Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

“They’d be establishing a pattern, yes,” Tarlo said. “A TSInarc or even ordinary chemical drugs help blur your recollection. I’m sorry, April, but we have to ask this: Did you sleep with him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When, please?”

“I suppose the first time was four days ago.”

“And you stayed over at their cottage when you did?”

“Yes. He had a room of his own. I’m sharing with Laura. We all made a pact about boys before we came here, that we’d use the couch if a roomie scored. But… I just. This was easier.”

“More private?” Tarlo said with a sympathetic smile.

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “I’m still a bit conservative, I suppose. Not that I mind my friends knowing I’m with a boy, but the walls here are really thin. I grew up on Solidade, which is just family.” Her head came up, giving them a dejected look. “You must think I’m a really dumb rich girl who knows nothing about the real world. Nobody else would be so gullible.”

“No,” Renne said. “You’re not gullible. It’s not that kind of con trick. They would have got the unisphere message author certificate out of you no matter what.”

The tears filled her eyes again. “But I don’t remember. And now the whole Commonwealth thinks I sent them Guardian propaganda.”

“By tomorrow the Commonwealth will have forgotten. Your family will make sure the news media never mentions you again. Normally I’d complain about undue influence, but in this case I have to agree it’s a blessing.”

April nodded slowly in agreement. “What happened?” she asked with a fierce whisper. “The family security people said they didn’t know, but I’m sure that’s what they were ordered to say. Tell me, please.” She looked from Tarlo to Renne. “Please. I have to know. I can’t even work out when. That’s so awful. I don’t care how bad it is, I just want to know.”

“It would have happened two nights before they left,” Tarlo said. Renne flashed him an angry glance, but he just shrugged. “Part of the routine of getting you drunk and high each night is that you wake up the next morning with a fuzzy head. So that when they take the next step you don’t even realize.”

April frowned, her eyes unfocused as she gazed out through the broad window wall, concentrating on something way beyond the sparkling sea. “I don’t remember. I really don’t. I’d like to say I was more sluggish than usual that morning. But I wasn’t.” She looked up at Tarlo. “So what happened to me?”

“They would probably have given you antronoine or some variant, slipped it in your drink. You wouldn’t know what was going on, it’s almost like being blind drunk except you’re completely open to suggestion. Then they’d have used an interface scanner in conjunction with a hack program on your inserts. It wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. After that, you would have had a memory edit.”

“Memory edit.” April ran her hands back through her hair. “You make it sound so clinical. That’s a piece of my life they stole from me. I never knew it could be that easy.”

“The technology is well established,” Renne said. “Some of the refinements didn’t even come out of corporate research. The first thing criminals do after they’ve committed a big crime is erase any record of the event from their memories. They don’t even know they’ve committed the crime—which is kind of weird—but that way we can’t read their memories and use them as evidence in court.”

“You know I think I hate that part more than anything, more than being seduced, or having my certificate used. It’s just awful. They could have done anything, anything; I’ll never know. I can’t believe I don’t remember.”

“We’ll need to run some tests on you,” Renne said. “Our forensics team will take some blood samples. Given this only happened a couple of days ago, we’ll be able to find traces of whatever drug they used. They’ll also want to run some calibration programs through your inserts. Do you think you’re up to that for us?”

“Yes,” April said. “Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. We’ll use a characteristics sketch program to get a picture of them. You and your friends can contribute to that.”

“Are you going to catch them? Realistically?”

“It will be tough,” Tarlo said. “The Guardians wouldn’t have shotgunned their message until after their team was off Nzega. By now they could be on any world in the Commonwealth. They’ll use cellular reprofiling kits to change their appearance. Our best chance of arresting them is when we break the whole Guardians group.”

“You’ve been after them for a long time, haven’t you? Everyone knows that, it’s Paula Myo’s only unsolved case.”

“Nobody can run forever,” Renne said. “Today will have brought them a little closer to justice. They will have left clues and evidence. Their DNA will be in the cottage; their software patterns will be all over Nzega’s cybersphere, in the finance for renting the cottage and hiring transport, their communications records. I know it doesn’t sound like much to you, especially now, but believe me, every little bit does help us.”

Renne and Tarlo left through the veranda window, sending the bodyguard back in. They walked over the spongy lawn toward the cottage the Guardians had used. Both of them had to slip their sunglasses back on against the glare of the hot sun.

“That was kind of you,” Renne said. “Telling her they would have used a date rape drug. I wondered what you were doing telling her about the hack.”

“She’s suffered enough,” Tarlo replied.

Renne stopped and looked out to sea, a humid breeze toying with her thick auburn hair. “Bastards. Fancy doing this to a first-lifer. Even without the memory, she’ll be screwed up about it for decades.”

“I hate memory edit,” Tarlo said. “Every time we come up against it, it gives me the creeps. I mean, suppose we already solved the Guardians case, started to round them up, when they turned it on us. We might have arrested them a hundred times already. I mean, it is goddamn strange that the boss has never got one of the principals.”

“You’re starting to sound like Alessandra Baron, always criticizing the Directorate. If anyone invented a memory edit you fired like a laser, we’d know about it.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said, shrugging, his arms held wide. “We did know about it, and the inventor fired it at us.”

“Stop it. You’re getting paranoid.”

He grinned ruefully. “You have to admit, something’s not right about this whole Guardians situation. Hell, you were there on Velaines. Did we make a mistake? Come on, I mean, did we? We played that so by the book we got paper cuts, and they still found out.”

“They got lucky.”

“They’ve been lucky for a hundred and thirty years. That ain’t natural.”

She gave him a troubled glance. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He sighed. “Come on, let’s go find out what Forensics turned up.”

“It’ll be nothing.”

“Optimist. Ten dollars that this is the time the Guardians made a mistake and left a decent clue behind.”

“You’re on.”

SEVEN

The CST exploratory division wormhole on Merredin had been down for fifteen months while it was given a class five overhaul—complete energy-focusing structure maintenance and upgrade of all the level beta support systems. It was no small job servicing a half cubic kilometer of high-energy physics machinery. Oscar Monroe had been on-site for ten months, managing the crews as they crawled around the wormhole generator armed with screwdrivers, arrays, programs, and every conceivable type of bot. Three more months had been spent training with his ground crew; after all, most of the systems were new, and that meant learning a whole new set of procedures. Six weeks had been spent with the forward crew as they got to grips with the latest marques of their equipment and software during innumerable simulation runs. That left him with an entire fortnight’s holiday.