“And you want me to find out? Expose the most secret project of the most powerful man in the Commonwealth?”
“You’re an investigative reporter, aren’t you? Besides, I imagine the SI will be eager to help in this case.”
Mellanie had to grin at the ironic sense of déjà vu. “Do I get a flying car?” she muttered.
“If the Commonwealth falls, I’d be prepared to take you with me.”
“What?” She’d thought she was immune to further surprise today.
“You’re smart, attractive, young, tough, and a survivor. I would get myself rejuvenated on the voyage. It would be an enjoyable marriage, I believe.”
“You’re proposing?”
“Yes. Has nobody ever proposed to you before, young Mellanie?”
She thought of the hundreds of proposals she was sent every day from her fans or simply people who’d recently accessed a copy of Murderous Seduction.
“You’re not the first,” she admitted.
“Was that a yes? It is difficult for me to get down on bended knee right now; even if I was out of the interface unit, my arthritis plays up something chronic.”
“Wow, that is so romantic.”
“Don’t let a four-century age difference prejudice you. I’ve had wives from every conceivable age group before. You’re not expecting Morton to come back from his heroic mission, are you? Think practically, Mellanie. The odds in his favor aren’t good.”
“I know what his odds are. And the answer is still no.” That young face is handsome, though, and he’s got a devilish grin. No!
“I understand. My offer remains open. And your answer doesn’t prejudice our deal. You should never mix business with pleasure.”
“That, I do know. But I don’t understand how you think you can get on the Sheldon lifeboat. You’re not a member of the Dynasty.” She paused. “Are you?”
The image chuckled. “Not by birth. But two of my wives were Sheldons, one of them fairly senior. I have five Sheldon children, two of whom are direct lineage sixth generation, and they certainly produced a goodly number of descendants. Funnily enough, that means I’ve got more chance with the Sheldon lifeboat than any of the others. I have leverage there. Once I determine what the score is, I’ll be able to make my play. So, will you try and get to Cressat for me, and see what’s going on there?”
“I can probably go back to Michelangelo with a pitch to investigate a Sheldon lifeboat. That way I won’t be completely exposed. How’s that?”
“Good enough. But you do realize that Baron will know it was you who put me onto her? Our Oaktier connection is inescapable. You can expect a visit from people like Simmonds and Deakins, if not a great deal worse.”
Mellanie pushed her shoulders back. “I can take care of myself.”
“I’m sure you can, young Mellanie. I’m curious. Do you actually have a weapon? A gun of some description?”
“No.”
“May I suggest you purchase one. I can give you the name of a reliable underground supplier.”
“I’m not a warrior, Paul. If I need physical protection, I’ll hire a security expert.”
“As you wish. But please be careful.”
“Sure.”
Mellanie swapped cabs three times before she got back to the motel they were staying at in the Rightbank district. She paid cash each time. The fact that Alessandra’s webheads could backtrack Paul was a worrying development. Even with her SI inserts she certainly didn’t have his skill; that left her feeling strangely vulnerable.
Their little chalet was on the end of the long row that curved around a grubby swimming pool. Only two others had cars parked outside. It wasn’t yet late enough for the motel’s main trade to start using the bleak, utilitarian rooms for their professional pay-by-the-hour encounters.
The chalet was made out of cheap composite panels that had bleached under Oaktier’s strong sun. Long cracks webbed the edges, exposing the reinforcing boron fibers, which were already fraying. The faded red door creaked loudly when she pushed it open.
All the blinds were shut, permitting only slim blades of late-afternoon sunlight to slide through the slits between them. The air-conditioning wasn’t working. It was stifling inside, with the old paneling groaning as the thermal loads shifted. Dudley was curled up on the bed, staring at the wall.
“We have to move,” Mellanie told him. And how many times had she spoken that phrase since Randtown?
“Why?” Dudley grumped. “Are you off to see him again?”
She didn’t ask who he meant by him; she wasn’t about to play that game. Besides, the memory was too strong: walking out of the rec room into the main barracks. Her blouse had been torn beyond use; she’d had to borrow Morty’s dark purple sport shirt to wear. Both of them grinned like naughty schoolkids as the rest of Cat’s Claws hooted and jeered at the state of them.
She gave him a last lingering kiss in the open doorway, with his hands squeezing her buttocks. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised.
That had been two days ago. She wanted to go back, to feel his body pressed up against hers. The wonderful reassurance of old times, when life was simpler and so much easier.
Dudley, of course, had embarked on a two-day sulk at the very notion of an old lover coming back into her life. She hadn’t admitted sleeping with Morton, but it was pretty obvious what they’d been up to. She’d still been wearing Morty’s shirt when she got back to the chalet.
“No, Dudley, I’m not visiting Morton for a while. We have to go to Earth. I’m making another pitch to Michelangelo about investigating Dynasty starships.” She’d never come so close to simply walking out on him. It was guilt pure and simple that had made her come back to collect him rather than take a cab straight to the CST planetary station.
