*Nostrum*
[[image:Nostrum_ThomasJung.png width="800" height="564" align="center"]]
//This story continues the plot begun in// [[El Destino Verde]].
“So you ain’t surprised, guy we’re going to see knows me by Jake Carter,” Jae Park said.
“I don’t care if he calls you Sun Mi Hee,” Kim said, “As long as when we’re done there we get a clean bill of health. Anyway, I like ‘Jake’ better. My grandpa was named ‘Jae.’”
They were flying over the Noctis tablelands, heading for an off-grid genehacker facility. The badlands spread out invisible below them, but an AR topo display showing their position hovered over the central instrument panel. Rank of captain meant Sage Kim could requisition better engines than most Ranger prowlers had. They were cutting up sky; wouldn’t take long to get there.
It was hours ’til dawn, but Cagehopper would be awake; the genehacker didn’t sleep much. Even when he did, he kept a fork up to tend to his living experiments.
“What do you care if Bobdog and I get a clean bill?” Park asked, “You going all soft on me, Captain Kim?”
“No,” she said, “But I wouldn’t want to have to shoot you for coming up zombie, all the same.” Her tone measured zero-percent sardonic wit.
“Wouldn’t worry,” Park said, “This is containment protocol. Pretty standard. Just a precaution.” He said that, but he was covering. He had that itch in his neck, that crawling feeling in his stomach he always got after facing an exposure risk. The fear never went away, and that was a damned good thing. He’d seen more than a few researchers who got stupid about the exovirus shot into red smears on Firewall turn-and-burn ops. Hell, he’d done for a few himself, though he didn’t savor it any.
“How you doing back there, Bobdog?” Park craned his head to check on the neo-primate. Bob huddled in the acceleration couch, breathing normally but looking gray.
Bobdog made the Warlpiri sign for “shit.”
“Hang in there, man. We’ll be at Cagehopper’s soon.”
Kim had locked her police baboons, Gloria and Smoke, in the back cabin. Too much chance of Smoke throwing a nicotine ﬁt and tearing one of Bobdog’s long, spindly neo-bonobo arms off. Park didn’t like the baboons much, but they’d come in handy dealing with the yakuza back at El Destino Verde.
“Be interesting to ﬁnally meet Cagehopper,” Kim said, real casual.
Well, shit, Park thought. “You know him?” he asked, keeping casual himself. He’d thought “Cagehopper” was a name the genehacker only used with Firewall. That she knew it set him on edge, but of more worry was the simple fact of a Ranger and a black-kettle genehacker being in the same room.
“Tried to arrest him a few times, sure.”
“Complicates things,” he said.
She reached over the center console and play punched his shoulder. Bit more than a play punch, point of fact, but probably not intentional. Kim was a ruster, but her body was heavy on the augments. He’d give her even odds against your average fury. “Don’t fret, Jake. I don’t give so much as a rat’s tail about this guy, so long as when we’re done he tells me I’m not gonna end up a barrel-shaped mass of mucus membrane with tentacles for a tutu.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
He believed her, for now. Cagehopper was well outside her jurisdiction, but the guy got around. She probably knew him from his dealings with the Arsia Mons smugglers. Didn’t matter, anyway; he had to bring her to Cagehopper one way or another.
----
Cagehopper’s place was dug deep into a gorge in the tablelands. Kim’s ﬂying truck had to squeeze onto a landing pad that was way too close to the gorge walls for comfort. There were no trails, but there was a space between some rocks just big enough for a buggy to crawl out. The outer garage door blended into the surroundings almost perfectly thanks to a programmed coating of chameleon materials. He’d never have found the place by visual.
They were probably being watched already, not that you could spot any sensors. Cagehopper would have microdrones scattered around, and he might be hip to the Maker trick of using lizards as camera platforms.
An AR alert ﬂashed up in Park’s peripheral vision. //Telefono.//
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Carter? What the fuck, citizen? You’re heavy a few bodies.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Heavy a few on account of we all got coughed on during the last run. Need you to take a look,]</span> Park messaged.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[And you show up in a cop truck?]</span>
Park messaged, <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Look, you’re not gonna like this, but my shotgun on this ride’s a Ranger.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Perceptive, Carter. You’re fucking right I don’t like it. Not at all.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Look, Cage, I got Bobdog LaGrange here in a bad way, and we’re all several of us exposure risks, right down to the baboo—]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Baboons! Carter, you rock lizard’s cloaca, I desire no fucking police baboons in my place of establishment.]</span>
This reaction was cantankerous even for Cagehopper.
