The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (198 page)

She settled back in a chair and bought herself a second hot chocolate. There were several big fountains playing in the Greenford’s plaza, their tumbling jets of foam occasionally blowing across the small clinic door, but apart from that she had a good view of everyone who came and went. Each time the door opened her inserts recorded the image of the person coming through, cataloguing it with the information and name she gleaned from the Tower’s security array. Three hours later, she cocked her head to one side as a bulky figure emerged into the late afternoon. Funnily enough, it was her time with Alessandra Baron that had given her the most insight into people, learning to recognize what they were in the first few moments.
Instant stereotyping,
Michelangelo had called it glibly, but she knew instinctively that this was the one she was looking for. Data from the security array rolled down her virtual vision, identifying the man as one Kaspar Murdo and confirming some of the things she’d already guessed at. She was already standing, leaving a couple of Illuminatus ten-pound notes on her table to cover the drinks. She began to follow Kaspar Murdo along the street, unleashing a flock of monitor programs into the public arrays around him as she went.

The crowds were thicker on Southside Crossquay, which was nothing but a wide strip of enzyme-bonded concrete holding the river and jungle apart, extending for fifty kilometers. On the central section, opposite Tridelta, eighty stone and concrete jetties bristled out into the water, angled back to provide some protection against the flow for the boats moored along them. Mellanie wandered down the broad avenue along the top, looking for the jetty where
Cyprus Island
was docked. On her left, Tridelta’s silhouette was a slim band of gaudy light just above the river, topped by the black towers that cut a sharp profile against the sheen of the jungle on the far side of the city. To her right, the trees towered over the walkway, casting a pale ever-shifting radiance across the admiring faces of the tourists as they searched for their jetty.

The
Cypress Island
was one of a dozen nightcruise boats tied up at the jetty; longer and slimmer than the ferries that plowed across the river from the city, it had a flat, open top deck with a bar in the center. Inside, the upper two passenger decks had transparent bulkheads, so that the restaurant and casino patrons could still have an excellent view of the jungle; only the third deck where the stage was installed had a normal hull. Mellanie walked along the short gangplank amid a gaggle of clubbers barely older than she was. Several of the boys gave her encouraging smiles, which she had to ignore. It was a shame; the kids here all looked terrific, taking a lot of care with what they wore and how they styled themselves.

She confirmed her ticket with the steward as she stepped on board. He took in her appearance with a fast expert glance. “Are you sure you want to be here?” he asked with a mildly concerned smile. “It gets a bit rowdy later on. Can be upsetting if you’re not used to it. The
Galapagos
will accept your ticket if you want, it’s the same company; they take out a nicer bunch of passengers.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, practicing a high-pitched giggle. She was privately delighted by his reaction.

“Okay then.” He waved her on.

The first drink was free. She took an imported light beer from Munich and squeezed her way to the top-deck rail.

The
Cypress Island
cast off twenty minutes later. Out of the lee of the jetty, its engines pushed it against the swift current producing a pronounced rocking motion. The ride changed for the better two kilometers upriver when they turned into one of the hundreds of tributary rivers feeding the Logrosan. A cheer ran along the boat as the water settled down and Tridelta vanished around a curve behind them. The engine noise faded away to a quiet murmur.

On either side of the small tributary trees grew down to the water, with their tangle of exposed, bloated roots caging the crumbling soil of the bank. Despite the light twinkling from each leaf it was dark between the trees, giving the jungle a mysterious aura. Nothing moved on the land; Illuminatus had never evolved anything bigger than its insects.

“You’d think it would be full of Silfen.”

Mellanie turned to see one of the kids from the group on the gangplank standing beside her. “You would?”

“It’s their kind of place. I’m Dorian, by the way.”

She hesitated. “Saskia.” He was handsome enough, tall with a mild Oriental heritage in his features. Small scarlet OCtattoos ran around his neck, dragons and serpents chasing each other. Semiorganic fibers had been woven into his dark hair, sending beads of light flickering through his dainty Roman curls.

“Can I get you another beer, Saskia?”

