People seemed pathetically anxious to meet the noblewoman, who—in perhaps only a few days’ time—would be running for her life, trying to escape the Huhsz. The aristocrat, standing under the bright colored lights near the center of the reception room, had taken off her shoes; her naked feet were half submerged in the thick pile of the room’s richly patterned carpet. Lebmellin loathed such aristocratic affectation. He had to suppress a sneer as he shared a joke with a popular and influential courtesan it would have been foolish to antagonize.
He laughed lightly, putting his head back. Good; Kuma was just introducing the Franck woman to the Chief Invigilator.
A few minutes after midnight, routine repair work on a factory ship a couple of vessels away from what had once been the Imperial Tilian Navy’s flagship Devastator resulted in a small explosion in the manufacturing vessel’s bilges.
The Repair Module sensed the faintest of alterations to the dim hanging shape of a distant ship, then registered the shockwave as it passed through the attached hulls above, and finally heard and felt the explosion pulsing through the water around it as it trundled quietly and softly across the mud toward the old battleship.
The gas detonation fractured several of the factory ship’s outer plates and ruptured the insulation of a main power cable, so that when the water rushed in through the gaps in the ship’s hull it shorted out the electricity supply for several dozen ships near the heart of the Log-Jam. That part of the city sank into darkness.
The Module sensed the electrical fields immediately around fade and die, leaving only the magnetic signatures of the fabric of the ships themselves.
Emergency lights burned on the ships for a few seconds until their stand-by generators took up the strain, so that, one by one, the vessels flickered into brightness again. The Log-Jam’s power supply center—tapping the reactors of dozens of old submarines and four of the eight nuclear-powered carriers which made up Carrier Field—instituted checks to determine where the power line had shorted, before it started to reroute electricity to the affected area.
The power supply in the Devastator took a little longer to re-establish while its alarms were checked. When the old battleship’s systems did fire up again, much of the emergency wiring—replaced only a few months earlier as part of the vessel’s rolling refit program by an electrical company very distantly owned by Miz Gattse Kuma—promptly melted, starting numerous but small fires throughout the old ship. The system was shut down again. Duty engineers on the Devastator—who, after the guards, made up the bulk of the old battleship’s fifty or so night staff—worked to reroute the generator supply while battery-powered fire control systems tackled the fires; most were put out within a few minutes.
The Module half-plowed, half-floated gently on, approaching the dark space under the silent battleship, whose wide, flat bottom hung suspended just a handful of meters above the floor of soft, black mud.
Lebmellin fought the desire to look at his timepiece or ask an aide the hour. He watched the Chief Invigilator as the older man fell under the spell of the golden-haired Franck woman. The aristocrat was quite outshone in her company. Zefla Franck glowed; she filled the space about her with life and beauty and an attraction you could almost taste.
The Sharrow woman had a sort of quiet, dark beauty, understated despite the strength of her features and forbidding, even if one had not known she was from a major house; she was like a dark, cloud-covered planet clothed in quiet, cold mystery.
But the Franck woman was like Thrial; like the sun; a radiance Lebmellin could feel on his face as she joshed and joked with his immediate superior. And the old fool was lapping it up, falling for it, falling for her.
Mine, thought Lebmellin, watching her as she talked and laughed, savoring the way she put her head back and the exquisite shape it gave that long, inviting neck. Mine, he told himself, fastening his gaze on her hand when it went out to touch the ornately embroidered material on the arm of the Chief Invigilator’s robe.
You’ll be mine, Lebmellin told her piled mass of shining golden hair and her wise-child laughing eyes and her perfect, agile, ever minutely swiveling and shifting figure and her luxurious, enveloping, softly welcoming voice and mouth. Mine, when this is over, and I can have whatever I want. Mine.
The Chief Invigilator offered to show the Francks the Log-Jam from his yacht. She accepted; her brother declined gracefully, to the obvious relief of the Chief Invigilator. He swept off with her on his arm, taking only his two bodyguards, private secretary, butler, chef and physician with him and leaving the rest of his entourage behind to look briefly discomfited, then relax and enjoy themselves.
