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Trap Under.
    “You’ve got a deal,” I said at last.
     

Chapter Five
    I’d never seen Epimetheus from space before; when
I’d left I hadn’t bothered to look.
    I looked this time, and decided I hadn’t
missed much.
    The ship I was in was Grandfather Nakada’s
private yacht; the old man had personally escorted me aboard to
hand over command. It had all the luxuries, including a live pilot,
just in case the old man wanted something the software couldn’t
handle. The pilot was a redheaded roundeye, tall, with a face I
could live with that wouldn’t win any awards, 100% natural as far
as I could tell. When I asked, the ship told me his name was Colby
Perkins.
    Wasn’t sure I’d heard it right at first, and
since the man himself wandered in just then I asked, “Your name’s
Pickens?”
    “It’s Perkins,” he told me, blinking those
pale blue eyes of his—strange how many colors eyes can come in, but
usually don’t. “Colby Perkins.”
    “Perkins,” I said. “Got it. I knew someone
named Pickens once, wondered if you were any relation.”
    “No, Mis’, it’s not the same name at all.” He
seemed a little uneasy about something, wouldn’t keep his eyes on
me, but it didn’t look serious. Maybe he just wasn’t used to
passengers.
    Or maybe I’m uglier than I thought.
    At least he wasn’t family to Zar Pickens, who
welshed on me back on Epimetheus; I wouldn’t want anyone who shared
ancestors with that human gritware to be piloting any ship I was
on.
    Whatever, I didn’t need to make him
uncomfortable, so I looked out the window, and he went away.
    Yes, window. Nakada’s yacht had big, fancy
windows in the lounge, not just vid or holo. I could watch
realtime, direct and live, as we came in across the nightside and
headed for the field in Nightside City.
    There wasn’t much to see. Just a lot of
darkness, and a seething mass of silver-gray clouds in a gigantic
ring at the storm line. If you get out further and look straight
down at the midnight pole the planet must look like a practice
target, with the pale slushcap at the pole, and then the dark stone
around it, and then the circle of clouds where everything
precipitates out of the upper-level air currents, and then dark
stone again, and finally the bright line of the dayside at the
edge. I suppose there would be occasional pixels of light at the
various settlements, too.
    I never saw it from that angle, though; we
came in low so it was just black and grey, no details anywhere
until the lights of Nightside City sparkled on the horizon, and an
instant later the light of day spread across behind the city in a
long, widening arc like a cadcam construction, hot and golden.
    I don’t like daylight, so I didn’t look any
more after that. I let Perkins, or maybe the ship, take us into
port, and when we were down I hit the ground. I wanted to move
fast. The old familiar gravity made me feel light on my feet, ready
to run.
    One thing about the Wheeler Drive—it’s so
fast that I hadn’t had time to plan much on the way. I’d taken in
some data on Nakada’s immediate family, but that was about it. I
came out of the port without any very clear idea of just what I was
going to do.
    I could eat and sleep on the ship, if I
wanted to—I’d made sure that was understood. I didn’t have to worry
about finding somewhere to park myself.
    All I had to do was find ’Chan and my father
and get them out of there, and if I happened to learn anything
about the conspiracy against Grandfather Nakada while the program
was running, that was fine and smooth. I was supposed to
investigate the conspiracy, sure, but all I really intended to do
was take a quick look, because the odds were way the hell up there
that the important stuff was back on Prometheus. As far as I was
concerned, I’d just come for my family.
    So where to start?
    My father was in a Seventh Heaven dreamtank
somewhere in Trap Under. ’Chan was at the Ginza, working for IRC.
Neither one was all that