Synners (3 page)

The young guy hesitated at the bottom of the steps as the others, including Mark, started up. Gina drew back farther against the wall as Galen paused to turn to him.

"Come on, Keely," he said in that oozy voice that had always reminded Gina of a perverted baby. "You think they come out and fetch state's evidence off the front steps?"

Joslin put one skeletal hand to her mouth and gave a giggle that only dogs should have heard. Gina still couldn't buy the skinny bitch-twitch as an implant surgeon. Anyone lying on a table who saw that coming on with an implant needle had to be stone-home crazy or dead not to jump up and run away screaming.

"You said I'd have a signed hard copy of the deal by now," the young guy said. "I don't see one." He was even younger than Gina had first thought, barely not a kid; an ex-kid.

"S'waiting for you inside with our lawyers."

Gina winced; only a kid would buy Galen doing casual. You could practically see the words stalking around on stilts.
Run, fool,
she thought;
what
the fuck, maybe they don't think you've got the nerve so they won't have
anyone to chase you.

"You said I'd have a hard copy
in my hands
before I ever set foot inside," the guy insisted, still holding his ground. But not very well; he was going to let them reel him in any minute. Gina didn't really want to watch, but there was no way to leave without being seen.

"Now, Keely," Galen said, with the lip-smack that had always made Gina want to pop his chocks, "we said we'd pull for you, but there's no way you can speed up a transcription or a hardcopy machine. They can only chug along so fast, you know."

The kid looked down and mumbled something about a hard copy again.

Galen dropped all pretense of congeniality and stumped down the stairs to stand two steps above the kid and just an inch taller. "There's a whole courtroom and an impatient judge waiting. We're going in anyway. You can go in turned over, or you can go in and get turned inside out. It doesn't really make a whole lot of difference to me personally."

Mark yawned noisily, and for a moment he seemed to be looking through the shadows directly at her. Gina tensed; then his gaze wandered past her. She slumped back against the wall. Even if he had seen her, she probably hadn't registered as anything but more of the video playing in his head. Hell, he probably didn't know where
he
was himself.
When I get
ahold of you, motherfucker,
Gina thought,
oh, when I get ahold of you,
won't be nothing left but shit and blood.
He didn't look as if there were all that much more to him now—skin and bones, with lank brown Jesus-length hair, a broken nose, dazed, faded green eyes, and a voice permanently buried in gravel. But Mark never had looked like much, even in the early days when they'd first been in the video business together, when it had just been her and Mark and the Beater and a revolving cast of others, hammering simulations into rock-video visions. But that had been back when the Beater had still been the Beater, and Mark had still been a banger instead of a burnout, and Hall Galen the Boy Mogul was still working on hitting the potty with it. And Joslin was torturing hamsters, most likely.

As if Gina's errant thought had activated her, Joslin came to life and went down the few steps to Mark.
Don't touch him, bitch,
Gina said silently, her mouth moving unconsciously with the words as Joslin's dead white hand came to roost on Mark's shoulder.
Get your claw off him, bitch, that
meat is mine.

Joslin's hand stayed there, as if she meant to anchor him against a sudden gust of wind that would blow him away. The way he was going these days, it wouldn't have taken much more than a light breeze. But he still had fire enough to make killer video. Not the only reason she wasn't ready to let him go yet, but it was the one that stood when she couldn't get anything else to stand up with it.

She probably still wouldn't be ready to let him go when he finally went, and he
was
going. They all knew it, her, the Beater, even Mark himself, in some far, as-yet-intact recess of his burning-out head. Galen knew it as well as anyone, and what he wanted in night court with some old wreck teetering with one foot already off his boogie-board, and an ex-kid who obviously didn't want to be state's evidence, and a bitch-twitch whose specialty was brain implants, was one of the better questions of the night.

