The Selling of Suzie Delight Read online

Dermet heard Charlie’s voice over the shipcom. “Every bit. I wish she’d implicated the worlds involved in the bidding, and the person who’d leeched your banking data. But I have enough to file a fraud suit against the Bone King.”

  “Please do that, then. I’m rather enjoying this dinner, and I’d like to see it through to the end.”

  Dermet took a deep breath and sent Laure for the second course.

  Charlie

  CHARLIE HAD ALWAYS KNOWN the trick to maintaining her post on the Longview was to avoid attracting attention.

  And more than anything, Charlie wanted to keep her job—because any other job she would have as a servant of her world would be worse.

  Yet she had willingly, as a favor to Mado Keyr, witnessed and recorded the confession of Deesa at the captain’s dinner. She had voluntarily filed suit in Werix Keyr’s name against Bone King and the half-dozen worlds Deesa had named, as well as Deesa and the crewman who had provided her cover story aboard the Longview.

  She had set up the Verilamp and tamper failsafes, and once Deesa recovered from her suicide attempt, had obtained both Deesa’s full confession and that of the Longview’s Two Blue ex-crewman who’d helped her. And then she’d streamed these holographed confessions to her controller in unencoded files over open public datastreams, and had tagged the files as exactly what they were.

  As a result, every entertainment and news source in Settled Space acquired the information for free, in unadulterated form, and had it up for broadcast at the same time that the involved Pact Worlds were discovering in their own datastreams the files that implicated them in a massive criminal cover-up.

  Charlie had voluntarily made herself the public face of the scandal—the single recognizable person whose actions had brought more than a dozen Pact Worlds and their governments to their knees; who had fed fuel to worlds that had been Pact Worlds trading partners and who were now boycotting the entire Pact Worlds system; and who had been the cause of the bidding on Suzee Delight being dropped back to the last legitimate bid, which had been to the Longview Death Circus for seven-point-five billion rucets.

  Charlie was pretty certain she was attempting slow public suicide, though she was equally certain that for the first time in her life she was doing exactly the right thing—and doing it with an absolutely clear conscience.

  She wondered if this was how Suzee Delight had felt, murdering the five men who’d plotted to turn the Pact Worlds into slave worlds by another name.

  Charlie wasn’t done destroying her career, though.

  The Longview had reached Cantata, where Suzee Delight had been transferred following the implication of her world in the bidding scandal.

  And Charlie had asked Shay for a favor.

  “This call is encoded and tight-beamed,” Shay said. “You’ll have to enter your contact information, but you’ll get Gen-ID verification before your data will go to the person you’re contacting. You have this room to yourself, and when you seal it, no one will be able to hear you. Will that be good enough?”

  Charlie nodded. “This may take me a few minutes.”

  “You’re fine,” Shay said. “Werix is grateful for everything you’ve done to help him over the past week. Without you being willing to act in your official capacity, the Longview would very likely have lost the bid.” Shay rested a hand on Charlie’s forearm. “And I know that doing what you did has put you at risk.”

  Charlie laughed. “I can’t go back. They won’t let me stay here and work this job, but I can’t go back.” She shrugged. “I’m not sorry, Shay. I’m not sorry for one single thing I did to help you.”

  Shay said, “And the owner remembers the people who help him. Don’t do anything stupid, Charlie. We’ll take care of you.”

  “I’m not going to hold you to that,” Charlie told her. “Not you or Mado Keyr.”

  “All right. But please remember what I said.”

  Shay left. Charlie sealed the room, and then she called her contact down in the city of Meileone. They went through the Gen-ID verification, and then she was face to face with the one friend she had who’d managed to slip out from under the monstrous thumb of the Pact Worlds machine to hide in plain sight.

  “Hi, Lee,” Charlie said, and winced. “I’m hoping you can help me out.”

  “Oh, Charlie. I thought I made some trouble, but you—I’ve never seen anyone work so hard to self-destruct.”

