_ _ _ 'Hero Sato'

I cast a sly gaze through the windows of hab unit C-025 before knocking on the door. I was expecting the worst, just another occupational hazard. The curtains were partially drawn obscuring a clear picture, though I got the impression this condo shared a similar layout as June-Hahn's. Despite what I'd seen through the window, I couldn't help but imagine that when that door opened I'd be transported back to that hell-scape of a basement, stumbling through the perverse dark until that beast in the skin of a man pounced on me. The dull pain of my blistering burns faded, the memory of that black dagger slashing and stabbing into my flesh overriding my mundane suffering of the moment.

If I kept lurking out here any longer I'd damage what was left of my cover, so I knocked on the door again and started palming a skeleton key. The door opened to my surprise. The man was big, with a face that perfectly matched the headshot I'd been provided.

"I don't need a janitor." Ivan Balakin said, already closing the door before I could so much as bow.

"Please! Sir." I bowed, proffering my Ident. "Hero Sato, station janitorial and maintenance services."

"I don't need a janitor." Ivan repeated, adopting the slow speech one uses with the elderly and the slow witted. "And I don't care what your name is."

"There's been some anomalous power drain in the area. We think there might be some damaged wiring in your unit. I need to inspect the unit for fire hazards." I spoke in a rush of breath before meekly adding, "This is unit C twenty-five, correct?"

Ivan glowered down at me and I made sure to avert my gaze, looking suitably cowed— it wasn't entirely disingenuous either. Ivan was a big man, standing a head taller than me and packing on at least twenty kilos of excess weight under normal gravity, mostly solid fat but there was guaranteed to be some muscle under that blubber. I couldn't get an accurate read of his physique due to the baggy casual wear of his shirt and pajamas; similarly if he had a piece strapped on him, I wasn't seeing it.

"It is… Get on with it already," He said motioning to his condo. "I have a meeting soon and if I miss it because of you, I'll have more than just your fingers broken."

"Of course, Sir. Thank you, Sir." I said while nodding my head.

"I know you're paid to grovel, Boy, but I have a schedule to keep."

Some cynic inside my head noted that everything until now would have all been for naught if Ivan gunned me down the second he shut the door behind me. If Ivan did gun me down, someone else could come scrape my carcass off the floor because I'd had just about enough of playing the subservient janitor. I pocketed my skeleton key while I fumbled my meter from my belt with heat-numbed fingers.

Ivan's condo was a two-story variant, more floor space but less open than a loft. I spotted the stairs but couldn't see much beyond their edges. The ground floor was virtually identical to June-Hahn's; the only change of any significance being that where she'd had an entry living room, Ivan had a command center of wall-mounted monitors above a massive wall-to-wall desk with more screens on it than most people had in their entire house combined.

"I think I know why the power draw was off." I stated idly. "Uh, Sir."

"Is that all you needed to see?" Ivan asked, arms crossed on his barrel chest. "If so, get out."

"No, Sir. I'll still need to take some readings from your panel and look around for damage."

"Be quick about it, and try not to touch anything." The big man growled.

"Yes, Sir. Of course, Sir."

I made my way to the command center and turned my head to goggle at all the wires while my eyes looked for my secondary targets. If the data was on a physical backup then there should have been a optical thumb drive but I wasn't seeing one. The entire command suite was all sleek glass and minimalist ergonomic design. With its displays in a dormant state, an OSD would have stood out like dead pixels on a white screen.

"Everything looks good here." I said loudly without turning my head beyond my duties. "Is there another office upstairs?"

"No, just a wall screen. Do you need to look at that too?" He snapped, sounding almost defensive instead of annoyed. Things would be easier if he was relaxed and trusting, but evidently Ivan had better survival instincts than that. I'd still need to turn the house over if I couldn't kill him quietly, so it could wait.

"I shouldn't, a wall screen wouldn't cause the level of power draw reported." I said, turning from the array of screens. Ivan was still hovering by the door with his feet spread, arms folded and shoulders flared. Quietly would be an issue. "I'll just have a look at your panel now. Uh, Sir."

The utility closet was nestled in the back across from the bathroom, away from the door and the partially-uncovered windows. Upstairs might work better but it was an unknown, better to act on a workable situation that I knew then to gamble on an uncertainty. Ivan was a large man, it was a good thing that firearms tended to ignore such natural advantages as reach, speed and mass. He was built like a bruiser, I didn't want to scrap with him if I could avoid it.

