Part IV. 'Dates'
Yuri woke up and stretched lazily. It had been such a good dream. It was too bad that Simon couldn't stay the night at the hotel, but needed to return to his ship... She had hinted that she could go with him, but either he didn't get it or he'd declined her offer. Yuri hoped the former was the case.
Rolling over, she stood up with a sigh and walked to the bathroom. The day was going to be a hard one for her. Maybe Jamie would be more promising than Simon was late night...
Kei was already up and soon met her as they descended for breakfast. Yuri was slightly annoyed when the receptionist hinted that breakfast up in the room would cost more. It wasn't their money they was spending and, eventually, someone would require an expense report... Better not to look for trouble.
They were now dressed in civilian clothing, their uniforms well hidden beneath them.
Yuri waited at the exit. At half past one, there was a report of a shuttle landing, and soon she noticed Jamie running toward her.
They met and only then did she notice he was fully a head taller than she. Jamie swept her up and spun her around before giving her a peck on the cheek and releasing her.
Yuri was smiling, despite the fact that, for a moment, she considered slugging him. He was overacting and in a peculiar way. And he looked awfully tidy for someone who had just come straight off a shuttle.
Kei was bored, always a dangerous situation. She had checked two bars so far, and in each one, she'd had to reject offers to 'have a time you'll never forget'. This was the third one now, but the scenario was unfolding about the same way.
Kei sampled an offered drink. Not bad: she'd certainly had worse. Besides, this was a freebie. A group of six men and women was throwing a party, and they were spending money left and right. Kei took a slow pull on her drink through a straw and eavesdropped on the conversations.
There were many. About the taxes and government. About the police and the smugglers. Then she heard one that got her attention.
"... we met 'em at Sigma II. Appeared outta nowhere, bang! Lucky I was in the last stage of hyperjump, so I just yanked the throttle and was outta there. I'll bet that had them starin' with their jaws hangin'…"
"Good work, German. But Rich wasn't so lucky..."
"Yeah..."
Kei glanced over at the speaker, a small man with a fresh scar on the left side of his face. She couldn't have said, observing from such a distance,. what might have caused it. But she thought he might bear watching.
A few minutes later, German stood up and, with slightly swaying steps, left the bar. Kei dropped a few credits on the bar and followed. Things looked like they might start getting interesting.
Yuri maintained a fixed smile at Jamie, while silently cursing to herself. What century were these people living in? Jamie was playing the same game as Simon last night: a cautious approach, a few promises and veiled hints, but nothing more. All right, fine -- if not pleasure, then at least she'd get some information out of him.
"You're always clearing ships at Tyre?"
Jamie smiled, showing a row of snow-white teeth. "Me and three hundred ninety-nine others."
"That many?" Yuri asked, not quite believing the figure.
"Five shifts, eighty people on each."
Yuri let the subject drift away, but something didn't jibe. That many personnel might be needed at a huge resupply and resort station, like the ones around Earth or other core UG worlds, but hardly at a simple docking station for space-only ships, which Tyre certainly was.
"Sometimes I wish there were more, especially when traffic gets heavy..."
"Isn't it boring to sit around and wait, seeing the same faces day after day?"
"It is... but you don't mind so much after a while. There, you are one on one with the Universe... the silence... the stars... Have you ever noticed how they look back at us? I often hope that, someday, we will meet another sentient race… and then we won't be alone anymore..."
A philosopher, Yuri groaned inwardly. I'm having a date with a freaking philosopher. If Kei ever finds out...*
But she remained patiently in her seat, nursing a low-alcohol drink and carefully questioning Jamie. At least he was good for free information...
Kei bailed out of the car, followed by a hail of curses. She turned and shouted back at the driver, who was also leaping from the limo.
"I said I'd be back with the money!" Kei growled.
"Like hell! No way are you going anywhere!"
The driver hurtled around the car and tried to snag Kei's hand. He regretted it immediately as she twisted his hand and slammed him against the car doors. She was about to declare a truce, when the driver's boot caught her under the knee, making her right leg numb in an instant. Her hold weakened and the man twisted free.
"You'll pay for this, all right," he promised, wiping blood from his cut lip. "I'll take the fare out of your hide!"
