Authors: Steve Perry
The ticket machine clicked, and after a second. Old Hairy touched the retrieve control and removed a cube. He turned and walked away, fast, but not excessively so, as might a man intent on catching a shuttle for which he was running late.
"C'mon," Wall Eye said. "Best we footprint."
"Why?"
"We don't want to be here when the cools come looking for Old Hairy, that's why."
As they walked, Wall Eye explained.
"Old Hairy's a ticket mechanic, y'see? Them machines got a programming flaw. Y'know what to do, you can confuse 'em and get a free ticket."
"Really?"
"Well, you couldn't, but a good mechanic can. All the ticket machines in a given port are run by a mainframe, so y'got to know the system and the codes to get past the safeties. Takes skill and practice, and y'got to keep up with the changes the Confed and private companies keep making. Old Hairy used to work for 'em, so he's got an edge."
"Seems like a lot of work for a free ticket."
Wall Eye glanced at Ferret. "Ha! You really are a backrocket baby, ain'tcha? Like as not, Old Hairy just got an open-ended ticket for a blank ID. Y'know what a ticket like that is worth, to the right people? Old Hairy can get maybe five, six thousand standards for that cube from an honest man who just wants to travel. A man on the run for killing a cool or blowing away a Confed trooper would give everything he had to be holding a ticket to anywhere."
"It seems too easy."
"Got a lot of 'seems' in you, don'tcha? Yeah, well, there's disadvantages. He has to get rid of the cube pretty fast. They're getting a lot faster at filtering stolen tickets. They'll put a cruncher on it, straining out every ticket sold, and eventually, they'll run it down. It'll take maybe three days 'fore they put a stop on it.
Whoever gets the ticket had better use it by then."
They were maybe fifty meters away from the ticket machine Old Hairy had just rascaled. Wall Eye stopped. The long and wide main corridor was thick with passengers, and there was nothing to make him and Ferret stand out. The man with the slicked-down hair twitched his head and pointed back at the machine with his nose. "Take a look," he said.
Ferret did. Two men, dressed in the can't-miss-it flaming orange orthoskin Confed uniform jumpsuits that instantly identified them as spaceport security, had just arrived at the ticket machine. They scanned the nearby passengers.
"Even Old Hairy hasn't figured out a way to bypass the security system. The machine screams when it gets taken. A good mechanic is not only sharp, he's gotta be fast."
Ferret watched the cools for a moment.
A smallish man close to the machine glanced over at the two Confed agents. A mistake.
Before he could move, the small man was grabbed and slammed into the nearest wall, face first. Ferret saw blood spray from the man's smashed nose. One of the Confed men swung his elbow into the man's back, over the right kidney. Ferret could hear the strike, and the man's yell of pain.
"Jesu! What are they doing that for? He didn't do anything!"
"Them's Confed, boy. It don't matter if that cit did anything or not. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The small man took another shot, this time from a knee. He began to slide down the wall, his hands dragging the smooth surface. Blood from his smashed face left a red smear on the plastic.
"That's not right!" Ferret said.
Wall Eye laughed. "Where you from, boy? A cave? Right? Shit, whatever the Confed
does
is right. That cit knows he'll get worse, he complains."
One of the security men kicked the fallen man a final time, then looked to see if anybody nearby was watching. Nobody was. People hurried past, looking away from the brutality.
"They couldn't catch Old Hairy, so they took it out on the first guy they could catch. The lesson's there, boy."
Ferret shook his head, stunned by the violence. Even Baba had to have a reason to strap him. "What lesson?"
"Don't fuck with the Confed, boy. Real simple."
The two security men walked away, moving as if they owned the port, swaggering as if they were gods and the people around them were no more than cattle. Ferret could hear one of them laugh, loud enough to carry even this far. Jesu, damn! How could they get away with it?
Ferret sighed. He had a lot to learn, all right.
"C'mon," Wall Eye said. "Old Hairy'll need a broker, and I just happen to know a man what's looking for a fast exit to points spin ward."
Wall Eye turned away from the cools and walked away. That was how he made it in the world of laners.
He was a middle man, buying and selling goods and information. He knew most of the scams and most of the scammers, and putting one in touch with another was worth money at times. Ferret followed him, but he kept looking back at the injured man lying sprawled on the cold floor. Nobody stopped to help him.
