“Such as?”
“Something that didn’t make sense at the time. Perhaps something he said. Something simple that he should have known, like a piece of history, or a Dynasty name. Or did you ever meet anyone by surprise, someone he was uncomfortable around.”
“Don’t think so, no. I can’t remember anything like that.”
“How about an incident from his childhood. If he grew up on Far Away he had a very different upbringing from ordinary Commonwealth children. Something might have slipped out that seemed odd.”
“No. That’s what the reporter asked as well.”
“What reporter?”
“Er.” Trisha’s fingers fluttered slightly, puppeting her virtual hand. “Brad Myo. He was from Earl News. He said he’d got your permission to talk to me.” She gave Renne an anxious look. “Didn’t he?”
Renne became very still, something like a ghost’s finger was stroking her spine. “No,” she said quietly. “We don’t issue any authorization to reporters to do anything, let alone talk to crime victims. That’s up to individual citizens.” To her surprise, Trisha started crying. The girl sank down onto the towel, great sobs shaking her shoulders.
“I’m so fucking stupid,” she wailed, and started hitting her fists against her legs. “Does everybody in the Commonwealth know? Why am I so gullible? He said you’d allowed him to see me so he could produce a sympathetic story. I believed him, I really did. Oh, God, I hate myself. I didn’t know. He was so sincere.”
Renne gave Warren an awkward glance, then knelt beside the distraught girl. “Hey, come on. If this is who I think it was, he would have fooled me, too.” Her e-butler had already cross-referenced Earl News. It was in one of Paula’s reports. The company didn’t exist, but someone had used it once before when he interviewed Wendy Bose. According to Paula Myo, his description matched Bradley Johansson. “What did he look like?”
Trisha sniveled. “Tall. With really fair hair. And he was old. I don’t mean close to rejuvenation. You just knew he’d lived a couple of centuries at least.”
“Shit,” Renne hissed under her breath.
Trisha gave her an uncertain glance, tears ready to burst forth again.
“What? Do you know who it was?”
“He sounds like somebody known to us, yes.”
“Oh, no! I’m going to get a memory wipe, I swear I am. I’m going to wipe out my whole life; everything, what I’ve done, who I am, my name. All of it. Wipe it and not use a secure store.” She glared at Warren. “And if the Dynasty won’t do it, I’ll go to some illegal back street clinic. I don’t care. I’d rather wind up retarded than go through life knowing this.”
“Easy there,” Renne said. She rubbed the girl’s trembling shoulders.
“You’re being far too hard on yourself. Just tell me what happened with Brad Myo. Please?”
“Nothing much, I guess. He turned up at the apartment a day before I came back here. Isabella had already left, and Catriona had gone to work. He told me he’d cleared the meeting with you; that’s the only reason I let him in. I should have checked with you, shouldn’t I? God, how dumb!”
“It’s done now. Please, don’t beat yourself up over this. What did he want to know?”
“The same as you did. Howard’s name, where he worked, how long I’d known him. All the basics.”
“I see. Well, don’t worry, there’s no real harm done.”
“Really?” The girl was pathetically eager.
“Yes. He’s just a stupid con man trying to sell his story to a major news show. None of them will run it.”
“Absolutely not,” Warren assured her.
“Okay.”
“Has Isabella been in touch recently?” Renne asked, making it casual. “Her old address code isn’t working, and I need to ask her the same questions.”
“No.” Trisha lowered her head. “I haven’t talked to many people since I got back. I don’t want to. I wasn’t kidding when I said I want all this out of my brain. It’s too difficult.”
“I’m sure it seems that way. But don’t be too rash, will you?”
“Maybe.”
“Did Isabella say where she was going before she left Daroca?”
“She was going skiing on Jura. There was a whole bunch of them hiring a chalet together for a fortnight. She tried to get me to come along, but I didn’t want to. She’s always going on trips with friends.”
“Which friends, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t know any of them.”
