Inquisitor (18 page)

“Decades,” echoed Angel, devoid of tone. “Can you see what I’m seeing?”

“It’s… not too bad.”

“Better than nothing, eh?” That Charlotte could see through her eyes sickened her. It was disturbing… no, more than that, invasive and repulsive. She needed a way to get her out. Mikal’s device and programs would help, but she hoped she could come up with a solution soon.

“Angel… I’m sorry. I’ve done my best, and I’m confident I’ll come up with some way to upgrade your vision as it is. But the long-term solution is just that: long term.”

Angel began to slowly eat the rest of her soup. “Nothing to be sorry about. Things happen, and you make do the best you can.”
Story of my life.
“Then what? What are your plans for
you
?”

“The Genevolve manufactory made machines to my specifications, which I’m using to make other machines, which in turn will make something to… house me. But I’m short of raw materials. The Genevolve manufactory was centuries out of date, and the more valuable raw materials were cleaned out when they evacuated.”

“So, a supply run, then. It’ll do me some good to get off this ship and stretch my legs on a planet.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be that easy,” Charlotte said.

“Huh. Tell me later. I’m tired.”

Angel went back to her cabin and locked the door. Stepping back from it, she frowned. Charlotte could easily open the electronic lock. She also remembered each cabin had two pinhole cameras installed for emergencies. She wanted privacy, and the way things were, she had none.

Sitting on her bed, she let out a groan as her muscles throbbed; then she got to work. She used speech recognition to order the supplies she required, and they arrived within minutes. It was slow going. With her eyesight gone, she had to work by feel alone, and any commands she sent to the ship had to be routed through Mikal’s programs in the ship’s system. When she used his programs, she felt as if he were with her, a presence, in spirit, at least.

She needed to make things right with him. For both their sakes.

What would have normally taken minutes took half an hour. But in her current state, if she didn’t want Charlotte to know what she was doing, it was the only way.

Taking a roll of insulating tape the ship had delivered, she tore off a square and felt around above the door. When her fingers encountered a circular indentation, she stuck the segment of tape over it.

When the ship’s systems described the image the camera transmitted as “nondescript black”, Angel smiled. She did the same with the camera in the bathroom. If Charlotte decided to check up on her, she wouldn’t see anything. And if she queried what had happened, Angel could reprimand the girl for spying on her.

Then she busied herself with the simple metal bolt she’d also had delivered.

She felt around the door frame, finding a good position. A few lines of adhesive and a short wait later, she had a manual bolt attached to the door to limit access to her room. Charlotte might be able to control technology, but she was still a child. If Angel didn’t want her to enter her cabin while she was in it, there wasn’t anything Charlotte could do about it.

Feeling a little more safe and secure, Angel lay back on her bed and let out a sigh. She rubbed her sore neck, and a twinge behind her eyes indicated she was developing a headache, but there was still more to do. She relaxed as best she could for a few minutes then set to work on the pills Charlotte had given her.

First, she deposited one of the pills into a receptacle and asked the ship to analyze the sample. While she waited, she sat back on her bed to examine the snippets of data she’d managed to download from Summer’s ship before it was out of range. It was hard going using only speech recognition and the system speaking its display or results of her searches.

A chime sounded, and the system told her the pill was a standard drug to help with radiation exposure. Well, that was something. Angel swallowed the remaining four pills with some water, and turned her mind back to the data.

Not a lot. But she gleaned scraps of intriguing information. She ran a few more searches, stifling a yawn. Recent communications popped up, between the Genevolve ship and an unknown party—there were references to “arming themselves against the Genus”, and an exhortation to rein in or destroy the “Sentience Project”. Clearly, they meant Charlotte.

But why would a Genevolve need to defend against the Genus? Unless they’d split into different factions. Well, every organization had factions, so the Genevolves should be no different. But it complicated things. What were the different groups’ goals? Who were their agents? What resources did they have at their disposal?

A list of banks was also brought to her attention, funneling vast sums of money throughout the known systems. Staggering figures. More money than most corporations saw in years. Her data was incomplete, but it was a start. Progress on her case, however slow, was still progress.

