Thin Air: The Cosmic Crime Fiction of Gustavo Bondoni

By Gustavo Bondoni and Tithi Luadthong

Crime has always been around, and it will continue far into the future. Whether it's priceless artifacts disappearing from a sealed container, trading useless space rocks to aliens in exchange for something far more valuable, a genetically-modified, not-quite-human-anymore celebrity who dies under mysterious circumstances, ghosts achieving the p

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hemelein Publications
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642780635

Gustavo Bondoni

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer with over two hundred stories published in fourteen countries, in seven languages, and is a winner in the National Space Society's "Return to Luna" Contest and the Marooned Award for Flash Fiction (2008). His latest books are The Malakiad (2018) and Incursion (2017). He has also published two science fiction novels: Outside (2017) and Siege (2016) and an ebook novella entitled Branch. His short fiction is collected in Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).

Book preview

Thin AirTitle Page

To my brother Frik,

who was probably wondering

when I'd get around

to dedicating a book to him.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Book Full of ‘em, Danno!

Joe Monson

Essential Clues

Thin Air

A Position of Power

Normal

Expanded Horizons

As Advertised

Stress Control

Land of Opportunity

Evasion

Flytrap

Offline

Wyrm of the Mangroves

Sileon the Unwinder

Anchored Down in Anchorage

Ghostprint

You Have Dialed the Wrong Number

The Safety of Thick Walls

The Difficult Death of Auguste Henri Vincent

Iced

Industrial Casanova

Milonga

Bats Domino

A Request

Contributors

by Gustavo Bondoni

Indizio

A BOOK FULL OF ‘EM, DANNO!

JOE MONSON

As an editor who works primarily in short fiction, I’ve read thousands of short stories. The drawback to that is that it’s hard to remember which stories are which sometimes because there are so many. I don’t remember the first story by Gustavo Bondoni I read. It’s been around a decade since then, and I’ve read so many of his stories now that they all sometimes blend together in my mind.

However, Gustavo’s stories always stand out.

His characters feel real. Almost all of his stories have a at least a little humor scattered throughout them (some have even more). He uses all five senses to develop the setting, and he doesn’t let the stories founder in unnecessary detail. He’s learned the ropes, and only breaks the rules when it works for the story.

I’ve been a fan of detective and crime fiction since I was very young, and I came to it in a similar way as Gustavo. I remember watching Perry Mason from a very young age with my dad. Since my dad was an attorney, he enjoyed watching that show as well as many others in a similar vein, and I watched them all with him: Agatha Christie movies, Hawaii Five-O (the original one), Rumpole of the Bailey, The Paper Chase, Matlock, Jake and the Fatman, Night Court (the original), Murder She Wrote, Cagney and Lacey, Law & Order (almost all of the different flavors), Mystery!, and more.

I also read quite a few mystery/crime book series while growing up, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, The Saint, Sherlock Holmes, and others. More recently, I’ve watched and read a number of Japanese anime and manga series such as Detective Conan, Master Keaton, and Kindaichi Case Files.

I’ve also been a fan of science fiction since I was young, and one of the first science fiction books I remember reading as young boy was Secret Under the Sea (1960), by Gordon R. Dickson. This was a mystery story set in the future where a young boy goes on an adventure to figure out what’s frightening his dolphin pal near the underwater research station where he lives with his parents.

It’s a pretty simple book, and definitely aimed at kids, but it fascinated my young mind in the same way that watching Jacques Cousteau did. Futuristic (set in the far-off year of 2013!) undersea mystery? I was 100 percent hooked!

Fast-forward several decades, and now I’m editing and publishing science fiction and fantasy, something I never expected to do. I’ve published Gustavo’s story For the Light in the Twilight Tales anthology I co-edited with Jaleta Clegg, worked with him on this volume, and he’ll have a story in my upcoming The Horror at Pooh Corner anthology featuring a mash-up of Winnie-the-Pooh and Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Thin Air came about through him trying to find a home for a different collection. I told him I’d be happy to read it to see if it would be something that would work for Hemelein. While that first collection didn’t quite fit here, Thin Air hit all the right notes from the first story.

