Manhattan in Reverse (26 page)

Christabel was close to the bar inside the central circle of pillars, knocking back a tall glass of Ritz Pimm’s. Her lips were microlayered gold. Whenever a hologram floated across her they sparkled dazzlingly.

‘You made it!’ she shouted at Paula.

Paula snagged a glass from a waitress. ‘Cheers!’

‘Is he here?’

Paula shrugged, pretending not to understand. But there was a specific reason she was wearing a traditional little black dress with a semiorganic hem that swirled about of its own volition. In her newly youthful body it made her look hot, and she knew it. Several junior Investigators were staring in a way they’d never dare back at the office. ‘Congratulations,’ Paula said. ‘Traitor.’

Christabel laughed. ‘I’ve served my time. And I made Chief Investigator on merit alone. That’s what I needed. For myself if not the Dynasty.’

‘You’ll be a loss to the Directorate.’

Christabel leaned in a fraction. ‘The Dynasty is going to need me. Our entire concept of security is going to have to be revised thanks to our idiot founders giving in to Merioneth. I heard that everyone is now pouring funds into researching personal-sized force fields generators. And they’re all beefing up the defences on our private worlds.’

‘Typical. So am I allowed to ask what department you’re joining?’

‘Deputy-manager EdenBurg protection.’

‘Wow. Big field.’

‘Yeah. Give me a couple of decades and I’ll make it to chief of the division. After that . . .’ she trailed off and drained her glass.

‘You’ll be locking horns with Nelson.’

‘Nhaaa. He’s too smart. We’ll get on, at that level you have to.’

‘Speaking of which—’

‘Of course. We’ll dataswap. Happy to. Unless dear old grandma Heather actually kills someone – then I’ll be helping to cover her arse.’

‘It’s not your Dynasty’s founder I’m interested in.’

‘Oh?’ Christabel plucked another glass from the bar.

Paula thought she looked defensive.
How quickly alliances shift
. ‘If you get the chance to access your Dynasty’s file on the Merioneth Isolation, I’d appreciate a summary.’

‘That kind of thing never gets put in a file, as you well know. What are you looking for? We got Fiech, for God’s sake. Two and a half millennia in oblivion! It doesn’t get better than that.’

‘Why did he do it?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t understand his motivation.’

‘To liberate Merioneth from Dynasty oppression,’ Christabel recited viciously. ‘And the bastards won.’

‘Yes, they did, but Fiech didn’t. He was utterly committed to his cause: so much so that he perpetrates one of the worst atrocities in modern history. One which almost killed his precious movement stone dead. People were repelled by what he did, even his old colleagues realized that was too much, which is why they quickly got professional. That’s how they won. Continuing to wipe out the Dynasty kids and keep bystander bodyloss to an absolute minimum was smart. It bought pressure to bear exactly where it was needed. Yet Fiech will never see the end result, he’ll never live on his free, liberated Merioneth. Motivated people simply don’t commit suicide, which is effectively what he’s done. By the time he comes out of suspension, the Commonwealth won’t be recognizable, even if it still exists. Damnit, we’ll probably all be post-physical by then. He’s sacrificed himself for something he’ll never know. That does not make any sense.’

‘Fanatics never make any real sense to anyone except themselves. Don’t look for logic here, you’ll only be disappointed.’

‘There
was
logic behind this. I just don’t understand it yet. And that bothers me. It means we’ve overlooked something. Whoever set this up expended a huge amount of effort. The Directorate ran checks on every planetary medical database in the Commonwealth. Nobody has any record of the doppelgänger’s DNA, which is extremely unusual for this day and age. The nearest we can do is identify family traits; he has ancestry within a mix of Celtic, Northern Spanish and Saudi ethnicities. We found what we believe is a possible cousin on Piura, it was certainly the closest genetic match. But the poor girl didn’t recognize Dimitros. I ran her family tree as best I could, but if he’s on it I couldn’t tell. We just don’t know who he is. If we can’t find out, then he’s either the most important man in the Merioneth independence movement, or an absolute nobody. I don’t believe either.’

