Thin Air, page 1
To my brother Frik,
who was probably wondering
when I'd get around
to dedicating a book to him.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Book Full of ‘em, Danno!
Joe Monson
Essential Clues
Thin Air
A Position of Power
Normal
Expanded Horizons
As Advertised
Stress Control
Land of Opportunity
Evasion
Flytrap
Offline
Wyrm of the Mangroves
Sileon the Unwinder
Anchored Down in Anchorage
Ghostprint
You Have Dialed the Wrong Number
The Safety of Thick Walls
The Difficult Death of Auguste Henri Vincent
Iced
Industrial Casanova
Milonga
Bats Domino
A Request
Contributors
by Gustavo Bondoni
Indizio
A BOOK FULL OF ‘EM, DANNO!
JOE MONSON
As an editor who works primarily in short fiction, I’ve read thousands of short stories. The drawback to that is that it’s hard to remember which stories are which sometimes because there are so many. I don’t remember the first story by Gustavo Bondoni I read. It’s been around a decade since then, and I’ve read so many of his stories now that they all sometimes blend together in my mind.
However, Gustavo’s stories always stand out.
His characters feel real. Almost all of his stories have a at least a little humor scattered throughout them (some have even more). He uses all five senses to develop the setting, and he doesn’t let the stories founder in unnecessary detail. He’s learned the ropes, and only breaks the rules when it works for the story.
I’ve been a fan of detective and crime fiction since I was very young, and I came to it in a similar way as Gustavo. I remember watching Perry Mason from a very young age with my dad. Since my dad was an attorney, he enjoyed watching that show as well as many others in a similar vein, and I watched them all with him: Agatha Christie movies, Hawaii Five-O (the original one), Rumpole of the Bailey, The Paper Chase, Matlock, Jake and the Fatman, Night Court (the original), Murder She Wrote, Cagney and Lacey, Law & Order (almost all of the different flavors), Mystery!, and more.
I also read quite a few mystery/crime book series while growing up, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, The Saint, Sherlock Holmes, and others. More recently, I’ve watched and read a number of Japanese anime and manga series such as Detective Conan, Master Keaton, and Kindaichi Case Files.
I’ve also been a fan of science fiction since I was young, and one of the first science fiction books I remember reading as young boy was Secret Under the Sea (1960), by Gordon R. Dickson. This was a mystery story set in the future where a young boy goes on an adventure to figure out what’s frightening his dolphin pal near the underwater research station where he lives with his parents.
It’s a pretty simple book, and definitely aimed at kids, but it fascinated my young mind in the same way that watching Jacques Cousteau did. Futuristic (set in the far-off year of 2013!) undersea mystery? I was 100 percent hooked!
Fast-forward several decades, and now I’m editing and publishing science fiction and fantasy, something I never expected to do. I’ve published Gustavo’s story “For the Light” in the Twilight Tales anthology I co-edited with Jaleta Clegg, worked with him on this volume, and he’ll have a story in my upcoming The Horror at Pooh Corner anthology featuring a mash-up of Winnie-the-Pooh and Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
Thin Air came about through him trying to find a home for a different collection. I told him I’d be happy to read it to see if it would be something that would work for Hemelein. While that first collection didn’t quite fit here, Thin Air hit all the right notes from the first story.
This volume is the first in the new Indizio publication series from Hemelein, featuring crime, mystery, and detective fiction with a science fiction or fantasy element to it. This collection is full of stories I would have enjoyed back when I was young, and that I enjoy reading now.
You’ll find detective stories, crime stories, and stories with a little mystery, all by one of the best and most prolific science fiction authors today. Hardly a day goes by (it seems to me, anyway) where he doesn’t post an announcement about another story sale. Gustavo really knows how to weave a compelling tale, and these are all among his best.
It’s only right, then, that this collection should be the number one volume in the Indizio publication series. We plan to feature many more authors in this series, with novels, short fiction collections, and possibly even some poetry mixed in there, too! Keep an eye out for more on that in the future.
And, if you enjoy these stories, look up Gustavo’s other works. I’m sure you’ll find even more interesting stories to enjoy!
Joe Monson
Managing Editor
Hemelein Publications
ESSENTIAL CLUES
They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
They’re right.
My own journey has brought me to a hotel room in London—where I am writing this introduction—because I need to be in a convention in Birmingham in a couple of days. Once there, I will be on several panels and signing books. If you’d asked the seven-year-old version of me whether he thought that I would someday be flying internationally to do that kind of thing, he would probably have laughed at you.
And yet, that same little kid was taking the first steps on his own thousand-mile journey. Since nights fell early in Switzerland, and there were only eight channels on cable—of which only one was in English—that little kid went to the school library every week and checked out a book or two.