This volume is the first in the new Indizio publication series from Hemelein, featuring crime, mystery, and detective fiction with a science fiction or fantasy element to it. This collection is full of stories I would have enjoyed back when I was young, and that I enjoy reading now.

You’ll find detective stories, crime stories, and stories with a little mystery, all by one of the best and most prolific science fiction authors today. Hardly a day goes by (it seems to me, anyway) where he doesn’t post an announcement about another story sale. Gustavo really knows how to weave a compelling tale, and these are all among his best.

It’s only right, then, that this collection should be the number one volume in the Indizio publication series. We plan to feature many more authors in this series, with novels, short fiction collections, and possibly even some poetry mixed in there, too! Keep an eye out for more on that in the future.

And, if you enjoy these stories, look up Gustavo’s other works. I’m sure you’ll find even more interesting stories to enjoy!

Joe Monson

Managing Editor

Hemelein Publications

ESSENTIAL CLUES

They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

They’re right.

My own journey has brought me to a hotel room in London—where I am writing this introduction—because I need to be in a convention in Birmingham in a couple of days. Once there, I will be on several panels and signing books. If you’d asked the seven-year-old version of me whether he thought that I would someday be flying internationally to do that kind of thing, he would probably have laughed at you.

And yet, that same little kid was taking the first steps on his own thousand-mile journey. Since nights fell early in Switzerland, and there were only eight channels on cable—of which only one was in English—that little kid went to the school library every week and checked out a book or two.

Today, I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer. The stories in this book are either new to this collection or originally published in genre magazines and anthologies. You would expect that seven-year-old me would have been voraciously reading science fiction.

I wasn’t. I was reading The Famous Five and The Hardy Boys.

Of course, I was aware that such a thing as science fiction existed. I loved Star Wars (we were two-thirds of the way through the original trilogy by then) and catching an episode of Battlestar Galactica on TV occasionally was considered the greatest of lucky breaks. But I wasn’t a science fiction reader. In fact, all I can remember of the written genre from that era was an abortive attempt at making my way through The White Mountains. I can’t even recall why I didn’t enjoy it, but I do remember that I never finished it.

Crime fiction was a different story. I devoured the books in a day or two and went back for more. I read every Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys book they had, and I kept right on reading them until I discovered Isaac Asimov and Robert Asprin as a ten-year-old.

Now, this is the mid 1980s, and Asimov’s books had just been republished en masse because Foundation’s Edge, published in 1982, had sold spectacularly well. Regardless of your opinion of that book, it was a seismic moment in the history of SFF and it reinvigorated the genre. That meant it was prominently displayed at every bookstore, and it drove kids such as I was then to the genre. Other kids might have come to it from a different direction, but that was mine.

Years later, I began to write stories, and I found that what I was writing was science fiction and fantasy. They weren’t all crime stories, but I had a special love for the ones that were.

You might say that science fiction and fantasy crime stories are the very essence of who I am as a reader first and a writer second. The distillation of years of growth.

That’s why this collection is important to me. It represents the forty-year path from that seven-year-old who needed entertainment on winter nights to the author sitting in a hotel room writing this introduction.

There is an entire reading and writing life between these covers. I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I have enjoyed the journey that informed them.

Gustavo Bondoni

London, April 2023

THIN AIR

I still can’t say that I understand how they did it, but I did learn a bunch of other stuff along the way. Mostly about myself, and mostly not the kind of stuff you’d admit to other people.

As usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. It started with the heist. No, scratch that. It actually started with the girl. It never starts with a girl, no matter what they tell you, but this time it did.

