No Going Back (22 page)

“A transport vehicle?” Lobo said. “I foresee an exciting future for myself.”

“The excitement will come soon enough. When is Ling’s show at Schmidt’s?”

“If you’re hoping to land a job with her crew,” he said, “you should immediately learn that references to her are almost always by her first name, ‘Passion.’ She will be at Schmidt’s twenty days from tomorrow.”

“Her data should not be anywhere as secure as Schmidt’s. Can you find ways into it?”

“Were we on the same planet with her,” Lobo said, “I could answer that question relatively quickly.”

“Let’s head to Haven,” I said. “Come in configured as a security transport, something the paranoid and the rich would use.

“We need to get a job.”

21 days from the end

In orbit over and in York City

Planet Haven

CHAPTER 27

Jon Moore

W
e hit Haven late in the night local time, and I was tired, so I went to sleep while Lobo searched the publicly available data streams and also tried to find his way into Passion Ling’s data.

The dreams that had been wrecking my nights haunted me yet again. Joining the dead children and the child soldiers was Omani, sometimes young, other times old. The young Omani kissed me and would not let go, gripping my head with insane strength, blocking my nose with her hair so I couldn’t breathe, and still she held on. When I finally was able to push her away, she was the old Omani I’d seen in her sick bed, tubes and wires trailing from her body, her fingers now the grips of the exoskeleton, her mouth sucking the life from me.

“First you left me, Jon,” she said, “and now you’re killing me. I won’t go without you.”

I looked at my body. It was shrinking, my muscles disappearing and my skin collapsing onto my bones. A mirror on my right showed my face, gaunt and wrinkled and covered in blotches.

“Time caught us both,” Omani said, “because of you!” She slapped me, the metal tips of her hand cutting my face and the force of her surprisingly strong blow knocking me to the ground. I felt my legs buckle as I fell, but I could not manage to focus enough to have the nanomachines fix me. Or maybe they were gone; I could not tell.

Again I sat upright in my cot, soaked in sweat, on the edge of a scream.

It was the middle of the night here, hours before I had to get up. I dared not fall asleep again, though, until I had cleared my mind.

“Lobo,” I said.

“Yes.”

I might as well use the time for something useful. “Do you now have access to Ling’s data?”

“I have studied and synthesized all of the publicly available information, and I have identified the locations in the Haven data streams where she stores her private data. I have not yet obtained access to that data, but based on the level of security software I’m encountering so far, there is a very good chance that I will be into that data before you were due to wake up.”

The best way to get anyone to like you is to like them first. With celebrities, that’s particularly true, though with them you need to be prepared to like both them and their work.

“What can you tell me about her music?” I said.

“She’s a singer,” Lobo said, “and the most popular live music performer in the Central Coalition. Singing and, according to all reports, looking very attractive while doing so are her talents. She does not play any musical instruments, nor does she compose any songs, lyrics or music, alone or with a machine collaborator.”

“Is that common? I thought almost every musician today used music machines to help create and enhance their compositions.”

“Statistics on all musicians are not readily available, but from the data I can find, no, her approach is not common. In fact, it’s quite rare, particularly among the more popular musicians.”

“Who writes her music?”

“She does not have a composition partner or even a set of them. Instead, she and, apparently, her manager, Zoe Wang, collect old songs and sing those. One feed referred to them as musical archeologists.”

“How old are the songs?”

“Programs from her concerts give the provenance of each song,” Lobo said. “In the ones I have found so far, a group that should be fairly complete thanks to her devoted fan base, the songs range from only fifty to up to six hundred years old, maybe older. Exact ages of some of the oldest pieces are frequently not definitively known.”

“Songs from Earth, though,” I said, “as well as from the early days of planetary colonization.”

“Yes,” he said. “In fact, several of her shows have used variations of ‘Songs from Earth’ as their titles.”

