Her three girlfriends were standing guard protectively around her. Marianna, Anjelia, and Laura, all from Queens University Belfast where they studied together. Two more Halgarth security personnel were also in the room, looking slightly lost. Their orders were to protect April from the media, and escort her home. The girl clearly wasn’t up to that much activity yet.
“Have you caught the bastards?” Marianna demanded when Renne and Tarlo identified themselves. She had a thick Irish accent.
“Not yet, no,” Tarlo said. “We’re just establishing the investigation.”
“Huh!” Marianna snorted. She turned her back on the two Investigators.
“Ms. Halgarth, we need to ask you some questions,” Renne said.
Marianna knelt down beside her friend. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
April peered up at Renne. “It’s all right. I want to do this.”
Marianna nodded reluctantly, and led the other two girls out of the living room. “If you don’t mind,” Tarlo said politely to the remaining bodyguards. One went out into the hall, the second left through the sliding-glass door and stood on the veranda outside.
“I guess you must be wondering why this happened to you?” Renne said as she sat beside the distraught girl.
“Yes,” April moaned.
“Mostly because you’re a Halgarth. The Guardians of Selfhood regard you as their enemy.”
“Why? I don’t know anything about them, I’ve never been to Far Away, or helped any aliens or anything. I’m just studying twenty-first-century history, that’s all.”
“I know. But your dynasty is the main backer behind the Marie Celeste Research Institute. To their warped minds, that’s a big crime. I have to tell you, don’t look for reason in this. There is no true rational explanation. You are the result of a search program. They wanted a Halgarth—it’s always a member of your family—and one who is—I’m sorry—slightly naive, and isolated. It was your name which popped up out of the program.”
April bent her head, dabbing at her eyes with a paper kitchen towel. “He was so nice. I can’t believe this.”
“What was his name?” Tarlo asked gently.
“Alberto,” the girl said. “Alberto Rasanto. He was with his friends Melissa and Frank in the cottage one down from here. They were doing the same thing as us, taking a spring break. They said. I suppose that was a lie.”
“Yes,” Renne said.
April winced as she stared into the cold coffee.
“So you met them,” Renne prompted.
“He was lovely. He had these big green eyes. I thought he was a first-lifer, just like me. They were on the beach the day we arrived. We all started talking. There was a little bit of competition for Alberto, you know? I mean, Melissa and Frank had each other. And there are four of us. We sort of gathered around Alberto. And Marianna’s really pretty; she always gets the best boys. But he liked me. He was always smiling when we spoke; and he was easy to talk to. He had a lovely smile—really lovely. So it was like me and him for the next few days. We went swimming, and he was teaching me how to windsurf; we all went out in a group to the bars in the evening, and had too much to drink. I even tried some TSInarc. Nothing hard, just some low programs. They were weird, but kind of fun. I suppose that was the start of it.”
“They’d be establishing a pattern, yes,” Tarlo said. “A TSInarc or even ordinary chemical drugs help blur your recollection. I’m sorry, April, but we have to ask this: Did you sleep with him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When, please?”
“I suppose the first time was four days ago.”
“And you stayed over at their cottage when you did?”
“Yes. He had a room of his own. I’m sharing with Laura. We all made a pact about boys before we came here, that we’d use the couch if a roomie scored. But… I just. This was easier.”
“More private?” Tarlo said with a sympathetic smile.
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “I’m still a bit conservative, I suppose. Not that I mind my friends knowing I’m with a boy, but the walls here are really thin. I grew up on Solidade, which is just family.” Her head came up, giving them a dejected look. “You must think I’m a really dumb rich girl who knows nothing about the real world. Nobody else would be so gullible.”
“No,” Renne said. “You’re not gullible. It’s not that kind of con trick. They would have got the unisphere message author certificate out of you no matter what.”
The tears filled her eyes again. “But I don’t remember. And now the whole Commonwealth thinks I sent them Guardian propaganda.”
“By tomorrow the Commonwealth will have forgotten. Your family will make sure the news media never mentions you again. Normally I’d complain about undue influence, but in this case I have to agree it’s a blessing.”
April nodded slowly in agreement. “What happened?” she asked with a fierce whisper. “The family security people said they didn’t know, but I’m sure that’s what they were ordered to say. Tell me, please.” She looked from Tarlo to Renne. “Please. I have to know. I can’t even work out when. That’s so awful. I don’t care how bad it is, I just want to know.”
“It would have happened two nights before they left,” Tarlo said. Renne flashed him an angry glance, but he just shrugged. “Part of the routine of getting you drunk and high each night is that you wake up the next morning with a fuzzy head. So that when they take the next step you don’t even realize.”
April frowned, her eyes unfocused as she gazed out through the broad window wall, concentrating on something way beyond the sparkling sea. “I don’t remember. I really don’t. I’d like to say I was more sluggish than usual that morning. But I wasn’t.” She looked up at Tarlo. “So what happened to me?”
