I made my way back through the city without remembering much of what I passed. I was too far inside myself.
I arrived back at the Common Cause house as the lights were sputtering their way toward twilight. The courtyard was empty except for the birds and the snakes, and one hopeful, mangy cat. Even sunk in my own increasingly frustrated thoughts as I was, I couldn’t miss the sight of the tall, scarred man slouched next to the main doors.
I was so startled, I stopped and stared, forgetting to dissemble. Fortunately, Vijay didn’t. He straightened up.
“I know, I know,” he sneered. “I’ve got it coming. Are we going to do this in the street, or you wanna keep our business private?”
In keeping with his thug persona, he didn’t wait for my answer, just shoved his hands in his pockets and stork-walked through the door on his long legs.
I followed, mouth agape. He was not supposed to be here. We were not supposed to have any contact at all. Vijay paused at the foot of the stairs and gave me a snide, quizzical look. There were only two private rooms in the place: Liang’s office and Siri’s listening room. I opted for Siri’s room and strode inside. Fortunately, she wasn’t there. She’d said she’d set up a meet with some engineers to try to get a team together to work on the lights. I didn’t want to have to dress Vijay down in front of her.
I slammed the door shut and shot the bolt home.
“What are you doing here!” I demanded.
The thug mannerisms vanished, and I was facing Vijay Kochinski. The scars, the bald head, and the skin color ceased to matter. I recognized his stance, his eyes, his voice.
“Something’s wrong with Siri,” he said.
I swallowed my first plan, which was to chew him out, then write him up for breach of protocol. With everything that was going on, I couldn’t blame him for being as close to the edge as I was. “She’s wound pretty tight…”
“Pretty tight!” he cried. “Are you blind?”
“Watch your mouth, Captain,” I snapped.
His shoulders jerked to attention. “I’m sorry, Field Commander. I’m sorry. I’m just…something’s really gone wrong with Siri.”
A cold knot settled into the bottom of my stomach. “Tell me.”
I listened as Vijay described what Siri had told him—and how badly she’d tried to make a joke of it—how he’d followed her, just to make sure she was all right, and watched her walk down into the space under the stairs.
Abruptly I remembered how I had gone down there and heard someone run from me. Could that have been Siri?
The knot tightened. This was not possible. It couldn’t be what it seemed. Siri could not be losing her mind.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Her Companion should be keeping her balanced, right?”
I nodded.
“Took’s been reminding me of that at least twice an hour since the meet, but I’m telling you, I know when she’s being serious, and she was dead-cold serious—at least until she tried to tell me it was a joke.”
“So, what are you thinking?”
He gestured helplessly. “Is it possible something’s gone wrong with the balance between her and Shawn? Like, I don’t know, some local infection that’s gotten in and is changing her responses to her Companion?”
The Companion balance was a sturdy thing, but it did respond to its environment, just like the rest of the brain architecture. I thought about the particolored funguses around us, and the badly ventilated air full of spores and dust. Dr. Gwin had said one of their main health problems was a local variant of hantavirus spread by the mice and the rats. Who knew what else we were all breathing in? There might even have been some damage from the head injury Siri took.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that. I suppose it’s possible…”
The bolt rattled, and slid open. We turned together in time to see Siri open the door and walk in. She looked from Vijay to me, to Vijay again.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I decided to be straight with her. I’d had enough of being forced into contortions by Erasmus.
“Vijay was telling me about your last meet.”
Whatever I had been expecting, it was not for Siri to sigh impatiently and whack Vijay on the arm.
“You idiot! I told you! That was for the Clerks.”
Vijay stared and she sighed again. “I do not believe this,” she said to me. “So I’m trying to make the Clerks think I’m buying the shine-and-shoot Natio Bloom is selling, and this one.” She shoved her palm against Vijay’s chest. “This one believes me and compromises every procedure in the book to come running to you. What has this place done to you?” she said to him, real anger heating her voice. “Huh? What?”
“Look, Siri…” began Vijay.
She didn’t let him get any further. “Did you even get around to telling her the important part? That you’ve got a berth on a smuggling ship and it’s heading out to the habitats?”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “You do?”
“Yes,” Vijay said to me, but his attention was on Siri.
“When do you go?”
Vijay’s jaw worked itself back and forth. His scars stood out ghostly white against his darkened skin. “Tomorrow. First thing.”
I nodded. “Okay, then. You’d better get yourself out of here. We don’t want your new employers to think this was anything but a dressing-down.”
“No. I guess not.” He turned around, his shoulders slumped, not in his thug walk, but in defeat.
“Vijay?”
He turned back toward me.
“Take care of yourself, okay?” I’ve heard you, I tried to tell him. Believe me, I did hear you.
“Yes’m.” His shoulders straightened minutely, and I knew I’d gotten through.
He paused next to Siri. She looked up at him and smacked his arm again. “Get!” she said. “Go on!”
And he went. He walked out the door, hauling it shut behind him. The thud reverberated through the room.
Siri sighed and shrugged. “What’re you gonna do? Clearly, my acting skills have improved.” She dropped into her lopsided chair and pulled her glasses out of her pocket. “Was there something else, Field Commander?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve just got to do the rounds and try to get this investigation onto some kind of coherent track.”