When I was younger and had just escaped from Aggro, songs from Earth were popular with older people, those nostalgic for the world on which they’d grown up. I’d heard a great many, though I couldn’t recall any particular tunes right then.

“Other than old music,” I said, “does she have any other particular passions I should be aware of?”

“Being called ‘Passion’ is,” Lobo said, “apparently quite important to her, as I noted. She is also a determined advocate of what her various online outlets call ‘unedited fidelity.’”

“Which is?”

“When she performs, with or without backup musicians, she demands that no musical software or hardware of any type alter the music in any way. To accommodate larger venues, she has agreed to amplification, but only when strictly monitored by her staff. What she sings is, her publicity material says, what you get.”

“So when she’s off, or a musician makes a mistake, or her throat is sore...”

“... you hear it,” Lobo said. “Her most serious fans consider her the standard by which all other musicians should be judged. Critical reaction varies from guarded appreciation to outright derision at her refusal to deliver the best possible sound to her audiences.”

“Show me some images of her.”

Holos floated in the air in front of my cot, each glowing softly in the darkness of my room like a visiting angel. Her skin was the soft gold of the first morning rays of the sun darkened the tiniest bit by fog that would soon vanish. Her nose was fine, her mouth broad, lips full, and her eyes huge, a bit too large for her head. The combination, though, appeared both lovely and fragile. Her body was thin and curvy. Her height was impossible to tell without context, but her head definitely seemed large for her body. Her black hair fell in a giant mass to the bottom of her back.

“How tall is she?” I said.

“Tiny,” Lobo said, “one point six meters. Either she grew up in an extremely poor family on a backward world, or for some reason she or her parents chose that she should be that short.”

“Surely people have questioned her about her height,” I said. “What has she said?”

“In all the cases I can find,” Lobo said, “she has either refused to answer or said, and I quote,” here his voice turned soft, slightly high, and feminine, in what I assumed was an accurate rendition of Passion’s, “‘unedited fidelity, like my music.’”

“Is she some kind of anti-tech crackpot?”

“Not as far as I can find, at least not in any area beyond her approach to tech in performances and, possibly, her body.”

“Play me her most popular songs,” I said. “Start with the most recent hit, and go backward chronologically. Put titles and lyrics on the wall past the foot of my cot.”

“I live to be your personal music player,” Lobo said.

I closed my eyes at first, wanting to focus on the music. I expected to need the lyrics, but I didn’t.

The first song was about sadness and loss, Passion pledging to follow a lost loved one into death.

The next was completely different in every way, a rant against injustice and a tale of lost opportunity, her voice periodically raging into what could easily have turned into a screeching scream but which she managed instead to deliver as a burst of soaring sonic power. Her words and the strength of her voice united the instruments into one protester as surely and as easily as a skilled speaker uniting an angry crowd.

Back we went to a love song, but this one about a parent for her child, a blend of love and terror at the tough times ahead for the child, the roughness of the world that we all inevitably face growing up.

“Turn off the lyrics,” I said.

They vanished, and I listened in the dark.

On even the most heavily orchestrated songs, her voice surfed on top of the instruments, never overwhelming them but always clear. It was a big voice, a huge voice, resonant with power and able to move flawlessly from very high notes to very low ones. It was the kind of voice I felt honored to hear, all the more so because, if Lobo was correct, it actually was her voice, something that came from that small body, and not a human/machine hybrid more computer than person.

Sometime past the fourth song, I don’t remember exactly when, I fell asleep.

I dreamed again of Omani, but exclusively the young woman I had loved. I felt her caress again, the shape of her body against mine, the warmth of shared breaths as we lay head to head in the darkness and whispered of nothing of consequence.

I dreamed, too, of Maggie, a woman I might have loved, maybe even had loved for short times, but who had to live apart from me. In the dream she kissed me once again as she was walking away, and I again watched until she disappeared in the crowds on the street.

