Chap 5

The Midas police station sat silent and alone under the driving rain. Its gray, wet exterior revealed nothing out of the ordinary, making it appear all the more unpretentious and austere. Within the environs of Midas, where the omnipresent shock of the new and the gaudy almost became oppressive, that was a building that stood apart.

As that clash of scenery came into view, Riki couldn't help wrinkling his nose in disgust. He found himself frowning all over again. He never would have imagined Darkmen barging into his apartment, forcing him into an air ear, and dragging him there.

Riki suspected the only reason the man told him to change his clothes was because he couldn't stand the sight of Riki standing there in his bathrobe like a wet dog.

What in the world was going on?

A thousand questions banged around inside Riki's head. He hadn't foreseen things turning from bad to worse so quickly. He wanted answers, but the men restraining him didn't look like they were in the mood for casual conversation. Those types treated slum mongrels like they were contagious, and would never even deign to look someone like Riki in the eye.

So the trip was a silent one.

Riki couldn't get comfortable. He was at his wits' end and couldn't relax. But the atmosphere inside the car was even worse. Committing no crime and yet suddenly being carted off by the cops, imagining what lay in store for him only fanned the flames of his anxiety.

The slum mongrels cruised the luxurious Midas nights for thrills and profit, and mostly to divert their attention from the oppressive claustrophobia of daily life in Ceres. It had become a rite of passage for the reckless young studs.

All the residents of the slums knew exactly what fate would befall them if they screwed up and got caught in Midas. Beaten black and blue. Limbs broken. The stuffing kicked out of them.

The Vigilante Corps in each area were not forgiving. Spot a mongrel, and they'd invent any pretext to justify thrashing him soundly—in some dark alley out of sight of passersby, of course.

Mingling in with the tourists and sightseers, the mongrels could blend in without a PAM device. But the Vigilante Corps had devised some way of singling them out and the mongrels were getting picked off with increasing regularity. Sometimes, a dead body ended up in a ditch somewhere, but the Midas cops could be counted on to brand it a John Doe and sweep the incident under the rug.

The slum mongrels had no civil rights. No grounds for seeking justice or compensation. That was life.

Riki was no longer in his territory. He was in the Darkmen's stomping grounds. That fact flitting across his senses was enough to make him clench his teeth and grimace.

The air car floated above the sea of garish neon, and then plunged down to the rooftop carport just above the black hole of the Midas Police Center. With a slight shimmer, the air car landed. At the same time, the shuttered doors of the roof closed tight. When the air car had come to a complete halt, a jab at Riki's back told to get out.

The apparent leader of the group—the man with the short, silver hair—went first. After him followed two men with Riki in tow, one at each shoulder. Close behind were two more backing them up. Riki was tightly contained in a solid wall of four men. It was like getting stuffed in a box. Every breath came hard and shallow. Though he wasn't handcuffed or shackled, it wasn't the treatment a mere material witness would expect. It was more like that doled out to deranged killers.

Naturally, a slum mongrel could assert all the civil rights in the world. And the Darkmen could be expected to accord him none.

After walking for a little while, they arrived at an elevator. Riki hesitated slightly in front of the elevator, and was jabbed in the back for it. Riki stumbled forward, crashing head-on into the chest of the silver-haired man.

As expected, there was not an ounce of give in the iron grip of the man's arms. The guy was all muscle and bone and nothing else, evidence of a daily workout regimen. Or a byproduct of what God gave him. Either way, the man's arms were even bigger than the epitome of android engineering that was Iason. Though Riki couldn't have said for sure if any of them were sporting man-made bodies or not. Frankly, if told the men surrounding him were androids, he would believe it.

Riki couldn't detect any body heat rising from them. Did veins of ice run through those limbs? He gave the forearms holding him a good long look.

You guys even human? But he wasn't so stupid as to ask that out loud.

The man he crashed into only hiked up an eyebrow. He said nothing. Instead, the one who shoved Riki stood at attention and said in a tense voice, "Sorry about that."

Riki couldn't have cared less either way.

The elevator descended from the roof to the second basement level in a shot. The doors opened without a sound. At that point, two of the guards left. Riki was relieved. All the way down, that walled in sense of claustrophobia had been driving him crazy.

The hallway was so brightly lit it almost blinded him. They continued down the corridor, Riki sandwiched between the remaining men. But the space around him opened up a bit, enough to give him a little air, enough to lift his spirits, albeit slightly.

He couldn't help flitting his gaze around his surroundings. Aside from the doors set into the walls on both sides of the hallway, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Because, no matter what, he was in the bowels of what every slum mongrel regarded as infamous: the Police Center.

Riki had been brought against his will to the black hole of every slum mongrel's nightmares. Nobody left there with everything still intact. Body, mind, and spirit got put through the grinder, and what came out the other end wasn't good for much more than compost. Anyone brought there would become an object lesson for the rest of them.

Riki couldn't help imagining what fate awaited him in such a horrible place. He couldn't pretend the thought didn't have his nerves on end. But even getting dragged there with no explanations, he wasn't so stupid as to try and strike a defiant pose. It wasn't the time or place to take the long view and make the best of it.

There being no sin or crime clouding his mind, he wasn't particularly frightened. He had no need to beg and whimper. Or so he thought. The way Riki saw things wasn't necessarily the way the Darkmen saw things. As long as he was a slum mongrel, truth and justice and human rights all went out the window.

But he could bluff as well as be bluffed, so he might as well keep his wits about him. Keep focused on what was happening. He knew those fixed and immovable parts of him could allow no fissures or cracks to develop. That conviction was his one true defense, the only way he'd keep a grip and get out of there alive.

When he was at Guardian, when he was leading Bison, when he was making a name for himself in the black market as "Riki the Black"—that article of faith had never failed him.

Except when it came to Iason. That was why he wore a pet ring.

Brilliant and crafty. Heartlessly charismatic. Biding his time. Iason carefully laid his traps. Unable to escape and cornered with a tenacity Riki struggled to comprehend, the only thing obvious was the pain of being bound in shackles.

