I summon the dead: Chapter 3.
In which Deimos takes a couple of calculated risks: to protect two kids, and to possibly provoke his nemesis.
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza checked in to the eccentric misfit-filled Pleiades Hotel, which will be his home base while he executes a complex bloody revenge plot. And then two children ran in, followed closely by officers of the Unity Corps - the tyrannical occupying army tasked with rounding-up off-worlders.
The last chapter is right here. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
chapter three: I summon the dead
“Where’d they go?” asked one of the armored Unity Corps bullies. Here inside the lobby they seemed small: dwarfed by even the shabby decaying opulence of the Pleiades Hotel.
“I don’t know who you mean,” said the woman behind the desk, and I watched one finger adjust the grav baffler to rise a few inches in the air, just enough that he had to look up to look her in the eyes.
“Two children. Scrappers. Off-worlder grubs. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t,” she said. “And even if I did, you’d need an administrative authorization from Ganymede Prime municipal, spelling out their full names, to come in here looking for them.”
“That’s not true,” said one of the other bullies, and another said “Fuck those municipal traitors,” but the one who’d spoken first silenced them both with a terse hand wave. “The courts have not been consistent on this issue. Should we let them decide? Easiest thing in the world, Psamatha, to take you in for interference, see what a judge says when they finally see you.” He let the threat hang, then turned to me. “What about you, sir? Did you see two children come through here?”
I stared at him without speaking. These were not the ones I’d met earlier; four other assholes I was not obliged to answer.
Or was I? I didn’t know fuck-all about what was happening on Ganymede, and this wasn’t the epic battle I had come for.
You’ll be skirting an awful lot of legality in the coming weeks - months - years? fuck, it might take years - no sense incurring unwanted law-enforcement attention.
I was seriously considering at least answering in the negative, when the woman in the floating chair said:
“Of course, if you say they came in here, then I wouldn’t dream of saying otherwise, agents. Perhaps they came in while this gentleman and I were talking, and they scampered into the bar,” and she pointed across the lobby. “Why don’t you guys go check, and while you’re there, get a round of drinks on the house. Tell them I sent you.”
And to my great shock, this actually worked. After some obligatory gruff stuttered posturing, they drifted across the lobby to the bar.
“It hurts my heart to give them anything, but they really can make your life miserable, and it’s best to stay on their good side whenever doing so doesn’t entail betraying everything you hold dear.” She looked at me for a moment, her curiosity still significant, but there were more pressing matters to attend to. She rang one of three little bells on the desk, then zipped her chair around to my side of the desk. “Weywot here will show you to your room.”
A man who I hadn’t even noticed stood up from a couch across the lobby, looking like a dignified impoverished old professor. Under her breath she said to me, “he doesn’t work here, or anywhere - I gather he was quite the bigwig where he’s from, and his self-regard won’t allow him to do anything as base as actual employment - but he is desperately poor and would be grateful for any tip you can spare. Please ring the front desk or come on down to see me if there’s anything else you require.” Then she was off, heading for the door the children had been taken through.
“Gongong, if a customer or a tenant comes through looking for me, tell them to ring the big bell, okay?”
A lobby occupant affixing feathers and broken glass to a dress raised one arm, then gave a single circular dancerly wrist flourish that must have meant yes.
“What’s that for?” I asked the artist, while Weywot made his tottering way toward me. They didn’t answer, didn’t even look up, until I added “Knife dance?” in the guttural stabbing consonants of my best long-buried Ganymedan.
“Indeed,” they said. “You know it?”
“I saw Caloocon Cabo Rojo dance it once.”
They laughed. Long hair, exquisite make-up. Probably past forty, and still a struggling dancer. “You’re a liar, but you’re cute.”
“It’s not a lie.”
“Come see our show here in the lobby tomorrow night,” they said. “I’ll quiz you afterward.”
“I’ll do my best to attend,” I said, and bowed. And got an idea.
