‘Malcolm?’ Alexia got up to follow him. Mossa looked up as he approached.
‘You look like shit.’ she said. Then she noticed the gun in his hand.
‘What’s… What the fuck?!’ Du Bois pointed the gun at her. Mossa had been loud enough to draw attention to herself. People saw the gun and came running. There were firearms officers present. They knew Mossa. They didn’t know du Bois, who found himself with MP5 sub-machine guns levelled at him. After the beating he’d just taken, they didn’t seem all that frightening.
‘I don’t care,’ he told her earnestly. ‘I just want a name, and it won’t get taken any further. You don’t give me a name and I’ll blow your head all over the beach.’ After all, she didn’t know that the gun was empty.
There was lots of shouting. Du Bois frowned. He wanted to hear what Mossa had to say.
‘It was you on the phone?’ she asked. He nodded. She looked at the gun and saw the resolve in du Bois’s face.
‘When I phoned in to re-task the police working the roadblock to help me raid the dog stadium, someone made a call from Kingston Crescent on your phone to another pay-as-you-go in the Tipner area, as close to the old dog stadium as triangulation could make out. You tipped someone off. I want to know who. Tell me and I’ll make sure that you don’t get prosecuted and you get to retire on full pension. Don’t tell me, and I blow your head off and find out anyway.’
There was more shouting. The only reason du Bois hadn’t been shot was that some of the senior officers on the scene thought they knew what he was.
‘McGurk,’ Mossa finally said. It was obvious from the reaction of some of the officers around them that what she had said made her dirty. Guns were lowered. Du Bois’s .45 wasn’t.
‘Where can I find him?’
25. A Long Time After the Loss
Even with the window polarised, the light pollution spilling into the large sparsely furnished marble office turned the two figures into shadows, like the negative of an old photograph.
‘You know what you are asking me?’ the Elite demanded.
‘I’m not asking you,’ the tall figure behind the desk said.
‘Because my copy demands it?’
‘No, because slavery is the price of great power.’
The Elite turned and walked to the window looking out into brightly-lit orbital space. Inter-starscraper vehicles looked like tiny black bugs lost in the sea of light.
‘This is a waste,’ the Elite said, and then sought his way through the glass. There was pain. His master was well defended.
A grotesque, an outlander, reaching for her, the needle in his hand, and she knew he was going to wipe her. Kill all her achievements in the Game, make the Absolute lose interest, deny her communion. Why was she helpless? She had her bone knife, a discreet thorn pistol, her body was laced with elegant and deadly virals; but the needle got closer until it filled her vision.
‘Zabilla?’ Dracup said gently. Her eyes flickered open. Internal narcotics dealt quickly and efficiently with the rising panic. Dracup was gazing down at her, but there was some vestige of paranoia from the dream that had her mistrusting how he looked at her. Beneath the concern, she thought she saw something new – towards her, anyway. A callousness. She bit back the anger. He was a fool if he was growing tired of her now while she was so close to such a major triumph in the Game.
More worrying was that the Absolute could not have failed to monitor the dream now that she was so important to the research into the cocoon. She wondered if the dream was a warning, the price of failure. Then she wondered if such thoughts were treasonous, if for no other reason than not being entertaining enough. Besides, she could not imagine that the punishment for failure would be so mundane, so private and over so quickly. She would surely become a public spectacle, entertainment, and the most galling thing would be that all those she had beaten to get where she was today would be there to enjoy her fall.
The fear was gone now, thanks to the drugs, and had been replaced with irritation.
‘A dream, nothing more,’ she told Dracup as she got up. She missed her old apartment. A not unattractive sculpted root structure made up two walls of their well-appointed apartment in the bunker down among the roots, but it could not make up for the loss of the view. She could not see the other atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. There was not that green quality to the light as the sun shone down through the translucent leaf canopy above, nor the bioluminescent glow at night. There was little of the Game to amuse her, just research. Down below the black leaves, she might as well have been one of the morlocks who served her. She got up and made her way towards the shower nook. The roots shifted, opening at her approach.
‘Be careful that your subconscious does not betray you,’ Dracup said.
Zabilla spun to face him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He was immediately conciliatory. ‘Just that we are being monitored closely…’
‘Do you not think I know that?’ Why are you saying this out loud? she left unspoken.
‘And now is not the time for a treasonous subconscious.’
‘And what exactly would you like me to do about it?’
‘More drugs?’ he suggested. Again he sounded reasonable, but again his suggestion just irritated her. Like everyone in the Game, she was used to altering her mood with chemicals, whether to enhance sensation, as a less controllable alternative to immersion theatre, to enhance performance, or just to remain seemingly calm in the face of other players’ moves. But other than performance enhancers, which would eventually make her crash, she needed to be able to focus without distraction. Mood-changing drugs dulled her wits.
Now she was wishing for a calming agent, a way to slow her racing brain as she strode rapidly towards her lab. Dracup was next to her, and they were flanked by two heavily armed human guards, four security satellites – S-sats, better-armed and larger versions of the P-sats that some of the more modern and gauche players favoured as familiars – and their two morlock retainers/assistants. The morlocks were frighteningly human-looking, Zabilla had to say. Dressed in what were apparently fabricated copies of pre-Loss servant finery, they looked like small pale people with skin where their eyes should be. Despite their blindness, they never seemed to have any problem finding their way or assisting with often quite delicate procedures.
She was getting nowhere. The cocoon was resisting all but the most invasive means of investigation, and the most invasive means seemed to threaten some sort of self-destruct impulse or were simply so ruinous that they would harm it. What they were not doing was getting any closer to discovering the secret of bridging to Red Space.
It didn’t help that an avatar was there daily. She could feel its hollow, empty eyes on her as she worked, somehow disapproving. Her reports went directly to the Absolute.
They went through one security checkpoint after another, each more thorough and invasive than the last. Zabilla reflected that all her research was being conducted against a backdrop of one security breach after another. There had been a number of breaches – electronic, nano and, most worrying and the most effective so far, biotechnological. It was whispered that the Consortium almost certainly had people on the ground, and it seemed unlikely that the Church was not making some attempt to secure its bridge monopoly. The sophistication of the biotech attempts, however, pointed to the Living Cities on Pangea. The avatar had told her that more than one of the Monarchist systems’ Elites was within response distance if anything happened.
Zabilla and Dracup walked through the final security and anti-infection field. They had to retract and lock down their nano-screens before they were allowed in and then were assigned S-sats designed to project a sterile field around them. The lab was as nanite-free as any place could be made.