Assaulted and plundered, run ragged until he gave up. The humiliations festered inside of him. The throbbing, obscene poisons dissolved the remnants of his inner resolve, making him gasp until his throat was dry. The tingling, pleasant numbness pierced his brain until conscious thought escaped him.

And yet Riki still couldn't figure it out. A Tanagura Blondy could have whatever his heart desired. Why had he gone to such lengths to make a lap dog out of a slum mongrel?

I so cherish these enlivening moments when you defy me even as a Blondy. When you react to me so humanly. I feel myself tingling right down to the center of my brain. I love how you look at me with such undisguised disdain. It is so endearing I want to rip out your beating heart and press it against my cheek.

That Iason would go to such lengths even in a mere moment of whimsy was more than an expression of troubled taste, but of a profound illness. An elite with his bewitching android body saying anything of the sort in public would be taken as a joke.

Those thoughts spinning through his head, Riki noted that the people passing now and then along the corridor would invariably straighten their posture and jmd to the silver-haired man.

Huh. This guy's no ordinary cop.

The respectful looks the man attracted spoke of his status or lineage, which only confused Riki more. Why would a man of such rank and distinction be messing with a slum mongrel? What circumstances would drive him to call Riki out by name and haul his ass in?

What is going on?

Riki couldn't begin to imagine. Nothing in Midas should connect back to him. Nothing in the past. Nothing in the present. And looking to the future, until Iason got tired of him—

But as was to be expected, with no explanation of the circumstances forthcoming, Riki was photographed, fingerprinted, and had his retinas scanned. From beginning to end, he was treated as a hardened criminal, pushed and shoved around.

Riki started getting a bit nervous. I may be in deeper shit than I thought.

He had never in his life been so stupid as to intentionally step on the tail of the Midas tiger. But he had obviously gotten caught up in some sort of trouble without being aware of it. And if it was so bad that the Midas Darkmen had been dispatched to clean up the mess, odds were he wasn't alone.

Tie up your loose ends, Iason had told him. Leave your regrets behind in the slums.

But he hadn't imagined that something like this would happen, what with things between him and Guy still up in the air. Wheels he'd never seen were definitely turning in places he didn't know. As usual, Riki was left alone at the controls.

Things were not looking good. When worse comes to worst—or rather, now that worse had already come to worst—he'd end up on the Midas police blacklist. That would mean very bad news for him.

And if it came out that he was Iason's pet—and if Iason found out—then what? Dwelling on such worst-case scenarios, Riki felt his face grow pale.

The backlash. The provocation. The self-flagellation.

Those three years in Eos, Riki was the brat who'd never been truly schooled, who never learned. Arrogant, pigheaded, obstinate. Just as Iason had taunted him, Riki didn't know when to give in and step aside. Everybody was his enemy. He was an unevolved ape who couldn't back down when it was in his best interest. Back then, Riki had done everything in his power to rub Iason's face in it. This time around, though, things were completely different.

In a sense, Eos was a messy birdcage, kept apart from the world. Never doubting that the worth of their identity could be summed up only in the scrap of paper attesting to their birth, the pets fawned over their masters. And at the same time, they were haughty and conniving and childish to the point of fragility.

That beauty and licentiousness were their highest virtues was ingrained on their psyches. And yet it was the shamelessness of the slum-bred Riki that drove them crazy with loathing. Naturally, mocking Riki as a mongrel and baring their fangs, they never once reflected on the fact that they themselves amounted to little more than pitiful sex dolls.

It never dawned on them until their pet registrations were deleted and, like the lining of that birdcage, they were cast out of Eos into the brothels of Midas.

But feeling no empathy for their plight didn't mean that Riki basked in any sense of superiority either. Lording it over the purebred, hothouse-raised pets would be no different than the citizens of Midas scorning the mongrels and calling them trash for not having official ID cards.

Riki couldn't easily consider them all in the same position. But looking reality right in the face and seeing, hearing, and doing nothing—that was the sort of careless stupidity he couldn't help smirking at.

There were as many different human values as there were humans. Change the star under which one was born, and a different man created a different reality, even in the same time and place. Perhaps being raised in loving ignorance was the better course. When Riki was working as a courier for Katze, he couldn't help feeling that keenly.

Which was why, even revisiting all the beatings he'd asked for during those three years in Eos, there was no denying the truth behind what was said and done.

Holding up reality for everybody to see was painful no matter how he sliced it. The reality was that some people really couldn't handle the truth. And in those cases it was better to keep the lid secured tightly.

Back when Riki was a pet for Iason, in a way that Riki found difficult to grasp, Iason was both an indulgent and cruel taskmaster. A slum mongrel and a Tanagura Blondy valued the world in completely different ways, and Riki had no sense of Iason's breaking points. Though in retrospect, it must have been because Eos was such an isolated birdcage that Iason forgave Riki his outrageous and audacious ways.

All that made the situation Riki was in all the more dangerous. By the time he was relentlessly pushed and prodded into a room, the angry red flush of his temper burned on the back of his neck. Inside the room were a small, sturdy table and a chair that made the uselessly large dimensions of the room seem all the more off-putting.

There was nothing else, except for the cameras in the ceiling. According to the specs Riki had memorized, these cameras had a 360-degree field of vision with zoom capability. They were disguised well, but the same make and model of camera was situated everywhere in Eos to observe the pets.

Riki knew they were there and ignored them. The other pets probably didn't have a clue. He didn't know who was looking on, but in a monitoring room somewhere the conversations that went on in that large room would be heard perfectly.

At the other extreme, the mechanisms were in place so that any unforeseen "accidents" occurring there would never leave the four walls of the room.

The silver-haired man had hardly spoken an unnecessary word while he was dragging Riki there from the slums. Now he sat down across the table from him. The man's redheaded subordinate hovered menacingly and wordlessly behind Riki's back.

"So? What's up?" Riki said.

The silver-haired man—the redhead had previously addressed him as Chief—didn't seem the talkative type, so Riki went first. And immediately felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up as the redhead loomed behind him.

He was disrespecting the Darkmen's boss, a damned fool who didn't know the precarious position he was in, but Riki frankly didn't feel like wasting any more of his time with all the runaround.

