Palace (28 page)

‘It’s good to be home,’ Hi said. ‘I’ve been running all over the city today.’

‘So Jevon told me when she got home tonight,’ Barra said. ‘I called your office earlier, but you’d already left for Government House.’

‘Yeah. I checked in with her after I talked to Karlo - oh, yeah, I ‘ve got something to discuss with you about that, too. Don’t let me forget. Sorry I’m back so late. At that reception I got buttonholed by a couple of masters from the Media Guild.’

‘About the Pansect crash?’

‘Just that. It was spectacular, huh? I haven’t seen a real report on it yet. Rico here tells me you know something.’

‘It wasn’t just an ordinary crash. It was vandalism or most likely more of the sabotage we’ve been running into.’

Hi swore with a shake of his head.

‘I was afraid of that. What’s the evidence?’

‘A delete and scramble icon shaped like a huge burning candle. It exploded the Map construct for Pansect’s narrow-band transmission by radiating icons that appeared as waves of fire. The worst thing is that it must have an independent power source - somehow. It would discharge a wave of iconic fire, then seem to dim down. A few seconds later, it would draw power from somewhere and explode more constructs.’

Hi swore again, then considered, staring out into space.

‘I need to get right on that,’ he said at last.

‘Hi,’ Barra snapped. ‘You’re too tired and you know it.’

He merely shrugged.

‘If you end up with a stroke,’ Barra went on, ‘who’s going to track this thing down? Don’t tell me that there are plenty of other masters in the guild. Sure there are, but which one of them are you going to trust?’

‘You have a point, Sis. I’m willing to bet that most of the guild is one hundred per cent loyal to their oaths. Most. But who’s the traitor, huh? I just can’t figure out what he’s going to get out of this. Or she. The last time it was extortion - they wanted lots of money, a little revenge, a ride off planet. I just can’t believe that anyone would be that stupid again.’

‘Neither can I,’ she agreed. ‘The money’s not worth the risk of being hanged.’

‘So it’s got to be some bigger goal. But what? What in hell would drive someone to start ripping up the Map? What can they hope to get out of it?’

It was Barra’s turn for the shrug. Rico had heard his mother and uncle chew over the problem a hundred times. They never got any farther than ‘someone in the guild must have gone crazy’.

‘Well,’ Hi said at last. ‘You’re right. I need to get some sleep, and first thing in the morning I’ll read over the report. Who saw the candle-like object?’

Rico felt his stomach clench.

‘I did,’ Barra said. ‘From the Chameleon Gate. So there’s no record of my route in the day’s log.’

‘What were you doing in the Gate? Not that I mind or anything. Just curious.’

Rico had to sit up. It seemed that every muscle in his body was going to spasm unless he moved. When Hi glanced his way, Rico found he couldn’t look at him.

‘Yeah, yeah, I get it.’ Hi sounded amused in a weary sort of way. ‘That’s what’s been eating you all day, isn’t it, Rico? Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn you over to the Discipline Committee.’

Rico felt his face burn worse than the candle had made it burn. He heard Barra laugh, just softly, and managed to look at her.

‘Your uncle’s sharp,’ she said. ‘That’s why he’s the head of the guild, and I’m just a lowly repair tech.’

‘Lowly?’ Hi snorted profoundly.

Rico gulped once for air, then steadied himself.

‘Well, this is better, anyway,’ Rico said. ‘This way I can tell you everything I saw. If it saves the Map I don’t much care what you do to me.’

‘Yeah? Okay. Let me rephrase that question. Rico, what were
you
doing in the Gate?

Joyriding?’

‘Not exactly.’ With all his will Rico forced himself to look at Hi. ‘I wanted to see if Arno had left me a message in this drop we had. But I didn’t want to leave a route record.’

‘So you thought you’d try the Gate. Figures.’ Hi sighed, briefly sad. ‘You heard Arno talk about it, I’ll bet. But then you saw this candle?’

‘Yes, Se, and I saw it blow up the Pansect construct. I had to tell someone, I mean that thing could kill somebody, maybe, and so I told Mom. And she said -’

‘She’d lie for you,’ Hi broke in. ‘What do you think is going to happen to you?’

‘Well, you’ll probably kick me out of the guild.’

‘I probably should, yeah, but I’m not going to. You know why?’

‘No, Se.’

‘Because I can trust you, that’s why. Remember what your mom and I were just talking about? Rico, something really big’s going I’m with the guild. One of us, maybe more, is destroying everything the guild stands for. One of us is trying to crash the Map. Do you realize what it would mean if they succeed?’

