Juliet inhaled the fresh air, the scent of flowers and pollen heavy on the breeze, and sat on the bench beside a babbling fountain. She watched Honey, Peter Voronov, and Lilia talking and laughing, standing together, a short walk down the path near a patch of grassy lawn inside Voronov’s Luna estate. Honey had wanted Juliet to come along, but she’d felt like sitting it out; the whole thing was awkward to her—Voronov didn’t know Lilia was Alexander’s clone, and Juliet didn’t think she could keep up the lie while he spoke to Lilia as though she were his long-lost niece.
It bothered her that Honey and the PAI running the show in Lilia’s head didn’t fully trust Peter. After all, he’d done everything he could to save the girl, hiring Juliet and getting her in touch with Lemur. Thinking it over, she frowned; when she laid it out like that, he really hadn’t done all that much. Maybe caution was the right play for the young clone. “And that’s why I’m not down there. My poker face isn’t up to it.”
“You do tend to wear your emotions on your sleeve, as they say.” Juliet wasn’t sure if she should be happy or chastened by Angel’s quick agreement. She decided to let it pass and continued to watch Lilia’s antics. She was acting the part of a little girl a lot more effectively in front of Peter than she had back on the ship. Juliet had hardly seen her throughout the journey from Titan, and when she had, the girl, as often as not, tended to stare into space, clearly doing something mentally. Juliet imagined it had something to do with curating or writing Voronov’s brain patterns.
“Do you think I should tell him?” she subvocalized.
“I think it would upset Honey a great deal, and there is the very real risk that Peter can’t be trusted as much as you’d like. If he knew what his brother had done, he’d have grounds to have her seized, and Alexander’s fortune transferred to himself.”
“Yeah. I guess we can wait and see. I’ll check in with Honey frequently; I think she’ll be honest with me about how things are going with the girl.” Juliet stared at Peter for a moment, watching his chiseled features bend into soft smiles and laughs. His eyes were bright as they followed Lilia’s movements, and, almost without trying, Juliet began to hear his thoughts:
What a wonderful child! She looks just like Alexander. I can’t believe she’s here, alive. I’ll need to see that woman is rewarded and this one, too. She might be a bit annoying, but Alexander liked her. I’ll keep her around, make sure she’s well compensated. Hah! What a voice she has, this little one! We’ll get her singing lessons, piano lessons, too. Lessons! She should know how to swim! We should go; time enough for that when we’re safe. Time to pay off this mercenary, and then we can disappear for a while.
Standing from where he’d been kneeling before Lilia, Peter looked Juliet’s way and approached, leaving Honey to pick up the child and watch him from a distance. Juliet blinked her eyes a few times, strangely disoriented as she came back to herself. She glanced at Honey, and her eyes met Juliet’s momentarily. She offered the very slightest of shrugs. The expression said a lot: “Thanks for not ruining things,” “Sorry I put you up to this,” “I promise we’ll talk soon,” “Trust me,” “I owe you.” Juliet nodded to her, trying to convey just as many things with her little gesture.
“Lucky! I can’t believe you pulled it off! Lilia says you were a true heroine!” His accent was still thick, but his voice was a good deal brighter and more cheerful than when they’d met at the Mirage. It felt like a million years ago.
“More like I lived up to my moniker yet again. I’ll take the compliment, anyway. She’s an . . . interesting child.” Juliet stood up and looked Voronov in the eye. “You ready to tell me what Levkin wanted with her?”
“It’s complicated and not something I can share. I’m sorry about that, but there’s still far too much at stake.” As he spoke, Juliet nodded, confirming, at least to herself, that he was full of shit—he didn’t know what Levkin had wanted with the girl. “In any case, she’s confirmed that her PAI captured footage that will implicate Levkin in the murder of my brother. Your part of our arrangement has been fulfilled, and if you’ll upload the contract we both signed, I’ll arrange for the payment of your fee and bonus.”
“Do you need any time? The contract will draw eyes toward Lilia.”
“No. Now that we have access to Alexander’s funds, and with her evidence, we’ll have all the protection we need.” He held out his hand, and Juliet took it in hers. Her joints clicked and scraped as they shook, and he looked down at the scarred-up appendage. “You should be able to afford some repairs now, no?”
