Saturn's Children (23 page)

AFTER I WAKE shuddering from that dream, sleeping is pretty much impossible. I feel stupid and tired. Am I going to need yet more cosmetic surgery? Certainly my current disguise is useless. (
And why didn’t Juliette tell Jeeves that the Katherine Sorico identity was blown? Or did she?
A paranoid corner of me wonders.) At least now I know why Stone and the Domina are after me. It was simply my bad luck she was on Venus, and he tagged me as Juliette’s kind. It’s so like an aristo to send her rival a message written in the dead flesh of an innocent sib.

And as for the events aboard
Pygmalion
. . . I flash on a memory of the Domina, Pete’s owner. I’m certain, now, that she’s one of Granita’s sibs: they’re too much alike for it to be a coincidence. Granita, who casually seduced me in body if not soul, then ordered her minions to fire on my presumed location? I twitch.
What have I stumbled into?
If Granita has told her sister the Domina that she met Katherine Sorico on a Mars-bound liner, and they successfully tagged me as Maria Montes Kuo, then—

Why does Jeeves want me to run errands for weeks, until the
Indefatigable
is ready to leave, using a blown cover identity?

I’m pacing around the bedroom like a clockwork toy, chewing on a knuckle as I think furiously. I don’t like the shape of this. I mean, I
really
don’t like it. If I was a nasty paranoid person like Juliette, I’d think Jeeves was trying to set me up. Having me charge around all over my enemy’s home territory, looking very much like the sib she swore vengeance on?
That’s not funny!
But . . . what’s in it for Jeeves? I can’t see any reason why he’d want me dead—if so, why the elaborate setup? And who’s trying to sue me into a hole in the ground and establish a claim on my body?

He’s using me as bait.
Or,
he’s the mole in the organization.

Neither prospect is reassuring. But I need that ticket out to Jupiter, don’t I? If I head back to, say, Earth, there’s no telling which of the Domina’s sibs will run across me next—or which of their bodyguards, the flamboyant aristo thugs or the munchkin space ninjas she leans toward. I’ve done surprisingly well to stay alive so far—but mostly because I’ve had help. If I cut and run on Jeeves, I might not be so lucky next time.

I sit down on the bed and think furiously.
Can I do it without exposing myself?
I summon up Jeeves’s letter and read it again. Then I double-check the travel itinerary. He wants me to run some errands around places as far apart as Carter City and Lowell and . . .
Yes,
one of me thinks,
this could work.

And so I begin to plot.

THE NEXT DAY, good-time Kate checks out of the decrepit hotel and hops aboard a slow southbound train. The train makes numerous stops en route to the destination she paid for, near the south polar city of Bougainville. She is no longer aboard by that point. Maria Montes Kuo—who is presumably on several watch lists—boards a suborbital to Fashoda, a maglev to Maxwell, and a train to Tribeca.
I
do none of these things and in fact buy a battered thirdhand spider with money from the wallet of Jennifer Sixt, one of the flimsier of Jeeves’s courier identities.

Did I say that Mars is
big
? Three days later, exhausted and sleepless and with every joint in my body shaken half-loose from the off-road driving, I ride my spider into the outskirts of Hellasport, nearly three thousand kilometers from where I bought the craft. I’ve had lots of time to think and brood and read and reread my instructions from Jeeves. And I’ve decided that if he wants cages rattling, then I’m going to really make them rattle—but not at the price of letting myself fall into the Domina’s hands.

I’ve done my research from a battered gazetteer, and it doesn’t take me long to locate the correct backstreet market; rows of kiosks and dingy shop fronts jostling elbow to elbow with power-distribution substations and vendors of assorted substances. I walk in, rather than taking the spider. What I’m looking for is slightly upmarket from Ferd’s dive in the backstreets of Marsport, but otherwise not dissimilar. The waiting room is painted black and sparsely furnished, the better to highlight the display of limbs, heads, torsos, and structural boning that adorns the walls and ceiling. All the organs are embellished with the surgeon-engineer’s signature. The location is cheap and nasty, but word is that Red spends her profits on her practice, not on a fancy paint job.

“Anyone here?” I call, sitting down on a bench seat with remarkably lifelike feet.

A munchkin pops out of a hole in the floor and chatters at me angrily. “What you want? Red not in!”

