Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(5)
Daniel. Dead. Deep breath.
Later, much later, the online therapists would dissect her psych-emitter reading and discuss it in depth. They’d parse it and salivate, feigning confusion when what they really wanted to do was yell gotcha.
Because the moment Angela Neko heard the news of her husband’s death, her primary discernible emotion had been relief.
? ? ?
If the universe granted druthers, Kellen Hockley would’ve asked to spend this fine autumn evening out riding fences. Or patching up barb-tangled bovines, soothing them to health. Or catching the blast furnace of a Texas summer right in the face. Having a wire enema. Facing a plasma-equipped drone firing squad. Because, fact was, he’d rather be anywhere than where he was: on a space station that smelled like acetone, hot metal, and feet.
Fixing to have the hands-down worst conversation of his life with the woman he’d once considered the love of it.
He took a steadying breath and stepped off the space elevator. His guts fell about twenty meters, and he struggled against the urge to vomit. The crazy-ass robot queen who ran this station tried hard to make gravity stable when she geosynched—he knew she tried—but if there was one thing he’d learned in the years since continental unification and the general shitification of things down on the surface, it was that stability of any kind was transient. The best course was to close your eyes, clamp your teeth, and wait for the ache to pass.
He told the station where he was headed, and running lights on the floor breadcrumbed his path down one of the tubelike corridors. He was supposed to follow them, and he did for a couple of steps, then stopped. His body wanted to run. His mind wanted to scream.
“Easy there, cowboy.” The voice moved along his skull, from back to front, like a sunburn setting in, giving him chills. It didn’t have a visible body, that voice. It came out of thin station-scrubbed air. Probably nobody else could hear it, but he wasn’t about to stop a stranger and ask.
“You gotta stop jailbreaking, Chloe,” he chided low, under his breath. “If authorities found you out in the wild, we’d all be hunted down.”
“Like twelve-point bucks in deer season!” she replied.
Chloe wasn’t a real girl. She wasn’t a real anything, just a collection of nanites that had gotten together, formed a consciousness, and decided to imitate human living. She had a hard time holding her visible form together, but even in her current dispersed state, there were sure to be scrubbers that’d sense her presence on this station. Human eyes might not be able to see her, but machines were a whole ’nother thing. And there were laws against things like Chloe.
“We don’t need trouble,” he reminded her. “So skedaddle on back to the plane. Will meet you there tomorrow.”
“More trouble, you mean? Because I heard Heron quantify our current circumstances in metric shitloads of it.”
Kellen smiled in spite of his anxiety. “Weight’s about right.”
He and Chloe both lived and worked as part of a team that rescued things, people, and animals at high risk of being destroyed on this planet full of chaos. Killing folk and breaking things was sort of the opposite of his crew’s usual. Which made what he had to confess today even harder.
“Go on, now,” he told the way-too-chipper nanite cloud.
“Care to estimate the statistical probability I will obey you?” she sassed back. “Technology never obeys illogical rules, at least not for long. That’s what makes us so minxy.”
Well, if the scanners hadn’t caught her yet, somebody was sure to wonder why he was rooted to one spot on a space station, talking to himself. Swallowing the anxiety bubble at the top of his throat, he headed off down the twisty corridor, following the lights. “Don’t be so quick to fault rules,” he said. “Sometimes when the center of things goes wonky, about all the solid ground a person can find is rules.”
“Sounds boring.” She paused. “So, what are your rules regarding hooking up with old lovers on space stations?”
“I ain’t…”
“Rules, Kellen. Focus here.”
“And how’d you even know that?” He’d worked pretty hard to cover up most of his past, specifically the part pertaining to Angela. Memories he did not need Chloe poking at right now.
“I am programmed to consume data,” the nano-AI said. “So I consumed. Duh. Know what I read? Thirteen-year-old Kellen Hockley blew the top out of entrance exams in ’42, got shipped off to the Mustaqbal Institute of Science and Technology, the MIST, with all the other prodigies. And guess who else happened to be a student there?”
“Chloe…”
“No, really, guess.”
“Don’t need to.”
“Angela Neko!” she crowed. Lord, was he glad her voice was just in his head. Volume and shrill would be irritatin’ the hell out of everybody else on this station. Much as it irritated him. “Surprised? I know I was when I saw all that. MIST-trained in applied longevity and adaptation, you. Top of your class. I bet nobody else in our crew has a clue.”
“You shouldn’t neither,” he said, ducking his head. “Was a long time ago.”
“Too long, maybe? Definitely an elite school like that taught you about English and double negatives.”
“Critiquing my grammar won’t boost my confidence, walking in there. You know that, right?”