Nightside CIty Read Online Free PDF

die, if the news reaches
anyone on Epimetheus, the complete records of everything I ever did
on my business com, legal or otherwise, go to the city cops, both
the port watch and the Trap crew, or whatever law enforcement there
is at the time—maybe by then it’ll be on Prometheus. That comes
with a detective license in Nightside City; it’s a requirement for
the job. Try and duck it and you lose the license, or maybe
worse.
    You want to see real security? Check
out the city’s in-the-event-of-death files. The whole ITEOD system
is semi-closed, supposed to be input only—though I already told you
what I think of that. They don’t count on that closure, though;
they’ve got full-range security. Go at it on wire and you’ll get a
scream that’ll rip your hearing up for weeks, even though it
doesn’t touch your external ears, and you’ll hit a glare of white
that’ll burn you alive. It tastes of acid and stinks of burning
corpses. You’ll be blind and deaf, and you won’t want to eat for a
week when you unplug.
    Yeah, I tried it once; of course I did. Who
could resist?
    I never even got close, but at least I didn’t
get caught; you can get yourself sent up for reconstruction if you
tamper with ITEOD stuff.
    The casinos are nothing by comparison. I
could handle anything they threw at me, as long as I was careful,
and I’d been careful. I read what my retrievers had brought me.
    The nine casino names had all turned up, as I
expected. I hadn’t managed to tag any real names; that was in a lot
deeper, behind at least one layer more security than I wanted to
tackle. They were all legitimate names, though—and they were all
first registered at the New York. Bond James Bond 54563 had also
played the Starshine and the Excelsis, and Darby O’Gill 34 had
spent a few nights at the Delights of Shanghai, and so on, but five
of the nine had only played at the New York, and they’d all started
there and played there more than anywhere else.
    That was interesting.
    Whoever was buying up the West End apparently
had some connection with the New York.
    I sat back and sipped my Coke and waited
until the parasite pyramid finished up and reported back empty. My
chair wiped off the sweat from my wire run, and massaged my back,
and the holoscreen on the far wall ran some contemplative
scenery.
    I still had two hours. Should I go down to
the Trap and drop in at the New York?
    No, I decided, not yet. First I wanted some
background on the place.
    I’d never spent much time in the New York,
not when I worked in the Trap, not as a kid, not even when I ran
wild for a year in my late teens. I was never that fond of sleaze,
and when I live dangerously it’s generally for some better reason
than a cheap thrill. I lost plenty of credits in the Starshine
Palace and the Excelsis and the three IRC joints, but I’d stayed
out of most of the others. I’m not real big, after all—a hundred
and forty-five centimeters, forty kilos—and most casinos don’t like
their customers armed, so I’d be in serious trouble if I got in a
fight with someone who knew what he was doing.
    This isn’t cowardice, just caution. I mean,
even unarmed, I can take out your standard drunken miner easily
enough, but I can’t handle them in groups, and I can’t handle them
if they’re sober and know how to fight, and I can’t handle them if I’m drunk or otherwise mentally or physically unsound, so I
always did my drinking and carousing in places where the bouncers
knew their job.
    The New York wasn’t quite up to my
standards.
    Which is not to say the place was a dump; the
New York was not like Buddy’s Lucky Night, a dive down on North
Javadifar that no tourist had ever come out of alive, and even the
smarter miners avoided. No, the New York was a serious Trap casino,
living mostly off the tourist trade—though some miners did play
there, and you never saw miners in the Excelsis or the Luna Park.
Nobody had ever been killed in the New York so far as I knew,