“As fast as you could.” Was that skepticism in her voice? “Leading to your arrival in the company of Rudolf Crimson-1102 and two of his assistants, descending by ballistic reentry vehicle from the armed privateer Branch Office Five Zero. For although you originally signed on as an unskilled ship-hand aboard the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonculease, you were observed departing that vehicle aboard a fast cutter owned by a notorious insurance salesman and pirate.” She fell silent, but her closed counsel was easy enough to decode: How do you explain that?
“He sold her a life insurance policy before she vanished—” It sounded weak, even to my ears. “What exactly are you asking me?” Despite my distractedness, my sense of unease was growing, like a white rime of mold attacking the dead tissues of a body whose ’cytes had curled up and died of the despair that killed their collective’s mind. Why was I telling her all this? It wasn’t like the debugger Rudi had used on me: This was something altogether more subtle. “I’m a mendicant academic: I came to this system to study with my distant sib; all this nonsense that has happened to me is just bad coincidences—”
The mermaid held me with her glittering eye: “Do you really believe that? Wait, forget we asked. Forget. You boarded one vehicle and arrived on another: We hope you can appreciate why this might lead to our questioning your bona fides as a legitimate scholar and speculate as to your motive for entering the kingdom.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have anything to add?”
“Um.” I licked my suddenly dry lips. “I don’t understand? Are you saying I can’t look for my sister? Where is everyone, anyway?”
She waved my questions off with a dismissive gesture. “Ms. Alizond, we do not believe you are being entirely forthcoming. I am not prepared to discuss the location of your traveling companions—” She looked directly at me. “So, by royal command, we are placing you under arrest, on suspicion of, let’s see: attempting to obtain illegal entry into the Monarchy of Argos will do for starters. We may need to consider adding conspiracy to smuggle antiquities to the list of charges in due course. But first, you will help my police with their inquiries into the murder of Ana Graulle-90.” The lid of the transport cylinder fell toward me again, nearly blocking her final words: “She’s all yours, boys. Take her away!”
Like the vast majority of my lineage, I am by disposition a law-abiding citizen. Consequently, I had managed to reach a considerable age without ever being arrested. As with most unfamiliar and threatening experiences, I found the actual event all the more stressful because of the uncertainty attached to it rather than because of the event itself.
“Take her away!”
With those words ringing in my ears, I fell backward, headfirst into the depths of Nova Ploetsk, protected from the crushing pressure outside only by the flimsy-seeming walls of my transport cylinder.
Now, as to the rest—
Medea might have been the Queen-in-Manifold, present in many instantiations to execute the activities of the government, but she was not, I subsequently learned, ubiquitous. Without my knowledge, I had become a person of some notoriety throughout Dojima System, at least in certain circles: My name was on a watch list. Rudi, to his discredit, had not anticipated this. So, while he and his entourage passed through the Customs and Immigration chambers under assumed identities (aided by the discreet crossing of certain palms with cash), it had not occurred to him to disguise my arrival. I was noticed and diverted toward the tender mercies of the police, but they had already slithered through Medea’s grip before they noticed my absence.
I imagine the subsequent conversation went something like this:
Rudi: “Where’s Krina? Marigold, I thought you were keeping an eye on her.”
Marigold: “We exited the capsule together. She was right behind me.”
Rudi: “Behind you? When you went through customs?”
Marigold: “I’m not stupid, I saw her enter a carrier pod right before I—”
Dent: “Did she make a run for it? Or was she snatched?”
Rudi: “Doesn’t matter, we have to get clear before whoever she’s with makes a play for us. Driver, I say, driver! Take us to the Hotel du Lac, right away . . .” Sotto voce: “We will discuss our response once we have switched vessels. Do not say anything until I tell you to.” Even more quietly: “The game’s afoot.”
INTERLUDE
A Thousand Years Ago
The dying man drifts from the rippling silver mirror of the sky.
He is almost completely dead, spine severed and circulatory system ruptured by a harpoon that sliced through the major vessels of his neck and lodged point first in the base of his skull. The gash in his throat streams a trail of emerald green circulatory fluid; meanwhile, the uncoordinated twitching of muscle groups in his arms and lower limbs hints at the coming struggle of individual mechanocytes to survive the demise of the collective. The weapon that killed him still quivers as it tries to free its blade from the cranial prison it so enthusiastically embedded itself in. But it has fulfilled its murderous impulse too welclass="underline" The tightly meshed tensegrity structures of his armored brainpan grip its barbs tightly, and the weight of his dead body drags it down. Killer and victim have embarked on their final journey together, drifting down into the darkness.
They will fall together for a very long time.
At first, the ceiling of the world seems close enough to touch: Waves and rippling interference patterns march across it, and small dark islands clump and drift just beneath the surface, casting long shadows into the depths. The ruby glare of the sun pierces the sky directly overhead. Clouds of semitransparent sunfeeders drift in the brightness, numerous beyond counting, hazing the water and casting dappled shadows across the silvery motiles that dart and nibble at them from below. In the pearly distance, leviathan grasses float like tenuous auroral continents, soaking up the solar largesse.
The corpse and its killer drift down through the sunlit upper waters of the world. His humanoid body plan puts a brake on their downward progress: His terminal velocity is less than five kilometers per hour, little more than a fast walking pace on land, and thanks to his residual buoyancy, at first he falls at barely a tenth that speed.
Fifty meters below the surface, the entangled bodies pass close to an eel-shaped motile. It sniffs the bloody trail, then closes in, clamps three sets of jaws to the wound in the body’s throat. It sucks greedily for a while, slowing the body’s fall as it extracts what’s left of his pressure circuit, but fifty meters farther down, the increasing pressure forces it to let go. Falling faster, the exsanguinated body leaves the sunlit upper reaches behind.
It is colder beneath the thermocline, and the pressure rises steadily the farther the corpse falls from the roof of the world. The red light of noon fades to the dim purple glow of the disphotic zone. In the direction of travel, there is no light to speak of: just a darkness as palpable as a black hole’s event horizon. The waters of this zone are a-chirp with the hunting clicks and shrills of saprophytic feeders: The overlapping thermoclines above reflect tight-beam upward-directed sonar pulses back down, illuminating prey and fragments of falling food without revealing the location of the scavengers to their toothy, bug-eyed predators.