Realms of Light (9 page)

I tapped for a cab before I was even out the
door of the Ginza, and one was waiting for me, door open, when I
reached the street. I gave my cop escort a friendly wave, then
climbed into the cab and told it, “Juarez.”

The old neighborhood had dropped a few bits
since I left, and it was easy to see why—sunlight was glinting from
the upper floors of the taller buildings, which just looked
wrong
. The streets were mostly empty. I guessed some people
had already managed to get off-planet somehow, but that most were
crowding over to Eastside, deeper into the shadow of the crater
wall.

The door of my old building let me in, no
questions asked—as I suspected, the landlord hadn’t bothered to
wipe my access. After all, I’d left Epimetheus, and why in the
galaxy would I ever come back? No reason to worry about me.

But here I was, all the same. I went up the
one flight to my office.

It was just as I’d last seen it. I walked in
and sat down at my desk, and it was as if I’d never left.

Except I
had
left. I’d wiped most of
my files before I left, so I knew I couldn’t just plug back in and
ride the wire. I’d brought copies of my office software, but I
didn’t have any of the local updates, and I hadn’t kept all the
data I’d had when I lived here. I hadn’t thought I would ever need
it. I could get on the nets, I could function, but I wouldn’t have
everything I used to have.

On the other hand, I had stuff now I’d never
had before. I had some access codes Grandfather Nakada gave me. I
had information about how Nakada Enterprises was set up here. And I
had a spaceship waiting for me at the port.

I booted up my desk, fed in the software I’d
brought with me, and ran a few checks. When I was satisfied, I
jacked in and started to dig.

’Chan had been right. The stories about how
old Yoshio Nakada had died in his sleep, reportedly on the same
night he was actually attacked, were all over the nets, and there
were rumors that it hadn’t been a natural death. People didn’t
believe that his symbiotes would have let him die without setting
off a dozen alarms.

They didn’t know what I knew, that he gave
the dream enhancer partial override authority that got it past his
defenses. Hell, they didn’t know a dream enhancer had anything to
do with it; they just didn’t believe he could die of natural causes
without warning.

And of course, I knew something else no one
on Epimetheus knew. I knew that old Nakada was still alive and
well.

At least, he had been when I left Prometheus,
and if he’d died since then it would be an even bigger story on the
nets. Dying twice isn’t exactly an everyday event even for the
spectacularly rich.

So why did everyone in Nightside City think
he was dead?

Because they had been told that he was. A
report of his death had been received from American City, back on
Prometheus, and it had been verified.

But who had sent that report? Who had
verified it? How was it done?

Most importantly,
why
was it done? Why
did someone want everyone on Epimetheus to think that Nakada was
dead? Who did it benefit, and in what way? The Nakada family
holdings in Nightside City weren’t that extensive. They did own the
New York—the New York Townhouse Hotel and Gambling Hall—which was a
mid-range casino in the Trap, catering to both tourists from
off-planet and miners from elsewhere on the dark side of
Epimetheus.

But that was most of their property here.
They owned some unremarkable real estate, and a few small
businesses, but nothing else major.

The New York was managed by a man named Vijay
Vo. He had been with the Nakadas forever, and had run the New York
since it first opened. He ran it well. There wasn’t a hint that he
might be involved in a plot to murder his employer; the rumors all
seemed to take it for granted that the killers, whoever they were,
were all on Prometheus. No one had suggested any local ties—but
they didn’t know Grandfather Nakada was only dead on Epimetheus. I
did.

Was Vo a candidate for my assassin?

I didn’t see it. He had been loyal for my
entire life and more, he was coming up on an honorable retirement
soon, the New York was presumably going to shut down at sunrise—why
would Vo suddenly turn on Yoshio?

And how would he benefit from the old man’s
death? He already had a free hand in running the New York, all the
more so since Sayuri Nakada got shipped back to Prometheus.

That brought up a possibility—when Sayuri got
sent home, who replaced her as the family’s representative on
Epimetheus? I didn’t know, but I thought it would be easy to find
out.

