“Amateurs buy fast vehicles. Professionals buy the forgettable ones and bolt the fast parts inside it. The best ride for sensitive work is the one no witness can describe an hour after it’s gone.”— Deleted post, the fixer network forum
The band buzzed again before I’d cleared the bottom of the stairs.
Erika: [pin] (Aravaca) the old freight lots, my guy’s yard. give it an hour, he’s working on the chair now
Aravaca. I’ve never been there. “An hour. Hm.” It was exactly enough time to do something responsible, and I knew which responsible thing it was before I’d finished not wanting to do it.
Calls with Naiche had a habit of adding items to my day faster than they removed them.
There was a bench I knew too well. I’d ended up on it once before, the day I learned what was being drained out of me. I sat down in the same place and keyed Naiche’s line. Voice only. The Kallum earpiece sat cleanly in my ear.
Naiche picked up on the first tone. “Dash.”
“Update for you.” Down on the platform, a Schwarzstahl train hissed in, breathed out its passengers, and was gone again before I’d properly settled. “Van’s handled. My friend came through, her guy’s got a rig that ticks Natalya’s entire list, magenta strip and lumbar chair included, and it lands under William’s ceiling. Cloner’s bought for fifty from my contact. The chemical’s the only open line now. My contact knows a mixer he trusts; says the man can turn a clean batch fast, faster than anyone he’d put his name behind, but he’s expensive and he won’t come down a single sol for being asked nicely.”
“Good.” Something shifted on his end, paper or a sleeve across a desk. “Better than good, as it happens. The schedule moved fifteen minutes ago.”
I shifted on the bench; this didn’t sound good. “Moved how?”
“The vote. It was eight days out on the Monday. It’s been pulled forward to Friday. Five days.”
I used my fingers to count the days. “Good. We’ve still got time, then.”
He paused. “Dash. Your math is bad.”
I winced. “Okay—C-minus, I know. But five days isn’t enough?”
“Five days is not the number you should be looking at.” The breath he let out was the patient one. Somehow that was worse than the impatient one. “The contamination needs its full run. The seedlings drink the feed and grow wrong across the cycle, sixty hours minimum, before they ride up to the QC bay. Then a human has to stand in that bay, register that the whole batch looks like a child drew it, and Bhavsar has to decide to burn it down. All of that has to finish before Friday, or we’ve poisoned a farm for nothing. So you count backward from the vote, not forward from today. Inject Monday night. It surfaces on Thursday, and that leaves one day of margin.”
Monday was tomorrow. I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand. “Monday night—hang on, that’s tomorrow. That’s—that’s way too soon!”
“Why?” The question sat there on the line, mild and patient and entirely reasonable, and waited for me to come up with something better than a feeling.
“Because I thought I’d have time.” It came out smaller than I meant it to. “A few days, at least. To level a little, push into some quiet shard. To walk that southern corridor myself and get my own eyes on the cameras, instead of trusting a report and a pair of thermal blind spots I’ve never laid eyes on. This is just—fast.”
“We have a solid plan,” he said. “You have a van. You have a driver you trust. You have the route, off seventy pages Hellboop wrote for the fun of it. The only thing standing between you and ready is a bottle of something the plants will drink. Source it, and we move.”
I looked up. Eddy’s sign buzzed its tired light over the shopfront. “Sure.” I dragged a hand down my face. “I’ll get it. I don’t like it, though. Ugh. The Cassette job was clean—turn up, do my thing, walk out. All this planning is so booooring.”
“You sound like my girlfriend.” He said it flat, with no weight on it whatsoever.
I thought of Regina with her boots on the table, up and out the door the instant the fun half of the meeting ended, hollering about other contracts to close. “...Yeah,” I said. “I can see that, and honestly, I prefer that.”
“One more thing before you go.” A small rustle—him already reaching for the next line on a list that never got any shorter. “When you talk to Kallum about the chemical, ask them for your payment.”
“Mine?” I blinked. “I’ve got the quest, though.”
