Jade Dancer by DezoPenguin

Chapter 3

Tane caught on fast that something was wrong. Jade didn't say so, but he could tell from the blank, stricken expression and her body language.

"Hey, we're okay now. You'd better get going, though. Who knows what'll be next out of that door?"

"I...I don't have anywhere."

"What?"

"I don't have anywhere to go. I lived there, at the club."

"I know, but a friend's, maybe, a residence motel."

She shook her head.

"There isn't anyone, and everything I had is back inside."

"What, even your money? You don't have a deposit account?"

Again she shook her head.

"Look, we have to get going. Come with me, I'll give you a ride and we can figure it out on the way."

They walked to the next building and Tane took her up to the fifth floor, where he'd docked his aerocar; he wasn't confident–or stupid–enough to dock at street level in Downtown. Jade said nothing until they were in the air, apparently going along with his decision to talk about it "on the way." Tane saw a couple of milipol cruisers and a tactical unit aerovan descending towards Vanity Dreams as they flew off.

"Great response time in this section, as always," he grumbled. People didn't start minor land wars in well-policed areas. Still, he supposed that human nature made areas like Downtown inevitable. A city that had been in existence for less than two years, on board a colony spaceship heading to another planet, and it had promptly grown an urban-jungle slum in the base levels of the same skyrakers where people lived and worked in their ordinary, day-to-day lives.

Depressing thought, that.

Tane entered a traffic channel and set the autodrive. He had a feeling some of the explanations Jade might give would be the kind to provoke really bad driving.

"All right, Jade, so talk to me. Tell me why a skilled dancer, who obviously brings Vanis in meseta hand over fist has nothing to her name."

She didn't answer at once, instead looking straight ahead at the city lights moving by. It was hard to read her emotions, even more so because her left side was towards him and that denied him the clue of her eye.

"Does your gun have a meseta account, Tane?"

"My gun?"

"Does it?"

"No." He didn't bother with a sarcastic comment, figuring that she was going somewhere with this.

"It makes you money, though? I mean, you need it for your job? And you spend money on it, give it what it needs–maintenance, ammo, holster to carry it in?"

"Right."

"But it doesn't own the ammo, even though it uses it, because it's just a possession.

"True."

"So am I."

"Jade, I know you're not in the cleanest line of work, but–"

She shook her head.

"That isn't what I mean. You've seen those old-model androids, haven't you? The ones without an independent AI?"

"You aren't an android, though. You're a Newman."

"So?"

"You're talking about slavery."

He'd heard the whispers. Tane had spent too much time working shadow-side not to. Organized criminals dealing in people. He hadn't really believed them, though; if nothing else the nature of Pioneer 2 made slave labor an irrelevancy, and the population registration, supplies rationing, and the like would make it impossible. But that was a flaw in his own thinking. The word "slave" conjured up images of dozens or hundreds of people working in plantation fields or some giant construction project, but that wasn't apparently the point. Slaves didn't have to be a work gang.

"How?" he asked. She could tell him to frak off, of course. It was none of Tane's damn business. It had been raised, though, and it was the kind of thing that, once out, couldn't be ignored. The genie was out of the bottle. He wanted to know. Maybe he had to know.

"I was tank-grown," Jade said, "one of a first-run set by Halvas Corp. On Coral." The Newman race was created by artificial genetic manipulation; while Newman children were starting to be born naturally, the originals were all created in a laboratory. New genetic strains were regularly being tested by biotech corporations and government labs alike. "It started all right, but the rapid-maturation process"–no one wanted to wait eighteen years for experiment results, so tailored drugs were used to bring Newmen to late adolescence or early adulthood in a year–"didn't go so well."

She gestured at her covered eye.

"Two of us died outright; the other four were 'defective product' and had to be dealt with. Selling us to the Black Paper syndicate just was a way to recoup some of the project costs. Vanis was leaving with Pioneer 2 and she had plans for Vanity Dreams even then, so she bought me."

"So all of the girls there...?"

Jade shook her head.

"Only two of us. Well, and the androids, but they weren't independent models. The rest were just, I suppose, the usual fare, girls who were down on their luck or just wanted some easy money. Even on Pioneer 2, there isn't really a shortage."

"I should have put a slug through her when I had the chance," Tane said flatly.

"Who, Vanis?" Jade asked in surprise.

"Yeah."

"That isn't fair, Tane. Vanis always treated me well. Better, really, than her other girls. She figured her responsibility to them ended with paying over their meseta, but she made sure I had an education, training..."

"While forcing you into stripping and prostitution?"

She looked up at him.

"And just what do you think would have happened if she hadn't bought me? Black Paper would have demanded pretty much the same thing, only they wouldn't have been anywhere near as nice about it. Or if I hadn't been sold to Black Paper in the first place, I would have been dumped out in the streets. Or, more likely, Halvas would have just had me killed. They didn't have anything to gain from a defective product."

"You're not defective," Tane said reflexively. Jade's mouth curved into a wry smile.

