Take Two

  Still, the feel of their hands and mouths on her body and those long fingers sliding wetly into her…Sadie pushed the memory out of her head and made herself pay attention; she had almost lost Holt as he pushed his way into a sinister looking building made of black concrete block instead of stay-gel. The flickering neon sign overhead read, “Slice of Night,” and it was located near the very edge of the atmosphere dome. She stopped in front of the bar, letting the crowd pass around her in either direction and considered her options.

  She could hear the Overlook-Me chip sizzling with alarming regularity now and she realized she might have less time than she’d thought. If she went inside and her chip failed where Holt could see her she was screwed, but she hadn’t come all this way just to hang around outside and wonder what was happening. She would have to take her chances and try to keep to the shadows, out of the blond detective’s line of vision. Somehow, Sadie didn’t think that would be a problem; The Slice looked like it had shadows to spare in its gloomy interior.

  Taking a deep breath, she marched bravely through the entryway and into the bar.

  10

  The first thing she saw when she entered the crowded, smoky bar was the most enormous Garon she’d ever laid eyes on. It was rare to see an ET at this end of the System, and Sadie took a moment to stare at the odd creature. He was slumped behind the bar, hulking shoulders bowed inward with a morose expression on his flat, scaly face, polishing shot glasses with a limp towel. There was a tiny, frilly white apron cinched around his thick waist and Holt was leaning on the bar, drinking a shot of what looked like Venusian tequila and talking to him.

  The rest of the clientele were scattered throughout the bar at rickety tables, drinking like there was no tomorrow, which, Sadie thought, for some of them there probably wouldn’t be. Ring miners had a high mortality rate. They were drunk enough and rowdy enough for her to be very glad her Overlook-Me chip was still in working order. She wouldn’t stand a chance in a place like this without the protective noninterference field the chip generated. Edging carefully around the crowd at the bar, Sadie was able to find a dark corner by one wall that was close enough to hear the conversation between Holt and the huge bartender over the heavy thump of Jovian Jazz that poured from the speaker grills.

  “…anything about it, Snug?” she heard Holt say. So the monstrous Garon must be Snuggly, Sadie mused to herself. Interesting.

  “I hear nothing,” the Garon replied in a voice like someone gargling with gravel, cutting his one large purple and green eye evasively to one side. Even Sadie could tell he was lying. Holt apparently could as well.

  “Come on, Snuggly, don’t give me that. If there’s anything illegal within a million miles it comes through your bar. The Slice sees more action in one night than the rest of this Goddess-forsaken end of the Solar System does in a year.” Holt drained his glass and shook his head when the Garon made as if to pour him another.

  “Why you always bother me, Holtstein? I got enough problems without you and your partner come around squeezing my balls.” The Garon set down the glass he’d been cleaning daintily and picked up another. “Where is your better half, anyway?” he asked.

  “Working the other end of town,” Holt answered shortly. He fished in the pocket of the beat-up work pants he was wearing and withdrew a fifty credit chip. “I know you know something, Snug. Maybe this will jog your memory.”

  The Garon eyed the chip thoughtfully for a moment, then slid it off the bar and made it disappear into one of the embroidered pockets of his frilly apron. Sadie wondered if he wore it on purpose or if he was so big that no one had the nerve to tell him it was a tad girlie for his massive physique. After pouring a round of shots for a rowdy crew of star-hoppers that had just walked in he went back to Holt, who was leaning against the counter waiting patiently.

  “Okay, Holtstein, I tell you what I know. Only because I like you, though. You and Blakely never fuck me yet. Better not start now.” He glared warningly at the blond detective, his eye going completely purple for a moment.

  “Don’t worry, Snuggly. You’re not exactly our type,” Holt said dryly. “What do you know? It better be good.”

  “Is good.” Snuggly nodded his massive bald head. “Or bad, depending on how you are seeing it.” Holt just raised one blond eyebrow and waited for the Garon to continue. “About a month ago a prostie trader is coming into my bar,” Snuggly said. “And he is how you say? Slick Willie—very smooth talking. He is saying he is representing a new company just set up right here on Iapetus. New kind of prostie-borg that is extra good. Extra cheap.”

