The SI ones, she realized. Then she read the date. “Three weeks? I’ve been out for three weeks?”
“That is correct.”
“Why?”
“Time required for medical treatment.”
“Oh.” Now Mellanie really didn’t want to look under the sheets.
Orion stirred, saw she was awake, and sat bolt upright. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. I haven’t tried to move yet.”
“The nurses said it’d be another few days before you can get up.” He came over to stand beside the bed, gazing down at her in awe. “Are you really all right? I was really worried. They spent so long treating you. The chief doctor said they had to grow new bits. I didn’t know they could do that.”
“They can. Uh, Orion, why are you here?”
“They said I could be when you woke up.” He suddenly became terribly anxious. “Why? Don’t you want me here?”
“No … I’m glad you are, actually.” There weren’t many people she wanted to face right now. The boy was easy, though.
His smile was euphoric. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
His hand crept down to where hers lay outside the sheets, then darted back.
“So are we under arrest?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, no. The security people weren’t very nice when the ambulance brought you back here. They said Nigel Sheldon was really cross with you. But it’s all been okay since he and Ozzie got back.”
“Back from where?”
“They flew to Dyson Alpha and restarted the barrier generator. It’s been on all the news shows.”
“Oh.” And I missed it all.
“There are Dynasty warships going off on Firewall flights right now. And there’s been alien agents arrested in the Commonwealth, and there was some big storm on Far Away that killed the Starflyer, and lots of other stuff. Tochee and I can hardly keep up with it.”
“Nigel’s back?”
“Yeah. He said to tell you the offer’s suspended. What does that mean?”
“He promised me an interview; that’s all.”
“Okay. And a bloke called Morton stopped by. He said you’d know where to find him if you wanted to.”
“Right.” He couldn’t be bothered to wait?
“Mellanie, where do you want to go when you’re better?”
“It’s a little early to … What did you call me?”
Orion hung his head sheepishly. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was heavily creased, as though it had been read a lot.
Mellanie recognized her own handwriting. She’d actually written it in this room.
Darling Orion,
I’m sorry I have to leave you like this. I don’t want to, but I’m not even who you think I am. My real name is Mellanie. One day I’ll explain, if you ever want me to.
“I’ve managed to find out most of it,” he said. “Who you are and everything, that the SI sent you. Ozzie explained.”
Her throat was tightening horribly. “Then why are you here?”
“I told you, they said I could be.”
“But, if you know …?”
He reached out, boldly this time, and brushed some of her hair from the side of her face. “None of that stuff changes the way I feel about you.”
Mellanie started crying. It just wasn’t fair that he was the only one in the universe who truly cared for her. Why couldn’t I have met him before any of the others? “I can’t do this. I’m wrong for you.”
“No you’re not, don’t say that.”
“I’m not a nice girl, Orion, really I’m not.”
Orion gave her a quick devilish grin. “Yeah. I remember. I was sort of hoping you’d go on being like that with me.”
She put her hand around his head and pulled him down for a kiss.
The building manager was standing outside the main entrance of the ancient five-story building, supervising the maintenancebot as it removed the sign. Paula watched the electromuscle tentacles drop it into a trolleybot’s wire cage. It lifted out the old sign and placed it on the stone wall, then began to screw it into place. She smiled at the familiar lettering.
“Madame!” the building manager’s face lit up. He bowed deeply. “You are back! Welcome, welcome. The world has regained its sanity.”
“Thank you, Maurice,” she said sincerely. “Slight exaggeration, but it does feel good.”
He kissed her on both cheeks. “Everybody is waiting for you inside. May I carry that?” He indicated the small plastic bag she was gripping in her left hand.
“No thank you, I can manage.” Paula took a breath, and walked up the steps. As the doors opened, the maintenancebot began polishing the letters on the sign. She paused and watched the ancient brass lettering start to gleam again in the Paris sunlight.
INTERSOLAR COMMONWEALTH
SERIOUS CRIMES DIRECTORATE
The first person she met when she walked into the office on the fifth floor was Gwyneth Russell.
