Guardians of Paradise

by Jaine Fenn

  Nual felt a surge of relief: she was only facing humans.

 

  The contact was fading. She reached out to him

 

  The sense of him receded into darkness. Rather than follow it, she opened her eyes to the star-dusted night sky. The world’s primary moon was just setting. She lay there for a while, wondering if the shadowy men who had Taro had any idea what a big mistake they were making.

  It was a good job he’d tidied up the living quarters on the Judas Kiss when Nual and Taro came aboard. Jarek didn’t think Orzabet was someone who’d put up with a mess.

  She’d already insisted on taking a shower, though that was fair enough; she must’ve got pretty hot and sweaty in that crate. Though Jarek had occasionally transported paying passengers this was the first time he’d taken on someone who’d had themselves delivered to his ship as freight. Still, if it was what she needed to do . . .

  It would take them four and a half hours to reach the beacon radius. Hubpoints were located at low-temperature dwarf stars, so the orbit shared by a hub station and its beacon was tighter than in most planetary systems, and the distance between them consequently smaller. Orzabet announced that she would use the time to get some rest, though from the sound of it she was pottering around in the rec-room. She was obviously nervous about going into transit awake and unsedated, but her plan relied on her being fully conscious at the moment they entered shiftspace. Jarek was apprehensive too. Orzabet’s scheme was an elegant one, but it unsettled him.

  He found himself thinking about his life on the Judas Kiss, his home for the last fifteen years. It was the longest time he’d lived in one place, even if that place did move around. He’d been happy with his lifestyle, though he’d always been on the look-out for causes to support. And now he’d committed himself irrevocably to the one he’d been dabbling in for seven years. He’d managed to buy a couple of dozen reels of nanoweave cable from Tarset, hoping to sell it on Kama Nui - it could be used for shipping and adventure sports - but he’d bought the cargo as much to keep customs happy as because he expected to make much of a profit on it. Trade was no longer his priority.

  ‘Sirrah Reen?’ Orzabet had stuck her head through the hatch onto the bridge.

  ‘Come in. Listen, given we’ll be travelling together for a while, why don’t you call me Jarek?’

  ‘All right. Jarek.’ She hesitated. ‘And you can call me Bez if you like.’ She looked away, and Jarek wondered when she’d last let anyone use that name. Her discomfort lasted a moment, then she said, ‘I need to patch into your main comp now, assuming we’re still on schedule to go into transit in twenty minutes?’

  ‘We are.’ He carried on with the pre-transit checks and initiated a modified version of the system shutdown routine while she settled herself on the floor and spread her tech out around her. Giving a relative stranger access to the systems on his ship’s bridge made Jarek uneasy, but he squashed his fears: he’d decided to trust Orzabet - Bez - and that was that. He preferred the diminutive; it sounded more human.

  Her plan required split-second timing, allied with her unique expertise: she intended to use a mirror-worm, a message impersonating another, which would, she told him earnestly, set off a data-cascade at the receiving system. Jarek nodded intelligently, although he had only a vague idea what she was talking about.

  All that mattered was the end result: the Sidhe would no longer be able to track his ship.

  There was a downside: if their ruse was successful it would become a lot harder for Nual to contact him. Her last message, received just over five hours ago, hadn’t updated him on her status, just that she was still all right. Her next one was highly unlikely to reach him, though he’d warned her of that, adding that just as soon as they were home and dry he’d find a way to get back in contact.

  But now he had business. ‘Thirty seconds to transit,’ he called out.

  Bez nodded tersely. ‘I know.’ Her hands hovered over her keyboard - she couldn’t risk using a neural interface, as she would still be connected when they entered the shift. As it was, the flatcomp she was using - the most complex piece of technology still active on the ship at this point - would most likely come out of the transit irrevocably fried.

  Jarek tried not to fret. He was putting the fate of his beloved ship into the hands - literally - of a paranoid sociopath, someone who tended to see the real world as an inconvenience getting in the way of nice, ordered data. In some ways she reminded him of a certain priest he’d met recently - and that wasn’t a relationship that had ended well.

  Bez’s fingers flew over the keys in a flurry of activity.

  Her hands froze.

  Then they were in the shift.

  There wasn’t much of a criminal underworld on Kama Nui - rather a contrast to Khesh City, where criminality in its various forms was almost the default career choice - and the only useful contact Nual found in Medame Ruanuku’s files was someone she had already met. The files had plenty on Olias Kahani’s past, but no clues as to where he was now. It did, however, list a certain Miku Tuan as one of his associates. Tuan also went by the name of Patai.

  Given the limited scope of the criminal community, Nual had to proceed carefully. She started by requesting a meeting with Patai - in a public place; as he had hired them for the failed mission she doubted he would agree to meet her alone. She made it quite clear her business with him was unrelated to any past associations, and emphasised the potential profitability for them both. If that didn’t hook him, nothing would.