Kei quickly executed a standard breathing exercise to calm her nerves. Who'd have known the cabbie would turn out to be a retired bodyguard?
"Listen, I'll get the money..." she said in a final attempt to end this without broken bones.
The driver threw a punch at her face.
"Oh-kay, I tried..."
Kei let her academy training take over from there.
She entered the hotel reception area, clutching a kerchief to her nose. That guy had been a good fighter, she had to admit. If it hadn't been for his age...
"Excuse me, miss, aren't you feeling well?"
"Keys. Room 208."
The receptionist stared at Kei and, without another word, handed her the set of keys.
"Lousy, outdated piece of…," Kei fumed as she stalked off toward the offending staircase.
As the girl disappeared around the bend of the stairs, the receptionist got up enough courage to leave his post to peer outside. What he saw made him feel glad he hadn't pressed her with any questions. The poor cab driver had managed to get to his feet, but was having some problems with walking around his car.
When she heard the door latch retract, Yuri raised her head from the pillows.
"Kei?" she asked.
"Yea..." came a rather nasal reply.
"Are you all right, Kei?" Yuri became concerned, stood up, and pulled a light robe around her shoulders as she entered the common room.
"No..." Kei sniffed, testing the integrity of her nose. "I am not alright!"
"What happened?"
"Enough of a beating for three cases... Ughhh..." Kei sulked. "That cab driver just capped off the day!"
"Did you run into some muggers?" Yuri asked, while filling an icepack from the fridge.
"Stupid barfight," Kei responded, falling into a chair after satisfying herself that her nose was still intact.
"Here." Yuri returned, handing her the pack. "So tell me what happened."
"Well, while you were having your little tete-a-tete with Jamie, I was walking my legs off making the rounds of the bars around the spaceport. And getting invitations from all kinds of guys." That was stretching the truth a bit: there had only been three invitations, all from former UG fleet personnel -- but Yuri didn't need to know that. "Things were going O.K., till one lech decided to go from words to deeds. I showed him the error of his ways, but he had a few of his pals along, and they decided I'd wronged their buddy. Next thing I knew, there was a total ruckus..." Kei paused to check her nose again.
"Then what?"
"After I took care of the third bozo, the cops showed up. Crashed through the doors like stormtroopers and rounded up everybody. They hauled the wounded off to some hospital and the rest of us to the precinct house."
"Kei in her element..." Yuri murmured.
"Huh, it gets worse. They nabbed me too: one creep accused me of starting the fight. They took me through the full routine..."
Yuri glared at her partner.
"What's 'the whole routine'?" she asked, suddenly serious.
"Fingerprints, retina scans, drug tests, blood samples..."
"Yaaah… Kei, you idiot!" Yuri screamed. "Do you realize what you've done?"
"C'mon, we're new here. They're not gonna find any..." Kei's voice trailed off abruptly. "Oh shit! You mean…?"
Yuri had already dashed back to her room, frantically setting up her desktop and tying into the planetary information network.
"This planet's part of UG now, so they might query the central databases! What do you imagine they'll say when they learn our real identities? 'Top WWWA agents, operating undercover on recently independent world, start bar brawl!' The media will have a field day!"
"D'you really think they'll ask about me? It was just a minor donnybrook..." Kei appeared in the doorway, still holding the icebag to her nose.
"Maybe not, but who can say? I'm not taking the chance. Kei, why didn't you call me as soon as you were released?"
"In the middle of that riot, some bastard cleaned out my purse..."
Yuri couldn't help laughing, despite the seriousness of the situation.
"Come on, come on..." Yuri was tapping her fingers on the desktop, waiting for communications to become established. "What police precinct was it?"
"You think I asked?" Kei muttered. "I can only remember the address. And I only know that because one of the cops called a cab for me. Luckily, the sergeant let 'im."
"Okay, I'm logging in."
Yuri closed her eyes, shutting off any outside interference. She had tested Trofar's defenses and found them tough; now she'd need to take them on in a frontal assault.
Virtual reality. A term that describes something without saying anything. Each system has its own form, its own laws. There is much in common among them, but the differences can only be found out the hard way.