Her inserts registered a transmission from him directed at the boat’s cybersphere node. It wouldn’t bother her normally, some boy bragging about pulling her to his friends back in the city. But the transmission was heavily encrypted. “Not just now, thanks.”

He tried to cover the hurt expression. “Sure. I’m on for the whole night.”

“I’ll remember.”

The message he’d sent bothered her. She still didn’t have the skill to decrypt it with her inserts, and she wasn’t carrying a handheld array, so she couldn’t work on it. For a moment she toyed with scanning him thoroughly just to see what kind of inserts he was carrying. Of course, if there was any serious wetwiring he’d detect the scan.

Why should he be wetwired? Heavens, I’m getting paranoid. So why don’t I scan him?

Dorian was back at the bar, smiling with his group of friends. Probably getting teased for getting the brush-off.

The tributary grew narrower, branching several times on both sides. Trees began to arch over the water, the tallest ones touching above midstream, their twigs starting to interlace.
Cypress Island
sailed on through a tunnel of coronal splendor.

Mellanie went down to the restaurant deck and helped herself to the buffet bar. It was dim inside, allowing the eaters to gaze out at the jungle. Her ticket didn’t qualify her for a table by the transparent walls, so she took her plate back up to the top deck, and sat on a bench in front of the bar, watching the intricate lacework of branches above the river. Some of the trees had a luminescence that verged toward ultraviolet, making her white top shine.

She stared down at the wool for a minute, not really registering what she was seeing. “Oh, sod it!” she muttered. Her platinum and purple virtual hand touched the SI’s icon.

“Hello, Mellanie.”

“There’s somebody on board I’m worried about. I need a message decrypted.”

“Very well.”

She’d been expecting to argue her case. The agreement caught her by surprise. She opened the file for the SI.

“Roughly translated, he said: Identity confirmed. It’s her.”

“Oh, God,” she gasped.
Alessandra’s goons have caught up with me!
She hunted around in a semipanic, but Dorian was nowhere to be seen on the top deck.

“Do you have any weapons with you?” the SI asked.

“No. What about your inserts? Is there anything that I can use to fight him off?”

“Not with any certainty. I might be able to load kaos software into his wetwiring, assuming he has some. Shall I alert the Tridelta police? They can have a helicopter with you in minutes.”

She glanced up at the radiant arch of light they were sailing under. “How would they get down to us?”

Her link with the unisphere ended.

Damnit! Not now.
She sent a scrutineer package into the nearest onboard array to check what the problem was. The network management routines reported that the node was no longer drawing power; it had been damaged physically.

OUR CYBERSPHERE NODE IS SUFFERING A TEMPORARY FAULT, the bridge array sent on a general broadcast. PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED. A NEW CONNECTION WILL BE ESTABLISHED SOON. THE COMPANY MANAGEMENT WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE IN THE MEANTIME.

Mellanie started shaking as the text ran down her virtual vision. “Come back to me,” she whispered into the fluorescent night. “Come on, you got through to Randtown.” Some awful inner voice was saying that Randtown had never been this isolated from the planetary cybersphere; it had landlines, a network. This was a lone boat in the middle of a jungle on a planet with only one city.

She clenched her hands, and pressed them against her legs, forcing the shakes to stop.
Think! I can’t beat him by myself.
Waiting for the police wasn’t a serious option. She didn’t even know if the SI had called them. She brought her stilled hand up to her face, giving her arm a curious look.
It’s still in there.

A fast scan around with her inserts revealed one of the boat’s arrays was installed behind the bar. Mellanie rushed over and ducked under the counter-top.

“Hey,” one of the barmen told her. “You can’t come back here.”

She flashed him a distracted smile as she ran her hand along the shelving. Scrabbling fingers found the array, tucked away behind boxes of snacks; it was a small one, used to handle the bar’s finances, but it had an i-spot. She pressed her palm against it. “Just one second,” she told the barman. “We’ll make out later.”

His jaw dropped. He didn’t know if she was joking or not.

Mellanie’s virtual hands activated a host of inserts, and fed in the code. The SIsubroutine decompressed, and flowed through the i-spot into the boat’s tiny net.

