*We could. I"d have to consult a specialist. It could be dangerous to do it so soon."
*Trust me, the real danger is if you don"t do it soon enough."
After monetary persuasion, the doctor agreed that Josh"s rehabilitation could be accelerated. Anneke put through a call to Fat Fraddo and within half an hour Josh had protection.
Once Josh was in a safe house, Anneke had time to think. The word had gone out quickly, both about the takeover by Myoto of Dyson Enterprises and Brown"s election as Military Capo.
She saw now that her suggestion to Myoto had unwittingly played into the mole"s hands, unifying normally divided forces within the Combine Cartel.
Yet it had been a bold and brazen move, one that had restored a small portion of Myoto"s former status within the galaxy, just as clearly it had - as she had predicted - forced Brown"s hand. Whatever his master plan entailed, it would necessarily require control of - or neutrality of - Dyson"s jump-gates. She had been right about that.
A quick check had also shown Brown knew that she knew where the lost coordinates were to be found.
He had used his new power as Military Capo to place all ports and shipping (and jump-gate entries) under martial law. Brown was now, effectively, the de facto president of Lykis Integer.
RIM"s slide into inaction had happened so fast Anneke was still reeling, profoundly shocked. RIM had seemed so vast, so eternal. And yet the policies of one man had caused the great edifice to crumble almost overnight.
RIM"s foundations had been built on sand. And the mole had known this, had managed to exploit it. So. How was she to get to Kanto Kantoris?
And how, since Brown not only now controlled all transportation on and off Lykis Integer, and must also frantically be seeking to decrypt the Enigma QSUs, was she to get therefirst?
The problem was, she did not know what his master plan was. There were so many pieces that didn"t fit together: the creation and unleashing of the Majoris Corporata; the refitting of the derelict dreadnought, which had then gone missing again; the search for the lost coordinates; the transmogrified humans she had encountered on the Orbital Engineering Platform; the infiltration and emasculation of RIM ...
Actually, when she listed them like that, they made sense, with one jarring note - the transmogrified humans and the virus that mutated them. That"s what threw the whole thing out, one big ugly piece that didn"t fit.
If she could only read Brown"s mind, just dip into his head for a second.
Then she had an idea. There was a way, after all.
The patient writhed in pain.
There wasn"t much that Arturo Ramid could do about it. Shutting down the entire pain centre was an option, but it would severely lengthen the adhesion time and, therefore, the recovery period.
And the patient had been adamant about that. Time was of the essence. Ramid shrugged. Time, in his line of work, was always of the essence. He never asked why. His clients did not like questions. And curiosity was like leprosy once was: from the moment it infected you, it gnawed away at you until you were dead.
So Ramid suppressed his inquisitiveness and lived to sculpt another day.
The patient, a woman, was suspended in a tank of fluid not unlike that found in the womb. The exact chemical and genetic profile was a secret. Proprietary material. The woman was beautiful and naked and every tendon and muscle in her body stood out like steel cables, her fists clenched into b.a.l.l.s, her face a grimace of pain that would not end soon enough.
I am a modern torturer, Ramid thought suddenly to himsel( Except my victims come to me willingly, pqy handsomely ... and scream silently . . .
Ramid watched the readouts carefully. He was etching a DNA *envelope" onto the patient"s existing helix, masking the old with the new. The process was known as a *full metal jacket", metal being a slang term for a DNA profile, and involved a technique called nano-retroengineering.
What Ramid did was create new human beings. Indeed, as the days pa.s.sed he watched as the patient shrank in height, yet increased in body ma.s.s and bulk. Her bones thickened, her hair changed to a wiriness not seen in her genetic lineage, and her skin darkened. Even the shape of her skull altered, changing her profile.
Internally, there were other changes, too, not just genetic ones.
Her larynx grew new chords, changed shape; her subcutaneous layer dwindled; her pelvis took on a new configuration; and she grew an appendix that had long ago been removed.
