Night Sessions, The (23 page)

Ferguson blinked and took a deep breath. Did Ford always talk like that? No wonder he worked in a cubbyhole.

“So what you're saying,” Ferguson said, “is that the machine I'm trying to trace became a leki, more or less, but for a private company, and now it's somewhere in space?”

“You got it.”

“Any chance of tracing it?”

“Needle, haystack doesn't
begin
—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ferguson. “Iron filing on a prairie. I've had that thought not long ago myself.”

“You have? What about?”

“I have a nasty suspicion,” said Ferguson, “that it was about the same thing.”

“Aha!” said Ford. “Your robot suspect Hardcastle has backed itself up on a space-based server.”

Ferguson gave him a severe look.

“Nice,” said Ferguson. “Try not to mention it.”

“Black hole,” said Ford, running a finger across his lips.

Ferguson thought about this.

“All right,” he said. “Seeing you've figured that much…here's another question. Would it be possible for these robots, maybe with the help of others, to construct a humanoid robot? On site, I mean—in space?”

“Of course,” said Ford. “There are humanoid robots working on the elevator already. There's machinery in place to repair any and every part of them that might be damaged. With that you could build a complete body from scratch.”

“Including the cosmetic component? The musculature and skin?”

“Sure.” Ford spread his hands. “Why not? Hey, it's not like they have some kinda metal-man body under the skin. The musculature is functional. It's just not made of meat. You're wondering if Hardcastle's body could have been made in space?”

“Right again.”

“Wait a minute,” Ford said. He turned back to the slate. “Let's check that out. Hmmm. Ho-fucking-hum. Well, fuck me.”

“What?” asked Ferguson.

Ford looked up, frowning. “They aren't just repairing humanoid robots up there—they're making more.”

“How many more?”

“It's not mass production. It's ones and twos, as needed, every few months. The humanoid frame is just ergonomically optimal for a lot of the equipment, so they add more robots now and again.” He shook his head. “I didn't know that! It's routine, man, it's fucking routine.”

“Who's ‘they’? Honeywell? Gazprom?”

“Or one of their subsidiaries up there, yes,” said Ford. “But the point is who actually carries out the manufacture.” For the first time, he looked perturbed. “It's the robots themselves.”

As soon as Ferguson was out of the Honeywell tower he invoked the PNAI, and added what he'd just learned to what he'd uploaded the previous day: the suspicion about the possibility of sabotage of the elevator, and the presumed location of the Hardcastle back-up. He was just about to link to the Incident Room workspace to check how the meeting was going when a call came through from Mikhail Aliyev.

“Morning, DI Ferguson.”

“Morning, Mikhail. What's up?”

“I've got an item of possible interest for you.”

“Aren't you at the meeting?”

“No, boss, I'm out on a different job. For DCI Mukhtar in Leith.”

“Oh, aye, the Gazprom thing. Well, go on.”

“One of my contacts from the Gnostics investigation left me a message this morning. I can zap you the details if you're interested, but here's the lead: about a year ago she met a guy, a religious fanatic from New Zealand, at one of the clubs. Said he was just checking out the goth club scene, ha ha. Heard that one before. Anyway, she saw him on the telly last night, in a news clip from New Zealand, where he works as a robotics engineer at Waimangu, a creationist science park which just happens to be the hang-out of most of the humanoid robots still on Earth. Robots, religion…you can see why the NZ news might be interested. She checked back through her records, and found a shot of him quite plainly recognising Hardcastle that night. So she called him up—”

“She called him up?”

“Yeah, well, initiative. And he admitted that he did recognise Hardcastle, that he'd met him before as Graham Orr, and that he'd been in the company of a group called, lemme see, the Free Congregation of West Lothian. And he gave the name of one man involved with that: John Livingston. Campbell promised my source that he'd call Livingston first thing this morning, to urge him to contact the police, but according to our phone logs no such call came through.”

“We're already investigating John Livingston. He's told us about his connection with Hardcastle. Said the first he'd heard of the search was on the news at seven, and then he called the police just before we burst in on him.”

“I know, boss, I've had a look at the Incident Room board.”

“And I've already fingered him as a fundamentalist. Hmm. Well, thanks for the heads-up, Mikhail. Having the name of Livingston's church group is something to go on, but apart from that I don't see what this adds to—”

“Sorry, DCI Ferguson, but I think it
does
add something. This New Zealand guy—John Richard Campbell, that's his name—is an employee of the Genesis Institute, which runs the park. Who do you think funds the Genesis Institute?”

“Fundamentalist churches?”

“Yes, a little, but the real money comes from American business people who moved to NZ after their side lost the civil war.”