It wasn’t quite as simple as I thought. There
hadn’t been any official announcements. I had to poke around a
little.

Officially, no one had. Which did make sense.
Sayuri had been sent to Nightside City in the first place largely
to keep her out of the way after she’d made a mess of things back
on Prometheus, and she had been given control of everything the
Nakadas did here
except
the New York, since that was the
only thing that really mattered. The position she had held had been
created for her; it wasn’t really necessary. Vijay Vo wasn’t a
Nakada, but he was still capable of running everything here
himself.

There had been a few visits by one of
Yoshio’s granddaughters, though, a woman named Akina Nakada. She
was Sayuri’s first cousin once removed—not a very close
relationship. She seemed to have been responsible for making sure
Sayuri hadn’t left any awkward programs running, and also for
seeing that no one on Epimetheus realized just how stupid Sayuri
had been, or why she got called back to Prometheus.

Did
she
gain anything from the reports
of Yoshio’s death? Nothing very obvious, certainly.

Sayuri herself wasn’t mentioned anywhere in
connection with the supposed death, and hadn’t set foot on
Epimetheus in almost a year. She might have been involved in the
attempt to kill her great-grandfather—she wasn’t clever enough to
have done it single-handedly, but she could be part of a
conspiracy, perhaps even its instigator—but I couldn’t see any
reason for her to have sent a false report of his death.

There
wasn’t
an obvious beneficiary. I
couldn’t see any way in which the fake death changed anything in
Nightside City. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Vijay Vo
ran the New York. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Akina
Nakada was just the family’s troubleshooter, not directly involved
in anything of consequence. And Sayuri didn’t have anything to do
with Nightside City anymore.

So what
did
the alleged death change?
It didn’t change anything in law enforcement, since it had
supposedly taken place on Prometheus and it was officially due to
natural causes, and not a murder at all. It didn’t change anything
financially, so far as I could see. It didn’t alter the power
structure.

I thought at first that it meant any
instructions Yoshio sent would be ignored, and maybe someone wanted
to undercut him on Epimetheus, but I quickly realized that was
buggy—if instructions got through, even if they weren’t believed or
obeyed, that would start an investigation and the whole program,
whatever it was, would crash. If someone was trying to prevent the
old man from intervening on Epimetheus, faking his death was
exactly the wrong way to go about it. Using whatever software had
faked the death reports to block the incoming orders made
far
more sense.

His
actual
death would have had
immense effects, but they would all be back on Prometheus, or in
the struggling little colony on Cass II, or in other systems
entirely. Nothing obvious would change here on Epimetheus—but so
far as I knew, it was only on Epimetheus that he was believed to be
dead.

The whole thing was glitched. After all,
sooner or later someone from Prometheus who knew Grandfather Nakada
was still alive was going to show up and debug the system, so any
changes in ownership or control or cash flow would be rebooted.
Whatever our mysterious gritware wanted, it had to be something
that didn’t need to be permanent. I tried to think what that could
be, and the screen kept coming up blank.

So I almost missed it. I almost just let it
go right past me. Finally, though, a passing mention in one report
beeped something, and I realized what would be changed by Yoshio
Nakada’s death that would not be changed by illness, or a trip out
of the Eta Cassiopeia system, or bankruptcy, or anything else. I
still didn’t see why it could possibly matter, but there was one
thing that his death brought about.

It meant that his In-The-Event-Of-Death files
were opened.

Anyone in any sort of high-risk occupation
maintains ITEOD files, of course—all the secrets that you wouldn’t
want anyone to know while you’re alive, but which you don’t want
lost if you die. Everyone who might want you dead, everything
you’ve hidden away that you want your heirs to have, it all goes
into the ITEOD files, tucked away behind the most ferocious
security possible. Anyone cruising the net who gets too close to
the ITEOD files gets warned off; try to touch them and you’ll get
the most horrific feedback you’ve ever experienced. Go in on wire,
and it’s like monsters screaming inside your brain, like blinding
light and the stench of death. There are layers of software that
hate each other guarding it, competing to keep everyone out. Nobody
has ever cracked an ITEOD file.

