Artemis (18 page)

“Landvik was Norwegian and Vetrov was Russian.”

“I see,” said Ngugi.

If you commit a serious crime, Artemis deports you to the
victim's
country. Let their nation exact revenge on you for it. It's only fair. But Lefty—I guess I should call him Alvarez—had killed people from two different countries. Now what?

“I'd like you to let me pick this one,” Rudy said.

“Why?”

Rudy looked to the cell. “If he cooperates I'll send him to Norway. If not, he'll go to Russia. Where would you rather be tried for murder?”

“Excellent strategy. I see you're a little Machiavellian yourself.”

“That's not—” Rudy began.

“You should release Jasmine, though, don't you think?” she said.

Rudy was taken aback. “Certainly not. She's a smuggler and a saboteur.”

“
Allegedly
,” I said.

“Why do you care so much about Jazz?” he asked.

“Sanchez Aluminum is a Brazilian company. Do you want to deport her to Brazil? She'd be lucky to last a day there before O Palácio killed her. Does she deserve to die?”

“Of course not,” Rudy said. “I recommend Deportation Without Complaint to Saudi Arabia.”

“Declined,” Ngugi said.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “She's clearly guilty. What is your fixation with this girl?”

“Girl?” I said. “I'm twenty-six!”

“She's one of us,” Ngugi said. “She grew up here. That means she gets more leeway.”

“Bullshit,” Rudy snapped. I'd never heard him swear before. “There's something you're not telling me. What is it?”

Ngugi smiled. “I'm not deporting her, Constable. How long would you like to keep her handcuffed here?”

Rudy thought it over, then pulled a key from his pocket and unlatched my handcuffs.

I rubbed my wrists. “Thanks, Administrator.”

“Stay safe, dear.” She walked out of the office.

Rudy glared as she left, then he shot me a look. “You're
not
safe. You're better off confessing to your part in this and getting deported to Saudi Arabia. It's easier to hide out there than here.”

“You're better off eating shit,” I said.

“O Palácio won't give up just because I caught their fixer. You can be sure they'll send another one on the next meatship.”

“First of all: duh,” I said. “Second off:
I
caught him, not you. And finally…how'd he track my Gizmo?”

Rudy frowned. “That does bother me.”

“I'll be on my way. If you need to reach me, you know the identity I'm using.” He'd confiscated my Harpreet Gizmo when he arrested me. I picked it up off his desk. “You've had plenty of opportunities to kill me and haven't done it.”

“Thanks for the vote of trust. You should stay around me for your own safety.”

It was tempting. But I couldn't. I didn't know what my next move would be, but it would definitely be something I couldn't do with Rudy watching.

“I'm better on my own, thanks.” I turned to Jin Chu. “What's ZAFO?”

“Suck a dick!”

“Get out,” Rudy said to me. “Come back if you want protection.”

“Fine, fine,” I said.

Hartnell's had its usual crowd of quiet, borderline alcoholics. I knew each of them by face, if not name. There were no strangers that day, and none of the regulars even glanced my way. Business as usual at my watering hole.

Billy poured me a pint of my usual grog. “Aren't you on the run or somefin'?”

I wiggled my hand. “Kind of.”

Was Alvarez the only thug O Palácio had in town? Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, how many people would you assign to your lunar mafia money-laundering operation? At least I knew one thing: They couldn't have sent anyone new. Not yet. It takes weeks to get here from Earth.

“Is it wise to come 'round your favorite pub then?”

“Nope. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever done. And that's a field of
intense
competition.”

He threw a towel over his shoulder. “Then why?”

I swigged my beer. “Because I made a deal.”

Billy looked past me to the entrance and widened his eyes. “Cor! There's a face I haven't seen in an age!”

Dale walked up to his old stool next to mine and sat down. He grinned from ear to ear. “A pint of your worst, Billy.”

“On the house for ya!” Billy said. He filled a pint for Dale. “How's me favorite arse bandit?”

