Android: Rebel (The Identity Trilogy) Read online

  I had no comment for that, but I was curious. I was glad that Simon Blake had thought of the same question those years ago. “Why would Haas-Bioroid set you up to be kidnapped?”

  “To frighten me. To pull me in closer to them. To allow them to insinuate some of their sec personnel into my operation.” She stood and shrugged, pacing restlessly, which was difficult to do given the small confines of the hut. “Director Haas doesn’t like doing business with anyone she can’t control. She can’t control me. All she’s been able to do is get me to agree to lease my neural channeling to her when I finish with the first iteration. And she has options on subsequent evolutions of the same.”

  “You think she doesn’t trust you?”

  Mara fixed me with a stare. “Do you trust anyone outside your unit?”

  I didn’t have to think about that one. “No.”

  “I feel the same way. I trust my development team, and I trust my sec team, but I realize now that my sec people aren’t able to handle extreme situations.” Her face darkened and she looked suddenly fatigued. “I buried over half of them. I knew all of them. They are…they were friends.” She paused and her hands knotted in her lap, shaking for just an instant. “I don’t want to bury more of my friends.”

  Simon thought about all the men and women, brothers and sisters in arms, that he had buried over the years as a mercenary, and I watched him cycle through. He couldn’t even remember all of them. Some of them he’d never gotten to know because they’d only had boots on the ground for a few days.

  I looked at Mara Parker and I knew that Simon had an inkling of what she was doing there, but he had to ask. “Why are you here, ma’am?”

  She looked at me and took a calm, steady breath. “Because I wanted to thank you for saving my life that day. And because I wanted to try to hire you as security chief for MirrorMorph, Inc.”

  Even though Simon had been expecting the question by then, he was still surprised. I recognized that in him.

  “That’s something you should talk to the colonel about. You’d want him before you wanted me.”

  “I tried to hire him. He was very polite and didn’t laugh in my face, but he told me I couldn’t afford him.”

  That was true.

  “However,” she went on, “he told me that if I could convince you to take the job, he would be willing to allow that. And to let you pick the people you wanted to take with you. Within reason.”

  Simon sat silently, taken completely off guard. I was puzzled. I had not before considered how Simon Blake had gone to work for Mara Parker. I thought perhaps they had fallen in love and the togetherness had resulted from that. Clearly that supposition was incorrect.

  “The colonel told you that?” Simon couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think the colonel would let a team go so easily.” What Simon really meant was that he didn’t believe John Rath would let him go. Simon could not remember a time when he wasn’t in his commanding officer’s life. Everything before that seemed like a faraway dream.

  “He’s not letting a team go easily.” Mara Parker crossed her arms. “It appears Colonel Rath is every bit the mercenary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In return for the services of a security team, he wants a piece of my company. Fifteen percent to be exact. To be honest, the price is steep. But the truth of the matter is that I can’t afford to leave my people unprotected. I can’t be left unprotected.”

  Simon didn’t want to leave her unprotected either. I knew that because his fears for her resonated in the programming that I had been encoded with.

  “If Haas-Bioroid was behind my kidnapping and the death of my security people, then they didn’t have control of the situation the way they thought they would have. They could have simply negotiated a ransom and made me feel obligated to them for the rescue.”

  “They could still feel that way. Whether they were involved or not.”

  “I don’t believe they are innocent. I’m convinced Director Haas or one of the other board members was involved; perhaps my friends are dead as a result of some intra-corp struggle I’m not privy to. I’m also convinced that the kidnap team had decided to change the deal and betray their employers, which is why Haas-Bioroid contacted Colonel Rath.” Mara shrugged. “Maybe in the long run, it was cheaper to hire you people than it would have been to pay off the kidnappers.”

  “We weren’t cheap.”

  “No, I suspect you weren’t. But having you people involved paid dividends for Haas-Bioroid.”

  I looked at her.

  “Or maybe it was simply a point of pride. Director Haas sent out a message to anyone who might have ever thought about kidnapping a Haas-Bioroid employee. Or anyone in an ancillary business. True?”

  I thought about the bodies we’d left in that building that day. “True,” I agreed.

  “So, my question to you is, do you want the job as my chief of security?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Simon’s reply seemed to give Mara pause. She stared at me for a moment, then nodded and picked up her helmet. “Don’t take too long, Captain Blake. I feel as though I can trust you now. I don’t know how long that feeling will last.” She turned and walked into the airlock.

  Chapter Ten

  Are you sure that’s really where you want to go?” Brad 2FE5BU looked genuinely concerned as he stared at me in the gathering gloom of the Martian night.

  Phobos and Deimos were both visible in the star-filled sky, and hoppers occasionally gleamed overhead as well. Back to the east along the mag-lev line, a cargo ship carved a bright yellow-white line toward space.

  Standing to one side of the train and the line of cargo handlers that shifted supplies and equipment to the mini-docklands outside the main dome of Bradbury colony, I surveyed the long, low buildings built into the side of the canyon that ringed the hopper pads. A few specially outfitted hoppers sat on the pads, but more of the spaces were empty than occupied. The brightly lit neon signs along the shops and businesses made that emptiness even more pronounced.

