The Albino Knife (24 page)

"Succeed in this and that will be the least of your glories, doctor."

Jambi tried to keep his face neutral, but Wall had no trouble at all watching the dreams play across his features. It would indeed be a biological miracle and one of which any scientist could be rightly proud.

Perhaps the visions would keep the good doctor blind to the dangers until it was too late. Wall hoped so.

Part Three

Point Death

C

Chapter Twenty-One

THE HOPPER HAD more than enough room for the four of them. Bork piloted the vehicle, as he usually did whenever he was on a mission. The big man had a way with aircraft. Must have been a bird in some past incarnation, Dirisha sometimes said.

Sleel was asleep in the back row of seats, sprawled and obviously comfortable, since he hadn't moved much in the last couple of hours.

Geneva peered through the thin sheets of denscris that made up the double window next to her seat, watching the ground far below. They were over the giant farming complex of central Nor Am, east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi River. Vast overlapping circles of greenery dotted the land, robot-tended fields of various crops too far below to be distinguished as to a particular kind. Some of the circles had to be several kilometers across and there were hundreds of them. The world's bread-basket, they called it. Ten decades past, the entire area had been replanned, and many of the cities had been deserted and eventually plowed under for more cropland.

Dirisha herself sat staring into nowhere, remembering the adventures of years before, and realizing how much she had missed the action. After the fall of the Confed, an enemy she'd never really thought they'd defeat, life had shrunk somewhat. Sure, she and Geneva had good times together; love was always a major factor. They'd toyed with the idea of having a child, maybe a couple, but it hadn't ever gotten beyond the wouldn't-it-be-interesting? stage. Geneva would make a good mother, but Dirisha had her doubts about her own abilities in that direction.

No, they had started to get fat and lazy, if only in the mental sense, and both of them had to admit they felt a lot more alive since all this latest crap had begun. Maybe some people just weren't built for peace.

After all her years of martial training, despite the philosophical aspects of being taught to avoid fights, to sit idle seemed a waste, somehow. Sure, she'd quit the Flex, but that was more because she'd been winning consistently than anything else. The game isn't so much fun when you don't think you can lose.

So, this problem would be resolved eventually. What then? If they lost, well, that settled that. Dead was dead. If they won, then what would be the next direction? Dirisha was pretty sure Geneva would agree with her, that teaching classes or freelance bodyguarding was going to be too dull to go back to again.

There would always be some kind of big trouble somewhere, even in the tamest of civilizations. If they survived this round, Dirisha was pretty certain of what she would have to do: go looking for a piece of that trouble to make into her own.

Hell of a thought, turning into some kind of galactic do-gooder. Well. Everybody had to be somewhere.

After a few minutes, she dropped into a light sleep, thinking about her future.

• • •

Bork said, "On approach to Rio, folks. Anybody want to freshen up before we put down, this is your chance."

Sleel came out of his sleep all of a moment, noticing that Dirisha and Geneva were half a second behind him.

"How long?" Sleel said.

"We're in de Janeiro airspace on autolanding beacon to Aeroporto do Guanabara, the new space and international port set on the renowned and beautiful artificialislandofSantos Pedro in the sparkling baia to the northeast of the city. ETA, now fifteen minutes."

"What,are you a tour guide?"

"Just furthering your education, Sleel. Maybe you'd like to hear the rest of the canned feed coming in with the beacon?"

"Thank you, no. I'll settle for your digested version."

Sleel went to the fresher, splashed some water on his face, relieved his bladder,then returned to the passenger section of the little ship.

"Wow. Look at that," Geneva said.

Sleel moved to a window to see what had interested Geneva .

The city, full of high-rise buildings and the usual attendant civilization, sprawled for kilometers in all directions away from the edge of the water. There was a small loop of land, a mountainous finger jutting into the east side of the bay.

Upon this projection of land was a giant head.

Sleel looked, as the autopilot banked the hopper and took it around the huge carving. Other ships looped around the stone at various heights and distances.

It was big, all right. Somebody had spent a lot of time working it. Hard to tell exactly how tall it was, given the scale, but a couple hundred meters, easy.

