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  “Is there time to eat?”

  Ri, the only woman traveling to Fantasia, was asking Lee as she tabbed the front of her shirt. Lee shook his head, apparently uninterested in what she was covering up, though Pete and the others all watched, Pete momentarily distracted from his unhappy musings. She was a professional, no question, young Eurasian face, tight body, impossibly perfect curves. Probably had an MX7 habit to support. She’d do well on Fantasia, if any of the workers had eyes.

  “Shit, and I’m starving,” Yen said, licking his lips, watching Ri.

  Ri grinned at him, slipped one hand over her right breast and rubbed in a slow circle. “You got a line?” she asked, confirming Pete’s theory.

  “I’ll get one,” he answered, taking a step closer to her, but her face shut down, the smile disappearing instantly.

  “I’m good for it,” he protested, but she seemed to have stopped listening. She turned away, picked up her shoes, and sat on an open bench to slip them on. Pete studied her more closely, saw the clench of her jaw, the purplish tint to her fingernail beds as she finished dressing. She wasn’t shaking or puking, but that was coming. She was undoubtedly feeling the lack.

  Yen looked like he was thinking about pressing the issue—with his hands, maybe—but Lee spoke up, addressing all of them. Besides Pete, there were five others in the room—M-Cat, a guy named Simon, Yen, Ri, and that other one, with the fucked up eye . . . Allen, that was his name. M-Cat and Simon were Msomi’s boys, probably headed to Fantasia to cycle out a couple of the workers. Yen was a pay-to-hide, and Ri was a prostitute . . . Allen was anybody’s guess. He was a skinny guy, not much to look at, but he seemed dangerous to Pete. He had that shine to his eyes that suggested madness, or at least some kind of disconnect from common humanity . . . And he seemed smart, which in Pete’s estimation, made him extremely unsafe.

  “We’re gonna drop in a few,” Lee said. “Harness up in AcelDecel or don’t, but do it now.”

  Lee turned and walked for the corridor. The rest of them followed, Pete trying to hang back as much as possible, to keep away from Lee. Lee and Moby worked directly under Msomi; Pete had met them when he’d still been a player, before the good luck had dried up. He’d heard that at least one of them was always on board the Fantasia runs, to keep an eye on things. Moby was crazy, a joker, but if you got on his good side, he wasn’t so bad; he was definitely an asshole, but kind of a fun asshole. Lee, though . . . there were stories about Lee. About how he liked to personally feed Msomi’s enemies to the XTs that swarmed Fantasia.

  Pete’s throat went dry at the thought of Msomi’s “pets.” They were alleged to be big and black and spidery and deadly. Back in better days, Pete had once met a guy who’d spent time on Fantasia. White collar sci-type, short little guy, name of Wick; he’d had a big 7 habit and a heavytech background in chemical engineering, just the type Msomi liked to exploit. Wick hadn’t said too much about being there—no one ever did—except to say that Msomi had found the best guard dogs in the universe and that there was no way Fantasia could be taken from him . . . Unless the XTs did it.

  Just not today, okay? Pete asked, to no god in particular. Not while Tommy and me are down there.

  Tommy. God, Tommy. He owed his older brother so much, too fucking much, but he’d make it up to him. Tommy wouldn’t be sorry for bailing him out, not this time.

  If they could just make it through the next day or so, they were golden. Pete took a deep breath and followed the others. He kept his head down.

  * * *

  Deirdre Allison Weber was flying through clouds of soft feathers. She was light and free, her arms outstretched, sailing through an endless white sea that supported and embraced her.

  “Didi. Wake up, baby. Time to get that sweet ass outta bed.”

  She rolled away from the voice, started to fall back into the safe, warm place, feathers . . .

  “Didi. Wake the fuck up, please.”

  She opened one bleary eye, then closed it again. Fucking Trace on the com.

  “Fuck off,” she mumbled, then turned her head toward the far wall and repeated herself, louder, just in case he hadn’t caught it.

  Trace sounded delighted. “That’s my girl. Today’s our special day, baby. Come on, I want you with me when we meet our new friends.”

  Didi didn’t answer. Fuck.

