Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,28

was measured the same way all other prices were—cold, hard credits.

She shrugged. “Mostly corporate stuff, actually. I don’t feel bad about helping one megacorp fleece another out of their intellectual property. But down here, I can tap directly into the station backbone, and all the electrical interference from the power plant means it’s more trouble than it’s worth to HabSec to keep monitors running.” Her face sagged a little. “It’s also where I’ve been hiding out since I found out about Miller.”

She came to a halt in front of a hatch labeled 49/4-B. There was no pad next to the door, and she pulled it open. I couldn’t be certain that she hadn’t used her agent to wirelessly disengage a lock, but I didn’t think she had. I doubted anyone ever made it this deep into the bowels of Daedalus, anyway. Locks were made redundant by the remoteness of the location.

The room beyond was bigger than my apartment, and far homier. What must have been the sleeping area was partitioned from the rest of the space with folding screens that looked like actual wood, their paper sides inked with elegant stands of bamboo. The inking looked original, not fabricated, and either Chan had done it herself, or she had paid a fortune to have it done. An AI-guided bot could have produced something of the same quality, but there was a level of imperfection to the artistry that couldn’t be programmed. A low table surrounded by scattered cushions defined a seating area and a large desk was tucked into another corner. The panels on the bulkhead by the desk had been removed, and wires ran from the walls to somewhere beneath the desk. Chan must have had a console there, wired, as she had said, directly into the main Net backbone for Daedalus.

She pulled the hatch shut behind her, and I saw that, while it may not have been intended to be locked, Chan had taken steps to fix that. Bowed bands of steel had been welded to the door and bulkhead on either side of it. Chan grabbed a composite bar from beside the hatch, and shoved it through the braces, literally barring the door. Not too long ago, it would have seemed like a ridiculous precaution. But that was before someone had twice tried to kill me—maybe to kill both of us.

Chan dropped down onto the cushions by the table, the languid motion somehow feminine despite the coil she wore. “We’re safe, for now,” she said. “Nothing’s getting through that door without a plasma cutter.”

I moved over and slumped onto some of the cushions as well. For a moment, I just leaned back and closed my eyes. It felt good to rest, to forget, if only for an instant, the tension and stress and chaos that had taken over my life. But only for an instant. I still needed to find out what had happened, why people were out to kill me. If Miller was truly gone. What had happened to Harper. The questions spun through my mind in an endless torrent until, finally, I gave up.

Instead, I looked over at Chan and asked, “Who are you, anyway?” I waved a hand at the bolt-hole in which I currently sat. “Who lives like this? Have you been some sort of master criminal this whole time? And how did I not know about it? And how in the world do you keep the station staff from finding it?”

She smiled and made a strange hair-flipping motion with her head. The smile turned into a grimace as the gesture didn’t quite have the results that it would have in her previous coil. “I’m hardly a master criminal, Carter,” she said. “And keeping out of the eyes of the maintenance staff is easy enough. I’ve altered the records, is all. As far as Daedalus is concerned, this compartment is a storage facility for spare pressure seals of a model the station stopped using decades ago. It’s too far off the beaten path to be viable living space and with a little programmatic encouragement from me and Bit, it’s been all but forgotten. I wasn’t really trying to hide it from you or the crew.” She shrugged. “We’ve all lived lives that we don’t talk about, all been other people at some point in our pasts. I think keeping secrets becomes a habit, sometimes.”

I grunted. Chan was right, and I knew it. Salvage hadn’t been my first gig, or second, or even fifth.

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