In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  He took it off the rack, suddenly aware of his nudity and the eyes prying from the ceiling. “Paris, are you watching me dress?”

  “I’ve watched you dress and undress every day for seven years, Tyson. Is today different?”

  Tyson strategically placed the suit jacket over his unmentionables. “Honestly, a little, yes. Could you, I don’t know, turn around for a moment?”

  He could’ve sworn he heard a sigh come through the speakers. “Cameras off. Two minutes should be enough to get your pants on, yes?”

  “More than adequate.” Tyson briefly considered saying something to try and smooth out his scorned AI’s bruised feelings, realized how crazy that sounded, and went to work getting dressed as quickly as he could.

  Minutes later, he stepped into a waiting travel pod in the basement garage of his residential building. “Immortal Tower,” he told the autopilot. The door clicked shut and pulled smoothly out of the garage with an electric hum. It was a six-minute ride from his apartment to the tower. Six minutes to organize his thoughts and set priorities for the day. Tyson felt rushed. He wasn’t used to feeling rushed.

  “Paris, inform Dr. Spaulding she’ll be presenting at the shareholder address tonight on our progress curing the Teegarden pandemic. Keep it short, five minutes, and no Ph.D.-speak. Has the tailor been to see her yet?”

  “For measurements and an initial fitting, yes, but he hasn’t delivered on the order yet.”

  “Put a rush on it to have an outfit ready and sent to her before the presentation tonight. Pay whatever ridiculous surcharge he throws out, minus twenty percent to keep him honest.”

  “Understood. Sir, I’m getting a Priority request from the NeoSun embassy. They request your personal attendance, as soon as is convenient.”

  Tyson cringed. “As soon as is convenient” was diplospeak for “Right fucking now.” His partners in Grendel were quite upset about something.

  “And the topic for this meeting?”

  “Sensitive.”

  “Shit.”

  “Succinctly put. Shall I redirect your pod?”

  Tyson wanted his pod redirected, all right. Straight back to his residence where he could resume depleting his stock of liquor. But there was nothing for it.

  “Tell the NeoSun embassy that I’ll be there momentarily.”

  The pod braked, hard, before reversing back to the last intersection it had passed, and took a new route toward Shensing Boulevard and Embassy Row. A dozen towers, each a unique architectural vision, lined the two sides of the boulevard, six abreast. NeoSun’s building, an imposing five-sided obsidian monolith clad in a lattice of burnished titanium pentagrams raced up to seven floors above the artificial ceiling long-dictated by Ageless tradition in Methuselah. As part of the Grendel endeavor, Tyson’s sometimes rivals, sometimes partners had renegotiated their rental agreement on those seven floors to be paid annually with tax-deductible donations to the MPD’s retirement program and the hospital system’s operating fund.

  It was an agreeable arrangement, saving NeoSun many hundreds of thousands in taxes each year, and taking those expenses off Ageless’s ledger. It cost Tyson nothing on balance, and had sweetened the pot for his new partners. Still, everything had a cost. Now the other eleven corps on the campus were pressuring him for a similar arrangement. Tyson pushed the indignant/whining communiques and official correspondence to the back of his mind. If they wanted the bennys, they could jolly-well belly up to the bar and sign on to their own partnership projects.

  The pod dipped below street level and rolled to a stop in front of the building’s private reception area. Here, VIPs could come and go without exposing themselves to the prying eyes of the public or press. Tyson stepped out onto the walkway and straightened a pantleg before continuing to the door. Two security guards in military-crisp business suits, one male, one female, stood to either side of the entry to the tower’s lobby.

  “Good morning, Mr. Abington,” the woman said. She was tall and fit, with taunt muscles filling out her jacket at the arms and shoulders. Ex-marine, almost certainly. A small, but noticeable bulge beneath her left breast betrayed the presence of a hand weapon of some sort in a holster.

  “Welcome to NeoSun. Please hold out your arms.”

  “Seriously?” Tyson said.

