Into Everywhere (27 page)

The spires that stood in the centre of the vast desert of Dry Salvages’s southern continent were the largest known, surrounded by the detritus of Elder Cultures that had come to study, worship or rewrite their texts. This, and the small wilderness of mirrors that orbited Dry Salvages’s star and gave access to a mostly unexplored portion of the wormhole network, had attracted freebooters, tomb raiders, scholars, wizards, pirates and hopeful dreamers from every part of the Commons and the fringe worlds. Artefacts and clandestine goods were traded in Freedonia’s libertarian economy; brokers bought and sold information about new worlds and unexplored Elder Culture ruins. This was where Raqle Thornhilde had forged a contract with Tony and a crew of wizards, sending them out to track down the rumour of ancient stromatolites left by the Old Old Ones on a remote slime planet. And now he had returned to confront the wily old broker, to ask her who had told her about the slime planet, and to find out what she knew about the Red Brigade, Aunty Jael, and Ada Morange.

The freeway switchbacked through a steep fell field of tumbled rocks to the top of the mesa and the entrance of the great cavern that, carved into one of the spires, housed the city of Freedonia and sheltered it from the extremes of temperature during the long days and nights. The city’s low-rise grid spread across the cavern’s flat floor. One- and two-storey flat-roofed buildings, open-air shopping malls and food markets, a golf course with swards of artificial grass. Bubble cars and trikes and shoals of cyclists swarming along wide boulevards under illuminated hoardings advertising perfume and clothes, drink and drugs. All this encompassed by black walls, scaffolded at their bases with the platforms where scholars and tourists inspected the spire-builder carvings, that curved up to the dome of the cavern’s roof and its fixed constellations of chandelier blimps and fierce stars of piped sunlight. It was like inhabiting the belly of a giant ship.

Tony spent most of his first day in the city recruiting a pair of bodyguards, a taciturn father-and-son team, renting two adjoining rooms in a motel they recommended, and hiring a little runabout. He dearly missed Junot Johnson, and his unflustered ability to sort out mundane matters. The next day he began the rounds of the bars, tearooms and cafés where freebooters and traders hung out. The routine was much the same in every place he visited. With one of the bodyguards stationed outside and the other keeping watch inside he would nurse a glass of tea or cup of coffee and fall into idle conversation with the other customers, working around to the prize that had been hijacked by the Red Brigade. They had murdered a bunch of wizards, he said, not needing to fake his outrage, and stolen valuable stromatolites recovered from a slime planet. Right now he was trying recoup his losses by selling some algorithms, unusual Ghajar stuff, that had been ripped from those stromatolites. Anyone who was interested in that kind of thing should come and see him.

He did not want to approach Raqle Thornhilde directly. It would imply weakness on his part. An admission that, despite the raid on his family’s home and the hit to their reputation, it was their fault that they had defaulted on the contract. And besides, although he would have loved to storm her home and put her directly to the question, the broker had powerful connections in the city and was protected by layers of robust security.

The first time Tony had met her, he had been summoned to her house, a rambling sugar-white confection in the exclusive district at the inner end of Freedonia, and had been subjected to intrusive security scans and an actual body search before being escorted by two burly men, alike as identical twins, to a tiled inner courtyard where water pulsed in a little fountain and birds chirped in gilded cages set amongst hanging ferns. He had sat there for more than half an hour before Raqle Thornhilde finally appeared, accompanied by a weircat and two men identical to Tony’s escorts: the same burly build, the same scowl, the same beady gaze under a thick monobrow, the same cropped black hair. They were rumoured to be clones of Raqle Thornhilde’s dead son. Why not? Many things forbidden elsewhere were legal in Freedonia.

The broker gave no excuse or explanation for the delay, which was clearly meant to underscore the point that this meeting was entirely on her terms. One of her escorts helped her lower herself onto a day bed; the other poured tea into silver-rimmed glasses while she studied Tony with a direct gaze that seemed to X-ray his soul.

‘You’ll like this,’ she told Tony, as she took one of the glasses. ‘A single-estate blend I import from Wellington for my own use.’