“Boss!” Gwyneth exclaimed. “Welcome back. And congratulations. Deputy Director. It’s about time.”
“Yes, well, you can’t spend your whole life in a rut.”
Gwyneth gave her a very startled look. “Absolutely not. I’m footloose and fancy free myself for the next fifteen years till Vic steps out of the Boongate wormhole. Fancy a drink tonight? I know some good clubs with lots of sweet first-life boys.”
“Not tonight, but sometime, yes.”
“Sure.”
Behind Gwyneth the rest of the investigators were standing at their desks, applauding enthusiastically. Paula actually felt her cheeks redden. She looked around at the familiar faces, and nodded her appreciation. “Thank you; it’s nice to see you all back out of uniform again,” she said. They fell quiet immediately, smiling. “It’s customary for the new chief to tell you that there’s going to be some changes around here, but I think we’ve all seen enough of that. From now on it’s strictly business as it used to be. So—I’ll want a meeting of all senior investigators in an hour to establish current case priorities. I shall also be reviewing personnel files today and tomorrow to see how you performed recently, and we need to rebuild teams after the losses we took during the navy days. To which end, I’d like to welcome Hoshe Finn to the office; I’m sure he’ll fit in just fine.”
Hoshe gave her a grin, and raised his cup of herbal tea in salute.
Alic Hogan was in the director’s office, putting his personal effects in a box. He gave Paula a half-guilty look when she walked in.
“Sorry, Chief, I wasn’t expecting you for another hour. How did it go with the Director?”
“Easy. Departmental meetings are a waste of time at best; it’s all politics and budgets. Nothing useful or relevant.”
“You’ll be all right, now you’ve got the Burnelli family backing you. Five years, you’ll be the Director.”
“Humm.” Paula cocked her head and looked out of the big window. “Adopted again.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I never realized: you can’t see the Eiffel Tower from here. You could from my old office.”
Alic swept the last pile of papers into his box. “Uh, you know that’s the one building management assigned me to.”
“Very symbolic.” Paula sat behind the desk and pulled her rabbakas plant out of the bag. The flower had faded, but another pink shoot was worming its way up out of the black corm. The hologram of the Redhound family was placed next to it. Then she took out a fist-sized perspex cube with a memorycell embedded in the middle. “I’m really pleased you’re staying, Alic,” she said.
“I don’t see a huge future for me with Admiral Columbia. Uh, I was surprised when you agreed to accept me in the Paris office.”
“From what I heard you stood up to him for what you knew was right. That means you’re in the right place.”
“Thanks.”
“In any case, you could have taken your pick of government jobs after Far Away.”
&
nbsp; “I quite enjoyed the work here, despite all the politics.”
“Yes, well, that should be considerably reduced from now on; Columbia has his hands full at the moment. He’s pressing the Senate for navy involvement with the CST exploratory division.”
Alic let out a low whistle. “What did Sheldon say about that?”
“Let’s just say he wasn’t very enthusiastic. The two of them are also struggling over who gets the credit for the Firewall. I expect we’ll see Columbia’s bid for the presidency before too long. Now, I’ve got a meeting scheduled with our office’s lawyers and the prosecuting attorney from the Justice Directorate at eleven o’clock, which I’d like you to sit in on.”
“No problem. What is it for?”
Paula held up the perspex cube. “Interesting case. Gene Yaohui, aka Captain Oscar Monroe. Do we re-life him and then hand him over to the Justice Directorate for trial and suspension, or should he sit out his thousand years here?”
Alic gave the cube a startled look. “That’s him?”
“Yes. I recovered him and Anna Kime from Stakeout Canyon. Anna’s being re-lifed, with a suitable memory edit to remove the Starflyer contamination under the conditions of the Doi amnesty. My contacts tell me we’re going to be facing a request from Wilson Kime’s lawyers to hand Oscar’s memorycell over to him for custody on York5. If that happens Kime will undoubtedly re-life him. There will be a lot of political pressure on the Justice Directorate to drop the Abadan station charges; heavyweight character references, emotionally loaded claims of rehabilitation claiming he’s paid his dues to society, the precedent for sentence cancellation set by the navy interdiction troops on the Lost23, that kind of thing. Should be quite an interesting court battle.” She smiled, giving the memorycell a curious gaze. “I might even lose.”
