by Jim Graham
Nettles was already at his desk, trawling through his mail.
‘Good morning, Terrance. How’s the eye?’
Nettles looked up. He was sporting a bruised cheek with red in the whites of his eyes.
‘Ooh! Nasty!’ Scat said.
‘It doesn’t feel so good either,’ Nettles replied. ‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’
Scat sat down before replying.
‘Boarding school.’
‘Not in the Marines, then?’
Scat chuckled.
‘No, but they did help me manage it. The trick is to be full on, not just dirty. It scares them as much as it hurts. You don’t want them thinking they should stick around.’
Nettles nodded, as though appreciating the advice.
‘Well thanks, anyway,’ he said. ‘By the way, they weren’t out-of-contract employees.’
‘No?’
‘No. I asked the police to pass me the result of their ID check. They’re Lynthax security guards.’
‘You sure?’ Scat asked, thinking of how Petroff might react to him injuring three of his guys.
‘Yes. I’m sending a complaint across to Petroff. I’d like to see how he deals with it.’
‘But the guy with the dickey eye said he had been paid to hassle you. I obviously didn’t hurt him enough.’
‘I think it was enough, Scat. Anything more would have been, well, disproportionate.’
Scat chuckled again, this time at Nettle’s political correctness.
‘How are the other two?’ he asked. ‘Still in hospital?’
‘One of them was released into police custody this morning. The other isn’t yet conscious. He’s got a fractured skull.’
‘Oh, well,’ Scat said without a hint of regret.
‘Indeed,’ Nettles concurred. ‘Look, House Security has asked us Reps to stay indoors and attend only official functions over the next few days. They’re saying this could be the beginning of some low-level intimidation, and they don’t want it getting out of hand. However, I need to be seen around town, and I’m not going to be intimidated into staying indoors, which is no doubt what Lynthax wants. Would you follow me around?’
‘Like a body guard?’
‘Yes. I’ll add something to your pay out of my own pocket. I’ll not get an allowance from the House budget.’
‘Sure,’ Scat said, thinking about how that would improve his Reservist pay, Lynthax salary, and House Researcher stipend and benefits. Things were definitely on the up.
‘Thanks. Right,’ Nettles said, changing the subject, ‘we’re due in the first technical session at 12. When we sit down, I want you to sit at the end of the table on my right. You’re to observe the opposition and take notes.’
‘What sort of notes?’ Scat asked.
‘Personality types—sufficient to help me when we go back in for our second session. Normally we’d already know who they are and how they react under pressure. In this case, we know zip about them, but my guess is they’ve done their homework on us. We need to even out that score as quickly as possible.’
‘Fair enough—personality profiles based on their reactions and behaviour during the meeting. I get it. Not asking for much, are you?’
Nettles finally looked up. Scat wore a cynical, uneven smile.
‘I’m asking for what’s possible, Scat.’ Nettles explained. He returned to his PC. ‘Do what you can. I’ve also asked the House shrink to do the same thing at the other end of the table, and, now that we know their names, I’ve asked the House Library to pull their publicnet records from Earth. The trouble is we won’t get them for days.’
‘So I have a deputy, then?’ Scat asked a little too flippantly. Nettles looked back up from his PC for a second time. Scat realised he was probably pushing too hard at Nettles’ sense of humour. ‘Which means I get to discuss it with him before hand, right?’ he asked, trying to sound more serious than he felt.
‘Yes. I’ve arranged for you to meet him in half an hour,’ Nettles replied looking down at his graf, ‘He’ll give you guidance.’
‘And you can’t use his staff for this, then?’
‘No, Scat. He’s private sector. We can’t afford more.’
Scat shrugged. He might as well find out how it felt being on the losing side. It might help him to cope better with Petroff when the man came looking for him.
60
At 12 noon, Nettles walked into the conference room on the third floor, holding his briefing documents. Cheryl followed him in carrying an armload of constitutional notes. Scat carried the pile of files she couldn’t carry.
The Trevon House staff had laid out the long table for 24 places, 12 on each side. Behind each chair was a second chair intended for aides. Name cards, water bottles, note pads, pencils, e-translator earpieces and power mats completed each place setting.
Nettles took his place, and Cheryl sat behind him. Scat sat at the end of the table closest to the double doors leading off to an anteroom. Simmons, the shrink, was already in place at the other end, closest to the entrance doors. Other Trevon Reps and aides took their places in between.
They chatted while they waited, nervously arranging and rearranging the additional piles of briefing folders, notes, and e-readers which now cluttered the Trevon side of the table.
The Earth Delegation then arrived. One by one, they filed into the room, carrying nothing more than their e-readers. None of them had an assistant.
As the Earth Delegates took their seats, Nettles glanced up and down the table, shrugging slightly, as if to ask his colleagues what they thought of Earth arriving unprepared. An elderly Rep sitting next to him shrugged back.
Finally, Ambassador Cohen walked in, accompanied by his junior aide, Mary Sheffield. The Earth Delegation stood up. The Trevons remained seated. Nettles walked to the end of the table, shook his hand then returned to his seat. Scat stared at Mary, disappointed she didn’t notice him.
