Undertow Read Free

in a while.”
    “You can teach most people to carry a tune, but one in a thousand is born to be a singer.”
    He stopped. She walked three steps more before she did likewise. She didn’t turn back to him. “So it’s no, then?”
    I’m sorry, André,
he prayed for.
Maybe if you could prove to me I can trust you—
    But what he got was a flat shake of her head, the glossy blunt-cut ends of her hair whisking over golden-yellow-clad shoulders. “You’re not a child I can hand a gun, André. I hope…I hope this won’t prejudice our relationship.”
    “If you mean,” he said, “am I likely to respond in a manner you might regret? M~ Zhou, I don’t bring my work home.”
    She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a tight little smile and a nod. “Good then, that’s settled. Come talk to me if you need some work done. Or send Cricket.”
    “I will,” he answered, and watched as she walked on, until the crowd swallowed her. When she passed out of sight he turned and knotted his hands on the rail, leaning over the channel. Fish flocked to his shadow, hopeful of crumbs, wary of an opportunistic seabird that swung around to see if any would pass too high. “Shit,” he said, and kicked the upright with the instep of his shoe.
    A passing businessman chuckled under his breath and rolled a sympathetic eye. André caught it and rolled one back, and they shared a rueful grin for a moment before the businessman was past him.
    Women.
    What are you gonna do?
    But women might be the answer, too. He composed a message to Cricket, thought about it, and added a paragraph on either end. Her connex was down; either she was sleeping, blocking, or busy. So he sent it head-mail rather than instant message.
    She’d get it the next time she checked in. One of the interesting things about Cricket was that Cricket knew
everyone
.
    In the meantime, another one of his messages was from a man named Timothy Closs. And that one might mean a paycheck, if everything played out right.
             
    Coincidence made Timothy Closs tired.
    And it was only due to an awkward coincidence that there was more than a minimal loss of life when the barge exploded. It blew up between twelve and thirteen, the darkest time of the morning, when neither diurnal humans nor crepuscular ranids tended to be awake. The recruitment barge should have been empty except for a night watchman, who was scheduled to be on deck when it exploded—and if he had been where he was supposed to be, he would have lived.
    But the evening crew had stayed behind for some impromptu overtime. The sort where “working late” was a euphemism that even the most naive spouse would be unlikely to believe, given a good whiff of the miscreant’s breath. So there were four men aboard, in the control cabin.
    The rear of the barge would have been empty, too, had not one of the native affairs coordinators, insomniac and behind a deadline, also been working ridiculously late. Uneuphemistically, in her case.
    She’d been in the interview room, open to the water and astern of almost everything—a sealed bathyspheric bubble accessible only via an airlock or the warm waters of Novo Haven Bay. But what exactly she was doing there three hours after midnight was a question that Closs knew would probably never be answered.
    Cold, freak chance: there wouldn’t be enough recovered of Lisa Anne Angley for a decent burial. Let alone any possibility of recovering her hard memory. The Bose-Einstein condensate processor and solid-state core of her headset were so much particulate in the sea air Closs breathed.
    His sunrise came on like war. Recovery teams were already moving over the wreckage, illuminated under the glare of sodium-vapor lights. The gray dawn couldn’t compete.
    Closs watched from the deck of a Charter Trade cruiser a half-kilometer off, shoulders squared in a smart-fabric wind-cheater. The day should heat up later, but for now the morning was cold, and suppressant foam dotting the