Jake Carter’s hunt for his missing sentinel had taken him, by buggy and by mesh, in a wide arc around the [[Mars#The%20TITAN%20Quarantine%20Zone|Titan Quarantine Zone]]. Bobdog LaGrange had been missing for three days, and the trail Bobdog’d had his nose on wasn’t one that led anyplace good. Finally, Carter got a break. A trafﬁc spime on a ditchstop spur of the M-4 had gotten a facial match on Bobdog, looking drugged in the back of a car.
He’d traced the car to a saloon at the end of the spur road and called in a favor from Sage Kim, Captain of the [[Elysium]] Rangers, to ride shotgun while he checked it out. She wasn’t Firewall, but Jake ﬁgured she wouldn’t be seeing anything too crazy on what oughta be a simple rescue mission. Kim knew him as Jae Park, terraforming worker and sometime-smuggler, and he meant to keep it that way for now.
Kim’s big gray Ranger ﬂier circled the wide hollow at the end of the lonely highway once, then touched down near a dozen other vehicles, landing lights brieﬂy illuminating the rusty Martian soil. The ﬂier looked like the very mean lovechild of a large jeep and a fanjet VTOL plane. The front doors swung up, and Kim, Park, and a baboon hopped out, boots crunching on frost. Another baboon, masked against the thin atmosphere, pulled shut the doors and hopped to the front window of the ﬂier, watching as the trio made their way across the landing lot.
“Cold enough to make dry ice tonight,” Kim said.
“CO2 doesn’t freeze in the Labyrinth anymore, lady.”
“Feels like it could tonight,” she said, “Let’s get inside.”
Even in the relative shelter of Noctis Labyrinthus, the canyon walls didn’t do much to stop the wind screaming across the Tharsis Plateau that night. They leaned in to the gusts, making a beeline from the prowler across the lot toward a lone building.
Both wore heavy boots, clothes made from drab fabric that looked like denim but acted like kevlar, well-worn sidearms, and rebreathers under dark balaclavas. Kim’s kit loosely followed the regulation uniform of the Tharsis League Rangers (which was how most rangers followed uniform regs—loosely). Both were Asian phenotypes with ruddy skin—rusters.
The baboon followed in the woman’s steps, stopping occasionally to scan the roof and windows of the building. Cape baboons weren’t the prettiest creatures to begin with, but with goggles and a full breather covering the muzzle, the big male—she called it Smoke—looked damned scary. 
The building was stacked together from twenty or thirty boxy green shipping containers. The place was only dimly lit in realspace, but in augmented reality a big neon sign ﬂickered over the buidling’s watchtower. It read, “Destino Verde.”
“Thanks for helping me come after Bobdog,” he said.
“If Bobdog didn’t feed me tips nice and regular, I’d have put his ass away long ago,” she said,
“He’s an idiot.”
“Ain’t gonna argue.”
“And the less I know about what’s actually going on here, Park, the better.”
“Crystal.” He clicked off the safety on his piece, heard the whine of magnetic rails going hot as she did the same. “Get your game face on, Captain.”
“You’ve never seen it off.” An AR graphic of a badge—the Ranger star with the Chinese characters for “justice” at its center—dissolved in over the lapel of her duster as she pulled open the building’s outer door.
There was a gust of warm air. The place didn’t have a proper airlock, just a couple of counter-weighted pressure doors. Cheap to maintain, and good for us, Park thought. If they needed to make a fast exit, an airlock was the worst option.
He turned on his t-ray emitter, shared what he was seeing with Kim through their tacnet, and scanned the room on the other side of the door. Front of the place looked like a typical roadhouse crowd, with someone pouring drinks and about a dozen other people either propping up the bar or scattered around the room. There was more than one way to the back; a little way down one of the passages was someone on a stool—probably a doorman.
“Got all that, Captain?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “Go time.” She pushed the inner door open and strode in, stopping next to the nearest table. The baboon hopped up next to her, pulled off its breather, grunted, and made a ﬁst-smacking gesture that aped packing a box of cigarettes. She absently offered him a pack and a zippo while Park walked up to the bar. Style points for the lighter; self-igniting cigs were for spacers and dome dwellers.