But the best question was what the
fuck
was Mark doing there all on his own without a word to her. She and Mark were in it together, always had been. They'd been in it together in the beginning, and when Galen had bought most of the video-production company out from under the Beater, and they'd been in it together when Galen had let the monster conglomerate take EyeTraxx over from him, and they were supposed to be in it together the day after tomorrow, when they were due to show up for their first full day working for the monster conglomerate—

The realization came just as the kid gave in and let Galen take him slowly up the steps. That bad-news, familiar face in the courthouse: Somebody Rivera, a minor honcho with the conglomerate, Diversifications, Inc. He'd been around to EyeTraxx a time or three, sniffing at this and that, taking a survey of what his company had bought itself. She'd managed to dodge him every time, but she'd never kidded herself. Rivera had known who she was and what she was, and if he'd really wanted to, he'd have found her no matter where she was. Anyone could. Just follow the trail of court-ordered garnishments on her income.

Surprised
that
fucker,
she thought. What little satisfaction she could take in that fact was short-lived. Ace fuckers like Rivera didn't like being surprised. She'd pay for it.

Or Mark would. The sight of him disappearing through the doors at the top of the steps sent a wave of goose bumps along her scalp, around each dreadlock. She had a sudden, wild idea of following him, hiding out till he emerged from the court and then jumping his ass, but there was no telling how long he'd be in there. Besides, Rivera would probably have someone looking out for her now. She'd wait for him at his place.

Something moved above her in the darkness, and for a moment she thought Rivera had already sent a goon for her. Then she saw the outline of the handcam against the darker shadows.

"Pretty interesting scene, huh?" he said. "You seemed to find it pretty interesting, anyway." He came down a couple of steps.

"Got that gag-sticker off okay, then?" she asked.

"Don't happen to know any of those people, do you?"

She blew out a short breath. "You?"

"I asked you first." He laughed a little. "But what the hell. Some of them. Your turn."

"Some of them," she echoed.

"It would be nice to know where we overlap." He moved down to the step just above her. "Can I interest you in a well-dressed cup of coffee?"

Gina wiped her hands over her face. "Right now, you couldn't interest me stark naked in a bathtub of lime Jell-O. Who are you working for?"

He hesitated, and she could practically feel him deciding whether to lie or not. Mark contended that extreme fatigue would do that to you, give you such heightened perception to nonverbal clues as to be all but telepathy. Assuming you could stay awake enough for it to register.

"I gypsy," he said at last. "It's a good living—"

"If you give good tabloid," she said.

He had a sexy laugh, even at this hour. "—if you can find slots for your stuff. I don't think I'd have much trouble finding a slot for this, if I knew a little more about what it was."

Gina yawned. "I don't think you're gonna find a slot for any of that. I think you're gonna find that suddenly nobody gives a fuck about raids on feel-good mills, that it's just another dog-bites-man story and nobody needs it, not even the most desperate tabloid net at the bottom of your market barrel."

"Is that so." No sexy laugh now; no expression in his voice at all.

"And then," she went on, "I think sometime real soon, you're gonna try uploading or downloading, and you'll find a virus has run through your entire file storage and chomped every second bit into garbage before it ran right into your handcam and told it to fuse itself. And maybe you'll have the bad cess to have passed the fucker on to one of your cherished markets, and they'll hand deliver a lawsuit while you're still standing around trying to figure out what happened to the guts in your cam. I think you could even find out that your insistence on scoping out news is classified as a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they recommend you be treated with implant therapy. And the next thing you know, you won't care about what's news anymore. Is that too high up in the stupidsphere for you?"

"You sure about all that?" he asked evenly.

"No." She yawned again. "The only thing I'm sure of is they put a gagsticker on your lens and the judge cleared the courtroom. Everything you've got is illegal as hell, and you'd go to the can just for attempting to sell it, so they probably wouldn't get to you until your sentence was up."

"You seem to know a lot about this," he said, leaning in a little closer.

"I don't know dick. I'm dead, and I'm going home to lie down decently until it's time to go to work."

"And who do you work for?"

Gina jerked a thumb at the now-empty steps. "Them." She turned and went down the stairs, leaving him to chew on that, if he could.

She was too tired to be able to tell whether she'd really thrown the fear of God into him or not. With any luck he'd at least bury the stuff if he didn't flush it. And without any luck, it wasn't her worry. She had big problems of her own.

