Horizons Read online

  Horizons

  Mary Rosenblum

  “A solid command of character development that makes her tales irresistibly compelling and distinguishes her as a major new voice in science fiction.”

  BOOKLIST on SYNTHESIS AND OTHER VIRTUAL REALITIES

  AHNI HUANG IS HUNTING FOR HER BROTHER’S KILLER.

  As a class 9 empath with advanced biogenetic augmentation, she has complete mental and physical control of her body and can read other people’s intentions before thew can even think them. Faced with deceptions behind deceptions, Ahni is caught in a dangerous game of family politics—and in the middle of it all lies the fate of her brother.

  Hew search leads her to the Platforms, which orbit high above Earth. On the Platform New York Up, “upsider” life is different. They have their own culture, values, and ambitions—and now they want their independence from Earth. One upsider leader, Dane Nilsson, is determined to accomplish NYUp’s secession, but he has a secret, one that, once exposed, could condemn him to death.

  When Ahni stumbles upon Dane during her quest for vengeance, her destiny becomes inextricably linked to his. Together they must delve beyond the intrigue and manipulated schemes to get to the core of the Platforms and shatter any preconceived notions of what defines the human race.

  “Her prose is strong and her insights true; although more than one story here deals with virtual reality, the pleasures afforded by this collection are very real.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on SYNTHESIS AND OTHER VIRTUAL REALITIES

  Mary Rosenblum

  HORIZONS

  ONE

  AHNI HUANG SHUT HER EYES AS THE SHUTTLE FROM THE Elevator matched spin with the main port of New York Up. Grief distracted you, could get you killed. The Platforms were alien terytory to her. She didn’t know the rules. The chairs swiveled as her limbs grew heavier, giving Ahni a vivid moment of nausea before up and down settled into place. Didn’t help that down had been up a moment ago. She drew a slow breath, dropping briefly into Pause until her heartbeat slowed and her biochemistry stabilized. You could control mammalian stress reactions, but like grief, you couldn’t entirely banish them.

  Please remain seated until docking is completed, the cool androgynous voice murmured.

  All through the cylindrical cabin, seat-webs clicked and retracted and the clone-similar business passengers plus a couple of overdressed tourists smoothed wrinkles from their singlesuits and pulled bags from the storage bins beneath their seats. Ahni scanned the faces, senses heightened to the max now, watching for the telltale slide of an eye, the subtle edge in body language that would mark a hit or a tail.

  Her brother’s assassins would expect her father to come for vengeance, but they would also be looking for any member of the Huang Family. Two natives on board. Their too-slender, almost fragile build gave them away. She watched them covertly as she pretended to fiddle with her bag.

  Anticipation, resignation, fatigue, boredom… As a Class Nine empath, and a sensitive one, she was sure they weren’t acting.

  So far so good. Ahni levered herself from the padded acceleration recliner, her stomach happy with the eighty percent Earthnormal gravity of the rotating can’s outer shell. She stretched, aware of the muscles cording on her small, lithe frame, wanting to go out and run for about six miles to work out the kinks from the long Elevator trip. They had a jogging path here in New York Up, but it required a Level Three tourist pass and she wasn’t staying in that kind of hotel. She slung her slightly scuffed business brief over her shoulder, looking like your basic mid-level Assist running the boss’s errands from the planetside business headquarters. She adjusted her body language to reflect mild boredom tinted with a bit of worry and slipped between a man with a polished gym physique and a lanky woman with natural Mediterranean genes—probably Turkey or Crete, Ahni guessed— and a taut driven face. Still on full alert, Ahni shuffled down the narrow aisle and out into Customs and Immigration.

  It wasn’t much more than a wide corridor with a desk and gate barring it a dozen meters from the docking lock. Just enough space for a shuttle-load of bodies. No uniforms, no stun guns, but Ahni’s skin crawled with the knowledge that a half dozen beams and fields were probing every square centimeter of her skin and body cavities. Up ahead, a man with unselected Han features jolted to a halt, a look of surprise on his face that transitioned through annoyance to resignation. His com link, an earring that looked like a natural diamond, had just informed him that Security wanted to talk to him. With a small shrug, he turned and headed toward a panel that had slid silently open in the wall. A couple of people looked at him curiously. Ahni shrugged. He was innocent of anything, or thought he was. But according to Jira, the family’s information synthesist, China’s Dragon Home was squabbling with New York Up over tariffs. With his face, he wasn’t going to get where he was going on time.