"What exactly are you charging me with?"

"You know this Kirie kid?"

It was the one question Riki least expected to have thrown at him. For a moment he just stared back in surprise.

"Where is he?"

"You gotta be kidding me. You dragged me all the way down here to ask me that?"

"Not only you."

Riki gulped.

"Kirie used to run with that bunch of hoodlums called Bison, right?"

Riki knew at once what was going on. Why Guy had missed their date. An unforeseen variable had intervened. That Guy hadn't blown him off on purpose gave him at least a moment of relief. And the next moment he was roiling mad at that man sitting in front of him, barking up the wrong tree. That bastard Kirie.

"And you're the leader of that gang."

What a fucking waste of time.

"Bison broke up a long time ago. I'm not the leader of anything." He would have thought these guys had better intel than that. Riki wanted to drive his fist into the chief's face. The bad cop routine was getting under his skin and pissing him off. It made him want to retch.

"So you all squared away your stories first, eh? Honor among thieves, is that it?" The man pressed with a slight sneer, "How far will you go to cover up for him?"

As far as Riki—and anybody connected with Bison—was concerned, the man was repeating a bad joke that long ago stopped being funny. But he apparently hadn't the slightest sense that he'd simply jumped to the wrong conclusion.

"Kirie is bad luck. A jinx. There's no way we'd have any idea where he is." And while Riki was at it, he had to add his own thoughts. "The next time you Midas cops come charging across the borderlines into the slums, you might want to get some accurate information first. Pretty embarrassing to see you all dancing around to some half-baked bar talk that wouldn't be taken seriously on a bathroom wall."

A split second later, a boot connected with Riki's side and he toppled from the chair, groaning, the wind knocked clean out of him. The blood churned in his veins, making his pulse thud like a bass drum against the inside of his skull.

The redhead grabbed him by the collar and, with hardly a grunt, dragged him back into the chair.

"We don't take no backtalk from slum scum like you," he hissed in Riki's ear, with no attempt to hide his contempt. "Don't try to hold out on us." The redhead's coarse laughter stabbed like an ice pick through Riki's eardrums.

At that juncture, the redhead's sense of humor hadn't yet gotten to Riki. But with the image of Kirie's smug face planted in his thoughts, Riki called to mind every expletive in the book and hurling them at him, and managed to take some of the edge off.

"Where is he?" asked the man across the table. The tone of his voice hadn't changed.

"I—don't—know—"

"You expect me to believe that? One of your made men? One of your brothers?"

Never a made man! No brother of mine!

Kirie dreamed his own dreams and attached himself to the ghost name that was Bison. Learning that the resurrection of Bison being talked about was nothing more than an urban rumor, Kirie had gone off on his own and left a steaming pile of shit behind.

The kiss of death.

Even if Riki had owed Kirie big time, that score was settled long ago. If Riki knew where Kirie was camped out, he would have said so before the first blow landed. He had no desire to throw down with the Midas Darkmen.

But from the start, the Darkmen went on ignoring the obvious. If they didn't want to listen to what anybody had to say, they could have gone in with the memory retrieval drugs from the start and rummaged around in the gray matter all they wanted. They didn't even try that. Obviously, tormenting Riki was so much fun they didn't mind the extra time and labor.

Yet as pissed off as Riki was with the Darkmen, the focus of his anger was all on Kirie. The last time he'd seen him was on the Orange Road. He'd pounded in the side of Kirie's face and told him, You don't ever want to show me your face again, Kirie. Not if you want to keep all your limbs.

It was the truth. Seeing Kirie one more time would be one more time too many. Riki didn't want to see him or even hear the sound of his voice. If possible, he would erase Kirie's existence from his brain. And he had every intention of trying.

Kirie, no doubt, felt the same way.

Riki had no idea where and how these Midas Darkmen got ahold of the information. But if it was from the former Bison gang members, that was one damned unlucky draw of the short straw. The kind of disastrous turn of events that made him grind his teeth in frustration.

He couldn't say what he didn't know. He couldn't offer what he didn't have. But the Darkmen wouldn't follow that simple logic. It was definitely the worst case scenario.

"Spit it out."

"I. Don't. Know!"

Another blow to his kidneys. Riki gasped and clawed at the tabletop. The incandescent pain roared through his body, emerging in inarticulate groans. His bones and muscles screamed. The convulsing scream of burning, bending, twisting pain rushed through every fiber in his body.

Driving his raw, trembling nerves beyond what any pleasures could accomplish, pure physical pain of a sort he was entirely unaccustomed to all but made the blood boil in his veins.

"I don't have time to play around anymore. Let's hear it!"

Despite their elite status within the Midas Division of Public Safety, rumors of the Darkmen's brutality were whispered throughout the Commonwealth star systems.

Half of it was propaganda generated to perpetuate the law and order facade that Midas operated under. Half was a veiled warning to libertine visitors who might take too seriously the lack of taboos in Midas. Though because these free-spending guests were their meal ticket, the Midas cops tended to exercise a modicum of moderation on their behalf.

It was all carrot and stick. In the right balance, it was the perfect strategy for avoiding unnecessary trouble. But that didn't apply to slum mongrels.

"Out with it!"

The redhead grabbed Riki with one hand, hoisted him off the table, and slapped him across the face.

The ultra-compact mobile device on the left wrist of the silver-haired Chief Marcus chirped shrilly. He flashed a look at his subordinate Jayd—the redhead who was enjoying beating the tar out of Riki—then took an earpiece from his jacket pocket and turned it on.

"What?"

"This a good time, Chief?"

"Go ahead."

"Concerning number G:05—" Their internal code for Riki.

"Anything on him?"

An emergency call getting put through in the middle of an interrogation was no ordinary thing. Marcus had to believe it had something to do with Riki.

"Clean as a whistle. But some strange data did show up in a different context. Can't figure it out."

His subordinate's unusually clipped answer made Marcus furrow his brow. Cut to the chase, he was about to tell him when the voice on the other end of the line said, "Sorry about this, but I think you better come down here."

