It had been so very long since she had seen a Pilot.
Pilot deVries stood in formal jumpsuit, black edged with gold, with a knee-length black cape that was more than a simple garment: it could if necessary become shield or weapon. For an offworlder, he made a decent job of the nuances in bowing to the correct angle, with leg turned correctly, as Lord Avernon entered the Great Hall. The Lady, from her ornate chair, smiled approval.
‘My Lord,’ said deVries. ‘Lady Suzanne was just pointing out your grandfather’s work.’ He gestured at the holoscape showing in an alcove. ‘A deliberate unbalancing of the golden ratio to produce a visual momentum, combined with a fractal dimension of 1.66 throughout.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ answered Avernon. ‘My Lady is privy to more than art appreciation.’
It was an indirect way of indicating he could discuss business.
‘Pardon my intrusion,’ said deVries. ‘I gather that you lodged interest in commissioning a voyage, before the Lords Major at the Regional Convocation.’
The high point of that Convocation, some fifty days past, had been the upraise of a servitrix to noble status, by virtue of her enormous self-discipline in using every educational opportunity available, and her superlative work. Now she ruled her own demesne in Penrhyl Provincia: a shining example for every commoner, except that upraise occurred maybe twice a century, no more.
But most of the actual work done during Convocation had been the usual – trade negotiations, strengthening or reshaping political alliances – during which Avernon had indeed lodged a discreet request.
‘Not exactly a mercantile voyage.’ Avernon’s tone lightened. ‘More along the lines of logosophical investigation.’
‘My Lord?’
‘I’m looking for a sequence of short flights in ever-wider orbits of Nulapeiron. Additional data to build on spacedrone investigations we’ve already carried out.’
(In Kenna’s judgement, the we in that sentence was unjustified.)
‘The details are in here,’ added Avernon, holding out an infocrystal. ‘Will you be able to carry out the work?’
Pilot deVries took the crystal and scanned it with his tu-ring. ‘Absolutely, my Lord.’
‘Then we’re done here.’
‘My Lord.’
As deVries bowed out, his obsidian eyes turned to an ordinary looking patch of wall that formed one of Kenna’s thousands of covert optical sensors, and then he winked. Inside herself, Kenna laughed: Pilots were as sharp as ever.
In contrast, Avernon had forgotten or never bothered to realise that Kenna’s distributed presence reached this far.
‘Pilots.’ Lady Suzanne continued to stare at the grand door-way after deVries had exited. ‘Are we still so dependent on them?’
‘Not so much,’ said Avernon. ‘But what would it be like, my Lady, if you could perceive events that were to come? How much power would accrue from such an ability?’
‘None at all, my Lord, if what you saw was your own ruin.’
Avernon blinked several times.
(And again, Kenna was amused.)
‘I’d be interested,’ Lady Suzanne added, ‘in how one might engineer such a thing.’
‘It’s, um, early stages yet.’
‘And when do you foresee those ideas maturing?’ Then she laughed and placed her palm on Avernon’s arm. ‘Forgive me, love. I’m only teasing.’
‘Yes, well. Of course you are.’
Then Lady Suzanne signalled for the palace steward to attend, and summoned up holo lattices of accounting data – Palace Avernon’s upkeep was a complex matter. As her steward stood before her in his white-and-platinum livery, cane of office in hand, he responded to his Lady’s questions and gave occasional recommendations, which she accepted. Lord Avernon gave the occasional nod, his attention elsewhere.
(Kenna followed his example, searching the Palace systems for deVries.)
In realtime she saw this: Pilot deVries stopping in a deserted corridor, kneeling on the floor, and keeping that pose as the quickstone whirled and he sank downwards, and out of sight.
*
The person that deVries met four levels down – still within the Primum Stratum, a lower level of the Palace complex – was a thin, hard-faced woman in the clothing of a drudge: an epsilon-level servitrix at best. Except that to Kenna’s perceptions, the smartlenses were obvious, and so was the conclusion: the woman was a Pilot living in deep cover.
‘I’m Linda Gunnarrson,’ said the servitrix.
‘Caleb deVries.’
‘Let’s get my standard report out of the way.’
There was a flash of light from deVries’s tu-ring.
‘Got that,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a good job, clearly. Any concerns?’
‘I don’t need the case officer pep-talk, deVries. All I want is—’
‘Working off the sins of the father?’
Gunnarsson flinched. ‘So you did your homework. But my father wasn’t— You think I’m after redemption?’
‘I’ve done the time-distorting hellflight bit myself. But look . . . My sister died on Göthewelt. I don’t blame your father for the Zajinet raid, and I sure as hell don’t blame you.’
‘Damn you.’ Smartlenses do not prevent tears. ‘All right.’ She blew out a breath. ‘Perhaps I needed that.’
‘And perhaps I can’t imagine the stress you live under, in this place.’
Gunnarsson reached inside her plain garments and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle. She folded back one corner, revealing a crystalline object. It looked like a spearhead. ‘It came from an archive chamber,’ she said. ‘Part of the Palace museum. The stores are filled with old stuff.’
‘Surely they check inventory.’
‘I replaced it with a quartz replica. Here.’
As he took it from her, deVries’s eyes widened.
‘Right,’ said Gunnarsson. ‘Hard not to feel it.’
‘But it’s a forgotten relic? Where the hell could it have come from?’
‘That’s going to take Labyrinth’s finest to work out. If they manage it.’
(Kenna cursed. Whatever she might have been once, her sensors picked up nothing untoward now.)
Then deVries switched his attention back to Gunnarsson’s welfare, and she unburdened herself by sharing stressful details of her life, but refusing deVries’s offer, clearly genuine, to extract her from Nulapeiron. ‘There’s opposition to the status quo,’ she said. ‘I’ve gathered some of them together and the group has a name, Grey Shadows, with an elected leader. Not me.’
Recruiting assets, running networks. Kenna remembered how that went.
Meeting over, deVries ascended to the part of the Palace he was staying in for the duration of his contract. The start date was immediate. Looking exhausted, his sleep-wake cycle clearly out of synch with this place, deVries performed a light stretching routine, ate a frugal meal delivered by a servitor, and went to bed, leaving his cloth-wrapped bundle on the bedside table.
His tu-ring nicely subverted the bedchamber’s inbuilt security system, so that it kept watch over him more than on him. But his espionageware remained unaware of Kenna’s system intrusion, subtle and deep: she had had five decades to work on it.
Motile fibres extruded from the wall.
For seconds, they sniffed the air for smartmiasmas, sensing nothing. Then they stretched out, growing microscopically fine as they extended all the way to the bedside table, to the cloth-wrapped package on it, and finally through the fabric.
It took an hour, while deVries slept but could have awoken at any time, to determine the shearing angle and the force required, and projection angles for collimated anti-sound to counter the tiny snap accompanying the act itself: the cutting off of a tiny sample.
Slowly, slowly, the motile fibres drew the minute crystal splinter back to the ornate wall; then the splinter was inside the quickstone, and the first stage of the operation was complete.
By capillary action, the crystal splinter moved within the Palace walls, with speed no longer an issue, only the need to keep it undetected as it travelled to the laboratory chambers, close to Kenna’s main components that remained, static as ever, in place.