They must be afraid somebody might be watching.
After a month, Ferret knew his path was not going to be either a scam artist or a sexual companion to one. He listened and he learned, and after a month, he made his decision. All right, it was going to be a hard life. Fine. He would be as hard as he needed to be.
It was on Koji, the Holy World, in the Heiwa System, at the spaceport in Rakkaus—called the City of Love, by people who had never been there. He was still traveling with Wall Eye, who liked him well enough, and he wanted to be sure he had the nerve to pull it off before he broke away from the man and moved out on his own.
In the end, it was simple enough to do. Getting up the balls for it was another matter. As when he had left his father's flitter near the police station back on Cibule, Ferret felt as if everyone in the port were watching him. He felt cold sweat beading on his body, and runnels of it flowing down the crease over his spine. His heart thumped so loudly he was sure people could hear it; he had to remember to breathe, and his skin itched and tingled. He stopped at a water fountain, to try and wash the dry ness from his mouth.
He went into the public fresher across from the first-class sleeping rooms. The port was a full-service operation: there were shops that sold everything from clothes and food to luggage and livestock; within the main terminal were also restaurants, gymnasiums, theaters and even a casino.
The first-class sleeping rooms on this corridor were plush, if small, units. At
fifty
stads the quarter-day, only people with means used them for naps. It followed that at least some of the people using the fresher across from the rooms were well-padded.
The fresher was unisex, catering to men and women, and it had privacy stalls, entered by paying a small fee to the fresher's computer. The row of a dozen stalls, each containing a bidet toilet and sink, was set against a long wall, just past the public communal sink and open squat toilets. Each stall was enclosed and had a lockable door, but there was a short gap at the bottom, for cleaning the tile floor; additionally, the top was open, and the walls were only two meters or so high.
Ferret swallowed dryly, and moved to wash his hands at the communal sink. Two men and a woman were also cleaning their hands. After a moment, they left.
Ferret didn't bother to use the air dryers, but instead jammed one hand into his tunic pocket and removed a string gun. It was a simple device. It fired a four-meter-long string; one end remained attached at the barrel, the other end carried a small wad of reusable quikstik. The quikstik was activated by the compressed gas that fired it from the slippery lofric barrel of the gun. Whatever the wad of plastic touched after that became attached to it with an almost unbreakable adhesion, until a let-go solvent was applied.
The boy dropped into a low crouch, almost a crawl, and scuttled past the row of enclosed stalls. He spared a glance over his shoulder at the fresher's entrance, but concentrated on looking under the bottom edges of the cubicles. He mostly saw empty stalls, or the feet of people perched on toilets, coveralls or kilts pooled around their ankles. Nine was empty, ten was empty, eleven—ah!
At the second stall from the end of the row, he saw his target. A blue-anodized aluminum travel case stood next to the man who sat upon the hard plastic bidet. The case looked expensive, buffed to a dull blue gloss, hardly scratched at all. This was it.
From his pants pocket, Ferret pulled a popper. He triggered it, and rolled it under the gap below the tenth stall. It was a small device, the popper, and the charge was hardly bigger than a cheap firecracker; however, in the enclosed and hard floored and walled fresher, the noise it made when it exploded was more than enough. It would get everybody in the fresher's attention. The man in number eleven wouldn't be looking down at his case.
When the popper went off, Ferret extended the string gun and fired it. The case was less than two meters away, but even so, he almost missed it, his hand was shaking so bad. But the clump of quikstik hit the upper edge of the aluminum case. Ferret looped the remaining string over his hand and jerked, hard.
With the sound of the popper still ringing in his ears, the case fell flat and slid out from the stall, bumping into Ferret's boot.
The boy didn't hesitate. He grabbed the case and ran for the fresher's door. By the time he reached the exit, people inside the stalls were starting to react.
"—the fuck is going on—?"
"—hey, hey—!"
And finally, the voice of his victim: "My case!"
Ferret rounded the exit and into the hall. He forced himself to walk. The man in the fresher wasn't likely to chase him with his pants around his ankles, he might even pause to run the bidet and wipe, and the service corridor for which Ferret had bought an entry code loomed just ahead and to his right.
