For the first time in days, Toni had to move under his own power. He did not find it easy. Or comfortable. Were it not for Ariel’s .5 gravity, he would have had to do it on all fours. He tottered up a side trail leading to a cargo field on the shoulder of Mt. Beanstalk. Above him towered the peak, with the razor-straight Beanstalk disappearing into the deep blue stratosphere.
Toni did not see the spark falling from orbit, but he heard the blast as it hit. Shock waves rattled the foliage, showering him with twigs. Scratch one sanitary unit. Alarms rang across the cargo field. Cargo handlers in mint-striped coveralls raced over, peering into the vegetation, though there was nothing left to see. Whoever offered him FOUR FREE HOURS had not even waited two minutes before blowing his dingy cubicle to bits. They must have assumed he was a moron. Hopefully, they now assumed he was a dead moron.
As guards came running up to take their look, Toni walked casually the other way. Women in shorn hair and green-striped coveralls grinned at him. Smiles were all they had to offer—their only way to look attractive.
Disheveled and out of shape, breathing hard from the run upslope, Toni did not fancy himself overly handsome. But these women had gone months, maybe years, without a man. The mere fact that he was walking free put him way ahead of the guys they were used to seeing. Swiftly, he searched out a matronly female trustee in loading and packaging, offering his life-support pack for cargo-class passage to Elysium. Toni had a bulging credit file, but dared not touch it—not so long as he planned to stay dead.
She readily agreed. What he wanted was only mildly illegal—and the support pack was crammed with drugs and paraphernalia. Stuff that could keep you entertained for weeks in lockup. Giggling mint-striped prisoners loaded him into a cushioned bio-container. The trustee, easily twice Toni’s age, with a long sentence behind her, leaned in and kissed him, pressing her breasts against him beneath the coveralls. Whispering “Sweet dreams,” she closed the lid. The box sealed.
Curled in the dark, Toni reviewed the news channels. (“The armed merchant cruiser M. Licinius Crassus regrets the accidental launching of an Osiris orbit-to-surface missile. Luckily, the missile impacted in a sparsely populated area, causing no significant structural damage expect to a public toilet.”) But the top story remained the hunting death of Transgalactic tycoon Alexander Gracchus. (“A member of his party is still listed as missing.”) Much bigger news than some blown-up outhouse.
Presently, he felt himself being loaded aboard a ballistic cargo carrier. Toni could still smell the warm odor of the woman who had tucked him in, reminding him how shitty some people’s “real” lives were. What had she done to deserve a lonely, single-sex realtime existence, locked away when she was not working. Not much, he bet. Whoever murdered Alexander Gracchus was bound to be doing way better.
And murder it was. Whatever slim chance had existed that this was all some ghastly hunting mishap had been punctured by Pandora turning up alive in Verona. Alive and on the run. Having known, or seen, too much. Clearly, she was supposed to have died along with Gracchus and his Chimp bodyguards. But she must have seen it coming, and set up her escape ahead of time—using PROTEUS to get Toni’s attention. Damn it, why had she picked him? Didn’t she know he was an addict?
Answer was, she did know. It must be one of the reasons why she’d picked him. It made him easy to manipulate. Desperate people have few scruples about other folks’ weaknesses. She had tapped into his private 3V fantasy even before coming down the Beanstalk—catching his attention at Carnival, making sure he’d come after her.
And whoever killed Gracchus had traced her contact through PROTEUS. No surprise there. Gracchus had been murdered through PROTEUS—using the Wyvyrn’s control collar. Huge winged megafauna made nifty murder weapons. Pandora and her would-be killers had been conducting a silent duel in cyberspace, while Gracchus stalked his Wyvyrn, and the Noble Dog panted after Silvia Visconti.
Which was why Toni had to stay off the net—playing dead. Not using PROTEUS until he absolutely had to. Surprise was his best weapon. Whoever did all this was not infallible. They’d missed Pandora. And they’d missed him. If only by an angstrom.
His thoughts were still spinning in these circles when the ballistic transport’s engines roared to life. G-forces slammed him into the cubicle cushioning. Like many stretches of realtime, the flight fast became a hideous bore. Interminable minutes of banging off padded walls. Inflight entertainment consisted of Toni tossing his cookies in free-fall.
He emerged battered and dirty on a cargo pad overlooked by the Elysium rimwall. A far better place for his purposes than the usual entry ports atop the rim—less used, and watched over solely by security cams and a trusting crew of maintenance Chimps. Best of all, the cargo pad possessed a clean, vacant public toilet. Adept at bathing from a sink, while doing his laundry in the hand drier, Toni used the time to check on the search, tapping into Ali, Doc, and Harpo’s control channel. The search pattern had tightened. Large sections of the crater floor had been gone over, or ruled out. The remaining area continued to shrink.
It took time to crack the code on the Wyvyrn’s control collar without alerting PROTEUS. But the code ended up being a simple binary transposition—any more encryption would have drawn unwanted attention to Dragon Hunt. The Wyvyrn also turned out to be in the prime search area.
Great. The more the merrier. Luckily the monster lay immobilized, paralyzed by its collar, pinned down now that it was no longer needed. Toni meant to do something about that—but not right now.
First, he had to find Pandora. Not a pleasing prospect. It meant going in person into Elysium—since he couldn’t use his cyborg body without alerting PROTEUS. But he had no choice. Someone who had murdered the richest man in this part of the spiral arm would gladly invest a couple of megacredits in making Toni go away. Pandora was his only protection. Come up with her alive, and he had half a chance. Without her, he would just be some homeless 3V addict with a weird story and an outrageous price on his head. An acutely terminal condition.
And he had to do it alone. The planetary authorities might be tough on drug addicts and tax cheats, but they were hardly up to interstellar conspiracies. Pair-a-Dice Security could care less what happened onplanet. And the Freeport Police were completely corrupt. Their idea of lending a hand would be to hold Toni for the highest bidder.
But the absolute worst of it was having to do it in realtime. In Verona, this would be no problem. Antonio the Noble Dog never failed at anything. But he was not Antonio. And this was not 3V. This was the real world—where everything could (and did) go wrong. Here, he could fail. Or die. God, how he hated realtime! In Verona, none of this would even be happening.
Being the only human at the cargo pad, he had the run of the place. To take him into the crater, Toni selected a skycycle, a hydrogen-filled para-sail with a solar-assisted pedal propeller. He could not chance using his own credit, but he easily convinced the simple-minded rent-a-stand to charge the flight to a regular client’s account.
Toni peddled the skycycle straight off the cargo pad into an updraft along the windward side of the rimwall. Here hot surface air and prevailing winds blowing out of Nightside formed a great standing wave, rolling over Elysium rim. This was the easiest entrance to Elysium, and the air above the rim swarmed with fliers, orthopters, and sailplanes. He felt comfortably lost in the crowd. Beneath him, a green canopy of kilometer-tall trees filled the bottom of the crater, climbing up almost to the rim.