“I don’t feel too good,” Dudley said. His face was white, slicked with cold sweat.
Mellanie wanted to slap him. She couldn’t believe he was doing this to her, not now. Didn’t he understand how much trouble they were in? “We have to hurry, Dudley, they’re coming.”
“Who?” Any further questioning was postponed by a violent judder that started in the middle of his chest. He squashed a hand to his mouth. People were staring at him as his cheeks bulged out, moving away with their faces wrinkled up in disgust.
Mellanie’s boosted senses showed her the SIsubroutine establishing itself in the drive arrays of vehicles along Cheyne Street. Both of the Institute troopers had reached the front of the courthouse building. One of them drew his ion pistol. “Hey, you,” he called out.
Dudley started to throw up. People backed away fast as watery vomit splattered onto the paving slabs. Now there was no one between Mellanie and the Institute troopers.
“Stay right there,” the first trooper shouted. He raised the ion pistol, leveling it. Mellanie blinked against a powerful green dazzle as the weapon’s targeting laser found her face.
A car horn sounded loudly. People turned in curiosity, then yelled in panic. There was a sudden rush of movement as an old Ford Maury saloon veered across Cheyne Street, heading straight for the troopers. The green laser vanished, swinging around toward the Maury. Mellanie caught sight of the driver, a middle-aged woman who was tugging desperately at the steering wheel, her face frozen into an expression of disbelief and horror as the car refused to obey. A fusillade of horn blasts from the road around the wayward car drowned out all other sound. The troopers tried to race clear, but the car followed their movements. Its front wheels hit the pavement curb, and the whole chassis jumped half a meter in the air as it lurched forward. The trooper with the pistol got off one wild air shot before the Maury’s front grill hit him full-on just above his hips. Mellanie winced as his body folded around the car, arms and upper torso slamming down across the hood. Then the car crashed into the stone wall of the courthouse. Its collision absorber frame crumpled at the front, reducing the deceleration force on the passengers. Plyplastic sponge bags sprang out of the seats, wrapping protectively around the driver. Outside the car there was no protection. The impact burst the trooper apart as if an explosive charge had gone off inside him. For a second the shocked screams of everyone watching rose above the cacophony of horns.
A second car thudded into the curb with a loud crunch, smacking into the remaining trooper, who was staring numbly at his colleague’s atrocious death. He was bulldozed into the courthouse wall not five meters from the first smash.
It broke the spell. People started to stampede away from the horrific scene. Vehicles and cyclists swerved to avoid the rush.
“Move!” Mellanie yelled at Dudley. She pulled him along, nearly lifting him off the ground in the planet’s low gravity. Somewhere farther down Cheyne Street there was yet another violent vehicle crash. Reviewing the flood of data her insert-boosted senses were delivering, she saw the SIsubroutine had taken over a delivery van and rammed it into one of the Institute Cruisers. The resulting snarl-up had blocked that half of Cheyne Street completely.
A small Ables four-seater Cowper pulled up beside Mellanie. Its doors popped open and she shoved Dudley in. “Let’s go,” she cried.
The Ables pulled out into what was left of the traffic. Everything else on the road seemed to move neatly out of its way, allowing it to accelerate smoothly away from the bedlam. Mellanie turned around to gape at the scene behind her. People had stopped running now. Some hardy souls were gathered around the cars that had killed the troopers, trying to help free the people inside.
She sank back into the seat with a shaky gasp of air. Her virtual vision relayed the excited pulses of encrypted communications weaving through the city net.
“Can you track the people in the second watcher team?” she asked the SIsubroutine.
“Yes.”
The chain of data traffic flipped up into her virtual vision, turquoise globes linked by jumping sine waves of neon orange. Ten people were sharing the same channel. Three of them were heading toward Cheyne Street in a vehicle of some kind. The rest were on the ground close to the courthouse.
“Any idea who’s in charge?” she asked.
