Into Everywhere (40 page)

Lisa said, ‘Wait. You’ve been there?’

‘No. Not yet. The problem, you see, is not that we do not know where it is. The problem is deciding whether or not we should attempt to reach it.’

The cluster of pixels shrank to a point. Other points drifted in from two edges of the screen. Lisa realised that the viewpoint had pulled back to show the star’s relationship to its neighbours.

‘Stars in the immediate neighbourhood are widely scattered,’ Ada Morange said. ‘Nevertheless, one is orbited by wormholes: an F8 star somewhat larger and brighter than Earth’s Sun, located a hundred and sixteen light years from your lodestar.’

On the screen, one of the points was suddenly circled by a blue ring.

‘It is not a long trip, between Terminus and this F8 star,’ Ada Morange said. Sparks of screen-light shone in her eyes. ‘I have sent several expeditions out there, to observe the lodestar. At the moment we can go no closer. If we cannot find a wormhole that leads to it, the only way to reach it would be to travel there directly, across more than a hundred light years. But it is clear that your eidolon has a connection with it, which is why I want you to go out there. To the F8 star. If nothing else, we can make use of your compass talent to absolutely confirm that this little M0 dwarf really is the target of the pulsar maps. And perhaps, when your eidolon is closer, it will tell us something more. Unlikely Worlds believes that this is a foolish hope, but it is one that should be tested. Well, what do you say?’

‘My ship’s bridle said that Ada Morange told her that I was on Veles,’ Tony said. ‘That part I can believe. As Aunty Jael, Ada Morange was in constant contact with the wizards on the slime planet. She must have taken the q-phone link with her when she escaped. But the bridle also said that she applied for permission from Dry Salvages’s traffic control to boot, and flew here under her own volition. I think that she thinks she is telling the truth, but what she claims to have done is frankly impossible. She is not programmed for autonomous behaviour. There are strict protocols to prevent her or the ship from acting independently. She should not have come here unless I told her to.’

‘Yet here she is,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘Probably because Ada Morange hacked her,’ Tony said, thinking again of that phantom spider-squid extending its tentacles from world to world. ‘She used the q-phone link to take control, and gave the bridle false memories of acting independently. And that is not all she did.’

‘She told your ship where to find her,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘Is that a guess, or did you have something to do with it?’

‘If I knew where Ada was, I would be there, not here,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘And it was not exactly a guess. More in the nature of a logical deduction. You told me that she was interested in the eidolon lodged in your head. She helped you to escape Raqle Thornhilde’s sons, and now she has made the obvious next move, and extended an invitation.’

They were in an open-air café at the edge of the tomb-raider settlement’s main street. Tony, ravenously hungry, was forking up a mess of red beans and rice; Victor Ursu was sipping a frothy milkshake; Unlikely Worlds squatted at the little round table with a shot glass of whisky set on the flat top of his tank, absorbing the organic molecules that flavoured the drink via a quantum mechanism that massively inflated the probability that they would be located inside the tank rather than in the glass. Or so he said.

Victor thumbed foam from his upper lip. ‘It could be a trick meant to send you on the wrong path, lad.’

‘I wondered about that too,’ Tony said.

‘Where is it, this place where she is supposed to be waiting for you?’ Unlikely Worlds said.

Tony opened the window that the bridle had sent to him. ‘I have full details of the route and the flight plan, but it passes through several mirrors that are not on any maps.’

‘Perhaps it is the destination of that ship Ada Morange dispatched a century ago,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘I don’t think so. If that had mirrors orbiting it, there would have been no need to travel there the hard way.’

‘Sometimes you cannot tell if mirrors are present around a star until you go there,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘And your maps of the wormhole network are woefully incomplete, even now.’

‘There’s only one way to know the shape of something in the dark,’ Victor said. ‘You have to lay your hand on it. As I think the lad already knows.’

‘I cannot trust the invitation, and I cannot trust my ship,’ Tony said. ‘But I have no other path to follow. How long will it take to reach the surface from here?’

‘Less than an hour to walk to the railhead,’ Victor said. ‘Then just twenty minutes by train.’

‘There’s a railway?’

‘It was built to carry out spoil when a company of tomb raiders excavated a necropolis close by.’

