“I need access to some financial documents, the old AquaState accounts. As you’re the chairman of the parent company, it’s simpler if I just ask you to release them to me rather than go through the courts.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t quite what he’d expected. “Do you mind if I ask why? What are you looking for?”
“I can’t discuss a case in progress. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes. I’m very familiar with government procedures, especially today.”
“That sounds unfortunate.”
He grinned in his winning way. “Commercial confidentiality, I can’t tell you about it.”
“But can you release the files?”
“Yes, of course. Would I be right in assuming you’re making progress, then?”
“Let’s say, you’re on the right track with that assessment.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” He told his e-butler to release the relevant files to her. “May I ask if you’re currently seeing anyone, Paula?”
“I don’t believe that’s connected to the inquiry in any fashion.”
“It’s not, but it was a very sincere question.”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard it enough times. But I want to be honest with you from the beginning; if you’re not involved with anyone then I would very much enjoy taking you to dinner one evening as soon as possible.”
The screen showed her head tilting ever so slightly to one side, mimicking an almost avian curiosity. “That’s most flattering, Morton, but right now I’m not able to say yes. I hope you’re not offended.”
“Certainly not, after all, you didn’t say never. I believe I’ll ask you again once this case is over.”
“As you wish.”
“Thank you, Chief Investigator. And I hope the files are useful.”
“They will be.”
The call ended. Morton wriggled down into the couch, looking at the blank screen where he could still see her elegant, composed face. Somehow, the day didn’t seem such a total loss after all.
…
It was the eighth day after he entered the forest that Ozzie had to delve into his pack for warmer clothes. They’d seen their last deciduous tree a couple of days ago. Now the path led through tall solemn alpine giants with dark trunks of stone-hard bark. Their waxy leaves were long and spindly, a fraction thicker than terrestrial pine needles, with colors shading from dark green to a maroon that was almost black. A thin tough layer of grass grew underneath them, and that was patchy around the trunks themselves where the acidic leaves had fallen. Here the chilly air meant it took a long time for them to decay into the kind of rich loam to be found elsewhere in the forest, and the air was heavy with their citric scent.
Sunlight seemed to have deserted Ozzie and Orion; the patches of sky they did glimpse were uniformly gray as low clouds bunched together in an unbroken veil. Patches of mist squatted across the path, reaching far above the treetops, some of them taking hours to trek through. Each one seemed progressively larger and colder than the last.
It was after riding through one for over three hours with no respite that Ozzie decided enough was enough. His thin leather jacket was dripping with moisture that was cold enough to be ice, and it hadn’t shielded his checked shirt at all. He dismounted and hurriedly stripped off the soaked shirt; changing into a dry one, shivering strongly as he did. Before the mist had time to sink into the fresh cotton he pulled out a slate-gray woolen fleece with an outer waterproof membrane. Much to Orion’s amusement he wore soft leather chaps on his legs to cover his cord trousers. Once he’d finally slicked down his rebellious hair, he crammed on a black bobble hat. Only then, when he’d dressed and remounted, did he put on his doeskin-palm gloves.
Almost immediately, he was too hot. It made a nice change. That morning, his own shivering had woken him as the dawn frost settled over his sleeping bag. A veteran of many long treks on foot and horseback, he favored modern semiorganic clothes that could heat, cool, and dry the wearer as required. They were inoperative on any Silfen world, of course, but he was pleased enough by how the old simple fabrics were performing.
Orion, who had brought little in the way of rough-weather gear, he loaned a baggy sweatshirt to wear under his thin waterproof cagoule, and a spare pair of oilskin trousers, which were perfect over trousers for his skinny legs.
The two of them urged the animals onward. Ozzie had no idea where they were anymore. With the clouds hiding the sun and the stars there was no way he could check their direction. They’d taken so many forks, traveled around so many half-day curves that he’d completely lost track of their progress. For all he knew, Lyddington could easily just be a couple of miles ahead, though he didn’t really think it was, not with this weather and the tall morose trees.
“You ever been this far in before?” Ozzie asked.
“No.” Orion wasn’t talking so much now. This wasn’t the airy summertime forest he was used to; the gloom and cold were pulling his mood down. It had been three days since they’d last caught sight of any Silfen, a group heading away from them on a diverging path. Before that they’d encountered almost one group of the fey aliens every day. They’d stopped to greet them each time, and not once had Ozzie managed to get any real sense from them. He was beginning to resent how right the SI had been: there was some deep schism between their neural types that prohibited any truly meaningful communication. His admiration for the Commonwealth cultural experts was growing correspondingly. He simply didn’t have anything like the patience they possessed to painstakingly decipher the Silfen language.
There was no discernible twilight. The grayness simply dropped into night. Ozzie had been relying on his antique clockwork Seiko watch to give him some warning, which it had done faithfully so far. But that night, either darkness fell early, or the unseen upper clouds had contrived to thicken into opacity.
When Ozzie called a halt, they had to light the two kerosene lamps that Orion had thoughtfully brought along. They hissed and fizzed as they cast a flickering yellow glow. The nearby trees loomed large and oppressive above them, while those at the edge of the radiance seemed to cluster into a dense fence, hemming them in.
“Tent tonight,” Ozzie declared as cheerfully as he could manage. Orion looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “You sort some food out, I’ll cut us some wood for a bonfire.”
Leaving the boy searching lethargically through the packs, he took out his diamond-blade machete and started to work on the nearest tree. Yet even though the blade came to an edge a couple of atoms wide, it still took him a good forty minutes of hard work to slice through the tree’s lower branches, cutting them into usable logs.
Orion stared glumly at the pile of water-slicked wood. “How are we going to get it going?” he asked miserably. “It’s all too wet for your lighter.” Nothing was dry. The mist had thickened to an almost-drizzle; water dripped continually from leaves and branches.
Ozzie was busy splitting one of the logs lengthways, turning it into slim segments of kindling. “So, like, I guess you were never in the Boy Scouts, then?”
“What’s that?”
“Group of young camping enthusiasts. They all get taught how to rub lengths of wood together so they spark. That lets you start a fire no matter where you are.”
“That’s stupid! I’m not rubbing logs together.”
“Quite right.” Ozzie concealed his grin as he opened a pot of flame gel, and carefully applied a small layer of the blue jelly to each of the kindling sticks. He pushed them into the middle of the logs, then took out his butane lighter—it was actually older than his watch. “Ready?” He flicked the lighter once, and keeping it at arm’s length, pushed it toward the kindling. The gel ignited with a loud whoomp. Flames jetted out around the logs, engulfing the whole pile. Ozzie only just managed to pull his arm back in time. “I thought they banned napalm,” he muttered.