Agnosis – Ch. 8

<– Chapter 7 / Chapter 9 –>

It really wasn’t much better outside than it had been inside. Dorian stood over Amara as she sat slumped in her office chair at the back of his cubicle, where she’d drawn it up before they had assayed Raville’s foam. For comfort, she’d said, physical proximity to take the edge off the fear of a hostile and alien scape. Even in anticipation, there had been fear. As if she had known.

He should have kept her closer. He should have been more careful.

He studied her now: arms hung limp at her side, legs splayed out in front of her, her head lolled to the side. She appeared to be sleeping, and quite soundly. A sleep as profound as death. Dorian lifted her eyelids and peered at the reptilian slits beneath. They shuttered closed in response to the light. Her moist nostrils quivered gently with each breath. He supposed that was good, the fact that she was still breathing. Her scales presented at room temperature, and he didn’t know if that was good or bad. He had no way to diagnose her in this form, except to finally put his head against her chest and listen for the firm, steady beat of her heart. That much had escaped modification, it seemed. He stroked the long, fine hair on her head, and she appeared to smile in her sleep. He had no way of knowing how deep her hurts might penetrate, or if she had even been harmed at all.

He had no choice but to trust Raville, which was doubtless exactly what Raville had wanted all along.

He stepped back and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t afford to dwell on her condition any longer. He had work to do. Evil things, and it was just as well that Amara would be asleep for them.

So he left her for a time to rummage about the shelves that lined his office space, scavaging bits and pieces of equipment he had stockpiled there over the years. Things he had shoved to the back, up against the wall, covered with canvas: wave analyzers, delta parsers, heavy quantum bomb res imagers. He spent a few minutes plunged in his private foam, digging into insanely encrypted storage vaults for the sorts of scripts, jack-abouts and streamhacks that could get a man’s implants confiscated, his geek permanently suspended. Artifacts of forbidden magics so black that the possession of them alone was punishable by life plus fifty in a maximum security prison. The raw materials of an anarchist revolution.

He’d been taught to do this once, a lifetime ago it seemed sometimes, in the Special Operations Service, one of the more infernal divisions of the Border Marines. How to peel a man open like a grape, sort his being neuron by neuron, then eat him alive from the inside out. How to insidiously inject logic chains that eventually altered synaptic pathways, changed the fundamental essence of a person’s identity. How to construct and implant viral bombs that not only shattered genetic encoding, but were so insidiously engineered that they weren’t triggered until a package upload process had been initiated. So that the infection followed the target wherever he went, carried in his own corrupted identity matrix, the closest thing that remained to a death sentence in a world that offered the simulated potential of eternal life to whoever could afford it.

Raville had accused him of being paranoid. If he’d known half the things Dorian knew about data terror and core manipulation, he would have been amazed that the whole universe wasn’t bloody paranoid. Anyone could kill another man’s body. Meat was soft, vulnerable, and ultimately disposable, no matter how heavily one modified it. It took a special kind of training and an especially deviant ruthlessness to destroy his pleroma–his fullness, his richness, his complete data being. Those were the skills Dorian had picked up during his military service.

He rapidly assembled his equipment. Raville had only promised him the better part of half an hour, so there wasn’t time to waste. He attached the thin metal band of the res cap to Amara’s skull and ran it through the base calibrations. Flipping into geek, he drilled down into his foam and unlocked the door to one of his many private chambers. This one was especially secure, though it rendered like any of the others as pale and anonymous hardwood. It would take a particularly clever and invasive data map for any external audit of his foam to even trace the extent of its defenses. But it was wicked ice beneath the veneer, laced with trolls, direct core virals and vector-shunt wormholes that could bog down a whole flotilla of icebreak servers, if the need arose.

Inside was his control room, lined with monitors and display screens, a disorienting array of blinking lights, toggle switches and faux-electronic paraphernalia. One by one, Dorian switched on the virtual representations of equipment he would need. The underlying wave synchronization scripts those objects metaphored began to execute. Somewhere in his soft tissues, his military-grade seenop processors sprang to life and began to coordinate with the tight beam signal being emitted from the res cap. On one of the screens, waveforms began to appear: gently sloping alphas, stuttering betas, the majestic whorls of delta graphed in triDvid. The strange and wondrous patterns of Amara’s mind. As the feed volume increased beyond preset event thresholds, it triggered bandwidth sensors, and more applications came online–whole banks of equipment designed to suppress and baffle and disguise his activities coughed and clattered and lurched to life, filling the room with the stench of ozone. Dorian felt himself bathed in the sinister glow of electron guns.

He cursed under his breath and flipped back into the realtime.

