In an excellent reflection of both its excessive democracy and forbearance, Laril realized the planetary gaiafield was almost devoid of emotional texture this morning. Everyone was withholding their consciousness stream, a universal condemnatory reaction to Living Dream’s Pilgrimage, which was the root cause of the crisis.
Again, big help. Although it was difficult to be so cynical about that. It showed a unity and resolve which even he found impressive.
Laril just hoped he could find that same level of resolve within himself. As soon as Araminta’s call had broken up, his u-shadow relayed the shotgun that had been loaded into Chobamba’s unisphere. He prayed she’d take the warning seriously, and get the hell off Chobamba. She certainly hadn’t called him again, which meant she’d either been caught or she was running. All he could do was assume the latter and prepare for it. She would call him for advice and help again, which was the antithesis of Oaktier’s stupid bureaucracy. This was one person making a difference, a big difference. It was what Laril had always imagined he would be doing, influencing events across the Commonwealth with his smart-thinking and innate ability to dodge trouble. Now he finally had that chance. He was determined to deliver exactly what Araminta wanted.
First off, he didn’t quite trust the code she’d given him for Oscar. Even if Oscar whoever-he-was had helped her at Bodant Park there was no way of knowing if he worked for ANA as claimed. To keep her away from the Accelerators it either needed to be the Navy or an opposing Faction. Laril just didn’t want to go running to the Navy. Trusting authority like that wasn’t right for him. Besides that would effectively be handing Araminta over to the President, who would have to make some kind of political compromise. Far better she teamed up with a Faction, who would take a more direct line of action, who would have a plan and get things done.
So he spent the night using his u-shadow to make delicate enquiries among people he used to associate with a long time ago. Every precaution was taken, one-time codes, shielded nodes, remote cut-off routing. All the old tricks he’d learned back in the day. And the magic was still there. A friend on Jacobal had a colleague on Cashel whose great-great-uncle had once been involved with the Protectorate on Tolmin so had channels to a supporter who had a contact with the Custodian Faction. That contact supplied a code for someone called Ondra, who was an ‘active’ Custodian.
After each call, Laril rebuilt his electronic defences within the unisphere, making very sure no one was aware of his interest in the Factions. It must have worked: by the time he got Ondra’s code none of his safeguards had detected scrutineers or access interrogators backtracking his ingenious routing.
He made the final call. Ondra was certainly very interested when he explained who he was. And yes, there were Custodians on Oaktier who might be able to offer ‘advice’ to a friend of the Second Dreamer. That was when Laril laid out his conditions for contact. He was pleased with what he’d come up with. Over an hour had been spent remote-surveying the Jachal Coliseum, seven kilometres from the Bayview tower. He’d reviewed the local nodes, and loaded a whole menu of monitor software. Then he’d gone through a virtual map, familiarizing himself with the layout on every level, working out escape routes. Finally, he’d hired three capsule cabs at random, and parked them ready around the Coliseum on public pads. It was a superb setup, and in place before he even spoke to Ondra. The meeting was agreed for nine-thirty that morning. Someone called Asom would be there, alone.
Laril finished his coffee and turned from the big window. Janine was coming out of the bedroom. They’d been together for six months now. She was only sixty, and rejuvenated down to a sweet-looking twenty. That she was migrating inwards at her age spoke for how insecure she was. It made her easy for his particular brand of charm. He understood exactly how the promise of sympathy and support would appeal to her. That kind of predatory behaviour would presumably be discarded along with other inappropriate character qualities before he’d achieved true Higher citizenship. In the meantime she was a pleasant enough companion. The Sol barrier, though, had brought back all her anxieties in the same way it had seen a resurgence of his more covetous traits.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, even though there hadn’t yet been tears. The thick mass of her curly chestnut hair hung limply, curtaining her heart-shaped face. She gave him such a needy look he almost swayed away. Unlike everyone else, her emotions were pouring out into the gaiafield, revealing a psyche desperately seeking comfort.
