Up Against It - M. J. Locke [160]
If she had been able to get the gun from him then, and known how to use it, she would have shot him without a second thought. He saw it in her eyes, and seemed amused. He gestured for her to move ahead of him.
The antechamber they were in held a digital art mural that shifted shapes and colors as they moved through. At the door to another room, Jane stalled in shock. Thondu was sitting inside. Definitely looking more female than male, and more European than African.
So much for my vaunted intuition, she thought bitterly. She had trusted the Viridians. This meant her DeadMan macro was useless. And that flash of insight next to Carl’s hologram? Sheer delusion. She felt heartsick.
But Thondu turned to her, and she reconsidered. The Viridian’s expression didn’t change, but from hir stiff posture and desperate glance, it was clear: ze was a prisoner, too. A fourth armed man stood in the corner.
“A word with you, sir?” the guard said to Glease, who took him into the other room. They left the door ajar and spoke in lowered voices. As Jane turned to Thondu, she caught a flicker of a gesture from the young Viridian, and a flimsy, near-invisible barrier settled over the two of them. The murmur of Glease and the young man’s voices ceased. Thondu did not look at Jane, but instead seemed to be working inwave.
“Listen carefully and don’t talk,” ze said swiftly. “Mr. Glease evaded arrest tonight and came to the Badlands. Learned Harbaugh’s dead and Learned Obyx was badly wounded, may be dead, too—”
“Holy shit!”
“He’s forcing me to make it look like you had a psychotic break, that you did the murders to prop up a paranoid fantasy.” Jane thought, And I just went to my doctor and told him I was hearing voices.
Glease must know, she realized. He’s using it. And that meant he had inside access to the “Stroiders” feed.
“He’s holding hostage the biocrystalline copy of the feral. It’s locked in his safe. He doesn’t know about this version.” Ze touched hir belly.
“But what about—”
“Shh! Listen! He doesn’t have your husband—a call just came in. Xuan eluded capture but he and others are trapped on a sugar-rock stroid, trying to fight them off. We have to—” Ze interrupted hirself by puncturing the bubble with a slicing motion of hir hand—so swiftly Jane only registered it after it had happened—as Glease and his flunky reentered the room. Ze incorporated the slicing movement into an action to bring up some images on the massive displays against that wall.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Glease said softly, angrily to his flunky, as the insulation bubble dissolved. He told Thondu, “Get me Woody.”
A shock ran through Jane as Elwood Ogilvie’s form materialized before them. “Well, what have we here?” Ogilvie asked, surveying the room, after a bare fraction of a second’s pause.
Jane did the math. He had to be within twenty million kilometers or so. Vesta was fifty million kilometers away—a third of an AU. He had to be closer than that, possibly on one of the military ships ready to launch at Phocaea.
“I brought you Navio, as you asked,” Glease told Ogilvie.
Woody Ogilvie’s gaze shifted to Jane. He looked very pleased to see her. “Commissioner. I am going to explain this to you once. I expect instant compliance. You will call a press conference and announce that you falsified evidence implicating Nathan in the murder of your man Martin Graham. Or I will order your husband killed.”
Jane’s heart knocked in her chest, and red waves washed across her vision. “No one would believe such a claim, since the recordings I obtained can be authenticated.”
“You let us worry about those details,” Ogilvie said.
“Our Viridian friend here is going to doctor the records in the local system,” Glease said, “indicating that the data has been altered by you. The librarian who sent you the records has already met with an unfortunate accident”—but how did they know? Jane thought, and then saw the look of suppressed horror on Thondu’s face; ze had helped them locate Masahiro. What will I tell Chikuma?—“and won’t be able to testify. By