At least I think it was a girl. Well, it’s probably more accurate to say that I hope it was a girl. With how easy it is to download people into bioprinted bodies on this station, it could just have easily been some guy who drew a truly crappy assignment. Yeah, I know that’s illegal, but with the kind of people I run with, you run into stuff that’s a lot more illegal than just printing bodies. And it’s not like the police on Tiantáng have ever caught a criminal. For all I know the mind in the body was just code, some upjumped AI virus they’d decided to send out into the world.

I really do hope it was a girl in there. The other possibilities creep me out. I guess I’m just not modern enough.

One thing that isn’t open to argument is the body. That girl was either printed from a fantasy catalogue or had been through the chassis shop for a complete rework. Not a line on her was wrong, and those lines had been designed to keep someone thinking about them, though I doubt that someone was me. I’m just a small fish in this mess.

She appeared in my office during one night cycle. I work the night cycle because my customers are asleep during the day.

Hello, she said from the doorway.

I grunted, not looking up from the display on my desk. Sit down for a second. I need to finish sending this.

She did, and I got a waft of perfume that made me look up. On a station where water is rationed and expensive as hell, perfume is all over. But hers smelled like the real deal, not the stuff you get in public dispensers. As soon as I saw her, I immediately regretted asking her to sit down. In fact, I wanted to conclude the interview as quickly as possible so I could watch her leave.

I already knew we weren’t going to be working together. The clothes on her told me that she could afford better, so the best I could do was to get her out of there as soon as possible.

They say you’re honest, she said.

They say a lot of stuff.

That’s pretty much all they said about you. That you’re honest. That’s it. But you’re the only one they said that about.

I shrugged. There were maybe four of us in this racket. Keef got the high end jobs, tracking down kidnapped rich kids. There were a couple of intermediate-level operators, and then there was me. The station wasn’t really big enough to support all four of us, so I ended up getting the true glamor jobs like following planet-monkey’s significant others around the station to make sure they weren’t fooling around while they were on assignment. Most of the time, what I found didn’t make them happy.

Yeah, I give what is paid for, tell what I see. Why? Do you need someone to tell you that you’re in the wrong place? I can do that for free.

I’m in the right place, she said. The face matched the body, reddish brown hair above big dark eyes and lips that were just the right amount of puffed. Had to be printed. Had to. Look. All I need is someone to be present, as a witness, when my employers unseal a container. You fit the bill. You’re for hire, and people will believe what you say you saw.

I raised an eyebrow at her. Let me guess. You’ll pay me a big chunk on the side if I say what you want me to, plus you’ll give me special favors.

She snorted. Actually, we’ll pay you exactly your regular fee to say what you actually saw. As for special favors, we can talk about those fees once the job is done.

Oh. I really hadn’t pegged her as a hooker. That threw me, but why not? Print a couple of interesting bodies and the punters would come streaming in. This one was a little tame for the starliner crowd, but might work well on folks from dirtside. We had quite a few tourists from Premen Tau on the station, and this girl looked like she’d been designed with the wet dreams of one-gee yokels in mind. Our station’s artificial gravity wasn’t strong enough for them to be built that way. When do I need to start?

Now.

Now?

Why, got something better to do?

She had a point, so I let her lead the way. She knew just how closely I was watching, so she made certain I had a good view.

While we walked, I did a background check on her using the single AI spider I subscribed to, which I knew would tell me what she wanted me to know. I found exactly what I expected. Not from Tiantáng, which wasn’t a surprise. Even if she was from the upper crust, a woman like that does not just appear without everyone having heard of her. Not on a station with a permanent population of less than five thousand people. More interesting was that she wasn’t from the Tau system at all. The records showed her arriving on a Cygee from Hermina three days before.

Of course, anyone who could print a body with impunity could edit the public records much deeper than my AI could penetrate. The most interesting thing I got from my implants this time was the name she wanted to go by, Camila Tsu. Interesting, as there was no trace whatsoever of oriental genetics in her look, which was essentially European, with possibly a hint of Africa.

