Cybelle shuffled from foot to foot, focusing on the screen with wide-eyed intent. “You have no evidence,” she said, taking a moment to glance over her shoulder at the Queens, who were now focusing on her person with pinch-browed concentration, as behind them a squad of royal guards adopted a pose that spoke more of vigilant readiness than of formal salute. “There were no witnesses, and you can’t prove anything.”
“Oh. Really?” Rudi moved, then, making some off-viewport adjustment: The image changed. A dim blue light illuminated, from above, a prisoner, cocooned and trussed to a metal framework dangling in darkness. The prisoner stared helplessly at the viewport: gagged, hands bound, a picture of vulnerability. “This is your witness: Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114, as I captured her, fleeing into the depths to join her sister. You will note the merform morphology: She evidently had her escape route well planned out. But that is not relevant to the point I would like to make.
“Sera Alizond is a historiographer of accountancy practices, with a special interest in the history of a particular type of fraudulent practice, the ‘FTL scam,’ as I believe it is called. Yes, she was induced to pursue this interest by her lineage founder, Sondra Alizond-1—I see from your expression that you are familiar with her—and at the time I captured her, she was in possession of what I believe to be a copy of the uncommitted counterpart to the very large financial instrument we are discussing. Unfortunately she had stored it in a memory palace in one of her cranial backup slots, and when capture was clearly inevitable she deep-sixed it, because, as you are no doubt already aware, she’s a vindictive little shrimp.”
At this point in Rudi’s narrative I flopped around angrily and rolled my eyes as convincingly as I could, doing my best impression of a vindictive little shrimp who had been caught red-handed in possession of her employer’s stolen property. (Whatever a shrimp might be.) I don’t know whether I succeeded in convincing the priestess that I was afraid of Rudi, but I certainly came close to blowing the entire setup by losing my grip on the “restraints” I had improvised from my depth-acclimation kit and the webbing beneath the bathyscaphe.
Rudi grinned, baring his fangs. “Despite losing the financial instrument and depriving me of a not-inconsiderable fortune, Dr. Alizond managed to hold on to her primary backup chip. Which, you will be pleased to learn, is no longer occupying a socket in her head. I have it, and I also have the necessary schematic for assembling a blank body into which to download a new instance of her twisty little mind. More to the point, I have already uploaded the schematic and a serialized dump of her soul chip to Branch Office Five Zero, from whence it has already been transmitted to a secure off-site backup location. Encrypted, of course. However, if I don’t regularly confirm that I am alive and at liberty, a trusted escrow agent of mine will release the decryption key and make copies of Dr. Alizond available to anyone who wants to interrogate her.
“And none of you want that to happen, do you? Because she knows more about your little conspiracy than you realize.”
“Have you finished monologuing yet? Or was there meant to be some point to this?” asked the priestess, just as the three queen-instances behind her dropped each other’s hands and gave vent to a collective howl of heartfelt frustration and rage.
“Yes, there’s a point,” Rudi snapped, as if at an invisible quadrotor bug looping around his muzzle. “I’m leaving. No, seriously. This has been a complete waste of money and time for me: a most annoying loss. But I know better than to try to recover sunk costs—a-ha ha—so you may take it as read that I do not really want to be shot out of the sky or to release the miscreant’s memories to all and sundry. What I desire is to put this sorry episode behind me and get back to the business of underwriting winners. So I’m going to offer you a once-in-a-lifetime bargain. You let me return to my branch office and depart from orbit without trying to blast me out of the sky, and I’ll tell you where to find Dr. Alizond. How about it?”
“We do not negotiate with—” “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” “Drop it, sis, he’s a fundamentally untrustworthy lying little shitweasel.” The Queens spoke simultaneously again, colliding in a hubbub of internal disharmony. While they were preoccupied, the priestess peered at a small retina wrapped around her wrist. Her eyes narrowed. “Your Majesties?” She attempted to get their attention. “Medea?”
“What?” Heads whipped toward her, simultaneously drawn by the implicit lesé majeste in her informality.
Cybelle bowed her head. “My recommendation would be to accept the privateer’s terms. He has already sucked Dr. Alizond dry; our priority must be to prevent her particular insights from escaping into the wider discourse lest they cause the general public at large to scrutinize our projects with undue cynicism.” She raised her head, attempting to make eye contact, but the Queens were too agitated to notice anything so subtle. “You”—she pointed at the communications officer—“please put the call on hold?”
“Your Majesty—”
“Do it,” said one of the Queens, then turned back to face Cybelle. “This had better be good,” she threatened.
“Oh, it is. Are we private . . . ?”
“He can’t hear you.”
“Good.” Cybelle smiled at Medea’s third body. “I think we should take Rudi’s kind offer to run away and leave us the prize. (Not that it’s much of a prize.) He’s outfoxed himself this time.”
“Why?” Medea asked sharply.
“I have just received word that Sondra isn’t on Taj Beacon after all. And I do believe that if you allow our annoying privateer to think he’s gotten away free, she will do our dirty work for us . . .”
We were nearing the surface, departing the Hadean depths for the photic zone: The waters around the bathyscaphe were no longer completely black. We had been ascending for more than a day. It had been at least four hours since Rudi’s attempt to bluff the Queen of Argos and her sacerdotal allies, and there had been no further underwater detonations to telegraph Medea’s frustration. “I think they’ve taken the bait,” Rudi told me during a brief reactivation of the bathyscaphe’s external retina. “Not long now. I’ll cut loose when we reach ten meters below surface level. Then we can put this behind us.”
“You spin an excellent lie,” I told him, finding it difficult to keep a note of admiration out of my voice.
“It’s the first and most necessary skill of the grifter. You, of all people, should understand that.”
The waters had brightened to sunlit turquoise, and I could see a shoal of feral piscoids grazing the underside of a leviathan grass field in the middle distance when I felt the ’scaphe’s ascent cease once more. We hung from the roof of the sky like the aerostat fliers of prehistory. Which meant I was shortly going to discover whether there was, indeed, honor among thieves—or at least enlightened self-interest and a willingness to forgo short-term profit for long-term business goodwill. Goodwill: one of those things that bankers and accountants hate because it is so inevitably unquantifiable, existing only in the eye of the beholder.