The face was that of a woman, quite beautiful, with a straight nose, full, sensual lips, and large eyes. The hair was cut short. It was as impressive a sculpture as Sleel had ever seen, and easily ten times as large as the faces of the four political leaders carved on that mountain back in the Northern Hemisphere.

"The Pao de Acucar Monument," Bork said, repeating what he was hearing from the landing com.

"Here, listen." He punched the volume up. A deep female voice filled the hopper.

"Originally called Sugar Loaf, named for its shape, the tallest spire now bears the likeness of Maria Passos Guerra Viera, First President of the United States of South America. It was created after the Revolucion Grande in the last days of the Twenty-First Century. Formerly Chancellor of the Universidade do Estado da Guanabara, winner of the Solar System's Pushkin Prize in Literature for her novel,The Snake With Warm Blood , and mother of five children, Presidente Viera was assassinated during her third term in office by a crazed divisionist zealot."

"As one, the decent peoples ofSouth America mourned Viera's loss, and the greatest sculptor in the galaxy, Chinlu Reilly, was entrusted with the honor of creating her monument. The work took seventeen years, cost six billion and twelve million standards, and reduced the size of the spire by nearly one third.

Even so, the monument is the largest single sculpture in the Solar System, and second in size inall the galaxy only to the Canute Nude on Koji. Over five million tourists come to see the sculpture each year, making it the most visited attraction in the Southern Hemisphere of Earth."

"They treat their heroes well down this way," Sleel observed. "I wouldn't mind having a monument like that after I'm gone."

"Yeah, but who'd want to work on a giant phallus?" Dirisha said.

"You're right," Steel said, shaking his head in mock grief. "They'd never find a rock big enough."

Dirisha laughed. She tried to speak, but kept breaking into more laughter every time she got started.

"Sleel's point," Geneva said. "You didn't get your next shot off quick enough, Rissy."

"Caught me flatfooted," Dirisha said. "I concede."

The hopper pulled away from the sculpture, leaving the swarm of other small aircraft buzzing around the monument in their preset patterns like so many flies.

"Should be on the ground in about five minutes," Bork said.

Sleel gave the statue one last look. Nice, but they hadn't come for a vacation. There was work to be done.

Veate followed her father into the governmental computer complex in SoCal, where they were to meet one of the leads given to Dirisha by Jersey Reason.

They had to pass through a series of airwalls, each of which circulated bacteriostatics, just to get to the visitor center. The viral-molecular computers deeper in the complex had to be protected from contamination, and to get there required elimination ofall possible fauna and flora, including that which lived inside normal people. Even with the hurryupE . coli inoculations and designer chem that workers got each day when leaving, computer experts lived on the edge of diarrhea all the time.So said her father, as they reached the heavily protected visitor's center.

The expert was already there, a short, rather rotund woman of maybe forty T.S., dressed in spray whites and hood. She reminded Veate of a great predatory bird she'd seen in a nature exhibit once, something called an owl.

"So you're Khadaji, eh? I thought you'd be taller."

Her father grinned. "Dr. Pemberton," he said.

"Between that old fartJersey 's rec and your clout with the Prez, I am at your service," she said. "What can I do for you that you couldn't ask for over the com?"

"I need a complete list of computers that are capable of a certain level of complexity. Some of the requirements are fairly technical."

"I'm recording. Shoot."

He began to rattle off statistics that meant little to Veate. He spoke of galactic interactions and holoprojic parameters, of gigabytes and googlums, and it surprised Veate that he could repeat the things from memory.

Pemberton nodded as she listened, her wide eyes blinking now and then. She asked a couple of questions, noted the answers, and then pulled at her lower lip with a thumb and forefinger."Hmm. I'll have to run the lines, but offhand, I'd say you are looking at thirty, maybe thirty-three possibilities. Twenty-five of those are Republic brains, stellar system Apex-class units. The rest are in private hands."

"How many in Sol?"

