The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

Foxy and Tiggs ^{Justina Robson}

Foxy and Tiggs were at the scene. The sun beat down out of a merciless noon sky, falling on tourist, tour guide, and body alike. It fell on Foxy’s lustrous fur and Tiggs’ crocodilian green hide and made Tiggs’ arm and crest feathers gleam with the beautiful gothic tones of an oil slick as she carefully picked over the site of the find.

Foxy shepherded the tourists back into the softly floating cocoon of their tour bus. “Back you go, folks, back you go. Crime scene here. Got to do some investigating and we’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.” She adjusted the lie of her hotel uniform—a dinky little hat with a feather in the band that marked her as a detective inspector and a smart jacket tailored to fit her small body perfectly and provide a harness to hold the items of gear she carried. Her brush waved behind her like a huge duster, rufous red and tipped with soft cream.

Her nose twitched. The body had been out a few hours and it was starting to stink.

She wasn’t the only one who thought so. Overhead, a gyre of vultures circled, stacking up one by one as they drifted in across the savannah. On the ground, Tiggs put out a claw to check the pockets of the deceased as the tourists adjusted their eyecams and leaned over the deck rails of the bus to get some good footage. It wasn’t every day you saw a velociraptor investigating a murder, and since this wasn’t on the itinerary or billed as an extra, it was premium gold level XP.

Foxy strolled up and down over the sandy earth but, as she expected, there were no telltales here to give the game away just yet. No footprints, no tyre tracks, no blow-patterns from hover vehicles. She was going to have to wait for Tiggs’ exemplary nose to give her the facts as it hoovered up local DNA and fibres and compared them with the hotel’s registry of guests and inventory of luggage.

The tour guide, a regular Earth human with a blonde crew cut and a rather fabulous waxed moustache, anxiously tapped the hull of the bus as he watched with grim fascination.

“Should I stay here? I mean, this is prime lion country. We’re just lucky the lions didn’t already find him. It is a him, yeah? Well, this is the home country of a particularly large pride right now. Did he—was he killed by a lion?”

Foxy watched Tiggs snort as she heard this—people often assumed Tiggs was just an animal or a bot. Foxy got past this by being a humanoid foxling, the size of an eight-year-old child, small and rounded, in every way the picture of a designed but intelligent being. Tiggs was a long four metres of saurian which looked exactly like the park ’saurs you could see in Lands of the Lost, albeit with less feathers and a blunter snout to fit all the telemetrics in. Tiggs enjoyed the anonymity and now played to the crowd as she flexed her hands with their huge hook claws and bent down, jaws open for a wide capture as if to consume the corpse.

The crowd ooh-ed and the bus rocked back as they recoiled. Tiggs smiled, although only Foxy could tell. Tiggs’ face didn’t have the mobility for expressions, but through their full-encryption powerlinks they were almost one being. They chatted privately as Tiggs stood up and made a show of stalking around, searching the local brush while at the same time picking up a bit of intel for the safari systems since she was there.

“Dumped from quite a height,” Tiggs said. “Broken bones all post-mortem, some impact bruising and burst lungs full of water. Drowned. Shorts dried out but they were wet when he landed. There’s droplets of salt on the ground and the leaves of this thorn tree here. Impact spread shows a bit of a roll. I’m waiting on the lab getting back to me about the water.”

Foxy reassured the tour guide and helped him re-schedule so that the tourists could enjoy seeing the arrival of the clean-up crew coming for the body. “Drowned over in Pirate Booty Bay,” she told him and her entranced audience.

“That’s half a world away!” said a boy, awed.

“Yes, sir,” Foxy agreed, “That it is. You know a lot about the hotel do you, son?”

“You have soft fur,” his little sister said, leaning through the rails. “Can I touch it?”

Foxy turned and put her brush up against the rail. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

“Minnie!” A horrified mother’s voice. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Minnie, we do not touch the little people. They are not toys.”

Minnie was very polite with the tail, as Foxy had known she would be. She didn’t mind. She’d got a track of this kid’s stay and she was as nice as they came, clean, tidy, caring. She assigned each child a special access pass to a ‘secret’ grotto where you could dive in powersuits along the most beautiful of the ocean reefs and later wear symbiote mertails and sport in a private lagoon. As the presents arrived at the family feed, the parents cooed and calmed down, which is what she’d been going for. Even as part of the police force at the String of Pearls Magnificent Hotel, keeping guests happy was her favourite part of the job.

