She placed one hand on his shoulder and guided him back through to the circular room he had just come from.
‘Back up, please,’ she said, leading him back over to the raised slab. Her manner was brisk and business-like.
Another thump echoed from across the room, but Zelia showed no sign of even being aware of it.
‘What the hell is that thing?’ Luc demanded, unable to hide his revulsion.
‘What thing?’ asked Zelia.
‘The man with no eyes.’
She glanced behind her with mild puzzlement, then back at him. ‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just an experiment.’
‘An experiment,’ Luc repeated. ‘What kind of experiment?’
‘One that needn’t concern you,’ she replied briskly. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve already treated us both for radiation damage.’
He gestured back in the direction of the eyeless thing. ‘But . . .’
She flashed him an angry look. ‘We’re not here to discuss my private research,’ she snapped. ‘I want to find out what happened to you back there at Vasili’s. How much do you remember, from when you collapsed?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘One minute everything was fine, the next . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well . . . something like it happened to me back on Temur, just after they brought me back from Aeschere.’
She nodded, as if this had been the answer she had been expecting. ‘I checked your records as soon as I had the chance, but the medicians attending to you couldn’t identify a cause for that first seizure. Is that correct?’
He nodded.
<But before we discuss anything else,> she scripted at him, her gaze unblinking, <tell me if you can understand what I’m saying.>
Luc stared at her, unsure how to respond.
A look of grim satisfaction spread across her face. <Just what I thought. You did know what we were all saying to each other back in Vasili’s library, didn’t you?>
Luc swallowed. <Scripting is fairly common, last thing I heard.>
<Except that was a private conversation, mediated through lattices, and using compression and encryption techniques far beyond anything a mere CogNet unit like the one you own could possibly handle. You shouldn’t have had any idea what we were discussing amongst ourselves. Just how much did you overhear?>
Luc felt his shoulders sag. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ he said out loud.
She stared at him with frightening intensity. ‘I could have you killed. Tell me, how did you do it?’
‘I don’t know. I just . . . picked up everything. It wasn’t anything I did, it just happened.’
‘I felt sure of it, from the moment you stepped inside that miserable hovel of Sevgeny’s.’
‘You already said your security networks might have been compromised in some way,’ he reminded her. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not it.’
Luc made an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I have no idea how I could have picked up what you were all scripting to each other. I mean, I realized I wasn’t meant to at the time, but how could I have told any of you? I was too . . .’ Too frightened.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But only because I’m scanning you on a number of levels right now, all of which tell me you’re not deliberately obfuscating the truth.’
‘Okay then, so how could I have picked up everything you were saying?’
She raised both eyebrows. ‘That’s a question that can’t have anything but an interesting answer. For instance, would you care to tell me exactly who put an instantiation lattice inside your skull?’
Luc gaped at her dumbly before answering. ‘No one. I don’t have any such thing.’
She smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, but you do, Mr Gabion. Look.’
Images of the interior of a skull – his skull, he guessed – blossomed in the air around them. One showed a lump of pinkish-grey flesh encased in fine silvery lines, while another depicted a messy tangle of pulsing blue light rendered in three dimensions, overlaid with a secondary, more orderly grid of red.
‘That,’ said Zelia, ‘is what an instantiation lattice looks like, in the very early stages of settling into its owner’s cortex – your cortex, to be precise. I had my house AI remotely analyse the inside of your head as soon as I realized what you had in there. But there are differences between this and any other kind of lattice I’ve ever seen.’
‘Differences?’
‘What you’ve got in there, unless my AIs are sorely mistaken, is more advanced than anything used even by the members of the Council, including myself. It has . . . functions I can’t begin to decipher.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head, her eyes bright and feral. ‘The question, then, is how the hell did it get inside your head?’
Antonov.
Luc’s blood ran cold and he knew, in that instant, that everything he remembered from Aeschere was real, and not a hallucination. Antonov had done something to him: booby-trapped him in some way, placed a ticking bomb inside his head for reasons he hadn’t bothered to explain beyond a few cryptic statements.
He shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he’d fallen into the hands of Victor Begum or Karlmann Sandoz following his seizure in the library or – even worse – Cripps. He might well have disappeared into some Sandoz stronghold, never to be seen again.
Not that he was necessarily any safer in de Almeida’s hands, he reminded himself. Unlike Cripps or Karlmann Sandoz, she was still an unknown quantity.
‘I swear to you, I have no idea,’ Luc replied, almost begging.
Zelia glanced towards the projections as he spoke, her lips twisting into a thin line. ‘Now you are lying, Mr Gabion: it’s all there in the flow of blood in your capillaries, and the unconscious reactions of your autonomic nervous system.’ She studied him with angry eyes. ‘If you lie to me again, I’ll know straight away. Think you can get that through your head?’
‘Yes,’ he replied carefully.
‘Good.’ Her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘Now tell me how this came about.’
‘Antonov implanted it inside me. We were on Aeschere hunting for him, when our mosquitoes turned on us, killing all of—’
‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped, interrupting him. ‘I’m already familiar with everything that took place on Aeschere.’
‘Not everything that happened is in the official report.’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
Luc took a deep breath. ‘When I told Director Lethe of SecInt what really happened, he warned me he was going to leave some of the details out of the official report.’
‘Why?’
‘He was worried that what I told him might give an investigative committee reason to call my sanity into question, especially since I couldn’t prove much of what I said happened down there.’
She folded her arms. ‘Then I take it back. Start from the beginning, and tell me what really happened.’
He told her everything that had taken place after he had found his way to the lowest level of the Aeschere complex, leaving nothing out.
‘And when you encountered Antonov on the ship, he was still alive?’
Luc nodded. ‘He managed to take me by surprise and knocked me out. When I came to, he was in the process of putting some kind of mechant inside me.’ He shuddered at the memory. ‘It was tiny, like a metal worm. It crawled in through my nose and dug its way through my skull.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Delightful.’
‘So what happens after I finish telling you all this?’ asked Luc miserably. ‘Are you going to hand me over to the Sandoz for more questioning?’