Remembering wasn’t hard, which disturbed him. The first parser locked here, just above the ridge of the orbital bone. The second on the spur of bone behind the left ear. The heavy binary streamjack locked on at the base of the skull where it could tap the faint emissions from the cortical array’s processor.

Maybe it was just because he’d done it so often, once upon a time. No matter.

Back into the control room, he tracked his progress, scribbled quick equations. Watched and waited for his foam to accumulate enough signal data to allow him to map the terrain of her pleroma, to make his virtual world and her s one and the same in perfect synchronicity. He loaded complex anonymizers that rippled through deflection algorithms like a tiger stalking through tall grass. Dorian became a thief in the night, prowling secret places where he had no business being. He was doing this for Amara’s sake, he told himself. For Amara. And it made him feel better for just a moment, even if it was only partially true.

The proximity sensor tracking the wave normalization between his foam and Amara’s gave a warning buzz. Wave synchronization alerts flashed. A woman’s voice came from hidden loudspeakers, counting down from five. He shivered with a sudden spike of the old, bitter surge of anticipation. When the count hit one, Dorian fired off his full battery of decryption hacks, augmented by hardcore black skeleton keys.

And he bounced.

It was a ride through lightning. He plummeted through chaos space, arms folded back at his sides, wind stinging his eyes. A human projectile following a silver skein as wide as the trunk of a sapling oak. He felt himself soaring at a great height, far above clouds and land and sea, enveloped in mist and storm, but falling, falling, his diagnostic and synesthetic adaptors buzzing inside his skull. Code structure variations and variable overlaps dappled his vision with slaps of riotous color that burst like fireworks and faded, formed phantasms that refused to cohere within his triDvid engine protocols. Dorian’s stomach lurched as he banked his shoulders against a current shift in the downstream, defied the laws of physics themselves to keep the skein beside him. Encoded auditory and visual-mem storage blocks bled into the smooth, if chaotic render where Raville’s code had failed to eclipse Amara’s inherent architecture. Flashes of inchoate experience exploded around him like peals of thunder. A girl’s laughter. Flashes of awareness around him like strokes of thunder. A shabby room, a tumbledown dollhouse, a persimmon colored kitten. A pink satin dress and furtive, clusmy kisses. More that he tried not to see, willed himself to forget.

This was Amara’s foam at the basic level, beneath even her own organizational architecture. The datastream jacked from her personal synaptic rhythm, synchronized with her cortical array, keyed to her private foam. It was a snapshot of her naked soul.

Data, he told himself. Just data.

The atmosphere thickened. He plunged into plastic, midnight water, felt himself buffeted by waves, and still he fell, down and down. There were monsters here. Colossal squids with eyes like dead pools and immense, grappling arms; thunderous beasts iridescent in the depths, perilous with fangs. A memory of screams, tearing, the phantom pain of limbs and loves and innocence he did not possess. Dorian flinched away.

I’m sorry, he thought reflexively. Forgive me.

And finally, finally, a blaze of white so pure that it’s glow refracted through the water in detonations of rainbows a kilometer wide and as dense as rock. The hole in the bottom of the sea. A crevasse between twin, craggy ridges, penetrated by the skein. It was a default object render of the appendant foam construct Raville had described. The portal into an alien dimension. He fell toward it at an impossible velocity.

And suddenly, Dorian burst from darkness into light.

There was a terrifying sensation of freefall, of gathering speed. His limbs seemed to pinwheel, and he squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to orient himself. But there was too much scope, too much space. This place, this foam was massive. It was a galaxy unto itself, and the mere size of it dazzled him. He plummeted out of control toward a crystalline dome of such grand dimensions that it appeared to have no curve at all, and the only imperfection in its seamless surface was the stem of the silver skein poking from a navel at its apex.

The dome grew in his perspective until it was all he could see. Dorian braced himself.

He didn’t have the key to pierce the perimeter locks. He didn’t want one. He had other business with this foam.

But it was going to hurt. There was no way around it.

He slammed into a wall of ice that splintered his bones, pulped his flesh. He dissolved into scarlet atomic mist. He imagined that he heard one great primal scream that shivered the fabric of reality. Or maybe it was just his own.

And in that agonized, glaring instant before the coherence scripts reassembled him, Dorian glimpsed the Exousiai. Their lumbering immensity, their eyes like naked fire, their ponderous and eternal thought-forms. Their sacred I Am.

His fractured metacomponents devolved into functional units: routine jackbots, core mapping bores, terragenic exploratory spiders. Behind them came flash icepicks and decryption drills, then extractors and parsers and dynamic defense mechs. Last of all was the necessary phalanx of log scramblers and id masks, both for himself and for Amara. A desperate, hopeless ploy.

