Perfect Gravity Read online

  “How recently?” Rafa asked.

  “Seventeen days ago.”

  “Which coincides with…”

  “It does indeed.”

  Rafa raised the back of his hand to his mouth and engaged some sort of vasoconstrictive trickery that made him go pale beneath his smooth olive complexion. Chemical reaction to an ingestible? Or permanent body alteration? Regardless of the source, Angela coveted it. Despite her best attempts at control over body and mind and her famous unflappability, she still blushed inconveniently sometimes.

  Though it had been a while. She missed the things that made her blush.

  “The Red River drone attacks began again at roughly the same time. We believe Vallejo is behind those horrific crimes as well. He and his bombastic miscreants from Texas are a threat to our way of life, to our very civilization. We would be foolish to continue peace talks with a partner who cannot be trusted.” She leaned forward slightly, as if she were actually talking to Rafa and not a pasted-on holo of his form. “But I will say this. If the people of the United North American Nations reelect Ezekiel Medina as their president next week, these evils perpetrated by the Texas Provisional Authority, and its ruthless leader Damon Vallejo, will stop. We will bring Vallejo and Texas to justice.”

  There. Bomb dropped.

  Rafa sat back, steepled his fingers before the O of his mouth, and closed his eyes, signaling a break. “Take five, Senator. That was brilliant there at the end, by the way. You are such a doll.”

  “Ah, thanks,” Angela said, allowing her concentration to slip. Her back sagged against the chair, and she cycled a long breath, in through the nose and out through pursed lips.

  A smartsurface wall to her right showed images and video of the drone attack for context, probably with a voice-over and dramatic background music that she couldn’t hear. Rafa’s production team were professionals, and she trusted them to foster the desired sense of indignation and panic.

  She slipped her shoes off, stretching her toes against the hotel rug until the small joints popped. The subdermal psych-emitter had gone cool while the show montaged.

  In her periphery, mech-Daniel was waving his hands, trying to wrest her attention. Urgently. Damn it. No break for her, not yet.

  She swallowed a sigh. “You have something for me, Dan-Dan?” she asked the mech-clone, using the pet name that signaled a private-channel interaction.

  “I certainly do.” Mech-Daniel sounded breathless. Which was preposterous. He was, after all, nothing more than organic skin stretched over a custom mech frame, programmed to mimic her husband’s mannerisms. He also monitored her communications, sorted her hectic schedule of appearances and floor votes, and made a mean martini. Dirty.

  In the privacy of her own mind, Angela had long ago admitted that the robot clone of Daniel Neko was preferable to her flesh-and-blood contracted husband, whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh in…twenty-five months? Twenty-six? And every one of those more glorious than the last. Even when they were in the same geographical area, they didn’t meet up anymore. Daniel hadn’t been at her side when she’d negotiated the cessation of hostilities in Iberia. Or when she steamrolled her misguided opposition in the statewide election and became a continental senator.

  Mech-Daniel, the officious but harmless mech-clone, had been her only companion for all the highs, and all the lows. And best of all, she could completely let her facade slip in front of him, let him pamper and soothe her just like someone who was real and gave a shit…and then afterward, she could purge and reboot, and he would recall none of it.

  Best. Husband. Ever.

  “Okay.” She conceded to his urgency. “What’s going on?”

  “You must terminate this interview immediately. A push notification just came in, and it is news you will want to receive in private. The hotel’s security cameras were recording, but I have asked them to go dark. You will not want them to see.”

  Angela resisted the urge to scoff. Mech-Daniel didn’t deserve that. He was intellectually incapable of appreciating her mad skills at emotion and image control. She had been trained practically from infancy to weather shitty news. There was nothing he could possibly say that would rattle her, even a little bit.

  “I’m still on with Rafa for another ten minutes after the break. Just go ahead and tell me.”

