gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap Read online

Her breasts were rising and falling as she struggled for air, and he could see the flush that infused her fair skin. “I appreciate that. But I’m a big girl, Derek. I can handle myself.”

  She’d already provided ample evidence of that, but he still found himself wavering. He’d never forgive himself if something happened to her. On the other hand, he couldn’t forcibly put her on a maglev bound for Chicago. Even if he somehow managed to do that, she was just stubborn enough that she’d probably get off at the first stop and come right back after him.

  “All right,” he said at length. “But I have no idea what we’re getting into. Hell, I’m not even sure how we’re getting into China. So we’ll take this one step at a time.”

  “Barstow first.”

  “Barstow first,” he agreed. “And after that…we’ll see.”

  “That works for me,” she said, and bent to pick up her suitcase with one hand while looping her free arm through his.

  Still worried I’ll bolt? he thought, a smile pulling at his lips. No worries there, Cassidy. From now on, I don’t plan to let you out of my sight.

  * * *

  The maglev had lost all novelty for Cassidy at this point, but she was just glad it was pointing westward and not back toward Chicago. Really, what the hell had Derek been thinking?

  That he wants you to continue breathing, she thought. She couldn’t really argue with that particular sentiment, as she would prefer to keep on breathing as well, but she’d also come too far to walk away at this point. Whatever happened, she’d stick by him.

  Why she felt such loyalty to someone she’d only met a few days ago, she didn’t quite know. Or maybe some part of her mind and heart had already guessed, but she wasn’t willing to acknowledge that truth. Not openly, not yet. At the same time, though, she knew she couldn’t bear the thought of not being around him, of never knowing whether he’d succeeded in his quest or not.

  Even if it got her killed.

  They didn’t speak as the train sped west, the desert landscape blurring past the window. Maybe they had too much to say. She wished she could think of something that would comfort him after that gruesome scene with his father, but she had the feeling Derek wanted to pretend it had never happened. It must be awful to have a parent who disapproved of you so heartily, and she still couldn’t quite figure out what Mr. Tagawa’s problem was. After all, even if he hadn’t stayed in Tucson and taught at the university, Derek was still a successful man, a scientist assigned to a very important project.

  Well, except for the part where a key component of that project had turned out to be a complete lie.

  Her stomach rumbled, telling her that it didn’t much appreciate running around day and night, and not getting anything to fill it up. Derek must have heard as well, because he smiled slightly and said, “There are vending machines in the forward car, if you need something to eat.”

  “It’s fine,” she replied. “I’d rather wait until we get to Barstow and can have some real food.” His expression didn’t change, so she added, somewhat worried, “That is, assuming we can get real food in Barstow.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, we can get real food there. I know a place where we can get some chilaquiles that’ll make you weep.”

  “Chila-what?” she replied, trying to get her mouth to pronounce the unfamiliar syllables. Anyway, did she really want food that would make her cry?

  “It’s a dish we eat here in the Southwest. It’s good.”

  Since he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate — maybe he wanted her to be surprised by these chilaquiles, whatever they were — she asked instead, “So you’ve been to Barstow before?”

  “Several times over the years, for conferences at the university, that sort of thing.” He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable in the cramped space. This train car didn’t feel quite as luxurious as the one they’d taken from Chicago. Maybe, since this was a shorter route, the designers had thought they could get away with skimping. “I made friends with some of the professors, and they took me around to their favorite places to eat around town. It’s the best way to get to a know a city — sample its restaurants.”

  “Mmm,” Cassidy replied, feeling once again as if she were on an alien world, rather than one from which she was only a single generation removed. Not that Luna City didn’t have its eating establishments, but the food at most of them was fairly bland, only a few steps up from the ready-made rations she took along to eat when she was traveling the route between the Moon and Titan. There were a couple of restaurants that specialized in hydroponically grown produce, along with meats brought in specially from Gaia, but those places were way above her pay grade. The lobster patties she’d shared with Conrad Waite were probably one of the best things she’d ever tasted, despite the company she’d shared them with.

  So the thought that a city could have such variety in its restaurants that they contributed to its personality was an alien one to her…but she didn’t mind giving it all a try. If nothing else, it sounded like a good way to re-energize before they left Normerica for China…which, she thought she’d read somewhere, once had quite a regional cuisine of its own. Maybe its refugees had preserved something of it, but she’d never had any dishes that claimed to be Chinese.

  The landscape outside the window steadily grew greener, and she found her gaze pulled to those unexpectedly verdant hillsides. For some reason, she’d thought all this area would be as dry and dusty as Tucson.

  “Not what you were expecting?” Derek asked, apparently noticing her distraction.

  “No,” she replied, still staring out the window. “I thought this was supposed to be a desert.”

  “It was, about three hundred years ago. But the rising oceans cooled the air, and the monsoon rainstorms became more widespread, and so it eventually greened up. It’s still nothing like the really green places — the upper Midwest, the United Kingdom — but it’s very different from what it used to be.”

