CHAPTER SIX
Adya pushed open the carved cedarwood door of the Lotus Room, a little afraid of what she would see inside. Her great-grandmother Udaramati Elso-Elso had spent her final years in that room, and died there, but that had nothing to do with Adya’s nervousness.
The lights came up as soon as she stepped inside, and Adya relaxed. Not much had changed. Great-Gran’s bronze bedstead with its green patina and smart-matter sleeping surface was just as it had been. Her framed portrait, done in five brush strokes by one of her friends from the Oort, was still on the wall by the door to the gallery outside—just above another framed work, a finger painting of a flying dolphin, done by her long-gone son Diran. Her desk was still cluttered with curios from a dozen moons and habs, including an inlaid nameplate of polished mahogany bearing the title “foreign minister” which had once sat in front of her place at Coordinating Committee meetings.
The main difference from the old days was the absence of plants. Great-Gran had kept dozens in here, watering and pruning them herself and shooing away the household bots. If not for the lack of greenery, Adya half expected to hear her great-grandmother call from outside, where she liked to sit drinking cashew brandy long into the night. Adya and Kavita had spent hours out there with her, in darkness lit only by the luminous flowers, listening to her stories.
“Pay attention to my aimless prattle,” she had told them once. “Some day soon I will go away for good, and what you remember will be all that remains of me.”
She kept the girls enchanted with tales of her own travels, ancient gossip about long-gone leaders in the Committee, the sordid details of business deals or political stratagems, and again and again came back to their grandfather Diran. “I still can’t comprehend why he went,” she would say. “Here he had friends and family, power and pleasure. Why leave all who loved him? To submerge all self!” That usually led to tears, and the girls would put her to bed and wait until she slept before slipping out.
“What are you doing in here, dear?” her mother asked from the doorway.
“Just remembering. I miss Great-Gran.”
“Many miss her. Your father refuses to empty this room, and Kavita used to spend hours here while you were away.”
“Maybe we should donate the place to the Philosophical Institute. The house is nearly a museum already.”
Her mother didn’t chuckle at that, but rather nodded. “A sensible suggestion. I will pass it along to your father.”
“I didn’t—”
“I know, but it may come to that. By the way, you are invited to a little tea party with the Nikunnus. An informal affair at their new krill farm. Just a few dozen, mostly Families.”
Adya knew what that meant. Her mother was trying to maneuver her into a betrothal, with witnesses. “Mother, I haven’t got the time right now to spend an afternoon making small talk with a lot of people I barely remember.”
“Nothing you can do is more important.”
Adya kept herself light green with an effort. “Finding out who is behind these financial problems seems more important to me.”
“There will be steamed bagung buns,” said Adya’s mother. “I know how much you love those.”
“I’m not six anymore, Mother. I can’t be tempted by treats, however tasty.”
She had the slight satisfaction of seeing her mother turn brownish red for an instant before reverting to olive green. “Adya, you simply can’t do this. You must go. You must.”
At that moment a little icon appeared in Adya’s vision, indicating a message. The originator was Atira Kaval, Adya’s self-appointed inside source in the Security Service.
“Just a minute. I’m getting a—”
“No! You do not talk to someone else and ignore me when I am standing right here in front of you!”
“Mother!”
“I shall inform Dipa Nikunnu that you will be joining us. Be ready at three tomorrow.” Her mother turned and went out.
Adya let herself turn red, but sat down on the bed and accepted the link. “Good afternoon, Assistant Director Kaval.”
“No need to be so formal. You can call me Atira.”
“As you wish. What can I do for you—Atira?”
“I need nothing but your attention. I managed to do some discreet digging and made a fortunate find.”
“You didn’t break the law, did you?”
“Oh, no. At least, not the letter of the law. I searched through the anonymous messages about your family’s seafood products. Some of them included images.” Atira sent Adya a set of pictures—fish filets blotched with purple mold, whole fish with parasitic worms erupting from their bellies, and a package of cured fish which included several dead flies.
“Those are fakes! We irradiate everything.”
