REBOOTS Read online

  And if the dope didn’t…the Boggart could still sell the info, later.

  The Púca nodded, brows creased. “Hmm. Put that way…they sound like the unluckiest wise guys, or the luckiest idiots in the universe.”

  The Boggart shrugged. “Won’t know until I find out more. I haven’t run out of options yet, but I’m going to need you to put down creds for a rented skiff.”

  “I’d already assumed you’d need one. Home Service has a franchise operation and you have a rental option wherever they are. Schultz Wrentals, with a ‘W.’ Don’t ask me why.” From the sly look on the Púca’s face, Humph actually had a good idea why. With a ‘W’ because what they were “wrenting” were “wrecks.” Oh well, as long as it got him there and back. It couldn’t be too bad here, though if he’d been back at that mining colony, all bets were off. Here? Well it didn’t do to kill the customer because the customers had families and anyone who could afford to come here could also afford a very expensive lawyer. But one thing was certain. Whatever he got wouldn’t be new, it wouldn’t be fast, and it wouldn’t be pretty. “By the way, in order to do that I had to look up your file. For your full legal name and all…”

  The Boggart waited. He knew what was coming. And he really wished this was a face-to-face so he could grab that smarmy bastard by the throat. With his teeth.

  “Really, now. Humphrey? Humphrey…Boggart?” The snickers started.

  “Yeah…and?” There were plenty of choice curses that some of the old gods, the ones that hadn’t died out yet, could probably grant him; the only thing that stopped the Boggart from uttering them was the fact that he still needed to be paid. A dead HS Púca can’t very well issue a check.

  But the only thing that would have mollified him at this point would have been the knowledge that whoever had first summoned the Púca had named him Harvey. Which, of course, wasn’t likely. Damned Norms. He hadn’t known anything about Old Earth vids and actors when he’d been summoned, or he likely would have found a way to get past the protections and swap his summoner’s face with his ass. All the hells, he’d gone millennia without a Norm name! It wasn’t as if he’d chosen it!

  He waited for the Púca to finish snickering and wipe his eyes. “Ah, that was good. Best laugh I’ve had all day. Your chariot will await you, Humphrey. I’d say ‘pick it up anytime’ but we both know that time is money, and Home Service is particular about getting their money’s worth.”

  A not-so-subtle hint that he was being watched and would not be allowed to linger on at a luxury station on the Home Service dime. This place wasn’t his style, but the Púca wouldn’t know that or even care. “Yeah, I hear you. We’ll be in touch, wabbit.” Oh and time for a not-so-subtle hint of his own. “Remember, I don’t get to break the rental and I do get paid per diem for transit time.” The Púca pursed his lips, gave a curt nod, and then broke the connection.

  Maybe that would at least ensure him that the wreck would be fast, if not new and pretty.

  Five minutes later, when he checked the Schultz client site on the station’s intranet, he smiled crookedly.

  A former long-distance racing skiff. The frame wasn’t warped, which meant it hadn’t been in any crashes. Everything else looked pretty beat up, but he wasn’t interested in the boat’s cosmetics. Yeah. That’ll do. He reached into one of his back pockets, producing a small round flask. A little whisky for the night, and come Standard dawn, we’ll ride out for a day on the beach.

  Without needing to be in ethereal form for this transit—or at least, part of it—he’d had the crate humped to the skiff without being in it. The skiff had been modified for idiots, of course. Manual override happened only if the automatics broke down. He could have bypassed it easily enough if he had cared to; knowing how to do such things proficiently were infinitely handy in his line of work. He just didn’t care to take the time to do it, for now.

  He did go ethereal just because it was more comfortable once the skiff launched on its automatic path—the Púca had supplied the rental firm with the coordinates, probably to make sure he didn’t make any side trips while on Home Service’ dime. From the smell that was pricking at his nose, someone had been sick in this thing, a lot, and a hint of the stink was still in the air-scrubbers. And he knew why someone had been sick in this thing. It was fast. And it was not at all delicate in its vector transfers. Well, it was a racing skiff after all, and you didn’t expect the same smooth ride out of one of these bastards that you got from your standard skiff. The inertial dampeners had been turned low, to give racers a better feel for the handling; it made for somewhat rough riding, however. The oversized engines that they had strapped to it were designed to run system courses almost as fast as military boats, which suited the Boggart just fine. The faster he got to the planet, the sooner he’d finish this job and be on to the next one.

