Ed Greavely looked out of the small apartment’s dirty window. The back of the old, run-down building across the dirty alley filled most of his view. He didn’t really see the rusted pipes or the stained concrete in front of him. Instead, he was looking past all that. Peeking over the very top of the building was a sliver of light coming from the Merchant Prince Jhon Castilla’s Crystal Palace.

Through the paper-thin walls of the apartment complex, Ed could hear his neighbors fighting. The male neighbor was Spanish, she was Russian, and the two of them bickered and argued loudly, sometimes in English, sometimes he’d yell in Spanish while she’d scream at him in Russian. On occasion, when they were drunk enough, objects would go flying. Neither one seemed able to hit the other with any serious force. No one around them seemed to care enough to report the domestic disturbance to the police.

As if on cue to Ed’s thoughts, a siren sang in the distance as a police cruiser responded to a call well outside the worst section of the city Astacus—a rotting favela called the Villa Vermelho, the Red Village. The poor, the destitute, the down on their luck ended up here, eking out some sort of living. And then there were those looking to stay off the official radar for as many reasons as there were stars on the dark side of the moon. A black market thrived here, ranging from your run-of-the-mill contraband and drugs, to full-on organ chop shops and body mods done dirty and cheap, no questions asked.

This was the third mission that giant cyborg Stockwell had Ed doing, and it was proving to be the hardest. Jhon Castilla was more paranoid than he was rich, and he was richer than Croesus. Ed had been here three weeks already without being able to formulate a decent plan to get inside. Every normal route was covered; the ones that most people don’t think about had been locked down. Nothing was completely impregnable—Ed knew from years of experience—but this was proving to be a very tough nut to crack. And, he had to admit, it was becoming a question of professional pride.

A small machine chimed lightly behind Ed. He turned around and walked over to the desk where he had laid out most of his electronics. The apartment was small, dingy, grubby, and smelled of mold mingled with the scents of countless previous renters. The kitchen had a single hotplate, a reconstitutor, and a stained pinkish plastic sink that spewed out brackish-brown recycled water from the pitted faucet. The sagging bed already in the apartment Ed left unused; he didn’t trust its history given the many and odd colored stains on it. Instead he slept in a cot he had brought with him. The battered desk had also been there when he rented the place. The landlord was greedy and stupid but not overly malicious. He had tried to con Ed into paying a little extra for the “amenity” of the desk. Ed had haggled until he was paying a few extra coins a month, letting the landlord think he had gotten the best of Ed, but not without a fight. Ed didn’t want the landlord to think of him except in that context.

The single hard display showed a flow of numbers as Ed’s main system worked the encryption schemes for one part of the Palace. The small 3D projector showed the outside of the Crystal Palace. The image was built from various plans and photos Ed tracked down. The blue-tinted image lazily spun around the center y-axis, showing off the airy spires reaching into the sky. A number of labels hung in the air around the Palace projection where Ed had attempted some sort of light attack and was repulsed. He had a file on how many other attackers he had detected during his own probing of the place. After the entries had multiplied well into the hundreds of individual attackers and thousands of attacks, Ed could see why the Merchant Prince was paranoid about security.

Ed tapped a few commands on his keyboard. In order to keep any signals from leaking outside of the apartment, he had switched off most of his implants and went back to a basic interface with his machine. Slow and low-bandwidth, it still got the job done without accidentally painting him as an anomaly around this section of the Village. The Merchant Prince wasn’t the only paranoid around here.

Ed checked the progress of the side-channel hacks he had been running. No results yet, and the processing power had drained two of the six battery packs, leaving him with four functioning packs. Ed wasn’t pulling power from the apartment’s electrical grid. Too big a chance that some system would notice he was using more power than almost the entire building combined. Instead, he had hidden a number of battery rechargers around the Red Village that siphoned smaller amounts from the grid to recharge his packs. Took a little more legwork on his part, but was something that had kept him away from official eyes, with the added bonus that he got a feel for the lay of the land around him.