“That doesn't surprise me, Mikhail. Creationism's been part of the whole theocracy package all along.”

“Exactly. Which makes them enemies of the secular states. What recent threats does that remind you of?”

“Ah! Well, there's that. Still looks a bit tenuous.”

“Hardcastle had creationist material in his desk slate, sir.”

“So he did. Interesting, but again…”

“Point is, sir, that the US exiles in NZ are a significant force, one that has the motivation and the capability to do significant damage. I see you've been poking the PNAI about the possibility of an attack on the Atlantic Space Elevator. That's just the sort of thing the exiles would love to pull off, and they'd have far more resources to do it than some little band of nutters in Scotland. And far more of an interest in doing it.”

“Well,” said Ferguson, “that's as may be, but our man Livingston hardly has such an interest. After all, his company has contracts to work on the elevator!”

Mikhail said nothing.

“Ah,” said Ferguson.

“And right this morning,” Mikhail went on, “DCI Mukhtar and I have been talking again to the esteemed Mr. Ilyanov about these Gazprom allegations about theft and possible sabotage of supplies to the elevator. They don't look quite as wild as we'd thought.”

“I'll get back to you on this,” Ferguson said.

Rain and aircraft fell from the sky. On the walkways people hurried,
buffeted by the squalls and eddies around the towers and by VTOL downdraughts. Ferguson walked to the Turnhouse tram station, barely noticing his surroundings, thinking. At one corner he hesitated, glancing down the street toward the light and awning of Livingston Engineering, and considered whether he should march in and confront John Livingston again. He decided against it. The man would be open on the innocuous and stonewall on the rest, as before.

Instead, Ferguson strolled to a cafe diagonally across the street from the office, and settled himself in a window seat with a coffee. His trouser knees were wet. His jacket dripped from the back of the seat. He wiped the steamed-up window, getting his shirtsleeve wet. He tabbed a message to Shonagh, telling her that he was carrying out a little impromptu surveillance of the Livingston office, and checked the Incident Room board as he'd intended. Then he sent a message to Grace Mazvabo, giving her the names of John Livingston and the Free Congregation of West Lothian.

He sipped the coffee and slowly warmed up, while the coffee slowly cooled. As he stared out of the window he was not really watching anything. If something interesting or untoward happened, he would notice. But for now he was looking at a lit doorway through rain, and thinking.

However wide the ramifications of this affair, Hardcastle was at its centre—Hardcastle, and the man whose name he'd taken, Graham Orr. There were two factors in this equation: the combat mech, and its comrade-in-arms, to whom it would have formed an attachment that could only be called emotional—even before the now unknowable and even then unknown moment when it had come to self-awareness. The young soldier, a committed Christian in the Faith Wars, had died on the field of Megiddo. For him, as for so many others, that battle must have seemed the fulfilment of prophecy, Armageddon itself. The final showdown with the forces of the Antichrist, the Beast, and the False Prophet.

A phrase floated through Ferguson's mind: “the Roman Antichrist.” Where had he recently seen that? Oh yes, in one of the Covenanter tracts. And, of course, he'd heard it often enough when he'd been on the God Squads, usually delivered in a Northern Irish or Scottish Highland accent, echoing around some bare church or meeting house. The fundamentalist Presbyterians still held that the Papacy, if not the current Pope, was the Antichrist.

Ferguson remembered, with a start, something that Connor Thomas had said: “Father Murphy was with us in the tanks at Armageddon.” And he'd also said that Graham—meaning Hardcastle—had remembered Father
Murphy from the Faith Wars. How, Ferguson wondered, would the original Graham Orr have regarded Father Murphy—as the brave, kindly padre, or as a pawn of the very Antichrist? And even if he hadn't thought the latter, his robot comrade might have come to that conclusion from its own tormented reflections. And in that case…

Connor Thomas had almost certainly not shot the bishop. The corrupted coastal mech, now in fragments at the bottom of the North Sea, might not yield its story to forensic science for some time, if ever. But Ferguson had little doubt that the fatal shot had been fired from one of its gun barrels. As for the Murphy bombing, if Thomas had all along been dealing with a robot there was no reason why his view of the book's being placed in the parcel couldn't have been the result of his vision's having been hacked—quite aside from the ever-present possibility, despite his later denials, of his having been taken in by sleight of hand.

So Connor Thomas was off the hook, and Hardcastle was very definitely on it. The question on Ferguson's mind was whether the robot was acting alone, or at least without the knowledge of any of the human beings around it. Ferguson didn't trust Livingston's disavowal of any knowledge of the Congregation of the Third Covenant. He pulled out a notebook and began to doodle names and lines.

