Fair Verona

But a Shadow

Toni jerked off his headset, staring at the walls of the sanitary unit. This was way worse than any flashback. Virtual junkies got used to being dumped into the middle of a street brawl at Carnival or having long dead friends tap you on the shoulder. But nothing topped a whiff of reality invading your dreams. He punched PROTEUS.

An answer flashed back: PROGRAM ERROR—PLEASE WAIT-FREE FOUR HOUR UPGRADE.

Four free hours. Wow! How generous. Way too generous for some little program glitch. Upgrades usually came measured in minutes. PROTEUS was going to great expense to get him to sit tight and not ask questions, waiting for his reward like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

Toni leapt up, jerking the glucose drip out of his arm, shutting down his life-support pack, pulling on his pants. He might be an addict, but he wasn’t an idiot. Toni knew what happened to lab dogs when they were no longer needed.

Tucking his deck and his life-support pack under his arm, he hit the release on the sanitary unit door. He hated leaving the exercise bike. Bright slanting sunlight nearly blinded him. Half-blind and wobbly on his feet, he steadied himself against the open door, getting his eyes in focus. “Elvis Saves,” was scrawled above the words OUT OF ORDER.

Peeling OUT OF ORDER off the door, he put the letters in his pocket to use later—if he ever got the chance. Then he set off at a stumbling run down a wooded path. The sanitary unit sat in a little-used part of a public park. Kilometer-tall trees soared overhead. Brightly colored flying eels snaked between vine-covered trunks.

For the first time in days, Toni had to move under his own power. He did not find it easy. Or comfortable. Were it not for Ariel’s .5 gravity, he would have had to do it on all fours. He tottered up a side trail leading to a cargo field on the shoulder of Mt. Beanstalk. Above him towered the peak, with the razor-straight Beanstalk disappearing into the deep blue stratosphere.

Toni did not see the spark falling from orbit, but he heard the blast as it hit. Shock waves rattled the foliage, showering him with twigs. Scratch one sanitary unit. Alarms rang across the cargo field. Cargo handlers in mint-striped coveralls raced over, peering into the vegetation, though there was nothing left to see. Whoever offered him FOUR FREE HOURS had not even waited two minutes before blowing his dingy cubicle to bits. They must have assumed he was a moron. Hopefully, they now assumed he was a dead moron.

As guards came running up to take their look, Toni walked casually the other way. Women in shorn hair and green-striped coveralls grinned at him. Smiles were all they had to offer—their only way to look attractive.

Disheveled and out of shape, breathing hard from the run upslope, Toni did not fancy himself overly handsome. But these women had gone months, maybe years, without a man. The mere fact that he was walking free put him way ahead of the guys they were used to seeing. Swiftly, he searched out a matronly female trustee in loading and packaging, offering his life-support pack for cargo-class passage to Elysium. Toni had a bulging credit file, but dared not touch it—not so long as he planned to stay dead.

She readily agreed. What he wanted was only mildly illegal—and the support pack was crammed with drugs and paraphernalia. Stuff that could keep you entertained for weeks in lockup. Giggling mint-striped prisoners loaded him into a cushioned bio-container. The trustee, easily twice Toni’s age, with a long sentence behind her, leaned in and kissed him, pressing her breasts against him beneath the coveralls. Whispering “Sweet dreams,” she closed the lid. The box sealed.

Curled in the dark, Toni reviewed the news channels. (“The armed merchant cruiser M. Licinius Crassus regrets the accidental launching of an Osiris orbit-to-surface missile. Luckily, the missile impacted in a sparsely populated area, causing no significant structural damage expect to a public toilet.”) But the top story remained the hunting death of Transgalactic tycoon Alexander Gracchus. (“A member of his party is still listed as missing.”) Much bigger news than some blown-up outhouse.

Presently, he felt himself being loaded aboard a ballistic cargo carrier. Toni could still smell the warm odor of the woman who had tucked him in, reminding him how shitty some people’s “real” lives were. What had she done to deserve a lonely, single-sex realtime existence, locked away when she was not working. Not much, he bet. Whoever murdered Alexander Gracchus was bound to be doing way better.

And murder it was. Whatever slim chance had existed that this was all some ghastly hunting mishap had been punctured by Pandora turning up alive in Verona. Alive and on the run. Having known, or seen, too much. Clearly, she was supposed to have died along with Gracchus and his Chimp bodyguards. But she must have seen it coming, and set up her escape ahead of time—using PROTEUS to get Toni’s attention. Damn it, why had she picked him? Didn’t she know he was an addict?