Yuri slowly traveled around traps set up for people doing pretty much what she was attempting. Fortunately, her hacking software had gotten through customs, so she was protected now. There were brain-fryers here: not many, but still… Others were "smart-traps" for computerized hackers, who relied more on their electronic augmentations than their own minds.
Her first reaction was wonderment. The planetary infosphere here was so weak, much as it would have been elsewhere about a hundred years ago. Certainly far too limited for a planet with five million citizens and one which boasted of being a central planet for the entire sector.
Yuri passed a transport control system and noticed a hole that had been discovered and patched in all UG systems two years ago. She stopped to apply a similar patch here from her own resources; otherwise, it stood as an invitation to some later hacker to cause mischief. She made a mental note to herself to warn the WWWA econ corps about the inferior status of Trofar's computer networks. Now that it was joining UG, the sharks would arrive by the hundreds: better to be prepared than to suffer the consequences of that.
The police databanks was better protected, but not well enough to stop her from breaking in. Her desktop hacked the passwords without even slowing down. The guardian routine showed some intelligence, but Yuri managed to replace its checklist with one she supplied herself as a top-level user: it simply stepped aside. Next were request tracers. It was a simple matter for her to toss them fake addresses, like so many bones to dogs. The whole business was so easy that she nearly ignored something very sophisticated that wasn't fooled with her standard tricks.
Yuri stopped again. This one was an algorithm she'd never encountered. Very well. With a feeling of admiration, she dodged around it and substituted the warnings into the delivery subroutines. If it hadn't been for the weakness of the other security systems, this one might have given her some problems. She copied its code to the desktop memory for later study and continued on her way.
One thing could be said for the Trofarian police: they worked fast. All the data concerning the barfight was already entered, along with material on all apprehended participants. Kei included.
Yuri quickly read through the list and made a copy of that to her desktop as well. After experiencing the politeness of Jamie and Simon, the rudeness of the assault on Kei seemed atypical. She understood soon enough; three of those listed as "perpetrators" were an engineer and two guards from a UG transport. What was one to think...
Next to their names and that of 'Kate Sinclair' was a note: "requested check of identity data from UG databanks". Yuri cursed the speed of communications.
The trails of the data queries were hard to follow. Yuri spotted a few replies from local databases -- nothing from them, of course. Then there was a response from UG. The closest sector central planet had a similar day/night cycle to Trofar's and their reply was already in. Yuri copied that too, as it contained data about two of the three assailants. She held up a reply about 'Kate Sinclair', in order to have time to make up a phony later, if she could manage to block the arrival of the actual replies.
Then Yuri withdrew from the police banks and hacked into the communication center. The planetary FTL communications block was UG standard issue: she quickly added a few more orders to it. Now, in addition to its usual functions, it would divert to her all outgoing messages with the keywords 'Kei', 'Yuri', 'Kate Sinclair', 'Ilona Magiani', 'Lovely Angels', and (ahem) 'Dirty Pair'. In the case of that last one, she requested additional information processing to find out the sender's address and the message route. All incoming messages with the same keys would be "delayed" until she could review them before allowing them to proceed on their way.
With all that set up, Yuri returned to the police databank and started assembling a false report on 'Kate Sinclair', citizen of UG, notified of exceeding posted speed limits a few times and of not paying her taxes once. She looked over the data a final time before feeding it to the databank.
So... she was done... Yuri checked once more for subtle traps and, finding none, relaxed as she logged out.
Yuri blinked, momentarily blinded by the room lights. "Got carried away," she breathed, pressing her hands against her temples and slowly pulling out the interface cable from the socket behind her left ear, hidden by her hair.
"Yuri?"
Kei was leaning over her, a strange mix of concern and sorrow on her face.
"It's O.K. now. I've set up fake replies and a trap for real ones, in case anyone bothers to send them. We are safe for a time."
"Yuri, I'm really sorry..."
The vidphone chose that moment to chime melodically.
"I got it."
Kei pressed a button. On the screen appeared the face of the hotel receptionist.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, but the police are down here in the lobby, together with a badly beaten man. He declares that you need pay him..." the receptionist said timorously.
"Kei?" Yuri stared at her partner.
