A long time ago he had decided that there were two ways he could do this cleanly.
One way was to step out of an air lock without an environmental suit.
The other was an adequately grounded electrocution.
The plastic on the panel cracked and his left hand came in contact with the cool surface of the glowing light beneath. A little more pressure and the frosted chemical illumination would crumble and his hand would be touching the live contacts, ending it all.
He wondered what his mother had thought before Perdition had been reduced to gravel.
Dom chanced to look at the mirror in front of him. The expression he saw on his own face made him jerk back. His foot slipped on the wet tile beneath him and he fell backward. He caught himself on the toilet before his head slammed into anything. As if it would damage him.
He sat, unmoving, wondering what had happened.
Above him, he heard the drain slurp itself empty.
He slowly got to his feet and looked in the mirror. He touched the surface, to reassure himself that it was, indeed, a mirror. The face beneath it was familiar, impassive, his own. There was no sign of the agonized mask he had seen a few moments ago.
Could he really wear an expression that held so much pain when he felt nothing himself?
Dom grabbed a towel and silently returned to his bed.
* * * *
PART TWO
Fellow Travelers
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
—John Bradshaw
(1602-1659)
* * * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
Secret Agenda
‘Anyone who believes in free speech has never tried to make a living as a writer.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
‘All revolutionaries are criminals meeting in secret.”
—Yoweri Adyebo
(b. 2303)
It had been a busy three days for Dom.
The first and most massive undertaking had been laundering the money he had received from Reynolds Insurance. No names had ever been attached to the account, but the nature of the policy—insuring GA&A—meant that someone might eventually trace the money to him. Dom had spent a whole thirty-two-hour Bakunin day on the hotel’s comm, wrangling financial deals ranging from commodities trading to currency speculation.
He came out of that day with a profit and an untraceable portfolio.
The second day he’d spent checking on names Tetsami had given him—the potential team members. There were a number of freelance security corporations in Godwin offering services to the two thousand corporations that formed the knotted heart of the city. Most of them would profile anyone for a price. It was simple for Dom to order up dossiers on the first two people Tetsami suggested contacting.
Ivor Jorgenson and Johann Levy.
He also called up a report on Tetsami herself.
Within a day of his order, Argus Datasearch supplied him with three thick packets of information. All of them he’d downloaded into his onboard computer to peruse at his leisure.
According to Argus’ data, Tetsami’s parents had come to Bakunin over two standard decades ago, from Dakota. That was interesting. Dakota was one of the Seven Worlds, and that entire arm of the Confederacy was populated by the descendants of Terran genetic engineering. Most of the people of the Seven Worlds were as radically nonhuman as one of the squid-delphine natives of Paralia. The natives of Dakota, however, were descended from gene-engineered humans. Unfortunately, all the data indicated was origin—not what made the Tetsamis different.
Tetsami’s parents had gone to work for Holographic DataComm, a broadcast network that no longer existed. The reason HDC no longer existed was a dirty little corporate war over broadcast airspace. A war that fried every one of HDC’s on-line hardwire console jockeys when the competition lobbed an electromagnetic pulse at the corporate HQ. HDC’s computers were EMP hardened— unfortunately, the console jocks weren’t.
Scratch Tetsami’s parents.
Seven years later, Tetsami went into their line of work. Strictly freelance, though. She could’ve made a lot more by latching on to some corporation. She’d been hacking the comm net for eight years standard.
There was another interesting thing in her file.
No wonder she trusts Jorgenson.
Ivor Jorgenson had come to Bakunin from Styx within three years of Tetsami’s parents. He had worked transport for HDC until the shit hit the fan. The file had little personal data, but Dom was adept at reading between the lines. The parallel addresses listed for both Tetsami and Jorgenson over a seven-year stretch was enough. Jorgenson must’ve been a friend of the Tetsamis’ and had taken care of the kid after the balloon went up.
Another thing Dom noted was the fact that Jorgenson and Tetsami diverged when Tetsami took up her parents’ profession. From the record, she was only thirteen at the time.
The other data on Jorgenson showed that, indeed, he’d make a good driver for the job. Spotless record in nearly twenty years standard. Freelancer since HDC. Most importantly, no connection to the Confederacy in any way, shape, or form.
However, for some reason that man made him uneasy.
Dom supposed it was the reminder about Styx.
The third file was Johann Levy.
The data here was sparse, but Levy seemed to be what Tetsami claimed he’d be, a wired-in part of Godwin’s seamy underside. The data said that Levy had been involved in the uprising against the theocracy on his home planet of Paschal. That seemed to give him a good reputation in this part of Godwin.
The uprising on Paschal had happened after Dom left the TEC, but he had heard about it. A collection of teachers, lawyers, and students demonstrating against the more extreme excesses of the Paschal government.
When the Paschal Elders called in the TEC, the revolution found out exactly what extreme was. As far as Dom knew, the mass grave didn’t even have a marker.
Dom had heard rumors that Paschal was where his brother got his commission, and a promotion to a desk job.
More important, though, the ex-lawyer Levy had made a reputation for himself as a safecracker.
As they waited outside Levy’s bookstore, Dom wondered if he had enough data on Levy to trust him.
Answer: he didn’t have enough data on anyone.
The bookstore they waited outside felt ironic to Dom. Just the fact that Bolshevik Books sold books, expensive, paperbound tomes of a generally political nature, gave Dom a feeling the place marched about half a cycle out of phase with the rest of the universe. Truly ironic was the fact that the place had a distinctly anticapitalist slant, and they were going to ask the owner to help resurrect a corporate enterprise.
Dom sat next to Tetsami in the front seat of a used Royt groundcar. They were both similarly clad in leather-covered monocast armor, and they both now wore personal field generators. His old exec suit had found its way into a disposal shaft in the Waldgrave the second day of their stay.