  When they met in the square in Stonetown, she claimed that she had been hired directly to track down a certain individual. At this stage she would not divulge the hiring party.

  ‘And who would that individual be?’ asked Patai carefully. She was scanning his surface thoughts: he was wondering, reasonably enough, how she had got hold of his number and become involved in the kind of work he usually dealt in.

  ‘Olias Kahani.’

  Patai’s face gave nothing away. His mind however—

  ‘I don’t know the name,’ he lied.

  Nual smiled. ‘I think you do. In fact I know you do.’ Adding just a feathering of coercion she added, ‘Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘No.’ Then he thought better of it. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Either you have or you haven’t,’ said Nual equably.

  Patai’s gaze flitted towards the heavily built man lurking by a nearby tree, no doubt a bodyguard hired in case the encounter with the Angel went badly. ‘No offence but, if I had, why would I tell you?’ he asked.

  In public and under the minder’s watchful eye, she would have to be subtle. She let her shoulders sag and projected a faint whiff of despair. ‘You’re right. I don’t have much to bargain with, do I?’

  ‘Perhaps if you told me who your employer is?’

  She sensed Patai’s genuine concern that business like this could occur without him hearing about it: this was the only reason he’d agreed to meet her. Time to change tack. Looking out over the square, she said, ‘There isn’t one. I lied to you.’ She turned back to him, letting him feel her desperation. ‘I want Kahani for myself, because he betrayed us and I have lost my brother as a result.’

  Patai’s silence was a pause for thought rather than an attempt to make Nual uncomfortable. However, she maintained her air of unease, giving the - not entirely inaccurate - impression that she was near her wits’ end. The combination of his honour code and the natural empathy that made him good at his job inclined him to be sympathetic to her, and she built on this, subtly enhancing and encouraging it.

  Finally he said, ‘Family is important.’ He nodded slowly. ‘And Olias Kahani has acted in a shameful manner. I’ll tell you what I know.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘You don’t have to stay, ariki.’

  Marua thought she de
tected a note of embarrassment, perhaps even resentment, in Tikao’s voice, though as she was hearing it through speakers she couldn’t be sure. ‘Of course I do,’ she said reassuringly.

  Technically Tikao was right: the machines in the laboratory and in the sea outside would be recording every aspect of the test and if anything did go wrong there was very little a human observer could do. She had volunteered to come down to the lab to witness the final live transit-kernel test to show her support for Tikao; though he’d monitored the interface readouts on previous tests, Grigan had always been the one strapped into the two-metre diameter sphere that floated outside the lab’s observation window. Tikao should not be alone when he tried this, and there were few others in her ngai permitted to observe what was about to happen. Fewer than fifty of her employees even knew this lab existed, and only a dozen were aware of what really went on here. Even her husband did not know the complete truth: he believed that the subjects who arrived in stasis were already dead. He had no idea of the exquisite torture involved in creating a transit-kernel. For her part, Marua tried not to think too closely about the details and instead kept focused on the bigger picture.

  ‘I’ll start the countdown,’ said Tikao.

  Tikao had been eager to fill his late boss’s shoes - he’d first asked about completing the final encoding the day after Grigan’s funeral - but Marua remained unconvinced of his suitability. It took a certain type of personality to repeatedly interface with insane alien minds that were able to leave the universe at will. Tikao had been fully trained, and had demonstrated a limited ability to interact with the transit-kernels, but Grigan had never involved him directly in the delicate, time-consuming discorporation/transference process; the integration of flesh into technology took many painstaking months for each subject.

  Fortunately the kernel at the heart of the sphere floating before her was fully integrated, and Grigan had started the programming. But though the hard work was done, failure at this stage was by no means unknown; the failure rate was over ten per cent. Grigan had had good results in the shift-and-return tests, but a transit-kernel had to do more than just transport itself through shiftspace: it had to create a bubble of reality and extend it around its vessel and any other beings contained within. To do this, the vessel needed to be a discrete item in a low-density medium. When the kernel was finally wired into a shiftship, ready to transit between beacons, the medium would be as low-density as it got - the vacuum of space - but the initial tests took place in the more forgiving environment of Kama Nui’s ocean. The test was being carried out in shallow water and Tikao wore a pressure suit, but there were still risks. The kernel must be convinced to take the entire vessel, and only the vessel, into the shift; it must return all the vessel - and only the vessel - to the same relative point, which meant successfully compensating for the planet’s movement through space during the fraction of a second the vessel was outside the universe. Marua wished there was some way of carrying out initial unmanned tests, or using animals, but the kernel’s first encumbered shift required the mind that was programming it to be part of the test.