He dissolved and was gone…

…back into a world he understood. By the time he bounced into his control room, the work was well underway, and the raw data mapping results were beginning to filter through the system and into his pre-defined hazardous content bubbles.

He had ridden Amara’s private geek into the underlying directory structure for Managed Index Protocol Address 14.17.266-Neg-087.9. Her own personal data haven, transformed by the implanted seed of Michael Raville’s treachery into something else—a door between worlds. But whatever it was, whatever it had become, it was Amara’s secret place, and he had invaded it without her knowledge or consent.

Dorian went to work extracting Amara from the pit into which she had fallen.

When he was done, he deployed a final script, one Raville had borne with him into the Infocache. He’d told Dorian exactly where to find it in the dead port storage net before they had parted. It was, he explained, a vicious sub ex-connex tether saw, and when Dorian unleashed it, it split the silver skein between the world of the Exousiai and Amara, Amara and the quae-ha-distra, the infinite and the merely virtual, like a sword through silk.

She was free at last, and if the only cost for it was a little self-hatred, Dorian would count himself lucky.

Amara awoke with a flutter of eyelids and some careful stretching. She sat up straight and looked around her as though taking stock of her environment. There was only the faintest glimmer of bewilderment in her eyes, the expression of someone who has fallen asleep unexpectedly and roused themselves too suddenly from a strange dream.

Dorian was there at once with a mug of hot coffee pressed into her hands. She accepted it gratefully, and set about blowing at the steam until it was cool enough to drink. Dorian watched her, feeling all at once distant, tentative and terrified almost out of his mind. The latter feeling did not begin to dissipate until she had knocked out half the mug of coffee without showing any inclination toward collapsing.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Late,” he said, then corrected himself. “Early. It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours. We were in there longer than I expected.”

“I had the oddest dream,” she began.

“How do you feel now?”

“Stiff. Like I slept in a chair for way too long. I think my butt is still asleep.”

He wanted to ask her about the orb, about her experience with the Exousiai, but he couldn’t, not without admitting what he knew, what he had done. Instead, he said: “I should take you home. Get you something to eat, then into bed.”

Amara put her had against her stomach and grimaced. “No food, I think. I’m a bit queasy.”

“Just home and bed, then.” Raville had said there would be consequences, and Dorian didn’t want to sound maternal. He also didn’t want to point out that he had warned her. Repeatedly. “I’ll get your coat.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you used to be a soldier?” Amara asked suddenly.

He froze as he retrieved her jacket from the coat rack, then pushed himself into motion again. He was afraid to ask how she knew such a thing. Data leakage had been know to occur between control and target; sometimes, if you weren’t careful, you gave as much as you took, and as easily as he had seemed to remember, he was still rusty. Clumsy.

“Raville told me,” she went on, as though she had read his thought. Not leakage then, just more of Raville’s treachery. He was glad her back was to him, so that she couldn’t have seen him falter. “It came as a complete surprise to me, but he was very clear on that point.”

“It wasn’t ever relevant,” he said, holding his voice steady only with some effort. “The law stipulates four year mandatory enlistment here in one of the sector services for all natural citizens. The only choice you have is the branch of service. The government thinks it’s a good way to build a homogeneous cultural experience.”

“We didn’t do that on Sae Phen. There weren’t really enough of us to make much of a security force anyway.”

Dorian didn’t comment. He’d been to Sae Phen, or at least to the Marine Training Facility down south at St. Ugard’s Bay. It still counted as the worst consecutive thirty-six weeks of his life. Constant combat drills, sleep deprivation, wave after wave of implantation, augmentation and subsequent device training. The flight over, six weeks crammed into the belly of a rustbucket cruiser, had been a horrific exercise in social dominance theory all on its own, and his first impression of the planet as he’d glimpsed it (crowded with fifteen other musket monkeys against a grubby porthole) had not been a promising one. A tiny frozen marble, it had seemed. A pearl set in ebony.

The actual experience had been even worse than the impression. The cold was blistering, pervasive, inescapable. The only people who lived on Sae Phen, outside the permanent Marine trainers and facility staff, were blue ice miners and harsh hab academics-slash-environmentalists of a notoriously radical bent. Academie Waldenaise was, by reputation at least, the most rigorous and accomplished biological research university in human space. That was the only thing the dismal rock had going for it. Otherwise it was a wasteland of desolation. Dorian never made it to Aldentag where the university was. Musket monkeys weren’t allowed off the training installation until after graduation, and by that time, no one wanted to go anywhere but home or hell or any moderately temperate zone in between where they didn’t have to worry about having to crack the scum of ice out of their hair if they took too long toweling off after their shower.

“What branch did you choose? You said you were given a choice, right?”