  “It’s beautiful.” She didn’t have a name for the scrubby green shrubs that looked halfway between honest-to-goodness trees and mere bushes, nor the bright yellow flowers that danced on the breeze, but somehow that didn’t matter. For the first time she understood what her father had been talking about when he told her it was dangerous to go to Gaia, that you’d see things there that would make the world of living shipboard and domed cities feel cramped and small, colorless and sterile.

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed, although she felt his gaze on her rather than the scene outside the window.

  Color rose to her cheeks, and she made herself keep staring outside rather than look at him. It would be nice to have Derek’s warm olive skin, which never showed much of a flush. Oh, well.

  “How much longer until we get to Barstow?” she asked then. She knew it was probably a transparent attempt at redirecting the conversation but couldn’t come up with anything better to deflect his attention.

  “Less than an hour. Luckily, I know the town a little, so I can get us to a hotel without too much trouble. I just have to make sure it’s not one I’ve stayed in before. The last thing we need is anyone recognizing me.”

  That was for sure. She knew how lucky they’d been so far, but there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. “Do you think that’ll be a problem? Running into someone who knows you, I mean.”

  He grinned. She loved the way his dark eyes lit up when he smiled, the small cleft that appeared in his chin. “In a town of a little more than two million people? I doubt it.”

  Two million. The number made it sound vast, although she knew Chicago was much, much larger than that. But she’d only seen one small section of that megalopolis, and so hadn’t gotten much sense of its true scale.

  She nodded, and they lapsed into silence again. Derek seemed to be staring off nowhere in particular, and his smile had disappeared. Something about his mouth seemed somber and quiet, and she wondered if he was thinking about his father, or simply attempting to figure out their next move. Either way, he didn’t l
ook too happy.

  Without thinking, she reached over and laid her hand on top of his, not squeezing it, not doing anything except letting him feel the warmth of her skin against his. That did seem to help, as his expression relaxed slightly, and the corners of his mouth turned up just a little.

  That was better. One way or another, she’d prove to him she was a valuable asset to have along on his quest.

  * * *

  Although it had been almost five years since his last trip to Barstow, Derek didn’t think it had changed all that much. A little bigger, a little noisier, with the frenetic, disorganized energy of a place that had grown far larger than it ever should be and still hadn’t quite figured out what to do about it.

  The travel advisor on his handheld gave him a list of possible places to stay, and he chose one not too far from the stratport, a hotel he’d never heard of but which had a good rating. Not that that necessarily meant much; it was common knowledge that those ratings tended to be based more on how much graft passed hands to inflate the recommendations rather than on an establishment’s actual merit.

  But when they got out of the cab and went into the hotel lobby, he was reassured by what he saw — gleaming travertine floors, walls painted a glossy slate blue, front desk of rough-polished aluminum. High end, but not over the top. The desk was manned by real people, and within fifteen minutes he and Cassidy had a room and were headed up in the elevator.

  Since it was otherwise unoccupied, he felt it safe to say, “Sorry there weren’t any suites available.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Well, that place in Chicago was impressive, I’ll admit…but did you really think we needed to have separate bedrooms?”

  Damn. He still wasn’t used to her forthrightness. Most of the women he’d known would never have come out and said such a thing so baldly. “I didn’t want to presume — ”

  A laugh as she shook her head and gave him a mock-annoyed look. “You’re not presuming. But maybe I am?”

  “No,” he said at once, wanting to shoot that idea down before it even had a chance to get started. “I — that is, I wouldn’t mind a repeat of that night on board the ship.”

  “Good,” she said with a wicked grin. Then she put her hand on her stomach. “Although I think you’ll need to feed me first.”

  “That I can do.”

  They got out of the elevator and went to their room, which was located about halfway down the corridor. It looked back over the city, showing the sprawl of downtown, the shimmering high-rises, the mountains on almost every side, closer to the north and east, much farther away to the south and west, those ranges hiding the view of drowned Los Angeles. Otherwise, it was much like pretty much every other hotel room he’s stayed in when in Normerica — large bed; small table with two chairs; a convenience station with a coffeemaker, infrared heating unit, compact refrigerator; a shower nicely outfitted with faux-stone tile and a separate dressing area.

  Just as he was stowing his suitcase in the closet, the door chimed. Cassidy shot him a puzzled look, and he lifted his shoulders before going to answer it. Waiting outside was a small room service mech.

  “For you,” it said, a tray extending from its side. On the tray rested a thin plastic envelope.

  Mystified, he said, “Thanks,” and removed the envelope before shutting the door again. The envelope had a small bio-sensitive square holding it closed, and he placed his thumb on it. Immediately the envelope opened, and several pieces of plastic and actual paper slid out.

  “What is it?” Cassidy asked.

  “Looks like our fake credentials. Probably our sponsor was waiting to see which hotel we checked into so he would know where to send everything.”

  “Impressive,” she remarked, casting a quick glance over the contents of the envelope.

  It was an audacious plan, actually, but one that made sense. Faking government credentials was nearly impossible, but pretending to be staff from the biggest vid-news network gave him and Cassidy a reason for traveling to China without putting them under too much scrutiny. And lord knows scrutiny was the one thing they needed to avoid at all costs.