“Okay. Never mind, we’ll look into it.” Renne stood up and gestured to Warren, who nodded. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Trisha. I apologize for putting you through this, but you have been helpful.”
The girl simply nodded, not looking up. Renne regarded her with a touch of concern before walking back to the VTOL.
“So who was the reporter?” Warren asked as the hatch shut behind them.
Renne settled herself into the deep leather cushioning of the chair. “It could be Bradley Johansson himself. The description is about right, and he’s posed as a reporter before using that company name.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Yeah.” She watched through the oval window as the plane took off. The light green patch of meadow shrank away quickly behind them as the acceleration pressed her down.
“But that makes no sense,” Warren said. “What would Johansson need to see Trisha for? The operation was over.”
“Good question. And he took a hell of a risk going to see her, too, he even used Earl News as a cover, which we knew about. It’s not like him to be that sloppy. Those questions were clearly important to him.”
“Why?”
Renne shook her head. She didn’t quite trust herself to look directly at Warren. Unlike Trisha, he wasn’t stupid. There was one explanation that fitted all too easily. An explanation that had implications she really didn’t enjoy. It would also mean she’d been quite right about the whole shotgun setup from the very start. It wasn’t the Guardians after all. And I don’t think it was the Halgarths. Christabel had no reason to lie to me. That doesn’t leave many options.
***
Mark Vernon sat in his rented Ford Lapanto as the drive array steered it along the six-lane highway down through the northern tail of the Chunata hills that formed the back of New Costa’s Trinity district. The slopes with their brown native scrub bushes and desert palms were decorated with large white houses encased behind tall walls and hedges like precious artworks in an exclusive store. It was an area favored by financial management types, who never liked to stray far from the office. A line of composite and glass skyscrapers marked out Trinity’s eastern boundary, winding along the base of the hills. They were home to various banks, credit houses, brokers, venture capitalists, and offworld currency exchanges.
The Lapanto’s drive array turned the car off the highway. There was a junction at the bottom of the ramp, where an ancient road began its lazy curve around the hill. A dilapidated sign called it Bright Light Canyon. Mark switched off the drive array, and started driving the car himself. Gritty yellow-brown soil had almost completely covered the thin layer of asphalt, turning the road into little more than a dirt track. Dead-looking scrub bushes were scattered over the slope below and above, their lower trunks buttressed by the conical mounds of nipbug nests. Behind the swathe of arid vegetation were crumbling white walls of enzyme-bonded concrete, scaled by ivy and climbing cacti. Various private roads led off the main track, looping around to gates.
For a moment Mark’s imagination painted over the image with the long straight driveways of the Highmarsh Valley branching off the main road. It was silent in the Chunatas, the noise of the megacity deflected by the foothills, a condition matching the land behind Randtown. Even the drab brown of the native plants was similar to the weak ocher shadings of boltgrass. But the air here was dryer, tinged with chemicals from the refinery sector sixteen kilometers away to the west. And Regulus was a too-bright point of
blue-white light in the cloudless sky, still emitting a fierce heat in the late afternoon. Even in his daydreams, Mark could never pretend to reclaim all they’d lost. Fantasizing about it was stupid, the sign of a complete loser.
It was his fault. He’d taken his family to Elan. He’d built up their hopes. He’d shown them a decent, clean life. His dream had died in fire and pain. It was a knowledge that prevented him from sleeping every night. Self-recrimination that made it impossible to talk properly to Liz. Misery at having to bring his lovely children back to this vile world that held him back from playing with them.
He was so wrapped up in self-pity he almost missed the turn. A fast pull on the wheel sent the Lapanto skidding around the sharp bend and down the little trail. Dusty soil puffed up from the back wheels as they spun. “Idiot,” he told himself.
