REBOOTS Page 6

  The Púca’s notes, though.…

  Ship reported being landed under control on a no-moon, G-class sun and water world. Huh. Unlikely as it seems, this would point to a takeover by the Were engineer. Beacon goes up, and no big shock, Home Service didn’t even do a looky-lou, figuring by the time they got there the ship would be gone. No wonder the Púca had contracted this out. He didn’t want to have to charter something from a settled system, then go out to nowhere to find nothing and a cold trail. On the other hand…it wasn’t as if the Boggart had anything pressing on his desk. He could put up with a lot of tedium for a per diem.

  Curiouser and curiouser. And it stayed put for three years. In fact the beacon had gone up while it was on-planet in the same place it had landed. Three years? What was the Fur-face waiting for? Furs were almost as well organized as the Fangs were; aggressive, territorial, and strong as hell when they wanted to be, they had expanded hard and fast on the early exploratory crews, and even more so once FTL became commonplace. Could it be that he was able to call up a Pack to hijack the ship, even the odds with the Fangs?

  What if it was…both? “Rendezvous with a Corsair and let us off with—” What? Well maybe they’d found something valuable, had dumped the Reboots and packed the hold with it. Call it Unobtanium. “—let us off with the Unobtanium, you get the ship and your choice of worlds.” No moon, and an island paradise to call your own…might not appeal to an Alpha Fur, but a Zeta, maybe. Point being, maybe there was some MacGuffin that made the deal attractive to the Were. That could complicate things.

  Or…if the Boggart had had hair, it might have stood up on the back of his neck. Or it might be a Lone Wolf. Lones were rare, and rightly so. The Pack generally did not tolerate any member that unsocial; and their intolerance was generally lethal. Lones were therefore that much more unpredictable and smart. Most of the strongest ones got out on the early flights, over a hundred years ago. Nowadays you found them on border worlds, or scamping through freighter lines.

  Work the latter two theories then. Hijacking by Pack or Nest, because Nest Elders were smart enough to set a ship down on auto just to confuse the issue, or collusion between the Elders and a Loner. He shook his head; speculation without more evidence was worthless at this point. It was time to track down what few leads he had.

  In the ancient days a PI would have hit the pavement. The Boggart flexed his fingers. There was still shoe-leather involved, but the first step these days was to hit the net. See what I can dig up on the turkeys they had on this crew.

  Hours later, the Boggart emerged from the sea of information with some nuggets. He leaned back in the chair; its elderly mechanism complained faintly. “Down lights,” he ordered; the office AI obeyed. He thought better in the dark. Fred Stewart had had no real Pack to speak of. The Fangs had all been from different Nests with different Elders. The Boggart shook his head. There didn’t seem to be enough of a connection to suggest that some Elders had cooked up a plot to hijack the ship. He very much doubted that the Fangs had colluded to do it on their own. What in hell had Home Service been thinking, back then? Well, maybe that was the point, they hadn’t actually been thinking at all.

  Or maybe that had been long enough ago that the old, clandestine “attrition policy” had been active. There had been plenty in Home Service that had figured the best way to be rid of the Paras on old Earth was to ship them out and let them tear each other to small, bloody bits. Stupid, of course. All you got out of that was a hijacked ship and one or two really powerful Paras with a hankering to taste Home Service blood. But, that’s how things had been done back then. Stupid, and wasteful; which seemed to be par for the course even nowadays (just the current wastefulness was in a different direction), but that was beside the point. Stewart did, however, have a “cousin;” someone Turned by the same Pack Leader. As good a place as any to start. He was currently on the edge of the solar system, working a mining platform in the Kupier Belt; interesting oddity there, because it was honest work, albeit dirty and extremely dangerous.

