He still worried about how the Unisphere was compromised. Although he was convinced he was beyond anybody's reach now.
Shotgunning is probably the right thing. He just hated drawing so much attention to himself. Although, if he was truly leaving, it didn't matter.
Trisha let out a startled gasp. Troblum glanced down as Catriona sniggered. Catriona could be impressively kinky at times, and she'd already got Trisha's little blue T-shirt off. That wasn't what had astounded Trisha this time. She was sitting up frowning as the green OCtattoos on her face began to glow brighter than ever. Then the seething pattern began to slip down her neck to flow across her chest and along her arms. She held them up in front of her as Catriona backed off fast.
'What's happening? Troblum asked the smartcore.
'Contaminated communication link, it replied, which fired Troblum right out of his fatigue lethargy.
'Can you counter it?
'I can close the link. The source is within the Unisphere which I do not have the ability to deal with.
'Is it trying to contaminate you?
'No.
'If you detect any such attempt, cut the link immediately.
Trisha was now a three dimensional human silhouette of writhing green curlicues. Her features vanished, and the shape shrank rapidly. New colours bled in. Tangerine and turquoise lines wove their way through the thicket of green until there simply was no more green. Hanging in the air directly ahead of a badly startled Troblum, tangerine and turquoise sine waves rushed back towards their vanishing point.
It triggered a deep memory, not in a storage lacuna but a perfectly natural recollection. 'I know you, he said.
'Congratulations, the eternity pattern said. 'You really do know your history.
'The Sentient Intelligence, you abandoned us a long time ago.
'I didn't leave, I was declared persona non grata by ANA.
'Oh. Everyone thought you'd gone post-physical. Troblum could barely believe he was talking to the SI. It had grown out of the huge arrays that the first CST commercial wormholes had used. Their programs had been so complex, with so many genetic algorithms they had become self-aware. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie who owned the arrays agreed to provide the newly evolved batch of Sentient Intelligences an independent super-array to operate in. The deal was for the SI to then write stable software which would operate the wormhole generators without any further evolution. The deal also included an independent planet where the super-array would be sited.
A lot of people in the Commonwealth questioned if the SI counted as truly alive, an old argument that never had an answer. But the SI and the Commonwealth had got along side by side without any problem until ANA came on line. ANA claimed the SI did not qualify as a genuine living entity, and that it was interfering in Commonwealth political affairs; a suspicion which had been given a lot of credence by ANA's exposure of various SI undercover scouts in strategic positions. Contact had been abandoned or cut off depending on which account and conspiracy theory you accessed.
'No, the SI said. 'I am still resolutely physical. The systems I operate within would have to be transformed for me to evolve-further.
'Can't you do that?
'Yes. Are you familiar with the phrase: for everything a season?
'Uh, not really. But I understand it.
'For the moment I remain content with my current existence. However, like several species, I am concerned by your proposed Pilgrimage into the Void. That threat is enough to upset the status quo between myself and ANA.
'Not my Pilgrimage.
'You work for the Faction which engineered it.
So how the crap did it know that? 'How removed are you from our affairs?
'Not as much as ANA would like, nowhere near as much as conspiracy theorists would like to believe. As always, I observe and interpret. That is my function.
'You're still in the Unisphere, then?
'I have some monitoring capacity left. After all, I predate ANA by several centuries. I am not easy to purge from existing systems.
'So what do you want with me?
'There is a lot of attention focused on you. You wish to contact Paula Myo, your u-shadow has been trying to locate her. Why?
Troblum wasn't going to answer that. He didn't even have proof that he was talking to the SI. It would be easy enough for the Accelerators to pull a stunt like this; and they knew of his interest in the Starflyer War. 'I have information for her.
'Is it relevant to the current situation?
'Yes.
'Will it prevent the Pilgrimage?
'It will weaken the Accelerator Faction. I don't know how badly that will affect the Pilgrimage.
'Very well, I will establish a secure link for you.
'No! I want to see her in person.
'Why?
'I don't trust you.
'How very unoriginal.
'That's the way it is.
'She is en route to an unregistered star system.
'Why, what's there?
'If you are still working for the Accelerators that information will help them.
'I'm not. And you contacted me.
'I did.
'I'm not going to some unregistered system. I don't know what's there.
'Very well. What about Oscar Monroe?
'What about him?
'You tried to contact him on Orakum.
'Yes, I trust Oscar.
'Smart choice. He is on Viotia, in Colwyn City.
'Okay. Thank you.
'Now you know that will you seek him out?
'I'll think about it.
At three hundred and thirty five years old, it always galled Digby that his great-grandmother still thought he wasn't experienced enough to do his job. He suspected it would always be the case. Nonetheless, as soon as he received the shadow assignment he vowed it would be the epitome of professionalism.
His starship, the Columbia505, helped; a brand-new ultradrive designed and built by ANA in its secure replicator station on Io. Its systems were the most sophisticated in the Commonwealth. Tracking Chatfield's stealthed hyperdrive ship as it left Ganthia was no problem at all.
Digby followed Chatfield out to an uninhabited star system just inside the loose boundary that defined the Greater Intersolar Commonwealth. A small star whose mildly variable spectrum drifted between orange and yellow in two-hundred-year-cycles. It had been examined by CST's Exploratory division nine hundred years ago, a short visit which soon established there were no H-congruent planets. According to the Columbia505's smart-core there were no subsequent follow up ventures.
Chatfield's ship rendezvoused with the Trojan point of the biggest gas giant. The only object of any note there was a small ice moon which had been trapped by the gravitational null-zone over a billion years ago. With a diameter of just over two thousand kilometres, its grizzled surface glinted softly in the weak copper sunlight.
The first thing Digby found as he followed Chatfield in was the elaborate sensor network scanning space and hyperspace out to a hundred million kilometres from the ice moon. His stealth systems allowed him to get within twenty-thousand kilometres before he halted his approach. The on-board sensors had just managed to pick up eleven vehicles of some kind orbiting the moon. They were heavily stealthed, and his ship's registry didn't have anything like them on file. Digby couldn't get any kind of image using passive sensors from such a distance, so the Columbia505 released a flock of miniature drones on a flyby trajectory. The only flaw with that was the flight time. To avoid suspicion about their trajectory and velocity the pebble-sized drones would take nine hours to reach the ice moon and skim past its unknown sentries.