It was safe to say that not only would the patient"s own mother not know her anymore, but she would not even recognise herself in a mirror.
Ramid was an artist.
Anneke awoke screaming.
It seemed to her, even before she finished taking her first gasping breath that she had always been screammg.
But then she stopped, and blinked in surprise. The scream was just an echo of something, something now gone. Ah, yes. Pain. The pain had stopped. Funny how the memory of it was so different to the thing itself Anneke looked around, or tried to. Her neck muscles were stiff, unyielding, and the room seemed odd, as if she were viewing it through filters.
In fact, everything felt odd, like she was wearing strange new clothes, someone else"s clothes. She tried to squirm, to wriggle, but could not. She was in a field that suppressed sudden movement.
Okay. Fine. Take a deep breath, Anneke. Yes, that"s it. And another.
Now lift your arm. It"s d.a.m.nably tight. Slowly does it.
OhmiG.o.d. That"s not my arm.
She craned her head slowly, looked down at her body. It wasn"t her body.
That"s when she let herself cry.
She woke again two days later. The feeling of wearing a stranger"s clothes - or indeed a stranger"s body - had worn off, like a wrist.w.a.tch one becomes used to. Though there was still an oddness.
*Kinaesthesia. Internal spatial awareness," said a voice. Anneke looked up. Arturo Ramid was in the doorway. *Your biometrics are different now. Shorter limbs, reduced height. But your mind has an internal *map" of where all your parts are and when they should come into view and when they shouldn"t. Alas, it still expects you to be 1.9 metres tall and have arms and legs of a certain length. But it will adjust."
*How long since I came in?"
*Two weeks. As you requested."
*Can I go?"
*One more day. Be patient. There are coordination tests you must do and some basic physiotherapy. This will help get everything aligned and will familiarise the brain with the new configurations."
*How long will the jacket last?"
*You were very specific on this point. You wanted a reversible jacket. I can make it permanent, you know."
Anneke shook her head. *No. How long?"
*Everyone is different. If you apply the treatments, then it could last six months. If you stop, then you will start to revert in three to four weeks. The body"s immune system tends to reject the *envelopes" more vigorously than ordinary renovations, unless we amend the immune system itself"
*I won"t have time for treatments. How debilitating will the reversion be?"
*Some nausea and discomfort. Nothing too serious. But it will not be pretty."
*Thank you, doctor."
Ramid moved to the door, then turned back. *Oh, you have some messages waiting for you. I will route them to your e-pad."
Josh said hi. He was making a full recovery and had already started on the final second-level code. Jake Ferren was also out of hospital and rapidly becoming something of a hero to the disaffected within RIM, which didn"t sound healthy to Anneke.
Neither Rench nor Brown would be happy with that, but at leastjake"s current popularity and high profile meant he was safe for now.
One message was from Sasume of Myoto. It thanked Anneke for her *suggestion" and enquired after Anneke"s health. Anneke ee"d her a reply, making yet another suggestion.
Then Anneke saw a message from Deema. It was sent via a scrambled loop, but Anneke knew that jake had taken extraordinary care in a.s.signing a former agent to care for her at a safe house.
None of her friends or *family" knew what Anneke was up to and it hurt her to read the distress in Deema"s message. Where was Anneke? Why hadn"t she been to see her in all this time? Did Anneke know her birthday was coming up? Or at least the birthday they"d picked for her, since no one knew the real one.
Anneke mentally kicked herself She should have gone to see Deema before coming here. She had a responsibility to the child and there were times when little girls were far more important than other stupid things, like rescuing the galaxy. And now she could not even send a visual.
But she did send a long message, telling Deema how she missed her and how much she loved her and that she would try very hard to be there for her special day. At the end, despite her own damp eyes, the letter seemed inadequate.
It hit her that she was abandoning Deema, just as she"d been abandoned. It didn"t matter that her parents had been murdered. What does a six-year-old understand of such things? All the child knows is that their parents are no longer there for them.