"Understood," Marcus said, ending the call. He wondered what sort of strange data could have come up.

"Jayd," he said, "I have to take care of this. You're coming too." Leaving Jayd alone in the room with Riki didn't strike Marcus as a wise course of action.

Jayd looked back at him, a spark of displeasure showing in his eyes. But he didn't object. Everybody tacitly agreed that there was no coddling of slum mongrels in their precinct, but the enthusiasm with which Jayd took to the task worried Marcus.

The mongrel could no doubt benefit from a bit more of a working over. He had pride and he had guts. Bloody but unbowed. As far as slum trash went, he was one tough cookie.

But breaking him before he fessed up wouldn't do them any good. Marcus had his own pride to tend to as chief of the Darkmen. His duty was to secure the peace and hunt down the criminals who feasted on Midas like parasites. Thus, his Darkmen had to be respected and feared by everyone—citizens, the illegal refugee sinkers, and especially the slum mongrels. The slum mongrels could only be controlled if they felt that fear in their very blood. According to the reports from the team he'd sent in, that fear was palpable after merely flashing their tasing nightsticks; ashen faces and trembling lips could be seen everywhere.

But the kid they called the old Bison boss was different. Sticking a gun in his face brought him up short, to be sure. But even knowing Marcus was a Darkman didn't make shake him. Marcus hadn't seen a speck of that expected fear.

There was something different about Riki's eyes. They weren't the eyes of some lowlife hoodlum. Call him foolhardy for recklessly calling their bluff, but the kid knew what to do. That was more than mere guts. Those were eyes that had been places and seen things. The kid carried more than a few notches on his belt.

Alcohol and drugs. Gangbanging and banging anything that moved. They drowned in their lives of depravity as hopeless packs of slum trash. All mongrels were the same—or so Marcus had thought.

Somehow, that Riki was different. With a brazenness bordering on impudence, the kid was no pushover, that was for certain. Which was why Marcus had dragged him all the way there. He had to nail things down, control the environment, or he'd get nowhere.

It was possible Riki had a past Marcus hadn't anticipated, that he'd been to Hell and back—and as the thought struck him, Marcus had to shake his head and smile ruefully to himself. What's all the fuss about this slum mongrel for?

Marcus had Jayd accompany him from the interrogation room to a monitoring room on the same floor. The subordinates working in the room all stood and bowed when the two men entered.

Marcus answered with a slight nod and sat down. "And?" he asked, turning to Gayle. "What's this strange data about G:05?" It'd better be damned important to interrupt me in the middle of my interrogation, was implicit in the question.

"Yes. You see, he's registered as a pet."

"A pet?" burst out Jayd, forgetting his place.

"What are you saying, Gayle? We're talking about a slum mongrel."

"That's what it says."

Quit the jokes. Marcus didn't say it, but that was exactly the thought on his mind.

"This scum-sucking slum trash?" Jayd shouted, glaring at Gayle. "Give me a fucking break!" To Jayd, a slum mongrel becoming a pet—even as a joke—wasn't funny.

"We thought so too. That's why we checked and double-checked it."

By the time Gayle placed his emergency call to Marcus, he had already anticipated Jayd's reaction. Marcus asked him point-blank, "You're sure about this?"

"Positive," Gayle replied shortly, handing Marcus the printout.

Registered pet number: Z-107M. Code name: Riki. Sex: Male. Hair: Black. Eyes: Black. Birthplace: Ceres, Guardian.

Even more amazing, the registration date was four years ago. Four years ago? This has got to be some kind of system error.

"We checked it against his retinal scans."

Marcus scrutinized the young face in the mug shot and growled to himself.

"Access is restricted by a level three security encryption code. This can't be an ordinary punk kid. He's got to have big time connections somewhere."

With each new unexpected revelation, the cleft between Marcus's eyebrows grew deeper. They usually had the correct security level to access the Pet Administration records, and the authority of the Midas Division of Public Safety should take priority.

Then what's a mere pet being classified level three for? Every possible answer defied common sense. The situation had gotten out of hand. Marcus didn't have the words to describe how deep the shit was getting.

Jayd looked over his shoulder at the printout. His body seemed to petrify on the spot. "Are you serious?" he roared, his voice on the verge of turning shrill.

"It says what it says."

"A slum mongrel? A lump of good-for-nothing trash? How does something like that become a pet?" Jayd went on, unable to accept the truth staring him in the face.

Jayd wasn't the only one asking that question. Everybody in the room was screaming inside. Pick anyone in the universe. Why pick a slum mongrel? The whole thing seemed like a joke. There was no fucking way.

But what they knew now couldn't be denied. No matter what they wanted.

"Whose pet?" Marcus asked.

Gayle fell momentarily silent.

"I asked, who is this pet's owner?"

Gayle had tried to keep it back, but couldn't any longer. "A Tanagura Blondy."

Marcus and Jayd gaped at him.

"The actual owner's name is masked, but this S-class code is unmistakably that of a Tanagura Blondy." When it came to digesting the impact of the alarming turn of events, Gayle had a jump on Marcus and Jayd. But his voice had still not recovered from the shock. "How do we proceed with this? A Blondy pet prowling around the slums could become a scandal of unprecedented proportions."

Slum mongrels belonged in the slums. Everybody knew that. But a mongrel that was a Blondy pet—that changed everything. Far from a mere scandal, there was the greater issue of violating Pet Law.

How had things come to that point? What in the world is going on? The mystery only deepened.

Eos pets normally had their registrations erased when they were tossed away and sold off in Midas. Aside from a few special cases, there were no exceptions to the rule. The added value of being reared in Eos made them the main attraction in the Midas brothels.

Blondy pets attracted even greater premiums, because a Blondy pet was usually Academy-bred. Female breeders were prized even more. Any offspring they produced were recognized as the property of that brothel. It was no exaggeration to say that a brothel's status was tied directly to how well it protected its purebred Academy lines.

Ignoring the Pet Law that laid down these cardinal precepts was a serious crime.

Was it even possible that a Tanagura Blondy could violate Pet Low? It could not be possible. The Blondies were the elite of the elite. They never made mistakes. However—

"Is this pet registration record still valid?"