“The one with the worms is almost certainly a generated image. But your slanderer was clever. Those others are real. They just added some ink spots or a printed insect.”
Adya’s mind was racing. “You found some clues in the images?”
“Not exactly. But the one with the mold had its metadata improperly scrubbed. The location tag survived.”
“Where was it taken?”
“Viranmar Plaza.”
Adya knew the place, a grand public space in the center of the city of Svarnam, fifty kilometers from the capital. “That tells us nearly nothing.”
Atira’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial murmur, just dripping with self-satisfaction. “Normally, yes. But as it happens, there was a case of involuntary genetic sampling in the plaza just a couple of days before that image went public. When the Service collects evidence we like to have plenty of context, so we saved all the images and public data from the plaza for a period of a hundred hours before and after the alleged sampling incident. And I think I’ve identified the person taking that faked image.”
Another set of pictures appeared. They were stills, from different angles, showing a woman with very long braided hair, sitting alone on one of the benches scattered about the plaza. The area was mostly empty, which suggested it was early morning. The woman was holding an archaic-looking data device over a pale object on the bench. An enhanced image showed that the object was indeed the ink-spotted fish filet. The last two images showed her face from two sides.
“Pulu Visap. She’s a professional influencer specializing in gray and black memes.”
“Which suggests someone hired her to do this—our real enemy.”
“I could probably come up with a reason to contact Visap officially,” said Atira, almost indecently enthusiastic.
“No, no. You’ve done wonderful work already. I don’t want to take any more of your time.”
“It’s no trouble. I’m very happy to do a favor for Kavita’s family.”
In other circumstances that last remark might have annoyed Adya just a little, but this time she barely paid attention to what Atira was saying. “I will speak to her myself,” she said. “From what Officer Sokwerevu said, it would be hard to threaten her with any legal action, and if she’s a professional, she probably knows exactly where the limits lie. I must influence the influencer by other means.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I shall appeal to her better nature. And if that doesn’t work, I will threaten her with my sister. Thank you, Deputy Assistant Director Kaval.”
“Give my regards to Kavita! I can feel the energy!”
Adya broke the link before sighing. For a second she thought about going downstairs for another round with her mother, but she suspected the result would be the same. So she took a deep breath, went out to her great-grandmother’s favorite chair on the gallery outside, and began searching the datasphere.
Pulu Visap was forty-two standard years old, from a family which had slipped gradually down the social scale to lodge in the precarious semi-gentility of intellectual poverty. A cursory look at available data showed a clever woman who hobnobbed with younger members of the Sixty Families, consulted for the Foreign Ministry, and could boast of successfully swaying public opinion for a long list of products, people, and causes. One of those causes immediately caught Adya’s attention: Visap had worked for the Polyarchist movement. Was it just business, or was she a supporter?
But when Adya turned her expensive brain and a skeptical eye on Visap’s public persona, she spotted the gaps and weaknesses. Pulu Visap wasn’t actually a friend of the wealthy and powerful—she just managed to be in their vicinity from time to time. Her “secret work for the government” was impossible to verify officially. And she provided absolutely no data linking any of her work to the success or failure of her clients. Even her Polyarchist connection was a bit vague—she had “increased awareness” of their cause.
Adya took a deep breath and sent a comm request to Pulu Visap. It was not accepted. However, while she was still trying to decide what to try next, Adya got a message: “Pulu Visap is no longer available for influencing services, and will not comment on any past jobs. Thank you.” The source was Visap’s own address, and even as Adya watched, the display of quasi-bogus qualifications and successes vanished from the datasphere. Pulu Visap, professional influencer, had just erased herself.
Adya crafted a couple of autonomous messages and sent them out in search of some other way to reach her. They were as reassuring as Adya could make them, but she had a suspicion they wouldn’t get a response. If Pulu Visap had crafted slanderous images designed to harm the Elso family, it was really quite unlikely she’d want to chat with Adya Elso.
