Into Everywhere (17 page)

The woman extracted a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve from her document case, laid it on the table in front of Lisa.

‘That was found on your kitchen table,’ Nevers said. ‘Could you tell me what it is?’

Lisa saw that he was definitely enjoying this. She wondered, with a flush of shame, if they had also checked her waste bin, found the empty vodka bottle.

‘You know damn well what it is.’

‘For the record. Please.’

‘It’s a contract.’

‘Is that your signature?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the contract is between you and a party named Brittany Odenkirk,’ Nevers said. It was not a question.

Lisa nodded.

‘For the record, Ms Dawes confirmed that this is a contract between herself and Brittany Odenkirk,’ Nevers said. ‘It concerns the tessera, doesn’t it?’

‘If you know about it, why ask me?’

‘We’re trying to establish what you know, and your level of cooperation. Which is, to be frank, disappointing,’ Nevers said, fixing Lisa with his gimlet stare. ‘Am I correct in thinking that Ms Odenkirk was your husband’s girlfriend?’

‘We were only technically married.’

‘Your husband gave her the tessera. And she gave it to you.’

‘She lent it to me,’ Lisa said, with a pang of guilt.

‘Did your husband give her anything else?’

‘You’d have to ask her.’

‘If you could answer the question,’ Nevers said.

‘I did. I don’t know.’

‘You work as a freelance analyst.’

‘On and off. Mostly off, these days.’

‘Amongst other things, you extract and analyse algorithms stored inside tesserae.’

‘Stored inside some of them.’

‘I believe that you analysed this particular tessera yesterday. Would you like to tell me what you found?’

‘It contains Ghajar narrative code,’ Lisa said. Nevers would have got most of the story from Bria, and his techs would have ripped out the files in the borrowed laptop besides. ‘No one knows what it does, what information it contains, but it’s basically harmless.’

Nevers was giving her that look again. She wondered if the Jackaroo avatar was watching on CCTV, had a wild thought that Nevers could be a puppet, fed orders by some kind of implant. There were stories, urban legends, that the Jackaroo had cultivated human avatars – a secret race bred from people kidnapped thousands of years ago, raised in Jackaroo ships or on some alien planet, and sent back to Earth to observe and report to their masters, or to interfere directly with history. If anyone was a Jackaroo spy, it would be Adam Nevers, with his semi-detached manner and barely hidden contempt for other people.

He said, ‘You examined the tessera with the help of Ms Mendoza-Trujillo, didn’t you?’

‘She had the equipment I needed to extract the code safely and securely,’ Lisa said. ‘I don’t, any more, because you took my stuff. You still have it, as a matter of fact.’

Nevers ignored that. ‘And you were also studying it at your home. Wasn’t that rather dangerous, seeing as you didn’t have the right equipment?’

‘I didn’t need a trap because I was working with a mirrored image of the code, in a virtual sandbox. Bria helped me extract and mirror it. It was entirely routine.’

‘Entirely routine, except for the fire in the code farm owned by your friend Bria Mendoza-Trujillo.’

‘A fire? What kind of fire?’

‘The serious kind,’ Nevers said. He was watching her with clinical interest, like a lab technician noting the reaction of a rat after it had been given an electric jolt.

‘Is Bria all right? Her people?’

‘No one was hurt, as far as we know. The fire marshals are working up the scene right now. According to them, the place is a total write-off.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘It was called in at a little past midnight. Are you saying that you didn’t know about it until now?’

‘If you’re trying to imply that the code did this, I don’t buy it,’ Lisa said. ‘We used standard quarantine protocols when we worked on that tessera. And as I’ve already said, there was nothing about the code that suggested it was in any way malign.’

She was remembering the fire in the code farm that had discovered the Ghajar navigational data some years back – work that had led to the opening of the New Frontier. There had been talk back then that the Jackaroo had been responsible, either as punishment for the code monkeys’ presumption, or as a preventative measure, destroying as yet unanalysed algorithms and datasets that contained deeper secrets. The location of Elder Culture home worlds, say, or images of the actual Jackaroo, the unseen creatures that controlled the avatars. Lisa had always discounted that kind of truther conspiracy bullshit until now.

