‘Grim …’
‘Come on, man. We’ve lived together before!’
‘Spending three miserable weeks in a shabby flophouse in a glorified mining dockyard two systems away from civilisation is not living, Grim.’
‘It’s the experience that counts.’
I swear he dredged these conversations up just to test me. ‘Grim, you’re my best mate, but we’re not living together. End of discussion.’
‘Can’t blame me for trying.’ Grim thunked his glass down and allowed me to pour more rum. ‘So what d’you think of the place?’
I glanced over my shoulder to see a man with a pulsing tattoo make a connection between a wall socket and the open port embedded in his skull, interfacing directly with substrate. Grim had told me you could tweak the modules and get a little extra kick when you dived in and out. ‘It’s … unique.’
‘Pretty cool, right? Just don’t ask the bartender to surprise you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just … trust me.’ The booze was hitting him faster than I’d expected. ‘I pick up most of my gigs here. It’s neutral territory. Hacker collectives, smugglers and brokers are always at war for fresh intel, always trying to sell each other out. But there’s no stealing from or breaking into other people’s neuralware allowed in here.’
‘What kind of data gets exchanged?’ I asked.
‘Everything,’ Grim slurred.
‘Could you be a bit more specific?’
He shrugged. ‘Everything. Bank details, trade routes, dead-drops, navigation firmware, darkmarket narcotics buyers and sellers. Everything. These guys know stuff before it happens. They can even target select organisations if you pay them enough.’
‘Well, that’s comforting.’
‘Not all of them are like that. Some just like to mess with people. Send them on scavenger hunts all over Compass, making puzzles, planting clues in mainframes, that sort of thing.’ Grim pointed to a Torven with blood-red tubes snaking down his spine. ‘A few months back, Kashyk got all the octodrones in Limefields to play a twenty-hour game of tag. Before that, he rerouted a bar in the Upper Markets, nullified all the payments. Free booze for a whole week!’
I drained my glass. Worlds within worlds within worlds. It didn’t matter how well you thought you knew Compass, there was undoubtedly another five hidden layers, buried beneath the asteroid’s surface.
I didn’t have high hopes for Harmony tracking Artyom down, even as I sent him an urgent transmission asking him to pull his head out and get in contact immediately. Didn’t have much else to do but sit around and wait. Relaxing, really relaxing for a length of time, isn’t something I do too well anymore. My body and muscles always want to move, sniffing out anything that gets my blood up and muscles pumping. The stormtech’s always looking for a way to strain the human body, pushing me over the edge one inch at a time.
But now, I had the time to try and relax.
After another twelve hours asleep, I spent two quiet days in my apartment ordering takeaways, soaking in the jet-shower, sipping gin and working through Grim’s filmlogs. I enjoyed most of them, but would never give Grim the satisfaction of admitting it.
I checked my shib’s comms regularly. Nothing from Artyom. No surprises there.
Knowing it was hopeless, I sent another message before heading out to explore Compass and get some shopping done. The Rubix can monitor my supplies and put in an automatic order, but I’m a hands-on type of guy. Not everything can be printed, especially not food if you want something that tastes better than blended leftovers. Besides, if you’re going to go shopping anywhere in the Common, Compass is the place to do it. Grim, shopping entrepreneur that he thinks he is, told me that if it exists, it can be bought here. And if it doesn’t exist, it can still be bought.
First order of the day was getting my shoulder-length hair shorn back to a crew cut. Afterwards, I trooped to the upper echelons of Compass, home to a luxurious health centre. A swimming pool, an assortment of saunas and spas, timbered steam rooms and fitness equipment greeted me. Tension from my little experiment in the cradle was still playing out in my muscles and I needed to unwind. It wasn’t quite as good as the Russian banyas back on New Vladi, but there’s something special about doing laps in a pool with a kilometre-long viewport that offers a sweeping view of an asteroid field against the backdrop of distant stars, under and above the water. The sauna was less successful. The compressed heat and tight space was uncomfortably close to being tortured inside my armour, and my stormtech lashed in response. I was getting a definite sense of being stared at. People avoiding sitting next to me, like I was going to attack them.
They didn’t realise that if you treat someone a particular way for long enough, they’ll become exactly that.
I ended up relaxing by myself in a private spherical spa, the transparent glass turning into a shifting canvas of space. Ambient sound effects rendered from a surveillance drone speeding along a planet ravaged by ion storms played to me as I was gently whisked through simulated space. I floated past swirling nebulae and dwarf stars gently pulsing with solar flares and drifted across the quiet, cratered surface of a moon. I passed a massive gas-giant, its brown surface swirling with turbulent storms. Brown, black, blue and white, coiled together like a marble painting in motion, a breathtakingly peaceful piece of cosmic art. Hot water dripped down my back, the gas-giant’s belt of dust-rings rippling as I was sped through them. I let my hand drift through a sweeping asteroid field, breathing in the calming scent of petrichor as we swooped down to a green forest planet wreathed with white mist. Whatever shreds of peace I had in this place, I was going to enjoy them while they lasted.
Several galaxies later, I headed back to the eternal chaos of
