Maze-Born Trouble Read online

“I didn’t come across anything like that when I was tracking her down either. But there was her trip to the Maze.” Lake drank his tea. “Any idea at all why she’d go down there?”

  Nam shook her head.

  “I would have said that she was angry at someone and wanted to shout at them in person, but she seemed like she was always mad at everything, so…” Nam shrugged.

  Lake let it go at that.

  “How have you been?” he asked. “The righteous life keeping you busy?”

  “You know me too well, sweetheart.” Nam grinned at him. “The slugs in zoning have come around to my point of view, but I’m still fighting with those idiots from Station Promotion. They want that repulsive logo of theirs flying over my place. A squid. A fucking squid—I was nearly eaten alive by a tank of those monsters. Fucking squid! They’re—”

  “Vicious little cannibals,” Lake provided.

  “I’ve mentioned how I feel about them before, have I?” Nam laughed.

  “Maybe once or twice.” Lake hardly recalled his parents or the adults in the Loviatar crèche who had taken him from them, but Nam’s stories of spying and smuggling her way across three star systems blazed in Lake’s mind almost as if he’d shared that life with her, instead of growing up hungry in a dark, stinking hole with only roaches for company.

  Nam nodded then she cast Lake an assessing look. “I heard Aguilar’s divorce went through a couple of months ago.”

  “Did it?” Lake feigned fascination with the remaining noodles in his bowl. Of course he knew about the divorce, but he wasn’t a damn vulture.

  “You should check in on him,” Nam advised. “He’s a tough guy, but sometimes those are the ones who get hurt the most. I bet he’d like your company and I know you’d like his—”

  “Yeah, I ought to get going if I’m going to catch the next D-lift,” Lake responded, feeling like he was nine again.

  “Oh, of course.” Nam laughed at him, but not unkindly. She turned her attention to the terrarium for a few moments then looked back up at Lake. “You don’t want to know how your wager will pay out?”

  “Whatever I win, it’s yours.” Lake passed his betting ticket to her and picked up his hat. “I’m always in your debt, darling.”

  Nam shook her head but took the small ticket. Then she leaned forward and kissed Lake’s cheek.

  “Go out through the kitchen, and we’ll make sure that your tail doesn’t follow you,” Nam whispered.

  4.

  By the time he landed back down in the Arc, Lake felt relatively certain Nam had kept her word. He hadn’t once felt the reedy presence of the blond detective or overheard the whisper of a security comm near him. But just to be safe he opted to take a route less traveled, particularly by people who hadn’t been around when the Arc had only been a series of tunnels and shafts filled with half-assembled infrastructure.

  He trudged two kilometers to the nearest loud, flashy entertainment plaza and popped open one of the substructural shafts hidden behind a plot of genetically modified cherry trees. The space below was pitch black and alive with chattering machinery and the soft throb of immense cables bundled with soothingly redundant wiring. Dropping down between loops of power cables to a maintenance catwalk, Lake hit hard and heavy. The violent jolt sent a pang through his arm but wasn’t nearly rough enough to really shake his incredibly dense bones. Still, he waited a few moments. He took in the rhythm around him and felt through the space for the swift whirr he wanted.

  He jumped out onto the flat hard surface of a fast-moving freight cart—probably loaded with one-day deliveries from depth-printing centers and headed to the sorting hub in Southblock. Lake hit the speeding cart with the grace of a steel plate, and the cart’s suspension wheezed. Then it rebalanced on its track and raced on. Lake clung to the freight cart’s ridged surface as frigid wind whipped over him. His fingers ached from the cold, and the gashes in his left arm nagged. Lake ignored them both and grinned at the sensation of rushing wind and his own racing heart. There were few faster ways to travel unseen across the station.

  The landscape high over his head altered, growing louder and more crowded with the weight of close-packed buildings and hundreds of human beings. Around him the massive shafts of sunken housing projects bristled with life and infrastructure. The low drone of the cricket mill warned Lake that he neared his destination. Getting on a cart was generally the easier maneuver than escaping one, but even the quickest carts slowed at major city junctions.

