Bralow sat down, sighed, then pulled the desktop pearl toward him. The girl's face was still on its pane. "She's the... the alleged victim," he said.
"Avril? No way, man. No goddamn way. I paid for her!"
"That's not her name."
Hal looked at the closed door, suddenly curious. "Who was that? The guy that went for me?"
"Her father. The mayor of Memu Bay. And she does have a collateral necklace. Ebrey Zhang put it on her himself."
"Oh, Jesus fuck," Hal whispered. He sat down heavily beside Bralow as real fright took hold. None of this was making any sense, goddamnit. "Lieutenant, you've got to get me out of this."
"That might be difficult now."
* * *
The Norvelle was in a thousand-kilometer orbit around Thallspring, its inclination of five degrees providing it with line of sight on Durrell each time it passed through the planet's prime meridian. At ten-fifteen in the morning it rose above the capital city's horizon. As the sensors acquired the sprawl of buildings, a low-power laser was fired from one of the huge vehicle's five communications bays, seeking out the East Wing of the Eagle Manor. It was detected by a small electronic receiver unit on the roof, which immediately sent an answering laser pulse back to the starship. With the beams locked on their respective sensors, their width reduced until it was less than two centimeters at the target point, providing a link that could not be intercepted. The rooftop receiver unit was connected to a module in Simon Roderick's office by an armored fiber optic cable. Again, splicing into the cable was impossible. The system provided him with the most secure link possible to the starship. Only five people knew of its existence. Simon had been waiting for the call since he arrived at the office that morning. His usual routine of administrative work had been delegated to his assistants and personal AS. Instead, his time had been spent reviewing information filed under the generic name "The Opposition." As he ran through it all he conjured up probable attack scenarios, which grew steadily more exuberant as the morning progressed. It didn't matter how fanciful he made them, he still couldn't determine what they were actually planning. Nothing quite fit into what was clearly an impressive capability. The more he went over it, the more he was convinced they were holding back, waiting to deliver the hammer blow.
The secure communication module chimed melodically, and a sheet screen on the wall lit up, showing one of the Norvelle's cabins. A man was sitting in front of a freefall work bench, with straps holding him down in the light gravity field. He looked into the camera and gave it a thin smile. "Good morning. It looks very sunny and warm down there today."
Simon settled back behind his desk and looked at the face on the screen. It was his own, but fifteen years older. That particular batch of clones, the SF9s, were notorious for their phlegmatic temperament. Each generation tended to have its own quirk, which they put down to the individuality of the crиche nursing staff and the inevitable influence they exerted during the clones' formative years. The SK2 batch, to which the Simon in the study belonged, were often regarded as the more peppery of the breed. Although they were positively mild compared to the short-tempered SC5s (whose proclivity had sparked a wholesale review of crиche staff screening procedures). But whatever their behavioral nuances, they were all totally dedicated to the company that they controlled.
"Morning," the SK2 Simon replied. "So what's the result?"
"Well, the good news is it wasn't a bomb."
"I never expected it would be. Far too coarse for our friends."
"Young Braddock Raines was most thorough. The space-plane cabin was scanned and analyzed down to a molecular level. He also had the accessible systems removed and reviewed in the starship's lab. There was no detectable foreign genetic residue. However, somebody had opened an access panel. There were metal traces in the Allen screws. The alloy doesn't correspond with the tools issued to our maintenance people."
"Thank heavens for that I was beginning to think they were almost infallible."
"Quite. The panel gives access to several electronic components, including a major network junction. None of the components had any trace of tampering, except the junction. And that took some finding. The nuclear macroscan revealed some very peculiar stress patterns in the casing's molecular structure. Our so-called solid state physics experts are apparently baffled. They don't know what could have caused it"
"Interesting."
"The word is alarming. I don't like the idea of Thallspring having technologies that we don't understand. Especially when they're being used against us."
"Their development has been very well hidden. We've run all the usual financial audits through the Treasury network. They couldn't spot any kind of government funds being diverted for clandestine technology projects in the last ten years."
"Hardly surprising when you consider we're talking about people who can walk into our spaceplanes whenever they feel like it. Whatever they've got it's real enough."
"Assuming whatever the intruder did to the junction gave him access to the spaceplane's network, what do our experts think he achieved?"
"The theory they're throwing around up here is total subversion. The IT boys have dumped the spaceplane's entire AS program into a storage core for analysis. So far they can't find a single extraneous code line. The best conjecture they can come up with is a hidden command compressed into the original code."
"In other words we don't know for certain what the hell the intruder did."
"Absolutely."
"Damn." The SK2 didn't waste time considering the puzzle. That was the advantage of having multiples working on the same problem: whatever solution his clone sibling came up with, it would be the same as the one he would eventually arrive at. And the SF9 had been thinking about this for over an hour already. "Recommendations?"
"This intrusion has to have been some kind of reconnaissance mission. The interest our friends have in the space-plane demonstrates they want to get up here in one form or another, and as it's a Xianti they must be targeting the star-ships as a final destination. If they could fly up already, it would have been done. Therefore, they're still in the preparation stage. For myself, I believe he copied the AS to study our procedures."
"I see. So what else do they need?"
"For a hijacked flight to pass unnoticed, the only other consideration will be communications. We must hope they haven't already been there."
"I'll make the necessary preparations. I take it you consider e-alpha to be compromised?"
"Completely."
"That will have to be taken into account."