“Can't complain. Still do, though.”

“Har!” He slid the pint to Dale. “I'll leave you two hatebirds alone.”

Dale sipped his beer and smirked at me. “I wasn't sure if you'd show.”

“Deal's a deal,” I said. “But if someone shows up to kill me I might need to leave early.”

“Yeah, about that. What's going on? Rumor has it you're tangled up in the murders.”

“Rumor's right.” I drained my glass and tapped it twice on the bar. Billy slid me another—he'd poured it in advance. “I was the next intended victim.”

“Rudy caught the murderer, right? The news sites say it's some Portuguese guy?”

“Brazilian,” I said. “Doesn't matter. They'll just send another one after me. I've got a short break at best.”

“Shit, Jazz. Is there anything I can do?”

I stared him in the eyes. “We're not friends, Dale. Don't worry about me.”

He sighed. “We could be. In time, maybe?”

“I don't see it happening.”

“Well, I've got one evening a week to change your mind.” He smiled at me. Smug little fucker. “So why'd you do the harvester job?”

“Trond was going to pay me a big pile of money.”

“Yeah, but…” He looked pensive. “I mean, it's not your style. It was risky—and you're really smart. You don't take risks unless you have to. You're not desperate for cash or anything, so far as I know. I mean, yeah, you're poor. But you're stable. Do you owe loan sharks or something?”

“No.”

“Gambling debt?” he asked.

“No. Stop it.”

“Come on, Jazz.” He leaned in. “What's the deal? This doesn't make sense to me.”

“Doesn't have to make sense to you.” I checked my Gizmo. “We have three hours and fifty-two minutes left until midnight, by the way. Then it won't be ‘evening' anymore.”

“Then I'm just going to spend three hours and fifty-two minutes asking the same question.”

Pain in my ass…I sighed. “I need 416,922 slugs.”

“That's…a very specific number. Why do you need it?”

“Because fuck you, that's why.”

“Jazz—”

“No!” I snapped. “That's all you're getting.”

Awkward silence.

“How's Tyler?” I asked. “Is he…I don't know. Is he happy?”

“Yeah, he's happy,” said Dale. “We have our ups and downs like any couple, but we work at it. Lately he's frustrated with the Electricians' Guild.”

I snickered. “He's always hated those fuckers. Is he still non-guild?”

“Oh, of course. He'll never join. He's a very good electrician. Why would he go out of his way to get paid less?”

“Are they squeezing him?” I asked. One of the downsides of having almost no laws: monopolies and pressure tactics.

Dale seesawed his hand. “A little. Some rumormongering and deliberate price undercutting. Nothing he can't handle.”

“If they go too far let me know,” I said.

“What would you do?”

“Dunno. But I don't want anyone fucking with him.”

Dale held up his glass. “Then I pity anyone who fucks with him.”

I clinked my glass against his and we both took a sip.

“Keep him happy,” I said.

“I'll sure as hell try.”

My Harpreet Gizmo buzzed. I pulled it out to take a look. It was a message from Svoboda:
“This ZAFO shit is amazing. Meet me at my lab.”

“Just a sec,” I said to Dale. I typed out a response.

“What did you find out?”

“It'd take too long to type. Besides, I want to show you what it can do.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Problem?” Dale asked.

“A friend wants to meet. But last time I met someone it was an ambush.”

“Need backup?”

I shook my head and typed on my Gizmo.
“Honey, I know what you're after, but I'm too tired for sex right now.”

“What are you talking about?”
Svoboda responded.
“Oh, I see. You're being weird to
find out if I'm being coerced. No, Jazz, I'm not setting you up.”

“Just being cautious. I have an obligation at the moment. Meet at your lab tomorrow morning?”

“Sounds good. Oh and if I am being coerced in the future, I'll work the word ‘dolphin' into the conversation. Okay?”

“Copy,”
I responded. I put the Gizmo back in my pocket.

Dale pursed his lips. “Jazz…how bad is it?”