After a couple of hundred meters the trail ended at an iron gate in a wall of terracotta-red concrete. Mark’s e-butler gave the gates his code, and they swung open. There was an oasis of lush emerald grass inside the wall. At the center was a long lime-green bungalow with red composite roof panels molded to resemble clay tiles. Several gardening bots trundled about, tending to the lawns and herbaceous borders, keeping them as neat as the building they surrounded. Mark always enjoyed the view from here; with the bungalow perched halfway up the hill they could sit on the patio and look across New Costa’s urban expanse as it rolled away into the horizon. From this vantage point it never seemed quite so objectionable as when he was down among the factories and the strip malls. All very different from his old house in Santa Hydra.
Kyle, Mark’s brother, leased the bungalow from the Augusta Engineering Corp; he could afford to with his high-paying job at the StVincent Loan & Trust. Everybody in Mark’s immediate family had offered to put them up when they got back from Elan. He’d accepted Kyle’s offer because he couldn’t stand the thought of having to move in with Marty, his father. Besides, he’d always got on well with Kyle, who at least was sincere in wanting to help, and the kids really liked their uncle.
He braked the Lapanto on the drive outside the front door, and went inside. All the reception rooms had glass doors, allowing him to look along the hall to locate his small family. Nobody was in sight, but he heard happy shouting coming from the patio outside the main lounge. Both Sandy and Barry were in the pool, with a suspiciously wet Panda lying on the sun-soaked slabs beside the pool. The dog looked up at him, but didn’t move.
“Daddy!” both kids yelled.
Mark waved at them. “Has Panda been in the pool?”
“No,” they chorused.
He gave them a fearsome disapproving look, and they both started giggling. Liz was lying on a sunlounger on the terrace below the pool. Antonio, Kyle’s boyfriend, was beside her. The terrace faced west, allowing them both to catch the last of the afternoon sunlight.
“Hi, baby,” Liz called. A maidbot was standing between her and Antonio, a wine bottle held in one of its arms. When he got closer, he realized both of them were naked. His throat tightened automatically. He didn’t say anything, because that would just show how small-minded and conservative he was.
Liz hadn’t got a job yet; the agreement was she would stay home to look after the kids. They weren’t in school, and Mark really didn’t want them to go to an Augusta school; he had too many bad memories of his own time at Faraday High. In fact, returning to Augusta was only ever supposed to be temporary; they arrived here purely because it was the first stop after Ozzie Isaac’s asteroid. He wanted them to move on soon, hopefully to somewhere like Gralmond, which was about as far away from Dyson Alpha as it was possible to get. But that took money, and the invasion had wiped them out financially, taking away their entire equity, and he knew damn well that even after the navy beat the Primes back into their own space Elan was ruined beyond reclamation. The mortgage he’d taken to buy their little vineyard and the Ables Motor franchise had left him massively in debt. If the insurance didn’t take care of it, he’d need a couple of lifetimes to pay it off. And the insurance company was based in Runwich, Elan’s capital. Nobody knew if the Commonwealth government would pay compensation to everyone from the Lost23, and even if they did it would take years if not decades for such a bill to work its way through the Senate. Right now tax money was being poured into building up the navy.
He knelt down and gave Liz a perfunctory kiss. “Hi.”
“Wow, you look like you need a drink.” She pointed to the maidbot. “We’ve got some extra glasses.”
“Not that, thanks. I’ll maybe get a beer.”
“No problem,” Antonio said. “Sit yourself down, Mark, the bot’ll get it for you.”
Mark gave him a tight smile, and sank onto an empty sunlounger. “How long have the kids been in the pool?”
“Not sure,” Liz said; she drained her wineglass and held it out for a maidbot to refill. “Half an hour.”
“They should be getting out soon. They need to have their tea.” He didn’t actually ask: What have you got them? But it was in there, implicit with the tone.
“The house array is watching them,” Liz said with a little too much emphasis. “This isn’t Randtown. The systems here are top of the line.”
“Always useful to know,” Mark replied coldly.
Liz turned around so she was looking out across the landscape below the hill, and sipped her wine.
“Hey, come on now, you two,” Antonio said. “We’re all on the same side. Mark, the kids know they have to get out at quarter past six, they always do. The kitchen is making tea for them.”
