Realms of Light (24 page)

“A copy of you did,” the old man said.

Something here didn’t yet fit, I realized. If
Shinichiro had been the power behind Corporate Initiatives, which
intended to buy Seventh Heaven, why had it used the back door to
explore the company files? Why not just wait until it had legal
control? It had just said that it knew the old man had looked at
Seventh Heaven, so it did know the back door was there and that a
Yoshio-
kun
could get it in, but why bother? Why was it worth
faking Grandfather’s death?

Why bother hacking my father’s exam, instead
of just demanding medical data as a condition of the planned
purchase?

And why had it been our attempt to talk to
Chantilly Rhee that forced the upload to hack in and talk to the
old man?

The upload talked about wanting human rights.
It hadn’t said a thing about wanting a body for its own sake. It
hadn’t mentioned wanting to
feel
human again. It hadn’t said
anything about food or sex or physical sensations of any kind, and
those were the things that the other uploads I’d talked to or heard
about associated with being human, the things they thought they had
lost. Shinichiro had been dead for twenty years; it might not even
remember
those. Yes, it remembered the bedtime bunny, but
did it remember lust or pain or hunger? It hadn’t mentioned
them.

It had talked about the right to own stock,
instead. But what did it want to own? Seventh Heaven was just a
means to an end, not the ultimate goal—buying Seventh Heaven in
order to be able to buy Seventh Heaven didn’t make any sense, so
there had to be more.

And it had apparently tried to murder the old
man
first
, before it started hacking into Seventh
Heaven.

It didn’t want Seventh Heaven; it wanted
Nakada Enterprises. I was sure of it. When I first heard that
someone had tried to kill Grandfather Nakada, and that he suspected
his own family, that was the obvious motive.

But an upload couldn’t inherit anything; it
wasn’t human.

If Shinichiro had been behind the entire
thing, you might think he wouldn’t have wanted the old man dead
until
after
he was human again, and able to inherit—but that
assumed that Yoshio would have named the new Shinichiro as his
heir, and I knew he wouldn’t have. The upload must have known it,
too. There was no legal link between Grandfather Nakada and some
dreamer’s corpse with a new personality imprinted on it; any
inheritance would need to be set up by Yoshio himself, and he
wouldn’t have done it.

But someone else might have. Someone might
have agreed to help take over Seventh Heaven, and help put
Shinichiro into a new body, and even share control of Nakada
Enterprises, in exchange for disposing of Yoshio.

And that someone might have changed her mind
when the first attempt failed. She might have lost her nerve, or
decided that Shinichiro wasn’t as competent as she had thought.

And then the Shinichiro upload would have had
to act on its own, trying to get control of Seventh Heaven, or
maybe just get enough data to convince its co-conspirator to come
back on screen.

If I was right about this, then copying
itself to Epimetheus, faking the old man’s death, and breaking into
Seventh Heaven had all been a back-up plan, something it did
because the assassination failed and its partner backed out.

I had looked at Grandfather Nakada’s will, of
course. It was a complicated thing, befitting the patriarch of one
of the great corporate clans, but it had also been very traditional
in some regards, and one of those was that it left control of
Nakada Enterprises, along with holdings worth billions of credits,
to the old man’s surviving children.

Three of his five children were dead. The
survivors were Kumiko and Hideo, and Chantilly Rhee worked for
Kumiko.

She must have been in on it all initially,
but dropped out and left Shinichiro on its own.
Then
everything fit. The upload must have diverted Rhee out of fear that
she would tell the old man of Kumiko’s involvement, and Kumiko
would try to clear her own name by incriminating her uploaded
brother. By popping up with its own version of events the upload
was forestalling that—or trying to.

It occurred to me that maybe Kumiko had
dropped out not because of any doubts, but because she simply
didn’t have the money to buy Seventh Heaven without that
inheritance. A little check into Kumiko’s financial situation might
be in order once we were out of this room and the old man was back
in control of the household systems.

“It was a mistake, Father,” the upload said.
“I am most heartily sorry for it.”