Rico tried to agree but found he couldn’t speak. The room had suddenly turned enormous and very, very silent. Hi and Barra looked at him, then at each other, then back to him.

‘Disaster, of course,’ Barra answered for him. ‘Palace has the best Map in the Pinch - the most complete, the most heavily used. It survived the neutrino wave when a lot of other systems went down. We lost some of it in the Schism Wars, but not as much as other planets lost of theirs.’

‘We have a lot of AIs left, is what it boils down to,’ Hi said. ‘There’s Dee over on Nox. His scientific functions are in pretty good shape, and I doubt if he was ever configured for more than the research he’s doing, anyway. Then there’s Nimue, and I still have hopes your mom can bring her back online. There’s what’s left of Caliostro. And then Magnus, out in the swamps. He’s another limited AI, of course, but what’s left of him functions well. Damn good thing, when you think of how important those pumps are.’

‘Compared to the other settled worlds,’ Barra put in, ‘we’re rich. If the Palace Map goes down beyond repair, the whole Pinch will feel it.’

‘Feel it?’ Hi said. ‘Hell, the whole Pinch will crash with it.’ The pool of lamplight seemed to have shrunk around them. When Rico looked away, he felt himself shiver.

When the alarm clock implant in the back of Hi’s skull went off, it did nothing so crude as stimulate his neurons to ‘hear’ a noise. Rather, it induced neo-serotonin to flood the receptors in his cortex, so that he was not only awake, but wide awake and alert. He sat up in bed and listened for a brief moment to the dark silence of the compound. The house’s autonomic functions - heat, humidity control, fungicide release, lights, fresh air intake - all transmitted information to another neural chip, this one in his cyberarm, so that he, the oldest member on planet of the Jons family, the master of this house in the most literal way possible, really could seem to hear it breathing around him.

On the wall just above his nightstand a comm screen blinked red with urgent code. His clock had picked up the transmission.

‘On,’ he said aloud.

The code cleared off to reveal Aleen. Her emerald hair hung in tangled curls round her face, utterly free of cosmetics. The flash of fear and the ripple of adrenaline that Hi felt had nothing to do with neural chips.

‘What is it?’ Hi said.

‘Bad news.’ Her voice sounded oddly tentative. ‘Hi, I just got a call from my tame Protector. The one who released,’ a long pause ‘your son to me.’

‘Yeah?’ Hi knew, then, but he could pretend for a few more seconds that he didn’t.

‘Hi, they found Arno’s body about an hour ago. Not far from the Spaceport gates. He’d been, well, murdered.’

There it was, the truth. No use pretending now.

‘I take it he’d left The Close?’

‘Yes. I tried to talk him into staying a couple more days. He wouldn’t.’

‘He just couldn’t wait any longer, huh?’ Hi got out of bed and stood looking at the blank wall rather than the screen. ‘Well. Shit.’

‘Hi, I can see you shaking. There’s nothing wrong with crying.’ He turned dry eyes her way.

‘Where’s his body? I’ll get dressed and go right down.’

Aleen sighed. On the screen her face seemed a little grey, more than a little exhausted.

‘In the morgue at the Security Admin building. The one in Centre Sect.’

‘Ah. Okay. I’ll wake up Nju, then.’

‘Yeah, don’t go alone. Hi, uh, well, the Protector said it was pretty bad.’

Hi tried to speak and failed.

‘I’ll be in all day,’ Aleen went on. ‘If you want to drop by.’

‘I can’t think of anything I want more. Trouble is, I can’t do it. Today’s my nephew’s investiture, and we’ve got a real problem on the Map. And now I’ve got to make, well, arrangements.’

‘Oh. But Hi, I worry about you.’

It was an admission that would have pleased him at any other time. As it was, he stared at the wall and tried to think of nothing. When he looked back at the screen, Aleen had hung up. He put a call through to Nju, then dressed and wiped his face down with depilatory. He let himself think of nothing but the Map, of the Candle on the Map, made himself rehearse every detail that Rico had told him the night before. The recital lasted him through the trip up to the landing pad on the roof. In the chilly silver light that did Palace for dawn, Nju was standing beside the aircar. With him, carrying her black sling-sack of scribing tablets and comm units, stood Jevon, dressed in a pale grey suit that matched her narrow grey eyes. Her long black hair hung perfectly, set in its tringlets and braids, studded here and there with a glass bead.