Answer was, she did know. It must be one of the reasons why she’d picked him. It made him easy to manipulate. Desperate people have few scruples about other folks’ weaknesses. She had tapped into his private 3V fantasy even before coming down the Beanstalk—catching his attention at Carnival, making sure he’d come after her.

And whoever killed Gracchus had traced her contact through PROTEUS. No surprise there. Gracchus had been murdered through PROTEUS—using the Wyvyrn’s control collar. Huge winged megafauna made nifty murder weapons. Pandora and her would-be killers had been conducting a silent duel in cyberspace, while Gracchus stalked his Wyvyrn, and the Noble Dog panted after Silvia Visconti.

Which was why Toni had to stay off the net—playing dead. Not using PROTEUS until he absolutely had to. Surprise was his best weapon. Whoever did all this was not infallible. They’d missed Pandora. And they’d missed him. If only by an angstrom.

His thoughts were still spinning in these circles when the ballistic transport’s engines roared to life. G-forces slammed him into the cubicle cushioning. Like many stretches of realtime, the flight fast became a hideous bore. Interminable minutes of banging off padded walls. Inflight entertainment consisted of Toni tossing his cookies in free-fall.

He emerged battered and dirty on a cargo pad overlooked by the Elysium rimwall. A far better place for his purposes than the usual entry ports atop the rim—less used, and watched over solely by security cams and a trusting crew of maintenance Chimps. Best of all, the cargo pad possessed a clean, vacant public toilet. Adept at bathing from a sink, while doing his laundry in the hand drier, Toni used the time to check on the search, tapping into Ali, Doc, and Harpo’s control channel. The search pattern had tightened. Large sections of the crater floor had been gone over, or ruled out. The remaining area continued to shrink.

It took time to crack the code on the Wyvyrn’s control collar without alerting PROTEUS. But the code ended up being a simple binary transposition—any more encryption would have drawn unwanted attention to Dragon Hunt. The Wyvyrn also turned out to be in the prime search area.

Great. The more the merrier. Luckily the monster lay immobilized, paralyzed by its collar, pinned down now that it was no longer needed. Toni meant to do something about that—but not right now.

First, he had to find Pandora. Not a pleasing prospect. It meant going in person into Elysium—since he couldn’t use his cyborg body without alerting PROTEUS. But he had no choice. Someone who had murdered the richest man in this part of the spiral arm would gladly invest a couple of megacredits in making Toni go away. Pandora was his only protection. Come up with her alive, and he had half a chance. Without her, he would just be some homeless 3V addict with a weird story and an outrageous price on his head. An acutely terminal condition.

And he had to do it alone. The planetary authorities might be tough on drug addicts and tax cheats, but they were hardly up to interstellar conspiracies. Pair-a-Dice Security could care less what happened onplanet. And the Freeport Police were completely corrupt. Their idea of lending a hand would be to hold Toni for the highest bidder.

But the absolute worst of it was having to do it in realtime. In Verona, this would be no problem. Antonio the Noble Dog never failed at anything. But he was not Antonio. And this was not 3V. This was the real world—where everything could (and did) go wrong. Here, he could fail. Or die. God, how he hated realtime! In Verona, none of this would even be happening.

Being the only human at the cargo pad, he had the run of the place. To take him into the crater, Toni selected a skycycle, a hydrogen-filled para-sail with a solar-assisted pedal propeller. He could not chance using his own credit, but he easily convinced the simple-minded rent-a-stand to charge the flight to a regular client’s account.

Toni peddled the skycycle straight off the cargo pad into an updraft along the windward side of the rimwall. Here hot surface air and prevailing winds blowing out of Nightside formed a great standing wave, rolling over Elysium rim. This was the easiest entrance to Elysium, and the air above the rim swarmed with fliers, orthopters, and sailplanes. He felt comfortably lost in the crowd. Beneath him, a green canopy of kilometer-tall trees filled the bottom of the crater, climbing up almost to the rim.

From his perch among the tourists and pleasure seekers, Toni kept tabs on the search below—happily letting Ah, Doc, and Harpo do the leg work. He beat back and forth to windward, listening in on their calls. Hours on the exercise bike had kept his calves in shape, and soaring allowed him to save his strength for one frantic burst once they found Pandora.