The timer in Mark’s virtual vision read: 18:12. “Fine, sure,” he grunted. “Sorry, it hasn’t been a good day.” Not that he was going to sit here and bang on about his day in the factory—that was too stereotype even for him; in any case he suspected they wouldn’t really be listening. He’d applied for and got the general technician job at Prism Dynamics the day after they left the asteroid. The salary wasn’t anything special, not for maintaining assembly bays that built fuselage sections for the aerospace industry; but he did actually enjoy the work. It was the combination of practical troubleshooting and writing program fixes that he was most at home with. He took it because there was no way he was accepting charity from anyone, not even family. That was a gene he’d inherited direct from Marty.
A maidbot trundled up to Mark and handed him a bottle of beer. He flipped the cap and took a decent drink. Liz was still ignoring him.
“Giselle Swinsol called,” Antonio said. “She said she’d be here at seven to interview you.”
Mark waited a moment, but Liz didn’t say anything. “Is this for me?” he asked.
“Yes.” Antonio gave him a baffled look. “Didn’t you arrange an interview?”
“No. Why would she call you?”
“It was to the house array, not me personally. She said she wanted to be sure you were in this evening.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Probably an agency headhunter,” Liz said.
“I’m not registered with any agencies.”
“Could be the insurance company,” Antonio suggested. “They’re paying out for the invasion.”
Mark drank some more beer. “Not with my luck,” he muttered.
Liz shot him a look as she got to her feet. “I’m going to get the children ready,” she said and pulled on a robe.
Antonio waited until she’d gone up to the pool and started calling the children. “You two okay?”
“I guess so,” Mark said limply. “We’re just finding our feet, that’s all. Honestly, Antonio, we had the most perfect life on Elan. Now there’s nothing left to go back to.”
“It’s tough, man. But you can beat it. I see that in Kyle. You Vernon guys don’t give in. You’re a scary family.”
Mark raised his bottle, and even managed a feeble grin. “Cheers. But you’re wrong. First hint of a job on a planet far from here, I’m taking Liz and the kids.”
“You sure about that?”
/>
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Well, I think that would be a big mistake.”
“How come?”
“Look, the Big15 are where they’re going to build all the ships and weapons hardware. Right? Yeah sure, other planets will get subcontracts, and High Angel does some assembly work, that’s politics. But here: this is the heart of the fight back, man. That means they won’t let Augusta fall. Earth will be overrun before we are. We’re gonna have the best protection it’s possible to have. Think about it. Wessex was the only planet to see off the Primes last time. Sheldon and Hutchinson made damn sure the invasion failed there. You want my advice, stay here. I don’t care what all the news show analysts are saying, this is the safest place in the Commonwealth.”
Mark wanted to laugh the idea off, but he couldn’t fault Antonio’s logic.
A long black Chevrolet limousine drew up outside the gates at two minutes before seven. Liz had just managed to coax the kids upstairs after tea, and Antonio was getting sober and dressed for his hospital shift. Kyle still wasn’t back; he usually worked in the StVincent Loan & Trust office until after seven. Mark didn’t understand how he kept the relationship with Antonio going; they only ever saw each other for a couple of hours a day. Perhaps that was why it had lasted so long. He and Liz barely saw each other for longer, but that didn’t seem to be helping much.
Giselle Swinsol wasn’t quite what Mark had been expecting. The limo should have clued him in: no agency manager would have a car like that. She was a tall brunette with the ambition of a second-lifer gunning for an executive slot, and the arrogance of a direct lineage Dynasty member. Her smart gray and oxford-blue suit cost more than Mark’s monthly salary, complemented by makeup superior to that of most unisphere news anchors. High heels clicked loudly on the hall floor.
She hadn’t waited to be invited in; she simply marched past Mark when he opened the door, and headed for the living room.
“Excuse me, but I didn’t know we were due to have a meeting,” he said. He wanted it to be sarcastic, but it came out woefully lame, not helped by the way he was scampering along behind, trying to catch up.