Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (25 page)

Yet beneath the chaos did exist an actual boulevard, stretching fifty meters in width and paved with marbled stone. At least, that was the rumor. No one had seen it in thirty years.

So, no, The Boulevard was not his favorite place. Still, occasionally his business necessitated a visit. He didn’t deal in chimerals, but there was a lot more for sale here than merely chimerals. More to the point, there were dealers here who dealt in a lot more than merely chimerals.

He slid in around the storefront to where his contact rested on a lounge stool and leaned in close so as to be heard over the raucous din. “Emilio, my man. How’s business?”

Emilio shook his head, sending long, glittering green braids swooshing through the air. “Same old. Want a beer?”

“Ah, wish I could, but I’m tight on time. Got to gather with a needy client on the Prom in twenty. Next time?” It never hurt to remind Emilio he had a diverse and well-paying clientele.

“I hear ya. Hang on a sec, I’ll get your gear.” Emilio slipped behind the shimmering barrier which separated the ‘store’ front from the supply area, but returned in seconds.

A handshake and Noah palmed the small, innocuous-looking gadget and slipped it in his hip pack. He instructed his eVi to transfer the funds to Emilio’s account. And like that, the deal was done.

He patted Emilio’s shoulder. “Pleasure doing business with you, as always.”

“I’m gonna buy a top-shelf
illusoire
with the proceeds, man.”

“Enjoy, then!” He laughed as he slid out of the booth and back into the crowd.

The city which comprised Pandora’s inhabited region constituted a two hundred kilometer swath of gleaming metal and bright lights. There existed dark areas of Pandora, but they resided below even the Boulevard.

People assumed Pandora was unruled, out-of-control chaos, a patchwork of merchants and clubs and black markets. In truth, it had been constructed and continued to be overseen by a loose association of wealthy entertainment moguls. Which individuals participated in the association was a closely guarded secret, presumably because they held important positions in society.

They built out additional infrastructure when it became needed and ensured the power grid and transportation system continued to function. They kept the slums corralled in small, well-defined areas and made sure the criminal cartels didn’t gain too powerful of a foothold in the commerce of the planet. Agents of the cartels existed on Pandora without a doubt; some of them even had significant business ventures, but they ranked no higher than the successful independent entrepreneurs.

Pandora was a world where anything went, where you could buy anything and sell anything, where you could live out your wildest fantasy or spend forty years in a haze of parties and booze and chimerals and sex—or do both. And it was an illusion.

Oh, you could do all those things, to be sure. But the world was an artificial creation. A planet-sized theme park where the machinery of the rides was kept hidden from public view.

Noah knew this because his father acted as a minor player in the association which controlled Pandora. In the weeks before bailing on his father’s grand plan for his life, he had hacked and made copies of his father’s personal and business records. For insurance, for blackmail if necessary, and out of mild curiosity at what he would be leaving behind.

He’d never used the information to his advantage, at least not overtly. But simply being aware of the ‘men behind the curtain,’ as it were, gave his life here a certain unreal quality. Like he had been immersed in a nineteen-year-long deep-dive full-sensory head trip. It gave him freedom and, it could be argued, encouraged a level of recklessness and imprudent behavior he might not be inclined to engage in if any of this were
real
.

Still…it was all good, he thought as he stepped off the levtram and into The Approach.

Most of the districts on Pandora were named some variation of a thoroughfare; there was also The Channel, The Promenade, The Avenue, The Passage, and so on. Their names gave no clue as to their character or quality, however. Visitors arrived clueless, but enterprising street urchins stalked the spaceport, willing to size up what a visitor had come to find and what they could afford and send them in the right direction—for a few credits, of course.

His apartment was located in The Approach, which only meant it lay in the region between the transport hub and the most popular entertainment district. It actually did have a lot of character, inhabited by a chaotic jumble of artists, merchants and runaways who had decent funds in their account—which he supposed, even after nineteen years, included him.

He unlocked the door and slipped in his apartment, grateful for once no one frolicked in the hallway, as he did need to work this afternoon. His proffered excuse for not hanging out with Emilio hadn’t been a lie, as such. He did need to meet a client on the Prom in twenty; it happened to be in twenty hours, not minutes. Emilio was an okay guy, but his cohorts weren’t. And besides, he’d just as soon not loiter on The Boulevard any longer than he had to.

He grabbed a water from the fridge and stepped in his work room. A floor-to-ceiling cabinet lined the left wall, full to the brim with components, spare parts and pending orders. The far wall contained four shelves of equipment and tools. He sat down at the workbench along the right wall, spun around to retrieve the other components from the cabinet, then sat back and contemplated the pieces spread on the table in front of him.

The item he had picked up from Emilio represented the final component for a special order of custom equipment. Individually, each component was innocuous: a neck wrap, a contact pad to access the tiny fibers at the base of the neck which connected to a person’s cybernetics, a quantum data transmitter and a data buffer. Combined, they created an extremely powerful and quite illegal tool.