But when a death is reported and verified,
the file is delivered to the city cops and read by both a human and
an artificial intelligence. It doesn’t all become public, but it
all comes out from behind the firewalls and encryption.

Did Yoshio Nakada have something in the ITEOD
files in Nightside City, something that someone else wanted a
better chance to hack? He undoubtedly had terabytes of juicy
goodness in ITEOD files back on Prometheus, or whatever the
Promethean equivalent of ITEOD files was—I hadn’t happened to have
any reason to check out whether cities on Prometheus had the same
system Nightside City did, but I guessed there was something
similar.

The first question was whether Yoshio Nakada
even
had
ITEOD files in Nightside City. He’d never lived
here.

But he had visited here, he had business
interests here, and he struck me as the kind of person who’d want
offsite back-ups, so I was guessing he
did
have something
here. And if someone had wanted something in that file, faking the
old man’s death was probably the best way to get at it.

If that
was
the motive for the bogus
reports of his death, then was it the would-be assassin who was
responsible for it?

Whoever reported the death must have known
about the attempted murder; the supposed death matched the failed
assassination perfectly, and I couldn’t buy that as mere
coincidence. Did that mean the liar was the assassin?

Not necessarily. It might be someone else who
had been part of the conspiracy, or it might have been someone who
found out after the fact, perhaps while spying on the old man. But
it certainly
might
be the same guy.

I began to wonder whether I might actually
crack this after all, and earn my five million bucks, and get ’Chan
and our father safely off-planet. Tracing back the fake death
report might not be possible, since the party responsible would
have expected that and would have covered her tracks as well as she
possibly could, but if the motive really was something in the ITEOD
files—and I couldn’t think what else it might be—then I might catch
her by checking everyone who had accessed those.

In fact, maybe that was why someone had tried
to kill Grandfather Nakada in the first place. Maybe the would-be
killer didn’t really care one way or the other about the old man’s
death, but was absolutely desperate to get at something in the
files.

That was, I admitted to myself, unlikely, but
I couldn’t rule it out completely.

This was all lovely in theory, but I didn’t
yet know whether it had any link to reality. I had some
investigating to do, and I did it. This didn’t call for anything
fancy; there were public lists of who was included.

Sure enough, Yoshio Nakada had established
standard ITEOD files here in Nightside City fifty or sixty years
ago, and they had been updated regularly whenever he visited, and
sometimes by encrypted uploads from Prometheus, as well. Those
files were turned over to the city cops about an hour after the
report of his death was verified.

I went to take a look at them.

I don’t mean I left my old office; I didn’t.
I was still jacked in to my old desk, dancing the nets on wire, and
I went looking for the files on the police nets. I didn’t have
legal access, but I’ve never worried much about details like
that.

I hadn’t made up anything special for this
sort of cracking, since ten minutes earlier I hadn’t known I was
going to be trying it, but I had my standard collection of
watchdogs and retrievers, and I put them to work. I cruised the
cyberscape around the police nets and launched little exploratory
jabs into the cracks and crannies, and at the same time I was
scrolling through all the public data, looking for anything that
might seem relevant and incidentally keeping some of the cops’
software occupied.

I focused most of my attention on that, but
at the same time some little corner of my head had already moved on
to the next question about the falsified death report. I had a
theory as to
why
someone sent it, but I didn’t have a clue
as to
how
.

Grandfather Nakada’s floater back on
Prometheus had said the old man didn’t trust anyone on his staff in
Nightside City anymore, and that he believed his family’s software
had been seriously compromised. I wondered whether he had actually
been in contact with Epimetheus at all. Whoever faked the report of
the old man’s death had somehow controlled communications between
the two planets so completely that nothing and no one contradicted
his story. In fact, he’d faked official verification of the
original lie.