Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

He half-swallowed. The faint smile widened. “Sweetie…”

“Shhh.” She straightened up and picked up her tea, which still sent gossamer coils of steam into the cool hospital air. “Rest, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can, and the nurses can page me if you need me quickly. Yes?”

They both knew why he might need her quickly. He nodded. She squeezed his hand one more time and turned away. Just don’t ask me how I got the pardon, Dad. Or ask me whether I really did anything worth going to jail for, all those years ago.

Somewhere in the Internet

Thursday 7 September, 2062

09:45:55:55–09:46:03:12

Richard Feynman was running for his life. Not running as hard as he might have been, admittedly. Perhaps more strolling purposefully, with the occasional casual glance over his shoulder. He would have chuckled at the comparison, if he hadn’t been so intent on learning the tricks of this new opponent.

Unitek had a hired gun in the house. And he wasn’t half bad at his job, either.

Which was, of course, making it that much harder for Feynman to edge his way through the firewalls and virtual barriers that had so far defeated him. And the new code jockey seemed to have caught on that somebody had been poking around his perimeters. At least, judging by the depth and the breadth of the security scans he was running, and the levels of new protections going up.

Or possibly it was just that something big was about to happen. And knowing that Elspeth Dunsany was involved, and the same Colonel Valens who’d nearly bought a dishonorable discharge when Chinese agents had stolen certain very critical information from a mission he was heading at the Scavella-Burrell base on Mars…

Well, Feynman had a reasonably good idea what was being made ready, and it made him all the more eager to find a way in.

At last, however, after narrowly avoiding an unexpected recon-in-force, Feynman had to admit he was beaten on a security front. Which meant resorting to his more favored method of breaking into things.

Social engineering.

Because he knew the code jockey’s name, and he’d gone out of his way to get to know the code jockey’s daughter. And Leah Castaign would be online again in the morning. Or perhaps even later tonight, if she snuck some gaming time after her father was in bed. Feynman might have smiled, shaking his head, recognizing something about a child who couldn’t follow rules simply because somebody told her to do so.

Contemplating that, Feynman wondered if there might be some way into Unitek through the servers hosting the VR game. Vast, quick, powerful — and maintained by Unitek I.S., although they were outside of the company firewall. And he was going to need to hack Phobos starbase anyway, and get a player character online there, so he could maintain contact with Leah — once she started her virtual pilot training.

Which, after all, was the goal of the exercise.

Feynman had an intimate understanding of bureaucracy and of the usual motives behind corporate citizenship. And he found it difficult to believe that Unitek, several of its tentacular subsidiaries, and the Canadian government were hosting a free recreational gamespace for no more return than the exposure.

There weren’t enough ads.

6:22 A.M., Friday 8 September, 2062

West Hartford, Connecticut

New Britain Avenue

Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of his battered Dodge hybrid and kicked his feet up on the dash, sipping coffee. He set the insulated mug on the center console and tapped his HCD with a light pen, flipping through illicitly copied reports.

The Dodge was halfway hidden behind a delivery van, but in the gray morning light Mitch had a clear view of the loading dock and rear door of the Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom warehouse. The reports flashing across his contact included spectrographic analysis of three seized stashes of Hammer as well as the files he’d been able to retrieve from Mashaya’s desktop in the apartment she had shared with him.

Mitch wasn’t a chemist or a pharmacist. He wasn’t even a homicide detective. He was a halfway decent vice cop, though, and he was getting a niggling, tickling sensation that a pattern was about to emerge just under his fingertips, almost close enough to feel.

He was also outside his jurisdiction, and had been told in no uncertain terms to drop the case. Mashaya, he thought, glancing up to check the deserted loading dock once more, then rescanning the scroll of data. Gonna get ’em for you, girl. Nothing moved. He set the HCD down on the dash, lighting a cigarette, letting the data creep continue. He blinked and yawned. A long night. And not a damned thing had happened.

Mitch wasn’t really certain why he was spending his off-duty shift staking out a pharmaceutical warehouse, unless you started to wonder why maybe the Hammer had showed up on his streets, not New York. And wonder about the coincidental existence of Canadian Consolidated Pharmaceuticals’ West Hartford warehouse. Mashaya had found out some interesting things before she died; the most interesting was that Hartford wasn’t the only city to have experienced a run of deaths related to recalled combat drugs in the last six months. It was, however, the only such city in the USA. And the only one with a facility operated by the company that manufactured the drug.

It was a break in the pattern. And breaks like that were where the answers tended to lie.

Mitch had yet to get a warrant issued on a hunch, however. Even if he had been permitted to help investigate the case. He knew perfectly well that he was lucky not to still be on administrative leave following the murder of his fiancée. That he was pushing that luck, and it was going to run out on him. That Hartford PD itself had a hard-on for whoever did Mashaya, and that lots of perfectly good murder boys were all over the case like white on Mitch’s own skinny cracker ass. That nobody was going to show up at CCP today either, and he was going to have to report for roll call unslept and stubbled at eight AM.

He closed his eyes just for a moment, head sagging. He jerked it upright and fought a jaw-cracking yawn, reaching for his coffee again. What is it? Something about the pills… contaminated pills… why only some?

Why not all?

How does only part of a batch get tainted?

His thoughts chased their tails as he drained his coffee. And when he set the insulated mug aside, something was moving on the loading dock, walking up to that concealed side door.

A tall, black-haired woman with military bearing and an unmistakable nose.

“Now what is that, Mitchy-poo?” Oblivious to the tread marks spotting the dash, Mitch pulled his boots down and leaned forward. “Don’t you look familiar…”

And not familiar at all.

Maker, he thought for one wild moment, but it wasn’t Maker at all. Five eleven, maybe, hundred and fifty and most of it bone. Latina or Native American, well-preserved fiftyish. And then he noticed the rest of it: walking without a limp, manicured nails on long clean fingers, five-thousand-dollar boots with mirror-shining toes. No scars disfiguring that arrogant profile, either. Goddamn.

He was halfway through reaching up to touch his ear clip on and report in when he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be there. Nevertheless, Mitch’s trained eye recorded every detail as she mounted the chipped concrete steps: black pantsuit, pinstriped charcoal, stylish jacket cinched at the waist with a matching belt and a pin glinting gold on the lapel. Razor-styled hair falling like a raven’s blue-black wing across a forehead he was willing to bet was enzyme-smoothed. Pale blue blouse with a winged collar, softening the tailored severity of the outfit and the planed severity of her face.