Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  Wake grinned. “Thanks. Pleasure doing business with you. There's just one thing. In exchange for my silence...I will need a set of Vyres.”

  Vante was taken aback. This again? “We're not allowed to sell them. I told you yesterday. You need licenses out the wazoo, you need permits, you need...”

  “Ah,” Wake said. “You want to bring paperwork into this? Pardon me. Maybe we haven't understood each other. I was thinking that mountains of paperwork was exactly the thing we were triyng to avoid.”

  “Yeah, but I'd have to account for the missing set of Vyres,” Vante said. “As soon as Ms Krepsen realises stock is disappearing, she'll order a full stocktake of our store, and the Quetzals will be counted. I can maybe hide the Quetzal's death from her, and I can maybe hide the missing Vyres. But I can't do both at the same time.”

  “I will give you a hundred thousand ducats for a set of Vyres, boy,” Wake said. “Take it, and purchase a second set from whatever passes for the black market around here. With that kind of money, you wouldn't even need this job. You could walk away from it today. What do you say?”

  In the end, Vante said the only thing he could say.

  “My thanks,” Wake hooked the Vyres on to his belt. He'd just wired the money. “It's always handy to have these things. I just can't stand being stuck on the ground when there’s a sky full of possibilities to be explored. I'll put them to good use, I promise.”

  Vante somehow doubted that.

  “Uh, can I just mention that you’re not supposed to carry a gun on the outer platforms?” he asked.

  “Why not?” Wake asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vante said. “It’s just a rule. I don’t know the reason we have half the reasons we do.”

  “Asking that question means you’re well on your way to being a free man. Wait until you start questioning the other half.”

  “I mean it,” Vante said. “Guns aren’t allowed.”

  “A gun saved my life.”

  “I know, but we need to pretend this never happened. Suppose the Quetzal’s disappearance comes to light. They’ll run a check on all the customers for that day, and you might get searched. And they have ways of telling that a gun’s been fired.”

  Wake nodded. “You’re pretty bright. How old are you again?”

  “Twelve.”

  Wake drew the pistol from his belt. It was tailored so close to his body that Vante hadn’t even noticed he’d had it before he’d drawn it, which he supposed was the sartorial intention.

  Wake threw it to him. “You can keep it. It’s yours. A little gift.”

  Vante turned the gun over and over in his hand, reviewing what little he knew about guns.

  It was a Meshuggahtech KA-32 pistol. Army issue, not police. Not unless the police now used expanded-capacity magazines, with bores specially drilled out to accommodate explosive or flesh-burning rounds.

  Most guns had lock-out systems, attuned to the individual’s heart rhythm. If they fell into the wrong set of hands, they wouldn’t fire.

  The lock-out system on this one had been disabled. It was an equal opportunity offender, as likely to be used by a lawbreaker as a lawman. It had a savage shine, as though it was an entity with no goals or directions beyond launching bullets at everything, everywhere.

  It was heavy. Fully loaded.

  “I’m not allowed to have a gun either,” Vante said, suddenly sweating.

  “What you’re allowed to do is a different question to what you can do, boy. Why don’t you keep it? Believe me, you won’t need a gun often, but when you do, absolutely fucking nothing will take its place.”

  He didn’t think he would take it. He had loathed even the idea of violence. It had taken hours of getting up his courage to do what he’d done to Emil Gokla. He walked over to the edge. “I’m going to throw it off. I’m sorry, but if it’s mine, then I can do what I want with it. And there’s no way I can keep it.”

  He looked down into the poisonous fog girdling the tiny bubble of oxygen. It was a thick and rank pea soup that would burn instead of nourish.

  The ultimate place to dispose of a body, and the ultimate place to dispose of a weapon. Venus ate steel nearly as readily as she ate flesh.

  Wake seemed abashed. “Well, whatever. No good deed goes unpunished. Have fun tossing a good weapon into the acid. Just remember that when you’re in trouble, you’re not going to be able to call it back.”