Today, I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer. The stories in this book are either new to this collection or originally published in genre magazines and anthologies. You would expect that seven-year-old me would have been voraciously reading science fiction.
I wasn’t. I was reading The Famous Five and The Hardy Boys.
Of course, I was aware that such a thing as science fiction existed. I loved Star Wars (we were two-thirds of the way through the original trilogy by then) and catching an episode of Battlestar Galactica on TV occasionally was considered the greatest of lucky breaks. But I wasn’t a science fiction reader. In fact, all I can remember of the written genre from that era was an abortive attempt at making my way through The White Mountains. I can’t even recall why I didn’t enjoy it, but I do remember that I never finished it.
Crime fiction was a different story. I devoured the books in a day or two and went back for more. I read every Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys book they had, and I kept right on reading them until I discovered Isaac Asimov and Robert Asprin as a ten-year-old.
Now, this is the mid 1980s, and Asimov’s books had just been republished en masse because Foundation’s Edge, published in 1982, had sold spectacularly well. Regardless of your opinion of that book, it was a seismic moment in the history of SFF and it reinvigorated the genre. That meant it was prominently displayed at every bookstore, and it drove kids such as I was then to the genre. Other kids might have come to it from a different direction, but that was mine.
Years later, I began to write stories, and I found that what I was writing was science fiction and fantasy. They weren’t all crime stories, but I had a special love for the ones that were.
You might say that science fiction and fantasy crime stories are the very essence of who I am as a reader first and a writer second. The distillation of years of growth.
That’s why this collection is important to me. It represents the forty-year path from that seven-year-old who needed entertainment on winter nights to the author sitting in a hotel room writing this introduction.
There is an entire reading and writing life between these covers. I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I have enjoyed the journey that informed them.
Gustavo Bondoni
London, April 2023
THIN AIR
I still can’t say that I understand how they did it, but I did learn a bunch of other stuff along the way. Mostly about myself, and mostly not the kind of stuff you’d admit to other people.
As usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. It started with the heist. No, scratch that. It actually started with the girl. It never starts with a girl, no matter what they tell you, but this time it did.
At least I think it was a girl. Well, it’s probably more accurate to say that I hope it was a girl. With how easy it is to download people into bioprinted bodies on this station, it could just have easily been some guy who drew a truly crappy assignment. Yeah, I know that’s illegal, but with the kind of people I run with, you run into stuff that’s a lot more illegal than just printing bodies. And it’s not like the police on Tiantáng have ever caught a criminal. For all I know the mind in the body was just code, some upjumped AI virus they’d decided to send out into the world.
I really do hope it was a girl in there. The other possibilities creep me out. I guess I’m just not modern enough.
One thing that isn’t open to argument is the body. That girl was either printed from a fantasy catalogue or had been through the chassis shop for a complete rework. Not a line on her was wrong, and those lines had been designed to keep someone thinking about them, though I doubt that someone was me. I’m just a small fish in this mess.
She appeared in my office during one night cycle. I work the night cycle because my customers are asleep during the day.
“Hello,” she said from the doorway.
I grunted, not looking up from the display on my desk. “Sit down for a second. I need to finish sending this.”
She did, and I got a waft of perfume that made me look up. On a station where water is rationed and expensive as hell, perfume is all over. But hers smelled like the real deal, not the stuff you get in public dispensers. As soon as I saw her, I immediately regretted asking her to sit down. In fact, I wanted to conclude the interview as quickly as possible so I could watch her leave.
I already knew we weren’t going to be working together. The clothes on her told me that she could afford better, so the best I could do was to get her out of there as soon as possible.
“They say you’re honest,” she said.
“They say a lot of stuff.”
“That’s pretty much all they said about you. That you’re honest. That’s it. But you’re the only one they said that about.”
I shrugged. There were maybe four of us in this racket. Keef got the high end jobs, tracking down kidnapped rich kids. There were a couple of intermediate-level operators, and then there was me. The station wasn’t really big enough to support all four of us, so I ended up getting the true glamor jobs like following planet-monkey’s significant others around the station to make sure they weren’t fooling around while they were on assignment. Most of the time, what I found didn’t make them happy.
“Yeah, I give what is paid for, tell what I see. Why? Do you need someone to tell you that you’re in the wrong place? I can do that for free.”
“I’m in the right place,” she said. The face matched the body, reddish brown hair above big dark eyes and lips that were just the right amount of puffed. Had to be printed. Had to. “Look. All I need is someone to be present, as a witness, when my employers unseal a container. You fit the bill. You’re for hire, and people will believe what you say you saw.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Let me guess. You’ll pay me a big chunk on the side if I say what you want me to, plus you’ll give me special favors.”