“Below optimum processing capacity available,” the SIsubroutine said. “I am operating in abridged mode. Why am I here?”

“I’m being stalked by a killer. He’s probably got weapons wetwiring.” She stood up and checked around again, half expecting Dorian to be coming for her. The barman moved up close. “Are you serious?” he asked in a low murmur.

“Hell yes, but later.” Mellanie backed out of the bar. She winked. “I’ll call you.”

“Suggest you call the police,” the SIsubroutine said.

Her mouth twisted into a groan of frustration. “I can’t. That’s why I decompressed you. I need help.”

“Do you have a weapon?”

“No. Find out if there are any on board.”

“No weapons listed on ship’s manifest.”

“Can you infiltrate kaos software into the killer’s wetwired armaments?”

“No kaos files in my directory.”

“Crap. What do I do?”

“Suggest you leave the ship.”

For a moment she considered it. The tributary wasn’t a problem; she could certainly swim to shore, or take a lifeboat. Then she’d be alone in the jungle. Kilometers from anywhere.
Possibly
alone in the jungle. If she jumped over the rail people would see her. The captain would stop. Dorian would come after her through the trees.

“Think of something else,” she instructed.

“Review enabled. Available processing capacity will not run comparative escape option routines at optimum level.”

Mellanie was rapidly losing faith in the SIsubroutine. This wasn’t going to be like Armstrong City where it hovered around her like a guardian angel.
I need a weapon, something that’ll give me a chance.
That same calm she’d had when she dealt with Jaycee had returned, blocking out everything else around her. There actually was one place on board that might have something she could use. She just had to get to it. God alone knew where Dorian would be lurking. He was certainly a class above the kind of street thugs that had been sent after Paul Cramley. A compliment of sorts.

Mellanie walked calmly to the stairs that led belowdeck.
Surely he won’t shoot me in public?
But there was no telling. Kazimir McFoster had been in the middle of LA Galactic, for heaven’s sake.

“Can you detect any encrypted local communications?” she asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. The captain has ordered an assessment of the onboard net to see why the boat functions have dropped to emergency default mode. The diagnostic software is interfering with my comparative option routines.”

“I might be able to get a weapon. Incorporate that possibility into your review.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“I don’t know. Nothing very powerful.”

“Complying.”

“And keep watching for encrypted traffic. I want to know where he is.”

The restaurant was crammed with passengers having their meal; long queues snaked back across the floor space from the buffet bars. With all her sensor inserts active, Mellanie couldn’t detect any of the power signatures that would indicate active wetwiring. She took the stairs down to the casino deck. There were only a few devout gamblers here; most of the tables were deserted, which wasn’t what she wanted. Warm air gusted up the stairwell from the third deck. Mellanie hurried down to the club. “Give me a floor plan,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Is there any escape route? Can I get to the lifeboats?”

“Canceling comparative escape option analysis.”

Mellanie clenched her teeth in anger. Then the boat’s schematics flipped up into her virtual vision.

“Lifeboat access is available on all decks,” the SIsubroutine said.

“Can I launch one without the bridge crew knowing?”

“I can block a launch alert.”

“Great.”

“Resuming comparative escape option analysis.”

At the bottom of the stairs a holographic sign flickered like a faulty strobe telling her that the hermaphrodite dance troupe Death by Orgy would be starting their first performance in twenty minutes. This was definitely what she was looking for. Heavy rock music thumped at her as soon as she went through the screened entrance, loud enough to make her bones vibrate. The club was packed solid and absurdly dim. Holosparks flittered through the air like perverted comets, providing the only flashes of illumination as they circled around the denizens writhing on the minute dance floor. She had to switch her retinal inserts to full light amplification mode to see where she was going.

The club sprang into gray-green focus. Fetish gear was in the majority. Semiorganic costumes offered up strangely modified genitalia as she slithered through the menagerie of bizarreos. Additional limbs were popular, several had infant-sized hands grafted on around the crotch area. Specialist cellular reprofiling had produced a lot of animalisms; furry arms groped at lines of teats, pointed ears twitched as they were licked by serpentine tongues, lustful smiles revealed sharp fangs.