Undertow (10 page)

The ranid that had found Lucienne’s body was hunkered comfortably in the reedy mud upriver, according to Jean, and Cricket had no reason not to believe him. It was a more comfortable topic than Moon Morrow.

“No,” Jean said. “I think if she’s not still working for Core, she’s relativistic under an assumed name, and our grandchildren will hear from her when time and scandal have forgotten her. Or she’s melting into an unmarked grave.” Jean let his fingers slide together, interlock. “It’s seventeen years body-time from Earth. At least a hundred, nonrelativistic—” he looked up, blinked his watery eyes. “But you know that, don’t you?” Cricket had never quite lost her North American accent. “Or you could be seeing how much line you can feed me before you set the hook, chérie.”

She smiled.

He caught her fingers sideways and gave them a squeeze. “What did you learn?”

“I’m still looking for the key to what Lucienne managed to mail me. I’ll find that—” She rubbed at the corners of her eyes with the other hand, feeling incredibly tired. “I wish we knew who she was meeting. I wish we had the rest of the file—”

“Do we know what Rim did with the body?”

“If they didn’t resink it?”

Jean gave her the raised eyebrow. She took her hand back, stood up, wishing she wasn’t at Jean’s house so she could check status on the half-dozen searches, bots, and ferrets she had running that didn’t require her constant attention—and the compiler trying to resolve the fragment of Lucienne’s deathbed message into something parseable. She wanted to walk away from Kroc, so she went to make tea, wondering if the tomatoes had ripened enough overnight to give her an excuse to walk out to the truck garden and pick some. Better than growing them in tubs on her deck, that was for sure. She liked the dirt under her fingernails.

He said, “No, they wouldn’t have made sure it got snagged in the cables if they didn’t want it found.”

“But did they want it found so soon?”

“What do you mean?”

Right. Jean didn’t know a damned thing about wetware, hard memory, or any of it. “Her hard memory would decay in something like twenty to thirty hours. Any data in her head would be irretrievable at that point. We know she was sending me something—”

“The other half might still be queued.”

“It probably is,” Cricket said, glancing at him. “We can’t obtain her body before we lose that data to bit-rot.”

Jean pressed the side of his hand to his mouth. From the way the muscle in his jaw worked, he was chewing the flesh near his thumb. “What if they downloaded her?”

Cricket shrugged, sliding the pot onto the stove. Cold water slopped over the enamel surface and wet her hand. “Whatever they killed her to keep her from bringing back to you might be in the file. Which would be in a Charter Trade data hold. Blasted Rimmers.”

Jean’s nose had been broken once and he’d never gotten it fixed. His breath whistled on the outflow. “You still think it was André, Cricket?”

If she bit her cheek hard enough, she could keep her eyes from stinging. “The common factor linking all of my unhappy romances is me.”

“Is that an answer?”

“It’s what you get. I don’t ask those things. I think it must have been—”

“I don’t have to use him.”

The water steamed, not yet bubbling. She threw tea bags into mugs. “Use him,” she said. “I knew it was on fire when I lay down on it.”

“Why?”

“Why did I know he was on fire?”

“No,” Jean said, very patiently. Silently he’d come up behind her; she saw his reflection in the cooktop before he laid his hand on her arm. “Why did you pick him?”

The water boiled. She wrapped the handle in a terry rag and lifted the kettle off the heat. “Because,” she said, roughly, “he could beat up my dad.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bad men,” Cricket said. “Bad men, the badder the better. And they don’t come badder than André Deschênes. He’s so bad he can be sweet as ice cream every second, and nobody forgets for any one of those seconds that he’s the baddest man in the room. That’s what I like. Men who could beat up my dad. They make me feel safe.” She lifted her chin and set the kettle down. “I know it’s crazy. It’s why I don’t let any of them get too close. Because I know what they are.”

She shook her head, shook Jean’s hand off, and—turning—warded him back with a cup of hot tea. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I think…I think they wanted it to look like an accident. Or like she ran afoul of a ranid sect. Some of the savages still kill humans in the marsh, you know.”

“Some humans.”