Kei groaned in despair.
Yuri woke up and stretched lazily. It had been such a good dream. It was too bad that Simon couldn't stay the night at the hotel, but needed to return to his ship... She had hinted that she could go with him, but either he didn't get it or he'd declined her offer. Yuri hoped the former was the case.
Rolling over, she stood up with a sigh and walked to the bathroom. The day was going to be a hard one for her. Maybe Jamie would be more promising than Simon was late night...
Kei was already up and soon met her as they descended for breakfast. Yuri was slightly annoyed when the receptionist hinted that breakfast up in the room would cost more. It wasn't their money they was spending and, eventually, someone would require an expense report... Better not to look for trouble.
They were now dressed in civilian clothing, their uniforms well hidden beneath them.
Yuri waited at the exit. At half past one, there was a report of a shuttle landing, and soon she noticed Jamie running toward her.
They met and only then did she notice he was fully a head taller than she. Jamie swept her up and spun her around before giving her a peck on the cheek and releasing her.
Yuri was smiling, despite the fact that, for a moment, she considered slugging him. He was overacting and in a peculiar way. And he looked awfully tidy for someone who had just come straight off a shuttle.
Kei was bored, always a dangerous situation. She had checked two bars so far, and in each one, she'd had to reject offers to 'have a time you'll never forget'. This was the third one now, but the scenario was unfolding about the same way.
Kei sampled an offered drink. Not bad: she'd certainly had worse. Besides, this was a freebie. A group of six men and women was throwing a party, and they were spending money left and right. Kei took a slow pull on her drink through a straw and eavesdropped on the conversations.
There were many. About the taxes and government. About the police and the smugglers. Then she heard one that got her attention.
"... we met 'em at Sigma II. Appeared outta nowhere, bang! Lucky I was in the last stage of hyperjump, so I just yanked the throttle and was outta there. I'll bet that had them starin' with their jaws hangin'…"
"Good work, German. But Rich wasn't so lucky..."
"Yeah..."
Kei glanced over at the speaker, a small man with a fresh scar on the left side of his face. She couldn't have said, observing from such a distance,. what might have caused it. But she thought he might bear watching.
A few minutes later, German stood up and, with slightly swaying steps, left the bar. Kei dropped a few credits on the bar and followed. Things looked like they might start getting interesting.
Yuri maintained a fixed smile at Jamie, while silently cursing to herself. What century were these people living in? Jamie was playing the same game as Simon last night: a cautious approach, a few promises and veiled hints, but nothing more. All right, fine -- if not pleasure, then at least she'd get some information out of him.
"You're always clearing ships at Tyre?"
Jamie smiled, showing a row of snow-white teeth. "Me and three hundred ninety-nine others."
"That many?" Yuri asked, not quite believing the figure.
"Five shifts, eighty people on each."
Yuri let the subject drift away, but something didn't jibe. That many personnel might be needed at a huge resupply and resort station, like the ones around Earth or other core UG worlds, but hardly at a simple docking station for space-only ships, which Tyre certainly was.
"Sometimes I wish there were more, especially when traffic gets heavy..."
"Isn't it boring to sit around and wait, seeing the same faces day after day?"
"It is... but you don't mind so much after a while. There, you are one on one with the Universe... the silence... the stars... Have you ever noticed how they look back at us? I often hope that, someday, we will meet another sentient race… and then we won't be alone anymore..."
A philosopher, Yuri groaned inwardly. I'm having a date with a freaking philosopher. If Kei ever finds out...*
But she remained patiently in her seat, nursing a low-alcohol drink and carefully questioning Jamie. At least he was good for free information...
Kei bailed out of the car, followed by a hail of curses. She turned and shouted back at the driver, who was also leaping from the limo.
"I said I'd be back with the money!" Kei growled.
"Like hell! No way are you going anywhere!"
The driver hurtled around the car and tried to snag Kei's hand. He regretted it immediately as she twisted his hand and slammed him against the car doors. She was about to declare a truce, when the driver's boot caught her under the knee, making her right leg numb in an instant. Her hold weakened and the man twisted free.
"You'll pay for this, all right," he promised, wiping blood from his cut lip. "I'll take the fare out of your hide!"
