… and the poor lad had ended up staying with her half the night just to give her a back rub, after she'd finished screaming and clawing his buttocks in one of the antisound-curtained alcoves at the sides of the dance floor.
"You're really tight," he said in amazement, kneading away at one shoulder.
"Oh, you bet." Her jacket had crawled into one corner and curled protectively around the rest of her gear. She lay facedown on the pad, damp and sweaty and postorgasmic and a bit stoned, trying to let go and relax, as he worked on her upper back. "Aaah."
He paused. "Want to talk about it?" he asked.
"Not really," she mumbled.
After a moment he went back to prodding at the sore patch on her left shoulder blade. "You should relax." Rub. "It's a party. Was it someone here?
Or someone else?"
"I said I don't want to talk about it," she said, and he broke off from trying to get her back to relax.
"If you don't want to talk about it, what do you want?" he asked, beginning to sound annoyed. "I could be out there." He didn't sound as if he believed it.
"Then go." She reached backward and grabbed his thigh blindly, contradicting herself. "Stay. I'm not sure." She was always bad at handling this, the difficult morning-after socializing that went with a one-off fuck with someone who she didn't know. "Why do you have to talk?"
"Because you're interesting." He sounded serious, which was a bad sign. "I haven't met you before. And I think I like you."
"Oh." She glanced over at the dance floor, legs moving in irregular strobing flashes of light only a meter or two from their sweaty nest. He smelled of some kind of musk, and the faint tang of semen. She rolled over on her back, fetching up against the padded back of the recess, and looked at him.
"You got something else in mind?"
He stared at her sleepily. "If you want to swap links, maybe we could meet up some other time?"
I'm being propositioned! she realized, startled. Not just sex. "Maybe later."
She looked him up and down, mentally dressing him, wondering what it would be like. A boyfriend? Tension clawed at her, an unscratchable itch.
She glanced at her hand. "My phone's turned off, and I can't switch it back on."
"If that's—"
"No!" She grabbed his hand: "I'm really, not, uh, being—" She pulled him towards her. "Oh." That wasn't the right answer, was it? she thought, as the slide of hot skin against her—and the interesting drugs they'd been taking—made the breath catch in her throat and brought a twitch of life to his groin. She reached out and caught him in her hands. "No swapping links. Just tonight. Make it like it's your last, best time." Cunning fingers found a nipple. "Oh, that's too easy." And it was back into the unthinking depths, with a frogman called Blow to be her skin pilot and a nagging tension at the back of her skull, banished for the moment by an exchange of lust.
Wednesday came awake suddenly, naked and sticky and alone on the foam pad. It still smelled of Blow. The dance floor action was going, but more slowly, the music ratcheting toward a false dawn shutdown. She felt alone for a moment, then cold. Damn, she thought hazily. He was good.
Should have swapped—
There was a set of rings on the pad next to her. And a self-heating coffee can set solicitously close to them.
"What the fuck?" She shook her head, taking stock. What a guy. She felt a momentary stab of loss: someone who'd take time out from a party to give her a back rub after making skinny, even if she hadn't wanted to talk … that was worth knowing. But he'd left a set of rings. She picked them up, puzzling. They looked to be about the right size. Still puzzled, she flipped the heater tab on the coffee and slid her own rings off, pulled the new set on, and twitched them alive. Instead of the half-expected authentication error, there was a tuneful chord and a smell of rose blossom as they glommed on to her implants and registered her as their rightful owner. Fully authenticated, with access to a whole bunch of stuff that was now instantiating itself in her implants from off a public server somewhere:
"Wow! Hey, voice mail. Any word from Herman?" she asked.
"Retrieving. You have a noninteractive message. Hello, Wednesday. This is Herman. Your instructions are as follows. Do not go home. Go to Transit Terminal B. There is a ticket waiting for you there, booked under the authority of professor-gymnast David Larsen, for your participation in a student work placement project. Collect the ticket and leave this hab immediately. Retain these rings, they're keyed to a new identity and set up to route packets to you via a deep market anonymizer. You cannot be traced through them. I will contact you in due course. Let me emphasize that you should not, under any circumstances, go home." Click.
She stared at her rings in astonishment. "Herman?" she asked, biting her lower lip. "Herman?" Don't go home. A cold chill brought up the gooseflesh on her back. Oh shit. She began fumbling with her pile of clothes.
