[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (5 page)

‘Laika’s mother!’ yelped Misha, dropping his canapés.

‘Oh, god, I’m so sorry!’ said Phoebe, putting her hand over her mouth and turning bright red. ‘Are you okay?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Misha, blinking back tears. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘You’re bleeding!’

‘Don’t worry. I bleed much too easily. My fault, really.’

‘You bleed too easily? Oh
god
. Should I get a medibot?’

‘No, I don’t mean I’ve got a condition, I just – forget about it.’ Misha smiled and tried not to wince at the same time. ‘I don’t even like these trousers anyway,’ he added, wiping pointlessly at the blossoming bloodstain with his sleeve.

‘Well, geez – sorry again,’ said Phoebe, shooting her cybernetic leg a mortified look. ‘It keeps doing that lately. I need to get it serviced.’

They both went back to awkwardly studying the sculpture. In the background the anthropologically interesting band finished a song about a Gippsworld potato blight and started a new song about plague sanitation.

Misha, after the pain in his shin had subsided enough for him to be able to speak properly, eventually nodded at Prometheus. ‘This puts me in mind of the Neo-Bauhaus school,’ he said.

‘Oh, does it?’ said Phoebe, blinking. ‘I don’t think I know them. What are they about?’

‘Well, lots of things. Hard to put into words. Being attuned to nature, that’s one of the main issues. Like here – with the way it has those … bits stuck to it.’

‘Right, definitely,’ said Phoebe. ‘It’s very clever. The bits. Makes you think.’

‘It does. It makes you think.’

The conversation lapsed.

‘You don’t see many cybernetic limbs these days,’ said Misha, after another excruciating minute had ticked by.

Phoebe nodded, and stared at the floor. ‘Most people assume it signifies gigantic mental issues.’

‘Not at all! It’s just – that’s to say – it’s none of my business, but I wondered – not that it’s important – but, you know, I
noticed
and I wondered …’

‘Why don’t I let them grow me a new one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Gigantic mental issues.’

‘Oh.’

Misha looked hard at the back of his own hand. Phoebe drained her drink. ‘So, are you one of the artists?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m in the trading business,’ said Misha. ‘Importing and exporting.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘Oh, you know, different things. Mainly quite niche products. Luxury items, I suppose you could call them.’

OR PIGS. PIGS. YOU COULD CALL THEM PIGS, his inner monologue shouted. Misha hated his inner monologue and was used to ignoring it. Detecting empty glasses, another baristabot bobbled up to them.

‘Hey, let me get these,’ said Misha, waving his ID at its head. He went to grab two more drinks, but the readout on the machine’s tuxedo flashed red.

‘Insufficient funds,’ said the baristabot, who wasn’t programmed for tact. Misha waved the card again.

‘There should be at least five credits left on there,’ he protested.

‘Insufficient funds.’

‘How much are these drinks?’

‘Ten credits.’

‘
What
?’

Phoebe leaned forward, waved her ID, and the readout flashed green. She took the cocktails and handed him one.

‘It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Prices have gone
bonkers
here since this whole Outsider Art fad. It’s like, two hundred percent inflation or something.’

‘I forgot that I’d put most of my cash on the other card,’ said Misha, by way of explanation. ‘The cash that I make from the importing and the exporting.’

‘No, sure, of course,’ Phoebe said with a nod. ‘I’ve made that mistake myself.’

The conversation hit a third, seemingly inescapable lull. Misha sighed. He made a show of checking the time, and tried to do a facial expression that signified he had an important appointment to get to as part of a full, vibrant life.

‘I lost it when I was nine,’ Phoebe suddenly blurted, just as he was turning to go, ‘trying to impress a lanky boy called Phil by inventing a new playground game. Jump Over the Plasma Beam Generator. It wasn’t a great game, didn’t catch on. But when I woke up with a new leg grafted into place I freaked out. I became
convinced
it was haunted, like it was some sort of
ghost
leg, and that it was going to try to kick me to death in my sleep.’

‘That’s understandable,’ said Misha, thinking that it sounded pretty weird.

‘My mum found me in the bathroom trying to cut it off with a spatula. Hadn’t got very far. In my unbalanced state I’d chosen utensils poorly.’

‘I can imagine that’s easily done.’

