city blues 02 - angel city blues (46 page)

Dancer’s sardonic smile showed from every display screen. Her voice came out of speakers all over the lab. “Sorry about the lousy floorshow. I tried to get an orchestra and some juggling monkeys, but it’s tough to find quality entertainment on short notice.”

I kicked off from the inside surface of the sphere, and launched myself in the general direction of the nearest jumble of drifting clothes. “Not funny,” I said. “You saved our asses, and we’re damned glad to see you, but we’re not in the mood for joking.”

“Cop survival mechanism,” Dancer said. “When you walk into a really nasty crime scene—something you
know
is gonna give you nightmares—out come the bad jokes. It’s how you keep from curling up into a fetal ball and crying your eyes out. And in case you didn’t notice, some spectacularly horrible shit just went down in here.”

I caught a grab bar with one foot, and jerked myself to a stop with a lack of dexterity that made the senator’s blunderings look positively graceful by comparison.

Reasonably anchored, I pawed through the floating constellation of clothing until I found the Nambu and what appeared to be one of the electrocution dart guns.

Vivien caught on to what I was doing, and launched herself toward another one of the bundles of clothing. She swam through the weightless environment with the aquatic elegance of a mermaid, further highlighting my own awkward movements.

A few seconds later, she had the Miroku and another of the electrocution guns. With the latter tucked into the waistband of her skirt and the former held firmly in her right hand, she looked around to me. “What’s the plan, boss?”

“
You’re
the boss,” I said. “And my only plan is to get the hell out of here.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

I made eye contact with Dancer on the nearest display screen. “Can you show us the way out?”

Dancer nodded. “Sure thing.”

The screens all went dark, and her voice came from somewhere to my left. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

I turned and saw the data pad, revolving slowly near a different bundle of clothes. Dancer’s face now occupied the pad’s rectangular display.

I launched myself toward it, misjudging my trajectory, but passing close enough to snatch the thing out of the air as I drifted by. It took me a moment to make it to a grab bar and steady myself. When I was situated, I flipped the pad around so that I was face-to-face with Dancer’s image.

“I never expected to see you as a Jap,” she said. “That’s not a half bad look for you.”

I bit back a reflexive comment about the racial epithet. “Pleasantries later, please. We need to get moving.”

A green flashing arrow appeared near one corner of the data pad. “That way,” Dancer said.

I looked in the direction the arrow was pointing. “The airlock?”

“Yep. Only exit from the lab. Once we’re on the other side of it, we’ve got options.”

“Let’s go, then.”

I shoved off in the direction of the lock. With her superior maneuvering skills, Vivien got there ahead of me.

Despite my utter lack of coordination in zero-g, Vivien managed to shepherd me through the airlock and into the cylindrical corridor beyond.

“Alright,” Dancer said from the pad. “We can take one of the public elevators down to the common areas, and try to get out through the front entrance or the tram station. Or we can take the executive elevator down to the landing flat and try to boost one of the hover-limos. Or we can stay up here in zero-g land, and make our way over to the shuttle docks. Try to bribe or sneak our way onto one of the private shuttles, without going through the terminal.”

“We won’t have to sneak,” Vivien said. “My husband never travels on public transportation. He’s got a charter shuttle waiting right now, I guarantee it.”

I looked at her. “Can we use it?”

“Why not?” Vivien asked. “He’s not going to need a ride home, is he?”

“I mean, can we get aboard?” I said. “It’s not chartered in our names.”

“I’m his wife,” Vivien said. “Or I
was
. And I control a hell of a lot more of the family fortune than he did. I can get us on board. If I have to, I’ll buy a controlling interest in the charter company.”

“Not to point out the obvious,” Dancer said, “but your face doesn’t exactly match your ID chip at the moment.”

“I’m Ms. Pampered-Rich-Bitch,” Vivien said. “You think this is the first time I ever went on vacation and came back with a different face?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dancer said. “I never had the money for shit like that. My idea of a vacation is three days on the couch watching vid, with an endless supply of chili-cheese fries.”

“I should get you to plan my next vacation,” Vivien said.

“Later,” I said. “First we have to get out of here alive. Are you sure you can get us on the shuttle?”

“Yes,” Vivien said. “Reasonably sure.”

“I guess that’ll have to be good enough,” I said. “Let’s go.”

An hour later, we were ensconced in a luxurious private lounge, waiting for the flight crew to finish prepping the shuttle for departure. Vivien had worked her usual magic: schmoozing, bribing, and threatening in approximately equal measures, until we were somehow transformed from uninvited intruders to VIP guests of the uppermost rank.

One complete wall of the lounge was a gently curving vid screen, dedicated to showing a high-resolution view of the starscape as seen from the colony’s axis of rotation. The image was stabilized for spin, so the stars didn’t wheel around in dizzying circles. The sight was both beautiful and unsettling, as if someone had peeled away an entire wall of the room, leaving it exposed to the vacuum of space.

Prolonged viewing tended to give me vertigo despite the stabilization, because my brain wanted to interpret the lounge as a box with the bottom torn out. I felt twinges of an irrational fear that we were all going to topple into the abyss, and fall away to infinity. The lack of gravity didn’t help.