“Good luck.” She waved at me with one hand and slid her glasses into place with the other.
I watched her as she plugged in and slid into her own world. I left, and hard as it was, I closed the door tightly behind me. I kept on walking, down the stairs and out the lobby.
Orry, his timing perfect as ever, was there to meet me, leaning against the banister at the bottom of the stairs.
The paranoia that had been lurking just beneath the surface of my thoughts rose in a mighty wave. I strode up to my friend and looked him right in the eye.
“So,” I said. “Is Liang asking you to keep watch on me, or is it your own idea?”
Orry, opened his mouth, closed it as he considered lying to me, and changed his mind.
“I told him I wasn’t very good at this.” He smiled sadly. “Sorry.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “It’s all right.” I couldn’t decide whom to trust, why should Liang be doing any better? I needed to move, I needed to get out of there. I needed to be able to pretend I was out of doors, away from doors. I needed to find some way to think straight and I didn’t know how. “Since you’re keeping an eye on things, keep an eye on Siri for me, will you? If she tries to go anywhere, tell her I asked for her to wait. We need to go back over some of the old reports.”
“Will do,” said Orry, and I all but ran out of the lobby.
I was four of Dazzle’s haphazard blocks away and three levels up when I ran out of steam and slumped against the wall. Dark was falling. Reesethree was just a burnished sliver at the edge of a patch of black sky far above.
My head was so full I couldn’t shift a sin
gle one of my thoughts. I stood there and watched the people of Dazzle pass by me.
There were too many threads. I couldn’t hold on to them all.
I had come here to work out if and how the descendants of Jasper and Felice Erasmus might be using the old jump gates as a means of attack on the Pax Solaris. I had come expecting to find that Bianca Fayette’s death was connected to her discovery that Erasmus was a hot spot.
Now I knew Bianca had decided to single-handedly take Erasmus apart. Why? What had driven her to it? It was bad here. It was foul. But we’d seen worse. All right, we’d seen at least as bad. What had driven her over the edge? Bern said he didn’t know. If Liang knew, he wasn’t interested in telling me.
She had been hanging out with smugglers. Was that because she was going to use them to take the place down or because she wanted to know about the runs to Oblivion and the habitats? Had she been trying to find the war or arrange the takedown, or both?
She’d said nothing at all about her time with the Grand Sentinel. Any mention of Torian was missing from the tattered remains of Jerimiah’s memory.
In the meantime, someone had risked a hell of a lot to arrange for me and Siri to be kidnapped. I’d gotten the briefing in the last burst from Misao. Kapa Lu’s employer, or at least his contact, was Nikko Donnelly, a disgraced member of the Blood Family. Had Donnelly meant to hand us over to the Blood Family? What for? What could he hope to gain by risking open hostilities with the Pax Solaris?
Donnelly, Misao said, was commander of Habitat 3. Vijay’s smuggling run was supposedly out to the habitats. Was Donnelly involved with the smugglers? Was he trying to kidnap us so the operation wouldn’t be discovered? If that was so, why not just have Kapa Lu kill us?
Kapa said he didn’t know what Donnelly was up to, and Misao believed that. So did I. Kapa had gotten in on the game because he was given freedom, or at least an internal drive ship, which was as good as freedom. With that as a prize, he would not question his employer’s motives.
And out in the middle of the black sky sat the Blood Family in their fortified palaces. According to the permission records and shots from the telescopes, not one of them took a step outside to actually oversee the system they supposedly governed. Except, that is, for the Grand Sentinel Torian Erasmus, who on the surface looked as disconnected from any business of actual governing as the rest of them.
What am I missing? I demanded of the darkness where Dylan used to be. What am I forgetting?
Forgetting.
Forgotten.
When something is forgotten, it is consigned to oblivion.
Oblivion was dead.
Why had the Blood Family let Oblivion die?
It was a dreadful waste. Even if you didn’t give an extra goddamn about the people, why let them die? You could let them get to the edge, sample death, then go in and offer them air in return for servitude. A lot of them would take you up on it.
And if you were going to let them die anyway, why waste an entire world? For almost a century, the prison had been highly successful and very profitable. I’d been elbow deep in the accounts when I was doing the historical analysis. The prison and prison labor from Moonfive had been almost as profitable for Erasmus as Hospital. Why not just go in, shovel out the old corpses, and restart the place? The infrastructure was all there. The ecosystem could be restored in five years or so.
And it wasn’t just Oblivion they were wasting. I looked around me with fresh eyes. This place, too. All these people, who were struggling to survive. If they were put to work, not just in a random press-gang style, but concentrated as a workforce, they could be the basis of rebuilding the Blood Family’s fortunes. Diaspora worlds always needed more hands than they thought they did. But they were letting it rot. Oh, they had Clerks and secops all over the place to keep anybody from getting ideas—and to snatch up whomever they needed—but there was no mechanism for governing, no chain of command between the people and the Blood Family.