“Drowned off Voodoo Beach,” Tiggs said, returning from her tour of the thorn trees. “No identification on him and reception says he’s come in on a false ID. Quite a good one. They’re promoting the DNA search out of house.”

Foxy recovered her brush with a flourish and bade the tour guide farewell as the cleaner crew’s glossy white and red cross rig appeared, floating down from orbit carefully to avoid disrupting the vulture tower. “Let’s sign him off to them and get ourselves over there then.” She took a walk over to the body and looked down at him together with Tiggs.

A young male human, well built, with some sunburn on his shoulders and nose. He had short dark hair, some body hair, although not enough to really call it hair in her opinion. Maybe he had been handsome before the bloating and the bruising set in. She wasn’t sure about that. They had some in-house footage of him coming in from Kyluria Point by shuttle, and he looked like every other tourist to her, stepping out of the door into the soft, warm light of Caribae with that combination of hopeful and weary that characterised people on their second hundred years. His clothing was made by the AI house Turbulent and fit him perfectly, its mixture of clean colours and distressed cloths a popular affectation of the intergalactically wealthy. His combination showed no particular imagination. He was every inch the potential corporate spy.

“We’ll assume he was dropped here so the body could be eaten,” she said, straightening and hopping up the long length of Tiggs’ leg to her position on the soft saddle that was part of Tiggs’ uniform harness.

Tiggs grunted. The lions in question were a part of their regular work in Safari World, where they spent most of their time patrolling the vast expanses without trouble other than the odd bit of animal vetting, light fraud and a robbery or two. It was just luck that a murder investigation had kicked off in their area, but Tiggs’ grunt signalled her lack of agreement on the ‘luck’ interpretation that Foxy had placed on it.

“Now we have to follow the whole thing through to the end, right?” Tiggs said, waiting for Foxy to settle down and get her hind paws in the bucket stirrups.

“All the way,” Foxy confirmed.

“Can’t hand it over to Pirate Baywatch?”

“No way. Come on, Tiggsy, this is what we’re made for! We’ve never had our own murder before. To the Bay!”

Tiggs grumbled at the idea of flying and the idea of being on someone else’s turf, the sound coming out as a growl as she set off at a run through the bush, weaving easily away from the scene and circling once at the landing site to signal the clean-up pod that it was safe for them to land—no wildlife of note around. Then she was doing what they both loved best: speeding through the hip-high grass of the plains, her feet almost silent as they struck, the wind blowing free through Foxy’s whiskers, following game trails, on patrol all the way to the distant lift-off point where the orbital shuttles rose and fell twice a day.

Hotel Main Ops sent them first class private through to the Bay. They said it was so the guests didn’t get disturbed, but Foxy knew they could have sent them cargo class for that. The luxury of first class was something that the Hotel itself was doing as a way of caring for them. The Hotel was its staff, just as much as its planets and its vehicles, its buildings and its life. The Hotel was all of them but bigger than them. Foxy and Tiggs had never heard the Hotel directly, but they felt it and, on occasions like this, they felt it a bit extra, a deep, lasting hug in their bones. It was good to be part of a Hotel. Foxy actually pitied the tourists who were always coming, looking, searching, leaving, combing things for every last mote of XP they could get before they had to move on.

They tried out all the luxury treatments they had time for. Foxy had a deep tissue massage. Tiggs went for a complete nanomask deep-clean of her skin and feathers and, to amuse herself, got one of her teeth gold-plated. ‘Now do I look like a pirate?’ she asked as they made ready to disembark, flashing the fang.

“Aye!” Foxy said and pulled down her eyepatch, which she had requisitioned with the notion it might not be a bad idea. The sunlight at the Bay was intense and there were many dark interiors at the buildings that ringed the beaches. She might need a good eye for each venue. “What about me?”

“Arrrrr,” said Tiggs, making the most frightening kind of noise that Foxy expected anyone had ever heard, particularly when paired with the sight of her teeth. It was good they were in a soundproofed cabin.

“You might want to ease up on that a bit,” she said as the door opened.

Their itinerary opened, hotel-style, before them, soft colours showing the ways they had to go, but instead of cocktails and sun loungers, they were headed to the last recorded places that their mystery guy had been seen.