She wished that Zee was there, or even Daslakh. Maybe Visap would be willing to talk with someone unconnected to the family. That thought made Adya suddenly wish Zee was there for a dozen other reasons. Just his silent presence made her more secure. She wondered what he was doing.
“What are you doing?” Daslakh asked Zee, who to all appearances was stretched out on a lounge chair on the top deck of Taraka’s superstructure. Overhead the sky lighting was reaching maximum brightness. Daslakh could sense the data flow coming from Zee’s implant, but was reluctant to just intercept and read it. Zee probably wouldn’t care, but Taraka might be watching.
“I’m trying to get in touch with Mr. Putiyat again. He’s the only link we’ve got to that exotic-matter payload.”
“If it’s real.”
“Well, yes. But I figure if somebody went to the trouble to send me a death threat about it, it’s worth digging into.”
“A reasonable conclusion. Any luck?”
“I can get past his house filters—not sure how—but he either refuses the link himself or cuts off as soon as I try to say anything. The last time he told me he’d bring in the Security Service if I contact him again.”
“No more ambiguous threats?”
“Not since we left Adya’s house.”
“I wonder if that’s a good sign or a bad one,” said Daslakh.
“I wish I knew. If Mr. Putiyat would just talk to me, we could settle this in a couple of minutes!”
“How do your arms feel? Up for another flight?”
Zee stretched and prodded his own chest experimentally. “Sure. Where are we going?”
“Twenty kilometers west by northwest.” For nearly twenty seconds Daslakh patiently endured the glacier-slow process of a biological looking up information.
“Is that really a good idea?” said Zee at last.
“All my ideas are good,” said Daslakh. “Sometimes there are failures in execution.”
Zee smiled at that. “All right, then! Taraka? How much do I owe you?”
The reply was private, and once again Daslakh resisted the urge to eavesdrop. Zee looked surprised. “But when I checked in you said—” he said aloud.
“I decided on a promotional discount,” the boat replied, as her crimson whale avatar appeared once again in their vision. “Tell your friends.”
“Uh, thank you very much!” said Zee. “Are you ready, Daslakh?”
“Any time.”
While Zee turned to go put on his wings Daslakh communicated digitally with Taraka. “How much of a discount did you give him? I’m curious.”
“You are indeed curious. I gave him half off, if you must know. The room would have been vacant otherwise, and he didn’t make a mess.”
“How much do you know about him? You’ve had plenty of time to search the infosphere.”
One of the crimson whale’s eyes flashed blue-white. “I like to know as much about my guests as possible. It helps me anticipate their needs. In his case, there’s an obvious connection to the Elso family, and to a spaceship called Pelagia. And when I looked at archives of news from the rest of the system, there’s some interesting stories from the Uranosynchronous Ring, and Summanus, and Mars.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
Zee finished his first step toward the wings.
“That swims very close to being a paradox.” The whale image grinned. “And now I have a question for you: What were you doing poking around the Mohan-Elso Center?”
“Poking around the Mohan-Elso Center, mostly. As I said, I’m curious.”
“Which means you presumably saw Vidhi Zugori and some mech dropping off another barge load of construction supplies.”
“When does the work start, anyway? There’s a lot of stuff stockpiled in there.”
“I haven’t heard anything. Nobody has asked me to move,” said Taraka.
“Nobody will. I predict there won’t be any renovations over there. In three and a half weeks that stuff will be gone and the place will reopen.”
“This has something to do with the Constructors’ Jubilee? Ah, I see: Zugori’s wife is organizing it this year. Yes, that makes sense. Using a research facility to store party supplies is a little odd, but here in Miranda it’s an acknowledged rule that anything one of the Sixty Families can get away with is by definition correct behavior.”
For a supposedly Baseline intellect, Taraka was pretty quick on the uptake, Daslakh decided. Neither said anything more as Zee donned his wings and went to the edge of the deck.
“Well, ’bye,” said Daslakh as it scuttled over to take its place between Zee’s shoulders.
