You will therefore be unsurprised to know that Sondra’s arrival was accompanied by all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of a visit by a head of state, aggravated further by the beacon station’s status as home of the Dojima SystemBank cartel and the assorted bourses, exchanges, credit unions, mutual societies, merchant bankers, and rent-seeking slime who made their margin by inserting themselves as close to the beating heart of interstellar commerce as they could get.
The arrival of her bodyguards and security staff and concierge and managers rapidly came to the attention of the news and gossip channels. But the ramping up of rumor only truly got under way when the aforementioned concierge and, latterly, two private secretaries, signed a lease on the headquarters of the temporarily-liquidity-embarrassed First Mutual (L6) Shiny Society. (The shiners had invested unwisely in the now-stalled project to build a space elevator down to the surface waters of Shin-Tethys. Over budget and behind schedule (as could have been predicted of a speculative civil-engineering project that combined all the most irritating characteristics of bridge-building and railroad laying), the beanstalk had sucked their pension fund dry, belched, and sucked harder: Leasing their headquarters to a visiting dignitary would help keep them going a little longer.)
The gossip gathered pace faster when two auditors from SystemBank New California arrived, to assume control of the presidential purse: The rumors then rose to fever pitch when a small human-resources team arrived and began hiring staff. By now a hive of activity was buzzing, complete with rumors that Sondra herself was downloading, or a body double, or perhaps Sondra and three body doubles. Whatever the truth, a team of security guards took up a discreet watch position at the arrivals hall, with the permission (however obtained) of Taj Beacon’s Board of Control. Finally, late one nightshift evening, a small army sortied from the former First Mutual and took over a private suite adjacent to the arrivals hall. Doors opened. Discreet packages were ferried into the decanting room. An immigration officer was challenged peremptorily and searched before being admitted to ask the usual questions of a new arrival, after which he left, hurriedly.
Finally, the door opened. Outside, in the plaza fronting the beacon terminal’s main entrance, a small crowd of rumormongers and gawkers and tourists and the pickpockets who preyed upon them had formed; but they were to be disappointed, for a solid phalanx of bodyguards emerged, clustered tightly around an unseen superior. Their eyes and other senses pointed outward, aggressively probing the onlookers for threats. A boringly discreet limousine drew up, opened leaf-shaped body panels and unrolled a red velvet tongue of carpet toward the feet of the cortège. It swallowed the core of the group as more guards held the onlookers at bay: Then reextended its legs and loped away toward a cargo duct.
“Are we clear yet?” asked one of the unsleeping, ever-vigilant security analysts.
“Looks like it.” A pause from the guard monitoring the limo’s telemetry: “Yes, it appears to have left the zone without picking up any bugs. We can go now.”
“My lady . . .” The security analyst turned to the private secretary. She was not unlike me in appearance: thin, with pale, colorless eyes, and a skin tone of turquoise blue. Her hair was as black as the ancient formal suit of her office.
She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Jean?”
“The public have now been made fully aware that Sondra Alizond-1 has arrived at Taj Beacon, without incident.”
“Good.” The private secretary nodded. Finally, after twenty days of frantic activity, her lips relaxed into an approximation of humor. “Then our work here is done and it’s time to upload to our next destination.”
“The dark coordinates?” The security analyst had been asked to do many things in the service of his employer, but uploading into a beacon station’s outbound channel over a laser pointed at empty space, well away from any settled star system, was one of the most unsettling experiences he had ever had.
“Yes. Except they won’t be dark when we arrive.” She turned and headed toward the corridor leading to the departures terminaclass="underline" The two remaining bodyguards hurried to place themselves ahead of her. “It’s time to activate Plan B. It’s a shame the zombie failed: This would all have been so much easier to deal with if there were only one meddling daughter to silence.”
“You are probably wondering why I sought this audience, Your Highness,” said the priestess to the Queen. (An onlooker might have thought them sisters, from their matching expressions of hauteur.) She stood before the royal pool, flanked by a pair of robed and space-suited deacons, with such poise that their roles might have been reversed, visiting supplicant and entrenched monarch.
“Wondering? No, not really.” Medea’s lower lip curled. “You’re chasing the same prize as everybody else, that much is perfectly clear. Whether on your own behalf or that of your Church is unimportant”—she ignored the barely suppressed bristling of the priestess’s retinue—“beside the fact that you entered my kingdom harboring an assassin. Who, to add insult to injury, successfully slew one of us. That is not a cause of wonderment, Your Grace, but of rage and the desire to make an example of the miscreant lest others follow their lead. Uneasy lies the head, and so on. You have cost us time, you have cost us money—but those are insignificant compared to the fact that you have cost us security. So, if you still wish to do so, say whatever you think will save your sorry mission.”
The priestess showed no sign of alarm at this sinister intimation even though she could hardly be unaware of the barbed fence separating her party from the royal pool, or of the palace guards stationed on every side. Or indeed of the naked and bound body of the assassin, fastened by barbed staples to the stainless-steel cross behind the queen, still twitching from time to time. While the Church had relatively few followers on Shin-Tethys, it was not without leverage on the larger stage of interstellar relations: While Medea might fulminate and threaten, the likelihood of her making good such threats had to be balanced against her sure knowledge of the trade sanctions that would follow.
“I was sent here to bring the blessing and the light of the Fragile to this world,” Cybelle said evenly. “This I have done, albeit no less imperfectly than is usually the case with such missions. I was also charged by His Holiness the Bishop Mallory to bring surcease to the soul of one of our elder parishioners and preachers, the Reverend Gould.” She gestured minutely at the body to her left. Gould slouched in the grip of his high-gee exoskeleton, mumbling prayers in a quiet monotone: He showed no sign of awareness of his surroundings. “His former name I shall not trouble you with: His sins are washed away in the service of the holy double helix. But in his previous life, he was one of the perpetrators of a crime, and as the beneficiary of an ill-gotten fortune, he expected to receive a substantial payoff. That payoff . . . suffice to say it never arrived. The most perplexing aspect of the affair, however, is that it was supposed to be received by way of a slow money transfer; that was to originate with an individual who at that time was a senior trustee of SystemBank Hector. You might have heard of her? For her name is Sondra Alizond-1.”