Aurora Blazing

by Jessie Mihalik

  Ian still did not look convinced, but I just smiled serenely and let the conversation lapse into silence, already planning where I would start my search. If I wanted someone kidnapped without it tracing back to me, I’d go to the Silva Syndicate. There were a few other options, but the Silva family ran the largest underground crime organization in the ’verse.

  And unlike the black market on APD Zero, the Consortium very much wanted to wipe the Syndicate out, mostly because they refused to give the Houses a cut of their profits.

  Because they were targeted by the RCDF, the Syndicate leadership was distributed on several enormous spaceships that were constantly on the move. Occasionally the RCDF would get lucky and catch one, but like a hydra, two more would spring up to replace it. I’d visited one of their ships just once, back before my marriage, when I was still doing active assignments for House von Hasenberg. It had taken a lot of very fast talking and massive amounts of money to walk away unscathed.

  But they’d also delivered exactly what they’d promised.

  I was pulled from my thoughts when our transport settled outside the House von Hasenberg family entrance. Ian gestured for me to stay put as he slid the door open and stepped out. He glanced around at the security personnel in place, then reached in to help me from the transport.

  “I know you are plotting something,” he said quietly as he escorted me to the entrance. “Do not leave the building without letting me know and taking a full security detail. Do you understand?”

  “I plan to spend the day researching Ferdinand’s disappearance,” I said.

  “That didn’t answer the question.”

  “No, it didn’t.” I smiled as I slipped into the building and left him scowling on the doorstep. One day he would learn that I responded far better to requests than demands, but that day didn’t appear to be today.

  Chapter 5

  On the way to my suite, I checked our sibling group channel, but no one had heard from Ferdinand. Ada had chimed in that she was okay and hadn’t been attacked. Everyone was speculating on who could be behind the attacks, but no one had any solid leads and no ransom demands had been made. I wasn’t the only one who thought the Syndicate might be involved, though.

  Ada had asked her friends Rhys and Veronica to keep their ears open. Rhys was a smuggler and Veronica had been a fence before she fled her home, so both had connections in the shady underbelly of polite society that might come in handy.

  I opened my official House account, just in case. Ferdinand wouldn’t message me there unless it was his last resort, but I would never forgive myself if he had and I’d ignored it.

  My official account had scores of messages, but nothing from Ferdinand. However, Lynn Segura, the young woman I’d chatted with yesterday, had messaged me late last night. I opened her message as I entered my rooms.

  Lynn had seen Ferdinand with three other men in Sector Eight of the Yamado quarter while she was on her way to a party last night. By the descriptions, the three men were his bodyguards. She said she hadn’t thought anything about it until the news came out that he was missing.

  I sent her a response, thanking her. I had no doubt that Ian knew exactly where Ferdinand had been, thanks to the trackers on the transports, but I sent him the time and location anyway. If he was looking for footage, it was another place to look.

  I stepped into my study and shut the door behind me. I nearly sighed in relief as the wireless signals winked out. While isolated, only wired devices like the terminal in my desk would be able to make outside connections, but the signal isolation didn’t block wireless transfer within the room.

  I copied Evelyn’s file to a secure partition on my terminal, turned on process scanning, and then opened it. The scan didn’t flag anything suspicious. The file was a flat list of messages, and Evelyn had left the message headers intact. I recognized one of Ferdinand’s private addresses.

  Even with the private address, the messages were obliquely worded, but I was familiar enough with Ferdinand’s style to recognize his voice. If this was a fake, then it was an excellent one.

  The messages went back months, though some had been redacted to little more than a greeting and closing. It felt strange to poke through my brother’s personal correspondence. I had no trouble snooping through strangers’ information, but I’d always tried to give my family a bit more privacy.

  For now, I would assume that House Rockhurst did not order the attack. So who did that leave?

  Unfortunately, the list was a long one.

  Ferdinand’s kidnapping was a blow to House von Hasenberg, but far from a fatal one. Father would bring the full might of the House down on whoever was stupid enough to do it, and even threats on Ferdinand’s life wouldn’t be sufficient to stop him.

  Someone either had nothing to lose or they thought they’d get away with it, which meant hiring professionals and not leaving any loose ends—such as a kidnapped heir who could escape and point fingers.

  I’d been working from the kidnapping angle because I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative, but I had to at least consider that this was an assassination. Taking the body would be unusual for an assassination, but not unheard of in the name of absolute secrecy. Still, as long as Ferdinand’s death folder remained unreleased, I would work under the assumption that my brother was alive.

  I closed Evelyn’s file and brought up my highest-level personal firewalls. My connections were normally encrypted, but I added several layers of additional protection, including bouncing the connection through a multitude of servers, both my own and public. Finally, I kicked off a script that made a lot of connections and requests to help hide my real traffic in the noise.

  I was about to do a deep dive into the dark part of the Net and I didn’t want anyone to be able to follow my trail, in either direction.

  I’d been gathering information for years under various anonymous online personas, so I started there. I checked my digital drop boxes one at a time. For each one, I went through the whole procedure again, just with different servers. It was paranoid, but it also kept me safe.