“Border Marines. Fifteenth Expeditionary Force.” They had been called the Icebreakers, but he wasn’t about to tell Amara so. Too many questions. “I wanted to make sure that when I got out, I was the toughest guy in my neighborhood.”

Amara turned her chair. Her eyes were bright, wide. “Then you’ve been to Sae Phen!”

“Only the awful parts.”

“That’s pretty much everywhere,” Amara joked, then relented: “No, that’s not true. The hab domes to the North, beyond Gideon’s Circle, aren’t so bad. They were mostly reserved for high whuffie visiting scholars, but in the off-peak season, the university held a timeshare lottery for the staff. It was very cold, nothing but blue ice as far as you could see, but the accommodations were luxurious, at least by Sae Phen standards.”

“Your parents were academics?”

“My mother. Xenobiospherics.”

“And your father? What did he do?”

Amara shrugged awkwardly. “My mother was something of a free spirit.”

“Ah.” Dorian changed the subject. “So, did you study at Academie Waldenaise?”

“Not technically. I was tutored by resident scholars one on one. Most of the researchers had already raised their children or were morally opposed to procreation of environmental grounds. There weren’t really enough children about at any one time to justify a proper educational system, so those who were willing took a turn advising us in their specialties. By the time I was ready to get out of there and see something of the universe, I was three or four years ahead of other kids my age academically. The Admissions Dean at Cambray in Atcheson City just about choked on my letters of recommendation.”

Dorian couldn’t help but laugh. “You left the most prestigious university in human space to study here? They must have thought you were crazy.”

“It wasn’t a rational decision. I was at an age where I just knew I needed to get out on my own, with people my own age. People who had normal, banal interests. People who weren’t all a hundred and fifty years old and had enough letters after their names to choke a print cartridge. My mother understood this, I think, so she allowed me to leave, but made me promise to stay in-system, at least for my First Flight coursework. She wanted me close, I guess. In case I got into trouble.”

It was a generational thing, Dorian supposed. Zap had made the concept of distance all but obsolete, but their parents had never really been able to get their minds around the reality, even if they did develop a fundamental acceptance of its utility. They came to use it, but they never successfully integrated it into their consciousness. Of course, it wasn’t like pointing out examples of arbitrary logic to one’s mother ever did any good, anyway. Dorian’s mother still hadn’t forgiven him for not joining the Naval Support Agency instead of the Border Marines. She hadn’t known anything about the NSA except that Betty McCurdy’s son Charlie from down the block had enlisted with them, and he’d spent his entire two year stint in Sonali, coming home on weekends and sleeping in his old bedroom. He’d tried to explain to her that this was largely because Charlie McCurdy was a jerk-off dork whose official military job classification was Drooling Idiot, but his mother had been unable or unwilling to grasp it. Elaine Dorian hadn’t even come down to the port to see him off when he’d straggled aboard the Intrepid for the trip to Sae Phen.

“Raville said you served for eight years,” Amara said. “I guess you liked it.”

“I didn’t have any say in it,” Dorian explained. “The Defense Staff suspended retirements during Hamers-Doss Insurrection, and unfortunately for me, my tour was up about that time. After that, I just had work to do, I guess. It seemed important at the time.”

“Were you infantry?”

“No.”

“That’s where you picked up all this security agent mojo, yes?”

“Some of it.”

“So did you see any action in the Insurrection?”

“No.” Not the sort she was imagining, at least.

Amara frowned. “This isn’t something you like to talk about, is it?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Of course you do. It’s what you do best.”

Amara laughed. “Fine. Keep your secrets if you want, but just so we’re clear, yesterday evening was officially the last time I walk you home, Mr. Border Marine. It’s fairly obvious that you engaged my services under false pretenses.”

Dorian held out her coat and helped her slip her arms into the sleeves, then collected his own jacket. Amara took one last look around the office, as if she was afraid she was forgetting something. Finally, she asked, “What did you do with Raville?”

“He’s safe.”

“You didn’t delete him?”

“Not yet.” Dorian put his arm around Amara’s waist and ushered her out the door. “But that doesn’t mean that I won’t.”

“You’re just a big ball of gooey goodness beneath that thorny exterior after all,” she said, grinning. “I knew it.”

He grunted. “Don’t push me, lizard girl.”