“They would probably have given you antronoine or some variant, slipped it in your drink. You wouldn’t know what was going on, it’s almost like being blind drunk except you’re completely open to suggestion. Then they’d have used an interface scanner in conjunction with a hack program on your inserts. It wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. After that, you would have had a memory edit.”
“Memory edit.” April ran her hands back through her hair. “You make it sound so clinical. That’s a piece of my life they stole from me. I never knew it could be that easy.”
“The technology is well established,” Renne said. “Some of the refinements didn’t even come out of corporate research. The first thing criminals do after they’ve committed a big crime is erase any record of the event from their memories. They don’t even know they’ve committed the crime—which is kind of weird—but that way we can’t read their memories and use them as evidence in court.”
“You know I think I hate that part more than anything, more than being seduced, or having my certificate used. It’s just awful. They could have done anything, anything; I’ll never know. I can’t believe I don’t remember.”
“We’ll need to run some tests on you,” Renne said. “Our forensics team will take some blood samples. Given this only happened a couple of days ago, we’ll be able to find traces of whatever drug they used. They’ll also want to run some calibration programs through your inserts. Do you think you’re up to that for us?”
“Yes,” April said. “Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you. We’ll use a characteristics sketch program to get a picture of them. You and your friends can contribute to that.”
“Are you going to catch them? Realistically?”
“It will be tough,” Tarlo said. “The Guardians wouldn’t have shotgunned their message until after their team was off Nzega. By now they could be on any world in the Commonwealth. They’ll use cellular reprofiling kits to change their appearance. Our best chance of arresting them is when we break the whole Guardians group.”
“You’ve been after them for a long time, haven’t you? Everyone knows that, it’s Paula Myo’s only unsolved case.”
“Nobody can run forever,” Renne said. “Today will have brought them a little closer to justice. They will have left clues and evidence. Their DNA will be in the cottage; their software patterns will be all over Nzega’s cybersphere, in the finance for renting the cottage and hiring transport, their communications records. I know it doesn’t sound like much to you, especially now, but believe me, every little bit does help us.”
Renne and Tarlo left through the veranda window, sending the bodyguard back in. They walked over the spongy lawn toward the cottage the Guardians had used. Both of them had to slip their sunglasses back on against the glare of the hot sun.
“That was kind of you,” Renne said. “Telling her they would have used a date rape drug. I wondered what you were doing telling her about the hack.”
“She’s suffered enough,” Tarlo replied.
Renne stopped and looked out to sea, a humid breeze toying with her thick auburn hair. “Bastards. Fancy doing this to a first-lifer. Even without the memory, she’ll be screwed up about it for decades.”
“I hate memory edit,” Tarlo said. “Every time we come up against it, it gives me the creeps. I mean, suppose we already solved the Guardians case, started to round them up, when they turned it on us. We might have arrested them a hundred times already. I mean, it is goddamn strange that the boss has never got one of the principals.”
“You’re starting to sound like Alessandra Baron, always criticizing the Directorate. If anyone invented a memory edit you fired like a laser, we’d know about it.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said, shrugging, his arms held wide. “We did know about it, and the inventor fired it at us.”
“Stop it. You’re getting paranoid.”
He grinned ruefully. “You have to admit, something’s not right about this whole Guardians situation. Hell, you were there on Velaines. Did we make a mistake? Come on, I mean, did we? We played that so by the book we got paper cuts, and they still found out.”
“They got lucky.”
“They’ve been lucky for a hundred and thirty years. That ain’t natural.”
She gave him a troubled glance. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He sighed. “Come on, let’s go find out what Forensics turned up.”
“It’ll be nothing.”
“Optimist. Ten dollars that this is the time the Guardians made a mistake and left a decent clue behind.”
“You’re on.”
SEVEN
The CST exploratory division wormhole on Merredin had been down for fifteen months while it was given a class five overhaul—complete energy-focusing structure maintenance and upgrade of all the level beta support systems. It was no small job servicing a half cubic kilometer of high-energy physics machinery. Oscar Monroe had been on-site for ten months, managing the crews as they crawled around the wormhole generator armed with screwdrivers, arrays, programs, and every conceivable type of bot. Three more months had been spent training with his ground crew; after all, most of the systems were new, and that meant learning a whole new set of procedures. Six weeks had been spent with the forward crew as they got to grips with the latest marques of their equipment and software during innumerable simulation runs. That left him with an entire fortnight’s holiday.
He took off for Earth, and spent the first ten days alone, e-butler address deactivated, sitting in a fishing boat on Lake Rutland in England at Easter time. It rained for seven of the ten days, and he caught a total of eleven trout. Those were probably the most relaxing days he’d enjoyed in eight years. Not that he wanted to make a habit of loafing around.