“Well, people want to kill me, so…pretty bad.”

“Who are these people? Why do they want you dead?”

I wiped dew off my beer glass. “They're a Brazilian crime syndicate called O Palácio. They own Sanchez Aluminum and they know I did the Sanchez harvester sabotage.”

“Shit,” Dale said. “You need a place to hide out?”

“I'm good,” I said. Then, after a few seconds, I added, “But if I need help I'll remember your offer.”

He smiled. “Well, that's a start, anyway.”

“Shut up and drink your beer.” I emptied my glass. “You're two pints behind.”

“Oh, I see how it is.” He gestured to Billy. “Barkeep! Some little girl thinks she can outdrink me. We'll need six pints—three for the gay and three for the goy.”

I awoke in my hidey-hole sore, groggy, and hungover. Probably hadn't been a good idea to get wasted in the middle of all this shit, but as I've established, I make poor life choices.

I spent a few minutes praying for death, then I drank as much water as I could stomach and emerged from the compartment like a slug.

I ate some dry Gunk for breakfast (you taste it less that way) and wandered off to the public bathhouse on Bean Up 16. I spent the rest of the morning there soaking in a tub.

Then it was off to a middle-class clothing store on Bean Up 18. I'd been wearing my jumpsuit for three straight days. It could almost stand up on its own at this point.

Finally I was sort of human again.

I walked along the narrow corridors of Armstrong until I reached the ESA lab's main entrance. A few scientists wandered the halls on the way to work.

Svoboda opened the door before I even had a chance to knock. “Jazz! Wait'll you see—whoa, you look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

He produced a package of mints and poured a few into my hand. “No time to mock your alcoholism. I gotta show you this ZAFO shit. Come on!”

He led me through the entryway and into his lab. The whole place looked different. He'd dedicated the main table to ZAFO analysis and shoved everything else to the walls to make room. Various pieces of equipment (most of it a mystery to me) covered the table.

He bounced from one foot to another. “This is so awesome!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “What's got you in such a tizzy?”

He sat on a stool and cracked his knuckles. “First thing I did was visual examination.”

“You looked at it,” I said. “You can just say ‘I looked at it.' ”

“By all accounts it's a normal, single-mode fiber-optic line. The jacket, buffer, and cladding are all routine. The core fiber is eight microns across—totally normal. But I figured there'd be something special about the core, so I cut up some samples and—”

“You cut it up?” I said. “I didn't say you could cut it up!”

“Yeah, I don't care.” He tapped one of the devices on the lab table. “I used this baby to check the core's index of refraction. That's a pretty important stat for fiber optic.”

I picked up a five-centimeter snippet of ZAFO from the table. “And you found something weird?”

“Nope,” he said. “It's 1.458. A little higher than fiber optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit.”

I sighed. “Svoboda, can you skip over the ways it's normal and just tell me what you found?”

“All right, all right.” He reached over to a handheld device and picked it up. “This baby is how I cracked the mystery.”

“I know you want me to ask what that is, but honestly I don't—”

“It's an optical loss test set! OLTS for short. It tells you how much attenuation a fiber-optic cable has. Attenuation is the amount of light that gets lost to heat during transmission.”

“I know what attenuation is,” I said. But it really didn't matter. Once Svoboda got going there was no stopping him. I've never known anyone who loved his work as much as that guy.

He set the OLTS back on the table. “Now, a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometer. Guess what ZAFO's attenuation is.”

“No.”

“Go on. Guess.”

“Just tell me.”

“It's zero. Fucking.
Zero!
” He formed a circle with his arms. “Zeeeroooo!”

I sat on the stool next to him. “So…no light gets lost in transmission? At all?”

“Right! Well, at least, as far as I can tell. The precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometer.”

I looked at the ZAFO snippet in my hands. “It has to have some attenuation, though, right? I mean, it can't actually be zero.”

He shrugged. “Superconductors have zero resistance to electrical current. Why can't there be a material with zero resistance to light?”