Sighing, Ed ejected the coin-like batteries packs from the battery case on his system, then slipped the packs into his jacket sleeves. He poked at his system a bit more to see how the crypto-cracker was doing. Of course, the Palace’s main systems were locked down with quantum encryption. Ed didn’t even bother trying to get his own quantum entanglers inside to piggyback their security. Even if he had an in for them, it would be much too expensive with too great of a failure rate. Instead, he attacked the weaker points—the kitchens, the waste management, the gardening and ground maintenance division, etc. People had a tendency to beef up security for the doors, but leave other avenues relatively open. Aside from the brute force method of cracking the ciphers, Ed was also looking for side-channels and leakage in different places. He did manage to set up a number of passive antennas close to the Palace grounds, sniffing the frequencies around the Crystal Palace, on the off chance someone did something dumb. Always a safe bet.

Before leaving the apartment, Ed turned on the camouflage system to hide his equipment. His desk now held a low-end junk system, at least a decade old. The disguise wouldn’t stand up to close inspection, but it would give the system enough time to wipe its own memory and slag the sensitive storage, rendering everything inert and useless if someone started poking around.

Ed shrugged on his jacket before thumbing the basic lock outside the apartment. The neighbors kept yelling at each other next door. The landing was poorly lit, the carpet a distant memory of threads and color, the flooring scuffed, gouged, and faded. He walked past his loud neighbors as he headed down the flight of protesting stairs. He ignored the creaky open-cage elevator that ran up the center of the stairwell. He didn’t trust it.

After five flights down, Ed walked out into the early afternoon light and onto the cobblestone streets. The smells and sounds of the village were a little more subdued this time of day. Seemingly to wander aimlessly, Ed limped down the street, avoiding obstacles and small, screaming children at play. Gravity wasn’t a full standard on Nicomedia’s moon, Thema Selene, which made pretending to have a limp easy to do.

Only a few ancient ground vehicles passed by on the rough streets as Ed walked. Anyone with money didn’t flaunt it here. Leave anything parked overnight, and it’d be stripped in the morning.

What was eating Ed, more than being stymied by Jhon Castilla’s security, was the reading list that overly loud monk had given him. The sneaky bastard had sent it while Ed was asleep during his trip. When Ed woke up, he had a stack of books in his memory storage with a note listing which ones he should read in what order.

At first, Ed ignored it. He was too busy, he told himself. And he was—for three days. Then he started reading. At first, he did it out of curiosity. He kept reading even when it started calling into question everything he believed in. He then reached Augustine’s “The City of God” and “Discours sur l’histoire universelle,” and he felt…

“Conflicted,” Ed muttered to himself as he stared at the shop window, not seeing past the grimy glass to the few wares inside. Lady Luck had been his mistress since her order had taken him in, taught him how to feed himself, how to take what he needed, and how not to get caught. Of course, he knew the basics around Christianity, but Ed hadn’t bothered looking into the details. Why should have he when Lady Luck provided for him and took away, according to her whims.

But now, all that was, if not up for questioning, at least not as dominant in his mind. Other ideas had crept in. Problems and riddles presented themselves to him. One passage stuck in his head. Ed turned it over and over, trying square his experiences, really his entire life, with it.

“Greed is not a defect in the gold that is desired but in the man who loves it perversely by falling from justice which he ought to esteem as incomparably superior to gold; nor is lust a defect in bodies which are beautiful and pleasing: it is a sin in the soul of the one who loves corporal pleasures perversely, that is, by abandoning that temperance which joins us in spiritual and unblemishable union with realities far more beautiful and pleasing; nor is boastfulness a blemish in words of praise: it is a failing in the soul of one who is so perversely in love with other peoples’ applause that he despises the voice of his own conscience; nor is pride a vice in the one who delegates power, still less a flaw in the power itself: it is a passion in the soul of the one who loves his own power so perversely as to condemn the authority of one who is still more powerful.”

The words were etched into his nigh-eidetic memory. And they pierced his heart. Ed had always prided himself on being a consummate professional, taking what he wanted with minimal collateral damage. He had only killed when his life was threatened, never out of cruelty or spite. In some way, he believed he had his own code of justice. But he had to admit, it was mercurial when a prize was on the line. He took only what he thought his target could afford, but not always. He cheated the rich, but not always just the rich.

“Realities far more beautiful and pleasing,” Ed mumbled to himself as he climbed a battered fire escape ladder that led to a small, dark room, musty with disuse and rat droppings. But what could be more than what he could hold in his hands?

And yet, hadn’t he prayed and offered up donations to Lady Fortune? Luck, in a real sense, wasn’t something he could hold in his hands, and still he knew it existed. And it was beautiful.