Not much of that on Herminia, which had been colonized by the Chinese back when Earth nations still mattered. A good number of my own ancestors could trace their roots to Herminia, so I knew what I was talking about.

Names were another thing that were easy to create. Easier than bodies, in fact.

So Camila, I said. Looks like you know your way around.

It’s a small station and I have good implants.

She would, of course. Especially if they’d printed her. They could simply print the flesh around the implants then. No scar tissue that way, and better reception. The deep galaxy pukes were always telling me how they’d switch bodies for each job, and how much better the implants worked. They told me that he wouldn’t believe the stuff they were doing a bit further down the spiral arm where no one cared about printing.

They were probably full of it. Printing was controlled because it went very wrong very often. If they were pushing the envelope, the envelope was probably pushing right back, and that meant that there were a bunch of starliners whose recycling facilities were working overtime to assimilate the mistakes. Deep spacers were unlikely to enjoy that kind of inefficiency.

If I hadn’t known where we were going, I’d have suspected her of leading me into an ambush. The storage decks weren’t the nicest parts of the station. No rust, of course—we only wished we had enough humidity in the air to make stuff rust—but there was dust everywhere. Someone told me that station dust was made of human skin cells. I hope they were wrong, because there was a hell of a whole lot of it on every pipe along the walkway.

Also, despite plenty of free energy, the illumination was weak. Weak enough that I completely missed the two cops in the grey of the station security detail until the moment we walked into them. They were standing extremely still, beside the entrance to an unloading bay.

One of them nodded at me. Sten. Nice to see you moving up in the world.

I acknowledged with a smile. It would be nice, but somehow I’m not convinced that that’s what’s happening.

Yeah, probably not.

We walked through the airlock and felt my ears pop. On the other side was a large metal cube of a room, about thirty meters to a side, painted grey and yellow, although the paint was faded and chipped with age and use. The far wall consisted of a sealed lock door, through which containers could be entered from space. The chamber was pressurized, although not quite as much as the rest of the station. Air was expensive, even if we had more of that than water.

Looking kind of lost in the middle of the room was a much smaller cube, maybe five meters to a side. A standard interstellar container.

I noted with interest that this was one of the fully sealed versions. Whatever was inside was valuable enough that the container had been 3D printed, fully sealed, around it. The only way to open it on the other side was to cut it open. In my thirty-five years on the station, this was the first time I’d seen one of these.

A group of men stood beside it. One of them was a man I knew, the other three were strangers dressed in a fashion unfamiliar to me. They wore bright tight-fitting tunics that reached their knees over ballooning leggings. It didn’t look comfortable, and was definitely not local. They nodded to Camila, and one took a step forward.

Are you the witness? he asked.

Looks that way. I’m actually a freelance investigator, but I do odd jobs as well.

The man turned to the guy I knew, a supervisor on the security force whose name was Rublov. And this is a credible witness.

Rublov didn’t like me. He knew it, and I knew it. But to his credit, he was either feeling very professional that day or he was being paid well enough to overlook his personal feelings. Yes, Sten is considered above reproach.

I gave him a raised eyebrow for that, but softened it with a respectful nod.

All right then. The man who’d spoken to us signaled for a worker in engineer’s dungarees to approach. Open it.

The technician nodded and closed his eyes. He was clearly wired to the control system of the loading dock’s machinery. A slot opened in the chamber roof and a bar-shaped industrial laser lowered itself, and swiveled until the business end was facing the smaller cube.

The engineer spoke. This is exactly fifteen centimeters thick, correct?

Yes.

I was surprised to realize that the person who’d responded was Camila, and not one of the offworlders. That was interesting.

Without further ado, the laser described a circle about a meter in diameter on the face of the cube. An electromagnet descended from the roof, attached itself to this section and pulled it away. The goon squad motioned that I should be the first to look inside.

I did.

It’s empty, I told them.

