The Dreaming Void (48 page)

“I've never seen anyone lift so much,” Boyd said. “You've got a lot of talent, Edeard.”

Edeard shrugged.

“I claim first rights to stand behind him when the shit starts flying,” Macsen said. “And the bullets.”

“You all look like you can handle yourselves if we get pushed into a corner,” Edeard said.

“Don't have a lot of choice, do we?” Macsen said. “Not enough skill for a guild and not rich enough to buy into the militia. So here we are, all of us clinging to the ass end of life, and we're only just starting out. One big long fall into the sewage from here on in, my fellow failures.”

“Ignore him,” Dinlay said. “He's just bitter at the way he got treated by his father's family.”

“Not as bitter as they'll be when I'm through with them,” Macsen said with unexpected heat.

“Plans for revenge?” Kanseen asked.

“Don't have to plan. Those arrogant turds break the law a dozen times a week. One day I'll have the clout to have the whole lot of the bastards locked up and ruined.”

“Now, that's what I like to see: ambition.”

“How come you didn't join a guild, Edeard?” Macsen asked. “You have more psychic talent than the rest of us put together.”

“I don't want to be ordered around for the next seven years,” he told them simply.

“Lady bless that,” Dinlay said. “We just have to grit our teeth for six months and we've made it.”

“That's a curious definition of making it,” Kanseen said in a dismissive voice as a ge-monkey brought her a tray with a bowl of porridge and a tall glass of milk. “Being allowed out onto the streets by ourselves to be shoved around by gangs and get beaten up trying to stop tavern fights.”

“Then why are you here?” Macsen asked.

She took a long drink of milk. “Do you see me being a proper little wife to some oaf of a tradesman?”

“Not all tradesmen are oafs,” Boyd said defensively.

Macsen ignored him. “Good for you,” he told Kanseen.

Her head turned ponderously to stare at him. “Not interested, thanks.”

Edeard grinned while Dinlay and Boyd both laughed.

“Me, neither,” Macsen insisted, but he had lost the moment and sounded very insincere.

“So is Chae right about buying the uniform?” Edeard asked. He was conscious that he probably had more coinage in his pocket than the others.

“Depends,” Dinlay said. “If you're definitely going to be a constable, then it doesn't matter how you pay. But if you're uncertain, then you're best off having them take it from your wages. That way, when you leave after a couple of weeks, you hand the uniform back and you haven't lost any of your own money.”

“Oh, face facts,” Macsen said. “If we're here, it's not because we're uncertain; we're plain desperate.”

“Speak for yourself,” Dinlay said. “This is my family profession.”

“Then I apologize. I don't have the luxury of alternatives.”

“You could have joined the gangs,” Kanseen said lightly. “It probably pays better.”

Macsen showed her a fast hand gesture.

“How bad are they?” Edeard asked. “The gangs, I mean. I'd never heard of them before I reached town.”

“Lady, you really are from the countryside, aren't you?” Macsen said. “When did you get here?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday!”
He said it in a voice so loud that several constables glanced curiously over at their table.

“Yesterday,” Edeard said firmly.

“Okay, well, too late now. The gangs are big in some districts and not in others; the majority are based in Sampalok. If you're rich, they're not much of a problem; if you're poor, then it's more difficult for you. They specialize in protection. Think of them as an alternative tax system to the Grand Council.”

“But with violence,” Dinlay said. “They're murderous scum, and they should be wiped out.”

“After first being fairly found guilty in court,” Macsen said with a smile.

“They're a real problem and getting worse,” Boyd said. “My brother is having to pay them to leave the bakery alone, and he's only ten minutes away from this station, which puts him about as far from Sampalok as you can be. It used to be safe there; my father never used to have such trouble.”

“Why doesn't he report them to the constables?” Edeard said.