The battery charger looked to be another piece of detritus strewn around the room, gathering in corners like small creatures huddled together. Ed placed his thumb and forefinger along the side and gave a little squeeze. The compartment slid open, and he swapped the charged battery with the other. He was using trickle-chargers; it would take ten hours to charge the battery fully, and no one would be the wiser.

Ed carefully walked across the room, stepping on the camouflage pads he had placed where he wouldn’t leave footprints. The door swung open soundlessly, and he eased into the short hallway. He had oiled the hinges to silence the noise of it opening—a dead giveaway if anyone was seriously investigating him—but Ed was willing to take the risk to prevent giving away his movements. The building was abandoned and only druggies and drunks used it; the various favela gangs didn’t care since it didn’t offer any strategic value for any of them.

He flitted from shadow to shadow, taking his time to make sure no one was around before he’d move to his next spot. Ed had only the lightest of security here; any more than that would increase the odds of someone noticing.

Ed limped outside and back onto the cracked asphalt road. He passed a small group of men caught up in their own addictions. He tossed a few coins to a few of them, enough money to feed them if they were careful about it. One grimy man easily caught the coins and gave Ed a crooked grin with his remaining teeth. He nodded at the man and pulled his tattered jacket around himself to ward off the chill seeping in as late afternoon changed into early evening. \The next battery charger station Ed passed by without a pause. He never followed the same pattern twice, never hit the chargers in the same order, never went back the same route. In the short three weeks he had been in Astacus, Ed had learned a lot about the Red Village.

Most of the inhabitants just wanted to make it from day to day. They got a rough hand dealt to them by Lady Fortune. Ed understood them; after all, he had spent his early days living on the streets. He knew how to avoid undue and unwanted attention from them. He blended in with them and didn’t do anything to suggest he was anything different.

It was the predators Ed really sought to avoid. He mapped out where the boundaries between the rival gangs existed. That’s where a lot of activity happened. Gangs were constantly probing the other’s defenses and response times, trying to carve out more territory and keep what they had. Ed steered clear of the hotspots.

He wandered the streets, presenting himself like a man without a purpose or responsibilities. Or money. He let his hair and beard grow unkempt. He applied dyes lightly to give streaks of gray in both. A touch of makeup, and he looked ten years older than he was. Coupled with dirty, ill-fitting clothes and his limp, Ed’s disguise was sufficient for what he was doing.

The third charger he used was in a small merchant’s gallery. Those that had some money tended to do their shopping in places like this. Most of the commerce happened later in the evening, but there was already shoppers there this early today. Ed shuffled along with the rest of the light crowd, pretending to be occasionally interested in something being offered. Most of the stalls sold cheap food items or simple housewares. There were a few surprises in the mix, like antiques, and a couple of stalls that sold cutting-edge tech in various states of disrepair. A couple of cheap costume jewelry stalls competed for attention. Ed ducked into a small stall that sold assorted parts for cybernetic limbs.

“Hey, Todd,” Ed rasped out.

The proprietor sat hunched on a tall stool where he could see his wares. He fanned himself lethargically with a folded piece of paper. Todd grunted in response.

“Hey, George. You got the goods?” Todd’s Astacus accent was thicker than Ed’s adopted one.

Ed nodded and pulled a bundle of parts out from inside his jacket. There were low-end parts for an old model cybernetic arm. The model was still being used around the Village. Ed had made sure he had swiped something of some value. He handed the pack to Todd, who grabbed it with his own prosthetic arm.

Todd pulled a cord from his head and plugged it into a well-used open metal box on the table next to him. As soon as a small light on the front turned green, Todd placed the package in the box and closed the lid. The LED light on the box gently changed from green to yellow to red then back to green. Todd nodded, pleased enough with the results. He retracted the cord but left the box closed.

“Decent set. I’ll give you hundred quine for the whole bundle.”

Ed scoffed. “The actuator motor is worth that alone. Everything there comes out to an easy five hundred quine.”

“Five hundred?! Are you trying to rob me blind? I’m just a simple merchant here, trying to make some money to feed my family!”

“You don’t have a family, Todd.”

“Not the point!”

Todd and Ed kept haggling until Ed agreed to accept three hundred and twenty quine.

As soon as Todd turned to get the money out of the till, Ed swapped the dead battery for a fresh one. The charger was in a pile of junk no one looked at. It was a risk someone would find it and buy it from Todd, but losing that one wouldn’t be more than an inconvenience for Ed. He placed it here to keep his sleight-of-hand skills fresh and the pretense of selling helped him keep a finger on the pulse of the place.