Harpo hit the trail first. Chemosensors and a heat trace picked up Pandora’s track, and Harpo’s cyborg body went crashing after her, calling on Doc and A1 to bring the hovercar. Swooping down, Toni plunged through a break in the canopy. Getting ahead of Harpo, he dodged in among the tall trunks, keeping between the upper canopy and the tangle of ground cover, hopefully showing himself to Pandora.

Harpo signaled that he had an infrared contact, bearing ZERO-THREE-ZERO, just shy of a large clearing caused by the fall of a forest giant. Toni headed for the contact, spiraling down through slanting lanes of Prospero light filled with gaily colored day moths.

Pandora had picked a perfect spot for her pick-up. The fallen Goliath had taken out a dozen lesser trees, tearing a huge rent in the canopy. Clear sky showed through the ragged hole, and much of the tangle beneath had been flattened by falling timbers. Toni set down atop a mossy pile of toppled logs. Insects whirred up to greet him.

Pandora appeared, breaking cover to Toni’s left, still wearing her synthetic leopard-skin. Her thigh-length boots were covered in mud, and her lacquered hair had drooping spikes—otherwise she seemed in decent shape. Scrambhng atop the log pile, she leaped from timber to timber toward him.

Toni lifted an eyebrow as she hopped aboard the skycycle behind him, landing on the back half of the banana seat. “Lady Silvia Lucetta Visconti?”

“Sorry about that, I was incredibly desperate.” She sounded as if she meant it, particularly the last part. Her arms looped around his waist, pressing her hips against his back. “Let’s go!”

“You almost got me killed,” he pointed out.

“Might still happen,” she assured him.

As if bent on proving her right, Harpo came crashing out of the undergrowth. Cyborg faces cannot register shock, but Harpo did come to a dead stop, sensors pointed forward. Not waiting for Harpo to recover, Toni kicked the emergency release on the skycycle’s hydrogen bottle.

The cycle’s gas bag ballooned above them, lifting the skycycle off the log pile. Toni backpedaled furiously, keeping them aimed at the hole in the canopy. Harpo dwindled until he looked like a plasti-metal toy abandoned in the clearing.

Pandora pulled them tighter together. Spiked hair tickled his neck. “Smashing. Absolutely smashing,” she purred into his ear—her voice had a rich timbre to it, worthy of a Visconti heiress. Or a beautiful, wealthy young widow, with holdings in a dozen star systems. Obviously on top of the universe, she started giving orders, “Head for the Beanstalk. There’s a gravity-drive yacht waiting on Pair-a-Dice. A Fornax Skylark—fast enough to get us comfortably lost.”

Toni nodded, happy to have somewhere to run to. But at the moment, he had his hands full with the here-and-now, keeping the overloaded skycycle on an even keel while balancing his 3V deck on his lap. No easy task with Pandora holding tight to him, hips and breasts pressed against his spine, her hands clasped just above his groin. He eyed her over his shoulder. “Doing okay?”

“Sure, great. Can’t you tell?” She plainly aimed to make the most of the moment. Passing through the canopy, Toni kept on going, meaning to get all the height he could out of the gas bag. For a laboring skycycle trying to make a quick getaway, altitude is everything.

Trouble appeared almost at once. A silver gleam below them whipped into a quick climbing turn. The Dragon Hunt hovercar. Doc and Ali must have picked up Harpo and were now coming for him.

He shouted to Pandora, “Hold tight.” Releasing the gas bag and the spent hydrogen bottle, Toni put the skycycle into a screaming dive. He had no chance of outrunning a jet-powered hovercar, but the dive would give him airspeed to work with—and the chance to make something happen.

Doc put in a call to him, “Toni, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

Having no good answer, Toni hung grimly into the dive. Treetops rushed up to greet him. The hovercar did another fast turn and bored after him. “Give it up, Toni, we’ve got the speed to run you down.” That was Harpo.

They had the speed, but not the agility. Spotting a hole in the forest canopy, Toni side-slipped and angled in, dodging between kilometer-tall trunks. The hovercar could not follow without risking hitting its rotors on the foliage or whacking into a tree. They had to throttle down just to draw even with him.

“Come on, Toni, we can make a deal.” That was Doc again, ever the reasonable one.

“I doubt it.” No deals. Toni had them right where he wanted them. He backpedaled, forcing them to come to a complete halt, hovering just above the canopy. Branches rattled in the propwash.

“Nobody cares about you,” Harpo assured him.

Toni smirked. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Give up the woman and we’ll see you get away.” Ah tried to sound like they had his interests at heart.

