by M. J. Locke
Glease gave her a tight little smile. “Fast thinking. Saves a mess.”
“Get to the point. What do you want?”
He tucked his gun into his jacket. “We’re going on a little jaunt.”
Jane pointedly looked around. They were on a Promenade level. Traffic was light, but a few people were out here and there and a trolley rattled past. “Why should I cooperate? Maybe you should just shoot me here and have done with it.”
“Oh, no. I have other plans for you. Besides”—he leaned close and whispered in her ear—“we have Xuan.”
He meant it. Her breath caught. “I’ll come.”
Glease took her up the Weesu stairwell to Level 60, and stopped at a private entrance to Kukuyoshi: the entry to the memorial garden. She went rigid as he keyed in a code. The door opened and he waved her in, but she refused to cross the threshold. “You have no right to be here.”
“Oh, come now,” he said. “You know the old saying. Might makes right.” He emphasized the verb, and shoved her, hard. She stumbled out into the clearing where the memorial had been held, flailing midair in the one-fifth gee till she could grab the limb of a nearby tree with a foothand. “That’s always been one of my favorite sayings.”
“I hope you realize,” Glease went on, while she climbed down, “this is nothing personal. I’m a company man. I have a family back home and we do cookouts on the weekend with our neighbors.” He spread his arms. “If I could have done this without resorting to these more extreme measures, I would have gladly done so. But you have left me with little choice.”
She alighted next to the memorial wall. He grabbed her by the collar. “I have big plans, Commissioner. And I’m not going to let some used-up, tight-ass old bitch with a messiah complex, in a rinky-dink rock in the middle of fucking nowhere, mess up those plans.” He gave her a rough shake with each insult. “Just saying,” he finished, and released her.
She eyed him, panting with despair and rage. She had no way to protect Phocaea. She couldn’t even protect Xuan. They would kill him, her, everyone who got in their way.
She had barely escaped Vesta with her life. The memories were something she never talked about, had forced herself to forget. But they surged up now, unstoppable.
She had been the one to find Vesta’s resource commissioner dead in his office. Poison. She never knew for certain whether it had been murder or despair. She remembered seeing the pills floating before his swollen, purple face. She remembered the bloody handprints on the bulkheads, as friends smuggled her and a handful of other, low-level officials to a freighter. She had spent seven weeks in an icy hold, and had emerged half starved, frostbitten, on Phocaea … only to find that no one cared. Vesta was a small cluster, millions of kilometers from anywhere. Everyone was busy and had their own problems.
So many friends and coworkers had died there. And it was not the work of an uncaring universe. No. It was the work of evil men.
An that hadn’t even been the worst of it. The worst had been those who had helped the Ogilvies do what they had done. Among them had been her own coworkers and friends. They had betrayed their fellow Vestans to the mob to save their own lives, or save themselves from humiliation, or to earn a troy. They had seen no reprisals. They were powerful people now; wealthy, connected. They keynoted Upside conferences and published papers. She sometimes saw their names in the news.
When she had returned to Xuan, all those years ago, he had loved her, held her, and comforted her, helped her to heal. He had given her every microgram of love and empathy a life partner could summon. He had nagged her for working too hard, for driving her people too hard, for being too inflexible with herself and others. But he had never reached this part of her. Not really. He had never understood why she drove herself the way she did. She had turned her own gaze away because she couldn’t bear to keep looking. The truth was too awful, too intractable.
It was simple, though, of course, now that she faced it. All these years, as Phocaea’s resource commissioner, she had been trying to outrun her own horror at what people were capable of, when they were greedy enough, or frightened enough, or broken enough. When no one was watching.
And it’s happening again.
Glease shoved her along. Their movement awakened the wall’s holographic ghosts, who whispered greetings and bon mots as Jane passed by. At the very end, Carl Agre’s ghost awakened. He grinned. “Air kiss…”
Carl. Her eight dead. Her friends and family. Her fellow Phocaeans. A weird calm settled over her. I’d rather be a bloody smear on a bulkhead, she thought. I’d sooner even give them Xuan, God help me, than help them butcher anyone else.