As Zee leaped into the air and swooped low over the water before flapping to gain altitude, Taraka sent a final message to Daslakh. “Watch your back!”
Zee sensibly relied on the local infosphere for navigation. He had grown up in a spinning hab, where the sky was a map and one could always orient oneself with a nod of the head to feel the direction of spin. In a world with natural gravity, no magnetic field, and a thirty-three-hour rotation, none of that worked. Over the sea, with diffuse light coming from the entire artificial sky and a light haze over the water, navigating by eye could lead even a digital intelligence astray.
Daslakh’s only task was to occasionally check their position to make sure Zee wasn’t getting distracted, and watching the ocean for anything to break the monotony. It saw a couple of whales—one of them transmitted a brief greeting before diving—and once they passed by a sea farm floating in a pool of light. The surface structure was a lot less fancy than the Elso mansion, just a landing pad for flyers and a few storage bins for dry material. Daslakh could just make out half a dozen dolphins wearing gills and tool harnesses swimming about, and guessed the main house was below the waterline.
With Zee keeping up a steady wing beat it took about twenty minutes to cover as many kilometers. Miranda atmosphere had neither head nor tail winds to worry about. At Daslakh’s suggestion Zee set his implant to full privacy and made a wide circle around the Putiyat estate at half a kilometer altitude to get a good look at the place.
The house was even bigger than the Elso mansion, covering just about all the floating platform surface, with only a central courtyard and a few rooftops for gardens. Unlike the Elso place it appeared to have been built as a single structure, with a rather relentless hexagonal symmetry. A dozen towers rose from it, each topped with a pointy octahedron holding a bright beacon. Daslakh never did have a solid grasp of human semiotics, but the place did seem a lot more flamboyant than the other houses of Miranda’s ruling class. Confident exuberance or desperate attention seeking?
“Daslakh, I’m going to need your help,” said Zee over his shoulder.
“That is a true statement,” said Daslakh.
“Can you talk to the Putiyat house system and keep it from flagging me as an intruder?”
“That’s a tall order. Let me see if I can manage it.” Daslakh generated a random number between 10 and 40, got 29, and waited that many seconds before telling Zee, “Okay, I think I’ve got it. Take us in.”
In reality, of course, the fragment of Daslakh’s personality it had installed in the Putiyat system days earlier kept putting Zee back on the list of permitted callers and visitors every time anyone removed him, so as he glided toward the house it recognized him and let him pass unchallenged.
Zee set down on a rooftop garden, stowed his wings under a bench, and then took a deep breath as if he was about to enter a stick-fighting bout. He exhaled, shook his arms to relax them, and then strolled confidently into the stairway leading down into the house. Daslakh followed silently, matching its color to the floor.
“Who’s at home right now?” asked Zee.
“Four family members and two staff in the house, six staff underwater. The house staff are both mechs, the water crew are four dolphins and two squid.” Daslakh sent Zee a list of the family members with pictures and locations. “We’ve got Karthika Kaminari-Putiyat, currently in her private office. She’s married to Panam Putiyat. Then we’ve got Mahesh Putiyat, Panam’s younger brother, in the sauna. Mahesh’s daughter Neha Putiyat is currently in the dojo, and her brother Vinay Putiyat is in his bedroom. Do you want to find one of them, or avoid them?”
“How do I get to the dojo?”
Daslakh took the lead, and Zee followed it down two levels and through a couple of big rooms decorated with portraits of other people’s ancestors to a space set up for training. An athletic-looking young woman in a black unitard and gloves was going through a defensive routine, dodging and parrying as three little air-jet drones tried to tag her. Her skin was deep blue-green with concentration, and Daslakh could see that her breathing and heart rate were calm and steady, a state of perfect absorption in her task.
Neha ducked one drone, batted another aside with a gloved hand, and then did an impressive aerial roll to avoid the third trying to hit her leg. As she landed she glimpsed Zee out of the corner of her eye and turned to look. All three drones struck her then, and from the way she twitched Daslakh guessed they were fitted with shock generators—presumably just enough to sting, since she didn’t fall unconscious or go into spasms.