  If only she hadn’t made that foolish promise two months ago. For as long as she had been aware of the family secret Marua had borne in mind her mother’s advice regarding the Sidhe: never give them a reason to doubt us. Her mother had delivered thirty-three transit-kernels when her time had come. Now Marua was determined to prove her own worth to her associates, and, ultimately, to humanity. That was why, when Grigan had assured her that the final subject would successfully encode, Marua had sent the Sidhe a message telling them she would have twenty-eight transit-kernels ready for collection on their arrival. To only pass on twenty-seven now would reflect badly on her.

  She had hoped to have Grigan’s replacement here to finish the job by now, but Kahani’s treachery had put paid to that, at least for the moment, so she was relying on Tikao to keep her promise for her.

  ‘May the Lord of the Sea go with you,’ said Marua.

  If Tikao made a response it was lost in the countdown. Though he was fiercely proud of his islander heritage - he’d hated that Grigan and his proposed replacement had both been born offworld - Tikao paid only lip service to his culture’s faith. His god was ambition.

  As the numbers ticked down, Marua watched the sun-dappled sphere, her mind blank.

  On zero, the sphere disappeared. Turbulence washed the observation window.

  Marua held her breath, straining to see through the bubbles and rushing water, before remembering the readouts on the console in front of her. Green: the sphere had successfully transited and returned. She gave an explosive sigh. ‘Well done!’ she said warmly. ‘You did it!’

  There was no response. The water had cleared enough for her to make out the sphere now, hanging exactly where it had been.

  She checked the monitors more closely. Though she lacked the technical knowledge to fully interpret Tikao’s readouts it looked like he was in there, and alive. She commed again, ‘Tikao, are you all right?’

  No answer.

  Then she saw the brainwave monitor.

  Olias Kahani had not attempted to leave Kama Nui yet, but Nual suspected he might try once he had a new ID. He had asked Patai, and though Patai was unhappy dealing with someone so dishonoured and dishonourable, Kahani obviously had some sort of hold over him - Nual got the distinct whiff of blackmail - so Patai had put him onto a man named Roake, who dealt with such matters, and who would have no such qualms about his customer.

  Nual commed Roake herself, and mentioned that a mutual acquaintance called Patai had suggested he could help with IDRELATED problems. He told her to come to a certain bar later that afternoon.

  The address was beyond the area of Stonetown tourists normally saw, further up the coast and away from the pleasure-boat harbour. Desalination plants and hydroponics farms were interspersed with neighbourhoods of neat but basic shacks clustered along unsurfaced roads. The bar was one of the few two-storey private buildings. When she arrived the place was deserted save for a pair of ancient, kava-dazed locals and a shaven-headed barman who pointed wordlessly to an unmarked door as soon as Nual walked in. This led straight into a poky back room made even smaller by the various crates and boxes stacked around the walls. Roake himself sat behind a wood-effect desk like any legitimate businessman; a well-muscled minder with a dartgun sat on an overstuffed chair next to the door. As knowing who was really who was Roake’s business, Nual guessed he already knew she was an Angel. As he gestured for her to take the seat opposite she had another thought.

  ‘Would I be right in assuming this conversation will be recorded? ’ she asked. Her original plan had been to read Roake for information on Kahani, then implant plausible false memories of the meeting, but a later review of his surveillance could tip him off that something odd had occurred - as would the extra human observer.

  ‘Of course.’ Roake thought she was being unprofessional, but it was too late to back out now.

  She glanced around the room; its small size might work to her advantage. As she went to sit she contrived to kick her seat, tripping and apparently falling towards the minder. The man reached for her, half to catch her, half to fend her off, and as she let him touch her she made eye contact, doubling her chances. She darted into his mind, instructing him to let her go, then to sit back down, be relaxed, think of nothing, do nothing: just wait calmly until touched or spoken to. He had a gratifyingly simple mind and complied almost at once.

  ‘Medame sanMalia?’ said Roake. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I tripped. I’m fine now.’ Nual blocked the fixer’s view of his man as best she could as she sat down, then turned her full attention on Roake. As she began to talk to him about the pretext for her visit she skimmed his mind, using natural pauses in the conversation to dive deeper whilst cutting his consciousness free so he would not recall the extra time passing. She was aware of the bouncer sitting quietly behind her, but still subject to only the softest of compuls
ions, and of the recording being made, and of how suspicious any long silent gaps would look if Roake chose to review this meeting.

  As apprehension made her heart speed up and her hands sweat Nual found herself having to block her own responses and she was relieved when she finally had what she needed and was able to bring the conversation to a close. Hopefully Roake would recall only that he had agreed to look into her request for a new ID, but had decided it wasn’t a priority, because she’d inadvertently let slip that she did not currently have the means to pay his asking price.

  She said a hurried farewell to both men, rousing the bouncer from his torpor with an insignificant word. As she left she was barely able to resist the temptation to run or fly from the bar as fast as she could.

  No one followed her, and she calmed down as she walked the dusty lanes back to the main road. She was angry at herself as much as anything, for assuming all her problems could be solved with Sidhe talent.