Caliban;s war

“Huh.”

She was tired. She was half sick with guilt and she wasn’t even all that sure what she felt guilty about. She disliked the man anyway. The hunch that popped into her head was almost certainly a result of her own paranoia and addled image of the world.

She got up, following him.

“This is really stupid,” she said to herself, smiling and nodding at a page who hurried by. She was over two meters tall on a planet of short people. She wasn’t going to blend.

Soren climbed into an elevator. Bobbie stopped outside the doors and waited. Through the aluminum-and-ceramic doors, she heard him ask someone to press one. Going all the way to the street level, then. She hit the down button and took the next elevator to the bottom floor.

Of course, he wasn’t in sight when she got there.

A giant Martian woman ru

Forget that it was an office building. Forget that there were no armed enemy, no squad behind her. Forget that, and look at the logic of the situation on the ground. Think tactically. Be smart.

“I need to be smart,” she said. A short woman in a red suit who had just come up and pressed the elevator call button overheard her and said, “What?”

“I need to be smart,” Bobbie told her. “Can’t go ru

“I… see,” the woman said, then pushed the elevator call button again several times. Next to the elevator control panel was a courtesy terminal. If you can’t find the target, restrict the target’s degrees of freedom. Make them come to you. Right. Bobbie hit the button for the lobby reception desk. An automated system with an extremely realistic and sexually ambiguous voice asked how it could assist her.

“Please page Soren Cottwald to the lobby reception desk,” Bobbie said. The computer on the other end of the line thanked her for using the UN automated courtesy system and dropped the co

Soren might not have his terminal on, or it could be set to ignore incoming pages. Or he might ignore this one all on his own. She found a couch with a sight line to the desk and shifted a ficus to provide her cover.

Two minutes later, Soren trotted up to the reception desk, his hair more windblown than usual. He must have already been all the way outside when he got the page. He began talking to one of the human receptionists. Bobbie moved across the lobby to a little coffee and snack kiosk and hid as best she could. After typing on her desk for a moment, the receptionist pointed at the terminal next to the elevators. Soren frowned and took a few steps toward it, then looked around nervously and headed toward the building entrance.

Bobbie followed.

Once Bobbie was outside, her height was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Being a head and a half taller than most everyone around her meant that she could afford to stay pretty far behind Soren as he hurried along the sidewalk. She could spot the top of his head from half a city block away. At the same time, if he looked behind him, he couldn’t miss her face sticking up a good third of a meter out of the crowd.

But he didn’t turn around. In fact, he appeared to be in something of a hurry, pushing his way through the knots of people on the busy sidewalks around the UN campus with obvious impatience. He didn’t look around or pause by a good reflective surface or backtrack. He’d been nervous answering the page, and he was being pointedly, angrily not nervous now.

Whistling past the graveyard. Bobbie felt her muscles soften, her joints grow loose and easy, her hunch slip a centimeter closer to certainty.

After three blocks he turned and went into a bar.

Bobbie stopped a half block away and considered. The front of the bar, a place creatively named Pete’s, was darkened glass. If you wanted to duck in somewhere and see if people were following you, it was the perfect place to go. Maybe he’d gotten smart.

Maybe he hadn’t.

Bobbie walked over to the front door. Getting caught following him had no consequences. Soren already hated her. The most ethically suspect thing she was doing was cutting out early to pop into a neighborhood bar. Who was going to rat on her? Soren? The guy who cut out just as early and went to the same damn bar?

If he was in there and doing nothing more than grabbing an early beer, she’d just walk up to him, apologize for the cookie thing, and buy him his second round.

She pushed the door open and went inside.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust from the early-afternoon sunlight outside to the dimly lit bar. Once the glare had faded, she saw a long bamboo bar top ma

Had Soren ducked out the back to ditch her? She didn’t think he’d seen her, but she wasn’t exactly trained for tailing people. She was about to ask the bartender if he’d seen a guy run through, and where that guy might have gone, when she noticed a sign at the back of the bar that said POOL TABLES with an arrow pointing left.

She walked to the back of the bar, turned left, and found a smaller, second room with four pool tables and two men. One of them was Soren.

They both looked up as she turned the corner.

“Hi,” she said. Soren was smiling at her, but he was always smiling. Smiling, for him, was protective coloration. Camouflage. The other man was large, fit, and wearing an excessively casual outfit that tried too hard to look like it belonged in a seedy pool hall. It clashed with the man’s military haircut and ramrod-straight posture. Bobbie had a feeling she’d seen his face before, but in a different setting. She tried to picture him with a uniform on.

“Bobbie,” Soren said, giving his companion one quick glance and then looking away. “You play?” He picked up a pool cue that had been lying on one of the tables, and began chalking the tip. Bobbie didn’t point out that there were no balls on any of the tables, and that a sign just behind Soren said RENTAL BALLS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.

His companion said nothing but slid something into his pocket. Between his fingers Bobbie caught a glimpse of black plastic.

She smiled. She knew where she’d seen the second man before.

“No,” she said to Soren. “It’s not popular where I come from.”

“Slate, I guess,” he replied. His smile became a bit more genuine and a lot colder. He blew the chalk dust off the pool cue’s tip and moved a step to the side, shifting toward her left. “Too heavy for the early colony ships.”

“Makes sense,” Bobbie said, moving back until the doorway protected her flanks.

“Is this a problem?” Soren’s companion said, looking at Bobbie.

Before Soren could reply, Bobbie said, “You tell me. You were at that late-night meeting in Avasarala’s office when Ganymede went to shit. Nguyen’s staff, right? Lieutenant something or other.”

“You’re digging a hole, Bobbie,” Soren said, the pool cue held lightly in his right hand.

“And,” she continued, “I know Soren handed you something his boss had asked him to take to data services a couple days ago. I bet you don’t work in data services, do you?”

Nguyen’s flunky took a menacing step toward her, and Soren shifted to her left again.

Bobbie burst out laughing.

“Seriously,” she said, looking at Soren. “Either stop jerking that pool cue off or take it somewhere private.”

Soren looked down at the cue in his hand as though surprised to see it there, then dropped it.

“And you,” Bobbie said to the flunky. “You trying to come through this door would literally be the high point of my month.” Without moving her feet she shifted her weight forward and flexed her elbows slightly.