Exodus, page 15
He got a buzz out of the equipment he’d been given to support his various operations. To him, it confirmed he really was working for an archon. When an operation came up, all he had to do was tell Mo what he wanted, and a carryandy would drop off a package. All the systems they contained were Celestial technology, making them immune to detection from the hardware that Travelers supplied to gangs—mainly Lidon military-grade units, along with some Remnant Era gadgets. They also allowed him to observe from a decent physical distance, reducing risk.
Like tonight: Younes had been told by Colvin, a senior Stanvar8 lieutenant, to meet an offworld acquaintance of his called Dagon and introduce them to Gyvoy Enfoe. Younes had been grumpy about the task, but it had interested Terence because the Enfoes were the largest Traveler Dynasty in Santa Rosa. The name Dagon, however, wasn’t registered as an arrival at any of Gondiar’s orbital tower stations. In itself, that would have made Terence take note, but there was more to it. Why would someone from offworld ask Stanvar8 for an introduction to an Enfoe? If Dagon was a Traveler, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to visit the Enfoes; Travelers did business with one another all the time. That kind of strange was worth investigating.
Ever since he began running Younes, Terence had been increasingly surprised at the scale of the Human Liberation movement. He wasn’t even quite sure what to call it; organization was too formal, implying something orderly, whereas this was more elusive. A loose association of people, not quite friends, stretching across Santa Rosa. They came from the civil service, the underworld, the merchant classes. The only people who didn’t seem to be involved were the uranics; but then as a government employee, Terence was a firm believer in the aphorism: useless uranics. They’d probably be as incompetent at revolution as they were at management.
No one involved in Human Liberation had done anything wrong, he acknowledged at some point in his second year of observation. Outside of the Q-I-X fanatics, there was no civil disobedience or criminality. They were just people who knew other people with the same opinion, like a members-only club, quietly helping one another along as they kept the belief going. The parallel between that and his own situation made him smile. But it was a club that was never advertised or even open about its existence. Mo and the archon behind him were right; it was an ideology. Human Liberation was a political movement.
What he hadn’t yet uncovered was anyone who could be classed as a leader, or even a committee member. It was too nebulous for that. All they ever did was provide support for one another.
Terence was hoping tonight’s meeting would provide some hint of offworld involvement in Human Liberation. Maybe some funding, or Remnant Era weapons. Now, that would be a real breakthrough.
Who knows, he told himself as Younes turned into Baume Avenue, this might finally help my career. Which made him snort in self-mockery. His upward progress in the police had gone well thanks to his unseen sponsor, but it came with a social price. Annabeth was great, a second-year medic in a biomech organ transplant team, hoping to progress up to teams that handled the bigger prize: top-of-the-range vat-grown clone organs. But she was becoming discouraged with his workload, just like Josefina had before her. The quiet help he was getting was starting to look like isolation. Same as Mo. Which is a crappy way of life.
The image from the flock of insect drones played across his vision lens. Younes turned across Baume Avenue and went into the outdoor seating area of the Fleesh Diamond—a roped-off section on the pavement with tables and big potted ferns. There were dozens of similar areas along Baume Avenue, starting to fill up with punters out to enjoy the evening. Exactly the kind of place Annabeth would have enjoyed, he thought resentfully.
“Loiter,” he told the drone flock manager. It was part of the new, sophisticated patch Mo had provided. Somehow it didn’t need to use Santa Rosa’s network to stay in touch with the drones.
The cymech insects obediently rose up to drift in a relaxed circle ten meters above the Fleesh Diamond’s seating area. Their sensors captured the faces and lnc codes of everyone using the bar, as well as people walking past.
Terence took a seat outside another bar a little farther down the avenue. Younes didn’t know he was being followed; they’d agreed he would simply report back. But Terence, ever suspicious about Younes, wasn’t about to rely on the man’s account.
Younes went over to Gyvoy Enfoe, who was sitting at a table with two attractive young women, both of whom were dressed for clubbing in small, tight outfits. Gyvoy grinned up at him, presenting the drones with a perfect view. The Traveler was in his late twenties, owning the kind of darkly handsome face that Terence immediately disliked. The looks, the casual confidence, the perfectly fitting hand-tailored jacket and silk shirt, discreet jewelry including a Lorentz timepiece that probably cost more than Terence’s annual salary—it all announced money and accomplishment. Gyvoy had been born privileged, and capitalized on it, evolving into the kind of urbane guy everyone would like to be friends with—apart from Terence.
“Younes, good to see you again,” Gyvoy said amicably. “Take a seat. What are you drinking?”
By contrast, Younes, who had access to plenty of money, looked down-market. His clothes—leather trousers and a colorful alligator-suede waistcoat—were expensive, but he somehow lacked the personality to carry them off with any style. It didn’t matter that they’d both done well for themselves; the disparity in social levels between the kid from the street and the kid from the mansion was vertiginous.
Younes hovered at the table, glancing indecisively at the two women. “We don’t really have time. I’m supposed to take you…”
“Sure we do. I’m paying.”
Uncertainty played across Younes’s face. Terence had seen that a lot over the years. Younes liked an ordered world. Presumably that was why Stanvar8 used him to tidy their money.