“Hey there,” he started in Mandarin, but the pleasure pod tending bar, whose outﬁt consisted of little more than AR graphics, cut him off. 
The pod had a fresh face but a mean sneer. “Get that monkey outta here,” she said to Kim, “This is a clean place.” She was speaking English with an Indian accent. Sounded weird coming out of a morph that looked Japanese, but Park’d heard weirder. 
Kim chuckled once. “This monkey’s the Law. Get back to selling betel nuts, cupcake.”
Park looked over his shoulder to see Smoke light its cigarette and take a satisfied drag, smiling to show huge canines. Whoever said smart baboons couldn’t grok human insouciance was dead wrong, but Park also noticed the baboon had one hand on its shock baton.
The pod stood there a minute, palms planted on the bar, attempting to stare down the ranger. Kim ignored the girl completely, slowly walking around the table, sizing up the other customers along the way, until she’d done a full circle, whereon she kicked out a chair and planted herself, one boot up on the table. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Only ones who might be trouble are the pair closest to the back,]</span> she messaged.
Park didn’t need to look their way; he was getting video from Kim in his tacs. He propped himself on his elbows and leaned on the bar like he was studying the beer taps, but his attention was on the little video window in the corner of his ﬁeld of vision. Big blond guy and a stolid Japanese kid, both sipping their drinks slow and showing Yakuza nanotats. The blond guy was looking his way; his friend kept glancing at Kim.
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[Some heavy citizens,]</span> he messaged. He glanced at the bartender, <span style="color: #0000ff;">[And where you ﬁgure they got the cred for a model like her in a dump like this?]</span>
Conversation in the room started up again, and the girl ﬁnally said sideways to Park, “What do you want?”
“Sorry about my friend. She ain’t been feeling so great. Pint of Red Iron?”
The girl narrowed her eyes brieﬂy at Kim, then looked back at him. “Your lover?” she asked. Jae felt a ﬂutter in his chest when she locked eyes with him. Tailored pheromones?
“The captain? Nah, I just owe her a favor.” Yeah, deﬁnitely pheromones; he was ﬁghting not to get distracted. “She’s due for some new genetic services packs; she’s got achy joints and all. She’s looking for a remedy ’til she can make the payments, wanted me along to make sure she didn’t get put over the barrel on the price.”
The girl finished pouring the beer and passed it over in a way that involved more bending and stretching than was strictly necessary. She said, “What’s a terraform-wallah know about being over a barrel?” She’d made him quick, but then his whole look screamed terraformer, even with his network proﬁle in privacy mode.
“You ever worked as a line engineer, you’d know the answer, darlin’: plenty.” He took a long pull off the beer; it tasted like burnt rice and the girl’s perfume. “Anyway, this is a bar … not a pharmacy.”
He slid some cred into an AR payment window, tipping generously. “Ain’t what I heard.”
She glanced toward the pair of yakuza. Through Kim’s video feed, he saw the young-looking one nod to her. “Why don’t you and your friend try in back?” She pointed to a hallway to her left marked, “EMPLOYEES ONLY.”
He abandoned the remaining beer. “Thanks, darlin’.” He turned to Kim and nodded toward the hallway, and the two of them headed back. Smoke stayed perched on its table, eyeing the two yakuza. The back room opened up into four cargo containers whose innermost sides, bottoms, and tops had been cut away, forming a big, mostly open space. At the back of it was a counter, and behind the counter was a tall stack of cases, drawers, cabinets, and hanging nets full of herbs, animal parts, and medicines in old-fashioned glass and plastic containers. The old guy behind the counter looked Japanese, but the labels on all of the containers and most of the AR graphics ﬂoating over items for sale were in Mandarin.
“What you need? Whatever it is, I got just the thing,” the old man said.
Park was suspicious as hell of anyone who chose to walk around in an old morph; meant you were either potent or desperate. “My lady friend’s GSPs’re up. She’s got some joint pain. Normal meds ain’t working. You got somethin’ to restore her chi ﬂow or whatever all this stuff is supposed to do?”