Favor Barclay, the highest-ranking Security official on Erasmus, had been shoved out of his station. Amerand Jireu’s personal Clerk jumped to his death. The cover-up was clumsy and amateurish, and the network did not even bother to act like it was going to blame Amerand Jireu. In fact, his Clerk told him he was going to be used to finish the system, and if he knew what that meant, he was a better actor than any I’d ever seen.
And maybe the real culprit for Clerk Hamahd’s death was Dr. Varus.
But Dr. Varus was from Hospital, and whatever the hell it was they were doing on Hospital, it wasn’t selling services to the diaspora worlds. In the past six months, there’d only been in-system flight from Hospital to Dazzle, or to Fortress. Unless they’d all been erased, no flights at all had come into or out of the system. But why erase the kind of flights that had been so common up to a couple of years ago?
Dr. Varus had also treated Siri, briefly, but she had treated her, before Siri had started acting erratically. Before she’d told Vijay a story about the Clerks’ network and voices siphoned from people’s bodies. But not before she’d decided that Bianca could still be alive, and on Hospital.
“Oh, fuckless!” I shot straight up. The heads of passersby turned and just as quickly turned away.
I took off running.
When I made it back to the base house, I bounded up the stairs four at a time to the third floor and all but flew down the corridor to 356. The door was partway open, and Siri sat there in her favorite listening position, one hand on her knee, one hand on her control unit. I shot forward with my hand out, slamming into the closed door hard enough to jolt my arm up to my shoulder.
Hologram.
I staggered backward. In front of me, through the partly open door, Siri sat in her room, in her favorite listening posture, one hand on her knee, one hand on her control unit.
Swearing, I fumbled in my belt pocket for my glasses and jammed them on. Now I saw the date and time stamp on the hologram, and the shimmering edges of the flex screen she’d laid over the door.
On a Pax world, this would have never worked. But here, the datasphere was so fragmented and those fragments were so tightly controlled, no one bothered to walk around with their sets or their implants switched on. I didn’t even know if Orry had implants.
I shoved the flex screen aside and twisted the lock. It recognized my touch and snicked open a split second before I shoved my way through the door.
And Siri was gone.
I stood panting in the empty room, the blood draining to my feet.
My knees wanted to crumple, but I couldn’t let them. I walked back into the listening room, pulling my set out of my belt pocket. I clipped the set to my ear, connected it to my glasses, and plugged in the lead to the comm node. If I could get a bead on what Siri had been listening to, maybe I could work out where she’d gone.
I plugged the other end of the lead into my set, and listened.
I heard silence, cold and absolute, without even any static. I pulled the set off and checked the connections. They were solid. I checked the power indicator on the back of the comm node. It was there. I clipped my set back to my ear and moved my hand across the node, seeking another frequency, another signal.
Nothing. Silence. All silence.
For days, Siri had been in here listening. She said she was amazed at how clearly the voices were coming to her, that she was even getting something new underneath the usual unfiltered voices.
I got nothing but silence.
I unclipped my set and tucked it carefully back inside my belt pocket. Siri was gone. She had been hearing voices, and she had followed them out into the city of Dazzle.
And I had no idea where.
Stop. Think. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Siri had told Vijay that the Clerks’ network was running on human voices, essences stolen from living people.
Vijay said she was serious. Assume he was right. Vijay told me. Siri found out he did. What would she do next?
My hand dropped.
Siri would assume Vijay had betrayed her. Siri might assume Vijay was working for the enemy.
Vijay was out at the port, with the smugglers. And Siri knew that.
I ran out of the room, bellowing for Dr. Gwin.
TWENTY-NINE
EMILIYA
Because she was staff, Emiliya arrived back on Hospital at one of the private ports. These were little more than cargo bays, kept cleaned and polished by the ever-present drones. In a state of numbness, she submitted to the various searches, scans, and debriefings, aware the whole time that if she let herself, she would start screaming.
Amerand is wrong. The Blood Family will not permit the Erasmus System to come to an end.
I am one of them. My father is Nikko Erasmus Donnelly, and I am a member of the Blood Family.
Her mother had known that, and that was the real reason she’d left. She thought Emiliya was in good hands, and she had to get her other children, who were…less well connected, out of the way.
Because there was never going to be an end to the Erasmus System.
That phrase kept replaying in her head as Emiliya walked down the corridor to her dorm room.
Her door was unlocked. She went inside. It was almost exactly as she had left it. It had been cleaned and searched, but that was standard practice. Plus, of course, the Grand Sentinel would want to make sure she had no lingering secrets.
She would have done the same.
Emiliya sat down on her hard chair and swiveled her desktop toward her. She couldn’t see straight. She should get some sleep, some food. She barely ate anything on the trip back, and she certainly didn’t sleep.
But she unfolded the screen from the desktop, slid the cover back on the keypad, and began typing. She entered all her codes, old and new, and watched the world unfurl before her.
Reports. Requisitions. Experimental write-ups. Years’ worth of information, decades’ worth, flitted past. Experiments on cells, on embryos, on full-grown animals of increasing complexity, and, starting five years ago, on humans. The list of subject numbers was four columns long.
Bitter Angels Page 30