“Well, sure. A quick one, then.” Younes pulled a chair out.
The image flickered. Terence watched the icon stream running down one side of his vision lens jitter and break up into nonsense pixels before re-forming. “Status update,” he asked the flock manager.
The image of the Fleesh Diamond’s seating area began to degrade, turning dark then fracturing. “What the hell?”
“Contact lost,” the flock manager reported.
“Huh?” Terence twisted around in his chair to look across the avenue to where Younes was sitting. The view was blocked by trees and pedestrians; made worse by globecabs, bikes, and scooters slipping soundlessly along the center route. “How can you lose contact?” That was the whole point of using Celestial tech for tradecraft; it worked perfectly and was immune to anything available on Gondiar. Oh! Gyvoy might have brought something back from his last starflight. Or Dagon, whoever he is.
“Signal failure of airborne units,” the flock manager reported. Terence thought it sounded sheepish. Reluctantly, he got up and paid the waitress who was just delivering his beer. He walked along the pavement until he was directly opposite the Fleesh Diamond. The two young women were still sitting at the table, but there was no sign of Gyvoy or Younes.
“Aw, crap!” He hurried across the road, dodging the traffic. There was no sign of them on the pavement. Did they go into the bar? But if he went in and checked, Younes might see him. He couldn’t risk that.
If they’d left, he didn’t know where to—unless it was the Dark Paradise club ten blocks down the avenue. It was owned by Stanvar8, serving as their main place of business. But he couldn’t go chasing off to it on a hunch. Besides, there was no way he could just walk in there pretending to be a civilian. Stanvar8 kept a file on all the city’s police officers.
There was only one option left, and he knew damn well it was a waste of time. He moved a couple of bars down and sat at a table that gave him a good view of the Fleesh Diamond. If Gyvoy and Younes had gone inside the bar, there was a tiny possibility they’d come out of the front when the meeting was over. He wasn’t convinced. Someone had known they were under observation and had the ability to disable the flock; they wouldn’t make the mistake of emerging in full view.
But procedure is king. So he ordered a drink and settled back to watch.
An hour later, the two women left. Ninety minutes after that, Terence gave up and went home, angry that he had no image of Dagon. He’d have to call Younes first thing in the morning and ask him what had happened.
* * *
—
Terence’s lnc patch woke him at five-thirty. He opened his eyes at the shrill signal and realized he was alone in bed, which just made him even more miserable. When he looked at the patch, its petals unfolded into a fifteen-centimeter gossamer circle. Lenertz Mo’s face appeared on it.
“I didn’t get anything last night, chief,” Terence said blearily. “The flock was disabled, so I know we’re onto something big.”
“They disabled the drones?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell, I didn’t think anyone could do that. Okay, you can update me later, and we’ll work out what our next step is. Meantime, I hope your dress uniform is clean.”
“Uh, I think so. Why?”
“Time for you to log some hours on high-level official duties. I have a special escort job for you.”
Chapter Six
Planets fascinated Ellie. So big, so beautiful. The first she’d ever seen, Kinnox, was a gas giant five AUs out from Kelowan’s star. When the Diligent went into orbit a million kilometers out from its pale green and blue clouds, she joined everyone else in her section, staring out through the big observation windows when the radiation shields finally rolled back. Her whole life had been spent in interstellar space, which made it hard for her to believe that so much solid matter actually existed. Yet there it was.
After that had been the approach to Anoosha, and the wonder of an entire bright globe with its oceans and continents that could support life—nothing less than a revelation to someone who’d lived in the arkship’s life support ring. She’d spent hours on the interplanetary shuttle’s command couch, mesmerized by the habitable world as it grew ahead of them. They were half a million kilometers out when they saw the incredible orbital tower stretching out from the equator to an asteroid in geostationary orbit. Dozens of spacecraft maneuvered around it, their dazzling ion drives casting a spectral haze around the rock. That was when the first wave of glitches hit.
So she got to experience Anoosha in a way she’d never expected, followed by Finn’s bizarre arrival into her life. It had been an exhilarating and bewildering time since they left the drug gang’s citadel behind. The skimmerfoil flew a precarious meter above the frozen river for a couple of hours to reach an estuary where the ice gave way to sluggish tidal water. At the mouth of the river, they flashed past the lights of a small fishing town, with three big semicircular livestone harbors. The few fishing crews and merchants left on the harbor paid no attention when they moored at an empty berth. In fact, they made a point of ignoring them.
“All I have to do is find a bank console,” Finn told them as they walked into the town. There were three of the simple-looking consoles inside a small one-room livestone building. Nobody else was inside. She watched Finn put his hand on the connection bulb and close his eyes to commune with the finance network. A couple of minutes later, the console ejected a small ebony disk. Finn held it up triumphantly. “Treasury coin. I’ve loaded enough on this from my main account to get the three of us back to Gondiar.”
“Huh,” Josias had said, unimpressed. “Just another finance app.”
Finn ignored him and put his hand back on the bulb to order local services from the commercial sector of the planet’s network. After another couple of minutes while he silently ordered a whole list of items, he said: “I’ve filed a report on the rekaul gang with the regional police headquarters.”