Toni was not even tempted. Without Pandora, he was just a loose end, waiting to be done away with. “They’re going to kill her,” he reminded them. “Just like they killed Gracchus.”

“That’s not our business,” Harpo protested.

“Too bad, it should be.” Toni hit the control key on his deck, sending out a coded signal.

The Wyvyrn roared out of its hiding place, saber-like mandibles flashing, wing segments beating, spine-tipped tail lashing. Given what had happened, the great segmented beast didn’t need much encouragement from its control collar to fly into a blind frenzy. Toni merely gave its anger direction.

Doc managed to get off an anguished MAYDAY before the monster hit. Imagine a huge hundred-meter centipede, with wings instead of feet, slamming into the light plastic-aluminum hovercar. The ship’s lifting body hull crumpled, and the hovercar flipped over, spinning out of control. It went whirling into the canopy, with the Wyvyrn still clinging to the hull, stabbing at it again and again with its giant stinging tail.

“That will teach you to trifle with the Noble Dog!” Toni couldn’t hang around to enjoy the virtual deaths of Doc, Ah, and Harpo’s cyborg bodies. Putting business ahead of pleasure, he pedaled off between the trees. Soon he was lost among the tourists swarming atop the standing wave at Elysium’s windward rim.

Pandora sat comfortably safe in her yacht, a drink in her hand, her back to the Skylark’s main viewport, looking like she had swallowed the canary. A mobile auto-bar stood moored beside her couch, serving up a frothy blue liquor that misted like hquid oxygen.

Behind her, projected in the viewport, lay Pair-a-Dice yacht harbor, backed by starlit void. Pair-a-Dice had grown in haphazard fashion from the original geosync station and Beanstalk terminus. Pleasure domes and gaming palaces came right up to the harbor edge, sticking out at odd angles amid the repair slips and taxi stands. The whole gleaming jumble ended abruptly in empty space. The “harbor” was merely a parking area around the geosync point. A couple of orbital yachts were clearly visible, and taxis going ship to shore showed up as tiny moving sparks. But most of the parked spacecraft were mere points of light, lost among the stars.

She told Toni, “Gracchus was damned good to me. We married for his money, but that didn’t make me hate him. Trouble was, too many folks stood to make trillions by his death. Like his bitch of a First Wife, and her little fuck-mate Selene. You remember her? Came to the Wyvyrn hunt in a faerie gown?”

Toni nodded idly. Pandora had been doing all the talking, happy to be rich and alive.

“I mean, the guy was worth giga-credits. In Aesir system, he owned his own goddamn moon! My measly 2 percent was worth killing for a billion times over.” Intersystem law made a small but immutable provision for secondary spouses.

She grinned at him. “Without a doubt, you saved my butt. And I’m gonna be grateful. Outrageously grateful. I’m fabulously rich, which is all I ever wanted to be. And I’ve seen way too many assholes stepping on people’s faces to get somewhere, forgetting who gave them their start. Well, that ain’t me.” Pandora laughed provocatively, “Prepare to be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams!”

Toni stared at her. What he saw was Silvia Lucetta Visconti with her halo of golden hair, lounging on a day bed on the poop royal of her great lateen-rigged trading galley. A handsomely hung serving lad in blue and white Visconti livery stood ready to refill her wine goblet.

Behind her lay the sparkling waters of the Venice lagoon, backed by the tall Campanile and the sun-drenched colonnades of the Piazza San Marco, where the Grand Canal came sweeping out of the city, headed toward the sea. Toni could see the twin Columns of Execution marking the sea gate to Venice, and the Greek bell-and-onion domes of San Marco Basilica poking above the Doge’s new Gothic palace. At the moment, Venice was besieged by high water. Wavelets lapped past the twin columns into the Piazzetta, flooding the “finest drawing room in Europe.”

Silvia had had the effrontery to suggest that he sail away with her to the East—where she claimed to have inherited rich estates among the Isles. What presumption, even for a Visconti! He was Antonio Cansignorio della Scala, nephew to the prince, not some rich bitch’s plaything. If the right people were poisoned, he would be heir to Verona!

And yet—Italy had gotten stale of late, with this obnoxious French Pope and no wars of note. Or at least none worth fighting in. Even Proteus had failed him, plunging Antonio into no end of trouble. And the East was said to be a real eye-opener—if you believed the Polos.

Besides, the Noble Dog had began to feel he had somehow outgrown Verona…