by Patty Jansen
I hoped Melissa had been smart enough to bring guards.
But I also knew that, being someone from Earth with still a very Earth mentality, she wouldn’t have.
“Nicha, is there a way we can send her help? Are Evi and Telaris back yet?”
“They’ll be back tonight, but they also should be staying with us. Now that we know these things, we may be at risk right here. Criminals do strange things when their anonymity is threatened. Melissa out there may well be safer than we are here.”
That was always a possibility, but I still didn’t like it. I had sent Melissa out there. If something happened to her, it was my fault.
* * *
It still took another two days before the medico would allow me to go home. On my first day out of the high-oxygen chamber, I developed a rash and they had to check that it wasn’t some sort of allergic reaction to the blood I’d received. My leg was on the mend but she wouldn’t let me go until it had fully scabbed over. She also insisted that I allow house visits by her and came back for checkups. It almost sounded more tiring than staying in the hospital.
But I was glad to go home. Thayu hired a water taxi that took us right to the jetty just outside our building. It was midday. The sun on my face and the wind in my hair were heavenly.
I came out of the lift to Eirani running out onto the gallery and giving me a hug, and Evi and Telaris in their familiar spots at the door. All the domestic staff were in the hall, as were Veyada and Sheydu, and Devlin, and the nanny with Ayshada who was singing at the top of his voice.
Everyone was smiling. I had missed them.
I hugged all the members of my extended household, who had become like a virtual family to me, but when I came to Devlin, he said, quietly, “There have been a couple of messages for you. I haven’t sent them through because I knew you were coming home, but some of them look like they might be urgent.”
“I’ll have a look at them later.”
First, there was lunch: a wonderful selection of breads, and fruit, and fish and fresh salad and tea and juices.
Eirani had put a comfortable armchair in the living room, which was fine for today, but I told her it would need to be shifted to the hub.
Eirani exclaimed, “You’re not going to work, are you?”
Well, actually, I was. I hadn’t liked the look on Devlin’s face when he mentioned those messages.
I asked, “Has anyone heard from Melissa yet?”
There were shakes of heads all around the room.
“She doesn’t report to us,” Sheydu said.
Maybe not, but this was getting ridiculous. “Can someone check out where she is?”
Later, I shuffled into the hub, where Eirani had set up another chair. She even came to bring me manazhu while I sat down. “I feel like an old man now.”
“I will be an old woman long before you’re an old man, Muri,” she said, putting the steaming cup on the sideboard of the control panel and fluffing one of my pillows.
Devlin gave me the earpiece so I could finally look at these urgent messages.
I opened up the list, and there they were, in orange: Margarethe Ollund, Margarethe Ollund and Margarethe Ollund. Damn.
I checked the time. She would be asleep in Rotterdam.
I opened the first one.
Cory,
I have heard nothing and I presume this means you haven’t yet found Mr Davidson. Please reply by return message with the status of your search. I have the press breathing down my neck and members in the assembly baying for blood.
Then the next one,
Mr Davidson’s wife has been giving damaging reports to the media. She claims that her husband was abducted by offworld people with ulterior motives. She claims that Nations of Earth has acted in support of these people. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to put a stop to this now and return him home so that we can get to the bottom of this.
The last message was the longest.
It said,
You may not be aware that we are in a time of election campaigns for the Nations of Earth assembly. I personally think, and I am sure you would agree with me, that we need to keep the dialogue between Earth and gamra going. I don’t think it can be rushed. I don’t think we need to get impatient. Balance is important. We cannot allow the situation to get out of hand when people start acting from the point of view of panic. These events of the past few weeks are a serious threat to the stability of our relationship with gamra.
What was she on about?
Some people were talking in the hallway. I called, “Nich’? Can you come in here for a moment?”
He did, carrying his son, who watched with wide eyes.
“Can you read this for me and see if it makes any sense to you.”
He read, his dark eyes moving from side to side. “Why is this so urgent?”
“That’s what I’m trying to establish. She seems to be trying to tell me something without actually saying it.”
“Why?”
I spread my hands. “I don’t know. I’m not getting the message. All I can gather, although she hasn’t said it, is that he’s not a simple tourist and not just some rich guy with more money than sense. He’s here for a reason. She probably knows what it is, but most likely she doesn’t want to say more through the Exchange.” Because communication through the Exchange wasn’t secure and couldn’t be secured and everybody who wanted could listen in, or ask for the transcripts. “Jasper told me that he seems to think that Clovis smuggles diamonds and that Robert might be trying to pull his business out from under him.”
“Pah. Diamonds. I don’t understand why people get so excited about them. I’d say it’s probably something political.”
It could be that, too. A cold shiver went over me. “All I can do is tell her that we’re working on it.”
