Seven of Infinities, page 9
Wine was smart enough to not make comments about Sunless Woods’s love life, which just left Sunless Woods with no one to blame but herself.
She really hadn’t meant to lie to Vân, but she had. She’d told Vân she wasn’t cutting her out, but the truth was that she’d surrender herself and all her treasures to the militia before taking Vân along to hunt down a band of thieves who’d murdered a woman and stuffed her in a safe—not only that, but former friends of Vân with every reason to bear her a grudge. Whatever Vân seemed to think of Hương Lâm, Sunless Woods wasn’t taken in: this was thieves who’d turned to murder on their way to the money of their dreams, and they wouldn’t stop just for the sake of old friendships, and that went double when one of them had already died for said money.
Which meant she had to get them out of Vân’s life, and fast.
She stood, for a while, in front of the curio cabinets that had so entranced Vân—not her scholar’s treasures but the gains of a lifetime of thefts, the fan Thiên Hoa had poached from the Purple Forbidden City on the First Planet, the unobtrusive jade dragon that was a carving from Quý Xuân that looked as though it was leaping to the stars. She held it in her hand, feeling the coolness of stone give way to pulsing warmth—everything she’d taken against all odds, and the time she and Hải’s children had led a desperate rescue to free Thiên Hoa from jail before she could be sentenced to branding or penal servitude.
She had done it before, and she could do it again.
She called Thiên Hoa.
“Big’sis.” The other woman was walking in the common spaces of a habitat Sunless Woods couldn’t identify—a brief pause and then it updated, showing her in Pure Metal Quarter in the Sword Turtle habitat, a district filled with teahouses and restaurants catering to the less savoury people on the social scale.
“Tell me you have something,” Sunless Woods said.
“Ah.” Thiên Hoa was silent, for a while, looking at Sunless Woods’s avatar. That mood, her eyes said. The harsh, implacable ship coming down like the wrath of heaven and earth. “That bad?”
“I have this pressing need to make someone very uncomfortable until they leave Vân and Uyên’s life.”
“Ah,” Thiên Hoa said again. “Come down with me, will you?”
Shipminds didn’t need to take shuttles, or make flight plans. Sunless Woods fielded in a query with the Mind of the habitat—which was accepted with a matter of course, her avatar allowed to incarnate in the corridors. She called up the bots she had in reserve on every habitat, and met Thiên Hoa in front of a street seller offering meat skewers with a tantalizing smell of scorched lemongrass and fish sauce.
“I have a lead,” Thiên Hoa said, curtly nodding to Sunless Woods as she arrived. She was nibbling at a skewer, and handed its overlay version to Sunless Woods. As Sunless Woods consumed it she got a brief, haunting memory of a meal in the communal kitchen with Mother and her long-dead siblings fighting for meat. Thiên Hoa shared, briefly, footage from the habitat: Ái Hồng sharing tea and talking with animation to a couple of strangers. Neither of them was Dinh, but the eldest among them—tall, regal and with the no-nonsense air of someone who wasn’t used to being contradicted—had a faint family resemblance to her. Hương Lâm, probably: strange how even with the physical and genetic alterations they ended up so close to each other.
“One week ago,” Sunless Woods said, noticing the time stamp. “Tea on White Sands. ” It was a teahouse on the outer rings of the habitat. “I’m not sure—”
Thiên Hoa smiled. “So the interesting thing about this is that it’s the last footage of Ái Hồng I find anywhere. The next thing she does is board a shuttle at the docks with a flight plan for the asteroids around The Elephant and Grass.” She tapped the skewers against her cheek, heedless of the streak of sauce it left on her skin. More footage, a little less distinct—she wouldn’t have been able to make out the faces but now that she’d seen them from closer in the bar, the gait and postures of two of them were unmistakable.
Sunless Woods thought, fast—which wasn’t hard, as she could run sixteen parallel threads before she markedly slowed down. “All right, so we know what they look like. I presume you tracked them using other footage from other areas.”