  “I’m glad I did it.”

  “For as much good as it’s going to do you, so am I, and so is everyone I know. But you have to know that with everything you’ve done on this Suzee Delight fiasco, you’re going to disappear the instant you get back here,” Lee said. In the year since they’d last met, Lee had changed her face, her body, even her voice—but her mannerisms were the same. “You aren’t going to get a trial or a sentence. You’re simply going to vanish into the grinding gears of the world, and never be heard from again.”

  “I know that’s what they plan. I have a plan of my own. But before I carry it out, I have to preside at the execution of Suzee Delight. So I need to know if you ever made any progress with that—project you were working on for yourself.”

  Charlie saw Lee’s eyes widen. “The insanely dangerous one? With the DNA kicker?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “I have the recipe on file, but none of it is tested. I’ll have to set up a port for each subject’s DNA that you want to include in the kicker. And there will be a delay before you can use the project.”

  Charlie closed her eyes. Nothing was ever simple. “How much DNA? How much time?”

  Lee said, “I don’t think you’re hearing me. I said insanely dangerous. Isn’t tested. Times and amounts are best guess because no one has ever used this. Ever. Right now, this whole thing is numbers and letters in a little file I have tucked away where no one will look for it. I can’t promise that the kicker will work. I can’t promise anything.”

  “I got that. This is the only chance I have.”

  On the screen in front of Charlie, Lee’s hands started waving, and her face sheened with sweat. “You’re insane. You are insane, and you are going to get yourself killed, and there just aren’t that many people left in Settled Space that I can actually stand, damn you.”

  “You owe me, Lee.”

  Lee looked away. “Yeah, I owe you. And debts must be paid. So, I’m going to repay you by getting you and some unknown number of your friends killed. Fine. You saved my life, I’ll make sure you end up dead. Helluva thanks. But I offered to get you out of the system, and you turned me down. So on your head be it.”

  Charlie had hoped Lee would be a little less dramatic. “It’s on my head, and I just might live. Walk me through the process.”

  Lee sighed. “Pull out one or two hairs from the head or body of each person who gets the kicker, clip the hair roots and bulbs off the end—you know what those are, right?”

  “I have hair.”

  “Funny. Put the hair roots and bulbs onto the DNA sieve, and shove the seals closed. Make sure you’ve got them tight. Shake the project. Wait at least six Standard hours before you use it.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Cash in advance. Twenty thousand for the project and kicker port.”

  Charlie exhaled. She’d received a large cash thank-you bonus from Mado Keyr when he won his suit and the bid for Suzee Delight. Twenty thousand rucets would have been impossible for her before, but now it wouldn’t even dent the money in her account.

  “And when I’m ready to use the project?”

  “Open the casing, give the contents one squeeze. One. Drop it on the ground and walk away. Squeezing will activate the cells, the project should bloom to full strength in five minutes, hold for five minutes, and then die off completely.”

  “Should?”

  “Untested,” Lee repeated. “Untested, Charlie. Everything about this is hypothetical. If you don’t understand that, don’t do this.”

  Charlie thought about it for just an insta
nt. “Untested will have to be good enough. I’m sending the money to you now.”

  There was a pause, then Lee said, “I have the full amount verified. I was really hoping when it came down to it, you wouldn’t have the plunder. But you do, and that suggests you’re into more than just doing your job. So...? Never mind. How shall I get the project to you?”

  “How big is it?”

  “It’ll fit in the palm of your hand.”

  “Pack it inside a tourist welcome package, and send it via courier to the Longview, care of Roget Major. Make sure third parties can sign. I’ll tell one of the crew I have something coming in that my controller can’t know about, and ask her to sign for it and get it to me.”

  “You’ll have it tomorrow.”