  No room for creature comforts either, just the one cramped little cabin with the barest of amenities necessary to biological life in space. But he didn’t need anything at all when he was ethereal, so that was how he stayed except between course changes. When he was in the nowhere space of the ethereal, he was still somewhat aware of what was happening to his pocket watch; after a time, he heard the ship’s alert blaring.

  Must be there.

  He slipped back into the corporeal world, and oriented himself as he absently stuffed the watch into his pocket. Keying up the viewscreen, he saw his destination hanging there against the blackness of space; it was an uninteresting water-covered rock of a planet, with a few islands dotting the surface from long-ago volcanic activity. Might be profitable for somebody to drop a claim on this place, develop it as a luxury planet, if it weren’t so damned far out here in the ass-end of space. He set his scans to wideband, looking for any satellites or other early-warning devices; hell, if he was lucky, the Cenotaph would show up as a dead hulk in orbit, waiting for him like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That would certainly solve everything and he could go home and collect his check.

  Of course, he was never lucky. Just some metallic particles and other light debris that all ships shed normally whenever entering or leaving atmosphere.

  It wasn’t hard to pinpoint where the ship had been when it launched the emergency beacon. The beacons hadn’t been made by the lowest bidder. They were the one item on the ships that was mil-spec. So he followed the coordinates down to one of the eleventy-million little islands that comprised this place, and the skiff bumped itself down right on the spot that the Cenotaph had vacated. Good thing it wasn’t still there; the skiff was made for speed, not sturdiness, and would’ve crunched quite nicely against the hull of a big science cruiser.

  Scan showed that the air was good—so he cracked the outer door and had a look outside. It looked like any other beach back on earth; silicates, water, the usual. The plants were all relatively simple, with a few Earth analogues. Wrong sort of green, a lot of blue and red. Looked like prehistoric stuff, Jurassic, Mesozoic, but without the giant bugs or monster reptiles.

  Something seemed off, though.

  The Boggart looked closer; there were definite signs that the area had been carefully worked over to look like it’d been untouched by sentient hands. He wandered around for a couple of hours, kicking things over, ranging the coast, looking for anything that might have been left behind to indicate what was going on at this beach for three years. The Boggart was about to give up and head back to the skiff when his ears pricked up on his skull; something was moving in the underbrush. Not stealthily, either. Something native?

  He took the big revolver from its oiled leather holster, and waited. No cover out here; just gonna have to face whatever is coming head-on.

  “Come out nice and slow-like, and it’ll go easier on you,” he growled.

  Whatever was in there stopped for a moment, and then seemed to change direction; it was definitely coming closer to him, now. It sounded bipedal. And slow. And clumsy.

  He had settled the sights on the revolver on a patch of unde
rbrush directly in front of him that was thrashing as something tried to force its way through. His clawed finger was slowly tightening on the trigger when it emerged.

  “Rurh?”

  A zombie stood in front of him, with its head cocked to the side in dim curiosity.

  The Boggart was taken aback—almost enough to drop his revolver—by what it was wearing. The zombie had been fitted with a grass skirt and what passed for a coconut bra, with a string of spongy flowers, long dead, draped around its neck. It picked up a frond of the local flora, and stalked towards him ponderously. When it was close enough, it stood up straight as it could, and started to fan the Boggart.

  It took him several seconds to realize his jaw was open, and close it with a loud click. He looked past the Reboot, and saw several other humanoid shapes shuffling through the bush. More of the same; some were still dressed in the H.S.-issue red jumpsuits, and others were similarly garbed as the first, grass skirts and all. He sat down on the sand, and just stared for a few minutes while his brain did its best to reset from the shock.