She snorted. “Actually, we’ll pay you exactly your regular fee to say what you actually saw. As for special favors, we can talk about those fees once the job is done.”
“Oh.” I really hadn’t pegged her as a hooker. That threw me, but why not? Print a couple of interesting bodies and the punters would come streaming in. This one was a little tame for the starliner crowd, but might work well on folks from dirtside. We had quite a few tourists from Premen Tau on the station, and this girl looked like she’d been designed with the wet dreams of one-gee yokels in mind. Our station’s artificial gravity wasn’t strong enough for them to be built that way. “When do I need to start?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Why, got something better to do?”
She had a point, so I let her lead the way. She knew just how closely I was watching, so she made certain I had a good view.
While we walked, I did a background check on her using the single AI spider I subscribed to, which I knew would tell me what she wanted me to know. I found exactly what I expected. Not from Tiantáng, which wasn’t a surprise. Even if she was from the upper crust, a woman like that does not just appear without everyone having heard of her. Not on a station with a permanent population of less than five thousand people. More interesting was that she wasn’t from the Tau system at all. The records showed her arriving on a Cygee from Hermina three days before.
Of course, anyone who could print a body with impunity could edit the public records much deeper than my AI could penetrate. The most interesting thing I got from my implants this time was the name she wanted to go by, Camila Tsu. Interesting, as there was no trace whatsoever of oriental genetics in her look, which was essentially European, with possibly a hint of Africa.
Not much of that on Herminia, which had been colonized by the Chinese back when Earth nations still mattered. A good number of my own ancestors could trace their roots to Herminia, so I knew what I was talking about.
Names were another thing that were easy to create. Easier than bodies, in fact.
“So Camila,” I said. “Looks like you know your way around.”
“It’s a small station and I have good implants.”
She would, of course. Especially if they’d printed her. They could simply print the flesh around the implants then. No scar tissue that way, and better reception. The deep galaxy pukes were always telling me how they’d switch bodies for each job, and how much better the implants worked. They told me that he wouldn’t believe the stuff they were doing a bit further down the spiral arm where no one cared about printing.
They were probably full of it. Printing was controlled because it went very wrong very often. If they were pushing the envelope, the envelope was probably pushing right back, and that meant that there were a bunch of starliners whose recycling facilities were working overtime to assimilate the mistakes. Deep spacers were unlikely to enjoy that kind of inefficiency.
If I hadn’t known where we were going, I’d have suspected her of leading me into an ambush. The storage decks weren’t the nicest parts of the station. No rust, of course—we only wished we had enough humidity in the air to make stuff rust—but there was dust everywhere. Someone told me that station dust was made of human skin cells. I hope they were wrong, because there was a hell of a whole lot of it on every pipe along the walkway.
Also, despite plenty of free energy, the illumination was weak. Weak enough that I completely missed the two cops in the grey of the station security detail until the moment we walked into them. They were standing extremely still, beside the entrance to an unloading bay.
One of them nodded at me. “Sten. Nice to see you moving up in the world.”
I acknowledged with a smile. “It would be nice, but somehow I’m not convinced that that’s what’s happening.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
We walked through the airlock and felt my ears pop. On the other side was a large metal cube of a room, about thirty meters to a side, painted grey and yellow, although the paint was faded and chipped with age and use. The far wall consisted of a sealed lock door, through which containers could be entered from space. The chamber was pressurized, although not quite as much as the rest of the station. Air was expensive, even if we had more of that than water.
Looking kind of lost in the middle of the room was a much smaller cube, maybe five meters to a side. A standard interstellar container.
I noted with interest that this was one of the fully sealed versions. Whatever was inside was valuable enough that the container had been 3D printed, fully sealed, around it. The only way to open it on the other side was to cut it open. In my thirty-five years on the station, this was the first time I’d seen one of these.
A group of men stood beside it. One of them was a man I knew, the other three were strangers dressed in a fashion unfamiliar to me. They wore bright tight-fitting tunics that reached their knees over ballooning leggings. It didn’t look comfortable, and was definitely not local. They nodded to Camila, and one took a step forward.
“Are you the witness?” he asked.
“Looks that way. I’m actually a freelance investigator, but I do odd jobs as well.”
The man turned to the guy I knew, a supervisor on the security force whose name was Rublov. “And this is a credible witness.”
Rublov didn’t like me. He knew it, and I knew it. But to his credit, he was either feeling very professional that day or he was being paid well enough to overlook his personal feelings. “Yes, Sten is considered above reproach.”
