The Credulity Nexus by Graham Storrs

it
into her pocket and set off back to the house. First things first,
she'd give David his marching orders, then shut the house up and go
see her sister. Theresa lived in a big old place upstate, and was
always asking her to go visit. Maybe she would take a couple of
days' vacation and leave the package with her when she came
back.
    Maria took a
last look at the bay and drew a deep breath. Once she'd got rid of
the package, she could focus on getting her feelings back to some
kind of equilibrium again. There were days – plenty of them – when
she wished she'd never met Rik.

Chapter 13
     
    Rivers
Valdinger was not a patient woman. Sitting in the back of a van
while Celestina's goons searched the hospital was not her idea of
getting the job done. That's why she was now twenty storeys up,
peering through a window at a grey-faced old man in a hospital
bed.
    She touched a
black fingernail to the glass and traced out a metre-high oval with
it. Under the diamond edge of her nail, the glass crackled and
crepitated as she scored a fine line across it. Placing a palm at
the centre of the oval, she tapped around its edges with her
knuckles, making a clean, fine break all the way through.
    When she
pushed, the oval moved into the room, held firmly by the gecko-skin
nano-filaments on her hand. She followed it in and set the big
piece of glass down quietly. The grey-faced man was still asleep.
Hell, he was dead for all she knew. Or cared.
    According to
the updates she was getting from Celestina's heavies, Blake Bonomi
was in a room on this floor. Comatose, they said, but the wife was
still with him. Well, the wife would have to do.
    Rivers crossed
the room. From high on the wall, one arm and one leg brushing the
ceiling, she pulled the door open a crack and put her head through.
There was nobody in sight. She pulled the door wide and slipped out
into the corridor, moving fast along one wall.
    They'd been
waiting for her at LAX when the hopper landed. Somewhere in her
wonderful new body, Celestina's doctors had implanted a tracker.
Rivers had suspected as much, but now she knew. A team had picked
her up from the tarmac in a catering van and driven her to a small
engineering shop nearby. They already had people tailing the PLEO
and his companion. Nobody knew who the companion was, but she had
to be with one government agency or another. It was the tail that
led them to Blake Bonomi and the mystery of who had put the guy in
a coma. Celestina's people swore it wasn't them.
    All this
uncertainty bugged the hell out of the young upload. She had built
her whole career on careful and meticulous planning, researching
every job down to the last detail. Now she had to work with people
she didn't know, hunting down a guy she had little background on,
competing with Cordell's people, government agencies, and now some
mystery killers who'd tried to rub out Bonomi – whoever the hell he
was! Rivers didn't like any of it.
    “ Bonomi had the package,” one of
Celestina's goons had told her, briefing Rivers before the trip out
to the hospital. They watched security video from the hospital,
showing the encounter between Rik and Brie. “But he's dumped it or
hidden it somewhere.”
    “ And you think the wife knows where it is?”
Rivers had asked. “So why didn't the PLEO get it out of her? Why
did he just take her word for it and move on?”
    There had been
no satisfactory answer. “And where's Drew going? Maybe he knows
more than you think he does?”
    That's when
they told her they'd lost track of Rik after he'd left the
hospital.
    The temptation
to beat the lot of them to a pulp and carry on alone had been
strong, but in the end, what could she do? She'd lost track of the
primary target, and the only lead she now had was Bonomi's wife.
Besides, incompetent as these guys were, they also worked for
Celestina, and Rivers didn't want to fall out with one of the
meanest, richest gang-bosses in the Solar System. Not if she didn't
have to.
    They'd