CHAPTER XIII
REPPING
“You can’t go to Greyjan’s now,” Max repeated. “You have to meet with the Technologist spokeswoman. I’ve also added a meeting with the Progressive spokesman to your schedule. Angel and Ruzik can’t go to the tavern, either. They’d get thrown out.”
I paced across the living room, past Angel and Ruzik. They waited patiently, with that ability of theirs to stand almost surreally still. We learned to do that back home, where your health, even life, could depend on your ability to hide.
“It’s more important we investigate Greyjan’s,” I said.
“If you cancel with the Tech rep and show up at Greyjan’s, you’re trumpeting your interest in the place,” Max said. “I don’t think anyone recognized Ruzik yesterday, but his image has gone viral on the meshes. People know you and they know him. If you don’t want to give away your hand, you need to stay away from Greyjan’s.”
“Fine,” I grumbled. I stopped in front of Ruzik. “You’re too famous.”
“Dust Knight is famous. No one knows Ruzik.” He tilted his head at Angel. “Or her.”
“Good point.” I went back to pacing. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Max, send the red beetle to find one of those shimmerfly drones. See if you can get the two of them to interact. Maybe you can even link to the shimmerfly and from there to the baby EI. Do the hoshpa thing. Get the EI to engage with you.” I thought for a moment. “Send the blue beetle to Greyjan’s.”
“Are you sure?” Max asked. “Almost every time we send a beetle to Greyjan’s, it gets fried. The last one made me go dormant.”
“Dormant is better than fried. That’s progress. Sort of.” I stopped pacing. “Blue didn’t get fried when it went with Ruzik and Angel.”
“They created a distraction. I don’t think that little drone can start a fight on its own.”
I smiled at the image of my drones misbehaving in a bar. “Just have it lay low. No offensive moves or attempts to break security. Have it observe, sending feedback to you in real-time. It can gradually work its way inside.”
“It will run out of transmission power if it sends me a continuous real-time feed,” Max said.
“Keep it going as long as you can. Then bring it home to recharge.”
“Will do.”
I turned to Ruzik. “You go to the co-op building, the site of the explosion, like we planned yesterday. Pretend you’re an onlooker. Maybe go to the bistro nearby. Get something to eat, act natural. Do your listening and watching thing. Then come back to report.”
Ruzik nodded. “Sounds good.”
“People want to meet him.” Angel regarded him with satisfaction. “Hero.”
She had a point. “Ruzik, if anyone recognizes you, act like you don’t speak Flag well, yah? Be nice to them, but don’t engage.
He laughed and said, “Will do,” exactly like Max.
I smiled, then considered Angel. “You’re our secret weapon. No one knows about you. Go help at the explosion site. See if you can find out anything more about what happened. If you see Ruzik, don’t let on that you know him.”
“You want me to spy?” she asked. “Or help clean up?”
“Both.” I considered her. “I know a person. I’ll get you on an ER crew.”
Angel nodded. “Can help. Lift heavy things. Watch.”
“Yah. Good.” Switching into Flag, I said, “Max, can you contact Lavinda Majda and ask her to clear Angel as a city worker with Lieutenant René Silvers?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Max said. “Angel, do you want me to mention you don’t speak Flag?”
“Nahya. I can do Flag.” Angel grimaced as if she’d eaten a sour fruit. “Not like. But do.”
“Good,” I said. “Max, send Green with them, to keep you in contact and make recordings.”
“Will do,” Max said.
“All right.” I nodded to Angel and Ruzik. “Let’s get moving.”
It was time to hear what the Technologists had to say about whoever was killing their best and brightest.
Marza Rajindia walked with me through her lab. Holos floated in the air above the lab tables and consoles, glistening with light, full of colors, graphs, schematics of gadgets, images of works in progress. It reminded me of the engineering lab where I’d worked in college, getting research credits toward my degree.
“This is my real passion,” she told me. “I joined the Tech party mostly because the Matriarch of my House was pressuring me to join the Royalists.”
Until that reminder, I’d forgotten Marza was an aristocrat. She’d welcomed me into her lab, casual and relaxed. Either she didn’t know I came from the Undercity or she didn’t care. Perhaps her willingness to defy tradition so she could follow her own path made her more accepting of others who also defied expectations.
“I hope you didn’t get too much grief for it,” I said.
“Let’s just say my family was less than pleased. Eventually, though, they accepted it.” With a grimace, she added, “I wish I’d never agreed to become the Tech spokeswoman, though.”
“Because of the violence?” I asked.
She spoke with difficulty. “I knew all three of the murder victims, and many who died in the bombing, some by reputation and some personally.” Her voice caught. “Laya Az was my research assistant. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss.” Although I hadn’t been close to any of the people who died in the explosion, I’d seen them coming and going through the lobby of our building, sitting in the kava shop, sipping a roasted brew and chatting with friends, or jogging along trails through the parks. We sometimes stopped for a few friendly words. I couldn’t believe they were gone, either.