  He did a little more data-mining and poking, but couldn’t come up with any other connections. Even the Fang Nests that the four Fangs had come from didn’t seem particularly interested in seeing them home again, and that had been before the ship went missing. That settled it; he’d book himself as freight for the next tramp freighter scheduled for that sector, and see what he could shake from the bushes. From there, it’d be onward to the planet Fred had landed on for his three-year vacation. Who knew? The ship might still be there, case solved, or at least, solved to the point Home Service wanted; he could collect his check and look for another gig. Home Service cared more about the equipment than the personnel; his term would be completed, and they’d send some bounty hunter after whatever was left of the crew. If there was anything, it was barely possible he’d find a bunch of Reboots wandering around and the withered remains of Fur and Fangs; space accident was still a valid explanation for this whole mess.

  He put together his traveling crate. He was not, after all, a creature that required very much in the way of resources. A little water, a little food, and air—and that was only on the front and back-end of the trip. For the rest…baggage class. That was why he was going to bill as if he was a paying passenger on these boats, but end up paying for nothing but a crate mostly full of nothing. Fey spirits of his sort didn’t need anything but their anchors. In his case, the anchor was a busted pocket watch. Air bottle, check. Water bottle, check and full. “Food,” well, he wasn’t fussy, and that was bars of the “one-bar, one-meal” stuff they fed military grunts; they tasted like lemon-flavored chalk, but it was better than nothing. Gun. Oh yes, the gun.

  An old fashioned .455 Webley-Fosbery, an antique, actually, like the P.I.s in ancient films carried. It was as heavy as an anvil, and as accurate as any L-gun he’d ever fired. It had a history, and was definitely not all that it seemed. He could have sold it for a small fortune, and would sooner have sold his soul, assuming he had a soul to sell. No one expected a Para to carry a slug-thrower, especially not an antique. Swords, knives, bows, sure. In the case of Fangs, whatever was newest, shiniest, and expensive. Not a gun. Something about a lot of Paras being unable to fully adapt to the times; immortality did that to some. And some were just plain allergic to iron and steel; the Púca was probably one of those. It wasn’t just the gun, though, it was the bullets. You had to have just the right bullets for a job like this one.

  All was in order. All he had to do was make the call and the pay the shipping fee, seal himself inside, and the pickup bots would do the rest. It wasn’t the first time his chosen shipping company had gotten the crate from a seemingly empty office, or delivered it back to the same office, and it wouldn’t be the last. The bots didn’t care as long as they had the lock code for the door and the fee had cleared the bank.

  He always preferred dealing with bots. They had no curiosity, which suited this Boggart just fine.

  The Boggart slipped in ethereal form outside the crate several times during the trip, just to check on the progress, but never long enough to trip the gremlin-sensors. The very last thing he needed was some freighter-bull coming in the back to check for hitchhikers. The Boggart wondered if there was ever a minotaur stuck in that gig; it’d have a nice bit of symmetry. And if there was one thing that the Home Service did show from time to time, it was the odd moment of whimsy. Flunkies like Ian had to keep themselves entertained somehow, and the Home Service cube-farm staff was about ten percent Paras. Which only went to show that there were bureaucrats everywhere. There was a rumor that Home Service had even considered hiring demons, because they were so good at bureaucracy, but in a rare moment of good sense, they’d decided against it.

  Tempting as it was to swap briefly to a solid body and snitch something from the galley, that would be a dead giveaway of his presence, and the Boggart confined himself to checking on their ship’s progress. Slow but steady. He’d pre-booked a bunk at the hostel—there were two kinds of housing at these
mines, capsule-hotels like the hostel, which were basically self-contained bunks, and company housing, which was basically a capsule in a shipping container that gave you about the same amount of space as a prison cell, with slightly better amenities. Some outfits still used open-hold barracks housing, but that hardly ever turned out well nowadays; too many “special needs” employees, whether it be need for blood, UV intolerance, weakness to cold iron, or a violent reaction to garlic. His shipping crate would be delivered to the hostel, he could climb out of it and check in. It was bot-run, he’d checked on that, so there would be no questions about where he came from or how he got there. Once checked in, he’d use the uplink in his capsule to place a call to the Púca, confirming his presence at the mine. Helped to create a paper trail; when he made out his expense report he would need to be able to prove he’d gone where he said he had. Have to justify everything for the bean-counters back at Home Service. In between progress checks there was just a lot of waiting. The hold was pressurized, but not climate controlled, and it was quarantined. Some ships just loaded everything into bigger shipping containers and strapped it all to naked frames exposed to space, but this was a smaller, older model that carried stuff that couldn’t take hard vacuum.

