An Eighty Percent Solution Part 5

To the recorded sounds of a Martian sandstorm he did two loads of laundry, in typical male fashion-throwing everything in until he had a full load, totally ignoring the color and fabric. Cin rummaged in clothes Tony piled and perched on top of the warm dryer between attacks. Tony didn't notice. He turned on one of the ever-popular daytime dramas, but not a single scene registered.

"So many people really don't know what they'll live and die for, Cin," Tony said sometime around ten p.m., a serious look on his face. His mind held the clarity of the air after a summer thunderstorm. "I certainly didn't know what I stood for until just today. I stand for life, else I wouldn't have even tried saving the old woman. I stand for justice, else I would've taken you, you escaped miniature rug, and flushed you down with the rest of the dinner leftovers. I may be hypocritical, but I think that's about it.

"What I don't know is what to do about it."

Tony lay down on the couch. Cin climbed up to his chest and settled down for a nap. He stroked her softly and scratched her under the chin and around the ear. The problem, as Tony lay there getting more and more resolute, was that he hadn't the foggiest clue how to accomplish any of his budding lofty ideals. Cin purred loud enough to finally drown out the solidoset.

Sonya clung precariously to the wall of the Colonization Unlimited Building, some seven hundred meters from the slums below. Luck had followed her thus far. By climbing the wall itself, using a plant extract c.u.m adhesive created in her own container garden, she managed to avoid all notice. Windows she avoided as much as blank stone, and iron was her friend. Her cloak, plus a few muttered words learned from her proctor, altered the perception of those random few who saw her. To them, she became nothing more than a window washer, or a pigeon, or maybe even a stone gargoyle-anything but a strange woman climbing the side of a building, bent on who knows what kind of mischief.

The drain on her body and her mind, in keeping up her mental guise during the three-hour climb, showed in her labored breath, aching muscles and a migraine starting just behind the right temple. Her trek wore on her much more than expected. She needed time to rest and recover. Sonya glanced through a nearby frosted window into a bathroom where dark shapes moved within. Highly unlikely there'd be continuous DNA or explosive detectors inside. She promised herself just two minutes.

Her research hadn't included whether this corp had unis.e.x bathrooms like most companies. Sonya timed the actions of a gla.s.s worker's tool with the flow of dark shapes within. When nothing moved, the tools reached behind the molding and released the pane as if she'd been doing it her entire life. A fugitive's upbringing provided one with all manner of useful skills. With exaggerated care, she pulled the window out on its slides. This made just enough room for her to slip inside, every muscle in her body poised for fight or flight.

She dropped silently to the floor in a crouch as she scanned the peach-colored room with overstuffed lounging chairs. By the mock chandeliers and an abundance of well-lighted mirrors, Sonya obviously found herself in a ladies' powder room. With no other movement or sound nearby, she relaxed a little. She pulled the window back into place using a suction cup on the inner pane. With the window set in place but not fastened, it could've been blown out by a strong gust, so as a bit of insurance, she set a tiny bit of putty in one corner.

She slipped into a stall and sat. As her body relaxed, her mind continued to work. Her target occupied this same height level so when she returned to scuttling like a spider on the outer wall, she merely needed to crawl around the corner to place her present. With that thought in mind she closed her eyes and opened her mind. She let mnemonics roll quietly off her tongue as her mind surged outward.

Near her objective she sensed four guards and one executive limousine with driver. As usual, they each carried repeating weapons, though she couldn't make out the type. Sonya rarely worried about such things. If they discovered her, four months of work on this setup would be for naught, even if she escaped. That would hurt more than anything they might do to her body or mind.

The sounds of two women entering the bathroom broke her from her mental journey. Their high heels echoed in the tiled bathroom. "Did you see Rhonda with George?"

"Yeah, she was all over him like a ground-level girl."

"As if you can't tell, that little b.i.t.c.h is sleeping with him for the promotion."

"She's sleeping with him?"

"From what I heard she's moved in with him."

"Weeble it all! If she's really sleeping with him, I guess that means I'll never get that job. I've been working for three years for that spot and now some bed dancer is going to get it! What is that, her third manager this year?"

"Fourth, not counting the two she's been seen with from Masterson Controls."

"Gads, I hope she goes over there. It'll get the s.l.u.t out from under our heels, and I can't imagine working for her. I'd probably just claw her eyes out."