I tucked myself deeper into the utility closet as if reaching to look at something and pulled the polymer holdout pistol from inside my coveralls while I was out of sight. The printed gun was so light in my off-hand that I could have mistaken it for a toy were it not for the groove furrowed in the grip that revealed a short stack of squat bullets in the internal magazine. The printed pistol wasn't a model I was familiar with—the lack of a fire selector or safety was probably the most glaring idiosyncrasy compared to other disposable firearms—but it wasn't that difficult to figure out. A pistol was a pistol, point and kill. Practically idiot proof.

"Um, Sir? Did you install this custom power converter yourself?" I asked, flexing my swelling fingers around the stubby holdout I held close to the chest.

"What power converter?" Ivan asked, leaving the safety of the doorway as he cautiously approached the utility closet.

"This one wired off the side of your panel. It's definitely the cause of the power draw on this row."

Ivan lingered near the kitchen some three meters away, close enough to hit even without aiming all that well, but if I spooked him, he could throw himself out of my line of fire. A cramped kitchen with cutlery wasn't an ideal place to be trading fire or blows, but if Ivan was smart he'd only hold me off while making a racket. Thwarting my goals at the cost of his life would be a bitter victory, but with the alternative being ignoble death and failure I couldn't factor it out. When people got desperate, they took anything they could get, I knew that as well as anyone. I might have risked snap shooting from here with my revolver's shot shells, but stealth wasn't fully out of reach yet. One clean shot to the head or chest would be all it took.

"There shouldn't be anything irregular about my panel." Ivan stated warily, glancing back towards the stairway for an instant.

"Should I note this as an 'unlisted' user modification then, Sir? There's usually a fee-"

"No, you won't." Ivan growled, taking that final step I needed away from the kitchen.

I backed out of the utility closet, flashily waving my meter in my main hand, hoping to draw his eyes long enough to bring my holdout to bear. If Ivan was worried about his power bill the trick might have worked. Clearly he wasn't.

His gaze was unfocused, taking in all of my actions at once without getting distracted by any one in particular. I'd have expected something like that from a martial artist but it was a neat trick for a data analyst who stared at screens all day. When he saw my pistol coming around, three things happened in the blink of an eye.

Ivan's crossed hands pawed under his corded arms, reaching for a twinned shoulder holster that wasn't there on reflex. Before his meaty fists finished closing, Ivan had already hulked out his bulky shoulders and started charging in a low rush. I got my my printed pistol out and squeezed the trigger. The pull weight was higher than seemed reasonable, refusing to yield until I savagely snatched down on it. The sound of something plastic snapping inside my holdout was deafeningly loud.

I stood there with my 'idiot-proof pistol' like an absolute idiot, doing nothing for a split second.

With no better course of action, I snatched the trigger again and this time it only weighed a hair. A round spat from the pistol I'd thought broken, tagging the charging man in the leg in the instant before his shoulder connected with my ribcage.

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Damn near a hundred kilos of enraged brute force hammered me into the bulkhead wall. The air rushed from my crushed lungs and I rained elbow blows into the back of Ivan's head even as he sank brutal hooked punches into my kidneys and liver. I got the barrel of my holdout back in my narrowing vision and pressed it straight down into Ivan's back, feathering two rounds down into his hips.

Ivan sagged, throwing a hurricane of punches into my guts the whole time. Nausea and pain had my eyes swimming drunkenly in savage waters. His head and chest were too close to me for a clean shot without hitting myself, so I brought a coffee-burned kneecap crashing up into his face. The brittle cartilage of his nose erupted in a geyser of blood while my freshly-formed blisters popped messily.

Ivan was rocking back in a kneel and I finally managed to breathe, pushing back the darkness encroaching around my vision and worsening my vertigo twice as much. I leveled the cheap pistol to his face and Ivan bucked wildly to the side, his forward leg kicking into my left ankle. I toppled left, my snagged shot went right, centimeters wide of Ivan's skull.

We both hit the ground, sprawling in the blood and sweat. Everything hurt, the coffee I'd drank earlier was trying to spurt out both ends and I couldn't catch my breath. Trading another round of body blows was about as appealing as taking a long walk off a short pier in icy waters. I centered my unsteady aim on Ivan's broad figure and emptied the holdout's magazine at point-blank range with giving a damn what I was actually hitting.