‘They packed me off to a lot of expensive psychologists, but that didn’t work out. I decided it was all part of a shadowy conspiracy. Eventually, after a few more increasingly messy attempts at leg removal, my mother got tired of having to repaint the bathroom, and managed to find a surgeon who’d agree to re-amputate and fit me with this.’ She pointed at the metal leg. ‘The hydraulics keep breaking down, sourcing spare parts is a nightmare. On the upside, I can keep sandwiches in my thigh compartment.’

‘That’s good. I like sandwiches,’ said Misha, instantly realising this wasn’t the sort of personal detail that impressed women.

‘He is also big fan of chicken buckets,’ said Yevgeny, wandering past and winking at Phoebe. ‘We call him Mister Chicken Buckets. One of our best customers. Enjoy your evening.’

Misha gulped at his drink and thought about lingering death.

‘So, Mister Chicken Buckets,’ said Phoebe. ‘Tell me more about the glamorous space trading business.’

Misha felt weirdly disembodied as he listened to himself talk. Partly it was the cocktails; mostly it was his brain’s attempt to try to insulate itself from the full horror of what was unfolding. He’d stood powerlessly by as he heard his mouth spend ten minutes explaining how prone he was to nosebleeds when adjusting to the space station’s centrifugal gravity. Then he heard it move from that topic onto a graphic description of his childhood bowel problems. Now, in some inexplicably inept attempt to change the conversational course it appeared to have resorted to regaling Phoebe with anecdotes lifted directly from Cliff Ganymede’s autobiography
The Moon’s A Balloon (Watch Out, Fake Moon! It’s A Thargoid Trap!).

‘… so that’s when the Pilots’ Federation made me the youngest pilot in the entire star system to be awarded the rank of Deadly. Which was a real honour. And did I mention that I fly a top-of-the-range Anaconda? Because that is also a thing I do.’

He wondered if she’d noticed the horseshoes of sweat on his shirt. He was wearing the latest gland-freeze spray, but there was only so much you could ask of it.
There is a chance she hasn’t noticed
, Misha thought,
so long as her eyeballs are just painted marbles, like on a taxidermied crow, and she’s faking being able to see
.

He tried not to think about the fact that once out of his sight it would take her five seconds to call up every detail about his employment history, income, mental health, and – given another half a minute or so – probably an entire run-down of all his recessive genes. Though it might take her a little while to work her way through the list, because he had many.

‘But, goodness, I seem to have talked quite a lot. What about you? Do you enjoy police work?’

‘Good grief. Is it that obvious?’

‘What?’

‘That I’m a cop?’ Phoebe wrinkled her nose. ‘Can you tell by my feet or something?’

‘No, I, uh, think I must have seen you doing a docking bay inspection. I notice that sort of thing because of the importing and exporting. For which, noticing skills are important. It must be exciting. Catching criminals, busting smuggling operations?’

‘It’s quieter than you might expect.’ Phoebe shrugged. ‘There’s been a bit of low-level smuggling since Placet B passed that Madeleine law.’

‘Madeleine law?’

‘Like the cakes.’

‘They banned cakes?’ Misha said, lost.

‘Not literally. It’s a nickname. Because of Proust.’

Misha tried to nod his head in the way he imagined a man who had read Proust might do.

‘Apparently, hundreds of years ago,’ Phoebe started to explain, ‘when they didn’t have so much in the way of instant reproduction tech, you’d have to just … remember stuff. People didn’t have recordings of everything they ever did. Product packaging would change, and everyone would get wistful for it. If you go back far enough there were actual entire shows and movies that had been lost. Obviously that’s before we sent out ships to pick up all the old radio waves. Anyhow, people would forget that stuff was rubbish; they’d sort of imagine everything with this kind of rosy glow they called “nostalgia”. And they felt happy thinking about how good things were, and they felt happy bitching about how terrible things were today by comparison. So to get the sense of nostalgia back, on Placet B they’ve tried to ban any technology or recorded material designated a non-vital cultural artefact that’s more than thirty years old.’

‘Wow, that seems extreme. Does it work?’

‘Not really. It’s a pretty ridiculous and unworkable law. But at least it means that every so often I get to find a hidden database of old movies and slap them with a fine. It’s not, to be honest, what I saw myself doing at this stage in life.’

