There is no major holiday party going on today in the dome. The turnstiles are shut to those without a pass. Bereft of credits, we turn our steps to the back alleys. It’s early morning now, and while it’s not raucous, there is constant noise. The ubiquitous slot machines advertise their presence, small trucks rumble by making deliveries to the backs of the fancy establishments. Generators and other equipment produce a low-level hum that seems to permeate everything. It is not quiet, but somehow people sleep in here. There aren’t many people out yet, but there are enough that our presence in the streets is not unusual.
I take another look at Fritz’s business card, trying to put the address on it into context. It’s a fancy clothes shop, accessible from the posh boulevard, but it must surely have a back entrance. Cleve and I stroll through the back alleys, checking street names as we pass intersections. “Are you satisfied now?” I ask him. “Our disguises have gotten us inside. Is that sufficient?”
“Are you thinking of changing it back?” he asks gruffly, glancing up at my hair. From his tone of voice, the answer is no. And he’s still grumpy. That’s fine, I can leave this look in place for now. Once we’re off the street at Fritz’s place, though…
Now stretches on, becoming longer and longer. We just cannot find Fritz’s shop, and I’m getting antsy. If we run into one of the other people I’m here to network with, then I’ll be in a quandary. I don’t want to put anything in motion without yet knowing what Fritz has done. This is his government to overthrow, not mine.
“Huh,” I hear Cleve say, and I find him bending down to pick something up. It’s a credit chit. Sticking it into a nearby slot machine gives us its value: enough for a single day pass to the fancy side of town. But we really both need to get to Fritz’s. “Maybe Bella could have him meet us somewhere,” Cleve says, sounding dubious of his own idea.
“Maybe,” I say, equally unsure. “Fritz did see Bella deliver your note to me last time. If my ‘messenger bug’ shows up, I think he’d recognize her. But I don’t know whether having a shimmerfly show up with a letter is a safe thing to have happen around him.” What would that look like to a client in the middle of a fitting? It could get him in trouble. “How is Bella at pickpocketing, though?” I counter. “If we show her one of those,” I gesture at the chit in Cleve’s hand, “could she find us another one?”
“Hmm…”
What is Cleve considering? Whether she can do it, or whether he’s okay with the ethics of this? Probably the latter, given what else she’s done for us. “Have her steal from somebody in the main boulevard,” I suggest. “They’re the ones with the money.” Which we have absolutely none of ourselves. And we’re going to be here for several days. There’s a lot of value within the trunk I’ve been wheeling along behind us, but we’re not about to just set up shop out here.
“We’re trying to avoid a war. We’ve got bigger problems than somebody losing a few credits,” Cleve announces with a firm nod of his head, mind made up. “But I don’t want to steal somebody’s last credits that they were going to use to eat. Hopefully Bella can tell the difference between targets.” The shimmerfly herself makes her presence known, and Cleve brightens to see her.
“Cleve, back on Skull Island, you said she told you stuff, and you described a boat that she saw. Do you get visions from her?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I think so,” he says, uncertainly. “Pictures. Or some kind of communication, anyway.”
Cool! “So, do you think she also gets pictures from you?”
Cleve gets a thoughtful look on his face and beckons Bella closer with a, “Hey, pretty girl!”
And so I get Cleve to envision a wealthy person, with the hopes that Bella will understand her orders. I pick the mark and describe Bianca Horvath to him in detail. Based on my run-in with the Vice President of Sustenance Operations on Planetfall Day, she is definitely rich, and she owes this planet more than just a pocketful of credits. Why go through Cleve instead of talking directly to Bella myself? Well, he has an effortless connection with her, an intuitive one. It probably works along the same lines as how I’ve communicated with craws and xenodragons, but so far, it hasn’t set off any alarms or seemed to cause him any pain. If I learned anything at all last time we were here, it’s that I have to be very careful about what I attempt in this heavily filtered environment. So if Cleve’s got this covered, there’s no reason for me to mess with resonance energies.
“Here’s what we’re after,” Cleve says, repeating it all back to the iridescent creature hovering about him. I understand; articulating concepts aloud helps me communicate them to Chiron natives through other channels too. When we’re done, Cleve looks at Bella a bit uncertainly. “Can you do that?” he asks her. He gets a colorful ripple of acknowledgement back and then gives a startled, “Oh!” With a chuckle, he tells me, “She wants a rainbow lollipop. Wonder where she saw that…”
“Maybe she was with us when we were on the boulevard last time, and she saw us pass the candy shop,” I suggest. Cleve nods; that makes sense to him. “Well, then she’d better find a credit chit large enough to afford one,” I add with a quiet laugh.
“So she likes candy,” Cleve murmurs, pleased to have learned something more about his little friend. Bella is only gone for a short while, during which we joke about all the things she might do with a lollipop: carry it around like a scepter, use it to fight off craws armed with tasers, and so on.
When the shimmerfly reappears, she is more laden than we expected. Wrapped up in her little legs is a roll of paper. Flashing satisfied rainbows across her wings, she drops it in Cleve’s hands, where it unfurls to reveal a credit chit. While he checks its value, I look over the document. It’s an executive summary report of something called the Hybrid Crop Program. Skimming it over, I learn that it was demonstrably successful. However, there is a large DENIED stamp on the cover. In the comments box, Horvath has scrawled, “We will not risk our health on food impurities! We will grow only fully Earth-organic crops.” I snort at that wording; nothing I’ve heard about how farming is done in Morgan lands would get organic certification back on Earth, that’s for sure.
This is a perfect find, more material with which to damn the current establishment while also showing that there is a way forward working more closely with the planet. Cleve’s pleased with the little heist, too. “She is so excited about that lollipop,” he says, sharing the value on the credit chit. It’s enough to keep us fed and grant us access to the clean streets for several days. “First order of business is to get her that before we get kicked out of this place or killed,” Cleve declares. Bella has definitely earned it.