“Problem?” Kim asked.
“He doesn’t like baboons. I didn’t know.”
She sighed. “They can stay in the prowler, long as we don’t take too long.”
Park thought about that. All in all, Kim’d been too acquiescing by half. Helping out bust a yakuza front, sure, all in a day’s work. She was the law, right? But agreeing to go in and meet a guy who’d have a list of felonies for unlicensed genemods a klick long on his rap sheet without her monkeys … It was too even-handed, even for a Ranger like Kim. He’d have to watch her close.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Cagehopper, how about this: the baboons’ll stay in the prowler. They’ll make nary a peep, unless it turns out we’re infected. Then we need you to check them, too.]</span>
A long chunk of dead air followed, but then the camouﬂaged garage door scrolled up into the rock face, letting a gust of warm humidity out to brieﬂy fog the chill, dry Martian air.
Inside was a dimly lit loading bay. Cagehopper had a ﬂying car and a buggy parked inside, leaving only a little space for the big Ranger ﬂyer. The place was clean and orderly. Park saw a few rats, probably smart animals, scurry away as the garage door closed and he stepped out.
Park got Bobdog from the back seat, carrying the neo-bonobo again. Bobdog looked even weaker than before; he shivered in the cold air of the garage.
Couldn’t Cagehopper afford an airlock? But space was at a premium. Looked like it’d been part of an underwater cave system, formed back in the time when the Noctis tablelands were at the heart of a great, winding alluvial system. As they would be again, if Park and the rest of the TTO’s army of terraforming workers had their way about it.
Kim got out and made cop eyes at the cave. “Not much for sensors in here,” she observed.
“I think he ﬁgures anyone gets in the front door, he’s already screwed,” Park said.
“Public AR,” Kim said, and started walking toward the back of the garage. Park ﬂipped over to the lab’s public AR channel himself. A trail of red dots led in the direction Kim was headed, so he followed.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Stay on the path,]</span> Cagehopper messaged.
After going through a decontamination airlock, they followed the red dots through a maze of narrow corridors cut into the rock. Cramped as the garage’d been, the rest of the place sprawled. They crossed dozens of silent, unlit intersecting passages and an equal number of heavily reinforced doors. The stone, rather than echoing, drank up their footsteps. Lot bigger than he’d expected after the cramped garage.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[What’s he need all this space for?]</span> Kim asked.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Never wanted to know,]</span> Park messaged back. The dots ended at a heavy metal door that slid open to reveal a sparsely furnished octagonal chamber. In a circle of light cast by an overhead surgical ﬁxture, several metal tables gleamed. A doctor bot stood motionless at the head of one, and several rolling tables of diagnostic equipment stood by the other two. Other than the tables, there was no place to sit.
Cagehopper came out of a sliding door on the far wall. “Sit on the tables,” he said, and they did.
His neo-neanderthal morph was shorter than Park or Kim, thick-browed, with a barrel chest and hands that looked like they could bust rock. Cage went to work. He injected Park with what he ﬁgured must be diagnostic nanomachines to do blood work, then took throat swabs and dropped them into a sequencer.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[What’s he doing?]</span> Kim asked Park.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[He’ll work with all the displays visible only to him,] </span>he messaged.<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [You can’t risk someone with an advanced infection knowing you’re on to them.]</span>
Cagehopper took a swab from Bobdog, frowning at the treatment Bob’s morph had taken, then dropped
that swab in the sequencer, too.
“The hell happened to him, Jake?” Cagehopper asked.
Park said, “Yakuza using neoprimate parts for Traditional Chinese Medicine.”
“I don’t want to hear more.” Cagehopper went back to work.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Why’s he even in the room with us?]</span> she asked.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Ain’t his real morph. He’s put up a different face every time I been here.]</span>
“What kind of tests are you doing?” Kim asked.
Cage’d been scowling at an AR window. The outline of it was visible so that they could see he was reading, but to anyone but him, the contents were a misty blur. Without turning, he said, “Tossing your junk DNA, looking for jabberwockies. For starters.”