And she was still going to jump Mark's skinny, burned-out ass. She was really going to pop his chocks.

LAX went as smoothly and uneventfully as the entire trip. Or trips, actually: K.C. to Salt Lake, Salt Lake to the Bay, and a jumper from the Bay to L.A. Decathlon traveling, but it was the only way to buy three different tickets under three different names—correction, only two; they hadn't asked for a name in San Francisco because it was just a jumper—using anonymous bearer-chips in quantities that wouldn't raise any eyebrows.

Sam hadn't really expected anyone to bother her about the insulin pump hanging on her side. The most attention anyone had given it was to screen it for off-color blips, and the security guard at the Bay jumper hadn't even done that. He'd just grinned at her, displayed his own pump, and said, "Pray for better tissue matching, eh, sister?" Airport security was interested only in weapons and explosives, not unlicensed or bootlegged computer equipment. Besides, it really had been an insulin pump once, before she'd gone to work on it.

She kept her pace to a leisurely stroll through the terminal, letting the crowds flow around her. The pump was out of sight in the pocket of her baggy pants, deactivated for the moment; the tacky sunglasses were hanging on a cord around her neck (tacky but functional; when not turned on, the retinal-projection screen in the left lens was transparent). The chipplayer was tucked away in her one small duffel bag. No one had shown much interest in the chip-player, either, but chip-players were far more common than severely brittle diabetics whose bodies rejected all cultured implants. Even if the security guards had been interested enough to pop on the fingertip-sized 'phones and take a listen, all they would have heard was hard-core speed-thrash, in stereo. Speed-thrash was undergoing yet another renaissance as a new generation discovered it was a great way to make everyone over the age of twenty-five give ground in a hurry, hands over ears. Sam was very fond of speed-thrash. She was seventeen.

 She passed the baggage-claim area, weaving her way through the people waiting to use the closed booths along the wall opposite the carousel. The Cal-Pac modem symbol above the booths buzzed and flickered; not the most confidence-inspiring sight, but nobody gave up a place in line. It never failed to surprise Sam how many people went on trusting Cal-Pac's public modems. Because of their broad compatibility, they were more susceptible to viruses, no matter how many vaccines were pumped into the system. But then, half the vaccines in use were pathetically outdated. Rather than spend money for further research and development, the government and the taxpayers (of which Sam was not one) had opted for stiffer penalties for vandals. As if that would put Humpty Dumpty together again.

She paused briefly next to the end booth. The small graffito was still there, scratched into the plastic in clumsy block letters:
Dr. Fish Makes
House Calls.
A new one had been added farther down:
St. Dismas, pray for
us.

At the exit to ground transportation, she ran the usual gauntlet of gawkers and hawkers—a few peddlers, some advocacy groups with handbills to waste, two rival clinics promising that her motivation would come back as if by magic, yes,
magic,
young woman, diagnostic practitioners on the premises,
right there on the premises,
no need to apply for a recommendation from a doctor who probably would refuse anyway since so many doctors these days didn't seem to understand that the healing force of implants was for anyone,
everyone
who felt the
need.

"Modern life is making you
sick!"
someone called after her.

"And your saying that is making
me
sick!" someone else yelled back.

Sam grinned to herself. My, but the karma was heavy today.

The airport rental lot was as chaotic as ever, impassably jammed with last-minute arrivals trying to turn in vehicles and make the flights they were already late for, and the recently-landed clamoring for service from the bored attendants wandering back and forth seemingly at whim between the
Rentals-ln
and
Rentals-Out
blockhouses in the center of the lot. Welcome back to L.A., Sam thought resignedly. After two weeks on the McNabb Nature Reserve in the Ozarks, she wasn't sure her shit-tolerance threshold existed any more.

Against her better judgment she joined the line in front of the blockhouse labeled
Rentals-Out.
No doubt by the time she reached the service window, the attendant would tell her they were all out of everything but the bigger models, sorry, no shortage discount, next please. But she felt too travel-weary to hike over to one of the hotel lots, and getting on one of the privately-run shuttles required producing a scannable ID, something she avoided as often as possible by using bearer-chips. She didn't care to make her movements too traceable.