For the last four days he went to London, where he was determined to catch some of the quaint live theater shows amid all the rest of the slightly-too-nostalgic culture that the grand old capital offered its visitors. On the very first night, during the interval of a “reinterpreted” Stoppard, he met a handsome young lad from some aristocratic European family who was curious and impressed with him and his job. With a shared taste for art and opera and good food they were inseparable for Oscar’s remaining three days. They waved good-bye at the CST London station and his express started the thirty-three-minute trip back to Merredin, two hundred eight light-years away.
Next morning, they began the wormhole generator power-up; done correctly it was a slow process. Six days later, Oscar was ready to start planet hunting.
The exploratory division base was visible while he was still eight kilometers away, occupying five square kilometers on one side of the CST planetary station. Such prominence wasn’t difficult. Merredin was the new junction world for phase three space in this sector of the Commonwealth. In anticipation of the fifty gateways that would one day connect it to those distant stars, the planetary station was a cleared area over two hundred and fifty kilometers square, located just west of the capital city. So far, it had one standard-size passenger terminal, a small marshaling yard, and three gateways, one back to the Big15 world, Mito, the other two out to the phase three frontier worlds Clonclurry and Valvida. The rest was just weeds, grass, drainage ditches, and a few roads leading nowhere. A month ago, most buildings had flown the green and blue national flag, but since Merredin’s team had been knocked out of the cup halfway through the first round they’d all been taken down. Disheartened janitors had locked them away, muttering aboutnext time .
The exploratory division base was laid out around its own wormhole, which was housed in a windowless concrete and steel building eight hundred meters long. At one end was the spherical alien-environment confinement chamber, a hundred meters in diameter, two-thirds of which was above the ground. A little town of industrial-style buildings surrounded it, containing offices, laboratories, workshops, training facilities, and the xenobiology department. Power came from the nuclear plants on the coast.
Oscar’s Merc 1001 coupe drove him through the main gate at seven forty-five and slid right into the Operations Director’s parking slot. He smiled at the few envious stares the car earned him from other members of the team as they pulled up outside the administration block. He doubted there were many, if any, others like it on Merredin. It was his one foible; changing the car once every twelve months (or less) for whatever the hottest new sports model was that year. This one had been imported specially from the Democratic Republic of New Germany, the Big15 planet where Mercedes had relocated its factories when it left Earth. He’d never decided, given his first-life background, if that consumerist extravagance was ironic, or if he was subconsciously distancing himself from that very same past. The only reason he hadn’t wiped the memories entirely when he rejuvenated was so he could be on his guard against any kind of relapse into the stupid idealism that his younger self had embraced. These days he was a fully paid-up member of the establishment, and finally at ease with himself and his role.
He made his way through the administration block and straight into the wormhole control center. The prime ground crew was already starting to assemble at the back of the big theaterlike room. He said his hellos and swapped a few jokes as he made his way down the sloping floor to his console at the front. The control center had eight tiered rows of consoles looking toward the broad molecule-chain reinforced sapphire windows that made up the front wall. Beyond that was the alien-environment confinement chamber, in its inactive state a spherical chamber fifty meters in diameter with dark radiation-absorptive walls. The wormhole gateway mechanism itself was directly opposite the windows, an oval fifteen meters wide, with a ramp leading up to it from the base of the chamber. Ranged around the walls were various airlock doors. The ceiling had a bright polyphoto ring, which was currently illuminating the chamber by emitting the same spectrum as Merredin’s sun. Around that were sealed recesses that contained a range of scientific and astronomical instruments. They had also undergone a major revamp during the downtime, and the prep crew had just finished testing them during the night.
Oscar sat at his console and told his PL to log him in with the center’s main
array. His console portals lit up, delivering simplified schematics of the gateway, while his e-butler established voice linkages to every console operator as they slipped into their seats and logged in. As he acknowledged their inclusion in the communications loop, the prep crew chief came over and briefed him on the state of play. As the handover progressed the prep crew left the room; several of them went into the observation gallery at the rear, jostling for seats with reporters, CST’s local executives, and various VIPs who’d wrangled an invitation.
By nine-fifteen Oscar was satisfied that the wormhole generator was ready for an opening. He went around the loop one last time, personally checking with his station heads that they were equally satisfied with the situation: astrogration, power, focusing, main ancillary systems, sensors, short-range astronomy, confinement chamber management, emergency defense, forward crew, planetary science, alien encounter office, xenobiology, base camp equipment quartermaster, and finally the medical staff. One by one, they all gave him a green light. Finally, he checked with the Restricted Intelligence array that would handle integrated procedures. It said it was ready.
“Thank you, people,” he said. “Chamber Management, please take us to status one. Astrogration, stand by. RI, I’d like the gateway brought to full activation readiness.”
The overhead polyphoto strips in the control center began to dim, putting the room in a twilight glimmer. Holographic displays inside the console portals cast an iridescent glow over the faces of their operators. On the other side of the thick sapphire windows, the alien environment confinement chamber’s big polyphoto ring also shed its intensity, sinking to a weak red radiance that barely illuminated the gateway oval.
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