  Transcript: Suzee Delight — Final Pact Worlds Interview

  Danyal Travers, SPORC Capital Offenses Interviewer from Cheegoth, assigned to the Suzee Delight execution, in the city of Meileone on Cantata:

  Suzee Delight, the Pact Worlds are deluged with holostreamed demands for your pardon and release. Cities across the Pact Worlds system are facing criminal riots instigated to cause friction among the lower classes, and demands from these under-citizens that government officials be removed from office and tried as criminals. Our Pact Worlds are being boycotted by outside systems that have been our trading partners for decades, and in some instances hundreds of years, that are now demanding that we dismantle the Covenants of the Pact or lose our status as Approved Worlds and instead be classified as rogue slavers. Are you pleased by the amount of trouble you’ve caused, Suzee?

  Suzee Delight, First Courtesan, Court of the Diamond Dome, Mariposa Pleasure City, Cheegoth, in the city of Meileone on Cantata: We’re on a first-name basis now? That’s interesting. All right, then, Danyal. I’m twenty-three years old and I’m on my way to my execution. Pretend you’re me. Is there anything in the universe that could please you?

  Danyal: Don’t evade the point. You murdered the five most important men in the Pact Worlds, and much of Settled Space is demanding that you be forgiven and applauded for what you did, and we, the law-abiding citizens of a law-abiding planetary alliance, are being called the criminals in your stead. You confessed to murdering five great and beloved men—leaders of our worlds. You said in other interviews that given the opportunity, you would murder them again. And you demanded execution through the Death Circus, when as a woman who was born in Order E but finagled your way into Order A Equivalency, you could have awaited trial and hoped for a life sentence. You are getting exactly what you asked for.

  Suzee Delight: No, I’m not. I asked to be allowed to transfer my citizenship to Bailey’s Irish Space Station to work in the field of nanoviral augmentation—

  Danyal (interrupting): You were seven when you requested—

  Suzee Delight (interrupting): I was nine. I knew what I wanted when I was nine, and I knew where I could become what I wanted, and instead, my government decided my many talents would best serve the greater good if I were employed as a sex trade worker. So for more than fourteen years, that has been my unchosen and unwanted fate.

  Danyal: Courtesans are treated as members of the highest level of society. You live in palaces, you want for nothing…

  Suzee Delight: You and I are both whores, Danyal. You’re voluntarily sleeping with a corrupt government. I got drafted when I was nine. Did you know that the average lifespan of an Order A Registered Courtesan is twenty-nine years? Or that fully half of all Registered Courtesans commit suicide before they’re twenty-one? (Voice drops to nearly inaudible.) Did you know that most of those suicides are actually murders committed by men in positions of power who like to hurt women, and who will never be held accountable for doing so?

  Third Voice: Danyal, cut the interview and get her out of there. We have enough holo to work with—there isn’t a single word of this that we’re going to be able to use unedited, but she looks good, and you can turn this into what we need.

  Suzee Delight: Remember this interview, Danyal.

  And know that I wish you a short and painful career as the Pact masters’ whore. I wish you the ever-louder voice of a conscience that reminds you that no matter what you choose to call it, you have volunteered to hide the evil deeds of criminals for a living, and to help oppress the people they were supposed to serve. And before I go, since I now know I’m speaking just to you and them, let me give all of you a final warning.

  Alive, I can only walk and whisper. Dead I’ll soar and sing. And every song from my dead lips will be another torch to burn down your twisted, subverted Covenants of the Pact and destroy everyone who gains and holds power from them.

  CHAPTER 6

  Shay

  SHAY HATED TO DO IT, but she could not allow any unidentified cargo aboard the Longview. So when Charlie finished her conversation with her friend Lee—a conversation as secure as Shay had promised it would be, with the single exception of her silent presence—she piggybacked through Charlie’s connection to Lee and set a tiny worm to track and report everything Lee did.