"Nine. Six belong to us, three to corporate factions. Ours are the four governmental mains, plus one military and one scientific research. I don't know all the uses on the corporate machines, but I can probably get a pretty good run-down. It sounds like the system you want has a lot of dedicatedspace, I dunno who could swipe that much from any of the guv's machines without it being noticed."

"You would guess a private system?"

"Yeah, I'd bet stads against toenail clippings. You really think the comnet is compromised?"

"See what you can find out, Dr. Pemberton. Here's my code, I'll be on Earth for a while."

"You got it."

As they left, Veate said, "Did that help?"

"Yes. If we can find the particular computer the bad guys are using for their games, we can get into it and maybe figure out who and where they are. If Pemberton is right, there are only three computers big enough to play by the rules they're using. It could be outsystem, of course, but I think maybe not. And I know who owns one of those comps—it belongs to the Siblings—so that narrows it down."

"We're getting close, aren't we?" she asked.

"Yes. We're getting close."

While scanning the continuous flow of billions of bits of incoming information, a warning flag lit in Wall's security net. He routed more than a routine share of his attention to the flag.

Well, well. A small rental vehicle had just landed at one of the nine airports in New Rio, the pilot's name being Saval Bork. The passenger manifest listed three others with him, also matadors of some repute.

Wall allowed a small measure of electronic amusement to dance within his being. Ah. They were getting closer. He did not know precisely what had led them to Rio, but that city-state was only a mere fifteen hundred klicks from the Old Brazil zoo, nothing compared to the galactic distances they had already covered to get this far.Very interesting. He had thought he would have to provide more obvious clues eventually, but it seemed that would not be necessary.

Care must be taken to slow them somewhat, of course, for there still remained a number of weeks before he was ready. And Khadaji wasn't with them.

They were better opponents than he had thought, and that gave him a nanosecond's pause.

Underestimating his competition had been very costly to him before; best he not fall prey to the same trap twice.

A hundred scanned scenarios later, Wall decided that the most likely reason the hunters had arrived at their present location had to do with Cteel. Certainly he was the most obvious bait, and the best thing to dangle before them at this juncture. They were tricky, these matadors. It would serve him to give them something to occupy their time.

Wall put in a call to Cteel. Once again, his old friend's current-generation namesake would serve his master. That would likely mean he'd have to create a new one pretty soon, but that was of no importance. One Cteel was as good as another. One could not use one's cannons without the proper fodder.

"Cteel."

"Here."

"I have a job for you."

"Moon, here," said the holoproj. Khadaji smiled at her. "I would ask your assistance."

"Ask."

He explained to her about his visit to the government computer complex.

"And you would have us cross-check their results."

"Yes."

"It could be a slow process."

Khadaji nodded. "Better a slow process than none at all."

"We'll let you know what we find."

The Black Sun contact was to meet the matadors in the Nova Praca, theNew Square in the Offworld District near the ruins of the Old Stadium. He or she would find them, the scrambled voice said in the communication.

Dirisha was the focus, with Sleel as close back-up, Bork and Geneva circulating through the crowds of tourists shuffling across the square. The district was flush with hotels, on a direct transportation line to the offworld port, and festooned with colorful attractions. A replica of an old-style market occupied one corner of the square, small booths selling wares ranging from personal electronics like translators, music players and vid gear to stalls hawking local fruit suitable for offworld export. The locals dressed in bright reds and blues, and shouted at the passersby in the native language, as well as standard galacticspeak. It was hot as the sun headed for its zenith.

"Some party," Sleel said, as he looped past Dirisha and continued walking his circuit.

"Yeah, takes you back to the good old days."

An offworld tourist carrying a holocam around her neck on a strap and a bag loaded with souvenirs glanced at Dirisha, away from her haggling with an erotic toy merchant. The woman was heavy, sweaty in the heat, and she wore badly tailored shorts and a loose-fitting silk shirt. The look wasquick, one that anybody might give to an armed black woman in matadora orthoskins, but Dirisha was scanning for contact. The woman was all too obviously a tourist, not worth a second look, except that she had a small hand wand tucked into her waistband. The weapon was pretty much hidden by her shirt, but it helped Dirisha decided that she'd made her connection.