Second Death of Daedalus Mole Page 2

  ‘I’m sure,’ said the locket. ‘You know how high the gravity is here. You wouldn’t want an accident, would you?’

  Daedalus poked his toe over the edge of the building.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no accidents.’

  ‘I’ll be done soon,’ she said. ‘I’d hate to have to leave without you.’

  ‘Right.’ Daedalus looked up. Far above him, clouds rolled against the ceiling, crashing into each other in slow motion, bursting apart and giving way to steel spires that ran down to the deck, rivers of people flowing around their bases. Light drones buzzed halfway up, lamps dangling on strings. The moment passed, and Daedalus, who had been feeling a comfortable lightness, settled back into his usual self and his headache returned. He dropped his bottle and made for the door leading back down to the street.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the locket.

  ‘Nowhere.’ He moved through the hotel lobby, past the snoring concierge, and emerged into the street. ‘I don’t know.’

  A security camera atop a nearby pylon suddenly jolted and spun to watch him.

  ‘Just be careful, dear,’ she said. ‘I need you.’

  Daedalus shuddered at her words, picked a direction and started walking.

  ‘How long?’ he asked. A nearby faulk gave him a sharp look from under her feathers and shook her head, walking faster.

  ‘Two hours, maybe more. This boy you left me with doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  A while, then. Daedalus kept walking.

  The world had changed. It was gone, for a start, and the people on it had been scattered to the stars. Their children’s children were now the underfoot nuisance in a galaxy of bigger, stronger and wealthier peoples. Daedalus hadn’t seen another human in three weeks. He hadn’t talked to one in four months. When humans did pass, there was a flash of recognition, an exchanged glance, but nothing more. Any shared experience there once was had worn away.

  Daedalus racked his soggy brain. There was a bar nearby, he was sure. Somewhere. He fumbled for a cigarette and pushed it between his cracked lips. It lit itself with a click and buzzed, spilling sweet-smelling white vapour into the dim station air. Daedalus let out a long, slow sigh.

  The Landing Leg. That was it. He took the lift down to the centre near the core, a dense collection of clubs and game joints sprinkled with unconscious people in varying states of undress, some still wearing their headsets if they’d passed out before mustering the courage to face reality again. They were mostly couriers and odd-jobbers, like him, or shipping company workers blowing off steam between shifts with pockets full of vouchers for night-long VR sessions and hundred-bit bar tabs.

  The Landing Leg was a relatively quiet joint tucked into a side street, heaving with jetlagged visitors who weren’t working on station time. Daedalus sidled into the hot noise and made for the bar. Being self-employed, he didn’t have any vouchers. The bartender wrinkled her snout at the bent card he handed over, but dropped it into the till nonetheless and produced a hissing pint of something grey and cloudy. There wasn’t space to sit, so Daedalus hovered near the end of the bar, a few feet from the corner booth, leaning into an alcove between two support beams.

  The first sip of a pint is never as refreshing as you expect. The sour, watery taste of cheap lager is bad enough, and the bitter fizz of sink-dust is worse, but a seasoned drinker will push on. Everyone knows that the real relief comes an instant after the first sip, when the drinker’s brain recalls the pleasurable numbness to come and kicks into gear in the hope that such numbness can be achieved again, and quickly.

  Daedalus took a sip and grimaced. His tongue reported to his brain that alcohol was coming, and everything slipped back into the muted comfort he’d become accustomed to in the last few months. It swallowed him up in the pressing heat. Then, just as he was sinking back into the noise, he heard something that he was much less accustomed to. It hit him like a cold drip on his face in a hot bath.

  ‘Six,’ said someone. ‘Bay six. You understand where that is? One more than five. One less than seven.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said someone else.

  Daedalus stared into his drink. Today, of all days. Humans. The sound rang in his ears. Thickly accented from the interspecial pidgin of the trade lanes, grating and angry, but undeniably the soft, lyrical human voice. He could barely stand it.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said the second voice, deeper than the first.

