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pretended to scroll through the imaginary message until
his peripheral vision was clear of movement. Then he carried on with his charade
for another twenty seconds or so before starting to walk, a casual glance at
the news panels giving him a view of the entire platform.
    No likely candidates. There were a few waiting for the
southbound line, backpackers mostly. Cal grinned. You found them on every
planet in the Republic – kids who spent a year or two wandering from world to
world, postponing the moment when they would have to get on with life.
    The problem here on Chaco Benthic was that they always ran
out of money and, if they didn’t have rich parents to buy them a ticket back up
to the orbital counterweight, they’d spend the rest of their lives beneath the
cold grey waves.
    It was relatively affordable to ride down on the tether, but
the exit ticket down here in Tsekoh was incredibly expensive. Though it was far
from the best-kept secret in the Republic, it helped provide the company with
an endless stream of unwary NRW employees and they reserved pretty much every
available up-bound kilogram for manganese exports.
    If company agents were following him, they certainly
wouldn’t do it while disguised as a backpacker. Too easy to notice. That kind
of thing might work if they were doing static surveillance – each man covering
a zone, handing off the target using coms implants. Static surveillance needed
a lot of manpower to work properly and it wouldn’t work in a public transit
station anyway. Sooner or later, folks would notice that you weren’t going
anywhere.
    Cal used a lot of transit stations when running Surveillance
Detection Routes. As an undercover operator, he had to act as though he wasn’t
trying to defeat enemy surveillance. Constantly looking over his shoulder would
have been a dead give-away that he was up to something. An SDR that ran through
a transit station gave him the opportunity to stop and check his surroundings
without being obvious about it. The fake message made it harder for anyone
following him to wait around without becoming obvious.
    He exited the station and moved into a medium-sized shopping
district. The place was a rabbit warren of side corridors and it would force
any surveillance team to close up on him. In this environment, it was far too
easy for him to duck down a narrow side alley and disappear.
    He stopped to cross the pedestrian traffic, checking behind
him as if choosing the best moment to move across the flow – still no evidence
of a tail. He darted across and into a media shop that he used from time to
time. It had a stair connecting with the next level. He spent a few minutes
looking at the wall screens before selecting an old Tauhentan graphic novel and
sending the file to his account.
    He nodded to the attendant and headed up the stairs, pulling
on a welder’s cap and stuffing his jacket into his satchel before reaching the
top step. Anyone handing him off to an agent on the next floor would have
described what he was wearing. Every little change helped.
    He quickly passed through the banks of action &
adventure memory screens and exited the store, his chip authenticating the
payment for his novel as he walked under the scanner in the doorway. He waved
down a magbike cab and gave the driver an address close to the café where he
was ultimately headed.
    For most of the last century and a half, Cal’s life had been
one long series of SDRs. He’d lived as a ghost on eight worlds, never letting
his guard down. It was as natural as breathing and he often didn’t even notice
when he was doing something purely for the sake of identifying a tail.
    He’d definitely had an easier existence back on Earth, but
it was the last place he would want to be noticed. Here, he was just another
Tauhentan expat, his ancestors cut off from home when the Humans had carved
their world out of the Republic.
    Back home, if you could even call Earth home anymore, he was
Callum McKinnon,