Cagehopper got a bunch of tests running, then ﬁxed up Bobdog a little. Once Cage’d put nanobandages on the worst of it, Bobdog put his hand to his throat and looked at the neanderthal. Park wondered how long severed vocal cords took to heal.
“I don’t have a quick ﬁx for that,” Cagehopper said.
“I can put you in a healing vat for a few days, or I can drill in some new implants and resleeve you.”
Bobdog looked at Park and signed, “New body,” in Warlpiri. Cagehopper glanced over at Park.
“Says he wants a resleeve,” Park said.
“I’ll trade you this one,” Cagehopper said, patting his chest. “By the way … you’re all clean.”
“Good,” said Kim, “I gotta talk to my people at the Ranger station.”
Cagehopper scowled. “Hopefully not about me.”
“Paranoia and egocentrism don’t go so good together, paatno-san,” she said, and left the room.
Cagehopper snorted and went back to prepping Bobdog for new mesh inserts.
“How you holding up, Bob?” Park asked, “Know it’s a lot to ask, but I need you solid, or you’re out.”
“Can walk straight,” Bobdog signed.
“What’s he say?” Cage asked.
Park told him.
“Remind me never to leave my burrow for you, Carter,” Cagehopper said.
----
“How you like the new morph?” Kim asked. They were ﬂying back to the stop on the M5 where Park’d
left his truck. The baboons hadn’t crapped the seats; Kim looked to be in a good mood about that.
Bobdog was pretty animated for someone in a new morph, but then he’d had the benefit of Cagehopper having kept the engine warm for him instead of sleeving him into a morph that’d been packed in stasis gel. “All right. Not bad. Kind of, too human, you know? Clumsy toes.”
“Yeah, I been in and then out of a bouncer,” Park said.
They were making small talk, but they’d have to cut that off shortly and make with the planning. He’d gotten Eidolon, one of the crows, to analyze the data they’d grabbed from the yak front. The meat of it was an undecipherable record of shipping times and routing numbers. The rest was an operations manual for handling exsurgents and extracting bodily ﬂuids from them without becoming contaminated oneself. The manual then went into how to store and package the ﬂuids for shipment.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[You got anything yet, E?]</span> Park messaged.
Eidolon’s response came slowly; they were an AGI inhabiting a massive art installation outside Locus, in the Jupiter Trojans. Park had plenty of contacts rimward. He liked using hackers outside Consortium jurisdiction when he could.
<span style="color: #ffa500;">[Yes, Jake. It is most distressing. The yakuza gang that Bobdog LaGrange discovered have been shipping their product to orbit, but I cannot deduce where. They are using combinatory routing codes.]</span>
Park did a mesh search on what that meant. Combinatory routing codes were a form of encryption used when sending physical goods—which meant they didn’t get used much. Parcels from multiple suppliers with combinatory codes on them would stack up at a routing center until all of them were there. Only by combining the codes on all parcels could you determine the ﬁnal destination. Corps who didn’t want competitors ﬁnding out where large quantities of components were being sent used them in the dark ages before microfacturing. Now they were mostly used by criminals.
Park patched Eidolon through the prowler’s speakers. “Y’all should hear this,” he said. “Eidolon, how do we ﬁgure out where the cylinders were going?”
After a long pause, Eidolon said, “You must ﬁnd all of the facilities from which they were originating. Or you could simply go to the routing center, and if there are enough parcels there, I might be able to deduce both their origin points and the ﬁnal destination by decrypting the collected routing codes from them.”
“You know where the routing center is?” Kim asked.
After a long moment, Eidolon’s reply came, “Of course. I only hesitated to provide the location because I feared I might have made an error in decrypting the code, but I have re-checked my work and am quite sure. It is a disreputable drinking establishment in the Zhongguancun neighborhood of Olympus City, on Mars. Sending you the precise address now.”
“That don’t sound like an error at all,” Park said. An AGI not grokking the idea of a front business didn’t surprise him. “Nice work, Eidolon. We’ll talk again soon.”
“Good day, Jake.”
Kim said, “I can’t do anything for you in Olympus, Carter.”
“I can,” Bobdog said, “I’ll leave right away.”
----

Bobdog LaGrange knew some helluv angry monkeys, Kim thought. Correction: apes. Never call ‘em monkeys, especially not the ones Bobdog knew.