  ‘Yes it was,’ said the first. ‘Yes, it absolutely sodding was. Aggro is going to kill you if we don’t do something. Ten thousand bits. He’s going to kill both of us. Ten thousand. Christ.’

  The pint was half gone. Daedalus kept drinking as fast as he could, trying not to listen.

  ‘What are we gonna do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Trev. But we better come up with something bloody quick. Bay six. Okay? Bay six. He’ll be here in thirty minutes and he’s going to want the merchandise in his hands. He wants to see it.’

  ‘What if… what if we pay him off?’

  ‘For god’s sake. Have you got ten grand in your pocket? No? No, of course you don’t.’

  ‘What if we run?’

  The first voice laughed long and loud, drawing the looks of a few drinkers nearby. Daedalus grimaced at the sound. The pint was gone, but he found he couldn’t move. There was a pull in his chest, right under his locket – a cold, big, empty kind of pull. He wanted to lean out and look for himself.

  ‘Right. You do that. See how far you get.’ There was a pause, then the screech of a chair being pushed back. ‘Get up. Get up, now.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Find it. We have to find it. It can’t have got far.’

  Daedalus shrank back into his alcove as they hurried past – two humans in dark clothes with close-cropped hair, one sporting a bloody nose and a very nasty bruise on his face. Then they were gone. A very tall person with thick blue fur gave him a quizzical look as she glided past him to take their booth.

  Daedalus felt the pull in his chest strengthen, as if, just for a moment, gravity had changed its mind and decided that down was forward. He felt the urge to follow them. Then his hand was up, under his coat, squeezing the locket between his fingers. The urge faded. Humans were trouble to each other. Better like this.

  By the time he finished his fifth drink he was sick of the place and made his way back out into the street. Staggering a little, tattered dress boots skidding on faux-cobblestones slick with condensation, he fished in his coat pocket and drew out a set of keys. The streets down here were still quiet. As he got further from the pub their metal jangling rang out clearly against the backdrop of gurgling drainpipes, cycling the same water through the station over and over.

  He wondered briefly about the humans he’d seen. Daedalus overheard a lot of things in his line of work, hopping between backwoods stations delivering secret packages to surly people. The better he got at going quietly – at passing before people’s eyes without registering in memory – the more things he heard. The more things he heard, the more it hurt to imagine that other people were just walking around with all these other memories in their heads, some of them good, so many of them bad, and they all seemed to be able to cope. It didn’t seem real that there were so many lives happening around him, and they moved forward through time, leaving things behind them in a way that he did not.

  Halfway to the elevator, he heard a sharp clatter. A few metres back from the street, in an alcove under a whirring gas exchanger, a pile of sticks and denim wriggled against a damp wall. A camera above Daedalus’s head followed his gaze. Its motor gave a little metallic hmph.

  The pile of clothes shifted and groaned. As he approached, Daedalus made out a narrow face and shoulders with smooth ochre plating: a stoss kid. The boy’s chestpiece hadn’t split yet, and he looked tiny inside the baggy denim jacket, head dwarfed underneath a full-enclosure game headset.

  ‘Mole, keep away,’ buzzed the locket.

  Daedalus k
nelt down.

  ‘Just a kid,’ he said. A line of bright blood ran under the visor and stained the jacket. Daedalus looked around, saw nobody, and reached out. The boy jerked back, hissing at his touch. Daedalus held the boy still with a firm grip on his shoulder and a knee pinning his legs. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Human,’ the boy moaned. ‘No human. Please.’

  ‘Not human,’ said Daedalus.

  ‘No human,’ said the boy, ‘no.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Daedalus patted his chest, ‘no human.’ Daedalus found a catch just above the visor and released it. Under a plastic flap a set of needles worked furiously with a rapid clickclickclick, tapping out their delirious rhythm on a patch of flesh between two skull-plates. The chemical they carried wasn’t addictive, he knew, but the dreams it brought on could be.

  ‘Can you do something about this?’ he asked.

  The camera overhead twitched. ‘I could,’ said the locket.

  ‘… Will you?’

