‘Perhaps if I data-ghosted there—’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘If Sachs can fool my surveillance networks that easily, he can certainly trick a data-ghost into seeing whatever he wants. This is going to require eyeballs on the ground.’
‘What about your armies of micro-mechants? Can’t you use them?’
She shook her head. ‘Cheng gave the Sandoz sole responsibility for handling security for Maxwell’s prison. That means I’m not allowed to have my own surveillance anywhere near it.’
‘So unless you plan on going out there yourself,’ said Luc, ‘you’re going to need me to go out there.’
She nodded. ‘Unless there’s something else out there I don’t know about, Maxwell’s prison is the only place Ambassador Sachs could have gone.’
‘And if we do find him there?’
‘Then we have the evidence we need to prove he’s been carrying out clandestine meetings, without putting you in any danger. And if we can confront him with that evidence, maybe we’ll be able to find out where he really was the night of Sevgeny’s murder.’
‘But what business could Sachs possibly have with Javier Maxwell?’
‘I can imagine a couple of possibilities,’ de Almeida replied, ‘and if even a few of them turn out to be true, the Council’s in far more trouble than I’d realized.’ She nodded toward the exit. ‘We have no idea just how long he’s going to stay at Maxwell’s prison, assuming he’s even there, and that means you need to leave now.’
Within minutes, Luc found himself back on board the same flier de Almeida had used to transport him from Temur. The craft accelerated towards suborbital space, before dropping back down in a long arc that passed over an ocean dotted with ice-floes.
Over the next hour, the floes gradually merged into a featureless expanse of white that stretched in all directions. After a while the same snow-capped mountains he’d seen in de Almeida’s laboratory rose from around the curve of Vanaheim’s horizon, growing larger as the flier carried him towards them.
The mountains continued to expand until the flier finally passed between two of their peaks. Glancing down through the flier’s transparent upper hull, Luc saw that the slopes on the near side of the mountains fell away into glaciated valleys and deep ravines that showed evidence of recent volcanic activity; he could see a few small unfrozen lakes here and there, tiny oases whose shores were streaked with patches of scrubby lichen and moss.
The lakes passed out of sight as the flier decelerated, dropping towards a landing on the far side of the mountains near some foothills. The peaks of the mountains were lost in dense cloud.
De Almeida’s data-ghost appeared in the cabin next to Luc the moment the AG motors ceased to hum. ‘You’ll find cold-weather gear in the back,’ she told him.
‘I thought you said it was too risky for you to data-ghost?’
‘I hacked the private account of someone who hasn’t data-ghosted in a couple of decades,’ she replied. ‘It’ll be a long while before he notices, if ever.’
‘I don’t see much of anything,’ he said, peering out at his surroundings through the hull’s translucent surface. ‘Just snow and rocks. Couldn’t you get any nearer than this?’
‘I didn’t want to take the chance of testing the prison’s security perimeter any more than I had to,’ she explained. ‘This is as close as I can safely get you without risking detection. That means there’s still some way for you to go on foot, I’m afraid.’
Luc stared outside. ‘Where to, exactly?’
‘Look there,’ she said, pointing towards the nearest peak. ‘The foothills are only six kilometres or so from where you’ve landed, and that’s where you’ll find the entrance to Maxwell’s prison. There’s a transceiver amongst your cold-weather gear – plant it where it tells you to if you can’t see any sign of the Ambassador, then come back. If he shows himself, the transceiver will let us know.’
‘And the Sandoz guarding this place won’t know about it?’
‘If you manage to prove that Ambassador Sachs is making some kind of secret deal with Javier Maxwell, no one’s going to care one way or the other. I don’t think getting there and back should take you more than a couple of hours.’
‘And if this doesn’t work?’
‘Then we’ll have to think of something else. There’s a storm front closing in on the mountains – don’t tarry, because you really don’t want to get caught in it.’
‘I’d better get going,’ he said.
She nodded, the hunger in her eyes reminding him he wasn’t the only one fighting for his survival.
‘Good luck,’ she said, and vanished.
Luc clambered through to the back of the flier, found the cold-weather gear and pulled it on, stepping outside as soon as he was ready. Even with the protection of the gear, a cold deeper than any he had experienced before sucked the heat from the few exposed patches of his face.
He started walking, ice and snow crunching under his heavy boots. Before long it began to sleet, a thick wet slush that stung when it struck any of his exposed skin. He adjusted the sunglasses he’d found amongst the cold-weather gear to cut down the glare from the snow.
Cresting a low hill, he continued down the other side, and when he finally stopped to take a breath and look back the way he’d come, the flier was nothing more than a stark black dot against the horizon. He’d already gone a lot farther than he’d realized. Distances were hard to judge in such a nearly featureless landscape.
He made his way down the other side of the hill and then up another, and then another, and another. Eventually he came to one that was slightly distinguishable from the rest by virtue of being capped with a lump of half-eroded granite only partly covered in snow. By the time he reached its peak, his legs had gone from aching to half-numb, but when he looked ahead, he could see what appeared to be a hangar cut into the side of a steep ridge several kilometres away.
Coming to a halt, he rested with his hands on his knees, taking a minute to recover his breath before using his sunglasses to zoom in on the cavern. There, he could see a flier parked near the mouth of the hangar.
He ran an analysis and got an immediate positive result. It was the Ambassador’s flier, all right – and he hadn’t left yet.
Luc had what he needed. Turning back, he saw dark thunder-heads to the north, sweeping in across the snowy wastes, and remembered de Almeida’s warning. The wind had already started to pick up, a thin, eerie whine that carved patterns in the ice and snow all around.
And there was something else, just barely audible over the rising howl of the wind. A faint hum, coming closer . . .
He made his way over to the granite stub rising from the peak of the hill and pressed himself into a shadowed indent. As he listened the humming got louder, then started to fade as the source of the sound moved away from him. Luc waited for a good half-minute before cautiously leaning out to take a look around.
He saw a mechant, already at the base of the hill and on its way towards the rock hangar. Breathing a sigh of relief that it hadn’t seen him, he made his way back the way he’d come as fast as his tired legs could carry him.
The storm, however, was coming in faster than he had imagined possible. The wind kept rising in pitch until it sounded eerily like the scream of an injured animal. He picked up the pace, very nearly breathless by the time he crested another hill.
<Zelia. Can you hear me? I’m on my way back.>
<Did you see anything?>
<I saw his flier. The Ambassador’s still there.>
He transmitted the data he’d recorded and waited a minute until she came back.
<That’s good work, Luc. Just what we’ve been looking f—>
Her voice broke up into static.