“The quest is the System’s business. The sols are Kallum’s. You need to be paid, Dash. Ask them.”
The line cut before I’d formed a reply, the earpiece going dead quiet. I looked back up at Eddy’s sign. “Right,” I said. “Let’s go do the boring stuff.”
The doorbell gave the same tired beep going in that it had going out, and Eddy didn’t bother turning around.
“Back already. Either you forgot something or somebody upstairs moved a date.” He pulled his hands out of the conduit and looked at me over his shoulder. “It’s the date. You’ve got the face.”
“The vote got pulled to Friday.” I let the counter take my elbow. “Which means I’m injecting tomorrow night, which means I need your mixer’s compound faster than you said he was fast, and I need to stop pretending I’ve got a week to think about it.”
Eddy whistled low, came down off the stool, and crossed to the terminal, wiping his hands on the rag that never got anything cleaner. “Tomorrow night. He’ll hate that. He hates a rush more than I hate a bean counter, lad, and you’ve heard me on bean counters. I already asked, but I’ll tell him it’s a rush job.” He was already typing. The terminal chimed back faster than I’d expected; his mixer apparently sat at his band the way Natalya sat at hers. Eddy read it, grunted, and turned the screen a few degrees toward me, a wall of compound notation I had no hope of parsing.
“Right. He can do it. Reads clean to a Bhavsar nutrient sensor, lets the seedlings drink deep and grow like a bad dream, surfaces well past the QC pass—exactly your job. Mixed and couriered by tomorrow midday, which leaves your evening a comfortable margin. Here’s the compound.” He let me copy it into the band before he scrolled. “Three thousand.”
I didn’t get that off my face fast enough. “Three—”
“Rush, bespoke, and a man who puts his name on the line that it won’t poison anything that isn’t a plant. Three thousand’s the number, and it’s a fair one.” He tapped the counter. “Plus three hundred.”
“Three hundred for what?”
“For me, lad. Finder’s cut.” He had the grace to look briefly pained. “Friend fee, if you want the polite version.” Then the grin came back through the grime. “I know. I stood right here last week and called the markup on honesty criminal. Turns out honesty’s free and introductions aren’t, and a shop doesn’t keep its own lights on.”
“Let me make a call.”
He waved a hand and went back up to the conduit, which was as much privacy as the place offered, and I took it.
William answered on the second tone, and I could hear him getting to his feet before he’d said a word. I gave him the compound, the courier window, the number, and braced.
“Three thousand three.” A pause where he was plainly reading off his model. “On a normal week, my pricing puts a clean bespoke feed agent closer to eighteen hundred. You are not on a normal week. The same-day premium is real, and the only thing more expensive than paying it is the alternative. Authorized. Use the channel, and I’ll clear it the moment it lands. For what it’s worth, this is the kind of line the once-per-mission allowance exists to cover. Spend it here. Don’t go over twice.”
“Got it.” Then, because Naiche had told me to and because I was apparently incapable of leaving instructions unfollowed, I cleared my throat. “There’s, uh. One more thing. Naiche said I should ask about—” I glanced at Eddy’s back, at the conduit, and lost the nerve for the specifics. “—the other side of this. For me.”
William did not deal in vagueness. He said it in full. “Your operational fee. Ten thousand, posting to your account on completion. Standard for a family-sanctioned solo with this exposure profile. Did Naiche not say?”
Up on the stool, Eddy’s hands went still in the conduit for half a second.
“Got it,” I said too fast. “Thanks. That’s everything. I’ll keep you posted.” I killed the line.
Eddy didn’t turn around. “You got it approved,” he said. “That was fast for a corpo.”
“I’m King’s heir; I get treated a bit differently. It is how it is.”
“Course it is, lad.” Which from Eddy was a whole essay, delivered flat.
I sent the go-ahead through the op channel and watched his terminal chime a half-second after my band did.