‘Maybe you’re right with the first one, and his pals in the Free Merioneth Forces are planning on springing him out of suspension just before CST shuts the wormhole.’

‘Not going to happen. Nothing and nobody can break into the Justice Directorate suspension facility.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Paula saw a nervous-looking Aidan appear at the top of the stairs. She smiled. ‘What I always do; keep the file open, solve the case properly.’

Christabel followed her gaze. ‘Of course, you always get your man.’

‘Yes. Always.’

WHAT PAULA FOUND OUT

Nelson Sheldon was right about the timing. Twenty-one months after Fiech’s court case, and three weeks after a planetary referendum officially denounced as a shambolic farce by Intersolar observers, the Senator from Merioneth stood up in the Commonwealth Senate to declare that her planet was regretfully withdrawing from the Intersolar Commonwealth to ‘pursue our future independently’. The Speaker wished her well, and there was a chilly silence as the Merioneth delegation dramatically walked out of the full chamber. CST immediately announced that the wormhole link to Merioneth would be withdrawn in three months, leaving enough time for anyone on the planet who didn’t wish to be Isolated to return to the Commonwealth.

Out of a population of seventeen million, the number wanting to remain part of the Commonwealth was just over nine million. It took an awful lot of trains running round the clock to bring them out. Which made travel to Merioneth extremely easy, with an inbound train arriving every ten minutes. When Paula caught a train to Baransly, the capital, three weeks before the wormhole was due to be shut she was the only passenger in first class. Most of the carriages were vehicle carriers. Emigrés favoured big trucks crammed full with their possessions. Local shipping companies were charging a fortune to transport containers of larger items. And the emergent national government was getting difficult about letting industrial machinery leave. The latest batch of restrictions covered all types of agribots; a lot of farmers were heading back to the Commonwealth.

Paula stared out of the long window as they emerged through the wormhole’s pressure curtain. It was winter outside, with flecks of snow drifting through an iron-grey sky. The landscape here outside the capital was arranged into neat fields given over entirely to row after row of some vine equivalent; with brown leafless stems stretched along wire frames. Hundreds of small agribots rolled slowly down the lines, their plyplastic tentacles pruning the vines back to their regulation two-metre length.

Baransly itself was a sprawl of housing estates and industrial zones clustered round a commercial centre that had already started to put up skyscrapers. The architecture was a little bleak and functional perhaps, but the city’s size was an excellent example of successful development for a world that had only been open to settlement for eighty years.

By the time the train reached the marshalling yard outside the station, there were signs of law and order beginning to break down. Streets were clogged with abandoned cars and vans. The crates and boxes that they’d carried were now strewn everywhere, broken open to spill their contents onto the icy enzyme-bonded concrete. It was as if the goods of a hundred department stores had been scattered across the district by a real live cargo-cult god. Gangs of kids and some adults were foraging the bounty. Then the train drew into the marshalling yard itself, and Paula’s view of the city vanished behind walls of metal containers stacked taller than the surrounding buildings, all waiting shipment out. Men in thick jackets with the Merioneth Nationalist Party logo on their sleeves patrolled the aisles.

The train drew in at one of the ten platforms under the cover of a sweeping green crystal canopy. Every square metre of the platforms and concourse was occupied by a bad-tempered crowd. Armour-clad CST security guards patrolled along narrow clearways, their jangler guns carried prominently.

Paula slipped off the carriage to be greeted by Byron Lacrosh, chief aide to the Prime Minister, Svein Moalem, who was also leader of the Merioneth Nationalist Party. Byron and an armed police escort guided her down one of the clearways. A large limousine took them from the CST station to the Parliament building along roads that were still being cleared of discarded vehicles. Every few minutes they passed crews of men and bots lifting cars onto big tow-trucks.