The mains power was reconnected by a different route before the Devastator’s generator could be hooked into the circuit. When the battleship’s circuits came alive again, many of the alarms went off. There were still dozens of small fires burning aboard, and though they too were extinguished shortly after the power returned, there was smoke in many of the ship’s spaces, only gradually being pulled out of the vessel as its ventilation system rumbled back to life.
The alarms continued to sound, refusing to be reset without triggering again. The engineers and guard techs scratched their heads and ran various checks.
It was a few minutes before they realized that they weren’t dealing with a set of persistent and interlinked false alarms, and that something really was wrong.
By that time the Module had used a thermal lance to cut its way through the battleship’s mine-armor just a little to port of the vessel’s keel, directly under the Addendum Vault. It trundled back a little to let the three-meter disc of white-heat-edged metal thump onto the mud and disappear, then powered through the thick plume of disturbed mud until it was just underneath the hole. It reconfigured its tracks and motor chassis for minimum-cross-sectional shape and vertical large-bore pipe-working, then floated up into the flooded bilgespace.
The Crownstar Addendum lay in what had been the Devastator’s B-turret magazine. The magazine and the turret above had been designed to rotate as a unit to train the three forty-centimeter guns on their targets; it had been heavily armored to start with, and on its conversion from magazine to vault had been reinforced with extra titanium armor, as well as having all its entrances but one sealed up, so that once it had been swiveled away from the matching aperture in the magazine cylinder’s sleeve, the only way in was through at least a meter of armor plate.
The Module placed a shaped charge rather larger than any projectile the Devastator had ever fired under the base of the magazine vault, then crawled to one side of the flooded compartment, withdrew all its surface sensors into its armored carapace and switched its listening devices off entirely.
The detonation shuddered through every single one of the Devastator’s sixty thousand tons. It raised eyebrows and clinked ice cubes in glasses on adjoining ships. Two senior technicians in the battleship’s security control room looked slowly at each other and then reached for the Maximum Alert panic button. Every alarm on the ship that hadn’t gone off already proceeded to.
Lebmellin got the call about a third after midnight; he was waiting for it, so sensed his communications aide’s stillness as she listened to something more important than the chatter of world news and Jam systems reports which usually spoke to her wired eardrum. She closed one eye, checking her lid-screen.
The Chief Invigilator’s comm man was already talking into a brooch phone.
Lebmellin’s aide tapped his elbow once, and spoke the code he was expecting. “Sir; a Court representative has arrived unexpectedly. He’s aboard the Caltasp Princess.”
“Oh dear,” Lebmellin said. He turned back to the industrialist he’d been talking to, to make his apologies.
* * *
“It’s on F deck!” the security chief said, slamming the console and looking round the smoke-misted atmosphere of the control room, where lights flashed from most surfaces and every seat was occupied with people punching buttons, talking quickly into phones an
d thumbing through manuals. “Oh, sorry, Vice-Invigilator,” he said, standing quickly.
Lebmellin left his aides in the corridor and strode into the center of the room, his gaze sweeping round the boards and walls of flashing lights. “Well now,” he said in his best calm-but-determined voice. “What is going on, eh, chief?”
“Something’s broken into the vault, sir. Straight up and in after a power cut; it’s only two bulkheads—fairly thin bulkheads—away from the central chamber now. The last-ditch stuff ought to activate, but as nothing else has stopped it…” He shrugged. “It’s jammed the vault, sir, but it can’t get away; we have two microsubs under the hole and four—soon six—crawler units standing by at the side of the hull, plus the duty submarine on its way to the nearest practicable space with divers ready, and all deck surfaces within two hundred meters under guard. We’ve informed the City Marines and they have aircraft and more men standing by. The Chief Invigilator is—”
“Indisposed, I believe,” Lebmellin said smoothly.