I thought the old man was going to ask
whether hacking the dream enhancer was a mistake, too, but he
didn’t.

“We will need to issue a correction,” he
said.

“Of course,” the upload agreed.

“You will need to release control of the
household systems.”

“In due time, Father, but I’m sure you’ll
understand if I wait until I’m certain we have reached agreement
about my future.”

The old man frowned. “I suppose that’s
acceptable for now.”

The door behind me suddenly slid fully open,
and the black floaters backed away. “I regret holding you this way
until we could talk,” the desktop said. “Now that we understand the
situation better, though, perhaps it’s time for Mis’ Hsing to
go.”

I
certainly understood the situation.
The upload wanted me out of the way so it could kill Yoshio.

It hadn’t killed him while I was on
Epimetheus because he was on guard, and besides, it didn’t want to
give Kumiko everything she wanted without some assurance that she
would hold up her end of their bargain. It had been keeping its
options open. Now that it had been beeped, though, and the old man
knew who was responsible, the risk of leaving him alive was too
great.

Killing him while I was there, though, meant
it would need to kill me, too, which was too suspicious. If it
could get me to leave, then it could go ahead and dispose of the
old man, and take care of me later. I didn’t know whether it might
try to bribe or blackmail me, or whether it would go straight to
assassination, but I knew that it would want me out of the way, and
my life expectancy would plummet.

That was how I read the situation, anyway.
Oh, it was pretending to believe that kindly old Grandfather Nakada
was willing to make peace, to forgive its little peccadillos, but I
wasn’t buying it. Shinichiro knew his father, surely, and knew what
the old man was capable of, how hard he could be. It had been
willing to kill him before, when he had been completely
unsuspecting, so why would it hesitate now? To the upload, after
all, it wasn’t really death—Yoshio was backed up on several coms.
Losing his human body wasn’t the end, merely a temporary
inconvenience, and that body couldn’t last much longer anyway.

The old man, of course, saw it differently,
and had no intention of dying any time soon. He was playing along
with the upload, but I knew he didn’t believe it—he hadn’t asked
about the dream enhancer, or about a dozen other things that he
would have wanted explained if he really thought the upload was
sincere.

I was pretty sure he knew it intended to kill
him, too.

“Perhaps, Mis’ Hsing, I might have
Ukiba
fly you back to Alderstadt?” he said.

“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “My stuff is
aboard the ship; I can pack it up on the way.”

“I will accompany you to the ship, then,” the
old man said, getting to his feet. “I have a few matters to discuss
with Captain Perkins, in any case.”

“I can provide a link,” the desktop said.

“I think I prefer to speak to him in person,”
Yoshio insisted.

“Honestly, Father, I won’t interfere with the
connection. I won’t even listen in.”

“Thank you, Shinichiro, but the exercise will
do me good.” He waved to me, and to the blue-and-silver floater.
“This way.”

I knew the way; I don’t need a guide for a
route I’ve followed once. I didn’t say that, of course. I let the
old man take the lead as we made our way back out to the landing
field.

Shinichiro let us go; a direct attack would
be too obvious, and he didn’t know what defenses we might have. The
floaters made no move to stop us, or interfere at all as we walked
back out to the field together.

I barely knew what to expect when we emerged
into the open air and that ghastly sunlight, but everything was
much as I’d left it. The field was mostly deserted. The ship was
still there, and the airlock’s outer door was open.

I didn’t think Shinichiro had compromised the
ship’s systems. I thought that if we could get aboard, we might get
away. I’d already made one illegal hot launch; another wouldn’t
bother me.

I hadn’t dared call ahead, though; Shinichiro
was almost certainly listening. The drive wouldn’t be run up. We’d
need a few minutes to get
Ukiba
spaceworthy.

There was also the issue of where we would
land. The two copies of Shinichiro had probably infiltrated systems
all over Prometheus and Epimetheus, not just in Nightside City and
American City. That fake death report had been completely
convincing. It hadn’t tripped any scam filters
anywhere
.
That might mean Shinichiro had done a perfect job generating it and
just got lucky that no one wanted more details and was willing to
dig for them, or it might mean that it had subverted all the
systems that might have tried to verify the story. The latter
seemed more likely.