  The man in front of her passed through the gate. Ahni stepped forward at the agent’s nod, keeping her bored/apprehensive body language carefully in place, and adding a mental layer of worry about the LaGuardia account and the discrepancies in the inventory database, couldn’t wait to get this mess untangled and get back to terra firma… Empaths made good money working for Security.

  She stood on the painted footprints so that the security scanner could check all her vitals against her ID chip. They’d match. The ID chip she had paid so much for was top quality.

  “Haarevort, Jessica, from the Free State of Singapore, Pan Malaysia Compact, on business with East Asia Biologicals, threeday visa,” the cold-faced woman intoned, her eyes on the screen in front of her.

  “Customs declaration?”

  “Nothing.” Ahni gave her the absentminded and impatient smile of the “small Family” member, the seasoned businesswoman running minor Singapore Family errands that the database assured the Immigration agent that she was. She held the brief to the scanner, and it chimed in agreement that the luggage seal had been placed at the Palembang Elevator station and hadn’t been tampered with.

  That had cost nearly as much as her ID chip.

  The agent looked up to nod her through, the hint of a flaccid sag to her muscles suggesting that she lived high up toward the axle of the orbital, not down here in the highG outer layers of the rotating can that was NYUp. For a second her eyes flickered as she focused on Ahni’s face, and a small flare of indecision made her hesitate.

  Ahni’s face was not Dutch Indonesian at all, but rather showed an unselected mix of Taiwan aboriginal, Han Chinese, and Polynesian genes in the planes of her face and tint of her skin. When she wore her hair long, it had a reddish cast in the sun, and a faint wave to the thick, unruly mass.

  The woman gave the slightest of shrugs and waved her through, although her indecision still tainted the air like a whiff of perspiration. Too bad. Ahni put tired unconcern into her posture as she hoisted her bag to her shoulder. If someone asked, this woman might remember her. Not good.

  She was here to kill. The World Council had granted the Taiwan Families Right of Reply.

  Still in business mode, Ahni followed the stream of passengers through the last meters of Immigration and out into the Arrival Hall. She closed her eyes, murmuring her access code to her implanted link.

  The screen lining her eyelids offered her a glowing map of the corridors opening into the Arrival Hall. The route to her Level Four hotel room glowed a neon blue, the others green. Fourth Level-close enough to the outer skin to have some gravity, far enough in to fit with her low-level errand-runner persona. She headed toward the elevator. Out here, on Level One, where all the tourist and business traffic came and went, the corridors were spacious, lined with shops offering trinkets — fragile crystals grown in microG, asteroid fragments set in precious metals, spidersilk clothing, food, euphorics, VR and fl
esh entertainment. Tourists strolled along, business travelers hurried somewhere. The thin-looking natives all wore service uniforms down here at this level. They weren’t curious, nor were they particularly friendly. A lounge with a vast window offered stars and a huge, blue-green slice of Mother Earth. Ahni halted in spite of herself.

  She had never been off-planet.

  Enormous against the endless black of space and the hard, bright glints of distant suns, the great blue sphere held her eyes. Down there, Xai had been born. And died. Grief lay like a stone in her heart.

  Killing his killer would not bring him back. But this was war. Ahni smirked for Security’s everywhere eyes, shrugged and turned away, the seasoned business traveler for a moment beguiled by what might have been real, but was merely a digital image on a wall screen faked to look like a window.

  A slip. Grief slowed you down. Boosting her senses to painful heights she left the lounge and crossed the crowded strolling spaces to the elevator, aware of every jostling shoulder and oncoming face. In the elevator, the floor numbers increased. Axle was up, skin was down. The floor pushed against her feet, but when the large car paused, she exited slowly, feeling as if she was walking on a trampoline. The other riders scattered from the lobby, comfortable in the diminished G. They vanished down corridors, intent, busy, not looking.