  “Did you get a name?” Holt asked casually, although Sadie saw the tension in the set of his well-defined shoulders. They could definitely be onto something here. The Garon shook his massive bald head.

  “No names. He says he is only passing through town, but he will like to make me a bargain before he leaves to sell his borgs on Titan. He says he had extra, would I like to buy.”

  “Did you?” Holt asked, leaning forward on the bar. Sadie found herself leaning forward as well. If the Garon was telling the truth, there was an illegal prostie-borg plant right here on Iapetus. Because the delicate synthetic brains that powered legal prosties couldn’t be shipped off planet until they were hardwired into a tank-grown body, the only legal flesh tanks were located on Mars, where Synthenex, the main manufacturer of the brains, was located. If someone had set up flesh tanks here, they must either have their own synthetic brain manufacturing facility, which was highly unlikely, or they were using black market transplant brains. Real human brains that had been ripped from their living hosts and forced to occupy a body grown in the flesh tanks made for sex. Sadie was so excited by the implications that she nearly missed the huge Garon’s reply to Holt’s question.

  “I am buying,” Snuggly said stolidly. “I am thinking it is good for business, yes? But after Slick Willie leaves, prostie goes bad after only two days. Is rip-off.”

  “Goes bad? What do you mean?” Holt asked. “Did she stop functioning or what?”

  “Stop functioning, you could say this, yes,” Snuggly replied morosely. “She is refusing to service customers, is punching, kicking, screaming, making a scene. I try to throw her out but she won’t go.”

  Looking at his hulking form, Sadie had a hard time imagining any sort of prostie-borg the Garon would have difficulty evicting from his bar. Maybe they were making them super-size now?

  “What happened to her? Where is she now?” Holt stood up straight and looked around.

  “Is in the back room drinking a bottle of my best Flare juice and teasing the daemon.” The Garon cast a morose glance toward the back of the bar.

  Holt whistled under his breath. “Goddess, Snuggly, you still have that thing? Aren’t you afraid it’ll get loose someday and kill you or one of the customers?”

  The huge shoulders shrugged. “Daemon is never leaving dark side of back room and is very good for business. Stupid drunks like to see how brave they are, how long they can stay before they have to run. Slice is the only bar on Iapetus to be having a daemon on the premises.” The Garon sounded almost proud of the fact.

  “Yeah, because you’re the only bar that straddles the dark side line,” Holt said. “How long has the prostie been in there?”

  Garon shrugged again. “Don’t know. Long time. Is very much rip-off. Worst prostie I ever have.”

  “Thanks, Snuggly. I’m going back.” Holt slapped the bar with one hand and turned to make his way through the drunken miners.

  “You are being careful, Holtstein,” the huge Garon called. “Prostie is there a long time. Daemon is getting strong.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.” Holt waved over his shoulder and continued to press through the crowd. Sadie had no choice but to follow him.

  At the back of the bar there was a long, dim corridor. Holt stepped into it without hesitation but Sadie stopped for a moment to read the warning scrolling tiredly across the holo-loop in twelve languages above her hea
d. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK, MANAGEMENT ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY. Could they really be keeping an Iapetion daemon back here, she wondered, clutching the shardi-knife tightly. Shivering, she remembered the chilling stories she’d heard about the creatures that lived solely on the dark side of Iapetus. How much of what she had heard was true?

  Sadie looked from the holo-loop to the hallway. Holt’s golden head was disappearing down the gloom of the long corridor, his wide shoulders clad in the black leather jacket barely visible now. She had followed him to get information, but now he was going into danger. Going alone. No—not alone. Squaring her shoulders and raising her chin in a little gesture of defiance, Sadie took a deep breath and plunged into the gloom after him. She would have done the same for Blakely.

  Walking quietly so as not to let Holt hear her, Sadie crept down the hallway. Just as she thought it was about to end she saw him make an abrupt left and disappear. She followed him so quickly that she barely saved herself from running into him and for a moment all she could see was his broad, leather-clad back. Then he moved out of her line of vision and Sadie could see that the hallway opened out into a room—the strangest room she had ever seen.