“I’ll catch whoever did this,” I said. “Bet on it.”
She took a deep breath. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to get dark.”
“I’ve felt the same way. I lived in that building.”
“You lived there? Thank the goddess you’re all right.” She snapped her fingers. “Now I know why you look familiar! I saw you on the news.” She nodded to me. “Your service for the people of this city is appreciated, Major.”
“Thanks,” I said, startled. Even though I knew what Lady Akarad had said about my craving publicity was bunk, it bothered me to have someone believe that about my character when I’d only wanted to help. Marza Rajindia’s words were a balm.
“We’re working on improving reflexes for biomech webs.” Marza stopped by a holo that showed a graph of how the human body reacted to the bio-hydraulics that enhanced our reflexes. The image appealed to me, color coded and textured to add additional data. I would have loved to spend the day here seeing all these wonders.
“It’s a good lab,” I said, ever the soul of understatement.
She smiled at me. “The way you look—it’s like a kid let loose at a sugar-sweets kiosk.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m an engineer by training. I love this stuff.” I regarded her curiously. “What do you think about the people claiming responsibility for the attacks? You’re both a tech and an aristocrat.”
She reddened. “Technocrat.”
“Does it bother you when people call you that?”
“It’s all right, now. Decades ago it meant people who sought to control others with tech. Nowadays, everyone uses it to mean someone who is good with tech and well paid for it.” She thought for a moment. “Do I believe the Royalists committed these atrocities? The noble Houses wouldn’t, I don’t think, but the Royalist Party is not the same as the aristocracy. The Houses aren’t all the same, either. Does a violent fringe exist to the party? Hell, yes.”
I hadn’t expected that. “Lady Akarad says no.”
“Jazin would say that.”
“She does have strong opinions.”
Marza snorted. “You’re being kind. She’s a bitzo.”
If I’d been drinking anything, I would have sputtered it everywhere. The last thing I expected to hear from a Rajindia noble was profanity more common in the Undercity.
Marza was watching my face. “Sorry if I offend. Jazin just annoys the hell out of me.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “No offense taken. I’ve heard far worse, Lady Rajindia.”
“Goddess, don’t call me that. Marza is fine. And about Jazin—she’d never admit to anything that looked less than noble for the party, even if she suspected otherwise.”
It didn’t surprise me. “So you think a violent fringe does exist in the party?”
“I don’t personally know of anyone.” She answered with care. “However, if it took armed conflict to return the Ruby Pharaoh to the throne, I suspect many Royalists would support it even if they never admit that aloud.”
At her mention of a coup, a chill went through me, like a whisper of a time in the far future. I shook my head, pushing away the odd sensation.
“Major?” Marza asked. “Are you all right?”
I focused on her. “Yes, I’m fine. And please call me Bhaaj.” I thought of what she’d just said. “Even if some Royalists feel that way, though, I would think they’d want good relations with the Techs. Your party could help them achieve their goals.”
“I suppose. Most of us don’t have much interest in politics. I prefer my research.”
I could relate to that choice. “Yet you agreed to be the spokeswoman for the party.”
“They kept after me about it, until finally they wore me down enough that I said yes.” She reddened. “They seem to think I’m good at dealing with people.”
“They’re right, I’d say.” She certainly did it better than Jazin Akarad. “I don’t get why the killers think Techs would want to—how did they put it? ‘Conquer the Imperialate by controlling the advances that dominate our lives.’” It sounded even stupider coming from me than when the reporter had read it on the news.
She laughed with ease. “You’d have to get enough of us interested in politics to bother taking over anything. Never happen.” Her smile faded. “When we say, ‘technology is power,’ it’s a warning more than anything else. To have a government that treats all citizens fairly, we can’t concentrate technology in the hands of any one group, including ourselves.”
“The Royalists must know that philosophy is part of your party platform.”
“I’m sure they do.” Marza resumed walking through her lab. “Although some Royalists might believe a coup is justified, I don’t see the party taking such a drastic step, especially not with murders or a bombing. Besides, Pharaoh Dyhianna would have to agree to any coup. I barely know her, but from what I’ve seen, I can’t imagine she’d want the Imperialate torn apart.”
“She’s rather soft spoken.” I thought of my interactions with her, during the case with Oblivion. I’d found her far more personable than I expected. She didn’t seem to care about status, and even knowing my full background, she’d treated me as an equal in our few conversations.
“Decades ago, she registered as a Tech,” Marza confided. “After the Royalist party formed, they asked her to join. For a while, she belonged to both. Eventually, though, she had to pick. So she went with the Royalists.”
Interesting. It said more than Marza seemed willing to admit. After all, the Pharaoh didn’t have to belong to any political party. No one did. “That she chose the Royalists is an implicit endorsement of their philosophy.”