  A tall, skinny man in a blue singlesuit, a genes elect Masai type, hesitated, frowning slightly at a personal reader, concentrating on something slightly irritating.

  A tiny shard of intent pricked through that concentration static. Ahni reacted without thought, flinging herself down and toward his feet, shoulders curling to roll. Displaced air feather-brushed her cheek as a dart skimmed past, then her roll caught him at the knees, out of control and sloppy in the lessened gravity. He flew over her back, his screen sailing to clatter against the elevator door. His head hit the wall with a dull sound. Ahni tried to continue her roll and failed. Different physics here! She slammed sideways against the wall, tasting adrenaline and blood, struggling to get her breath.

  Nice setup. At this level, the elevator lobby apparently emptied quickly. Poison on that dart? No place to hide an unconscious body in these sterile residential corridors. She rolled him against the wall, tugged his singlesuit straight, arranged his limbs to suggest a nap, and strode briskly out into the corridor, her body language relaxed, senses straining. Eyes flicked past her in the hallway, not looking, not seeing, bodies brushed by. Time to disappear before Security got into the act.

  He could have darted her easily, but he had hesitated. Why? Ahni ran her fingertips over her shoulder as eyes skimmed past her, unseeing. She found the slickness of the tiny pseudoskin patch, peeling it off with a sharp fingernail under the pretense of scratching a small itch. A trace of blood made her fingertips slippery as she squeezed the purchased chip from its shallow bed.

  A tall woman with too-thin bones danced past her, humming to music playing in her head, naked from the waist up, a silver filigree of inlaid fiberlight decorating her full breasts, ringing her dark aureoles. The naked breasts startled Ahni in spite of her homework on NYUp customs.

  Holos or flat graphics decorated residential doors. The images–starscapes, unicorns, strange flowers–had the look of addresses. Not many uniforms or business suits up here, above the tourist level.

  Ahni turned down a connecting corridor, putting casual purpose into her posture and stride, dropping for an instant into Pause to suppress the flood of corticosteroids into her bloodstream. Without breaking stride, she pressed the pseudoskin patch to a residential doorway decorated with holographic vines. If Security looked for Haarevort they’d find her loitering in this doorway. Ahni paused, closing her eyes to summon the map of New York Up from Data. She needed safety, time to drop into full Pause–access her personal AI–and figure out how things had gone so wrong so fast. And how to fix it. An ancient fairy tale sprang to mind, about a Muslim rabbit and an Israeli fox. About a thorn patch… The corridor walls up here curved into floor and ceiling without angles, covered with a fine fibered carpeting, tinted a soft, soothing green. She hadn’t passed a hotel room for some time now. All residential? She’d stand out–stranger. When she reached the next service bay, she slowed until the preoccupied woman in the neon green singlesuit and natural euro-mix face disappeared into a room. Then Ahni whisked into the bay and palmed the control plate next to the service elevator. It only took a handful of seconds for the network in her palm to analyze and override the lock. The door slid open and she stepped in. They’d expect her to go down to Level One, to the safety of gravity and Security. She overrode the controls, sent the car up. Past the residential levels, past the manufacturing and storage levels, clear to the axle.

  The end of the line.

  She’d never spent time in microG before. Rabbit in the thorn patch. The Krator clan, Xai’s murderer, was an Earthside clan, just like the Huang clan. They wouldn’t look for her here.

  So why NYUp, where Krator had as little presence as Huang? Not even Pause had yielded an answer, but this was where the assassin’s trail had led her. I will avenge you, she promised her brother’s spirit as the elevator slowed and beeped at her. Xai would want vengeance. As their father did. Secure for MinimalG. The letters ran silver and gold across the wall in multiple languages, chasing themselves around and around the tubular walls. Not that she needed them, she was barely anchored to the floor by a shadow of down. Her stomach stirred, protesting, as she slipped into one of the padded harnesses that lined the wall.

