Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

She set up the crew and signaled them to pack up and come on down, and suddenly felt empty, almost drained. It took her a moment to realize why.

For the first time in a very long time, she was absolutely on her own. She’d done the last thing she had to do. Oh, a few added debriefings, and some soft soap and maybe fancy moves when the leasing company digested the fact that the Stanley ’s rent hadn’t been paid, but, otherwise, she was done.

She had a week or two, she knew, before things began to get ugly. Word didn’t exactly travel instantaneously around the known galaxy anymore; it took time for these things to get back to the leasing people, for somebody to figure out the score, and maybe for some enforcers to be sent out to see what could be done, if not to collect, perhaps to make examples for the future.

Avoiding those types wasn’t a real challenge, either, for the same reason as it took for word to get around. The distances involved in this kind of life were vast. The real challenge was the DNA sample they had of her, but even that could be fudged, if it came to that.

What was required was what she didn’t have: money.

She wasn’t worried about the others. They were a guild crew and had been properly hired; she was the one with her ass on the line, putting her neck on the chopping block thanks to a talkative young marine who’d seen this whole deserted colony while on his last patrol and who wanted to show off just where he’d been.

She knew now that she should have left it to the marines, but the money potential had been so huge that it had been worth the risk. She still would take such a risk again for such a possible prize. Those who didn’t take those kinds of risks remained insects, grunts on the ground or in the brothels doing the same monotonous and degrading shit until they either died or killed themselves leaving no permanent marks on the landscape of history.

It was time to find her own room here, take a shower, dress for optimism, and go on over to a bar.

She didn’t want a place close to the guild billets; it would do her no good to run into everybody she knew or try and pick up another broke guildsman. Hocking what little she had left, she got herself more than presentable and took a taxi over to the Hotel Center where the buyers and sellers of all sorts of junk congregated.

Most of the time she always hated being so small. A hundred and forty-five centimeters put you well below most, and even if your body was very well proportioned, forty plus kilos didn’t make for an imposing figure. You had to do that on look, on bearing, on how you moved. Her entertainer background was always the most useful to her when not in space, although much of it came as naturally to her as her height or weight. She hadn’t been designed as an entertainer in some genetics lab, but the odds were her mother, or maybe her whole lineage, had been.

That’s why she’d liked space so much, though, other than that you were on your own or the equal or boss of the rest of your fellow workers. If you were in a weightless area you could move a ton of ore just as easily as someone twice your size, and even if you were piloting a tug, the tug became an extension of you and made you just as powerful as anybody else in one.

Now it was back-to-basics time until she had enough to break away again and guarantee a disappearance into another more equalizing position.

The dumb-clever name of the Prefabricated Inn showed up between two of the five central hotels in the business district. It looked like the right kind of place, although she didn’t remember it from the past.

She paid the taxi with her card and then got out and looked around the place as the little vehicle, itself rescued and rehabbed from the junk pile, buzzed off.

It hadn’t been too long ago that she’d been a guest in one of these, after she’d taken the prospectus and proofs to the agency reps and gotten financing for the salvage trip. It had been, in many ways, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: Here not because you were doing escort duty, plying business information, or giving other forms of personal service, but because you were a guest, a paying guest who belonged here. Being called “Miss” and “Ma’am,” having the service types try and solicit you, walking into places like this bar like you were about to sign a billion-dollar deal.

Well, she was dressed pretty much the same now, and had the same look, so maybe she’d be remembered. If so, nobody would be looking for her as just another escort on the make. She just hoped she could find a mark quickly and easily in this place.

She couldn’t afford to be sitting around one very long otherwise, and it was a long, long trip back to the hostel if she didn’t score.

Young, old, male, female, it didn’t really matter so long as they had some money. Even information wouldn’t be all that valuable now. Not until she could clear the decks and her obligations and take chances again.

The place wasn’t a dump like the world it was on, but it was a prefab model that some designer had tried to disguise as something interesting while only making it something more plastic. It probably was something from the salvage yard—even the fancy hotels in this area were assembled from true surplus projects—but, for a bar with some limited food service, it looked and smelled pretty clean.

It wasn’t all that busy, though. Oh, there were a few dozen men and women, mostly business types, sitting around talking in low tones to each other, and a few young people in military uniforms over in one corner accompanied by a man and a woman who were clearly both from the escort services and doing their usual fine acting to their paying clients. She recognized the guy—Yuri, his name was—from old times, but she gave no acknowledgment nor would he to her if he saw and recognized her. It was part of the code.

You knew you were in a first-class establishment, though, because there were real people doing drink service. Usually it was all automated: you gave your order into a hidden speaker, it arrived on a robot tray after being mixed by some barely concealed bartending machine, and that was that. Nobody needed to wait tables, or be waited upon. It was all ego, all part of making you feel like you really were better than other people. Not like the escorts. Cybersex could be far more intense than real sex and very, very authentic, but it turned out that you paid a real price physically for doing a lot of it, and it got cold after a while, too, because you knew it was fake and you knew just how it would wind up. Until people became machines they needed other people.

She had always wondered about those who did merge with machines. It was a one-way trip; you could be switched to other mechanical devices but you’d never be human again. Like the woman who was the captain of the Stanley, for example: a brain and spinal cord in a charged fluid bath whose thoughts controlled every aspect of that big ship and whose thought processes and calculating abilities were augmented by a gigantic high speed quasi-organic super computer. What would make somebody do that? You really didn’t live much longer, overall, unless you were employed by people willing to put in constant maintenance. Even then, even if you got to live a few extra centuries, what did it matter? You might feel superhuman and all powerful, but you were really just a part in a big hulking ship that went where others told it to go, and you could never touch or feel other human beings, never really come down here, even to a dump like this, and enjoy life.

But you sure were anonymous if you wanted to be. After all that experience, An Li realized that she never knew the captain’s name, nor anything about her past except that she’d been a woman. She’d been nothing but a disembodied voice, the captain. She was up there now, unable to move out of orbit until somebody with the correct codes allowed her to do so, and then only to where those signals told her to go.