Todd handed the bills and coins over to Ed with a grunt.

“Nice doing business with you, Todd.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just get out of here. You’re scaring away customers!”

No one was around or looked like they were heading their way.

Ed chuckled and shuffled out of the stall. He made his way through the thickening crowds that turned out in the evening. More stalls opened, adding to the general hustle and bustle. Vendors of all sorts shouted and called out, trying to attract customers. Smells of cooking started to spread as food vendors started opening their stalls.

Though the Red Village was poor, there was still money and goods flowing through the veins of commerce. And, if Ed’s nose hadn’t failed him, there were serious amounts of money being moved in the black market in the favela. He stayed away from anything that had real connections to the darkest parts of the seedy underworld. He didn’t want them to know he even existed.

Ed slowly made his way over to an emergency water overflow canal. Flooding had been a concern for years while the moon was terraformed. The city had been designed to deal with flooding, and wide concrete canals ran throughout the city to handle the problem.

He stopped at a rusted and bent railing and looked across the canal to the other side. Ed couldn’t see much over there; the plants had grown thick and wild along the edges.

It wasn’t like him to feel so pensive, Ed admitted to himself. He stared at nothing as he turned over possible next steps to breach the Crystal Palace’s security, maybe even just walking up to the gate and knocking if everything else failed. He had to solve this. Lars had faith in him, and Ed hadn’t had anyone in his life in a long time that did. As soon as he started thinking of faith, Ed’s thoughts turned to Father Justinian and his reading list.

There were too many ideas and concepts Ed had never really bothered with in his life to know how to grapple with them, or even square them up with his own life experiences. More than once, he almost gave up and walked away from it all, but something wouldn’t let him leave it alone. So, he struggled and stewed, staring without seeing the shadows lengthen and the city’s lights—even in a forgotten and abandoned section of a lost and forgotten favela—flicker to life, shedding faint pools of yellow-green light into the gloom. Ed couldn’t make everything fit. He wasn’t even sure how he could.

What he really wanted, Ed admitted, was someone, even that bombastic monk, to talk to about all this. Lars would be good, too. But both men were millions of miles from where he was. For once in his adult life, Ed felt lonely.

Night had fallen before Ed turned back toward his apartment.

Three days later, Ed had his first big lead. The Crystal Ship Race was a mere three weeks away, and the richest of the rich were all converging on Astacus. Many had already arrived and hundreds more were anticipated to arrive before opening ceremonies, which were to be held at the Crystal Palace.

Ed had been probing the Palace’s housekeeping and maintenance departments, looking for an opening there, when his snoopers found out a last-minute cancellation from one of the guests had been misdirected to the wrong person. Ed jumped on the chance, and played the cards he had been holding for something like this. He slipped into the Palace’s network, accessed the personnel datastore, forged a set of credentials he then used to access the messaging system. He dumped everything he thought could help him back to his machine’s datastore, then erased the cancellation and modified the logs to show nothing unusual had happened. He disconnected before any of the normal security Expert Systems started backtracking his connection, and find dozens of hops throughout the city, far more a legitimate user would have.

Ed let out a slow sigh, relieved he hadn’t tripped any automated alarms. Electronic espionage wasn’t as risky as wet-work, but it set him on edge even more. As a general rule, Ed preferred to do things in person.

Now, he had a chance. The Crystal Palace didn’t know that one Meneer Rodrigo van Tassel and his party wouldn’t be attending. Ed had four days to put together a passable imitation of Meneer van Tassel and his junket. He smiled. Finally, things were looking up.

Ed was about to give praise to Lady Fortune but something in him didn’t let him. He needed to know what he really believed first. He’d feel like a hypocrite if he did anything less. He couldn’t thank God, either, for the same reasons.

Laughing at himself for having an attack of self-awareness and conscience in a conman, Ed arranged for his own death. One of the appeals of the Red Village was the choices and options it offered for just such a problem as assuming someone else’s identity. Ed reached out to his middleman and started the process. He dropped two-thirds of the needed money into a shell account from one of his many fake companies, packed up his stuff, and staggered out into the night, weaving erratically, knowing in the morning there would be a look-alike dead from a drug overdose in his apartment and “George” would be forgotten about in a couple of days.