Meticulous, rigorous planning was my strong suit. A gift from my mother. A gift I loved and valued and used constantly, which had helped me amass a fortune and mastermind a gruesome complicated set of assets and alliances and schemes.
But I had another gift. A gift from my sibling. One I feared and mistrusted: the occasional irrational idiotic idea. The deeply dumb things. Long shots. Gambles.
Gambling wasn’t my style. Odds were always against you. But long shots sometimes led to breakthroughs I’d never achieved by following a plan. And seeing this artist, this fierce creature still struggling to make something meaningful in a place that did not value them, I had: an irrational, idiotic idea.
I squatted, to leave a generous credit chip on the table beside their pile of feathers. “Mind telling me what you know about Thyone Ullapool?”
It was a risk. Saying her name. Letting it be known I was asking about her. Like brutal local power players in every one of the thirty-thousand settlements, Thyone had her fingers in so many people’s pockets. Even this impoverished dancer might have owed her money or allegiance, or seen there might be profit to be made from alerting her to a potential threat.
But I hadn’t come here to hide, and sooner or later Thyone was going to learn my name. Even though it wasn’t mine.
“Only what everyone knows,” they said. “Thyone runs the metals-buying business here in Ganymede Prime, and allegedly in a bunch of other settlements as well. Made her money that way, and then did with it what money does - spread it out into a bunch of other interests. Bad idea to get on her bad side. Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“I’ve simply heard so much about her. Wondering what’s true.”
Their eyes blazed: with rage? hatred? of Thyone, or of me? “Everything you’ve heard is true, honey, and you ain’t heard the half of it.” And then their attention returned to the dress, and I was dismissed.
“You must be a widely-traveled man,” Weywot said, gesturing to the ornate curving central staircase. I followed him. “So many of our guests have been to so many marvelous places. Forgive my presumption, but have you ever in all your travels had reason to visit my beloved home world of Sedna?”
“I’m afraid I have not,” I said, trying to remember what stray details I’d picked up about it along the way. A dwarf planet. trans-Neptunian. Iron red; weapons-wealthy. A monarchy - last lingering monocratic hold-out in the Scattered Disc, which had predominantly come under control of a brutal collectivist alignment. And then, only a couple years ago - a revolution, a handful of angry locals flush with money and guns and bombs from Orcus. A government fallen. “Forgive my impertinence if the question is unwelcome, but do I dare guess by your presence here that you were of the losing faction in the recent troubles?” Something about his professorial elegance made my own speech aspire to greater sophistication, with I am afraid significantly embarrassing results.
“You dare correctly,” he said, eyes watering behind the thick greasy glass of his spectacles. “It was my great privilege to serve my majesty the king.”
“In what capacity?” I asked, not entirely caring.
He waved his hand; of course his all-consuming devotion to the sovereign could not be encompassed by any simple job title. “I was with the king from his earliest days. Tutor, sparring partner, music teacher, chaperone, political adviser.... whatever was needed. You understand, surely.”
“Surely.”
He moved so fucking slow. She could have just told me to find the room on my own and no matter how lost I got I’d have found it faster than this.
I pinged him ten thousand sequins - which a working-class Ganymeder might make in a month, back when I’d lived here - and he gave me the stiff bow of a porter who’d just been tipped a pittance. But probably the dignity of a former aide to a king would permit no greater expression of gratitude.
Inside the room, I shut the door and took a deep breath - which was a massive mistake, because suddenly all the thirst and exhaustion and aching pain of my hangover came flooding back in. Plus I badly needed to use the bathroom.
But another need was stronger than all of that. A hunger more than hunger.
I sat on the floor, my back to the bed, and assembled a hundred-strong nested identities - and connected to the hotel network via a labyrinthine web of overlays and tunneling protocols - and uncapped a cylinder of nano-miasma, releasing a couple billion tiny pieces of programmable matter into the air around me...
And said my dead sibling’s name, to summon up their digital ghost.
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