"You won't attack her, but you won't like working for her either. At least she'll be gone soon. All she has to do is find a bigger boss to sleep with and she'll be out of your hair.

"Personally that wouldn't be so bad, but I don't know if I'll be able to stand another year in this position. Marvin is such a beastly manager..."

The conversation faded as the bathroom door opened and closed once more. Sonya might've listened, but something got lost in translation. The conversation went beyond her comprehension. Oh, she understood the words and the meanings, but couldn't understand how people subjected themselves to such things. She couldn't understand the lure to maintain that mockery of a lifestyle.

Her strength returned enough to finish. Before anyone else invaded her temporary sanctum, Sonya worked her way back out the window, replacing it as skillfully as she'd opened it. It wouldn't do for anyone to even suspect that she'd paused there.

A breeze whistled in from the east, insistently plucking at her clothes as she eased around the corner of the building. While always careful, she slowed even further because of the wind. She pulled flat against the surface to prevent the air getting between her and the wall, where it might increase its grip upon her.

Corporate guards were paid to be alert, and generally succeeded. Her approach needed to be exceedingly careful in order to maintain the effectiveness of her protections. She needed a painstaking hour of creep-and-stop to cover the last hundred meters. The two guards exchanged banter but took no notice of the shadow, or the sign, or the stonemasonry that barely moved along the wall.

Anticlimactically, Sonya's act of sticking the pipe bomb above the executive entrance compared to playing with clay in kindergarten. Just pressing the device into place caused no problems, entailed no additional risks. She sweated with tiny but continuous efforts as she eased her way back around the corner.

The danger pa.s.sed quickly with the corner between her and the only real threats. Her fatigue also flew as she could now move much more openly. She used her tools once again to open the window of a vacant office. Now it didn't matter if anyone caught her, as the most they'd do is kick her out of the building. Once safely inside, she mumbled a few words, rubbed a red powder across her lips, dripped yellow paint into her hair, put a pea into each cup of her bra and wrapped a length of ivy vine around her waist, cloak and all.

Unlike her cautious entrance or the long, slow sojourn around the building's perimeter, not one single person failed to note Sonya illusionary facade as she left. Men drooled and women narrowed their eyes jealously at the overly buxom blonde with full, cherry-red lips and the kind of hourgla.s.s figure men have l.u.s.ted after and women have coveted for millennia. Sonya appropriately swayed her hips and gave cold stares to the few men who dared approach her. Once out the primary exit and onto the lift-bus, she became even more untouchable.

Now, waiting was all. Sometimes that was the hardest part.

Tony dreamed of a night with Carmine, sealed inside a luxury hotel room surrounded by hot and cold running delicacies of both the flesh and palate. The two of them spent a fortune on a baccha.n.a.lia where they indulged in every way possible-women, men, and some who were in between.

"Open up under Civil Code Fourteen-eighteen, paragraph J! Metro officers identifying themselves and their right to enter."

But every time Tony got close to Carmine herself, she giggled and slipped away, leaving someone else in her place.

"If you do not open the door, we have been authorized to override the command sequence."

Tony bolted upright. He had thought the melodramatic voice an annoying, if simple, part of his dream. Intending to step down from his bed, he instead tripped getting up off the couch. Disoriented though he was, he knew the Metros couldn't be allowed to find Cin! Where was she...?

"I'm on my way! Keep your helmet on!" Tony shouted as he scrambled about, looking everywhere he could see. "I'm in the back room and getting dressed. I'll be there in a second."

The kitten didn't want to be found, so Tony hoped she'd remain that way. Sweat crept over his scalp as he opened the door. Two Metros towered over him in full black riot gear, faces fully obscured. "Out of the way," came the voice sonically enhanced with seven hertz anxiety infrasound. One of the pair slammed Tony aside with one power-a.s.sisted arm, briefly pinning him against the entryway. Even without being able to see his back, Tony could feel the bruises forming. "We have a right to search and seize chattels upon your premises."

Tony panicked to do something to deflect an all-out search for whatever they were looking for. With sudden purpose, he spun to face the fair protectors of Portland. "Your authorization?" he barked.

While the blank face-mask gave no emotion, Tony got the distinct impression he both amused and annoyed the man. Ma.s.sive ebon fingers held out a recording crystal the size of Cin's paw and dropped it to the carpet. Tony picked it up as the armored policemen went into the bedroom.

"You can't be too sure these days," Tony offered feebly. "You never know. Fake cops and all."