  He turned and started walking away.

  Los Neo Angeles – June 26, 2143, 1200 hours

  Sirens screamed in the distance, and the floodlights blinked off and on again.

  Earthquake warning. The third that day so far.

  Treading through the rubble littering the streets, Ubra Zolot left Rose and Yves’ apartment. As always, she left by a different route than the one she'd come by. Los Neo Angeles was full of roads, many of them new and unplanned. When a wall fell down, people passed through it. The city was crumbling, and it was now paradise for vermin like her. Despite her theatrics over the rash, she was pleased. Yalin was in relatively good hands.

  No need to break down a door every day. She'd make weekly visits. Then biweekly visits. Then visits only when guilt commanded her to go.

  At the start, a burning hate for Andrei Kazmer had been her only prerogative. She’d only cared about Yalin to the extent that she wanted to keep her safe while she began her manhunt.

  Weeks later, Kazmer was as elusive as ever. Meanwhile, Yalin needed a mother.

  I'm getting nowhere, she thought, not with despair, but with cold, desperate calculation.

  Probably thirty billion inhabitants in the solar system, across trillions of kilometers. She was looking for one of them. And he would be dangerous, vigilant, and on his guard. She was looking for a needle in a haystack, and the needle was tipped with poison.

  She wished she hadn't let Kazmer escape. She'd had him on the ground, and could have finished him. But she'd had to fight an inner war before pulling the trigger, and circumstances hadn't given her enough time. No matter. She wouldn't fight that war twice.

  Beneath her thick coat, she had weapons. She felt them wobble against her body as she walked, like pendulums of death. She was no match for Kazmer in a fair fight. But when they finally met, it wouldn’t be a fair fight.

  What she urgently needed was more information. She needed specific information about where Andrei Kazmer was.

  At the moment, she had information that was accurate but not precise - he was somewhere in the solar system. If she knew that he was still on Terrus, that would help. The planet held about 60% of human life, reducing her search by 40%. If he'd skipped out to Mars, which held 15% of humanity's population, she'd save 85% of her search. Selene would save 90%. Venus would save 99%. Ceres would save 99.9%.

  But she needed something.

  She followed a winding route. Los Angeles had been a less than hospitable place for centuries, but now it was armored soldiers who harassed you instead of vagrants and buskers. Ubra's crudely forged badge got her through most of these encounters, and her tongue got her through the rest. She made her way down the winding streets that had once glowed with neon lights, enhanced with electronics. Now, there was no more neon. In his quest for the future, mankind had engulfed the world in fire, and returned to his past.

  As soon as I kill Kazmer, she told herself, the thought a reassurance in much the same way as the guns swinging at her side were, I am taking Yalin and going far away from here. Some remote asteroid outpost. A place where the gravity is artificial and you need dialysis twice a week because the air's impure. Somewhere so shitty that nobody has any incentive to fight for it. That’s the only way we can really be safe.

  War wasn't exactly hell - when she thought of hell, she more thought of being trapped on a planet with a god-rapist - but it wasn't any place to raise a child.

  She found a building, and let herself in the front door. In a deserted lobby that had once housed some business or other, she found an elevator and desce
nded.

  The elevator rattled as it sucked her straight down to the city's underworld, such as it was.

  She was worried that an earthquake would have caved in tunnels underneath the city, but apparently, they still held. They might well outlive everyone.

  Ever since returning and divesting herself of Yalin, she'd gotten to work understanding how to do things outside of the law. Things that came second nature to someone like Mykor or Kazmer was now a skill she had to learn, too.

  How to meet people, and leave no trace.

  How to trace, and leave no people.

  As yet, she hadn't yet committed any kind of criminal act beyond impersonation of a law enforcement officer, and petty vandalism of security equipment. Not terribly good, but not beyond hope of explanation if she was caught. She had no hope that this record would last.