“Eeh, other areas is hard,” Thiên Hoa said. “They don’t keep archives for long enough. Private shops, though… It’s amazing how much archiving the shady teahouses keep, just in case one of their shadier customers decides to cross the line and they need hard evidence for blackmail.” A wide smile. “And amazing how little encryption they put on said archives. Like a knife through ripe mango cheeks.”
“You’re not going to make me believe you just found out about this.”
An innocent smile from Thiên Hoa. “Honest merchant, remember? Anyway, I have one of them right now. The Cups of Hollow Bamboo.”
“Uh.” It was the teahouse across the plaza, which looked like a haunt of middle-class scholars and merchants. The footage Thiên Hoa sent showed the woman—not Hương Lâm, the other one—sitting down with what looked to be a merchant wearing pale orange robes, his face creased in thought. Sunless Woods got to work on the audio on a background thread, separating it from the rest of the ambient sound. It was live.
“They’re going to be sitting down for a bit,” Thiên Hoa said, but Sunless Woods’s cleaning algorithms came up with words of the conversation.
“Passage beyond…price…soon.”
“They’re negotiating for a spaceship. Probably beyond the Đại Việt Empire.”
Thiên Hoa’s face went flat. “What kind of timeline?”
“A few days.”
“Then they haven’t scored yet, but there’s no time to waste. All right then.”
And, without another word, she dropped the skewer, and marched across the street.
Sunless Woods weighed the chances of the Mind’s habitat granting her teleportation. She’d have to provide a good reason to disrupt the physicality imposed on the habitat, and that would make her stand out. Never mind. She altered the posture of her avatar slightly, to seem more human, and with the mannerisms and bearing of a higher-class scholar, one who most definitely wouldn’t ordinarily patronise the teahouse.
Inside, Thiên Hoa had finished arguing with the waiter at the entrance: by the looks of it, paying a bribe to let herself in without taking a table. The waiter took one look at Sunless Woods and the determined way she was marching in, and bowed himself out of the way.
The common tables held no one matching the video: Thiên Hoa was now moving through the scattered private booths with a faint look of concentration, hacking into privacy screen after privacy screen to see inside the darkened overlay walls. Sunless Woods called up her bots, and scattered them—except that she was struggling to get them authorisation to breach private overlays, the habitat’s Mind being justifiably peeved at demands that didn’t stem from maintenance needs.
Here, Thiên Hoa said, and sent through her own authorisations. A dozen, a hundred simultaneous feeds rising in Sunless Woods’s awareness—and all the threads of her thoughts engaged at the same time, sorting out the accumulated information until she found what she was looking for, while her avatar stood motionless in the middle of the floor, every pretense of humanity stripped from it, and the stars beneath Sunless Woods’s ship body spreading under its feet, across the floor of the teahouse.
There.
They were in one of the isolated booths at the very end of the room, just a few forelengths away from the back door of the teahouse. She pinged Thiên Hoa with the location, but Thiên Hoa was already moving—and the woman and the merchant were both rising, running towards the door.
No feeds outside, or the really bad communal ones: they’d lose them if they went too far outside the teahouse.
There was no time.
Sunless Woods couldn’t teleport, but she could tweak a few things—namely, the length of her strides and the speed of her leg movements. She didn’t run so much as glided—gathering back to herself the images of the stars as she compressed everything into her avatar and the handful of bots close enough to the booth—two groups of them went for the woman’s legs, but the woman’s own bots flowed down to meet them, heading them off.
Thiên Hoa was arguing with the merchant, who wouldn’t get out of her way and whose face was flustered in the familiar outrage. If Sunless Woods had been paying attention she would have picked up their conversation, but all her attention was on the woman: the merchant was just a random bystander who happened to have berths free on a spaceship.
The woman threw up the privacy screen to maximum opacity, suddenly vanishing from Sunless Woods’s field of view. Sunless Woods cursed—she should have expected this, and she couldn’t just turn off the overlay because the woman had priority access to it by virtue of the authorisations conferred on her by the teahouse.