  There Lake sprang onto another catwalk, and shimmied up a shaft. He crept out into the artificial night behind a public toilet and cleaned up a little while he was there. His hat had taken a hell of a ride in his coat pocket. Moments later, he wound his way through the working-class crowd, encountering a few street buskers and granddaddies peddling egg sacks of illicit milk spiders as he traversed the narrow service alleys.

  At last he reached his apartment block. Up on the sixth floor, police barriers cordoned off his door, so Lake circled around to Mrs. Saari’s apartment. The Maze-born old women gathered there allowed him inside in exchange for a fistful of Maze-minted pocket change and a little friendly conversation in native Suomi.

  The eldest of them, Fern Saari’s grandmother, led him between the contraband vats of fermenting rahka and tart piimä. Heading for the kitchen, he edged between biocases brimming with fat milk spiders and cauldrons of fermented webbing bubbling with pearly thick milk. At the very back of the kitchen, down under the tiny sink, lay the crawlspace that connected the circulation shaft of his apartment and Mrs. Saari’s.

  Lake squeezed through the concrete passage while the old women in the kitchen laughed and wished him a happy journey into the place beyond. One of them patted his ass—or maybe she’d been attempting to shove him through. Either way, cackles of laughter drifted after him into the crawlspace. A tiny colony of escaped spiders fled before him. Their fine webbing clung to his hair like candyfloss.

  He emerged into his closet, where a suit and a change a shoes kept the space from appearing vacant. Out in the bedroom he found his mattress sprawled across the floor like it had gone on a bender without him. His potted cactus displayed a number of broken spines, which meant it had probably given as good as it got from the careless goon who’d tossed his place. Lake rewarded the cactus with a little water and reset the timer on its grow light.

  A quick inventory assured Lake that nothing other than two beers had been stolen. Tellingly, a wad of cash and Lake’s cold automatic, the bulky gun built for the heavy gravity and explosive, high-oxygen atmosphere of the Maze, remained untouched in its holster.

  Lake took both along with a change of clothes and his clean kit. Then he exited the way he’d come. He purchased a tube of rahka from Mrs. Saari and a burnbox of spicy cricket cakes from a vendor on the open street, before he jumped his way back to Aguilar’s address.

  Lake arrived outside Aguilar’s freestanding kit-house ten minutes early. The glassy panes of Jun-Sang’s glider were nowhere to be sensed, and Lake noticed that Aguilar had built up several more hydroponic screens of flowers and vegetation where it had once docked at the front of the house. The masses of suspended water and verdant plants felt like hanging chimes to Lake. The sharp, strange smell of tomato leaves drifted over him. Lake wanted to linger, basking in the scents and textures and listening to the warm buzz of the GM honeybees that Aguilar had spent two years certifying and then establishing in his garden. He longed to run his hands over the cascades of leaves and rest on the poured-bamboo bench hidden back between walls of scarlet long beans and cherry tomatoes. He wanted to belong in this place—wanted it so badly that it felt like a grinding pain gnawing at his ribs.

  But he didn’t belong here.

  And nothing attracted attention in a sedate suburb like the sorry stillness of a stranger gazing too long at someone else’s home. So Lake circled around to the back, where Aguilar kept his greenhouse and beehive. Big pots of jasmine blazed in Lake’s senses, strong, sweet and intoxica
ting.

  Lake passed between them, and the leaves brushed his cheeks and hair. He reached the humidity lock that connected the green house to Aguilar’s residence and knocked.

  Just as he felt Aguilar’s tall, familiar mass signature drawing near, Lake recalled himself enough to tug his optics on. Deep shadows and soft glimmers of light played over bowers of glossy leaves, and droplets of condensed water glinted like bright notes as they fell from flower petals. Power & Life Support had geared down all but a few rays of humming starlight and allowed a chill to creep into the air. Microturbines in the greenhouse stirred cool breezes; the last of the foraging honeybees buzzed past Lake, rushing back to the warm chambers of their hive.

  Lake briefly wondered how much this facsimile resembled the genuine nightfall of that distant battered Earth that Aguilar heralded from.

  Aguilar swung the back door open. He looked like he’d just emerged from a shower—his hair still wet and his light underclothes clinging to the damp, dark skin of his shoulders and thighs. Lake thought he could almost feel the heat of Aguilar’s bare body.

