Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,60
has killed, and who knows how many they’ve… erased.” A small shudder coursed through her. “Killing is one thing. Snatching coils and blanking them for resale is worse. But Miller shows that they are willing to do the unthinkable. We can’t stop them through legal channels. So, we do what we have to. I’ll bet the possibility of doing time against the certainty that they’ll eventually find us and… delete… us if we do nothing.”
I nodded my agreement. “We do what we have to.”
* * *
Ingles’ house—and it was an actual, freestanding house, an unheard-of luxury to hab dwellers—was located in a section of Pallah that, in another place and time, might have been called a suburb. The entirety of the Pallah dome was small enough by Earth standards that the neighborhood would likely be considered “urban core” Earth-side, but it had that air that suburbs sometimes do: a sense of peace combined with an undercurrent of desperation. There weren’t children playing in the streets. Most habs, and domes, too, I supposed, had strict regulations around procreation. Every person added to the environment increased the strain on the life-support systems, not to mention the eventual impact on the already over-stressed re-coiling queues. No one had—to my knowledge—tried to outlaw procreation, but it wasn’t unusual for some habs to require proper licensing. Earthers were different of course and I’d heard Luna was as well, despite their reliance on domes.
Ingles’ place stood among a neat row of nearly identical houses. The heart was standard prefab, and the dull gray composite was still visible here and there. But an effort had been made to mask the blandness with what looked like actual aluminum siding. It was ironic that, in an effort to make the dull gray boxes of colonist life look more appealing, the neighborhood had succeeded in taking a bunch of houses that looked exactly the same and made them more aesthetically pleasing… while at the same time, ensuring that they all continued to look exactly the same. To me it seemed like a terrible waste of resources, and there were few things the spacer in me hated more than waste: every square centimeter of space aboard a ship served a purpose, and the largest berth I’d ever seen would have fit in a tiny fraction of the space that a single one of these dwellings took up. Even on a hab, you could fit multiple families within the cubage of even the smallest of the houses. The sheer scale of these freestanding, individual dwellings affronted me on an almost personal level.
I shook those thoughts from my head as the car rolled to a stop a few houses down from the Ingles’ residence. Chan wasn’t with me—at least not in the meat. She was nearby, and our agents had linked, so we had direct access. We had both agreed that she would be more useful handling the electronic warfare side of things rather than kicking in doors and, if things went bad, dropping bodies. “I’m here,” I Net-linked to her.
“I’ve got you,” Chan replied, and I started at the words. Not at the words, but at the voice. Somewhere along the line, she’d taken the time to program some kind of voice masking software. The “I’ve got you,” wasn’t in the smooth tenor of the male coil she wore, but back in what I thought of as her voice, a low contralto. She wasn’t giving me any time to get over my shock, though. “Ingles definitely has some kind of electronic security system up and running.”
“Can you shut it down?”
I couldn’t see the long level look of near-disdain, but somehow, in the silence that followed, I knew it was there. “Of course I can shut it down, Carter. But that’s amateur hour. Net providers monitor activity and up/down status. If I were to pull Ingles’ house off the grid, we might as well call HabSec ourselves and ask them to meet you there.” She paused, but I said nothing, refusing to ask the question: then what the hell is it we are going to do?
“Now,” she continued, “I could take down the whole sector, disrupt any kind of signal access for a few blocks. That would bring the authorities, but we’d have some time. They wouldn’t know where to look.” Something about the way she said it told me that wasn’t the answer either. “But who knows how much time you’re going to need in there? Can’t have a bunch of nosy