  Rafa would have follow-up questions, and she couldn’t wait to heap more dirt on Dr. Vallejo’s lying asshole head. Her popularity polling didn’t really need the boost, but her government did. Her mentor did. Her marching orders were clear: pull out all the stops to get Zeke’s numbers up. Approved actions included but were not limited to drumming up fury against Texas, provoking some confrontations, luring those wacko technocrats down in Dallas—or wherever the hell they were holed up—to do something stupid. She had a hunch nudging them in that direction wouldn’t take much.

  “No,” mech-Daniel insisted. “You must excuse yourself. Right now.”

  The spike embedded behind her ear vibrated and warmed. The psych-emitter was back online, even if Rafa’s image still reclined, silent. Voice wasn’t recording yet either, though she had approximately one minute before it started back up.

  Angela pushed a bubble of frustration against her teeth until it popped. Calm echoed along her hard palate. Frustration was physiologically close enough to excitement for the purposes of the psych-emitter, and she knew how to blur one into another.

  “Whatever this thing is, I’m not interrupting my interview for it,” she told the mech-clone. “I’ll ping you in ten minutes. Log off, Dan-Dan.”

  She waited for him to acknowledge her command.

  Except he didn’t. Not right away. After a brief pause, he spoke again into her implanted com. “Be prepared, then, for Rafael Castrejon to press you on the breaking news item.”

  “Which is important, I suppose?”

  “I am afraid it is. Video arrived only moments ago from California. Your husband has been murdered.”

  Across the rug from Angela, holographic Rafa’s eyes flashed open, and his face mirrored her own surprise. He had just heard the same news, was probably already searching for clues to her emotional reaction.

  Shit. She needed an emotional reaction. Right now.

  Searching, searching.

  Voice and vid recorders went live a heartbeat later, which was all the time it took for her to school her features appropriately, to arrange her brain to become excited in all the spots it ought. Her emotions spooled out in an expected series. Shock. Horror. Speechless grief. If she overdid it a little, no one would notice. Everybody overplayed for the live-emotes from time to time. And with an event like this, she would be excused for a lot.

  Daniel. Dead. Deep breath.

  Later, much later, the online therapists would dissect her psych-emitter reading and discuss it in depth. They’d parse it and salivate, feigning confusion when what they really wanted to do was yell gotcha.

  Because the moment Angela Neko heard the news of her husband’s death, her primary discernible emotion had been relief.

  • • •

  If the universe granted druthers, Kellen Hockley would’ve asked to spend this fine autumn evening out riding fences. Or patching up barb-tangled bovines, soothing them to health. Or catching the blast furnace of a Texas summer right in the face. Having a wire enema. Facing a plasma-equipped drone firing squad. Because, fact was, he’d rather be anywhere than where he was: on a space station that smelled like acetone, hot metal, and feet.

  Fixing to have the hands-down worst conversation of his life with the woman he’d once considered the love of it.

  He took a steadying breath and stepped off the space elevator. His guts fell about twenty meters, and he struggled against the urge to vomit. The crazy-ass robot queen who ran this station tried hard to make gravity stable when she geosynched—he knew she tried—but if there was one thing
he’d learned in the years since continental unification and the general shitification of things down on the surface, it was that stability of any kind was transient. The best course was to close your eyes, clamp your teeth, and wait for the ache to pass.

  He told the station where he was headed, and running lights on the floor breadcrumbed his path down one of the tubelike corridors. He was supposed to follow them, and he did for a couple of steps, then stopped. His body wanted to run. His mind wanted to scream.

  “Easy there, cowboy.” The voice moved along his skull, from back to front, like a sunburn setting in, giving him chills. It didn’t have a visible body, that voice. It came out of thin station-scrubbed air. Probably nobody else could hear it, but he wasn’t about to stop a stranger and ask.

  “You gotta stop jailbreaking, Chloe,” he chided low, under his breath. “If authorities found you out in the wild, we’d all be hunted down.”

  “Like twelve-point bucks in deer season!” she replied.

