by Steve Perry
"Now what?"
"A few more pieces of the puzzle,then we need to go see Pen."
There was a small stone building not far from the main complex of the zoo; inside was a room upon which Cteel and his assistant had spent much time and effort. Aside from a chair in front of a comp terminal set into the wall farthest from the door, the room appeared empty. It had no windows or doors save the one.
Into this room came Elbu ra Jambi, a brilliant man who had made, however, one bad mistake.
"Have a seat, doctor," Wall said. He allowed a holoproj image to appear over the com.
"I know your voice, but the face is different," Jambi said as he moved to the chair.
"The real me," Wall said. "I resorted to a subterfuge before; I hope you'll forgive my little deception."
Jambi shrugged. "It is of no importance. I do find it somewhat interesting that you are an albino."
"In my first incarnation.Later, I looked like this."
The holoproj swirled once, like a stirred drink, and cleared to show the face and body Wall had last worn, when he had been Marcus Jefferson Wall, Factor, adviser and puppetmaster controlling the Confederation President.
Unlike some men in his profession, Jambi was not politically illiterate. He recognized the face.
"Really?I had heard that you died during the revolution."
"Alas, it is so."
"Then how—?"
"Surely you are not unaware of the theory of encoded information transferral from organics to viral matrices?"
"Stevenson's Practicum," Jambi said.
"Precisely.And the simpler side of the coin upon which you have lavished so much admirable work."
"Ah. So that's why you hired me. You want the process reversed forpersonal reasons."
"You speak that word as though it were blasphemy, doctor."
Jambi shrugged again. "Your reasons don't matter, I suppose, only the end result."
"True. And I have it on the best authority that you are dragging your feet on your experiment."
"I beg your pardon? Who has lied to you about this?"
"It's true enough. You could finish the implant within a few days; is this not true?"
"It is not. I could complete thedevice , but this is not the same as finishing theexperiment . There are protocols that must be adhered to, tests that need to be run. To proceed without them would be scientifically absurd. I'd never be able to publish; I'd be laughed off the planet."
"I'm afraid I'm in a hurry and must insist, though."
"I won't do it."
"Not under any circumstances?"
"That is correct. And you must be aware that I hold the trump card here, sir."
"You would think so. Still, it's a pity. Ah, well."
The image of Wall raised its hand and pointed its forefinger at Jambi.
"What are you doing?"
"Adieu, doctor."
Wall's finger seemed to explode.
The frangible ceramic pellet hit Jambi square on the left eye; on impact, the thumb-sized bullet shattered into thousands of corkscrew-shaped fragments that sliced and carved the man's brain into mush. He was hurled clear of the chair by a final muscular spasm. He wiggled on the floor for a few seconds,then died.
The holoproj vanished, and the tracking gun retracted into the wall, hidden by a permanent projection that looked like the rest of the stone.
There came a hydraulic whine, and the floor of the room split down the middle. Jambi's body and the chair slid toward the center of the room as the trapdoor mechanism widened. Beneath the building, some five meters below, a large vat of contact-activated acid received the mortal remains of Jambi and the chair upon which he had last sat. The acid hissed and roiled. In ten minutes there would be no identifiable part of Jambi or the chair remaining, only a slight organic thickening of the soup in the special denscris vat. The organics would eventually be boiled off and then vented through special pipes into the swamp some kilometers away, the pipes then being flushed and cleansed with a different kind of acid brought to a hard steam and sprayed through them several times.
Elbu ra Jambi's transition in the way of nearly all flesh was thus greatly accelerated. Somebody looking for him would really have to work at it to find any identifiable trace.
It was, Wall thought, a great toy.
• • •
"There he goes," Bork said.
Sure enough, Cteel emerged from the small house and started toward his flitter.
"Let's get back to the hopper," Dirisha said.
"He's poking along awfully slow," Geneva said. "You think he's spotted us?"
Bork said, "I don't see how he could."
"Yesterday he was heading almost due northwest," Dirisha said. "Now he's altered his course farther to the north. What's out there?"
Bork called up a map.
"There's another farming town about two hundred klicks ahead of us," he said.
"Past that?"
"Nothing but swamp and mountains for a couple thousand kilometers, not until the Monte Alegre Metroplex on the Amazon."
"Can he get that far in his flitter?"
"Not unless he's swimming to the eyeballs in fuel. Thing's got a range of maybe eight, nine hundred klicks, tops."
"He didn't refuel last night."
"So, if he stays on this heading, he'll land in this farming town."
"Unless he knows something we don't," Sleel put in.
Dirisha shook her head. "Something doesn't feel right here."
"So, what do we do?" Geneva asked.
"I don't see what we can do, except follow him."
"Maybe we could grab him and convince him to tell us where Juete is," Geneva said.
"Yeah, and maybe he's got a suicide zap charge built into a tooth or something," Dirisha said. "Better not chance it. He's going somewhere. We'll stay with him until he gets there or we figure it out."
Veate was with her father as he crisscrossed back and forth over the western half of the country, stopping no less than six times for certain errands before they refueled and headed for the Siblings Compound on Manus Island.