Kei quickly executed a standard breathing exercise to calm her nerves. Who'd have known the cabbie would turn out to be a retired bodyguard?
"Listen, I'll get the money..." she said in a final attempt to end this without broken bones.
The driver threw a punch at her face.
"Oh-kay, I tried..."
Kei let her academy training take over from there.
She entered the hotel reception area, clutching a kerchief to her nose. That guy had been a good fighter, she had to admit. If it hadn't been for his age...
"Excuse me, miss, aren't you feeling well?"
"Keys. Room 208."
The receptionist stared at Kei and, without another word, handed her the set of keys.
"Lousy, outdated piece of…," Kei fumed as she stalked off toward the offending staircase.
As the girl disappeared around the bend of the stairs, the receptionist got up enough courage to leave his post to peer outside. What he saw made him feel glad he hadn't pressed her with any questions. The poor cab driver had managed to get to his feet, but was having some problems with walking around his car.
When she heard the door latch retract, Yuri raised her head from the pillows.
"Kei?" she asked.
"Yea..." came a rather nasal reply.
"Are you all right, Kei?" Yuri became concerned, stood up, and pulled a light robe around her shoulders as she entered the common room.
"No..." Kei sniffed, testing the integrity of her nose. "I am not alright!"
"What happened?"
"Enough of a beating for three cases... Ughhh..." Kei sulked. "That cab driver just capped off the day!"
"Did you run into some muggers?" Yuri asked, while filling an icepack from the fridge.
"Stupid barfight," Kei responded, falling into a chair after satisfying herself that her nose was still intact.
"Here." Yuri returned, handing her the pack. "So tell me what happened."
"Well, while you were having your little tete-a-tete with Jamie, I was walking my legs off making the rounds of the bars around the spaceport. And getting invitations from all kinds of guys." That was stretching the truth a bit: there had only been three invitations, all from former UG fleet personnel -- but Yuri didn't need to know that. "Things were going O.K., till one lech decided to go from words to deeds. I showed him the error of his ways, but he had a few of his pals along, and they decided I'd wronged their buddy. Next thing I knew, there was a total ruckus..." Kei paused to check her nose again.
"Then what?"
"After I took care of the third bozo, the cops showed up. Crashed through the doors like stormtroopers and rounded up everybody. They hauled the wounded off to some hospital and the rest of us to the precinct house."
"Kei in her element..." Yuri murmured.
"Huh, it gets worse. They nabbed me too: one creep accused me of starting the fight. They took me through the full routine..."
Yuri glared at her partner.
"What's 'the whole routine'?" she asked, suddenly serious.
"Fingerprints, retina scans, drug tests, blood samples..."
"Yaaah… Kei, you idiot!" Yuri screamed. "Do you realize what you've done?"
"C'mon, we're new here. They're not gonna find any..." Kei's voice trailed off abruptly. "Oh shit! You mean…?"
Yuri had already dashed back to her room, frantically setting up her desktop and tying into the planetary information network.
"This planet's part of UG now, so they might query the central databases! What do you imagine they'll say when they learn our real identities? 'Top WWWA agents, operating undercover on recently independent world, start bar brawl!' The media will have a field day!"
"D'you really think they'll ask about me? It was just a minor donnybrook..." Kei appeared in the doorway, still holding the icebag to her nose.
"Maybe not, but who can say? I'm not taking the chance. Kei, why didn't you call me as soon as you were released?"
"In the middle of that riot, some bastard cleaned out my purse..."
Yuri couldn't help laughing, despite the seriousness of the situation.
"Come on, come on..." Yuri was tapping her fingers on the desktop, waiting for communications to become established. "What police precinct was it?"
"You think I asked?" Kei muttered. "I can only remember the address. And I only know that because one of the cops called a cab for me. Luckily, the sergeant let 'im."
"Okay, I'm logging in."
Yuri closed her eyes, shutting off any outside interference. She had tested Trofar's defenses and found them tough; now she'd need to take them on in a frontal assault.
Virtual reality. A term that describes something without saying anything. Each system has its own form, its own laws. There is much in common among them, but the differences can only be found out the hard way.