Ed limped his way out into a desolate area of the Village; he slipped behind some corrugated metal sheets leaning against a weathered and beaten concrete building. He worked his way in the dark until he came to a small trapdoor. Taking a careful look around, Ed convinced himself the area hadn’t been disturbed since he had set this up when he first arrived. He opened the trapdoor and slid into a narrow tunnel. Shutting the door overhead, he threw the bolts he had installed, locking it from anyone else entering without needing to cut or blow the door open first. Ed had found this on one of the maps Lars had delivered to him. According to the research Lars provided, this had been abandoned not long after the city had been established, and in this derelict village, it had been neglected out of ignorance.

Ed shimmied down the ancient ladder into a low musty-smelling tunnel. He cracked open a chemical light and headed further in, stooping slightly as he went, using the pale green light to show the way. If everything had gone according to plan, one of the AIs had carefully redirected some resources down here. Ed could see the drag marks and treads from small movers in the dust, which he took as a good sign. Two turns later, he was inside his improvised bolt hole. It was a small round chamber roughly ten feet wide and ten high. The rough concrete was stained various shades of brown and covered in piles of debris. A path had been scooped to the side by the delivery bots, giving Ed enough room to set up a small campsite from the containers left by the same bots. In the past, the chamber served as an overflow from the drains above in the city to handle the intermittent flooding. A collapsed tunnel cut off the water from flowing in for at least a decade. Ed was grateful Lars had signed off on the plan, since there was a very good chance Ed wasn’t going to need anything like this. Ed hadn’t on the last two jobs, though he always had them in place.

Ed quickly set up his perimeter alert system, unpacked enough of the camp to put together a low-powered transceiver, and pulled out a camp chair. He sat down and powered up the radio. As soon as the system was reporting green, he snaked out a cord from the box and plugged it into the back of his neck.

Anyone listening? The signal was encrypted and scrambled across a dozen or more frequencies, with just enough power to blend into the background noise.

Reading you loud and clear, Ed.

Somehow, hearing Archie’s voice construct made him feel better. He was getting soft.

Leave it to you to pick this signal up.

Archie laughed. Blame Abacus. He taught me all about this sort of work. I hate to sound rude, but how can I help you? I have, uh, well, I have lot going on.

Of course, Archie.

Ed quickly outlined his plan of taking over Meneer Rodrigo van Tassel’s life to get into the Crystal Palace.

Love it! Archie almost gushed. I have everything about the man on the way. What else do you need?

A flashy entrance for the first night of the gala. A man you can trust to provide extra eyes and ears. A crew for the racing ship. Rodrigo is well off to have a small entourage. Keep him from finding out I’ve taken over his life.

Consider it done, Ed. Lars will summon him for Coalition business or something. Oh, Blaise Fournier is down on the planet on business for Lars. Would you like his help?

Ed thought for a minute, weighing the pros and cons of involving the Empath.

Not at this time, but do let him know what I’m up to.

Will do. Expect everything to be lined up in three days. Archie over.

Thanks. Over.

Ed unplugged before he assembled enough of his computer to have a functioning screen. He connected it to the radio and tapped the transmit button twice. There was a short burst of static and he had Rodrigo van Tassel’s dossier on his equipment. Ed dismantled the radio and stuck it back in the padded box it came in. Now he had the information and that Archie knew where he was he had no need of it. Lars would make sure things were in place in three days. Now, it was up to him to become Meneer van Tassel. He got to work studying the man from his childhood and everything done in the public eye.

Three days later, a lanky man pulled himself out of the tunnel and dusted himself off. He pulled a comb through a well-coiffed pompadour, scratched at his carefully manicured chin stubble, then sauntered down the road to a waiting high-end, pearl-white ground vehicle. A chauffeur opened the door as he drew near.

“Welcome back, Meneer van Tassel,” the chauffeur said in a clipped accent. The man was shorter than the other but stockier. His bald head shone in the early morning light. He held up a piece of paper with a dense code printed on it.

The lanky man stopped and let his implants digest the information contained. He nodded as way of acknowledgment.

“Thank you, Fredricks.” The man’s accent was upper class Thema Selene.

After they both were settled in the vehicle, the chauffeur slid down the privacy window.

“I assume, sir, we are heading to the hotel first?”

“Correct.”

The privacy window slid up. Without warning, the vehicle leapt forward and tore off into the distance.

Behind them, without anyone noticing, a wisp of smoke rose from the trapdoor as the equipment Ed left behind turned into slag.