Impossible, Rublov blurted, shouldering me aside to look for himself.

Not impossible, the leader of the men said. Simply difficult. We showed you the video.

That must have been faked. Must have. All you can see on it is a bunch of paintings dissolving. And then they just aren’t there. It’s stupid.

Have your own people do an analysis. I’m sure they can measure how long ago this space was occupied by the material. That will confirm what we’ve told you.

Rublov muttered that he’d do just that, and his features went slack as he communicated with the central office.

I guess I did what I came to do, I said.

Stay where you are, Rublov said. I’m not done with you yet.

I glanced at my employer, who shrugged rather delightfully. You’re being paid by the hour. Might as well stick around, she said.

It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do, but Rublov’s growing anger made me nervous, especially when the lab bots confirmed the offworlder’s claim that the sealed chamber had recently held canvas and pigments in certain quantities. The numbers rolled over me, as well as phrases like electron spin analysis and quantum anomalies. I really wasn’t into the technical side of investigation. That wasn’t why people hired me.

Can someone translate what’s going on? If you want me to testify, which I assume is the reason I’m here, I need to know what I’m testifying to.

Camila stepped forward. Her previously calm demeanor had broken down, and I could see some stress on her perfect features. This container held six paintings that arrived from Earth six months ago. They were monitored by closed circuit camera and they were fine until six hours ago. Then, they simply disappeared. In one frame, they were there, the next they were gone.

Valuable paintings? As if I really needed to ask.

Three Van Goghs, a Picasso and two Trinarchs.

Oh. Even I’d heard of them. Trinarch was synonymous with painting. His moving pigment technique which changed the painting depending on the mood of the viewer had revolutionized the art world. Putting two Trinarchs in the same container was irresponsible. But then my brain kicked in again. I can think of a dozen ways the video could have been faked.

Yes, that’s what Rublov said. And that’s why we had his team do an analysis.

He’s not happy with the results, I observed.

We are much less happy.

Either that was true or she was an excellent actress. Her eyes were moist, and I could have sworn she was using all of her self-control to avoid breaking down.

She went on. I was hoping this wouldn’t be necessary, but there’s another part of this job.

If figured. They never called me in just to witness something. You could get any citizen in good standing to do that, or any official. Hell, I think there’s even a notary somewhere on the station, although I would guess that his rates are a bit more expensive than mine. When I got called in it was usually because there was dirty work expected or, less frequently, because someone was in danger of getting themselves bounced all over the station by unfriendly goons, and preferred to grant the honor to me.

I grunted to let her know that I’d expected as much. Talk to me.

Not here, she said, nodding toward Rublov and the three other guys that I assumed were her partners in whatever crime was happening. They were arguing amongst themselves and paying no attention to us. For some reason I got the impression that it wasn’t Rublov she wanted to keep the rest of the conversation secret from.

We walked past the sentries, and I expected her to turn left, head toward Sparklertown, the richer part of the station, where a radiation-shielded dome of reinforced lexanium offered stunning views of Premen Tau or of the surrounding stars, depending on which way the station was oriented.

She surprised me. Before I knew it, we were sitting in one of the dives on the dockside central hall. The barman hailed me by name, suggested that I was all kinds of deviant for not having been around in ages and explained that he’d sent my usual table off to be disinfected, because after I’d sat there it wasn’t fit for other customers.

He did all of that for the girl’s benefit. I’d been there two nights before.

The worst part of it was that it worked. Camila raised an eyebrow at me. I ignored it and led her through the dark, dank and smelly corridors between the tables to a booth at the back from which I could watch the door, and no one in the bar could watch me without me watching them right back. I didn’t think the precautions were in the least bit necessary, but one has to keep up the forms.

Can you tell me now? Or better yet, let me guess. You want me to find the paintings.

Yes. She paused and looked shifty-eyed for a second. Then she sighed. Well, maybe.