The robot refuge in New Zealand was operated by a creationist foundation. The foundation was financed by American exiles. American exiles had a long record of conspiring against US interests, and of occasionally assisting their “Left Behind” friends in the US in carrying out terrorist attacks.

Livingston had a connection with at least one of the New Zealand creationists, a man who was himself a robotics engineer. Both had—they claimed—known Hardcastle, but only as Orr. And this man, Campbell—he'd been seen a year ago in one of the goth clubs, where Hardcastle had suborned the two clueless Gnostics. Had Campbell been there in the first place to make some Gnostic connection too? Possible—but not necessary, or likely.

Hardcastle had printed and perhaps written the Third Covenant leaflets. It had used the Gnostic students to distribute them.

The Third Covenant leaflets threatened major suicidal attacks not just on Scotland but on all of what they called the Revolution states, as well as on apostate clergy.

The only actual attacks so far had been on two clergymen. One had served as a Catholic chaplain at Armageddon, where the real Graham Orr had been killed. The other had opposed the war, and now held the same benefice as the best-known victim of the historic Covenanters.

Hardcastle, in its role as Orr, had worked on contracts for Livingston Engineering. On one of them, it had corrupted at least one coastal mech.

The real Graham Orr's robot comrade was last known to be working in security on the Atlantic Space Elevator. Robots on the space elevator could build more robots.

The Hardcastle back-up had been uploaded to the space elevator. It could not have done that on its own. Hardcastle had worked for Hired Muscle, not just in the clubs but on the docks. Hired Muscle was in dispute with Gazprom security.

Gazprom's man on the Leith docks, Ilyanov, claimed that this was because Hired Muscle was complicit in pilfering or damaging supplies to the space elevator. These supplies were landed at Leith, trucked to Turnhouse, flown to the Elevator.

Livingston Engineering supplied roller bearings and other moving parts for the crawlers on the Atlantic Space Elevator.

This was beginning to look like a case.

Ferguson was staring at his scribbled lines when the room darkened. He looked outside at the also darkened street, and the shadow passed. He glanced at his watch. The soleta eclipse, late again. The morning's news had mentioned that the soletas were still out of kilter, and that there had been another crawler breakdown on the Atlantic Space Elevator.

Ferguson blinked and shook his head. He added these points to his list, and copied the lot to the PNAI, the Incident Room, and to Mukhtar.

Then he sat back and wished he hadn't. Was he wasting time and attention on this outside chance? The bottom line at the moment was that Hardcastle was still on the loose.

Ferguson saved his work on the notebook and stood up to leave. As he slipped the notebook in his pocket his glance fell on the date display. Monday, September 7. He'd never got around to changing it from the US date format. He might as well do it now. As he fingered over the calendar function he noticed that the coming Friday was September 11. The anniversary of the start of the Faith Wars. There would be the usual commemoration at the embassy—must check security for that, he thought, taking out his pen again to tick the note. A small crowd, but a possible symbolic target. If you really hated the Americans, it would be a good date for—

For a real spectacular.

Ferguson made haste for the tram.

The tram was held up by a sudden tailback halfway along Princes Street.
The rain had stopped, and Ferguson needed fresh air. He hopped off to walk the remaining few hundred metres to Greensides. He was just passing Waverley Station when his phone clip tingled. As he reached to answer the call he noticed people around him, in the sparse crowd of a Monday mid-morning, doing the same thing simultaneously. The moment of shock spread like a gust across grass. Ferguson hadn't seen the like since the Faith Wars. He felt an instant dread, which Shonagh's voice confirmed:

“Boss, there's been an explosion…”

“Where?”

“Dynamic Earth, a few minutes ago.”

Ferguson stood still and closed his eyes. “Casualties?”

“Nothing confirmed but…” She took a long, ragged breath. “We know there was a school party in there.”

“Jesus, Jesus!” Ferguson found he was banging his forehead with his fist, and stopped. He opened his eyes, stared down at his white knuckles, and unclenched the fist. The impulse came to him to fill that hand with a heavy pistol. Noises were coming from his throat.

“Adam?”

“I'm fine. I can be at the station in two minutes. Where are you?”

“Incident Room.”

“See you there.”

Ferguson sprinted, swerving and swearing, across Waterloo Place, across the road and down the first blocks of Leith Walk, up the steps and into Greensides. The Incident Room was empty except for Shonagh, DC Connolly, Skulk, and Mukhtar.

“Details yet?”

Hutchins waved a hand in front of his eyes. “Headspace,” she said.