Impersonations

by Walter Jon Williams

  However beautiful her weapons, Sula and her party were now well armed enough to begin an insurrection.

  Before her purchase was complete, Sula received a message from the morgue informing her that Goojie’s autopsy had been completed, and that the body was being released to her. The rest of the day was spent dealing with arranging for the cremation and for Goojie’s ashes to be sent to her family on Chijimo. Sula would have to send them a personal message, but she put that job off till later. While she was engaged with the morgue and its paperwork and the undertaker with even more paperwork, her display buzzed with one message after another: the commissioner, presumably still riding the rocket the Lord Governor had ignited under her, and who assured Sula that she was taking the Manado accusation seriously; Parku offering condolences; Koridun making another play to take personal command of Sula’s guards; Ratnasari sending sympathy from Constantinople . . . even Adele Souka, Jack Danitz, and other members of the Democracy Club expressing their condolences, though these last didn’t have her direct address but sent their messages courtesy of her office in the Fleet dockyard. There were also a great many requests from journalists for statements or interviews—the story was already being widely reported, and the attempted assassination of a decorated hero of the Naxid War was a story that carried its own sensationalism with it. As a result of the story, sympathy now flooded in from thousands of perfect strangers.

  The journalists were persistent enough that Sula decided they had to be dealt with, and she and Parku and Lady Gudrun’s office worked out a statement to be released through Sula’s office—it was brief, with Goojie’s biography, another of the killer, and an expression of Sula’s confidence that justice would prevail. It also declined all interview requests.

  “And by the way,” Parku said finally. “It looks as if Karangetang is going to blow. I can start to make preparations if you’re too busy.”

  It took a moment for Sula to remember that Karangetang was the island volcano just north of Manado. “Is there established procedure for an eruption this close to the skyhook?” she asked.

  “Yes. This sort of thing has happened before. Normally, we send a team to the surface to see to the physical safety of the facility. The cars are sent up to the ring to be out of danger, and engineers stand ready to release the cables from their moorings if their integrity is ever compromised.”

  “Right. For now, err on the side of excess. Have at least twice as many crew standing by as the plan calls for.”

  “Very good, my lady.”

  The day was long, and late that evening, Sula was back in her hotel, eating a room service bowl of clear, fragrant broth with little zieg-filled dumplings and scallions, when she received the documents from the Lord Governor’s office. She linked her sleeve display to the video in the room and paged through the available information on the Manado Company. Whomever Lord Moncrieff had assigned to the duty had done a very thorough job.

  The Manado Company had been formed a year or so before the war, by one Aram, Lord Tacorian in partnership with a Madeleine Patel. Lord Tacorian ran a small shipping company with business entirely in the Sol system, and Patel was one of his captains. Just before the Naxid War broke out, the company acquired an investor in the form of Lord Mogna, a wealthy Daimong Peer in Zanshaa High City who happened to be patron to the Tacorian clan. The Manado Company began acquiring ships, a practice that continued during the war when various shipping lines were going under due to war losses. The company also acquired an ocean-shipping firm on Terra and with it Lord Peltrot Convil, who had successfully managed the Terran firm and who was now put in charge of the entire Manado Company. Around the same time, Lord Mogna probably made some backdoor arrangements for the Bombardment of Utgu to be purchased.

  To Sula it seemed clear enough. Captain Patel had found something in the Kuiper Belt, and she and Tacorian had found a company to exploit it. Tacorian had brought in funding via his patron in the capital, bought the ships suitable for harnessing the discovery, and then hired an experienced hand capable of managing a larger company.

  More names were added to the list of owners, and Sula recognized most of them as important members of the Convocation, those in a position to vote the Manado Company rights to whatever it was they had discovered. And then, down at the bottom of the list, Sula encountered the final name.

  Caroline, Lady Sula.

  “Ah. Hah.” She stared at the name for a long while, and then at the figures that followed the name. She computed the numbers in her head to discover that she owned something like four percent of the Manado Company, and until that moment, she hadn’t even known it.

  She wondered if Lord Peltrot Convil had bribed her, then forgotten to tell her what he’d done.

  And then, in a rush of amazed wonder so sudden it left her breathless, Sula realized what was happening. I’m being set up.

  * * *

  Sula’s first impulse was to call Lady Gudrun and tell the commissioner what she’d discovered, and then she realized that she couldn’t tell anyone at all, because it would look more like a confession than a clue. It would look as if she were trying to wriggle out of a corruption charge by claiming that she hadn’t known the bribe existed in the first place.

  How long before Lady Gudrun finds this out?

  Then she looked at the date of the document and felt another surge of astonishment. The shares had been assigned to her weeks ago. While she was still in the dockyards on the ring, well before she’d seen the Manado or heard of the Manado Company. Long before she’d had any kind of conflict with the company, long before she’d ever heard of Lord Peltrot Convil.

  So, whoever was setting her up hadn’t intended a conflict with the Manado Company, had in fact wished to make it look like Sula was doing the Manado Company all manner of illicit favors.