“Chi’s serious business,” the old man scowled. “I got a reed and marrow rub for that, just the thing.”
Park said, “C’mon, oyabun. I know you got better.”
“Ah, I have just the thing … Houzi cream.” He started to take a tin from under the counter.
“Tinned? I could make that in a fabber. Quit trying to jerk me around, or we’re going somewhere else.”
The old man grunted, backed up and crossed his arms.
“You’re worried about the badge, paatno-san? C’mon, we know this is a yak place. We’re here for your merchandise, not to make a bust, or we’d have her monkey in here tearing your shit up already.”
The old man scowled. “I can make you up a Houzi cream, but it ain’t cheap.”
Park messaged her, <span style="color: #0000ff;">[Ask to see the gibbon.]</span>
Kim crossed her arms and looked around the shop like she was thinking about it. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Are you fucking serious, Park? You think—]</span>
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[Just do it!]</span>
She looked at the shopkeeper. “I’m gonna need to see the gibbon. That ain’t a problem, right?”
The shopkeeper led them deeper into the maze of shipping containers.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[What’s going on with this operation?]</span> Kim messaged,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [I seen some weird shit, but … ]</span>
Park messaged, <span style="color: #0000ff;">[Traditional Chinese medicine. Old-timey, superstitious shit. It was mostly dead ’til the corps kicked in with the GSP racket and people couldn’t ﬁnd any cure’d work on their pains and asthma. Some of the recipes call for ape parts. They lop off the pieces to make the meds, then throw ‘em in a healing vat, rinse, and repeat. People’ll try anything, and they think uplifts make stronger medicine. Surprised you never ran into this before.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Wait, so what are the yakuza into it for?]</span> she messaged. She was mapping out all the twists and turns they’d
followed on the tacnet.
They passed through a barrier of hanging plastic, and the reek of confined animals hit them. The hallway opened up into the harvesting room. In the gloom, he saw a neo-bonobo drugged in a cage. Park peered at him, but it wasn’t Bobdog—no dreadlocks. Unless he’d resleeved. Through another doorway, he could see a row of bear cages.
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[Triads won’t touch it,]</span> he messaged, <span style="color: #0000ff;">[They think it’s a cultural embarrassment, if you can believe. But the demand’s there, so the yakuza got into it.]</span>
The yakuza rolled out a cage with a gibbon in it. Jake really wanted to ﬁnd Bobdog and get out of here before he was responsible for them cutting on this monkey but … well, here was some fucked up shit he hadn’t seen before.
The gibbon was hopping around in its cage freaking out, but it was also signing to him in Warlpiri. <span style="color: #800000;"><Jake! Get me out of here!></span>
He signed from where the old man (hopefully) wouldn’t spot him while Kim made a show of walking around the cage inspecting the ape. <span style="color: #0000ff;"><Bobdog? That you?></span>
The gibbon tried to hoot, its throat sack inﬂating, but only a sick croak came out. <span style="color: #800000;"><Yes! Get me the fuck out of here now!></span>
Park could see where they’d shaved him and popped his stack; they’d burned out his mesh inserts, too.
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[That’s a neo-gibbon. Bobdog’s sleeved in it,]</span> he messaged Kim.
She glanced at him over the cage. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[How do you know?]</span> she messaged, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[It doesn’t have a PAN.]</span>
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[Australian native sign language.]</span>
She shot Park an incredulous look but didn’t say anything. “Okay, it looks good,” she told the yakuza. The old man pulled out a metal pole with a wire snare on one end and started trying to catch Bobdog’s hand with it, cursing under his breath as the neogibbon freaked out in the cage.
“I haven’t got all day,” Kim said, then messaged, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[What’s he doing?]</span>
<span style="color: #0000ff;">[If he gets a hold on Bobdog’s hand, he’s gonna slice it off with that vibroknife in his belt and use it to make your Houzi cream. Game time,]</span> Park messaged, <span style="color: #0000ff;">[How you wanna play this?]</span>
She answered by breaking the old man’s face with the butt of her pistol.
He fell back, screaming and clutching his broken nose. “What the fuck? You think that badge means you gonna walk out of here alive?”