“Yes, sir. Unavailable, sir, so we contacted you.”
“Very good, chief,” Lebmellin said. “Please return to your post.”
The Module broke through into the central vault in a cloud of smoke, its carapace glowing red hot. A machine gun opened up, sprinkling the Module with fire; it lumbered on regardless, dragging a wrecked track behind it. One of its arms had been torn off and its casing had been dented and scarred in various places.
Gas gushed into the circular space, filling it with unseen fumes that would have killed a human in seconds. The machine trundled and squeaked to the center of the chamber where a titanium sleeve had descended from the ceiling to cover the transparent crystal casing around the Addendum itself.
The Module mortared a shaped-charge fusing pin at the point where the titanium sleeve disappeared into the ceiling, piercing the armor and jamming the sleeve in position. A pulse weapon fired, filling the hazy, gas-choked chamber with sparks but failing to scramble the Module’s photonic circuitry.
The machine extracted what looked like a very thick rug about a meter wide from an armored compartment under its carapace, wrapped the rug clumsily round the titanium column using its one functioning heavy arm, then sent the light pulse triggering the pre-patterned close-cutter; the charge blasted four microscopically thin crevices through the metal, and a meter of the titanium sleeve fell apart to reveal the undamaged crystal dome within holding the Crownstar Addendum, like a seed cluster within a halved fruit.
The Module loosed its most delicate arm from a slot on its side and reached toward the crystal dome, a hypersonic cutter humming on the end of the spindly arm. It made an incision round the base of the thick crystal dome, lifted it carefully off and placed it to one side, then reached in for the Addendum, lying on a neck-shaped slope of plain black cloth.
The three multi-jointed digits closed in on the necklace, swiveling and adjusting as they neared, as if uncertain how to pick it up.
Then they slowed, and stopped.
The Module made a gasping, grinding noise and seemed to collapse on its tracks. The arm reaching for the Addendum sagged, lopsided, its metal and plastic fingers still a couple of centimeters away from its goal. The fingers trembled, flexed for one last time, then drooped.
Smoke leaked from the carapace of the Module, joining the gas and the fumes and smoke already filling the chamber. A noise like a groan came from the battered machine.
It was quarter of an hour before the emergency motors were able to grind and force the vault round so that its door and the magazine sleeve door were aligned, and before the central chamber was cool and gas-free enough for Lebmellin, the security chief and the other guards to enter.
They wore gas-masks; they stepped in, over pieces of wreckage still glowing, and found the Module where it had stopped, its thin metallic arm stretched out grasping for the Addendum. The guards eyed it warily; their chief looked round the wrecked chamber with a look of disbelieving fury.
Lebmellin stepped gingerly over a lump of sliced titanium, holding his robes up off the debris-scattered deck. “Perhaps we ought to rename the ship the Devastated, eh, chief?” he said, and chuckled behind his mask.
The security chief gave him a bleak smile.
Lebmellin went to the necklace, staring intently at it without touching it.
“Best be careful, sir,” the security chief said, his voice muffled by the mask. “We don’t know that thing’s really dead yet.”
“Hmm,” Lebmellin said. He looked round, then nodded at the security chief, who motioned the guards out of the chamber.
The two men went to a metal fire-hose cabinet on the wall and each inserted a small key into what looked like an ordinary, non-locking handle. The dented mild steel cabinet swung open and Lebmellin reached in under the remains of the ancient canvas hose for a thin package wrapped in clean rags.
Lebmellin peeled back the rags to reveal the real Crownstar Addendum, which of course was far too valuable to leave the vault or ever be left exactly where people thought it was. The two men took magnifiers from their pockets and stared at the necklace. They both sighed at the same time.
“Well, chief,” Lebmellin said. He reached inside his robe with the hand not holding the Addendum and rubbed his chest. “It’s here, but we are going to have to fill out an awful lot of forms, and probably in triplicate.”
