The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (32 page)

“You had to tell Pak Young-Min about the theft because otherwise it would come down on your head. I understand that. But after that it was out of your hands and things got out of control,” Marc said. He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair at the beginning of the session; now, in white shirt and red braces, he leaned forward and stared straight at Lansky. “You are a smart man. You know how much trouble you are in. And you know what Pak Young-Min is capable of But we’re here to help. We can make your troubles disappear. All you have to do is tell us exactly what happened. What was stolen. What happened to the two foolish kids who stole it. Where it is now.”

Meyer Lansky shook his head, eyes half-closed, lips pressed tight. He looked as if he was trying by sheer mental effort to teleport himself to some more congenial place.

Marc looked up at me, and I told Lansky that the UN would settle him anywhere he chose. That we’d even take him back to Earth, if he cooperated with us. That he would have a chance to start over, and meanwhile the men he feared would be put away for the rest of their lives.

Lansky shook his head. “Nothing was stolen. Those two kids, they just left. It happens all the time.”

“It’s time to tell the truth,” Marc said. “Lying about what Pak Young-Min did won’t save you. He’ll go down anyway, and you’ll go with him. But you can save yourself All you have to do is tell the truth. It seems hard, I know. But once you start, you will feel so much better. It will be like a great weight lifting from your back.”

Marc was good, and I did my best to back him up, but we couldn’t get through to Lansky. “Talk to my lawyer,” he said, and wouldn’t say anything else.

At last his lawyer and the assistant CA came back. The assistant shaking her head, the lawyer telling Lansky that he was good to go.

“Hard-shelled son of bitch,” Marc said, after they had left.

“He’s scared.”

“Of course. But not of us, unfortunately.”

“I suppose we’ll have to wait for the forensic results,” I said. I was tired and empty. It was two in the morning, my investigation had been broken open, and I had nothing to show for it.

“We will rest and tomorrow begin again,” Marc said, as he shrugged into his jacket. “You are my best investigator, Emma. I trust you to deliver what we need.”

But our first break wasn’t anything to do with me, or with Varneek Sehra’s forensic crew, either. It was all due to one of our technical staff, Prem Gurung.

Prem was a modest young man who attributed his find to luck, but I knew better. His cubicle was as messy as the bedroom of as an undisciplined teenager – desk stacked with folders, papers, fabbed trinkets, and littered with every kind of electronic junk, walls tiled with photographs, postcards, print-outs, cartoons, and coasters in defiance of every regulation – but he was a skilled, intelligent, and hard-working investigator. He had been examining the work logs of Hughes and Singleton, and chunks of the mirrored code they had been working on, and had quickly found something of interest in one particular piece, an incomplete variant of the navigation package used to control refurbished ships retrieved from the Sargassos.

“It isn’t so much what’s there as what isn’t,” Prem said.

He was eager to show me, and I reluctantly agreed to take a look. Code is usually explored and manipulated via virtual simulations Disneyed-up by interface ware: dreamscapes that look a little like coral reefs, their exotic beauty haunted by sharks and moray eels and riptides that can fry synapses or burn permanent hallucinations in optic nerves. Coders, exposed to the stuff eight or ten hours a day, commonly suffer all kinds of transient hallucinations and risk permanent neurological damage – psychosis, blindsight, loss of motor control, death. But they are like deep sea divers working in the chthonic depths, while I was a snorkelling tourist dipping in for a brief peek, gliding over a garden of colourful geometric shapes, complex fractal packages of self-engulfing information that branched like bushes or were packed as tightly as human brains or formed shelves or fans or spires, everything receding into deep shadow in every direction, under a flexing silvery sky. Still, I couldn’t shake off the sense of things unseen and fey lurking at the edges, where steep cliffs plunged into the unknown.

Prem guided me to a spot carpeted with intricate spires, and asked me if I saw it.

“I’m not very technical, Prem.”