Ferret reached the entrance, and hurriedly punched in the four-digit entry code.
Behind him, his victim's voice grew louder.
"Help! Police!"
Ferret shoved at the door. It wouldn't budge.
Jesu! Was the code wrong? If so, he was caught! He'd seen what the Confed did to an innocent man—what would they do to him, guilty as sin?
"Help! Stop! Thief!" The man was still inside the fresher, but almost to the exit now—
Ferret tapped the keys again, forcing himself to move more slowly and carefully. Oh, shit, shit, shit! Six.
Come on! Nine. Three. Hurry, hurry—! One—
The lock snicked, and the door gave under the pressure of his hand. Ferret's breath was almost a sob as he jammed into the narrow corridor and shoved the door shut behind him. He could hardly breathe, his gut was twisted into a knot, his bowels felt watery.
Had the man seen him? Ferret leaned against the locked door, waiting for a pounding upon it that would announce his pursuer. Oh, God, please—!
Five seconds passed, seeming more like five years. Time for all the police on the planet to converge upon him, guns leveled, ready to burn him into dead cinders. To smash him against a wall and kick him to a pulp.
"Thief!" a voice screamed. But it was dopplering past the service corridor.
He hadn't been seen!
Ferret sighed again and shook his head. The adrenaline pumped through him, and he felt tight, alive, and scared. It was a wild and mixed feeling, fear and the realization that he had pulled it off. A few seconds ago, he would have promised anything to never have to go through this again. Now, now he could see that it wasn't all bad. In fact, he felt like he had when he'd first run away from home. Triumphant. In control. Yeah. It was all right.
Hefting his prize, he started off down the corridor.
Technically, it was not his first theft. He had stolen the string gun and popper from a cubicle on the wheelworld of Volny, where he and Wall Eye had spent a few days, a week past. But the case was his first public venture, and the only one with real risk. The gun and popper belonged to an old junk woman Wall Eye knew, and she probably wouldn't miss them for some time, if ever.
Ferret had a hammer and chisel, but the case wasn't even locked. Hiding in a fresher stall across the port from the score, he opened his treasure chest.
There were some flimsy plastic sheets with numbers and figures inked on them; an expensive reader, inside a genuine leather holder, with several stainless steel info balls nestled in soft rubber sockets; a hand-held flatscreen computer and recorder unit; and several writing instruments—a light pen, paint pencil, and electric coder. There was also a credit cube, shiny translucent plastic, with a gold bar stamped across the corner. Ah. The gold bar meant the owner had plenty. A regulation man, a citizen.
The cit would have the cube and case replaced before the local sun went down, and no shit, but this was something for Ferret.
Ferret grinned, and leaned back on the bidet. He didn't know the cube's code, so he couldn't use it without security-locking it into any payment computer. But there were people who specialized in figuring out the codes for stolen cubes, and using them before a stop-pay alert was issued. The cube was worth stads to a codebreaker, although he didn't know how much. Cit money was tricky. He'd seen Wall Eye bargain with other laners over the odd item, and he knew that he'd better be prepared or risk being cheated. He shoved the reader, flatscreen and cube into his tunic pockets. The case he wiped clean with tissue, then dropped into the waste disposal on the way out of the fresher. The case was too large to reach the grinders, and eventually it would block enough trash so that the container overflowed. By then.
Ferret figured he would be light-years away.
He spent a pleasant few minutes in an electronics kiosk, pricing readers and flatscreens. The ones he had stolen were expensive enough, retailing at over a hundred standards each. If he was lucky, he could get a quarter of that from a fencer. The cube was something else. He didn't have any idea how much it was worth. Maybe fifty or a hundred standards, no way to tell what the market was like.
He went to make his deals.
Ferret didn't know why, but the woman called herself Warbler. He had met her on Krishna, and seen her in the lanes a couple of times since. She was a hard-faced woman of about twenty-two or -three T.S. years, and, the word was, under the death penalty on Thompson's Gazelle for killing a husband or wife, whichever. He met her in a sleep room she had booked, and they both had to sit on the cot; there was barely enough height to stand erect, but insufficient floor space, in any event.