CMR Chapter 1

The sky over Nicholson hung low and bruised. Crenshaw Mack grumbled as he fumbled with the key to Wǒk This Way, the Xhinzhouren restaurant to whom he paid rent for their office space. It was well after restaurant hours, but he needed something from the office.

That something was a bottle of gin tucked away in his desk. He'd gone through most of the stuff in his small apartment and he wanted to retrieve his emergency bottle while he could still make the journey on foot. To his surprise, the handle clicked and the door swung open. He squinted at the darkened interior, hand sliding into his coat to hold his gun handle nervously. Blue pips glowed in the dark. It was Dolly’s eyeshine. He felt a jolt of panic before his brain caught up, a sequence she always noted with some approximation of amusement. She stepped into the light, face placid as she took him in.

At a glance, she could pass for human. Her skin was too smooth, however, and her features too symmetrical to be natural. Blonde hair framed her face, and her movements had the fluid grace of her original existence as a companion-bot. Her stance was wider, now, and her posture more dangerous. Crenshaw had bought her aftermarket from a used tech stand not too far from his home. She'd seen many upgrades to her internals and her programming to make her a dangerous combatant. The katana set hung on her hip wasn't for show, even if it got eyes rolling in Xhinztown.

"Crenshaw," she greeted. "I was beginning to think that you didn't get my message."

He hadn't, of course. When his holocomm had rung, he'd been trying to secure a cute barfly's number and answering a call with a woman on the other end wouldn't have helped his cause at all. By the time that he had successfully gotten her unnecessarily harsh rejection, he'd already forgotten about the call from Dolly. She didn't need to know that, though. "Of course I got it. Came right over."

"It's been three hours," Dolly sighed. "You're drunk."

"You're not my mother," he reminded her, unhelpfully. "Why?"

"There's a client. She's been waiting with... uncanny patience. And I don't like her."

He laughed. "You're a synth. Why do you sound spooked?"

She glanced over her shoulder, then looked at Crenshaw. "I don't like this one. But we need the work."

He nodded, then looked at her with reproach. "Does this mean you're going to sober me up?"

"It does." She handed him an already bubbling glass.

He knew what was in it. Raising the glass in a mock toast, he squared his shoulders and tipped the drink back. Please No was never pleasant as nanites sought out and destroyed the alcohol in his bloodstream. He swayed on his feet, leaning against the doorframe as Dolly's cool hands brushed sweat from his head and straightened his clothes. When he could stand again, he cleared his throat and brushed past her. "Alright, let's go. Anything I should know?"

Dolly hesitated. "Please don't pursue romance."

He came up short and turned to her. "What?"

"I know you're lonely, Crenshaw. She's attractive and confident but... there's something there. Something... dark."

"Dark?" he mused, "So she's a brunette?"

"No, blonde," Dolly answered with growing frustration. "I mean something... evil."

"Come on, Dolly... you're the only blonde I go for!" He laughed. "You're spending too much time around Xhinztown, Dolly. Locals are starting to get their mí xìn into you."

She shook her head again. "No, Crenshaw, you're not getting it. It's not superstition. There's more to this woman, something bad. I'd have told her to leave if we didn't need the chits so badly. Please tell me that if you get a hint of this not going well you won't agree? We'll walk away?"

"I'll handle it," he relented. "How attractive can she be?" He walked through the restaurant as Dolly closed and locked the door. He slipped into the back and up the narrow staircase to his office. He made a few last minute adjustments to his clothes and knocked before walking in. He had a greeting prepared, something professional and curt, but it left his mind as the breath left his lungs.

The woman sitting primly in his office was stunning. Noble cheekbones and a sleek jawline formed a heart-shaped face with impeccably pursed lips and blue eyes sharp enough to leave scars. Her cornsilk hair was bound back in a severe bun that invited fantasies of her pulling the pin and letting it cascade around her shoulders. She was dressed so finely and so professionally that his already shabby office looked comical by comparison. Her shoes alone could probably have been resold for enough money to pay his rent for a year. Over it all, there was something off, like she was using a different light than the dingy surroundings. He tried for the greeting again, reaching for some vestige of his planned opener but came up short. Finally, after he realized that he'd spent nearly half a minute with her staring expectantly at him in silence, he managed a gruff, "Hello," and crossed the room to his desk. As he settled behind the desk, he apologized. "Sorry to keep you waiting, I was finishing a case. I'm Crenshaw Mack. What can I do for you, Miss...?"

"Noles," she offered. Her voice was professional, but there was an underlying rhythm to it that almost made her speech sound like music. "Soki Noles. I have a job for you, Mister Mack."

"It's a little late," he noted, glancing at the tiny window set high in the wall."Any reason this couldn't wait for office hours?"

"There's some amount of time sensitivity." She put a projector on his desk and switched it on. A display of a black-haired woman with eerie blue eyes and a simple, dark tunic appeared and slowly rotated. "This is Amaris Volkert. She won an auction a few days ago on Astarte Station. Do you know it?"

"I've been to Venus," Crenshaw answered, leaning in to examine the hologram. "Astarte's difficult to miss. Is this a missing person sort of job?" 