“Drones stop!” she said aloud, her skin shifting to angry orange.
“I’m sorry,” said Zee. “I didn’t mean to distract you.”
“No,” said Neha, still orange. “I let myself focus too much on the drones. In a real fight I can’t ignore my surroundings. Who are you?”
“My name’s Zee. I’m a friend of Adya Elso. She told me you might be interested in trying some nulesgrima sparring, and since I was passing by I decided to stop in.” Zee’s heart rate had been steady, but when he had to lie the beats sped up. Daslakh found it charming.
“Adya? Oh, Kavita’s sister. Isn’t she off doing some crazy research project on Mars or someplace?”
“We landed a week and a half ago.”
“So what do you know about nulesgrima?” She looked at him appraisingly. “All the best nuledors are small. Wiry. You look too big.”
“Get a couple of palos and see for yourself.” Zee’s nervousness had faded, but now it was Neha whose heart rate was speeding up, and her angry orange color took on a distinctly pink shade before she could return to light blue.
She found a couple of palos in a cabinet. They weren’t the light padded ones for sparring, or even the tough graphene rods used in competition. These were actual fighting sticks: graphene tubes with a core of steel, hard and massive enough to break bones.
Zee hefted the one she handed him and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. The two of them took up positions on opposite sides of the room, saluted, and then launched themselves at each other.
Neha managed an expert tumble to put her feet forward, with the palo held parallel to her direction of motion. As Zee came within range she tried a powerful thrust with her whole body’s strength behind it. He managed to parry, the clash of sticks pushing both of them in opposite directions. Neha hit the base of one wall with her feet and kicked hard to shoot herself up toward the center of the room’s volume.
Zee had acquired a spin from his parry so touched the floor with his feet, steadied himself, and then jumped straight up to ricochet off the ceiling, diving very fast at Neha with his stick held horizontally. She twisted out of the way and turned that rotation into a swing of her palo at Zee as he passed. It caught him on his left calf with a meaty sound of impact.
They hit the floor at the same instant, Neha on her feet and Zee with his palo. He cartwheeled away from her as she did a reverse jab under her left arm. When Zee got his feet on the floor he halted his motion, and that gave Neha the opportunity to come at him fast, stabbing the end of her palo right into his face. He tried to duck aside but it caught him just to the right of his nose. Zee did manage to roll back with the blow, doing a complete somersault in the air and hitting the wall with his back.
Until that point, Zee had been relaxed, heart rate consistent with the exercise, breathing steady. But after Neha hit him in the face, Daslakh could see his skin temperature rise, and heard his pulse and breathing accelerate. His face got an expression Daslakh had seen only three times before in all the time he’d known Zee.
The tempo of the bout suddenly got a lot faster. Zee managed a backward somersault up the wall, getting clear of Neha and then launching himself across the room over her head. He dug one end of the palo into the ceiling to stop himself in mid-leap and push himself to the floor. Neha had been in ballistic motion across the room in pursuit, so this unexpected stop put Zee behind her with his palo perfectly positioned for a swing that caught her across the back of her thighs.
In a friendly sparring match Zee probably would have paused there, let Neha get her feet on the floor and start another round. Instead he pressed his attack, getting a solid jab into her ribcage, and when she touched a foot to the floor in order to spin and get her palo in position to defend, Zee knocked her stick aside and got her under the arm with the other end of his weapon. He kept her off balance, pushing her back, taking advantage of his mass and strength, hitting her hard—though Daslakh noticed he was still restraining himself; she would have impressive bruises but no broken bones.
Neha gamely tried to break loose, and landed a few one-handed blows on Zee’s upper back with the end of her palo. Her own pulse rate had skyrocketed and she was pink with excitement all over. When she backed up against the wall and couldn’t get away, she finally knocked three times to signal the end. Zee hesitated for a moment before backing off, and kept his palo in a defensive stance until Neha put hers down.
“Good match,” he said. Daslakh could see that he was speaking out of one side of his mouth, and his face was already quite swollen where she’d hit him.