  This’ll do somethin’ special to the Púca, for certain. He holstered the revolver, and got out his minivid camera. He just knew that if he didn’t shoot some vid, the Púca would never believe him. He was puzzling over his next move as he got as much footage as he cared to.

  Who the hell would put Reboots in grass skirts and teach them to fan people? Not ’jackers. This was putting an entirely different complexion on the problem. And…reluctantly…he was beginning to like these guys.

  Which was another problem, because he was supposed to catch them and turn them over to the company; he was contracted to find the ship, but it had been implied since then that he was taking on the job of finding this Fred character and whatever accomplices he had. He shook his head; the Boggart always finished a job, and by all the hells of the universe, he was going to finish this one.

  Two things were for sure here. This was a yellow-sun world, and anyone who put Reboots into grass skirts had a hell of a sense of humor, so there was no way it had been the Fangs who grounded the ship here. Most Fangs had about as much of a sense of humor as a chunk of ice.

  It had to be Fred, and that meant he was one dangerous Fur, because he’d somehow overcome four Fangs, one of which was likely an elder vamp. Whenever the beacon went up, he had to have known his goose was cooked; probably did a quick clean-up job on the site, and then made tracks for the stars. A pre-FTL boat, so it’d have been slow going, and he’d want to get to the closest bit of civilization so that he could blend in, the Boggart wagered.

  Well, that would give him his next stop: whatever was nearest. He sighed. “Time to check the charts and draw up the anchor,” he told the Reboot.

  It, of course, said nothing.

  The Boggart decided to go ethereal for the trip to the next station. It was a short hop by translight, and he was bored. After a while, interstellar flight did that to you; it wasn’t as if it was scenic by any means, and if you weren’t going from here to there on some fancy luxury boat that had a myriad of things to entertain the passengers, you might just as well be sealed in a box with crap food and minimal comfort. He was already docked at the station on autopilot, he became aware that an alarm had gone off; he recognized that the alarm only indicated that the ship had dumped the cockpit’s atmo. You know, the important stuff for the continued functioning of most living beings. And in a skiff…well, by the time he checked, it was too late to go corporeal and try and fix the malfunction.

  Mentally cursing the Púca, the company that had rented him this almost-death-trap, and the Fates, he retreated into the nowhere to wait for the station to repressurize the skiff and investigate. Eventually they would have to do both. You couldn’t have a boat tying up a dock indefinitely.

  After a length of time, he felt that his pocket watch was still in zero atmo, but moving.

  The hells?

  I got a bad feeling about this…

  But it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it. He was one of the Paras that needed to breathe. Vacuum wasn’t good for him, and that was entirely aside from inhibiting his ability to imbibe whisky. That “malfunction” was beginning to look like an “on purpose”—but who would know about the watch? Or had this just been a simple “purge and grab”? He’d heard of those…not many, because people who had the ability to even rent something that could go translight were wealthy, and wealthy people had heirs, and heirs asked questions…but it did happen.

  Well if that was the case, someone was going to get a rude surprise. He might not have his revolver with him when he came out of the nowhere, but he was something of a weapon all by himself.

  The watch went into a dark, small place. Also in a vacuum. After a while, he sensed the hiss of air returning to wherever the watch was. And there was light, and heat, and what felt like enough room to fit his frame. He was tempted to erupt into the area like a Boggart-shaped jack-in-the-box from Hell, but native caution made him go corporeal…carefully.

  It was a good thing he had. There were many, many weapons pointed at him.

  The lighting was subdued, which was what you would expect, seeing that the people holding the weapons were either Fangs or in Clan colors, though he didn’t recognize the Nest. Silver and dusky lavender? Not one he knew. But this wasn’t some over-the-top Bordello-style “reception” room, crowded with expensive baroque furniture and trinkets, nor was it the angsty-gothic-blacker-than-black trite room out of some old vid. This room would not have been out of place in the home-office of a major executive. Everything was sleek, stylish; there was a lot of high-end equipment in here, and most people would never even recognize it as equipment in the first place, because it had been styled to be unobtrusive. The chair that the watch—and now he—were sitting on probably cost more than he’d ever made in his long life. The piece of sculpture functioning as a desk across from him cost…well, his brain went into meltdown trying to figure it out. And the woman behind the desk, as sleek and stylish as the room…

  …had not been that expensive when he’d last known her.

