9 – Specters of the Past

  When he walked out of the office, Hector wasn’t surprised to find Jam looming over Lemon as she shrank away. Her back was to a bar top, and she was wedged between two stools while the big thug—one hand on the bar, the other twirling a lock of her straight blonde hair—spoke to her in low tones. Hector wasn’t a genius at body language, but he could see Lemon wasn’t having a good time. Her hands were clenched into fists, and she kept darting her eyes toward the exit, leaning back uncomfortably as Jam leaned in.

  A not-so-small part of Hector wanted to move silently, catch the asshole by surprise and punch him in the kidney so hard he’d piss blood all the way to the trauma doc. He bit back that hot, angry urge, though. He didn’t need a pile of new enemies—not yet. Instead, he stopped at the single step down that marked the bar’s perimeter and cleared his throat.

  When Jam and Lemon looked his way—her eyes tented, hopeful; his narrowed and angry—Hector jerked his head toward the door. “Lemon. Boss has a job for you.” When Jam didn’t move, despite Lemon trying to sidle past him, Hector couldn’t stop himself from growling, “Step off, Jam.”

  So much for playing neutral.

  “What’d you say, runt?” Jam pushed off the bar and, glowering like a red-eyed scarecrow, stalked toward Hector. Maybe he expected him to back off or stammer some sort of apology, but when Hector just folded his arms and glared, Jam’s steps faltered.

  Hector gave him an out: “Go talk to the boss about it, if you want.”

  Jam stared for another few seconds, his thin lips pressed together in a frown, highlighting a white scar that ran from his right nostril to the left corner of his mouth. “We’ll finish catching up later, Lemon.” His long arm stretched out, and his fingers, tipped with sharp black nails, gently tugged at Lemon’s shirt sleeve as she hurried past.

  Hector saw the revulsion twist her lips as she replied, then she was past him, and Hector followed her to the exit. His spine crawled knowing he’d turned his back on a predator, but he knew the guy was too scared, deep down, to attack him. Hector hadn’t put him into enough of a corner to force the issue. Outside, the sunlight made it feel like they’d stepped out of a surreal dream—at least to Hector.

  “Ugh! What an asshole! Thanks for the excuse. I can’t hide all day, though. God, I never thought I’d miss Orin! He usually keeps that creep in line.”

  Hector shrugged. “He should be back soon; I didn’t kill him.”

  Lemon looked at him sideways. “For a second there, I forgot you were the one who hurt him.” She nodded toward the club’s entrance. “Was that, like, a rescue? I mean, did Grando really have a job for me?”

  A train on one of the second-story tracks whistled by, blowing warm wind on them, stirring Lemon’s hair into a momentary blonde halo. Hector pulled the crumpled slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. As she read the note, he said, “Wants you to see what’s wrong with her.”

  “Sadie? Yeah, now that you mention it, I haven’t seen her in a minute.” She looked up at Hector, narrowing her eyes. “He really wants me to go?”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Oh—well, yeah, okay. Still, he’s never sent me off on—”

  “Said you’d get a bonus if you did a good job.”

  Lemon tightened her grip on the paper, closed her mouth and, after looking into Hector’s eyes for a second, nodded. “Want to make a stop on the way? We can talk to a guy I know…about your bit-lockers, I mean.”

  Hector thought about it, then shook his head. “On the way back.”

  Lemon narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  Hector’s fingers twitched, and he could feel the blood throbbing in his skull, but with a sigh, he explained, “We don’t know what’s wrong. Might be time-sensitive.”

  She slowly nodded, then turned and started walking. Her legs were long, and Hector had to stretch his to catch up. When he was beside her, she smiled. “We’ll need to take a train; she lives out in one of the stacks.”