“One of the people in the vehicle is issuing more messages than the others, which would indicate they are in charge. However, I do not have the capacity to break their encryption, so I cannot offer any guarantee of this analysis.”
“Doesn’t matter. If the other guys were from the Institute, this lot have to be Guardians. Find an access code for the leader’s interface.”
A city net personal address flipped up into her virtual vision. The rest of the imagery was shutting down. When she held up her arm, the lacework of silvery OCtattoos was fading from her skin. “Are you all right?” she asked Dudley.
He was curled up in the passenger seat, shivering badly. “Do you think they had memorycells?” he asked in a faint voice.
“I imagine re-lifing is part of their contract with the Institute, yes.”
“I want to go home.”
“That’s not a bad idea, Dudley. We’ll do that.” The wormhole opened again in two hours. She suspected their hotel would be under observation. If they left right away they might just manage to stay ahead of the Institute. “See if you can get us on the passenger manifest for the next flight back to Boongate,” she told the SIsubroutine. “And cancel the route back to the hotel. Take us toward 3F Plaza, but not actually into it, not yet.”
Mellanie took another minute to compose herself. The car crashes had been deplorable. But then, if the SIsubroutine hadn’t intervened, she and Dudley would be in the back of a Cruiser heading for a very unpleasant, and short, future.
She told her e-butler to call the Guardian member’s code.
Stig stopped the car at the end of Kyrie Street, just before it opened out into 3F Plaza. Franico’s, the Italian restaurant, was twenty meters ahead of him.
“You want to do this?” Murdo McPeierls asked.
“It’s not as if we’ve got the element of surprise,” Stig said. He tried to stop it sounding grouchy, but Murdo had been in the car when he’d got Mellanie’s call.
“I’ll scout around,” Murdo said. “Shout if you need me.”
“Sure.” Stig gave the traffic a slightly apprehensive glance. Kyrie Street looked perfectly normal. But then Olwen said there’d been nothing out of place on Cheyne Street until the cars started going berserk.
Stig squared his shoulders and went into Franico’s. Mellanie hadn’t chosen it for its décor or its menu. Gray curving walls and archways of dead drycoral divided up the restaurant into low segments modeled on some insect hive floor plan. The food was pasta and pizzas, with the house speciality of fresh fish from the North Sea.
It took Stig a moment to find Mellanie. She and Dudley were sitting at a table close to the door, half-hidden by one of the crumbling archways, which gave her a good view of anyone coming in while remaining out of direct sight. He went over and sat down. Dudley scowled at him; the young re-life astronomer was nursing a glass of water. Mellanie had a beer and a plate of garlic bread.
“Thank you for coming,” Mellanie said.
“Your call surprised me. I was interested.”
“I need to talk to the Guardians.”
“I see.”
She grinned and bit into a slice of the bread. Melted butter dribbled down her chin. “Thank you for not denying it.”
Stig nearly protested, but that would have been churlish. “How did you find me? More importantly, how did you get my address code?”
“I have a good monitor program. A very good one.”
“Ah. It was you who released it into the city net.”
Mellanie stopped chewing to give him a surprised look. “You knew it was there?” She dabbed a paper napkin to her chin.
“We knew something was there. It’s v
ery elusive.”
“Okay, well, don’t worry. It’s not hostile.”
“I doubt the Institute would agree with you.”
“Their troopers had drawn weapons. They were going to take me and Dudley for interrogation. We’d probably be turned into Starflyer agents.”
Stig was silent for a moment while he reviewed what she said. “Very likely. Do you mind telling me what you know about such things? Frankly, I’ve never met anyone other than a Guardian who believed in the Starflyer.”
“I discovered my old boss was one, Alessandra Baron. She sabotaged an investigation I…” Mellanie stiffened, turning abruptly. Stig saw a dense, intricate pattern of silver lines flicker into existence on her cheeks and around her eyes. “What the hell are you?” she blurted.
He looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Friland glide out from the back of the restaurant. A faint purple nimbus had replaced the usual shadow inside his hood. It died away. When Stig glanced back at Mellanie, her complicated OCtattoos had vanished from view.