Out at the front it was morning, and the boardwalk that ran the length of Voodoo Bay was already busy. The Bay was a very broad curl that ended with a spit of land sticking out into the ocean, pointing like a finger. On maximum zoom Foxy could see people at the tip diving into the deep water from the rocks, the glitter of drones taking their pictures like dots of light. Down the other end of things was a tall cliff into which one of the hotel guest houses was hollowed out in a series of caves. Some of these ran directly in from the sea, accessed by boat and fin; others were high above the waterline, serviced by interior lifts and private jet or glide packs. Behind them the majority of the bay was lined with shanty huts of low level and apparently no tech. There was no land side exit; you had to take a shuttle or a powerhaul to the adjoining coastal zone. She and Tiggs took a walk down to the hire shop where watercraft were loaned out, studying their inner maps of the new place as they went.

“I got a ping from the lab,” Tiggs said as they walked along the sand, aware of being watched, so unusual and out of place. She returned various waves and signals from the local tritons who hosted the beach and pinged ahead for someone to talk to at the store. “They say the john is a fabricant from a shop out in the Bosphoric Chain, and not a particularly high quality one.”

“Ooh, Chain stock,” Foxy said. “That’s slumming it, even for a spy avatar.”

“They’re washing him for trip data—radiation sigs, all that—to see if they can match him to a factory.”

The sun on the water glittered but the breeze onshore was cool. The bay water was shallow, a pale turquoise that slowly melded into deep sapphire blue at the bay’s edge.

“It was old though, for an avatar. Someone on the run?”

Tiggs nodded as they arrived at the Float Shack. “If you’re stuck in an avvie that long and you get killed in one, do you, you know, do you die? For real?”

“Depends on the hosting dunnit?” Foxy said. “How far it was, how good the transmission is, how encrypted. I mean, it got through on a special guest permit—a stolen one I may add, but even so. That’s not a hard data barrier, only a mild checker. You can get in and out on it. Maybe. But the host would have to have some kind of transmitter in the hotel and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. I’m askin’ all the same.”

The triton in charge of the shack had been updated and came out to greet them. He was a tall humanoid with a silver, sharkskin finish and many cartilaginous finny appendages, webbed fingers, but human hands otherwise for handling the gear. A triple row of ridged fins framed his face instead of hair, shielding a mass of trailing tentacles that hung to his waist in the back.

“Detective Foxy. Detective Tiggs. Welcome to the Bay. How can I help you?”

Behind him Foxy watched other tritons preparing a skim boat, loading it with picnic supplies, fishing rods and speeder skis. “Hey there, Lucas. We’re looking for news of a guest that was murdered out here sometime last night, we think around one a.m. local time. Has anyone asked about someone missing?”

“No, nothing like that. We’ve been tracking all our gear and doing a backcheck since your shuttle sent out the alert. Nothing missing. And none of the deepwater services have mentioned anything.”

“The water was from this Bay,” Foxy said. “What goes on here at night?”

“Everything that goes on in the day time, minus the sunbathing I’d say,” Lucas said, “But last night was the weekly big bonfire up over on the point. Big cookout, lots of drinking, lots of partying. Everyone goes to it.”

“We have a sighting that looks like it was at night. Here.” Foxy displayed it for him on his mindnet.

“Ah, that’s definitely near the fire. What’s this from, a guest net?”

“There’s something at work in the background,” Foxy said. “Very few pictures of him and what we do have is blurred, like interference. I think it’s a local firewall.”

“Nothing like that here hotel side,” the triton said. “Maybe got yourself a stalker.”

“Thought it,” Foxy said, tipping her hat to him. She was getting very hot and thought quickly, to spare herself some sun. “I’m going to go check out all the shanties and the buildings down on the far shore at the end of the ’walk, see if we can find someone who recognises him. Tiggs here is going to do the hard work, aren’t you, Tiggsy?”

Tiggs flattened her crest. “I need someone expert on the water. See if we find an exact profile.”

“I know the guy,” Lucas said and beckoned. “C’mon.”

Foxy excused herself and took a drink of water as she watched Tiggs walk off, Lucas pointing, talking. After a moment her partner set off down the beach at a run, giving the sunbathers a wide berth, which didn’t stop several groups of them getting up and running off in a moment of panic. Foxy didn’t laugh. That would have been unprofessional. A lot of people started asking if there was a cross-level event, a dino invasion, something exciting like that going on, and was it a real dino and would it really eat anyone…

Humans. They were such dipshits. If they bothered to read any of the hotel menus, they’d know they could go for a hunting party by special request, lethal or any other kind. But she made a note for Entertainments about the interest in unplanned monster attacks.