[Kallum Operations—disbursed: ¢3,300]
“Tell your guy he’s on. I’ve gotta go see a man about a magenta light.” I pushed off the counter.
Eddy lifted a hand without looking down from the panel. “Don’t get cornered out there; don’t trust anyone with colored lights.”
Aravaca came up out of the dark as a name I’d never had a reason to learn and a station I’d never had a reason to use.
I’m exploring a lot of Tago lately; Alice would love this.
The rain started somewhere over the tracks and committed to it by the time the Schwarzstahl train let me out.
The platform emptied onto a street that surprised me. I knew rich from Central, all bio-sculpted hush and silence you could hear, and I knew poor from everywhere else, and Aravaca sat in the gap.
The towers topped out at ten stories, maybe, skinned in pale stone the color of old bone, ochre where the rain hadn’t reached and darker where it had. Arched windows. Wrought-iron balconies bled rust down the facades and dripped from every rail.
Terracotta tile, neon curling in some older script over a shuttered bakery, a holo-ad drifting between the rooftops at a height a real skyscraper would have laughed at. Half the homes weren’t towers at all, just low, tile-roofed courtyard things behind iron gates, lamps burning in their windows, somebody’s old idea of permanence.
I took a few pictures and sent to Alice, but she didn’t call me instantly. Hopefully she wasn’t forced to attend another trust-learning punishment.
Rain sheeted off the hoodie and refused to soak in, beading and running and leaving me dry underneath. The one luxury I’d built myself, and it still felt like cheating every time it rained.
I walked it. The nice part thinned out toward the district’s edge the way nice parts always did, stone giving over to chain-link fence and gravel and the low, flat sprawl of the old freight lots. Container stacks. A few dead loaders. Off in one corner, under a fitted cover, a low-slung hover-racer sat looking like the only thing in the yard anyone loved. Puddles did their best impression of the neon overhead.
A kid with a sword walking the edge of a neighborhood like that, I clocked exactly one curtain twitch and decided not to take it personally.
Then I saw the lamp.
It stood at the center of one lot like a small sun someone had staked into the gravel, a big industrial work-lamp throwing a hard white cone down onto an orange van. Just a van. Unassuming, boxy, a little dented, the orange gone matte with age, the single most forgettable vehicle I’d ever laid eyes on, which, against Natalya’s boring on the outside, don’t wanna people knockin’ clause, meant Erika’s guy had read the brief and understood every word of it.
A pair of boots stuck out from under the chassis, the rest of the man somewhere beneath it, a low murmur of a voice talking to the undercarriage as if the undercarriage might answer.
Erika leaned against the lamp’s stand with her arms crossed and her hair plastered to her face from rain she’d plainly not tried to dodge, and when she caught me coming across the gravel, she laughed and pushed off the post.
“Here, Dash!” she waved me in, then tipped her head at the boots. “Roy! He’s here.”
The murmuring stopped.
Then the man came out from under the van on a mechanic’s creeper that hovered a hand’s width off the gravel and rolled on nothing at all, gliding him into the lamplight and sitting up out of it in one simple motion, warm brown skin, grease to the elbows, a grin already arriving ahead of the rest of him.
Erika’s racing guy.
“Hi, Roy. I’m Dash.” I put out a hand, and he took it before I could think about the oil, which ran to his elbow and now, generously, onto me. I let the hand drop to my side and didn’t make a thing of it.
“Oye, Dash.” He wiped his palm down the coverall, far too late to matter. “Eri told me you need a van with magenta lights.” He looked me over once, landed on the yellow hoodie, and nodded slowly, like a man whose suspicions had just been confirmed in court. “Sí. I see why.” Erika laughed.
“It’s for my netrunner,” I said.
“Claro.” He smiled and did not believe me in the slightest.
“It really is.” He let that go with a grin that said he was being generous about it.
“Also installed the chair. Bolted it down—no te preocupes, it won’t move on you, not a millimeter.” Then something connected behind his eyes. “Oye, espera. You’re the Central guy. The one with the workshop?”