“Shall we call that an honorable stalemate?” Dr. Friland asked in his mellow, echoing voice.
“Sure,” Mellanie said guardedly.
“I am glad. As to your original question—”
“You’re a Barsoomian.”
“Correct. My name is Dr. Justin Friland. I’m pleased to meet you, Mellanie Rescorai.”
Mellanie pointed a finger, and switched it between Stig and the tall robed figure. “You guys working together?”
“We do on occasion,” Dr. Friland said. “And this is one of them.”
“Right.” Mellanie took a sip of her beer, still not looking away from the Barsoomian.
“All right,” Stig said. “We’re not shooting at each other, and we agree the Starflyer is our enemy. So what did you want to talk to the Guardians about, Mellanie?”
She gave him a moderately flustered look. “I came to ask what I should do.”
“You want our advice?” Stig found it hard to believe anyone as ballsy as this girl would need to turn to anybody else for help. She was smart, determined, and resourceful; she could also clearly look after herself. He’d never seen wetwiring so sophisticated. So who’s she working with?
“Like you said, nobody in the Commonwealth believes in the Starflyer. I need to know what you’re doing to bring it down. I need to know if I can help. I’ve got some very strong allies.”
“Oh, fine, one moment while I go fetch copies of our plans, and hand over the names and addresses of everyone we have working in the Commonwealth.”
“Stop being a prat. We both know what’s got to happen here. You give me a onetime unisphere address, I’ll go back to the Commonwealth and make contact. That way we get to negotiate and find some middle ground where we both help each other.”
“That’s you,” Stig said. “What about your partner here?”
Dudley barely looked up from his water. He looked thoroughly miserable to the point of being disinterested.
“What about Dudley?” Mellanie asked.
“He kicked this whole thing off.”
“You stupid, ignorant, little man,” Dudley snapped waspishly. “Have you no sense of perspective? No one person began this; no one person will end it. Least of all me.”
Stig thought he did well to hold his temper in check. “Without you, the Second Chance would not have flown. Without you, millions of people would still be alive.”
“I died out there, you shit!” Dudley said. “They caught me, and they took me prisoner, and they…they…”
Mellanie’s arm went around him. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay, Dudley. Sit back now.” Her hand was rubbing along his spine. “Dudley was used by the Starflyer,” she said to Stig. “If you don’t believe me, ask Bradley Johansson; he spoke to Dudley’s ex-wife. He knows all about the astronomy fraud.”
Stig didn’t know what to do. The simplest thing would be to give her a onetime code as she asked; hand the whole problem over to Johansson and Elvin. But right now, sitting across a table from an obviously unstable Dudley Bose, Stig felt as if he was being manipulated into that very position. His instinct had it that anyone as beguiling as Mellanie couldn’t possibly be duplicitous. Rationally, he suspected she was about ten times as lethal as any veteran clan warrior. Yet she seemed so earnest, so open.
“May I ask what you will do if the Guardians don’t provide you with any assistance?” Dr. Friland asked.
“Carry on as best I can,” Mellanie said. “Gather as much evidence as I can against Baron, use it to expose her to the authorities, and hopefully penetrate whatever agent network she’s a part of.”
“She will be one of only three people. That’s the classic model of spy cells, and with today’s encrypted communications she may not even know the other members.”
“I’ll find the others,” Mellanie said grimly. “No matter how secure she thinks her communications are, I can hack them.”
“Of course, you said you had allies. And we witnessed a small fraction of its ability today, did we not? Are you sure it is trustworthy, Mellanie?”
“I’d be dead if it wasn’t.”
“Yes. I suppose that does generate a respectable level of personal confidence. All I ask, Mellanie, is that you continue to question. You are a reporter, are you not? A good reporter, despite your circumstances and the unseen help you have received.”
“It doesn’t matter how much help you get,” she said. “There has to be talent there to start with.”