"Maybe finding a bunch of paintings could be really tricky. Like if I do, I maybe get paid, and if I don’t, likewise."

I’ll pay you your hourly rate, same as up till now. The thing is we may have to decide on the fly whether the paintings appear or not.

Now this was the kind of thing I was used to. Clients never tell you what a job is about right up front. And if they do, they’re lying to you and often to themselves as well. I suddenly felt much more comfortable, as if I’d changed into an old pair of shoes. Suddenly this girl fit into my world much better than she had before. Sure, it made her a little sleazier and weaker and possibly a criminal, but that, it seemed, was how I like them.

Also, it suddenly became I’ll pay you as opposed to we’ll pay you. That’s the kind of subtle difference we highly trained professionals spot right off the bat.

Now, I knew how this went. I held up a hand. Before we continue, I’m going to ask you to pay me a couple of days up front. Non-refundable. I think I’m about to learn a bunch of stuff that I’d be much better off not knowing, and that kind loss of innocence comes with a price. Mine is two days in advance, even if the job lasts a couple of hours. If we end up with more than two days, we’ll talk again then.

All right, she replied.

My implants pinged one of the nerves in my ear and a message from the station’s financial computer appeared in front of my eyes. I suppose my surprise must have shown.

The extra is to cover your concern about the maybes.

That was a lot of extra for a few maybes. I had a sudden feeling that I might want to spend some of the extra on a good life insurance policy, or maybe just to get a backup of my brain and memories uploaded somewhere. But what the hell, I didn’t really have anyone I wanted to leave the money to, and as for a backup, I’d never really believed that that would make much difference if they actually got to me. This me would still be dead.

All right. You have my attention. How do we define whether I find them or not?

Basically, she replied, That depends on who took it.

Any doubts about how many factions we had playing this game just went out the window. Any time there were more than good guys and bad guys involved, the answer to that was too many. I felt that, in this particular instance, there were too many and then a few. Crap, I said. Care to start at the beginning?

It’s not that complicated. This shipment came from the Luna Collection, and it was in transit to Gliese, for the Trent family. It disappeared, as far as we were able to tell, between ten and twelve in the morning cycle. The camera inside the container seemed to be malfunctioning, showing fuzziness and then, all of a sudden, it was working fine and the paintings weren’t there. You know the rest: the container hadn’t been tampered with, and the paintings aren’t in there. That’s it.

Except for the fact that it’s completely impossible, I said.

Well, not entirely. I’ve heard of something like this happening once before, and the theory that was being thrown around was that they’d found a way to use the quantum information of the artwork’s molecules to actually displace it.

You mean teleportation? Even I know that’s impossible.

Again, yes and no. It’s been possible to send information through entangled quantum pairs for centuries. Now it seems that they’ve found a way to replicate matter. What no one explained to me was why the originals disappear, but they do. Probably some kind of exclusion principle.

I have no idea what you just said. Let’s just call it teleportation.

She shrugged. Suit yourself. I was just trying to explain why I need your help. You see, to get the quantum information necessary to do that, you’d need to scan the paintings at a subatomic level. You’d have to have basically unlimited physical access to them.

How far away would they need to be to make something like this work? I asked.

Reliably? I would think that they needed to be on the station. The kind of data stream you’d need to transmit to make something like this work is staggering. If you tried to send that though space, especially with the kind of interference you get in the Tau Ceti system, you’d end up with nothing but goo on the other side. This has to be perfect, or it’s worthless—all you’d do is destroy the originals for no reason.

Well, that makes it pretty easy. Do you know anyone on this station who could have had the access?

She paused for a second, and looked down at the table. Just one.

And that, of course would be the guy she didn’t want me to finger. I know you want to protect this person, but if you want me to work for you, I need to know the facts. Who is he?

Camila looked back up and held my gaze. Me. I was the curator for the gallery, and had unlimited access to all six pieces. The only problem is that I didn’t do it.