Cohen looked along the table and smiled at a couple of his negotiators.
‘Good morning, ladies, gentlemen,’ he began. ‘I trust you have all had a decent night’s sleep and can produce some good work today. I’m aware that these sessions may get a little tedious, but the details are crucial. I wish you all the good luck and the success you deserve. Two worlds are counting on you all. In fact more than two worlds, but let’s not add more pressure to your work than is necessary.’
He then stood there, hands held together behind him.
Nettles sensed Cohen was expecting a formal response. He stood up, and as the technical session’s leading House Representative, he replied with diplomatic niceties of his own, thanking the Ambassador for his encouragement.
Cohen waited until Nettles had sat back down before formally opening the meeting:
‘So, let the negotiations begin.’
He then turned on his heels and left the room, followed by his assistants, leaving the teams to get on with it.
The lead Earth negotiator kicked off as Scat watched Mary leave the room turning back only to close the door behind her. He almost missed the opening statement.
‘First on the agenda is point 1.01: To confirm the legitimacy of these proceedings.’
From further down the table a second Earth negotiator began reciting the laws associated with the leases establishing the New Worlds. He rattled on for around five-six minutes without referring to any notes. Scat didn’t get a clear look at him, but it sounded as though he knew his stuff.
A Trevon Representative responded, anxiously shuffling through his notes and briefing papers, looking for the relevant sections that confirmed what the Earth speaker had just said. His aide tried to help by poring over the other files and passing them forward.
‘The House concurs with the Earth delegation’s understanding of the law.’
It had been a painful four or five minutes.
‘Second on the agenda is point 1.02: to confirm the rights of Trevon House to administer Trevon on behalf of Earth.’
A third Earth Delegate rattled off what those rights were. This time Scat had a square-on view of the speaker. He scribbled a note, folded it, and asked the person on his left to pass it down to Nettles.
It made its way along the line, and Nettles looked down as he held it below the tabletop. On it, Scat had scrawled, ‘We’re screwed! They’re using the neuralnet.’
‘The farking bastards! The miserable low-lifers!’ Nettles was extremely angry. ‘The underhand bunch of two-faced farks. They would have known we don’t have access to the neuralnet.’
‘We’re at a serious disadvantage, Terrance,’ said the elderly Representative who had just joined Nettles, Scat and several other Representatives as they took their first coffee break of the afternoon. ‘We’re being killed in there.’
‘It’s making us look like a bunch of farking natives, Hammond,’ Nettles agreed, ‘but what can we do?’
‘Block their comms,’ Scat suggested.
Nettles sucked on his teeth.
‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘There’s to be free access to information during the sessions.’
‘Then, as I said, we’re screwed.’ Scat shrugged.
Hammond shook his head.
‘They can tie us up in knots all day long,’ he said. ‘We’ll be knackered by the end of each session, and they’ll still be as fresh as daisies.’
Nettles expression continued to darken as he looked down at his shoes. He looked furious. Then his head snapped back up. It was as though someone had flicked a switch. The scowl was gone.
‘There’s not much we can do about it now, except, maybe complain,’ he said. ‘But complain about what? I doubt there’s a rule banning its use: not one we’d know of, at any rate. Let’s suck it up for this session and look at it again later this evening. Meanwhile I’ll ask Cheryl to warn the Reps at the other session. They might not have noticed.’
Hammond looked back from the conference door and touched Nettles’ arm.
‘Terrance, we’re being called back in.’
Nettles took a deep breathe.
‘OK, so we’re disadvantaged,’ he said by way of summary. ‘But we’ve the moral high ground, and we believe in what we’re attempting to do. For the time being, and under no circumstances, is anyone to concede a point, or agree anything without a full check of our briefs. No feeling pressured to come to a quick agreement. Absolutely no precipitous concessions—even if we do feel stupid for taking so long. Does everyone understand?’
Several heads nodded in agreement, and they filed back into the room.
61
The conference broke up at nine pm and Scat went off to his overnight accommodation in the east wing, his mind dulled by the glacial pace of progress made over the last nine hours, and the tedious nature of diplomatic negotiations.
The Trevon delegation made off to their various offices. Nettles slipped away to meet with Reggie Irwin and a group of secessionists at the Sports Club, to report on the day’s progress, or lack of it. He was in a black mood; he did not relish having to explain the humiliation of the Trevon delegation at the hands of the extremely well prepared and unfairly augmented Earth Delegation
Around 10 pm, the lights around Trevon House dimmed repeatedly to indicate that the House was closing for the night. Scat then realised he was “on call” so he walked down the stairs to the main lobby to check in with the security officer staffing the front door.
‘Is everyone out?’ he asked.
A grey-haired, blue-uniformed officer looked up from his e-reader. He saw the duty officer’s badge hanging from Scat’s collar and stood up.
‘Not yet, sir,’ he replied. ‘There are still some Reps on the fourth floor. It shouldn’t be long though.’
As the officer finished speaking, three Reps made their way down the last flight of steps and into the main lobby.
The officer pointed them out.
‘These will be them,’ he said.
The Reps waved their farewells and filed out through a small side door to the right of the main entrance.
