Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

At midday the site was handed back to Homesecure. It was part of the contract to guard the property until the owner returned and assumed responsibility.

A lawyer representing Mr. Cramley arrived at the Olika police precinct at two o’clock that afternoon and paid the steep fine for violating the dangerous aliens law, and gave an undertaking the crime would not be repeated, paying a five-year bond to guarantee compliance. The lawyer then went on to the Homesecure control center, and signed off on 1800 Briggins, assuming full responsibility for the property. The guards went home.

Mellanie’s cab drew up outside the bungalow just after four in the afternoon, responding to a message that Paul had left in her e-butler’s hold file. The lock on the gate had already been repaired. It buzzed and opened for her just like before.

She picked her way through the blackened interior of the bungalow, wrinkling her nose up at the smell of burnt plastic and other fumes that still hadn’t completely dissipated. Cinders and scorched parquet crunched under her fancy red and gold pumps. It was probably a mistake to have worn heels.

The little circular swimming pool at the center of the bungalow was undisturbed, though several of the patio doors leading out to it were smashed, their metal edges warped by the heat. Leaves floated on water that hadn’t been filtered for a month. She looked around curiously. “Paul?”

The water started gurgling. As she stared at the pool, a whirl appeared at the center, deepening into a cone. Within a minute the water had emptied away, leaving the marble walls dripping. On the side opposite the steps, a doorway irised open.

Mellanie arched her eyebrow at it. “Neat,” she commented. She took her pumps off, and walked down the slick steps. The door was plyplastic disguised to look like marble; there was a narrow concrete corridor beyond it with polyphoto strips along the ceiling. It angled down quite steeply.

Ten meters in, she turned a sharp corner. The floor leveled out, and the corridor ended at a wide brightly illuminated room. It had the same clean green-tinted walls and floor she associated with an operating theater; similar cool dry air, too. Several tall stacks of electronic equipment stood in a loose circle around what appeared to be a transparent coffin. Paul Cramley lay in it, floating in a translucent pink liquid. He was naked, his face covered by a conical mask of blank flesh, the apex of which fused into a thick plastic air tube that snaked away into a socket in the top corner of the coffin. Hundreds of filaments no thicker than hair sprouted from the skin along his spine; every few centimeters clusters of them were braided together and plugged into thick bundles of fiber-optic cable.

Mellanie walked over to the coffin and peered down. The gooey pink fluid magnified Paul’s scrawny ancient body in a way she could have done without; but she could see he was still alive, his chest rising and falling in a slow regular rhythm.

A portal on one of the cabinets lit up with an image of a young man’s face. It had a lot of Paul’s features. “Hello, young Mellanie, welcome to my lair.”

She glanced from the body to the portal. “Cool setup. Paranoid, but cool.”

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” The image smiled.

It was actually quite a handsome face, she thought, which disturbed her more than she wanted to acknowledge. “Have you been hurt? Is this a rejuvenation tank?”

“Not at all. This is a maximum interface unit. My nervous system is fully wetwired into the large array here in the crypt. Every sensation I now feel is actually an artificial impulse. You have a virtual vision; I have virtual smell, taste, temperature, tactile reception, hearing, everything. What my brain interprets as walking is in reality a directional instruction to access sections of the unisphere and the arrays connected to it. My hands can manipulate programs and files to an amazing degree, and all at accelerant speed.”

“Morty always said you were a complete webhead.”

“How right he was.”

“What happened here last night, Paul?”

“It wasn’t a break-in; they were sent to kill me. I used a focused EMP on their inserts, and…nature took its course. Not to mention stupidity.”

“Who were they?”

“Good question. Would you like to start trading?”

Mellanie suddenly felt as though she was slipping away from her earlier position of confidence. Her initial judgment of Paul was a woeful underestimation; and all the clues had been there if she’d bothered to think about them. An impoverished, seedy four-hundred-year-old? Come on! “You already owe me Alessandra Baron for telling you about the Starflyer.”

“Very well. Baron was receiving and sending a great deal of encrypted traffic across the unisphere.”

“Aha!”

“Unfortunately, the protective monitors she uses are excellent. The person using them actually managed to backtrack my own operation. That’s quite an achievement. Outside the SI, I know of only a dozen or so webheads in the Commonwealth boasting that kind of ability. This unknown person has a level of skill equal to my own, a development which I find more disturbing than the SI’s protection of Paula Myo. Clearly Baron has something very serious to hide.”

“I told you that. And it was probably the Starflyer who tracked you down. I need to know who else is involved.”

“For a start: Marlon Simmonds and Roderick Deakins, the two who broke into my bungalow last night.”

“Big help, Paul, your creepy alien pets took care of them.”

“Show some patience, Mellanie. It is the connection which is interesting. Once I discovered their identity, I accessed their bank accounts. Both of them received a payment of five thousand Oaktier dollars yesterday. The money was transferred from a onetime account opened approximately three hours after Baron became aware of my interest.”

“Damn!”

“Which I backtracked to a corporate account on Earth, in the Denman Manhattan bank.”

Mellanie gave the youthful face in the portal a startled look. “You backtracked a onetime account? I thought that was impossible.”

“So the banks would like you to believe. It is very difficult, but it can be done. There are certain small flaws in the onetime establishment procedure which can be exploited, that even the Intersolar security services don’t know about. I know because I used to know someone who knew someone who was involved with writing the original program. Does the name Vaughan Rescorai mean anything to you?”

“Grandpa!”

“Your great-great-grandfather, I believe.”

“You knew him?” she asked in surprise.

“We mega webheads are a small, close community. Vaughan was a good man.”

“Yes. Yes, he was.”

“He was your way into the SI, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Thought so. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Thanks, Paul. What was the company?”

“Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. They are a legal firm—”

“From New York on Earth.”

“You know of them?”

“Yeah. Some of their associates were involved with a scam involving Dudley Bose. I think the Starflyer used them to fund the observation of the Dyson Alpha enclosure.”

“Which resulted in the Second Chance flight, and the collapse of the barrier, and ultimately the Lost23. I see. It certainly ties in with your theory. I managed to track some of Baron’s communications before her countermeasures forced me to withdraw. Two of them were addressed to a Mr. Pomanskie at Bromley, Waterford, and Granku.”

“Hell. He was on the board of the Cox Educational charity.”

“I suspect Pomanskie, or some junior lieutenant, hired Simmonds and Deakins to put a stop to my electronic spying.”