infinities (39 page)

Surely Disappearance Inc would have thought of that.

Maybe they had. Maybe it was buried deeper in the information they had just given her. Or maybe she had the wrong idea about plant workers. Maybe her objections had more to do with her own prejudices than with her abilities or lack of them.

The idea of working in a textile recycling plant, with fibers floating in the air, not to mention the filth that had to be cleaned off other people's possessions, made her queasy. She hadn't had a job like that ever.

Her palms were damp. She rubbed them on her pants and looked at the rest of the profile.

The textile plant was in Von, a town she'd never heard of. She would have her own apartment—a one bedroom, company-provided by the plant, and if she managed to save enough money, she might be able to buy a place of her own.

She ran a hand over her face. Money would be a problem. She had been short on funds before, but she'd always had the family money in a trust. This time, she would have no backup. When she got the company-owned apartment, they would own her. She would need the job and the terrible pay, and she would have to begin all over again.

For the very first time, the reality of the change she was undertaking was sinking in. Before she had understood the loss, but not the future. She hadn't thought about where she was going because she had no idea. She had decided not to fantasize about her new life because she hadn't wanted to be disappointed.

But she was disappointed anyway.

An impoverished thirty-five year old woman whose skills only let her do manual labor, who lived in an unknown town.

She frowned, wondering where the town was. There was nothing about her upcoming destination in the bio. It had to be somewhere else in the material Jenny had given her.

Or perhaps it was in the hand-held's database. Most computers carried the same basic information—dictionaries of over 1000 main languages, food compatibility charts for human/alien physiologies, and, of course, maps. She searched the hand-held for a moment, wondering if its memory had been purged of non-relevant information, and finally found what she was searching for.

The map function. She typed in Von and added that it had to be in territory that could be occupied by humans. She only got one hit.

It was on Mars.

She stared at the map for the longest time. The blinking feature showed that Von was in Mars' northernmost region, above the Arctic Circle. Obviously the town was big enough to have its own dome, but not really large enough to be well known.

And that bothered her, because she'd been to Mars and she knew what this place would look like.

Mars was run by the Disty, small creatures with large heads, large eyes, and narrow bodies. They hated the feel of wide open spaces and built their own colonies like rats' warrens. When they took over human colonies, the way they had on Mars, they added corridors and false ceilings and narrow little passageways, so the entire place felt claustrophobic.

She could get used to that. She knew there was a possibility she would go somewhere that wasn't controlled by humans but where humans were tolerated. Initially, she'd even thought she'd go to Mars because the Disty and the Rev did not get along. They avoided each other's colonies and were barred from each other's home worlds.

Then she had done some research. Both the Disty and the Rev had ventured into each other's colonies in the past few years searching for Disappeareds. Because the Disty and Rev had similar missions, they respected each other's warrants and often helped each other find Disappeareds on each other's land.

Both alien species had caught on to the game that the Disappearance services were playing, and were foiling them on the ground. Instead of hiding Rev fugitives in Disty territory and vice versa, the good Disappearance services were now going for less obvious hiding places.

Her stomach twisted. She thought she had done the right research. According to everything she'd looked for, all the people she'd talked with, Disappearance Inc was the best Disappearance service in the known universe.

Why then would it hide her in a place the Rev surely would look?

She put the hand-held on her lap. Maybe the administrators at DI had misunderstood. After all, she hadn't written down whom she was running from. She'd told as few people as required by DI's business practices, but she never told them what she had done because, they said, it wasn't relevant, and she told only a few of them who she was hiding from since they had to know to keep her out of certain places.

Like Mars.

Unless things had changed even more than she realized. Maybe their research was more up to date than hers.

But, judging by the personality profile they pulled, the job they gave her, and the place they had chosen to hide her, their research was shoddy. Either that, or they had confused her with another client.

She picked up the hand-held again, and scanned the rest of the information. Her name wasn't in it, of course, but that bio suggested that this was hers.

Ekaterina stood, her restlessness growing. Damn them for not allowing her to bring anything along. She couldn't even carry a hardcopy of her agreement with DI because that was like carrying a piece of identification. She wasn't linked, so she couldn't used the password they had given her to access the information.

Had they planned it this way? If so, why? So that she wouldn't complain? Were the reports of satisfied customers made up?

She had no idea.

Her stomach turned again, that queasy feeling remaining. The Rev never gave up searching for fugitives from their justice system. If she got caught, she'd spend the rest of her natural life in a Rev penal colony.

She'd seen Rev penal colonies. Working in a textile recycling plant in a Disty-run Mars town would seem like heaven in comparison.

She would do it if she had to. The problem was that she didn't feel this identity would hide her.

But she had no idea what her options were. She tried to remember the text of the agreement she'd signed. Essentially, she was putting her life into DI's hands. It was, she knew, the only way to survive.

She hadn't even asked the lawyerly question: what if they were wrong? She had done what all naïve clients did. Once she had completed her research, she had trusted blindly.

Of course, she had been panicked at the time. Her case had been denied by the Eighth Multicultural Tribunal. The Rev warrant, issued so many years ago, stood, and the Rev would come for her immediately.

An old friend who clerked at the Tribunal had sent her a warning before the Tribunal made their announcement. She had no idea how long she had until the Tribunal spoke, but she knew it wouldn't be long.

So she had done what she could, researching and finding a Disappearance service. But she hadn't been as thorough as she should have been.

That was incredibly clear to her now.

She'd allowed her panic over being discovered to override her natural caution. She still had funds. Accessing them would be tricky, but it could be done. She could hire a different Disappearance service if she had to.

And she just might have to.

