Chapter: Dwelling of a Ghost
“It is not hard to get lost in the Nova Rim, whether intentionally or not.”
—Bago Balgmyr, former Patriarch of the Endengemnon Syndicate
Zaina took her first steps onto Bantoor and tasted the hot, dry air. Everywhere she looked were steep, uneven rock formations, or sand. Not a plant to be seen from the small plateau Reida had landed them on to the horizon.
Kazlo and Baeus were beside her. Reida had taken off again to detach the Order’s ship, restrictor and all, from her new vessel.
Baeus pulled up beside Zaina. “Bantoor’s a fascinating planet. One of the Deepworld’s bread baskets, even though the world is barren by nature. Large sections of the planet have been terraformed to serve as farmland. Why, they produce so much food they’re able to export about seventy percent of it, all while having one of the lowest ratings in the Starvation Index. Their food production-to-population is among the highest in the Deepworlds.”
Kazlo sighed. “Let’s get Gizmo off your ship and have a look, shall we?”
Zaina retrieved the glyph once Reida had detached the tow cables. She handed him over to Kazlo, who took the glyph and examined its exterior. “Looks like he’s in good condition from a hardware standpoint.”
“I make sure to clean him once a week at least,” she replied.
“Good,” he said. “Follow me.”
Zaina glanced over at Baeus, who was right behind her. Reida had parked her ship, but she hadn’t left it yet.
She wants Kazlo. Keeping him away from her is the key.
Zaina turned and jogged to catch up with Kazlo, who had gone on a thin path behind one of the larger rock formations. They didn’t have to go far—Kazlo slipped through a foot-wide crevice.
“I don’t think I’ll fit through there,” Baeus remarked.
“Yeah, probably not,” she replied, wincing. “I’d tell you to go back to the ship, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You think she’d try something?”
“I can’t rule it out,” Zaina said. “Why don’t you wait here? I’ll be back out as soon as I let Kazlo know what’s going on.”
Baeus chuckled. “You don’t need to worry about me, you know.”
“It’s all precautionary,” Zaina replied. “We don’t know what she’s planning or when she’ll make her move.”
Baeus’s pod turned around. “Do what you need to do. I’ll be here. But—” He paused.
Zaina’s head tilted to the side. “But what?”
“I don’t think you need to be so afraid of her. I mean, if it comes down to it, you’re still a lancer.”
Zaina frowned. “She’s killed lancers before.”
“Right,” Baeus said.
Kazlo called out from the cave, “Hey! You out there?”
“Yeah, coming!” Zaina shot one last look at Baeus and then slipped through the narrow opening. Her armor scraped against the stone walls, but she made it through. It was much more homey inside than she expected—the stone walls had been carved out to make a small room in which most of the space had been dedicated to tables and desks covered in glyph parts and other machine pieces. The walls were covered in shelves, and nearly every inch was jam-packed with dust-covered mechanical bits and bobs of varying sizes and shapes. A handful of computers were scattered across the desks, and Kazlo was turning them all back on. He’d already turned on a pair of floodlights taped to the ceiling, lighting up the entire space.
He gestured to the messy workshop around him. “Welcome to my home away from home. It’s not much, but it gets the job done in a pinch. Now, let’s wait for everything to get a few cycles to iron out any rust, and then we’ll plug Gizmo in and see what we can do.”
“Do you think you can fix him?” Zaina asked.
“In all likelihood,” Kazlo said, “there’s nothing that needs fixing. This little guy usually knows what he’s doing. I guess we’ll figure it out, won’t we? Let’s take it one step at a time and get a proper diagnostic going.”
It wasn’t exactly a comforting answer, but Zaina decided to take it positively. “So, if you don’t mind me asking—how did you meet Gir?”
Kazlo didn’t even look up from fussing with wires on the floor. “Gir?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a little bit of a story,” he said.
“If we have time, I’d like to hear it.”
“When you’re good at something, like I am, all kinds of people want you to work for them,” he replied, connecting two wires with a spark before putting a rubber stopper over them. “The government, the underworld, the corpos—everyone. I never liked the government or the corpos, so I went off to do my own thing. But when you’re not with either of them, guess who comes knocking. Early on I made a few connections here and there, and before long I was involved in some illicit activities. No one ever got hurt, mind you, unless you count financially—blackmail, theft, fraud, that sort of thing. Well, it turns out some of my partners were involved in a lot worse. And when we got busted, I thought my life was over. Little did I know it was gonna be a very lucky day for me.”