"Yes. It shows no trace of being deleted, forged, or otherwise tampered with."

"If that's true, then this thing has been on some Blondy's leash for the past four years."

That a slum mongrel had been kept in Eos came as a surprise, but even more startling was that the same pet was living in the slums.

It was inconceivable. The thought itself was repulsive and common sense said it was impossible. Eos security dwarfed anything in Midas. A pet simply couldn't escape from there.

"Just to make sure, couldn't we request a confirmation of these records?" Gayle suggested, still to the notion that it might be an error in the Pet Administration system. That would be an appropriate measure—if standards procedures applied.

"No. Leave it."

"But, Chief. None of this makes sense, no matter how we look at it. Do you see a pet ring anywhere?"

The pet ring was a pricey accessory that stood in lieu of a personal ID. A ring or necklace or earring. It was jewelry that, in addition to advertising the creature's status as a pet, advertised its owner's status as well.

Consequently, popular practice was to make the pet ring as ostentatious as possible. It would have never occurred to them to suspect a D-type cock ring. If they knew such a thing existed.

"A pet without a pet ring isn't a pet, right? That means—"

"That means this situation is even more complicated than it first appeared."

A Blondy letting a pet run free outside the confines of Eos made no sense. It was unthinkable. But the unthinkable was sitting there right in front of them. Such was their confusion that they simply couldn't wrap their minds around it.

But that was—and would continue to be—their problem. Darkmen though they might be, there was no way they could go tromping into the territory of the Tanagura elites.

"Despite the missing pet ring, it certainly has a pet registration record. The odds of it being a system error are small. As irrational as this may sound, I can't accept that a pet has been prowling around the slums just for the hell of it. Or that Pet Administration made a clerical error. We have to conclude that this is what its master wishes."

Pet Law applied to the Tanagura elites as well as their pets. It did not stand to reason that the flawless Blondies would defy the rules. Treating a pet like some sort of free range anirnal—how could that ever be condoned? And if not condoned, then what circumstances brought it about?

Everybody turned their attention to the image of Riki on the monitors, still sprawled on the desk in the interrogation room.

What was this creature? They all asked themselves.

"Is that really a slum mongrel?" Gayle asked himself in a loud whisper.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"His place of birth is definitely registered as the Ceres foster center. But what if that's a cover for something else?"

"Like what?"

"I have no idea. But I can't believe that a level 3 security access restriction is totally unrelated."

To be sure, nobody could open Eos pet records on a whim and go browsing through them. But sealing a record with an encrypted access code—no matter how they looked at it, was not normal.

Something was going on. The questions welled in their minds unbidden. As if a positive retinal scan had tripped some sort of trap door, or a vulgar digital snare was laid down to deliberately raise a red flag. It was like a puzzle dangling out there tempting them to try and solve it. Or maybe it meant nothing at all.

Though he might be just imagining things, Gayle couldn't stop thinking about it. "You can't get any lower than a slum mongrel, right? So what fool would fake his own birth records and bury himself at the bottom of a slag heap?"

Prejudice and contempt. The ever-present sense of disdain and superiority. The fruits of a Midas education had seeped into the marrow of Jayd's bones. Gayle's words only aroused repugnance in him.

Up until then, Haggard had been quietly watching things unfold. "There are plenty of sinkers who make like mongrels and hide out in the slums."

"That's because they don't have a choice," Jayd rejoined with a cluck of distaste. "It's sink or swim for them."

Nobody contradicted Jayd. It was different for those whose birth planet set them apart, or imbued them with some special characteristic. But for the most part, the significant number of illegal aliens known as sinkers mingled in with the slum mongrels and kept their distance from the Midas Division of Public Safety.

Once their entry visas expired, Tanagura no longer recognized their existence. So visitors and sightseers who didn't leave when their visas ran out were declared undocumented and arrested on the spot.

Excuses didn't matter. Immigration control didn't want to hear about accidents. The rowdy and bad-tempered among them were added to a blacklist and forcibly repatriated.

Toe the line and follow the rules and Midas was a taboo-free paradise. Abuse the rules and discover that the velvet glove covered a mailed fist.

People were forgetful animals. Whatever hell a traveler raised, whatever compromising positions he found himself in, he preferred to leave it all behind him. But Tanagura wasn't so eager to forget. Step outside the lines and he'd suffer the consequences.

Being registered on the blacklist meant a nanochip being imbedded in the base of the skull, making a return visit to the planet of Amoy impossible. Any attempts to disregard the ban and enter illegally, for example, with a fake passport, and the nanochip would respond in a flash, killing its host.

Because legal attempts to apply for a visa were answered with a direct warning notice, lawbreakers were accorded no considerations, and no second chances. If the unwary traveler wished to leave whatever disgraceful things happened in Midas back in Midas and go on with his peaceful, uneventful life, then he was advised to never return there again.

Which was why those who chose to deliberately become refugees kept their distance from the Midas Division of Public Safety, and disguised themselves as slum mongrels. The ghost city of Ceres was beyond the reach of Midas law.

However, no matter how good the disguise, being guaranteed a quiet existence there was a completely different matter. Life had an altogether different value, and the changes to one's environment were as different as night and day. The slums were a law unto themselves. Those who couldn't acclimate to that fact would get squeezed out as a matter of course.

"As far as we're concerned, sinkers and slum mongrels are litter from the same dumpster. The leech cuddling up to the cockroach to drain each other dry."

"A sinker trying to pass as a mongrel and a Blondy pet in the slums are two completely different problems," Gayle stated, the implications ringing clear in his voice.

"Gayle, you aren't trying to say that this thing's being raised as a Blondy sleeper, are you?" Marcus asked, making Jayd and the others freeze, their mouths and eyes wide open. They couldn't have ever imagined those words coming from Marcus's mouth.

A sleeper. Code word for a special-duty cop working undercover. Who they were, how many there were, and their official assigmnents and personal histories were all listed as top-secret. Nothing about them was ever more than rumor and speculation, because no one person in the Midas Division of Public Safety knew the whole story.