  Hector nodded, repeating the word, “Stacks.” Even back in his old life, they’d been using the term. Megastructures filled with coffin-like cubicles they called apartments. They weren’t much worse than Lemon’s place, but they were worse—bed alcoves and toilets that opened onto communal cafeterias and living spaces. Hector hadn’t seen any true megastructures in Helio, but it sounded like the stacks were a bit removed.

  They walked past the next corner, and he saw their immediate destination. A fifty-story plasteel spire with elevators on either side and a spiral staircase up the center. Dozens of train tracks converged on the spire, weaving up, over and around each other to the boarding platforms on the different levels. It was the first bit of construction he’d seen in the city that was impressive to him. Those tracks on their plasteel supports were a work of art, the way they looped and twisted, keeping thirty or more routes separate. To his eye, it was a little bewildering.

  People crowded the sidewalks leading up to the spire, and the steps going up and down were packed, but the queues for the elevators were long. “Everyone’s heading toward the city center for work,” Lemon sighed, taking his wrist as she started weaving through the crowd. “I don’t want to step onto a train and then find out I lost you in this mess!” she yelled over her shoulder.

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  He nodded.

  She pulled him onto the steps and began to climb, sticking to the left where people moved a little faster. They passed several landings, each formed from a different color of plasteel—yellow, orange, green, purple—then they stepped out of the spire onto a blue one. Lemon pushed through a crowd, almost running, and then leaped through the open doors of a train, just as the calm, feminine voice announced, “Blue line to Eastern Districts seven, nine, eleven, and thirteen is now departing. Take hold or sit down for your safety.”

  Ever at the mercy of his memories surfacing at the wrong moment, Hector suffered through a dozen flashbacks of similar train rides in his old life. Even as they washed over him, he hastily grabbed hold of one of the straps hanging from the ceiling. Squeezing his eyes shut, he waited for the overwhelming déjà vu to pass. The shuttle train rocked back and forth slightly and then surged forward, accelerating rapidly enough that Hector had to tense up all his muscles to keep from stumbling.

  Cool fingers touched his neck, and Lemon asked, “You okay? Trains make you sick?”

  He shook his head. “I’m good.”

  His takeaway from the strange flashbacks was that it didn’t seem shuttle trains had changed much in the time he’d been out of commission. It wasn’t the first time a thought like that had hit him, and he found it a little jarring; shouldn’t more have changed in almost 200 years? He supposed some things had, in a way. Heliopolis had been a tiny company town, and now it was a bustling metropolis.

  What did you expect from a train? Think it should be flying or something? He snorted at the thought.

  “What’s funny?” Lemon asked.

  He shrugged. “Trains.”

  The car they were in wasn’t very crowded; here and there, he could see empty seats. Most people coming into the city, not heading to the outskirts. When Lemon saw him looking around, she said, “We could sit and talk. It’s a twelve-minute ride.”

  He nodded, but not because he wanted to talk; he was feeling…off. His aura system was doing things to his body, including his nervous system and, while the jump from level one to two wasn’t a big one, all things considered, he knew it was pushing things to run around the city like nothing was going on. He could already feel the yawning cavern of his stomach, and his hands were trembling with some nutrient deficiency or another.

  As he collapsed into one of the plastic seats, he said, “I need electrolytes.”

  Lemon settled down beside him, her eyebrows lifting as she looked at his face. “You look a little pale. I’m surprised, though, after that breakfast you ate.”

  He shrugged. “My system’s doing some work.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded but ignored the implied question. Another thought had occurred to him. “Do you have net access?”

  She nodded. “Just a narrow band, though. Why?”

  A narrow band meant she didn’t have enough connectivity for real feeds—maybe text, maybe a static page or two. It also meant she probably didn’t have the neural hardware to render anything complex. “Can you look something up? The Conti family.” He’d been awake almost a day, and it was well past time to stop trusting that everything Grando told him was gospel.

  “Conti? That you?”

  “No.”

  She frowned at his non-answer, then said, “I don’t have any database subs. I’ve got fifty minutes of AI time banked, though. Want me to ask?”