  The elevator stopped, and the door hissed open like a serpent's whisper. Beyond was a filthy corridor, darkening to black as the light faded.

  Every day found her deeper inside Neo Los Angeles's criminal fraternity. A black market was growing stronger, even as security tightened above ground. The network of streets beneath the city allowed people to travel past the curfew. They could forge papers and make it look as if you were something you weren't.

  They’d immediately picked up on the fact that Ubra wasn't a member of the Solar Arm Constabulary. This worried her. Her disguise was almost transparently thin.

  "Is Moritz Edel available?" she asked the first person she encountered. "There's a clock I need repaired. One of the numbers has worked its way loose, and it's holding back the hour hand."

  He pointed at a room down the hall. They were big on non-verbal communication, especially since microphones existed that could record frequencies down to 20hz while being functionally invisible.

  She'd wired twenty thousand ducats for access to this place. She didn't fault them, or think them greedy. It was money to investigate her, and make sure they weren't bringing a mole into their criminal organisation.

  She knocked on the door to Edel's room. He opened the door, and invited her in.

  His table was littered with gears, cogs, sprockets, and actuators. As with everyone here, he had a front and a back. His front was a clock repairer - a ridiculous, old-fashioned exercise, but one that his nebbish features and centuries out of date clothes made almost plausible.

  His actual profession was hacking.

  He specialized in man-in-the-middle attacks. He could insert himself into authenticated conversations, siphoning data out, while leaving the two parties convinced that they were only talking to each other. It was sophisticated, challenging, and required enormous brain power. Usually, hacking involves breaking stuff. But when you were compromised by Moritz Edel, you would never know he was even there.

  She was paying him massive amounts of money to gain access to the records of all recent spaceflights and their passengers. She was hoping she’d find a familiar name in one of the data sheets.

  "So what's the latest?" Ubra asked him. "Have you gotten me the Solar Arm Aerospace's global itinery yet?"

  He wouldn't take his eyes off the gears in front of him.

  So she already knew the answer.

  "I've failed," he said, the weight of that failure heavy in his voice. "I went for the most obvious angle of attack - Neo Los Angeles spaceport. There's a physical cable from their endpoint to a relay junction in Washington DC, at which point it gets transmitted to Selene, where all of the space travel data is agglomerated into a single huge database. I bribed a repair team, and was able to cut the cable and connect a packet spoofer. That's my usual MO. When security is designed against software threats, I go hardware. When security is optimized against hardware threats, I go software.

  "What happens if it's optimized against both?" she asked.

  "Then I use a human threat. A rogue agent on the inside of the SAA would help, but I haven't been able to find anyone. They're really up tight since the occupation. Whenever I contact someone and try to turn them, they immediately say no and report my smurf to the Constabulary."

  "So why didn't the packet spoofer work?"

  "They have a third party authentication system. Maybe it's in a physical tower somewhere. I don't know. Basically, the endpoints both expect packets of a certain size. If I send a 128byte request for the universal itinerary, and the Selene endpoint expects a 256 byte packet, the request fails. This isn't a problem if I know what the expected packet size is - then I can tailor it so it's exactly the right size. But what I have here is a system where the size keeps getting fucking randomised."

  "Huh," Ubra nodded. "So at certain times it expects one, at certain times it expects another."

  "Yeah, exactly. And it's completely unpredictable. It's designed precisely to beat a man in the middle attack, and it's beating me. I'm sorry. I'll give this some more thought, and maybe a magic solution will pop into my head. But as of press time, we're stuck."

  Ubra digested that.

  If she had the database, even for the few minutes, she'd be able to search it for known names or aliases of Andrei Kazmer. And time was of the essence. Right now, she thought he might still be reasonably close, and perhaps not so well hidden. But each passing day meant he had more and more time to become invisible, to disappear.

  He was now doing a vanishing act, and she was running out of time to find him.

  "So what the hell are you doing with this information, anyway?" Edel asked. “I just don’t get why you need to trace fifty million flights.”

