“Tell me when your predicted battery life drops below one day. Otherwise, give me an optical guide point, stop chattering, and start spooking the parasites.”
A faint green beam appeared, a scattering of laser light leading down into the darkness. I kicked gently, then eased myself into a slow rhythm as I followed it toward the vanishing point. Ana had obviously gone to some considerable lengths to set this meeting up in a manner that would ensure nobody on the surface had any idea that she was still alive, much less where she was. Best not to disappoint, then.
But I intended to have some very pointed words with my sister, when I found her.
Marigold turned, slowly, eyes scanning as she took in the room. She took two steps sideways, then performed another slow twirl.
“Well?” Rudi demanded.
“Move.” Her thumb jerked sideways. The count moved as she took two steps sideways, twirled, and scanned again. “I’m checking.”
“This all adds up,” Dent grumbled from the other side of the room. His nose twitched as he rapidly flipped through the pages of the ledger. “There are no keys to the items in this table, but there are currency conversions here, betwixt prices in Argos dollars and the reales of the Windward Republic. If one assumes the numbers for each type of item are unenciphered, then one may attempt to date the transactions by referring to public records of exchange-rate fluctuations—”
Another twirl and scan. “I have it,” Marigold announced. She referred to the forensic imago that she had so painstakingly constructed in the Cartesian theater of her mind’s eye: “Two individuals present, no violence, but brief physical contact. Then one collapses. A load-bearing truck enters via a service hatch.” She gestured at the wall. “Doubtless very carefully scripted.”
“How long ago?” Rudi bared his teeth impatiently.
“Fifty to seventy hours.”
“Bankrupt her!” Rudi swore, blazingly angry, his focus directed inward. “Why couldn’t she just have— Forget that. They could have taken her anywhere by now.”
“I doubt it.” Dent, half-blind to social cues, offered his opinion unprompted. “The options are limited. She may have left via ballistic ascent, in which case a look at the passenger manifests of”—Rudi, screening him out, bent to examine the service hatch—“any logged departure will reveal her proximate destination. Otherwise, she is either dead and disposed of, still present in or under Argos, or departed via subsurface excursion. As hydrodynamic drag increases with the cube of velocity, we can infer an upper limit of the distance she may have covered, unless her abductors used a propulsion technology energetic enough to attract attention—”
Rudi straightened up. “That’s not your problem. Your assignment is to estimate a date range for the transactions in that ledger, and notify me immediately when you have it.” He turned to Marigold. “We now have two missing bodies of the Alizond lineage. The threat surface has just doubled.” Although he almost quivered with suppressed rage, Rudi’s movements and diction remained precise, overcontrolled. “I want to know who our adversary is.”
At precisely that moment, his earring vibrated for attention. “Yes?”
“You asked to be alerted when the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease arrived, sir?” The duty officer aboard Branch Office Five Zero prompted him. “We have just confirmed that it is maneuvering for a docking port at Highport. And—”
“Good—wait. What else?”
“They have publicly posted a tender for a ballistic descent capsule from Highport to Nova Ploetsk, departure within the next hour, any reasonable price. Or unreasonable. I placed a countertender, just to see how high they were going, sir: They were still throwing silly money at it when I dropped out of the bidding.”
“Oh, well played, Joris.” Rudi clattered his jaws. “When are they due down here?”
“You have at least two hours, sir. Even if the descender they’re hiring docks directly and does a fast ballistic drop, they can’t punch through atmosphere before that.”
“Good. Keep me alerted of any changes.” Rudi preened, then looked pointedly at his team until even Dent noticed. “Dent, you will apply yourself as directed to that ledger. My guess is the transactions will turn out to be somewhere between two days and two years old, but I may be wildly wrong. As soon as you know, you are to inform me. Mari, you and I are going to the arrivals hall. I believe we have something to discuss with Her Grace.”
“You’re expecting Lady Cybelle?” Marigold asked flatly. “Do you anticipate trouble?”
“I absolutely anticipate trouble. The only question is whether it will be aimed at us or at parties as yet unidentified . . .”
Krina Descending
I swam for an interminable time, following my guide box’s dim green beam down into the turbid depths.
I had no idea where I was. Aside from the beam, I was surrounded by darkness in every direction. My inertial sense told me that I was descending at an angle, moving laterally by approximately five kilometers and descending a little less than half that distance in each hour. But I didn’t feel it. My proprioceptive sense was curiously numbed by whatever arcane upgrade my abductors had applied to my techné in the midst of their more obvious surgical modifications: I couldn’t feel the pressure mounting. And there were no other light sources. Here in the anoxic depths, the water flowing through my throat and gills tasted sulfurous and bitter. Again, the subtleties of the depth-survival pack made themselves known to me only by implication: I was still respiring, somehow metabolizing the hydrogen sulfide dissolved in these waters instead of the more familiar oxygen of the sunlit surface. But I was now a creature of the deep, every cavity of my body pressurized and perfused, the enzymes and mechazymes within my ’cytes warped and modified to function under many kilometers of hydrostatic pressure—conditions under which even molecular machinery may bend and twist into dysfunctional wreckage if not carefully tweaked.
I was effectively blind but for the navigation light: However, I was far from deaf, and there was a lot to hear. Burblings, rapid ticking noises, a buzzing whine, bumps in the dark: The sea was full of sounds. Some of them I could feel trailing ghostly fingers along my spine and up and down a pair of strangely sensitive lines on the flanks of the bulky, meaty travesty that had replaced my fused legs—I refused to dignify it by calling it a tail—but in any event, I could sense roughly which direction most of the noises came from, and somehow knew that most of them were distant. (It was the noise sources I couldn’t locate that worried me.)
Hours passed. Tired and now feeling the onset of hunger, I continued to push on through the darkness. Presently, I heard a new noise, a quiet metallic ping: It repeated every few seconds, directly ahead of me. “Attention, Krina,” said the guide box: “Waypoint buoy in range.”
“Really?” I stroked onward, following the dim green beam of light. The pinging loudened. Before long, I saw the faintest outline of something silhouetted against the guide light. “What do I do now?”
“Krina, proceed to the waypoint buoy and retrieve the next guidance capsule. There is a rest platform with feedstock and an inductive power feed: You should rest for at least three hours before continuing. This guide is now expended. Please drop this guidance capsule—”
“You want me to drop you?”
“Please drop this—”
I could see the waypoint buoy now: A tiny red beacon flashed regularly beneath it, effectively invisible from above. I unpeeled the guidance capsule from my flank and let it fall, experiencing a flash of mild pleasure as I did so. It began to sink, slowly drifting down toward the crushing depths below. A few seconds later, the guide beam winked out. Minutes later I heard a faint pop, then it fell silent.