"Gallant, aren't you? But by their standards that was exactly what I was. There were a lot of bad people in this chain of events, Tane, and Vanis definitely wasn't the worst of them. In fact, she's been better to me than anyone else who's had power over my life."

That was a hard one for Tane to swallow.

"Okay, maybe there's a point there. It still doesn't make it right. There's no excuse for slavery, in any form."

"For a hunter who had some kind of business with Vanis, you're pretty idealistic."

"Most of life is made up of gray areas; usually, you just get to choose your shade. Some things, though...they're all the way over the line into evil."

An uncomfortable silence settled over them both, broken only by the sound of the aerocar's engine, which was muffled to a quiet hum by the cockpit insulation.

"Hey," Tane said, mostly just to break the ice, "how did you learn how to fight like that, anyway?"

"Would you believe, I didn't?"

"Those moves weren't pulled out of thin air."

Jade nodded.

"It's like this. Vanity Dreams was doing very well, and the truth is, as a whore I wasn't necessary. Oh, I know that clients aren't really interested in a girl's face, but if you have a choice of a girl with an eye patch or one without, more than likely I'm going to be the loser." Tane wanted to say something, but he knew she was right, especially in a place like Vanity Dreams as opposed to a low-rent, no-frills brothel or a street corner. "So, Vanis looked to see if there was something I could do that was different."

"Your dancing."

She nodded.

"Uh-huh. As a Newman, I have superior agility, flexibility, and coordination. I honestly think I'm above average even for a Newman; maybe that's what the scientists at the Halvas labs were trying to improve in my strain's genetics. Vanis thought I might be able to handle something a little more upscale, more arty than a straight striptease. Tyra had done something like that already and her act had gone over well. I'd read about sword-dancing in some of my history files and thought it would be different and appealing–a play on the whole sex and violence thing. Only, swords are dangerous, so Vanis arranged for Master Yoshida to teach me how to handle them without hurting myself and to do it fast and accurately enough to be effective in the performance. Until today I never realized he was actually teaching me how to really fight!"

"So you've never had an actual fight before today?"

"Only sparring with Master Yoshida, and that was just training in how to handle the weapon...I thought. I choreographed my dances myself; I used what I'd been taught but I designed the specific movements for artistic effect. It never occurred to me that I was being trained for combat, until I was attacked by that man in my room and I realized that I knew what he was doing and what I had to do to stop him. It would have been a surreal experience if I hadn't been so scared."

Jade shuddered, obviously recalling the fight, her thoughts and feelings as it had happened. And the killing. Killing changed people. Some took to it, some couldn't deal and broke down, and some came to accept it–usually after a struggle–and moved on. Tane had years ago gotten to the point where the killing itself didn't matter, only the reasons and circumstances. He'd lost the part of himself that held life as sacred, leaving that just another gray area.

Would Jade deal with it? Maybe. She'd stayed functional in the club, but that had been under pressure, driven by adrenaline, fear, and the survival instinct. Her life had been chock full of bad dreck to this point, so maybe having to kill in self-defense was just more of the same. Or maybe it was the last straw, instead. One crappy thing too many for her to take.

"You said a man named Yoshida trained you?" Tane said. It was mostly just to keep her talking, keep a human contact open instead of letting her pull back inside herself. "Is that Aaron Yoshida? About sixty, short blue hair?"

"Yes, do you know him?"

"Not drinking-buddy know him, but we've met a couple of times. He's a master of the Yoshida Rising Moon style of swordsmanship. The Miyama style is a little more famous because of Great Sword Zoke, but people talk about Yoshida too. Those katana styles aren't so common because everyone uses Photon weapons these days."

"Katana?"

"A full-length metal sword with a single cutting edge and a chisel point. It doesn't use Photon technology the way we know it, but the really famous swords, made by the great masters like Tengai or Dousetsu have magic in them that work kind of like Photons." Tane grinned at her. "I'm kind of a pre-Photon weapons geek, you see." He patted the Yasminkov's butt. Jade grinned back, as he'd hoped.

"So, that leaves us with two problems."

"I suppose I'm one of them," she said.

"Uh-huh. I suspect Vanis is probably dead now, and even if she isn't, I wouldn't give you back to her. Nor am I going to put you out on the streets." He chuckled self-consciously. "You know, Jade, there's an old proverb that says if you save a person's life, you are obligated to take care of that person forever. I never really understood that until now."

"What," she said, "if I don't want to be taken care of?"

"Then we'll probably argue, and if you stand firm, I'll dock this crate and you can walk off into the night. The offer's on the table. If you don't want it, it just gives me more time to deal with problem number two."

"Which is?"

"Business. I wasn't there for fun; your act was the only thing there that did a damn thing for me. I had a deal going with Vanis, it's shot to hell, and I need to find out how much damage control I need to do."

"Is it going to be a lot of trouble?"

"I don't know," Tane told her honestly. "Maybe it means I go to bed and forget I'd ever heard about it. Or, it might mean that I have to go fix the problem or my own client flatlines me for general incompetence. But if I had to guess, I'd bet on the latter."