I sighed internally. I should have known. All right. Then we move down the list. If access isn’t the key, then we need to try data use. What kind of bandwidth are we talking about?

She shook her head. Too much for station systems to handle. You need dedicated quantum computers.

Even easier. We need to look for unexplained electrical surges. I know just the guy who can help us out, he’s been hacked into the control system for so long that the security protocols actually ask his systems for permission before doing anything. Come on.

I wanted to move, and this excuse was as good as any. I supposed that I was the only person involved who’d needed to be told that my lovely Camila was the prime suspect. Sitting in one place for so long made it certain that every other player knew exactly where we were, even if they couldn’t see me from inside the bar without me seeing them.

I carefully plotted a tortuous route to my hacker’s place, designed to allow me to throw off amateur followers and spot professional ones. So I was pissed if not actually surprised when a bunch of guys suddenly jumped out from behind a boiler.

I got a single curse out before one of them whacked me over the head with something solid. It felt like a starship, or perhaps a building. Something along those lines.

I went nighty-night for a while.

I awoke to screams. Her screams. They weren’t hitting her, weren’t doing anything noisy, but whatever they were doing was making her bitch and moan like they meant it. I stayed quiet for a while, just to see if I learned anything interesting, but all I heard was a couple of yells, a long, drawn out scream and a muttered: crap, she passed out. Go get some cold water.

A quick inventory revealed that all of my arms and legs were still around and intact, although my wrists and ankles were bound to the chair. I stifled a snicker. These guys were truly rank amateurs at the whole business of keeping people immobilized.

But I’d deal with that later. First, I cracked open an eye and looked around. We weren’t anywhere special. In a station the size of ours there were countless abandoned nooks, each and every one walled off with steel sporting faded paint. We could be ten yards from where they jumped us or at the other end of Tiantáng. I knew we weren’t on one of the docked ships because I was certain that no one else in the galaxy was using that particular shade of light blue on their walls.

The wall was about an arm’s length from my nose, which meant I wasn’t going to get any more information without taking a decision: stick around for a while to see what was up, or get out of my bonds and do something about it.

Camila moaned. She was coming around. The moan soon turned to a yelp as the remaining guys did something to her.

That decided it. I needed to move while one of them was still away.

Closing my eyes again, I ordered my implants to send a small troupe of nanobots out of my bloodstream and toward the cord around my wrists and ankles. I’d paid dearly to have this particular feature installed, but I’d never had a chance to use it before. When they exited my body through my skin, it was surprisingly painful considering that they were smaller than the thinnest needle. Once the cords were well coated with nanomachines, they self destructed, heating up the ropes and allowing me to free my extremities.

The brochure somehow failed to mention that I was going to get burnt by the process, but I suppose they assumed that anyone who got tied to stuff so routinely wouldn’t care about a detail like that.

I was hopping and flapping my arms in pain as I turned to face my captors, which probably explains the looks on their faces when they saw me.

I didn’t stop to take pictures but advanced on them as fast as I could. There were two of them, and I recognized them both. Sadly, or perhaps luckily, they ran before I had the chance to reach them.

I watched to make sure that they weren’t coming back, and then the pain in my head returned, and I leaned against the nearest wall and turned my attention to Camila.

They’d worked her over a bit. I could see that one eye would be turning black pretty soon, and that they’d left a nice track of burns along the inside one arm with a small soldering iron that lay next to the chair she was tied to.

How are you? I asked. Yes, brilliant repartee, that’s my line.

To her credit, she didn’t call me on it. I think they broke one of my ribs. Can you help me up?

I undid the knots, keeping one eye on the entrance, and she got up gingerly. I was relieved that she could stand—there was really no way I would have been able to carry her to safety. I was a low-gee baby, which meant that though she was shorter than I was, she probably weighed as much as I did, if not more.

She saw it, too. Why’d they run?

"It was the smart thing to do. Sure, they’d have kicked