To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  The display faded.

  Jana sipped coffee.

  “You'll need to give this Federico a copy of the video log.”

  “I know.” Yoshiko sighed. “I guess I've been withholding evidence, haven't I?”

  “Er—” Edralix looked diffident. “Jana? May I talk with you for a moment?”

  Jana stood up. “Excuse us, Yoshiko.”

  Yoshiko waited until they had left. She stared out of the window, not seeing the pleasant grounds at all, but gathering her thoughts. Then she opened up a realtime call, and almost immediately her request was acknowledged.

  Strange sense of vertigo.

  To Yoshiko's left, below the balustrade in reality, lay the Sanctuary's dojo. In front, down the vanishing perspective of the preternaturally real holo display, lay a long training hall. Men and women in jumpsuits tuned olive green were warming up: butterfly jumps and flickflack somersaults.

  Even in her youth, Yoshiko would not have trained like this.

  “What do you think?”

  Federico's gaunt image stood on the right, overlooking his agents. He was dressed in the same fashion, and his face was bathed in sweat.

  “Lori told me you were interested in the fighting arts, Professor.”

  In front of Yoshiko, the agents paired up and began to spar. Boots thudded into ribs, elbows into jaws. Yoshiko saw one heavyset woman grab a smaller man by groin and throat and throw him bodily against a wall.

  “What do you think?”

  “Very impressive,” Yoshiko said weakly.

  An enormously muscled man at the side of the room barked an order. The agents formed groups: four against one.

  “Go!” shouted the instructor.

  The sparring grew fierce as the outnumbered single fighters tried to tangle up their opponents, punching and pushing them into each other's path.

  The lights flickered out. In the darkness, bright pulses blazed like lightning, amid thunderous crashes of sound. The men and women continued fighting without pause.

  “Battlefield conditions.”

  Battlefield? Yoshiko wondered. I thought these were supposed to be law officers.

  The lights came up. The fighting ceased. Those who could stand to attention, did so.

  “I gather your medics keep busy,” said Yoshiko.

  A dry chuckle from Federico.

  “You've got that right.” In the display, he turned his back to Yoshiko. “Guido? Perhaps a demonstration for our caller?”

  The hugely muscled instructor stepped into the centre. He pointed to five of the biggest men, and they formed a circle around him.

  Without warning, two of the men barrelled straight at Guido: one kicking at Guido's knees, the other throwing elbow strikes. Guido locked the kicker around the neck, and threw the convulsing man into the other attacker, and both men went down.

  Guido took the attack to the other three, felling them quickly. Sweeping the last one to the floor, Guido dropped knees-first straight onto the man's chest, and there was an audible crack.

  “Well, enough of that.” Federico smiled pleasantly at Yoshiko.

  The smile chilled her soul.

  Guido came up to Federico.

  “This is Professor Sunadomari.” Federico gestured in Yoshiko's direction. “She practices the, ah, traditional arts, you know?”

  Yoshiko wondered how much more Lori had told him about her.

  “Flower or stone?” Guido's voice was as rough as she had expected.

  Yoshiko had to think about what he meant.

  “Flower, I guess.”

  Ornamentation, rather than rough stuff. Dō—disciplined path—more than jutsu, hard and practical.

  “Anyway.” Federico stepped in front of Guido, and the training hall became indistinct background. “This wasn't why you called, was it? I just thought you'd like to see TacCorps in training.”

  “Do they always train like this?”

  “This is the Alpha Squad. They do.”

  In the shade beyond the image, Yoshiko could see that Jana and Edralix had returned. Edralix shook his head.

  Yoshiko said, “I guess you don't have too much trouble, ah, subduing suspects.”

  “Not much.” Federico smiled again. “You'll be happy to know I've already assigned two of my agents to the investigation, and Guido may be joining them.”

  “I—thank you.”

  Would Major Reilly appreciate the additions to her team?

  “They will get results, I promise.” His pale mismatched eyes looked intent. “You don't have any information, beyond what you gave to Major Reilly?”