Her peremptory manner was not so much arrogance as indifference to any opinion that contradicted her tastes and decisions. Her bulk was draped in a scarlet and gold kaftan; her jowly face was powdered white, lips painted red. The weircat sprawled at her feet, long legs folded under its wasp-waisted body, its tiny head aimed at Tony, its red eyes glittering. When its mouth dilated in a kind of yawn, it displayed a rim of crooked black thorns.

After a brief exchange of pleasantries the broker explained that she had a lead on a pre-empire survey report about ancient stromatolites, was looking for someone who could take a crew of wizards to check it out, and believed that he was the person for the job.

‘To be frank, I didn’t invite you here because I was impressed by your experience, or your ship. It’s because your family owns a laminated brain that could be of great help if the wizards actually find some algorithms. Are you still interested?’

Tony, scenting the possibility of a big score, admitted that he might be. Raqle Thornhilde introduced him to Fred Firat, the leader of the crew of wizards she had already recruited; over a dinner of imported oysters and roast beef, the wizard expounded on the expertise of his crew and the potential importance of the find with a fiery passion that was only slightly less impressive when he repeated the performance for the benefit of Ayo and Aunty Jael over a q-phone link. Aunty Jael confirmed that the report was very promising and Ayo shared Tony’s enthusiasm, but there was a nerve-racking wait while she sought the approval of the family council. She called Tony early the next morning, told him that she had won the vote at the council meeting and the deal with Raqle Thornhilde and Fred Firat was on. Standing on the balcony of his motel room, still drunk from the night before, the guy he’d picked up in a bar snoring on the bed, Tony had believed that he had passed some kind of audition. That he had finally proven his worth to his family and was about to embark on the first of many fabulous adventures. He had been so stupidly happy.

He knew now that the adventure on the slime planet had been part of Aunty Jael’s escape plan, and he wanted to discover if Raqle Thornhilde had been a willing collaborator. If she was, she might know where Aunty Jael, aka Ada Morange, and the Red Brigade had gone, and how to contact them. If she wasn’t, she might help him track down the people who had cheated her out of her share of the find.

Innocent or guilty, she would know why he had returned to Freedonia, and suspect that his talk about selling Ghajar algorithms was bait for some kind of trap. But he was certain that she would not be able to resist checking it out. If she was innocent, she’d arrange a meeting and bluster at first, accuse him of cheating her and dodging his contractual obligations, but once they got past that Tony believed that she would be willing to negotiate. But if she had been collaborating with the Red Brigade and Aunty Jael, she would come at him some other way, and he would have to hope that the two bodyguards could protect him. And while she was checking him out and planning her move, he could try to find out if anyone knew why the Red Brigade wanted those stromatolites, and the copies of the Ghajar eidolon.

Mostly, he heard only the same old rumours. The Red Brigade had found the frozen body of Emperor Truman Johnson, and had laminated his brain. Their philosopher queen, Mina Saba, had cloned herself and the clones were riding a hundred ships in a hundred different directions, looking for the Jackaroo’s home world. Or she’d already found that world, and ancient secrets she’d uncovered there had enabled her to transcend the limits of the human mind. And there were the usual stories about agents from the Red Brigade spreading sleepy sickness, contaminating water supplies with alien drugs or genetically engineered gut bacteria, launching cube sats that broadcast mind rays . . . The same old same old.

He did hear one interesting tidbit in a small café with people playing backgammon at a couple of tables, under the husks of big silvery bugs hung from a mirrored ceiling. It seemed that a few weeks ago the Red Brigade had raided a police outpost at a small, recently discovered sargasso of Ghajar ships. According to the freebooter who told Tony the story, it contained a number of mad ships, and the police had been making arrangements to transport them to one of the collection sites in the Commons. The sole survivor of the raid claimed to have been interrogated by Mina Saba herself, said that the Red Brigade had made off with a mad ship caged in an automated U-class hauler.

Tony thought of his brother, commanding a similar lonely outpost; thought of Ada Morange’s interest in mad ships. He asked if anyone knew what the Red Brigade wanted with their prize.