‘They can’t get through the barrier,’ she said in a cracked voice. ‘The Navy’s been trying for hours. There are science ships there now, trying to analyse its composition.’
‘They’ll work something out, I’m sure.’
‘What, though? Without ANA we’re lost.’
‘Hardly. The Accelerators can’t get into the Void without the Second Dreamer.’
‘They’ll get her,’ Janine wailed. ‘Look at what they’ve done already.’
Laril didn’t comment, though it was tempting. He ran a hand over his chin, finding a lot of stubble there. Araminta always used to complain about that. I need a shower and clean clothes. ‘I’m going out.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I have to meet someone, an old friend.’
‘You are kidding?’ she squawked as outrage fought with fright. ‘Today? Don’t you understand? They’ve imprisoned ANA.’
‘The biggest victory they can have is to change our lives. I am going to carry on exactly as before. Anything else is allowing them to win.’
She gave him a confused look, her thoughts in turmoil. More than anything she wanted to believe in him, to know he was right. ‘I didn’t think of that,’ she said meekly.
‘That’s all right.’ Laril put his hand on the back of her head, and kissed her. She responded half-heartedly. ‘See?’ he said gently. ‘Normality. It’s the best way forward.’ The prospect of making contact with a Faction agent, of becoming a galactic power player, was making him inordinately randy.
‘Yes,’ she nodded, her arms going round him. ‘Yes, that’s what I want. I want a normal life.’
Laril checked the clock function in his exovision display. There was just enough time.
The taxi capsule slid out of the vaulting entrance to the hangar which made up the seventy-fifth floor of Bayview tower. Laril sat back on the curving cushioning, feeling on top of the world. It doesn’t get any better than this, not ever.
Direct flight time between Bayview tower and the Jachal Coliseum was a couple of minutes at best. Laril had no intention of flying direct. Until he was absolutely sure of the Custodian representative’s authenticity he wasn’t taking any chances. So they flew to a marina first, then a touchdown mall, the Metropolitan opera house, the civic museum, a crafts collective house. Twelve locations after leaving the tower, the taxi was finally descending vertically towards the coliseum. From his vantage point it looked like he was sinking down to a small volcano. The outside slope of the elongated cone had been turned to steep parkland, with trees and fields, and meandering paths. There were even a couple of streams gurgling down between a series of ponds. Inside the caldera walls were tiers of extensive seating, enough to contain seventy thousand people in perfect comfort. The arena field at the bottom was capable of holding just about any event from concerts to races to display matches and baroque festivals. Ringing the apex of the coliseum was a broad lip of flat ground which hosted a fence of two-hundred-year-old redka trees, huge trunks with wide boughs smothered in wire-sponge leaves the colour of mature claret.
Laril’s taxi capsule dropped on to a public landing pad in the shade of the trees. He immediately examined the area with his biononic field-scan function. It was one of the functions he was adept at, and he’d refined the parameters during the taxi flight. When he stepped out, the biononics were already providing him with a low-level force field. He wore a blue-black toga suit with a strong surface shimmer, so there was no visual sign of his protection. The scan function was linked directly to the force-field control, so if he d
etected any kind of threat or unknown activity the force field would instantaneously switch to its strongest level. It was a smart procedure, which along with his other preparations provided him with a lot of confidence.
He walked across the lip to the top tier. His u-shadow was maintaining secure links to the emergency taxis and the coliseum’s civic sensor net, assuring him that everything was running smoothly. As agreed with Asom, he was the first to arrive. There were no nasty surprises waiting for him.
A steep glidepath took him down the inner slope to the arena field. He kept looking round the huge concrete crater for any sign of movement. Apart from a few bots working their way slowly along the seating rows there was nothing.
Once he reached the bottom he expanded his field-scan function again. No anomalies, and no unusual chunks of technology within five hundred metres. It looked like Asom was obeying his groundrules. Laril smiled in satisfaction, things were going to be just fine.