  There were a few interesting messages that I flagged for follow-up, but most of the messages I got were worthless—common rumors, wild speculation, or lewd suggestions. My various identities were well known in their circles, and I paid generously for good information.

  I saved the most likely account for last. This identity was known to want Consortium gossip. Almost all gossip was worthless by the time it was sent, so it was a badge of honor in some circles just to have produced a piece of information worth payment.

  I had a dozen messages and nearly all of them pertained to the attack on me or Ferdinand’s disappearance. I started with the messages about Ferdinand. The first two messages were from unknown contacts and didn’t offer anything I didn’t already know. The third message was from someone I’d worked with before. It hinted about Ferdinand’s dinner with Evelyn, which wasn’t public info as far as I knew. I sent them a small payment and a request for more info. They probably didn’t know anything more than I did, but double-checking was worth the expense.

  None of the other messages about Ferdinand were useful, so I moved on to the messages about the attack on me. Only one message seemed like it might be useful. The sender claimed to have information about the shooter. The contact was one of my regulars, so I went ahead and made the good-faith payment and requested more information.

  I posted an oblique request for information about House von Hasenberg and House Rockhurst on a couple of the boards buried deep in the underbelly of the respectable Internet. Making a semipublic request meant I would get a lot of spurious messages, but it also meant anyone with real knowledge would know I was looking.

  Unfortunately, my usual passive information gathering hadn’t turned up any useful information, at least not yet, so I had to switch to active looking. The risk was higher, but so was the potential reward.

  I refreshed my security protections, then stood and pressed a switc
h on my desk. The lights in the room died and the walls disappeared. welcome to hive hovered in front of me, formed by one of the projectors in the room. Below the text, a red virtual connect button glowed softly.

  I passed my hand through the button and held for a count of five. It was a safety measure to ensure I didn’t connect accidentally. The button winked out, replaced by a bustling projected street in a gleaming virtual city. I rested my fingers on top of my desk as I waited for the initial vertigo to dissipate.

  HIVE stood for High Impact Virtual Environment, though few remembered the name was actually an acronym. It was the largest virtual reality zone in the ’verse, and one of a handful of communication protocols allowed to use the FTL communication network. Every few years another new zone popped up to try to derail HIVE’s dominance, but so far, none had succeeded, in part because HIVE was backed by the three High Houses.

  On the low end, users could enter HIVE with just a set of cheap smart glasses. At the other extreme, some users had dedicated rooms with treadmill floors and force suits that made interacting with the virtual world feel real. Originally designed as a game, HIVE was now used for everything from business to pleasure, though both the Consortium and the syndicates tended to eschew it for more traditional face-to-face meetings—there were fewer hidden eyes in the real world, after all.

  Although the Consortium rarely conducted internal business in HIVE, they still wanted everyone to know that the zone flourished because of their benevolence. Each High House owned a prime block of the main street where entering users landed. Users could bank with the Houses, shop for virtual items like synthesizer recipes, or deal with various administrative issues like taxes and fines.

  To my left, House von Hasenberg’s stone-and-crystal skyscraper defied physics but made for a pretty building. On my main account, I “owned” an entire floor of that building. I used it for the occasional long-distance meeting, but I, too, preferred face-to-face appointments.

  Today I was logged in as Fenix, one of my anonymous accounts. This avatar was a tall, busty redhead with matching red cat ears, wearing a black corset and black leather pants, complete with a high, giggly voice. Everyone assumed I was a man in real life, an assumption I protested too loudly and too often.

  Avatars had to be approximately human-sized but were otherwise only limited by the user’s imagination, so all manner of creatures inhabited HIVE. A blue mermaid wearing a sparkly silver bikini top swam by, despite the fact that we were nowhere near water. Realism was optional in HIVE, and users competed to have the most interesting and unique avatars.

  “HIVE,” I said, “transport to Nadia’s bar.”

  “Transporting to saved location 172b.217r6.2a2w,” a female computer voice responded. The projection flickered then shifted to reveal a narrow brick alley ending in a wall with a single black door. Unlike most locations in HIVE, this alley wasn’t connected to the rest of the zone. Only users with the exact address could visit, and the address updated frequently, so random users couldn’t just wander in.

  I lifted my right hand and held it palm down over the desk, then leaned forward very slightly. The motion trackers in the room captured the position of my hands and the movement of my body. This particular combination meant I wanted to move forward, toward the door.

  There were several ways to move in HIVE, but once you got the hang of leaning, it required the least amount of effort. I’d set the hand gesture as a requirement because I tended to move around while I talked and I didn’t want my avatar walking into walls in the middle of a conversation.

  When the door was right in front of me, projected over my desk, I reached out and pressed on an invisible button, about chest high and left of center. It took a couple of tries before I hit the right location because it was a little more difficult without force gloves to provide tactile feedback. Finally, a click indicated success and the scene changed.