Glease took her to a secluded space behind the wall, near the bulkhead. There he spoke a password and presented his retina to a panel that revealed itself. A hatch opened up. He forced her down into it, and she found herself in a hidden room. Three armed men stood there. Glease locked the hatch and pulled his weapon out again. Jane eyed it in distaste. “The one you used to kill Marty, I take it?”
“The very one.” He displayed it, laying it out on his palm, and stroked it lightly with his fingertips. “You like it? Latest model; cost a mint.”
If she had been able to get the gun from him then, and known how to use it, she would have shot him without a second thought. He saw it in her eyes, and seemed amused. He gestured for her to move ahead of him.
The antechamber they were in held a digital art mural that shifted shapes and colors as they moved through. At the door to another room, Jane stalled in shock. Thondu was sitting inside. Definitely looking more female than male, and more European than African.
So much for my vaunted intuition, she thought bitterly. She had trusted the Viridians. This meant her DeadMan macro was useless. And that flash of insight next to Carl’s hologram? Sheer delusion. She felt heartsick.
But Thondu turned to her, and she reconsidered. The Viridian’s expression didn’t change, but from hir stiff posture and desperate glance, it was clear: ze was a prisoner, too. A fourth armed man stood in the corner.
“A word with you, sir?” the guard said to Glease, who took him into the other room. They left the door ajar and spoke in lowered voices. As Jane turned to Thondu, she caught a flicker of a gesture from the young Viridian, and a flimsy, near-invisible barrier settled over the two of them. The murmur of Glease and the young man’s voices ceased. Thondu did not look at Jane, but instead seemed to be working inwave.
“Listen carefully and don’t talk,” ze said swiftly. “Mr. Glease evaded arrest tonight and came to the Badlands. Learned Harbaugh’s dead and Learned Obyx was badly wounded, may be dead, too—”
“Holy shit!”
“He’s forcing me to make it look like you had a psychotic break, that you did the murders to prop up a paranoid fantasy.” Jane thought, And I just went to my doctor and told him I was hearing voices.
Glease must know, she realized. He’s using it. And that meant he had inside access to the “Stroiders” feed.
“He’s holding hostage the biocrystalline copy of the feral. It’s locked in his safe. He doesn’t know about this version.” Ze touched hir belly.
“But what about—”
“Shh! Listen! He doesn’t have your husband—a call just came in. Xuan eluded capture but he and others are trapped on a sugar-rock stroid, trying to fight them off. We have to—” Ze interrupted hirself by puncturing the bubble with a slicing motion of hir hand—so swiftly Jane only registered it after it had happened—as Glease and his flunky reentered the room. Ze incorporated the slicing movement into an action to bring up some images on the massive displays against that wall.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Glease said softly, angrily to his flunky, as the insulation bubble dissolved. He told Thondu, “Get me Woody.”
A shock ran through Jane as Elwood Ogilvie’s form materialized before them. “Well, what have we here?” Ogilvie asked, surveying the room, after a bare fraction of a second’s pause.
Jane did
the math. He had to be within twenty million kilometers or so. Vesta was fifty million kilometers away—a third of an AU. He had to be closer than that, possibly on one of the military ships ready to launch at Phocaea.
“I brought you Navio, as you asked,” Glease told Ogilvie.
Woody Ogilvie’s gaze shifted to Jane. He looked very pleased to see her. “Commissioner. I am going to explain this to you once. I expect instant compliance. You will call a press conference and announce that you falsified evidence implicating Nathan in the murder of your man Martin Graham. Or I will order your husband killed.”
Jane’s heart knocked in her chest, and red waves washed across her vision. “No one would believe such a claim, since the recordings I obtained can be authenticated.”
“You let us worry about those details,” Ogilvie said.