  It was shaped like a dome, perfectly round with a high, curving ceiling that was made of some transparent material that let light pour in from above. But the light filled only half the room, Sadie saw. There was a definite demarcation, a line almost directly down the center of the round room, and the light that poured from the ceiling remained on one side of the line like a curtain of brilliance. On the other side was a blackness more complete than any Sadie had ever seen. She frowned, the light should have illuminated the entire room with radiance, but it didn’t. Instead, the brightness on one half of the room only served to make the darkness of the other half more impenetrable. What could keep the light that filled one side of the room from spreading to the other side as well?

  As if to answer her question, she heard a muffled thump that drew her eyes to the pitch-black half of the room. It was like a pit filled with midnight and it hurt her eyes to look at it. She looked anyway, at first seeing nothing. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the strange duality of the room, Sadie felt her skin trying to crawl right off her body. Something was moving in the blackness. She couldn’t see much, but there was a suggestion of power in its coiled form and a sound like a heavy weight dragging across the floor when it moved. Crimson gashes glittered in the blackness and she realized those must be its eyes and it was looking right at her. An Overlook-Me chip apparently had no power to effect the vision of an Iapetion daemon.

  Sadie felt her heart pounding as though it was trying to get out of her chest. The red eyes seemed to pin her in place as with an unspeakable, low slithering sound, the thing dragged its bulk closer to where she was standing, still half hidden behind Holt’s large frame as he stood in the doorway. Sadie tried to remember everything she had heard. Could the creature really feed on emotions? If so, her fear must be a banquet to it. With a huge effort she dragged her eyes from the midnight blackness of the daemon’s side of the room and concentrated on the other side.

  The half of the room that was bathed in light was bare except for a rough plexi-table and some form molded chairs. In one of them slumped a tiny, stunningly beautiful woman with long, tangled blond hair and a bottle of Flare juice clutched in one hand. No, not a woman, Sadie saw after studying her a moment. A prostie-borg. Her skin had the slightly plastic tone and marked lack of flexibility that denoted tank-grown flesh. It was an effect Sadie herself had achieved through latex make-up when she had posed as a prostie at the Pleasure Dome complex.

  Just then the blond prostie looked up, blinking, and Sadie saw the strange, intricate blue design on her right eyelid. It was the exact same tattoo that all the new prosties—the ones that were receiving injections—had been wearing at the Pleasure Dome Prostie Palace. She wished fervently for a moment that she had brought something with her to take notes.

  “Hey.” Holt entered the room with seeming nonchalance although Sadie noticed he was careful to stay far to the light side of it. The woman looked up at him without much interest.

  “What the hell do you want?” she returned in a high, feminine voice. Then, as though the sound of her own voice had upset her, she raised the bottle and took a huge swallow, her delicate, pixielike features twisting in a grimace as the liquor burned down her throat. She belched and wiped her rosebud of a mouth carelessly across the back of her arm, then just sat staring at Holt.

  “You want to take it easy with that stuff, honey,” Holt cautioned her, walking across to take a seat at the table beside her. The brilliant light pouring down from above made his hair look like molten gold. Sadie, still standing in the doorway, noticed that he deliberately put his back to the daemon. Was he ignoring it so it couldn’t feed off him?

  “The fuck I will.” The prostie took another hit off the bottle. The words seemed doubly crude, somehow, coming from such a pretty, pouting mouth, Sadie thought.

  “Suit yourself but you’re gonna have one hell of a hangover, lady,” Holt stared at her intently.

  “I c’n hold my liquor,” the prostie protested, making an effort to sit up a little straighter in the crooked chair. “Used to drink two, three of these a night and still be up for a morning raid.”

