Crashing Heaven (14 page)

Chapter 19

Jack thought it would be hard to reach Corazon. To his surprise, the call went straight through.

‘I followed your suggestion,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at the files. There is something strange there. I think – I think I’m beginning to believe you now.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. And there’s something I want to ask you too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I need you to find someone for me.’

‘Let’s discuss that in person.’ There was fear in her voice. ‘This call might not be safe.’ Jack wondered how much of a leap it had been for her to realise that. ‘We need to meet as soon as possible.’

A couple of hours later she sent Jack a one-off Homelands entry permit. It specified time and place of entry and exit, but no particular user. That helped calm Fist down a bit. [She doesn’t want anyone tracking you,] he said. [At least we won’t be drawing too much attention to ourselves.] Jack was to take a train through the Wart to Chuigushou Mall, changing once at Vitality Junction. Corazon would wait for him in a particular coffee shop, wearing civilian clothes.

[ I think we should sell the travel pass to a sweathead, and let them go begging in Homelands. Or find those little bastards that were attacking your squishy friend and give it to them. They’d find some good victims in the malls.]

Jack presented himself at Wound station gate and entered the ticket’s code in a manual terminal that looked like it hadn’t been used for decades. Soon they were trundling through the darkness of the Wart on a nearly empty train.

[Going after the Pantheon traitor,] said Fist. [ You’re turning into Grey’s weapon after all.]

[ I’m doing this for me. And Andrea. And you, come to that.]

[ You’re endangering my
future,] snorted Fist.

[ I’m making sure you have one
. Those bastards want to use you up and throw you
away.]

Outside, darkness rushed by. Homelands was a sudden blaze
of light. Jack wished he had some sunglasses. His eyes
had hardly adjusted when the train pulled in to Chuigushou
Mall station. Large escalators led down from the platform into
a perfectly circular piazza. It was at least five hundred
metres across. The open space was defined by two white
marble colonnades, which encircled it like hugging arms. They came
together in a pointed arch directly opposite the escalators. A
glass façade loomed up behind it, several storeys high – the
main body of the mall.

Jack remembered a hectic commercial
bustle. The piazza’s serenity was a shock to him
. There were no colours but white marble and black weave
sigils; no sound but the hushed bustle of feet on
stone and the excited susurrus of shoppers anticipating purchases or
taking joy in new goods. Most of the colonnade arches
had restaurants set into them. Waiters bustled between tables, sometimes
shouting, sometimes stopping and staring into space as customer management
systems fed new commands to them. Diners busily forked food
into their mouths. Almost all were staring up as they
ate, barely registering each mouthful.

Entertainment must be dancing merrily
through each restaurant. Jack wondered what he would be seeing
if he were onweave. Presumably it would be something far
from this classically elegant space. The latest musics would be
pounding through his mind, personalised advertising displays bursting in front
of him like small fireworks. Years ago, he’d been
a reasonably frequent mall visitor. He remembered little of those
visits, beyond a certain strained excitement that had tipped too
easily into sensory overload.

He reached the arch and stepped
on to a moving walkway. It pulled him up into
the western end of the mall. Spinelight shone through the
mall’s peaked glass roof, high above. Its floor stretched
away into the distance. Walkways crisscrossed its great central
nave, connecting its side walls. Each one was segmented into
seven or eight floors of shopping space. Balconies alternated with
advertising
hoardings, painted with great, multicoloured sigils that ran from floor to ceiling like brilliant windows.

Two arched voids opened up halfway down it, leading to smaller north and south wings. The nave continued beyond the crossing, its eastern space holding the more expensive and exclusive stores. Only the elite could visit them. Jack had been taken into one of them once by an advertising executive he’d briefly dated. The lunch he’d bought her had cost him the best part of a month’s wages. Even then, he could only afford half an hour’s worth of flavour. They’d had to eat quickly to enjoy it.