“I suppose. I just don’t see how anyone who wants her back on the throne would think killing Techs could achieve their ends.”
“If anything, it just makes people hate the Royalists.” After seeing the widespread coverage of how many people had suffered in all this, I wanted to hate them, too, and I didn’t even believe they committed the murders.
Marza paused by the exit from her lab and let me go ahead into the corridor outside. As she joined me, headed down the stately hall, she said, “Who do you think is doing it?”
“I don’t know.” I wished I had a better answer. “I’m not convinced it’s political. I need to talk to the Progs, though. The Modernist and Traditionalist reps want to talk to me, too.”
She smiled. “You’re famous now. A heroine of the people.”
“I wish I wasn’t.” I’d never liked to draw attention, ever since I first walked out of the Undercity at age fifteen. “I can’t do my work when everyone recognizes me.”
“Oh, people love heroes.” Marza waved her hand as if dismissing an obvious fact. “And that rugged young man who saved the child, so handsome and silent. It’s dynamite.”
I blinked at her. “Excuse me? Did you just turn into a holomovie producer?”
Marza laughed affably. “Sorry.” Her smile faded. “It’s the one good note in an otherwise horrific series of events.”
“Yah,” I murmured. At least we’d saved lives that day. “I’ve no idea why the Mods or Trads want to see to me.”
“Especially the Mods. They never get involved in anything.” She spoke in a confiding tone. “I think that’s why so many people join their party. No stress.”
I decided it was better left unsaid that even as a Tech, I’d voted for Modernist candidates a few times for exactly that reason. “Historically, they’re also the oldest party, aren’t they?”
Marza nodded. “They formed after we regained space travel. They didn’t think a hereditary dynasty should rule a star-faring civilization, so they proposed the Assembly. The Royalists immediately formed to oppose them. The Techs started at about that time, too. Huge pressure existed back then to develop new technology.”
I wondered what it had been like in those days, when the idea of an elected government barely existed. “When they first formed, did the Mods have any gripes with the Techs?”
“Not at all. In fact, they teamed up to reach more people.” Marza paused. “The Ruby Pharaoh finally agreed to an Assembly if the dynasty held a substantial number of votes. To get the Houses to agree, they all got at least some votes. Most had to settle for only a few, but the Majdas had enough sway to gain a large bloc. The Pharaoh also demanded that the position of Imperator—the commander in chief of the military— would remain hereditary, with a large voting bloc.”
“She was the mother of the current Pharaoh now, right?”
“That’s right. The Imperator then was the grandfather of Kurj Skolia, the current Imperator.”
“I’ve seen Kurj Skolia a few times at military functions.” Huge and formidable, he dominated any place where he appeared without saying a word. I wondered how Vaj Majda felt about serving a leader who contradicted every idea she had about men. Whatever her thoughts, she dealt with it. They had shared goals, after all. I had little doubt that if faced with a coup, both would support the dynasty rather than the Assembly. “Is it possible that some faction of the Royalist Party still adheres to the founding principles? If the Techs teamed up with the Mods back then, the Royalists must have considered them dangerous.”
“Back then, sure.” Marza shrugged. “That alliance only lasted a few years. We’ve been allied with the Royalists for so long, I just don’t see them suddenly attacking our party. Getting rid of us weakens their base.” Her face paled. “Someone wants to get rid of us. No place feels safe.”
I understood how she felt, especially after the bombing, but I’d signed up for these risks and she hadn’t. “I can arrange bodyguards for you.”
“Chief Hadar said the same.” She slowed her pace. “Do you really think it will help? Some sort of super sniper shot the victims while they were inside closed rooms.”
I thought of the reports I’d pored over these past days. “The shooter has weapons tech well beyond what’s available to civilians, at least legally. These were professional hits by an assassin.”
Marza shuddered. “I don’t see how a bodyguard could stop shots that come out of nowhere.”
“It didn’t actually happen that way. That’s a misconception the newscasts have spread.” The blasted reporters exaggerated everything about this case in the worst possible way. They implied the killers could get anyone at any time in any place. In fact, it was odd. Reporting here had long been known for high standards of accuracy. How could it change so much in such a short time?
I spoke firmly. “Even regular city protections can block almost any attack. And right now Selei City is on high alert, which means even more precautions.”
She regarded me with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “That hardly puts my mind at ease. It means that even with all our precautions, the sniper still got inside the workplace or home of the victims, or else shot them from a distance without leaving a trace.” She gestured at the hall around us. “How do I know someone won’t come here? I’m the most visible face of the Tech Party.”
Damn my inability to speak. Instead of reassuring her, I’d made it worse. “This hall has sensors that would immediately alert both you and the university police if someone had a gun, bomb, or most any other type of weapon.”