  Nadia’s bar was dim and smoky, with wood-paneled walls and dark leather furniture. A long mahogany bar ran down the left side of the room. In the middle of the room, groupings of low chairs were separated by generous empty space, ensuring privacy. And Nadia’s regulars all had shrouded alcoves along the right side of the room.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as the scene loaded. Normally the bar buzzed with muted conversation as information flowed. Today, however, the soft jazz background music was the only sound.

  A few users sat in a sullen cluster in the center of the room, shackles around their wrists. I saw a catgirl, a big green something, a blue lizard man, and more. They must be new, because experienced users would abandon an avatar as soon as it was clear they couldn’t defeat the security measures. Better to lose an account than give the authorities time to track down your real location.

  Nadia stood behind the bar, her stunning sable skin set off to perfection by an off-the-shoulder aqua dress. Her avatar looked entirely human, a purposeful choice designed to engender trust. She didn’t even glance my way, but thanks to the magic of technology, she whispered in my ear, “House raid. Get out now, if you can.”

  “I need information,” I whispered back.

  “I will reopen tomorrow. The new location will be posted in the usual places. But my regulars will be scared off for a day or two.”

  “Actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”

  “If you get free, meet me here in ten,” she whispered. An address popped up and I saved it.

  She blinked out of existence as a man stepped out of the farthest alcove. I squinted through the hazy air, but, unfortunately, I’d recognize him anywhere. Ian Bishop moved my way in his official avatar. At least now I knew where he got some of his better information. Too bad he couldn’t have waited another twenty minutes.

  “Who are you?” he asked me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ian Bishop, House von Hasenberg security.” He held out his hand but I made no move to take it. Instead, I held my left hand out, palm down. My avatar didn’t move, but it brought up my supplemental menu. I had a feeling I was going to need it sooner than I’d prefer.

  The room twisted, glitching as HIVE tried to handle whatever destruction Nadia had kicked off on her way out. She was probably trying to wipe the whole damn bar. My admiration for her went up.

  It was odd, looking directly into Ian’s eyes. My avatar was the same height as his, and the projectors in the room mapped the projected image to my actual height, so the point of view would be correct. Ian’s avatar was as perfect as I would expect from a House representative. He looked exactly like himself.

  “Well,” I said after a long pause, “I suppose since you’ve killed the buzz, I’ll be on my way. Nice meeting you, security man.”

  “Not so fast. I have some questions.” He raised his right hand and shackles appeared around my wrists, called into existence by the zone admin security scripts. He would also be trying to track my real location. He held out his left hand and the room stabilized slightly, though the edges kept fading away.

  I didn’t even need my extra scripts for this level of restraint. I laughed and pulled my hands apart. The digital shackles snapped in half and disappeared, defeated by my standard security settings.

  Ian’s expression flashed to annoyance and I couldn’t hide my grin. Before he could try again with something more substantial, I blew him a kiss, then swiped my left hand through the exit script on my supplemental menu.

  The projection flickered as the script jumped me through five random locations. It wasn’t exactly stock functionality, but I’d spent enough time in HIVE to have found a few tricks. I ended up in what looked like someone’s living room. Luckily it was unoccupied and no one questioned my presence.

  I checked the location Nadia had sent me. Like the bar, it wasn’t in the standard zone map. I’d be going in blind. I’d known Nadia—as far as two highly secretive, anonymous people in a virtual world could know each other—for five years, and she’d never betrayed me. That didn’t mean that today wouldn’t be the day sh
e would start, but I felt confident enough to risk it.

  “HIVE, transport to saved location eight.”

  “Transporting to saved location 208a.080m3.1q5y,” the computer said.

  The projection wavered, then solidified into a cozy sitting room with pale peach walls and sleek charcoal furniture. A quick glance around revealed that there were no doors. Nadia sat curled up in an overstuffed chair in front of a roaring fireplace. She gestured at the chair next to her.

  I directed my avatar to sit and the projection’s perspective shifted again so we were at eye level even though I remained standing in real life.

  “You escaped,” she said.

  “I did. Thank you for the distraction. He was too busy trying to stabilize the room to try anything too serious.”

  “What information is so important that you’d risk a House raid to get it?”

  “Likely the same information that caused the raid in the first place,” I said carefully. “I have a client who is very interested in Ferdinand von Hasenberg’s disappearance.”

  She glanced sharply at me. “You’re working for House von Hasenberg?”

  I didn’t have to fake the sly grin. “No.”

  She relaxed, and I filed that information away. She stared into the fire for a long minute. “I think you should walk away, Fenix. This isn’t something you want to poke into. Leave House politics to the Houses. They can take care of themselves.”

  “I would if I could,” I said softly. It came out far more bitterly than I had intended.

  Nadia’s expression turned hard. “If you need help . . .” She trailed off, leaving the offer open.

  “You don’t know how much that means to me,” I said, “but I am okay. And a job is a job. This isn’t the first I time I’ve stuck my nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “Ten thousand credits and you forget where you heard anything I tell you,” she said. “And don’t darken my door for a few weeks while the heat dies down.”