Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two (8 page)

“Why do they keep talking about Caleb on the news, Bela? Is he in trouble?”

“It’s a misunderstanding, Mom. It’ll get cleared up.”
A ‘misunderstanding’ involving the death of thousands and the igniting of a powder keg strong enough to blow up the galaxy.
She had rarely been so glad the woman was absentminded and only half in the present. If she managed a tiny bit more awareness she’d be hysterical over the world calling her son a mass murderer, likely to such a level as to be unmanageable.

“That’s a relief…” she settled in a chair at the small kitchen table “…how’s Marlee? It’s been forever since I last saw her.”

“You saw her a few weeks ago, remember?”

“Did I? Oh…I suppose I did.” Her mother frowned at the table. “Why isn’t she here now?”

“She’s sleeping over at her friend’s house tonight. I didn’t want to…I didn’t want to disrupt her schedule again so soon.”
I didn’t want her to hear her uncle slandered on every news screen. I didn’t want to have to answer her innocent, endless, maddeningly perceptive questions.
“I’ll be right back, okay?”

Isabela departed the kitchen before receiving a response. She normally exhibited more patience when it came to her mother, normally felt comfortable here in the house she had grown up in. She’d been twelve years old when her father left and held as many memories of the house without him as with him.

But today her mind and attention were elsewhere. The war concerned her; Krysk wasn’t too far from the border region where most of the fighting was taking place. She hated to leave her professorship early, but she refused to risk her daughter’s safety.

Mostly though, she worried about Caleb—what had happened to him, where he had gone, whether he would be cleared of involvement in the bombing or railroaded into prison. Or worse. God knew if there was anyone who could take care of himself just fine, it was him, but this represented a new level of trouble he found himself in.

At least she assumed it represented a new level of trouble. When she’d told him she knew what he did for a living, she might have been overstating the case a tiny bit. She had believed he worked for the government in a secret and dangerous capacity.

Now the entire galaxy knew him as a covert special ops agent for the Senecan Federation Division of Intelligence. With such a job maybe he had been in worse, if less public, trouble before.

The thought chilled her. How many times had she almost lost him and never known?

She ascended the stairs to her old room. She needed to retrieve Marlee’s coat and a pair of shoes left behind in the rush to her next adventure. Caleb said Marlee ‘had spunk’…more like she was hyperkinetic, a bundle of perpetually regenerating energy.

She adored her daughter, truly. The little girl was the light of her life and the center of her world ever since Daniel died. But she had never known the meaning of ‘tired’ until Marlee learned to walk.

The tiny coat was hanging half off the dresser, but the shoes were nowhere to be seen. She crouched down to search under the bed.

Loud footsteps beneath the floor startled her, and her head jerked up to bang against the frame. She crawled backwards out from beneath the bed while rubbing the back of her head gingerly.

“Bela! There are—” Overlapping voices muddled whatever her mother said.
What the…?

She rushed out of the bedroom but only made it to the second step before a man and woman in conservative black suits appeared at the base of the stairs. “Ms. Marano? Would you mind coming with us?”

They weren’t regular police. There were no uniforms and no formal procedures being followed. She tried to look innocent, but unlike Caleb she had always been a terrible liar. “What is this regarding?”

They continued up the stairs, calm resoluteness indicating they entertained no doubt she would in fact be coming with them. The man’s muscular frame filled out his suit, adding intimidation to his threatening countenance. His partner stood taller than him; auburn hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck emphasized attractive features. The woman gave her a small, placid smile intended to convey reassurance.

It didn’t work—her heart hammered at her sternum like it was planning to make a break for it—but it wasn’t as though she possessed a route of escape. And even if she did, she couldn’t abandon her mother to fend for herself. She did her best to keep her voice controlled and even. “Am I being arrested?”

“We’d appreciate you answering a few questions.”

“About my brother?”

“It’s better if we discuss it at the office.”

“The ‘office’? What is that? Where are you intending on taking us?”

“Bela! What’s going on?” Her mother’s voice echoed from the hallway below, shaky and shrill, the way hers desperately wanted to be.

“It’s going to be okay, Mom. I’ll be right down.”

She backed into the banister, all too conscious of the four-meter drop behind her to the living room below. The agents—if they weren’t police they were government agents—did her the courtesy of stopping at the landing, though their deportment made it clear she would not be allowed past them. “I’ll come peacefully, if you promise you won’t harm my mother.”

“We’re not intending on harming anyone, ma’am.” The woman was now firmly ensconced in the role of ‘good cop.’ The man’s left hand hovered over the stunner on his belt. “We simply need to speak with you. Both of you.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, buying herself time to send a message to the couple taking care of Marlee to let them know she might be delayed. Then she nodded. “Very well.”

I
NTELLIGENCE
D
IVISION
H
EADQUARTERS

Director of Intelligence Graham Delavasi turned away another office visitor seeking to ‘check in’ or ‘pick his brain’ but in any event steal his attention. In simpler times he enjoyed the occasional visit by military officers and government officials and subordinates and even friends. But the last week had eradicated any remaining traces of simplicity from his life.

Special Ops Director Michael Volosk was dead. Murdered steps from Headquarters—the building he sat in now. The man’s throat had been sliced open and he had been left to bleed out in the goddamn
parking lot
.

