“Damnit, all right. But if she’s found, I want to know immediately. We keep this as quiet as we can.”
Renne got out of the chair. “You got it.”
“Are you off to Solidade?”
“Yeah. The express to EdenBurg leaves in forty minutes.”
“Okay, good luck. And I want to know what the planet looks like when you get back.”
There was a limousine waiting for Renne when she arrived at EdenBurg’s CST station in Rialto, the planet’s megacity. A young man dressed in a smart dark gray business suit introduced himself as Warren Yves Halgarth, a member of the Halgarth family security force, and her assigned escort. They drove out of the station and into the midday sunlight.
Renne had visited all of the Big15 at one time or another. She was always hard-pressed to tell the megacities apart. Rialto was a slight exception in that it was sited in a temperate zone, while most of the others favored tropical locations. Apparently it was an accounting thing. A city that had summers and winters needed different types of civic services to cope with the individual seasons, and Rialto had an impressive snowfall in winter, averaging out at two meters each four-hundred-day year. Keeping the citywide grid of five-lane expressways open and the all-embracing network of rail tracks clear and functional for those three icy months of the year required thousands of snowplows and ancillary fleets of GPbots. The cost of all that bad weather machinery was considerable, and the city council had to charge the companies and residents to cover the expense.
It was a factor that was countered by the cost of power on EdenBurg, which was among the lowest in the Commonwealth. One of the principal reasons Heather Antonia Halgarth had chosen EdenBurg as her family’s Big15 world was the planet’s massive oceans. None of the three continents had deserts—precipitation was too high for that; instead, they were covered in rivers, with vast coastal plains subject to continual flooding. Instead of the fission plants the other Big15 used, Heather went in for hydropower on a colossal scale, damming two-thirds of the watercourses on the Sybraska continent where Rialto was situated. Electricity was delivered to the megacity via superconductor, and Sybraska’s plains drained, then irrigated to provide nation-sized tracts of highly productive farmland.
Because of the cold months, Rialto favored monolith apartment blocks rather than the vast sprawls of individual homes and strip malls found on worlds like StLincoln, Wessex, and Augusta. Each district had its core of Manhattan-like skyscrapers and bulky concrete tenements, which were encircled by huge swathes of factories and refineries.
The CST station was on the edge of the Saratov district, which was the megacity’s financial and administrative heart, giving it the largest nest of skyscrapers, and also the tallest. The industrial estates radiating outward tended toward the smaller, more sophisticated manufacturing facilities. Accommodation blocks were gigantic, fifty to seventy stories of sturdy stone façades, with large apartments overlooking broad well-maintained public parks. There were fewer rail lines and more elevated roads, reflecting the population density and its relative wealth.
Renne couldn’t help staring at Saratov’s central area as they swept toward it along the expressway. Some of the skyscrapers were so high she thought they must touch cloud level; they couldn’t be economical to build, even with today’s materials and robotics. It was all about corporate prestige.
Right in the middle were five tapering towers housing the Halgarth Dynasty’s headquarters. They were all identical in size and architecture with crown spires producing a bristling apex. But the reflective glass windows on each one had a different color.
Renne’s car drove down into the basement of the green tower, and into a secure parking zone. The Halgarth family security force occupied several floors halfway up the tower. Renne wasn’t told how many. The elevator they used didn’t have an indicator. She was ushered into Christabel Agatha Halgarth’s office. Curving walls of tinted glass looked out toward the ocean, thirty kilometers away. Three more skyscraper districts stood between Saratov and the coast, brief pinnacles of color and style with their moats of parkland. The terrain between them was a dark synthetic desert of rectangular factories and warehouse cubes with black solar collector roofs. Thousands of spindly metal chimneys squirted gray-blue vapors up into the iron sky, misting the whole scene with a thin dreary smog.
Sitting at her plain steel desk, Christabel Halgarth was silhouetted by the remorseless industrial backdrop. Newly rejuvenated, she was a small brunette, with a face that indicated a strong Asian ancestry. Renne expected someone this senior in the Dynasty to be wearing a business suit, one costing a good ten or fifteen times more than her own. But Christabel was dressed in a worn blue sweatshirt and baggy track pants with muddy stains on their knees, as if she’d just come in from gardening. Appearance obviously didn’t matter to her.
Or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t count.
Christabel followed Renne’s glance at her legs and smiled. “I cut my morning jog short to meet you. Haven’t had time for a shower yet.”
“I appreciate you taking the time,” Renne said as they shook hands. “It wasn’t quite that urgent.” She hadn’t told Alic Hogan that she’d requested an interview with Christabel. It wasn’t lying, exactly, but the Commander was antsy enough about her just getting permission to go to Solidade. Something like this request should probably have gone through the Admiral’s office, with any number of administrative staff reviewing it, and most of them unwilling to send it forward for fear of rocking the boat. Better, Renne thought, just to fire off the question and see if she could circumvent the bureaucracy and politics. Paula would have done the same.
“We’re both here now,” Christabel said graciously. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m following up the last Guardians’ shotgun. Basically, what I need to know from you is if it was an entrapment operation mounted by your organization.”
Christabel regarded her with a look of mild surprise. “Not that I’m aware of. One moment.” Her eyes unfocused as she scanned her virtual vision. “No. We knew nothing about it until it happened.”
“I see. Thank you.”
“Care to tell me why you asked that?”
“There was something wrong about it.” Renne waved a hand dismissively.
“Nothing solid I could put in a report at the time; and now Isabella has dropped out of sight.”
“Hardly conclusive. She’s young. The Commonwealth is in a minor state of chaos, especially with people migrating away from the Lost23 neighbors. A lot of our rich brats involve themselves in unsavory activities which they try to keep quiet from me. Don’t you think you might be overreacting?”
Renne was unsure if the woman was laughing at her, or irritated her time was being wasted. “She used to be good friends with Patricia Kantil.”
“I see. You’re adding up the discrepancies. And I admire you for sticking to your instincts. I can understand that. Especially given your previous mentor.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“You’re doing real detective work. You probably didn’t review my file, such as it is, but one of the nonclassified entries is that I graduated from the Serious Crimes Directorate’s Investigator training course one year after Paula Myo.”
“Ah,” Renne began to relax.
“I was furious with the Dynasty for supporting her dismissal. A little less politics in our lives would see a few more results, not that my dear Dynasty ever grasps that at a collective level. Even so, Columbia should never have done what he did, it was a complete abuse of power.”