Mary Rosenblum - Horizons

A tall, skinny man in a blue singlesuit, a genes elect Masai type, hesitated, frowning slightly at a personal reader, concentrating on something slightly irritating.

A tiny shard of intent pricked through that concentration static. Ahni reacted without thought, flinging herself down and toward his feet, shoulders curling to roll. Displaced air feather-brushed her cheek as a dart skimmed past, then her roll caught him at the knees, out of control and sloppy in the lessened gravity. He flew over her back, his screen sailing to clatter against the elevator door. His head hit the wall with a dull sound. Ahni tried to continue her roll and failed. Different physics here! She slammed sideways against the wall, tasting adrenaline and blood, struggling to get her breath.

Nice setup. At this level, the elevator lobby apparently emptied quickly. Poison on that dart? No place to hide an unconscious body in these sterile residential corridors. She rolled him against the wall, tugged his singlesuit straight, arranged his limbs to suggest a nap, and strode briskly out into the corridor, her body language relaxed, senses straining. Eyes flicked past her in the hallway, not looking, not seeing, bodies brushed by. Time to disappear before Security got into the act.

He could have darted her easily, but he had hesitated. Why? Ahni ran her fingertips over her shoulder as eyes skimmed past her, unseeing. She found the slickness of the tiny pseudoskin patch, peeling it off with a sharp fingernail under the pretense of scratching a small itch. A trace of blood made her fingertips slippery as she squeezed the purchased chip from its shallow bed.

A tall woman with too-thin bones danced past her, humming to music playing in her head, naked from the waist up, a silver filigree of inlaid fiberlight decorating her full breasts, ringing her dark aureoles. The naked breasts startled Ahni in spite of her homework on NYUp customs.

Holos or flat graphics decorated residential doors. The images–starscapes, unicorns, strange flowers–had the look of addresses. Not many uniforms or business suits up here, above the tourist level.

Ahni turned down a connecting corridor, putting casual purpose into her posture and stride, dropping for an instant into Pause to suppress the flood of corticosteroids into her bloodstream. Without breaking stride, she pressed the pseudoskin patch to a residential doorway decorated with holographic vines. If Security looked for Haarevort they’d find her loitering in this doorway. Ahni paused, closing her eyes to summon the map of New York Up from Data. She needed safety, time to drop into full Pause–access her personal AI–and figure out how things had gone so wrong so fast. And how to fix it. An ancient fairy tale sprang to mind, about a Muslim rabbit and an Israeli fox. About a thorn patch… The corridor walls up here curved into floor and ceiling without angles, covered with a fine fibered carpeting, tinted a soft, soothing green. She hadn’t passed a hotel room for some time now. All residential? She’d stand out–stranger. When she reached the next service bay, she slowed until the preoccupied woman in the neon green singlesuit and natural euro-mix face disappeared into a room. Then Ahni whisked into the bay and palmed the control plate next to the service elevator. It only took a handful of seconds for the network in her palm to analyze and override the lock. The door slid open and she stepped in. They’d expect her to go down to Level One, to the safety of gravity and Security. She overrode the controls, sent the car up. Past the residential levels, past the manufacturing and storage levels, clear to the axle.

The end of the line.

She’d never spent time in microG before. Rabbit in the thorn patch. The Krator clan, Xai’s murderer, was an Earthside clan, just like the Huang clan. They wouldn’t look for her here.

So why NYUp, where Krator had as little presence as Huang? Not even Pause had yielded an answer, but this was where the assassin’s trail had led her. I will avenge you, she promised her brother’s spirit as the elevator slowed and beeped at her. Xai would want vengeance. As their father did. Secure for MinimalG. The letters ran silver and gold across the wall in multiple languages, chasing themselves around and around the tubular walls. Not that she needed them, she was barely anchored to the floor by a shadow of down. Her stomach stirred, protesting, as she slipped into one of the padded harnesses that lined the wall.

Movement resumed. The harness cut into her shoulders slightly, not enough to be painful. Then… the downward tug ceased and she floated, held by the straps.

So far so good. Ahni slipped out of the straps. She swallowed, groping for up and down, but the featureless tube of the elevator offered her no orientation. The doors didn’t open and the annoyed blip of a beep told her that she was neglecting something… probably a password. Her palm tingled just above the threshold of feeling as her embedded hardware dealt with the control plate. The door slid open…

…and she gasped.

She recoiled, a knee-jerk primate reaction, uncontrollable. That flinch started her tumbling and she bounced off the wall. Stomach knotting, she grabbed wildly for the door frame, missed, tumbled out into the blinding glare, floundering, helpless. Up. Down! She struggled for orientation as the world wheeled around her. Damp air, rich with unfamiliar smells. Soft green things brushed her. Hydroponics at the axis, she remembered, and the soft brush became recognizable as leaves, but up and down still refused to fall into place. Bad choice of thorn patch! She forced her burning eyes open, struggling to bring the green glare into some kind of focus. Goggles. You had to use something up here. Would the fierce light blind her? She used Pause to quell a spurt of fear adrenaline, grabbed, feeling soft plant things crush beneath her hands. She tore free and grabbed again, palms slick with plant juices. This time the stems held and she halted. Behind her, the elevator beeped and the door whispered closed. Somebody wanted it.

So much for the thorn patch.

Still clutching handfuls of moist, bruised leaves, Ahni stretched out a cautious foot, holding tight to the anchoring plants. She felt something thick and fairly solid beneath her foot. A large column? Behind her, the elevator chimed again and she caught a flicker of movement off at the edge of vision–the door opening.

Before her conscious mind could catch up, she planted both feet against the leaf-covered column, knees bent. Her thigh muscles bunched and she shot forward, blind, arms shielding head and face, praying to all her ancestors that whoever had come down in the elevator would miss.

She felt him, intent and at ease. Sure of himself.

Her shoulder slammed hard into something that gave some and sent her tumbling wildly, cartwheeling like a kid’s pinwheel or a kite spiraling down. She curled into a fetal ball, head down, rebounded from another column, grabbed, felt stems tear in a spray of moisture. One foot landed squarely on something and she pushed again, hard. Just go! She rocketed forward again.

Felt something tiny sting her shoulder. Felt his triumph.

Damn.

Vision faded and her body no longer worked. Paralysis? Or death? Her face hit something thin and whippy, then something harder, bruised, couldn’t do anything. Slowing… vision fading…

Ahni tried to close her burning eyes as her body drifted. Couldn’t do it.

An apparition appeared in front of her. Narrow face, like a hairless skull drawn into caricature by some art program. Weird milky eyes with no pupil, limbs too long for their thin boniness and they… bent. Like green bamboo. A demon. I am dying, Ahni thought.

The demon grinned at her, grabbed her wrist. She felt that… and experienced a moment of surprise, then more nausea as the demon yanked at her. Green and light fled by her and then she plunged into darkness.