Agent Cutler woke her tablet, showed Lisa the image it displayed. It took her a moment to figure out what she was looking at. Everything was charred and ruined, wet ashes and blistered wood and the melted remains of a desk chair.

‘Do you recognise it?’ Nevers said.

‘It looks like a workstation,’ Lisa said, with freezing caution.

‘Is it the workstation where you and Ms Mendoza-Trujillo extracted the code from the tessera?’

‘I can’t say for sure.’

Agent Cutler tapped the tablet; it yielded a new image. A sooty surface shingled with blistered rectangles.

‘Ms Mendoza-Trujillo says that the workstation was decorated with postcards,’ Agent Cutler said. ‘Postcards like these.’

‘Then I suppose this could be where we were working,’ Lisa said reluctantly.

‘Ms Mendoza-Trujillo says that it was,’ Nevers said. ‘And the fire marshals believe that it was the seat of the fire. Where it started. So tell me, Ms Dawes, do you still believe that this so-called narrative code is “basically harmless”?’

Aunty Jael’s plan was elegantly simple: break into the transceiver, force it to send a fault signal, and wait for the traitor to come to check it out. She told Tony that they should wait for three or four days before baiting the trap because the traitor might become suspicious if the transceiver failed immediately after the discovery of the Ghajar eidolon, but he told her that he wanted it done straight away. If they waited too long, Opeyemi might tell the family council about the traitor, and that would be the end of everything. And it was also a matter of pride. Opeyemi’s discovery of the clandestine messages was a humiliating black mark that could be countered only by an audacious act of cunning and bravery.

That was why, after the transceiver had been hacked, Tony chose to wait inside the transformer shed with Junot Johnson and one of Aunty Jael’s hands. He wanted to arrest the traitor himself, saw himself standing in front of the council, explaining how security had been compromised, how he had intervened, and why it meant that the work was vitally important. He would win more time for the wizards; they would find something astonishing; he would get back his ship. It was all good.

He sat on the floor with Junot Johnson in the humming, ozone-scented darkness, sharing a small window that displayed feeds from drones stationed outside the shed, trying not to think about the eidolon in his head. Aunty Jael had scanned his brain activity and confirmed its presence, told him that it had imprinted itself within a small tangle of neurons in his temporal lobe and was at present mostly inactive.

‘My work with the wizards suggests that it is stimulated only by the narrative code,’ she had said. ‘If it is no more than a simple translation device, it is nothing to worry about.’

Which did not mean that he was not worried. Far from it. Like every freebooter, he had heard all kinds of cautionary tales about wild algorithms infecting the unwary and driving them crazy, and now something very like those storied horrors was curled up like a tapeworm in his brain. He wanted to believe Aunty Jael’s reassuring diagnosis, could not help wondering how he would know if he began to think thoughts that were not his own . . .

Hour bled into uneventful hour. Tony fell into a doze, woke from a muddled dream about chasing Cho Wing-James through a host of inhuman statues carved from stromatolites. Junot said quietly, ‘Someone is coming.’

‘Give me the window.’

Tony recognised the stolid silhouette at once: Eli Tanjung. He and Junot stood, pulling up the snorkel hoods of their camo cloaks. They were armed with fat-barrelled guns that fired sticky foam pellets, ready to immobilise the traitor as soon as she touched the transceiver. Aunty Jael’s hand, crouching up in a corner of the ceiling, was backup, and was recording everything. Tony planned to show the video of the arrest to the family council.

The door concertinaed back; Eli Tanjung stepped inside; the lights, usually motion-sensitive but presently controlled by Aunty Jael, came up at half-strength. But the woman didn’t cross to the junction box where the transceiver was located. Instead she hung by the door, nervous and uncertain, saying, ‘Where are you?’

Tony sweated inside his cloak, gripping his gun, willing the woman to step towards the junction box. She called out again, her uneasy gaze sliding past Tony, coming back. He saw her expression change, knew that she’d seen the contours of his cloak. As he brought his gun up, motion exploded from shadows above him and the spidery hand collided with Eli Tanjung. She spun around and fell backwards, and the hand pinned her to the floor with its wiry limbs.

Tony pulled down his hood and stepped forward, aiming the gun at the young woman. ‘Tell me why you are here,’ he said.