They went out into the hall and Dorian flashed his security pins at the geek reader to lock the door behind them. The corridor was bare cinderblock painted an industrial shade of two-tone gray. Recessed florescent tube lighting in the ceiling turned everything that wasn’t gray an unflattering shade of lavender. Wiring conduits and heat taped plumbing pipes lined the walls like irregularly spaced ribs. The Archive was a glorious architectural structure. The style was a subtle hybrid of Mediterranean domes and old European Gothic arches. The builders had favored flying buttresses and acres of stained glass, sprawling wings with Doric columns and high ceilings, dark marble facades and burnished hardwood floors. If anything, the render that served as their public face was less impressive than the building on which it was based. But down here in the basement, most of what Dorian saw was the straightforward and functional ugliness of a utilitarian space. That had always seemed fitting to him.

He and Amara stuck to service corridors as much as possible, partly because it was easier to get to the parking garage this way, partly because there were more security sensors upstairs and sometimes the cleaning crews smudged the lenses so that their broadcast security pins didn’t register accurately, and then poor Mike and Ridley on the night watch had to argue about who would go check out the disturbance in the grid.

They avoided the elevators for the same reason and took the stairwell on the west side of the building up six flights to the third floor. The door there opened onto an unimposing staff corridor–unimposing in Archive terms, which meant parquet floors, vaulted ceilings and tasteful art prints as far as the eye could see. To the left was a heavy steel security door that led to the enclosed plexsteel skyway that spanned the street between the Archive and the garage.

Dorian stopped the stairwell door with his foot before it locked behind them and knocked his head against the frame a couple of times. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I just remembered that I promised Old Man Hill that I’d reset the tamper locks on the ex-connex router in Conference Two. He’s got Masonic brass geeking in for a quarterly meeting first thing in the morning and they’ve got to hold a formal Lodge before they get down to business. He’s terrified that they’re going to get jacked.”

Amara sighed wearily. “Go easy on him, John. It’s his first rotation as Worshipful Master.”

Dorian wiggled his fingers at her and made an ominous face. “Oogly-oogly.” She didn’t laugh, and he shrugged. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I forgot this. It’ll just take a few minutes. Fifteen tops, I promise.”

“Do you want me to comm Mike and let him know what we’ll be doing?”

“That’s okay. I can get to Con Two without hitting any of the sensors if I go through the service closet. No need to bother him with this.”

They hurried back down the stairs and exited onto the second floor. Dorian led them on a roundabout path to the conference room that avoided all the security triggers. As he expected, the service closet was unlocked, though he did have to climb over a stack of round banquet tables that had been crammed inside and apparently forgotten after last year’s Christmas party. He scrambled clumsily over and across the mess, then through the recessed door that opened into the conference room proper. It took a bit longer than he expected to locate and reconfigure the local router. Apparently WM Hill had been worried enough about getting the task done in a timely fashion that Dorian hadn’t been the only tech he’d contacted, and whoever had attempted the reset earlier in the day hadn’t possessed security adequate for the task. Amara giggled through much of the next half an hour as Dorian got it straightened out.

They finally made their way back to the skyway entrance. Dorian was grumpy and starting to feel his lack of sleep. It didn’t help that the skyway door decided to be troublesome. He had to stand in front of the sensor panel for several seconds before it read his key and the lock clicked open. He jerked it open with a few carefully chosen profanities and was about to slam it closed behind them when the intercom below the sensor array buzzed.

“Hey, Mr. D! Is that you?” It was Ridley.

Dorian growled to himself and thought about ignoring the page, but waved for Amara to wait for him. He leaned back inside the building and punched the comm button. “This is Dorian.”

“Ah, crap, I thought you were gone!” Even through the comm crackle, Ridley sounded distraught. “Look, you got a call through the main switchboard about twenty-five minutes ago, but my panel showed that you’d just set your office locks, so I told him that you’d gone home for the night. The guy sounded like it was important, but I wasn’t going to buzz you at home, you know? I’m really sorry if I screwed up.”

“I don’t know who would be calling at this hour, Ridley,” Dorian said. Unless it was Worshipful Master Hill making sure that Dorian hadn’t forgotten about him. He was too tired to give it any more thought. “I’m sure they’ll call back if it turns out to be important. If they do, just route it to my mailbox, okay? I’ll get to it first thing in the morning.”

“Sure thing, Mr. D. Have a good evening.”

Dorian signed off and let the door close behind him.

“Do you want to see what that was about?” Amara asked him.

“No.” He may not have been more certain about anything in his entire life. “Definitely not.”

The night had grown cold, and he urged Amara forward, anticipating the Roland’s industrial grade heating system. Assuming, of course, that it hadn’t managed to get itself stolen in the long hours it had sat unattended since he and Amara had arrived at work the previous morning.

But it was right where Dorian had left it, parked on one of the lower levels under a light that had blown out a few weeks ago and not yet been replaced. It loomed up out of the darkness only when they were practically on top of it.

“You need to find a safer parking space,” Amara called to him from the passenger side as she waited for him to unlock the doors.