I looked around the lounge. “Is there a remote for that thing?”

“You mean the wall screen?” Dancer asked. “You want to watch porn or something?”

“Anything,” I said. “Scenery. News. Old vids. Commercials. Anything but
that
.”

The wall changed to a watercolor seascape that I probably should have recognized, but didn’t.

Dancer raised an eyebrow. “Is that better? I can get you porn, if you need it.”

“This is fine,” I said. “How did you
do
that?”

The lights in the lounge dimmed by about twenty-percent. “Same way I did
that
,” Dancer said. “Spook in the circuits, baby. Ghost in the machine…”

Vivien yawned. “I’m pretty sure that’s not what Ryle was talking about.”

Dancer cut her a sideways glance. “What? Who the fuck is Riley?”

“
Ryle
,” Vivien said. “Gilbert Ryle. He was a…”

She let the idea drop, and waved a hand in dismissal. “Never mind. Not relevant to the conversation.”

She yawned again. “Ms. Dancer, I apologize. You’re the queen of the ghosts. And you can haunt my machines any time you want.”

“Speaking of haunting machines,” I said, “how did you cram your ghostly ass into that data pad? That thing can’t possibly have more than a couple of petabytes of capacity. I don’t know much about Turing Scions, but I know they’re a hell of a lot bigger than
that
.”

Dancer cut her eyes at me. “Are you trying to say I’m fat?”

She cut me off before I could answer. “I’m not
in
the data pad,” she said. “I’m just using it as an interface device. My actual code is still in the station’s data cores. I’m working on ways to download myself to some Earth-side network without setting off every bandwidth alarm in the place.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “How did you get into the net to begin with? Surfing the public sites is one thing, but the Akimura Nanodyne networks are bound to be hardened against jackers, viruses, AI’s, and every kind of penetration attack and intrusion tactic imaginable. But you just waltzed right in, and set up housekeeping. I want to know how you did that.”

“
I
let her in,” said a voice from the far end of the room.

I looked toward the wall screen. In the middle of the huge display, superimposed over the watercolor seascape, was the face of a middle-aged Japanese man.

I had seen trids of this man before. He was Akimura Hideaki, the reclusive emperor of Akimura Nanodyne. And we had just killed his only remaining son.

CHAPTER 39

My first instinct was absurd. I wanted to whip out the Nambu and brandish it at our uninvited guest. But I couldn’t very well threaten an image on a display screen, and we’d had to ditch our weapons before entering the shuttle preflight area.

“I was curious,” Akimura said. “I had not seen another kikai no seishin since I crossed over, nearly ten years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Another
what
?”

“Kikai no seishin,” Akimura repeated. “You would say… perhaps…
machine spirit
? Or…
electronic person
?”

Crossing over? Machine spirit? Was he saying what I
thought
he was saying?

“I was curious when Dancer-san appeared on the colony webs. Not software. Not a browser interface. But a digital person like me. The first I had encountered. So I lowered the barriers and let her into my networks. Allowed her to replicate herself in my data cores. And I’ve been watching her, as she watches you. She is a most interesting…
person
.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Akimura,” I said. “My friend, Dancer
is
an interesting person. But that’s not why you’ve chosen to reveal yourself to us.”

I swallowed, and asked a question that I really didn’t want an answer to. “Why have you come here?”

As if in response, the door to the lounge slid open. Outside were a dozen armed and helmeted security men in black carbon-weave coveralls and body armor, their boots tucked neatly under two parallel rows of anchor loops.

Once again, I should have been expecting it. This man—this over-amped Turing Scion—had the resources of an entire colony at his disposal. He could send a dozen security operatives to arrest us, or kill us, or drag us back to the Akimura lair. He could send two dozen. Or two-hundred. He could pretty much do anything he wanted with us, and no one would step forward to stop him.

Our only chance of escape, slipping quietly out the back door, was now blown. All that remained was to find out how Akimura was going to exact revenge for the death of his son.

Might as well get it over with.

“Go ahead; give us the bad news,” I said. “What are you going to do to us?”

His electronic eyes showed the barest hint of some carefully-controlled emotion. “I’ve taken the liberty of searching Dancer-san’s record as a police official in Los Angeles. What I found there was consistent with my personal observations.”

“Meaning
what
?” Dancer growled.

“There are seven prime virtues in the Bushido code,” Akimura said. “Rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, and loyalty. You have shown
all
of these traits.”

Dancer snorted. “
Respect
?
Benevolence
? I hate to tell you, Buddy, but somebody’s been pumping sunshine up your ass.”

There was that flicker of something in Akimura’s eyes again. “The virtues don’t always manifest in the ways we expect.”

“Are you planning to get to the point anytime soon?” Dancer asked.

“I believe that you are an exceptionally effective police officer,” Akimura said. “And I believe that you are samurai.”

Dancer laughed at this. “
Samurai
? You mean the guys who fight with those little Jap swords?”

The digital image of Akimura shook his head. “Not quite. You are a warrior who follows a code. You pursue justice and honor, even at the cost of your own life.”

“I’m just a cop,” Dancer said. “And not even that anymore. Now, I’m just an illegal recording of somebody who used to
be
a cop.”