A slightly odd motion on the opposite side of the field caught his eye. Someone was walking out of the cavernous performers’ tunnel. She was naked, not that such a state was in any way erotic, not for her. Her body was like a skeleton clad in a toga-suit haze. She walked purposefully over the grass towards him; two long ribbons of scarlet fabric wove about sinuously in her wake.
‘Asom?’ Laril asked uncertainty. Suddenly this whole meeting seemed like a bad idea. It got worse. His connection to the unisphere dropped out without warning, which was theoretically impossible. Laril’s force field snapped up to its highest rating. He took a couple of shaky paces backwards before turning to run. Files in his storage lacuna were already displaying escape routes to the emergency taxis he’d mapped out earlier. It was fifteen paces to a service hatch, which led to a maze of utility tunnels. The skeletal woman-thing would never be able to track him in there.
Three men appeared in the seating tiers ahead of him; they just shimmered into existence as their one-piece suits discarded their stealth camouflage effect.
Laril froze. ‘Ozziecrapit,’ he groaned. His field scan showed each of them was enriched with sophisticated weapons. Their force fields were a lot stronger than his. They advanced towards him.
His exovision displays abruptly spiked with incomprehensible quantum fluctuations. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth to scream before the whole universe turned black.
Arranging an entrapment had never been so easy. Valean was almost ashamed by the simplicity. Even before she landed at Darklake City, Accelerator agents had secreted subversion software into the Bayview tower net. Incredibly, Laril used his own apartment’s node to access the unisphere. She wondered if all his calls to various old colleagues were some kind of subtle misdirection. Surely nobody was so inept? But it appeared to be real. He genuinely thought he was being smart.
So she replied personally to his final call, assuming the Ondra identity. Again, the suggestion of the coliseum as a meeting point was a shocking failure of basic procedure. Isolated from the public, its thick walls provided a perfect screen from standard civic and police scrutiny. The Accelerator team were laughing when they found his ‘escape’ taxis, parked suspiciously close to utility tunnel exits. And as for the antiquated monitor software he’d loaded into the coliseum’s network . . .
Valean waited in the darkness of the performers’ tunnel as he slid down the glidepath. His field-function scan probed around, its rudimentary capability finally confirming how woefully naive he was. Her own biononics deflected it easily. As soon as three of her team were in place behind him, she walked out into the morning sunlight. Laril seemed so shocked he didn’t even attempt any hostile activity. Lucky for him, she thought impassively.
The team closed in smoothly. Then Valean’s field scan showed her a sudden change manifesting in the quantum fields. Her integral force field hardened. Weapons enrichments powered up. Laril vanished.
‘What the fuck!’ Digby exclaimed.
The Columbia505 was hanging two hundred kilometres above Darklake City to monitor the whole Jachal Coliseum affair. Digby’s u-shadow had kept him updated on the software shenanigans in the Oaktier cybersphere, how Valean had run electronic rings around poor old Laril. Given the nature of the people he had to watch during his professional career, Digby never normally felt any sympathy for any of them. Laril, however, was in a class of his own when it came to ineptitude. Sympathy didn’t quite apply, but he was certainly starting to feel a degree of pity for the fool who’d been dragged into an event of which he had no true understanding.
Digby watched in growing disbelief as Laril’s taxi landed on the lip of the coliseum. The man had absolutely no idea what he was walking into. The Columbia505’s sensors could see the Accelerator agents from two hundred kilometres altitude. Yet Laril’s own field-function scan was so elementary he couldn’t spot them from two hundred metres.
Letting out a groan, Digby brought up the starship’s targeting systems. No doubt about it, he was going to have to intervene. Paula was absolutely right. Valean could not be allowed to snatch Laril. Precision neutron lasers locked on to Valean and her team.
He still wasn’t sure if he should take the Columbia505 down to retrieve Laril afterwards, or simply remove Valean’s subversive software from his ‘escape’ taxis and steer them to a rendezvous. He was inclined to pick Laril up himself. The man was a disaster area. He shouldn’t be allowed to wander round the Commonwealth by himself, not given his connection to Araminta.