“It’s a patch, copied from another part of the code,” he said, turning the viewpoint through 360 degrees. Spires of every size and shape, glowing with purples and greens and golds, flowed around us in a three-dimensional tapestry. “It isn’t easy to see at first, which is of course the point. But when you do see it, it’s obvious. I have written a little executable. Here . . .”

A ghostly scape descended from the silvery sky, spires in wirework outline sitting askew the spires that stood around us.

“It does not seem to match at all, until you perform a simple geometric transformation,” Prem said.

The wirework outline spun and stretched and merged with every contour of the spires around us, gleaming like frost on their complex and colourful surfaces.

“I think someone deleted something and wanted to cover it up,” Prem said. “Fortunately for us, he was skilled, but lazy. Instead of designing something from scratch, he copied and distorted another part of the code and stitched it in. It is, on the surface, a seamless illusion. It even runs several processing cycles, although they are of course all futile. Like code that has gone bad, as much code does.”

The strange shapes and colours of the code reef, hallucinatory bright, crammed with thorny details that repeated at every level of magnification, were aggravating my headache. I hadn’t had much sleep and was running on coffee and fumes. I stripped off my VR and asked Prem if he had any idea about what had been deleted; he told me that despite the fractal nature of the code, little or nothing of the excised portion could be reconstructed. He started to witter on about working up a rough contour grid by extrapolation from the boundaries, using edge-crossing-detection, random-walk searches, and vertex-pruning mutators, blah blah blah. Like every tech, he was more interested in playing with a problem than actually solving it. I cut him off and said, “Bottom line, you don’t know what it is, and there’s no way of finding out.”

“I’m afraid so. The deletion is too thorough for reconstruction, and catalogue comparisons have proven to be of no use.”

“They stole something. We don’t know what it is, but Hughes and Singleton definitely stole something. They mirrored the code and deleted the original, did their best to cover up what they’d done, and made off with the copy.”

“That’s certainly one scenario,” Prem said. “Although there is a problem. How did they smuggle the stolen code past the farm’s security?”

It was a good point. Code is stored in specific quantum states of electrons and other fundamental particles, so it can’t be copied and stored as easily as the vast binary strings of ordinary software; to prevent decay into quantum noise, mirrored code has to be kept in cold traps, and these are cooled with liquid helium. Archive traps are as big as trucks; the smallest portable trap is somewhat larger than an ordinary domestic Thermos flask. And like all coding farms, Meyer Lansky’s business possessed an insanely paranoid level of security. Coders had to step through scanning frames when entering or leaving, and they were subject to continuous scrutiny by CCTV cameras and random searches.

“Perhaps they had bribed a guard, or secreted the cold trap in some other piece of equipment sent out for servicing,” I said. “Or perhaps Lansky himself might have been in on it.”

“Or perhaps they didn’t smuggle anything out,” Prem said. “Perhaps they hacked into the farm’s records and found out where the code came from, then deleted the code and altered the records. Perhaps they did not sell the code, but the location of the original.”

I liked the idea – it would certainly explain why Hughes had left with Sarkka – but there was no way of proving or disproving it unless we caught up with them. Meanwhile, Varneek Sehra’s crew had come up blank on DNA analysis because the two bodies had been thoroughly cooked, but they had identified one body as Jason Singleton’s from its English dental work, and the second wasn’t Everett Hughes, but a male in his forties. He had an old, healed bullet wound in his left shoulder, and examination of his burnt skin under UV light had revealed a blood group tattoo on his right ankle, suggesting that he’d been a soldier at some point. Varneek’s crew had also retrieved a partial thumbprint from a stolen SUV in the motel’s parking lot, and that had yielded a hit on the US military database: Abuelo Baez, who’d served as a sergeant in the Special Forces of the US Army until two years ago. The name did not appear on the emigration records, so he must have arrived on First Foot under an alias, either working for one of the corporations, or on the dark side. Varneek was planning to work up a facial reconstruction and use it to track down the dead man’s emigration file; I hoped that once I knew Abuelo Baez’s alias, I would be able to discover what he had been doing in Port of Plenty, perhaps even link him to Meyer Lansky or to the Pak family. Varneek also told me that there was a small discrepancy between the two bodies. Jason Singleton’s body had smoke particles in its lungs, consistent with someone who had burned to death; Abuelo Baez’s didn’t. Either the ex-soldier had been killed outright by the blast, or he’d been dead before the room had been set on fire, it wasn’t possible to tell.