“Then why didn’t they find the ones the sniper used?”
I doubted Chief Hadar wanted me to discuss the reports, but we’d found a few new details and Marza deserved them, the why of all the steps taken to protect her. “In the case of Dezi Marchland, someone hacked a cleaning bot that dusted her office. They reached it because the drone maintenance at the university was on a different mesh than the main campus. It still wasn’t easy; it looks like it took them almost a year to crack the system. Even then, they couldn’t do much, just turn off the visual recording of the room for about two seconds when the killer fired. And that method only worked for the first two murders. The police have since plugged that hole.”
“That must be why the security network for the school had a complete overhaul last year.”
I nodded. “Not only here. The city has done continual security updates since then, removing not only that hole in their webs, but looking for others they can fix as well.”
“Tejas Akarya was in his lab.” Marza spoke with sadness. “We used to joke about which of us had better lab tables, even though they’re identical.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “For your losses. For all of it.”
She paused, her gaze downcast, then looked up again. “He was brilliant.”
“His work applies to starship engines, doesn’t it?”
“That’s the most obvious application. He studied quantum stasis, what we call quasis.”
I could easily guess why the military had supported his work. A quasis coil protected a ship by fixing its quantum state. The ship didn’t freeze; its particles continued to behave on a quantum level exactly as they had when the coil turned on. But they couldn’t change state, which meant that on a macroscopic level, the ship became rigid even to huge forces. Current quasis systems were crude, more “quasis lite” than anything, designed to protect ships from large accelerations. But in theory, full quasis could protect ships from enemy fire. If a ship couldn’t change state, it couldn’t explode. The obvious military applications of the research had offered the perfect foil for the assassin, making it easy to manipulate us into believing the Traders perpetrated the crimes. Hell, I hadn’t ruled anyone out. Our supposed leads were a tangled mess.
“I don’t see how they could reach a drone that cleaned his lab,” Marza said. “Tejas used his own, to make sure they didn’t damage the equipment.”
“That was actually how they hacked his lab,” I said. “He had a different system.”
“That shouldn’t have mattered.” Marza stopped in the middle of the corridor. “Tejas worked with the university security people to make sure he had no holes in his system.”
“Did he ever mention a student asking to join his group?”
“They asked to intern with him all the time.” She started walking again. “But he’d never hire someone without doing a background check.”
“That would focus more on their academic record, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Mostly. But I’m sure he also checked to see if they’d had run-ins with security, the law, anything like that. ISC checked them out, too, since Tejas had military contracts.”
I thought of the spies I’d known in the army. ISC kept their records clean and unremarkable. “That doesn’t mean a student would never act against him.”
“I hate to think of it coming to that.” Marza fell silent as we walked down the hall, headed for the glass doors at the end. Sunlight slanted through them and lit up the corridor, with dust motes drifting in the rays. Finally she said, “If an intern did gain his trust, Tejas might have showed them how to lock up the lab so they could work after hours if they wanted. Could someone have bribed a student to leave a hole in his security? It’s not impossible.” She glanced at me. “That’s why the police did all those checks on my students, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I doubted that had gone well. “I hope they weren’t too upset.”
“A lot of them quit.”
Ouch. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She lifted her hands, then dropped them as if she didn’t know what to do. “Some were angry. They felt like the police were calling them criminals. Others understood, but they were afraid to stay in my lab. The police and army have vetted the few I have left again and again.”
For lack of any better response, I said, “I wish we had a better way to deal with this.”
“At least I’m still alive.”
“For many more years, I hope.” I meant it as more than a courtesy comment. I liked her.
We walked into the sunlight at the end of the hall and stood at the doors, gazing into the bright day outside. Students walked along paths and across lawns in the quad there. Some sat under trees studying, eating, socializing, or lying on their backs, staring at the sky. It was hard to believe violence had ever occurred on this campus.
“It’s so idyllic,” Marza said. “Yet I’m afraid to leave the building.” She turned to me. “The police tell me they don’t think the killer would fire in broad daylight out here. Too many cameras.”
“That’s the theory. Also, they have an army of drones monitoring campus.” Like in Marza’s office and lab. “Even if someone did shoot, a drone could probably stop the bullet before it struck.”
“The army rep said similar.” Marza smiled wryly. “She was trying to tell me they had my back without revealing how. Apparently some of their new methods are classified. In a different situation, it might have been funny, all the verbal contortions she went through trying to reassure me without saying anything literal.”
“Yah, that sounds like the army.” I’d had to do that a few times myself back in the day. I wished I had something better to tell her, like You won’t die.
Marza lifted her chin. “I can’t live in hiding.” She pushed open the door.
I walked outside with her, looking around, staying aware. The quad drowsed in peace, with only the low hum of voices. The scent of flowers tickled my nose—
A streak of silver flashed my side vision.