  Bioroids and modded clones worked the service lines on the hoppers. The majority of the aircraft were packet runners, couriers who transported special equipment for the terraforming operations at the edges of the Martian frontier or food to the skeletal human overseers that ran those processes. Two of them were marked with medical insignia, designating them as emergency med-flight hoppers.

  Several businesses surrounded the hopper pads: casinos, whorehouses, supply warehouses, all-terrain vehicle licensors, small cantinas, and sensie houses for the flesh and blood workers employed on-site, as well as bars and drug dens. Out in the frontier, laws weren’t quite the same as they were in the megapolis, and they weren’t strictly enforced either. Vice became a marketable product and customers showed up to partake of their choice.

  I was familiar with that from my time in the NAPD on Earth and on the Moon. As long as what the general population considered to be the dregs of society slowly killed themselves off—or quickly murdered others like them—no one truly cared.

  “There’s a lot more red color in the local environment, Drake,” Shelly said, “but we’ve been here before. You know how things work out here.”

  I silently agreed, but focused on Brad. “I am sure.”

  His programming wouldn’t allow him to let go of the matter without a more robust debate. “This is a dangerous place. You need to know that.”

  “I will be fine.”

  “People get killed here.”

  “I know.”

  “Bioroids get scrapped and sold for parts.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  He gave a very convincing sigh of exasperation. “What can you possibly do here?”

  “Scout potential market resources.”

  “The only thing growing in this place are several strands of mushrooms and herbs used to narcotize imbibers.”

  “I hav
e a portfolio of pharmaceutical corporations that look for such things.” That was true. The portfolio was part of my cover. During our time together, Shelly and I had run into people that had done that very job. They had walked a thin line between legal and criminal activities, procuring samples from both groups.

  “Fine.” Brad didn’t seem happy about the situation. “If you get into trouble, if I can be of any service—though I guarantee that will be limited and I will not risk my neck because you are not human, you can find me there.” He pointed at the Lorilei Casino. He also gave me his PAD comm so I could get in touch.

  The holo advertising the casino’s existence was tacky and garish. At least, that was what Shelly thought of it and demonstrated no qualms about advancing her feelings. Above the two-story building, a bountiful woman rolled dice with one hand and held a drink in the other.

  Even Brad didn’t look too excited by his future place of employment. He said goodbye, then trudged rather than walked across the red earth packed hard from bioroid and clone feet and the boots of humans and ATV treads. The constant heat given off by the minihoppers taking off and landing helped fuse the landscape into a semi-gloss state that cracked where it was stepped on and looked like a glaze in areas that hadn’t been broken.

  I turned my own steps toward a secondhand electronics shop that I had seen listed in the newsrags often enough to know was probably a dealer in black market goods and few enough times that I trusted they were good at what they did.

  Bloo Moose $alvage and S&%@ was a three-story affair that jutted out from the cliff wall in uneven tiers that didn’t look connected. It was like someone had hammered the floors in at different times at different heights. I assumed that originally three businesses had existed in that space but had succumbed to losses or perhaps to Bloo Moose’s successes.

  I walked toward the shop as a minihopper took off from the pad. The airlock door was sealed when I arrived at Bloo Moose. I thumbed the vidscreen next to the door and waited.

  After a minute and seventeen seconds, a middle-aged man’s face filled the pixilated screen. The image didn’t inspire a lot of confidence about the goods that could be found inside because the man looked too green to be flesh and blood.

  “Maybe it’s a play on green Martians,” Shelly suggested.

  I didn’t think so. I believed the tech was faulty.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  I gave him my current ID.

  “Hold your e-visa up to the reader where I can scan it.”

  I did as requested, then waited some more. I trusted Rachel Beckman’s e-docs forger to backstop the identity enough to get it passed a paranoid shopkeeper.

  “Checks out.” The man sounded disappointed. “What do you want?”

  “Some replacement hardware. Maybe a few odds and ends.”

  “Like what?”

  “A PAD upgrade for starters.”

  “You cleared for that?”

  I slotted the credstick Rachel had sent and never took my eyes from the monitor. I only let him see part of the amount, enough to get him interested in opening negotiations if he was what I believe him to be. “Am I?”

  “We can talk. What kind of odds and ends?”

  “I will be happy to talk with you about those when I am inside.”

  The man hesitated only a moment longer, then buzzed me into the airlock. “Come inside. Talk is free. Anything else is going to cost you.”

  I stepped into the airlock and waited for it to cycle me into the building.

  * * *

  The Bloo Moose was more neatly organized than I had believed it would be. Plascrete shelves filled the central space and covered the walls. I was intrigued by the collection of things on hand, knowing that many of them had to possess interesting histories as to how they managed to get to Mars and then to linger on the secondhand shop’s shelves.

  There were several games and game consoles, old merchandise that split the difference between relic and junk. A collection of jazz albums on original wax commanded a premium position among all the goods. There were a lot of holo projectors and aud systems. At the back of the shop, a collection of weapons ranging from lasers to slug-throwers to stunsticks hung on the wall behind an iron bar cage.

