Luc had been one of those Benareans – one of thousands of refugees who had scattered across the Tian Di in the wake of the Battle of Sunderland. It had not, at first, been an easy existence. Orphaned in the wake of the rebellion, he had been given over to the charge of a Benarean family. His adoption had not gone well, and he had only rarely returned to this part of the city since.
He arrived there just over an hour after de Almeida summoned him, stepping out of an Archives flier to find himself confronted by half a dozen armoured Sandoz cars arrayed outside a building whose walls curved gently as they rose towards a peak sufficiently lofty that he couldn’t quite make it out.
Several data-ghosts conferred with each other beside one of the Sandoz vehicles, while a few steps away, SecInt mechants kept a small crowd of a dozen or so civilian onlookers at a distance from the building.
Luc decided to keep his own distance until Zelia made her appearance. The data-ghosts, all of which had their backs to him, alternated between studying something on the ground immediately before them and craning their heads back to peer at the upper floors of the adjacent building.
Luc couldn’t see just what it was they were all staring at on the ground, but he could make an educated guess. Someone had exited the building the hard way, and at a terminal velocity. As he continued to watch, one of the data-ghosts turned away with a grimace, covering his mouth as if he was about to be sick. This convinced Luc he’d guessed correctly.
Just when he had started to wonder if de Almeida was going to turn up at all, the data-ghost of a small, wiry-looking woman with blond hair and severe eyes stepped away from a mechant she had been addressing and approached him.
‘It’s me,’ the woman muttered, leaning in close. ‘Zelia.’
Luc shook his head. ‘Why the disguise?’
‘It would cause something of a fuss, don’t you think, if people were to know there were this many members of the Council standing around Kirov Avenue in the middle of the night?’
‘Where?’ Luc asked, glancing around. He saw one or two data-ghosts, but none he recognized. . .
‘Oh,’ he said, feeling stupid. He wondered if Father Cheng himself might be amongst them.
‘I want you to take a look at the body.’
‘If you’ve found your killer,’ said Luc, ‘why do you need me here?’
‘Because I think you might know him,’ she said, before turning her back on him and suddenly fading from sight.
Luc stepped towards the cluster of vehicles, muttering a curse under his breath.
His name was Reto Falla. He had fallen nearly three quarters of a kilometre from the window of his apartment, landing in a sculpted garden area at the base of the tower, which had long since gone to seed. His legs were grotesquely folded back behind his body, while his torso had ruptured upon impact. The back of his skull had also shattered where it had struck a decorative rock. He had died, Luc noted, with a look of surprise on what was left of his face.
He stepped away as mechants proceeded to hide the body from view inside a temporary, dome-spaced structure. De Almeida’s data-ghost-in-disguise beckoned to him to follow her away from the cluster of people, again coming to a halt a short distance away.
‘So?’ asked de Almeida, ‘was I right? You knew him?’
Luc sighed. ‘Yes. We both come from the same small settlement on Benares.’
‘A settlement that was entirely wiped out during the Battle of Sunderland, I understand.’
‘Yes,’ Luc admitted, a sudden tension taking hold of him. ‘Falla and me and some other kids were on a school trip to a low orbit factory at the time of the attack. All of us became orphans in the exact same moment.’
Luc studied the face of de Almeida’s data-ghost, to see if he had evinced so much as a trace of pity. None was apparent.
‘But you were already aware, I gather, that he had since become involved with Black Lotus?’
‘Sure. He was picked up during a raid some years back, when Black Lotus were just gaining a real foothold here on Temur. That’s when I saw him, for the first time since we were kids.’
‘When, exactly?’
Luc was sure she already knew the details, but answered anyway. ‘They put me in charge of his interrogation, in case knowing me might make him more inclined to be talkative.’
‘And did it?’
Luc laughed, glancing back over to where Falla’s crumpled form was now hidden inside a brightly coloured dome, shadowy figures moving inside. ‘He hardly even remembered me. When I told him we’d grown up in the same place, he just looked at me like I was lying. It had been a long time, after all.’
‘Just how deeply involved was he with Black Lotus?’
‘He was far from being a high-level operative, if that’s what you mean.’ He felt a sense of inexplicable sadness that he recognized as just one legacy of the trauma of those years. ‘He wasn’t much of anything; more of a fantasist, with no real connections. He had some psychological issues, along with a whole roster of dependencies, chemical, neural and otherwise.’
‘Curable enough, I would have thought.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Some things run too deep, Miss de Almeida. You can’t just root them out without fundamentally changing someone’s personality.’
‘But is he the kind of person Black Lotus would want to recruit?’
‘He was certainly disaffected enough, but he never amounted to much. At best, he knew people who knew people, if you follow.’
‘So what did you do with him?’
‘Nothing. We made him into a paid informant, but we never got anything useful out of him.’ He made sure to fix his eyes on de Almeida’s. ‘And in answer to your next question, there’s absolutely no way he’d have been able to pull off anything so sophisticated as a high-level assassination. Not even with a lot of help.’
She regarded Luc with a look of amusement. ‘It’s interesting the way your lives worked out. Him on one side of the fence, you on the other.’
He frowned. ‘Reto fell for Black Lotus’s bullshit. I didn’t.’
‘What kind of bullshit?’
‘Is there a reason for this line of questioning?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I want to know the answer.’
‘Black Lotus claimed they weren’t responsible for the assault on Sunderland that killed a huge number of Benareans, but it’s demonstrably not true. As far as Black Lotus were concerned, the Benareans who died as a direct result of their actions were nothing more than collateral damage.’
‘That didn’t stop a lot of other Benareans joining their ranks afterwards,’ said Zelia.
‘Then I guess you’d have to ask them for their reasoning,’ he replied levelly.
De Almeida again regarded him with a look of amusement that was already becoming as familiar as it was deeply irritating. The real problem with data-ghosts, Eleanor had once said, is that you can’t punch them in the face.
A second data-ghost appeared next to de Almeida’s, and spoke to her without acknowledging Luc’s presence before vanishing once more.
‘Two hundred and thirty-first floor,’ said Zelia, turning back to face him. ‘That’s Falla’s apartment. The elevator’s out of action past the two-hundredth floor, I’m afraid. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.’
‘Or,’ he said, ‘I could just ghost there.’
She shook her head. ‘No. Father Cheng might want you to take a look at physical evidence, and you can’t do that if you’re only present as a projection. If you start now, I’ll see you there in half an hour.’