Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

“Have you managed all right, since…?” he asked quietly.

“I do okay.”

“I’m sorry; it can’t have been easy for you. I should have made some kind of provision, put some money aside, some cash. I just never considered…”

“I said I’m all right, Morty.”

“Yeah. Jeeze, you look fucking amazing. I mean it.”

She smiled, running her hand back through her hair, combing it away from her face. “Thanks. I really missed you.”

Even now, all he could think of was screwing her again. “So have you…got anyone?”

“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “Nobody special. Not like you. Things have been kinda strange for me. Especially since the Prime attack.”

“I’ll bet. What’s with this job you’ve got? You mentioned Michelangelo.”

“Oh, yeah. I work for his show now. I’m one of their reporters.”

“Congratulations. That must have been a tough gig to grab.”

“I have a good agent.”

“What the hell. It got you in to see me. That’s all I care.”

She rested a hand on his chest, stroking affectionately. “It wasn’t an excuse, Morty. I could have come to see you anytime. You’re allowed visitors.”

“Right.” He didn’t understand.

“The offer is genuine. It took me a little time to put it together, and the show’s lawyers had to convince the navy to agree. But it’s all sorted.”

“You want me to report back from Elan?”

“Yes, basically. You’re entitled to a short personal communications burst at each contact time. That’s part of your service agreement.”

“I never read the small print,” he muttered.

“The lawyers made the navy agree that you could use the burst to send us a report. Michelangelo will pay. It’s a good fee. That’ll mean you’ll have money when this is all over. You can use it to start again.”

“Fine. Whatever. Do I get to see you again? That’s all I’m interested in.”

“It’ll be difficult. I won’t get many chances. And it can’t be long before the navy begins the fight back.”

“Will you come back to see me here?” he asked insistently.

“Yes, Morty, I’ll come back.”

“Good.” He started to kiss her again.

“There’s something I want to show you,” she murmured.

“Something you’ve learned?” His tongue licked eagerly along her neck.

“Something a bad girl would do?”

She took both his hands and held them firmly. He grinned in anticipation. His e-butler told him the OCtattoos on his palms and fingers were interfacing. “What—”

Morton was suddenly standing at the bottom of a white sphere. Faint lines of gray script flowed across the surface, too quick for him to focus on. They reminded him of his virtual vision’s basic standby mode graphics.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Mellanie said.

Morton turned around to see her standing behind him. She was wearing simple white coveralls. He looked down at himself to see he was wearing an identical garment.

“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

“It’s a simulated environment. Basically, we’re inside your inserts.”

“How the fuck did you do that?”

“The SI gave me some fairly sophisticated OCtattoos while you were in suspension. I’m just starting to learn how to use a few of them for myself.”

“The SI?”

“We have an arrangement. I supply it with unusual information, and it acts as my agent. I’m not sure how much I can trust it, though.”

“You supply it with information?” Morton wished he could string together a sentence that wasn’t a question. He was coming across like a petulant ignoramus.

“Yes.” Mellanie sounded mildly annoyed at the implication.

“Oh, right.”

“We’re linked like this because it’s completely private. There’s no sensor the navy can use to overhear what I have to tell you.”

“What’s that?” he asked cautiously.

“You remember the Guardians of Selfhood?”

“Some kind of cult? They were always shotgunning the unisphere. Didn’t they attack the Second Chance? They believed an alien was running the government. Crap like that.”

“They were right.”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s called the Starflyer. It might have triggered the war.”

“No, Mellanie.”

“Morty, I’ve been lied to. I’ve been shot at. Its agents tried to kidnap me. Even Paula Myo thinks it’s real.”

“The Investigator?” he asked in amazement.

“She’s not an investigator anymore. The Starflyer got her fired, but she has political connections. I don’t understand it all, but she’s working for another government department now, I think. She won’t tell me anything. She doesn’t trust me. Morty, this is frightening the hell out of me. I don’t know anyone else I can turn to but you. I know you’re safe; you’ve been in suspension while all this has happened. Please, Morty, at least consider the possibility. The Guardians must have started with some kind of reason. Mustn’t they? Every legend starts with a grain of truth.”

“I don’t know. I grant you they have been going an unusually long time, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. In any case, what has all this got to do with me? I’m off to war any day now. I can’t protect you, Mellanie. Even if I snuck off base, the navy has all the activation codes for my wetwired armament systems. They can switch them on and off anytime they want.”

“Really?” She sounded intrigued. “I wonder if I could hack them.”

“Mellanie, I’m sorry, I can’t risk going back into suspension. Not even for you.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

“What then?”

“I want you to send me information back from Elan.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything you can get on the Primes which would normally be classified. We can’t trust the navy, Morty, it’s been compromised by the Starflyer. And yes, I know that sounds paranoid. I would have said the same thing myself a year ago.”

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Morty.”

He waited a long moment before asking: “Would you have come to see me if you weren’t caught up in all this?”

“I would be here no matter what happened to the Commonwealth. I promise. I don’t even care that you might have killed Tara.”

“I probably did, you know. Investigator Myo doesn’t make many mistakes.”

“It doesn’t matter. We were good together, even if I was just a naïve kid. I know we’ve both changed since then, but we have to see what we can be this time around. We both owe our old selves that, don’t we?”

“Damn, you are something else.”

“Will you send me what information you can?”

“I guess so. I don’t want to disappoint you again, Mellanie. So…I suppose you’ve got some foolproof method of smuggling the data back to you?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, thought so,” he said in a resigned tone. This truly wasn’t that first-life teenage Mellanie with the hot ass that he’d sweet-talked into bed. Not anymore. She’d changed into somebody a lot more interesting. Still goddamn hot, though.

Mellanie pulled a hand-sized square out of her pocket and held it up. It was made up from densely packed alphanumerics that glowed a faint violet as they flowed against each other in perpetual motion, always staying inside their boundary. She peered at it curiously. “Wow, I’ve never seen a naked program before.”

The sheer girlishness made him smile in fond recollection. “What is it?”

“Encryptionware. I bought it off Paul Cramley.”

“I remember Paul. How is the old rogue?”

“Harassed. He promised this will bury your private message to me in the sensorium datastream you send to the show. I can pull it out, but no one else will be able to.” She pressed the square into his hand, and it unraveled, strings of symbols flowering outward to blend into the sphere walls. They chased the gray script around for a moment, before fading into the same semivisible gray as the rest of the symbols.