When worn by an individual, the item allowed the person to interface directly with a remote synthetic neural net (‘Artificial’ being the somewhat derogatory but widely used term). The buffer was a necessity because even a heavily cybernetically-enhanced human brain couldn’t begin to process the data streaming from a neural net in real time; absent one you risked frying your cybernetics from the overload of data.

Artificials were required to be registered and pre-approved by regulatory authorities, who certified the mandated security blocks were in place and sufficient. Even on the most free-wheeling independent worlds they were carefully monitored. And remotely interfacing with one—which thanks to quantum transmission might literally be halfway across settled space—was strictly forbidden. A person walking down the street, or more likely sitting in a corporate boardroom, sporting secret access to zettaFLOPs of mental power went several steps beyond the unfair advantages tolerated by society.

Seeing as it really was a dangerous tool, he wouldn’t normally be comfortable either constructing or selling it. In this case, however, he knew the client personally and felt certain she didn’t intend to use it for galactic domination. No, he suspected she simply wanted to see what it was like to effectively meld with the mind of an Artificial…and because she
could
.

18

SIYANE

M
ETIS
N
EBULA,
U
NCHARTED
P
LANET

C
ALEB SAT ON THE BOTTOM RUNG
of the ladder, arms draped over his knees and hands clasped loosely together.

She lay half-subsumed beneath the tear in the wall, working to re-secure a long strip of threaded cabling in the narrow space between the interior wall and exterior hull. She hadn’t said more than two words since they had come downstairs, the two words having been ‘stay there.’

He had already analyzed what he could see of the hold. Though the rather significant damage muddled matters somewhat, he had quickly classified the engineering section as an advanced but mostly standard layout for a ship of this size, albeit featuring several unusual customizations.

This conclusion he had come to in the first two minutes; thirty-seven minutes later, there was only one thing left in the hold for him to analyze.

“So you’re a treasure hunter.”

It was the most rational conclusion. The instruments and panel readouts on the main deck were geared toward measurement and detection of element concentrations, spectrum spikes and notable astronomical phenomena. They covered too broad a range for a purely scientific expedition; and besides, a double Masters in mechanical engineering and stellar astronomy yet no doctorate suggested she was far too practical to be a scientist.

The ship displayed a complete lack of corporate branding anywhere, and the last employer listed in her file was from eight years earlier. Taken together with the fair number of personal extravagances, it meant she had to be independent.

The muffled response came from within the aperture. “I’m an explorer.”

“That’s what I said—a treasure hunter.”

She grunted in exertion and a section of cabling snapped snugly against the wall. “And
I
said for you not to bother me.”

He gave an exaggerated shrug, though he doubted she was able to see it. “Right, my bad.”

A few seconds passed. She groaned and slid into the open to glare at him in obvious annoyance. “I find undiscovered planets, resources, astronomical events, other anomalies, and sell the information to whoever can make the best use of it.”

“To the highest bidder.”

“If they’re legitimate and meet the correct profile? Usually, yes.”

“That’s cold. Ruthless even.”

She exhaled. It was less a sigh and more a forceful expulsion of air from the lungs. He took note of the way the firm muscles in her stomach expanded then contracted beneath the thin, pliant fabric of her shirt, but decided it would be best to ignore the smooth rise then fall of her chest.

“No, it’s not. Everyone is better off as a result. Without my work, no one knows about the resource. With it, others are able to develop new tech, new materials, even new worlds. I’m merely improving civilization.”

He burst out laughing. It was genuine and unplanned and he just couldn’t help it.

She straightened her arms behind her and sat up, the better to direct the full power of her glare at him. “
What.
”

The white-blue light of the screens hovering in the otherwise dark hold transformed her irises to liquid silver. He blinked and tried to ignore the startling effect—which was somewhat difficult if he was to continue meeting her gaze. Ignoring every attractive quirk of hers might be harder than first thought.

But he wasn’t here to get laid; he was here to get off this planet in one piece. Building an amicable relationship furthered his goal, but he suspected coming on to her would result in another elbow to the face. For starters.

Of course, he probably shouldn’t tease her either.
Ah well, too late now.
“You are not out here, on this very unique ship, to ‘improve civilization.’”

Her eyes widened in offense. But he merely regarded her with amusement, and the severe countenance melted away.

She rolled her eyes at the low ceiling, but her shoulders snapped straight into a proud posture. “I sleep well at night, comforted by the knowledge what I do helps rather than hurts. But…no, perhaps it’s not my
primary
purpose.”

Then she frowned, and it occurred to him maybe she hadn’t intended to say so much—which meant she thought she had revealed something about herself she hadn’t wanted to.

She dropped to the floor and slid back under the wall. “Now would you
please
shut up?”

He needed some time to ponder what the accidental reveal meant, anyway. “Certainly.”

She was eyeing him over her sandwich—roasted penzine, which his data cache told him was a small fowl native to Erisen, and Swiss cheese on dark rye bread. “Why are you out here?”