  “Bomb sweep,” the man said, producing a chem sniffer wand.

  “We’ve had a few bomb threats called in recently,” the woman said apologetically.

  Tyson smirked and held his arms out like a scarecrow. “If I wanted to destroy your building, I’d sign an order of demolition, not blow myself up.”

  “Rules are rules.”

  The wand beeped and turned green.

  “He’s clean.”

  “Obviously.” Tyson’s arms dropped to his sides.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Abington, and I apologize for its necessity.”

  “If you’re getting bomb threats, you should really be reporting them to the MPD so they can be traced back.”

  The woman smiled cordially. “NeoSun InfoSec policy prohibits sharing the details of internal security matters.”

  “It’s not ‘internal’ if someone collapses your tower onto the NorKel embassy across the street.”

  “I’ll forward your request to my supervisors.”

  “You do that. Now, is someone going to tell me why I’m here, or am I supposed to guess?”

  “Of course not, sir. If you’ll follow me.” She turned on a heel and headed through the blast-resistant, overlapping sliding glass doors that protected the opulent lobby. The male guard fell into step behind the two of them. So, not doormen, but his escorts. That was fine with Tyson. Anything to speed this up.

  In contrast to the clean, modern contours and metallic decor of Ageless’s receiving atrium, the more ostentatious and colorful tastes of NeoSun’s founders were still present more than a century after their deaths. Intricate tile mosaics covered the floor and crept halfway up the walls. Large, ornate columns, purely decorative, broke up the open space like walking through an old-growth forest. Holographic AI receptionists and assistants wandered the floor freely, projected by optical arrays hidden in the columns and ceiling, answering questions for tourists and new-hires. And everywhere, there was gold. Most of it was thin inlays and gold-leaf veneer, but not the logo. The half-sun at the top of the main entry wall, and all seven of the rays of light streaming down from it were solid gold, three centimeters thick. All told, it was more than six hundred kilograms of twenty-four-karat gold. Tyson knew its purity and mass, because his grandfather had personally signed off on an exemption for the Lazarus Charter code against hoarding precious metals to allow that much gold to be granted an import permit in the first place.

  There was enough gold in that gaudy logo to destabilize the local economy if it was melted down and distributed. Which also explained the security measures protecting it. NeoSun didn’t bother hiding the battle androids standing at either side of their lobby. Indeed, they were a popular selfie backdrop. Tyson had signed that arms import waiver.

  They reached the lifts. Like most of the towers on Embassy Row, the lower third of the NeoSun building actually contained shops and residential space, the rents on which were used to offset the impressive costs of running an off-world diplomatic operation that had fewer opportunities to act as a profit center than a traditional building. Still, the communications bottleneck inherent to interstellar travel meant that each embassy operated as a semiautonomous local headquarters for each transtellar corp, more akin to a wholly owned subsidiary than a satellite office. Local business decisions often couldn’t wait for the two-week to three-month communications loop to complete itself, so local administrators were given significant leeway to make the sorts of decisions usually reserved for C-level execs.

  It was about the time they passed the hundredth floor that Tyson started to notice something was different. He’d been to many meetings and confabs here, but they’d all been hosted in the grand ballroo
ms and executive offices around the seventieth floor.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “We were told to bring you directly to the Svyatilishche. That’s the extent of my knowledge regarding your visit, Mr. Abington.”

  Tyson mentally stumbled over the unfamiliar word.

  “Russian for ‘Sanctum,’” Paris said unbidden inside his head. He’d forgotten she was there.

  “What the hell does that mean?” he sent back.

  “I don’t know. I’m not Sokolov’s AI.”

  “Right.” Tyson stewed in his own thoughts for a moment. If anywhere in his tower could be called a sanctum, it was his penthouse office. Locked away from curious onlookers first through its position near the very top of the tower, then through multiple layers of security and anti-eavesdropping equipment. It was even more private than his residence in more ways than one.

