One of the larger spheres answered him officiously. “Of course. Who
else
might you have been? We trust the quickening has been performed to your general satisfaction?”
He picked at a patch of damp fur, suppressing the urge to shiver. “Everything seems in order. Perhaps if we moved to a warmer room. . . .” His voice sounded normal enough, despite the alterations to his face: maybe a touch less deep than normal, with the merest suggestion of a feline snarl in the vowels.
“Naturally. Doctor Austvro has been waiting for you.”
“I’m surprised she wasn’t here to greet me.”
“Doctor Austvro is a busy woman, Inspector, now more than ever. I thought someone from the Office of Scrutiny would have appreciated that.”
He was about to mention something about common courtesies, then thought better of it: Even if she wasn’t listening in, there was no telling what the aerial might report back to Austvro.
“Perhaps we’d better be moving on. I take it Doctor Austvro can find time to squeeze me into her schedule, now that I’m alive?”
“Of course,” the machine said sniffily. “It’s some distance to her laboratory. It might be best if I carried you, unless you would rather locomote.”
Fernando knew the drill. He spread his arms, allowing the cluster of flying spheres to distribute itself around his body to provide support. Small spheres pushed under his arms, his buttocks, the padded black soles of his feet, while others nudged gently against chest and spine to keep him balanced. The largest sphere, which played no role in supporting him, flew slightly ahead. It appeared to generate some kind of aerodynamic air pocket. They sped through the open door and down a long, curving corridor, gaining speed with each second. Soon they were moving hair-raisingly fast, dodging round hairpin bends and through doors that opened and shut only just in time.
Fernando remembered his tail and curled it out of harm’s way.
“How long will this take?” he asked.
“Five minutes. We shall only be journeying a short distance into the inclusion.”
Fernando recalled his briefing. “What we’re passing through now—this is all human built, part of Pegasus Station? We’re not seeing any KR-L artifacts yet?”
“Nor shall you,” the aerial said sternly. “The actual business of investigating the KR-L machinery falls under the remit of the Office of Exploitation, as you well know. Scrutiny’s business is confined only to peripheral matters of security related to that investigation.”
Fernando bristled. “And as such . . .”
“The word was ‘peripheral,’ Inspector. Doctor Austvro was very clear about the terms under which she would permit your arrival, and they did not include a guided tour of the KR-L artifacts.”
“Perhaps if I ask nicely.”
“Ask whatever you like. It will make no difference.”
While they sped on—in silence now, for Fernando had decided he preferred it that way—he chewed over what he knew of the inclusion and its significance to the Metagovernment.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humanity had achieved the means to colonize nearby branes: squeezing biological data across the hyperspatial gap into adjacent realities, then growing living organisms from those patterns. Now the Metagovernment sprawled across thirty thousand densely packed braneworlds. Yet in all that time it had encountered evidence of only one other intelligent civilization: the vanished KR-L culture.
Further expansion was unlikely. Physics changed subtly from brane to brane, limiting the possibilities for human colonization. Beyond fifteen thousand realities in either direction, people could survive only inside bubbles of tampered spacetime, in which the local physics had been tweaked to simulate homebrane conditions. These “inclusions” became increasingly difficult to maintain as the local physics grew more exotic. At five kilometers across, Meranda Austvro’s inclusion was the smallest in existence, and it still required gigantic support machinery to hold it open. The Metagovernment was happy to shoulder the expense because it hoped to reap riches from Austvro’s investigations into the vanished KR-L culture.
But that investigation was supposed to be above-top-secret, the mere existence of the KR-L culture officially deniable at all levels of the Metagovernment. By all accounts Austvro was close to a shattering discovery.
And yet there were leaks. Someone close to the operation—maybe even Austvro herself—was blabbing.
Scrutiny had sent Fernando in to seal the leak. If that meant shutting down Austvro’s whole show until the cat could be put back into the bag (Fernando could not help but smile at the metaphor), then he had the necessary authorization.
How Austvro would take it was another thing.
The rush of corridors and doors slowed abruptly, and a moment later Fernando was deposited back on his feet, teetering slightly until he regained his balance. He had arrived in a much larger room than the one where he had been quickened, one that felt a good deal more welcoming. There was plush white carpet on the floor, comfortable furniture, soothing pastel décor, various homely knickknacks and tasteful objets d’art. The rock-effect walls were interrupted by lavish picture windows overlooking an unlikely garden, complete with winding paths, rock pools, and all manner of imported vegetation, laid out under a soothing green sky. It was a convincing simulacrum of one of the more popular holiday destinations in the low-thousand branes.
Meranda Austvro was reclining in a silver dress on a long black settee. Playing cards were arranged in a circular formation on the coffee table before her. She put down the one card that had been in her hand and beckoned Fernando to join her.
“Welcome to Pegasus Station, Inspector,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you sooner, but I’ve been rather on the busy side.”
Fernando sat himself down on a chair, facing her across the table. “So I see.”
“A simple game of Clock Patience, Inspector, to occupy myself while I was waiting for your arrival. Don’t imagine this is how I’d rather be spending my afternoon.”
He decided to soften his approach. “Your aerial did tell me you’d been preoccupied with your work.”
“That’s part of it. But I must admit we botched your first quickening, and I didn’t have time to wait around to see the results a second time.”
“When you say ‘botched’ . . .”
“I neglected to check your header tag more carefully. When all that cat fur started appearing . . .” She waved her hand dismissively. “I assumed there’d been a mistake in the profile, so I aborted the quickening before you reached legal sentience.”
