“Oxide converter in the chimney, ladies and gentleman, so we can actually have a real fire tonight,” Geraint explained. Don’t do that too often. Anyway, as I say, not too much alcohol. We've got work to do after this, and plans to make. It’s all beginning to swim into some sort of focus now.”
Friday morning saw Geraint walking with Rani across the meadows within the castle grounds. The abundance of nature so entranced her that he wished it were. spring so that she could see, smell, and gather the daffodils, daisies, buttercups, and other flowers that grew hereabouts. It had taken a dozen years of detox before the first of these had blossomed once more in the land.
“The cows had really frightened her at first. She’d seen them on trid, of course, hut in person they seemed so much bigger than expected, and a whole herd of them was quite scary. It had taken a real effort of will for Rani to walk up and actually touch one. At the hesitant touch of her hand, the Jersey mooed pleasingly. The ork jumped back in alarm, but quickly recovered her poise enough to go back and caress the animal as it chewed on the sparse winter grass. That something so simple could bring an expression of such delight to her face touched Geraint. Too long in that penthouse, Master Geraint, he chided himself silently.
As they strolled down to the farmhouse, he talked over the night’s decisions with her. He hoped he wouldn't seem patronizing, but he wanted to be sure she understood everything.
“Well, Rani, we’re up to fifty-six Mary Kellys now, but we can discard seventeen of them, plus the four you checked. It’s too dangerous for us to go back to London, so it was a good move to have private investigation firms doing the spadework. Every hour of today should bring us more information. We can narrow down the candidates without going anywhere near the threat of danger.”
She nodded, “But what about the others you found in my patch?”
“Yes, three more. If you plan to get back to your contacts tonight, well, that gives you Saturday to check them out. This time we’ve got to get to the girl before the murderers do.”
“The police are really no help?” She actually wanted him to say no. If he’d said yes, it would have made everything an anticlimax, brought an end to all this enjoyment. The police had never done much to protect East Enders in her part of the streets of London, but she’d always believed that powerful rich people controlled the forces of law and order with ease.”
Geraint sighed. “Because of what happened to us the night we met you, going to them would be too much of a risk. Despite all my connections we could still end up in jail ourselves. I gave them the best anonymous tip I could, using a special ID code that should alert them that the information comes from a source to be taken seriously-nobleman, politician, or one of their own. But they won’t do anything about it. Not in time, anyway. And they won’t even be able to check out some of the evidence. For one thing, they’ve got nothing on Catherine Eddowes. Without evidence they won’t act purely on the basis of a tip. But at least we’ve tried.”
Walking down the stony path toward the thatched farm buildings, Rani nodded sadly. That was the one murder that had touched her own heart.
“Smith and Jones, those men, we can’t get at them?” She wanted them badly. The way she saw it. they were the ones who had killed her family.
“No way of knowing their whereabouts. They might be acting as fixers right now, and we wouldn’t, couldn’t, know where. Not much we can do about them, curse it. I’ve got my investigators checking them out, but its unlikely we’ll get anything soon. When we do, Rani, you’ll be the first to know. I promise you that.” Geraint knew what it meant to her.
The people behind it all. That company, Transys?” She wasn’t sure, even now, if she remembered the name right.
“Oh yes. We know that they hired Serrin for something pointless, we know they were behind hiring you, we know they hired Francesca. Whether those things are connected, we don’t know. And the problem is that we can’t find out in time. Their computer system won’t let us back in.”
He didn’t bother trying to explain all the details of the midnight run he and Francesca bad attempted late last night; the alerts were constant, the IC impossible to deal with, and the corp had installed an algorithmic node rerouting system that they’d utterly failed to decrypt. They’d gotten out of the system very, very quickly. No more fun and games for a bard and a priestess in Edinburgh now.
“We also think that, for some reason, they’re using brainchipping technology to re-create the Ripper. We’ve got no proof, though. We only know they were once associated with another corp that tried something similar a few years back. We found a file on the subject, but we couldn’t get at the information in it.
“We don’t have much that’s concrete, but it’s still plenty to go on, especially after Francesca was attacked by that Ripper construct in the Matrix. Transys has to be playing around with this. There isn’t any clear link between the Ripper and what Transys has been doing with us, though,” he concluded. That was the sore point for Geraint. He ached to find some connection, some link that would tie it all together, but for the moment nothing presented itself.
“It surprised me that the American knew something about the Squeeze,” Rani said as they reached the bottom of the hill. Geraint knew that disparaging references to “The American” had to mean Francesca; it was as plain as the points of Serrin’s ears that Rani resented the other woman’s beauty and condescending attitude.
“Yes, me too,” Geraini agreed. “But she did some work for British Industrial a while back; you know, the people in Angel Towers?” The corporate arcology adjoining the notorious, strife-torn South London districts known as the Squeeze was an all-too-familiar London landmark. Peter the Panda, the ghastly, fifty-foot-tall purple neon corporate logo, shone far and wide.
“Seems she has a contact in British Industrial she can use. He knows folks in the Squeeze. British Industrial gets their labor there.”
“Don’t I know it.” Rani thought of the busloads of hopeless, underpaid slave laborers, desperate to earn even a subsistence, that the corporation brought in every day. She’d seen their desperate faces behind armored plexiglass. The hell of the Squeeze, its mutated and wretched people, caged in the armored buses, selling themselves for peanuts. She could relate to that.
“You want to see Transys Neuronet?” He was suddenly emboldened. They’re not far away, or at least their weirdest place isn’t. The land belongs to the Earl of Cardiff, but I can easily get permission for a quick sightseeing tour. While Francesca and Serrin deal with the computer downloads, we’ll take a copter and show you something really off the wall. Can’t risk flying directly over their heads, but we’ll get close enough for a good look. What do you say?”
As they sat down to high tea Geraint continued talking about this and that, but Rani wasn’t really listening. Her head was full of the amazements of Caerleon. Nothing he could have said had prepared her for the sights of the place.
Caerleon, once a Roman town, was more than two thousand years old. The muddy, glistening banks of the River Usk bisected the old from the new town, and from the copter she could see the incredible amphitheater and Roman bullring, with its concentric stone circles ringing the field of battle. Clustered around it were a complex of shiny, flat-roofed buildings, the Transys corporate complex, wrapped up delicately within a web of triple security fences and a whole army of private security.
It was the Knights of Rage that had really amazed her. Resplendent in their black, brown, green, and gold apparel, the dreadlocked blacks stood in knots around the perimeter of the fencing. They raised their crooked staves as one to greet their copter, and the almost simultaneous gesture affected her somehow, bringing tears to her eyes. She had no idea what kept them here, no idea of what this bizarre juxtaposition of high technology and primal instinct meant, at least no conscious idea. Something simpler than that had tugged at her emotions.