Dorian shook his head. “This is what we call urban camouflage. If the thugs don’t see it, maybe they won’t steal it.”

“Sure, until somebody replaces the lights.”

Dorian transmitted a code to the lock and then hauled the heavy door on his side open. “Then I’ll just have to break it again.”

He climbed inside, leaned across the front seat and flipped the security switch on Amara’s door. He gave it a hearty shove, and she slipped in beside him. She slammed it closed behind her and the whole frame rattled like the roll of a cannonade. The fuel lines had partially gelled during the chilly day, and the starter groaned crankily for several seconds before the rumbling Rigman diesel finally caught. Dorian revved the engine, spewing a dark cloud of foul smelling smoke from the tailpipe. Amara put her hand over her nose. The Roland lurched and rattled and barked into gear, sounding more like a machine of war than a civilian vehicle. He backed them out of their parking space and accelerated down the ramp toward the exit.

“Are you sure this thing gets stolen, or do you just hide it from yourself hoping that you’ll forget where you left it?” Amara asked as they pulled out onto the street. “Or maybe the government just confiscates it for your own protection.”

Dorian goosed the transmission into a higher gear, and the engine whined. He patted the dash. “Don’t listen to her, baby. She just doesn’t know a fine piece of transportation machinery when she sees it.” To Amara he said: “When I pull out the solars, she purrs along like a hover transport. The suspension is so smooth, you’d think you were riding on a flying carpet. I’ll take you into Southrange sometime, over the mountains, and you’ll see. You’ll never want to cram into public air again.”

“All the people trying to sleep along here would probably appreciate it if you engaged the solars now.”

He grimaced. The storage cells had quit on him almost six months ago. “How can you not appreciate the throaty growl of a full bore Rigman diesel?”

“It’s not the growl that bothers me so much as it’s the fear that that the poor thing is going to rattle itself to pieces.”

“Bah!” He stroked the dashboard a few more times for good measure. Or maybe for luck. Either way, he began to understand what his mother had meant all those times she’d told him how fortunate he was that he’d never had any sisters.

The streets were quiet as they rolled into the business district downtown, the lull between late night revelers and early bird entrepreneurs. Dorian kept a keen eye out for traffic patrols and violation sensors, but saw neither and so didn’t bother with most of the traffic signals. As they neared the high dome of the Landgrant Office, Amara gave him directions. Right onto Morgan, then a few blocks down, south on Braston Rightway. He couldn’t help but notice her subdued tone.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She darted her gaze out the window. “I’m okay, really. Just a little shaken, I think. It’s been an. . .interesting evening.”

Dorian eased the Roland’s speed and executed a deft U-turn in the middle of the street.

Amara looked back over her shoulder. “John, my apartment is–”

“I know, I know. I made a command decision. I think it would be better if you spent the night at my place again tonight. On account of the special circumstances, you understand.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, but said nothing. He was fairly certain she was smiling, though.

“I’m still a curmudgeon,” he grumbled, apropos of nothing. “I want us to be clear on that. This has nothing to do with me going soft, getting emotional or feeling unwarrantedly fond of you, and if you had any sense of decency at all, you would sit there quietly as I drive and occupy yourself contemplating how many times I told you so. Are we clear?”

“Oh, certainly.”

They idled through the city in the early morning, running over increasingly dilapidated streets until the pavement gave out all together and the Roland bounced over rutted dirt roads on its approach to Quiksand. He opened the gates with his security pin, cruised quietly up the drive and down the short ramp to the underground garage. He found a parking space on the first level near the lift and killed the engine, then sat in the shadows for a moment, listening to the motor tick as it cooled.

What was he doing, exactly? Was this guilt? Was he somehow trying to make up for what he had done to Amara by invading her space? He didn’t understand this impulse, this sudden need to caretake her. He had told her so. Several times, in fact, and she was lucky to have emerged as unscathed as she had from the assimilation of a viral application.

Maybe he was going all squishy after all.

“Make sure you lock up,” he said, probably more harshly than was warranted, and kicked his own door open.

They rode the lift to the lobby. Dorian tried to make a point of checking in with Cuervo, the night watchman cum maintenance drone, when he came in a odd hours. Usually, he brought him coffee, chatted him up. Greasing the wheels of the maintenance queue, he called it. But when he poked his head out of the lift doors, there was no one at the desk.

Cuervo must be out on a walkabout or taking a piss, doing night watchman sorts of things.

Dorian shrugged and poked the button for his floor. It was just as well. He was too tired to explain what he was doing sharing the lift with a strange woman in the middle of the night, which tended to be the sort of thing that Cuervo was most curious about. He wasn’t sure he could adequately explain it to himself.

