The Quiet Years

[Manticore]

────────────────────────────────────────────────── LOCATION On board the Second Hand DATE 04.08.836 ARCHIVE personal log · title: 'The Fourth Gregory' · access: restricted ────────────────────────────────────────────────── Nine hundred gigabytes of someone else's secrets were moving through her uplink, and Lisa was thinking about a drink. The Second Hand was docked at Lanzarote Station because Lanzarote had bandwidth, and the bandwidth was the only reason Lisa ever came here. The files had to reach the drop before she got paid. Everything else was waiting. "Ninety-five percent uploaded," JADE's voice echoed across the room. The mess hall of the Second Hand had long since stopped being a mess hall - six workstations now, racks of servers in the cabinets where plates used to go. Her eyes flicked down to the screen just in time to watch the progress meter click over to 96%. She fought the urge to fidget. The job was almost done, which meant the part Lisa hated was about to begin. The job was standard for what her work had become. Corporate espionage, the kind where she walked away paid and everyone else involved walked into a bad quarter - reprisals, firings, someone's career quietly ended over a file they never should have lost. The corps never learned. That was the only reason she still had work. She keyed in the call. The routing ran through six layers of anonymizing relays before it left her ship, and the audio latency was still under a second. She'd built the routing herself, years ago. It still held. "Murakami," a gruff voice behind a modulator finally answered. Her lip twisted. She'd forgotten he'd given himself a Kusari codename. "It's Jaeger. I have something for you." "So it's done?" "Wouldn't be calling you otherwise. Transmitting the link." A long pause as he accessed it. "Why can't I download the files?" Here we go. "It's read-only until I receive my payment. Top of the folder, my invoice. Open it." Another, shorter pause. "This is not what we agreed on." "Time and materials contract, as agreed. Time came in as planned, despite a detour to Omega-3. Materials ran over. The drone class I needed wasn't cheap." She didn't bother with inflection. This was the fourth Gregory she'd dealt with this year. She could recite his lines for him. He sputtered. "You... you've got to be fucking with me. 575k for a drone? Are you out of your goddamn mind?" "I told you when you signed that I didn't know the materials cost yet. And you said - your words - 'money is no object.'" "I didn't... didn't mean spending... fuck! How am I going to get this through Payables? This is way too big of an..." he trailed off. She didn't like when they did that; it meant they were plotting some kind of incredibly stup- "I'm not paying that," he was trying to sound determined. "Credits are already spent, which makes it part of what you owe me." "Fuck you. You're lucky I give you a dime over this... this..." He paused again. "One minute." She said it quietly. "Wire my creds or these files are gone. Decide." "You can't... I'll... I'll report you! I know who you are, Lisa Jaeger. That's your real name, isn't it? I... I have proof of you committing a crime against Bretonia. So release the files or I'll turn it all over." "Akiko." A long pause on the other end. "How do you know that name?" "The oiran you see in New Tokyo. Photos, video. Your wife would probably want to see them. So would her friends." "You... you bitch." "Shut your mouth, Gregory. It can get worse." Silence. A small mercy. "You wire me one million, eight hundred and forty-seven thousand credits. I unlock the files. We don't speak again." "Fine. Credits sent." She watched the credits hit her account, then keyed in the command to release the files. Killed the connection. Stared at the black screen. The emptiness felt sharp in her belly in a way that wasn't related to not having eaten recently. Eventually she stood up. Pulled on her jacket. Checked her pockets without thinking about it. "I'm going across, JADE. Airtight mode." "Affirmative, Lisa," JADE answered. She went across. ────────────────────────────────────────────────── end of record · jaeger@second-hand:~$