  So naturally NeoSun had a room just like it. And he was being taken there. Where no one could see him. Where no one could hear him.…

  Suddenly, the presence of two armed guards sharing his elevator car felt a lot less routine and a whole lot more ominous.

  Tyson shook off the thought. Paris knew where he was. If he fell out of contact for any length of time, she would summon the MPD, even raise the Planetary Defense Reserves if necessary. Which might be necessary to get past the pair of decommissioned military meat-tenderizers in the lobby.

  No, he shook off the thought. These people were his business partners, and they were still on his planet, in his city. Sovereign embassy real estate be damned, there were some things one just didn’t do among the ruling class. It wasn’t proper. He was being paranoid. It had been a strange night capped off with a rough morning and he was just a smidgen off his game. That was the extent of it.

  The lift reached the hundred and forty-third floor, damn close to the top of the occupied portion of the tower. Another handful of floors and they’d be in machine rooms and the massive, multi-ton harmonic dampener chamber. The doors slid open.

  This high up, there wasn’t much square meterage on each floor, so it was a short walk to the Sanctum. As anticipated, the door was lousy with security precautions, from biometric scanners, to video surveillance, to automated defenses, to the size and thickness of the door itself. The male guard entered a dizzyingly long password, thumbed his print, and had his facial topography scanned.

  “Tyson,” Paris said into his head. “That room is radio-shielded. There’s a wireless deadzone right around it. I can’t follow you in there.”

  “I understand.”

  “Be careful.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said to himself as much as to her. “Still, have the cavalry ready if I’m not back in contact in twenty minutes.”

  “A lot can happen in twenty minutes.”

  The massive door swung open, perfectly balanced on hinges as thick as his wrist.

  “Ms. Sokolov wants to speak with you,” the woman guard said. “Privately.”

  Tyson’s interest perked. “She’s inside?”

  “Ms. Sokolov regrets that she was unable to make the trip, but she has prepared a message.”

  “A vid? Are you serious? You could have just sent it over to my assistant.”

  “No, we couldn’t. It’s for your eyes only.” She held out a hand, inviting him inside. “Please, enter.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “We’re not authorized to see the message. This was part of the instructions that accompanied the packet.”

  “So you’re just going to lock a rival CEO inside your company’s most secure facility on the entire planet, alone?”

  “Believe me, I’m not thrilled about it,” the man said.

  “Please excuse my partner, Mr. Abington. We’ll be waiting here to escort you back to your pod as soon as you’re finished.”

  “All right. Don’t forget I’m in there and wander off for a vape break while the door’s locked.”

  “We won’t.” The heavy door swung shut and clunked shut with finality. All external noise disappeared, leaving Tyson with only the sound of his breathing. A loss-of-signal error in the corner of his augmented reality field announced that he’d lost connection to Paris, just as she’d predicted.

  It was funny. Less than an hour ago, he’d wanted her gone, or at least in another room for the first time in seven years. Now, with the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears, he’d do anything to bring her back.

  In contrast to the decorations in the rest of the tower, the spherical chamber was utterly stark. Featureless and flat white, the only accoutrement was a plain, contoured white chair at the center of the room. Not seeing any interface or control panels and unsure of what else to do, Tyson walked around it once, then sat down.

  The room flipped in an instant from flat white to an infinite black. Tyson’s eyes tried to adjust, but there was nothing to focus on. His head shook against the disorientation and he closed his eyes. The view was still just as black, but somehow more manageable.

  “Hello, Tyson,” a familiar accent said. He pried his eyes open and stared into the face of Valeria Sokolov. It was a hologram, of course, but in the absolute black of the rest of the room, it was absolutely convincing. She stood against the velvet dark, dressed in a regal evening gown that suggested she was about to attend a party of some prominence.

  “Hello,” he said out of social habit.

  “I’m sure my representatives have already conveyed my apologies for being unable to leave New Vladivostok for this conversation, but I wanted you to hear this from me personally, if indirectly. The location I’ve picked for you to receive this message should further reinforce just how … confidential … I expect it to be. We’re of a kind, and I want to show you the respect and trust your position deserves.”