The dreams carried pain, pain and loss and sadness, but it wasn’t the kind of pain that woke me. In each case, I had lost someone special and dear, but I had chosen that loss, made the best decision I could, and though those decisions hurt, I knew they were right.

The music brought the dreams, but it also brought more focus on and appreciation of the bright and warm memories of those precious moments I had enjoyed with each of them. My mind accepted the dreams, and when they passed, I fell into a deeper sleep than I had enjoyed in many months.

I awoke when Lobo said, “Time to move, Jon. I think I’ve found our opportunity.”

CHAPTER 28

Jon Moore

I
showered, surprised at how rested I felt. Though calling herself “Passion” was a gimmick I disliked on principle, I had to admit that it captured the unifying thread that ran through all the songs I’d heard.

When I was dressed, I grabbed some water and a few protein bars from our larder and headed up front.

“What did you find?” I said.

“Passion and her crew are in York right now,” Lobo said. “They’re gearing up for a three-month tour of shows on Haven, one of which will be the charity special in twenty days at Schmidt’s. They will move out tomorrow afternoon for the first show the following night.”

“So what’s our opportunity? How do I get onto Passion’s crew?”

“You don’t, at least not
per se
. Passion appears to travel with her own entourage and security staff, all of whom have been with her for a long time. They use a vehicle she owns that they customized for her. Everyone else, though, travels in locally hired transportation; when they change planets, they change transports. Her manager, Zoe Wang, rides alone with a lot of research material in a vehicle smaller than I am on the outside but less heavily armored and so not significantly smaller on the inside. From the data I can gather—and I am now into their private databases—the vehicle is her workspace on the shows, a sort of command central for the team. It and its driver are local and have not been with them for long.”

“What else does the driver do? Piloting the ship can’t really require much of his attention.”

“Of course not. He appears basically to do whatever Wang wants; the job description in the contract is vague.”

“So how do we replace him and the vehicle?”

“They hired him through an agency. I’ve been able to insert us into their database with a backstory that should hold. I’ve also made sure no other local talent in the agency’s database will be suitable. We just need the driver to prove to be unavailable.”

“So we bribe him or take him out in some nonpermanent way,” I said.

“Bribery is too risky and likely to fail,” Lobo said. “Everything I can learn about him suggests he is a good person. Further, the contract he signed with Passion’s team pays a small reward for identifying newstainment types who offer to buy information; they’ve used this approach to smear more than a few would-be dirt-diggers. And, he’s a fan of Passion’s, someone who contacted her multiple times about getting the job.”

I shook my head. “Taking him out is the only option, but I hate it. I’ll have to hurt him in some way, and he’ll lose money as well by not working.”

“We can fix the money problem,” Lobo said. “I can spoof the identify of any of a number of groups, including insurance companies, and offer him a payment from a policy the agency got for him. You supply the money, I intercept and manage his communications, and as long as he doesn’t talk to them in person, we can fix that end of it.”

“Good,” I said. “I have no desire to hurt or involve any more innocent people.”

“Taking him out, though, has to incapacitate him, and it has to happen very quickly.”

“I don’t want to break something if I can avoid it,” I said, “or to cause any permanent damage. Ideally, he’d get sick in some way that would last three weeks and leave him unable to do his job.”

“I can generate a serum with a blend of neurotoxins and slow-decay support molecules. It’ll knock him completely out for two or three days, and then he’ll have vertigo and stay sick for at least weeks.”

“Won’t the medtechs spot it and deliver the antidote immediately?”

“Please,” Lobo said. “Do you think I can’t outwit some hospital’s computers, at least for a while? I’ll go biological, separate the compounds and mask each, then build in some countermeasures and some spurious DNA. In my medtech stores, I have samples of every major biological weapon under consideration or in active use at the time of my deployment, as well as their antidotes. Most of them are now old, but most of them were also never used in conflict and were the private property of the Frontier Coalition. No one in this part of space should have any experience with them. I can—”