The printed pistol crunched empty after the sixth shot. Without skipping a beat I dropped the cheap piece of polymer garbage and got a real gun trained on Ivan. He wasn't dead yet, but he sure as hell wasn't up for another round of fisticuffs. I watched the blood pour from him as I finally caught my breath, battling down my nausea with every gulp of iron-ripe air.

This wasn't a clean painting of any real skill or artistry, it was a rush job that left a pound of butchered meat twitching on the killing room floor. I thought about putting an end to that twitching mess of a man when I realized my ears weren't even ringing after using that toy gun in a sealed room. It was a polymer piece of garbage, but damned if it wasn't quiet. I left Ivan to bleed out and picked my own ass up off the floor.

Glassware shattered in a burst of pinging, crystalline fragments. My eyes found a scantily clad, heavy-set woman frozen halfway down the staircase. It didn't take a genius to realize that, shocked though she may be, she recognized a corpse when she saw one. With the stiff, juddering motions of a wooden doll she turned to look at me.

"Scream-" I started. She screamed at the top of her lungs before I could add 'and you die.'

I pulled the familiar weight of my revolver's trigger. A deafening blast of shot peeled throughout the condo, a clutch of bismuth pellets slamming the woman into the wall just as surely as any heavyweight body blow would. Sheer animal terror, adrenaline and possibly something more kept her upright, desperately running towards the door as her bare feet were cut to bloody ribbons on the shattered crystal glassware she'd dropped.

My second shot ripped through her fatty torso and suddenly her will to live wasn't enough to keep her going. Her jerky, wooden doll movements carried her down the rest of the stairs, her face splatting to the floor with long slivers of glass skewering her dead fish eyes. Her skull bounced once off the metal flooring, the hollow sound lost to my ringing ears. I didn't waste the breath to curse her stupidity, deftly slotting two fresh shells into my four-shot cylinder before locking the door and moving on to plan B.

I had to assume that someone heard the scream and gunshots, that any second now a response would be mustered and within a minute, a tactical unit of cops or crooks would be smashing down that door to come sniff around. A robbery gone bad was close enough to the truth that it didn't take much faking. The curtains were closed enough that adjusting them would draw more attention than it would spare so I left them alone.

Darting upstairs, I swept the house at gunpoint and breathed a sigh of relief that Ivan only had one girl over instead of a whole harem. I didn't think about the plump girl dead at the foot of the stairs. I didn't have the time to waste on that poor luckless innocent. She was just another girl lost to this damned glass bubble paradise.

I tossed the master bedroom first, a locked drawer on the nightstand drawing my attention. Shooting the lock would have been faster but I couldn't draw any more heat to myself, so I searched for a key and found it within arm's reach under the self-cooling mattress.

My stomach sank to my knees when I opened the drawer and found an OSD, a pair of loaded service pistols and a semi-holographic Ident badge for one Detective Ivan Ballalikia, courtesy of Zashachetk Security Holdings. I knew more than most about ZashaSec from my planetside work in the shadows; they were a private military corp that handled a few dozen city-wide high threat response contracts. When the cops couldn't or wouldn't handle something, ZashaSec stepped in to get the job done at any cost, be that cash or corpses.

"No connections worth mentioning my ass." I grumbled.

I shed my sullied worker's garbs, stuffing the loot into the pockets of the nondescript day clothes I'd worn underneath. The bloodied (not to mention snotted and coffee'd) disguise plus its accompanying belt and hat got crammed into my duty bag along with a fistful of whatever looked valuable within arm's reach. I froze on the third fistful of jewelry, remembering my walk through the worker's bazaar. I didn't know the first thing about what was actually valuable in Tengoku's luxury-loaded, barter-based black market so I stopped wasting time and went back downstairs, stepping as far around the dead girl as I could.

Both the condo's occupants were well and truly dead now. I tossed the kitchen, adding a collection of assorted pills to my stash. Figuring enough time had passed between the gunshots and now, I stepped over what was left of Ivan, expecting him to reach up with his dead hands and try to throttle me like the last guy I killed. Ivan's jewelry encrusted fingers didn't so much as twitch, though one ring stood out from the rest.

The craftsmanship was exceptional if antiquated, the wear of the years separating the ring from the rest of Ivan's glittering jewelry. Pocketing the antique ring, I made my escape. It wasn't exactly a clean getaway, but I eventually hit the thoroughfare tunnels and dug out my comm.