She was sitting on the end of a motel bed eating the leftover half of a bibimbap burrito. Park was laying
back against the headboard behind her, smoking a joint. They were watching a tacnet replay on a shared AR window of Bobdog’s friends in Olympus tearing up a speakeasy run by a local gang.
In the end, the apes found more cylinders and got the data. Whole back of the place had been set up for shipping and receiving. Trucks loaded with goods come in off the maglev railroad stopped at the front business on their way to the space elevator, left light some goods and heavy a batch of nondescript cylinders full of zombie plague. Rinse, repeat. The gang were contractors—knew fuck all about what they were really involved in. Just knew they were getting paid.
Strictly speaking, as a deputized ofﬁcer, she ought to be concerned, but she’d have been surprised if the Olympus police didn’t know about the place. That department had three priorities: the Space Elevator, ComEx property, and whomever was paying them bribes, in that order. Bobdog’s neo-primate gang friends had done the Olympus cops’ job better than the cops would’ve.
As for Jake Carter–or Jae Park, which was about the most boring real name a guy could have–she glanced back at him. “How long you think Eidolon’ll take on that?”
He smiled. “You got somewhere to be?”
“I got a department to run, in case you’d forgot.” Although the truth of it was, she regularly went a week without setting foot in the station. Running things via mesh was easy enough. Rank of captain in the Rangers basically meant being a beat cop but having to answer a crap ton of mesh calls, too. Oh, and she got a better truck.
As for Park … she wasn’t sure this was going to happen again, but he hadn’t been overly disappointing. Like all men, he needed to read the documentation; unlike the majority of them, he did what it said. She liked him. They were both Korean, they were donggap—born in the same year, they were both from agrodome families (from what she could get out of him about his history). And it’d been a while. She didn’t fool around with co-workers, and most other men she met, she arrested.
“Hey, pause it and go back a couple seconds,” she said. She’d noticed something on Bobdog’s tacnet movie.
“Here, have the controls,” Park said.
She shuttled back about a second and a half. There. “Hello again, cupcake,” she muttered.
She zoomed. Cowering in one corner of the frame, doing a good job of looking terriﬁed, was a scantily clad pleasure pod. Almost a dead ringer for the one at El Destino Verde—probably the same model year. And again, high rent for the establishment they were looking at.
Park let go a stream of musky smoke. “Well, shit.” “She ain’t just a party favor,” Kim said, “She’s a moving part.”
He got up and started putting clothes on.
“What’re you doing?” she asked. He stopped. “Shower,” she said. “And then shower again. Smoke smells me all over you, he’ll get jealous.”
He laughed. “Serious?”
She had not stuttered. “What’s your hurry, anyhow?”
Park slipped off the jeans he’d started to put on. “Eidolon’s got their nose to the trail, but might be the pod girl’s a short cut.”
“That feed’s from Olympus. Have Bobdog pick her up.”
“Last message from Bobdog said he was going into psych,” Park said, “So count him out.”
Reasonable. She wouldn’t want LaGrange having her back after what’d he’d been through. Anybody’s game’d have some stress fractures after getting cut on for folk medicine by a bunch of technical yakuza zombie farmers.
“Finding her’ll be a good trick,” Kim said, “She’s gone to ground for sure. Just getting to Olympus’d take us hours.”
“I’m thinking we go after the pod girl from El Destino Verde. And I got a friend who’s good,” he said, smiling at her.
“Me? Carter, I’ve tracked plenty of people, but this one’ll be cold. It’s been eighteen hours.”
“I got her mesh ID when I tipped her.”
She smiled. “All right, that’s different. But it could still take longer than it’ll take Eidolon to break the encryption on those cylinder routing codes.”
He got up for that shower and sent her a mesh ID. “I got a friend who’ll help, name of Sedition. If you don’t mind working with someone else, that is.”
“Why not, long as they don’t expect access to Ranger databases.” She pulled open an AR window and started a tracker search for the pod girl’s mesh ID on public spimes in the area.
“I let him know you’d call. Use a VPN; he ain’t someone Captain Kim wants to be seen socializing with. I’m gonna make myself smell nice for your monkey now.” He closed the bathroom door
----
Park’s friend, Sedition, was damned good. Said he was a journalist by trade; she didn’t say anything about what she did. He threw out a lot of unorthodox ideas about what kind of searches to run, stuff far aﬁeld of the cop playbook.