‘You won’t need to worry about mining any new metal for a few years,’ Paula observed.

‘Material resources aren’t our prime concern,’ Byron Lacrosh said. ‘We hope to establish a culture which isn’t as technology-based as the Commonwealth.’

‘You’re going to go the agrarian route?’

‘We favour divorcing ourselves from the consumerist monoculture that dominates the Dynasty-ruled worlds, yes. We don’t shun technology, we just don’t see the necessity to incorporate it in every aspect of life.’

‘Appropriate sustainability, then?’

Byron gave her an interested look. ‘You understand the philosophy?’

‘It’s hardly new. My birthworld is based on it.’

‘Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten where you came from, Investigator Myo.’

The Parliament building was a concrete and glass monstrosity, intended as a vigorous statement of a new planet’s identity and prosperity. The result was the kind of design-by-bureaucrat-committee that Paula always found depressing, representing the exact opposite of the ethos it had originally been commissioned to promote.

Svein Moalem’s office was on the fifth floor, with a curving glass wall that opened onto the hanging rose garden – famous locally for its cost overruns and leaky troughs. He sat behind a dark desk made from native kajawood, a broad-shouldered man ten years out of rejuvenation, with a neatly trimmed beard – following current local tradition. His light-blue eyes were strongly contrasted with dark skin and mousy hair. Paula saw tiny luminescent green lines flickering along his cheeks to curve round the back of his neck. More OCtattoos shone on his hands. When she ordered her inserts to scan the office she found a considerable amount of encrypted electromagnetic traffic emanating from him. To be exact, from the necklace of flat opals he wore. It was the kind of emission level she usually associated with sensory drama actors, allowing the unisphere audience to experience their body’s sensations. The two people, a man and a woman, sitting in front of his desk were also broadcasting an unusually large amount of data, from similar necklace arrays. Paula suspected every aspect of her interview was to be recorded and analysed. A high-capacity cybersphere node was discreetly incorporated into the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind the desk, but apart from that and several security sensors she couldn’t detect any other active hardware. Not that she expected any weapons to be active.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, Prime Minister,’ she said.

Svein Moalem nodded graciously, but didn’t get up. He gestured to an empty chair directly in front of his desk. ‘I asked for two representatives from the Attorney General’s office to be present.’

Paula glanced at the two lawyers flanking her as she sat down. ‘I’m not here to arrest you. In fact, nobody really knows if the Intersolar Commonwealth has jurisdiction here at the moment. You’ve declared independence, and we’ve agreed to recognize it in three weeks’ time. Anything between those dates is a very grey legal area.’

‘Yes, but nonetheless they will ensure my reputation is protected from unfair allegations.’

‘Allegations are for tabloid shows. I’m only here to ask questions.’

The green lines under Moalem’s beard scintillated. ‘As a friend of the Commonwealth I’m happy to oblige; we have nothing to hide from you. And of course, who can resist your personal notoriety? So let’s get started, shall we? I can spare you thirty minutes.’

‘I am the appointed Investigator for the Dimitros Fiech case. Did you know him, Prime Minister?’

‘I know of him, sadly. His misguided organization was one of the main inspirations behind setting up our Nationalist Party. Of course, we completely repudiate the use of violence to achieve independence.’

‘So you didn’t know him personally?’

‘No. My party’s goals were achieved by legitimate democratic ends.’

‘I accessed the report from the observer team on your referendum. They wouldn’t agree.’

‘Biased vitriol from those who have a vested interest in our continuing dependence and integration with their monoculture.’

‘Whatever. Fiech and his colleagues proved exceptionally resourceful, and they certainly learned quickly from their mistakes. He is the only member of the Free Merioneth Movement we have apprehended so far. What they did required a large amount of money at the very least. Is your government aware of where that finance originated from?’

‘Your pardon, Investigator, but right now the treasury department has more pressing concerns than examining bank transactions from two years ago. Little matters like making sure we have a valid currency in place for the cut-off. You understand.’