Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.
“What about it, Prescott.” I waved my hand through the holograph. “Anything in here that begins FOR WHAT YOU DID TO MY GIRL, DAUGHTER, SISTER, MOTHER, DELETE AS APPLICABLE?”
I didn’t need her to answer me. I could see it in her face.
With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the trees across the meadow, Oumou Prescott bent to the database keyboard and called up a new purple oblong of holographic light on the display. I watched as it bloomed and opened like some Cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind me, another cow voiced its resigned disgruntlement.
I slipped the headset back on.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The town was called Ember. I found it on the map, about two hundred kilometres north of Bay City, on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.
“Free Trade Enforcer,” said Prescott, peering over my shoulder. “Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built. Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the town grew up around the site to cater for the tourists.”
“Tourists?”
She looked at me. “It’s a big ship.”
I hired an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-coloured suspension bridge. I needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but almost deserted so I stuck to the yellow line in the centre of the road and barrelled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above my head, but I finally found a Neo-Maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of me, and for a while I forgot about the Corps and Innenin and everything that had happened since.
By the time I hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted angles of the Free Trade Enforcer’s launch deck, and the last of its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either side of the wreck’s shadow. Prescott was right. It was a big ship.
I slowed my speed in deference to the rise of buildings around me, wondering idly how anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to shore. Maybe Bancroft knew. He’d probably been around then.
Ember’s main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian railing in wrought iron. There were holograph ‘casters fixed to the trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman’s face wreathed with the words SLIPSLIDE—ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATRE. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.
I rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the façades, and finally found what I was looking for about two thirds of the way along the front. I coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty metres up, sat still for a few minutes to see if anything happened and then, when it didn’t, I got out of the car and walked back along the street.
Elliott’s Data Linkage broking was a narrow façade sandwiched between an industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where gulls screeched and fought over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Elliott’s was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the operations room. I stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harboured behind a long moulded plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass-walled office. The far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the brackets had resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.
“Help you?”
A thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head round the corner of one of the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.
“Yeah, I’m looking for Victor Elliott.”
“Out front.” He gestured back the way I had come. “See the old guy on the rail? Watching the wreck? That’s him.”
I looked out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the rail.
“He owns this place, right?”
“Yeah. For his sins.” The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. “Not much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is.”
I thanked him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade now, and Anchana Salomao’s holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, I came up next to the man on the rail and leaned my own arms on the black iron. He looked round as I joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgement, then went back to staring at the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.
“That’s a pretty grim piece of parking,” I said, gesturing out at the wreck.
It earned me a speculative look before he answered me. “They say it was terrorists.” His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he’d once put too much effort into using it and something had broken. “Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both.”
“Maybe they did it for the insurance,” I said.
Elliott looked at me again, more sharply. “You’re not from here?” he asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone this time.
“No. Passing through.”
“From Rio?” He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. “You an artist?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill he’d forgotten. “You move like an artist.”
“Near miss. It’s military neurachem.”
He got it then, but the shock didn’t seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes. He looked me up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.
“You come looking for me? You from Bancroft?”
“You might say that.”
He moistened his lips. “Come to kill me?”
I took the hardcopy out of my pocket and handed it across to him. “Come to ask you some questions. Did you transmit this?”
He read it, lips moving wordlessly. Inside my head, I could hear the words he was tasting again: … for taking my daughter from me … will burn the flesh from your head … will never know the hour or the day … nowhere safe in this life … It wasn’t highly original, but it was heartfelt and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Prescott had shown me on the Rabid & Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the death Bancroft had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the outside of Bancroft’s skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated contents across the room.
“Yes, that’s mine,” Elliott said quietly.
“You’re aware that someone assassinated Laurens Bancroft last month.”
He handed me back the paper. “That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his own head off.”
“Well, that is a possibility,” I conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it into a refuse-filled skip below us on the beach. “But it’s not one I’m being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there.”