Cupcake didn’t take long to track down, once they put their heads together. The pod girl’d been careful, had probably used a bunch of fake IDs, but she made the mistake of buying a ticket to orbit out of the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport. Sedition suggested not bothering trying to draw a line between her real mesh ID and any fakes she might be using. Instead, they had their muses stake out some likely (and, to her, not-so-likely spots) where her real ID might show up.
Turned out the pod girl didn’t trust her fake IDs far enough. She dropped the masquerade in spaceport security, probably gambling that her real ID would be more likely to get her through, and then she’d be on a rocket, beyond reach.
“//Heo-jeob//, Cupcake,” Kim muttered. Bad math thinking she could get away with that with a Ranger on her trail. One fugitive bulletin to the Noctis-Qianjiao spaceport cops was all it took from there.
She thanked Sedition, leaned back, and re-lit the joint Park’d left on the nightstand. She got a mesh call reporting the pod girl was in the clink by the time Park got out of the shower.
He looked at her funny. “//Go-go-ssing//,” he said, pulling on his cap. This struck her as funny, that he’d put that on before anything else, and she laughed a little. He raised an eyebrow. “What’re you doing hitting that?”
She leaned forward and took his wrist. “Ain’t no hurry, Carter. I got our girl. How about helping me ﬁnish this?”
“Serious? Strong work, Captain.” He gave her a butterﬂies in the stomach smile and accepted the joint.
She watched him inhale; she liked how he looked with his eyes closed. So Kim’d made up her mind about having another helping of Park, but even as she yanked him back onto the bed, there was one thing she was going technical trying to ﬁgure out: why’d Cupcake need to escape in her body? Wasn’t like back-country Mars lacked for shady egocasting facilities.
She decided she’d hold that thought.
----
Park hadn’t liked being left in the prowler with Smoke and Gloria, but the baboons were meshed. Kim could call them off from afar. And anyhow, looked to be he was now part of the pack. Gloria kept trying to groom him, while Smoke lounged in the back seat idly jerking off. Neither of them went anywhere near Kim’s seat.
They were parked on the shoulder of the covered service road that looped past the spaceport terminals, waiting for Kim to bring back Cupcake. Every so often a Qianjiao spaceport cop rolled by and gave the ranger vehicle the stink eye, but no one bothered them. Eidolon hadn’t gotten back to him except to say the decryption was taking longer than expected.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Be there in a sec,] </span>Kim messaged,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [Soon’s I ditch the local //jjab-sae//.]</span>
Park shooed Gloria way for the fourth time. <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Ain’t a nice thing to call another cop, Captain.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[I hate spaceport cops. Rangers get imaged and frisked like everybody else when we ﬂy.]</span>
Kim emerged from the terminal with Cupcake. The name on her mesh ID was Janu Vaidyar. Flanking her were two spaceport cops; the ranking one was gesticulating and talking to Kim’s back.
Vaidyar’d ditched her bartending outﬁt—which hadn’t been much more than go-go boots, AR graphics, and hair extensions—for a short, asymmetrical haircut and severe suit. She looked more like an intellectual property lawyer for a Lunar design house than a bar trixie in a yakuza dive, and it wasn’t just the clothes. Park was disappointed with himself for not making her sooner.
Park cracked the window as they got closer to the prowler. Even in the tunnel, there was a cold desert breeze cutting through the smell of monkey.
The airport cop’s words got clearer as they approached the truck. They were speaking Mandarin. “… with Director Cheng’s sign-off, which is ﬁne, even if it’s not standard procedure. But we don’t want to lose face over this prisoner.” He stopped for a second when he noticed Park. “And who’s this guy?”
“TTO,” she said, “They’ve got an interest in this case. He’s an observer.” Which was sort of true.
Park hopped out and opened the back door of the prowler.
The airport cops eyed him. “He doesn’t look like an ofﬁcial,” one said.
“We don’t wear suits in Operations,” Park said, watching Janu Vaidyar as Kim bundled her into the truck and cuffed her to a heavy ring set in the seat behind her. Smoke huffed at the pod but didn’t do anything else.
He didn’t like this. Vaidyar was an exposure risk, too. He made sure to get the names of the two cops. They might need to be checked up on later after physical contact with her.
“Well, don’t say NQSPD never did anything for you,” said the port cop.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Kim said.
Once they were in the air, she said, “Cagehopper’s.”