Alessandra would find the motel, if she hadn’t already. Even cheap thugs like the ones who’d gone after Paul would blow Dudley away, and probably in a very painful fashion. Let alone what would happen if one of the Starflyer’s wetwired agents tracked him down …
She’d got him into this, and that made him her responsibility.
“Why can’t we just get out?” he moaned. “The two of us. Leave. We’ll go back to that resort in the forest, nobody will know about us, nobody will care anymore. If we don’t interfere with the Starflyer and the navy, then they’ll forget all about us. Why don’t we do that? Just the two of us.” He rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Mellanie. We could get married.”
Oh, save me! “No, Dudley.” She said it fast and firm, before he had any chance to work on the idea. “Nobody should even be considering things like that, not with everything that’s going on. Life’s too uncertain right now.”
“Then how about afterward?”
“Dudley! Stop it.”
He bowed his head petulantly.
“Come on,” she said in a more considerate tone. “Let’s get packed. There are some great hotels in LA. We’ll stay in one of them.”
It was raining again, a persistent, miserable cold drizzle that smeared windows and turned pavements to slippery ribbons awash with a dismaying amount of litter. Hoshe Finn never ceased to be surprised and depressed by how wet it was in the ancient English capital city. He’d always assumed the old jokes were simple exaggeration. Walking to the office from Charing Cross station as he did every morning, he’d learned better. The UFN environmental commissioners who shared the vast stone government building with Senate Security must have been more successful than they admitted in reversing the global warming trend.
He shook his raincoat out in the elevator, and held it at arm’s length as he walked down the corridor to his office. Unsurprisingly, Paula was already in, and poring over screens on her desk.
“Morning,” he called out.
She gave a cursory smile, not looking up.
Hoshe hung his coat on the back of his dark wooden door and settled behind his desk. The number of files awaiting his attention was dispiriting. He’d only left at half p
ast ten last night, and now it was barely eight. The RI had spent the night pulling out anything relevant to the queries he’d made yesterday. He started on the old Directorate report of the Cox Educational charity.
At eleven o’clock he gave the door to Paula’s office a perfunctory knock and walked in. “You might have been right about the educational charity,” he told her.
“What have you got?”
“There are some anomalies between the files I requested.” He sat in front of her desk, and told his e-butler to display the data on the big holographic portal that took up one wall. “First off I started with the report that the Directorate’s Paris office put together after the attempted hack against the charity’s account in the Denman Manhattan bank. Your old colleagues were reasonably thorough; they investigated the charity for any evidence that they were a front. The report’s conclusion is that they’re not.” He waved a hand against the rows of names and figures that were scrolling down the portal.
“This is the list of all the outgoing donations. It’s pretty comprehensive. The Cox supported over a hundred academic projects at one time or another. Recently they’ve declined considerably, although they’re still going. The Gralmond University astronomy department was just one of them. So far, so ordinary; according to the report there is nothing here to be suspicious about.”
“So it looks,” Paula said.
“Okay. That was my starting point, then I began checking references. There are a couple of things that are unusual to start with. Not illegal or suspicious, just odd. The charity’s funds come from a single private donation deposited thirty years ago in the Denman account. The sum was two million Earth dollars, which was transferred to the Denman bank from a onetime account. Secondly, there is no named founder. The firm of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku registered the Cox with the New York charity board, and opened an account with one dollar. The two million was transferred in a month later. It has only ever had three commissioners: Mr. Seaton, Ms. Daltra, and Mr. Pomanskie, all of whom are associates of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. Your original Directorate investigation team never pursued that, which is something of a lapse if you ask me.”
“There are a lot of rich eccentrics out there giving their money away to strange causes.”
Hoshe raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there are. But according to its own records, the Cox doesn’t support strange causes. So why keep the benefactor concealed? It’s not for tax purposes. By staying anonymous they don’t qualify for any tax credit at all.”
“Go on, what’s your answer?”
“There isn’t an answer. But it made me curious enough to start digging a little deeper. You see all these names? The ones who received money?”
“Yes.”
“The Directorate report doesn’t say how much was given. Also unusual. We know that Dudley Bose received just over one point three million dollars’ worth of funding; that doesn’t leave much for the rest of them. In total seventy-one and a half thousand dollars were distributed; that’s to over a hundred academic projects covering a period of twenty-one years. That financial data was made available to the Directorate investigators. The raw data was still sitting in the Paris array when I requested it. Someone obviously excluded it from the report.”
“Damn,” Paula said. “Who were they?”
“It was a team research effort. Renne Kampasa, Tarlo, and Jim Nwan all have their names attached. The Cox’s original finance file doesn’t have a named access log, just the team code. One or more of them did look at it.”
“It can’t be all of them,” she said. “It simply can’t.”
“There’s something else. Remember what you told me about our old friend Mellanie discovering this?”