They rode up in silence, pinging past the floors and watching the numbers click past. Amara leaned against his shoulder, and he let her, taking strange pleasure in the warmth and solidity of her touch.

He must be really, really tired.

At last, the doors parted, the bell dinged, and the long corridor to Dorian’s coffin stretched out before them. The lights were dimmed, the filaments run down to orange embers to conserve energy. Dorian stepped out onto the landing. Amara followed quickly at his heels, probably as anxious to fall into bed as he was.

Meow.

She perked up at once. “Is that your cat?”

He didn’t know of any other cats on his floor, but he shook his head. “Can’t be. We locked him inside this morning, remember? Besides, he’s a big pussy. It scares him to death to be outside the coffin.”

Amara slipped free from his hand and tiptoed stealthily about the landing. The low, vaguely pathetic mewling continued, and she zeroed in on a stand of potted plants tucked behind a sofa in the corner next to the stairwell entrance. She lunged into the greenery and retrieved a tiger striped bundle of hissing, growling fur.

“It is your cat!” she cried, exuberantly tucking the animal into the crook of her elbow and stroking its belly. “Pretty kitty. Aren’t you a bad boy, pretty kitty.”

The cat purred.

“He must have gotten out,” she said. “The poor thing is shivering. He’s terrified. Poor, poor kitty.”

“We locked him inside.”

“Do you have someone who checks on him when you work late?”

“Actually, that’s an idea I should probably look into, but no.”

“Maybe maintenance–”

Dorian shook his head. “They would have called me if something was wrong. It’s in the Hab Covenant. They can’t enter a coffin without permission unless it’s an emergency. . .and if there had been an emergency, then they would have called.”

The cat hated being outside the apartment. Hated it. Unless Dorian had strangers over, which was why he’d been so careful about making sure the cat was locked up that morning, because it was going to be in a snit all day from Amara’s scent on the bedclothes. But here was the cat outside, nevertheless.

That feeling. He knew that feeling scratching at the back of his brain.

“I bet he’s starving,” Amara said. She leaned down and nuzzled the cat nose to nose “You are starving, aren’t you? Poor little baby.”

And where had Cuervo been? Didn’t he usually put up a sign when he went to take a piss? Back in TEN minutes. Of course, maybe he didn’t always use the sign. Maybe when he had to piss really bad, or maybe when his bowels decided to erupt, he didn’t take the time to throw out the sign. Or maybe he just forgot this once.

That was much more likely than any alternative, wasn’t it?

Much more likely than this howling, grinding imminent detonation of fear in his skull.

What would you do in his position? Raville had asked. If someone had just uncovered your plot to wage a covert war against an alien species, how angry would you be?

But Giari Tau and Michael Raville were millions of kilometers away, and even if Dorian had failed to cover his intrusion adequately, it was impossible that Raville could coordinate a retributive response so quickly, wasn’t it? He and Amara had barely had time to drive halfway across town. Impossible.

Dorian backed toward the lift doors, watching, but there was nothing to see except shadows. Nothing to hear but the early morning hum of the building’s air circulation system. Beads of sweat formed on his lip.

He punched the button to call the lift and shifted his eyes to Amara, who had moved over to the sofa and taken a seat, stroking the cat in her lap.

“We need to get out of here,” he said.

Amara lifted her chin at the hard cadence in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Something.”

Behind him, the lift doors pinged and sighed open, and suddenly he didn’t have any desire to cram himself back into such a restrictive space, a box with only one exit. He dashed across the landing and banged open the door to the stairwell. It was clear. No sound but the rolling echo from the door impacting the wall.

“Come on.”

Amara made no objection. She rose slowly, her body language uncertain, and let the cat spring from her arms. It dodged through the open door and vanished down the stairs without looking back.

That was all the proof Dorian needed. He followed his cat, quickly and quietly.

“What’s going on?” Amara hissed at him, her voice carrying like a shout. Dorian shook his head, said nothing, and she didn’t ask again.

They sped down four flights, then stopped. He edged up against the door and peered through the narrow pane of glass onto another landing exactly like the one on his floor and just as apparently empty. Tugging at Amara’s hand, he drew her inside. But not to the lift. Dorian banked into the corridor, broke into a sprint and hauled her all the way to the end of the hall to the service elevator at the end. It was dank, grimed with oil and dirt and had only one working overhead light. Only when the doors had closed and the car had begun to descend did he allow himself to slump, panting, against the back wall.

“It wasn’t someone you know who let the cat out, was it?” Amara whispered. In the dim light, her eyes were as large as moons.

“No.”