The way he said it, looking directly at her, was as if he was seeking approval.
“Great,” she told him.
They headed back to the skimmerfoil. Over the next half hour, several carryandys had rolled out of the dark. The little cubes contained clothes, more medical products, three lnc patches, and boxes of hot food.
Ellie had nibbled tentatively on the pizza a grinning Finn had offered her. They made pizzas on the Diligent, but like everything they were produced from the vats. They certainly never tasted this good. Her second bite was half the slice. “What else have you ordered?” she demanded.
They were finishing off profiteroles, dripping them in a chocolate sauce that was absolutely nothing like what she knew as chocolate, when an oval vehicle drew up beside them.
“Globecab,” Finn said. “All the human worlds in the Crown Dominion use them.”
The globecab had driven them through the night to a small city. From there Finn had hired an aircraft to take them to the capital, Swiftville. The ride up the orbital tower had a dreamy quality, allowing her to watch more and more of the planet unrolling below them.
They had berths reserved on the Dilopo, a human-crewed interplanetary cargo ship that was taking fifty thousand tons of refined aluminum and steel to Gondiar, where extruders would turn it into agricultural machinery. Interestingly, the ship didn’t feel all that much more advanced than the Diligent—though perhaps that was her overfamiliarity with ship systems in general. The technology was more sophisticated and compact, but the functionality was the same. Except for the food. The food was uniformly excellent compared with the arkship.
During the eleven-day flight she’d come to quite like Finn Jalgori-Tobu, and that slightly annoying way he unknowingly talked down to her also gave him a gentle nature quite at odds with his claim to be some kind of soldier of fortune. He was full of strange paradoxes like that. But he clearly had ambition, which she couldn’t fault. And he had exactly the same kind of despair about the endless monotony that came with the life he’d been born into that she did.
He was interesting, too—or at least what he knew was. All she’d ever known was shipboard life, the trivial yet somehow dominant gossip, and the tedious routine that made up every day without end. Now she had the history of the entire Centauri Cluster to listen to—a chronicle that was ten times longer than human history on Earth before the Diligent left. Small wonder she spent as much time in his company as she could.
When they reached Gondiar, her amazement at Anoosha’s orbital tower was completely eclipsed by Gondiar’s seven towers, then jumped again thanks to the georing—a loop that encircled the entire planet around the geostationary orbit, attached to the towers’ anchor asteroids, supporting the hundreds of industrial stations and massive habitats that were spaced out along it. Finn pointed out that it wasn’t a perfect circle. Gondiar was a binary planet; another habitable world, Atapedia, orbited it two million kilometers away. It was slightly smaller than Earth, but exerted a strong tidal force. Consequentially, the georing was engineered to allow a gentle gravitational distortion bulge that followed Atapedia’s orbit the way high tide followed Earth’s moon.
“The Celestials are rather good at megastructures,” Finn said grudgingly as she stared open-mouthed at the panorama.
“Do humans live in the habitats as well?” she asked. Most of the slowly rotating cylinders she could see must have measured a hundred and fifty kilometers long. She couldn’t begin to understand the stress forces on the bearings that connected them to the ring. Celestial materials science was certainly as implausibly futuristic as she’d expected.
“No, we’re only—” He stopped himself. “We have the whole planet to ourselves.”
“You’re only allowed on the planet?”
He gave a tight nod of acknowledgment. “And High Rosa, where we’re docking.”
Ellie had been disappointed that they hadn’t seen any Celestials when they docked at High Rosa. Finn’s descriptions of the dominions in the Centauri Cluster had her more than a little curious. He said there were some Imperial Celestials in High Rosa, the city that encircled the tower’s anchor asteroid: members of the Grand Families that owned various estates and enterprises on Gondiar, and agents for the interplanetary cargo ship fleets. But they kept to their own sections.
The three of them took one of the capsules down the tower to Santa Rosa, sitting in the lower deck’s big observation lounge, which had a floor-to-ceiling wall of perfectly clear ultrabonded carbon.
The capsule dropped out of the planetside surface of the asteroid and began to accelerate. Ellie watched eagerly as Gondiar appeared below them. Even from this height, she could tell it was a lot bigger than Anoosha. The continents were vast, and she was mesmerized by the slow-moving swaths of dazzling white cloud.
“We won’t really see Santa Rosa until we reach the atmosphere,” Finn said. “The angle’s all wrong until then. But you’ll start to get an idea of how big Gondiar is.”
She smiled at how relaxed he sounded. There was a warmth in his voice she hadn’t heard often. “Glad you’re coming home?”
“Happy about why I’m coming back,” he replied defensively. “No one in our family has ever come close to a deal like this.”
“Can we see Hafnir from here?”
“Just, I think.” He pointed at a coastline and started describing the countryside fondly. More eagerly, she thought, than someone who claimed to be indifferent to it should be. Then he went off into details about how his family was established as the administrators of the Santa Rosa prefecture and its surrounding territories for an alliance of various Celestial Grand Families who owned the land rights. How the Crown Dominion’s inheritance laws and culture were modified for uranics, and the differences—