At exactly that point, the Module made a noise like a shot, and moved briefly on its tracks before falling silent again. The security chief spun round, eyes wide, a cry starting in his throat. After a moment he turned back. “Probably just cooling,” he said, smiling shamefacedly.
The Vice-Invigilator looked unimpressed. “Yes, chief.” He covered the necklace in his hand with the rags and put it back in the fire-hose cupboard; they locked it together.
Lebmellin nodded at the machine. “Have the men force that thing back out the way it came,” he said. “Let the units under the ship take it away; we don’t want it doing anything awkward like self-destructing now, do we?”
“No, sir.” The security chief looked pained. “Of course it may do just that if we try to move it.”
Lebmellin looked meaningfully at the fire-hose cupboard. “Only the Chief Invigilator and five members of the City Board may move what’s in there; for tonight, we have no choice. Dump that damned thing down the hole it came through, and make sure this place is extremely well guarded.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now do let’s leave; there’s a terribly regrettable smell in here, even with this mask, and my hair is going to stink for absolutely days. Call the guards back in.”
“Sir.”
They supervised the removal of the necklace the Module had been about to grasp; Lebmellin went with the fifty fully armed Marines who escorted two nervous-looking bank vice-presidents to the Jam’s second most secure vault, in the Log-Jam branch of the First International Bank, on a purpose-built concrete barge modeled on an ancient oil-production platform.
Lebmellin left the bank on his official ACV with his aides. The security chief called from the Devastator. The Module had been levered and hoisted back down through the ship without incident and was now being dragged away from beneath the hull by a Marine crawler.
“Very good,” Lebmellin said, staring up through the cockpit canopy at the junklit clouds above. He smiled at his comm aide and official secretary, wondering which one was in Kuma’s employ. Possibly both.
He took a deep breath, holding one hand over his chest as he did so, as though breathless. He smiled beatifically. “I believe Mister Kuma was throwing a party after the reception; let’s see what’s left of it, shall we? You needn’t stay; you may all then depart for some well-earned sleep.”
“Sir.”
Miz Gattse Kuma’s party on the old mixed-traffic ferry was just starting to lose momentum. The upper car-deck of the ferry held a dance floor; the lower train-deck held half a dozen train carriages fitted out with snug bars. The ferry was a recent ac
quisition moored on the outer fringe of the Log-Jam, facing out to the lagoon sandbar and the sea beyond and only attached to the rest of the city by ordinary gangplanks. Using its stabilizers the ship was able to rock itself from side to side and so simulate a moderate ocean swell, which all but the most sensitively constituted party-goers had thought highly amusing.
Lebmellin climbed to the bridge of the old ferry, ignoring the dispersing party and nodding to the burly men who made up Kuma’s security team. His mouth was dry and he found that he was trembling, partly in delayed response to the theft of the Addendum itself, and partly in anticipation of what was going to happen now.
The wide, red-lit bridge was almost empty; much of the ferry’s instrumentation had been removed. They were there; the noblewoman, Kuma and the Franck man. They all wore street clothes. The aristocrat carried a small shoulder satchel. He nodded to Kuma—relaxed and holding a drink—and moved to a pool of light over a chart table where a drinks tray sat, crystal goblets glittering.
“You have the piece, Mister Lebmellin?” Kuma said.
“Here,” he said, taking it out of his robe. He laid it on the chart table, opening the cloth. The three clustered around, staring at it.
He watched them while they gaped at the jewel. He tried to see what was different about them, how this SNB virus, this ancient piece of scientific wizardry had changed them, infected them with each other somehow, made them—at times, the rumor went—better able to anticipate one another’s reactions than identical twins. He had done his homework on Mister Kuma; he knew his past, and how this viral drug had altered him—and these others—forever. But how did it show itself? Could you see it? Could you detect it in their voices? Were they reacting similarly now? Did they think the same things all the time? He frowned at them, trying to see something he knew could not be seen.
Whatever, he thought, suppressing a smile; for all their fabled powers, they were no more immune to the spell-casting attractions of the necklace than anybody else.
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