Black Glass (22 page)

Pup Benson doubted he could get into the lab at all. It was high security. He had a pass for some Slakon buildings, but not for this one. And when it was dark out, and the buildings were mostly empty of personnel, the guards always got more suspicious.

An actual in-person, physical security guard was looking doubtfully at Pup from the window of the booth beside the facility gate. The booth stood in the cone of a streetlight glow that marked out the sketchy lines of a thin rain. The guard was a black man in a Slakon Security uniform, his wide face etched with a scowl that looked permanent. Just now he was scowling over Pup’s pass. It said “Rod Hooper” on the pass, a name the Claire woman had given him. She’d sent him the pass online, he’d printed it out real high-rez. It had the right barcode, had his photo on it, but the guard didn’t seem to want to open the gate.

“I got to see some ID to go with this,” the guard growled.

Pup didn’t have any ID that said Rod Hooper on it, of course. Now what?

On an interior wall to the guard’s right was a thin comm screen, which suddenly lit up with an image of Terrence Grist. Pup could see it, beyond the guard. He had never met Grist but he’d seen him plenty on iNews. “You there—Spaulding!” the image barked. Grist’s image was looking furiously at the guard’s back.

The guard jumped a bit in his booth, turning to face the screen. “Mr. Grist?”

“Yeah that’s right—me you managed to correctly identify. Now stop holding up my associate! Let Mr. Hooper through
now!
No more delays! He’s on a mission for me! And see to it no one bothers him while he is on the property! He’s cleared for all doors and corridors! Follow him on monitor and unlock anything that needs unlocking! He’s fetching equipment for me and I need it fast!”

“Yes, sir,” the black guard said, licking his lips and thumbing a release panel. “I’m on it right now, sir.”

Pup realized his mouth was hanging open. He shut it, wondering how there could be a connection between Grist and the Claire woman. Was it Grist who’d transferred the money to him? But it didn’t make sense. Why would Grist want him to steal something that belonged to Slakon—to Grist himself?

But the gate rolled back, out of his way. Pup took back his pass, clipped it to his coat pocket, and walked through the entrance, hurrying through the misty evening toward the building Claire had designated ...

Ten minutes later, he was walking through a door—a door that had simply opened for him as he’d approached—and right past a security robot, that seemed utterly indifferent to him.

Pup shook his head, as he scanned doors for the right lab number. Had he misunderstood the Claire woman? He’d had the definite impression he was here on an illegal job; that he was to slip something past Slakon. But suddenly Slakon was eager to cooperate with him.

He thought about the money.
Ours is not to reason why ...

Here was the lab. He put his hand on the door’s opening panel—and it resisted him. It was firmly locked. So now what?

Then he heard a click from within the door. He tried it again, and this time it opened.

Inside, in a cluttered, musty electronics lab, with rag ends of food on greasy plastic plates between stacks of cryptic gear, he saw the object he was looking for—Claire had sent him a picture of it. It was a holotank with some kind of little platform inside.

A robotic cart rolled up to him, as he approached the work table with the holotank on it. “
Available transport,”
said the cart, in its androgynous voice.

Chewing the inside of his cheek nervously, Pup unhooked the devices, and, grunting, lifted them into the compartment in the side of the cart.

“Who the hell are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing?” came a reedy voice from behind.

Pup straightened up, turning to see a blotchy-faced fat man in a cargo pants, sandals, and a sauce-stained tee shirt emblazoned
CompleteAndUtterDespair.mesh
, glowering at him from the doorway. He had a security badge stuck to his tee shirt with the name SYKES on it.

“Mr. Grist sent me for this gear,” Pup said, his heart pounding.

“That’s drop-call, troll. That’s my equipment you’re fumbling around with. That’s a one of a kind object. It’s as much the hardware
as the software—you’re not taking it anywhere. You just stay there, I’m going for security.”

“But he did send me for it ... just ask Spaulding at the gate. He spoke right to Mr. Grist.”

“Did he?” Sykes came into the room. Stopped a few steps away, looking thoughtful. The door closed behind him. He looked at the empty place where the holotank and hard drive had been. “An image of Grist on a screen, you mean?”

“It was on a comm, yeah. So?”

