Rogue(107)

She nodded and got the quivers under control.

I said, “I trained him. I trained them all, with a lot of personal attention. I managed while we all shared knowledge. He needs to prove he’s better than me. At the same time, he’s scared of me. No one else could have stuck with him this long. We’re going to keep dialing up the tension until he slips. There’s no sportingship here. If I get a shot at his back, I’ll take it. If you do, you take it. If we can mine something to blow him up, we do it, even if takes some collaterals. If we can get him beaten to death in custody, we do that, too, though it’s not something to plan on because it’s not effective. If they half beat him to death, I’ll walk up and gap him as he’s released in a powered chair. He knows this, too, and will try to flee if he can, kill us if he can’t.”

She nodded, looking young and scared and with the tremble again.

“Endgame,” I said.

Then I pulled power and circuit from the phone.

“Scratch that one,” I said. “Also, be ready to bolt in a hurry.”

“I am,” she said. “This place is creepy. It’s like a prison.”

“Very much, and worse since the War, it looks.”

She suddenly turned back to her system. “Silly,” she said.

“What?”

“The comm system and my sensors can’t backtrack the phone, but the provider can.”

“Careful,” I advised.

“I’ve got a customer code, and now to request account . . . and slam it . . . and there. Request log, reverse for incoming, and I’ve got it. Disconnecting.”

“You’ve got it?”

“He’s two buildings over. Would he be doing something there?”

“Let’s look, and let’s get out of here. We’ll find transient space. Pull all phones and comm unless we’re using them.”

She disabled the spares, but left the console unit up while we both went through news, event listings and schedules.

The problem with the megascrapers is they’re huge. Four hundred meters square by five hundred tall huge, some to a thousand. Since we’d blown several tens of them into crematoria during the War, through sabotage, they had very, very tight security on the technical areas. They’d shoot kids and then claim terrorist intent. But that wouldn’t stop us; the military attack included nukes, kinetic energy weapons and destructive star drive points detonated overhead, but they were terrified of, and played on, the threat of infiltrators.

She said, “Three conferences over there. One medical, one materials science, one software.”

“What about the software?”

“Marketing.”

“What’s the medical?” I was wondering if someone had failed to save a life and relatives were petty or frazzled enough to want revenge, but that didn’t sound like something he’d take. Materials science. Had a building collapsed? That would be possible. I said so.

“Looking,” she said, “this is going to take time, though and he knows where we are.”

“He’s also got to make money. I’m secondary, and dangerous. I need to know where to get him.”

“I can take one show, you the other, I call when I see anything?”

“Not enough response time.”

I’d been down less than half a div, barely over an Earth hour, and we were this close that fast. Something would go wrong for him. Something had to.

She said, “I’m not finding any reason to kill a materials scientist or professor. It would have to be personal. No major deaths listed in medical attendee histories. Is it just a building resident?”

“Possible, but few very high-profile people live in these. Box Proles low down, Box Tops up high, middle-class managers, engineers, et cetera. The management are resident and similar to a city council.”

“Guests?”

“No idea, and hard to tell. What’s the marketing convention?”

“Node-based Broadcast Direct Marketing Strategies.”

“There!” I almost shouted.

“Yeah, everyone hates those fuckers.”

“Organizer? Lead speaker?”

“Organizer’s been in the news a lot. He’s milking the notoriety and getting more business from it. He’s found loopholes in Earth’s laws and several regions.”

“Him.”

I was up and moving.

“How are you getting in?”

“They’re spammers. They won’t exactly close off access to potential customers. You lead. I’ll follow.”

She grabbed a handful of things, stuffed them into pockets and tossed my chip and a new phone at me.

“Look the part,” she said.

I remembered now, and it still applied. Earthies are in constant chat with friends and relatives. For a while they’d even kept video running, until it became both a security and a safety issue. Audio, though, ran pretty much nonstop except in government buildings and there were courtesy areas and terminals there as well. The entire planet was so urbanized that being held incommunicado was considered worse than actual violence, and considered “brutality.”