Sparrow and I don't take the time for long goodbyes. She wants to be away, and I know that every minute sitting here is torture. She's wondering if she's squandering what time she has left, and she can't miss the return window between the moons' orbits. And I can't miss my hearing.

  Or rather, I can. Maybe I should. If I don't technically need the weapon certification, does it really matter? Is it just because I hate giving up? Ah, no, it's because I can't stand the idea of being helpless. Of being forced to surrender the means to defend myself because some bureaucracy says I'm damaged. There's plenty of folks less stable than me who are packing serious heat.

  And I want whatever weapons I can get my hands on when I meet Rabi again.

  But standing inside the docking arm, behind the airlock, I'm worried. My arms are shaking, and there's a pit in my belly. I feel I'm making a terrible mistake, like I'm abandoning Sparrow. Still, as I watch the Chimera pull away from the port arm, thrusters swinging its body around and tail pointed away, I know. It's too late. I'm committed now.

  I didn't bring any luggage, so I pull up the map in my overlay and plot a route to the administrative building. There's plenty of foot traffic, but nobody seems to be paying anyone else much mind. Not many obvious synths; it's almost entirely human, and maybe one out of four are obvious augments. And most of them have the tall, lean build of spacers.

  The few who obviously grew up in earth-gravity, like me, stick out like dogs among cats. I can feel eyes on me, but nothing stands out when I scan the crowd. I try to adopt a looser posture, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I walk. I may not know Ganymede, but I know low-G personal defense. If someone wants to assume I'm easy meat, bring it.

  But nobody does. Maybe I'm just paranoid and edgy. Maybe I didn't look like easy prey after all. Most of all, I try not to be distracted by the advertisements being displayed just about everywhere. Many are smart-pigment, which ripple with changes in color and intensity. The vibrant images draw the eye, and nano-layers give everything a strange depth. It's a cacophony of color and motion that overwhelms the eye.

  Bars, clubs, concerts, casinos, racetracks, sports arenas, holosuites, game pods; there's virtually any form of entertainment one could wish. There's plenty of more adult-themed advertisements as well, and one or two makes me pause. I even lift an eyebrow at one. The Trojan Whores? It's classified as a nude-bar, but there's very little subtext there. Well, at least some people around here have a good sense of humor.

  But not my particular vice, so I turn away and pull up the map of the colony. I follow the silver route in my overlay, exiting Aquila station proper and stepping into the wide tunnels. It looks like the admin center is below and south of the port, under one of the radiation-shielded domes. A wealthier part of the colony to afford that; wonder what that implies. That the local admin is cut in on financing? Or that admin is owned by business? Well, comes out the same. A wealthy local government is never a good sign for those being governed.

  The light gravity lets me bounce; the pull feels about the same as Luna. Old hat. In fact, it's disconcerting. I really don't want more reminders of Armstrong station. Thankfully, the walls and floor are very different. The skin of the station and corridors is some sort of dark carbon composite. It's flexible enough to bend, but rigid enough to provide support. The ice crust must flex with the tidal forces; I bet the cycle would be hell on anything too brittle. It gives the curved corridors a spring-like quality.

  The tunnels in the ice are lined with ferrocrete, a mix of crushed regolith and binding agent over pre-fabbed metal supports. It's well insulated, so the ambient temperature is fairly warm as I descend into the icy crust. Warm, and drier than I expected the atmosphere to be here, given that we're technically underwater. Better than wetter, take it from me.

  The tunnels are smooth and polished hexagonal corridors, with branches and doors and pressure seals at the intersections. Active nodes sit at junctions, open to public access. In my overlay, I see writhing threads of silver. Trying to link in, however, prompts a demand for login information. Ah, pay-to-play networks. Looks like my data usage is going to be billed to my account. Oof, look at these rates! They're robbing the tourists blind.

  Shaking my head, I continue walking to the next corridor, past several branching tunnels leading to the gaming quarter. And more leading to the 'pharmacology' center, which I'm sure sells only the best in mind-altering and body-destroying substances. Damn, is there anything you can't buy here?

  Well, finding coffee might be a challenge, but I don't want to leave empty-handed. Might as well shop. As I walk, the silver knots in my overlay resolve as active nodes within the tunnel walls, and I attempt to link into the local virts. With a heavy filter, of course. I brush each node I pass, checking. Hmm, looks like different carriers and providers charging different rates for different service packages, all hooked up to different node networks.

  It's a hodgepodge of independent, home-grown clustered virts on a variety of different processing substrates. How many different manufacturers' gear did they wire up in this tech? It makes the Chimera look elegant. Ugh, look at this! Admin is hosted on a separate substrate from the entertainment system? And the virts for businesses and personal use aren't even directly connected? Look at all these bottlenecks in the exchanges! This is a hot, wet mess. Who designed this? Well, nobody did, I suppose.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  There's no centralization outside of the admin system. Though it should mean more privacy, it means D-space on Ganymede is even more of a chaotic warren than the tunnels in meatspace. In any event, the moderate activity in the nodes suggests there's plenty of folks paying for their entertainment, probably at better rates than publicly available, given the volume of data.