  “I'm sorry.” Yoshiko shook her head,

  “Be assured, we will do our utmost to find Tetsuo. Thank you for calling, Professor Sunadomari. Endit.”

  The display terminated, and Yoshiko let out a long sigh of relief.

  “Bloody hell,” said Edralix. “They don't mess around, do they?”

  Jana stepped in front of the window. Sunlight created a bright nimbus around her unruly mass of black hair, her witchlike pointed face.

  “You didn't give him the evidence.”

  “No,” said Yoshiko. “I didn't.”

  “The thing is—” Yoshiko was explaining, “—Major Reilly wasn't really friendly, but she didn't try to intimidate me, either.”

  She tensed her muscles, relaxed. She was wearing a borrowed black jumpsuit, having freshened up, and felt ready for a training session.

  “Well—” Jana's deep black eyes glanced at Edralix. “From Ed's political analysis, this Federico may be quite a potent force behind the scenes.”

  “He wasn't trying to help Yoshiko,” Edralix said. “He was trying to keep her out of the investigation.”

  “Yes. That's just what he was doing.”

  That was what they had been discussing outside the room. Yoshiko had always known that Pilots kept their own intelligence services. It paid commerce to know what was happening among their clients’ cultures.

  Of course, no energy weapon had ever been transported from one settled world to another. On one level at least, the Pilots’ intentions were overt, and patently benign.

  “Are you going to give the video-log to Major Reilly?”

  “That seems best. With Edralix's analysis, if that's OK?”

  “Of course.”

  Jana leaned forward.

  “There's something else.”

  Looking into her eyes was like falling through a black endless space.

  “What?” asked Yoshiko, feeling suddenly fearful.

  “This Felice Lectinaria—do you know her?”

  “Her name's vaguely familiar, from the journals. I've been meaning to check.”

  “But you didn't meet her before the Aphelion Ball?”

  “No. We only talked briefly. Why do you ask?”

  “Because—” Jana's black eyes held distant golden sparks, threatening to flare. “There's more to her message, I think, than seems apparent.”

  “Oh.” Yoshiko glanced at Edralix. “Encrypted info?”

  “Not in that sense,” said Jana. “I think she was being subtle, not knowing under which circumstances—in what company—you might receive her message.”

  A tree.

  A bush, the tree's very different descendant.

  “The second generation—” Yoshiko spoke slowly. “Grew up to be quite different from the parent.”

  “But it thrived.” Jana's soft voice seemed to cut through the air.

  “Yes, it did.”

  It had been her greatest fear. Only now, could she acknowledge it.

  “Tetsuo's alive, isn't he?”

  Ghostly images stalked the control room, walking among the fallen researchers like lost souls.

  “You two go on.”

  Kerrigan bent over the holoprocessor, refining the decoy images. All around the ellipsoid control centre, a horizontal band had been tuned to transparency.

  From outside—at least, from a distance—everything would look OK. As soon as t
he unconscious bodies were dragged out of sight.

  “Come on,” said Dhana. “It'll be easier going down.”

  “I should hope so.”

  Tetsuo followed. The walk downstairs was tedious, but not exhausting.

  “You OK?”

  “I'm not that unfit.”

  Dhana was out of sight. Rounding the turn, he saw that she was waiting for him.

  “So why are you breathing heavily?” she asked.

  “Because you're near me?” He made it a question.

  “Yeah?” Dhana grinned. “In your dreams.”

  They carried on.

  At ground level, Tetsuo steered well clear of the open doorway. No control signals blasted into his brain.

  They continued descending, until they reached the basement level.

  The kitten was dead.

  “Oh, no.”

  It was the first cage they came to, among the rows of experimental specimens. Dhana gently took the small white body out. Dark crimson blood stained the tiny head around the implant incision.

  “How could they?”

  Tetsuo said nothing. He had heard both sides of this debate from Mother—live experiments were a last resort, but were used when other options were exhausted—and still had no answer.

