Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [124]
No, this was personal.
So Jo-Jo tagged Tekton from Belle-Monde to Scolar and then on to the hick planet called Araldis.
Jo-Jo parked in one of Dowl’s executive bays and got properly, bad-tempered sober. Then he collated everything he’d learned about Tekton.
When he got bored reviewing the information he stretched his legs and hung out at the kafebars, listening to gossip. It confirmed most things he already knew and coloured in a few extra pictures. Araldis was run by inbred aristos who couldn’t organise a jar of piss in a tavern.
Jo-Jo found the best bar tucked in a corner of the station that had a view of the res-shift zone and a pervasive smell of av-oil. He reset his Health Watch to low sensitivity and idled away more hours brooding about Tekton. The fop had played the wrong guy for a sucker. Jo-Jo’s rejuve was in good shape and he was rich enough not to have to do anything but plan.
Everything he’d dug up on Tekton reeked of privilege. There was the upper-class Lostolian family with over a thousand spare epidermises each in secure store (the average Lostolian tight-skin had three, maybe four). That meant the fop would probably be as long-lived as Jo-Jo himself, barring accidental death.
Then there was the brilliant academic career as an architect, distinguished by his contributions to the design of the Latour Moons Bridge and various other God-awful constructs. Jo-Jo thought of them as Godawful because he was an old-fashioned guy when it came to messing with the universe. That was the reason he’d become a minerals scout. All that artificial crap on the civilised worlds wasn’t for him. Giant gas formations and meteorite-cratered worlds were his type of architecture—and were what God had intended.
The frontiers of space were Jo-Jo’s idea of romance and beauty—or they had been. Since actually discovering God, though, he seemed to get a lump in his chest and a pain in his frontal lobe every time he tried to think through the wonders of space. It wasn’t a good pain. Not a ‘Shit-this-is-too-big-to-contemplate’ pain: more like a ‘Something’s-not-right-and-I-can’t-for-the-life-of-me-put-a-finger-on-it’ pain.
It was as if something was trying to stop him thinking in a certain direction. Jo-Jo wasn’t in the least given to superstition or speculation of the metaphysical kind but his trip to Belle-Monde had become a kind of blur. He remembered the details of being there but not why he’d actually gone there. If he didn’t know better he’d think that substance abuse had finally wreaked its havoc.
No, he consoled himself, not with my HealthWatch model.
As Jo-Jo watched shifters resonate in and out of the station space he pondered the best way to crush a humanesque. Tekton had risked his reputation by using a Hera contract to get what he’d wanted. Then he’d forced Jo-Jo to search out a metal alloy that had the properties of liquid and the strength of steel.
What for?
Somehow the fop needed that to better his position on Belle-Mode. If Tekton lost his position, what did he have left? A failed career and shame to take home to Lostol.
Jo-Jo had already learned that returning to Lostol wasn’t optimal for Tekton. It seemed that the fop had left back there a disgruntled Dean’s daughter who was relying on him to come up big in the godhead stakes to save her pride. Tekton had wedded and bedded her to get to Belle-Monde and everyone knew it. The only way to make that less tawdry was for the fop to be a hit with the Entity—and then all would be well. The Dean’s daughter could justify her choice of husband and Tekton could stay away as long as he damn well liked.
Tekton had narrowed his options before Jo-Jo had even got started on narrowing them for him. That notion gave Jo-Jo a shiver of excitement. Which got him looking around for a drinking buddy.
The only other humanesque in the