And now Anneke was doing the same thing to Deema.
Well, she would move heaven and earth to be there for Deema"s birthday. This gave her two months. Two months to find the lost coordinates, outwit the mole, and maybe, just maybe, save the galaxy at the same time.
Piece of cake. Whatever that meant.
HE needed the lost coordinates, needed them like a drug. The thought of them burned in his brain, day and night. None of the others understood, or had ever understood. The empire was an old dream to them, a relic that existed in the past, a fairytale of heroic deeds from an age long gone and all but forgotten.
But they were fools.
Company and Clan alike, they saw only profit and mistook control of the galaxy for a new entrepreneurial enterprise. It was as if the great web of star systems, the trillions and trillions of souls who inhabited them, and the sheer weight of military, economic and political infrastructure that they represented, were just one big business opportunity.
How short-sighted of them. How blind.
Black was perhaps the only one, not counting the Envoy (whose visions still remained opaque to Black), who saw clearly. Who saw precisely.
The empire wasn"t a thing, wasn"t even a symbol. It was a machine.
A vast system-spanning machine that would weld millions of worlds, and quadrillions of beings, into its spider-like web to produce the one true coin of value: raw omnipotent power.
And in the process, it would turn Black into a G.o.d.
The call Black had been waiting for came late one night as he stood on a Quesadan batdement that overlooked the capital city. Nearly a kilometre above the ground, Black could survey the entire core of the city, including the spectacular lava pits that erupted regularly and which pinpointed the headquarters of that now sidelined organisation, the Regis Imperium Mentatis.
A shadow moved. Black had his blaster out and aimed in a nanosecond.
*You are fast. For a human."
Black put the weapon away. *Coming from you, Envoy, that is indeed a compliment."
The Envoy bowed his head slighdy.
*You have news?" Black could not keep the hunger from his voice.
*This place is secured?"
Black nodded impatiendy. *No one can hear us." The Envoy emerged fully from the shadows, his hood thrown back, revealing his alien face. As unreadable now as when Black had first met him.
*Kanto Kantoris."
Black groped out till he found the cold stone of the battlement, and steadied himself At last. He was on his way again. He couldfiel his destiny beckoning. Taste it.
*You *re sure?"
*We can read the decoded coordinates. They contain internal validations. There is no doubt."
*How did Enigma crack it?"
*Ingenious," said the Envoy, as if speaking to himself *They used quantum time entanglement. Paradoxical, but it appears to have worked."
Black closed his eyes. Of course. In another universe somewhere, the Enigma team had cracked the code the hard way. That information had then been retrieved by this Enigma team, creating - sp.a.w.ning - a new universe entirely.
Did that mean there was a universe in which Black did not succeed?
Well, who cared? He was stuck with this one. And it was stuck with him.
*Good work," he said. *Make sure Mika, Karl - andjeera- are rewarded."
*You do not intend to kill them?"
*No. I gave them my word."
*Interesting."
*That I keep my word?"
*No, that you gave it in the first place."
*Did you check in on Kilroy?"
*The degeneration has accelerated."
*Dammit, why isn"t it working? The equations predict ninety-three per cent chance of success."
*And a seven per cent chance of failure."
*Thanks for reminding me. I"d almost forgotten." Black turned back to the view of Lykis, pondering the new data. *We must get to Kanto Kantoris," he murmured, almost to himself *There is still unrest here. Not everyone has accepted you yet. Remember, you won the military leadership by one vote only. They expect you to act." Black turned back, his face somehow darkened.
*Act? Haven"t I done enough for them? Haven"t I turned their dreams into a reality?" He raised his arms, then let them fall helplessly, as if the stupidity of humans was too much for him. *We have to keep our eye on the main prize, Envoy. The second set of lost coordinates. Nothing else matters."
*If you say so."
*I do. Start prepping a team. We leave for Kanto at once."