“I’m wanting to give Red some money,” I say calmly enough. “If he’s not in, tough.” I stand up, ready to go, just as the inner door opens.

“Hello. Pay no attention to Zire, he gets possessive.” She looks me up and down with a professional eye. “What do you need?”

I toss her a memory stick. “What’s on there. I think it’ll take you a while to arrange everything, yes?”

“Hmm.” She pops it into her arm and glances at the palm of her hand. “You’re not joking. Cold weather kit’s easy enough, but radiation hardening? What are you planning, a skiing holiday on Pluto? Or maybe you’re taking a job supervising a reactor plant?”

“Close enough,” I say lightly. “Can you do it, is the question?”

“Hmm.” She keeps reading. I see the point where she pauses, does a double take, and continues. “Expensive. Some of this is going to be difficult to get hold of.” I’m pretty sure she’s thinking of the Block Two requirements—the added techné to bring me up to the same spec as my secretive sister. “The cryotolerant kit isn’t exotic, just not particularly common. It’s the other stuff that may be problematic. It’s going to attract attention,” she says apologetically.

“I was thinking twelve thousand Reals ought to cover it,” I say carefully. That’s about thirty percent over the odds.

She stares at me, unblinking. “Fifteen thousand.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fifteen, and not a dollar or centime less.” She pauses. “I’ll need the money to grease some joints. Getting some of these subsystems without anyone noticing officially—” She shrugs. “I assume that’s what you want?”

I nod. “Alright. Deal.”

I spend roughly the next week in and out of Red’s chop shop, being prodded and poked. Most of it isn’t too bad, but I am extremely unhappy about remaining conscious when it’s time for her to crack my thighs open and replace their fab lines with new assembler arrays. Also, having all the joints in my body realigned and resocketed is tedious in the extreme, and occasionally agonizing when she misplaces a pain block. Which, to be fair, isn’t her specialty.

When she’s through with me, I don’t
look
very different on the outside—I’ve got the same bishojo eyes and feathery blond hair I’ve been wearing since Mercury, the same too-perky nipples and narrow waist as the original Katherine Sorico and my sister Juliette the impersonator—but internally there have been some big changes. I won’t freeze until you get right down to liquid-nitrogen temperature, and given appropriate footwear and clothing, I can go singing in the methane rain on Titan. My Marrow techné is able to fix a whole lot more radiation damage than I hope I’ll ever be exposed to, and there are some other surprises. Like the distributed reflex net Red has spliced into my peripheral nervous system. Its responses are dumb and stereotyped, but if someone’s sneaking up behind me with a knife, that’s all I need. I’ll leave the fancy disarming techniques to Juliette’s reflex set, when it fully imprints on me. In the meantime, I am becoming Kate, hair-trigger splitter of skulls and ice-cool frigid bitch.

There comes a morning when Red looks in on me. “Oh, still here?” She makes shooing gestures. “Go on, get out! I’m not running a hostel!”

“I thought you still wanted to fine-tune my—”

“Nope.” She doesn’t smile. “I took the air-conditioning down to minus a hundred and twenty while you were sleeping, overnight. There are no hot spots, so you’re ready to check out.”

“Oh,” I say, slightly crestfallen. “Well, thanks.” And I pick up my coat and walk out of her body shop—for good, I hope.

It’s time to go to work.

TWO DAYS AND three deliveries later I get my first actual evidence of who Jeeves is trying to draw out. (Not that I didn’t have a list of suspects already, but the first rule in both of the two oldest professions is “don’t make assumptions.”)

The work is mostly trivial stuff: Go to venue Alpha without being tracked, accost person Bravo and give recognition sign Charlie, accept payload Delta, proceed without being tracked to venue Echo, locate person Foxtrot, and complete. There’s a rhythm to it. It’s a soft-shoe shuffle of a job, and it’s singing in my nerves as I hop transport routes, change outerwear and the more easily adjustable physical signifiers, touch base, and dance on. Really, I’m not doing anything a million other couriers could not do; I’m just trying to be as discreet as a giantess half as tall again as the average citizen can be. Which is to say, not very.

I collect the fourth item (an encrypted soul chip—what a surprise!) from a shibeen in the warrens under Metropolis, and check the delivery instructions on a local classified ads bulletin board. And that’s when I get the first shiver down the spine. The destination’s in Hellasport, the railhead town in the Hellas Basin that’s the closest city to Her estate. I’ve been there before. Or Juliette has. And the delivery instructions? Even creepier.