  “Excuse me?” Holt looked interested and he was still paying no attention to the malevolent blackness barely three feet behind him. Even if ignoring them was the preferred method of dealing with Iapetion daemons, it still made Sadie distinctly nervous to watch those hungry crimson eyes caress Holt’s back with obvious greed. She crouched in the doorway, the shardi-knife held so tight it was making a groove in the center of her palm and waited.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t act like a normal prostie,” Holt said to the pixie-faced cyborg.

  “That’s ’cause I ain’t one.” She slouched in the chair, legs spread in a most unladylike display and scratched her crotch with the hand that wasn’t holding the bottle. “And don’t get any ideas ’bout fuckin’ me neither, bub. I don’t care how long you been in space or how horny you are, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t care what that son-of-a-space-whore at the front of the bar told you.”

  “Who, Snuggly? He’s okay,” Holt said casually, leaning back in his chair a little in a way that made Sadie even more nervous for him. “He thought he was buying a real prostie. Bet he paid a lot of credit for a beauty like you.”

  “Well if he did he made it back in the first forty-eight hours before the drugs wore off,” the blond-haired prostie snarled. She took another huge gulp from the bottle and banged it down on the table sharply, making Sadie jump. “Karma,” she muttered, slurring her words, the long, tangled blond tendrils hanging in her eyes. “’S fuckin’ karma’s what it is. But swear to Goddess, if I find that red-headed bastard who did this to me I’ll fuck ’im up.”

  “Who did what to you?” Holt asked gently. He raised a hand and Sadie thought he might have wanted to lay it on the prostie’s shoulder to offer comfort. It was the same way he and Blakely often touched each other when either of them was blue or upset, she thought. But Holt’s hand wavered and then dropped back to the table—probably a wise choice.

  “Did what? Turned me into this, ’s what he did.” The prostie gestured with the bottle at her tiny, voluptuous form and managed to spill the bright orange Flare juice all over herself. Judging from the state of her clothes it wasn’t the first time. She cocked her head and fixed Holt with big brown eyes that looked like they belonged in a children’s vid about nature. “D’you know who I am?” she asked. “A month ago if I’da sat down beside you at the bar you’da pissed your pants, blondie.” She nodded her head in big, exaggerated movements. “Pissed your pants,” she repeated to herself apparently liking the sound of the words.

  “Who are you then?” Holt asked, apparently losing patience. Sadie knew she was; she just wanted him to finish his questions and get the hell out of the back room. Without noticing, Holt
had shifted his chair backward an inch or two and the glowing red eyes pinned on his back got noticeably brighter.

  “You ready for this?” Without waiting for a reply, the prostie took another swig from the bottle and continued, enunciating carefully. “I, my blond friend, am none other than Bjorn Xavier, terror of deep space for the past fifteen years. I raped, robbed, pillaged, leveled whole colonies, and nobody could stop me. Nobody till my double-crossing right-hand-man Red Mike decided to screw me on our last deal.”

  Sadie drew in a quick breath and hoped she hadn’t been heard. If the prostie was who she claimed she was, she or he was responsible for more raids and attacks on underdeveloped colonies than any other person in recent history. Xavier was known for his ruthlessness and cunning; no one had ever been able to catch the notorious pirate. And now he was trapped in a prostie-borg body. The delicious irony of it would make amazing copy, Sadie thought. She listened more closely, trying to commit every detail to memory, and forgetting to keep an eye on the daemon crouched in the blackness behind Holt.

  “You were behind the mind rapes on Phoebe,” Holt said flatly.

  The prostie who was actually a stellar pirate looked surprised. “How’d you know about that? We figured it’d take longer’n a month for anybody to notice we cleaned out that little shit hole.” She shook her head and sighed as with deep nostalgia. “Was our best take ever,” she said, her big brown eyes beginning to fill with easy tears. “We had it all planned—we were gonna drop the brains off to Van Heusen and split the profits fifty-fifty.”

  “Roald Van Heusen?” Holt asked, leaning forward to stare at the prostie space pirate. Sadie could scarcely contain her glee. Van Heusen was known throughout the system for his illegal operations. Like Xavier, he had never been caught. What a story this was going to make! “The Roald Van Heusen?” Holt repeated like he couldn’t believe it.