The mall ended with a great sunwards-facing logo carved into its final, eastern wall. Light poured in through it, turning it into a brilliant tribute to the bounty of Silver and of the Pantheon as a whole. The fulfilment that Chuigushou Mall provided was their gift to the people of the Solar System, the highest aspirations of post-Terran man made concrete and consumable. Its blaze was blinding. After a moment, Jack had to look away.

[ This place is full of wankers,] said Fist.

[ I know.]

[And it’s far too loud! I’m going to climb back into my little box till we’re out of here.]

[ No skin off my nose …]

[ We shouldn’t have come here, Jack.]

Jack was surprised to see that a couple of shops seemed to have been attacked. Workmen were replacing the glass windows and carrying broken furniture out of one of them. The frontage of the other had been entirely boarded over. He wondered how and why the damage had been done. It implied a chaotic violence that jarred with the commercial serenity of the rest of the mall, and the wider world of Homelands.

Corazon hadn’t reached the café yet. Jack waited for her just outside it. A small, dirty child ran past, ragged clothes fluttering behind her, a younger version of Ifor’s attackers. She was carrying something heavy, but vanished before Jack could see what it was. She too seemed so out of place. For a moment, he wondered if she was a glitch – but of course, he was offweave.

‘I don’t know how you can look so relaxed in here,’ shouted Corazon when she emerged from the softly bustling crowd. She was dressed in loose white clothes that drifted endlessly around her. Black sigils danced across expensive fabrics. ‘It gets so loud. That’s why I thought it would be a good place to meet.’

Jack followed her to an empty table. All he could hear were variations on near-silence. Corazon flicked a hand around her head, banishing a hubbub of datasprites. Her voice dropped to a more normal level. ‘Gods, I need a coffee.’ She waved at a server to catch his attention. He nodded as he received her request. When he brought the cappuccino he looked questioningly at Jack. His expression switched from surprised to worried as the café’s ordering systems found no weave presence to mesh with. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Corazon then, turning to Jack, ‘what do you want?’

‘Plain black,’ he answered.

‘On my tab,’ she told the server. He whispered to a colleague as he poured the coffee out. The colleague brought the coffee over, suppressing a nervous giggle as she put it down.

‘Probably never met a long-term offweaver before,’ said Corazon.

‘I’m not about to start throwing tables around. Now, what have you found?’

Corazon leant in towards Jack, talking quietly but urgently. ‘Too much missing from the Penderville file. Your investigation into the Panther Czar’s finances for starters. There’s a full datacomb reference for it, but nothing stored at that address. Someone’s wiped it, the backup’s gone too.’

‘That should be impossible.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that. And most of Harry Devlin’s interviews have been deleted – including Aud Yamata’s.’

‘She was the only real suspect. They must have got rid of the rest to avoid pointing too obviously to her. What about Penderville? Did you manage to talk to his fetch?’

‘He was tagged as a terrorist. His fetch is frozen. Nobody can reach him.’

‘Ah.’ Jack sat back in his seat, wondering how much to tell her about Harry. ‘Unusual.’

‘Freezing a fetch is very serious. There should be a lot of evidence to justify it. But there’s nothing.’

‘Deleted too?’

‘There’s no record that it was ever there, that any sort of due process was followed.’

‘Pantheon.’

Corazon looked down into her coffee. ‘That’s not something I wanted to believe.’

‘There’s no belief about it. It’s fact. Only a god could wipe files and backups, and cage a fetch with no evidence at all.’

She looked up at him. There was a terse, defensive anger in her voice. ‘I hoped I wouldn’t find it. It confirms everything you said.’

‘The fetches in particular – Penderville’s not the first to be interfered with. I’m surprised you didn’t try to talk to Harry Devlin. You wouldn’t have been able to.’

‘They froze him too?’ Disbelief and fear jostled in Corazon’s voice.

‘They corrupted his dataself,’ said Jack.

[Liar …] whispered a quiet voice from deep inside him.

‘Shit. So one of them really is smuggling sweat and going all out to cover it up.’

‘They’re after Fist now,’ replied Jack.

‘Yes, you said.’