The elevator jerked as it reached the lobby. Dorian leapt forward and held his finger on the express button to keep the doors from opening. The car lurched, rocked on its cable and proceeded down. He watched the display. Sublevel One. Sublevel Two. Parking.

Dorian flipped the emergency stop switch and waited, listening. He heard nothing over the clank and clatter of the elevator’s normal settling noises. Carefully, he unfastened the ceiling grate and unscrewed the lone remaining light bulb. Darkness closed in on them.

“When I open the doors, stay low,” he said. “Move fast. Keep your head down, and keep away from the wall as much as possible. The Roland is at the top of the grade. You’ll be able to see it in the lights from the elevator landing. If you reach it before I do, wait for me on the driver’s side, okay?”

“Okay.”

“If they start shooting, run faster. Your body will try to freeze, but you can’t let it. Tell yourself that you’re going to run. Repeat it until you believe it.”

Indignation. “I’ve been shot at before, John. I know what to do.”

“Oh, right.”

“I can defend myself if I need to.”

“Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. Fast and low, okay? We’ll sort out what comes next later. Ready?”

“Yes.”

Dorian toggled the switch. The doors heaved open on ancient hydraulics, squealing loudly enough to wake light sleepers in Southrange, it seemed. He plunged forward from darkness to shadows, pounding up the ramp. He tried to keep Amara behind him, where he could keep her safe if they encountered any trouble, but she was too quick and swiftly outpaced him. She ran almost without a sound, low and fast and graceful, as fluid and alert as a predator, while he lumbered after her, his boots slapping against the pavement with gunshot cracks.

They saw no one, and he heaved a sigh of relief as reached the Roland, where Amara waited, hunkered down below the truck’s profile. He keyed the locks and they piled inside. Dorian cranked the engine and ground the transmission into reverse, then slammed into first gear and accelerated for the exit.

When they were clear of the building, Amara finally leaned back in her seat and exhaled heavily. She trembled with pent up tension. “I didn’t see anything.”

“I didn’t either.”

“That’s good, right? Maybe it was. . .”

“Just paranoia?” Dorian finished for her.

“It was just your cat,” she replied, sounding apologetic. “And we’ve had more than our share of stress today. I mean, Raville didn’t exactly help our state of mind, you know?”

“It wasn’t just the cat.” Cuervo hadn’t been at his station, either. Cuervo! Why hadn’t he thought of that right off rather than dashing off into the night like a headless chicken? “Hold on. I’ll ping the front desk through the Hab switchboard. He can check the service logs to see if there’s been any access to my coffin, authorized or otherwise, since we left this morning.”

Beginning to feel more than little foolish, Dorian bounced through his connection protocols and performed a remote log patch through his coffin’s network router.

/&OpenSess

<Ping>

<Ping>

<Ping>

<No Response: Auto-disconnex>

<[C3NP error: 7576. Log generated.]>

/&EndSess

He flipped out of geek in time to negotiate the wide bend leading to the front gates. No answer. He chuckled self-consciously. “Switchboard’s down. That’s probably what Cuervo was working on when we–”

The night erupted in a brilliant ball of orange flame. A burst of thunder rolled toward them, and a gust of concussive force nearly shoved the Roland off the road. Amara cried out and turned her head away reflexively. Dorian slammed on the brakes and they scudded to an abrupt halt.

“What–?”

He looked out his window, his throat suddenly dry. Large tongues of flame swept along the face of the West Quiksand tower, up near the top, some of them ten or fifteen meters tall. Black, oily smoke plumed into the sky, obscuring the stars. Very near to his own floor. Too near, in fact, to be any sort of accident.

A second eruption blossomed like a flower of fire. Amara screamed again and clutched at his arm, but Dorian hardly heard her. The roar of the detonation howled in his ears. The Roland’s windscreen shivered with the second blast, but held. Dorian felt the force of the explosion like a massive hand pressed against his chest, squeezing the air out of his lungs. Bits of flaming debris began to rain down on the hood and roof, on the lane about them.

What was left of the top several floors of Dorian’s building spat blinding gouts of flame into the night.

Without a word, Dorian cranked the steering wheel and mashed the gas pedal. The Roland’s all-terrain tires screeched and the back end fishtailed. He corrected automatically and kept his foot pressed all the way to the floor.

He didn’t stop for the gate.

Only when they were speeding off in the opposite direction, did he yell at Amara to get her head down, but there was no way she could have heard him. He couldn’t even hear himself. The Roland shuddered as it picked up speed heading east, down the gravel lane, then onto solid pavement again, always accelerating.

He didn’t look back.

Dorian didn’t know where he was going. Just east, then north to the expressway. Just away.

Far away from the scene where the most powerful man in human space had just tried to murder them.

<– Chapter 7 / Chapter 9 –>