But nobody could deny their existence. Even the Darkmen—the self-acknowledged elite of Midas law enforcement—saw important intel arising in sectors they were not involved in, setting critical events into motion with seemingly miraculous timing.

Just the other day, there'd been a large-scale uprising in Neal Darts—a perpetually tricky territory for the regular cops—which was why it was said the sleepers operated under the direct control of Tanagura.

A slum mongrel being a Blondy pet made no sense. Neither was it reasonable that a Blondy would flaunt the law and loose a pet in the slums as if it owned the place, its records intact. But it was rational to suppose that a Blondy protégé—a sleeper—would behave like that.

From that perspective, all the perplexing pieces of the puzzle—including that punk-ass gang leader with a pair of brass ones—came together.

"I wouldn't take things that far," Gayle said, looking down, though he couldn't dismiss every troubling thought from his mind. "Still, I can't dismiss the possibility that it's all coincidence, as much of a reach as that might seem."

Gayle wasn't alone. "Lacking positive proof, it's all speculation. We're talking shades of gray. The only thing that we can nail down, here and now, is that thing's a Bloody pet."

That was what stared them in the eyes. They'd been looking for Kirie, and Riki had fallen into their laps instead. Very likely it was unrelated to the case the Darkmen were actually working on. As far as Riki was concerned, though, he still didn't know the specifics behind his reason for being detained.

Midas had its Division of Public Safety and the slums had their own law enforcement detail. And the hard and fast rule had always been that the two did not cross paths.

The slums weren't worthy even to lick the boots of Midas. So it was hardly worth the time and bother to run down slum trash and beat some sense into them. To the Darkmen, the slum mongrels deserved no more attention and concern than a bug crushed underfoot.

By then, all those theories went by the wayside. The regular beat cops weren't sent after a bunch of slum hoodlums, but the Darkmen themselves. Moreover, the slum law enforcement seemed to tacitly be along for the ride, suggesting that certain lines of communication remained open.

"Our orders were to track down and arrest a slum gangbanger named Kirie. Right now that should be our only priority."

As unwilling and disagreeable as it might be, their duty was to carry out their orders as quickly and precisely as possible. That wasn't something their chief should need to articulate, but Marcus felt compelled to lay down the law.

"Yes, sir!" Gayle answered, though the rest of the personnel in the room did not doubt that the same applied to them.

To lay any other doubts to rest, Marcus ordered them to delete all the data pertaining to G:05. But not because doubts remained about the theory that the slum mongrel was a sleeper.

"If what's in this file is true, then that kid is Blondy property. If we end up catching any flack from this, it's not going to be pretty," Marcus said, because that's what he was really worried about.

Marcus and his squad had no authority to go poking into what the pet's Blondy master was doing with him. Marcus got to his feet to return to the interrogation room. He felt a weight on his shoulders and a sluggishness in his gait he hadn't felt when he walked into the monitoring room.

Left alone in the interrogation room, Riki's shoulders heaved as he caught his breath while his black hair lay plastered against his pale forehead.

That piece of shit Kirie. That jinx on all of them. Riki was going to pound his face in. Riki cursed him with all his might, while clenching his teeth against the pain. His sides throbbed and spasmed, and his head pounded like a drum. And yet somehow, beneath the aches and pains, his thoughts were unusually clear.

What the hell has Kirie been up to?

The Midas cops never came into the slums, let alone the Darkmen, who charged in with blood in their eyes in pursuit of Kirie's whereabouts. Something serious was going on. It wasn't a mugging gone wrong.

But Riki didn't really want to know. As long as he didn't know, he'd have nothing to say, no matter how severe a thrashing they gave him. Ignorance was the best defense against the irrational.

Riki heard the door opening and looked up. The thud of boots against concrete accompanied the return of Marcus and Jayd. He ground his teeth. So the intermission is over?

He couldn't begin to guess how long the abuse would go on before they called it a day. That thought was even more depressing than the pain.

Just as he had before, Marcus sat down across the table from Riki. Riki expected that Jayd would position himself again at his back. But he didn't. Compared when he'd left the room, Jayd looked positively submissive. He planted himself behind Marcus instead.

What the hell—

Within the expected weight of their twin gazes, Riki detected a different quality suffusing their attitudes.

"Seems you're some Blondy's pet," Marcus said, his voice pregnant with implications. The change in attitude suddenly became crystal clear.

Riki clenched his teeth for altogether different reasons than a few moments before. Though he'd half expected a development of that sort, having the reality thrust in his face was another thing entirely.

There was no way he could suddenly turn defiant with a Yeah, so what of it? attitude. The label of "pet" was to Riki nothing more than an embarrassment. The thought of anybody outside of Eos knowing the truth about him was unbearable.

"The best pick of the litter from a Midas harem would be lucky to make it to the middling ranks of Eos society. So how does a slum mongrel climb to the very top?"

There was no bitterness or sarcasm in Marcus's voice, only cold curiosity. But it still rubbed Riki the wrong way. The days and weeks bound by the chains of lust and carnality, his pride festering and rotting away—to call that climbing to the top—he'd trade places with anyone in a heartbeat. So when Marcus said, "You can go," Riki didn't comprehend what he was saying at first.

You can go. Riki turned the words over in his mind. He furrowed his brow. And at last he understood. He was free to leave.

But why? Because he was a Blondy's pet, that was why. Nothing else could explain the Darkmen's sudden change of attitude.

So that's what it comes down to.

Riki briefly uttered a silent prayer even as he tasted the bitter bile at the corners of his mouth.

What's a Blondy pet doing in the slums? Marcus didn't show any eagerness to pursue that line of questioning despite the fact that up until a few minutes ago, he'd been more than willing to continue tormenting a mere slum mongrel.

The abrupt change of heart made clear that the power and influence of the Tanagura Blondies reached into even the Midas Division of Public Safety. Even though they'd been so intent on Kirie, they were letting Riki go. Let sleeping dogs lie. That was what it came down to. All thanks to Iason, I guess.