Valean emerged from the tunnel and walked towards a startled Laril. Three of the eight Accelerator agents discarded their stealth. Digby designated the fire sequence.
Strange symbols shot up into his exovision. It was the last thing he’d expected. A T-sphere enveloped Darklake City.
Laril teleported out of Jachal Coliseum.
The T-sphere withdrew instantaneously.
Digby reviewed every sensor input he could think of. Valean and her team appeared equally surprised by Laril’s magic disappearing act, launching a barrage of questors into the city net. To Digby there was something even more disturbing than their reaction. The T-sphere hadn’t registered in any Oaktier security network.
That would take a level of ability which went way beyond a team of Faction agents.
He called Paula. ‘We have a problem.’
‘A T-sphere?’ she said, once he’d finished explaining. ‘That’s unusual. There’s no known project on Oaktier using a T-sphere, so that implies it’s covert. And given no official sensor could detect it, I’d say it was also embedded. Interesting.’
‘The Columbia505’s sensors gave it a diameter of twenty-three kilometres.’
‘Where’s the exact centre?’
‘Way ahead of you.’ Visual sensor images of Darklake City flashed up in Digby’s exovision. They focused on the Olika district, one of the original, exclusive areas bordering the lake shore. Its big houses sat in lavish grounds, a mishmash of styles representing the centuries over which they’d been added to and modified. In the middle of the district was a long road running parallel to the shore. The centre of the image expanded, zooming in on a lavender-coloured drycoral bungalow. It was a circular building wrapped round a small swimming pool. Probably the smallest house in the whole district.
‘Oh my God,’ Paula said.
‘That’s the centre,’ Digby said. ‘1800 Briggins. Registered to a Paul Cramley. Actually, he’s lived there for . . . oh. That can’t be right.’
‘It is,’ Paula told him.
‘Do you think the T-sphere generator is underneath the bungalow? I can run a deep scan.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘But . . .’
‘Laril is perfectly safe. Unfortunately, Araminta won’t be able to call him for advice now, not without paying the price to Paul’s ally.’
‘Then you know this Cramley person? My u-shadow can’t find anything on file.’
‘Of course not. Paul was busy wiping himself from official databases before Nigel and Ozzie opened the
ir first wormhole to Mars.’
‘Really?’
‘Just keep watching Valean.’
‘Is that it?’
‘For the moment. I’ll try and talk to Paul.’
Digby knew better than to ask.
Laril knew the light and air had changed somehow. He wasn’t standing in the sunlight of the coliseum, and the air he gulped down was perfectly conditioned. It was also quiet. He risked opening his eyes.
Of all the possible fates, he wasn’t prepared for the perfectly ordinary, if somewhat old-fashioned, lounge he was in. The lighting globes were off, making it appear gloomy. Its only illumination came from sunlight leaking through the translucent grey curtains pulled across tall arching windows. He could just make out some courtyard with a circular swimming pool on the other side of the glass. The floor was dark wood planks, their grain almost lost with age and polish. Walls were raw drycoral, lined with shelves.
There were some chic silver globe chairs floating a few centimetres above the floorboards. A man was sitting on one of them, its surface moulded round him, as if it were particularly elastic mercury. His youthful features gave him a handsome appearance, especially with thick dark hair cut longer than current style. Instinct warned Laril he was old, very old. This wasn’t someone he could bullshit like his ex-business partners and girlfriends. He didn’t even risk using his field-function scan. No way of telling how the man would react.
‘Uh,’ he cleared his throat as his heart calmed a little. ‘Where am I?’
‘My home.’
‘I don’t . . . Uh, thank you for getting me out of there. Are you Asom?’
‘No. There’s no such person. You were being played by the Accelerators.’
‘They know about me?’
The man raised an eyebrow contemptuously.
‘Sorry,’ Laril said. ‘So who are you?’
‘Paul Cramley.’
‘And am I in even deeper shit now?’
‘Not at all.’ Paul grinned. ‘But you’re not free to go, either. That’s for your own good, by the way; it’s not a threat.’