For a genetic experiment gone wrong, the Genevolves seemed to have a lot of money, and people willing to do their bidding. Which, if Angel didn’t miss her guess, meant they weren’t scattered any longer.

•

“You what?! A fucking hit and run?” Angel didn’t feel the need to watch her language with Charlotte anymore. The “girl” could handle it.

“A resupply trip. Minimum fuss, no mess.”

“Trip… You mean a raid. In other words, a robbery.”

“It’s Mercurial Logic owned.”

“Doesn’t matter. Not everyone who works for them is immoral.”

“It’s a onetime thing. In and out. If we’re lucky, no one will know until we’re long gone.”

“And how’s our luck been so far?”

“I have to do this. With or without you.”

“Without, then.”

“Angel… it’s not just for me. There’s biological material I need if I’m to make any progress on your eyes.”

“My eyes can wait. It’s too risky.”

“I can plan it down to the last detail.”

“You can’t plan for human nature.”

Charlotte’s circle-head bobbed in a nod. “Probabilities can be calculated.”

“Listen to yourself.” Angel suppressed a string of curses. “These are human lives we’re dealing with here; they’re not going to care if they’re dead because you calculated a probability incorrectly, or the action they chose was only five percent likely, so you discounted it. Being alive, being
human
, is more than just self-preservation. It’s about dignity, decency, compassion, caring about other people—”

“I care about you.”

“Bullshit. Caring about someone isn’t preventing them from getting hurt. It’s about respecting what they want. Caring about the things they care about. All you care about is yourself and what
you
want, but there’s a whole universe of people out there suffering just as much as you did, and you don’t give a damn about them. About Harry or Jessica Smith, or Viktor Lukin, or any of the people who’ve been killed by Mercurial, or who will be killed because of what we do. Being alive isn’t about taking what you want, it’s about taking responsibility for your actions, and until you realize that, then you may as well just be a string of numbers, whatever a bloody sentience test says.”

Charlotte was quiet for a time. Eventually she said, “Did you give Mikal a choice when you left him? Or were you trying to protect him, do what was best for him, regardless of what he said he wanted?”

“Don’t you dare bring him into this.”

“We need the raw materials. Without them, they’ll catch me again, eventually; and your eyes… we’d have no hope of fixing them.”

“There has to be a way to do this and avoid any possibility of bloodshed.”

Charlotte didn’t reply, and her circle-triangle form remained still. Eventually, she spoke. “There might be a way. And come to think of it, if it works, I can really annoy Mercurial.”

Chapter 11

Angel shuffled along the street, a long coat keeping the cold out and preventing casual observers from noticing her weapon. She wore a set of shaded eyeglasses large enough to cover the gauze over her eyes. Even though it was night, many people wore them to dim the constant glare of advertising signs, especially in Cerberus’s entertainment district, which was active all day and night. Indeed, it looked to be busier at night, for some reason. Food stalls and knickknack shops lined the streets and narrow lanes. The sounds of the crowd were almost deafening, when they were mostly what she had to go on to determine her surroundings. The basic details her implants were able to provide barely kept her from bumping into people when she walked, though the images were sharper once Charlotte had tinkered with them. Even so, she had trouble believing she was where she was, and not in some sick simulation.

The aromas wafting from the coals of barbecue vendors made it feel more real: heavily spiced meats, though what the local meats tasted like, she had no idea. Line and circle people lounged in doorways and on corners. Likely illicit dealers, from the pungent smell of weedsticks, so brazen and obvious Angel knew the local law enforcers were corrupt. The occasional figure shorter than the others ran through the crowd—children, dodging past people, far too young to be up so late.

On Angel’s wrist, Charlotte’s bracelet tingled, indicating she was approaching their target. She moved to the side of the road and leaned against a wall. She adopted the droopy-headed pose of someone accessing their implants on full stream. In reality, she was scanning the street as best she could. In one hand she held a disposable cup, and she periodically sipped at her tea.