As the sun began to settle into dusk, the computer control piloted the little ship at a cruising height of nearly eight thousand five hundred meters across the glitteringPacific Ocean , racing at twice the speed of sound.
Inside, the wind noise was muted by the insulation, so the ship was almost quiet.
There passed what seemed a long time of silence.
"My mother said you were a mystic," Veate finally said.
Khadaji, looking through the sea far below, nodded.
"I used to be. I had a vision during a battle, when I was soldiering for the Confed. It's what drove me to do what I did."
"It must have been powerful."
"It was.The single most powerful event in my life. It reshaped me totally."
The sunlight reflected in a vast sheet on the water so far below, growing dimmer. They were too high to see waves, if there were any.
Veate said, "You said 'used to be.'Not a mystic any more?"
"No. I burned too manybridges, I saw too much grief to believe in a benevolent cosmos any longer. I caused much of that grief myself." He paused.
"Pen and his priests have a computer program that can almost predict the future. I mentioned it earlier, remember?"
"Yes."
"Integrates, they call it. They study the butterfly-and-tornado effect."
"I've heard of the theory," she said.
"Mmm. If you can gather enough information, can put it together correctly, it takes on a life of its own.
Very large patterns have to be interpreted, but it is possible to make some sense of some of them, some of the time. It's still a fledgling science, much like chaos-theory was a couple hundred years ago, but eventually, there won't be anything that can't be predicted."
"That hardly seems likely."
"Oh, it might take a couple million years to evolve computers and beings capable of manag
ing it, but I expect it to be possible. Certainly the Siblings of the Shroud believe it."
"I don't think I want to see that," she said. "It seems awfully dull, somehow."
"I agree. But knowing that it will happen, along with all the experience I've had in my short span, has helped turn me into a cynic."
She laughed.
"Something funny?"
"Yeah.You.You're the least cynical person I've ever met."
"You think so?"
"I didn't want to like you before I met you, you know. I had some grievances, most of which weren't valid, but they were treasured wounds I didn't want to heal. Bork has made me let go of a lot of those.
He thinks that love can pretty much redeem just about anything, and I'm beginning to believe maybe he's right."
"What's that got to do with me?"
She smiled. "You're a man who kicked over the supports of a repressive government and literally made a change that affected the entire galaxy, just because it was the right thing to do."
"That was then—" he began.
She cut him off. "Yeah, and half a decade later, you're the same man who came out of retirement to mobilize the best bodyguards in the known universe to scour the galaxy to find a woman you once loved—because a daughter you didn't know you hadasked you to do it. You can space the cynic pose, Father. There's probably not a bigger idealist and romantic alive."
He tried to keep a straight face, she could see that, and it amused her no end that he couldn't manage it.
He grinned.
That was what she needed. It was the final push. She had seen how he acted, seen what kind of loyalty and love he inspired, and there wasn't any way he could have faked that. People were willing to put themselves on the line for Khadaji, to risk death, because somehow, he called up that kind of belief.
Almost a devotion. Bork had said it simply: "Your father is a great man."And damned if she didn't believe it.
Her grin mirrored his. "Hi, I'm Veate, your daughter. And I'm glad to meet you," she said.
And damned if it wasn't true.
Chapter Twenty-Four
PEN, WRAPPED IN his enigmatic shroud as always, came to meet them. Veate marveled at how well he moved, given that he was, according to her father, easily in his eighties.
In Pen's office, the information came quickly. The priest handed her father a small recorder.
"The computer is a top-of-the-line viral matrix maxi-frame with multiple attendants, constructed during the final days of the Confederation. The start-up order came directly from Limba Kokl'u."
Veate watched her father. Kokl'u had been the President of the Confed, killed at the hands of a mob inBrisbane during the revolution. Khadaji did not give away anything with his reaction. Not even a blink.
Pen continued. "The computer is ostensibly owned by a private company, Tenton Electronics, but the corporation is a dummy, as are the holding companies that formed it. We have backwalked the trail through nine false fronts and have yet to discover the real owner."
Khadaji shrugged. "Doesn't matter."
"Not to you, maybe, but we like to have things tidy around here."
"Go on."
"The ship is in geosynch just inside the perimeter of the Duralum Wall. Coordinates are in the recorder."
Veate said, "Duralum Wall?"
Her father said, "Since the first satellites were orbited hundreds of years ago, a lot of trash has accumulated in orbit. Most of the bigger stuff gets swept, but anything under a few grams is hard to track.
Since it moves at different relative speeds, it can pack quite a punch. A paint flake or a shard of metal sheared from a nut barreling along at fifteen klicks a second relative will make quite a dent in an unprotected ship's hull. A chunk the size of your thumb will punch a crater in denscris armor. The Duralum Wall is a series of overlapping plates that protects a large satellite complex hung in geosynch orbit. Cheaper than sheathing each sat or ship."
"Ah."
"Your theory is just barely possible, according to what Diamond has learned," Pen said. "It's a reach."
"Makes sense, though," Khadaji said.
"We've figured the other orbit you asked for. If you're wrong, it could be an expensive mistake."