Eli Tanjung stared up at him, started to say something, seemed to choke on the words. Then she was arching under the hand, balanced on her heels and the back of her head, pink foam spattering her lips, bubbling at her nostrils. Junot rushed forward, cradled her head with one hand and with the other gripped her jaw and forced it open and stuck his fingers inside, trying to clear her airway. But her face darkened and her eyes rolled back and she shuddered and fell limp.

Junot was straddling her, pumping his laced hands on her chest, when Lancelot Askia walked in.

Eli Tanjung had killed herself with a tailored neurotoxin favoured by the Red Brigade. It suggested that Tony’s guess about the identity of the claim jumpers had been correct, but that counted for nothing when he stood before an extraordinary session of the family council. He was commended for his actions in locating and neutralising the traitor, but his plea that the wizards should be given more time to complete their work and his offer to travel to Dry Salvages and confront Raqle Thornhilde were brushed aside. A majority vote supported Opeyemi’s proposal that the wizards should be transferred to the care of the Commons police as soon as possible

‘My uncle broke his word,’ Tony told Danilo. ‘I did as we agreed. He should have supported me. Instead, he whispered in people’s ears before the meeting, telling them that Eli Tanjung’s duplicity meant that we could not trust any of the wizards, and spreading lies about the dangers of the research. And now everything will be lost. The police will shut down the work and exile the wizards to some remote facility on an otherwise deserted planet. That is what they do with any discovery that threatens the status quo. They lock it away, or they destroy it. And the funny part is this: I helped them. I blew up the stromatolites left behind on the slime planet, to keep them out of the hands of the claim jumpers. Now the police will get rid the rest.’

Tony had drunk too much gin, knew that he was letting all his anger and self-pity show, and didn’t care. He had not told Danilo about the eidolon in his head, had not told Ayo or anyone else, either. He felt wretched and soiled.

When Danilo said that the news feeds were claiming that Tony was a hero, Tony told him that it was the family’s spin. ‘I failed. I failed to take the traitor alive. And I failed the wizards. I had a contract with them, and I have reneged on it. My ship will be taken from me, and sooner or later I’ll be shunted into an off-world marriage . . . And then I will lose you, because I will have to go and live with my husband. That is how my family gets rid of embarrassments like me.’

‘Well, but at least you won’t starve,’ Danilo said. ‘Even if the worst comes to the worst you’ll still have everything most people can only dream of.’

‘I won’t have you.’

Danilo smiled. ‘You’re sentimental because you’re drunk.’

Tony took the singer’s hands in his. ‘I mean it.’

‘You’ll forget me soon enough.’

‘Never. There’s a freighter coming in two weeks. I could have a word with its captain, arrange to stow away on it. Run off to another world.’

‘That isn’t something people like me do.’

‘Of course it is. How do you think your ancestors got here?’

‘And anyway, your family would find us. And what would happen to me then?’

‘I’ll make sure nothing ever happens to you, Danilo. I swear.’

He would buy his lover a café, or a bar. Make sure he was set up for life. It was not much by way of making amends, but it was the least he could do before his family found a way of exiling him. But when he told Danilo about his plans, as they held each other in the dark, the singer said that he didn’t need his help, that he knew how to look after himself. And anyway, why was Tony talking of leaving?

‘I am talking about losing you.’

‘Silly man. I’m right here,’ Danilo said, and put his hand on him, and tenderly squeezed.

‘Yes. Yes, you are.’

But Tony knew they had only a little time left.

Two days later, Ayo invited him to go hunting in the hills with her and her eldest son, Chidike. They hiked up through plantations of pine and larch into the forest of native trees (although they weren’t really native to Skadi, had been introduced ten or a hundred thousand years ago by an Elder Culture known as the Constant Gardeners), where spires clad in leathery black plates soared skywards, sprouting clumps of feathery yellow sporangia at their midpoints, topped with mops of filmy orange and red banners. Chidike walked ahead of his mother and Tony, a crossbow slung over his right shoulder. Ayo was likewise armed, even though this was more of a ramble than a serious hunting trek. Two forest rangers and a pair of house servants followed at a discreet distance.