Medea had indeed heard of her: Her involuntary tail spasm slapped the surface of the royal pool like a depth charge, sending a wave rippling over the edge and across the mosaic floor of the audience chamber. “You can substantiate this?” she demanded, leaning forward eagerly.
“Of course.” Cybelle shook the leash she held in one hand, taking in the slack: Father Gould took a shuffling step closer to her. “My brother in Fragile flesh here took a vow of poverty and assigned his entire worldly estate to Mother Church. I have the notarized statement he made to prove it. The bulk of his estate is in the form of a slow money instrument that was sent on his behalf from SystemBank Hector to his account at SystemBank Dojima—but committal of which was not completed, for Trask, the banker acting as proxy for my humble brother, disappeared.” Cybelle met the monarch’s disbelieving stare. “And now we know what this is about, do we not? The two halves of the missing transaction have been located by searchers in different systems. The Alizond sisters are evidently working against the wishes of their proprietor. All it would take would be for the body or soul chips of Ivar Trask-1 to be discovered, and . . .” Her shrug was eloquent. “Do you know where Trask disappeared, Your Majesty?”
“You are going to tell us that your presence here in this system at this time is not a coincidence,” stated the Queen. “And then you are going to add that your church believes in paying its dues for the services of the temporal authority, are you not?” She held Cybelle’s gaze, unblinking. “Fifty percent. Take it or leave it.”
“You pose an interesting conundrum for Mother Church, Your Majesty. Does your government provide anything of use in return for this windfall tax?”
“Yes, we believe it does.” Medea looked aside for a moment, nodded at a courtier. “Let us see. You have a claim to the instrument, and a vehicle in orbit. We have a kingdom that just happens to be located above the Antares Deep, in which you expect to find our miscreants, and a judicial system recognized throughout Dojima System. And the miscreants in question, in turn, came here because Ivar Trask-1’s last recorded sighting was in the Ballard Republic, which at that time was located over the Antares Deep. One may surmise that one of the victims of this, ah, conspiracy caught up with him. Or that he was up to something else and paid the price for it. (Once a criminal, always a criminal.) But in any case, it left your priest here high and dry, but with a claim to the asset. And you would now like the Kingdom of Argos to assist you in retrieving the funds from their current illegal custodians, even if it means paying a windfall tax on the lump. How much are you expecting?”
“Five million eight hundred thousand slow. Give or take a few thousand.”
Medea’s cheeks dimpled. “We believe the state’s share of that sum will cover a lot of services. Now, if you are to work together with us, we believe we should be fully aware of the depths we are swimming in. So perhaps you could start by telling us all you know about the real Krina Alizond-114 . . . ?”
Lest you question my sanity in trusting that flying fox Rudi, I should say in my defense that he seemed like the least bad option on the unappetizing menu available to me at the time.
Consider my circumstances:
Ana could look after herself, I think. Certainly with a squid-nation to back her up, and her share of our mutual treasure trove, it would be possible for her to vanish into the depths in such a manner that it would be very hard to find her. And if she made good with her avowed intent of merging her wealth with that of her chosen people, there could be no motive for anyone (except, perhaps, Sondra at her most dementedly vengeful) to go after her.
Andrea was out of play. So: Either dead or safe, it made no difference to me for the immediate future.
I, however, had just inherited nearly two million slow dollars. Not only that, but I had inherited the soul chips of a long-dead and suspiciously missing banker who had clearly been implicated in the money-laundering chain handling the proceeds of the Atlantis scam. The money in my second soul-chip socket was evidence of the scale of the crime. After nearly two thousand years, it was vanishingly unlikely that the original victims would be in a position to come after me. However, the surviving members of the criminal network were another matter altogether—meaning: Sondra, my own lineage mater and former slave owner. Moreover, that kind of quantity of money is a magnet for muggers on all scales, from street-corner thugs to heads of state. Two million slow is approximately equal in scale to the value of the entire infrastructure of a medium-sized nation on Shin-Tethys. It’s enough to buy you a founder’s share of a colony starship—a very large founder’s share at that: sufficient to guarantee a place on the board, if not the presidency.
The correct place for such sums is in a vault, under guard, with access controlled by barriers of protocol and process, for use as a capital reserve held against interest-bearing loans. But right now it was clogging up my soul chip. And to make matters worse, it appeared that everybody knew about it. Or if they didn’t know, they suspected. The crew of the Chapel of our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease had been in the game, directly or indirectly; perhaps the treasurers of the Mother Church itself had gotten wind of the scam over the centuries and sent the chapel to sniff around Dojima System. Rudi, for his part, had assured himself that I didn’t actually have it but that I was in play—at which point he had pivoted briskly from piratical captor to friendly life-coach. One could reasonably assume that Queen Medea had her suspicions, as—for all I knew—so did every half-assed tribe of crooked accountants within a dozen light-years.
Finally, the presence of my stalker and Andrea’s increasingly frightened messages told me that Sondra was at the very least aware that our conspiracy existed and was reaching out after me. How desperate she might become was an open question. If it were merely the loss of nearly six million slow dollars from the Atlantis fund that troubled her, then she might content herself by sending a stream of assassins and slandering me from one end of settled space to the other. But if she felt herself to be vulnerable—either from conspirators incensed by her loss of their investment or from fear of retribution by victims of the scam (after all, some of those victims had been insane enough to launch an interstellar military-industrial complex in response), then she might decide to dedicate herself to making my life as short and miserable as possible.
It was enough to set my skin a-crawl, with the sensation of a target tattooed between by shoulder blades. Which is why I turned to Rudi. Rudi’s cupidity was transparently obvious, but as a banker and underwriter, I felt I could understand his motivation. And more to the point, his institutional framework would prevent him from simply scrambling my soul sockets and stealing my assets. It would be bad for future business to sacrifice investor goodwill so crudely. Why bother, when he could offer me a deposit account, then nickel-and-dime me to death with bank charges?
The best kind of deposit account for slow money is in another star system. My escape plan was becoming clear: Firstly, retain the services of a bank-affiliated privateer. Secondly, deposit my wealth with his parent institution—taking, in exchange, sufficient shares in that august body to guarantee both oversight and a modicum of transparency. Given the amount of money in play, a nonexecutive directorship was not out of the question. Thirdly, I intended to arrange for my own transfer out-system to a destination where Sondra couldn’t get her claws into me. And after that, I could think about building a new life for myself.