Flight of the Vajra (73 page)

Everyone was at least calm
by the time
we reached the
Vajra
, whose programming had passed all of my loopback
and checksum tests before we popped the hatch. Again, I didn’t think Marius had
managed to root out the keys to my kingdom, but why assume?

The first thing I did, aside from make sure nothing
had been looted, was pull out the hair I’d chopped off of “Aram” and show it to
Ioné. “You can bet I’m going to be tearing this apart at the lowest possible
level,” I said, “and sharing the results. I think they’re going to be
enlightening
,
to say the least.”

“You believe this and the evidence shared with you
before are related,” she said.

“Related, nothing,” I insisted. “Joined right at
the head. That said, if I’m neck-deep in looking into this and Marius starts
unleashing plagues of locusts in the street outside, feel
completely
free to disturb my concentration.”

“Understood. By the way, I assume there isn’t any
weaponry on board. —Aside from myself, that is.”

“That’s part of why I didn’t have any, yeah. That
said . . . I can instantiate a few things, but I don’t have a lot of
substrate to work with. And the substrate feeds supplying the ship have all
already been turned off.”

“Put together whatever you can in the time we
have. IPS is patrolling the area anyway, so we should be reasonably safe in
here while they shut down this sector and sanitize it. I just wanted you to
rest assured that, me aside, you have the liberty to protect all of us. Without
repercussions.”

“You know I’d do it even if there were.”

She sequestered herself on the lower deck. I
camped out in the upper area (which was now declared the bridge), ordered up
some weaponry, threw the hair into the ship’s reclamator and within ten minutes
had every display surface in the cabin running side-by-simulations harvested
from that sample versus the stuff Kallhander had sent me. Everything in the new
sample fit somewhere in the old one, and filled in everything that was missing
and then some.

I should have been elated; I should have been
ecstatic. I should have been spinning in my chair and singing sea chanteys at
the ceiling panels. Here were the last pieces of the puzzle, the first real
clues as to who or what was responsible for the missing years of my life, and all
I could do was sit there and feel as if I’d been cheated out of something.

“One of these days I
am
going to stop doing
things and apologizing for them five minutes later,” Enid said, standing in the
doorway to the cabin.

I looked away from the squirming dazzle on the
displays. Enid had switched back to her regular mutable outfit, and cleaned the
mess out of her hair. The tentative way she stepped into the cabin wasn’t
emotion, but the torn muscles in her leg, which I assumed were under repair
right now courtesy of a protomic doc-shot. She didn’t sound like she was
spoiling for a fight, or spoiling for much of anything at all really.

“All that crap I said in the car,” she went on. “About
taking the heat, and so on. I really need to keep my mouth shut more often.
Ioné’s holding it all against me, I think. She’s got my knife and refuses to
give it back. She says it’s ‘evidence’, but I think she’s just making sure I
don’t do something stupid with it.”

“I’ll ask her about it. But I doubt you’re
planning on running back outside anyway.”

“If I have to, I will.” She sounded a little less
drained as she spoke. “See, maybe I’m opening my big mouth all over again by
saying this, but . . . Back in the car, I was going to say something
like ‘I’m not scared of anything anymore.’ But that’s a dead lie; everyone’s
scared of something. Angharad’s scared of something;
you’re
scared of
something.”

“Damn right I am.”

“But I also know—” She sat down on one of the
other couches. “—I’m not going to turn away from anything again if I can help
it. Even if I feel like a wreck for what I did, I think:
And what about if
I’d just sat there?
I’m not a do-nothing person, you know that. And now I
know that, all the way down.” She looked at her feet. “Doesn’t make me feel any
less weird for
shooting
the guy I was just kissing an hour ago.”

I played silent partner to her a little longer,
just to see what would come out. Sure enough, she spoke again after a few more
seconds: “If you’re going to say that the fact I did that saved us—”

“I was. But I’m also never going to tell you to
feel good about it.” I looked back at the screens and started remapping
everything so that it was all superimposed into one schematic. “The fact you
squirm tells me you understand more than most people.”

