He ducked down a side street strung with more cut flowers, past three men and five women carrying shopping bags, and stepped into the shade. “House,” he said, feeling ridiculous, although he’d waited until there was a gap in the flow of people, “show me how to get to Pretoria household.”
At first there was no reaction. But then a shimmer formed along the wall, neither an arrow nor a trace, but something like a ripple on water. It was a pale sheen of blue luminescence, dim in shadow and brighter in sunlight, and it led him further along the street he had ducked down.
It didn’t take him long to realize that he wasn’t being led by the most direct route. Instead, House brought him down side streets, less populated ways, and through shadowing courtyards. It concerned him, but he didn’t know which other way to go, and so he followed. The shimmer ran along walls, or sometimes immediately underfoot, always a half‑step ahead until it brought him back into sunlight on a quiet byway with only a little pedestrian traffic, not broad enough for a car. There, at the bottom of a set of broad shallow steps leading to a screened veranda, it abandoned him, vanishing into the pavement like oil dispersing on water.
He looked up the steps at the front door, which glided open. Behind it stood a young woman with Lesa’s broad cheeks but a darker complexion and curlier hair. “House said to expect you,” she said. “I’m Katya Pretoria. Come in off the street.”
That’s a bit more than a goddamned giant utility fog,Vincent thought, but he didn’t hesitate to climb the steps.
“Your mother might need help,” he said, pausing to glance over his shoulder, back in the direction from which he’d come.
“Household security’s on the way.”
10
“MISS KUSANAGI‑JONES,” MISS OUAGADOUGOU SAID AFTER he had entirely managed to lose track of the time after, “do you need to check in with your ship?”
He glanced up from sketching schematics on his watch, refocusing on Miss Ouagadougou through shimmering green lines that overlaid the physical gallery. His watch identified her as an individual rather than a part of the landscape, and backgrounded the display plan behind her. It looked odd, sandwiched between her and a Gerуnima Cruz Montoya casein‑on‑paper painting. “Sorry?”
“It’s past teatime. And the station should be overhead in a few ticks. We’ll eat upstairs, and I thought you might–”
“Very kind,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, recollecting himself. “Does this suit?”
“The schematics?” Her hair bobbed on the nape of her neck. “If you finalize them, I’ll upload them to the ministry net, and they’ll keep a crew in tonight to finish the setup. It actually works out better this way.”
“It?” He was already sealing the plans, satisfied with the exhibit. Miss Ouagadougou had a good eye. “Lead on,” he said, before she finished fussing with her headset.
They ascended the lift in companionable silence, Miss Ouagadougou still fiddling and Kusanagi‑Jones pulling up a sat‑phone license on his wardrobe menu. He’d need a relay station; his watch couldn’t power orbital communication.
If he was lucky, his communication would reach Kaiwo Marubefore she dispatched a packet‑bot back to Earth to swap mail. It would still take six months to send a message and get an answer, assuming The Pride of Ithacaor one of the other inbound ships was close enough to relay the bot’s signal. But at least this way the message would be in the queue.
If anything happened.
He coded two reports. The first used a standard diplomatic cipher, and detailed a strictly factual, strictly accurate report of his and Vincent’s doings since landfall. The second, concealed in the first and still largely innocuous to Coalition eyes, concerned itself with a perceived obstructionist element in New Amazonian government.
There was a third message, contained not in a discrete data stream, but in the interplay of the others. In the cracks between. Kusanagi‑Jones concealed an ironic smile.
This one, of necessity brief, must be sent when Vincent wasn’t present to record it. It was sealed eyes‑only, quantum coded. When Kusanagi‑Jones broke the seal on his own end of the code, a quantum entanglement triggered a wave‑state collapse on the other end of the system, alerting his principal that a message was en route. The only man in the universe who could read the message was the one who held the other half of the key.
That man was Siddhartha Deucalion Hunyadi Lawson‑Hrothgar. He was a senior member of the Earth Coalition Cabinet. And its contents, if they couldhave fallen into the wrong hands, would have meant surplusing and execution not only for Kusanagi‑Jones, but for Lawson‑Hrothgar as well.
Kusanagi‑Jones understood Vincent’s position. The great‑grandson of a Colonial Founder, the son of Captain Lexasdaughter–the most powerful head of state remaining under Coalition control–Vincent would work withinthe system, attempt to ease the Coalition’s stranglehold through diplomatic means.
Kusanagi‑Jones, with the assistance of a revolutionary patron, had chosen another path.
Which was the thing Vincent could never be permitted to learn about New Earth, and the destruction of the starship named Skidbladnir,and why they had been separated: that it had happened so because Michelangelo had planned it that way.
“When you report,” Miss Ouagadougou said, as they stepped out into brilliant sunlight, “I’ll have something to add.”
Kusanagi‑Jones wouldn’t show startlement. Instead, he stepped aside to give her a line of travel and fell into step behind. “Something about the plan I’d like to discuss. May I uplink the new version to your datacart?”
“Of course.” She pulled it out of her hip pack and flipped up the cover. “Password?”
He gave her one, and established a single‑photon connection. The security detail hung back, just out of earshot if they spoke in level tones. New Amazonian courtesy. But there were some things you didn’t say out loud.
Green letters flashed across his vision and vanished. The director of security is a radical,Miss Ouagadougou said. Get her to enlist.
Kyoto?he asked. That old dragon?
She’s inclined pro‑Coalition. A free‑maler. Claude’s a loss. Saide Austin holds her purse strings, and Saide Austin…He glanced at her as the text scroll hesitated. She shrugged, a slow rise of her shoulders, a quick tilt of her head. He recognized the name from the gallery. Saide Austin.
More than an artist, apparently. You’re a Coalition agent.
Since before the war.
He wondered what they’d given her to buy her loyalty–money, access to Coalition art treasures–or if hers was an ideological treachery.
She put her hand on his arm. I’ve imbedded an information packet in your copy of the plan. She transmitted a code key, which he saved. “I’m starving,” she said. “It’s been hours since lunch.”
“Miss Ouagadougou?”
Kusanagi‑Jones looked up. One of the agents had stepped forward. He might as well have been a shadow on the wall.
“Cathay.” Miss Ouagadougou smiled. “Problem?”