“You’re good, too,” she said. “How’d you do that stop and drop?” Zee explained, and as he did Neha moved closer to him. “I hope I didn’t hit you too hard,” she interrupted, and prodded his swelling cheek with one forefinger.
Zee couldn’t keep himself from wincing, but he gave her a lopsided smile. “Should have kept my guard up.”
Neha pulled her unitard down and stepped out of it, then kicked the damp garment into the corner. “I’m all sweaty. Let’s clean up.” Without looking behind her she led the way out of the dojo and a short way up the hall to a room lined with a smooth continuous surface of blue glass, broken only by drains at the edge of the floor and water jets in the walls.
Zee put down the palo and followed. As he passed Daslakh in the doorway of the dojo he took a couple of jagged white objects out of his mouth and handed them to the mech. “Get rid of those for me,” he said. “I swallowed the smaller bits.”
Daslakh identified the little misshapen pieces as half of a canine tooth and most of a bicuspid. “Can’t you just glue them back where they belong?”
“I’ll get new ones. Don’t let her see them.” Zee walked calmly toward the shower, and only Daslakh could hear his rapid pulse.
Zee stuck his sweaty head under the cold stream, rinsed out his mouth, and then left the shower while Neha was still enjoying the hot water jets playing over her skin. When she turned and saw him already drying his hair, she didn’t even try to hide the annoyance and disappointment in her voice, let alone keep herself from turning a muddy crimson. “Well?”
“Good match,” he said again. “I’d be happy to stop by for another session.”
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “I’m not done with you.”
Zee faced her then. “I’ll stay a bit longer—but only if you can do something for me.”
“I can do all kinds of things,” she said, blatantly shifting to coral pink.
“Introduce me to your uncle. I want to talk to him about business.”
Her eyes narrowed and her color became more purple. “Who are you, really?”
“I told you: a friend of Adya Elso. Your uncle bought some property from her family and I’d like to find out what happened to it.”
“So talk to Panam.”
“He doesn’t want to see me. But I figure he can’t ignore me if I’m right in front of him.”
“Adya never paid attention to anything but ancient history. And I can’t believe either of the elder Elsos would even talk to you about their business affairs, let alone allow you to act for them. This sounds like some kind of con.”
“Believe what you want. I just want to talk to him.”
“Come massage my muscles and then we’ll join Uncle Panam for lunch when he lands. I want to see your pitch. He’s no fool, you know, at least not about money matters. He’ll see through you and see you off, and I’ll laugh to see it happen.”
Zee took firm hold of Neha’s latissimus dorsi muscles, and made circles with his thumbs pressed deep into the skin on either side of her spine. She made a noise halfway between a gasp and a grunt, repeated as he moved his hands upward until he was kneading her trapezius muscles between neck and shoulders.
“You’re better than my bot.”
“I’m sure it gets more practice.”
“Hey,” said Daslakh aloud. “The house says Panam’s just landing upstairs. You’d better get yourselves dried off. Wouldn’t want to drip all through lunch.”
Neha and Zee joined her uncle in the dining room, which was a huge space with very expensive decorations. The walls were covered with sheets of bismuth metal, inlaid with curlicues of tantalum and rhenium. Nothing as plebian as gold or iridium. The table was all smart matter, with individual food printers at each place. Neha wore a clean unitard and Zee was back in his much-worn travel suit.
Panam Putiyat had already taken his place at the head of the table and was watching his chana bhatura rising from the black panel in front of him as the tabletop assembled the food molecule by molecule. He happened to glance up, smiled at his niece, then caught sight of Zee and scowled.
“You! I said I don’t want to talk to you. How did you get in here?”
Neha smiled a little maliciously. “He’s been sparring with me in the dojo. He’s not bad, but I landed a good one on his face.”
Zee’s cheek was notably puffy and purple by now, but he was determinedly not showing any pain. “I got careless. Mr. Putiyat, I just have one question—”
“I know, I know. That pesky particle payload. My purchase was perfectly proper.”