  “You go back to sleep, babe?”

  “I’m up,” she said. She sat, automatically reaching for the drawer at her side of the bed. She placed her thumb in the print lock. Don’t think don’t—think don’t THINK—

  “Good. Moby just tapped in, he says they’ll be here in a few. Meet me at the lock in . . . ten minutes? That’ll give you time to get ready, won’t it?”

  Like you give a shit. “Not really,” she said. The drawer slid open, and she grabbed up the carved wooden box that Trace had given her, back when they’d been . . . not in love. Never that. Just more hopeful, maybe. She had been, anyway, when she’d first come to this fucking place.

  “You’ll be beautiful,” he said, his voice lowering slightly, going husky. God, she fucking hated drop days.

  She pulled a jumptab out of the box, peeled the backing, and lay back on the rumpled bed. She pressed the small, lightly abrasive circle into the fold between her thigh and groin, as close to the femoral as she could get it, holding it there until she could feel her pulse through the thin patch, until it was warm. You could patch anywhere, but she liked thinking that she was getting it as fast, as strong as she could.

  “Wear something nice, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay,” she said, anything to make him shut the fuck up, closing her eyes as the 7 coursed into her, bringing color into the world, bringing a sense of confidence and clarity. The relief was the best thing, the feeling that everything was going to work out. It was the most important thing, more important than boys and their idiot games, more important than her work—although that was important, too, vital, creating beauty was life—more important than anything.

  Being happy, she thought. Being who you are.

  “Wear the dark red thing,” Trace added, his gruff voice caressing her through the com. “It makes your tits look really hot.”

  Tits. “Don’t be crass, Tracy,” she murmured, still riding the initial wave. Thinking about things she’d done, things she still had to do.

  “Sorry, baby,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly sorry, but she didn’t really mind, not lately.

  She thought about that for a second or an hour, her relationship to Trace, all relationships, really, the complexities and shifting roles. Lovers, siblings, parents, and offspring, the intricacies of interaction, the dynamics of power and how it corrupted some, made martyrs of others—

  “So, are you coming?”

  Trace. She thought she hated him . . . though perhaps hate was too limiting to what she felt. Too simplistic. She spent far too much time thinking about him, that was the greater issue, that was the problem . . . but that would change soon enough, soon enough beginning today, maybe, and she’d be free to—

  “Babe?”

  Didi sat up again. She wanted to move, and needed to get ready. “Yeah, I’m coming,” she said.

  Trace chuckled. “Save that for later,” he said, and the com clicked out, leaving her alone.

  She stared into blankness, letting the essence of Trace vibrate her skull a moment longer. Drop day. What he wanted, what he always wanted. The strange animal rawness of his inevitable desires, and what that meant to her. For the barest of seconds she felt sick, really sick—but it was distant and cerebral, too, easily set aside in even less time.

  It will be different now, she thought. She’d thought it before and it comforted her, now as then, and with that inkling of comfort, she let it go.

  She rose, stretched, felt her muscles flex and relax, the tickle of her skin as it slid over flesh and bones. Her bladder was full; that tickled, too. She padded to the ’fresher, sat, urinated, reflecting on the integrated systems that mad
e up her body, thinking that she would wear her burgundy dress to meet the fish, he liked that one and it didn’t really matter to her. Clothes didn’t define her.

  She looked in the mirror a moment, saw through wide, dilated eyes the beauty of the flesh that housed her soul, turning away before she had to look for too long. She told herself that her physical form was a distraction from reality, and felt centered.

  She had to get going. It was drop day, but perhaps the last in which Trace would make her perform. She walked back to the bed, lifted out the patch box. It was good to be happy, to make strong choices, to understand. To know it was all going to work out. That was the most important thing.

  2

  Tommy sat in the chill, stale cockpit, cold but sweating, trying to readjust his body to being in motion, his mind to intelligent thought. He checked the drop ship’s status again, still wishing he’d been given more time, trying not to think about it because it was a waste of what little he had—about a minute left, by Moby’s last count. According to the computer, they were ready to go—sealed and pressurized, drive online and standing by, navigation programmed and locked—but nothing felt right, and he didn’t know if it was a gut instinct he should follow or if he was just feeling bad about a bad situation. Either way, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he could do about it.