Dr. Friland laughed. “Not to mention self-belief. So, Mellanie, all I ask is that you don’t throw away that reporter’s instinct. Keep questioning. Don’t stop asking yourself about your great ally’s motivation. It is, after all, not human. It is not even flesh and blood. Ultimately, its evolutionary destiny cannot be the same as ours.”
“I…Yes. All right,” Mellanie said.
“Treachery is always closer than you expect. Ask Caesar.”
“Who?”
Stig frowned. She’s joking. Right?
“An old politician,” Dudley said wearily. “An emperor who was betrayed by those closest to him. For the greater good, of course.”
“It’s always for the greater good,” Dr. Friland said. His voice sounded like someone very young, a boy who felt sadness strong enough for it to be grief.
“I won’t make that mistake,” Mellanie said. She deliberately looked away from the Barsoomian, and took another drink of her beer.
Stig told his e-butler to prepare a file with one of his fallback unisphere contact addresses in it. “Here’s your address,” he told Mellanie as the file transferred into her holding folder. “I hope you’re on the level with me.”
“I know,” she said. “If I’m not, you’ll track me down, blah blah blah.”
“You. Your memorycell. Your secure store.”
“Nice try. If we don’t defeat the Starflyer, neither of us will be around to duke it out. If I had been a Starflyer agent, you and everybody at Halkin Ironmongery would already be dead.”
The casual way she dropped their secure base of operations into the conversation made Stig want to scowl at her. Instead he felt a touch of admiration. She really is quite something. So why Dudley?
She gave him a pert grin, knowing she’d won that round. “The wormhole opens in another seventy minutes. We’d better get going. Dudley and I are booked on the next Carbon Goose flight under different names. That should be enough.”
“We’ll be watching,” Stig told her. “In case the Institute causes any trouble.”
“I’m sure you will. Good-bye, and thanks.”
“Safe journey.”
***
As modern-day wedding ceremonies involving members of Intersolar Dynasties went, it was short and very old-fashioned. Wilson and Anna went for the classical love, honor, and obey pledges. Current fashion was for the bride and groom to write their own vows, or if they lacked the poetic streak themselves hire someone to compose some poignant l
ines on their behalf. The newest one-upmanship variant of this was for the vows to be set to music in order for the happy couple to sing them to each other in front of the altar. Society brides had been known to undergo a little cellular reprofiling of the vocal cords to ensure perfect harmony.
“You can stuff that,” Anna said when the hopeful wedding planner mentioned it as a possibility.
It was a good decision, given who was actually attending their service in the Babuyan Atoll multidenominational chapel. Chairwoman Gall was of course invited, on the groom’s side, and managed to sit in the pew in front of President Elaine Doi and the Senate delegation led by Crispin Goldreich. Senior navy personnel sat on the bride’s side, along with a small number of Anna’s family, who looked uncomfortable and out of place amid so many Grandees. Wilson had to make some tough choices about who to have from his own extensive family. His ex-wives were omitted despite him being on good terms with nearly all of them; on principle he asked one child from each previous marriage, a representative number of direct descendants; then of course there were a lot of Farndale people he had to invite—political obligation. Courtesy meant he had to invite Nigel Sheldon, who said yes for himself and four of his harem. Ozzie was sent an invitation, but didn’t bother to reply.
Given the ever-expanding number of guests, suggestions were made to the couple that they use a cathedral to accommodate all the additional people who really, really, would like to attend. Wilson said a flat no, and wished to God he’d never listened to Patricia Kantil and her idea about feelgood propaganda. A full third of the chapel pews were reserved for media correspondents. Medium-level reporters on permanent assignment covering the navy in High Angel suddenly found their “company” invitation appropriated by celebrity anchors and chief executives.
Wilson sat in the front pew slapping one hand into the other while the organist played some dreadful twenty-second-century hymn. His perfectly tailored dress uniform with its flawless midnight-black cloth was becoming oppressively warm while he waited. And waited.
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