"Herman … "
Her invisible agents, the software ghosts behind the control rings and her implants and the whole complex of mechanized identity that was Wednesday's persona within the Septagon network, didn't reply. She dragged her leggings and boots on, shrugged into the spidersilk camisole, and held out her arms for the jacket; the sarong she stuffed in a temporary pocket. Jittery and nervous with worry, mouth ashy with the taste of overstewed Blue Mountain, she lurched out of the privacy niche and around the edge of the dance floor. Miss Ball Gag was gagged no longer, straddling the lap of Mister Latex, taking it hard and fast and letting the audience know about it with both lungs. Exhibitionists. Wednesday spared her a second's snort as she slid past the bar and round the corner and out along a corridor—then up the first elevator she came to. She had a bad feeling, and the sense of unease grew worse the farther she went. She felt dirty and tired and she ached, and a gnawing edge of guilt bit into her.
Shouldn't she have called home, warned someone? Who? Mom or Dad?
Wouldn't they think she—
"Holy shit."
She stopped dead and abruptly turned away from the through-route, heart hammering and palms sticky.
The corridor that led to her home run was blocked dead, the eery blue ghost glow of polis membrane slashed across it like a scar. Cops in full vacuum gear stood beside a low-loader with green-and-orange flashing spurs, pushing a mobile airlock toward the pressure barrier.
"Oh shit oh shit oh shit … " The seconds spurted through her fingers like grease. She ducked around another corner, opened her eyes, and began looking for a dead zone. Fucking Bone Sisters … well no, this wasn't their doing, was it? Dom games require a sub witness, a survivor. This was Yurg, he an being not happy and strangers' boot steps clicking in the cold, wet darkness behind her. And Herman on the phone for the first time in years.
She found a corner, stopped, and massaged the pressure points in her jacket, the ones she'd spent so much time building into it. It clamped together around her ribs like a corset, then she reached over and pulled the hood over her head. The leggings were part of the same outfit; she rucked them up, then stretched the almost-liquid hem right over the outside of her boots, her beautiful dumb-matter platform-heeled lace-up air-leaking boots.
"Pressurize," she said, then a moment later: "Fade." The jacket rubbed between her shoulder blades, letting her know it was active, and the opaque hood over her face flickered into transparency. Only the hissing of her breath reminded her that from then on in she was impregnable, hermetically sealed, and invisible so long as she danced through the Bone Sisters' blind spots.
There was a service passage one level up and two over, and she ghosted past the slave trolleys, trying to make no noise on the hard metal floor as she counted her way toward the door leading to—
"Shit and corruption." The door handle was sealed with the imperious flashing blue of a police warning. Below the handle, the indicator light glowed steady red, a gas trap alert. Panicky claustrophobia seized her.
"Where the fuck is my family?" She brought up her rings and called up the home network. "Dad? Mom? Are you there?"
A stranger's voice answered her: "Who is this?"
She cut the link instantly and leaned against the wall. "Damn. Damn!" She wanted to cry. Where are you? She was afraid she knew. "Headlines, rings." Anoxic sink hits residential street in sector green, level 1.24, six dead, eight injured. "No!" The walls in front of her blurred; she sniffed, then rubbed her eyes through the smart fabric of her hood.
The door was sealed, but the bottom panel bulged about ten centimeters out of it—an emergency lock. She knelt and yanked the red handle, stood back as it inflated and unfolded from the door and bulged out, until it occupied half the corridor. Fumbling at the half-familiar lock tags with her gloves, she unzipped it halfway and scrambled in. She was beyond panic, by then, just a high voice at the back of her head crying NoNoNoNoNo continuously, weeping for her while she got on with the job. Rolling on her back and zipping the entrance panel shut, she kicked her way forward into the lock segment on the other side of the door and poked at the display on the other tag. "This can't be happening," someone said. The pressure outside was reading fifty millibars—not vacuum, but as close as made no difference. Even pure oxy wouldn't keep you alive at that. "If they're in there and running on house gas, they'll be safe until the cops reach them," the voice calmly told her, "but if the bad guys hacked the house gas reserve, then dumped pressure overnight, they're dead. Either way, you can't help them. And the bad guys were going to wait there for you." ButButBut.