“You? I doubt it.”
“The sea’s right outside,” Barry squealed as he ran back through the house. He flung himself at Mark. “Right there, Dad!”
Mark ruffled his son’s hair. “I told you it would be.”
“Can I go in now? Please! Please!”
“No.” Mark gestured at the pile of boxes and crates that the trolleybots had taken off the big removal truck. He could see them through the wide open doors, bringing more boxes. How did we acquire so much stuff so quickly; we lost everything in the Ulon Valley. “You can’t, I’ve no idea where your swim trunks are. And besides, I don’t know what the currents are like.” Which was a white lie; the development company brochure file guaranteed that the beaches of the Mulako Estate had benign weather and tides.
“Where’s the sea?” Sandy demanded as she came in through the front door, holding her backpack.
“Outside, come on!” Barry grabbed her hand, and the two of them raced off through the huge living room and out onto the veranda, Panda barking loudly as she raced after them. The lawn beyond had only just been turfed, gardenbots were still tending the new shrub boarders. It ended with a long dune that topped the private beach of white sand and azure water. A thicket of palms had been planted down one side of the lawn, shielding them from the rest of the estate. Mark had never seen so much civil construction work in one place before, not even on Cressat. That morning they’d driven out of Tanyata station, itself undergoing a massive expansion, and down the coastal road. Outside the burgeoning capital city, the land along the shore was one giant building site, with the developers offering exclusive homes in fifteen-acre private grounds. Mark had bought the plot at the farthest end of the estate, where the national park began. They didn’t need a mortgage, the Sheldon Dynasty had paid for it, although Nigel had wanted him to take something even grander on Cressat—in fact anything anywhere was the offer. Mark said no thanks, living in mansions just wasn’t him. He didn’t want to live off a trust fund, either; he’d seen the way Dynasty children turned out and he wasn’t going to let that happen to Barry and Sandy. So he’d accepted a directorship at the Tanyata offices of Alatonics, the Dynasty’s principal bot manufacturer, which paid him a colossal salary—and the way Tanyata was growing he was going to be earning it. Immigration was running at a quarter of a million a week, mainly refugees from the Lost23. Once all the arrangements had been made, Liz sat down with the architect for a week, designing the big airy house that to be honest was a small mansion. Now they were here, it didn’t seem quite real.
“Don’t go in the water,” he yelled after the kids. “I really mean it.” He looked around the big hall, trying to remember which doors led where. Then he caught sight of the marks that Barry’s sneakers had left on the living room’s polished hardwood floor, and winced. “Find out if there’s a maidbot,” he told his e-butler.
Liz walked in, carrying a box full of crockery. “Guess what?”
“Er …”
“The furniture store just called. They won’t be delivering until Thursday.”
“But that’s two days. What are we supposed to do until then? We haven’t got much furniture.” He still couldn’t believe the size of the rooms; it was like a house made up from aircraft hangars. The few items they had brought with them wouldn’t fill his study, let alone the reception rooms.
“Good question. The marshaling yard at the station is just a mess, the container is there somewhere. They think.” Liz gave the hall lighting a suspicious stare. “Those aren’t the fittings I ordered.”
“Aren’t they?” Mark thought the gold and pearl fittings were quite nice.
“No. Where the hell is that development company rep? She should have been here when we arrived.”
“Yes, dear.”
“What’s that?” Liz was looking back out at the front of the house, where a MoZ Express courier van had drawn up next to the removal truck. “Never mind, I’ll find out.”
“Do you want me to help unpack some of the boxes?”
“No. You watch the show, it’s starting. The portals were all installed—at least they’d goddamn better be.”
