Anderssen's lips twitched into a wry smile. "What was I looking for? I was looking for a scrap of legendary shell. A memory out of the past. One of your stories. Something so old it would be new to human eyes. Even older than the Jehanan or the Haraphan. As old as Jagan itself."
"Hoooo…" Malakar whistled, nostrils flaring. "You are seeking the heart of the Garden! The false idol, the holy of holies which the blind worship, crawling before a dead god. You are looking for the kalpataru."
Anderssen nodded, one hand sliding inside her jacket and taking hold of the chisel. "I am."
"Worthless," the Jehanan said, puffing air dismissively. "Old accounts say the tree once gave every desire, revealed all secrets, elevated the mind as the gods might…but I know no Master of the Garden has been graced with its power for three hundred generations! This I know, though my old hide would be laid bare with barbed whips to say such a thing aloud."
"Have you seen it?" Gretchen said eagerly, before she could restrain herself. "Is it far away?"
"Hoooo! Your eyes are very bright, human! Your voice is quick, your little claws scratching at the wrapper of a sweet – very much like a short-horn, you are, very much."
"Your pardon," Anderssen said, bowing in apology. "Just show me the way to the terrace."
"Hurrr… A curiosity to confound the foolish…" The Jehanan paused, long snout lifting in thought, eyes glittering in the gipu-light. "Your machines…You wish to pry and snoop and listen and measure the tree-of-deceit, don't you? Yes, you do, all those hungry thoughts picking and chipping and breaking open shells to see what savory treats lie inside." A delicate trill escaped the creature's throat.
Gretchen watched the Jehanan with growing unease. There was a malicious tone creeping into the gardener's voice. "What happened to you?" she said after a moment. "You believed in the Masters ofthe Garden once, but now…now you think I'll prove the kalpataru is false. Will that give you back what you lost? You didn't seem pleased about the school-room…"
"I will never tend the Garden again," Malakar said, head dipping mournfully. "None of the others would allow such a thing. The short-horns and hatchlings are not interested in my dusty old stories. But this new Master…his snout is crooked and filled with lies! He says…he says the tree is still alive – but that only he can hear, that only he is blessed."
A frenetic energy welled up in the old Jehanan's frame.
"I think he lies," Malakar snorted, "but you can tell me the truth of the matter, can't you?"
Swallowing, her throat unaccountably dry, Gretchen nodded.
"Yes," she said. "If you take me to the device, I can see what can be seen."
The Cornuelle
In Orbit Over Jagan
Two message-waiting glyphs – one from Engineering and one from Sho-i Smith – winked to life on Chu-sa Hadeishi's command display. As the communications officer had been ordered off the bridge, Hadeishi pointedly ignored the call from Engineering and thumbed open a comm pane to the junior officer's quarters.
The v-pane unfolded, revealing Smith – still in uniform, sweat-stained collar undone – sitting in the cramped workspace created by folding a JOQ rack into the bulkhead. Hadeishi could see Three-Jaguar lying on the bunk overhead, eyes half-lidded as she listened to a signal feed on a set of old-style headphones. A command-class comp was jammed in with her – a feat only possible because the Tlaxcalan woman was petite enough to fit sideways into a Fleet sleeping rack – and the display was alive with analysis diagrams and data flow patterns.
"Yes, Smith-tzin?" The Chu-sa kept his voice level, though he was irritated with the boy. Junior officers are supposed to sleep whenever they can, Hadeishi thought very piously, not stay up working late.
"Kyo, we've managed to trace most of this off-band encrypted traffic through the local comm networks. There is a locus and it's in orbit."
"Coordinates?" Hadeishi raised an eyebrow in interest. "A ship or a satellite?"
Smith punched the descriptors directly to the threatwell on the bridge of the Cornuelle. One of the heavy merchant ship icons shown on orbital path flared amber and acquired a targeting outline. The Chu-sa considered the shipping registry data on his sidepane.
"The Tepoztecatl…Six months outbound from Old Mars. Interesting…registration is up to date, port taxes paid, customs seals intact. Logs show daily shuttle traffic to the surface – expensive." Hadeishi brought up the secondary comm traffic data the two junior officers had collected and his face stiffened into impassive, glacial surprise. "This is an enormous volume of traffic… What arethey doing?"
"Video feeds, kyo." Smith glanced up. Jaguar nodded in agreement, eyes now open and following the conversation. She'd pulled the headphone away from one ear. "We haven't been able to crack their encryption, but the volume of data is so large they can only be passing realtime video from some kind of surveillance array on the planet back to the ship."
"Video? You mean they're processing intercepts from a fleet of spyeyes?"
Smith and Jaguar nodded. "There are hundreds of active comm channels in the traffic volume, and we think each one is a discrete camera. And, kyo, look at the source distribution…"
A map of the northern part of continent four unfolded on Hadeishi's command display. An orbital track designator appeared, showing the location of the Tepoztecatl, while clouds of brilliant points emerged on the map, clustering heavily in the large cities, but also liberally dusting the countryside.
"This covers every locale of size from Patala to Gandaris," the Chu-sa said in a thoughtful voice. He paused. "This level of coverage must be enormously expensive to deploy and maintain." Hadeishi glanced at the two officers. "Could we deploy this kind of network?"
Jaguar shook her head. Smith shrugged. "We've got spyeyes for the Marine combat teams and some extras for shuttle security and surveillance, plus spares, which gives us twenty. This network on the planet has – at last count from the data-stream – almost a thousand in operation."
"Then they're not documentary filmmakers," the Chu-sa said in a dry voice. He was beginning to get a tickling feeling on his neck. This sounds familiar, but where… "What else do we know about this freighter? Have they had any conversations with traffic control?"
"Minimal contact with traffic control," Smith answered. "All their transponder codes are squared away and they haven't moved orbit other than station-keeping burns. They seem to have four different shuttles aboard – or so Hayes-tzin guesses from their drive-flare signatures." Jaguar reached over Smith's shoulder and tapped up something on his panel. The Sho-i nodded, watching the feed come up. "Here, kyo – we shot some video of them as well – just to make sure we were tracking the data-stream properly."
A hand-sized v-pane appeared on Hadeishi's display, showing the long cylindrical shape of the Tepoztecatl with an edge of Jagan in-frame. The view panned, showing that nearly a quarter of the surface was covered with antennas and comm relay receptors. The Chu-sa grunted, not terribly surprised. "Looks like a Nightingale-class emissions collection frigate…" Then he squinted in interest at the display. Hadeishi tapped the 'magnify' glyph twice and then slid his finger back along the time-in-spool indicator. From a distance, the freighter seemed stationary, but the close-up revealed the cargo and habitat pods behind the screen of communications equipment were spinning.