“So that was probably a semblant.”

“So what?”

“So it wasn’t really an authorized semblant—at least I doubt it. It was probably the ...” Sykes broke off, shook his head. “Never mind. Put that thing back and get out of here. You’ve been manipulated by a ... a rogue program, let’s put it that way. Get out or face arrest. You see that comm. there? I’m going to call Mr. Grist ... the real-deal this time.”

Okay. So the image of Grist was some kind of faked semblant. This guy was obviously the technician, the engineer, who’d worked up the equipment he was supposed to take. He would know. But Pup didn’t care. “Sykes—I don’t think so.” Pup had twenty grand in his account that hadn’t been there the day before and he had a lot more WD coming. And other things, too. She’d promised him a lot of things. So, he was probably working for some competitor of Grist’s who was using a faked semblant. Whatever. The money was just as good, whoever it came from.

And Pup drew a pistol from his coat pocket. Charged ammo, 9 mil.

Sykes stared at the gun. “You don’t understand what’s happening here ...”

“Don’t matter. I’ve been paid and paid good. And I don’t have any way to restrain you, keep a big guy like you from raising the alarm. So ... sorry.”

It was surprisingly easy to pull the trigger. To shoot the fat guy down. It took three bullets before Sykes actually fell, convulsing from the charges.

The convulsions quieted and the big guy lay on his back, gasping, twitching, face gone white, blood welling up in the three
chest wounds in rhythm with the pumping of his heart. Very red, that blood. Quite a bit of it. Welling up, streaming down over his chest, onto the floor; a growing scarlet puddle.

Should put another one in him. Pop one in his head.

But suddenly the gun felt very heavy in Pup’s hand, as he watched the supine fat man gasping, choking, trying to speak, eyes darting desperately back and forth as if he were trying to spot something vital on the ceiling. Pup couldn’t quite lift the gun up to fire again. So he put it in his coat pocket, and turned to the cart, angled it toward the door. The cart rolled itself along, steered by gentle pressure from his hands.

He steered the cart through the door, leaving wheel-marks on the floor in blood as he passed through the puddle around the gasping fat man.

C
andle couldn’t tell if Zilia was glad to see him or not.

He seemed to see pleasure, anxiety, irritation, determination flicker across her face, all in little more than a second, as she encountered him outside the door to her loft stairs, her multicolored hair protected from the evening drizzle by a plastic-fiber hoody of emergency-orange. On a strap over one shoulder was a green military-material carry-bag.

“I probably shouldn’t be coming here,” Candle said, sticking his hands self-consciously in his coat pockets. “Some stuff has happened. I almost got shot. Someone near me did get shot. Cops and corporations might be looking for me.”

“Slakon?”

“Yeah. I haven’t found Danny yet, either. So what good am I to you? But I thought ... you might want to hear about it. I don’t know why.”

She took a few moments to digest that, looking at the halo of precipitation around the streetlight. Finally she said, “You can’t come in here. This place has to stay as safe as I can make it. My work’s here. We’ll have to go somewhere else. Come on. There’s a self-op freight train we can take. My brother’s an inspector for Slakon Freight ... You don’t have, like, luggage or something?”

“No.”

“That’s right, you come with invisible baggage. Okay, Candle, come on. This way.”

“You can call me Rick, you know. Or Richard. I’d rather give ‘Dick’ a miss though.”

She didn’t answer, walking around the corner of the squat old warehouse building; he followed, both of them glancing behind, looking for drones. He wished he had the little palm sized detector Shortstack had used ... And he wished Shortstack had thought to use one in the black stock market room ... would it have saved Monroe? Would it have detected an unmoving drone?

Another block along, the street dead-ended in railroad tracks. A self-op freight train was sitting on the track, chugging softly to itself, idling. No one was visible through the windows of the locomotive’s cab. Most trains now were remote control or self operating.

They crossed a moraine of broken rock, the cinders crunching under their feet, walked to within five yards of the train. Tons of living machine, breathing out a redolence of ethanol and ozone. Zilia glanced around to see they were unobserved—as much as you could ever tell, anymore, whether you were unobserved—and took out a small folding palmer. She thumbed its keyboard, stared into the little screen, nodded to herself. “All ready for us.” Her thumb flicked again, and the device made a chiming sound. A metal hatch on the side of the freight train clicked and folded open.