Wasn’t a question. “Yeah,” he said, looking back at the pod girl. Vaidyar stared out the window, silent. “This one’s gonna need special handling.”
----
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Go away, Carter!]</span>
Cage was gonna need some talking down. They were staring at the outside of the camouﬂaged garage door in Cagehopper’s ravine, trying to remain patient. Park glanced back at Vaidyar—he’d angled the rear view mirror on his side so’s he could watch her—and caught her smiling before she noticed and ﬁxed her face back into a stare.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Cage, man, this is bad news. Serious. I got a potential widespread infection risk, and you’re gonna dick me around because you don’t like my cop friend and her monkeys?]</span>
Kim shot him a “c’mon” look across the seat; he was sharing Cagehopper’s messages with her. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[I’ll make threats if you won’t,]</span> she said.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Bad cop?]</span> He thought about whether he was up for some potential bridge burning and decided yes. <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Fine… go.]</span>
[Cagehopper,] she messaged,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [This is Kim.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[What the hell, Jake? Did I say you could give her my mesh ID?]</span>
Park didn’t respond, just kept his eye on Janu Vaidyar. She was pretty calm for someone getting taken to an off-the-grid cave in a ravine instead of into Ranger custody.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Listen, Cage,] </span>she continued,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [I ain’t making this offer twice. Let us in, check this prisoner out for us, and I’ll pretend I never been to the notorious Cagehopper’s black kettle. Hell, I might even ignore it next time you move dubious wetware through my beat. Turn us away, and my memory might get sharper.]</span>
Cagehopper messaged back, <span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Why do you even care?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[My beat’s the TQZ. I take this shit seriously.]</span>
There was a long pause.<span style="color: #b02f5f;"> [A diamond could start out a lump of dinosaur shit, I guess.]</span> The door started sliding open.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Thanks,]</span> she messaged, but she was mouthing something else.
Same drill as last time. They weaved through the garage, following a path marked by Cage on AR, leading Vaidyar. They were four turns into Cagehopper’s maze when Park’s dorsal spinocerebellar tract went technical on him.
It was as if his extremities were suddenly boats, unmoored from him, drifting away in a slow current. He could feel his legs but couldn’t feel where they were in relation to each other, so that when Vaidyar jerked away from Kim and threw a shoulder into him, Park went down ass over tit. Vaidyar was making a run for it, headed back toward the garage.
Kim’d fallen on him, babbling in a way that might have been an attempt at cursing. Then she rolled off him; he could see the back of her head and her limbs ﬂailing.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Don’t try to move,]</span> he messaged, <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Real easy to overextend a muscle.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[What the fuck is this?]</span> she came back.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Cupcake’s an async.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Those’re just stories,] </span>she messaged. But she stopped trying to move.<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [I’m setting the monkeys on her.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Do it.]</span>
She unlocked the prowler and messaged the baboons. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Gloria. Smoke. Kill.]</span> Then she sent a command to their ﬂak jackets. The jackets obliged, pumping the baboons full of aggression drugs.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[What’s going on?]</span> messaged Cagehopper.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Lock all your doors, Cage. Prisoner’s an async. Just fed our proprioception centers kimchi and did a runner.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Noob mistake. How the fuck did you make proxy again?]</span>
Cage left out the dry cackle, which was ﬁne by Park.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Occupational hazard, Cage. Somebody’s gotta get dirt under their nails.]</span> He tried moving. It was no better.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[How long will this last?]</span> Kim messaged. 
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Minute or two, tops.]</span>
An animal scream echoed from a distant corridor, followed quickly by a human one.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[That was Gloria.]</span> She tried to move again, made it to her knees, but then put her arm in the wrong place and face planted.
Vaidyar gave a short scream that cut off quickly, but the baboons made no further sound.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[You’re gonna hurt yourself; then you can’t help anybody,]</span> he messaged.
“Gloria’s ﬂatlined. And I can take plenty of hurt, Jake.” She slurred bad, but managed to get the words out. She tried standing again, keeping all of her limbs where she could see them, and managed to make it to her feet.
