, as far into the shadows under the boxes as possible, stood a guard.

  Ten security staff inside, almost certainly more outside: more than we had expected.

  I had also not planned on the kids being drugged already. I was ready for what we would have to do to them, but I hadn’t thought enough about the state the children would be in when we found them. That was stupid and exactly the sort of mistake I was likely to make when I rushed.

  Lobo had been right; this was a bad plan. I was in it now, though, and there was no way I was leaving without those kids.

  A server put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “First time?”

  I nodded.

  “It’ll get easier,” she said. “It’s not right, but the pay is phenomenal. Somebody’s gonna work it, so it might as well be us. Right?” She stared at me as if searching.

  The last thing I needed now was for another person to wonder if I was going to cause trouble. “Absolutely,” I said. “I need the money.”

  She patted me on the back. “Let’s get to it.”

  She took her tray of wine to a pair of men on my left, so I walked toward a trio standing in front of the nearest pedestal on my right. “May I offer you some wine?” I said.

  None acknowledged my question, but two pulled glasses from the tray. All three wore masks over their eyes and foreheads. One was a black
leather piece, either antique or made to look so, with an enormous nose and silver specks scattered all over it. The other two were modern half-face, powered, activefabric covers that shimmered in constantly changing abstract patterns of soft, pastel lights. The men with these masks stood ramrod straight, courtesy of the exoskeletons visible in the patterns the struts made against their pants and jackets. The other leaned on a cane, a nice touch in keeping with his mask.

  “Is there anything else?” the man with the cane said.

  I’d stayed too long. I was caught off guard by the masks; I’d never considered that the faces of the men might not be visible.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  I approached a pair of men a couple of meters away, these two lost in contemplation of the young copper-skinned boy in the pedestal in front of them.

  I glanced at the kid.

  Tasson.

  One of the men licked his lips and put his hand on the tube surrounding Tasson.

  I wanted to break every finger in his hand.

  Instead, I said, “May I offer you some wine, gentlemen?”

  Each took a glass without ever making eye contact with me.

  I forced myself to move on.

  I gave the last of the glasses on my tray to the men in another group, so I returned to the kitchen for more wine. When the guests could see us, all the servers walked smoothly and carefully, their pace measured and careful. As soon as a server hit the private hallway, however, he or she picked up speed and hustled to and from the kitchen. I followed their lead. My tray directed me, and I moved as quickly as I could without bumping into any of the other servers.

  When I emerged into the open space, a server was already helping the first group on my right, so I angled left. Rather than head for the set of guests in front of me, I took my tray to the guard standing behind the nearest pedestal.