‘They want to use him when I’m gone.’

Corazon clutched at her coffee mug, her firm grip whitening her knuckles. She laughed bitterly. ‘I feel like such a fool. Even when East told me that I couldn’t choose my own career – I thought they’re all good, they’ve got our interests at heart. She knows what’s best for me.’ A moment of moving through her own memories, of letting her new knowledge roil in her, and then she snapped herself back into focus. ‘And I may be pissed off with her,’ she continued, ‘but I still hope she’s got nothing to do with this. And that’s what’s next, isn’t it – find out which one it is?’

‘Yes. And we’ll do it through Yamata, and her skinner.’

Corazon looked round then whispered ‘David Nihal.’

‘That’s him. How did you know?’

‘I looked back to see what Yamata was up to around the time of the murder. Sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t.’

‘We’d started to look into that ourselves. How did you work out it was him?’

‘I ran a full search on her links with known skinners. For a while, he was a regular face in her life. Once every couple of months, there he was – standing at the door of a nightclub she’d just gone into, or walking in a park that she’d just left. No traces of them ever meeting, but …’

‘They must have wiped the weave surveillance.’

‘Yes. But only when they’re actually together, not when they’re arriving or leaving.’

‘Lazy.’

‘Or overconfident. And that’s something too – if you can wipe surveillance data like that then—’

‘You must have Pantheon behind you.’ They said it both together. It felt like a mantra. Jack sipped his coffee. It had cooled to lukewarm.

‘And we definitely can’t go straight to her now?’ he said.

‘No. Even back then she wasn’t easy to track. She had a bot-layer covering her basic weave functions when she wasn’t herself. It was a very good one. I only found it when I ran a custom data density check on her. All the basic public stuff went on – the bots pretended to follow set daily routines – but there was nothing happening behind it. Half the time, she was a fiction. And then she just disappeared. A few months after Devlin was killed. There’s no record of her death. She’s an invisible.’

‘Do InSec even have anything like that?’

‘We don’t need it. And frankly, even if we wanted to pull something like that off, it would be beyond our capabilities. Not to mention every kind of illegal. Data faking like that will have already severely compromised Yamata’s fetch potential. Her life’s lost to the Coffin Drives.’

‘Like Penderville’s and Devlin’s.’

Corazon laughed again. ‘And all the other people they’ve silenced,’ she said. ‘You know, it’s quite liberating? Realising that at least one of the Pantheon just doesn’t care. Maybe they all don’t. They could all be lying to us. Perhaps we don’t owe any of them anything after all.’

‘I certainly don’t think we do,’ said Jack. ‘But that’s a dangerous thing to understand.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘We shouldn’t have come here. It’s too public. You should have just arrested me. We could have talked in a holding cell.’

‘No. Our conversation would have been monitored. Lestak would have queried your arrest. Anyone could have seen that you were in the building because of me. All this has been going on for a long time. I don’t know who’s involved with it. I couldn’t risk alerting them.’

‘But they’ll have picked up your searches …’

‘Out into the weave from behind the InSec firewall. I randomised my wp address. They’ll know it’s InSec, but nothing else.’

‘Unless they see you with me, here.’

‘I’ve been running an anonymiser all the way in. I just look like another shopper – and the bandwidth load of all the promotional sprites here will confuse any surveillance even more. It’s even tough for puppets to handle. So I suspect Fist will have gone rather quiet.’

‘He has.’ A distant [fuck you] echoed through Jack’s mind. He laughed, then wondered briefly about living out the rest of his life in shopping malls. ‘Anyway, all this is very impressive,’ he continued. ‘You know your stuff. Where did you find that custom data density check?’

‘Wrote it myself.’

‘Very sharp for an East acolyte.’

‘We’re not all weathergirls and ad candy.’ Corazon smiled sadly. ‘Maybe she was right about me, at that.’

‘What next?’

‘I’ve been on the offensive. Quietly and discreetly. I wrote a passive app to track Nihal’s data flows. See if he was still around. And I’ve found him.’