Macsen gave a disrespectful snort. “Take a look around you, Edeard. Would you ask us to protect you from an organized gang that thinks it's funny to throw your children or your mother into the canal with a rock tied to them? Are you going to stand outside a baker's shop for twenty-four hours a day for ten years just to save them? Do you think Chae would let you? And if he did, what about everyone else in the district? No. They're a fact of life in Makkathran now. The best the constables do is maintain an uneasy truce and stop us from falling into complete anarchy.”

“So young, so cynical,” Kanseen said. “Ignore them, Edeard. It's nothing like as bad as they say.”

“I hope not,” he said in a subdued voice. Maybe he was still suffering from the shock of city life, but he had an uncomfortable feeling that Grand Master Finitan had not been entirely honest with him about life in Makkathran.

Investigator Second Level Halran stood in the vault's open door and surveyed the chaos inside. Every surface—walls, floor, ceiling, corpses—had been covered in a thick carpet of blue-gray gossamer fiber, as if a million spiders had spent the night spinning their webs together. The slender strands were actually semiorganic filaments that had taken over three hours to neutralize the nerve toxin leaking from spent kinetic projectiles and damp down several other lethal energy surges coming from munitions left over from the firefight. Halran was mildly surprised that the St. Mary's clinic would use nerve agents, but then, important people did like reassurance that their secure memory stores were truly secure. He had told the clinic manager that he would be inspecting their toxic armaments user certificate at noon—a time scale long enough for high-level calls to be placed and the correct licence to be procured. It was that kind of flexible interpretation of procedure that had earned Halran his last two promotions. He figured what the hell, the big boys ran the world, anyway; there was little capital to be made from annoying them. That was why the police commissioner had handed him this assignment. And as soon as he got it, the Mayor's assistant was calling him to explain certain political considerations, foremost of which was that the complete destruction of half a million memorycells belonging to the wealthiest, most influential people in the state had not actually happened. If there was a temporary glitch in kube data retrieval due to the unfortunate accident with the clinic's power generator, it was regrettable but not a cause for alarm or excessive media interest. Reporters could cover the damage to the forest; they were not to be permitted into the administration block and its sublevels.

Halran's u-shadow completed its analysis of the gossamer and reported that decontamination was complete. “All right,” he told the eight-strong forensic team standing behind him in the corridor. “I want a full scene survey down to a molecular level. No budget limit; this is way way above our usual priority rating. Col, Angelo, you build the event sequence for me. Darval, see if you can get me the name of the memorycell that bastard Telfer was after.”

Darval peered over Halran's shoulder; the emergency lighting projector that had been rigged up in the doorway was producing a silver-blue holographic glow throughout the vault, eliminating shadows. It made the gossamer shimmer softly, resembling a rippled moonlit lake as its undulations smothered the congealed splinters of half a million kubes. “How in Ozzie's name am I going to do that, chief?”

Halran gave him an evil grin. “There should be one missing, so all you have to do is reassemble the fragments of those that are still here and tell me which one was taken.”

“Fuck me.”

“Good point. Plan B: Go through the names on the registry and assign them a probability of someone wanting to steal their memories. Start with political, criminal, and financial categories.”

Darval gave a reluctant nod.

“Force fields on at all times, please,” Halran ordered. “There were some very nasty munitions loose in here. I don't want to take any chances.”

The forensic team moved cautiously into the vault. Examiners scurried in with them, bots like lead cockroaches scuttling along on black electromuscle legs, bristling with sensory antennae that wiggled though the gossamer to stroke the surfaces beneath. Over two thousand were released, streaming over the floor and up the walls to build a comprehensive molecular map of the vault.

Halran waited until the tiny bots had whirled around the corpse of Viertz Accu before he gave her a more detailed inspection. Her cocooned body was still in a kneeling position, spine curved forward as if she were at prayer. They had found the top of her skull upstairs while waiting for the gossamer to run its decontamination procedure. Halran knew what that implied—this was turning into a bad case from every angle.

His exovision overlaid the results of the examiners, showing him the narrow burn lines on her exposed brain. A lot of energy had been applied in a fashion he recognized. He applied a deep scan module, tracking the depth of the beam penetration. Her memorycell had been destroyed.