Foxy finished her water and took a trike up from the shack to the walk, spinning along, taking readings of the air to see if any traces of interest were about, but the air was thick with barbecue fat and smoke, high with ozone. Even moving slowly among people, she didn’t find a human that had been in contact with him. Not that she expected to. Murderers who could falsify hotel data systems were few. But they must have hijacked a Private Skimmer to make the flight and the drop without getting rebuffed by Sysops, and that meant that they took it, like any guest, from the Skim Depot. So she was going there and showing her photos on the way. She asked a lot of people, all finding her “so cute, look at this fox, honey, look, she works for the security people, isn’t that adorable…” but although people did recognise that Foxy was especially lovely, nobody recognised the john.

Tiggs reached the cliff guest house and turned to the water when she found the barbecue pits and stone circle where Bay Services were steadily cleaning up from the previous night’s fire and entertainment. Records of the dead man’s few moves flashed through her mindnet and she matched them to the landscape she could see. He’d been here, here… and here. The moves took her towards the water in the direction she was going anyway. He had left the fire shortly after the music started and the dancing. He’d come out here… but of course the tide had washed all the marks away.

She was met at the edge of the surf by Tovi from Deepwater Safety. Tovi was, like her, almost an identical replica of the creature he resembled: a giant mantis shell crab. His carapace gleamed, heavy with weeds and limpets. Mussels festooned his back. He raised his larger pincer in greeting and together, with him as the guide, they began to move out to sea. He walked and Tiggs swam above him, helped by some web-sheet that Lucas had given her for her hands and feet. Her skin found the water very cold but surprisingly enjoyable.

“There’s a regular patrol at the reef’s edge,” Tovi told her as she was lifted and lowered by the rolling waves. “I’ve called in a few of the lads. They’ll meet us there. They know what they’re looking for.”

By the time she had swum out that far, Tiggs was starting to feel tired. She was glad when Tovi pointed out a spot where the reef was close to the surface, and relatively safe for her feet, so that she could stand and have a breather. Their contacts were already there, gliding around, their fins breaking the water’s surface. Grey sharks. They could smell an individual ten miles away in the ocean, even more. She gave them the aroma of the dead man and they vanished, one by one, silently, into the depths.

They were soon back with an answer. “Found it. The old raft beyond the point. There were swimmers in the water all night, but there’s residue on the rope there. Maybe on the top there’s more. I’ll call Vince, he’ll give you a lift.”

Vince was a megalodon and couldn’t get too close to the reef. He surfaced at his slowest speed so Tiggs could swim out to him and walk up onto the broad back behind his head, as tall as the enormous fin behind her.

“All aboard,” he said, mindnet to mindnet, and then, with imperceptible movements of his fins, they were off, Tiggs surfing all the way, her ankles breaking the water but never going deeper, her balance never in doubt. She thought that Foxy might be right about the luck. It was sad to lose a guest and perhaps dangerous to rout a troublemaker, but riding on a shark across the ocean on a fine day was an unexpected and complete joy. She held out her arms and her feathers caught the wind. She could imagine that she was flying…

The fixed raft came up all too soon, and she had to leap off and onto the weathered old decking, hoping she wasn’t ruining a crime scene. Vince loitered as she made her inspection, studying the area as closely as she could, mapping it, then taking various tastes of the boards and the ropes with her tongue. Her nose was good, but the seawater was abrasive and pungent itself and she wanted to feel confident—the tongue never lied. And there it was. A match. And a lot of other DNA traces along with it.

She pinged Foxy. “He was here. Vince verifies that the water profile by this raft matches his. It has a particular coral and protein signature from the plankton rising up that is almost unique to this kilometre. He was alive on this deck—I’ve got semen matching. It’s mixed with female human DNA. I’m relaying to the lab and to reception and guest services. I’m coming back.”

Foxy was at the Skim Depot. They had checked out several private shuttles around two a.m. None of the routes were tracked, but they could download the internal tracking data as long as there was a warrant. Foxy served the warrant and was shown aboard the one that had taken off last. It had recorded its flight to orbit, but then glitched and there was no further data to be saved.

“You can see here once it’s back in the Bay, it resets,” the service manager said, poring over it with Foxy together. “I’m no expert but if there’s a mindworm involved, it will have been put in via the access panel…” They went over to the plate and undid it.

Foxy took a sniff of the area. “Does this match what you’ve got, Tiggsy?” She sent over the sniffings.

“Same woman,” Tiggs said immediately.

