But it was enough.
“It’s in your line’s nature to yearn to govern, Derstu,” Kivits said. “The very best of you recognize it and work to suppress it. I’m encouraged to see you accessible to reason.”
“I walk the path.”
“Indeed.” Kivits took a lap around the clutching chamber, letting the fall of each of his four feet echo around the space. “What do we do about the human cruiser?”
“It would be easier to answer that question if I knew what the Symphony really hoped to achieve with our assignment here.”
“I’ve read the same dispatches you have.”
“That’s what worries me, Kivits. They’re instructions, but that’s all. They lack context to help us determine the intentions and motivations behind the instructions. You’ve been dulac over six derstus. Have you ever seen a song from the Chorus with so few layers? Such amateurish composition?”
“Not for an entire assignment. For simple things like ‘Proceed to Adrolor for resupply,’ but not for something of this … delicacy.”
“Exactly!” Thuk said, unable to contain himself. “We’re out here perched on top of the most powerful weapon our race has ever conceived of, facing the only mound that has ever fought us to a standstill, and the Dark Ocean Chorus has left us spinning like a felled leaf caught in a river curl. Spinning, no direction.” Thuk moved in for the rhetorical kill. “Even the Seven Sacrifices were trusted enough by their queens to be told their true purpose, but our harmony can’t be? Tell me that doesn’t bother you. I will trust your judgment and say no more of it.”
“Chasm below,” Kivits swore. “That’s not exactly fair.”
“It’s a simple enough question.”
“The hardest questions usually are.” Kivits clicked his mandibles, then grew quiet, contemplative. It stretched long. So long even Thuk felt the ancestral urge to fill the silence with something. Clicking, humming, rubbing the signalers of his midarms together. Anything.
“Yes, it bothers me,” he said at last. “But what are we supposed to do about it? We have their song.”
“It’s enough for now that we’ve given voice to our concerns. I’m glad to know we’re reading from the same scroll on this. As for what we do about it, maybe nothing. Maybe the rest of the assignment goes off free of rain and wind and we never have to speak of this again.”
“And if the rain falls and the wind scours our plates?”
“I don’t know, Kivits,” Thuk said honestly. “But we should be thinking about an answer. This human ship and its … cop-tan are clever and dangerous enough. I’d rather have reassurance that I only need to worry about the enemy in front of me. Maybe request clarification of our instructions from the Chorus?”
Kivits pondered this. “We risk appearing disrespectful, and there’s no assurance we’ll learn anything new. They could just repeat the song, or refuse to answer altogether.”
“That itself would teach us something, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” Kivits scratched at one of his elbow joints. “All right, we’re in harmony. We’ll send another singing husk back to the Chorus.”
“Good, I’ll return to the mind cavern and get it sent off immediately.”
“I assume I don’t have to tell you not to poison the minds of the rest of the harmony with your paranoia?”
“That you share?”
“Our paranoia,” Kivits corrected. “They’re bearing enough weight already and don’t need two fools adding to the burden.”
“I agree,” Thuk said. “Although I think our recording attendant harbors her own suspicions.”
“Hurg?” Kivits said, imitating the sound one makes before regurgitating. “I don’t care for that one.”
“Her performance appraisals have been exemplary,” Thuk answered back.
“It’s not her competence I dislike. It’s her arrogance. Carrying her wing sheaths between molts, rubbing her nobility in our faces.”
Ah, of course that was it. “Come now, Kivits. How would you react if everyone expected you to walk on your hindlegs and pretend your forelegs were midhands?”
Kivits exhaled, a long, slow sound. “Not well, I expect.”
“Nor I, if you demanded I walk around on my midhands as if I had quadlegs. The queens were deposed centuries ago. Let her be what she is. If she tries to mutiny, I’ll hold the double-door open for you to throw her into the dark ocean.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
“Something tells me it won’t come to that. Our young royal is eager to gratify and quite a bright spark.”
Kivits ran a hand gently down the wall of the clutching chamber, almost wistfully. A wisp of shame danced over the dulac’s features and it all came into focus. Gently, so as not to raise attention, Thuk grazed a few nearby surfaces with the finger pads of his primehands, sampling the oily residue coating the material as he did so. The pheromones told the story the dulac dared not. Thuk swirled the tips of his finger pads together absently, tasting the past.
Kivits and Hurg had been in this very spot, no more than three or four days ago. And they’d been aroused. So, the dulac had a secret tryst with a royal. Quite the scandal, but hardly unique. After the Fall of the Queens, many among the former laborer caste succumbed to the temptation to, quite literally, stick it to a royal bloodline. As perversions went, it bordered on the mundane, but Thuk tucked the knowledge away in the back of his memory regardless.
You never knew when a little gossip could come in handy.
“I should return to the mind cavern. We’re on the far side of the system by now and the attendants will be trying to get our bearings. Decisions will need to be made.”
“Yes, of course.” Kivits moved aside to open the path out of the clutching chamber. “But don’t forget what we’ve discussed here.”
“Oh, I won’t forget what I’ve learned today,” Thuk said, his meaning deliberately ambiguous as he left Kivits behind.