The solido crystal went into his player and a solido image sprang forth in the middle of the room. Carmine's image, life size, spoke to him from behind the faux wood desk he'd given her as a present on her last birthday.

"Mr. Sammis, or whatever your real name is, I had no idea you were such a deviant. I don't know how you could've deceived me for so long, but I must've been seven kinds of fool for having trusted you with any part of my life." Crashing sounds issued from the bedroom. Carmine leaned forward over the desk and shook her finger at him, like scolding a naughty schoolboy. Some part of him, despite her reaction to his news about Cin, still had hoped she would be the anchor in his life, just as she'd been with every other disaster. Instead she chose to inflict even more abuse.

"It's obvious I can have no more to do with you, so I've sent the police to retrieve my things. Don't interfere with them, for I've paid them well to make it unpleasant if you resist." The image carried a feral smile.

"Do not attempt to see me. Do not attempt to contact me. Do not attempt to contact anyone we know. If you do, I'll have the Metros return and show you real justice.

"My skin crawls to think I ever let you touch me. You must've been quite pleased to get a nice real girl like me into your clutches, you pathetic Nil. Have you no shame? But then your kind rarely does.

"May your skin burn from acid fog at ground level." The solido image gave him a universally understood and despised gesture before winking out. One of the Metros chose that moment to return to the room. Seemingly at random he picked up a lead crystal lamp and smashed it to the floor.

"What the h.e.l.l are you looking for?" demanded Tony.

"We have everything but one item-necklace, Black Hills Gold, with double grape cl.u.s.ter and differing colored leaves." Tony had worn it since his time with Carmine in college. It had been reciprocation for him giving her a friendship ring. Without a thought, he snapped its tiny chain from his neck and held it out to the cop.

"There is your f.u.c.king item. Now get the h.e.l.l out!"

"Sergeant, I've got it. Let's make jet-tracks."

"Rog-O."

Tony watched as the two walked out the door with an armload of booty, some obviously Tony's own property. They didn't even bother to close the door after they left. Tony heard a muted hiss from under the couch. Cin only now gave her opinion of their unwanted guests.

"I agree."

Sonya violated her own prohibition on technology in her home with one item, an old-fashioned FM radio. If she played with the dial just right, she picked up one hundred eighty-five stations in the metro-Portland area.

She sat at her dinner table with a ball of gray fur in her lap and listened to the seven o'clock news report. As usual, the news depressed her, but she must know if everything went according to plan before she took credit for the action. Her favorite, Plutonia, purred and kept her company while the headlines were read. The tiny, still unnamed Chihuahua sat shivering on the tabletop side by side with her Pomeranian, Maxine. Sonya smiled at it and placed a kiss on its tiny nose. She made only the fourth headline story.

"In sadder news, four bombs detonated on the Colonization Unlimited Building in downtown today. Seventy-three confirmed dead and one hundred eighty-six others injured.

"Police refuse to speculate if this bombing had anything to do with recent GAM actions. Chief Adams, is this related to the other bombings?"

"How can I tell? We haven't had any time to run tests, talk to informants, or even get their call to confirm it-"

Absently Sonya wondered if four actually went off. Were they censoring the total number, or that a corporate exec met his maker? Sonya imagined the cruel way she'd just killed seventy-three (or more) people, and the destruction wreaked by her bombs. She had reconciled herself to this course long ago. Wars like this weren't clean and neat-lawyers had claimed the cleaner kind of warfare centuries ago. Her deeds of death and destruction didn't warrant a smile, but as hard and demanding work, they did. She grinned and set Plutonia on the floor.

Sonya switched off the radio and walked out her apartment door once more. Her next task wouldn't work up any sweat.

Tony found himself awakening much later than his norm, once again on the couch. His body crawled and itched like his poor days back in college-sleeping in his clothes, no shower, stubble on his face, too much stress. He walked back into his bedroom.

His bedding was filled with gla.s.s fragments from the antique mirror which once had hung on the nearby wall. Smashed splinters of the chest of drawers lay sprawled about the floor, the jewelry box and what had been its contents spread all over the room.

"b.l.o.o.d.y Metros," muttered Tony. "I'll bet they just enjoyed the h.e.l.l out of this."