Khadaji grinned. "Yeah, well, that never stopped me before, did it? And I never noticed the Shroud falling all over itself to slow me down, either."
Pen laughed. "What will you do now?"
"A little more checking. Dirisha says their quarry is playing games, hopping back and forth between backrocket towns in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I can figure out where he's going."
"And after you find Juete?"
"Well, we'll have to see."
"Our projections have changed. Things are going to happen sooner than we figured.Days now, maybe even hours. The system is in flux; there are too many variables. We can't pin it down."
Khadaji shrugged. "I figured."
"We can't be sure of your fate, Emile."
Her father smiled. "If you find out, don't tell me."
"Do you understand what it is I am asking of you?" Wall said.
The man in the chair said, "Yes."
"Is there any problem with compliance?"
"No. I cannot guarantee success, but no problem with doing it as you have outlined."
"Good."
"I had thought that Jambi was the galaxy's expert on this," the man said. "But you seem to be as knowledgeable as he is in every aspect."
"I am," Wall said.
"I am surprised that I haven't heard of you. I keep up with this subject."
"I value my privacy, doctor.Highly."
"Point taken.Too bad Jambi fell ill, though. He is going to be sorry he missed this."
"I'll try to keep him informed as we go."
"Well, then.Tomorrow. You'll have the subject for us?"
"No. The implantation will take place elsewhere. I have my own medical team."
"That is most risky. We have consulted the four best electroneurosurgeons in the galaxy and they are not of a like mind on exactly how the procedure should best be performed. "
"I have access to a Ninth Generation Healy Surgidrome, doctor, fully programmed withevery recorded operation your four cutters have done, along with over a thousand other most carefully documented procedures."
The man shook his head."Really? I didn't think any of the multiunit dins were in private hands. I'd heard the Healy people've managed to get only three or four of them fully operational and online."
"You are correct. One of them belongs to me."
"Your resources are nothing short of amazing."
"I know."
"He has to know we're back here," Sleel said.
"I don't see how, but, yeah, I think you're right," Bork said.
Dirisha stared at the tracking screen. The blip that represented Cteel hung in empty space, moving slowly toward its next destination. "What's the town he's heading for now?"
"Poxoreu," Bork said.
"Another great outbrush metropolis," Sleel said. "Wonderful. We're being led around like achombu on a leash here, folks."
Pemberton's call came as Khadaji and Veate were about to leaveManusIsland . The transmission was voice-only, so they couldn't see the woman's face, but she sounded quite pleased with herself.
"I did some checking," she said. "I think maybe I got something for you."
"Appreciate any input," Khadaji said.
"You know anything about elephants?"
"Elephants?"Dirisha said.
"Yeah.There's a zoo full of them a couple hundred klicks from where you are now," Khadaji said. The comcircuit was a little out of tune; it made his voice deeper than it should have been. "That's where I think Cteel is heading."
The matadors looked at each other.
"Those big armored things with the nose horns?" Geneva said.
"No, those are something else," Bork said. "These are the ones with flexible snouts. They're bigger than the horned animals; some of th
em have these long white tusks."
"Oh, yeah, curlnoses."
"What makes you think that's where Cteel is going?" Dirisha asked.
"I've got a source that tracked the ownership of the place.Used to belong to Marcus Jefferson Wall."
"What's he got to do with this?" Sleel asked. "He's fertilizer, right?"
"He died, yes," Khadaji said. "But maybe he's got a brother.A twin."
Dirisha said, "There's a pleasant thought. You think Juete is on this elephant farm?"
"It's possible."
"Then maybe we should just skip the tour of the countryside."
"Give me your coordinates," Khadaji said. "I'll meet you there. We'll all go pay them a visit."
They were parked in a grassy area when Khadaji and Veate arrived and landed their flitter. It had been almost eight hours since they'd last talked.
The late afternoon's heat had hardly abated and the shade of the nearby trees offered a little respite. The group moved that way.
"So, what's the drill?" Dirisha asked.
"I expect they know we're going to show up," Khadaji said. "Our advantage is that they probablydon't know exactly when or how. The place sits on the edge of a swamp, in the middle ofa big grassland.
Some of the vegetation is nearly twice a man's height. I think they can spot anybody coming in by air, but we should be able to get pretty close on the ground. They'll have some basic sensing gear to track the livestock, butnothing a flatpack confounder can't rascal ."
Bork, who was standing next to Veate with one big hand resting lightly on her shoulder, glanced at Khadaji, then back at the albino woman.
Khadaji said, "Veate will stay with the vehicles. If things get out of control, she can come in blasting. I've had some modifications made to our flitter."
Bork relaxed a little.
Veate wasn't particularly happy about being used as a back-up, but she also knew she didn't have the skills her father and the others had.
"I've got the loan of five class-one shiftsuits, with coolers," Khadaji continued. "Yours might be a little tight, Bork."
That brought smiles.
"I've got some supplemental weaponry. Plus a construction plan of the zoo. We'll do a study, talk it out, and go in after dark, everything being equal."
Veate said, "Can you be sure she's there?"
"No guarantees," Khadaji said, "but everything points to it. Pen's projections say this is all about to peak.