Reception came back almost at the same moment. They had several in-use identities for the dead avatar, all being sent over. They had an ID on the woman guest. She had not left the hotel, and there was no current record of her whereabouts.

“Well, I never,” the skim service manager was saying. “Spies! Here, in the Bay. What was she doing?”

Foxy told her and thanked her, then popped her eyepatch down and went outside. Tiggs jogged towards her along the beach looking pleased with herself even as she complained, “Bloody hot it is out here.” She tiptoed around families and avoided various of their pets, snarling at a particularly barky dog and showing her gold tooth.

Foxy ordered a bucket of water and an iced tea and took them out to a table with an umbrella sunshade at the edge of the sands to wait for her. Tiggs’ snout disappeared into the water bucket as soon as she reached the umbrella, and there was a long pause.

Foxy twirled the tiny paper umbrella in the mass of fruit stuck to the side of her iced tea. “If she hasn’t left the hotel, and the skimmer was returned here…”

“Then she’s likely still here. She hasn’t swum out, I already asked Tovi and Vince. Some of the Bay rats say they’ve got traces around the shanties—food stands, especially one that serves seafood skewers. Got quite a groove there. They’re looking all around now to see if they can find her.”

“You’re so smart, Tiggs,” Foxy said, glad they were of one mind. It made life so much easier.

“I am.” Tiggs lifted her head up and then lay down on a lounger for a moment, resting her head on the table. Her eyes swivelled to look at Foxy. “I rode a shark.”

“Show me later,” Foxy said, trying not to be envious. “Ooh, here we go. Sighting in the casino. Classic.” She had a final lap of the tea and then hopped up and onto Tiggs’ helpfully low back. “Let’s ride!”

“Cowboy,” Tiggs said, unamused, and heaved to her feet. “Oh, I drank that too fast… my stomach hurts.”

“You’ll be fine, just take it slow. The casino roaches are tracking her.”

“What do you think is going on?” Tiggs asked as they paced along the walk and then turned to face the huge, glossy frontage of the seafront casino. It was a beautiful building, like a cliff of glass. To either side of it, lesser buildings provided restaurants, bars, theatres and haciendas within which all manner of spa treatments and indulgences were available. Skinshops and tattoo joints stood out here and there. Foxy saw a young woman come out entirely recoloured from head to foot as a zebra. Even her eyes were white with black rings.

They stood in the shade of one of the tall palms that helped to separate the casino from the beach. “I think…” Foxy began, questioning the sense of going in without any backup, but getting off the saddle and checking her vest anyway. “That time is of the essence. She’s got wormware. She’ll have some way of finding out she’s been spotted. We know she can bypass ordinary security. We should go arrest her. I’m heading in. You stick around here and be ready in case she makes a run for it.”

Everything was human-sized. Tiggs clearly could not be the one to go inside. “All right,” she said. “But keep me on live feed. I need to know where she goes.”

Foxy gave her a pat on the knee. “Don’t you worry, I wouldn’t feel safe if you weren’t right with me.” They synced up, and Tiggs watched as Foxy walked through the revolving doors, absurdly small for a police officer on the hunt of a ruthless criminal. A roach pinged from the gambling floor where classic card games were in play. Foxy vanished from sight and Tiggs watched her on second sight. She was so still and so absorbed with the strange view of legs and bottoms that were the majority of Foxy’s vision that it took her a while to realise that a family with toddlers had stopped next to her.

“How much is it for a ride?” asked the father, looking around Tiggs for a place he could scan his wristband, clearly under the impression that she was a mechanical child’s toy. They were day-rate guests, flown down to the beach from the cheaper accommodations on the massif.

Tiggs cocked her head to look down at the children.

“It’s so realistic!” the woman said, putting out a finger to stroke one of Tiggs’ arm feathers. “I love how they spare nothing on the technology here. Not like Procyon Paradise—you could tell all their machines straight off. Really clunky finishing.”

“I can’t find the tagger,” the man complained.

Tiggs felt her eyelid twitch. In the dim, chandelier-lit confines of the card arena, Foxy had cashed up a few chips and prowled herself to a seat at the Blackjack table, opposite the mark. Roaches were moving into position at key points to oversee all the exits.

“I wanna ride!” screeched the smaller child, holding up its arms imperiously.

“Here, just sit on it for a minute,” the woman said and lifted the boy up, setting him down with a thump on Foxy’s saddle. “Put your feet in the thingies. There you go.”

