Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

He rode the EHB shuttle into Bonemarche and got off at the Estrange with perhaps a dozen other people who worked for the companies there. The largest group, junior botanists and lab techs from NuGen, were talking loudly about some new plant they were working on— which couldn’t be that promising, Tatian thought, or they’d be keeping it more of a secret —while a couple of hard-muscled secretaries were discussing the ranking system for the Nest’s full-contact mattata tournament. Tatian had dated one of them, briefly, smiled as he drew even with her, and received a pleasant smile in response. It seemed suddenly strange that no one was talking about the destruction of the bars, and he said, on impulse, “Did you see the fire on the news this morning?”

“Fire?” The woman looked blank, shook her head.

“Oh, I saw that,” the other secretary said. “The one by the harbor, right? It’s a good thing it wasn’t by the warehouses.” He looked at the first woman. “Some bars burned down, on Dock Row. If it’d been a little farther north, it would’ve taken out the Starsys warehouse.”

“That would have been bad,” the woman said, and stopped at the entrance to the arcade, where a gray-haired indigene in off-world clothes sold bread and local honey from a folding cart. “We were lucky.”

The bar owners weren’t , Tatian thought, but their attention was already on the breads spread out for sale. Or the people who went there . He remembered the crowd at Shinbone: not what he’d expected, less trade, or less obviously trade, than what the indigenes called odd-bodied and the wry-abed, mems, fems, and herms, and anyone whose sexual tastes didn’t match the indigenes’ simple male/female model. It had been one of the few places on Hara not run by off-worlders where he’d felt things were—almost—normal, and he wondered suddenly if that was what the indigenes were looking for when they did trade. And the money was good, too, he reminded himself, striving for his usual detachment, and went through the arcade into Drapdevel Court.

For once, Reiss was there before him, perched on the edge of the secretarial desk in the outer office, a chunk of spicebread in one hand and a stylus in the other. He looked up as Tatian entered and hastily blanked his screen. Tatian sighed, wondering what he was doing this time— probably more work on his jet cars, using our design systems —but said only, “I need to talk to you, Reiss. When you’ve got a minute.”

“Any time,” Reiss said, and used the stylus to flick virtual switches. “Now?”

“That would be good,” Tatian said, and the younger man followed him into the office.

Tatian touched his wrist, then winced, hit the override a fraction of a second too late to stop the cascade of static. He touched the shadowscreen instead, lighting the desktop, and glanced quickly at the update screen. It showed nothing of immediate importance, and he looked back at Reiss. He hated having to reverse himself, the more so because he had known he was wrong, and said, “It’s about that case you were involved in, Destany Casnot’s.”

“So Raven came through,” Reiss said.

“You knew about this,” Tatian said, and controlled his anger with an effort. “You work for NAPD, Reiss, whatever your clan affiliations are. I can’t afford divided loyalties, especially right now.”

“No, it’s not like that.” Reiss shook his head. “I had to tell them, tell Raven and Haliday, and Destany, for that matter, and when we met to talk it over, Raven said something about offering part of the surplus. I didn’t know if 3e could, much less whether it’d be worth it. That’s all I knew.”

Tatian stared at him for a moment. It was plausible enough—if nothing else, Reiss wasn’t the sort of person one trusted with a complicated plan—and he nodded slowly. “All right—”

“One thing,” Reiss said. “Okay, maybe I should’ve told you, even if I didn’t know what Raven was going to be able to do, but what you were asking wasn’t right. I owe Destany—more than that, 3e’s got rights, even if 3e is an indigene.”

Tatian took a deep breath, biting back an instinctive, angry answer. Reiss was right, and more than that, he knew that NAPD was wrong. “You’ve lived on Hara all your life,” he said, after a moment. “You know who has power—you know how much power the IDCA has, particularly if they can connect a company to trade. To fight that, you need solid backing, and for the Old Dame to give us that, well, we need a solid reason, something the Board and the shareholders can appreciate. Yeah, maybe I should’ve told you—like you maybe should have told me—when I got the offer. In retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t. But right now, we have Masani’s support—you have Masani’s support, to make this statement. Let’s go from there.”

“Would you have done it without the—offer?” Reiss asked.

I don’t know . Tatian said, “I couldn’t have. It’s that simple, Reiss.”

There was a little silence, and then Reiss looked away. “All right,” he said, almost inaudibly, then shook himself, “I’ll talk to Haliday—Destany will be pleased.”

Tatian nodded and looked back at the blinking desktop as the door closed behind the other. Would I have done this without Warreven’s offer, without the lure, the bribe, of the surplus? Well, I told the truth when I said I couldn’t ’t have risked it, couldn’t have taken the chance of getting the IDC A down on us—but it’s also the truth that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to take the chance without Warreven . He sighed, and reached for the shadowscreen, trailing his fingers through the virtual controls until he could call up the communications system. The mail screen was almost empty, only a few general circulars, and nothing from Prane Am or the port. He swore under his breath at that and switched to the general monophone system, punched in the numbers Warreven had left on file. At least he could let Warreven know that they were prepared to do business.

The communications screen stayed empty for several seconds, then flashed a single word—forwarding—and a second string of codes. Tatian raised an eyebrow at that, raised both eyebrows as the connect notice appeared followed by the message video n/a.

“Æ?” a voice said, from the wall speaker.

“I’m looking for Warreven,” Tatian said, in franca . There was a little silence, and Tatian made a face at the blank screen, anticipating another routing error.

“I’ll see if he’s available,” the voice said, and was replaced by the hiss of a holding signal.

Tatian sighed again, and settled himself to wait, reaching for the shadowscreen to call up another set of files. To his surprise, however, the holding signal vanished within a minute, and Warreven’s voice spoke from the wall.

“Yes?”

“Mhyre Tatian here. I wondered if we could meet.”

“Ah.” There was another little silence, live silence this time, and Tatian could imagine Warreven’s brows drawn together in thought. He missed the video image, wondered where Warreven was that lacked such basic capacity….

“I assume you have good news,” Warreven said, and Tatian dragged his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Yes. At least, we’re prepared to talk.”

“That is good,” Warreven said. “I’m—I have some business to finish here, I’m at the Harbor, Barbedor’s club on the Embankment. Can you meet me here, say, at noon?”

Tatian nodded, then remembered the missing video. “All right. Does this club have an address?”

There was a pause, and Warreven’s voice, when it came, sounded grimly amused. “No. But you can’t miss it. It’s the one on the south side of the missing buildings.”