Making a display of his master's status had been the last thing on Riki's mind. But if it made the Darkmen bow and scrape, Riki wasn't about to object. Neither did he think it a gutless surrender on their part. Go nipping at the wrong heels and a man would pay for it dearly. They knew it just as well as the slum mongrels.

Despite whatever Marcus was feeling inside, he had learned from bitter experience. He wouldn't be making the same mistake Riki once had. In short, Iason had the kind of pull that could twist a Darkman's pride into knots. Though that realization was coming a bit late in the game for them, which was why they wanted Riki out as soon as possible.

Clutching his sides, Riki got slowly to his feet. But that strain alone was enough to make him groan. Dragging his feet, liable to fall over at any second, he made his way forward, clenching his teeth.

From the start, no matter how much pain Riki was in, nobody showed the slightest inclination to lend him a hand. And anybody doing so would have only pissed him off all the more.

Nevertheless, Marcus's pride as a Darkman didn't allow him to let things go just at that. Or else curiosity had won out in the end.

"Hey, kid," he called out. "Don't you want to know what that friend of yours was up to, and why he's on the run?"

Maybe Marcus simply wanted to ascertain Riki's true intentions.

Riki halted his laborious, slouching pace. "He's no friend of mine!" he growled.

There was nothing wrong with trying to get ahead in life. Every slum mongrel harbored dreams of striking it rich and getting the hell out of there. Once upon a time, so had Riki.

But there were right ways of going about it. And wrong ways. Even with Iason pulling the strings behind Riki's back, some things were impermissible, no matter what.

"That bastard is a walking death wish, I'm telling you."

Having Kirie and himself placed in the same company was one thing Riki couldn't bear. Whether Marcus believed him or not, it was the truth.

"If you really want to get your hands on Kirie, you might want to do a little homework before charging in waving those nightsticks around. Or get yourselves a few reliable informants before taking it out on us. It's not like you don't have the cash to spare. I can't believe how clueless you guys are. If you think this is the way to track down Kirie, you're a bigger bunch of dicks than I ever imagined."

Riki didn't care who was listening in. He was filled to the brim with bitter bile and he was spitting it all out. That was not the place and they were not the people at whom he should be venting all the anger stored up inside him, but he couldn't keep it contained in his gut anymore.

Marcus reacted with an arched eyebrow, while Jayd looked about ready to blow his stack. But he held his trembling, clenched fists by his side. That Jayd didn't come flying at Riki told him that his disgrace of being identified as a pet had far different implications to the Darkmen.

Having said all that was on his mind, and seeing that Marcus wasn't about to break his silence, Riki again continued to stagger along.

Giving voice to his anger hadn't calmed Riki's emotions. If anything, his heart felt all the more inflamed. A hard, heavy pain. Try as he might, he couldn't drive the image of those two Darkmen from his mind. His head throbbed in a manner apart from the ache in his sides.

It was approaching midnight and the rain continued. From the second basement level of the MPC to the lobby, Riki clung to the walls and trudged along, gasping for breath.

"You can go," was another way of saying "You're on your own." Nobody was going to escort him to the slums.

So after dragging me down here, they won't even give me a lift back. Riki and the Midas Division of Public Safety hadn't exactly gotten along, but considering all the trouble they'd put him through, the Darkmen could have at least sprung for cab fare.

Far from having enough for an air taxi, when first patted him down, he'd been relieved of his coin and cash cards. And nothing was returned. Riki could believe it was simple payback for mouthing off.

Tossed out without any money, he had no way to get home. They really know how to fuck a guy over.

The cold curled mercilessly around the grating pain in Riki's back. He couldn't even walk straight. His body heaved with every breath. Dragging his shoulders along the wall, thoughts of how to get home spun through his head. He had no money. The rain was coining down. He could barely walk. He was in a very bad way. He poured out curses against the Darkmen.

There was the free, twenty-four-hour tourist shuttle bus that ran through each sector. Except the MPC was far off the beaten track and no shuttle bus ran anywhere near the place. The thought of dragging his tormented body through the pouring rain made Riki wish desperately for the money to hail a cab. But that didn't mean he was about to lift a patrol car right under the noses of the MPC. Though he was really itching to.

Turning the thought over in his mind, Riki ducked behind the wall he'd been following. Bringing out the small mobile phone he'd managed to keep on his person, he did a little research on the capsule cars circling in the vicinity of the MPC, and called one over.

These capsule cars were automatic drones utilized for routine tasks and business purposes. As cargo transports, they were plain and unappealing in appearance. As they were not used in the tourist trade, they could be directed anywhere on the map, even to places in the red zone prohibited to tourists.

Moreover, they were free.

Of course, having been erased from the official maps, Ceres could not be assigned as a destination. But close was good enough, and he'd figure things out from there. If push came to shove, it'd be a simple matter to jimmy the steering mechanism and run the thing manually at ground level.

Riki had obtained that knowledge while working under Katze as a courier. He'd been in his employ for less than a year, but Riki had learned everything he could during that time, above and below the law. Things that the Darkmen weren't even aware of.

He climbed into the capsule car and shut the door. A detailed map of Midas flashed on the small heads-up display. The map could be zoomed in and out. But without bothering to confirm the location, Riki turned to the control panel and keyed in a destination.

Area 3. Mistral Park. Genova.

Riki extracted a memory chip from a hidden pocket in his boot, inserted it into the slot on the console, and entered an access code and password. These were backdoor codes he'd obtained when working as a courier, and he wasn't sure they still worked. But thankfully they did, and for once Riki was grateful to Katze for keeping his status active.

Air taxis didn't discriminate among its passengers as long as the fee was paid. Industrial capsule cars were different. An access code was required to divert one from its set course and designate a new destination. Without it, they wouldn't budge.

They weren't exactly user-friendly transportation. On that occasion, though, Riki was in a frame of mind to use whatever he had on hand. Doing what he had to do with an accustomed touch, Riki smiled sardonically to himself.

Boosting a capsule car with a secret security chip. Yeah, someone must have been asleep at the switch.