He dragged both hands down his face for the hundredth time in the last hour. Michael was an outstanding agent. One of the best. Though he may have sat behind a desk for the last few years, no one would accuse him of being a bureaucrat. What kind of assailant could have gotten the jump on him in such spectacular fashion?

Agent Marano?

His head began shaking of its own accord, as if to provide its own answer. He would stake a significant number of credits on Stefan Marano’s son being innocent.

Marano
. He’d not seen that name in a long time…nearly twenty years, in fact. He’d been aware when Samuel recruited the son into Division of course, but deliberately kept his distance in every way. Now though….

He had spent days pouring through Michael Volosk’s recent reports and private notes. Michael had been a busy man, and not solely or even mostly because of the war. For one, he’d sent Marano on an official mission to Vancouver. A dubious, shot-in-the-dark, certifiably insane mission…which had almost worked.

Michael’s notes stated Agent Marano had brought back the top secret Alliance autopsy file on Minister Santiagar, but no one could find any trace of the file’s existence. It hadn’t entered the Division file system, nor Michael’s personal files. It was not found on his body or residing in his internal data store.

The most logical conclusion? The killer pilfered it. A scenario which made zero sense if Caleb Marano was the killer. Why give Michael the file only to kill him and steal it back mere hours later?

Then there was the report from a deep cover watcher agent on Earth, delivering word people within EASC were expressing doubts about the events that had kicked off this war. The agent also conveyed that Marano had in fact done exactly what he’d been sent to Vancouver to do—attempt to convince EASC leadership to investigate those events. He had been arrested for the effort, then everything had gone to hell in a designer handbag.

While the report cast clear doubt on Marano’s guilt with respect to the Vancouver bombing, in his mind the sum total of the information before him constituted enough to all but exonerate the man with respect to Michael's murder. Couple it with him sending an alert from halfway across the city minutes at most after Michael was slain, and the wafer-thin case against the agent crumbled. Unfortunately this led to more disturbing implications.

Marano’s final communication before going off the grid indicated he and his notable companion had been attacked by multiple assailants at nearly the exact moment Volosk lay bleeding out meters from the side entry to Division. The bodies at the riverwalk certainly backed up the story. The events of that fateful night painted a clear and stark picture.

Within the space of a single hour EASC Headquarters on Earth exploded, no less than four mercs ambushed Marano and Solovy and an assassin murdered Volosk and stole two specific files. It seemed the raw data set on the Metis Nebula delivered by Alexis Solovy to Michael that evening had, interestingly enough, also gone missing.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t believe there could be a conspiracy; he’d spent decades in the intelligence business after all. But if a conspiracy did exist—if both governments were duped into a renewed war—it meant a lot of people had died for no reason. It meant he faced a helluva battle ahead.

Michael had bought into Marano’s theory the war was purposely instigated by…someone. Despite the investigation being officially closed, he’d continued to probe into the Atlantis assassination. The day before his death he paid a visit to Jaron Nythal, the Assistant Trade Director. Graham reviewed the notes from the meeting again.

Mr. Nythal acted alternately evasive and confrontational. I am reinstating basic surveillance in the hope the pressure will force him into a mistake. I have sought approval for a persistent trace on his bank accounts as well.

He had meant it when he told Michael he believed Nythal was squirrelly, and part of him was glad to see Michael had taken the advice to heart. Yet a nefarious voice in the back of his mind questioned if the advice might have led to the man’s death.

He returned to the report from his deputy, Liz Oberti. Given the seriousness of the accusations, he had put her in charge of the Marano investigation. With his approval she was bringing the family in for questioning. They were unlikely to be involved in whatever was transpiring, but they might know where the agent had gone to ground.

Retracing his train of thought to its origin, he realized he needed to get personally involved whether he wanted to or not. But first he needed to make an unannounced visit.

7

EARTH

EASC
H
EADQUARTERS

D
EVON
R
EYNOLDS STOOD AT THE CENTER
of a webbed prism of light. The sea of qutrits painted a tableau in more colors than names existed for and wove a pattern so dense nothing beyond it could be seen.

To the untrained eye—and most trained ones—the web signified chaos. After all, the code underlying CUs and commercial ware was ordered and structured and crafted in the defined lines of immutable logic.

The mind of an Artificial, however, reflected exactly what it was: a sophisticated neural net. Sister to the human brain and easily as complex.

The development of functional ternary computing late in the 21
^st
century had finally enabled true neural net technology. The ability for each q-unit to hold all possible superpositions of 0, 1
and
2 increased feasible computing power exponentially beyond the capabilities of traditional binary quantum computing.

Researchers had created synthetic intelligence which surpassed the pure processing power of the human brain decades prior to the advent of ternary dialectics, but this represented a transformation not solely of degree but also of kind. Still, large-scale ternary computing was both expensive and required precise hardware kept in controlled conditions, thus Artificials for now remained the province of governments and the very wealthy.

Also, the fact an unshackled Artificial had killed over 50,000 people at Hong Kong University early in the 22
^nd
century meant they were exhaustively regulated, locked down and confined.

Begin check routine.

Multiple orbs within the web exploded in dancing light racing in every direction. Devon reached up to spin the web then zoomed into a dense cluster of the virtual gossamer silk.

The check routine reached the cluster he had selected; he studied it carefully as it branched, circled and came together again before continuing on.