I met the girl's eyes, read them and saw nothing dangerous. 'Okay,' I said, and held out my arm with my sleeve pulled back, hoping that this wasn't the tenth time. She pressed the sprayjector against my skin and triggered it. I felt the quick burn as the drugs went in, and the deal was done. I didn't feel any different, but the macromolecular labels from the sprayjector were now busy hooking up to binding sites in my synapses. The anticatalyst mixed with them would keep them from metabolizing for as long as it held out. My synapses would adapt to form memories normally during that time, but once the anticatalyst ran out the labels would attack the adaptations and undo any changes that had occurred since they were bound in the first place. A big chunk of experience would simply cease to exist for me.
You'd have to be desperate to take a deal like that. I was desperate.
I took my eyes off the patterned tile ceiling to look at Lieutenant Neels, brought back to the here-and-now. 'And that's all I remember. I guess it worked.'
He just looked at me for a long, painful time, his expression hard and unreadable. I'd sold three weeks for half a million stars and now I was a witness with no memory in a murder investigation. I told all that to the cop. He dropped a holoprint in front of me.
'Is that the woman?'
I nodded. It would take more than a brain blank to make me forget her. 'That's her.' I had a bad feeling about the way he asked the question, but I didn't know enough to start lying.
His lips compressed to a thin line. 'Did you kill her?'
I looked at him in shock. I wasn't a witness, I was a suspect. The suspect, said a little voice at the back of my brain. I'd known the deal had something deep behind it, but Bodyguard had told me the job was a package delivery, straight up and simple. Kzinti don't lie, it's beneath their honor, and I wouldn't have taken anything dirtier anyway. A brain blank doesn't change the way you act, and I'm not a killer. I shook my head. 'I didn't even know she was dead.'
'You wouldn't under the circumstances, would you?' His eyes bored in to mine. 'There's about a gallon of her blood in your airlock.' He held my gaze for a long, uncomfortable time. 'Anything you'd like to add to your statement?'
'Who is she?'
'Opal Stone.'
Opal Stone. I felt a sudden urge to look at my palm, to the place the red inked words had been. Instead I just looked at him, not knowing what to say. I didn't remember anything… Opal Stone.
He kept his eyes locked on mine for a long, long time, while I sat there feeling like a prey animal myself. Finally he turned away. 'We don't have a body, yet. The UNSN has a ship scanning your last recorded course, and we're talking to Jinx.' He looked back at me and his voice hardened. 'If you spaced her, we'll find her.'
'I don't…'
'Remember,' he finished for me. 'I know. You can go. Your ship is under seal. Don't leave the asteroid.'
I left with my head spinning and cursing myself for taking the deal in the first place. I thought I was desperate before, but now…I thought back again, trying to glean some missed detail from my mind, but the brain blank was complete. My first memory after the meeting was of staring up at the time display. She'd died-nobody loses a gallon of blood and lives. It was supposed to be a simple delivery trip. What had gone wrong? I pulled out my beltcomp and tabbed my last transactions, another attempt to fill in the blanks. There was a half-million-star deposit a week ago, and then today there was the rental bill for the cube dorm on horizontal sixteen-I hadn't thought to check the location when I'd left with the cop. Now I knew the timeframe, but what was I doing staying in a place like that with half a million stars to my name? The answer came too easily. Hiding. That didn't help me believe in my own innocence. I took a drop shaft to level sixteen and found the place again. It was residential space awkwardly converted to daily rental cubes, the kind of place that takes cash and doesn't ask names. I had to ask the proprietor which cube was mine. He sent me to number twenty-three. The lock opened when I thumbed it, and I went inside.
Something slammed into me from behind, and suddenly my face was jammed into a corner. Something soft and strong had me by the neck, and three sharp needles pressed delicately against my jugular vein. A kzin. I made a mental note to complain to the management about their security.
'Where is my client, Dylan Thurmond?' he snarled.
'What client?' My life was getting progressively more confusing.
He spun me around to face him, and I found myself staring into bared fangs. 'Opal Stone.' The kzin was Bodyguard. 'She is missing from your ship. I will have an answer.' The needles pressed harder.
I shook my head as well as I could. 'You were there when she brain-blanked me. I don't have any answers.'
'Then I will have your life.' His eyes got big and his ears swiveled up.
'I didn't kill her. I know that much.' I didn't know that much, but I said it. I hoped it was true.
'I watched her board your ship. Now her blood is all over your airlock.' His grip tightened again and I began to have trouble breathing.
'It wasn't me,' I gasped.
'Prove it.'
'It's too obvious, I've been set up.' His eyes bored in to mine, his fangs inches from my face. 'With a brain blank I can't even defend myself.' The kzin's grip didn't slacken. 'Whoever framed me did it.' I was grasping at straws, making it up on the fly. 'If you kill me you lose your only link to them.'
He let go and I slumped to the floor, rubbing my neck. 'Thanks for your restraint.'
Bodyguard snarled. 'My honor has been insulted with the death of my client. That has earned quick death for those responsible.' His eyes were still locked on me. 'Except if I find that it is you after all. Deception added to insult will make your death slow and painful.'
I nodded slowly, and fervently hoped I wasn't deceiving him. Kzinti earn high as bodyguards because they make the consequences of even a successful attack too severe for the most determined assassin. Any smuggler who gets to Centauri System knows better than to cross a kzin. Their honor code demands vengeance regardless of cost, and they're all too enthusiastic about following it.
I went over to the bed and sat down. The tiny space was barely big enough for me. With me and a hostile kzin it was decidedly claustrophobic. 'What happened after the Constellation?'
'Hrrr. Opal boarded the ship with you.'
'What was in the package?'
'She was the package.'
I tried to control my surprise. 'Did you see her get on?'
'Yes. I watched until the ship left. Her safety was my responsibility.'
'Tell me what you know, about Opal, about anything that might be important.'
He turned over a paw and studied his extended talons. 'Dr. Stone is senior vice president for finance at the Consortium.'
'Dr. Stone?' My eyebrows went up. I had assumed she had a bodyguard because she was a holo actress. Now I knew better, and the news wasn't good. I was in way over my head. It occurred to me that she hadn't said a word to me in the entire encounter in the Constellation. Had she said anything on board Elektra?
'Where was she going?'
'Jinx.'
'And when she got to Jinx?'
'I do not know that.'
'Do you usually go with her on trips?'
'Sometimes. At other times not. I am not privy to the details of her business arrangements.'
Another advantage of kzinti bodyguards is their lack of insight into the subtleties of human interaction. Opal Stone, what were you doing that you needed some desperate singleship pilot to take a brain blank? I might have refused to take her if I knew who she was. Relations between the Consortium and us independents are hardly smooth. And why didn't she take a Consortium ship?
I needed the money badly, but if I'd thought a little more carefully I never would have taken the job. A brain blank is just too serious. I'd counted on myself to be smart enough to not get into exactly this kind of trouble. Obviously I'd been wrong. Whoever framed me had done a good job.