“I hope she backed up recently,” he muttered.

“What do you make of these, chief?” Angelo asked. He was standing in front of an exotic matter cage.

“Nice idea, I suppose. I haven't seen one before. Telfer obviously didn't know they were here.”

“Much good it did the clinic. Those guards didn't exactly slow him down, did they?”

“No. His enrichments were off the scale.” Halran called up the main case file again. Telfer appeared in his exoimage, a picture taken in the main reception area showing a possible Oriental ethnicity, but with odd gray eyes. Age locked into his thirties, which was unusual, and with a dense stubble shadow. Completely unexceptional. Halran knew that was deliberate, not that visual features meant anything in this day and age; even DNA identification was inconclusive now, and they had enough of that from the blood trail back up to the roof. The picture showed him smiling as he greeted the beautiful young clinician. His accomplice, though, was a different matter. She certainly did not qualify as unexceptional; a real beauty with a freckled face and thick dark red hair. Cute nose, too, he thought admiringly. People would remember that face.

Everything about their arrival had been perfectly normal right up to the moment when the clinic security net had started glitching and Telfer had vanished from the smartcore's passive surveillance. The raid, too, had been extremely professional apart from the exit. The woman had seemed almost surprised, as if she were improvising the whole thing. That did not make a lot of sense.

“Chief,” Darval called.

“Yep.”

“The registry was hacked.”

Halran started to walk over to where Darval was stooped over the registry pillar. Several examiners were crawling over its gossamer cloak, prodding the top with their antennae. “Has there been physical—” he began to say. The sentence was never finished. A woman walked into the vault. Halran gave her a surprised look, about to ask who the hell she was, suspecting another of the Mayor's staffers because nobody else could get through the police cordon without his permission. Then her face registered, and Halran did not need to ask. He knew all about this living legend; everyone in law enforcement did. “Oh, sweet Ozzie,” he murmured, and an already bad case turned nightmare on him. She was shorter than most of the citizens of the contemporary Commonwealth, but the confidence she exuded was much greater than average. Harlan had encountered enough Highers in his time to recognize their slightly smug self-belief; she was on a level far above them, with a composure that rated glacial. Her face was enchanting, a combination of pre-Common-wealth Earth's Filipino and European features framed by thick raven hair brushed straight and devoid of any modern cosmetics, a beauty he could only describe as old-fashioned. That was fair enough given the fact that she had not changed her appearance once in the last fourteen hundred years.

The whole forensic team had fallen into awed silence, staring at the woman.

Halran stepped forward, hoping he was concealing his nerves. She wore a conservative cream-colored toga suit over a figure that was as ideal as any created by St. Mary's specialists. When he attempted to scan her using the most subtle probes his enrichments could produce, they were deflected perfectly. It was as if nothing were there; the only empirical proof he had that she existed was his own eyesight.

“Ma'am, I'm Investigator Halran, in charge of this case. I, er, that is, we are very flattered you're here.”

“Thank you,” said Paula Myo.

“Can I ask what your interest is?”

“It's not my interest; I am only ANA: Governance's representative.”

“In this universe,” Darval whispered to Angelo.

Paula gave him a sweet smile. “The old jokes are always the best ones. And they don't come much older.”

Darvel's expression turned sickly.

“Okay,” Halran said. “So what's ANA: Governance's interest?”

“Mr. Telfer.”

“Is he Higher?”

“What do you think?”

“His weapons biononics are the most sophisticated we've ever seen on Anagaska. The vault guards were hired purely on the basis of their enrichments, and he took them both out in less than a minute. So if he's not Higher, he has access to the best the Central worlds have to offer.”

“Very good,” Paula complimented him. “So?”

“He's probably working for one of your factions.”

“Excellent rationale, Investigator. That's exactly why I'm here: to see if that particular conclusion is correct. Now, I'd like first access to all your forensic results, please.”