Meantime, Park could feel his own limbs drifting back together. Kim was staggering toward the noise, so he decided to try crawling. The ﬁrst time he took his eyes off his hands he ended up fumbling and banging his chin on the ﬂoor, but he could feel the effects fading.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[She’s down,] </span>Cagehopper messaged,<span style="color: #b02f5f;"> [I got a drone to the scene. Ugliness.]</span>
Park regained his feet, and Kim was walking almost normal now. They followed the breadcrumb trail back. Cage shared a map of the hallways with them and highlighted Smoke’s location. As they got closer, they heard a wet smacking sound.
They rounded a corner. Vaidyar’s corpse lay in a mess of gore. Smoke stopped beating her with his baton as they came closer. He trotted up to Kim, sweeping his hands against the ﬂoor nervously, and hugged her leg, grunting.
Kim rufﬂed his fur, said, “Good guy,” and gave him a cigarette. Smoke took it, lit it, and then hopped over to Gloria’s body. Her eyes bulged, and one hand was limp over her muzzle. “Damn it,” Kim said.
Gloria’s face was darkened with spreading masses of subc
[[image:BaboonFight_MarkMolnar.png width="800" height="545" align="center"]]
utaneous blood ﬂow. “Internal hemorrhaging,” Park said, “Some of ‘em can do that.” He looked back to Vaidyar’s body. Something was wrong. Pleasure pods had cyberbrains, which meant pod morphs were rubbish at using async powers. So either Vaidyar was incredibly potent with psi, or this pleasure pod was no pod at all.
“Jake, let’s get this done. I just lost one of my monkeys. Ain’t good for me.” She was still studying Gloria, stroking the baboon’s head.
Park wanted to take her hand or hug her, but he was feeling that weird day-after-out-in-public distance that sometimes follows casual sex. So instead, he messaged Cage. <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Cagehopper, area’s secured. Gonna need a gurney and some cleaner swarms here.]</span>
A few minutes later Bobdog—scratch that, Cagehopper—rolled up, perched on a gurney pushed by a featureless bipedal servitor bot. The morph that had been Bobdog’s had glossier fur and healthier skin than the last time they’d seen it.
“You never fail to keep me entertained, Carter,” the neo-bonobo said.
Kim’s eyebrows creased up nasty, but she held her tongue. Together, she and Park swung Vaidyar’s limp form onto the gurney, trying to avoid the blood. Then she picked up Gloria, stroked her head, and put the small body on the gurney, too. Another foot trail appeared when they were done.
“Follow that trail to the guest rooms. Get cleaned up, and leave the male baboon there when you’re done,”
Cagehopper said, “I’ll examine our guest … and take care of your unfortunate friend. Shouldn’t take long.” He loped off into the dim passageways; the servitor turned the gurney around and followed him.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[You trust him?]</span> Kim asked Park.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Well enough.] </span>He started along the trail.<span style="color: #b02f5f;"> [The unkindly disposition’s an act. He’s down with the cause.]</span>
“Yeah, speaking of that …” she said. She looked back. “C’mon, Smoke.”
“What’re you thinking?” he asked. They took another turn. Except for the occasional security door, the corridors were almost featureless. He’d had GiGi, his muse, mapping it for him as they went.
“That I like how your friends are dealing with this shit instead of just trying to rope it off and hope it stays contained,” she said, “I want to know more.”
“Org’s called Firewall,” he said, “Ain’t government, though it’s got allies in a few of them.”
The AR tracks ran to a door at the end of a passage. They went inside and found themselves in a spartan living area. She said, “I requested the TQZ periphery as my beat. We oughta be clearing that land of the machines, but instead we’re ordered to patrol and watch. It’s stupid.” She started looking for a way to clean up Smoke.
“So you down for helping out some more? Because my next stop’s wherever they were shipping that exsurgent gunk.” He turned a chair around and sat on it.
She’d stood Smoke on a counter next to a sink and was toweling blood off of him. “Yeah. I have some questions. But if you’re not just a bunch of nutjobs, I want in.”
----
They stood in Cagehopper’s lab, trying not to look too often at Janu Vaidyar’s morph. Cranium’d been peeled, and Cage hadn’t bothered covering it up after he went through it for goodies. Some of the augments in her head needed more juice than could be drawn off a corpse. Her cortical stack glittered amid large droplets of blood in a shiny polymer tray.
Autopsy’d been done by a doctor bot with Cagehopper supervising. Still presenting himself in the neo-bonobo, he perched at the foot of the operating table. He shared a medical data AR channel with them; graphics poured over her body and some severed pieces of it as he began.