TWELVE
The bartender poured two fingers of junmai daiginjo sake from a chilled carafe into Tyson’s cup. The clear, floral liquid filled his nose as quickly as it filled the cup. Chilled to a perfect two degrees, the imported sake was a welcome distraction after a brutal day.
The Nakamura family’s craft brewery on the outskirts made an excellent range of sakes from locally cultivated rice, but this wasn’t one of those. Instead, Tyson had come across the intoxicating brew during an extended business trip to Kyoto several years ago and had a case shipped home. It was genuine Japanese sake, brewed by the Asahi Shuzo brewery in the Yamaguchi Prefecture.
It was probably the most embarrassingly expensive liquor on the entire planet. And Tyson was the only person besides the bartenders in Klub Kryptonite that knew it was even here. A fact that at least one of them had taken advantage of, as half a bottle had been lost to “spillage” over the last several months, but Tyson didn’t mind. Let them live a little, he thought.
“Thank you, James,” he said, then lifted the small porcelain cup and sipped its contents. Crisp notes of apple and strawberry played across his tongue. Amazing what could be accomplished with nothing more than rice, water, time, and skill.
Kryptonite was located on the sixty-ninth floor of the Immortal Tower. Its imported marble countertops and barstools floated above the floor, trapped in electromagnetic eddy currents strong enough to hold up many hundreds of kilos thanks to steel strips imbued into their undersides. After a little idle digging, Tyson had learned the name was a clever joke referring to the one weakness of an immortal hero from twentieth-century Earth mythology. If anything fit that bill for the majority of the tower’s residents and employees, alcohol was it.
During the work week, Kryptonite was an exclusive bar patronized by executives and the ladder-climbers eager to impress their superiors. Friday and Saturday nights, it was a velvet-rope, invite-only music and dance club for Methuselah’s beautiful people and trust-fund babies, and the lecherous men and women who preyed upon them with promise
s of jobs or paid-for leisure and comfort.
But, being as it was a Tuesday evening, it was just Tyson and James.
Tyson glanced down at his tablet. The display was encrypted to the implants in his eyes. Anyone else casually glancing at the screen would see only static. He could read the reports within his augmented reality environment just as easily, of course. But Tyson, for some indelible reason, had always preferred to keep whatever he was reading out of his head and in his hands. It was a strange quirk, but harmless. Today, he wanted to keep the news at arm’s length.
The two-headed monster of the Teegarden bacteria and the Xre incursion near Grendel had, in forty-eight short hours, wiped out almost seven years of Ageless Corp. stock growth. It was now the biggest drop in company history over such a short span at a time the rest of the market was running with the bulls. Despite furious attempts by his PR department at spin control, the fallout from the INN interview had been decimating. No one had any idea how to stop the hemorrhaging. The board was verging on panic as many tens of billions of nudollars’ worth of market cap disappeared. For his part, Tyson was steeling himself to weather the storm and find out where the new bottom was while he pressed ahead with his investigation. There really didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
“Long day?” the bartender asked.
“Longest on record.” Tyson swirled his cup, then took another sip.
“I’d heard about the incursion. That was some bad luck.”
Tyson waved it off. “That’s the least of my problems.”
“An alien invasion is the least of your problems? Wow, that is a long day,” James said with a wink.
“It’s hardly an invasion, just saber-rattling.”
“If you say so. Then again, I just pour the booze. The big-ticket stuff is a little beyond the purview of people who live off tips.”
“We’re all living off tips, James. That’s all profit is. The tip customers are willing to pay for making their lives a little easier, or longer, or more entertaining. You just earn yours on a person-by-person basis.”
“Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it like that. These other problems, anything you want to talk about?”
“Want to? Sure. Able to? No, not really.”
James nodded as he loaded the small glass-washer at his waist. “That’s fine. There’s a lot of nervous people around is all. We have some mutated space super-plague in orbit, bug-eating aliens knocking at our back door—it’s a lot for folks to take in.”
“It’s a lot for me to take in, James, believe that.”
“I do. Haven’t seen you in a state like this since … what was her name? Rachel, Rochelle?”
“Really? You’re going to bring her up? I thought bartenders were supposed to help their customers forget.”
“Well, which one would you rather be thinking about right now?”
“You’ve got me there.” Tyson pulled a bit of fluff off his sleeve. “You’re trying to get me to say something reassuring, aren’t you?”
James shrugged. “Lot of people are looking for reassurance. It’s to be expected. We haven’t had any trouble with the Xre since most of our grandparents were kids. People come to me for comfort, just as you did. If I can give them some that I got right from the source, well, it would go a long way to easing their minds. And fattening my tips up a bit.”
Tyson chuckled at that. “All about the bottom line, hey?”
“I’m providing a service.”
“Indeed you are.” Tyson drained the rest of the contents of his cup, which had begun to warm. “A fresh chilled cup and another shot, James. And pour yourself one.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.”
“I know you’re sneaking them anyway. May as well make it legitimate.”
James’s normally smooth, flowing movement from one task into the next faltered for the briefest of moments, but quickly recovered. If he hadn’t been looking closely, Tyson wouldn’t have picked up on it at all. But he had been, and he knew the message had been received louder than if he’d shouted it. His private store of genuine junmai sake would once again be there for his pleasure alone.