  “Tervetuloa,” Aguilar greeted him in Suomi, and his careful pronunciation caught the warm tone of the welcoming word just right. “Come on in. I’m about to set the security perimeter. I’m keying it to recognize you as well, so you can come and go if you need to.”

  “Thanks.” Lake stepped over the threshold.

  The door fell closed behind him with a low soft whisper, and Aguilar keyed a code into the lock. Then he turned and Lake followed him to the common room, where a poured-bamboo table stood surrounded by four empty chairs. A large terrarium, filled with cacti and desert succulents occupied the far wall. Both Lake’s cacti had come from Aguilar’s collection—the first had been a gift to celebrate Lake’s promotion to detective. The second was a parting gift after Cullen had stripped the title from him.

  Aguilar’s big, old couch stood with a view of the large desert plants and their delicate flowers. The framed glider stills, shelves of trophies, and sweeping depth-pics that had completely dominated the remaining three walls were absent. In their place a single small depth screen hovered like a cube of smoke. Inside it flickered electron clouds in the forms of autopsy reports, witness statements, citizenship documentation and small images of Holly Ryan, Clay Torni and Leaf Koivu.

  “Still bringing your work home,” Lake commented.

  “Where else are you gonna stay,” Aguilar replied with a quick smile, then he turned to the depth screen. “Power & Life Support is processing my request for the power-down information from yesterday and today. They claim that they need a day to clear it.”

  “They’re stalling, you think?” Lake asked.

  “Oh of course they are. But whether that’s because they’re up to something or because they resent security intruding into their business, I’m not sure. Not yet, at least.” Aguilar nodded to a flickering little star in the left quadrant of the depth screen. “I’ve got a snooper crawling through their system, so one way or another I should get the information by tomorrow.”

  Lake nodded. It had always amazed him how often Aguilar got away with planting snoopers right in front of people. They just didn’t expect such a big, direct-seeming man to possess such deviously light fingers.

  Though at this moment his long hands were engaged in the mundane task of pulling a pair of loose exercise pants on over his underclothes and hiding the burn scars that peppered his left thigh and calf.

  “How did your trip up to the Drift go?” Aguilar asked.

  “Interesting.” Lake held up the dinner offerings he’d brought. “You care to join me for a bite and I’ll tell you all about it?”

  “Sure.”

  Lake placed the tub of rahka and the burnbox of sizzling cricket cakes down on the table, while Aguilar brought utensils and two cold drinks from his kitchenette. They both settled at the table. Like old times—only Lake felt foolishly nervous and Aguilar seemed somehow much more tired than he ever had back when they’d worked together. Lake hoped that Aguilar wasn’t wasting his time or energy missing Jun-Sang and then felt like an ass. Of course Aguilar missed the handsome fucker. He’d married him and worked hard for years to make things work. Aguilar didn’t give up easily or often; that made him a great detective but also came at a cost.

  Aguilar sampled one of the cricket cakes, got up, and returned with a bottle of hot sauce and a huge carton of kimchi.

  “So how forthcoming was the Queen Beetle? She never tells me shit.” Aguilar popped open the kimchi and a pungent aroma rolled up over Lake.

  While they ate, Lake laid out everything Nam Yune had told him and described the blond detective who’d been sent after him.

  “Yeah, Gonzales and I call him Game-boy. He’s useless but he looks great in uniform which is what Cullen likes so we keep him around for PR.” Aguilar took a bite of thick, white rahka and raised his heavy black brows. “If this delicious mess is spider milk, please don’t tell me.”

  “How could I tell you something that I don’t know myself?” Lake replied with a grin. He dolloped his cricket cakes with creamy mounds and topped those with kimchi and hot sauce. Aguilar followed suit, doubling the splashes of hot sauce.

  “So, Holly not only knew the two men who broke into your office, but they escorted her down into the Maze?” Aguilar asked.

  Lake nodded.

  “Nam Yune thinks that she was blackmailing someone, maybe the person she visited in the Maze,” Lake added, and then gulped down a second crunchy, hot and creamy mouthful.