Tony got the coordinates of the railway’s surface terminal and calculated orbits and descent paths while he followed Victor Ursu and Unlikely Worlds to the railhead, and told
Abalunam’s Pride
’s bridle when and where to rendezvous. He was monitoring her radar feed and listening to chatter from traffic control. Raqle Thornhilde must know by now that his ship had booted from Dry Salvages, must have guessed where it would be heading. Her two sons would be watching it, waiting for Tony to show himself. Waiting to pounce.

At the railhead, Victor told Tony that his responsibility for him ended here. ‘I went out onto the skin once, when I was part of a delegation that met with politicians in Tanrog. I am not in a hurry to repeat the experience. I hope that your path is a true one, and you will come back and walk with me again, and tell me how your story ended.’

Tony, touched and surprised, embraced Victor before climbing onto one of the train’s flatbed wagons; the burly man raised a hand in a farewell salute as the train drew away, then turned and walked away into the dark. Hauled by a small electric locomotive, the chain of wagons clattered through empty chambers and narrow tunnels lined with pale ceramic. Fifteen minutes after they set off, Veles’s traffic control was shouting in Tony’s head, demanding to know why
Abalunam’s Pride
had dropped out of orbit without permission. He tuned it down, kept watch through the radar feed.

At last the train emerged into grey light, rattling through a long cutting. Rain prickled on Tony’s face as he squinted at the low clouds, worried that stealthed drones and police spinners undetected by
Abalunam’s Pride
might suddenly stoop down. Then the walls of the cutting fell away and there she was, hanging just above the terminal’s tangle of sidings, her black bulk glistening in the rain, overshadowing strings of derelict wagons rotting amongst weeds and thorn bushes. Beyond, a scattering of low buildings hunched below the bare black mounds of spoil heaps. A small crowd stood outside a bar, staring up at the ship.

By now, traffic control was reciting penalties for laws broken and orders to stand down and await arrest.

‘A nice theatrical touch,’ Unlikely Worlds said as he followed Tony along a weedy track.

‘Purely practical,’ Tony said. ‘We have only a little time before Tanrog’s police or Raqle Thornhilde’s sons catch up with us. Find a place to secure yourself as soon as we are aboard. I aim to boot at once.’

He went straight up, punching through streaming layers of cloud and emerging in the raw light of Veles’s star. Traffic control was raving. And as Tony aimed
Abalunam’s Pride
towards the wilderness of mirrors, another ship rose out of the planet’s atmosphere, changing course to follow him.

Bob and Bane, in their hired ship.

The common channel blinked. Tony ignored it. There was no point listening to their threats. He was driving towards the mirrors at the maximum acceleration permitted by the bias drive. His pursuers could do no more than match it, and would always be at least thirty minutes behind. He would have to think of some way of dealing with them when he reached his destination. Although if he really was heading into a trap, who knew, he might need their help.

When everything changed Lisa was down on Niflheimr, staying on the farm owned by Zandra and Nick Papandreou. Time out. A vacation while she waited for the ship to return to Terminus from the F8 star, resupply, and light out again, taking her with it. Ada Morange’s people had offered her a huge bonus that overtopped the consultancy fee she had already been paid. More money than she knew what to do with, frankly, although she planned to send a hefty fraction of it to Bria, as an apology for fucking up her life. But mainly she was going because she was curious. She wanted to know how the eidolon would react with the lodestar just a hundred and sixteen light years away. She hoped to get a better idea of what Willie’s jackpot had got her into.

Then she would come back to Terminus and help Ada Morange’s science crew to come up with a way of exorcising her ghost.

That day she was out hiking with Isabelle Linder, her official minder until she boarded the ship, trying as usual to ignore the two bodyguards who tagged along wherever she went. They were walking alongside a creek that looped through sheep pastures – Zandra and Nick owned some four thousand head, scattered across fifteen hundred hectares. The air was pleasantly cool, the sky shrouded edge to edge with grey clouds. Threadbare green pasture stretched away either side of the ribbon of native vegetation – vegetation brought here long ago by various Elder Cultures – that grew along the creek’s winding course. Wire grass, stands of things a little like palm trees with dreadlocked tangles of violet straps, hummocks of a kind of blue-green moss, a single tree-thing jagged as a lightning strike, decked out in feathery webs.