She knocked back another drink, and continued glumly, ‘Do you ever think that there’s like a hyper-loop shuttle, and that all your peers got on the shuttle at the point they were meant to, but somehow you didn’t, you missed it, and now you’re stuck on the platform and there are no other shuttles coming ever again? Do you think you can mess up your life because of one stupid mistake? Sorry, that’s a daft question. You’re a successful importer-exporter of niche luxury items.’

‘Well, yes, but that’s not to say I’ve not had my share of disappointments,’ said Misha, wishing he had dialled it back a little. ‘What was it?’

‘What was what?’

‘Your mistake?’

Phoebe bit her lip. ‘It was my dissertation. For my final year Policing Exams. Up to that point, I’d pretty much aced everything. Top marks at theory, attendance, badge polishing. A star student across the board. And then I decided to write a thesis about the history of Galcop. You know the old Coriolis stations? I went through a bunch of operations logs, and it turns out the police back in those days were total imbeciles. I mean, unfathomably stupid. If there was an alert, the standard practice – which had been drawn up by this Commissioner Osborne guy, the real bigwig – anyway, the standard practice was just to fly out of the station regardless of any intel. Half the time the perp would simply
park
there, waiting, and pick the cops’ Vipers off one by one. Crazy casualty levels! The sort of thing mad generals in the bad old days would have approved of. So I wrote a scathing account of what a giant idiot Commissioner Osborne must have been.’

She downed another drink.

‘Clever Clag. Didn’t bother to think about the fact the current police chief’s surname is also Osborne. The famous historical idiot turned out to be her grandfather. So, long story short, I’ve been stuck here for the last two years.’

‘Ah,’ Misha tried to think of something better and more comforting to say than ‘ah’, failed and so just said ‘Ah’ again.

‘Hold this. I’ll be back in a second,’ said Phoebe.

She slumped down in the toilet cubicle, turned the dial of the drug dispenser to ‘Neurotic’, and necked a couple of mood pills. Then she slapped herself hard in the side of the head. What, she wondered, was
wrong
with her? She had finally talked to the guy from the vending machine with the pleasant, open face, who turned out to be both successful and
multilingual
, because he’d definitely said ‘yag’ instead of ‘hello’ that last time they’d spoken, and now she was messing it up by being miserable and by making weird shuttle metaphors and by sharing too much about her dysmorphia issues
.
And, to cap it all, there was obviously a bug in her neural link, because that was the third time the leg had gone on the fritz and she’d booted somebody. The trigger seemed to be whenever she found herself in an awkward social situation. Which, she realised gloomily, meant it was going to happen a lot.

She blinked on her police crime scene recorder, guiltily sped past the NOT FOR PERSONAL USE warning boxes, and a ream of data about the evening scrolled past her face. This kind of thing was ethically dubious, but she was so poor at judging facial cues she could justify it to herself as simply levelling the playing field. She was pleased to see that Misha’s eye dilation and sweat levels suggested either a fatal pituitary disease of some sort or a
70
% chance that he was interested in her.
Jesus Christ
, she thought, as more biometric data scrolled past,
he has a LOT of recessive genes
. Glen’s almost flawless DNA flashed into her mind for a moment before she had a chance to stamp the image down. A nice-looking double helix wasn’t everything. She undid the top button of her shirt and wished she’d changed it earlier. Hopefully the noodle-stain looked like a deliberate bit of design. Perhaps she could pass it off as
avant-garde
. It’s not like some of these Gippsworld artists weren’t wearing enough crazy crap.

Heading back across the throbbing Jazz Lounge, Phoebe was so busy worrying about the stain that she didn’t notice a rowdy new group at the bar until a terrible, piercing shriek stopped her in her tracks.

‘Fffeeeeeeeeeeebbbbbbssss!’

Phoebe froze.

‘Alicia!’ she said, turning around and doing the best approximation of a grin she could manage in the circumstances.

Alicia, just as bony and glossy as she remembered, did weird little air kisses either side of Phoebe’s head and pulled her towards where a gaggle of homicide detectives were shouting and downing shots and giving each other high-fives. Phoebe could tell they were homicide because they were all wearing their stupid shiny homicide division bomber jackets. A slightly confused but glassily cheery Peterson was there too. He raised a wobbly drink at her.

‘Soooo great to see you! You didn’t reply to my message!’ Alicia shrieked again, right into Phoebe’s ear this time. ‘Have a drink, we’re celebrating!’