  Hector rubbed his forehead, fingers sliding over clammy skin. He hoped the spell would pass quickly; they usually did.

  “Hector?”

  “Hmm?” He looked at Lemon, then the question finally registered. AI minutes. It was a concept he knew existed but had never had to deal with personally. Most people couldn’t afford a personal assistant AI, let alone a properly conscious aura system. Royals didn’t run into that kind of limit. “Do you mind?”

  “No, it’s fine. I get twenty minutes a month on my plan, and I don’t use it much.” She tapped her temple twice with her middle finger, and her eyes unfocused as she murmured her query.

  Hector straightened, watching the windows as the train glided away from the heart of Helio. The towers thinned out, giving way to endless high-footprint rectangles—manufacturing slabs, orbital-hub warehouses, all of it stretching to the horizon.

  Goddamn place has grown.

  “The Conti Noble House was wiped out in the massacre known as the Night of the Gray Phage in AE 412,” Lemon said suddenly, her voice a shade flatter. She was repeating the AI’s response. “Drake Conti, his wife, their children, and forty-seven extended relatives were killed during a family gathering at their vacation estate on the lower slopes of Mount Cadrus on Ganymede.

  “The attack was part of a coup attempted by Arndt Conti. Arndt was executed by Emperor Damian Lautrec the Fourth. His surviving children, Jenessa and Favian, were stripped of titles and assets, given a stability stipend, and relocated to their mother’s kin in Old Italy.”

  Hector scowled. No real surprises—nothing worse than what Grando had told him, anyway. “What about the Conti holdings? Who ended up with them?”

  Lemon muttered a quiet follow-up command, then said, “The Ventress Consortium held the majority of Conti debt and was compensated through the Court of Equity. They received what contemporary sources call a ‘catastrophic profit ratio’ on their claims—catastrophic to the Conti holdings.” She blinked, then added, “Nearly a dozen other creditor houses received portions of the remaining Conti assets, but even combined, their shares were a fraction of what Ventress acquired.”

  “One more: what about Hector Finalis? What was his role in the coup?”

  Lemon’s eyes unfocused again as she murmured the query. After a moment, her voice shifted back into that faint, reciting cadence: “Hector Finalis: classified as a primary conspirator in the Night of the Gray Phage. Official records attribute to him the targeted killing of Lord Drake Conti, Lady Mara Conti, and their immediate heirs during the first phase of the coup. Contemporary Imperial inquiries describe Finalis as a renegade praetorian-grade combatant in service to Arndt Conti.”

  She paused and blinked a couple of times, then continued, “Hector Finalis was killed during the suppression of the uprising by Sir Alistair Ventress-Dane, a visiting adjutant attached to the Lautrec delegation. Ventress-Dane was awarded the Imperial Star of Fidelity for neutralizing the assassin responsible for the Conti slaughter.”

  Lemon’s gaze sharpened as the AI connection faded. “That’s…pretty heavy.” She rubbed her eyes, then focused on Hector. When he was unresponsive, staring into space, his mind chasing blood-soaked images that he couldn’t quite grasp, she asked, “Are you named after him? A relative?”

  “Something like that.” Hector barely heard the question. An image had surfaced: the southern parlor of the Conti estate on Cadrus. He saw white couches, spattered crimson; long, pale arms, fingers twitching; a small crumpled form in gauzy yellow skirts—

  Hector choked out a rough gasp, almost a sob, but he wasn’t capable of tears…was he? He squeezed his eyes shut as Lemon grabbed his shoulder gently. “Hector, what was all that about? Are you okay?”

  He cleared his throat, nodding brusquely. “Fine. Just side effects.”

  “Your aura system?”

  He nodded.

  “You want me to ask my AI anything else, or can I close the connection?”

  Hector opened his eyes, forced his face into a neutral expression, and stared out past the yellow haze, toward skies that were beginning to look almost blue. “Close it.”