At least there was one clause in her agreement with DI that she had memorized. She had done that on purpose, worried that if she hadn't, she would be stuck in just this situation.

She could terminate at any time.

DI wouldn't be liable for her safety, of course, but they were required to take her to a settlement. They couldn't just eject her in space and hope that she survived.

She swallowed hard. Firing DI was as much of a risk as disappearing in the first place. But she had to trust her own instincts. Maybe she could browbeat the crew into taking her to DI's nearest headquarters and they could rerun her profile. Maybe they could see what went wrong in the San Francisco offices and repair it.

She shut off the hand-held and slipped it into her purse. Then she slung her purse over her shoulder and walked to the door separating the passenger section from the crew areas.

The door wasn't locked as it was supposed to be. Clearly Jenny had forgotten to reseal it when she had brought out the hand-held. Either that or the crew hadn't sealed it at all, thinking one slight female passenger wouldn't be a problem, no matter what she had done.

Ekaterina pushed the door aside and walked through. She had never been in this part of the crew area. The airlock was to her left, a small galley to her right. The carpet was still plush here, although it got thinner closer to the cockpit.

The theory was that the crew didn't need luxury, not like the passengers on the space yacht did.

No one sat in the galley. She walked toward the cockpit, her boots making no sound as she moved.

Voices filtered toward her. She couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded official.

As she peered through the cockpit door, she froze. Through the main portal, she could see the orange and blue stripes of a Rev penal ship.

"We'll be evacuating the yacht in thirty Earth minutes," the pilot was saying through the interlink. He was clearly talking to the Rev. "She won't know we're gone. Give it another thirty minutes and you can board."

Jenny was sitting beside him, her hands behind her head, as if she were watching a vid. The co-pilot was on the other side, tapping something into the ship's system.

The pilot continued. "I'll be picking up the ship from impound in a week or so. If there's permanent damage, I'm coming after you."

Ekaterina's mouth was dry. The pilot was selling her to the Rev. He would make more money from them than he would as a contract employee of DI. Supposedly, services like DI screened-out people like him.

But not in this case.

The Rev would take her and imprison her for life. Few humans survived in a Rev penal colony for more than ten years. The work alone was too much for the human frame. That didn't count the xenophobia, the way that Rev inmates treated someone who was completely different.

She eased away from the door. No one in the cockpit had seen her.

She had been given a slight chance to save herself.

Now she had to figure out how to use it.

Four

As they stepped out of the ship's tunnel, DeRicci's hand-held beeped. She cursed and took it out of her pocket. She punched the screen, information already blinking. "As if we don't have enough to do. We've got another."

"Where?" he asked.

"Terminal 5," she said, more to herself than him. Terminal 5, while technically next door to Terminal 4, was a healthy hike from where they were. "What the hell's that one again?"

"Suspected criminal activity by a ship's owner."

DeRicci glanced at him. "You're useful in the docks."

"I'm useful most of the time," he said.

There was nothing else on the hand-held. Just the order to report to a ship tunnel in Terminal 5. Someone would meet them and explain the situation.

"I hope to hell this isn't something complicated," DeRicci said as she headed back to Terminal 4's main entry. "I want to put this Disty thing to bed."

Flint was feeling uncomfortable. Detectives got one, maybe two cases down here per week total. Now he and DeRicci were getting two in one day.

"We're better off taking the train between terminals," Flint said. "If we walk, we'll lose that time advantage Headquarters wants us to have."

DeRicci frowned. She clearly didn't like his new outspokenness. But he was tired of letting her run things. She was out of her depth in the Port. He was going to take over this partnership whether she liked it or not.

He led her to the interior train system. It had been designed to link the various terminals after the Port had taken over the bulk of space traffic control for the Moon. At that point, the Port had mushroomed into something with unwalkable distances. Fifty interior trains ran at set times. Only one ran all the way around the Port, and it was usually crowded.

Flint took DeRicci to the tracks that worked for the shuttle between Terminals 4 and 5. Because the locals weren't advertised in the Port, they served mostly as crew shuttles. If tourists had to go from one terminal to another, they took the main, crowded train.

The train pulled up, its dark glass sides reflecting the lights in the waiting area. The doors slid open silently and three workers in blue uniforms got off. Then Flint walked on. DeRicci followed.

There were no seats. Passengers held onto bars and metal hand rings. The tougher passengers stood, feet braced, in the center of the car. It took skill and talent to ride the trains that way without getting hurt.

Flint had learned how to do it, but hadn't enjoyed it. He gripped the rail now, and DeRicci did the same. They had the car to themselves.

The moment the door closed, the train sped backwards in the direction it had just come. After a moment, it reached its top speed, moving at a velocity faster than the high speed trains that ran between the various domes littering the Moon.

DeRicci looked startled and reached her other hand around the metal bar. The train slowed, and then, smoothly, stopped. Even though the movement was even, Flint watched DeRicci's body yank forward then back. She glared at him as if the effect of the train were all his fault.

He supposed, in an odd way, it was. He should have warned her about the speed. These trains had been designed for efficiency, not for comfort. Back in the days when the interior train system was first built, Armstrong Dome had been known for its efficiency.

A lot had changed since then.

The doors opened. DeRicci touched a hand to her short hair, as if the swift ride had created a wind that ruffled her.

"You okay?" he asked.

"You did that to torture me."

"Maybe that was a secondary reason," he said with a smile. To his surprise, she smiled back. The expression surprised him.

He had been blaming her for her unwillingness to give him a chance, when he had once treated his new partners in Traffic the same way. DeRicci had gone through five new partners in five years, all of them beginning detectives. Perhaps it wasn't so odd that she expected him to prove himself before she started to give him the benefit of the doubt.