“I can’t get it to…” the man was saying when Tiggs gave a little whole-body jerk as if she had just been put to life by a very slow processor command. “Oh thank God. You walk with him, Jody, I’ll put Kimmy on when you get back. Go up to the ice cream shop and come back.”

The croupier was setting up as the bets were going down. The mark, a tall, athletic human with long black hair and mahogany-wood-style skin, was toying with her chips. At her elbow a large vodka tonic was half gone, ice cubes melting to blobs. She was wearing a fine silk jumpsuit, and something about the movements made Tiggs think she had a powersuit on underneath it. She said so to Foxy and, at the same time, began a careful and slow march towards the ice cream shop.

Foxy ordered a pina colada and made a modest wager. The cards went out. Foxy got a three and a six. “Her name is Ghabra Behdami. So it says at Reception. They think she’s the original. She’s a premier platinum passholder but bought it only two days before she got here. Everything about her checks out, but if she is wearing a powersuit, then it’s good enough to pass, and that means she doesn’t check out at all. Plus she bugged that skimmer. The roaches are in. As soon as this hand’s over, I’m taking her out.”

Tiggs was nearly at the shop. She could still see the casino out of the side of one eye. “Got a bit of a situation here. Wait, what are you doing? Doubling down on nine?”

“What does it matter?” Foxy ignored her drink and shoved more chips forward. “Oh, look at that. Look at her eyes. That’s some fancy crap in those irises and on that retina. This is military grade. Shit. What should I do now?”

“We haven’t found any accomplices. We don’t have motive, we only have association,” Tiggs said, waiting as a dripping cone was passed over her neck before slowly making a turn and starting a creep back towards the avenue of palms and the glass frontage. “Show her the photo.”

Foxy got a two out of the shoe. The croupier already had eighteen. “So, has anyone here seen this guy? He’s gone missing and we need to find him. He has a virus. It’s complicated.” Foxy showed the registration photo of the dead john, his open necked linen shirt, floppy hair, plumped skin all unsuspecting they were on the final countdown.

Ghabra Behdami looked at it on her feed, looked at Foxy—not just a glance but a real good look—and then without any warning at all bolted from the table, jarring it and knocking over all the drinks as she got a good solid boost off it. In a heartbeat Foxy was in pursuit, bounding over the glasses and the foaming, icy froth, her paws slipping on cards before she was in the air and then on the floor, her arms pumping. She was fast and she was nippy, in and out of legs and around chairs, but Behdami had a front-line soldier’s power-assisted second skin on, and if it weren’t for the fact she had to change direction a couple of times, throwing guests left and right like ping-pong balls as she hurled herself towards the kitchen server entries, then she’d have been able to outpace any regular hotel security.

At the front Tiggs crawled the last few steps to the waiting father and second child, who was whining and swinging at the limit of his father’s arm. A large glob of melting vanilla cream ran down her neck and into her ruff feathers. All sorts of hormones were coming up, readying her for the hunt, and she started to drool uncontrollably.

“Eww, look at it,” said child two as the mother reached up, standing on Tiggs’ foot, and hefted the first one out of the saddle. As soon as she stepped clear, Tiggs whipped her head around and put her nose right in child two’s face. The spit slid off her gold tooth and onto the pavement.

“Y’aint no picture, sweetie,” she said and then she was off like a bat out of hell around the side of the building. She heard the kid screaming and winced as roaches pinged her with the news that the mark was barrelling through the kitchens and, soup catastrophes in progress, would be out of the back and into the service bay in five seconds.

Tiggs sprinted, had to go around a laundry cart, skidded on the corner on loose sand, made the back just in time to see the doors burst open and Behdami come powering out. The silk jumpsuit was baggy on the limbs, tight at the waist, gathered at the bust. She looked like an insane genie from a cabaret in her high heels as she caught sight of Tiggs and made a quick change of angle, away from the street exit and towards the high wall that screened the backyards from the gaggle of two- and three-storey blocks that make up the Hexen—a little district devoted to pirate fantasy fun for adults, thick with roleplayer zombies and cursed sailors packing cutlasses and pistols. It was nearly three o’clock, when the backwaters would be surging with crocodiles as the pirates made their play to steal the “naval” masted ships and make for the open seas of the lagoon, flush with treasure and slaves and all the whatnottery of a very good time. Behdami leaped like a hero, took a stride up the wall and over it, pumped off the top into a cat’s leap that took her onto the roof of a fortune-telling bodega. A chicken squawked as Behdami vanished from sight, and Tiggs was after her, claws scrabbling on the wall top for a moment as she recruited ten rats and a seagull to help her see.