“Definitely. Thanks, Voronov. Tell Honey I’ll be in touch, will you?” Juliet looked over his shoulder and saw Honey leaning forward, hands on her knees, watching the girl as she babbled about some flowers on the other side of the lawn. Was she really happy playing pretend with that . . . she almost thought of the girl as a thing again and chastised herself. If Honey believed Lilia was something . . . more, then she should be understanding—what would anyone think of the way she felt about Angel?
“Of course, of course. I’d invite you for dinner, but we have to move to a more secure location, and I’d rather no one knew the exact address.”
“No worries. Just don’t cut Honey’s comms, or I’ll have to come find her.” Juliet met his eyes, unblinking, letting him know there was no humor in her words.
“Understood. Thank you again, Lucky.” With that, he turned and sauntered back toward the lawn. Juliet watched him, his loose, exquisitely expensive slacks and shirt rippling softly in the breeze. For someone who’d been “nearly out of funds,” he’d still managed to keep himself clothed and housed pretty damn comfortably.
She turned and started down the path to the estate’s gate and muttered, “Maybe it is best that they don’t trust him completely.”
“I concur,” Angel said, and Juliet smiled; she’d definitely take Honey’s decision to stay with Lilia a lot harder if she didn’t have Angel.
“If she wasn’t going to leave her to go home to help with her little cousins, she sure isn’t going to leave her to go adventuring with me, right?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good comparison . . .” Angel started to say.
“Yeah, I know. I’m just being bitchy. She sure seemed to take Temo’s death in stride, though. She honestly believes it was a coincidence. I think Levkin or . . . do you think Voronov might have done it? To keep her with him? I mean, so Temo wouldn’t bug her about coming home?”
“You mean Alexander?”
“Yeah.” Juliet made the last turn, exiting the garden, and saw the gate before her. She decided there wasn’t anything she could do about Honey or the mystery of Temo’s death, and she didn’t feel like torturing herself over it anymore. “Did you submit the contract to the SOA?”
“Yes; it should clear their filters in the next few minutes, and then Peter Voronov will be able to access and pay the completion fee.”
“Let’s hope he gives me a good review,” Juliet spoke aloud, and when the guard at the gate stared at her, she winked, striding past him toward the red and black Crater Cab Co. sedan waiting for her at the curb. “You got the address for the hangar Bennet rented?” While Luna City was almost a hundred percent traversed via mass transit, this dome, where most of the rich people lived, had streets, cars, and cabs. More than that, Juliet had learned that “highway” systems, essentially domed roads, ran between many of the domes. They were used by cabs like hers, freight trucks, buses, and, of course, by rich people who wanted to ride in luxury vehicles.
“Yes. I already forwarded it to the cab. Are you sure you don’t want to get an apartment while you’re here?”
“Why? I’m going to want to keep lifting with Bennet, and I think it’ll be fun to work on the gunship during my downtime. I mean, with simulated pilot lessons, Dr. Ming sessions, and reading that box of paperbacks that Aya got me, I’ll be busy enough. Why waste time traveling between domes to stay in some corpo tower when I have a perfectly good bunk inside the gunship?”
“I might make an argument for the benefits of socialization . . .”
“Nah, nah—I’ve got about a month before I have to book passage to Jupiter and meet Alice’s friend. I intend to make the most of that time.” Juliet stretched out her legs in the spacious passenger compartment of the cab. “Now, let’s go over what I’m going to ask Ladia in my appointment tomorrow morning.” As she spoke, she remembered an earlier conversation and a to-do item she’d forgotten. “Shit! Did you order the dream-rig?”
“Yes.” Angel’s electronic voice somehow sighed more believably than any flesh and blood person Juliet had known. “Of course I did. It will be delivered to the hangar before the end of the week.”
“You got the one with the g-force simulator, right?”
“Yes, it cost an additional seven thousand Sol-bits.”
“Probably worth it, don’t you think?”
“As we discussed, it will prepare you much more realistically for what you’ll face in the Jovian System.”
“Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Going out there to work with Alice’s friend? Did you find anything out about the guy?”
“Nicholas Grant, currently working for Greater Gas Corporation, has a long list of previous employers. His first public record of fighter piloting comes from Venus fourteen years ago. He was a member of the Sedona Station Militia and fought against the Viejas Pirates that terrorized the inner system in the early nineties. After winning commendations for valor and . . .”