  Moby sat a few meters behind him at communications, his only company—there was no co-pilot, no one on computer or drive or electronics. It was all on Tommy, getting the nameless ship down and docked, and while he was usually pretty slick in the sticky—he was a pilot, after all—this was an entirely new experience for him. Not just going it alone, but alone and totally unprepared. He’d been trained for emergencies, sure, but it had been a long time since flight school. That the autopilot would be handling the entire operation wasn’t much of a relief. Some other guy had programmed it, and he didn’t know this “other guy,” didn’t know if he had fifty years dropping in and out of orbit under his belt or if he was just reading out of a manual. Granted, it didn’t make a lot of sense for Msomi to go cheap on the ware—he could sure as shit afford the best—but Tommy didn’t like the idea of betting his life on a kingpin’s whims.

  “Time’s up,” Moby said. He sounded bored. In the midst of his text-only crash course on Msomi’s ship, Tommy had been vaguely aware that Moby had been pecking at a keyboard, presumably sending scrambled word to the Fantasians that they were on their way. It seemed he’d finished.

  “Just a minute,” Tommy said. He tapped at the nav screen once more, calling up what little there was on the world to which they’d be dropping. He wasn’t sure if Fantasia was the name of the planet or the installation or both, and he got no help from the computer—according to the drop ship’s system, they were about to land at “unspecified,” and the stats were bare minimum. It was smallish, maybe half Earth’s size, with an artificially supported gravity that belied what its atmosphere and surface area would indicate. No remarkable bodies of water, no apparent agri past terraform algae, some lichen . . . a topo map that told of endless low hills riddled with underground tunnel systems, a sharp crevasse here and there to break up the monotony. Minimum light at about four hours a day, boosted by a satellite panel reflect, but even at Fantasia’s “brightest,” radiant flux would be low—a murky twilight at most. Average temp was minus 8 C, give or take, oxy concentration just over a third of Earth’s around sea level—not bad, considering. If you ended up outside without a suit, you’d be real cold and hypoxic in a matter of minutes, but you wouldn’t freeze to death and you wouldn’t suffocate. Not right away, at least. There was a thin capture of ozone, that was something . . . But radon levels from decaying uranium in the bedrock averaged seven picocuries per liter, and mREMs were . . . He couldn’t wrap his mind around the math. Way too high. Moby had been right about not wanting to go outside, even without the XT threat. Cold, dark, and deadly.

  Like the aliens. Tommy felt a chill, mostly dread—Pete said these things were supposed to be like big black bugs or something, roaming free over the whole planet—but there was a spark of excitement in there, too. Sentient alien life forms, even nasty ones . . . He was going to see something that very few people even knew existed. And there were surely some heavy duty safety measures in place, or it wouldn’t be worth the risk to keep a bunch of lethal XTs around—Msomi’s secret shake-and-bake was worth far too much. Tommy scanned through the backup files, looking for any reference to the XTs. Nothing, nothing . . .

  “How ’bout now?” Moby asked. “Come on, pilot. It’s all laid in, I told you. Just button pushing, innit? Coupla ’justments?”

  Then why don’t you do it? Tommy thought, but only nodded, still reading, looking for anything that might prove useful if something went wrong. Once they were away from the others, Moby had offered a semi-conciliatory explanation as to the great hurry—with the navigation preprogrammed, they needed to drop from the freighter in a specific time window, one they were dangerously close to overshooting. Miss the window, they’d need Tommy to program new navigation.

  “And then we’d have to kill you,” Moby had grinned, and Tommy had grinned back, wanting very much for it to be a joke. When Tommy had asked why they hadn’t just woken everyone up sooner, Moby’s grin had gone ever wider.

  “Only two of us, right? Don’t want you lot to have time to get ideas.”

  Ideas for what? A mutiny? The notion seemed impossible, a short run drop ship in the middle of vast Fuckall, but Tommy supposed that the cargo might be worth the peril to some. In any case, this wasn’t Tommy’s show. He’d shut up and gone to work, doing his best to be prepared for anything that might come up. That was the real reason he was here, he knew; Moby was right, anyone could push a few buttons when the auto was on . . . but that was assuming that there would be no variables, nothing unexpected, and that was a dangerous way to think. When you were the pilot, it was downright negligent.