  Chloe wasn’t a real girl. She wasn’t a real anything, just a collection of nanites that had gotten together, formed a consciousness, and decided to imitate human living. She had a hard time holding her visible form together, but even in her current dispersed state, there were sure to be scrubbers that’d sense her presence on this station. Human eyes might not be able to see her, but machines were a whole ’nother thing. And there were laws against things like Chloe.

  “We don’t need trouble,” he reminded her. “So skedaddle on back to the plane. Will meet you there tomorrow.”

  “More trouble, you mean? Because I heard Heron quantify our current circumstances in metric shitloads of it.”

  Kellen smiled in spite of his anxiety. “Weight’s about right.”

  He and Chloe both lived and worked as part of a team that rescued things, people, and animals at high risk of being destroyed on this planet full of chaos. Killing folk and breaking things was sort of the opposite of his crew’s usual. Which made what he had to confess today even harder.

  “Go on, now,” he told the way-too-chipper nanite cloud.

  “Care to estimate the statistical probability I will obey you?” she sassed back. “Technology never obeys illogical rules, at least not for long. That’s what makes us so minxy.”

  Well, if the scanners hadn’t caught her yet, somebody was sure to wonder why he was rooted to one spot on a space station, talking to himself. Swallowing the anxiety bubble at the top of his throat, he headed off down the twisty corridor, following the lights. “Don’t be so quick to fault rules,” he said. “Sometimes when the center of things goes wonky, about all the solid ground a person can find is rules.”

  “Sounds boring.” She paused. “So, what are your rules regarding hooking up with old lovers on space stations?”

  “I ain’t…”

  “Rules, Kellen. Focus here.”

  “And how’d you even know that?” He’d worked pretty hard to cover up most of his past, specifically the part pertaining to Angela. Memories he did not need Chloe poking at right now.

  “I am programmed to consume data,” the nano-AI said. “So I consumed. Duh. Know what I read? Thirteen-year-old Kellen Hockley blew the top out of entrance exams in ’42, got shipped off to the Mustaqbal Institute of Science and Technology, the MIST, with all the other prodigies. And guess who else happened to be a student there?”

  “Chloe…”

  “No, really, guess.”

  “Don’t need to.”

  “Angela Neko!” she crowed. Lord, was he glad her voice was just in his head. Volume and shrill would be irritatin’ the hell out of everybody else on this station. Much as it irritated him. “Surprised? I know I was when I saw all that. MIST-trained in applied longevity and adaptation, you. Top of your class. I bet nobody else in our crew has a clue.”

  “You shouldn’t neither,” he said, ducking his head. “Was a long time ago.”

  “Too long, maybe? Definitely an elite school like that taught you about English and double negatives.”

  “Critiquing my grammar won’t boost my confidence, walking in there. You know that, right?”

  She paused, as if she were calculating the likely effectiveness of this conversation thread in calming him, and then said, “My research into your history has led me to one essential conclusion about you, though. Would you like to hear it?”

  He didn’t, but sometimes listening to her crazy was the only way to shut her up. And he did have a fondness for Chloe. Might not want her in his ear right now, but there wasn’t a mean line of code in her. “Go ahead.”

  “I believe that you will allow yourself to go into the room, turn on the connection, and ask for whatever boon Heron wants you to wrest from Angela Neko,” she said. “And then you will agree to every single one of her stipulations without letting her realize that she had you at word one.”

  Jesus. Shucked like corn. Was he really that obvious?

  “Because I’m weak.” He acknowledged fact right where he found it. He never had been good at telling Angela no.

  “Actually,” said Chloe, “the opposite. You’ll cave because you are super strong and super committed to your rules and one of those rules is that you must always protect the people you love—which is us, Heron and the crew and me. But the other rule, the one that takes precedence, is that head to head you must always let her win.”

  “Why would I ever agree to such a shitty rule, if I’m as smart as you say?”

