The overloaded circuit started working again, and Dom could stand up. Tetsami was firing again. The paladin on the balcony was still blinded, but Dom’s enhanced ears picked up the sound of more armor approaching.
“Reinforcements are coming.”
Tetsami turned to him and noticed his limp. “Can you walk?”
“The question is, can I run?”
Dom started for the main doors. Tetsami came up behind him and pulled his right arm around her shoulders. She ran, pulling him along. It was a good thing she did. Dom thought his right ankle might be sprained, if not broken.
It seemed to take much too long to get to the doors, but they made it before more paladins showed.
They made it down the front steps of the cathedral and Dom was gratified not to see the war zone of East Godwin—
But he had no idea what part of the city he was in. He had spent way too much time sequestered in his suite at the GA&A complex.
He let Tetsami lead. She seemed to know where they were.
They’d gone barely thirty meters down the road when she turned him down a brick street that’d be too narrow for half the traffic in Godwin. They passed two skinny doorways and she pushed him into a third. This doorway was a kiosk that someone had constructed a building around. No door, only stairs down. In the darkness, Dom automatically adjusted his photoreceptors until he saw a monochrome light-enhanced image of a frozen escalator descending five stories below street level.
“Where are we going?”
“The Bakunin underground—” Tetsami snorted. When they hit a landing, she continued. “Five years ago someone tried to run a passenger commuter train from Godwin to Proudhon. For some reason it went bankrupt about three months before they finished construction. Some bank owns it now.”
They left a short corridor and ended up on an abandoned train platform. Tetsami appeared unable to see in the darkness, but she moved as if she knew the place. She felt along a wall and found a control box.
About half the panels set in the wall started glowing.
Dom killed the gain on his eyes and found himself facing the tracks for a high-speed maglev tube. A chromed sign was set in the wall. It read, “Wilson Station.” He still had no idea what part of town they were in.
“The Church’s goons can search for us, but if we go about a hundred meters down the tube, they haven’t stolen all the magnets yet—”
Dom knew what she meant. He knew the sensors the paladins would be carrying, and sitting under one of those magnets, and under a dozen meters of concrete and earth, would be effective defense against anything but an eyeball search.
“Okay. Kill that light. I can see without it, and it won’t help down the tube anyway.”
She killed it and reached out for him. He grabbed her hand and started limping down the tube. “How’d you know about this place?”
“There are stations all over Godwin.”
True to her prediction, after a short walk, the huge magnets still lined the rails in both floor and ceiling, sunk into the concrete. Even though no power ran through them, they still had enough residual magnetism to slightly blur his vision.
They sat down, next to each other.
“So,” she asked, “after we get out of this, what are we going to do?”
What were they going to do?
What could they do?
Dom called up his personal database and started taking a mental inventory of all the assets he had off the GA&A complex.
* * * *
CHAPTER NINE
Insurance Fraud
“People prefer deals where only they benefit to one of mutual benefit between themselves and others.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Nobody has money who ought to have it.”
—Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881)
Tetsami sat across from Dom. They were in a waiting room inside the Reynolds Insurance Building, and she wasn’t quite sure why she was here. They should’ve been holed up under a rock somewhere. She didn’t expect to see her 50 K, in the IBASC or anywhere else, no matter what Dom said. It was too easy to move money around when you didn’t have any.
Despite that, instinct told her to stick with this guy— and her instincts had taken her five years past the point anyone in her line of work had a right to go.
Dom was a survivor. Not only that, there was something buried under the impassive façade. There was power there, nearly hidden. She had the feeling that if they split up, she’d be the one someone canceled.
Still, she wished he had the sense to hole up somewhere. It was barely eight hours since they’d skipped out on the Church. Here they were, though, sitting in a corp lobby, and he flipped channels on the complimentary holo as though nothing had happened.
He barely showed any emotion at all. The only real change she’d seen on his face was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not the most reassuring of facial expressions.
The door to the inner offices slid aside, and Tetsami had to restrain a frantic impulse to draw her laser and shoot the secretary. She was too wired. She needed sleep. A luxury that Dom seemed to be able to go without.
The secretary was a chiseled blond whose body looked as though it had cost a small fortune in cosmetic augmentation. He talked to Dom, ignoring Tetsami completely. “Mr. Brodie will see you now.”
Dom turned off the holo. Tetsami had a brief glimpse of stock reports before the picture faded. Dom stood up and ran his hands down the front of his suit. It didn’t help. With what his clothes had been through, he looked more like a refugee from a commune war than a corp type.
Dom walked up to the door and turned around when she didn’t follow. “Come on. This concerns you as well.”
She shrugged and got up. The secretary showed no sign of caring one way or the other. He led them down a plush corridor done up in imported woods, crystal, and off-planet artwork—mostly aquatic sculpture by the Paralians. Incredibly expensive stuff to transport, all webworks of threadlike coral that had to be kept in pressurized cylinders.
What in hell was she doing here? Tetsami got nervous this close to money, at least when it wasn’t hers.
And, how much would a policy against the failure of a corp enterprise be worth? Her paranoia was kicking in again. Her palms were sweaty. It was too close to a payoff.
She felt things could go ballistic very easily.
The blond secretary stopped in front of a large door and motioned them through. The door was manual, a slightly irritating conceit. Dom led the way, and Tetsami had to put a hand out to stop the door from swinging back and hitting her. The secretary stayed in the hall.
Brodie’s office did its best to scream money. None of the wood was native to Bakunin. It was mostly the purple close-grained hardwood from the Kanaka rain forests. The wood gave the room a slight tang of bay leaves and rancid mint.
Brodie was planted behind a U-shaped desk topped with red-and-green-veined marble. The light in the room was provided by the most ostentatious display that Tetsami had ever seen. In the wall behind the desk was a window about ten by four meters. Behind it was a huge Paralian coral sculpture, and darting back and forth in its midst were tiny aquatic life-forms that had to be from Paralia themselves. What the upkeep on that must cost....