  The locket went silent. Daedalus reached behind the headset and felt around for a safety catch. There wasn’t one. He sighed, and gripped the boy’s head in two hands before smacking it against the wall. The headset split after two strikes, and Daedalus eased his finger into the crack, pulling it gently into two pieces. The clicking died away, and the boy let out a lungful of air. Underneath the visor his gaze was unfocused. After a few moments of fumbling and drawing in wet breath, his eyes came to life and fixed on Daedalus, brow knitting inwards in fear. The boy kicked and wriggled his legs free.

  ‘Human!’

  Daedalus stood and backed away as the kid scrabbled for something to hit him with. By the time he’d pulled a metal bar out of the rubbish, Daedalus was gone.

  *

  ‘You’re going to get it when you come home,’ said the locket.

  ‘He was just a kid.’

  ‘Just a kid. Incredible. What was I?’

  Daedalus felt a sick, gratifying twist in his stomach.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, shut up, is it?’ she said. ‘Someone’s feeling mouthy today. I don’t like it.’

  The alcohol had hit him hard. Daedalus blinked hard and brought his attention back to the plane of the living, where, it turned out, he was lying on a bench near the docking arrays. Geared-up pilots hurried past him to make their departures. Some of them were dragging last-minute passengers or cargo trolleys they’d picked up in the trade rooms, and most of them looked hung over. On the big departure screens he saw listings of ships ready to leave, and the names of planets they were bound for. A few tankers were carrying prisoners to Dolorian Prime a couple of jumps away, but most of the ships were headed for Minna Minna, the closest planet with a decent trading station. Everyone had somewhere to go besides Daedalus. Through a grimy window he watched a couple of them pass. A vicious-looking cruiser with Itinerant Light stencilled on the stern dropped free of its docking arm and drifted ponderously out of view, and a round little freighter took its place, spotlights bringing out the name The Steamed Bun lovingly hand-painted on the bow.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  Daedalus heaved himself upright and tried not to be sick. ‘Where?’

  ‘Bay six. Honestly. You’re pathetic.’

  Bay six. Something scratched in the back of his mind, almost like a physical itch.

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Yes, six. Are you losing it? I need you to fly.’

  His thoughts were like quicksand. The more he struggled to catch that vital piece of relevant information floating out of reach, the faster he sank. After a few seconds of trying, he gave up.

  ‘Is there a coffee place?’

  ‘No. You’re easier drunk. Go to the Back Burner, across the street.’

  Daedalus followed a meandering line from the bench to the bar. On the way he received a few contemptuous looks, and something short in a hood bumped into him, nearly knocking him over. Finally he collapsed into an empty booth.

  The air was colder up here. Slowly, against his wishes, he started to wake up. The blood pumping around his head was too loud, and the people around him moving too fast, doing too many things. The world pressed in hard from all sides. Daedalus felt the headache thudding back into his skull.

  A machine making a great deal of noise approached his table and leaned over him. One big orange eye fizzed in the middle of its head.

  ‘A whiskey for sir?’ it said, rattling slightly.

  He nodded, avoiding eye contact, and fished in his pocket for a card, finding nothing.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ it said. ‘And for you?’

  Daedalus looked up. From the opposite seat, a pair of extraordinarily dark, wide-set eyes looked back from under a ragged hood.

  ‘Water,’ she said.

  The machine jittered and straightened up. ‘Very good. Two whiskeys it is.’ Without waiting for a correction, it raced away towards the bar. The two patrons stared at each other.

  ‘Are you blind?’ she asked.

  Daedalus slouched back, waiting for a clever response to make itself apparent.

  She sat still, watching him. The soft orange light made her green skin look mottled and unhealthy. Could mean anything. Lots of people were green.

  ‘Who –’

  ‘I need a ride,’ she said.

  Daedalus groaned and ran a hand over his face. It came away slick with sweat. ‘I’m not working today. Ask someone else.’

  ‘Taxos. I need to get to Taxos.’