  He would never do this to an animal. He knew that much.

  “Major Reilly, please.”

  “I'm sorry, that officer is unavailable at this time.”

  “Never mind.” Yoshiko made knot-tying motions with her fingers, joining three bobbing crystalline spheres of light. “I have some info for her.” The three objects were the Maximilians’ video log, Edralix's analysis of the editing, and a copy of the Luculentus mind diagram. “Can you accept?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The mind-schematic had been reconfigured so that the initial display showed the all-important physical dimensions, the vast number of plexcores forming the nexus. There was a short text addendum, explaining that Yoshiko had found it among Tetsuo's personal effects.

  Yoshiko pointed, and the objects were gone.

  “Info accepted. Do you wish to record a message?”

  “No—I think it's self-explanatory. Thank you.”

  “You are welcome, ma'am.”

  As the display faded, Yoshiko dabbed a faint film of perspiration from her forehead.

  “You did the right thing.” Jana spoke from behind her.

  “I hope so.” She felt shaky but relieved. “At any rate, it's done now.”

  The capuchin, sitting on Brevan's shoulder, chattered away into his ear.

  “I wish I knew what he was saying.”

  “Complaining, by the sound of it,” said Dhana.

  “The attrition rate has been awful. According to the logs, they've only just started surviving the interface.”

  The Agrazzus moved among the cages, making notes on his wrist terminal.

  There were chimps and macaques. There were parrots and parakeets, ravens and owls. There were large lynxettes and tiny tabby cats.

  “We have to—”

  “No.” Tetsuo interrupted Dhana. “No, we can't let them go.”

  “I can't believe you said that.”

  “They're better off here than in the wild. We're only just into the habitable zone.”

  “Subsonics.” Dhana looked pensive. “We could drive them towards the forest.”

  “But if they were bred for research—”

  “She's right.” Brevan looked around. “TacCorps will shut this place down, as soon as they realize it's been discovered. The animals will be destroyed.”

  Tetsuo stared. There were so many of them. So many cages.

  “Besides—” A wry smile flitted across Brevan's face. “—you won't win an argument with Dhana.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Yeah,” said Tetsuo. “But he's right.”

  It was the last cage.

  Two hours of wrestling the cages onto the loading bay's elevator disk, and taking them up to ground level a dozen at a time. The disk surfaced at the tower's base, close to the doorway.

  There was an acrid tang to the air. Though Tetsuo did not need his resp-mask, they were close to the escarpment edge, close to the hypozone beyond the clifflike drop.

  Wind whipped heather all about, and a flock of grey owls—released by Dhana from the previous load of cages—sensed the subsonics, and perhaps the stench of unbreathable atmosphere from the hypozone, and wheeled in the intended direction, heading for the dark forest.

  “It'll bite you,” Brevan warned, as Tetsuo opened the final cage.

  A great white lynxette padded out, and looked up at Tetsuo with wide pale green-and-amber eyes. Its tufted ears were laid flat, in protest against the subsonics, but it made no move to leave.

  The implant was a tiny scar on the back of its head.

  “I wouldn't—”

  But Tetsuo was already running the back of his hand along the lynxette's whiskers.

  “Bloody hell.”

  Brevan looked at Dhana, who shrugged.

  “Go,” said Tetsuo.

  It ran.

  The white lynxette loped across the swirling heather, towards the forest.

  “Get the cages out of sight.” Brevan's voice was gruff.

  Tetsuo rubbed his nose.

  “This wind really stings, doesn't it?”

  “Yeah.” Dhana sniffed, and dabbed at her own eyes. “You guys.”

  The lynxette reached the trees, and was gone.

  Blanched face, trembling hands. A crash had seemed inevitable.

  “Are you OK?” Jana's slightly waspish voice cut into her thoughts.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Yoshiko hid her amusement. The flyer had been manned—a tourist taxi—and the fellow had been scared witless at the notion of two Pilots for passengers, besides Yoshiko. He had dared to speak only to her. She had insisted on paying, and had tipped him generously.

