“Wonder what he’s come for,” Zefla said.
“Yes,” Sharrow said, slipping her glass under her veil to sip at her drink. “I wonder.”
They watched the auction through the afternoon, strolling from the lounge to the main hall and back again, keeping track of the events on the centre’s closed-circuit screens.
The multifarious items came up for sale and were knocked down; all the items easily made their reserve price, which meant-according to a media person they overheard filing a report-that the pessimistic large-scale conflict forecasts various analysts had been making recently were being confirmed by the traders. Weapons futures rose another point that afternoon.
Elson Roa didn’t appear to buy anything, but he and his assistant seemed to be watching everybody just as carefully as were Sharrow and Zefla.
The first day’s selling ended late in the evening. Sharrow and Zefla strolled past the docks and then sat on a pair of bollards as though soaking up the late evening sun, watching the people who had come for the auction as they departed in their various craft for yachts offshore, or hotels in nearby regions where the radiation level was what Golter considered normal.
They watched Elson Roa and his assistant approach a chartered VTOL jet, then Sharrow shook her head.
“What is he doing?” she said, then turned to Zefla. “Cover,” she said. She stood up, ignoring Zefla’s protests and walked over to intercept the Solipsist leader.
“Politeness,” she said, putting her veil back.
Elson Roa looked at her strangely as though not recognising her at first, then bowed slightly and said, “Yes, hello.”
“Congratulations on your bail,” she said, searching his expression. He looked mildly surprised. “I believe you’ve set a new record. You must have rich friends.”
Roa shook his head emphatically. “A strong will,” he said, raising his voice to counter the noise of a jet taking off. “I think I am beginning to alter reality.”
“I think you must be,” she agreed. “Does your alteration to reality have a name?”
“I do not believe it needs one,” the tall Solipsist said coolly.
“Perhaps not,” she said. She smiled. “So, what brings you to the auction?”
Roa looked puzzled and pointed to the VTOL. “That,” he said.
Sharrow looked levelly at him. She had the depressing feeling that Roa didn’t realise it was a joke most people got out of their system in junior high.
She shook her head. “Never mind.” She glanced at the female assistant at Roa’s side, not sure if she recognised the woman. “How is Keteo? I don’t see him here.”
Roa’s brows furrowed. “He is gone from me; he proved to be only a temporary apparance.”
“Oh? What appeared to happen to him?”
“He appeared to become religious and join some decamillennialist faith. A section of my personality I am best rid of, I think.”
“Ah-hah,” she said.
Roa looked at his assistant, then at the waiting jet. “I must go now. Good-bye.” He bowed.
She raised one hand. “Pleasant journey. Watch out for low bridges.”
Roa ignored this as he walked for the plane.
She rejoined Zefla.
“Anything?” Zefla said.
“Nothing,” Sharrow told her.
Roa’s plane rolled towards the take-off pad and was gone a few minutes later.
They met up with Miz and Dloan at the hotel and had dinner in their suite. The men had worked out the position the bike dials were indicating to a ten kilometre circle near the head of a ninety-kilometre-long fjord deep in the Embargoed Areas. They discussed the options for getting safely into and out of the Areas.
Later, Sharrow took the service stairs out of the packed, noisy hotel and walked back to her apartments through the quiet. She got slightly lost but then saw Feril’s steam car parked on the street in a pool of light cast from the brightly lit lobby of the apartment block. The lights were on in the apartment Feril was renovating just below her own.
She stood in the lobby waiting for the lift, whistling quietly to herself. She thought she heard the clack-clack of android footsteps on the stairwell at one point, and looked up the steps round the side of the lift shaft waiting for Feril to appear, but they stopped somewhere above.
The elevator appeared and she took it to her floor. She was about to open the door to her apartment when she heard a door open on the floor below.
“Lady Sharrow?” she heard Feril call.
She looked down the stairwell. Feril’s head poked round the side of the lift shaft. “Yes, Feril?”
“I think there was somebody here to see you,” the android told her. It sounded puzzled. “But it was strange.”
“How?” she said.
“The person looked like an android, but it was actually a human dressed to resemble an android; they didn’t respond to my transceiver and a simple EM scan-”
“Did they go in here?” Sharrow said quickly, jabbing her thumb towards her apartment.
“I believe so,” Feril said. “I thought perhaps it was somebody you knew.”
She looked back at the door to her apartment. “Wait here,” she said. She pressed the button for the lift and heard it rumbling in its shaft.
She looked back down at the android. “On second thoughts,” she said, “don’t wait here. Just to be on the safe side; get out of the building.”
The lift doors hissed open. “Do you think-?” she heard Feril say as she swung into the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. The lift descended. She checked the HandCannon.
There was nobody on the first floor, or in the lobby. She kept against the wall and went to the doors; there was no way she could get out to the street without it being obvious. She sidled back to the rear of the lobby and made her way out of a dusty office and a short corridor into a dark side-street.
She walked quickly to the corner of the building, keeping her boot heels off the pavement so they wouldn’t make a noise. She looked out. Light from the apartment block lobby cast a soft glow for a half-block in each direction. After a few seconds, Sharrow made out a pale figure crouched in the shadows diagonally across the street, in an awninged doorway under another building. The figure-it did look like a rather bulky android-was looking up towards the top of the apartment block, and seemed to be holding something in both hands.
Sharrow sensed movement to her left, at the apartment block doors; she saw the figure in the doorway look quickly down from the top of the building to the doors.
Sharrow glanced to her left, to see Feril come out of the lobby doors and stand on the pavement between the doors and the silent bulk of the antique steam car. Feril looked diagonally across the street towards the figure crouching in the doorway, then raised one hand.
The figure brought a hand gun up and fired at Feril. The android flicked its head to one side; light flared on the stonework immediately behind it as a crackle of noise burst across the street; Feril dropped to the paving stones. Sharrow aimed the HandCannon as the figure raised its other hand and seemed to shake something. She fired the HandCannon.
Light flickered above her an instant before it burst from the muzzle of the gun. The wall beside Sharrow rippled as the gun roared. A mighty thump came through the soles of her boots and then a crushing, numbing pulse of sound rolled down over her, dwarfing the percussive bark of the gun.
She half-fell, half-dropped to the ground, then rolled across the pavement towards the building and under the cover of a broad window sill as the blast echoed and re-echoed off nearby buildings and merged with a terrible, tearing noise. Chunks of masonry and huge long shards of glass began to fall and shatter on the street and pavement.
Dust choked her nostrils; the roaring noise filled her ears through an insistent, cacophonous ringing.
When all but the ringing stopped, she stood up, brushing dust and flakes of stone from her jacket and skirt.