A Break in the Sunlight

22. Special Delivery

"Where ya been?" Suz looked up as Jaren entered.

"Out." Jaren answered, heading for her locker. "And I will be again, in a sec."

"Damn." Suz pulled her patch cord from her temple. "I wanted you to help me with this zerostream. I'm completely stuck."

"Maybe later." Jaren pushed through the shallow locker until she found the small black case she was looking for. She threw it on the bed followed by a bulky jacket.

Suz kicked backed in her chair. "That looks pretty serious." She nodded at the case.

"Yep. One of Biddle's specials."

"You want a walk-along? I can call Ma'hisa."

"No. I think I've got it handled." Jaren shrugged into the laserproof jacket.

Suz snorted. "That's what Karss said."

"I'm not Karss."

"What does that mean?" Suz frowned at her. "Don't think for a minute you couldn't get strung up the same way, but worse, Jaren. Karss had twice the time logged that you do. And I've seen it happen to better."

Jaren shot her a look. "You finished with the dire warnings? Cause if you are, I have to get to work."

Suz lifted her shoulders. "Fine. Just be careful. Biddle's got some weird customers, and you aren't as tough as you think."

"I'll take it under advisement." Jaren answered. She picked up the case, and shot Suz a reassuring smile as she left the apartment and headed up the stairs.

She wasn't worried. Sure, Karss had gotten roughed up by the local cops, but it could've been a lot worse than that. Biddle was one of the few vendors in Sona who gave a shit about his couriers. He had strict rules about dumping information if you were picked up, and his customers knew they needed to keep a copy on hand until the delivery was completed, or they risked losing it all in a shake down.

She emerged from the apartment building on the below ground level, and hit the button for the transport cue, leaning a shoulder on a cement column and trying not to breathe too deeply of the mouldy air about her. While she waited a humanoid couple appeared on the platform farther down, and then an old Pennelian with a long set of whiskers. He was talking to himself.

Jaren turned away so as not to catch his eye. Not out of any sense of delicacy, but because Pennelians were known to fly into pretty nasty rages without much provocation, and despite the black case in her pocket, she wasn't anxious for an altercation.

"Fuggin' sharp-suited Verigish pigs anyhow," railed the Penellian. "Damn me? Damn you! ...bitch of infidel wandering bastard. Yeah, you."

After a few seconds waiting, a bubble platform rose from the rut in front of them. When they stepped on, Jaren leaving a wide berth between herself and the old man, the dome closed around it, and it shot them forward to meet the rushing train. If they'd been in a more populated sector of the city they probably wouldn't have had to wait at all, but this district was mostly warehouses, and ran on cue.

Once the bubble entered the train, the dome retracted, and Jaren stepped forward to find a seat. The Pennellian wandered in the other direction, thank god. The faces Jaren passed looked bored and pallid, rocking in motion with the ever-moving train. The eyes looked glazed and faces slack. Some nodded sleepily. They were meat–manual workers headed home for the evening.

Jaren checked the map, ripped and graffiti-marked on the wall above. MarketTown was about a half-hour ride from here. So she had about twenty minutes before she needed to reboard a bubble. The hot musty air was bitter and stifling. She wondered if she could make it the whole way without breathing.

Balqis had definitely been right about Sona. It was a pit. But despite the grime, the darkness of the ground sectors and the repellant, spit-at-you-as-soon-as-talk-to-you citizenry, Jaren found the planet strangely seductive. Information flowed here like water. Brackish and dirty water, perhaps, but once she had begun to learn how to work the system, things had begun to improve.

She'd left the Nasira without much idea of where she would go. She just knew she needed to get away from Balqis. She'd thought maybe she could go back to whoring, but the idea didn't hold much appeal. Maybe Bal was right, and she was frigid. Or maybe it was the opposite. Or maybe it just reminded her too much of what had gone before. The upshot was, it didn't matter why–she just wasn't going to do it. So she needed a new income earner. And after all, wasn't that why she'd set out for Sona in the first place?

So she'd begun hanging out in the Hale district, the information sector of town, haunting bars and looking for leads on running jobs. But that had been a quick dead end. Sona wanted experienced runners, not kids with expensive bio-ware they could barely work. The city was a lot of things, but a training ground wasn't one of them.

"Why you want to sell you heaaaad." One gap-toothed Cirellian had grinned at her, tapping his temple and grabbing his trousers suggestively. "This kind heaaaad you don't need no experience. Jus you tits. Yeaaah."

She'd told him to sod off, but it had made her think. It was obvious that high-end bioware alone wasn't going to get her a running job. But what if she could put that asset to use in other ways? Perhaps as a courier of information, a place from which she could work her way up. And that decision had led her to Daroxian Biddle.

Biddle was always on the lookout for girls. In fact, he only hired teenaged girls. He said they were easier to deal with, and less suspicious. That was probably true, since his sexual tastes lay in other directions. Except that in many ways, Biddle was a pimp all the same, it was just that the intercourse he brokered was information instead of sex.

Which was fine with Jaren. She had a lot to learn from Sona, and delivering was a start. In their spare time, the couriers had full access to the SonaNet, and Biddle had even offered her a few tips. She was getting good at plumbing the depths of the packet stream, and already had developed a reputation among the couriers as someone who could break through tricky code.

Biddle kept a pool of 15 to 20 girls at any time. He bunked them together in an apartment building he owned in the warehouse sector, telling anyone who asked that they were a religious cult.

The mostly teenaged girls hung out until he beeped them, then loaded the code into their bioware, walked it to the client in person, picked up the cash card and were on their way. Biddle collected the card and paid the girls fairly well from it. Nothing to it.

Sometimes things got interesting, though. The cops watched the girls. Last week one of the girls, Karss, had taken a pretty good beating after she'd been picked up, and the cops had gotten a portion of her delivery. Nothing important, but a caution all the same.

And occasionally they were paid to hang on to something for a while. That's what Suz was doing right now. The holders weren't allowed out of the apartments, since most of the time they carried sole copies of the data. They just stayed put until the client called for a meeting.

Over all, the rules were pretty simple. If you were holding you stayed inside. If you were on delivery you went straight there, and straight back. And if you got picked up, you dumped the info.

Most of Biddle's customers weren't career criminals, really. There had been a crackdown in Sona by the Central authorities, and a lot of the businessmen preferred to continue their exchanges without the watchful eye of the ConFed peeping in. So they called Biddle, and he made portions of the data transactions disappear, by taking them to the street. Some of the exchanges involved minor trade or financial infractions, but most of it was harmless on its own. Usually.

Biddle occasionally got a job that fell outside the parameters. A job that for one reason or another he'd had no choice but to accept. These called for a greater degree of urgency and risk. Biddle didn't like them, but they were a cost of doing business, to his mind. So he bit the bullet, called his best girl, and tried to get rid of them as soon as he could.

This time he'd called on Jaren.

All rights reserved. Copyright Jae Darcy 2016