Her fingers were buzzing, her rings calling. She held them to the side of her head. "I told you not to go home." It was Herman. "The police have noticed an airlock trip. You have three minutes at most to clear the area. They'll think you did it." Silence.
Wednesday could hear her heartbeat, the swish of blood in her ears. An impossible sense of loss filled her, like a river bursting its banks to sweep her away. "But Dad—"
The next thing she knew she was standing in the corridor beside a slowly deflating emergency airlock, walking round a bend back toward human territory, away from the blue-lit recesses of the service tunnel. "Jacket, back to normal." The hood dropped loose and she pushed it back, forming a snood; the leggings could wait. She walked away jerkily, tugging her gloves off and shoving them into a pocket, half-blind, almost walking into a support pillar. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. She slid back into the aimless stroll of a teen out for a walk, slowly reached up with a shaking hand to unfasten her jacket. It relaxed quickly, blousing out loosely around her. Oh shit.
Posessed by a ghastly sense of loss, Wednesday headed toward Transit Terminal B.
Centris Magna was a small hab; its shuttle port wasn't designed to handle long-haul craft, or indeed anything except small passenger shuttles. Bulk freight traveled by way of a flinger able to impart up to ten klicks of delta-vee to payloads of a thousand tons or so—but it would be a very slow drift to the nearest ports of call. Only people traveled by fast mover.
Consequently, the terminal was no bigger than the hub of Old Newfie, its decor dingy and heavily influenced by the rustic fad of a decade or so earlier. Wednesday felt a flicker of homesickness as she walked into the departure lounge, almost a relief after the sick dread and guilt that had dogged her way there.
She zeroed in on the first available ticket console. "Travel ticketing, please."
The console blinked sleepy semihuman eyes at her: "Please state your destination and your full name?"
"Vicky Strowger. Um, I have a travel itinerary on file with you for educational purposes? Reference, uh, David Larsen's public schedule."
"Is that Vocational Educator Larsen, or the David Larsen who paints handmade inorganic toys and designs gastrointestinal recycling worms for export to Manichean survivalists?"
"The former." Wednesday glanced around nervously, half-expecting blank-faced fuckmonsters with knives and manglers to lurch out at her from behind the soft furnishings. The wide hall was almost empty; grass, service trees, gently curling floor (it was so close to the axial end cap that the curvature was noticeable and the gravity barely a quarter of normal)—it was too big, positively threatening to someone who'd spent her youth on a cramped station.
"Paging. Yes, you have a travel itinerary. Payment is debited to the Outbound Project on—"
It's now or never. "I'd like to upgrade, please."
"Query?"
"Sybarite class, please, or the nearest thing to it you can find for me." She'd checked her credit balance and she was damned if she was going to hunch restlessly in a cattle class seat for the duration of the transfer flight.
The terminal mumbled to itself for a while. "Acknowledged. Annealing to determine how we can accommodate your wishes—confirmed. Departure from bay sixteen in two hours and four minutes, local shuttle to Centris Noctis orbital for transfer to luxury liner WSL Romanov for cycle to Minima Four. Your connection will be in twenty-eight hours. Which option would you like and how would you like to pay?"
"Whichever."
The terminal cleared its throat: "I'm sorry, I was unable to understand that.
What economic system would you like to pay in? We accept money, approved modal barter, agalmic kudos metrics, temporal futures, and—"
"Check my purse, dammit!"
The terminal abruptly closed its eyes and opened its mouth. A small blue six-legged mouse poked its head out. "Hello!" it piped. "I am your travel voucher! Please allow me to welcome you to TransVirtual TravelWays on behalf of all our entities and symbionts! We hope your journey with us will be enjoyable and your business will be fruitful! Please keep your travel voucher in your possession at all times, and—squeep—"
Wednesday caught it.
"Shut the fuck up," she snarled. "I am not in the fucking mood. Just show me to my cabin and fuck off."
"—Please note that there is a security deposit for damage to TransVirtual TravelWays property, including fittings, fixtures, and emotivationally enhanced passenger liaison systems! We hope you have a pleasant voyage and a succulent profession! Please ensure your luggage remains under your control at all times, and proceed now to the green walkway under the cherry tree for transit to departure bay sixteen, where the VIP