There was a crash and screams from somewhere outside. On his tacnet feed, Jae saw the big blond yakuza looking terriﬁed for a split second as Smoke turned over the table onto his companion and came at him with its shock baton.
Kim kicked the old man to the ﬂoor and pointed her gun at his head. “Open the cage now, and I might not shoot you.”
The cage door swung open, and Park lifted Bobdog out and stood him on top of the cage. <span style="color: #0000ff;"><Can you run?></span> He signed.
The neo-gibbon shook its head, signed, <span style="color: #800000;"><Weak.></span>
Park lifted him. “All right, arms around my neck, pal. We’re Althauser 5000.”
<span style="color: #800000;"><Not yet,></span> Bobdog signed, <span style="color: #800000;"><You need to see what’s in back.></span>
There was a gunshot from somewhere down the hall. The old yakuza cackled sickeningly from the ﬂoor. “Stupid fucking garlic eaters,” he said, “When my boys get done with you, I’m gonna sleeve you up like that one and use you all for fucking monkey parts.”
Kim shot him three times, the railgun almost silent except for the crack of the slugs.
Park looked over in time to see the old man slump over. “Damn,” he said.
Park lifted the neo-gibbon just as the doorman from out front came tearing into the room. Park spun and leveled his pistol at the man. Bobdog was clinging to him like a baby; kid was gonna need some serious time in psych after this. “Hold it!” he shouted.
The guy hesitated for a second but kept coming, pistol out. Then the baboon took him down. Smoke leapt at him out of the gloom of the hallway, grabbing him around the neck and swinging its weight forward so that the gangster tumbled and fell to the ground. Smoke landed in front of the guy, then swung its baton hard into the wrist of his gun arm. Bone cracked wetly.
The yakuza grunted and sat up, holding his wrist. Smoke howled in his face, showing two huge canines. Smoke had been grazed by a shot, though its ﬂak jacket had stopped most of the damage. The baboon looked pissed.
Park motioned with his gun. “C’mon, Toshi. Get in the cage.”
The guy stumbled to his feet, the baboon circling him. “Name ain’t Toshi.”
“Toshi, Fu, Iggins, whatever; get in the damned cage.” 
He got in. Park put down Bobdog, pulled out his COT, and made a neat row of nanotack welds between the bars and the lock.
“Those’re illegal, terraform-wallah,” Kim said.
He looked up for a second. “So’s shootin’ technical old yak pharmacists for calling Koreans names.”
“I like monkeys and garlic. He messed with both in one breath. He needed killin’.” She looked none too penitent.
“Arright,” Park said, “This one ain’t following us. Now let’s see what all else they got hidden in here.”
He picked up Bobdog again; the neo-gibbon pointed toward the bear cages.
She stayed put as he headed for the bears. “You’re kidding, right Park? We should go. Now. I’ll come back later with a tac squad and clean this place out.”
“They didn’t seem too afraid of cops. Whose jurisdiction is this, anyhow?”
“Gray area. My force doesn’t come down this way much. It’s on the line between me and the [[Noctis-Qianjiao|Noctis]] Rangers.”
“Who you know damn well got termites in the frame. Bobdog here’s down a cortical stack, mesh inserts, and a set of vocal cords over what they’re hiding in here.”
The neo-gibbon signed something in Warlpiri.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Kim asked.
“Uh, rough translation? ‘Cowgirl up.’” He shifted Bobdog to his back and headed into the bear cage room, gun ﬁrst.
“Well, fuck. C’mon, Smoke.” She caught up, then took point, with the baboon bringing up the rear. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Gloria,]</span> she messaged the other baboon, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Strap in,]</span> and then to the AI in her prowler, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Dust off and circle high.]</span> A few seconds later, the truck was a moving blip on their tacnet.
A few black bears looked up sadly as they crossed the room. They were stunted and weak, their wire cages barely allowing movement. A neatly attached catheter dangled from the belly of each—for milking their bile, if Park recalled rightly. Beyond that was a room with more primates—gibbons, monkeys, and another drugged out neo-hominid. The whole place smelt of sickly caged animals, and Smoke was getting edgy, sweeping the backs of his hands nervously over the ﬂoor whenever they paused. Kim gave him another cig to cool him down.