Cin padded behind him, sniffing only at the odd bit of fluff strewn about the floor. Tony trundled into the bathroom to find, placed neatly on a clear spot on the bathroom vanity, the friendship ring he'd given Carmine. The once meaningful trinket now sat just slightly pushed into a small pile of human excrement. Obviously the Metros made deliveries as well as pickups. Carmine's message didn't need a solido sign.

"It figures she'd think up something so tasteless," Tony said, using some toilet paper to brush the entire ma.s.s, ring and all, into the toilet. That part of his life disappeared with a simple flush.

He needed nearly three hours to make some semblance of order out of the chaos of his home, all the while bantering back and forth with himself and the kitten, as the mood suited him.

"I don't know why I bother. They're still going to take my home away.

"But then I guess I still need to have somewhere to stay.

"How could they be so callous?

"The solido of mother, ruined...

"Cin, don't play with the gla.s.s!

"What could they possibly have been looking for in there?"

Each broken item he swept into the garbage set the muscles in his jaw dancing to a dark tune. With everything he placed back into its proper place his fists clenched tighter.

"Radio, news."

"...dder news, four bombs detonated on the Colonization Unlimited Building in downtown today. Seventy-three confirmed dead and one hundred eighty-six others injured.

"Police refuse to speculate if this bombing had anything to do with recent GAM actions. Chief Adams, is this related to the other bombings?"

"How can I tell? We haven't had any time to run tests, talk to informants, or even get their call to confirm it."

"So you have no ideas?"

"Sure we have ideas, you moron. But we aren't stupid enough to give them out where anyone can hear-"

Action crystallized within Tony as he stalked out of his home, leaving Cin loose inside.

For the first time in a dozen months, the clouds above parted and allowed in the silvery light of the moon. This omen lightened Tony's mood slightly but didn't stop his flight. He jumped onto the first lift-bus that showed up at his condo's platform. By chance it happened to be the same one he usually took down to the Rose Quarter. Out of sheer habit he exited the bus near the Wilted Rose. But this time the scenery took on a whole new meaning.

In the past he unconsciously lorded over everyone in this slum. Now he clung just a precarious rung above the people here. A male prost.i.tute flipped his long hair back and batted his brightly painted eyes. A street performer played his antique guitar to the tune of "Stairway to Heaven" and nodded to each person pa.s.sing. Three beggars sat patiently holding signs proclaiming their inability to find work and starving families. Three hucksters tried to sell him imitation Rolex watches, guaranteed-not-to-break condoms, and bed-s.p.a.ce in a local abandoned warehouse. Two recycled food vendors competed with one another for the few credits which could be made on that end of the street just outside the zone patrolled strongly by the Metros.

The people and cla.s.s changed as he got closer to the Rose. The hookers were cleaner and prettier, the merchandise a bit more upscale-or at least better disguised knock-offs. And Jock stood as the usual intimidating doorman for the Wilted Rose.

"Howdy, Jock," Tony said, as he saw that one friendly face. A ma.s.sive alloy arm came out and barred his way into the club.

"Sir, I'm afraid I have special orders dealing with you. You are not allowed to enter. The staff has reports of you bothering Miss Carmine."

"Excuse me, Jock? How long have I been a patron here?"

"I have my orders, sir."

"Has everyone gone mad? I'm not a criminal! I'm an ordinary guy." A tiny hesitation crossed Jock's face with the barest humanity flickering to life, and Tony pounced on the opening. "Why are they doing this, Jock?"

Jock waved a few other patrons into the club, and then looked around surrept.i.tiously before lowering his voice by at least half.

"Sir, had it been anyone else, I wouldn't have given it another thought. But you've been good to me with a kind word and a smile. It didn't seem to matter to you that I was a Nil."

"Why should it?"

"It shouldn't, but stop sidetracking me. I don't know all the details, but what I see happening to you has all the earmarks of a top level megacorp hose job.

"Miss Carmine showed up at the club yesterday and talked to the boss. She pa.s.sed him a stack of bills that even I couldn't tear in half." Jock lifted a velvet rope and pa.s.sed another high cla.s.s couple into the loud venue. "About ten minutes later I got my orders to keep you out. You add it up, sir."

"Where would Carmine get that kind of money?"

"That's what I mean, sir. Someone's paying to put you down and that usually means the resources of a corp. I shouldn't say any more. I've probably said too much already."

"OK, Jock, I've got just one more question for you, please. Do you know how to get in touch with the GAM?"

"Sir?!"

"Sorry, I just thought you might know."