  The whole place reeks of traded favors and bribery and backroom meetings, and black-market deals. There's clearly no oversight or planning to the virt distribution or growth. Commercial zones can be pretty lawless, but I can't imagine a Code Enforcement precinct could police even a fraction of these networks. Nothing standardized, different coding languages. Oof, and some of these virts are completely private? No public gates? How did they get the licensing for that?

  The walk brings me to one of the largest 'blisters' on the surface, a translucent dome over a green landscape. Stepping through, the artificial lighting takes a yellow tone, almost like sunlight. The natural light through the dome is dim, given the distance from Sol, but someone took the time to simulate it. And it's green! But this isn't grass....

  I walk to the edge of the greenery and kneel, touching the ground. It looks like clover. There must be some reason for that plant specifically. And a yellow and white flower grows in circular rings. Zinnia, I think? And something that's probably gene-modded lettuce or cabbage. Must be some sort of active crop rotation going on, which means this is actual, productive soil laid down on the ground. Just out in the open.

  Holy cow. Now that's luxury. No botanical bay, with carefully curated rows using the minimum of nutrients required. No tedious tending of soil to maximize yields. Just letting plants grow? I whistle appreciatively. And the smell. The smell of real earth and growing things? I close my eyes and just breathe deeply.

  "Excuse me, ma'am, can I help you find your way?" My eyes snap open and I stand, turning on my heel. A taller, broadly built man gives me an even look, eyes running up and down my body. But in a way that makes me think he's checking for weapons.

  "Sorry, just taking a moment to enjoy the scenery," I say, giving him a cool look in return.

  He crosses his arms. He's not a scouting officer, but he's dressed in tight black tactical pants and shirt and vest that scream 'private security'. I don't see any badge or labels, but that doesn't mean much. But there's a plasma pistol on his hip. "This area isn't for civilian use. This is an exonet admin area, move along," he says, squaring up.

  I look past him to the administrative building, a hexagonal structure taking up about a quarter of the area, under the dome. Off-white and three stories tall, it's nothing spectacular. In my overlay, however, there's a thick braided white ribbon of through-put running through the bottom of the structure and blooming from the top like a flower.

  I lower my gaze back to meet his eyes. "I have an appeal scheduled before hearing officer Delmond in an hour, actually."

  The man doesn't move. "Really? Do you have a hearing number?"

  I raise an eyebrow, and the hair rises on the back on my neck. You're confrontational. "Yeah, why? You don't look like any sort of official security."

  The man frowns, and his eyes narrow. "We've been retained to help keep the peace on Aquila, given the recent Luddite violence. Your name and hearing number?"

  I pull up the confirmation in my profile, but I pause. "Sorry, isn't the violence on Callisto?"

  His hand slowly lowers to his side. Hovering near to the grip of the pistol. "And we're stopping it from spreading here too. And if you can't provide me with confirmation that you're here for official purposes-"

  "Fine, asshole," I say, flicking my fingers and pinging him the details. It looks like he only has a temp augment; I see a single thread of silver in my overlay, and he squints as he verifies it.

  He sets his jaw, and gives me a long look, but nods. "Fine, please check in, and move along," he says with a dark tone. "Loitering will earn you a stay in a cell around here," he says as he turns his head.

  I'm proud of myself; I don't fly off the handle and rip him a new one. I just visualize speaking my mind, as I proverbially and literally bite my tongue. And spend the walk to the front counter of the admin building imagining the creative insults that would surely haunt this prick for years.

  A blonde woman at the counter looks up at me as I approach. She's in her late twenties, if I had to guess, wearing too much makeup and giving me an impatient glance. I try to smile. "Hello, I'm here to check in for a hearing."

  The woman looks up at me for a moment, face blank. "I'm sorry, you are?"

  I recognize her voice. Ms. Anna Delmond, huh? "Mel Cruz. I have an appeal of my weapon certification denial scheduled for today."

  She blinks at me, uncomprehending. "I'm sorry, any standing hearings have been rescheduled. Officer Dyer is out on injury."

  I blink right back at her. "Yes, I know. You called me to inform me my hearing was moved up. You kept calling me Melody."

  Her eyes widen for a moment, before a plastic smile slides over her lips. And doesn't touch her eyes. "Of course, thank you for arriving so timely. Please be sure to check in with our system. You can wait out here in the lobby," she says smoothly.

  I bite my bottom lip at that. You didn't expect me to appear at all. You didn't think I'd pay for a ride from Io on short notice. You tried to screw me over, and you're shocked I arrived.

  There's a lot about how this is going that ties my guts in knots. But when I link into the system through the node in the wall and log my arrival for the hearing, things change. An alert blooms in silver in my overlay like a raindrop on a pond. My sniffer... it's alerting to a positive tag. What? Oh... oh shit.

  It’s the sniffer I coded to alert on the tag for the catfishing scam. It's alerting me to a positive code tag on the administrative system itself. Someone's been using an official admin profile and the admin system to run a large-scale fraud operation?

  Oh, holy void-spawned fuck. It's one thing to say, tongue in cheek, that the government is run by a bunch of criminals. Technically, it might even be true. But holy oxide-huffing scam-bait, this is a different beast altogether; Ganymede has a criminal government!

  It's a bad day to be a former cop.