Back when he was working as a courier, the lessons were hammered into him by his partner Alec. "Access codes are like lover's words. Use the same over and over and they'll tire of you. They'll always know when you're coming and where to find you. The best course is to randomly choose a new code on a regular basis. In a rush or panic, there are always bound to be screw-ups. So the thing you want to keep in mind is, no matter when, no matter how big of a pain it is, always make sure the security gets top priority."

That was five years ago.

Alec was a long way behind him, and should have been forgotten by now. But in a heartbeat those old lessons came back. Alec was probably the best hacker in the black market, if not the whole star system. He'd made the chip for Riki, who had kept it hidden in his boot like a keepsake until now. Riki leaned way back in the seat. Without the slightest creak or moan, the capsule car lifted off the ground.

In the MPC monitoring room, Marcus and his underlings stared intently at the screens displaying Riki's image. After leaving through the front lobby, Riki had walked with difficulty, clinging to the wall, body heaving with each breath. The pain accompanying each hard breath was so apparent, it was almost audible. However, those occupying the monitoring room had no concern for Riki's condition.

"So, what does he do now?" Marcus asked himself as much as anybody else.

The slum mongrel had spoken his mind to the Darkmen without any fear in his eyes. Now the question of how he would make his way back to his den in the slums had everyone intrigued.

The kid could call every bluff and shoot lightening bolts with those black eyes of his, but the practicality of making a move with no money in his pocket was an entirely different matter.

Under any normal circumstances, having confirmed his identity as a Blondy pet, regardless of whatever personal motives they otherwise might be harboring, the logical course of action would have been deposit him in the slums. And that wasn't taking into account the fact that they'd roughed him up badly enough that he could barely walk on his own two feet. Yet Marcus gave him the boot without any money.

For a piece of slum trash, the kid had backbone. That was undoubtedly one suspiciously strange mongrel of a pet. Marcus wondered how the mongrel would extract himself from a sticky situation. He'd probably just collapse on the spot. Marcus wanted to see it with his own two eyes.

If he proved in the end to be all mouth and no action, Marcus wanted to see that, too. He'd wait a suitable amount of time after the kid collapsed and order somebody to drag the sorry mongrel back to the slums.

In a sense, the Riki on the monitors was a complete fool. He'd batted aside the narrow-minded opinions that the Midas Division of Public Safety held and mocked the reason and logic of the Darkmen in their stronghold.

What a strange creature. He was too clever by half. The Darkmen, with all their pride, were loath to admit that Riki would come out on top. If they could only come right out and state how they all wanted to make the little smart-ass cry, the whole thing would have gone down a lot easier.

The punk! Marcus couldn't get the thought out of his mind. And neither could he take his eyes off Riki. If Marcus had the presence of mind to admit it, the kid had him under a spell. That was the feeling that suddenly came upon him.

What manner of Blondy made a pet of a kid concealing such a sharp soul? With full knowledge of his presumptuousness, at least once he wished to behold those eyes and see for himself. Already, as those thoughts passed through Marcus's mind, Riki had retrieved his micro-mobile phone.

Jayd snorted. "Idiot. Playing with that slum toy here."

Ordinarily, the cellular systems in Ceres and Midas were incompatible with each other. More specifically, signals reaching from Midas into Ceres were jammed to the degree that no wireless communications could be picked up, further showing the extent to which Ceres was isolated from Midas. Cellular technology that worked in Ceres would be inoperable in Midas. That was why Marcus hadn't bothered confiscating it in the first place. At any rate, after manipulating the phone for a while and apparently finding it useless, Riki returned it to his pocket.

"Naïve fool," exclaimed Jayd. As if he'd been personally slapped in the face, he felt compelled to overreact to every move the kid made. The people around him couldn't help smiling. But Jayd's excessiveness and the slightly becalmed atmosphere in the room was broken by Haggard's surprised reaction. "What the hell? Chief, a cargo lifter has been diverted from sector K."

"A cargo lifter?"

"An industrial mini-cab on a routinely scheduled run."

Why would an industrial mini-cab—? Everybody thought the same thing at the same time.

"It's rendezvousing with G:05," Haggard concluded.

And there on the monitors was Riki opening the door and climbing in like he owned the thing. They all gaped and gulped at once.

What the hell is going on? The last thing they expected to see was happening right before their eyes. There was no way. No way. They stared in silence at the impossible reality.

"So this is what the kid meant about underestimating the slums?" Marcus couldn't be bothered to hide what was on his mind any longer.

"Put it that way, and it's not the slums, but this Riki kid," Gayle answered with a hard expression.

A slum mongrel. A Blondy pet. Probably a guy with a few other aliases besides those. Suspicions couldn't be lightly set aside, especially not watching the utterly abnormal scene unfold before them.

"No way is this the slum mongrel mind-set in action."

No mere mongrel could have made it that far or lasted that long.

"Mark my words, that kid knows his way around Midas."

Starting with Marcus, each of them was running the numbers and calculating the scenarios, trying to find a way to the bottom of the mystery.

"He's heading to Mistral Park, Genova."

By entering the vehicle registration number, that information was readily available.

"According to the map coordinates, it's the closest stopping point to the slums."

"Makes sense. Commandeer a commercial transport in order to get him within a stone's throw."

"You can't just jump into a mini-cab and fly off without a passcode."

"I came to that conclusion a while ago."

There was no way he could have flagged down a cargo lifter without the security codes in the first place.

"Gayle. Can you do a reverse trace on the codes the kid used?"

At that point, given his state of mind, Marcus figured he was in for everything.

"Yes. I've captured the codes now," Gayle said, anticipating where Marcus was going. But a moment later he blanched.

"What happened?"

"It's no good. The codes are encrypted."

Marcus sighed and drew his eyebrows together contemplatively. Among the Darkmen, Gayle's skills were on par with those of a typical computer hacker. But if he had a hard time cracking something, that was a compliment to the creator.

But why encrypt the access codes to an ordinary cargo lifter? What was the kid trying so hard to keep hidden?

Pondering that question, the lines between Marcus's eyebrows deepened. The attention of the Darkmen fixated on the monitors. They watched as the capsule car lifted lazily off the ground, fueling their misgivings further.