Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,55
despite working together, had never really gotten to know her. She had been a private person, trying to hold on to that privacy in the close confines of a ship. I could respect that… it was a code that all of us aboard lived by. Besides, I knew that personal relationships within small crews always ended badly. So, I had admired her from afar, but never tried to take anything further.
Now, here we were. The stigma around sexuality had long since faded—it hadn’t made much sense to begin with, but when the ability to be re-coiled into another body came along, it died a quick and unlamented death. Even the most fundamentalist of people couldn’t very well attach the essence of a person to their physical shell when they would wear many physical shells, some of them of a different biological sex, over the course of centuries. But that didn’t change the fact that most people still tended to be wired to be attracted to a definable subset of the gender spectrum. I belonged firmly in the “liked bio-females” camp—I had no sense of physical attraction to the coil that Shay now wore, handsome and well put together though it was. But…
But. But I couldn’t stop the burgeoning feelings that I felt for the person trapped in that coil. For the brave, determined, skilled professional that hadn’t been bowed or broken by the chaos that had torn away our old world and dropped us into one that was far more dangerous and violent than previously believed. And that confused the hell out of me. I wasn’t sure that now, when not just our branches, but our lives, were hanging in the balance was the proper time to delve too deeply into it. So, I cleared my throat again, for a third, unnecessary time, and turned the conversation back to the most important matter at hand.
“What do we do now?”
Chan shrugged. “I couldn’t find anything else on the data cube. I’ve got Bit working on some Net searches, listening for Harper or Copeland, and for both of us as well. As much to make sure that we don’t all suddenly disappear as anything.”
I winced at that, remembering my awakening and the attempted hack on my backup. The successful hack on Miller. “Any luck on finding Harper?” I asked.
“No. But Bit has just gotten started, and Mars is a big place. And it’s Genetechnic’s headquarters. If Harper found anything that pointed to… well, anything about all this, they’ll end up here. There’s still proof of their existence, anyway, so I don’t think they’ve been… erased.” Her voice dropped to a whisper for the last word.
“We need to make some decisions, Shay,” I said. “The police here have our information… if these Genetechnic hackers are as good as you seem to think…”
“Good enough to have hacked into the backup servers,” she interjected. “That’s as good as anyone ever needs to be.” She lifted her shoulders in a sort of half-shrug. “I’m not sure I could do it. I’d say it was impossible, but we’ve all known that it’s impossible for so long that people sort of stopped trying. But if they got in, they’re definitely good.”
I nodded. “Well, if that’s the case, then it won’t be long before someone gets the information out of the police network. That assassin, at least, knows we’re here.” I flexed my left arm and pressed against the floor with my left leg. Both ached savagely and sent little trills of pain coursing up and down them with the pressure, but it was much better than yesterday, and the actual projectiles had been expelled while I slept. “We needed to recover yesterday, but we can’t stay here.”
She gave me a grin that, on her old coil, would have reminded me of a slightly naughty schoolgirl. On her surfer-dude face, hovering as it was above a too-short robe, it looked almost lascivious. “I’ve already got a pair of backup identities in the works. We should be ready to move in an hour or so. Or, we could go now, and just… wander… until that time was up. Once we have the clean idents, we can hit another hotel.”
I shook my head in mute wonder. “Why did you ever work salvage?” The question slipped out, but damned if I didn’t want to know the answer… the real answer. With her skills she could easily have gone to work for any of the megacorps, or the government, or maybe just set