‘What are you doing up?’ Hi said to her.

‘Nju woke me.’ Her voice was soft, controlled. ‘He said we had an emergency on our hands.’

From the waist Nju bowed to Hi.

‘How could I deny her rightful place at your side?’

Jevon glanced back and forth between them with eyes that revealed nothing.

‘Yeah, well, hell, I’m glad you’re both here.’ Hi paused and looked off at the brightening horizon, where he could see the lights of Tech Sect dimming down and winking out. ‘We’re going to Centre, Nju. Security Admin building.’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘The morgue. Arno’s dead. Someone killed him last night.’

Nju hissed, open-mouthed and feral, then threw back his head and wailed. Jevon never moved nor spoke, but tears welled in her eyes and ran.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Hi said. ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’

‘There will be forms and affidavits and things like that.’ Her voice had gone very small, like a child’s. ‘Nju’s right. It’s my job.’

Yet once they’d reached the morgue, once they were walking down an echoing grey corridor on their way to identify the corpse, Hi regretted bringing his factor along. She walked in small steps, clutching her sling-sack in her arms, and looked only at the floor, counting tiles, he supposed, to keep from thinking. With them walked a chatty Protector in a brown office uniform, talking away while Nju glared at his back as if he were thinking of silencing the man with a knife.

‘Brought him in at the ringing of the fours, Se Jons. Too bad, isn’t it, I’m real sorry, but well, you must have said goodbye to your son a long time ago, huh? When he took to the drugs, a real tragedy, but anyway they found him in an alley behind the parking structure at the Port. He’d been dumped there, not killed there, yeah, we’re sure of that. Well, here we are, and maybe the lady would like to wait outside?’

They stopped before a pale green glass door, lettered with official glyphs and a sign, ‘No Admittance Unaccompanied by an Officer’.

‘I’ll go in,’ Jevon said, but her voice was almost too soft to hear.

‘No,’ Hi said. ‘Leave it to me and Nju. Officer? Is there a chair?’

‘I’ll stay out here with her. The coroner’s waiting for you inside, Se Jons.’

The coroner, a tall woman with wound braids of grey hair, stood at a counter at the near end of an echoing white gymnasium of a room, cold enough to make Hi shiver and Nju’s fur rise and fluff. She herself wore a white lab coat over a bulky sweater, bright red and sticking out at the sleeves and neck.

‘Se Jons?’ she said. ‘Well, first of all, let me offer my sympathy. Identifying the body is always hard on the family. But this time -well, prepare yourself. I think it must be some kind of drug-related killing. That’s the only thing that’ll explain it, gang rivalry, maybe, and they wanted to make an object lesson out of him. I’m very sorry.’

Hi and Nju followed her down the long room to a wall covered with drawers, a huge cabinet with each ID plate flickering with red readout. The coroner opened a drawer at about waist-height and pulled it out with the waft and reek of heavy chemicals. A long white cloth covered something roughly man-shaped. The coroner glanced at Hi and picked up a corner of the cloth.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yeah, Se. Go ahead.’

With a twitch of a practised hand the coroner flicked back just enough of the cloth to reveal a head, a face, Arno’s face, but gone all pale and bluish - a mouth, twisted in frozen agony; a long thin slash down each cheek, crusted with black blood; and the eyes. Hi nearly gagged. The killer had pulled out his implants, then gouged out his flesh eye, leaving sockets filled only with blood, dry now and congealed. He was alive when they did that to him, Hi thought, and with the thought, he noticed one thing more and felt as if he’d turned as cold as the corpse. Arno’s head was not attached to the body underneath the cloth.

‘That’s my son, all right,’ he growled. ‘What did they do to him?’

‘You don’t need to see more, Se Jons.’

‘What else did they do to him?’

‘His whole body’s been cut. Slashed like those cuts on his face. He bled to death, actually.’

Hi could only stare at the thing on the slab and wonder just how long it had taken Arno to die. Had the killer, had Vi-Kata, made one cut at a time and taunted him, before he made the next? The coroner flipped the cloth back and released him.

‘Just unofficially,’ she said, ‘those cuts look like Lep work. The retractile claws, you know. They tell me your son was a drug addict. A couple of the biggest dealers in Pleasure Sect are Leps. But this has to stay off the record - I’m just speculating.’

Nju began to chant under his breath, a few words repeated over and over. Hi could guess what they meant: vengeance. The coroner touched Hi’s arm and made him look away.