Gretchen rapped her knuckles on the barrel of the nearest weapon. "This is anodized steel."
"Exactly." Parker started to chew on his tabac. "So if iron and copper are supposed to be like gold here, why could I buy these on the sidewalk? Why so cheap? What are they doing here anyway?"
"I don't know." Anderssen stood up. "But they're not our business and we don't need them. In the morning, I want you to trade them for something useful – anything but more weapons."
"Wha…boss! Wait a minute, there's something else you need to know." Parker stood as well, and Gretchen was alarmed to see open fear on the man's face. "I haven't been here long, but everywhere I went there was a really, really bad vibe in the air. Down in the souk – I mean where the natives go to get happy – they don't like humans very much. Not at all… We might need th ese. I saw…thereare plenty more guns on the street. And what about the priests in this reed house place? They don't sound very polite either!"
Gretchen shook her head sharply. "Parker! We aren't here to rob a bank, even if these monks are vicious fanatics. We aren't an army and we're not going to try and take on the city population. We're going to stay quiet and get up to Takshila and find out what this 'heavenly tree' is, or isn't, quietly. Guns are not quiet. Ever."
The pilot started to speak, saw the tense look on her face and raised his hands in defeat. "Sure, boss. I'll get these out of here in the morning."
"Good." Gretchen turned to the Hesht. "Maggie, can you access the local wireless voice network? Are our personal comms compatible? They are? Good." She shuffled through the papers Petrel had given her and found what seemed to be a rental agreement. "Find out where this apartment is and make sure it's in line of sight of the House. If it is, great, otherwise – find us someplace that is."
The Hesht nodded somberly. "What about this den?"
"We'll keep it," Gretchen said, staring out at the city again. Lights were beginning to shine fuzzily through the murk as the rain lifted. She wondered what the Jehanan sitting in those dimly lit rooms were thinking. Are they cursing us? I might be, if Imperial merchants suddenly started dumping surplused machine guns on my streets. "We might need to arrive suddenly at any hour. Keep the key."
A Nondescript House
On a Street of Trumpetvines, Central Parus
Skin stretched tight, a jittery hum tickling her spine, Itzpalicue settled into a nest of patterned quilts and v-pane displays. Thin trails of blood seeped down her chest, spouting like tiny serpents from pricks along her collarbone and breasts. The bitter taste of oliohuiqui burned on the back of her tongue and the Mйxica woman felt two steps removed from the quietly glowing panels. Lachlan's technicians had installed two large v-pane displays on either side of the bed.
Every window was shuttered – the putative owners of the house were on vacation, visiting the seaside temple of Tembanifar, way off in the south near Patala – and reinforced with ablative armor. One display held a string of palm-sized v-panes, showing feeds from cameras scattered through the house and grounds.
A motley company of Arachosians squatted or dozed in the garden, long reptilian heads hidden by embroidered traveling cloaks. Not one of the mercenaries was more than a hand's reach away from his weapons. Invisible against the smoggy sky, translucent spybugs drifted over the whole neighborhood, watching every passing cart and laundry boy. Inside, the downstairs rooms were empty save for lengths of armored cable descending into the tunnels under the old house. Three meters behind each window and door, 'pop-top' area saturation weapons stood on triangular stands, ready to erupt if anything burst uninvited into the ground floor.
Itzpalicue's wrinkled hands drifted across the displays and they sprang to life, filling with dozens of v-panes, showing telemetry from the orbiting Cornuelle, video from every native and Imperial groundside source, an overhead view of the Mirror operations center, even the bridge of the Flower Priest support ship Tepoztecatl.
"…thirty-five seconds to command conference call," Lachlan announced. In the background, his technicians were busy at work, examining and discarding datafeeds, winnowing out everything but the transmission streams from the Army cantonment at Sobipurй, the Legation in Parus and the Cornuelle high above. "Stand by to intercept."
The old Mйxica woman stretched her back, settled her haunches and thumbed up the three primary displays. A blank v-pane appeared in each, accompanied by secondary panes holding personal information, morphology data and a constellation of datastream adjustment controls. She started to slow her breathing in preparation for a sustained burst of activity.
"Legation secure comm is up," Lachlan reported and the leftmost display shimmered. "Matching feed, slipstreaming…now." The face ofa diplomatic service communications tech appeared to Itzpalicue's left for a moment as the man adjusted the comm set in a well-appointed office and stepped away. Legate Petrel sat down, stubbed out a thin cigar and leaned back, waiting for the other members of the conference call to come on-line.
"Running morphology check now…" Lachlan's voice was a constant, steadywhisper in Itzpalicue's ear. "Heart rate slightly up, eye-blink rate normal, breathing normal…tension index is moderate. He's having a good morning – the missus must have sent him off to work right."
That was not helpful of Greta, Itzpalicue thought in amusement. He needs to be irritated.
"Delay conference interconnect by one minute," she ordered Lachlan through her submike. "Push disturbance report series one through Legation."
The other two panes began to shimmer as Fleet and Army secure comm registered on the Imperial network. Itzpalicue let her awareness lose discrete focus, taking in the appearance of all three men at once. Both Hadeishi in orbit and Yacatolli at the Sobipurй base showed minute and welcome signs of tension. They waited patiently while the conference call synchronized.
"Legation push complete." Lachlan came back on-line. "Routing delay for tri-connect stands at thirty seconds."
Legate Petrel looked aside as an aide leaned in, whispering urgently, a sheaf of dispatch reports clutched in his hand. Itzpalicue spent the extra ten seconds the delay gained them thumbing up the latest pause-counts for Yacatolli and Hadeishi. The Fleet officer's numbers made her frown.
Fleet and Army secure comm was routinely compromised by the Mirror in the name of state security. Lachlan's technicians had been busy for the past week capturing every comm stream generated by the three men waiting for the conference call. From this data, an array of Mirror comps had been building voice-delay patterns from intercepts of Hadeishi and Yacatolli in conversation. Luckily for Itzpalicue's purposes, the normal flow of human conversation was filled with innumerable silent pauses, gaps, filler sounds like uh, and misspoken, repeated words. Not all minds processed data at the same rate. A distinctly measurable response time dragged between exposure to new data and the mind's concious response.
Chu-sa Hadeishi's recent medical records indicated the long patrol voyage had worn down his body – immune counts were off, fatigue was up, muscular degeneration was apparent, reflexes had slowed – but his mind seemed to have been honed to a distressing keenness. His pause-count was quite low. The old Mйxica woman's fingers danced across the panels, shifting comp attention to the Chu-sa's datastream. Every microsecond will count.
"Connect in three…two…one." A solid green bar outlined each v-pane.
Itzpalicue let her mind release from conscious concentration, hands poised over the display controls.