All of this was useful, but it was my hunch about the missing motorcycle that yielded the most significant advance in the case. It had been discovered in the parking lot of a mini-mall a kilometre south of the motel; security camera footage showed that it had arrived some thirty minutes before the fire in the motel had been started. Everett Hughes had been riding it, and loitered near a rank of vending machines for some forty minutes until a white Honda Adagio pulled up.

I showed Marc the footage of Hughes getting into the Adagio, pulled down an enhanced freeze-frame of the moment when the courtesy light in the car came on as Hughes opened the door, briefly illuminating a bearded man wearing a baseball cap pulled low enough to obscure half his face. I explained that the driver had not yet been identified, but the car had been traced to the Hertz branch at the spaceport, where it had been rented using a snide credit card, and it had been retrieved for trace analysis.

“After Hughes and the driver returned the Adagio to the rental company, they took the shuttle bus to a ship that departed two hours later. A standard J-class cruiser registered in Libertaria. It dropped through Wormhole #2 six hours ago, and I’ve asked our offices in every port it could reach from that part of the network to look out for it. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Varneek and the PPPD’s forensic people retrieved fibres and hair from the seats, and fingerprints from the steering wheel and elsewhere. Hughes’s friend is Niles Sarkka.”

Without missing a beat, Marc said, “I am not sure that I would classify that as good news.”

Niles Sarkka was one of the Fortunate Five Hundred, the self-styled elite who’d ridden the first emigration lottery shuttle to First Foot. Before his downfall, he’d been a leading expert on Elder Cultures with a chair at the University of Port of Plenty, and the star of a TV show popular in Port of Plenty and exported to almost every country back on Earth. In each episode, he led his crew of prospectors to a new site in search of strange and valuable Elder Culture artifacts, surviving dangers and hardships, exploring weird landscapes and worldlets, unearthing wonders. Most of it was faked and exaggerated, of course, but Sarkka was a handsome and charismatic man with an infective enthusiasm for his work. Also, to the disgust of his fellow academics and the delight of his TV audience, he recklessly embraced crackpot ideas about the fates of the Elder Cultures, and conspiracy theories that suggested that the Jackaroo had influenced human history by dropping meteorites or manipulating the climate or starting the world war that – just before they’d turned up as saviours – had almost destroyed us. He was a leading exponent of the belief that the fifteen stars were not a chance to start afresh, but a trap. A cage in which we would be the involuntary participants in some vast and strange experiment, as had the Elder Cultures which had preceeded us. And he had worked up a crazy theory of his very own, which he talked up on every episode of his show. All of this made him rich and famous and notorious, but in the end his hubris was clobbered by nemesis. In the end he took one risk too many, and other people paid for his mistake with their lives.

My boss had been one of the team that had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.

The crew had been working on an unlicensed site with inadequate protective measures; Niles Sarkka was convicted of manslaughter and spent five years in jail. As soon as he was released, he promptly fled First Foot and established himself on Libertaria, using what was left of his fortune to pursue the theory that was now an obsession.

Given that there was a wormhole link with the Solar System and Earth, he said, then it followed that there must have been links with the home worlds of each of the Elder Cultures that had once inhabited the worlds and worldlets of the fifteen stars. And those wormholes might still be around, somewhere, collapsed down to diameters smaller than a hydrogen atom, or hidden inside gas giants or in orbits close to stars where they could not be detected by their fingerprint flux of strange quarks and high-energy particles; it might be possible to find the home world of the Ghajar or one of the other Elder cultures, and find out what had happened to them. It was even possible that some remnants of the Elder Cultures might still be alive, either on their home worlds, or elsewhere.