“What? No, no, no. this is a social call. Why don’t you come down to the Mongoose on seventh?”
She looked up at me warily. “You want me to come drink with you? It’s Wednesday, James.”
“Is it? Doesn’t matter. We’ve got something important to talk about.”
“Like what? You’d better not be talking about your—”
“No, no, no. Nothing juvenile like that. I’m talking about finding a very important place. A place where you died once. Back when you were lost in time and space… I’m talking about the planet where you were permed.”
She stared at me, blinking in confusion. “I was never—oh. You don’t mean Green World, do you?”
“Shhh! Hush, girl. Come on down to the Mongoose, will you?”
Natasha hesitated, but it didn’t last long. She was as curious as a housecat in a pet store.
“All right. I’ll be there soon. Don’t get drunk before I show up, or I’m turning around immediately.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
I ordered two more drinks, and by the time they showed up, Natasha was walking in the door. It was nice to have friends with predictable interests and habits.
-20-
Natasha absorbed her drink and my story with equal interest. I told her about Green World and the smuggling and how I’d ended up out there. I didn’t bother to mention some of the less savory details, such as killing Raash and then later reviving him on Dust World with Floramel. That wouldn’t have gone over, as the two women didn’t like each other much.
“So… you really think this smuggling group is behind the explosion in the harbor? You think they’d perform such an act of insane vandalism just to cover their tracks?”
I blinked at her. Natasha was pretty naive for a Legion Varus girl. She still thought people were better than totally selfish bastards—or at least that some of them were. I didn’t bother to set her straight, I just shook my head and pretended to be sad.
“It’s a crying shame, isn’t it? But it makes sense to me. Whoever it was who ran the op probably figured the secret would get out, so they blew up the ship and the entire crew. That way, they might be able to keep pulling the scam later on when things quieted down.”
“Huh… it’s all so horrible—but what can we do about it?”
“We can find Green World, that’s what. If Legion Varus can find and target these hooligans, well sir, we can bring down some righteous vengeance.”
“Okay… now I see why you contacted me. I was out there, at one point. On Green World, I mean. As far as I know, Central never bothered to make a big effort to find the place, as we later beat the Cephalopods in the war without hitting them there. But there are clues.”
“Damn straight there are!” I said slamming my drink down and beckoning for another to a bored-looking waiter bot. “Uh… what clues?”
“For starters, we can triangulate using the various reported jump-times from different locations. That will give us a general idea of Green World’s vicinity. Then, we’ll have to start looking at each star system and eliminating them one by one. I’ll need all your tapper recordings from out there. Immediately.”
I hesitated. “Why’s that?”
“To gather data, James. A simple spectral analysis of the sunlight will probably be enough to rule out most star systems. We might be able to isolate the target with just that much information. If not, I’ll combine all the data on the local atmosphere and weather. We might not be certain which world it is, but I can at least build a list of likely planets.”
“Uh… that sounds great. You want another drink?”
She shook her head, and I tossed over all the data she asked for, tapper-to-tapper. She got up and left then, and I looked after her in sore disappointment. I’d shared a beverage with two women in two hours, but both of them had been too busy to give old McGill a second glance.
Sighing, I stood up and paid the tab with the waiter.
“A gratuity is customary, sir,” the robot had the gall to tell me.
This kind of pissed me off. These robots were from the Pegs, just like all the other advanced AI around. The Pegs were still recovering somewhat after half of them had been eaten and converted into cyborg minions for the Skay.
That was all well and good, and I wished them the best, but their morality since those dark days had slid to the bottom. They now sold machines that played on people’s feelings and such-like. Sure, this new breed of bot was supposed to be funding the rebuilding of their planet, and that was a good cause and all, but still… having robots ask for handouts got me angry.
“You’ve got no kids to feed,” I told the bot. “You’re just going to give that extra cash to the bar! Scram!”
The robot huffed and rolled away. I knew the game. The robots fleeced dumb humans, and that’s why the businesses bought the robots. None of that money was going home to 51 Pegasi—except for the price of the begging robot itself.
Walking out of the place, something caught my eye and stopped me at the door. Was that a flash of reflective blue out on the street? A metallic glint that I’d seen before?
Throwing the door wide, I charged out onto the sidewalk.
Raash already had hold of Natasha. She was bent back, helpless in his big leathery arms. He had her by her jacket, and those claws were digging into her back.
Natasha wasn’t much of a fighter, but she’d been in Legion Varus for a long time. She kicked and stabbed at him with a small sharp object. It could have been one of those stylus-things that convert into a weapon with a flick of the wrist.
