A Break in the Sunlight

27. Tapping the Glass

On the forty-seventh floor of the Gennwrugh Building, Manager Golnik was losing his icy calm veneer. Despite well-placed internal alarms and safeguards, he found himself dangerously, annoyingly, close to losing his temper. And over what? A traitor and a two-bit buggering pimp who, despite numerous resuscitations, couldn't hold up to the mildest of scans before keeling over again like a dead ion battery? He gazed at his assistant from behind the massive Largon teak desk. Golnik's lips were thin, eyes hooded.

"I hope you have more to report than that, Mr. Markss," he said, deceptively calm. The eyes were mild, but on the desk in front of him, his fingers clenched a hard plexi stylus so hard that white shone at the knuckles like bloodless caps of flesh. "I certainly pray that you got something out of him, this time. I am not anxious to take this to the division Director. Not at all."

The Sedelhi in front of him winced. He saw the white knuckles. "No, sir. But we couldn't revive him again. We're doing an autopsy now, sir. We may be able to recover something more from his internal drive. And we're searching the house. Some of the girls are in CIP custody as well. There is one girl that is unaccounted for..."

Golnik's eyes narrowed as his lieutenant trailed off. "Elaborate," he said, a bit too sharply. "A girl. What about this girl?"

The Sedelhi cleared his throat. "We got it from him just before he crashed. Jarrin something. She wasn't at the house, but she'd been with him. We have Rigg's men looking for her now, at the spaceport. It is doubtful she will have the codes, but he thinks she can't have gotten very far, in any case."

"Fools. All of you." Golnik punctuated the words with the sound of hard plastic stylus snapping in two. "All of us." He turned toward the window, which showed a view of the Gennwrugh tower opposite, and beyond that, of the city skyline. "Do you know what Gennwrugh does to fools, Markss?"

"Y-yes sir."

"Do you?" Golnik turned back to him, broken stylus in hand and expression calm, always calm. Almost amused. "Because if we don't find these codes, you and I. If we don't find that *girl*, Mr. Markss. I fear we may just find out first hand. First hand."

The pieces of broken plexi dropped to the desk, and his lieutenant saw that Golnik's hands were trembling, as he let them drop to the arms of the sim-calf chair. The Sedelhi felt a cold shudder trace down his torso and grip his testicles.

It took more than anger to make the Manager lose control, the Sedelhi knew.

It took fear.

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The flight to Cambria had been short. There was a lot to be said for that, since the entire time in hyperspace Jaren wanted nothing better than to throw up. She tried to keep her face bored, eyes on the magazine on her lap and not the empty space next to her. The empty space that wasn't Biddle.

She waited. For the inevitable tap on her shoulder. The inevitable, "Excuse me, miss? There's been a call through from Sona station." Or perhaps they'd get her on the disembark. But it never came.

The ship settled onto the landing zone on Cambria Prime, and Jaren moved off the plane with the rest of the passengers. Unaccosted. Unquestioned.

She'd been to Cambria before, with Bal. It was a small collection of moons, circling a gas giant and held together by a loose political alliance, not far from the Sona system. Cambria made its fortune mining the noxious gasses that emanated from its amorphous blue gravity host and shipping it off to Sona, where it was used in the Power Mills. The moons were a big consumer of Fresh. Most of the mining systems in this sector were.

The tiny moon of Cambria Prime had no atmosphere of her own, and had landed the gig of spaceport. Almost the entire moon had been encased in a series of bubbledomes, and one didn't have to cross through Cambrian customs until boarding a shuttle for one of the sister moons that glowed bluely on the dark horizon. It was a central point for the whole system, and saw quite a bit of traffic. It also had pretty low tech security. Not a bad place to be lost in, for a while. Particularly if one was trying to figure out where to go next. If anything, it gave one motivation to go somewhere, anywhere, else.

Jaren had wasted no time finding someplace to wait things out. Home base was a cheap room on the back concourse of the spaceport. It was the less reputable district, not seedy enough to attract the attention of the law, lined with discount hotels, second rate pickup joints and souvenir shops.

Jaren wondered how the shops stayed in business. Selling liquor, probably--not that there was much on Cambria worth taking home. She'd used her last cash card to rent the room, had come up ten creds short, in fact, but the attendant had taken pity on he--doubtless all he saw was a tired, vulnerable-looking young woman who was low on cash. Or maybe he thought she'd be fuckable. She must look like an easy score, arriving as she did with her kohl-smeared eyes, tousled black hair and wearing her only change of clothes, black minidress and silver teflon tuck-jacket.

The hair had been the first thing to change, in a staff washroom next to the airport fuel cells. Next had come the clothes, thank heaven she kept a change in her satchel. She had also dumped the persona of Miss Ilsa Gellen in hurry. There was no doubt that one was going to be hot, if it wasn't already. ID card and retinal filters had been burned in the first cini she'd found, and she'd moved on to the last ID card in her wallet, aside from her own: Julian Sure, the file clerk she'd worn for the Gennwrugh job.

Ironic, she thought grimly, as she'd slipped the filters into her eye, tensing as the nanobots positioned and then suctioned on to the cornea. She hated that part. But it worked. The filter might not completely hide the retinal patterns, but it dimmed them enough to fool all but the most sensitive scanners. It did the job.

So here she sat, in this tumble-down hotel room, hungry, scared shitless of what she was carrying in her head, and unable to do much more than sit on the beaten-down bed in her motel room, hands wrapped around her knees, vacantly watching the vid for any clue that they might be looking for her.

And in the back of her head, behind the green eyes, shuffling numbers down to their binary roots and back again—deep in her mind—she worked on breaking code.

All rights reserved. Copyright Jae Darcy 2016.