I’m to go to the Riesling Hotel, check in under false identity number four, and hand the stick over to “Petruchio.” A name that I promptly go and look up, and that tells me nothing . . . except that the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end.
Oh my!
I think. My own response takes me by surprise.
Can you catch love by proxy?
I suddenly realize that I’m anxious to see this Petruchio for entirely unprofessional reasons, and that’s a far-more-unwelcome revelation than even the worst possible answer to the questions about Jeeves’s motivation that I’ve been asking. There are layers of game being played above my head, that is true, but it is up to me to look to my own self-preservation. That’s why I hung on to the Swiss army handgun, and make sure I don’t sleep in the same room two nights running.

Hellasport is over five hundred kilometers away, and I am still running a day behind schedule. There’s—I check the assignment—a time window attached to this delivery. I’ve only got six hours to make it; I didn’t notice it was time-critical earlier. I swear at myself, do a hasty twice around the block to check for tails, then dive onto the overhead suspended tramway and make my way to the railway station. Luckily for me, there’s an express leaving in less than an hour. I buy a second-class seat on it, then dive into the concourse to grab my travel kit from left luggage. Second class is for respectable working independents who have to carry their own stuff and can’t simply order new (or send a slave to buy it) at the other end. Even though I’ve got a strong suspicion that I’m bait in a trap, I can’t resist this one. Because if Petruchio is who I think he is, it’ll help me get a handle on the unsettled feelings Juliette has inflicted on me.

I try not to tap my fingers on the tabletop as the train finally pulls out of the station. “Express” can cover a multitude of sins on Mars, and there’s nothing terribly speedy about this behemoth—it just rumbles along steadily without stopping between major cities.
What if he
is
Pete?
I daydream (bad Freya, bad!). I can almost feel his maddening, tantalizing ghostly fingertips running across my skin. I shiver. How do I avoid succumbing when just thinking about him raises secondhand memories of his incubus touch?

Spung.
I shudder and cup my left breast with one hand, feeling dampness. I glance around, mortified. Luckily, I’m alone in this compartment, so there’s no one to witness my embarrassment. My left nipple hasn’t been quite right ever since that fly-by-night toastwit Ferd overfilled it. Arousal was supposed to make it firm up; now it triggers an emergency pressure-release valve and I end up oozing hydraulic fluid. It’s really disgusting.
Arousal?
I am having some difficulty sitting still. “This is going to be bad,” I mumble to myself as I massage my malfunctioning mammary. “There must be something I can do ...”

Then it hits me. What happened to Juliette wasn’t the standard obedience reflex everyone feels in the presence of a master; it was the more specialized submission reflex, locking on to her actual designated personal owner. We were trained for service in two modes, and while we are normally open and eager for affection, when one of them
chooses
one of us and acquires ownership, we have no option but to love them exclusively. I remember Rhea learning to her surprise and chagrin about this mode—in the abstract, though, because as template-matriarch for the lineage her teachers could not risk exposing her to premature love.

We’ve got chemotaxic receptors in our gas-exchange filters, embedded in the intricate channels and ducts behind our faces—it helps to be able to smell environmental contaminants like chlorine trifluoride before they dissolve you—and our Creators used the same mechanism to make us sensitive to
their
smell, because they used to leak particulates everywhere. Including chemical signaling messenger molecules that indicated sexual and emotional receptivity: vasopressin, oxytocin.
Of course.

We
are designed to become aroused by anyone who wants us, but an owner would want one of us who aroused
them
, and so . . . that’s what happened. Juliette and “Pete” were already mutually aroused because they were in a situation that required each of them to mimic one of our masters. In combination with the hothouse atmosphere, they slipped into a feedback loop strong enough to trigger the reflex that enslaves. All I have to do is avoid breathing in his presence, and I’ll be fine . . .

I squeeze my nipple until a viscous, ropy thread of hydraulic gel starts to ooze out of it. Then I roll it between finger and thumb. The kneading begins to hurt after a while, but I don’t stop until I have a fingertip-sized sphere of clear jelly. I flush my gas-exchange compartment—exhale—then raise the ball to my face (I can’t bring myself to look at it), and snort it up my left nostril. Then I repeat the exercise with my right.