They climbed up steel rungs to the cab, Candle feeling an adolescent
frisson
as he felt the vibration of the idling engine. He’d never been in a train cab before. They clambered into the claustrophobic cab, found it fusty and cluttered with someone’s discarded empty beer cans: Guinness Chocolate Ale. They sat on seats that were there only for emergency manual-control. Zilia threw a small switch and the door shut; almost immediately, the train lurched into motion and rumbled slowly down the tracks, north.

“It’s like it was waiting for us,” Candle said, squirming to get comfortable; leaning back, finding a padded shelf to lean an elbow near the left side of the train. It was warm in here; the windows were beginning to steam up.

“Kinda was waiting for us,” she said, pulling back her hood, absently straightening her hair with expert flicks of her hand. “My half-brother Jeff works for the Slakon Freight division. So while they’re looking to catch Rick Candle they’re giving him a
ride away from them—all at the same time.”

He looked around the cab; most of its inner surfaces clustered with instrumentation he didn’t recognize. There was a monitor with a divided image, the tracks ahead and behind, endlessly spooling and unspooling for the camera.

“That’s a pretty hypnotic TV show,” she said, nodding toward the monitor. She glanced at him, seemed to pick up the concern on his face. “You worried they’re watching us in here? Nah, relax. No interior camera is turned on; no monitoring of us in here at all. Don’t worry about that. Jeff’s got me covered. I take the train up to my place out northeast of town. Takes a couple hours. Slow most of the time, but free. And—I just love riding in this thing. I can make it stop when we get there, using the code he gave me. Long as it’s not much behind schedule, no one notices. They just assume its robot engineer waited for some obstruction on the tracks to pass. I was heading for it when you came so—good timing.”

“For once,” he said. “My timing hasn’t been so great lately.”

He had to tell someone. He told her everything. Told her about the undermarket, Shortstack, Nodder, the raid, Shortstack’s wounding. Monroe’s death.

“Oh fuck. You saw that? Her head getting shot away?”

“Yeah. Earlier today.”

“Fucking hell. Jesus.”

“Weird shit sticks in my mind—like, the gunfire flipped her wig off her head. What was left of her head. Like the fliptop on a bottle. And wondering what she could feel. And ... I don’t know ...” He shook his head.

“You feel responsible. But you didn’t pull any triggers. You didn’t click ‘fire’ for any flying guns, Candle.”

“I was hired to prevent someone else doing just that.”

“Seems to me you prevented a lot worse happening.” She took off the carry-bag. “I know it’s hard to live with ... especially the same day. I’d be a basket-case, for awhile, if it was me.”

Privately, Candle doubted Zilia was that fragile. “I keep seeing it like a snapshot—bang, she’s dead—and how it looked–” He shrugged and looked at the video monitor. Track unspooling; the backs of buildings marching past on either side of the track.
Hated to seem weak in front of her. But he had to talk to someone and he felt it was even more irresponsible to go to Kenpo. Put him and his wife, two people, at risk; take a chance on losing a spiritual master. And he suspected he’d been under surveillance at Kenpo’s; if he went back there after a raid that put Kenpo at definite risk. Zilia—he didn’t think they were watching her.

Could be wrong about that. Probably should’ve dealt with it on his own. Hide out in Rooftown maybe. But he suspected that Zilia would know someplace safer he could lay low. “Anyway,” he added, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the train, “I’ve got to get back by tomorrow night. To go to the Black Glass.”

“Kind of dumb to go there, isn’t it? Won’t they look for you there?” She was fishing around in the green military bag.

“I don’t know. Going to risk it. I can check the place out before I go in.”

She dug in her bag, came up with a flask. “You like absinthe? Jeff makes his own. Swears it’s the most authentic recipe.”

“Your half brother’s a resourceful kinda wanx ...”

“What we gotta do is get you into a whole ’nother state of mind. I’ve got a couple of therapeutic approaches in mind.” She shook the flask. “I already added the water and just a little sugar. You can’t drink the stuff straight.” She uncorked the flask and poured translucent green liquid into a small metal shot glass.