Kim came to a pressure door with a tiny window. Instead of peering through, she angled her gun so that she could look through its smartlink. Through his tacnet feed, Park could see the room beyond as she slowly panned. It was a lab set up: bunch of steel tables, equipment cabinets, industrial gear for ﬁlling up some small, heavily shielded cylinders—for gas or liquid, he wasn’t sure. There was a batch of a dozen cylinders racked up on the table.
All these details he took in after the back wall, though. In one corner was a heavily shielded incinerator—the kind that used magnetic containment and a blast of plasma to vaporize whatever was in it and then vaporize it some more. Next to that was a biocontainment chamber: a wide, white-lit, glass-fronted enclosure about ﬁve meters wide and three deep. There were three ﬁgures—or rather two ﬁgures,and a … thing—secured to the back wall of the enclosure with a multitude of heavy straps and room for two more.
One was Bobdog’s morph, a tall bonobo with dreadlocks. It was horribly emaciated but still breathing. Tumescent lumps studded its waist. The second ﬁgure was human, probably a ruster, but its skin had gone dead, nearly translucent white. Around its midsection writhed a double ring of stumpy tentacles surrounded by puckered scar tissue.
The third thing had only the vague outline of a humanoid shape. The legs had fused into a barrel of muscle ending in a wet surface like the belly of a gastropod, and the head and arms had disappeared into the trunk of the body. The tentacles on this one were more active but similarly stumpy and scarred; looked like its keepers’d been trimming them back as they grew.
Kim sucked in a breath. “Damn it, Park, I don’t know why I do favors for you. You get me into the weirdest shit. Is that radioactive?”
Park looked at the exsurgent. “No. And ain’t your job patrolling a zombie graveyard for robot monsters?”
“That’s got nothing on the kind of stuff happens every time I go on one of these runs with you. And this takes the cake. What the hell is this?”
“Stuff nobody oughta see.” He edged up to the door and opened it, “Should be safe enough behind an enclosure like that, though.” He went inside, and she followed, Smoke in tow.
“I hope you’re right. What kind of operation you think this is? They’re not cooking up tabs of hither in a setup like this.”
Park said, “Trying to improve on bear bile, you want my guess. Mind watchin’ the door, Captain?”
He put Bobdog down on a lab table. <span style="color: #0000ff;"><Maintaining?></span> he signed.
Bobdog pointed at his morph, signed, <span style="color: #800000;"><Fork of me. Infected. Kill it.></span>
<span style="color: #0000ff;"><You got it,></span> he signed, but this was a bad scene. The Bobdog strapped to the wall was pretty far gone and infected with something; if he had a stack, better to destroy it. But he couldn’t be too sure about the Bobdog he’d been carrying around the last few minutes, either. When he got out of here, their ﬁrst stop would be a genehacker kettle in the tablelands about twenty klicks north. He had a friend who could give them a clean bill of health … or not. Park tried not to think about the “not.”
He tapped at the window separating the room.
“Hab window glass. Ideal.” There was an airlock with a decontamination shower leading into the enclosure and a few clean suits on a rack. The set up was basic but looked like it’d work.
“Ideal for what?” Kim asked.
He walked once around the enclosure, estimating its strength. “Blast containment.”
He started poking around, found a workstation with a rack of tiny quantum computers next to some of the lab equipment. <span style="color: #0000ff;">[GiGi,]</span> he asked his muse,<span style="color: #0000ff;"> [Can you get into this?]</span>
<span style="color: #808000;">[Mais oui,]</span> the AI messaged, and started throwing exploits at it.
The baboon was having another cigarette. Thank goodness for bad habits, Park thought. There was another door leading farther back. If the schematic they built up on their ﬂyover was any good, it lead to an exit.
Kim checked the back hall for herself, then asked, “I really need some answers about what’s going on in here, Park.”
Park started pulling on a clean suit. “You ain’t seen enough illegal activity yet?”
“Human trafficking, animal cruelty, assaulting a ranger, possession of a biohazardous substance, possession of TITAN relics … Yeah, sure, I can throw the book at that old man if I pop his stack and take it in.”