“Our Viridian friend here is going to doctor the records in the local system,” Glease said, “indicating that the data has been altered by you. The librarian who sent you the records has already met with an unfortunate accident”—but how did they know? Jane thought, and then saw the look of suppressed horror on Thondu’s face; ze had helped them locate Masahiro. What will I tell Chikuma?—“and won’t be able to testify. By the time anyone else is able to send a claim to Earth to compare your records to those Downside, there will already be so much chaff in the system that no one will be able to tell what is truth and what is not. With your confession, we have all we need.”
He paused. Jane did not reply. Ogilvie said, “I am not a patient man, Ms. Navio. You will do this without further argument, or your husband dies tonight. Speak now.”
Jane drew a calming breath. “Very well. At this moment, I am recording and beaming to a safe location everything that has happened to me, including Nathan Glease’s confession a few moments ago that he killed my aide, Marty Graham, and your threat just now to kill my husband if I don’t cooperate with your attempt to cover up that murder.
“I have a dead man’s switch. If anything happens to me, this recording will immediately be beamed to local news organizations, as well as public Earth tourism wavesites regularly trawled by ‘Stroiders.’”
Glease’s eyes widened. “She’s lying!” he told Ogilvie. “We have the best antiwave security money can buy. This office is in a silent zone. No way she could be recording anything, much less beaming a signal out.”
“Very well,” Jane said. “I will prove it.”
She called up her software, grabbed the snippet of video of Ogilvie saying, “You will call a press conference first thing in the morning and announce that you falsified evidence implicating Nathan in the murder of your man Martin Graham, or I will order your husband killed,” and transmitted the video to Ogilvie. A few seconds later, he frowned, and gestured inwave. His eyes widened as he focused on something unseen. Then he pursed his lips. “I’m afraid she’s telling the truth, Nate.”
Glease gestured to the guard, who grabbed Jane and pinned her arms. She did not resist. Glease gripped her chin and turned her head, and eyed the processor in her ear. “I think we should just pull it right out,” he said. “Rip out the wiring. See how much brain matter comes with it.”
“You could. But DeadMan is about to trigger a request for a code, and if I don’t respond promptly, the recording goes out automatically.”
“Let her go,” Ogilvie said. “Don’t be foolish, Nate.”
Glease had gone pale, and now red. Jane could see the rage in his eyes. He gained control, gestured for the young man to release her. DeadMan asked for the input and she gave it. Meanwhile, Glease spun and ordered Thondu, “Track her signal. Crack her face. Shut off the switch!”
Jane looked at Thondu and held her breath; ze could almost certainly break into her waveface and disable DeadMan—and might just, to protect the feral.
The Viridian spent a couple of minutes doing something in hir waveface. A bead of sweat trickled down hir cheek. Ze turned to Glease, avoiding a glance at Jane. “I’m afraid I can’t. She’s masked with some security tech. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’d need my lab and several hours of uninterrupted time to penetrate it.”
Glease eyed Thondu. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He opened the safe and pointed his gun at the thing inside it. Jane realized it was the biocrystalline backup of the feral sapient.
“I’ll count to three,” he said. “One … two…”
Thondu went ashen. “I can’t!”
“Too bad,” Glease said. “Three.”
“No!” Thondu launched hirself at Glease. The lawyer’s hireling intervened, pinning Thondu to the wall. Glease fired, and an explosion released a puff of mist. Bits of bioglass went everywhere. They all ducked. Jane covered her mouth and nose till the ventilation sucked the mist away.
“I hope that made you feel better,” she said.
“I should just shoot you and be done with it,” he told her, aiming the gun at her. “That would definitely make me feel better.”
“You could. And the police commissioner gets a recording of the murder in his inbox, with coordinates. There’s only one way off Zekeston, and they can get to the surface lifts before you do.”
He lowered the gun.
“So here is my counterproposal,” she said to Ogilvie, watching impassively via wave. “I will wait exactly an hour to release my recording. That might give Mr. Grease here enough time to get offworld—if he hustles. If at any time, anything bad happens to me, my husband, or anyone I know, ever, I will release the recording. There is no statute of limitations on this kind of crime, Mr. Ogilvie. You renege on the deal, I release the recording.” She checked the time in her heads-up. “The clock has started.”
