Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (23 page)

“For one thing, her dress is
wrong. Sara’s had deeper cleavage.” Or, maybe it was Sara who had the
deeper cleavage.

“They botched the bio-lights
on her right shoulder blade—the pattern’s not even close.” He had stared
at that particular swirl of lights so much he could map every little purple dot
by memory.

“Her hair is the wrong
texture.” He wanted to say
softer
, but how he could know that from
just a vid?

“And, the arch of her body
is all wrong.” He remembered the feel of her curled up next to him, every
slope and angle. “Sara’s curves outward slightly from her waist to her
hips, and her waist is a lot smaller than that. Plus, she has matching dimples
just above her….” He should probably stop there. “On her lower
back.”

The train car was silent, except
for the cheery music. The surprised stares said that he had revealed too much,
implying more of an intimacy than he intended.

“You have to be kidding me.”
Kenon nearly sputtered in outrage. “Of all the people….”

Geir slapped a stunned David in
the chest and said, “I guess he won’t be filing anymore petitions with the
Embassy.”

Sean had definitely said too much
and was worried he had betrayed Sara’s confidence or painted a picture as false
as the vid playing over the Media. He chanced a look at her, expecting to see
disappointment or anger. He noticed his words brought a blush to her cheeks
where even the vid hadn’t.

Kenon was beside himself. He
asked, “Why, Sara? Why him?”

The others waited for her to
respond. Sean tried to think of a way to explain how he knew such personal details
without compromising more of Sara’s trust. He could say he had been watching
her without her knowing it. He’d look like a pervert, but at least they
wouldn’t think Sara docked him right after meeting him. He could bare their judgment
to protect her image. It’s not like he cared much about his reputation anyway.
He was about to bite the bullet when Sara simply shrugged and said, “He’s
sexy.”

Sean couldn’t hide the smile
tugging at the corner of his mouth. Maybe that kiss did mean something to her,
too.

As the train decelerated into the
station, Geir said, “I told you he cleaned himself up for a woman.”

Festive trills announced the
group’s arrival among a mob of extravagantly dressed Uppers, all clamoring to
talk with Sara up ahead. Sean moved against the throng with David and Mari, who
were in a full blown argument.

“Mari, that wasn’t real. You
know that, right? Sean proved it.”

“Maybe it just proves Sara’s
working her way through every man on the ship,” Mari said.

“She’s not like that,”
Sean snapped out. He wanted to explain how innocent her time with him had been,
but Mari pressed on.

“You’re delusional, Sean. If
a voyeur records it, the Media will air it. That’s why they’re so effective.
They capture it all. Just look around.”

He had counted six voyeurs since
they disembarked and was trying to avoid direct eye contact with all the flying
spies. It was the Embassy’s way of saying once you entered public domain, you
forfeited your privacy. He also suspected they could manipulate and suppress
the
live
feeds for their own purposes—the incident with Sara and David
proved it.

Kenon and Geir eddied out of the
crowd in front of them.

“How do they expect us to be
seen in a crowd this large?” Kenon asked.

Though Sean didn’t like being
smashed against so many people, he did welcome its temporary anonymity.

“There’s a Media kiosk. I’m
going to talk to somebody about that broadcast.” David hesitated and
looked at Mari, then pushed toward the kiosk a few meters away.

Geir put an arm around Mari and
gave her a quick kiss to the side of her head. “Don’t worry. David’s crazy
about you. We all see it.”

Kenon leaned in. “Though
everyone likes to sample something new now and then.”

“Leave it alone,
Kenon,” Sean said. He still tended to be a bit protective of Mari. “You’re
just pissed because Giselle’s taking an Armadan amour.”

“An Armadan in
your
family circle?” Geir started into one of his loud, bellowing laughs.

Kenon balked. “Nothing’s
official yet.”

Geir took Mari’s arm and guided
her toward the welcoming center. “You got nothing to worry about with
David. Trust me.”

Trust. One virtue Sean had a hard
time finding in this system.