“She said Alessandra Baron had tampered with the charity’s records.”
“She might be right. I requested a current financial report from the New York charity board. Legally, each registered charity has to file accounts with them every year. According to the filed accounts, the Cox stopped funding the Gralmond University astronomy department right after Bose made his discovery; however, they did continue to make their usual small donations to other academic projects. I started checking with the named recipients. None of them had ever heard of the Cox, let alone received their money. That is until two days after the Prime invasion; then the money transfers became real again. Those accounts are false, they’re there to satisfy any casual investigation.”
Paula sat back in her chair, and rubbed a finger against her chin. The faintest smile touched her lips. “Mellanie was right. Well, how about that.”
“Looks like it. Paula … the Starflyer funded the whole Bose observation. That means it knew what Bose would find.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Logically, it must have been there; or its species was aware of the Primes and their imprisonment within the force field.”
“Did it let them out?”
“That’s the obvious conclusion.”
“So the war was started deliberately. The Guardians were right.”
“Yes.” She grimaced, and gave him a sad smile.
“So what do we do now?”
“Firstly, I inform my political allies. Secondly, we arrest the Cox commissioners on fraud charges. They’re obviously Starflyer agents. If we can read their memories, we might gain a better understanding of its network inside the Commonwealth.”
“What about Alessandra Baron? She was the one Mellanie tipped us off about. She has to be a Starflyer agent.”
“It will be difficult to arrest such a public figure without having a good reason, and we can’t afford to go public with the knowledge of the Starflyer. Senate Security will make a formal request to navy intelligence to put her under covert observation.”
“What? But we know they’re compromised.”
“Yes. But it’s an excellent opportunity to see what the request kicks loose.”
The green and orange priority icon popped into Nigel’s virtual vision as he was reading The House at Pooh Corner to his youngest children before they went to sleep. He tried to read them a story each night, to be a proper father as he classified the ideal. His children would be dressed for bed by mothers and nannies, then they’d be herded into their playroom for the story. He always read from the classics, using a proper printed book, one you could open to find the place, and shut with finality when the evening’s chapter came to an end.
Right now he was halfway through The House at Pooh Corner. The seven children at the mansion who were over three years old sat or lay around on cushions and soft mushroom couches, listening contentedly as their daddy read out loud with amateurish intonations and big arm gestures. They smiled, and giggled, and whispered among themselves.
It was his expanded mentality that was calling his attention to the item from the Dynasty’s security division. The observation team Nelson had assigned to Mellanie reported her arriving at a bungalow in Darklake City owned by one Paul Cramley. Security simply filed the name. In Nigel’s expanded mentality it was immediately cross-referenced with his personal files. That produced the priority notification.
Nigel’s primary awareness shifted out of the playroom to focus on the information flowing into his artificial neural network. He accessed the reports on the burglary, and saw what a mess the nostats had made of the would-be burglars. Typical Paul, never quite guilty himself.
Cramley had been one of the programming team who’d written the algorithms for the first AIs that CST had used to control their early wormhole gateways. After the AIs evolved themselves into the SI, Paul had chosen to live out of the limelight, involving himself in various activities of dubious legality, a minor league player but with masterclass hacking skills. A list of references rolled down Nigel’s virtual vision. He stopped at one of the most recent. Paul had been caught running an illegal search through the City of Paris restricted listings.
Two things were badly wrong with that. Firstly, Paul had searched out Paula Myo�
��s address. Secondly, Paul wouldn’t get caught doing something that basic. Yet Myo had produced documented evidence sufficient to have him convicted, fined, and his equipment confiscated. She must have a mega webhead shielding her data. More likely it was the SI.
Nigel wondered who Paul had run the search for. Mellanie? Why would she want to know where Myo lived?
The more he delved into Mellanie, the more curious he became. According to her file, she’d visited Far Away for the Michelangelo show. Was she in contact with the Guardians? Or was she the SI’s contact with them? That surely was paranoid speculation. There were so many data points available, but he couldn’t connect them. He didn’t often delve into security matters, but this was turning into the mother of all exceptions. His fascination was further goaded by her sassy looks.
He retracted his primary awareness from the artificial neural network, and continued reading until he’d finished the section. The children pleaded and wheedled, but he was firm, and promised them there’d be lots more tomorrow. They kissed and hugged him good night, and dispersed to their own rooms.
Sitting alone in the playroom with its tidal wave of toys and gloriously gaudy primary-color decoration, Nigel knew he needed to acquire a lot more information on Mellanie to solve the mystery she was tantalizing him with. He sighed reluctantly and made the call. Normally, anyone he called was surprised and flattered to receive any form of personal communication from the great Nigel Sheldon. Michelangelo simply said, “What the hell do you want?”
The Lucius skyscraper was eighty stories high, a ponderous conservative tower of gray stone and smoky brown glass. But then it did sit in the middle of Third Avenue; architecture in this part of town was never flamboyant.
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