  What other favors am I supposed to have done? It was only because of a dispute with the Manado Company that she’d investigated and found this surprising addition to her portfolio. She wondered how many other bribes had come her way without her knowing anything about them.

  And if they had, where were they?

  A spinning whirlpool of speculation filled Sula’s head, a maelstrom in which the very few facts she knew tried desperately to stay afloat. She wondered if there were a bank or brokerage account with her name on it, and if there were, how it could be found. And she supposed that Lady Gudrun and the police could find the information a lot more easily than she could.

  And if she were her unknown enemy, she’d be quietly tipping off the police right now about the existence of those funds.

  She pushed away her dumpling soup and rose from the table to pace back and forth between the two main rooms of her suite. Sula knew her time was running out: soon it would look very much as if the assassin had been sent by some character she was supposed to have been in business with, and that would be the end of that. She’d be disgraced and probably executed, just as the late Lord and Lady Sula had been.

  Sula needed to know who might have been involved in payments, and how many payments there were, and how they’d been made without her knowledge, and where they were. She needed a lot of information, but she had no investigative authority and no way of prying open the records of banks or brokerages or other financial institutions.

  If only she’d toured banks, she thought, instead of Terra’s monuments.

  The thought called to mind her adventures in Constantinople with Ratnasari, and the tedious meeting of the Democracy Club, who had bored her senseless but then sent her condolences on Goojie’s death. She remembered Jack Danitz, who claimed to have researched her, and Adele Souka, the red-haired woman who had claimed to have met her . . . and then she realized, It wasn’t me she met.

  It had been someone who looked like Sula. Someone who looked enough like her to confuse an assassin and apparently Souka as well.

  Goojie! The wave of surprise struck Sula with an almost-physical impact, but on further reflection, it was clear that Goojie had to be in
volved somehow. She’d been posing as Sula, negotiating with people like Lord Peltrot and accepting bribes to discredit her.

  It seemed an elaborate plot, and an expensive one, for no apparent return; and then Sula began to wonder which of her relatives would inherit the Sula title if she died. She’d assumed all along that the title would become extinct, but perhaps it wouldn’t, and perhaps Goojie would consider acquiring the title worth her effort, at least to the point where she got bumped off by her own assassin.

  Sula reached for her hand comm. The chronometer assured her that it was a reasonable hour in Constantinople, and she put in a call to Ratnasari.

  “Lady Sula!” he said, surprise plain on his even brown features. He recovered, and his face assumed a more solemn expression. “I’m very sorry to hear about your—was she your cousin, Lady Sula?”

  “Thank you,” Sula said, and then watched surprise return to his face as she asked her next question. “I wonder if you have contact information for Adele Souka? The woman from Democracy Club, the one with red hair?”

  * * *

  Adele Souka was both startled and pleased by Sula’s call. Her red hair, bright in the hand comm display, was unbound and framed her face with its thick coils. After she stammered through condolences regarding Goojie, Sula thanked her and went straight to the point.

  “I was wondering if you could remind me where we met?” she asked.

  Souka’s surprise deepened. “Well, ah—it was at the meeting with Miss Kantari. I was her assistant.”

  Sula had no recollection of any such meeting, but then, she hadn’t expected that she would.

  “When and where was this meeting?” Sula asked.

  Souka’s surprise turned to bafflement. “That would be two months ago, in Adrianople.” She gave a nervous smile. “Jack Danitz was so jealous I’d met you! He wanted to talk to you about tactics, and he didn’t get the chance.”

  “He may yet,” Sula muttered. “Can you tell me what the meeting was about?”

  “The Kantari Modulars contract,” Souka said. By now, she seemed less perplexed than deeply concerned, as if she were worried the questions could be displaying symptoms of mental illness.

  “Could you refresh my memory concerning this contract?”

  “Well.” Souka blinked. “We make electric and communication components—modular, so they can easily be plugged in and out. And we signed a contract to supply the dockyard and all other Fleet installations with electronic components once your current contract expires.” She ventured a wan smile. “We’re ramping up production so that we’ll be ready on the day! And we’re just about to sign an agreement on building a new assembly facility.”

  Sula considered this. “Were there any—” She searched for a suitable phrase. “Side agreements? Fees? Not mentioned in the contract?”

  Fear touched Souka’s expression. Perhaps it had occurred to her that admitting a bribe on an easily recorded video call might not be her most discrete option.

  “Lady Sula? May I ask what these questions are in aid of?”

  Sula decided to aim for ambiguity. “There are some discrepancies in the timeline,” she said vaguely. “I’m trying to resolve them.”

  “Are there—” Souka tried to make sense out of Sula’s answer, failed, and then apparently gave up trying to understand what was happening. She waved a hand. “The filing fees? They arrived, didn’t they?”

  Sula concealed the triumph that was blaring like trumpets in her head. “The person you encountered at this meeting—you’d swear she was me, yes?”

  Adele Souka blinked ferociously. “I—it was you, Lady Sula.”

  “Describe her, please.”