“Er, I'll see you get copies, of course.”

“Your planetary government has granted ANA: Governance full cooperation on this case. I'm sure you appreciate the politics involved. Please feel free to check with your Commissioner and even the city's Mayor, but that's not copies. I require first and unrestricted access to the raw data, thank you.”

Halran knew when he had lost a battle. “Yes, ma'am. First access. I'll set that up right away.”

“Thank you. Now, who's analyzing the registry?”

“That's me,” Darval said awkwardly.

“Who do you think Telfer was after?”

Darval glanced at Halran, who gave a tiny nod. “Easy, actually. One of the secure stores belonged to Inigo.”

“Ah.” Paula smiled. She closed her eyes and drew a long breath through her nose. “When was the last update?”

“The year 3320.”

“The year he left on his Centurion Station mission,” she said. “And he didn't return to Anagaska until 3415, correct?”

“Yes,” Halran said. “Living Dream's central fane on Anagaska was built in Kuhmo; he was here to dedicate it.”

“Interesting,” Paula mused.

“You think someone's going to full-clone him?”

“Why else would you steal his mind?” Paula said. “Thank you for your cooperation, Investigator. And I'd still like those results as they come in.” She turned and started to walk out of the vault.

“That's it?” Halran asked.

Paula halted, tipping her head to fix the investigator with a level stare. “Unless you have something else to add.”

“What about Telfer?”

“Good luck hunting him down.”

“Are you going to help us?”

“I won't put any obstacles in your way, political or otherwise.” She left the vault, leaving Halran staring at his team in confusion and indignation.

Paula walked out of the administration block and glanced at the forest. The air blasts had produced superficial damage. Most of the clinic's buildings were still intact, and while the larger trees had been toppled, there were still enough younger ones to maintain the forest once the dead trunks had been cleared away. A police cordon extended for several hundred yards, with uniformed officers reinforcing the patrolbots. Members of the clinic ground staff were working with contractors and forestrybots to clear the worst of the damage. Little curls of smoke were drifting upward from the blackened ground where fires had burned for a couple of hours during the night before being extinguished.

She did not pause as her field effect scanned the area, but two of the contractor crew were red-tagged by her u-shadow. Both of them were shielded, utilizing sophisticated deflection techniques available only to high-grade biononics. Hers, of course, were even more advanced. They were keeping their distance from the cordon, but her eyes managed to zoom in and snatch a facial image. Her u-shadow produced a cross-reference for both of them in less than a second. Once upon a time, about a thousand years earlier, Paula would have confronted them there and then. These days she liked to think she had mellowed somewhat, although in truth it was more advantageous to let them think she had not spotted them.

Paula had been born on Huxley's Haven, a unique world funded by the Human Structure Foundation, which genetically modified all citizens so that they would fit into a simple social structure framed within a low-technology civilization. To the horror and dismay of the rest of the Commonwealth, what they condemned as genetic slavery actually worked, producing a population that was mostly happy with their predetermined lot. The few malcontents were kept in order by police officers who received specific psychoneural profiling. Among other traits was a variant on obsessive-compulsive disorder to ensure that they never gave up the chase. The Foundation had created Paula to be one of them, but she had been stolen from a birthing ward by a group of Radical Liberals intent on liberating the poor slaves. She had grown up in the Commonwealth at large, first becoming an investigator in the Serious Crimes Directorate and then, for the last seven hundred years, acting as an agent for ANA: Governance.

Huxley's Haven still existed, its society chugging quietly along on its ordained course without changing or evolving. The Greater Commonwealth had very little contact with it these days; Paula herself had not been back for over three hundred years, and that essentially had been nostalgia tourism. There was no need to keep an eye on it; ANA: Governance was very protective of non-Higher cultures. It was a policy that ironically gave Paula very little opportunity to return; her designated task of preventing the ANA factions from pursuing their illegal interference among the External Worlds kept her incredibly busy.