“Because Gir’s the one who caught you,” she replied.
“That’s right. Right in one of my workshops. Lot like this one, but much bigger. He saw me working on a glyph mod and decided to give me a chance. If I told him everything I knew about my partners and did him a favor, he’d let me go.”
Zaina’s eyebrow raised. That didn’t sound right—Gir trading favors with criminals? “What could he have possibly wanted?”
“Ah, that’s the really weird thing. A request like no other. He wanted me to mod his glyph,” Kazlo said. “He always had an affinity for the little guy. Thought of him as a friend, a partner—quite unlike most glyph owners, I must say. Most view them as little more than a pet at best. He wanted a glyph that was capable of more. One that could help him with things no other glyph could. He wanted a true partner, one that could think and make decisions for itself.”
Zaina’s gaze fell on Gizmo, who was now being hooked up to a series of wires connected to various computers and server towers throughout the room. He can think?
Kazlo chortled. “You know, it was the strangest thing. He asked me that day, ‘Can glyphs dream?’ I said sure, some can if the code layers are dense enough to replicate synaptic networks. He told me he wanted Gizmo to be one of them. Can you imagine that? Most people throw their glyph in the trash the first time it malfunctions, and here’s Gir wanting his to be able to dream. It came to me the same as every bucket of bolts assigned to every lancer in the Order, but our friend Gir was a lancer like no other.”
To be honest, Zaina could imagine it—that did sound like Gir. He cared deeply about Gizmo, even if he’d complained about him more oft than not. “That’s Gir for you—caring when no one else does.”
“What’s that, now?”
“Nothing,” she replied sheepishly.
“Okay,” Kazlo said. “I’ve got my diagnostics running. Looks like it might take a while—if I had to wager I’d say by tomorrow I’ll at least know what’s wrong with him. As for fixing the little guy, that might be something else entirely, but we’ll probably have a better idea of what to do.”
Zaina frowned. A whole night—that gave Reida too much time to work with. “Is there anything you can do to speed that along, maybe?”
“It depends how fast the diagnostic comes back with a result,” he said. “Now, I need some space to work—would you mind waiting outside? Maybe keep an eye on the door in case she comes around?”
Zaina nodded, still not feeling great about their circumstances. As long as Reida was around Zaina had to keep her guard fully up—she couldn’t afford to drop it for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
Zaina squirmed her way back outside through the crevice. There, Baeus awaited beneath the shade of a tall, leafy tree.
“So, what’s going on?”
Zaina walked over and sat beside him. “He said the diagnostic could take up to a day. That’s a long time to play keepaway.”
“I’ll help however I can,” Baeus replied. “For now, I think your time may be best spent talking to Reida.”
Zaina glared. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“She’s not going to make her move with you there,” he reasoned. “It makes the most sense to either watch the target or watch the perpetrator. In this case, I can stay here and make sure no one goes in and out of the cave except for Kazlo, and you can make sure Reida doesn’t find another way in.”
Zaina groaned. It made sense, even if she wasn’t going to admit it. “What, I’m supposed to fake being nice to her?”
“Well,” he said in a low voice, “if your goal really is to bring her to justice, maybe it would make some sense. You want her to think you’re both on the same side, that she can trust you. Once she lets her guard down we involve CID if you want.”
Now that was an appealing thought—using Reida’s own game against her was poetically perfect. “You might be on to something.”
“I believe so, if I do say so myself,” he said. “Think of it as a mission. You had to go undercover on your last mission, didn’t you?”
Zaina gulped. She hadn’t exactly sold her performance, and had very nearly gotten herself killed because of it. Acting wasn’t one of her strong suits. Still, this was their best play, and the stakes were nowhere near as high as infiltrating Siyavna’s enclave. If Reida discovered the ruse, nothing really changed.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Yeah, I think I can do this.”
The real question was whether or not Zaina could put aside her disgust. Reida had hurt her deeply, and worse, she had hurt others to enrich herself. Now was her chance to finally have some measure of resolution for the horrific attack on Otmonzas.
Zaina smiled at the thought that her relentless pursuit of saving Gizmo might lead to Reida’s downfall. Perhaps this was a better opportunity than she thought.