'Discretion is the whole point of this,' Gadfium said. 'Only myself and the other party would know.'
'The process will utilise the neuro-lattice which would normally only be activated on madam's quietus. This is the device which —'
'Yes, I know what it does.'
'I see. There is some danger…'
'I'll risk it, dear.'
Another Gadfium woke, looking out through the eyes of the original. This must be a bit how old Austermise feels, they both thought, and experienced the other's thoughts as an echo.
The view was of a gently lit booth lined with curtains of intricate design. She was in some reclined seat, her neck and head held firmly but comfortably. There were two people standing looking down at her; a serious-looking older woman in a white coat, and the young lady in red.
'Madam's very first memory, again?' the older woman said.
'Earlier I said it was the blue swing,' she said (and heard herself say it, and thought: oh yes, the blue swing, but what about the — ), 'but actually I think it must have been the time when my father fell off his horse into the river.' ( — horse? Ah…)
The woman nodded. 'Thank you. Do you still wish your construct to be released into crypt-time now?'
'Please,' Gadfium said, trying to nod but failing.
The woman in the white coat leant forward and reached out one hand to touch something on the side of the unit restraining Gadfium's head.
The man slipped in through the curtains behind the two women as the older woman's hand disappeared from Gadfium's field of view. He was tall, slim and dressed conservatively in a light suit. His face did not look quite right. He held something thick and black and curved in his hand. Gadfium only recognised it as a gun when he brought it up towards her.
Gadfium felt her eyes widen and her mouth start to open. The girl in the red swimsuit began to turn round. The man saw her turn towards him; the gun moved quickly to one side so that it was no longer pointing at Gadfium's face but at the girl. The man shot her first.
The noise was minimal; the girl's head jerked back and she fell instantly, a delicate fountain of blood spraying up and back onto the tented ceiling. Gadfium watched it all in real time
/and in crypt-time, as the older woman began to turn, her hand still somewhere behind Gadfium's neck.
Gadfium felt her other self, the construct, drop away from her like a bomb from a plane, producing an instant of vertigo as the girl hit the floor and the man — his face too straight, too unmoving — turned the black tube towards the woman in the white coat. The shot hit her in the temple, whirling her round so that she pirouetted as she collapsed. More blood, Gadfium felt, as she tried to move her head but still could not, still trapped, still held, as though her neck and head had been fixed in concrete, bored through and bolted with steel.
The man's face turned impassively to her and the gun came up. She beat her feet on the reclined couch, brought her hands up to scrabble over the surface of the helmet unit trapping her, feeling desperately for some release mechanism.
He took a step forward and pointed the gun at her forehead.
/Quickened, she fell away from the scene in the traumparlour an instant before the man shot the woman in the white coat.
Gadfium had visited the crypt many times, through receptor devices in helmets, chairs and pillows; she was less adept than the average person in navigating its complexities — the sort of natural ease that came with immersion from childhood would never be hers — but she was no stranger to the medium.
It took her new self only a few seconds of crypt-time to realise that she was effectively free within the system, at least for now. Existing initially within the traumparlour's grey-zone hardware she had not yet been given an official crypt identity.
She checked the immediate surroundings for clues to why one woman had been murdered, another was about to be and a third — herself — soon going to be.
Everything seemed normal; no security blanket thrown over the local data corpus, no obvious gaps in local traffic, no closed-off circuits. Certainly the Palace crypt-space was supposed to be completely unrestricted — once you were in, which was the hard bit — but she had half expected to find some sort of crypt presence linked to the assassin. Perhaps the Palace's private channels really were inviolable; perhaps that was why simply sending in a man with a gun was considered the best way of dealing with a problem. She wondered briefly why all this was being done, what had triggered this ghastly, murderous act, but decided to leave investigating that for later.
She looked into the hardware surrounding her head. You turned off the restrainer field… well, just here… but she hesitated. Perhaps she could save her base-reality self.
She glanced back through Gadfium's eyes. The view was still, like a photograph. Running her own vision round the picture in Gadfium's mind exposed both the weakness of the human sight system and its cleverness. Looked at closely from inside with an independent ability to focus and concentrate on different parts of the view, you could see the lack of clarity and colour at the edges of vision; the view was grey and smeared everywhere about the lucid central portion. And so slow! What torture to watch somebody being killed and know your turn was next; the woman in white was still turning, the gun in the man's hand still moving to point to where her head would be in a moment's time…
She sucked herself away from the view. First she had to double-check the headset release mechanism, then decide what her physical self ought to do next, then work out the right moves to get her out of this situation, then form it into a plan that could be dropped instantly into her base-reality self's head and be acted upon without the slightest flicker of hesitation… she had less than a second, real time; a couple of hours, in here. It might be a close run thing…
The gun came up to point at the middle of her forehead. Gadfium watched it, helpless.
Then it was as though the bomb she had felt dropping away from herself earlier had somehow slammed straight back into the top of her head.
Move!
Her head was free and suddenly there was a whole choreographed pattern inside her head; a slotted-in four-dimensional sculpture in which all she had to do was follow the tunnel-shape her body made through that sculpture.
The lights in the booth would go out now. They went out.
It was almost as though the pattern moved her body for her. She ducked her head and flicked it to one side as the shot cracked into the head unit. She levered herself forward with her elbows while drawing her right leg back. She snapped it forward and up just here…
The impact was appreciably two-fold, as both the bones in the man's fore-arm broke. She added to the momentum of her still swinging leg with a two-handed push off the couch and landed already swivelling on the floor. She punched upwards but the man hadn't reacted quite as she'd expected; cloth brushed her fist as he fell away, a sudden soughing noise coming from his mouth.
Something thudded into her head and for an instant she thought he had clubbed her, but the blow was light and the thing that fell from her head and bounced off her hip was the gun; she caught it on the floor.
The lights went on again. She turned the gun towards the man. He was crouched entangled within some of the room curtains, holding his broken arm and looking at her. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell over on his side.