She didn’t need to turn around to know he was smiling. Jean Kroc—whatever his real name was, and she didn’t ask that either—went into the marsh with impunity. Lucienne had, too. “Discredit the labor rights movement,” she continued, as if he had not interrupted. “Maybe something more complicated, but that’ll do for a surface motive.”

“If they wanted the body found, why grab the person that found it?”

She shrugged. “Somebody made a mistake? The frog saw something it shouldn’t have? The body was supposed to be found by a human and not a ranid? It was found too soon? Could be a lot of reasons.” The water hissed. She poured. “If there’s information out there, I’ll find it.”

If the information was connex anywhere. But that went without saying.

She had learned a lot about net mining in fifteen years. She was good at it, knew roots and routes to old caches and layered backups and coredumps and virtual lockers from two hundred years ago. She had old ciphers and she had archives and she had backdoors into current data holds, too.

The more old information one could find in the warrens of connex, the more uncharted paths one knew from point A to point Q, the more
new
information one could get to that one wasn’t supposed to know about. And sometimes the old records were useful in themselves. For historical reasons, or—in a relativistic galaxy—sometimes for more present ones.

Cricket had never actually had to blackmail anyone. Not since she became an archinformist, anyway.

“You always do,” Jean said, bringing the tea that Cricket thought was still too hot to drink to his mouth. It was why he needed her. He might conjure, and she would bet he had the illegal coincidence engines to do it with. But he wouldn’t swallow wire, or live with it in his head.

She tapped fingers on the edge of her mug. “Do you think they’ll let a ranid person testify in a Core court?”

“Well, they would if they were a tech species. Of course, if they were a tech species, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

Cricket hated him for a moment, hated the falseness of his pale, open gaze. “Like they’d let it make a difference.”

“They?”

“Core,” she said. And then qualified, “Charter Trade. They’d find a way around the law, even if the ranids had spaceflight, if there were something on Greene’s World that they wanted.” There was; she knew it, and she suspected Jean did, too. “They don’t care where the luxuries come from, or who suffers to pay the way.”

Jean looked down. She wondered if she had shamed him. “Find out, won’t we? I need you to step up your efforts regarding Closs and his cronies.”

There were a half-dozen stupid questions she could have asked, most of them the kind of contentless noises people made to reassure themselves that communication was taking place. If Jean didn’t think, or at least hope, that Closs was involved in something dirty enough to bring him down, he wouldn’t have asked her to keep looking. And Cricket knew the sorts of things that people who should know better got up to.

She drank off her tea. She’d been right; it was hot enough to break sweat across her forehead, and she mopped her face with her sleeve after she put the mug in the sink. “I’ll ask André to come see you when I blink him tonight. I’m going to go look at the vegetables.”

Jean laid a hand inside her elbow as she stepped past him. “What are you doing on a lump of mud like this, Cricket?”

“Instead of gnawing imported bonbons in the Core? Connex doesn’t take time, Jean. I can live anywhere. It’s cheaper to do it here.” Practically guileless, she smiled into his eyes.

“And here I was hoping that maybe you killed a man.”

She winked and drew her arm away. “Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid.”

André’s clients usually came to him, though for Rim he made exceptions. He still didn’t like to be seen entering their barge, however, so he skinned in the bathroom of a coffee shop (after he ordered a mug he would not drink) and walked into reception resembling himself only casually. Of course he flagged as altered in anyone’s headset, but cosmetic skins were more common than not.

Reception chipped him, verified that he was expected, and locked on a wristlet to guide him up. He didn’t need it—he knew where Timothy Closs worked—but Security would have its little games and this would get him past most of them.

Its plaintive beeping led him on.

Closs got up from the desk to greet him. One thing about Timothy; the ceremonies he stood on were all politeness. He extended his right hand, gave André’s larger but not much darker one a clasp, and handed him a drink without asking. “Good job last night, André.”

André took the seat Closs gestured him into and set the stubby glass on the arm. “Thank you, Major. I hope there’s not a problem.” He would prefer not to talk about old business under any circumstances. Like a leaf upon the water: let the current slide it by.