“Hold up, Angel. You can write me a summary and file it, okay? What time’s my appointment with Ladia?”
“0700—she’s set aside the entire day to work with you.”
“Right, so back to my earlier question. What are we going to ask her about? I mean further enhancements.”
“First, you’ll need to pay her for your arm surgery; the prosthetic is paid in full, but the surgery will be nearly twenty thousand bits. You want to inquire about shunts and ports for your lungs and vascular system to work with active-system acceleration couches. You want to see about exchanging your medical nanite organ for a higher-tier one, specifically one that has the capability of banking essential nutrients, minerals, and other cellular building blocks. Additionally, we agreed you would ask if she could direct us to a fabricator for the active cooling system I designed for your blood.”
“To keep me from stroking out if the lattice goes into overdrive.”
“Correct, though ‘stroking out’ isn’t exactly the right way to phrase what happens as the lattice gets hot.”
“I know, I know. It’s just going to cool the blood going into my head?” Juliet tried to picture it, imagining the worst ice cream headache in the history of the human race.
“Yes, I designed it in three parts—two small, flexible sleeves that will sit beneath your skin, around your carotid and vertebral arteries. Flexible tubing will connect those to a refrigeration unit about the size of an apple nestled in your torso.”
“And I won’t notice a mechanical, apple-sized object in my chest?”
“Not in your chest; we’ll house it among your intestines. I shouldn’t have said apple; that’s the correct mass but not the right shape. It’s more like a cucumber, and only parts of it are hard; most of it is quite flexible. You won’t notice it.”
“Just make sure it doesn’t freeze my brain unless the lattice is really heating things up.”
“That’s the plan.” Angel’s tone wasn’t flippant, exactly, but she might sound a little annoyed. Was she tired of Juliet asking her to go over things they’d already covered days ago while burning toward Luna?
“You know, I remember most of this stuff; it just helps me relax to know I’m not forgetting something, right?”
“Yes. It’s not a problem. I was thinking, Juliet, you should ask for a new data port. I could use more coprocessors and memory. The only problem is that I’ll have to sever most of the nerve connections I’ve made to you.”
“What?” Juliet nearly shouted, alarm in her voice. Hadn’t Angel said that part of who she was came from the connections she’d made to Juliet, not just emotionally, but physically?
“Only temporarily, Juliet! I’ll sever the synth-nerves outside the data port and reconnect when the new port is installed. I won’t lie to you—this will be a difficult procedure for me and not a little dangerous. It gives me a good idea of what fear feels like. That said, I think you should purchase a high-end data port so we don’t have to do it again for a long while.”
“Do you really need it? Can’t we upgrade my current port?”
“Only the memory and then only a small amount compared to some of the A-tier data ports.”
“Okay, we’ll talk to the doc about it. Anything else?”
“There are, quite literally, millions of cybernetic enhancements and cosmetics you could purchase, but those are the most critical. Oh, one more thing!” Angel’s enthusiasm brought a chuckle out of Juliet as she watched Luna’s gray expanse outside the narrow dome covering the roadway. She looked at the map on her AUI and saw they were about halfway from the Alder Dale Dome to the B2 Port Dome, the location of the hangar they’d rented for the gunship.
“One more thing, huh?”
“Yes! Your arm will be capable of speeds similar to those exhibited by Jensen and that fellow who nearly killed you on Titan. Make sure Dr. Ladia runs a high-capacity nerve backbone from the prosthetic to your new data port. That way, you’ll be able to control the arm at high speeds when I boost your mental acuity.”
“So, when you speed up my brain, and I go to move my arm, it won’t feel like I’m stuck in molasses?”
“That’s right.” The cab slowed as another “highway” tube merged traffic into theirs, and it widened.
“Does it harm me to think or move that fast? Remember that guy we did our first job with?”
“Don?”
“Yeah. Remember how much he twitched all the time?”
“That was more an effect of poor-quality synth-nerves and electrical boosts to synthetic muscle fibers. When I help your brain to move at faster-than-usual speeds, I’m far more careful. More than that, you have a very high neural adaptiveness threshold. So long as the boosts are for short intervals, and you give your brain time to recover, you won’t suffer any adverse effects.”