  "It's for my business," she smiled.

  "Huh?"

  "It's a convent of Irish nuns. I call it Nun-o-Yer Business."

  He scowled, and gave her a thumbs down. "I'm serious. This is a sophisticated system I'm butting heads against - and that means police, as well as encryption. Suppose I get picked up and questioned. Suppose we both get picked up and questioned. We need to have a story, and it needs to match."

  "I'm a member of the Solar Arm constabulary," Ubra said.

  "You're not, and they'll swiftly find that out."

  "But still, I'll just say I'm trying to collect data on a dangerous outlaw - which is the truth! I have only the best interests of the Reformation Confederacy at heart."

  "And who is this dangerous outlaw?" Edel asked.

  "I'll have to ask one of my Irish nuns."

  "I warn you," he said, "I need straight answers. The money you have paid me is just barely acceptable for this level of risk. And if you are willfully endangering me by withholding information, then it's not acceptable at all."

  "I’m not," she said. "His name is Andrei Kazmer. He's a former member of the Constabulary, and he has...problems. To not bore you with the details, we was apprehended at a facility at Arrakhia Mountain and then escaped. No clue where he is now. If I knew the names of the passengers on every shuttle in the solar system in the past ten days, then I might have a shot at pinning him down."

  Edel shook his head again. "You are absolutely insane. If he's trying to stay hidden, you'll never find him. Not even if he's in this very city. Be reasonable."

  "I have motives that transcend reasonability," Ubra said. "It's all I think about.”

  “You want to kill him. I see it in your eyes.”

  She nodded, “I want him to die. It’s all I think about. I can't slow down, I can't stop, I can hardly sleep. This is my life. This is all I do, and until I have evidence that he's gone, it's all I will do. Preferably evidence in the form of a gun recoil hurting my shoulder."

  “You’re even crazier than he is,” Edel said, shaking his head.

  “Well, keep me posted,” she turned to go.

  "What do you want me to do?" Edel asked.

  "Keep trying."

  Ubra was back in Rose’s apartment.

  “I need you to do something," she said.

  "I'm already doing something," Rose said. Yalin squalled softly. Earthquake warnings still echoed from the cityscape outside.

  "I need
you to do something else. What soldier credentials do you still have?"

  "Probably less than zero. Lots of people are going away and not being seen again. I went to the veteran's office and they..."

  "Look, I don't care about that," Ubra said. "I need to someone who can authenticate a change to a military data cable. Think you could do it?"

  "Hello no," Rose said. "I’ve been told to literally forget I was ever a soldier."

  "Sometimes permissions aren’t properly cancelled. If I gave you an address, could you at least go there and make enquiries? I have a friend who's trying to do some investigative work, and we badly need to access the records of the Aerospace Commission."

  "This is fucking dangerous," Rose said. "And I won't do it. If I'm caught monkeying around with something..."

  "You're doing nothing. Just authenticating a friend. You're taking care of my daughter - do you really think that I'd give you this job if there was substantial risk to you?"

  "My answer is still no."

  "So let's negotiate how much money it would take to turn your answer into a yes."

  In the end, it was far less than Rose would have felt comfortable admitting.

  They were burning through their savings fast.

  "I'll be back in a day or so," Ubra said. "Please grant read-access permissions, and link them to my suit. I need to know exactly when the authenticator switches codes.”

  Yves was standing in the doorway, staring at the scene as if she was witnessing an unstoppable tragedy.

  Assault on Venus

  Zephyr City – Venus – June 27, 2143, 1800

  Something was wrong with the Quetzals.

  Vante attempted to feed them that afternoon. He'd concocted a story about how they were overfed and lethargic, and it sounded believable enough that Krepsen only ordered eleven sheep carcasses until of the usual twelve. Vante strapped on his Vyres - she hadn't yet enquired about the missing pair, and no doubt he'd have to improvise a story there too - and flew underneath the platform.