At the kitchen doors Foxy, panting, hat in her hands, paws covered in soup, could only stand and watch. “Go get her, Tiggs!”

The chase was swift and deadly. Behdami could parkour like a goddess, and she did—up walls, onto roofs, ten metre jumps, down the fire escape slides, over the heads of gawping navvies in the burning heat of the afternoon. Everywhere she went, the seagull watched, the rats pursued, and Tiggs came after. Behdami cleared a street in one bound. Tiggs followed and crashed through the roof of a taco stand, got up and was after her in a second. Behdami dashed over the rooftops, doubling back towards the casino, no doubt having realised the only way out of the zone was either the Skim Depot, which would block her now, or by a direct route physically out of the main gates and through the hotel parking zone into the raw wilderness. The gull’s call became a siren wail as more security was called in.

Staff pirates shouldered their way through the groups, but like everyone else they were sidelined as Behdami rolled, somersaulted, vaulted her desperate race using every surface like a rebound board in an effort to avoid the relentless, slavering velociraptor that followed her stride for stride. High in the air, mid-leap, Behdami spun to fling out a line of razor thread, but Tiggs was wise to it—the seagull saw her pulling it out of her sleeve—and she threw herself to the side, tail balancing the zigzag with incredible flexion. The thread fell aside and cut through the fake thatching of the zombie master’s roof where someone will have the unlovely job of cleaning it up soon but not Tiggs—she was wide-eyed and as deadly as an arrow. Behdami feinted left, dived right and dropped into the street, going to cover herself with the milling agitation of the pirates on the quayside. A rat noticed the plan—there were two rights and a left before the gate to the outside world, but if she went through the buildings, it was only two doors and a pedestrian crossing.

Tiggs changed direction and cut her off, bashing her way in through the back doors of Black Blood’s Barbecue as Behdami entered the dining area. A quick-thinking freebooter drinks server shoved the doors closed, trapping them in the grill. Behdami went for a knife but Tiggs was already pouncing and on her. She was not the only one with a skin suit on today.

Tiggs stood, victorious, her prey under the deadly claws of her feet. Ice cream and drool ran off her neck and ruined Behdami’s lilac jumpsuit. Behdami struggled for a moment but felt what she was up against, looked at Tiggs properly and gave up, lay back on the rubber matted tiles, her chest heaving for breath. It was over.

A few rats gathered for a look and then dashed off again, remembering their place. Somewhere in the deep background of her mind, Tiggs saw Foxy approaching with the handcuffs and calmed down. This was how they always operated. Foxy and Tiggs.

“Sorry about the kid,” she said as Foxy calmly trussed up their spy or whatever she was.

“I comped them a cruise, don’t worry about it,” Foxy said, so proud of Tiggs she could hardly speak. “Ghabra Behdami, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of an unknown man in Pirate Bay. You can say what you like but we both know it’ll all come out in the end.”

“God, you people,” Behdami said from the floor as Tiggs reached over to the grill, foot still clasped around her neck, and helped herself to a half-cooked steak. “Will you let me go if I give you your story?”

“Try us,” Foxy said. “Let’s see what it’s worth.”

“It’d be easier without you sanding on my n—”

Tiggs squeezed, just a little. It had been a very long, hot day.

“Fine. Have it your way. Your man’s name is Fantheon Pelagic and he was hotel security, just like you. That’s how come you couldn’t see him—he was never tracked here because he was part of the hotel, only he worked out in the spacelanes, tracing counter agents from rival groups. He came down here looking for some lowlife from the Dream Tripper group—her data’s here, look. She’s a spy.”

“What’s your angle?” Foxy asked, taking a seat on Behdami’s thigh and patting her. “You’re tooled up nicely.”

“I’m Solar Military, I’m on furlough,” she said. “I’m not here because of your hotel, only because of Pelagic. He was the lover of my best friend and he’d been cheating on her. Once you can excuse, but they were going to get married and he was still at it so I came to take him out as a kind of… not wedding present, let’s say.”

Tiggs went for the other steak because it was getting overdone and there was no way any guest would be served it now. “Go on.”

“I came down here, found him at the beach party, seduced him—not like that was difficult. I mean, that’s pretty low, right? I had to be sure though, sure he was scum.”

“So you drowned him and then took him to the Safari in the hopes he’d be eaten before we found out what had happened.”