Several attendants from the
welcoming center rushed at the new arrivals to upload v-maps of the Tredificio
into the guests’ wrist reporters. Sean could barely hear the brunette woman
spieling to him about the Tredificio’s amenities as she competed with a barrage
of synth spiders playing around them. He walked away from the attendant
mid-sentence, scanning the mass of people for Sara.

She was surrounded by clinging
Socialites, and Soli was right in the middle of it all, acting as Sara’s
personal liaison and smiling pretty for the voyeurs hovering overhead. She
looked more comfortable with the attention than Sara did.

A woman strolled up beside him
and took his arm. “It’s been a long time.”

Sean looked the woman over,
seeking recognition. Deep blue bangs framed her jawline but the rest of her
shoulder-length hair was blonde. Her face was a homogenized combination of the
usual Socialite features. He breathed in her citrusy scent, but still no
memories came.

“Don’t tell me you forgot
about me already. Our friend, Zak, would be so disappointed.”

It was then he noticed the mayfly
hologram pin at the bottom of her cleavage. The wings fluttered.

“Our last meeting was kind
of ephemeral,” he said, testing his theory.

She put her hand over his ear and
kissed him on the cheek. A puff of air blasted into his ear. He flinched.

“We have a subvocal
connection now through this cocom.”
He heard her voice inside his
head, but her lips never moved. The cocom devices were gaining popularity among
the fraggers, but Sean thought using one was a good way to mark yourself as a
criminal. Guess he no longer had a choice.

“Call me Phoebe and act
like you’re happy to be catching up on old times.”
What she vocalized
for everyone else was, “I bet I could find a way to help you
remember.”

“I don’t think we’ve
met.” Sara stood at Sean’s elbow with Soli.

He looked only at Sara as he
introduced the women. It felt awkward using her full title. Distancing. He
didn’t like it.

“Nice to meet you.” Sara
gave Phoebe’s hand a pulse, then slipped her hand into Sean’s. The subtle show
of possessiveness sent little electric sparks through his fingertips.

“You’re quite friendly
with the ambasadora.”

“She’s just a passenger
on my ship.”
The subvocal conversing was giving him a headache, or
maybe it was just the new implant.

“Your body language tells
me otherwise. You’re worried about how she’s responding to our implied
intimacy.”

Sean didn’t say anything.

“Sara, there’s someone you
have to meet.” Soli called to a friend.

Sara looked from Sean to Phoebe
once more. “I’ll see you at dinner, Sean?” She kissed his cheek.

“Sure.” He squeezed her
hand before letting go.

Phoebe said her farewell
pleasantries to Sara as she reproached Sean.
“She’s dangerous. I
received the same background check on her that you did. She was trained as a
contractor and most likely sent to eliminate you.”

“I considered that. I
have it under control.”

Sean watched Sara walk away.

“I’d say she has you
under control.”

“I said I—”

Phoebe cut him off. “Do you
have a dance for an old tumble?” She took Sean by the arm and led him
through an entryway to a large elevated platform.

Numerous couples held each other
close and softly swayed around a darkened dance floor. Sean hesitated when he
spotted the turquoise beams of mind minstrels scanning the dancers. It was bad
enough citizens fell over themselves to have a voyeur record their actions and
opinions for Media broadcast, but now the Embassy had taken transparency a step
further by stealing a fragger interrogation technology and repurposing it to
read a person’s thoughts and emotions.

Not
actual
thoughts, not
even the tech geniuses among the fragger organization could do that…yet.
Rather, these thin floating parallelograms scanned a target to read their brain
waves. Depending on what center of the brain was most active, they could
interpret emotion, mood, and bits of memory, occasionally a word or two if the
person saw words spelled out in his head. The odd result had been a tonal
feedback that resulted in almost musical patterns. As a joke, someone worked up
a randomizing program which assigned notes to certain data as it came in, then
played the results back as musical entertainment, sometimes with lyrics
snatched from bits of dialog.