  “It's up ahead.” Edralix, first out of the taxi-landing pagoda, pointed to a long black building on a low rise.

  In the darkness, a plain orange holo floated over the med-centre's surrounding parkland.

  ***LUCIS MEDICAL COMPLEX GAMMA***

  Vin was in there, somewhere. Yoshiko's amusement faded as quickly as it had arrived, and she shivered.

  “Don't worry.” Jana briefly touched Yoshiko's arm. “It can't be an emergency, if it's scheduled.”

  “No—you're right.”

  When Yoshiko had called the med-centre earlier, there had been a message waiting for her: an invitation to attend the med-centre's Neurological Institute at twenty five hundred hours, precisely.

  Flanked by the two black-caped Pilots, Yoshiko slowly walked up the dark brick path which led to the main entrance. A small holo floated outside: an unravelling DNA double-helix surrounding a vertical tower processor, the ancient Hippocratic logo.

  Small batlike flitterbugs darted back and forth around drifting glowglobes, attracted by the clouds of moths. The flitterbugs’ erratic flight, hovering then flicking away, reminded Yoshiko of the hummingbird she had seen back on Ardua Station.

  “Wait.” Jana stopped, seemed almost to sniff the cold night air.

  “What is it?” Yoshiko heard the nervousness in her own voice.

  A flitterbug dipped down, flew past them, was gone.

  Jana said nothing, black eyes questing in the darkness.

  Trees rustled.

  Edralix raised a hand as the flitterbug returned, arcing down towards Yoshiko—

  Something flashed in Edralix's hand, and the flitterbug dropped onto the dark bricks with a soft splat.

  Not a real flitterbug, at all.

  “Ed—” Yoshiko stopped. A fluorescent blue fluid was leaking from the tiny body.

  She reached down to examine the thing, but Edralix caught her injured arm, just above the cast.

  “Smartvenom,” he whispered.

  “Quiet.” Jana.

  Normal night sounds. Ignore.

 
Yoshiko forced herself to breathe calmly.

  Shadows. No movement in the darkness—

  There.

  A glint of silver.

  “Look out!” Edralix pushed Yoshiko down, just as she started to move.

  There was a crack of sound, and white fire lanced out of the trees towards them, but Jana had stepped into its path, whipping her cloak upwards.

  A vertical shield of golden motes.

  White fire splashed against sparkling gold. It spat and sprayed, but could not burst through.

  “Come on.”

  Yoshiko got to her feet and sprinted for the main entrance, flanked by Jana and Edralix. No time to think. Heart pounding, mind reacting like an automaton, she just ran, while fire split the night behind her.

  The Pilots’ hands grasped her, almost lifting her up the last few steps, and then they were through. They nearly skidded across the polished pink granite floor.

  “Peacekeeper emergency,” Jana said urgently to the human receptionist, but the foyer's windows were already turning to impenetrable silver. “Someone's firing energy weapons out there.”

  “My God.” The receptionist's face grew pale, as he waved open a display with fluttering hands. “You're not joking, are you?”

  The impossibly handsome proctor appeared: the public face of the Peacekeeper AIs. “ProctorNet. Is this an enquiry or an emergency?”

  Jana leaned over the receptionist's shoulder.

  “Emergency. Get Major Reilly.”

  From the doorway, Edralix called back, “This is secured. The building system's very quick.”

  Small daylight-bright images of the grounds appeared in holo spheres above the reception desk—including fast-moving viewfields broadcast by smartbats—while three blank-carapaced drones skimmed into the foyer and hovered.

  The med-centre's systems would already be interfaced with the proctors, Yoshiko thought. The entire building was sealed and under surveillance.

  “What's going on?”

  Yoshiko's heart thumped as she recognized the voice.

  “Maggie! What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you—I think. What is all this?”

  “Someone's firing a graser outside.”

  “Not someone.” Jana had appeared beside them, out of nowhere, and Maggie yelped in surprise.