The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [126]
‘Here we go,’ said Nicodemus. ‘The big switcheroo!’
From a coat pocket he took a little box with an old-fashioned rocker switch which he pressed. Abruptly the wicker ceiling dissolved into flat grey while one of the compartment walls vanished, revealing a long narrow room with metal rack shelves on one side and a couple of desks sitting beneath more shelving on the other. A pair of archaic bulbs hung from a high ceiling but the only light came from the rows of small screens sitting on the shelves over the desks.
‘Mr Nicodemus, I presume,’ Harry said. Julia saw that he was back in the Tiger-Duke exter and she was Lioness-Lady again.
‘Just Nicodemus,’ their host said. Pushing the goggles up onto his dark bristly hair, he busily retrieved a couple of grubby wheeled office chairs from the room’s shadowy far end. Once they were seated, he leaned back against a desk edge, folded his coat shut, crossed his arms and regarded them both with wide, intense eyes.
‘My zetetic feed tells me that you are both code entities although one of you is a fractal simuloid, highly recomplex with a non-bounded sentience.’ He paused to regard Julia with fascinated eyes. ‘You should realise that while I am a living, breathing organic Human, and therefore prey to all the failings of the flesh, this image of mine is no more than a remote exter. I’m not neurally linked therefore cannot be wet-hacked or mindseared in any way. If either of you were considering such gambits.’
‘Nothing could be further from our minds, I assure you,’ Harry said. ‘Were you able to identify our contact? If you know anything about his origins and allegiance you would get some notion of our reliability.’
Nicodemus gave a bleak smile. ‘Sure, I know about the Construct and your drone patron was able to satisfy me that he is the genuine article. I just had to be certain about you two, especially with those zazins on your trail.’
‘Ah, so that’s what they were,’ Harry said, his features suddenly serious.
‘A little background would be helpful,’ Julia said.
‘Code-specific hunter-killers,’ he said. ‘Whoever is behind them managed to get hold of full or even partial scans of our code cores. Zazins don’t stop – they just keep regenerating.’
‘So we’re in danger … anywhere?’ she said. ‘Out in the Glow, for example?’
‘Yes, which makes our task just that much trickier.’
‘Okay, I admit it, I’m intrigued,’ said Nicodemus. ‘What kind of mischief do you have in mind?’
Harry laid it out for him, the dire predicament of Darien, the Earthsphere fleet journeying to join a Hegemony armada, the arrival of the lost Sino colonists, who then vowed to fight for the Darien colony, and the riveting report by Kaphiri Farag. Nicodemus listened, breaking in a few times for clarification on this or that point. When Harry was done, their host sat there on the edge of the desk, one arm across his chest, his other hand clamped across his face, beneath his nose. After a few moments the hand fell away as he let out a bark of laughter.
‘Yes, you’re right! – getting into the private homenets of eight such high-status individuals would be like trying to crawl into a shark’s mouth undetected. Add to which, an intruder alert would certainly bring the netlaw down on top of us like … a ton of boots. No, we have to get them to leave reality, leave their virtual citadels and enter the Glow with the aim of seeking us out!’
‘And they would do this … because … ?’ Julia said.
Nicodemus’s smile was all narrow-eyed cunning.
‘Because, dear Lioness-Lady, they will be compelled to do so. This … falls within that arena of instinctive talents and persuasive genius known as ego-engineering. It would be a demanding task to carry out against just one person but you’ve brought me eight targets! … with the added bonus that we only have a matter of s-hours to make it all work!