  Mind, even hard vacuum didn’t get rid of gremlins; no such thing as a perfect vacuum, after all, and gremlins would latch onto anything. But that wasn’t his problem. The point was, he had to pretty much stay ethereal so he wouldn’t use up his consumables. But a P.I. job had always involved a lot of waiting, whether it was staking out a wandering spouse, or drowsing away a long wait to get to where you were going. One reason why he was in this job; he was good at waiting.

  The trip was boring and uneventful, the docking routine, the delivery—by which time he was in corporeal form again, and using his air and food and water—also routine. The automated desk asked no questions at the hostel, and within an hour of checking in he was sealed in his pod and placing that call. After making sure it was office-hours for the Púca, of course. Wouldn’t do to inconvenience the meal-ticket. Most of the trip had been made at sublight, with the latter half traveling “backwards” as the ship slowed itself. Without too much time dilation, there was still a stretch that had put him out of sync, star-lagged.

  “Ah,” the creature said, then blinked at something he read on his end. “Where in all the hells of Earth are you? A mine?” Dumb bunny doesn’t know how this sort of thing shakes out.

  “Fur had bloodline kin here,” the Boggart said shortly.

  “Oh.” The Púca leaned in to look at the screen. “Are you in a pod? What kind of shithole—”

  “They don’t exactly have five-star accommodations out here,” the Boggart pointed out. His contact shuddered. Anything less than executive suites and room service on call were foreign to the company man. “I’m just checking in, per the contract. I’ll let you know one way or the other after I contact the other Fur.”

  “And Home Service appreciates your exactitude. I’ll expect your call; if I don’t take it, leave it for my message service.” The Púca terminated the connection, not wanting to waste a cent more on it, no doubt. Home Service appreciates your exactitude…what’s he do, spend his time memorizing a dictionary? Probably one of those “word a day” calendars; it’d fit for his type of office drone.

  He spent the next few minutes stowing what few belongings he had with him. The pod was just over eight feet long, four high, four wide. The bed conformed to whatever configuration you put it in; the climate control meant linens were not necessary. An entertainment and ’puter-pad workstation swung out of the wall on an arm, and there was a built-in light just over his head. Everything was a matte cream-color. The slide-down side could take a bullet, and dark gods forbid this section had a blowout, it would seal and the pod would become a lifepod in which you could last as long as you didn’t die from lack of water. Croaking the customers gave a chain a bad rep.

  His next course of action would be to hit up the local watering hole; every place like this had one as a matter of necessity. When beings were engaged in hard and dangerous work, they needed a designated place to unwind; otherwise, they found other—and often more destructive—ways to release the tension. And it had to be some place that was not owned by the Company they worked for, or by Home Service. If such a place didn’t exist when an outpost was established, someone would create it, off the books, clandestinely, in warehouse space or even a ventilation shaft if one was big enough. Off the books meant home-brewed swill that could poison people as often as not, and worse, so far as the Companies were concerned, was not something they could charge duties or taxes on. So after a brief time of trying to fight such places, the Companies now planned in spots and leased them, collected their bit, and looked the other way. A much tidier solution.

  “Where’s the bar?” he asked the desk-bot. They hadn’t wasted any money on this one; it was basically a screen, an electronic slate and fingerprinter, both set into the wall. The entire setup was covered with crude graffiti, most of it directed towards Home Service or the bot. The tinny speaker crackled to life.

  “Please follow the directions on the screen, and have a nice day!”