The news unnerved him. Failed quickenings weren’t unknown, though, and she’d acted legally enough. “I hope you recycled my remains.”
“On the contrary, Inspector: I made good use of them.” Austvro patted a striped orange rug, spread across the length of the settee. “You don’t mind, do you? I found the pattern quite appealing.”
“Make the most of me,” Fernando said, trying not to sound as if she had touched any particular nerve. “You can have another skin when I leave, if it means so much to you.”
She clicked her fingers over his shoulder at the aerial. “You may go now, Caliph.”
The spheres bustled around each other. “As you wish, Doctor Austvro.”
When Fernando had heard the whisk of the closing door, he leaned an elbow on the table, careful not to disturb the cards. He brought his huge whiskered head close to Austvro’s. She was an attractive woman despite a certain steely hauteur. He wondered if she could smell his breath, how uniquely, distastefully feline it was. “I hope this won’t take too much time, for both our sakes. Scrutiny wants early closure on this whole mess.”
“I’m sure it does. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about your investigation.” She picked up a card from one part of the pattern, examined it with pursed lips, then placed it down on top of another one. “Therefore, I’m not sure how I can help you.”
“You were informed that we were investigating a security hole.”
“I was informed, and I found the suggestion absurd. Unless I am the perpetrator.” She turned her cool, civil eyes upon him. “Is that what you think, Inspector? That I am the one leaking information back to the homebrane, risking the suspension of my own project?”
“I know only that there are leaks.”
“They could be originating from someone in Scrutiny, or Exploitation. Have you considered that?”
“We have to start somewhere. The operation itself seems as good a place as any.”
“Then you’re wasting your time. Return down-stack and knock on someone else’s door. I’ve work to do.”
“Why are you so certain the leaks couldn’t be originating here?”
“Because—first—I do not accept that there
are
leaks. There are merely statistical patterns, coincidences, that Scrutiny has latched onto because it has nothing better to do with its time. Second, I run this show on my own. There is no room for anyone else to be the source of these nonexistent leaks.”
“Your husband?”
She smiled briefly and extended a hand over the coffee table, palm down. A figure—a grave, clerical-looking man in black—appeared above the table’s surface, no larger than a statuette. The man made a gesture with his hands, as if shaping an invisible ball, then said something barely audible—Fernando caught the phrase “three hundred”—then vanished again, leaving only the arrangement of playing cards.
Austvro selected another, examined it once more and returned it to the table.
“My husband died years ago, Inspector. Edvardo and I were deep inside the KR-L machinery, protected by an extension of the inclusion. My husband’s speciality was acausal mechanics. . . .” For a moment, a flicker of humanity interrupted the composure of her face. “The extension collapsed. Edvardo was on the other side of the failure point. I watched him fall into KR-L spacetime. I watched what it did to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Fernando said, wishing he had paid more attention to the biographical briefing.
“Since then I have conducted operations alone, with only the machines to help me. Caliph is the most special of them. I place great value on his companionship. You can question the machines if you like, but it won’t get you anywhere.”
“Yet the leaks are real.”
“We could argue about that.”
“Scrutiny wouldn’t have sent me otherwise.”
“There must be false alarms. Given the amount of data Scrutiny keeps tabs on—the entire informational content of metahumanity, spread across thirty thousand reality layers—isn’t
any
pattern almost guaranteed to show up eventually?”
“It is,” Fernando conceded, stroking his chin tufts. “But that’s why Scrutiny pays attention to context and to clustering. Not simply to exact matches for sensitive keywords, either, but for suspicious similarities: near-misses designed to throw us off the scent. Miranda for Meranda; Ostrow for Austvro, that kind of thing.”
“And you’ve found these clusters?”
“Nearly a dozen at the last count. Someone with intimate knowledge of this research project is talking, and we can’t have that.”
This amused her. “So the Metagovernment does have its enemies after all.”
“It’s no secret that there are political difficulties in the high branes. Talk of secession. Exploitation feels that the KR-L technology may give the Metagovernment just the tools it needs to hold the stack together if the dissidents try to gain the upper hand.”
Austvro sneered. “Tools of political control.”
“An edge, that’s all. And obviously matters won’t be helped if the breakaway branes learn about the KR-L discoveries and what we intend to do with them. That’s why we need to keep a lid on things.”
“But these clusters . . .” Austvro leaned back into the settee, studying Fernando levelly. “I was shown some of the evidence—some of the documents—before you arrived, and, frankly, none of it made much sense to me.”
“It didn’t?”
“If someone—some mole—was trying to get a message through to the breakaway branes, why insist on being so cryptic? Why not just come out and say whatever needs to be said instead of creating jumbled riddles? Names mixed up . . . names altered . . . the context changed out of all recognition . . . some of these keywords even looked like they were embedded in some kind of play.”
“All I can say is that Scrutiny considered the evidence sufficiently compelling to require immediate action. It’s still investigating the provenance of these documents, but I should have word on that soon enough.”
Austvro narrowed her flint-gray eyes. “Provenance?”
“As I said, the documents are faked: made to appear historical, as if they’ve always been present in the data.”
“Which is even more absurd than there being leaks in the first place.”
He smiled at her. “I’m glad we agree on something.”
“It’s a start.”
He tapped his extended claws against the coffee table. “I appreciate your skepticism, Doctor. But the fact is, I can’t leave here until I have an explanation. If Scrutiny isn’t satisfied with my findings—if the source of the leaks can’t be traced—they’ll have no option but to shut down Pegasus, or at least replace the current setup with something under much tighter government control. So it’s really in your interests to work with me, to help me find the solution.”