  Movement resumed. The harness cut into her shoulders slightly, not enough to be painful. Then… the downward tug ceased and she floated, held by the straps.

  So far so good. Ahni slipped out of the straps. She swallowed, groping for up and down, but the featureless tube of the elevator offered her no orientation. The doors didn’t open and the annoyed blip of a beep told her that she was neglecting something… probably a password. Her palm tingled just above the threshold of feeling as her embedded hardware dealt with the control plate. The door slid open…

  …and she gasped.

  GREEN LIGHT

  She recoiled, a knee-jerk primate reaction, uncontrollable. That flinch started her tumbling and she bounced off the wall. Stomach knotting, she grabbed wildly for the door frame, missed, tumbled out into the blinding glare, floundering, helpless. Up. Down! She struggled for orientation as the world wheeled around her. Damp air, rich with unfamiliar smells. Soft green things brushed her. Hydroponics at the axis, she remembered, and the soft brush became recognizable as leaves, but up and down still refused to fall into place. Bad choice of thorn patch! She forced her burning eyes open, struggling to bring the green glare into some kind of focus. Goggles. You had to use something up here. Would the fierce light blind her? She used Pause to quell a spurt of fear adrenaline, grabbed, feeling soft plant things crush beneath her hands. She tore free and grabbed again, palms slick with plant juices. This time the stems held and she halted. Behind her, the elevator beeped and the door whispered closed. Somebody wanted it.

  So much for the thorn patch.

  Still clutching handfuls of moist, bruised leaves, Ahni stretched out a cautious foot, holding tight to the anchoring plants. She felt something thick and fairly solid beneath her foot. A large column? Behind her, the elevator chimed again and she caught a flicker of movement off at the edge of vision–the door opening.

  Before her conscious mind could catch up, she planted both feet against the leaf-covered column, knees bent. Her thigh muscles bunched and she shot forward, blind, arms shielding head and face, praying to all her ancestors that whoever had come down in the elevator would miss.

  She felt him, intent and at ease. Sure of himself.

  Her shoulder slammed hard into something that gave some and sent her tumbling wildly, cartwheeling like a kid’s pinwheel or a kite spiraling down. She curled into a fetal ball, head down, rebounded from another column, grabbed, felt stems tear in a spray of moisture. One foot landed squarely on
something and she pushed again, hard. Just go! She rocketed forward again.

  Felt something tiny sting her shoulder. Felt his triumph.

  Damn.

  Vision faded and her body no longer worked. Paralysis? Or death? Her face hit something thin and whippy, then something harder, bruised, couldn’t do anything. Slowing… vision fading…

  Ahni tried to close her burning eyes as her body drifted. Couldn’t do it.

  An apparition appeared in front of her. Narrow face, like a hairless skull drawn into caricature by some art program. Weird milky eyes with no pupil, limbs too long for their thin boniness and they… bent. Like green bamboo. A demon. I am dying, Ahni thought.

  The demon grinned at her, grabbed her wrist. She felt that… and experienced a moment of surprise, then more nausea as the demon yanked at her. Green and light fled by her and then she plunged into darkness.

  “WHY?’” THE VOICE penetrated a midnight sea filled with half-seen sharks. Anger rumbled in it and fear. “What were you thinking of? Koi, you know better.”

  “He was going to kill her. She’s pretty. And she couldn’t get around any better than a new baby. Why did he want to kill her? It… wasn’t fair. She couldn’t get away.”

  Different voice, high and thin like a child’s. She didn’t feel a child’s butterfly presence, but rather a clear stillness, like a pool of water.

  “Damn.” The anger voice rumbled. “Now what?”

  Ahni tested muscle groups and was rewarded by a whisper of response. Sank deeper into Pause. Play dead… or maybe get dead.

  “I can take her back, Dane,” the child-voice said. “Before she wakes up. I thought downsiders couldn’t come up here. Look at all those muscles! I’ll take her back and send her down.”

  “Too late. She’s listening to us.”

  Uh oh. Another empath. Change tactics. With a mental shrug, Ahmi opened her eyes and gasped, not needing to pretend confusion. The light stunned her.