"No. I don't care about the Volkert whelp. I care about what she won in the auction. She took her winnings and departed soon after. She didn't, however, use the waygates, which means that she intends to go the long way to Eris. Or to disappear with the object. There are a lot of dark markets in the system which would be interested in such an item." She switched the hologram over to display a jar filled with a strange and unnatural creature. It looked mummified. Hanging off the jar was an old style stylus. "This is an artifact connected to Sephiran Dubhan. That name means nothing to you, correct?"

"You got me," he confessed, leaning back. He'd liked to have believed that the posture change was just him being casual, but in truth he wanted to get away from the nasty little thing. Even the hologram made his skin crawl. "How much do I need to know?"

"Sephiran was a kthoniker, one of the first. He was active and disappeared in the early days of the Reformed Solar Commonwealth Era, nearly a thousand years ago."

"Kthoniker?" Crenshaw laughed. "You really believe in all that crap? Demons of subspace and such?"

"Does it matter?" Soki cocked an elegant eyebrow. "I'm paying you to find and retrieve something, not believe in it. My own opinion on the matter is as irrelevant as yours."

"Fine. Collector slop it is." He looked at her again, this time appraisingly. Something about her demeanor was tickling the back of his brain but he couldn't place it. Her eyes made him feel dissected. "You're here on some rich collector's orders, right? Some anonymous backer with deep pockets and an interest in the occult?"

"Something like that," she answered, and for the first time her facade cracked. An almost undetectable hitch in the corner of her mouth portended a suppressed smile. 

"Why me?" he asked, still trying to piece something together. "I don't exactly advertise offworld, and I'm not a thief. Any particular reason you decided to brighten up my office?" 

"You came recommended," she answered simply. "You'll understand if I can't divulge who made the recommendation. Discretion is extremely important to me. I'm not asking you to steal it, I'm asking you to acquire it. I don't care how that happens. Worse comes to worst, just track it and when you can tell me with certainty where it is give me the coordinates and I'll hire someone else to take care of it."

He stood up, thrusting his hand out for a shake. "Discretion's my middle name, Miss Noles! I'll take the case. Standard market, plus per diem and-" he faltered as she gripped his hand. Her grip was a soldier’s—controlled, unyielding—and he felt a spark of warning up his arm. He wanted his hand back immediately.

"That won't be necessary, Mister Mack. I'm offering thirty thousand now, and another seventy thousand when that jar is in my hand. That's more than you make in a year taking photos of cheating spouses and finding runaway teenagers."

"So it is," he answered carefully. He tried to meet her gaze but his instincts stopped him. This woman set off every biological alarm for 'danger' that he had. She released his hand and he crossed his office to hold the door open for her. "I'll get right on it first thing in the morning."

"See that you do." She stood and walked gracefully out of his office.

He shut the door, trusting Dolly to show the woman out. He was already pouring himself a glass of gin when Dolly entered the room a few minutes later. He looked up at her, thoughtfully chewing on his tongue. Finally, he asked, "You heard all that?"

"Of course," she nodded. She'd never told him outright that she bugged his office, but he'd worked it out on his own. "You took the job."

"I did," he confirmed. "We need the money. You're right, though. There's something..." he searched for the words but came up short. With a sigh, he downed his glass. 

"You should have asked about the competitors," Dolly noted. "If she's willing to pay that much, then there must be others chasing it."

"I wouldn't have gotten a straight answer," Crenshaw responded. "And I doubt any of the names would have meant much to me. I'm not up on this occultist nonsense. I do know how crazy art collectors can be, though. We're in for a ride."

"Are we going to steal it from Volkert?" she asked. "That seems unwise."

He shrugged. "Harmony and Detente. Our client obviously works for a Great House. This is politics, the law won't get in the way. Volkert doesn't hold grudges against the help, not like Kosse or Lamora. We should be clear either way." He looked at her, rocking back in his chair, feet up on his desk. "Of course, stealing from the spookiest house isn't my first plan. I'm working the angles right now." He tapped his head.

"There are too many unknowns," Dolly pointed out. "Like that woman. She's trouble, Crenshaw. I think we might be in over our heads."

"You don't think, Dolly," he reminded her. "It's all programs and parameters in your head. Let me do the thinking and you just keep me alive."

She didn't correct him. She never did. He still thought she was a synthetic, a nonsentient piece of hardware. The truth was that she was fully AI. Legally she should have a cricket, a minder that kept her from thinking too freely. She didn't know how he would react if he found out that he was partners with an unshackled AI instead of a synthetic, so she just let him keep thinking it. Instead of pressing the matter, she began to prepare his bag for travel. "Don't get too drunk," she insisted, "We're leaving first thing in the morning."

He downed his second glass of gin with a petulant smirk. "Yes, mother. I'll keep the drinking to a minimum on school nights. When you get a chance, order us a ticket to Rhea. I'll do some searches on SolarNet on the way to find us someone who'll clue us in on the spooky crap. Can't shake a stick on Rhea without hitting a mystic."

"Shouldn't we do more research than that?" Dolly asked, pausing in her movements. "It could be important."

"Who cares?" he pressed, "It's all made up, anyway."

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