* * * *
Tetsami ended the day in a little modular apartment near the core of the commune. A place she supposed was pretty much like the place where they’d filed Captain Shane. Zanzibar had programmed Tetsami’s security clearance into the base computer looking as though she were undergoing an amputation without an anesthetic.
When Tetsami was left alone in her room, the first thing she did was make sure the door was unlocked.
“I’m not having second thoughts—more like tenth or twentieth.”
She sighed and sat in a recliner facing the built-in holo. There were controls on the armrest, and she switched the holo through the local airspace without really paying much attention to it. She stopped on a scene where two overlapping channels were warring on the air, playing the game “Who’s got more wattage?”
She stared through the rainbow-blurred imagery and thought of the job she was supposed to do.
Objectively, she was doing well. The people they needed were falling into place. Even if she didn’t like Zanzibar, Zanzibar had been chief of security at GA&A before the Confederacy happened to the place. Was there anyone she’d prefer to have in on the break-in?
Shane, a defecting member of the team that took GA&A over had to be high on the list.
And even if she didn’t like AIs—no, that was too kind. They were creepy, perverted, and scared the bejesus out of her. But, even if she didn’t like Mosasa’s little machine, Random Walk, a Race-built Al machine could run rings around any human-built computer. That’s why they were one of the few things that were illegal throughout the Confederacy. Capital crime to run one.
That, and genetically engineering a sentient being, Tetsami thought.
“Admit it, you don’t like Mosasa’s toy because it reminds you—”
Reminds me that I’m not really human.
Random Walk’s circuitry was a relic of a few centuries past, just as Tetsami’s genes were a relic. The birth of the Tetsami clan occurred back when every nation was still jammed onto one planet, when the scientists were still klutzing around with the stuff of life.
When the Wars of Unification came, the UN command decided that engineering human-level intelligences wasn’t a good idea. Every citizen whose genes had been fiddled with got shot down a convenient wormhole like the rest of the undesirables.
In the end the genetic undesirables got Tau Ceti, a system lucky enough to have two inhabitable planets. The Tetsamis got the frozen ball of Dakota, along with all the other engineered humans. All the other genetic products got Haven and, eventually, five planets beyond.
The Seven Worlds was now one of the five arms of the Confederacy.
Tetsami’s parents had escaped Dakota—a rather unpleasant place with one of the more despotic regimes in the Confederacy—and came here, Bakunin. The pair of them managed to parley their genetic and technical heritage into high-paying high-class jobs as executive combat hackers.
It was a prestige job that, in the end, got them killed.
Tetsami was barely old enough to understand what was going on when Ivor Jorgenson smuggled her out of the wreckage. Eventually, despite Ivor’s objections, Tetsami followed in her parents’ footsteps—up to a point.
Tetsami distrusted all corporations and had long ago promised herself that she would be a permanent freelancer. She’d never sell her soul to a corporation, even though she might make ten times what she lived on in the streets.
And, eventually, she would abandon this shithole of a planet.
What burned her was the fact that to do that, she would have to disguise her heritage. If someone discovered her roots, they were likely to look at her the way she looked at Random Walk. This despite the fact that by the time the Tetsamis’ bloodline had reached her generation, her genes were as human as the next woman’s. A thorough gene scan on her probably wouldn’t even show anything unusual.
The only gift from her parents was her exceptional facility with a bio-interface.
Even though she could prove her humanity with a gene scan, she’d still be treated like a freak.
Maybe that was Zanzibar’s problem.
Her train of thought was derailed by an annoying buzz. The buzz repeated a few times before she realized that it was the door. She opened her eyes, realizing that she’d nodded off long enough for the gladiatorial contest to win the wattage war over the demolition derby.
She went to the door and opened it. Standing outside, in the hall, was Dominic Magnus. He looked—odd.
“Can I come in?”
Tetsami shrugged and stood aside, not quite certain whether or not she was irritated at her “partner.”
Dom walked in and spared a glance at the holo, where two hypertrophic steroid junkies were dueling with a pair of chain saws. He shook his head slightly and settled on the edge of her bed.
“I wouldn’t blame you for being angry at me,” he said.
Tetsami settled into the chair and killed the holo during a particularly gruesome parry. “Dom, I don’t know if I’m pissed or not yet.”
Dom sighed. Tetsami decided why he looked so strange. He looked tired. The look of fatigue was radically out of place on his face. It was as if a marble statue had suddenly sneezed. “I’m sorry for snapping at you back there. The news caught me a lit—”
Tetsami suddenly realized that they were on two very different wavelengths. “Whoa there, hold it a minute.”
“What?”
“You think that you being upset is why I should be pissed?”
Dom looked confused.
“Okay, I didn’t say that quite right.” She took a breath and started again. “Dom, if I’m angry at you, it’s not because you flipped a gear back there.”
Something she said actually made him wince.
“But I wanna know, CEO-man, if I’m your partner in this, or if I’m just another frigging employee.”
“Partner,” Dom said quietly, as if he didn’t quite understand the word.
She was beginning to realize that Dom hadn’t been thinking along these lines at all. “Damn straight. You might be financing this op, but I’m planning this thing. We pulled each other out of the shit. We’d be dead without each other—and this heist would never’ve been born.”
“I know.”
“I thought we were in this together.”
“We are.”
“Oh, we are?” Tetsami stood up and kicked the holo display. “Then why the fuck didn’t you let on about this place?”
Dom inhaled. “I was keeping it secret. They’re after GA&A employees and I didn’t want to lead—”
“That kept you from telling me? You’ve pulled Zanzibar and Shane on to the team without even talking to me!”
“They fill the requirements, and Shane knows—”
“I don’t give a shit what Shane knows! For all you know she could be the ever-loving colonel’s mistress. And that ain’t the point.”
Dom sat there, quietly, for a long time. After a while he said, “I suppose it isn’t.”
“So, am I your partner? Or am I just another employee you get to order around?”
“And if I say you’re an employee?”
Oh, you fucking bastard. “I’ll get that box cracked if you give me a kangaroo to work with. But I’m gone once I get paid. Way gone.”
“What if you’re my partner?”