  Souka’s expression had grown wary. Clearly, she suspected a trap and was refusing to march blindly into it. “Well, you looked like you,” she said. “Blonde, fair-eyed, wearing the uniform. You talked like you do, very direct.”

  Goojie. Sula’s heart sank. She had thought she’d managed to make a friend, and instead, the woman had been planning to betray her all along.

  “Thank you,” Sula said. “I appreciate the information. I think you should probably tell Miss Kantari to put off acquiring that new production facility. It appears you and she have been the victims of a fraud by someone who has been impersonating me.”

  Souka’s wary look increased. She probably thought that Sula had thought better of the Kantari deal and the bribe and was trying to wriggle out of it. Sula continued.

  “You should also probably tell your firm’s counsel that there will probably be a criminal investigation of the impersonator. Do you by any chance have contact information for that person? Or recall any details of the account into which the filing fees were disbursed?”

  Souka had contact information, but it was useless. “I tried to contact you when I heard you were in Constantinople, but the code no longer worked.”

  “Thank you, Miss Souka,” Sula said. “You’ll get back to me with that account information, won’t you?”

  * * *

  Sula’s next call was to Jack Danitz. His aggressive affect was hardly diminished by distance or by the fact that he appeared as a miniaturized, bearded bust on Sula’s display. Alone of all the callers she’d received that day, Danitz did not offer condolences on Goojie’s death.

  “Thank you for calling, Lady Sula,” he boomed in his huge baritone voice. His smile was huge. “You’ve decided to take me up on my offer, I assume?”

  “You still haven’t worked out how Light Squadron Seventeen survived Second Magaria?”

  “Not yet.” The brilliance of his smile faded slightly.

  “Let’s strike a deal, Mr. Danitz. I’ll tell you how to thrash any virtual opponents at the Battle of Magaria if you’ll do me a favor.”

  The beaming smile was back and implied that Danitz had expected exactly this situation. “Of course, Lady Sula!” he said. “What do you need?”

  “I need you and your group of obsessive researchers to help me with a project.”

  He seemed a little surprised. “You need something researched?”

  “I need someone found. It turns out that someone’s been on Terra for at least the last couple months, impersonating me.”

  Danitz boomed out a laugh. “That shouldn’t be a problem!”

  “No?”

  “Of course not! If a decorated war hero visited my town, I’d probably take a picture! And I’d put that photo in some online account where my friends could see it! And once the photo passed the censors, it would be available to practically anyone!”

  Sula was dizzied by Danitz’s enthusiasm. “Well,” she said. “If you could tell your friends to get busy . . .”

  “Of course, Lady Sula!”

  A warning finger touched the back of her neck. “And if you could, caution your people to be discreet. I don’t want any warning reaching this person’s confederates, assuming she has any.”

  “Absolutely!” he roared as his presence filled the little screen. “You can count on us!”

  She touched a control on her display, and the orange end-stamp filled the screen for a few seconds before the chameleon fabric rotated and returned the fabric to its normal deep green color.

  Sula gave a long sigh—Danitz long-distance was nearly as exhausting as Danitz in person—and then took off her uniform tunic and returned it to the closet.

  Feeling buoyed, she looked at her table and her bowl of soup, now cold, its surface spotted with shiny drops of fragrant grease, and pushed the bowl away. I wasn’t hungry, anyway, she decided, and went to bed.

  * * *

  Next morning, Adele Souka sent the account number at the Bank of Zanshaa to which Kantari Modulars had sent the supposed filing fee, and Sula contacted the bank and was told that the account still existed and was in her name. Sula knew that if she had actually solicited a bribe, she would have been intelligent enough not to have put the account in her own name, and the money wouldn’t have stayed there for long. But then this account was supposed to be
found; it was supposed to provide evidence that would get Sula arrested and executed.

  Several additional messages arrived from Jack Danitz, with pictures and video of Sula on Terra. Some were perfectly genuine, catching her in Constantinople or Xi’an, but others showed her in places where she knew she’d never been. There was also a news item describing her giving a speech to something in Paris described as “the exclusive Continental Club,” the sort of event she wouldn’t have attended on a bet. The quotes given in the article seemed plausible enough—they were the sort of things she might well have said had she been trapped into attending such a gathering—and they testified to the amount of research the imposter had done.

  Well, there was plenty of video of her from the war that Goojie could have studied.

  She messaged Danitz her thanks and told him to keep going, then studied the images of the imposter. They were uncanny—the imposter even walked like her, in her straight-backed military stride, and the scowl with which she regarded the video camera seemed more like Sula than Sula herself.

  What the imposter didn’t seem to be was Goojie. Sula couldn’t see anything of Caro’s cousin in the way she moved or spoke. Goojie must have been a chameleon, to have adopted Sula’s part so convincingly.

  Perhaps, she decided, that sort of thing ran in the family.

  * * *

  Sula’s theory crumbled into dust the next morning, when Koridun delivered a report on Goojie’s movements. She’d disembarked from the Benin exactly when she said she had, had stayed in a hotel on the ring when meeting with the Kan-fra delegates, and had then dropped to Earth to meet Sula in Sulawesi.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Sula asked.