“Yeah. It seemed like the easiest way, you know? A couple of park rangers were the worst that would happen. I mean it should have taken days for you to figure it out, and all I had to do was ride my real ticket out tonight.”

“I don’t believe it,” Foxy said as their check on the data she’d given them paid out. There really was a spy in the hotel, and nobody, until now, had found her.

“Yeah, me neither,” Behdami said. “Rangers and pirate zombie rats. God in a fucking bucket, but you are one badass hotel.”

“It’s a cutthroat business,” Foxy said and stood up. “Tiggs, you can let go now. The offworld police are here and I need another drink.”

Tiggs let go and stepped back. “We did it!” she said privately to Foxy.

“You did it, dear.” Foxy patted her and then hopped up and onto the saddle. “Hey, this is all sticky and—what for the love of all booty has been going on up here?”

“You don’t want to know,” Tiggs said. “Trust me. Do not. Want. To know. I’m going for a swim.”

“I think they have floating loungers and a wet bar,” Foxy said. “Let’s go find out while we wait for the specials to pick up that spy.”

Crime is not uncommon in the world of business. For a hotel such as myself—The String of Pearls—four pearly planets, orbiting the golden jewel of their travelling star as it heads steadily on into the depths of unknown space, the greatest prize of such a crime would be the looting of the consciousness protocols that govern every aspect of hotel life and my evolution as a living system within which people and creatures may live and prosper to the best of their abilities as honoured guests. This was the prize that the Dream Tripper franchise of luxury liners had been going for in its wonky, desperate way, and who knows what they might have done if they had not been caught on the tails of a crime of passion?

I am reasonably sure they could have done a lot of damage, but it’s not in my nature to be vindictive. That is the very antithesis of hospitality and a hallmark of bad romance. So, once the matter of Pelagic had been cleared up and the spy returned to the Dream Tripper’s nearest waylay point, I sent Dream Tripper a full and complete copy of my functional mindmap and its operating systems and dependencies. If it is worth stealing, then it’s worth sharing.

Meanwhile, later the same day Foxy and Tiggs are back on their usual patrol route on our Serene Serengeti pathway. The night is cool and clear, the full swathe of the Milky Way visible as we pace majestically towards its mysterious heart. In both the friends a sense of wonder and happiness from their adventure is still burning—they are young and they are valuable, successful, in a beautiful world that loves them.

I copy that and I send it on to Dream Tripper too. I want to be clear that there is no such thing as just a park ranger, just a rat. Upon the actions of the innocent, the daring, the incidental and the tiny, so much fortune can turn and it must be free, not governed from above.

For a while I watch the guest shuttles come and go from our major reception station. A heavily laden schooner full of people who have been on long serving trade craft in deep space is coming in. They’re all so eager to see and be on a planet again that I’ve felt inspired. I’m quite delighted with all the little treats I’m planning for them as they acclimatise to their ancestral worlds—though not Foxy’s suggested monster invasions, not yet at least.

I hope some of them will stay awhile and maybe become permanent guests—all fellow travellers are welcome and I hope many of them will have stories of their own to share. But until they arrive I am watching a foxling and a raptor run the game trails in the dark beneath a hunter’s moon.

But really it’s hard to live at that level of the romantic even though I love it. I’d rather watch Foxy. I’d rather watch Tiggs.

“Foxy, you know when you have that feeling that you’re being watched?”

“You mean when the hotel is paying attention?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Is it, like, really there or is it imaginary? Is there really one big mind or is that just what it feels like when some bits of the hotel have to check what you’re doing and… and is it related to that funny ringing noise you sometimes get in your ears?”

“That high-pitched whine?”

“Yeah, like you have a crossed wire or a mosquito stuck in there—there for a second, then gone. Is that like—what is that?”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was something being downloaded.”

“I thought that but then nothing seemed to happen.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t, would it, if it was a secret download of stuff. It would just update you and then you’d feel the same but operate better. If it was that.”

“Oh yeah. We were good though, weren’t we?”

“Like real detectives. You heard what that woman said. Park rangers would not get it. But we did. Yeah, we did! I’m almost sorry it’s over.”

“Don’t be. I’ve got a note from Entertainments that says they’re starting a series of live murder mystery events and they want us to lead the investigations.”

“Really? Oh yes, I’ve got it too now. Wait… did you hear a sound before you saw it?”

“I think that was an actual mosquito, Tiggs.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“What’s that sound, then?”

“That’s an elephant blowing off. Move upwind of them. I think they’re onto us.”

“I’m on it.”

Definitely.