“And the arm? It’s designed for it?”
“Exactly. The arm you are purchasing is very high-end tech.”
“Cool.” Juliet leaned her head against the glass of the cab’s window, watching the strange, desolate expanse of the moon’s surface roll by.
“Look out the other window, Juliet. You can see the Luna City Dome.” Juliet followed Angel’s advice and looked to her left. Sure enough, past the other traffic lane, through the clear surface of the narrow dome, she saw the fairytale, silver and glass towers of Luna City rising toward the semi-opaque dome that covered the city. It had to be twenty kilometers or more away, but the city was huge, and it filled most of the horizon in that direction. Juliet might have had trouble seeing the dome’s material from the inside, but it was hard to miss on the outside. Angel had to dim her optics as she stared at the top of it, where it reflected the sun’s light.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed softly. It was true; she had to admit, from a distance, Luna City was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. “I guess I haven’t seen enough of it up close to say the beauty doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Maybe we should go out a few times while I’m here—see some of the nicer clubs or restaurants, visit a museum or two. I don’t know.”
“I think that would be good for you.”
“For us,” Juliet corrected. “You’re probably not looking forward to being cooped up in a hangar for a month, either.”
“No,” Angel said, a chuckle in her voice, “I suppose I’m not. Yes, I think that would be nice. Let’s start with the Luna City Zoo.”
They rode in silence for a while, the cab having to slow down several times because of congestion. Juliet daydreamed about sword fighting, ship battles, and weird scenes where she tried to imagine reunions with her sister, Ghoul, and even Honey after her friend snapped out of it and left Lilia to her family’s care. The scenes were weird because she tried to imagine showing them around the gunship or the Kowashi, and the fantasies began to unwind, falling apart. She tried to think of realistic alternatives and was picturing herself visiting Phoenix and staying in a nice hotel to greet her sister and ease her into her strange new life when Angel interrupted her thoughts.
“Your SOA card has been updated, and we received payment from Voronov. It seems Alice and Shiro marked your job for them complete. Also, you’ve received quite a bump in your rating!”
“Really? All right, all right, let’s see it.”
“Before I share your status compilation, I’d like you to know I’m no longer ranking your wealth against my database. I find the numbers to be wildly inconsistent when compared to common databases for top earners, corporate pay scales, etcetera. I’m going to leave that section blank while I try to devise a better way to make comparisons for you.”
“Oh, geez. What will I do without you telling me my wealth ranking?” Juliet snorted. “Actually, it’s kind of suspicious that you’re changing things now that I have a pretty fat bank account.” She held up her hand, forestalling more explanations from Angel. “Just show me the tables, please.”
Juliet Corina Bianchi
Physical, Mental, and Social Status Compilation:
Comparative Ranking Percentile (higher is better - previous value in parenthesis):
Net worth and assets:
Sol-bits: 713,029
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Neural & cellular adaptiveness:
.96342 (scale of 0 - 1)
.91
Synaptic Responsiveness:
.19 (lower is better)
.31
Musculoskeletal ranking:
–
.22 (68.09)
Cardiovascular ranking:
–
.88 (73.91)
Cybernetic and Bionic Augmentation:
Model Name and Number:
Overall Rating of the Augmentation (Grades are F, E, D, C, B, A, S, S+):
PAI
WBD Project Angel, Alpha 3.433
S+
Psionic Lattice
Grave Technologies, GIPEL
S
Data Port
Jannik Systems, XR-55
C
Data Jack
Bio Network Solutions, 8840
C
Medical Nanite Suite
Horizon Medical Nanite Battery, 2105 model, ver. 74.19
C
Retinal Cybernetic Implant
Hayashi, Crystal Optics 3.2c - Customized Retinas, EMP Hardened
B-
Auditory Cybernetic Implant
Cork Systems, Lyric Model 4 - EMP Hardened
C+
Cybernetic Prosthetic Right Arm, bottom half
VitalityTek, Hercules - Damaged
F
Programmable Synthetic Fingerprints
Ross Inc., Biomesh 9
C
Programmable Synthetic Hair
Tulip Co., Rainbow Strands, Version 12a
C
DNA Spoofing Package - Saliva
WBD - Custom Model
C
No other augmentation detected.
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