The problem facing the Inquisitors was that if one turned rogue, they knew how the system worked. And that system was easily manipulated, security taken for granted by the corporations, who had a hold on the general population. Their main threat came from other corporations, industrial espionage, and intellectual property theft. But when you’d spent years investigating how a few individuals had been able to take on the corporations and almost get away with it, you gained a fair bit of useful knowledge.

Angel finished the dregs of her tea and paused.

[There’s a waste container beside you. The box with the hole in the top.]

Of course.
She popped the cup into the container, keeping her focus on the target: Senior President Crissalt of the Bank of the People. A minor corporation that took advantage of colonists and pioneers who naively signed over a percentage of all future profits for cash and resources now, in order for them to be able to start a new life. It was more like the People of the Bank as, all too often, the company ended up owning everything as their clients’ debts mounted. It was a business practice that had been ancient when man first took to the stars. But it wasn’t the corporation itself Charlotte was interested in; it was what they had access to: the banking system.

But there was another anomaly Angel hadn’t told Charlotte about yet. Crissalt and his bank were both in the data Angel had pulled from Summer’s ship. Two names among hundreds. But it meant he had to know something about the Genevolves and what they were up to.

Charlotte made sure Crissalt stood out. He shone brighter than the surrounds, so Angel could easily identify him. But she couldn’t see his expression, his eyes; didn’t know where he was looking, or if he’d seen her.

Angel took a breath and made her way through the crowd, stepping aside to let a smaller, bent-over triangle with a circle head, pass.

[It’s an old woman.]

“Thanks,” Angel replied.

Crissalt was an oddity for a senior president. Charlotte had confirmed there was no flashy tailored suit for him, and he wandered around the eclectic district. Angel trailed him as he wound through the crowd, stopping occasionally at stalls selling jumbles of lines, circles, squares and a myriad other shapes. Oddments and assorted knickknacks, she assumed. Crissalt took his time and pawed through their contents. Eventually, he stepped through a rectangle set within a cube—the door of a building.

[It’s a noodle parlor.]

Angel followed him inside. The floor underfoot was rough, and the humid air was laden with garlic and ginger and chili.

[It’s seen better days,] Charlotte communicated. [Judging by the splotches overlaid on the walls and floor, the place could do with a good scrubbing. There are stools around a counter—the stretched oval you can see—with servers in the center and a window to the kitchen area situated at the end.]

Crissalt was sitting across from her, next to a triangle with a circle head—a woman. He was hunched over, peering at a square.

[He’s reading the menu.]

“Yes, I get it,”
snapped Angel, immediately regretting her outburst.
“Sorry. I’m a bit testy.”

This was going to be tricky. She made her way to the side of the counter opposite the banker. She shuffled to a red circle at about waist height, which was on the end of a vertical line descending to the gray floor. From the geometric figures to either side came the sounds of chewing and slurping. She sat on the circle and swiveled to face the counter.

She overheard Crissalt order dumplings and pickled vegetables, and the hollow ache in her stomach gave her an excuse to hang around. After a moment’s deliberation, she raised a hand and waited until a triangle/circle in the center of the counter came over. She ordered a bowl of spicy noodles. Her food and Crissalt’s arrived at roughly the same time, and she tucked in. The noodles really were good. The homemade stock had a rich depth of flavor and was spicy enough to burn her lips. She could understand why Crissalt came here. After scoffing down half her bowl, she wiped her mouth with a tissue and ordered an almond milk tea.

Crissalt hadn’t moved, other than to eat his dumplings. Charlotte had obviously put some effort into giving him more details, and on the end of his stick arms he held two more sticks: chopsticks. He was moving them from a circle in front of him, a bowl, to a smaller circle to the side. Probably dipping sauce. He was taking his time, and Angel relaxed slightly. Nothing would happen for a while, and she might as well loosen up while she could. Her head and eyes still ached, and she was gobbling painkillers like they were candy. She’d lowered her self-medicated dosage for tonight, knowing she’d need to stay sharp and keep her wits about her.