Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

Outwardly, Adam drank his coffee quietly as the waiters fussed around the restaurant tending to the other guests. In his virtual vision, he prepared the message for decryption. His wrist array was worn on his left arm, a simple band of dull malmetal that flexed and expanded constantly to maintain full contact with his skin. Its inner surface contained an i-spot that connected to his OCtattoos, which in turn were wetwired into his hand’s nerve fibers. The interface was represented in his virtual vision by a ghostly hand, which he’d customized to a pale blue, with sharp purple nails. For every tiny motion he made with his flesh and blood hand, the virtual one made a scaled-up movement, allowing him to select and manipulate icons. The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the businesspeople having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them.

He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s Cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: PAULA MYO IS ON VELAINES.

Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. “Shit!”

Several nearby guests glanced over to him. He twitched his lips in an apologetic smile. The array had already wiped the message, now it was going through an elaborate junction overwrite procedure in case it was ever examined by a forensics retrieval system.

Adam never did know where Bradley got half of his information. But it had always been utterly reliable. He should abandon the mission right now.

Except… it had taken eighteen months to plan and organize. Dummy companies had been established on a dozen worlds to handle the disguised machinery exports to Far Away, routing and rerouting them so that there would be no suspicion and no trail. A lot of money had been spent on preparations. And the Guardians wouldn’t receive another shipment of arms until he could set one up. Before he did that, he needed to know what had gone wrong this time.

They had been so close, too. Rachael Lancier’s last call confirmed that she had put together about two-thirds of the list. So close.

Maggie Lidsey’s car drove her into the headquarters building underground parking lot an hour before she was due on shift. She’d been working longer hours ever since the case started. It wasn’t just to curry favor with Paula Myo; she was learning a lot from the Chief Investigator. The woman’s attention to detail was incredible. Maggie was convinced she must have array inserts, along with supplementary memorycells. No aspect of the operation was too small for her to show an interest in. Urban myth certainly hadn’t exaggerated her dedication.

The elevator in the lobby scanned her to confirm her identity: only then did it descend to the fifth basement level where the operations centers were situated. The Elvin team had been codenamed Roundup, and assigned room 5A5. Maggie was scanned again before the metal slab door slid aside to admit her. The interior was gloomy, occupied by three rows of consoles with tall holographic portals curving around the operator. Each one was alive with a grid of images and data ribbons. Laser light spilled out from them in a pale iridescent haze. A quick glance at the ones closest to the door showed Maggie the familiar pictures of the buildings that Rachael Lancier used to run her car dealership from, along with shots from the team’s two shadow cars showing Adam Elvin’s taxi as they followed him through midtown.

Maggie requested an update, and quickly assimilated the overnight data. The one item that stood out was the encrypted message delivered to Elvin’s e-butler through the Westpool Hotel node. She saw Paula Myo sitting at her desk at the far end of the room. The Chief Investigator seemed to get by on a maximum of two hours’ sleep per day. She’d had a cot moved into her office, and never used it until an hour after both main targets had retired for the night. And she was always up an hour before the time they usually got out of bed. The night shift had standing orders to wake her if anything out of the ordinary happened.

Maggie went over to ask about the message.

“It came from a onetime address in the unisphere,” Paula said. “The Directorate’s software forensics have traced its load point to a public node in Dampier’s cybersphere. Tarlo is talking to the local police about running a check, but I’m not expecting miracles.”

“You can track a onetime address?” Maggie asked. She’d always thought that was impossible.

“To a limited degree. It doesn’t help. The message was sent on a delay. Whoever loaded it was well clear.”

“Can the message encryption be cracked?” Maggie asked.

“Not really, the sender used folded-geometry encryption. I logged a request with the SI, but it said it doesn’t have the resources available to decrypt it for me.”

“You talked with the SI?” Maggie asked. That was impressive. The Sentient Intelligence didn’t normally interface with individuals.

“Yes.”

There was nothing else forthcoming.

“Oh,” Maggie said. “Right.”

“It was a short message,” Paula said. “Which limits what it could contain. My guess is it was either a warning, a go authorization, or a stop.”

“We haven’t leaked,” Maggie said. “I’m sure of it. And they haven’t spotted us either.”

“I know. The origin alone seems to rule out a mistake by any of your officers.”

“The Socialist Party does have a number of quality cyberheads, they might have noticed our scrutineer programs shadowing Murphy’s e-butler.”

Paula Myo rubbed a hand over her forehead, pressing hard enough to furrow up the skin. “Possible,” she conceded. “Although I have to take other factors into consideration.”

“Yes?” Maggie prompted.

“Classified, sorry,” Paula said. Even though she was tired, she wasn’t about to confide her concerns to anybody. Although if Maggie was any kind of detective she should be able to work it out.

As Mares had said, a hundred thirty-four years without an arrest was an uncomfortably long time. In fact, it was impossible given the resources Paula had to deploy against Bradley Johansson. Somebody had been providing Johansson and his associates with a great deal of assistance down the decades. Few people knew what she was doing on a day-to-day basis, so logically it was someone outside the Directorate. Yet the executive administration had changed seventeen times since she had been assigned command of the case. They couldn’t all contain secret sympathizers of Johansson’s cause. That just left her with the altogether murkier field of Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties, the kind of power dealers who were always around.

She’d done everything she could, of course: set traps, run identification ambushes, deliberately leaked disinformation, established unofficial communications channels, built herself an extensive network amid the political classes, gained allies at the heart of the Commonwealth government. So far the results had been minimal. That didn’t bother her so much, she had faith in her ability to work the case to its conclusion. What concerned her more than anything was the reason anyone, let alone someone with true wealth and power, would want to protect a terrorist like Johansson.

“Makes sense,” Maggie said with a trace of reluctance. She knew there was a terrific story behind the Chief Investigator’s silence. “So what action do you want to take about the message?”