His father had taught him many indirect lessons, but the most important had been the value of a subtle application of power. James set two cups down on the bar and emptied the rest of the carafe. They clinked cups, dipped to tap the bar, then drank together.
“Oh, that is lovely.” James set the cup down on the floating marble.
“The finest.” Tyson leaned back from the bar. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give James something to spread around. He was well-liked and well-connected among the bar’s influential patrons, and most people trusted the word of their favorite bartender a hell of a lot more than any newscaster or CEO. There was no sense keeping secrets that had already gotten out.
“You want some good news to spread around? I’ll oblige. I’ve got a whipcrack smart lady coordinating the mission to eradicate this bacteria, and she’s confident her team is on the verge of a treatment breakthrough. As far as the Xre are concerned, the fleet has already bumped up to full alert status. It’s not a threat to Ageless, it’s a danger to every transtellar in human-controlled space. Fleet is treating it accordingly. And you didn’t hear this from me…” Tyson held the man’s gaze until he got a nod to continue. “… but the ship stationed over Grendel is the Ansari, an endurance cruiser straight out of drydock with a fresh coat of paint and bristling with upgrades. Her captain has already sent the Xre running once and destroyed several of their drones and decoys. The situation is in good hands.”
“That’s good to hear,” James said. “I’m sure more than a few people will be glad to hear it.”
“Now, now, James.” Tyson touched his nose. “Our secret.”
“Of course. Another, Mr. Abington?”
“One more, then perhaps an appetizer menu?”
“Coming right up, sir.”
Tyson laced his fingers behind his head and savored the small victory for exactly three seconds before the next fresh hell greeted him like a jilted lover.
“Sir, I have news,” Paris said into his auditory implants.
“I’m trying to enjoy a quiet drink and a bite to eat, Paris.”
“Apologies, but I wouldn’t interrupt if it could wait.”
Tyson’s right fist balled up. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. What do you have for me?”
“Two items, actually. First, I’ve discovered the source of the leak from the freighter, sir. It wasn’t a person, it was a limited AI program. Buried deep in a communications subroutine. The worm tapped into the ship’s comm records, then broadcast the information through tiny manipulations of the output of the freighter’s fusion drive plume once it started decelerating toward Lazarus. Anyone listening on standard radio channels wouldn’t hear a thing, but anyone who knew what to look for with a sufficiently powerful telescope and a modified fiber-optic cable repeater could read it clear as day.”
“So there’s no fingerprints on the local net, either?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Tyson swore under his breath. It was a very clever plan, he had to acknowledge that much.
“I still get my carapace, yes?” Paris asked coyly.
“If you can trace the worm backward to where and when it was uploaded to the ship.”
“I’m already working on it. And I’ve already ordered the carapace. I didn’t think you’d mind that much.”
Tyson let his assistant’s indiscretion slide. “And the second item?”
“I have your spy.”
That grabbed Tyson’s attention. The annoyance he felt at the interruption melted away in an instant as his back went rigid. “When?”
“A few minutes ago. Methuselah PD wheeled her into Xanadu Hospital.”
“I want to speak with her at once.”
“That … will be a one-sided conversation.”
“She’s dead?”
“About as dead as one of you can be, if the initial report is to be
believed. You’ve been formally requested to identify the body, in fact. Or what remains of it.”
Tyson’s stomach lurched at the implication. “Understood. Have a pod waiting for me downstairs.”
“It’s already parked. And sir, I would really feel better if you’d let me assign a security detachment to your person.”
“I haven’t had bodyguards since I took the job, Paris. Being seen with even one now sends entirely the wrong message. The CEO of Ageless needs to project calm and normalcy to his planet. Especially now.”
“I understand, sir. I just disagree.”
“You’re free to.”
“At least a hornet drone, sir. I’ll keep it at a respectful altitude. It’ll blend in with the media drones that follow you around below the airspace ceiling anyway.”
“You want to stick an armed drone in the middle of a swarm of UHD cameras? Did you skip an update?” Tyson asked with annoyance mixed with genuine concern.
“I’ve taken the liberty to have one camouflaged to look like a common delivery drone in the unlikely event you were swayed by reason.”
“What, you spray painted ‘UPS’ on its micro-rocket box launchers?”
“Something like that, except competently executed. Really, Tyson…”
“I’m sorry.” Tyson held up his hands in mock surrender, knowing she would be watching the CCD camera feed. “Fine, launch your cross-dressing hornet. But I don’t want it buzzing my head like a lost puppy, understood?”
“Completely,” his AI assistant said with more than a little sass leaking into her tone. “Pod’s waiting. I’ll tell the MPD you’re en route.”
“Something wrong, sir?” James asked, stress lines reaching across his forehead.
“Nothing, James. It’s fine. Please run my tab against my expense account. And give yourself a generous tip.”
“An appetizer to go?”
Tyson thought again about the scene that awaited him at the morgue in Xanadu Hospital as he pushed away from the floating bar top.
“No, thank you. Afraid I’ve rather lost my appetite.”
In the Black Page 13