"It's the painter, job's done. I used the alternate style and found some very interesting additions."

"Impressive work. We've seen waves about an uncouth worker near the painting, but haven't heard of anything else outside of the ordinary."

I wasn't in the mood to deal with Matsumoto's backhanded compliments or snide jabs. Getting myself lost in the station's depths had been more difficult than I'd initially expected, which was already a high bar to reach. I'd finally made it back to level 7, barging my way through the thinned crowds of the worker's bazaar.

"There were… complications. My oils ran outside the lines."

"Art is far from an exact science. I can assure you that such complications are the norm here on Tengoko."

"I see," I'd figured as much, but having it blatantly admitted sat poorly with me. How many innocent girls like her died every day here in Heaven, only to be written of as destroyed property? "All that remains it the final hand off, it would seem."

"So it would seem." Matsumoto agreed, a calculating sneer peeling from my comm. "You already know where, a time will be confirmed when convenient on our end."

The line clicked dead.

"Jackass." I growled under my breath.

My burn-swollen thumb flicked down the list of contacts pre-loaded into my burner comm. The less contact I had with anyone on station, the better. I knew that… but as I worked my way through a crowd of drop-dead gorgeous women, I realized how utterly alone I was in Heaven. Not just in Heaven, I'd been lonely my entire life and I'd never noticed because I'd never been anything else. I'd never known enough to realize what I'd never had. It was stupid, I'd just need to forget about these women and they'd need to do the same for me. But still… I tapped out a text for my pre-loaded street doc. For Shenhua.

P - Got anything for burns? Nothing special just hot water. Maybe a few cracked ribs too.

I'd been on Tengoku for less than a full day and it was like I'd been flung into space ages ago. Intatenrup was a stone's throw away (with a little help from gravity that was) and that distance was still so absurdly far. I'd known getting on the Thread of Heaven was a one way ticket off world, but I hadn't known just how one way that really was. I could always go back down to Intatenrup, not that I wanted to. It was right there, but I doubted I could ever go back. It was a sickeningly bittersweet prospect, I was finally free of the life I'd left behind but I'd lost the sheltering ignorance that came with it; from knowing what the universe was like beyond the smog-lined sky of my home planet. The realization caused the strangest throbbing kind of sensation and weirder still, the phantom heat inside me seemed… I wasn't sure, almost sympathetic somehow. I didn't like it, but it was kind of nice too.

My comm buzzed, stirring me from my reflection but it was just Matsumoto.

Senpai M - 2230. Bring everything you found.

That was hours from now. Hours I'd rather not spend stuck inside my own head. On a station this size, there was bound to be some kind of driving simulator or rental options but neither could compare to the real thing. The open road never failed to clear my head, but if I was stuck in space for the foreseeable future the odds of hitting the open highway were near nil. I wished I'd brought a few paperbacks of Chon Wang's rough riding adventures, I'd always loved those old cowboy books. Being a kid working on the frontier, it was easier to relate to those old stories than anything else.

As it was, I'd have to settle for a few hours of shut eye and, hopefully, another chance to talk to Shenhua. The shut eye came and went in a blink, my exhaustion trouncing the pain of my wear and tear. Bleary-eyed, I checked that there was still some time between my check-up and Matsumoto's meeting. I still hadn't gotten an answer back from Shenhua but there was still an hour until she said she'd come back.

For an hour, I did nothing but tidy up the coffin of a room and wait for her to come. After that, it took more of my willpower than I'd imagined possible to just sit in my room instead of constantly poking my head out the door to watch for her arrival. An hour after she'd said she'd be back, I sent another text.

P - I think everything is healing right, but I could use a second opinion.

And for another hour after that, I did nothing but wait in my room for a text or a knock at the door or the sound of her choppy, close-enough accent. By the time I couldn't delay any longer, I'd already worked through hundreds of conversations we might have, thousands of questions and answers to anything and everything and nothing at all. I made a dozen excuses for why she wasn't here.

Surely it was no fault of her own; she had to work or there was an emergency somewhere or she was just sleeping and had her comm set to silent. When I finished my meeting with Matsumoto and Satou I'd probably have a message from her waiting on my comm. She'd want to meet up again before I shipped off station and we'd have a blast.

It definitely wasn't because she hated me after how things had ended last time. It could have been anything but that. I must have told myself that at least ten times on the walk over before I reached the orbital's upper dockside housing the Goodnight Moon.