I wrote a brief message to Margarethe, saying that we were working on it, but that it was not easy, and dangerous. I wished I could say more, but likewise I had to keep it annoyingly vague. I wished I could ask for her to send me a secure message—the old fashioned way, on a piece of paper in a sealed container—but even that would raise eyebrows. And even if she sent that information, it might not get to me before I needed it.
Something was going to blow up soon, and I wished I knew what it was.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
IN THE EVENING, we all gathered in the living room for dinner.
Everyone cheered as I came in, walking independently across the hall from the hub to the table. I was improving in leaps and bounds. My leg was still a bit itchy, but no longer painful. I would almost be back to normal after a good meal and a good sleep.
Eirani clasped her hands together. “Look at you, Muri, getting so much better already.”
I sat down at my usual spot: in the middle of the long end of the table, facing the window. It was dark outside, and beyond the balcony—where the evidence of the storm had been cleaned up—loomed the black darkness of the marshlands, where Robert and Melissa were in some sort of trouble.
“He’ll be back to annoying everyone very soon,” Nicha said, still talking about me.
“Well, let’s hope he’s learned a lesson.” Thayu met my eyes across the table. “This is why we spend so much time preparing every job. What looks simple rarely is.”
“You’re channelling my grandfather.”
She gave me a blank look, and I remembered too late that anything to do with belief and spiritual language usually went over Coldi heads, and that I’d probably bent the use of the word channelling to mean something it normally didn’t.
She continued, “I’m right. You almost got yourself killed. Next time you’re determined to get yourself killed, let me know and I’ll come with you. I might even bring some other people to greatly reduce the chance that you’re successful.”
“Oh, come on, Thay’, back off,” Nicha said. “He’s learned his lesson.”
“I hope so, but I suspect he doesn’t really unders
tand.”
“You have to accept it,” Veyada said. “When we worked for Ezhya, he would sometimes do things that we would have advised against. Sometimes they worked to his advantage; sometimes they did not. You can warn a person, but ultimately, they have to lead their own life.”
“But did you ever think your life would end if something happened to Ezhya?” Thayu’s voice sounded close to breaking.
An uncomfortable silence followed her words. I met Thayu’s eyes, glittering with moisture.
I cringed. I hated embarrassing her, even if embarrassment didn’t appear to be an emotion Coldi felt in great doses. I felt it on her behalf, and I hated it. “I learned my lesson, really.”
She nodded. I had no doubt there would be more words said about this later when we were alone.
The rest of dinner was a chaotic, noisy and jovial affair. Eirani hovered behind my chair, jumping every time my cup was empty or I had eaten a slice of bread. She wasn’t happy with the amount I ate—although it was a lot more than I’d been eating in the hospital—and kept commenting on how thin I was.
I had to tell her several times that I could not possibly eat any more.
I called everyone to an informal meeting afterwards, just to keep tabs on what everyone was doing. We moved to the hub for this, where I sat next to Devlin on the central bench and everyone else either occupied seats at the other workstations or leaned against the walls.
Devlin and Deyu reported on the security situation, and that appeared to be a little more worrisome than I had expected. They had run checks on the entire system, found some bugs, and found some additional bugs that no one had known were there. Those had to be fairly recent, and I suspected that the loading of advertising messages with buggy code was not a one-off restricted to this one company. I had often wondered why the person who set up the apartment had made such a clear separation between the office and hub systems, and this was clearly why. Because of sneaky Barresh merchants inserting sneaky code.
Thayu and Deyu had investigated the bugs that we did know about, and that had come through the advertisement sent to the office that had sparked the alert. When activated, the code opened a direct link to outside that could be accessed by a small piece of corresponding code that could be automatically sent out by a reader, even by people just walking past who had no idea that their equipment was being used in this way.
I asked, “And then what does it do with those snatches of information?”
Deyu said, “They can be sorted based on key words that indicate what a particular office is talking about and would be interested in paying for. It’s not a high-tech spying operation, but it would lead to people sending you lots of business solicitations.”
“Is this why we’ve been getting so much advertising?” And here was I thinking that I was becoming popular.
“Likely.”
“Whoever they are, they’re much more interested in business matters than in gamra politics.”
Thayu said, “Yes, but we would need to look at who uses the information, because these businesses are not the end users. They merely gather the data. Who are their customers? Suppliers of office equipment, yeah, I’d have not that much trouble with, although we don’t exactly want anyone listening in, but it worries me when they start selling information to lobbyists and other people who have political motives.”
I agreed that was a worry. The idea that people would pay for this, too. “Is this even legal?”
Veyada said, “Not within gamra, it isn’t, but because these are local businesses, they don’t fall under gamra law, and local laws relating to business concerns are much less strict, and in general, data-gathering is considered fair game as long as it concerns publicly available data—”
“I would hardly call this publicly available.”