  “Hello, Claire.” She’d been beautiful then, by human standards. Now she was a work of art. Every platinum hair in her chin-length bob was in place, her pale complexion was flawless, and she had not gone the route of so many Fang women by painting her lips whore-red. Tasteful. Very tasteful. As was the two-piece, asymmetrical, steel-gray suit she wore. No surprise that she had a lot of equally expensive boy-thralls holding those weapons on him. And they looked competent. Pretty boys who were also well-trained bodyguards—either she’d had pretty boys trained, or she’d had bodyguards sent out to whole-body-sculptors and either way, it would have made a big hole in most people’s bank accounts. Well, she’d learned about the need for competence from him. “Been what, thirty years? You don’t look all that much worse for wear.” He appraised her again. “Little bit on the pale side, though.”

  “I have an iron deficiency,” she deadpanned. “And there’s just no sun up here.”

  “Shame, that. You used to kill in a bikini.”

  She smiled. He didn’t like that smile. There was a nasty edge to it. “Oh,” she said. “I still do. Easier to clean up that way.”

  He felt a chill. This was a woman with a grudge; one who had nursed that grudge, cherished it, and given it a name. “I can see you’re doing well for yourself. It’s been nice chatting, but I’m not here on a social call; work, you see.”

  She surprised him. He’d halfway expected some sort of dramatic scene. Instead, she sat back in her chair, and with a touch of a finger on the armrest, a large screen opened up on the formerly blank wall. “Let’s see. Working for Home Service. Skip-tracing? Or would you call yourself a repo-man?” A copy of his contract and the image of the Púca came up on the screen. “Really, Boggie, is that all you can do? I thought you had more ambition than that.”

  He shrugged the slight off. “A gig is a gig, darling.”

  “Ah. A ‘gig,’ like I was a ‘gig’?�
�� Her expression didn’t change, but he could feel the acid in her voice. Still cool and collected in front of her underlings, though.

  The Boggart stared at her hard. “You know what I meant. Don’t make one thing about the other.”

  “You can’t have your argument both ways, darling. Either I was just a gig, and easy to leave behind, or you are a lying rat bastard with the morals of a tomcat.” Perfectly manicured nails tapped slightly on the polished surface of the desk. “In a way I have you to thank for my success. If you hadn’t dumped me like yesterday’s leftovers, I wouldn’t be in this chair today. You taught me all about looking out for Number One, Boggie, darling.”

  “Thirty some-odd years is a long time to hold a grudge, don’t you think?” He bit his lip, then shook his head. “You want something, Claire, and it isn’t revenge for what went on back in Cleveland. If you wanted me dead, you could’ve had me spaced and had a shiatsu massage by now.”

  “What’s thirty years when you’re immortal?” she countered. “But yes. You owe me, and I intend to collect. And I have your watch.” One of the drones snatched it off the chair and handed it to her. She dropped it into a box, a small, but very heavy-looking box. She closed the lid. “Now,” she continued, her voice taking on the hard and chill quality of a diamond. “This is how it is going to be. I—well, my Nest—own this station. Everything is all on the up-and-up so far as anyone is aware. But you know my kind. You know I have other deals going. Things that the Norms would rather not know about. There is a bad man, who wants me to pay him money not to tell the Norms. I wouldn’t mind this, blackmail is factored into the balance sheets, but he’s also demanding permanent docking and repair privileges. Sanctuary, so to speak. This is not a privateer station. I often have military, corporate, and Home Service ships here. Granting him his request would make things very difficult for us. He knows all my thralls, all my drones, and everyone I might go to in order to make him go away. But he doesn’t know about you.” Her fingers tapped on the surface of the box. “You are going to make him go away, remove him permanently from the universe. If you do, you get the watch back and we are even. If you don’t, the contents of this box will be vaporized. That means you cease to exist, as far as the universe is concerned, if you don’t keep to the deal. Are we clear?”