  Aguilar turned his chopsticks through his long fingers. That slow thoughtful motion that Lake recognized even after four years of keeping his distance to avoid Jun-Sang.

  “What?” Lake asked. “You don’t think so?”

  “No. It could be the case…” Aguilar said, but his tone assured Lake that he wouldn’t have put real money on it.

  “But?” Lake prompted.

  “But I did some deep digging into Holly Ryan’s history. Turns out she was born on the Arc and her father is Maze-born—”

  “Liam Ryan was never Maze-born,” Lake cut in.

  “No, he’s definitely not,” Aguilar conceded easily, and Lake knew from the smile in his voice that there was more to the story. “But he’s also not her biological father. Turns out her mother, Mrs. Eun Ryan, arrived the last year of the war with a bevy of private contractors and had herself a fling with a Maze-born translator named Wind Vanhanen.”

  Lake considered that while he sipped his cold beer. He’d hated the stuff when Aguilar had first introduced it to him, but now he found the carbonation and taste of bitter hops on his tongue relaxing. It reminded him of off-duty hours listening to Aguilar talk about the old ruins of Earth: the forests of the poles and the vast belt of desert between them. The taste soothed him, allowing him to forget how personal all of this really was—how close he and Aguilar had both come to dying this afternoon in his office. Even the twinge in his arm seemed to fade from his awareness.

  “Did Liam Ryan know Holly wasn’t his?” Lake asked. He’d only spoken to the man twice and those had been disjointed pulse comms, but he still would have sworn that the old man’s distress over his daughter had been genuine.

  “Yes, he knew. It wasn’t hard to look up,” Aguilar replied. “But he also formally adopted her as his own when she was only five weeks old, so I’m thinking that he and the wife patched their relationship up and made it work.”

  Lake nodded and kept his eyes on his kimchi. The thought of patching things up after affairs reminded him too much of how hard Aguilar had struggled to sustain his marriage to Jun-Sang. Lake felt like a shit for being even a little happy that it had failed. And yet he couldn’t help but feel relieved that he wouldn’t have to try to find things to pretend to like about Jun-Sang and the way he took Aguilar for granted. Maybe Eun or Liam Ryan had inspired the same covetous longing and a would-be lover had blamed the daughter for lost love. Though eighteen years struck Lake as too long to nurse a gr
udge, especially when the daughter had already left the nest.

  “I’d bet that Holly Ryan went down to the Maze to find her biological father.” Aguilar’s comment brought Lake back to the matter at hand, and he nodded.

  “Did you have time to look into the biological father’s situation?” Lake asked. “Any angle for blackmail?”

  “He’s a translator for the local branch of Federal broadcasts. Emergency warnings, drills, PSAs. That sort of thing. Not a lot of credit to squeeze out of him even if you did dig up some dirt.”

  Lake frowned. He supposed it would have been too easy to just have the answer land in their laps. He glanced up at the information drifting through Aguilar’s depth screen. The cold tingle of autopsy files played across Lake’s hands.

  “Anything on the bolt guns used to take out Holly and Clay?” Lake asked.

  “Yeah, it was definitely the same gun, a compact Heat Repair model 301-20. But there are literally thousands of them on the station. Probably over a hundred just in the police-evidence lockers alone.” Aguilar shook his head and took a long drink of his beer. Lake followed suit, closing his eyes and allowing himself to actually relax for a few moments.

  “I don’t like that you’re caught up in this,” Aguilar murmured.

  “I’m not thrilled about it myself,” Lake replied.

  “But I mean how you’re caught up in it. If someone killed Holly Ryan over blackmail then why come after you? You didn’t have any contact with her…”

  “None. I told you, I saw her the once and that was it. What’s so hard to believe about that?” Lake opened his eyes to meet Aguilar’s gaze.

  “I don’t know.” Aguilar smiled at Lake’s irritation like it was somehow charming to have Lake glower at him. “But obviously someone, with deep pockets and a means to tap two security trainees, is convinced that you’re involved.”

  “Or maybe Leaf and Clay thought I did the hit on her and came after me,” Lake suggested. “Her real murderer got wind of it and figured he’d be smart to pop them if I didn’t.”