Too Like the Lightning (69 page)

The Servicer rushed to catch Carlyle among the cramped aisles. “Sorry, what? I can't hear you when you're rushing around like this.”

Carlyle's eyes came into focus on the Servicer at last. “I'm sorry, you're totally the wrong person for me to discuss this with.”

A frown of sympathy. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Short of taking me to Bridger, no,” Carlyle answered. “I can call a car myself.”

“Whoa, slow down.” The Captain caught Carlyle by the shoulder as he started to bolt. “A car? Sorry, I can't let you go.”

“What? Why not?”

“I told you, that evil sensayer Dominic is after you. I'm under orders to keep you here with us until the threat blows over.”

“Under orders?”

“It's just an expression,” the Captain claimed, though her dark eyes said different. “You're in real danger. Whatever you're doing, it can wait.”

“That's my decision,” Carlyle countered, “not yours.”

“For the last time, this is serious.” The Captain seized Carlyle by the coils of his scarf, dragging him back toward the picnic. “You're being offered food and hospitality by people for whom a little food is a big deal. Now sit down!”

Carlyle found himself shoved into a group gathered within the bridge's shadow, where a pair of Servicers had stripped the trash-smeared shirts from their backs to dance. It was beautiful, not one of society's formulaic, social dances, but the primitive enjoyment of the body, reaching, kicking, leaping, ducking, close as daredevils, always a hair's breadth from scraping one another's cheeks, or sharing sweat. It wasn't until one, thrusting with knife-straight fingers, scored a touch upon the other that Carlyle realized they were sparring.

The sensayer's voice grew cold. “Servicers aren't allowed to practice combat sports.”

The Servicer Captain stared. “You say that with the public finding out that Mycroft Canner is a Servicer? That's reason enough to study self-defense if we didn't have others!”

A long frown. “I should go.”

“No.” Strong hands seized the scarf which looped around Carlyle like a harness. “I said, I'm under orders. You're staying here, safe.”

“I have someone indescribably, incomparably important to find.”

“You're staying here.”

“Against my will?” Even as kind a soul as Carlyle can become nasty when the friendly face before him is less real than his mission. “I could message the Servicer Program about your little combat practice, have your paroles revoked. I will if you keep getting in my way. No, better yet, I know who to message.”

“Stop!” The Captain seized Carlyle's arms with practiced speed, but tracker messages are fast as twitching. “What have you done?”

“Nothing that will hurt you. I just accepted an invitation I was offered to meet someone called Heloïse in Paris in an hour. It's an hour from here, so if I don't leave immediately, a lot of important people will start asking why.”

I will not subject you, gentle reader, to the full breadth of this Servicer's knowledge of profanity. “Mycroft didn't warn me you were too stupid to live. You do realize I meant ‘kidnap and rape' literally, right? We're talking about Dominic Seneschal.”

“I know the kinds of threats that Mycroft makes. I've been to Paris, I know more than you.”

The Servicer Captain frowned. “I also know the kinds of threats that Mycroft makes, and I've known Mycroft years longer than you have. This was a real threat.”

Hush fell as the two competed, stare for stare. They both think they know me. They both think they know me so well.

“It's on again!” A young Servicer broke the silence. “Channel 1113.”

As when a cloud consumes the sun and makes an afternoon's bright colors dim at once, so the Servicer Captain grew instantly cold. “Last chance, sensayer. I know Mycroft. I know the threat is real. I want to help you. But I won't let you endanger all the others if this person in Paris really will get us in trouble if you don't go now. Decide. Cancel the signal or go.”

Carlyle smelled a rat. “What's on again? 1113, that's a tracker channel?”

“Crap is what's on, crap only we care about. Now, choose: safety or Paris?”

It was no choice, reader, not for a sensayer. Not now that the thought had come: that there are Two.

But Carlyle did make another choice, in the car en route to Paris, those sixty minutes. He tuned his tracker in to Channel 1113. It turned out to be a minor news station broadcasting from a square in Ankara, where Tully stood again upon his soapbox: “What do you think caused the great wars of the past?” he ranted, this time to a larger sliver of the listening world. “Economic instability? We have that, the economic giants, Masons, Mitsubishi, desperate to tear one another down. Was it prejudice? One group hating another? Walk down a street and hear the way angry people use ‘Mason,' ‘Cousin,' ‘Utopian,' as if they were insults. If we magically plucked a war expert from the past and showed them the present, they'd say in an instant that we're on the verge of war. The only reason our current experts haven't said it is that we don't have any. We believe so blindly that war's impossible that we hardly study it anymore. You think the Hives are too friendly, too closely allied, too civilized to make war? The nation-states thought the same thing about each other in 1914, right before the First World War broke out. All it takes is one spark. That time it was the assassination of an Emperor's nephew. What will it be this time?”

 

C
HAPTER THE
THIRTY-THIRD

Martin Guildbreaker's Last Interlude: “The Utopians Aren't Dirty like the Rest of Us”

NOTE of Martin Guildbreaker, 03/27/2454: Caesar, do not read this. Nor you,
Domine,
not yet. All that I have and all that I am are open before the pair of you, always, but these are the raw notes of something not yet quite transparent. They would hurt you. They would hurt you, Caesar, by making you unable to continue as you have. You could not trust, could not endure, but at the same time you could not act, not on the little that is here. I would not see you so paralyzed. As soon as there are answers, enough for your awakened rage to know its foe, I will tell you. Until then, mighty Caesar, I trust you to trust me. As for you,
Domine,
read not this transcript yet. For you the price is grief. I would not have you suffer until I can, at least, bring with that suffering the consolation of understanding.

*   *   *

08:38 UT, 03/27/2454, Universal Free Alliance Police Headquarters, Romanova.

Commissioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias:
“Well, well, if it isn't Martin Guildbreaker! What brings you to my office at this hour of the night? Or is it not night anymore? Nine-thirty
A.M.
! Where does the time go?”

Guildbreaker:
“I want an unbiased second opinion.”

Papadelias:
“Don't set those down here, this is my Mycroft Canner desk, you don't want to get your files mixed up in these. Use that desk, my Everything Else desk. Don't mind the mess. This is about
Black Sakura,
I assume?”

Guildbreaker:
“I want an unbiased second opinion.”

Papadelias:
“About time. I've been telling you from the start this wasn't a matter to be handled without me. Now, I know better than anyone how tangled poly-Hive law can get, and I agree sometimes the world is better off when you and your team lubricate these things, but I have seventy years' experience at this and you have six, so when I send you a message that I need to see you about something ASAP, it shouldn't take you four days to turn up here.”

Guildbreaker:
“I want an unbiased second opinion.”

Papadelias:
“Quite a mountain of files you've got here: flight plans, autopsy reports, sensayer session schedules, old
Sniper
magazines … What's brewing? Something big, I could've told you that four days ago.”

Guildbreaker:
“I want an unbiased second opinion.”

Papadelias:
“What's happened?”

Guildbreaker:
“I want an unbiased second opinion.”

Papadelias:
“Understood. Shannon, cancel whatever I have scheduled in the next five hours, and make sure nobody not nobody comes in here unless the Emperor's on fire.”

Guildbreaker:
“Thank you, Commissioner. I'll lock the door.”

Papadelias:
“I'm going to shuffle these files so I read them in a random order without influence from how you arranged them.”

Guildbreaker:
“I organized them alphabetically by the ninth word in each document.”

Papadelias:
“Random enough. I'll ask you yes/no or fact questions from time to time as I read, but no opinion questions, sound good?”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes. I'm recording this conversation for the record. I'll have it reviewed by an independent party to verify that I didn't suggest any conclusions to you.”

Eight minutes of reading in silence.

Papadelias:
“So, one engineer's report says the damage Aki Sugiyama's fiancé's ‘suicide kit' did to the car shouldn't have been enough to make it crash, but the other two didn't find anything suspicious.”

Guildbreaker:
“I've ordered another three engineers to review the wreck. I expect their reports by the end of today.”

Papadelias:
“The engineer who was suspicious was the same one who said the flight plan was fishy?”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes. There are 162 standard flight paths from the origin to the destination city, of which only two guarantee that the car would not hit any habitations if it crashed. It was on one of those two. The likelihood of that is one point two percent, and the passenger could not control which flight path the car took.”

Papadelias:
“This is sketchy. I see the hints, but this is nowhere near enough to make an accusation of complicity, not in court. Not when we have this call between Aki Sugiyama and O'Beirne in which O'Beirne explicitly states suicidal intent.”

Ten minutes of reading in silence.

Papadelias:
“Esmerald Revere's notes on Cato Weeksbooth classify these ‘episodes' into two types.”

Guildbreaker:
“In Type A Cato demands an emergency sensayer session and appears in a state of extreme distress. In Type B Cato doesn't see Revere, but puts in twice the normal number of hours at the museum that week, and museum colleagues report Cato skipping meals and displaying other signs of agitation.”

Papadelias:
“Twenty-seven out of forty-seven car crashes in the past five years were immediately preceded by one of these episodes. That's roughly half of all crashes.”

Guildbreaker:
“I'm still working on the preceding five years, but I've had to get the crash reports through back channels, since the standard channel is to call Ockham Saneer.”

Papadelias:
“One episode preceded Revere's death, and got worse right before the O'Beirne crash.”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes.”

Papadelias:
“Before, not after.”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes.”

Two minutes of reading in silence.

Papadelias:
“This says Cato has eight to eleven episodes per year, and half of them don't precede car crashes.”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes, almost exactly half.”

Papadelias:
“But the other half do.”

Guildbreaker:
“Very precisely half.”

Twenty-one minutes of reading in silence.

Papadelias:
“This is sketchy.”

Guildbreaker:
“What?”

Papadelias:
“The death of Yangtze Dekker in a car crash 11/22/2453 resulted in their widow appealing to their brother on the news, which probably ended the Six Lakes Hostage Crisis. The death of retired
Romanov
editor Anlevine Gorz-Marmalade in a car crash 08/08/2452 drastically weakened the Nurturist faction in the European elections. The death of Madden Manila in a car crash 05/15/2451 made Mycroft Gao drop out of the anti-Mitsubishi-land-grab movement. The death of Kirkegard Ranker may have passed the Reservation Welfare Act. The death of Jay Daiko may have saved Rongcorp & Subsidiaries. The death of Herrera Lee may have eased the Greenpeace Mitsubishi factionalism. But none of this is direct influence, these are all friends, cousins, ex-roommates, sometimes with four or five degrees of rather sketchy separation from the effect they're supposed to have had.”

Guildbreaker:
“Yes.”

Papadelias:
“Connections no one would spot unless they were already looking for something suspicious, just like with Sugiyama's grandba'kid's fiancé.”

Guildbreaker:
“Exactly.”

Papadelias:
“How many of these did you find? These politically consequential crashes.”

Guildbreaker:
“Thirty-four so far, roughly five per year or fifty percent of all car crashes over the last seven years.”

Papadelias:
“Thirty-four? Was whoever did this analysis told which crashes were preceded by Cato's episodes?”

Guildbreaker:
“No.”

Papadelias:
“Yet it seems every single politically influential death was preceded by an episode.”

Guildbreaker:
“So it seems.”

Papadelias:
“And the crashes which were not preceded by episodes seem to have had no meaningful political consequences.”