Trevon House was empty. It just needed locking up. With nothing to do, Scat rode the elevator back to his floor and dropped onto his bunk.
The security officer settled back into his chair for an hour before realising his buttocks ached. He rubbed his eyes. He had been monitoring the day’s activities on the security screens all day long. They felt strained. Well, damn it, he would take a walk! Sod whoever it was that said he had to stay in the House all night long.
He checked his graf still had coverage and wandered, a little stiffly, around the building towards the east wing of the House. He looked up at the dark facade of the front of the building to see if there were any lights still burning. He then turned the corner and walked down the east wing where light spilled from the Trevon House underground vehicle park exit onto an unlit road. A two-wheeled c-pod was turning quietly into the street, the House vehicle park shutters rattling closed behind it.
He stepped back to look up at the upper floors just as a bright blue flash lit up the road behind him, accompanied by a loud and violent crack of discharged electricity. He flinched, panicked and threw himself to the ground behind a low wall, scuffing the heel of his palm.
As he recovered his wits, he realised it was a PIKL. He was sure of it. A PIKL rifle sounded just the same when it discharged. He had seen it on NetStream. Even the ionisation of the air was the same.
Pulling off his cap, he peered over the wall. Just below him, the pod slew around in a lazy quarter-circle, bumping to a halt against the kerbside on the opposite side of the road. Smoke began to waft up from below the passenger compartment and then it caught fire. As its internal gyroscopes failed, it toppled onto its front.
He struggled to see whether anyone was inside of it, still.
Please, Mother, let it be a remote.
Assuming the worst, he pushed himself up, clambered over the wall and rushed across the road. By the time he got there, the whole thing was ablaze, its plastics burning off a dense, toxic smoke that rose quickly up the side of the building. After a couple of attempts to grab the emergency door release, the heat finally pushed him back into the middle of the street where he stood, helpless, with a hand on his head. Then he remembered this was no traffic accident. Instinctively he snapped to a crouch, and quickly scurried off the tarmac to kneel behind a roadside dispensing machine.
He glanced up and down the street and then up at the building that fronted that section of road. He could see nothing that would tell him where the firing point had been; the rapidly spreading smoke was obscuring everything, and the street was deserted.
It then struck him: other than the PIKL owner, he was probably the only person to know what had just happened.
He called it in.
62
Scat got a call within minutes of the shooting being reported back to House Security: someone had shot at a pod leased to Earth Delegate Ramesh Booni. It was now burning in the street alongside the East Wing.
He rushed across to his bunk window, opened it and looked down onto the road. Craning his neck, he could just see smoke rising from a small vehicle not far from the east wing’s vehicle park exit. A couple of people were watching from a safe distance. They appeared to be House Security, looking on helplessly. In the distance, he could hear emergency vehicles making their way to the scene. Already a small, remotely operated fire department firefly was circling overhead assessing the scene.
Scat ran across the landing to the elevator and made his way down onto the street. By the time he got there, the firefly was squirting a pathetically thin stream of foam into the fire. House Security was setting up a cordon.
The security officer who had witnessed the shooting walked across to him.
‘It was a bright flash, sir. Just like a PIKL. Then “pop”, that thing just burst into flames and fell over.’
‘Where did the shot come from?’ Scat asked, turning to take a closer look at the rapidly disappearing pod.
‘Any idea?’
‘No, sir. I was checking the perimeter of the building. I wasn’t looking that way. It lit up the whole street though. My hair’s still sticking up. Can’t you smell it?’
‘Yes. I can,’ replied Scat, the smell of burning flesh and plastics bringing back unwelcome memories.
‘I called it in as soon as I realised I couldn’t get into the passenger compartment. It was too hot, and it was completely ablaze.’
‘You did well, er ...’
‘Fawlty, sir.’
‘You did well, Fawlty. Well done. Why don’t you tell the officer you need to be back on the main door?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Scat ducked under the cordon tape and went over to talk to a police officer who confirmed what Fawlty had feared: someone was inside the vehicle. It was inaccessible right now, but they would pull the body out once the fire officers had dowsed the fire and cooled the pod down. Right now, they were calling in more police officers to comb the area for any telltale signs of a PIKL firing post.
The fire was out before long, and they started to pull out bits of the Earth Delegate’s body, each piece seared by the intense heat and covered in solidifying molten plastic. Scat looked away from what was a familiar scene to him almost a decade ago, and called Nettles.
‘Are you sure it’s an Earth Delegate, and not an administrator running duties?’ Nettles asked.
‘Can’t be sure, but you had better plan for the worst. There are no media right now, but they’ll be here soon. A couple of bugcams are overhead. It’ll not be long before the reporters arrive.’
‘Thanks Scat. Get yourself back to the House. We’ll talk again in the morning.’
Scat hovered around the security station in the main lobby for 15 minutes or so, making sure the House was secured again. For the next few hours, he remained available in the House canteen and fielded several calls from House Reps who wanted to know what had happened. He told them what he could of it, and referred the constant stream of press queries to the police.
When he felt he had done everything that was expected of a duty officer, he made his way back to his bunk, flopped onto his bed and let his mind go blank for a moment of two.