‘Nothing good, you can be sure of that,’ the freebooter, a shrewd sensible grey-haired woman, said. ‘The Commons police have been rounding up mad ships ever since that terrorist gang, the ones claiming to be the true heirs of the Second Empire, tried to use one to drive an entire city crazy. I was there, one time. On Takama-ga-hara? You can still see the impact crater. Maybe you know the official story: how the mad ship parasitised the multiple-frequency bands the terrorists were using to fly it in by remote control, punched through their firewalls and drove every person and AI on board their ship insane. How it was brought down by a hero pilot who flew her raptor into the hauler carrying it before it could escape. Well, someone in Takama-ga-hara’s traffic control told me that pilot flew into the hauler, all right, but she didn’t do much damage. What really happened was that the mad ship crashed itself. It reached out to the terrorists and killed them, and then it committed suicide.’

Abass had once told Tony that story. He’d also said that the police team which had located and boarded the terrorists’ ship afterwards had discovered a charnel house: its crew had killed each other with their teeth and bare hands.

‘You have to wonder, if it really did commit suicide, why it did it,’ the freebooter said. ‘Maybe mad ships have some kind of ethical code, and it killed itself because it had been misused, and death was a way of making that good. Or maybe it’s just that mad ships are crazy. What’s your interest, kid?’

‘Some wizards I know got themselves involved with the Red Brigade.’

‘You probably don’t want my advice, being young and immortal and all, but here it is anyway. You should fly on by. Wizards are clever, but they lack caution and common sense. They have moths, where you come from?’

Tony shook his head.

‘They’re from Earth. Winged bugs, a lot smaller and much prettier than those monsters,’ the freebooter said, indicating the silvery husks overhead. ‘They mostly fly at night, navigating by the light of the moon. Earth’s moon, that is. Nothing else like her in all the known worlds. Nothing so big or so bright. I don’t miss most things about Earth, but I miss that big old moon. But we were talking about moths. The point is, any light at night, they’re attracted to it. They’ll circle a candle until they burn up in the flame. Wizards are like that. And they’ll take you with them. If you don’t want to get burned, you should fly your own course, not theirs.’

‘I hear that,’ Tony said, thinking of Cho Wing-James and the others lying dead in the stinking aquarium water.
I only want your head.

The freebooter said that she’d got the story about the stolen mad ship from a trader who had a contact in the military division that supplied stations that controlled sargassos. So maybe there was a grain of truth in it, just enough to make Tony a little paranoid, to make him wonder why Colonel X hadn’t told him about it, and what other information the colonel might have withheld.

The bridle had at first been blithely optimistic about their quest; now she began to echo Tony’s unease.

‘You should trust your instincts,’ she said.

And: ‘When you feel it’s time to cut and run I’ll be ready.’

And: ‘Whatever you choose to do, I’ll always be there for you.’

Using her newly acquired abilities, she had delved into the records of Dry Salvages’s traffic control, but the only G-class frigate to have visited the planet in the past year had been owned by the Commons police, and the three K-class freighters which had recently touched down had all had been registered to governments or legitimate companies, and none were in port right now. So if the Red Brigade had paid a visit to Raqle Thornhilde, they hadn’t travelled to Dry Salvages on the frigate which had jumped the claim on the slime planet, and they hadn’t used the hijacked freighter to deliver the stromatolites and Aunty Jael to the broker directly after the raid. The bridle had also checked the records of Raqle Thornhilde’s previous contracts and trades, but could find no evidence that she had any involvement with the Red Brigade or their known proxies, or any previous interest in stromatolites, the Old Old Ones, Ghajar narrative code, or mad ships.

Tony paid a bribe to a minor official in the city’s police who claimed that she would be able to dig up some dirt on Raqle Thornhilde, check for clandestine deals that didn’t appear in the records, so forth. But every time he contacted the woman she said that she needed to do a little more work. It looked like the only way he could find out if Raqle Thornhilde was in league with the Red Brigade would be to ask her directly, after she came to him.

She seemed to be in no hurry to do that. Five days passed, six, and there was no sign that she was checking out Tony or probing his ship. He nursed his dwindling funds – his bodyguards’ per diem was substantial. He worried that Colonel X hadn’t sent him to Freedonia as an independent investigator but to bait some kind of trap. He worried about the eidolon that had infiltrated
Abalunam’s Pride
’s systems, the conversation it was having with the actual ship that the bridle still couldn’t understand.