The door. She was going to move towards the door. Sunless Woods sent queries to the teahouse and the habitat’s Mind, in the forlorn hope either of them would be granted in time, and ran towards where she remembered the door was.
It wasn’t there. The privacy screen obscured it, and muffled all sounds so that all that floated to her was the argument Thiên Hoa was having with the merchant. By Thiên Hoa’s face, she was looking for a good excuse to knock the merchant flat, except that they had enough trouble with one fugitive without adding a fight with the wrong person into the mix. Could Sunless Woods get a bot with a sedative-loaded injector on the merchant’s neck? Probably not: the merchant had bots of his own.
Ah-ha. The teahouse had finally granted her access to the privacy screen on the basis of her location, though her access remained limited. Sunless Woods threw all she had at the privacy screen: it wobbled and went semi-transparent, enough to see that the woman was nowhere behind it.
Where—
The door was closed, and her bots’ sensors hadn’t heard it move. Perhaps she’d hacked it in a way that wouldn’t show up?
Her gut feeling was that she hadn’t. Which meant she had to be elsewhere.
Where—
Movement, on Sunless Woods’s right, behind another privacy screen. She gave up on querying the teahouse, and instead moved all her bots towards it, running enhancing algorithms to fuse the bots’ minute perceptions into hers. A wall of chittering noise that was the privacy screen’s muffling—a sharp, unpleasant noise that seemed to take over everything, and the same across her field of vision, something like dirty, dead snow rising to fill the space where the table should have been.
But, in that space, there was movement. It was faint and barely perceptible, but she was good at making that out—and the bots latched onto it, amplifying it even as her algorithms adapted to filter out the rest of the noise. A vague shape—no, four vague shapes, but only one of them was running, the other three were just barely rising from the table they’d been sitting at.
Sunless Woods sent half of her bots towards it, and moved to the other side of the privacy screen. From her bots came the indistinct, blurred images and sounds of other bots getting in their way—but, as the woman exited the zone of the privacy screen with barely a glance behind her, Sunless Woods was already there—and behind her Thiên Hoa, still peevish-looking from her argument with the merchant.
The woman—out of breath, her topknot in disarray, her bots still struggling to free themselves from Sunless Woods’s bots—hesitated, her eyes darting left and right as if there was any chance of escape, but there was nothing, and none of the teahouse’s customers or staff were going to get embroiled with what obviously looked like a private, nasty but localised affair.
They had her.
Sunless Woods smiled, slow and revealing rows of pearlescent teeth around a black and vast maw. “Going somewhere?”
* * *
THE WOMAN SAT in a high-backed chair in one of the private rooms of the teahouse, unmoving—body restrained by ropes, and by Sunless Woods’s bots on her chest, ankles and wrists, monitoring her for the slightest move.
Thiên Hoa had smoothed out everything with the teahouse, while Sunless Woods stood looking forbidding and pretending to be a much higher-ranked scholar than she currently was. The privacy screen was set to muffle all sounds, and the walls of the room themselves were padded—which suggested they weren’t the first set of customers to need a room for questionable purposes, and in turn that the teahouse was much less respectable than it advertised.
Not that Sunless Woods was surprised. The scholars were quick to ascertain their natural merit in the order of things, but they could be as arrogant and as rotten as any of the lowlifes they derided.
She looked up as Thiên Hoa and Sunless Woods walked into the room, Sunless Woods matching the rhythm of her own steps perfectly to Thiên Hoa—her reaction times, even with the lag, were faster than humans’, and she knew how disturbing this could be on a primal level.
“So,” Thiên Hoa said. She had a vacuum knife in her hands—not turned on, but the woman’s gaze went to it nevertheless. “I did a little digging. Your name is Hoàng Thị Lam Khê. You hire yourself out as bodyguard, with a variety of less savoury and less legal occupations that I don’t have time to go into but that I’m sure will interest the militia very much.”
