• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Time we called Logan,’ he said.

11

Quantum Localities

Donovan’s mail filter routinely discarded 98.3 per cent of incoming messages: sabotage attempts by enraged systems administrators, enquiries from journalists, advertising shots for everything from nuclear depth-charges to anti-fouling paint. That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh’s message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary’s direct approach.

So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared.

Too soon.

Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his aching hands. He’d been up all night, winding down the mechanical ferocity of his virtual hordes. It would probably be another day before the process was complete and they’d have a clear sight of whatever the Watchmaker entity was doing.

A girl in denims and deck-shoes came up from the galley with his breakfast coffee. He nodded to her and motioned her over. She approached with an air-hostess smile that relaxed to gratitude and relief when he asked her to massage his shoulders and neck. The insistent pressure and warmth of her fingers soothed his mind as well as his muscles. He drank the coffee and scanned the news. The increasingly fraught international situation came almost as a relief: it might give the CLA and Stasis time to deal with the Watchmaker entity while Space Defense was busy iraqing the Japanese.

He turned around in his seat. ‘Thank you,’ he told the girl. ‘You can go now.’

‘You’re…welcome, Mr Donovan,’ she said, and walked, very carefully, across the floor and down the ladder. Donovan waited until the sound of her footsteps was lost in the sough of the sea and the sigh of ventilation, and put out a call for Bleibtreu-Fèvre.

Within seconds the Stasis agent’s face appeared on a flat screen. If he had been up all night he certainly didn’t look it. Used to it, perhaps: Donovan had a vague image of him sleeping through the day, hanging upside down by his feet. Bleibtreu-Fèvre apparently mistook Donovan’s momentary amusement for cordiality, and returned him a thin-lipped smile.

‘I’m about halfway there,’ Donovan said. ‘How are your people reacting?’

‘There is no panic,’ replied Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I have reported my suspicions, but the consensus is still that it was sabotage, if not by your movement then by some freelance hacker. The disruption seems to be over, for the moment. However, Mrs Lawson reports a small but persistent unaccounted increase in net traffic since the…event. Barely detectable, unless one is specifically looking and applying appropriate diagnostics. Like global warming.’ Another thin smile. ‘It is rising – by a very small fraction, but it is rising. It will be obvious to the dimmest sysadmin within about three days, to the rest of my agency some time before that and, no doubt, to Space Defense some indeterminate time after…How banal it will seem,’ he added, ‘if the first tangible evidence of a new intelligence on our planet should be unexpectedly high telephone bills, ha, ha.’

‘Some would say it’s been with us a long time,’ Donovan said, sourly acknowledging the joke but smarting inwardly: Bleibtreu-Fèvre was playing back to him an idea he’d advanced a little too seriously in Secret Life. ‘What about Dr Van?’

‘There we may have a problem,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘I have not heard from him for some hours. He has an infuriatingly vague answer-fetch which takes the form of a pretty young lady who sounds as if she is promising to put him in touch with you immediately, but as soon as the call is over one realizes she has promised precisely nothing.’

‘Probably an actual person,’ Donovan said as gravely as he could manage. ‘The skill is almost impossible to automate.’

‘Any progress with Kohn?’

Donovan flipped Kohn’s message into Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s field of view.

‘So much for that scheme,’ the Stasis agent remarked after reading it.

‘Perhaps,’ Donovan said reluctantly. ‘However, Catherin