They all looked at Ogilvie. He leaned back in his chair, eyeing her and tweaking a lock of his well-groomed beard.
“Well played, Commissioner,” he said finally, with a sigh. “Nate, please haul your expensive legal ass out of there. Now.” He signed off. Glease shoved a finger in her face. “You’ll pay. I’ll see to it.”
“You’re burning escape time.”
The door snicked shut behind them. She hurried to the outer office. Glease had left the hatch open. She leaped up into the memorial garden, and exited. A few people walked along the atrium, along the curve of the thoroughfare, and someone was helping someone else stand. They were looking at the Weesu lift doors, which were closing.
“First things first,” Jane said. She called Aaron. He answered sleepily, and she filled him in on what had happened. “I can’t release the recordings for another fifty-nine minutes,” she said. “A deal’s a deal. But I never promised not to report Glease’s movements. He should be arriving in the Hub in the next two minutes. Can you shut down the Hub-to-surface lifts, and get a police squad out there?”
Aaron’s eyes glinted. “You bet I can.”
Jane disconnected, turned off DeadMan, and returned to Thondu.
Thondu was on hir knees by the safe, looking at the wreckage inside. Ze looked back at Jane, stricken. “I couldn’t sacrifice Phocaea. Not even to save BitManSinger.”
Jane knelt, too. “I’m sorry. You have the other copy though, yes?”
Thondu dashed away tears, touched hir belly again. “Yes. Thank the Nameless. It’s the last complete copy. But we may have lost everything already. This new method of encoding was experimental. We haven’t fully tested it yet.”
Jane stood. “How would you like a chance?”
“To test it, you mean?”
“Yes. My husband and some others are still in trouble. Woody Ogilvie has a fleet of ships within striking distance. We have no ice. This isn’t over yet.”
Thondu stood, too, and brushed off the glass dust, looking wary. “What did you have in mind?”
She gestured at hir belly. “Do you have a way to extract your copy of the feral and install it in a standard server? What would it take to do that?”
Thondu hesitated. “We’ll definitely want to make another backup. But what good will it do you? Only the city system and U
pside-Down’s servers are big enough to house an active copy—and we all agree that BitManSinger isn’t ready to be released into the wild. It is still too young and unformed. Unbiddable. Destructive.”
“I’m going on instinct, Thondu—”
“Call me Vivian.” Jane looked at hir askance, and ze said, “I’m not Thondu. Not when I’m expressing the female and suppressing the male.”
Jane suppressed exasperation. What was this, multiple personality disorder? But she had little room to talk; hello, Voice. “If I can come up with a place the feral will fit, will you help me use it against the mob? I promise you, no harm will be done to the sapient.”
Thondu—no, Vivian’s—gaze went to the shards on the floor and wall. Hir gaze hardened. “If it can be done safely, yes. With great relish.”
27
Geoff and the others spent a good while trying to figure a way out. While Amaya and the professor made an inventory, Geoff and Kam explored the mine tunnels. Kam suggested they look for forgotten passages, and Geoff remembered that Joey Spud had had maps. They located the mining map archive. The maps were archeotech, as usual for Joey Spud: big, dusty scrolls of blue-lined, laminated scrip, tucked away on shelves in an old storage room. Geoff dug through the scrips and passed them to Kam, who spread them out on the workbench.
They went through several dozen maps and got nowhere. Most of the tunnels they had not yet explored had been sealed off with methane ice, and the rest were now inaccessible due to the explosions at the entrance.
Finally they gave up and headed back to join Amaya and the professor in the way station. The professor was dozing in his hammock. Geoff didn’t like the way he looked: his skin was ashen and his breathing shallow.
Amaya looked up from her lists. “Any luck?” she asked softly, but saw their expressions and slumped back down. A gloomy silence settled over Geoff as he surveyed his companions’ dirty, tired faces. He was out of ideas.