  The shopkeeper stood behind a counter at the back of the large room. He was of medium height, of indeterminate origins due to his black hair and swarthy skin, and his two front teeth sported a centimeter gap. From his body language I knew he had some kind of weapon back there with him.

  A clone built from some kind of Congo primate DNA leaned against the back wall a few feet away. Short dark fur covered his arms and chest exposed in the deep vee of his shirt. His face looked wide and broad as a baseball catcher’s mitt, and it was the color of a Concord grape. He wore a cutdown tangler rifle under one arm and a slug-thrower on his hip. I knew he’d been constructed for intimidation, and I thought he would have served well in that capacity if I had been human.

  “Don’t mind Gordon,” the shopkeeper said. “As long as you don’t bother me, he won’t bother you.”

  “Of course.”

  “You may call me Jitish.” His voice modulation shifted just enough that I knew immediately he was lying about his name, but he was good at that lie. I kept the fluctuation as a baseline against further business I would be doing with him. “What kind of hardware are you looking at replacing?”

  “My PAD.”

  “What model are you currently carrying?”

  I held out my palm and juiced the specifics of the PAD I’d had installed on the Moon. During the voyage over on Khloe, I’d used my PAD to connect with Floyd so he could fill me in on the Jonas Salter investigation. We had set up a virtual meetbox to converse. As Khloe had left Earth behind, though, the eventual lag time had dropped into our conversations, and we hadn’t wanted to risk discovery anyway.

  “I can definitely do better than this, but it’s going to be expensive.”

  “We can negotiate.”

  Jitish grinned as if I were mentally challenged. “I got stuff you want. I don’t see much room for negotiation.”

  “You are the first shop I have visited. You can close a deal, or you can be a baseline that I can improve on. That is your choice.”

  The grin disappeared as fast as a magician’s assistant. “I’ve got a Gibson 23 MNEM.”

  “A Gibson is fine.” Those PADs were near the top of the market. “I want to do better than a 23.”

  “Do you know what you can do with a 23?”

  “Yes.” While working with the NAPD, I had been equipped with a Sterling 101 ENGI. I doubted that I was going to find that here.

  Jitish was quiet for a moment, long enough for Gordon to shift his stance and start to come over. The shopkeeper held up a hand and Gordon returned to his repose.

  “I’ve got a Gibson 68 with a ZOOMUP expansion that lets you work on the Net faster.”

  That would do nicely, and the ZOOMUP could also double as a filter mask if someone had the right utilities. I could code those myself in a few days.

  “How much?” I asked.

  Jitish named a price, then we settled in to haggle. As it turned out, he’d recently come into possession of the Gibson PAD from someone who hadn’t known what she had her hands on. I gathered the pronoun from when he had lapsed twice. There were two problems with the Gibson 68: someone was probably looking for it, so he didn’t just want to tell anyone about it, and it was too valuable for him to sell to a semi-legitimate customer.

  I got more of my price than Jitish did, though you would have thought I had hit him in the face with scalding water by the time the final amount had been decided. Payment for the Gibson severely impacted the credstick Rachel had sent for me, but I knew the investment was worth it.

  “He’s still probably making a small fortune for the PAD.” Shelly wasn’t happy about the situation. She didn’t like the shopkeeper. I knew she wouldn’t have. “Whoever dumped it in his lap probably didn’t get much for it.”
>
  I silently agreed.

  “You’re wanting an install, right?” Pretending to be casual, Jitish studied me.

  “No. Just wrap the PAD up and I will take it with me.”

  While in transit, I had downloaded the necessary vids to manage my own upgrade. Normally Haas-Bioroid units weren’t allowed to do anything like that. Even licensors and owners weren’t permitted to change out hardware or software that wasn’t installed by Haas-Bioroid. That voided all support on part of Haas-Bioroid and could result in lawsuits.

  Also, tampering with the Haas-Bioroid safety measures was almost impossible for a human due to the involved nature of the replacement/installation. The installments took hours and were tedious. A bioroid could do it, but they were programmed not to.

  Miranda had removed my programming so that I could work on myself. I was already a fugitive, so I couldn’t be any more voided by Haas-Bioroid.

  Jitish boxed the PAD with recycled bubble wrap and pushed the package across to me. “You said you were in the market for other items.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I want a Synap. And a stunstick.”

  A grin flitted across Jitish’s swarthy face and his eyes sparkled. “I gotta say, you’re the most interesting bioroid that’s ever entered my place of business.”

  I felt certain that was true.

  “What kind of trouble are you in?” Jitish opened the weapons cage and took down a Synap that was gathering dust in one corner.

  “I am not worried about the trouble I am in.” That was mostly true because I had and could continue to elude my pursuers. “These things are for the trouble I expect to have.”

  Jitish placed the Synap on the counter. “You walk into trouble with this, you’re going to hardly notice the difference. Unless you are in the military or are a licensed mercenary, you will be taken into custody by the NAPD or by the Martian army. But if you’re determined to break the law…” He cocked a suggestive eyebrow. “I take it you can’t carry a slug-thrower.”