One of the small devices hovered
above a kissing couple to their right. Its beat became sultry and loud as the
couple groped one another. The mind minstrel drew on their energy. Its rhythm
followed the sway of their hips and the pounding of their hearts. A low female
voice sang out of the energy amps,
“I’m waiting for you…to touch
me.”
A voyeur broadcast the dance and music across the Media, much to
the couple’s delight.

Sean steered clear of the area.
He didn’t need his thoughts and conversation put to music. His emotions were
charged and a minstrel would detect the agitation through his respiration and
heart rate. It was similar to the tech he had used to monitor Sara last night,
only without the musical accompaniment, though part of him admitted he would
like to have a read on her emotions.

Phoebe put her arms around his
neck, and they fell into a rhythm with the music.
“If docking her is
your idea of controlling her then you’re not as smart as I thought.”

Sean narrowed his eyes and said
out loud, “Don’t assume anything.”

“And, don’t speak out
loud!”
Her grip on his shoulder tightened, and he felt the bite of her
nails through his shirt.

“I’m not docking
her.”

“That’s even worse. I
could accept your sexual attraction to her, but from the way you’re acting, I
believe you’re heading into an emotional fallacy. This behavior isn’t like you.
I’ve studied all of your training, your anti-social and anti-Embassy attitudes,
and I vouched for you personally. You had no interest in the Socialite scene,
but now you’d let some Embassy bitch play you for a fool because she makes your
pants a little tighter? Eliminate her. Make it look like an accident.”

Sean crushed Phoebe’s hand and
grabbed the back of her neck to force her ear to his mouth. “You may have
watched some vids and read some reports about me, but you have no idea who I
am. And, I don’t know you. There are very few people in this system I trust.
You’re not one of them.”

She put her head on his shoulder
to force an illusion of intimacy.
“You don’t have a choice, Sean. The
fragger bosses have splintered and that will soon trickle down the ranks. I
have a way to hold the organization together.”

“How do I know any of
this is true?”

“I know what the intel
dump is and where it’s hidden.”

Sean stood still. “You
know?”

She shot him a warning look about
speaking out loud.

“You’re involved?”
Rage welled inside of him.
“I killed one of my own men because the
bosses told me he was responsible. That’s what trust got me.”

“It wasn’t me who gave
those orders. There are some of us who still want to bring down the Sovereign,
end his illegal takeover. I believe your ideology matches ours, otherwise I
wouldn’t waste my time.”

“Then tell me what’s in
the dump.”

“The cure for Prollixer’s
curse. Patch codes for his cell sweepers.”

Sean’s mind raced with the
implications. The idea of a doubled or tripled life span or the myth of eternal
life sounded like society’s ultimate dream, but the insanity that accompanied
those with such an unnatural longevity would become a nightmare of world
proportions.
“Who figured out the patches?”

“An Embassy tech team,
one of whom was a fragger operative. They needed test subjects, so injected
cell sweepers into volunteer Armadan troopers.”

“Not contractors?”

“Contractors aren’t as
loyal as they pretend to be. Armadans are bound by a higher sense of duty to
the Embassy, no matter who’s in charge.”

“What happened to
them?”

“
Our man smuggled the
patches into the V-side and destroyed the originals before they could be
treated. The risks of repairing their bots were too high. The Embassy could use
their DNA to reconstruct the patch codes.”

So the Armadan volunteers were
dying like Prollixer, and experiencing the same type of dementia.

“Where is the dump?”
Sean asked.

“Later. We’ve been
together too long and starting to draw attention. Meet back here tonight after
dinner.”
Phoebe pulled away from him as a turquoise beam of light
approached.

“I hope no one gets motion
sick.” Sara looked at the floating tables. The slightly scooped hot pink
and green platforms were reminiscent of giant water lilies, the pedestal table
standing at the center like an azure stamen. Hundreds of real lily pads floated
around them in the huge inset pool, their blooms matching those of the dining
platforms. The air was awash in flowery notes.

“Welcome to the Aqua Biome,
Ambasadora Mendoza,” said their male host. He wore white flowing pants
cinched with the gala’s official dark green sash, but no shirt over his shapely
torso. He led them to a gangplank. After a few tentative steps Sara realized
there was no sway.