The woman blinked. It was minute, but matched by a slight speeding up of her heart rate. Sunless Woods said, “Mind you, I’m pretty sure they won’t have to dig very far for things of interest. Murder is the slow death, isn’t it?”
She and Thiên Hoa had never killed anyone, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t rough Khê up both mentally and physically. Wine, ever the philosopher, would probably argue that by turning Khê over to the militia, they’d be responsible for her death. Sunless Woods thought Khê had gotten everything she’d ever asked for when she and her friends had made the decision to stab Ái Hồng to death.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Khê said.
“Oh, don’t give me that.” Sunless Woods materialized her own vacuum knife—which wouldn’t cut anything unless she brute forced her way through the woman’s physical access layers, but she didn’t need to do any of that, because Thiên Hoa was an effective threat of all her own. “I found the body. And I’m not amused—” she leaned in a fraction—“that you’re going sowing chaos in my territory.” She used an ambiguous word that meant the place she lived in, but also the stretch of station space a gang would call theirs—a very fine line to walk, because she didn’t want to blow her cover.
Khê stared at her, levelly.
“Don’t give me that either,” Sunless Woods said. “I have more sensitive bots than yours. You’re scared. Talk. Who are they, and what are they looking for?”
“Why should I bother?” Khê’s voice was soft.
Thiên Hoa leaned over, her mannerisms changing slightly to become the lowborn ones rather than the wealthy First Planet ones she’d affected. “They hired you, didn’t they? Blood’s on their hands, not yours.”
“Makes no difference,” Khê said. She sounded almost regretful.
Thiên Hoa looked at Sunless Woods, and sent her a sub-vocalised message.
Let me deal with it.
Going to sympathize with her?
You know what I’m going to offer her, Thiên Hoa said. She was looking at Khê, thoughtfully.
Legal help, or escaping the militia, or both. Which meant she’d never see the punishment for her crime.
Thiên Hoa said, You have to figure out what you want. Can’t have everything.
Sunless Woods weighed it up. Khê was scared, but they couldn’t use that fear against her, because the militia would indict her for murder and inflict the slow death on her. And they needed to find Hương Lâm to keep Vân safe.
She wanted to be in charge and mete rough justice and keep Vân safe, but Thiên Hoa was right: she couldn’t have both of these.
All yours, she said, grudgingly.
* * *
SUNLESS WOODS WAS leaning against the corridor of the teahouse when Thiên Hoa came out. She was sipping on a cup of tea that was neither as good nor as evocative as the ones Vân had served her, which only increased her annoyance.
“So?” she asked.
Thiên Hoa shrugged. “You’re not going to like it.”
Sunless Woods was no longer in the mood for games, and especially not Thiên Hoa’s borderline sadistic varieties. “Do you know where Hương Lâm is?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s all I need to know.”
Thiên Hoa’s hand on her shoulder stopped her—not quite physically, but a faint thing almost indistinguishable from a breath of wind in the corridor. “Ái Hồng died because there was no fortune. Because Ngân Chi gambled it away before she died. Because the safe in Uyên’s room was the last such place to try, and because Hương Lâm already knew it would be empty.”
“Dinh tried to get to it,” Sunless Woods said.
“Yes. Dinh was in pain and desperate. If Hương Lâm had had her way, she’d never have gone.”
“I fail to see what any of this has to do with Vân,” Sunless Woods said, except that of course there was no treasure, no fortune, nothing that she could give Vân to make it all worth it. She hadn’t thought disappointment could be a physical thing—as if some giant hand were twisting her hull out of shape, and she could barely hold in the pain.
Thiên Hoa smiled. “That’s because you were right. They are about to score.”
“On a non-existent fortune?”
“I didn’t say that.” Thiên Hoa’s smile was wide and wicked. “They have another target. Another treasure of great value. You’ll like this.”
Sunless Woods had had enough of being jerked around—not that she didn’t love Thiên Hoa, but there were limits. “Not really, no. Another treasure that’s smaller and more attainable, and that they’ll find in someone’s home? I’d rather hoped—”