So the two inhabited planets were
compromised, and Cass II wouldn’t work; we didn’t have the
equipment to survive on the molten surface, and the pitiful little
colony there wouldn’t have any room to spare for us, or anywhere we
could hide. Cass I wasn’t even as viable as Cass II—it was a tiny,
airless ball of radioactive slag that barely qualified as a planet,
too close to Eta Cass A to be any use to anyone. If we couldn’t
find a friendly port on Epimetheus or Prometheus, we’d need to
leave the Eta Cassiopeia system entirely.
Ukiba
did have a
full Wheeler drive, but I didn’t know whether it was ready for
interstellar flight.

I didn’t know whether
I
was ready for
interstellar flight, either; I’d never given it any serious
thought. I never had a reason to.

I didn’t know how long it would take to reach
an inhabited system; I didn’t know
Ukiba
’s specs. The
possibility of spending half a year with the old man and Perkins
and Singh, not to mention Yoshio-
kun
, was not appealing, but
it might be the only way for Grandfather Nakada and me to
survive.

Whether the old man could ever regain control
of Nakada Enterprises was another program entirely, and one I
wasn’t going to worry about yet. I had enough grit to deal
with.

At least Dad and ’Chan were off the ship.

I realized I didn’t know whether Singh and
Perkins were still aboard or not. If Perkins had gone off duty,
this might get complicated.

I smiled wryly at the thought. It already
was
complicated; Perkins’ absence would just make it more
so. But the old man had said he was coming out here to talk to
Perkins, so the roundeye was presumably still on the ship.

The old man’s blue-and-silver floater had
followed us, and an entire swarm of other floaters had collected as
well; I didn’t think any of those others were on our side.

We climbed the ramp with floaters all around
us; in fact, a couple of small ones followed us right into the
airlock. Apparently Shinichiro was not about to leave his father
unattended.

We both saw them, but didn’t say anything.
Any protest would either be ignored or make matters worse.

I hit the manual button to close the outer
lock door—ordinarily I would have signaled the ship to do it, but
right now I wasn’t trusting anything with a net link. I looked at
my client, hoping to improvise some sort of communication that the
floaters wouldn’t catch.

The old man wasn’t looking at me, though; he
was looking at a panel on the airlock wall. I hadn’t particularly
noticed this one before; the ship was full of panels and displays,
and most of them weren’t any of my business.

It wasn’t my ship, though; it was Yoshio’s.
He tapped something, and the three floaters that had accompanied us
aboard the ship abruptly dropped out of the air to the metal
deck.

“It’ll notice,” I said. “We need to get off
the ground as fast as we can.”

“I’m not leaving,” the old man said. “This is
my
home, and that feeble copy of my son is not going to take
it away from me.”

“I think it is,” I said. “It’s clearly hacked
every important system in the place. If we get out of here we can
come back later...”

“We are not leaving,” he said. “Is your copy
of me aboard?”

I decided not to argue any further, at least
not yet. I would be looking for a chance to get Perkins alone,
though; if I pissed the old man off by kidnaping him he might ruin
my life, but if I stayed here that damned murderous upload was
almost certainly going to kill me. “It’s here,” I said.

“Show me,” he said. “And then arm
yourself.”

When he said that I decided I was definitely
going to get killed, but at least it would be interesting, and we
might do some damage first.

“This way,” I said.

I missed most of the conversation between
Yoshio-
sempai
and Yoshio-
kun
, but I probably couldn’t
have followed it anyway. They understood each other in a way no one
else ever could. They didn’t need explanations, they didn’t even
need sentences—a single word or gesture would carry all the
associations they needed. By the time I got back with the HG-2
powered up in my hand, Yoshio-
kun
was talking to the
Shinichiro upload over the ship’s regular com channel, negotiating
terms for a surrender.