“Not with your work,” Closs replied, returning to his chair. Perched on the edge of it, he gave the impression of someone still in motion. A compact brown man in a navy and white suit, he seemed—to André—
condensed
. “No, it’s another problem entirely. One of the board made an unfortunate decision, and it’s left us a loose end.”

“This all sounds very euphemistic.”

“To put it mildly.” Speaking quickly, Closs outlined the problem: the scheduling conflict that had led to a ranid liaison discovering the body ahead of time, the site team’s errors in recovery, Jefferson Greene’s overreaction.

“He’s given it something to talk about,” André said, understanding.

Closs knuckled his eye and nodded. “It gets worse. The witness was liberated last night.”

“The explosion.”

“Unfortunately. We think it’s been taken by a ranid anticolonialist faction. You can appreciate the implications.”

“If they can get anyone to listen to them.”

“Connex is free,” Closs said. “There are humans on this planet who would be all too happy to foster a scandal, if it affected Rim. The savages aren’t the only Greens in the galaxy. Or the only enemies of Rim.”

“True enough.” But André’s hand gesture said,
What do you want me to do about it
?

Closs put his hands on the desk. “We want you to cover the contract, André. At something more than your ordinary fee.”

Jean Kroc poled his skiff upriver.

He could have used his motors, sure, and the caterpillars weren’t even too noisy. But the birds could hear them, and the ranids, and it never hurt to show a little courtesy. Besides, there were enough powered craft on Greene’s to affect the natives’ long-distance communications. Like Earth’s cetaceans, the ranids took advantage of the sound-conducting properties of water to hold conversations with friends and relatives they might never have swum side by side with. The advent of mechanized transportation had been unkind to their culture, their art, their discourse, and their science.

And in any case, there was something to be said for slipping over the brown water in the heat of afternoon, his shirt rubbing sweat from his shoulders as he threaded the channels of the delta. Four-winged insects so like an Earth darning-needle that they bore the same common name slipped over the water, leaving chains of ripples like the paths of skipped stones. With a quicksilver twist one rocketed upward, the drone of straining wings rising in pitch. It clutched something that twisted in muscular panic; Jean winced, but it was just a fish or a tadpole—too small for an eggling, and anyway no endoparent would let an infant out of its pouch. Fat drops of water scattered, and the darning-needle settled on the flat prow of Jean’s skiff to sever its dinner’s spine with a scissoring bite.

He could not
actually
hear the crunching.

Green reeds rose up around him, reflected smoothly in flat water. Their heads nodded, heavy with pollen in feather-duster flowers. A red flannel rag off to port marked his channel. It was an odd-numbered rag and the knot was at the top; he turned away from it.

Even Jean Kroc needed a little aide-mémoire to find his way around the bayou.

The yellow sun rode behind haze, swarms of no-seeums zooming among the tassels. Greene’s World was better than Earth that way; about half of the local biting insectoid life had no use for mammal blood. The leeches, however, weren’t so particular. And the ragweed equivalents could have choked an elephant.

The air felt primitive. The rich scent of fermenting vegetation bubbled from beneath the water, and Jean’s salt stung his cracked lip and his eyes, dried itchy among his stubble. Even to the profusion of alien flowers—mauve and white silverling with its feet wet and its belled heads shaded beneath taller plants, parasitic cutthroat weed threading from reed to reed, its waxy paraorchids dripping treacle-sweet beads of sap with which to trap small unwary creatures—the New Nile Delta could have been Earth in the Upper Cretaceous. Jean could imagine a
Dryptosaurus
slipping along the shallow waterways, barely ruffling a leaf in passing—eyeing him like the also-extinct tiger from between concealing reeds.

His hands sweated inside his fingerless gloves as he dragged the pole from the sucking mud of the channel bed and swung it forward. The strain caught him first along the biceps and across the shoulders, and as he leaned into the push, he felt it in his chest, triceps, latissimus dorsi, hamstrings, calves. He tugged the pole again, let the momentum of the skiff draw it from the bottom, swung it up. The name of the game was control. He glanced over his shoulder, as if a dinosaur might in fact be considering him for its supper, and almost missed the blue rag with the knot tied downward that marked the next turn.