Mark hurriedly found a big floor cushion in one of the boxes, and carried it through into the living room. He put it on top of the scuff marks. Liz would kill Barry if she saw them.
He sat down and told the house management array to access the Michelangelo show. The portal projected the image across half of the empty floor. The resolution and color definition was superb, even with the sunlight streaming in through the open veranda doors.
Michelangelo was dressed in a flowing purple silk suit, standing by himself in the middle of the studio. “Hello, one and all. This is the show we’ve been trailing for a couple of weeks now, the one where we promise to give you the real story behind the war. And believe me, I am not kidding. To prove it, we have Nigel Sheldon here in the studio.” The image focus switched to a line of chairs, Nigel sat at one end, and smiled at the studio audience as the applause started. “Ozzie, himself,” Michelangelo announced as if he couldn’t quite believe the guest list. “Retired Admiral Wilson Kime, Senator Justine Burnelli, Chief Investigator Paula Myo, and our two very special visitors, Stig McSobel, spokesman for the Guardians of Selfhood, and a MorningLightMountain motile containing the memories of Dudley Bose.” Michelangelo applauded the line-up, then smiled winningly out at the audience to show how really happy he was with the next announcement. “And although it’s technically my show, the interviewer of course simply has to be our very own Mellanie Rescorai.”
Mark chuckled as the image zoomed in on Mellanie sitting behind Michelangelo’s big desk.
“You should have gone,” Liz told him.
He looked up and grinned. “Not a chance. Remember the last time she interviewed me?”
“Yes,” Liz drawled. “Anyway, the delivery was for you.”
“Oh, what is it?”
Liz gestured at the trollybot. There were ten children’s school lunch boxes resting in its basket. “There was a note.”
Mark frowned as he opened the little envelope. “Fresh from the kindergarten,” he read. “Enjoy your new house. Ozzie.” He grinned and opened the first lunch bo
x. “Hey, champagne!”
“Millextow crab salad,” Liz exclaimed as she opened another. “Thornton’s chocolates. Damn, we need more rich friends.”
Someone knocked on the front door. When they went into the hall they saw three people standing on the shaded porch. Mark did his best not to stare at the tallest of them, a lean man wearing a kilt and white T-shirt. Every part of his exposed skin had an OCtattoo; golden galaxies glowed on his bald head. “Hello there, I’m Lionwalker Eyre, and these are my life partners, Scott and Chi. We’re your new neighbors. Thought we should come and introduce ourselves.”
“Please, come in,” Mark said. He was now having trouble not staring at Chi, who was enchantingly beautiful. “I didn’t know we had neighbors yet.”
“Aye, well, we’ve been here a while,” Lionwalker said in a broad Scottish accent. “Normally I’d have moved planets by now. Don’t like the crowds. No offense. But there are no uncrowded planets anymore. So, best make the most of it, eh?”
“We were just about to open a bottle.”
“In the middle of the afternoon? My kind of neighbors.”
“I know you,” Chi said. “You’re the Mark Vernon.”
“Ah.” Mark casually sucked his belly back in. “Guilty, I’m afraid.”
“Actually,” Liz said, as her arm closed around Mark’s shoulder. “He’s my Mark Vernon.”
Bradley Johansson did the one thing he didn’t expect to do: he opened his eyes. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed. His throat had trouble forming the words, they came out very wrong. These vocal cords were evolved for more sophisticated sound, and song.
“Did you ever doubt that?” Clouddancer asked. “We named you our friend.”
“Ah,” Bradley said. He tried to get up. When he moved his arms, the wing membranes came with it, rustling heavily. He looked down in astonishment at his Silfen body. “Is this real?”
Clouddancer laughed. “Hey, pal, if you ever find out what real is, you be sure and let us know, okay?”
It had been a long three weeks out in the new desert. Tom was tired and filthy after the endless days scanning the sandy soil and digging endless holes. He also wanted a break from Andy’s constant whining and Hagen’s wretched cooking—say about ten years. Brothers they might be, but that didn’t mean he could stand being cooped up with them for so long.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 232