“She wasn’t a pod, just cosmetically modded to look like one,” he said. The neo-bonobo’s voice was rich and musical.
“Kinda ﬁgured that,” Park said, “What else you got?” 
“Blood work.” Cagehopper gestured to a stream of data on blood borne pathogens. “Conﬁrms Watts-MacLeod infection, but then you’d already worked that out.”
“Watts-MacLeod?” Kim asked.
Park shot her the entry-level EyeWiki entry on asyncs. “What else?”
“Implanted QE comm,” Cagehopper said; the AR graphics ﬂashed on an exposed area of her thoracic cavity sporting a piece of hardware that looked uncomfortably large to be carrying in one’s gut, “That’s the qubit reservoir.”
“Now that’s helluv weird,” he said, “Who gets one of those?”
“Human commlink,” Kim said, “Seen it. Once. Guy had it was a Consortium agent inﬁltrating a real paranoid Guangxi outﬁt.”
“Why would Cupcake’ve needed it?” Park asked. 
Kim looked at him like he was slow. “Gangs probably thought she was just a gift, something to seal the deal, not an agent set to watch them with an implanted FTL comm unit.”
“That’s not so good,” Cage said.
“Nah, it ain’t,” Park said, “Means they for sure know we’re coming.”
----
Park had an incoming message. Long, long distance. It was Eidolon. <span style="color: #ffa500;">[Jake Carter, I’ve ﬁnished decrypting the routing information from the cylinders Bobdog LaGrange found.]</span> The AGI followed that with a stream of locational data.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[That’s good news, Eidolon. Thanks much.]</span> He shared the data with Kim, and they started looking it over. 
“Never heard of this hypercorp before,” she said.
“Panacea. They’re a ﬂy-by-night, most like.” He messaged his muse,<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [GiGi, dossier à propos de Panacea Corporation, s’il te plaît.]</span>
They were back in the guest quarters at Cagehopper’s complex. Place smelled a little like wet stone dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Kim’d collected a gene sequence of Gloria from Cage, then she let the genehacker recycle the remains. Maybe she could get her cloned, one day. Smoke paced the long, narrow room nervously while she and Park sat on a bunk poking at AR windows of Eidolon’s ﬁndings.
The picture got clearer. Panacea was shipping the exsurgent goop to orbit after collection. All of it was going to a single orbital factory in the cloud of satellites and smaller habitats trailing Progress, the Planetary Consortium’s largest orbital. It still wasn’t clear what Panacea did with the stuff.
<span style="color: #a1a301;">[Recherche terminée,]</span> GiGi messaged. He pulled up the ﬁle and shared it with Kim.<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [Aw, hell. They’re a nanopharm manufacturer. That orbital’s their main plant.]</span>
“So you ﬁgure they’re putting the virus in drugs. What I don’t get, who the fuck does this kind of thing?” she asked. “There’s no money here.”
He stood up and stretched. “Someone trying to ﬁnish the TITAN’s work for them.”
Smoke padded up. She dispensed a cigarette automatically. “Like who?”
“I got a hunch, but I don’t wanna get anyone else thinking on the wrong track. I need to check out the Panacea facility. You riding along?”
Kim rufﬂed Smoke’s fur and shook a leg. “Riding along? Eff that, Carter. I’m driving.” She put in a call to her station. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Deng, this is Kim. I’m coming by in four hours. Gas up the Skink.]</span> She packed up her kit. “You ever ridden in a Ranger cutter before?”
He chuckled. “Only in handcuffs.”
“I’m going to leave that one alone. See you in the garage.” She pecked him on the cheek and made for her prowler.
Park watched her go.
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Are you trying to bring her in or date her?]</span> Cagehopper messaged him.
The room was empty now, and Park knew Cage had everything in here miked, so he said out loud, “Won’t lie. I ain’t excited about putting her through the loyalty tests.”
Cagehopper messaged, <span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Only a dumb redneck like you would recruit a high-value asset like her and then fuck it up with feelings.]</span> The baboon might not have smelled what he and Kim were up to earlier, but Cage sure had.
“We were just passing time.”
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[You know Carter, I’ve got implants that could make you not a completely shitty liar.]</span>
“I’ll keep that in mind. For when we get back.”
“We?” Cagehopper’s voice shrilled over the room’s speakers. “I don’t think I heard that right.”
But Park had not stuttered.

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