“Doubt it.” Jake buckled on the boots and started checking the seals. “Bet you his stack’s wiped. He’s the type’ll have a dead switch on a throwaway body like that. Or he wasn’t that important.”
“Then so it goes,” Kim said, “But whatever’s going on here, it’s the low end of the food chain.”
Jake sealed the helmet and ran the clean suit’s diagnostics. <span style="color: #0000ff;">[Probably true. I ﬁgure they’re working on a way to infect more people. Can you do a visual inspection on the seals on this suit?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[OK.]</span> She went behind him, checking seals, then came around and gave him a thumbs up. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[You think someone’s trying to weaponize it?]</span>
He dragged the storage cylinders into the airlock with him. Frost came away where his gloves touched them; they were self-refrigerating. <span style="color: #0000ff;">[Maybe. Gotta look for the big ﬁsh now.]</span>
Bobdog’s clone tried to look up at him as he cycled the lock and entered the enclosure. He looked away; he couldn’t meet the neo-primate’s eyes. He suction cupped an incendiary charge to the window in front of Bobdog, then in front of the human. Finally, he set one up in front of the whipper, giving it a wide berth.
He squirted scrapper’s gel on the storage cylinders. He stepped away as the gel burned through and blood began oozing from the cylinders. Three incendiaries would be plenty in a chamber this size.
When he glanced out, Kim was smoking, too. He’d thought the cigs were just for the monkey. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Shit, Park. We can’t help him?]</span>
He cycled the airlock. The chemicals from a decontamination shower hissed off the suit before the outer door opened. <span style="color: #0000ff;">[You want to try? You know TQZ containment procedure.]</span>
Park got out of the suit, letting the pieces drop to the ﬂoor, and found the atmosphere controls for the biocontainment enclosure. He adjusted the mix to hypersaturate the chamber with oxygen.
“What now?” Kim asked.
“I’ll be done here in a few. We burn the stuff in there so it doesn’t infect anybody else, and after that you can do whatever cop stuff you want to this bar.” The exsurgent in the enclosure had grown restive in the oxygen-rich chamber; it squirmed and whipped its stubby tentacles around. He sealed the oxygen line to the chamber; didn’t want too big an explosion.
Kim said, “I still want more answers. They got infected by a TITAN virus, I take it?”
GiGi reported her intrusion complete. He spread out an AR window on the lab table next to Bobdog and showed her. “Thing farthest left we call a whipper,” he said as he scanned the text, “Used to be a person; ain’t anymore.”
The chemical and biological data was mostly over his head, but what they were doing with it wasn’t too hard to suss out. The yakuza were intentionally creating exsurgents, milking them for bile and other ﬂuids, then shipping the goop somewhere for processing.
“Who’s ‘we,’ Park?”
“Huh?” He stopped reading.
“You said, ‘What we call it.’ Who’s ‘we?’ Are you a fucking Oversight spook or something?”
Park laughed, “Nah. I work for the good guys. Least, that’s what I think most days. I was kinda hoping you’d sign up.”
GiGi messaged, <span style="color: #808000;">[J’ai toutes les données,]</span> into the AR window.
She raised an eyebrow. “Your muse speaks … is that French?” 
He grinned, closed the AR window, picked up Bobdog, and made for the door. “What? It’s sexy. She’s got all the data. C’mon, I can explain the rest when we’re safe in the air.”
They put a breathing mask on Bobdog, wrapped him in a heavy blanket, and walked right out the front door. The yak in the cage cursed at them as they passed, but they let him be. The pleasure pod bartender and bar patrons had ﬂed the front of the bar, so they weren’t around to hear the mufﬂed explosion from far back in the maze of shipping containers. The camera Park had left in the room showed that the containment unit held; inside was nothing but ash.
Kim’s prowler touched down, Gloria peering at them out the front windows. Park wasn’t sure whether a yakuza cleanup crew or Kim’s ranger buddies would get there ﬁrst, but in the scheme of things, that wasn’t so important. They were in the air, and headed for the hills.
//Part 1 of 3; To be continued...//

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