  He supposed he should be glad that their benefactor was covering all possible angles, but there was still something a little disconcerting about all that smooth, behind-the-scenes efficiency. But he supposed he should let that go for now. First things first.

  “Still hungry?” he inquired, knowing exactly what her answer would be.

  “Starving.”

  So he said “Margarita’s” into the handheld, and it gave him a quick map and an estimated trip time. They were actually so close that he thought they could walk. It would feel good after so many hours cramped up in the maglev.

  “Margaritas?” Cassidy inquired. “Do they have those here, too?”

  “No — that is, yes, they do, but ‘Margarita’s’ is also the name of the restaurant where we’re going.”

  “Does Margarita’s have margaritas?”

  “Of course,” he said, offering his arm. “Not up to Tucson standards, but I think they’ll do.”

  She looped her own arm through his, then said, “Lead the way.”

  * * *

  It was a pleasant early autumn day, the temperatures barely touching 25 C, a fresh breeze moving over the high desert town — desert no longer, although people still referred to it that way. He found it fascinating to watch Cassidy’s face as she looked at the shops and restaurants they passed, at the people hurrying to and from their places of work, at the hundreds of different makes and models of aircars that filled the streets. These were all commonplaces he took for granted, but aside from brief glimpses in Chicago and Tucson, this was her first real introduction to life down on Gaia. Maybe it felt more real now, since they were striding along the sidewalk instead of being removed from everything in the back seat of a cab.

  In the early twenty-third century, some large towns had installed moving walkways, but then protests were made about them taking away the charm of a city — not to mention being detrimental to health and fitness — and so they’d all been torn out. The sidewalk they traversed now was not so different from those made centuries ago, although the invention of duracrete had made them virtually maintenance-free.

  Around them he heard Anglic and Spaniola and the odd snippet of Nippon and Szechuan, as a good many of the Cloud’s refugees had ended up here in addition to the area around Tucson. Normerica’s official language was Anglic, but that didn’t keep people from speaking the language of their forebears around others in their family or extended social group. He could speak Spaniola and Nippon, and had a smattering of Szechuan, although he was much better at reading than speaking it. Being able to read signs had come in handy when he was working in Hunan Province, although of course there was no one around to speak Szechuan to these days.

  But that only made his thoughts turn to the devastation he’d seen there, and he didn’t want to think about that right now, not on a day as lovely as this, not with a woman as beautiful as Cassidy Evans by his side. The breeze was picking up her hair and blowing strands of it around her face, causing her to constantly reach up to brush them aside, but she didn’t seem annoyed. No, she appeared fascinated, as if she’d never had to manage the wind blowing her hair in her face before.

  He supposed she hadn’t, not if she’d spent her entire life shipboard or in Luna City. In that domed settlement, everything was carefully regulated and controlled. No fresh September breezes there, that was for sure.

  After a walk of some ten minutes, they arrived at Margarita’s. It was set back a little from the street, with a large open courtyard area where one could dine al fresco if the weather permitted.

  Cassidy gaped at the metal tables and chairs. “Do people eat outside here?”

  “Sure, when the weather’s pleasant. Would you like to? There’s a table over there under the pergola where there’s some shade.”

  Her brows drew together at the word “pergola,” and he realized she’d probably never
heard it before. But when she saw the spot he’d indicated, still out in the fresh air but protected by a wooden structure with bougainvillea vines covering it, she nodded. “That looks beautiful.”

  They went and took their seats, and a minute or so later a young woman who looked like she was probably working her way through the university came and brought them their menus, along with some water. Although many restaurants had taken to sending their bill of fare directly to patrons’ handhelds, or used heads-up displays next to their tables, Derek had always liked the places that did it the old-fashioned way, with a menu printed on real paper and backed with cardboard or faux leather. It made the food seem more real, somehow.

  Cassidy was frowning as she stared at the menu, obviously confused by the unfamiliar dishes.

  “Do you want me to order?” he asked in an undertone. “Normally I wouldn’t presume, but….”

  A look of relief passed over her features. “That’s probably a good idea. Otherwise, I’d end up ordering dessert for the main dish or something.”

  Smiling, he asked for a couple of house margaritas, and then chilaquiles for Cassidy and chicken enchiladas for himself. That way they could share a bit, if she wanted to taste something different. And, if she still had room after that, the best flan on this planet or any other.

  The server took the menus away, promising that the margaritas and water would be out in a few minutes, then went back inside the restaurant.

  “So….” Cassidy began after sipping at her water. “What now?”

  Part of him wanted to leave the question of their next move aside for the moment, to simply sit here and feel the wind on his face, smell the faint aroma of spices and warm oil from inside the restaurant, but he knew that would only be wasting their time. He glanced around, saw that they were the only ones sitting outside, mainly because it was now almost two and so past the time most people would be taking a break for their midday meal.

  “Put out an SOS,” he replied, then dug in his pocket and got out his handheld. Although there was no one around him, he thought it was prudent to type out his question rather than use text to speech. After pulling up his last conversation with their benefactor, he tapped in the message, In Barstow, need help with biometrics. Thank you, then sent it.