The stony ridge where Zandra, Nick, and their two small sons would join them for lunch had just appeared at the close, visibly curved horizon when one of the guards hurried forward and said there was a problem, everyone had to return to the farm. He shrugged when Lisa asked what was wrong; Isabelle, poking at her phone, frowned and said, ‘It is Investigator Nevers.’

Lisa felt a catch in her heartbeat. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He is here. On a ship that has just come through the wormhole. And he is accompanied by a crew of TCU agents and lawyers.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am afraid so,’ Isabelle said. She seemed unreasonably calm. ‘We have a contact in the TCU offices. They received a message just an hour ago. It seems they did not know he was coming here before he arrived.’

‘But he isn’t here yet. It will take him a day to get to the elevator terminal, ten hours to ride down to the surface . . . And anyway, he can’t do anything. The Commonwealth doesn’t recognise the TCU. That’s why you’re here.’

‘We are to go to our compound at the elevator port, and await further instructions,’ Isabelle said. ‘Don’t worry. The Professor knows what she is doing. And she has your best interests in mind.’

They were halfway home when Isabelle’s phone chirped. ‘Mais bien sûr. À la fois,’ she told the caller, and handed the phone to Lisa. ‘It is the Professor.’

‘There has been a development,’ Ada Morange told Lisa, without any preamble.

‘Aside from this thing with Adam Nevers?’

‘I am sending you a video.’

It was a brief clip pulled from one of Niflheimr’s news sites. Two Jackaroo avatars in black tracksuits being interviewed by a young woman, their gold-tinted translucent faces vaguely reminiscent of half a dozen movie stars, their smiles and body language uncanny simulations of the smiles and body language of actual human beings.

‘We are sightseers,’ one said, when the young woman asked them about a rumour that they were here to investigate Karyotech Pharma.

‘We love what you’ve done with the place,’ said the other.

‘There’s more,’ Ada Morange said, ‘but it is only the usual polite evasions. The point is that they are here, on Niflheimr. That interview was posted ten minutes ago, shortly after they stepped out of a cargo elevator. My people believe that they arrived on a freighter from Earth that docked yesterday, and somehow evaded security.’

Lisa said, ‘Are you sure that they are working with Nevers?’

‘It would be a tremendous coincidence if they were not, because Jackaroo avatars have never before visited Niflheimr. We must assume that they know everything we know. That is how they are. And that means that Nevers knows it too.’

‘But what can he do here, without authority?’

‘He tried to stop my work on Mangala, without authority. And he nearly succeeded. But do not worry,’ Ada Morange said. ‘I have made arrangements to get you to a place of safety. This is no more than a bump in the road to your star.’

Ten minutes later, a helicopter resolved in the middle distance and swept towards them, scattering sheep.

‘Don’t worry, it’s ours,’ one of the bodyguards told Lisa.

The two of them were young men dressed in ordinary hiking gear, relaxed and vigilant.

Isabelle, poking at her phone again, said, ‘There has been a change of plan. You are to go up to the terminal right away.’

‘But that’s where Nevers is heading,’ Lisa said, deeply unsettled by the swift sudden crisis, the sense of unseen forces in motion all around her. It felt a lot like a kidnapping.

‘A TCU vehicle picked up the Jackaroo avatars,’ Isabelle said. ‘It is heading in this direction. You must leave Niflheimr at once, Lisa. You will reach the terminal before Nevers arrives, and transfer to the timeship. You will be quite safe there.’

The helicopter made a circle overhead and dropped down, landing on its skids in the rough grass. It was the kind that ranchers used to herd cattle on the big ranges north of Port of Plenty, its two-blade rotor raised on a stalk above the little pod of its cabin. Lisa followed Isabelle towards it with a heavy feeling of resignation. The two bodyguards walking either side of her, everyone ducking under the chattering blades. Isabelle had a brief argument with the pilot. She wanted to go with Lisa; the pilot said that he had orders to take only Ms Dawes.

One of the bodyguards helped Lisa into the bucket seat next to the pilot, showed her how to buckle the safety harness. Isabelle told her that she would see her soon, and wished her bon voyage, something Lisa had thought only people who weren’t actually French said, and the helicopter lifted with a jolt that left her stomach somewhere on the ground. The last she saw of Isabelle Linder, the woman was standing with the two bodyguards in a circle of flattened grass, blonde hair blown awry as she looked up, shading her eyes with her forearm. And then the helicopter turned and put its nose down and the pasture unravelled into scrub forest.