  “Yes, yes,” Tyson said to the digital ghost of nine-days-ago Sokolov. “Stop fluffing me and get on with it.”

  “So, it is with a heavy heart and great regret that I must tell you that the NeoSun board will be exercising the Emergency Termination Clause of our partnership in Grendel.”

  “What?!” Tyson blurted out, genuinely caught off guard.

  “I realize you’re presenting your shareholder address this evening, and I hate to dump this on you ahead of it, but there’s just not time. The board hasn’t voted to make it official yet, but I’m pushing for this decision myself, so whatever angles you’re starting to formulate, don’t waste your time. You can challenge me through the arbitration process, of course, but I’ve already sent word to our associates in the system to pull up stakes. Even if you win the arbitration, our end of the operation will have been cold for months.”

  Tyson forgot he was looking at a hologram and almost started to argue, but caught himself. This was asinine. They’d cracked the Teegarden plague, and after tonight’s presentation, investors would swoop in to buy up Ageless shares for cheap at the start of their recovery.

  Or, they would have.

  “Or,” Sokolov went on, “we can behave like adults and handle this breakup quietly and avoid a lot of the bad press. If you’re honest with yourself, Ageless is far more exposed on that front than NeoSun is. Consider it a peace offering. Now, the really scary shit.”

  “That wasn’t the scary shit?” Tyson asked the empty room.

  “The reason I’m pulling out of Grendel is that something’s gone terribly wrong out there. We’re closer than you are, and I sent this message on my fastest skip drone, so you won’t be getting any official notification of this news until the standard com drones catch up in twelve hours or so. So don’t do or say anything that would give away that you know, but Grendel is going under official quarantine. I don’t know the full details, but there was a confrontation between the CCDF cruiser and the Xre raider that’s been poking around the edge of the system for months. There were explosions out near the treaty line they could see clear back in the planet’s orbit. The Admiralty House is mobilizing a task group to send in to recon the ar
ea. No civilian traffic in or out until they’ve finished, and a coms blackout will go into effect as soon as their skip drone arrives. I can only assume this means our cruiser on station was lost.”

  Tyson’s throat went dry. Grendel had just turned into a flashpoint of a war no one had seen coming. This was definitely scarier shit.

  “I’m afraid by the time you’re watching this, there will be no way for you to get an evacuation order to your people ahead of the blackout. The pieces are already in motion and I can’t stop them. However, in my communiqué, which will beat the blackout by a few hours, I took the liberty of suggesting to Governor Honshu that you wouldn’t be too terribly upset, given the circumstances, if she decided to exercise a little initiative and call her own evacuation order. I know that’s stepping on your toes a bit, but there was no way to include you in the decision loop considering the time lag. I hope you’ll forgive my presumptiveness.”

  Tyson fell back in the chair, only then realizing how far forward in the seat he’d been leaning. There was nothing to forgive Sokolov for. She’d probably just saved hundreds of lives, provided that stubborn imbecile Honshu took her advice. She was a cousin to Tyson’s COO Nakamura, and he’d never been particularly fond of her. When the chance to dump her off on Ageless’s furthest-flung frontier holding presented itself, Tyson had been only too happy to sign off on the assignment.

  Now he hoped he hadn’t inadvertently stuck an incompetent at the focal point of an unfolding interstellar war. Nepotism had the most inventive ways of coming back to bite you.

  “That’s all I know for now. This is a real clusterfuck, Tyson. I don’t know where it goes from here, but I’m concerned it’s going to make our recent troubles seem pretty goddamned trivial. And word to the wise, not everyone on your board is looking out for your best interests. Personal or otherwise. That’s all I can say for certain for now. Keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel. Maybe we can have another go at it in a few years when the dust settles. Good luck. And remember, you don’t know anything until the official drone makes orbit. Dasvidaniya.” With that, Sokolov’s avatar faded from view and plunged the chamber back into darkness.