up as a criminal mastermind. Why bother with the crap pay, cramped living, and danger of deep-space salvage?
She sighed. “I’ve told you. There’s been more than once in my life when someone was looking for me, Carter. My hide on Daedalus was pretty good.” She waved one hand, as if in dismissal. “But nothing beats a ship in deep space if you don’t want to be found.” She arched an eyebrow in my direction. “Besides, I’m not the one taking out assassins left and right. Not to mention treating a few gunshot wounds as a minor inconvenience. One could wonder what you did before getting into the salvage game.”
The question made me shrug uncomfortably. The lives I’d taken since the Persephone weren’t the first, but that didn’t mean I liked it. “It doesn’t matter,” I hedged. “What matters is that we have to get out of here. I’m not sure walking the streets is a better idea, though, not unless you can somehow keep us off the grid while we do it.”
She shook her head. “We know they have pics of our new coils. They’ve got to be scanning the Net for our images. Too many cameras out there. Too many eyes. I’m good, but I can’t hack them all.”
“Then we wait here until the false IDs are in place. We give Genetechnic—or whoever is looking for us—the least amount of time possible to find us.”
“So, we end up at a new hotel that they—whoever they might be—may or may not know about. And then we… what?” There was the slightest edge of panic to Chan’s words. I felt the same thing, as if a fist were slowly closing around my lungs, making every breath a struggle. We could run. We could hide. But no one beat the megacorps. Not for long.
“I don’t know, Shay,” I admitted. “But at least now we have a general idea of what’s going on. Whatever they’re planning on doing with these nanites, Genetechnic wants to keep a tight lid on their existence.”
“And they’re willing to kill, and worse than kill, anyone that gets in their way,” Chan said with flat finality.
There was no answer to that, so I only nodded, and began gathering my meager possessions.
“We need proof,” Chan said.
We had switched hotels, giving up the luxury of the Martian Palms for a cheap, no-frills motel that offered cramped rooms and a view of an industrial complex that, as far as I could tell, produced nothing but ashy black smoke that drifted through a series of pipes before being vented into the Martian atmosphere outside the dome. At least the motel was clean; the various automated systems ensured that bugs—which had taken to the stars along with mankind and settled in just as many places as we had—and the pervasive red dust were kept to a minimum. We’d both kept the hoods of our vacc suits up and our heads down as we made the transfer. It earned us another measure of strange looks, but whatever crawlers were out sniffing for us wouldn’t be searching the minds of the people on the streets. Even the best facial recognition software couldn’t latch on to someone without a discernible face.
“Agreed,” I said. “But how?” It was the paradox of the modern panopticon—nearly every action humanity took was recorded and registered on some sort of electronic device, and, yet, the technology had come so far that one could create wholesale forgeries of almost any interaction or data set conceivable, which rendered electronic data from unverified sources as suspect, at best. Such information rarely passed the rigorous tests necessary to be entered as evidence in a court of law. The only time it seemed to matter was if the information came from an “unhackable” source, like the backup repositories, that was independently verifiable by a government, or if there were so many different sources that the sheer omnipresence of it could not be ignored. At the moment, we had none of that.
Shay dropped her head into her hands, blonde hair spilling over her interlocking fingers. “I don’t know, Carter. It’s not like we can go directly to the source and break into Genetechnic.”
The thought had crossed my mind. I drew a slow breath and let it out in a long, low sigh. “We could,” I admitted. “And with your Net skills, we might even be able to make it out again.”
Shay just looked at me, the incredulity in her expression almost comical. I raised my hands, to forestall