“Of course. I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just want to know if you’d consider selling it back. It’s got sentimental value.”
Panam just glared at Zee. “Sentimental? Do I seem a simpleton?”
“I can pay back everything you gave for it. The family can, anyway.”
“Can they? I’ve heard rumors.”
“Well, if you name a price I can find out if they’ll pay it.”
“I must disappoint you. I no longer retain any rights to that payload.”
“Who does?”
Panam smiled, but his eyes didn’t change and his skin was still pale purple. “I take it you enjoy combat sports, Mr. Sadaran.”
“I was nulesgrima champion of Raba habitat three standard years running.”
Panam took a bite of one bhatura bun and made himself light blue. “I only enjoy games when there is something at risk. The idea of playing something purely for pleasure bores me.”
Zee smiled with the unbruised side of his mouth. “Plenty of risk in nulesgrima if you’re not wearing armor.”
Panam waved his hand as if batting the idea aside. “Unless there’s a chance of real death, injury is inconsequential.”
Zee said nothing.
Panam took a spoonful of chickpeas and continued. “It occurs to me that we could settle this with a game. My stake is the answer to your question. It has value to you, and I have good reasons for not wishing to give it out. But what do you have to hazard?”
“I don’t have much,” said Zee. “I don’t care about piling up gigajoules, and I’ve always been able to earn what I need. I haven’t got much stuff. Nothing I can’t print out if I want it.”
“What are you afraid to lose? Would you risk your life to find out who controls that payload?”
“No,” said Zee promptly. “Sorry,” he added. “I guess I have to disappoint you this time.”
“Oh, not at all. A wise gambler should always know what he is willing to lose.”
“How about this?” said Neha, with an odd gleam in her eye. “If you win the game, Uncle tells you what you want to know. If you lose, you’re mine until I get tired of you.”
Panam laughed aloud at that. “It appears you have one asset after all!” He glanced at his niece and back to Zee. “I’m guessing this puts you at risk of more than exhaustion and a few bite marks.”
“He says he’s a friend of Adya Elso. I think it’s more than that.”
“Turned you down, did he? Now I understand. Well?” He looked back at Zee, still smiling, but his eyes were very cold. “Would Miss Elso forgive a few weeks’ dalliance, do you think?”
Zee lifted his chin a couple of millimeters and stared straight back at Panam. “She probably would forgive me. But I wouldn’t forgive myself.” He stood and looked Neha. “That was a good match. One thing you should work on: the palo’s a tool for movement as well as a weapon. You can do more than just hit people. Practice that.” He turned to leave.
“Just a moment,” said Panam. He took a small metal disk from the cabinet behind him. “Call it—Archer or Twins?” He flipped it into the air, and in the low Miranda gravity it spun above his head for nearly a minute.
“Archer,” said Zee as it hung for a moment just below the ceiling before falling back.
Panam caught it in his outstretched hand and placed it on the back of his other wrist, keeping it covered for a dramatic three seconds before revealing the symbol of Sagittarius. “You are a lucky man! A good thing, too. I transferred the rights to that payload to an individual named Dai Chichi, to settle some debts. If you have dealings with him, you will need to be lucky indeed. Now: Get out of my house. I never want to see you again.”
Neha watched Zee go, but didn’t get up from her chair.
As Zee pulled on his wings in the roof garden, Daslakh took up its customary position between his shoulders. “What now? Go talk to this Dai Chichi person?”
“First I need to get a couple of new teeth, and I think maybe some bone cement for my face. And—I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell Adya about any of this.”
“Unless my memory’s corrupted, you turned Neha down two or three times. Nothing to conceal.”
“Oh, not that,” said Zee. “I mean about the teeth. She’d worry.” He leaped into the air, gave a few powerful strokes with his wings, then banked to the southwest, where a town with public medical pods was just a few kilometers off.
Daslakh decided not to mention that the spin rate of a falling metal disk could be affected by low-power infrared laser heating. It would only upset Zee.