  He rubbed his temple. ‘Right, I know you core people are used to getting what you want, but out here if a man says he’s not working, he’s not working. Okay? We don’t have trading standards people you can write to. There’s no bloody… there’s no manager. You can’t push me around. So… so you can bloody well… just… go away.’

  She placed a set of keys on the table. Daedalus looked at them.

  ‘Those are mine,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  Daedalus reached into his pocket again. It was still empty. He shifted in his seat and she snatched the keys back, vanishing them from the table almost too quick to see. In the moment her face moved into the light, he saw that she was badly bruised, and in the turn he got a better sense of her frame: small and wiry, with an unmistakable shape given by the second pair of arms tucked away under her robe. He couldn’t see, but he realised there must be a tell-tale crest beneath her hood, which she was trying to keep very still.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You’re somewhere you shouldn’t be.’

  ‘So help me get home,’ she said.

  ‘Taxos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Back in the shadows, her eyes glittered. Bulbous and black, they caught tiny white reflections that made them look like portholes into space.

  Daedalus sat forward. When he opened his mouth to speak, he found he was short of breath. He could smell smoke.

  ‘Why?’

  She looked at him with an inscrutable expression, her mouth a slit. Daedalus could see that she was small. Entari were supposed to be the same size, all of them – that was kind of the point – but this one was short. She was propping herself up to reach eye level, hiding her body in a bundle of robes, but he reckoned she was a good foot shorter than him. Tiny. Her gaze felt hot on his skin. Slowly, she withdrew a wallet from her clothes and set it on the table.

  ‘I’m looking for someone. And I’ll pay,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  Daedalus looked at the wallet, emblazoned with a crude, anatomically-improbable design of a naked human.

  ‘That’s your wallet?’ he asked.

  She glanced down at it. Daedalus noticed her nose was slightly squashed, like it had been broken.

  ‘… Yes.’

  A thief. And a bad liar. Thieves with no cunning always had a violent streak. Often a temper to match.

  ‘Oh.’ Daedalus stressed the syllable, affecting surprise. ‘So you’re one of those.’

&
nbsp; Daedalus saw a shadow cross her face. There’s a button, he thought. She went a deeper shade of green and under her hood he saw a twitch as her crest stiffened in anger. He was still swimming through a tipsy fog with a headache, but he reckoned he’d got the measure of her.

  ‘Is that a problem, human?’

  He took a breath. ‘Just keep whatever’s in your pants in your pants, and we’ll be fine.’

  The entari visibly bristled, but sucked her teeth and nodded.

  Daedalus relaxed. Clearly she had a temper, but one she could rein in. Just about.

  The acting made him feel greasy. Obviously she’d stolen the wallet from a human, but he found it interesting that she’d jump to the defence of human-lovers rather than reverting to straight contempt. Very unlike an entari. Though judging from the contempt for him, specifically, that was now written all over her face, she wasn’t herself a particular fan of humans.

  ‘All right, money,’ he said. ‘How much are you looking to spend?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘First time?’ he asked. ‘Okay, look, standard rate to the Capital is three hundred bits, but… ’ Daedalus leaned back in his seat and thought about all the drink he was going to buy. ‘Since you’re obviously in a tight spot I’ll knock it down to two hundred. One hundred now, one hundred on arrival, as long as you buy me a drink. How does that sound?’

  ‘A drink?’

  The mechanical waiter returned with two glasses on a tray. It set them down a little too hard, sloshing whiskey over the tabletop, and shakily held out its card reader.

  ‘Which sir will be paying today?’

  She stared at him, suspicion and fear mingled in her expression. After a long moment she reached into the wallet and withdrew a bright blue ten-bit card to hand to the waiter, who pocketed it and left. Then she pulled out two orange fifties.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Mole,’ said Daedalus. ‘Daedalus Mole.’

  ‘Erin,’ she said, and pushed the cards across the table.

  Daedalus took them with one hand and held up his glass with the other. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

  Erin gave a short, sharp laugh. Daedalus flinched. She put her hand to her mouth, as if she hadn’t expected it. Like the laugh had been stuck there by someone else.