Trickster

standing over him.

'Yes, Mother,' he muttered.

'What?' Ben said.

'Nothing. Help me up. Then get Gretchen and Lucia in here. We have a kidnapping to solve.'

'Look, I've gone through this with the police twice already,' complained the woman. She was dressed in scarlet from head to foot, with a scarf twisted through night-black hair. The small hologram hovering near her collar gave her name as Linda Tellman and her title as First Manager. She had an artificial sort of beauty that told Kendi's practiced eye she had been to a fresh-up at least once.

'I know, ma'am,' Kendi said, slipping the fake police ID back into his pocket. 'But you know how this sort of thing works. Every time you go over it, you may remember some detail you left out before.'

'Well, you cop-guys are thorough, I'll give you that,' Tellman muttered. She gestured at a chair near her desk. 'Have a seat, Detective.'

'Actually, I haven't seen the crime scene yet,' Kendi said. 'Could you go through what happened while we walk down there?'

Tellman sighed. 'Somewhere in here I do have work to get done, but it can wait, right?'

Kendi didn't answer. He merely followed her through a series of corridors and down two flights of stairs. The DrimCom building, located on the outskirts of Felice, was low and sprawling, with lots of steel and blue-tinted reflective windows. Many of the offices they passed were empty, recent indications of DrimCom's recent loss of revenue.

As if reading Kendi's mind, Tellman said, 'If we can't get these two back, the company's going to go under. There isn't much of it left as it is. We had twenty-six Silent-'

'All slaves?' Kendi interrupted.

Tellman nodded. 'But after the Despair, only two of them were able to enter the Dream. We held on to the others as long as we could, hoping their Silence would come back, but eventually we had to sell them. We raised our communication rates for the two Silent we had left, just like everyone else is doing, but then this happened. Our only source of revenue-gone. DrimCom's dying on the vine now.'

'You don't seem overly upset,' Kendi observed.

'I've got my savings-unlike a lot of people around here,' Tellman said. 'And I have prospects. My uncle works for Sufur Enterprises, and he says they have positions open, if you know who to talk to.'

They reached an area that reminded Kendi of the Varsis Hotel. Numbered doors faced a quiet hallway lit with yellow lamps. Tellman selected one of the doors and thumbed the lock. It clicked open for her.

'These are our slave quarters,' she said, entering ahead of Kendi. 'The woman's name was Violet. This was her room.'

Kendi stepped into the room. It was plainly furnished but bright, with yellow walls and a beige carpet. A light smell of perfumed body powder hung on the air. Several pictures-pen-and-ink drawings, not holograms-hung on the walls. Kendi almost gasped as he recognized Outback landscapes. Unable to help himself, he moved closer to one. A falcon skimmed high above a rocky cliff. At the base of the cliff wall sat a kangaroo. It was leaning back on its tail and staring up at the sky. In the bottom corner, the name 'Martina' had been worked into the roots of a bush. Kendi's throat closed. This indeed belonged to his sister. She had eaten and slept and held onto her name in this very room. Her scent still lingered. With a trembling hand, he reached out to touch the glass of the frame.

'Is there something about her drawings?' Tellman asked behind him. 'A clue?'

Kendi pulled his hand back and swallowed hard to get his voice under control. 'Maybe. Why don't you tell me what happened and I'll look over the room.'

'Like I told the other cop-guys, there isn't much to tell. The housekeeper was bringing Violet and Brad-that was the other one's name-their breakfasts and found the rooms empty. The doors were unlocked. The housekeeper tried to check with the security computer, but it had been taken off-line. A virus, we later found out. I was the Manager on duty, so the housekeeper called me next. I checked Brad's room, and he was gone, too. The moment they left their rooms, their shackles should have set off the alarms and shocked them unconscious, but that whole program was off-line. What with the recent cutbacks, we only have one tech left, and he only comes in every other day. Security was also reduced, but we didn't think it would be that big a deal. In retrospect, we probably should have been expecting this. Functioning Silent are a hell of a lot more valuable than they used to be.'

'Was there a guard on duty that night?' Kendi asked, still unable to take his eyes off the landscapes. He had no idea Martina could draw like that. And they had given Utang the name 'Brad.'

'The guard was found unconscious at his post. Hit with a brain taser. He doesn't remember anything from the past three days. The doctor said that's normal.'

'Was anything taken?'

'Besides the slaves? No. They didn't even take their clothes or any possessions. That's why we're treating it as a theft instead of an escape, even though there were no signs of a struggle. My guess is they-Violet and Brad- were hit with the same brain taser that took out the guard.'

Kendi looked through Martina's closet. Judging from her clothes, she was a head shorter than he was, and either she liked the color blue or that was all DrimCom provided for her. As he searched, he kept up a running series of questions to Tellman and gleaned a few more facts. The surveillance cameras had been shorted out just before the guard had been tasered, so there were no video or holographic clues. The security files for the entire night had also been erased. A police search of both rooms had turned up no blood and no evidence of weapons discharge.

'What about Brad's room?' Kendi asked.

'Same thing,' Tellman said. 'No struggle, nothing missing but him. It must have been really weird for him.'

'What do you mean?'

'We bought Brad only one day before the Despair hit. We thought we were lucky to have grabbed him. But he was depressed and despondent after the Despair. I don't think he and Violet even met. He refused to come out of his room. We were just about to start a more aggressive treatment program on him-'

'— and then this happened. He arrives here, then leaves again. Weird for him. But if he's Silent, he must have been genegineered, so he'll probably adapt. Comes with not being entirely human.'

Kendi wanted to hit her, had even clenched a fist, when another woman poked her head into the room.

'Manager Tellman?' she said. 'There's a police detective here who wants to interview you.'

'Another one?' Tellman said.

'Lena Halfson,' replied the woman.

'That's her. Why don't you go down and get her, Manager Tallman, while I finish up in here?'

Tallman left, grumbling to herself about her position being reduced from manager to errand girl. The other woman followed. The moment they were out of sight, Kendi eased out of the room and sauntered swiftly down the hallway in the opposite direction. Then he paused, dashed back to the room, snatched the Outback landscape from the wall, and rushed back out. A bit of searching turned up a back exit. Kendi hurried out of the building to his rented groundcar, kept his back to the police vehicle parked only four spaces over, and drove quickly away, Martina's landscape on the seat beside him.

'How'd it go?' Ben asked when he arrived back at the hotel. 'Any good news?'

'You tell me,' Kendi replied, and quickly summarized what he had learned. 'It sounds like someone snatched them up because they're functional Silent. The question is, who? And how do we find out?'

'Sounds like we need to do a lot of record-checking,' Gretchen said, scratching her foot where the heal-splint had recently come off. She and Lucia were perched on chairs by the window while Harenn sat with her son on the sofa. The boy insisted on being called Bedj-ka and wouldn't answer to Jerry. He seemed to be adjusting well to his new situation. Harenn was the one who looked continually bewildered.

'I agree,' said Lucia. 'We can find out which ships have left Drim since then, see if any of them might be worth following up on. With Irfan's guidance, we might turn up something there.'

'We can also check with other companies on Drim that employ-or own-Silent,' Harenn pointed out. 'Perhaps one of them has lost Silent as well. Or unexpectedly gained them.'

'I can get into the Dream and see if anyone's heard from them,' Ben offered. 'Now that we have current names and the name of the firm that owned them.'

Kendi sat down on a love seat, the drawing on his lap. 'Thanks, guys. We'll keep trying, I guess.' No one