Nova Swing by Harrison M. John

Author:Harrison, M. John [Harrison, M. John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery
ISBN: 9780553385014
Amazon: 0553385011
Goodreads: 1666406
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2006-11-09T08:00:00+00:00

7

Space Noir

Vic took Mrs Kielar to Hot Walls in a rickshaw. On his way home the next morning he was arrested. The arrest was quick and deft: a Cadillac convertible, travelling quietly against the grain of the traffic, pulled up alongside the kerb, its front passenger door swinging open just far enough ahead of him for Vic to walk into it. “Hey!” he said. By that time Aschemann’s assistant was out on the sidewalk with him, grinning right in his face and saying, “Get in the car, Vic.” It was already a nice day, with a light but lively onshore breeze. The sunshine glittered off a wing mirror, slicked along the Cadillac’s perfect finish and into Vic’s eyes. He must have had an unpredictable look about him that morning, because the assistant’s smile broadened and he saw her tailoring cut in, a ripple of nanomotion, subcutaneous and subliminal. Her eyes blanked over. Data poured down her arm, full of excitements of its own.

“Vic Testosterone!” she said. “Vic, you can try me out, or I can call down a fire-team—” here she glanced meaningfully skywards “—or, how would this be, you could just come with me and no one would be killed at all. What do you say?”

Vic shrugged and got in the Cadillac.

She stared down at him expressionlessly for a moment, then shook her head and shut the door.

“Use the seatbelt,” she advised.

Vic expected to be taken to a holding cell. He expected to be processed. Instead, she drove him around in the light traffic for perhaps five minutes, enough to make him wonder what was happening, then said suddenly:

“You must have known Lens a long time.”

“Who?” Vic said.

“Did you ever meet his wife?”

“Ask your arm,” Vic suggested. “Maybe it can tell you.” He didn’t know what she was talking about. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t have wanted to go any further into it. “Or does it just get the fight results?”

“He’s here,” the woman said into her dial-up.

“This is a nice car,” said Vic, as if there was a third person in the Cadillac with them, perhaps in the back, “and I enjoy the smell of the real leather bench seats.” He turned a chrome knob on the dashboard, music came out. Station WDIA, Radio Retro, airwaves to the planet. Aschemann’s assistant, still talking into her dial-up, reached across and switched it off again.

“No,” she said, looking emptily at Vic then back at the street, “he isn’t a problem.”

Vic was left alone for about ten minutes in an office on the second floor of the police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. It had been sprayed recently to smell of authentic furniture wax; the blinds were down, though enough narrow strips of sunlight fell through them to make visible the used, uneven but shiny surfaces of everything, the brown leather chair, the knocked-about steel desk and filing cabinets, the polished floor of green linoleum. One or two shadow operators emerged from the corners as Vic sat down, looking worn and under-used at the same time.

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