I glanced at Erika. She lifted both shoulders, palms up. Guilty.
“Uh, yes?”
Roy laughed, delighted with the whole world. “When me and Eri were working on her car—” he swung an arm around her and pulled her into his side, and she went without a complaint, one hand settling flat on his chest “—for the qually, ¿sabes? She mentioned you. Some corpo kid from Central, she said.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That tracks.” I didn’t love being a story two people had told each other across a chassis.
Roy let her go and slapped the van’s flank. “Bueno. Come, I show you the inside.”
We crossed the gravel to the back, and Roy talked the whole way, because aparently Roy was a man who talked the whole way. “I’m not worried about her out there, you understand. Eri is the third-best driver I know, eh, and I put new gravitic engines in this thing this morning, so—”
“Second,” Erika said.
“—so she’ll be—”
“Second best, Roy.”
He didn’t slow down. “The last race. Who won the last race, mi reina?”
Erika pushed her mouth into a pout, no comeback in it, just the pout, and it was such an easy, unguarded thing to aim at a person that I stopped walking for half a step before I caught myself doing it.
Then Roy hauled the rear doors open, and the inside was a different building than the outside.
The shell was dented orange nothing; the interior was clean lines and bolted-down tech, lit in a low magenta wash off a strip run around the ceiling seam. No white anywhere. Not one hospital lumen. Roy tapped the strip. “Magenta, sí. Eri showed me the list. ‘White light is for hospitals and for losers.’” He read it off his band in a flat, little deadpan, and Erika snorted behind me. “Strong opinion. I respect it.”
The chair sat bolted to a steel plate at the front of the rig, high-backed, real lumbar, and Roy shoved the backrest to prove it didn’t give. “Welded the plate down. She sits for hours, she doesn’t slide around like cargo. Most expensive seat in the van, and it does the least driving.”
In front of it, a fold-down desk and a bare rack frame waiting for her holos, cable runs already pinned along the wall in neat loops. Roy walked me down the length of it, touching each thing as he named it, and the patter never stopped, but underneath it the man knew exactly what he’d built. He rapped a sealed grey box under the desk. “Power. Its own loop, isolated, sealed. Cooling can kick, engines can pull, nothing dips. Eri’s friend said something about a gulag.” He looked at me. “I did not understand the gulag. But I understood she did not want one. So. No gulag.”
He moved to a vent grille. “Real cooling, hombre. Not a fan and a prayer. Runs hot outside, cold inside, all day.” Then he knocked his knuckles on the wall itself, and the knock came back dead and flat. “Shielded shell. The whole box. You run your—whatever she runs—and nothing leaks. Just a boring orange van full of nothing.” He looked proud of that.
Last he reached up and slapped a low housing on the ceiling. “And the mast. Roof dish, deploys on a switch, aims itself, or aims by hand if your runner is particular—”
“She’s particular,” I said, and Roy laughed at me.
He thumped the floor with his heel. “And under all of it, the engines, installed now. Gravitic, paired, tuned.” He aimed the rest at Erika, grinning. “Because if it goes wrong and you run, mi reina, I am not sending you out on the old set. The old set is for losers. Like white light.”
Erika grinned back, pout gone as if it had never happened. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
“Sí,” Roy said, happy as anything. “Speed. The only language.”
“Well, I need the language tomorrow,” I said with a small wince. “Evening.”
Roy’s laugh bounced off the container stacks. “Tomorrow! Claro, hombre, the van is ready when you are.” Then he tipped his head. “But is Eri ready? Short notice for a wheel job, ¿eh?” He pulled her in again, an arm across her shoulders.
Erika answered it straight at me, from inside Roy’s hug. “I’ll manage.”
Every line on Naiche’s list had a name beside it now. Standing there in the rain in a freight lot in Aravaca, with the van done and the team set, I let myself believe, for about four seconds, that I had this.
The System agreed with me.
[SYSTEM QUEST: The Saboteur]