“No, but to comply with the legal part of the business, they will filter out the publicly available data, never mind that the method of collection was illegal, because they have ways to obscure that, too. This will be where your solicitations from businesses selling office equipment come from. There will also be a much more interesting shadow market in illegal data. It will still only concern insignificant-looking, very low-level security data that no one cares much about, but when you collate it, you can form a complete picture of a person or business’ behaviour and know where to target them for lobbying.”
Or, I realised, for damaging a rival company. If you knew such things as where they bought their supplies and when they did their accounting, who did it, and how much they were paid, then you could target a business with cheaper prices or someone who had more skills for the same price. Then you could also plant spies in your rival’s company.
The possibilities were endless.
Devlin was right: not only did we need to stamp this out, we needed to make sure it never happened again. How this could be achieved was another matter altogether. Not only that, if it was happening to us, it would be happening across gamra and probably even the council.
“Who are the people buying this illegal stuff?”
“Shadow men and shadow companies. People we’ve never heard of and companies we’ve never heard of in places we’ve never heard of.”
Sheydu said, her voice dark, “Like Tamer. They’d been doing their thing for ages before someone took notice.”
There were nods all around. Like Tamer, and likely just as disturbing. Someone had turned data collection into a form of art.
Devlin said, “So, I guess you want me to disable the directories and destroy the document and all the links related to it?”
“No. Leave it.”
He frowned at me.
“Make it so that to the outside world it looks like everything is still working, but disconnect that part of the system from everything else. Reinstate some of the old operating data from Renkati. I don’t care what, just dump something in the partition that looks like real data, so they don’t know that we’re onto them.”
“Certainly they already know that?”
“Maybe. These sorts of scam merchants don’t always think everything through.”
Sheydu nodded her approval. “You can usually catch them when they do something stupid, either because they are stupid, or because they don’t have enough people to cover every part of their butts.”
There were nods all around. Waiting for the opponent to do something stupid was always a good tactic.
The medico had said nothing about getting my leg wet, so after the meeting, Thayu, Nicha and I retreated to the bathroom where we had a drink, and where, when Nicha had gone to look after his son, Thayu washed me all over, and I proved to her that I was getting back to normal.
I asked if she wanted to talk about what had happened, but she said she did not. Everything had already been said, and perhaps it was best that we move on.
I promised her to try not to get myself in other similarly dangerous situations, but also said that I couldn’t absolutely guarantee it would never happen again.
“Just promise me that if you ever get yourself in danger again, you are with me.”
“I think I could live with that promise.”
We slept in each other’s arms.
* * *
Being at home did wonders to my health, because when I woke up the next morning, I felt almost completely normal. It was quite early and the light filtering in through the window was still misty and grey. Ugh—it was raining, a steady, grey drizzle from an equally grey sky.
I slipped from the bed, letting Thayu sleep. She must have gone through a hard time trying to keep the household together, but would rather die than admit she was exhausted.
There was no one in the hub, so I sat down at the central bench to check the overnight news. We’d set a flag on the location of Melissa’s boat—and the satellite had travelled directly overhead very early in the morning—but the boat hadn’t moved.
I stared at the little dot in the 2D projected image that I had pulled from the satellite data. The boat
lay at the western end of the beach on a little island. You could see a little boat-shaped dot on the image. It also showed the remains of a fire on the beach—no megon trees there—and a square patch of something grey that could be a tarpaulin or a tent, it was impossible to see what because of the dense tree cover.
What worried me most was that the island’s scan which Devlin had completed late last night did not show any significant sources of fresh water. Surely, she would have had to move to collect water? Had she at least brought a solar distiller? But even so, why hadn’t that boat moved for the last two days?
I was certain: we had to do something because she had run into trouble. We had run out of excuses to wait any longer. We had to go after her.
I went into the service directory and tried to find someone who owned a boat—someone who was not connected to Clovis, or the Barresh Ferry Company, or the company that officially owned the Barresh Ferry Company—which was Clovis’ of course. Tracking down that company showed up that Clovis also owned a good number of shops, the water taxi company that we used to get to the island quickly if needed, two accountancy firms, a health practice and several building companies, most notably the one that held the contract for the constant and ongoing repairs and maintenance on the ancient council buildings.
This guy literally had his nose everywhere, and yet his name never appeared on any of the contact information of those companies. I wondered if by chance he was involved with this data-gathering company, but I couldn’t find a connection. That company had its address at a locker number at the Courier’s Guild headquarters, which usually meant that it was either off world or, more likely, it didn’t have a formal office in town, and for a business that dealt with virtual goods, that was not unusual either.
“What are you doing?” Thayu asked at the door.