“You really think so?”

“I’ve got a couple of decades of experience on you
that tells me so.” And I’m never going to get tired of reminding you of that, I
thought.

“So—what is all this, anyway, up on the screens?
It looks like the files Kallhander sent you.”

I was happy to let her change the subject, so I
gave her a condensed version, up to and including my strange, deflated feeling
about it. “All along I thought I’d have this mess of a mosaic joined together
and sealed over by nothing more than the force of my will,” I said, “and now I
had all the rest of the tiles just
handed
to me.”

Enid gave a very Enid-esque snort. “There, I’m
definitely not like you. I’ll take whatever I can
get
handed to me.”

I hang around you long enough, I thought, and
maybe I’ll feel the same way.

Angharad was in the doorway now as well, equally
captivated (and probably confused) by the glittering threads and bustling nodes
of the simulation. “Have you made another discovery?” she said. Just those
words, and the tone of voice she used, put a lot of heart back into my, well,
heart. Count on her to rebound nicely, I thought, but let’s see how deep that
runs.

“This is Marius’s friend,” I said, “close-up. He
was a protomic construct—like Ioné, except that Ioné only exists by the good
grace of the IPS, the diplomatic relations that exist between Continuum and
many other worlds, and a whole bunch of regulatory bodies. This guy’s a rogue,
and therefore as illegal as they come. And his programming is a dead match for
the pieces scraped up from the
Kyritan
and the uprising.”

“So an entity like that is responsible for what
happened in both of those incidents?”

“That’s the first and most likely guess, but I’m
not going to let a hunch. I’m running a bunch of decompilation routines now—a
lot of the core code’s protected, which I expected would happen, but the stuff
we scraped up earlier may point us towards some ways to do a complete
disassembly and a code dump, a total decryption instead of just running fuzzing
against state-machine snapshots and praying.”

“I see.”

I knew she didn’t, so I dropped back a bit. “I
don’t think this thing is
responsible
for anything. I think he’s a tool,
a product of some kind. The way Marius was treating him told me everything I
needed to know there. This wasn’t his comrade-in-arms or anything; this was a
slave, and Marius didn’t care who knew it.”

“
Henré,”
Ioné CLed from below to all of us,
“we’re at T minus seven minutes to the main city infrastructures going offline.”

“Thanks, keep me posted. —Say, how about a
gentleman’s bet?”

“Pardon?”

“If I’m right, and Marius has something scheduled
to go down at zero hour, how about you give Enid back her p-knife? There’s
nothing that you don’t already know about it, anyway—and I seriously doubt
Marius is going to be filing assault charges. And for all we know, she might
need it.”

“I’ll err on the side of caution for now,
Henré.”

“Ahh, you’re no fun. Listen, do they have Marius in
the stockade yet? Is he talking?”

“Kallhander’s been dealing with him but he’s
refusing to speak. Unsurprisingly. They’re attempting to find his backups as
well, but they suspect his will have been torched too.”

“For once I don’t blame you for choosing the low
road.” I looked at Angharad; she didn’t look thrilled either, but also didn’t
look like she was about to pick any new battles.

“There’s other reasons. Another major chunk of
the reconstruction from Arsèni’s lab came through, and most of it involves the
collusion that was going on between Arsèni and Marius. Based on some of the
schematics and programming we unearthed, Marius was apparently going to have
provided distraction and cover for Arsèni once he had the drive module in hand.
Plus, Arsèni was going to hire out some of his protomic engineering skills to
Marius—something about a reverse-engineering project, but it looks like Arsèni
himself was being kept in the dark.”

It’s a good thing they didn’t approach
me
for
that job once upon a time, I thought. I might have taken them up on it.

“
We might learn more about that once we reconstitute
what’s left of his partner, Amon, but they’ve been having little luck there. Your
insights ought to expedite that process. I’ll give you the CL bridge ID of the
analysis team if you want to share your discoveries with them.”

“Good idea. Do that.” My mind was in so many
places at once just then, I couldn’t say anything more committal.

