Up Against It - M. J. Locke [162]
They all looked at Ogilvie. He leaned back in his chair, eyeing her and tweaking a lock of his well-groomed beard.
“Well played, Commissioner,” he said finally, with a sigh. “Nate, please haul your expensive legal ass out of there. Now.” He signed off. Glease shoved a finger in her face. “You’ll pay. I’ll see to it.”
“You’re burning escape time.”
The door snicked shut behind them. She hurried to the outer office. Glease had left the hatch open. She leaped up into the memorial garden, and exited. A few people walked along the atrium, along the curve of the thoroughfare, and someone was helping someone else stand. They were looking at the Weesu lift doors, which were closing.
“First things first,” Jane said. She called Aaron. He answered sleepily, and she filled him in on what had happened. “I can’t release the recordings for another fifty-nine minutes,” she said. “A deal’s a deal. But I never promised not to report Glease’s movements. He should be arriving in the Hub in the next two minutes. Can you shut down the Hub-to-surface lifts, and get a police squad out there?”
Aaron’s eyes glinted. “You bet I can.”
Jane disconnected, turned off DeadMan, and returned to Thondu.
Thondu was on hir knees by the safe, looking at the wreckage inside. Ze looked back at Jane, stricken. “I couldn’t sacrifice Phocaea. Not even to save BitManSinger.”
Jane knelt, too. “I’m sorry. You have the other copy though, yes?”
Thondu dashed away tears, touched hir belly again. “Yes. Thank the Nameless. It’s the last complete copy. But we may have lost everything already. This new method of encoding was experimental. We haven’t fully tested it yet.”
Jane stood. “How would you like a chance?”
“To test it, you mean?”
“Yes. My husband and some others are still in trouble. Woody Ogilvie has a fleet of ships within striking distance. We have no ice. This isn’t over yet.”
Thondu stood, too, and brushed off the glass dust, looking wary. “What did you have in mind?”
She gestured at hir belly. “Do you have a way to extract your copy of the feral and install it in a standard server? What would it take to do that?”
Thondu hesitated. “We’ll definitely want to make another backup. But what good will it do you? Only the city system and Upside-Down’s servers are big enough to house an active copy—and we all agree that BitManSinger isn’t ready to be released into the wild. It is still too young and unformed. Unbiddable. Destructive.”
“I’m going on instinct, Thondu—”
“Call me Vivian.” Jane looked at hir askance, and ze said, “I’m not Thondu. Not when I’m expressing the female and suppressing the male.”
Jane suppressed exasperation. What was this, multiple personality disorder? But she had little room to talk; hello, Voice. “If I can come up with a place the feral will fit, will you help me use it against the mob? I promise you, no harm will be done to the sapient.”
Thondu—no, Vivian’s—gaze went to the shards on the floor and wall. Hir gaze hardened. “If it can be done safely, yes. With great relish.”
27
Geoff and the others spent a good while trying to figure a way out. While Amaya and the professor made an inventory, Geoff and Kam explored the mine tunnels. Kam suggested they look for forgotten passages, and Geoff remembered that Joey Spud had had maps. They located the mining map archive. The maps were archeotech, as usual for Joey Spud: big, dusty scrolls of blue-lined, laminated scrip, tucked away on shelves in an old storage room. Geoff dug through the scrips and passed them to Kam, who spread them out on the workbench.
They went through several dozen maps and got nowhere. Most of the tunnels they had not yet explored had been sealed off with methane ice, and the rest were now inaccessible due to the explosions