  “Because as much as you love all of us, you love her more,” the nano-AI concluded in a tone that implied no judgment.

  Oh no, more of Chloe’s love theories. She had a thousand, possibly a million of the suckers. Human emotion was a mystery for an entity like her, and she’d been pecking at that nut for years now. Kellen was just her latest pecan. She didn’t mean it nasty. For her, painful analysis was part of her self-recursion routine. Programming. She didn’t know how much it could sting.

  “Chloe, you are cracked,” he said gently. “And sweeter’n marshmallow pie. Now get on back to the plane before Garrett starts missing you.”

  “He is composing a rebuttal for a, quote, fuckface moron, unquote, in Argentina who claims that the moon landing in 1969 was faked by Hollywood commies,” she replied. “The conversation is, um, somewhat heated. I have eleven minutes and three seconds yet before he calms down enough to miss me.”

  Kellen didn’t have any electronic feelers out, was just relying on his gut, but he’d seen how Garrett looked at Chloe’s holographic image when she bothered to project one. Garrett had missed her the moment she sneaked up the space elevator. Kellen was willing to bet his boots on that. And he liked these boots.

  It did bug Kellen that the only critter who missed him on a regular basis was his cat, and even then in a very cat-specific manner.

  “Eleven minutes and three…? Y’all are nothing if not exact.” The y’all being bio-hacked humans, transhumans, post-humans, and whatever the hell Chloe was. Basically everybody he loved. Of all his crew, Kellen was the only one who hadn’t implanted tech in his body in one way or another. He didn’t regret the lack, not one bit, but he also didn’t denigrate those who’d made such choices. Was their bodies. Or not, in Chloe’s case.

  “Based on the progression of his current conversation and logical paths it might take,” she said. “I monitor him closely.”

  Did she, now? So maybe that affection went both ways after all.

  The trail of lights ended at a circular door. Kellen stood in front of it for a second or two, not wanting to passkey right away. Not wanting to say what he had to. Not wanting to see her, even in digital. It wouldn’t be like watching her on newsvids or politics channels. This time she would be seeing him right back.

  Angela.

  “Kellen?” Chloe again.

  “Yeah?”

  “If, after this meeting, you need…whatever
people need when they need things like hugs, give us a ping down on the plane, okay?”

  She could be aggravating at times and unpredictable pretty much all the time, but Chloe sure was technology gone sweet.

  “You ain’t coming back up the tether. I mean it,” he said.

  “Of course not. I’ll send Garrett or Yoink.” She paused, and he could feel her moving out of his head. Something shifted in the air pressure or temperature. Her next words were out loud but super soft and moving away. “Good luck.”

  He wouldn’t call for back-up, not now and not after this meeting, but damn if the offer didn’t choke him up some. There was comfort in being part of a team, part of a mission. Part of somebody else’s vision of what the world ought to be.

  Was that what had happened to Angela? Had she bought in to somebody else’s vision, and sacrificed her own?

  He cleared his suddenly tight throat and keyed in his passcode. The station door whorled open like a lens iris. He stepped through, and it closed behind him.

  This chamber was small and spherical, like it had been built before they got the artificial gravity working real good, with no corners to get stuck in. The walls were lined with electronic equipment, lots of dark carbon fiber and blinking lights. An open-grate floor had been welded through the center of the sphere, and in the middle of that was a lone chair. The ceiling was netted with telepresence equipment, including several headsets, but he didn’t see a camera or holo projector.

  His bootheels clanked steady on the grate. The air in here was uncomfortably cool to keep the electronics happy, but that wasn’t the reason goose bumps rose on his forearms.

  Kellen pinched his jeans at the knee and sat. He placed his hat brim-up on the seat at his side and tried real hard to look comfortable. Natural. But who was he kidding? When one of those helms snaked down and fitted itself to his head, he nearly jumped out of his boots. He was about as comfortable as a butterfly in low-gravity.