“Has there been any reaction from the other guests
of the summit?” Angharad asked.

“Apart from Ulli and Cioran . . . there
has already begun a petition to have the summit cancelled. It’s . . .
gained quite a bit of momentum. And we’ve also just received a demand for an
audience with you, Your Grace, once infrastructure services have been restored
completely.”

“Who from?”

“Prince Nancelares. Suzerain is his official
title, for the dominion which includes the city. Our host.”

Enid’s shoulders sagged.

“He’s probably going to have some
pithy
things to say about the circus that’s been going on in his city,” I said.

“I’d . . . assume so, yes.”

Angharad didn’t say anything, just touched three
fingers to her forehead and closed her eyes.

I spent the next couple of minutes keeping my mind
as preoccupied as possible with the work I was sure only I could do. First
thing I ought to try, I told myself, now that I’ve got a full sequence of this
thing’s code, is unpack as much of it as possible and run it in a fully-loaded simulation.
That coffin thing he climbed out of from the pool—that’s obviously the same as
the container shape I was able to generate when I ran simulation on the
fragments easier. Meaning, what—that he starts off like that? Those boxes are
his cradles? Makes sense if you’re mass-producing them.

—
Ioné, word of advice,
I CLed
. Let
everyone else know more of these buddies of Marius’s might be turning up real
soon now. I get the feeling he had a whole mess of them squirreled away
somewhere. I just don’t know where.

—
They’re examining the house now,
she
replied.
No sign of anything other than the one bier that he was decanted
from.

Good choice of words, I thought:
decanted
.

To kill a couple of moments, I took all the spare
processing power as I had aboard the
Vajra
and devoted it to the
full-scale simulation. Start with the bier, as she called it, with a full
complement of code—what does that do? Does it just sit there, or does it need
some kind of external stimulus? Did the “outer clock” I’d discovered come into
play here? If that was the case, then the sample I’d harvested from Aram would
only tell me half the picture. I didn’t just want the end product—meaning, him.
I wanted an intact egg that had hatched the chicken.At T minus four minutes the
ship’s manufaxture offered up a gunvest preloaded with two hundred rounds of Type
E-powered ammunition, and two sets of full-body kineto-responsive armor—one
Enid-sized, and one Angharad-sized. I handed each of them their gear, which
they donned without a word, then I zipped myself into my own gunvest and let it
wrap itself around both my torso and arms. The ammo feeds ran along the lengths
of the arms and then coiled against each other, yin-yang style, in the
disc-shaped receptacle that lay across my shoulders. All I had to do was not
get clubbed from behind and I ought to be okay, I told myself.

At T minus three minutes Cioran CLed both me and
Enid.

—
Not to interrupt anything,
he said,
but
. . . well, first of all, if I had a medal to give you, I’d give you
one. Both of you.
All
of you. Is it wrong of me to wish I’d been there,
just to see it happen firsthand?

Another, earlier me might have called his tone
indecorous
,
but Cioran lived to embody lack of decorum. If you didn’t know that ahead of
time, you had no right to complain.

Me: —
Eh, not all that wrong.

Enid: —
But all the same, I’m glad you didn’t
have to. I take it your show’s been scotched?

Cioran: —
Indefinitely, but then again so has
everything else planetside, hasn’t it? Also . . . Her Grace isn’t in
too
many pieces, I hope?

Me: —
I won’t lie. The whole experience rattled
some bones. You might want to hold off before you ask her anything critical.

Cioran: —
Not so much
critical
as just,
well, comparing notes. See, I just received what looks like a bona-fide,
hand-tooled invitation for an audience with—

Cosm alive, I thought, how many of those invites were
sent out?

Me: —
an audience with
Nancelares?
Oh,
no, you are
definitely
not the only one who was so summoned. I’ve got an
image now of a whole platoon’s worth of people lining up outside his office to
be read the riot act, one after the other. I’m betting the reason he summoned
you separately is because you’ve got a foot in both Ulli’s world and
Angharad’s.