Jade’s was a small hotel on the corner of one of the main streets and a narrow alley. A bright sign decorated by a carved jade dragon indicated the hotel had vacancies.
I exited the transport and hurried to the door. A bell tinkled overhead when I pulled it open. I stepped into a small but clean lobby. The main desk was off to the left and a couple of chairs on the right clustered around a lit fireplace.
A petite woman with long, straight black hair bustled out of the back room. She smiled at me. “You must be Ms. White,” she said. “I am Jade, the owner. Gunther will be pleased that you arrived safely.”
So this recommendation was a kickback and not a trap. Probably.
I stomped a few times to knock off the worst of the rain before I dripped all over the dry floor. When I was reasonably dry, I lowered my hood. “Does Gunther work at the spaceport? About this tall?” I asked, holding my hand twenty centimeters over my head.
Her smile grew wider. “Yes, that’s my Gunther. He looks fierce but he’s a big teddy bear.”
I’d have to take her word for it. Gunther looked as if he could pull arms off people without breaking a sweat. “He said you have rooms available?”
“Yes. One hundred credits a night, with a two-night deposit. Breakfast is included.” She showed no sign of recognizing me as Lady von Hasenberg.
“I’d like to prepay for a week,” I said.
She didn’t even blink. “Checkout on the seventh day?” she confirmed.
Because solar days and nights lasted months, most Brava residents were used to thinking in Universal Standard Time. So a day was just twenty-four hours, regardless of whether it was dark or light.
“Yes, please.” I hopefully wouldn’t be here that long, but Peter Guskov moved at his own pace. If he thought I was trying to rush him, he’d let me cool my heels for a few days just because he could.
Jade held out a chip reader. “Scan here, please.”
“I’d prefer to pay with hard credits.”
That got me a raised eyebrow, but she didn’t protest. She entered the amount on the reader then handed it to me. I inserted a credit chip with a moderate amount of credits. The reader shouldn’t report the total available credits back to the vendor, but some vendors were shadier than others.
Jade took the machine back after I removed my credit chip. She handed me an old-fashioned keycard. The fact that she had them handy told me I wasn’t the first person to stay here who was reluctant to scan my identity chip. “Your room is on the fourth floor. The lift is out of order; are the stairs going to be a problem? Do you need help with your luggage?” She peeked around the desk, looking for my bags.
“No, thank you, the stairs are fine. I can manage my backpack.”
“Breakfast is from six to nine in the dining room.” She gestured to a door behind me. “And the stairs are farther down that hall on the right.”
I thanked her and headed for the stairs.
Chapter 9
As a young woman, my self-defense tutor had kept me in excellent physical condition, something that I’d taken a bit for granted. After Gregory modified my nanos, I hadn’t felt well enough to keep exercising. I’d recently started going to the gym again, but I was nowhere near my normal fitness level, and I felt the four flights of stairs.
I let myself into the room I’d be calling home for the next few days, assuming I could hack it. My head was already lightly throbbing. Tonight would be the first night I voluntarily slept in an unshielded room in four years—since Gregory had first modified my nanos.
I’d nearly died before he’d conceded and deigned to shield my bedroom. I didn’t remember much of those early days but apparently I’d gone into seizures any time I was exposed to the minimal amount of signals around our House.
For the first six months after the injection, I’d been too sick to continue working remotely for House von Hasenberg, which had caused Father to start asking questions. I think that, more than anything else, is what changed Gregory’s mind. He didn’t want Father to steal his research before it was finished.
After my body had begun to adapt, Gregory would occasionally lock me in unshielded rooms to see how I would react. I’d been too weak to fight back, both physically and emotionally. The shame of that failure still burned in my chest.
I shook myself out of my thoughts and glanced around. The room included a small bed, a nightstand with a lamp, a narrow wardrobe, and a window overlooking the alley. It was sparse but clean. Even the tiny attached bathroom had been scrubbed to a sparkling shine. I made a mental note to thank Gunther for the recommendation if I saw him again.
Rain ran down the window, blocking most of the view, but there was no fire escape outside, so I didn’t have to worry about midnight visitors. I used my com to search for bugs or trackers in the room. The search came back empty, which was surprising enough that I ran it again, with the same result.
With no extra eyes on the room, or at least none that I could detect, I carefully hid a few of my credit chips in various nonobvious locations. If I got mugged, I didn’t want the assailants to have access to all of my hard credits at once. I stashed my backpack in the wardrobe but kept a couple of the trackers and bugs in my pockets. I also kept my weapons and the second com. Walking out unarmed in Brava was just asking for trouble.
I checked on directions to Peter Guskov’s shop. He wouldn’t actually be there, nothing was ever quite so easy, but I needed to make initial contact in order to set up the real meeting. The shop was a kilometer away on foot, but with the horrible weather, I went ahead and ordered a transport. It was an extravagance that a normal Brava citizen wouldn’t have purchased, but Guskov already knew I wasn’t a normal Brava citizen.
Going down the stairs was far easier than climbing them. Jade was nowhere to be seen, but my transport waited outside. I pulled up my cloak’s hood and stepped out into the downpour. It was nearly noon, yet it remained pitch black. I couldn’t live on this planet in the dark for months at a time. Continuous sunlight wouldn’t be much better, either.
I entered the address and the transport lifted off. The trip took less than five minutes, but I remained mostly dry and entirely unmugged, so I decided it was a worthwhile expense.
The transport landed outside a shop window filled with various odds and ends. Expensive antiques sat beside cheap plastech knockoffs. One mannequin sported an evening gown, while another was dressed in head-to-toe combat gear.
I pulled on my public persona. Peter Guskov was very particular. He had a process and it required a great deal of patience, especially when the information you wanted was time sensitive. I could not afford to lose my cool.
An armed security guard opened the door for me. “You break, you buy. You steal, I break,” he said, his meaning clear even with his heavy accent. “No cloak.”
I shed my cloak and hung it in the provided space. “I expect that to be there when I return,” I said.
If the guard was surprised that I was a woman, he didn’t show it. He nodded.
The shop was empty of other customers, so I perused the shelves slowly, keeping an eye out for the sculpted sapphire bluebird I knew lurked somewhere in one of these piles of junk. The room was chilly without the added benefit of my cloak and I shivered. That, at least, was a solvable problem. I grabbed a black sweater in my size, paid for it, and put it on.