  What Lee did was both fascinating and terrifying. She broke into a government-secured nanoviral database using a high-clearance researcher’s ident-encode, and broke into the agency’s Class-V Restricted Nanoviral Agents Registry, wherein she connected with one tiny file coded with a non-Agency tag. Shay realized Lee was using her government’s strongest security system to secure her own personal dangerous files, and doing it in such a way that the rightful users of the system would never find what she’d hidden there without a brute-force search. Lee then retrieved her chosen file using a system-override-and-trail-erase routine so fast and elegant it filled Shay with envy.

  Briefly, Shay wondered if she might recruit Lee to the Longview, but reconsidered immediately. Lee was doing interesting things right where she was, and needed to be left to do them for as long as she could.

  So Shay contented herself with copying Lee’s copy.

  She needed to know just what Charlie had coming.

  Before she killed the connection to Lee, however, she set a little tag on Lee to let the Longview know if Charlie’s friend was ever investigated or arrested. Shay thought she would be worth a rescue if she ever needed one.

  And then Shay sat down with Lee’s file and manually dissected the formula, working out by hand (but out of the shipcom’s reach) what turned out to be a short-burst airborne nanoviral crowd agent.

  It was a nightmare—one designed by a woman with much better bio-weapons skills than she’d let on, who apparently planned to destroy any army that came at her down to the last man.

  And Lee was sending her weapon to Charlie.

  Shay smiled a bit.

  Charlie might have hung her head when informed that Suzee Delight had to be executed, but not for a second had she considered letting that happen.

  And she’d figured out a solution. One hellish horror of a solution, granted, but looking over the formula and her own extrapolations based on it, Shay had no doubt it would succeed.

  Shay’s only remaining question was how Charlie planned to carry it out.

  Charlie

  SUZEE DELIGHT WAS FINALLY only minutes and meters away.

  Surrounded by armed crew from the Longview, Charlie waited at the exchange point in the neutral corporate space station Abdex Trade and Security, trying to ignore the incredible noise of thousands of people jammed into every available space, all chanting, “We want Suzee, we want Suzee...”

  Station sporcs in green uniforms lined both sides of the outer skin of the temporary corridor through which the prisoner exchange would take place, providing a human barrier to keep the crowd from pounding on the moleibond, or doing anything embarrassing.

  The far end of the corridor remained clear—the exchange was set to take place at 1200 Standard hours, and according to the chatter in Charlie’s eario, set to the sporcs frequency, the procession should appear through the open doors in fifteen seconds.

  She stared up through the transp
arent dome of the station to the small shuttles and smaller dronecams that hovered outside. She recognized logos on the hulls—the biggest news agencies in Settled Space were well-represented, as were organizations she’d never heard of. From the looks of some of the shuttles, a few members of the ultra-rich had arranged front-row seats for themselves, too.

  The moleibond shielding and the sporc patrols would reduce the risk of any incidents during the transfer, but couldn’t eliminate them entirely. The Human Purity shuttle directly overhead worried Charlie—that particular anti-sex group insisted that all sex was perversion, that human beings existed in a state of damnation, and that for any human to engage in intercourse even once without Divine InterVenntion™ was to invoke an automatic death sentence. Human Purity sold Divine InterVenntions™, of course—sterile programmed clones of their leader, Statius Venn, available in both male and genderflipped female versions, which followers could purchase for an ungodly fee so that they could engage in holy sex while avoiding the doubly damned sin of reproduction.

  Every Impurator™—the Human Purity term for a mating or reproducing human anywhere in Settled Space—was going straight to HellVenn™. Charlie thought it funny that in the eyes of the Puritites, eternal damnation could only be truly horrible if it was trademarked.

  But that particular group could be dangerous. Charlie was trying to figure out whether the Puritites were up there to take a shot at Suzee Delight with some new weapon, or if they were simply cheering the pending death of one of the most visible flaunters of their religion, when the doors on the far end of the corridor slid open and a wall of green-uniformed sporcs five across marched toward Charlie.