  The bar was called, imaginatively, Bar. The instructions were fairly simple. It was nowhere near the hostel, which was portside and beside the admin housing. It was tucked right in between the miners’ housing and the dockworkers’ housing, and as far from admin and the port as it was possible to get. Gave the drudge workers easy access, and allowed the VIPs to go slumming when they wanted to.

  Well, right now he’d fit right in. Deep down inside, some part of him wanted, desperately, to cruise into the place in a fedora, trench coat with the collar up, and a snub-nosed stogie in hand. But do that, and he was just begging for trouble; more than usual, at least. So…old coveralls that had once been a sort of yellow-brown and were now mostly gray-brown with oil and wear, baggy and saggy enough to hide the gun, over a t-shirt and cheap pants. Face-shaped face, slightly unkempt, slightly graying dark hair, stubble. He’d found that the face was one of the less important details, so he had a few that he used regularly as templates. Nevermind the fact that most Norms looked all the same to Paras, and vice versa. And if any Company goon questioned his being at the hostel instead of assigned housing, he’d flash his Home Service temp ID and his permanent PI license, and say something like he was “looking into irregularities.” That always made Company men sweat, because there were always irregularities, and it was their nightly prayer that no one ever looked into theirs. Graft and corruption were the hallmarks of civilization.

  He didn’t encounter anyone though, at least, not on the way down. It was down, too; at least as this mining base counted things. Waste not—as they hollowed out the rock, they had taken the surface constructions down and rebuilt them inside. Cubic space was cubic space, after all. Smart, really; things were safer under a skin of rock.

  It did mean that there wasn’t exactly a view, however.

  To keep people from feeling as if they were living in a hamster maze, the corridors all had two-story ceilings, with faux sky panels over the lights. Since this wasn’t an exactly top-tier operation, it was all low-grade and poorly fitted. Right now, it seemed to be designated “night,” so the faux-sky showed lots of blotches that were supposed to be stars, and the lighting was subdued. Which meant that the garish red light-tube BAR set into the wall beside a door was visible from the lift. Otherwise it was just blank gray walls with doors, some with plaques telling what they were for, the rest of the way. Not even an attempt to make it look like a regular city street.

  He pushed open the door; it wasn’t powered like you’d find on any decent setup. A few raggedy pool tables tucked into the corner, even more raggedy beings crowded around them, and dim lights. The actual bar top took up most of the space. It was lit from below, which cast everyone’s faces into sinister and jagged shadows. Two bartenders to deal with the volume of customers; the Boggart got the impression that this place was
probably constantly packed, as different shifts went on and off duty. Rank smoke from cheap smokables filled the space, which no doubt gave the air scrubbers fits, assuming that they even bothered with them. No one looked up or noticed him coming in; he was just another miner, beaten down and ready to forget his shift over a few libations. Funny word, that. It meant an offering poured out for the gods. Except this looked like a place, and people, the gods had forgotten, and they knew it.

  The Boggart trudged up to an open spot at the bar, putting just the right amount of weary shuffle into his gait; he’d found that getting the walk right helped sell a disguise as much as anything. He bought a beer. He drank it, and listened. People thought that being a PI was all about asking questions. It wasn’t. It was all about listening unobtrusively. Then asking the right questions to the right people. One of the bartenders was a Norm, the other was a Para—and you didn’t have to be a Para to pick that out. The customers had neatly segregated themselves in front of their respective barkeeps. Like keeps with like, and that was the rule even out here. Well, except for the groupies. There were always groupies, at least for the attractive Paras. You saw them in the fancy high-priced Para hangouts, the kind that Púca probably frequented. Lots of kids wearing black and too much makeup for the Fangs, lots of kids all primitive and tribal for the Furs (even though the rate of Turning was a lot lower for the Furs), and a crap-ton of kids all done up in weird pseudo-medieval or what he liked to call ‘magic-slut’ getups for the…Others…even though there was no way in anyone’s ’verse you could get Turned into one of the Others. But no one was winning any beauty contests out here, and no one was going to become the poster boy for the trendy lifestyle of the Urban Para.