  “Give us a countdown, flyboy,” Moby said.

  Tommy nodded again, skimming through lines of numbers and levels, particulate counts, dioxy, nitrogen, trace methane—

  “Now,” Moby said, and the jokey tone was gone.

  “Yeah, okay,” Tommy said. He exhaled heavily, ran his hands through his hair, looked for the shipwide com panel. “I need to let them know . . .”

  “Got it. Just get us moving, right?”

  Tommy looked over the controls again, took a deep breath, nodded. “Right. Ah . . . thirty seconds.”

  “‘Bout fuckin’ time,” Moby mumbled, and punched a button. “Half a minute, criminals. Belt in or drop dead.”

  Tommy nodded again, tapped through the protocol—Moby or Lee had already booted up and entered an intricate series of pass codes, presumably before waking Tommy up—and ran the program to communicate with the freighter, opening its hold. He slipped his headset on, tightened his harness. An instant later, a bone-deep, throbbing vibration worried the ship—and then there was no more AG borrowed from the freighter, and Tommy felt his gut lurch as the tiny ship fell into the black and silent cold.

  He carefully watched numbers and codes flashing across his eyepiece as bursts of compressed air gently maneuvered the drop ship around and away from the enormous automaton that had carried them so far from home. He imagined that he could feel them falling away from the floating giant, imagined that he could hear the freighter’s massive hold door sliding closed—and then the real countdown began. The ship’s drive would kick on in . . . fourteen seconds, the very instant it could safely verify that their heading was exact. The initial surge-burn would be fast and hot, would punch them cleanly through Fantasia’s scant atmosphere and put them actually quite close to the installation. Two minutes fly-time and they’d be looking to dock. Thirteen. Twelve.

  “In ten,” Tommy said, settling back in his seat, calmly monitoring multiple windows on the board’s too-small screen, still reading the count off the eyepiece. Now that he couldn’t afford the anxiety, his nerves were still and his consciousness
focused, alert. His hands were poised lightly over the controls, ready to correct.

  Moby tapped a key. “Ten, kiddies, tighten up.” Another tap.

  “Hey, anyone ever tell you what happened to the last pilot we had, Mullin?” he asked brightly.

  Tommy kept his gaze on the screen, felt the power building, imagined that the small craft was swelling with it, near bursting, ready to explode toward the planet’s surface. “No.” Three. Two.

  “He thought he’d—”

  The drive surged and the ship jumped, blasting Tommy back and up, the harness suddenly heavy against his shoulders and chest. Moby wasn’t wearing his headset, so whatever hilarious or horrifying anecdote he meant to relate was lost to the drive’s roar. Tommy watched the screen, his body yearning to be free of the chair as the drop ship did what it was made for. The ever-efficient auto-pilot took care of each minor amendment before Tommy even had time to register the number drift, the pulse of the drive humming through his bones.

  Fantasia spun up to greet them, or so the screen told him, and the ship slowed, slowed, letting the planet’s gravity take hold. The heat came, brief and searing and safely diverted, and a few seconds later, the front shield panel slid away, giving Tommy his first glimpse of dark sky. Another impossibly long second of falling, falling—

  —and the drop ship shot forward, angling sharply down, another system of drive burners taking over, pushing him back in his seat. A deep purplish twilight made way for them, screes of condensation too thin to be clouds whipping over the front shield.

  Moby still wasn’t talking. Tommy looked back, saw that the scary wiseass drug runner had his eyes closed tightly, and almost smiled. Almost. The tricky part was still coming up.

  Tommy tapped up the docking specs as the ship shot through Fantasia’s murk—dawn’s early light, if the chrono was accurate. The autopilot was working perfectly, but it was a complicated set-down, he wanted to have an idea of what was coming. The dock was inside a hollow cone with a retractable cover—one that, presumably, was being opened even now—and there would be very little room in which to maneuver. Straight drop down, heavy on the retros. Lot of heat.