Yuri slowly traveled around traps set up for people doing pretty much what she was attempting. Fortunately, her hacking software had gotten through customs, so she was protected now. There were brain-fryers here: not many, but still… Others were "smart-traps" for computerized hackers, who relied more on their electronic augmentations than their own minds.
Her first reaction was wonderment. The planetary infosphere here was so weak, much as it would have been elsewhere about a hundred years ago. Certainly far too limited for a planet with five million citizens and one which boasted of being a central planet for the entire sector.
Yuri passed a transport control system and noticed a hole that had been discovered and patched in all UG systems two years ago. She stopped to apply a similar patch here from her own resources; otherwise, it stood as an invitation to some later hacker to cause mischief. She made a mental note to herself to warn the WWWA econ corps about the inferior status of Trofar's computer networks. Now that it was joining UG, the sharks would arrive by the hundreds: better to be prepared than to suffer the consequences of that.
The police databanks was better protected, but not well enough to stop her from breaking in. Her desktop hacked the passwords without even slowing down. The guardian routine showed some intelligence, but Yuri managed to replace its checklist with one she supplied herself as a top-level user: it simply stepped aside. Next were request tracers. It was a simple matter for her to toss them fake addresses, like so many bones to dogs. The whole business was so easy that she nearly ignored something very sophisticated that wasn't fooled with her standard tricks.
Yuri stopped again. This one was an algorithm she'd never encountered. Very well. With a feeling of admiration, she dodged around it and substituted the warnings into the delivery subroutines. If it hadn't been for the weakness of the other security systems, this one might have given her some problems. She copied its code to the desktop memory for later study and continued on her way.
One thing could be said for the Trofarian police: they worked fast. All the data concerning the barfight was already entered, along with material on all apprehended participants. Kei included.
Yuri quickly read through the list and made a copy of that to her desktop as well. After experiencing the politeness of Jamie and Simon, the rudeness of the assault on Kei seemed atypical. She understood soon enough; three of those listed as "perpetrators" were an engineer and two guards from a UG transport. What was one to think...
Next to their names and that of 'Kate Sinclair' was a note: "requested check of identity data from UG databanks". Yuri cursed the speed of communications.
The trails of the data queries were hard to follow. Yuri spotted a few replies from local databases -- nothing from them, of course. Then there was a response from UG. The closest sector central planet had a similar day/night cycle to Trofar's and their reply was already in. Yuri copied that too, as it contained data about two of the three assailants. She held up a reply about 'Kate Sinclair', in order to have time to make up a phony later, if she could manage to block the arrival of the actual replies.
Then Yuri withdrew from the police banks and hacked into the communication center. The planetary FTL communications block was UG standard issue: she quickly added a few more orders to it. Now, in addition to its usual functions, it would divert to her all outgoing messages with the keywords 'Kei', 'Yuri', 'Kate Sinclair', 'Ilona Magiani', 'Lovely Angels', and (ahem) 'Dirty Pair'. In the case of that last one, she requested additional information processing to find out the sender's address and the message route. All incoming messages with the same keys would be "delayed" until she could review them before allowing them to proceed on their way.
With all that set up, Yuri returned to the police databank and started assembling a false report on 'Kate Sinclair', citizen of UG, notified of exceeding posted speed limits a few times and of not paying her taxes once. She looked over the data a final time before feeding it to the databank.
So... she was done... Yuri checked once more for subtle traps and, finding none, relaxed as she logged out.
Yuri blinked, momentarily blinded by the room lights. "Got carried away," she breathed, pressing her hands against her temples and slowly pulling out the interface cable from the socket behind her left ear, hidden by her hair.
"Yuri?"
Kei was leaning over her, a strange mix of concern and sorrow on her face.
"It's O.K. now. I've set up fake replies and a trap for real ones, in case anyone bothers to send them. We are safe for a time."
"Yuri, I'm really sorry..."
The vidphone chose that moment to chime melodically.
"I got it."
Kei pressed a button. On the screen appeared the face of the hotel receptionist.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, but the police are down here in the lobby, together with a badly beaten man. He declares that you need pay him..." the receptionist said timorously.
"Kei?" Yuri stared at her partner.
Kei groaned in despair.