METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire Page 10

  “I have a theory,” Bashar announced as they pressed through yet another stand of Scotch broom. “Whoever sent Tygre to us also bombed us.”

  The Cascadiopolis bombing was the mother of all cold case files for Cascadia LEC. The only reason the death toll was estimated in the dozens was the near-total evacuation of the city in the week before fire had rained down from the sky. Tygre had virtually vanished from awareness except as an old file, but squad rooms and restaurant booths had heard plenty of speculation about the bombing over the years.

  “Why did you all leave Cascadiopolis?” she asked. “Why did almost everyone survive?”

  “We never left Cascadiopolis. We took it with us. The city is an idea, not a place.”

  She could actually understand that, almost. “Then why did you leave this place?”

  “Because of Tygre.” Bashar slowed his steps, stared up at the basalt ridge. At this distance, the hexagonal columns were obvious, as if the rock had been carved by the giants of Nod before the beginning of the world. “He showed us the way, and we slew him for it.”

  An old snatch of song slid through Mindy’s head. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

  “No,” he said. “Not that at all. So much … more.” Bashar led her into a stand of small pines at the foot of the ridge. “We’re almost here.”

  Her cop’s instincts wondered about the ‘we’ who had slain Tygre. Murder or sacrifice? The law did not distinguish.

  She followed Bashar into the shadows, wondering if the light would ever look the same.

  * * *

  2070 Annual Report to the Cascadia/Western Conference of Governors, Mayors and Political Executives:

  There are clearly connections between the Cascadiopolis daughter-cities and the urban reclamation efforts of the Cascadian governments and corporate citizens. Though no official relationships exist, and the unofficial relationships are by their very nature difficult to document, the underlying sociology and design philosophy behind settlements such as Heddlebrook, and the associated rewilding efforts, could have come straight out of the Green movement’s hidden cities movement. Some observers have speculated on a ‘hiding in plain sight’ strategy, a particularly audacious application of the purloined letter principle, but the likelihood of such an effort remaining undetected is staggeringly low, unless one is willing to posit extremes of economic and political influence that seem at best quite unlikely to remain as deeply hidden as they would have to be if they existed.

  In short, we would know.

  Would we not?

  * * *

  Nerves kill more operatives than the enemy does

  It turned out Crown had authorized a series of transactions of which he had no recollection. He raged for a while, ineffectually given his level of energy and focus, then sulked.

  “The drugs can’t be this bad.”

  Heinlein had mostly taken him on during the tantrum. “Your memory is not what it used to be.”

  “I know, but I didn’t spend … six million Euros … over three months in my damned … sleep.”

  “It does seem strange. Not to mention which six months ago your medication load was quite different.”

  Crown dredged a medical phrase up from the depths of his memory. “Retrograde amnesia?” Deep breath, then, “I don’t think so.”

  He considered the problem for a little while. The expert systems remained silent, the medical machinery whirred softly—he’d had the audible alarms disconnected two months ago, when the beeping had reached a level approaching madness. “You have my verbal authorizations … on file for all those listed expenditures.” Seventeen transactions, ranging from questionable to outright improbable.

  “Of course,” said Kornbluth.

  “Play them for me now.”

  A long silence ensued. Eventually Kornbluth spoke again. “There seems to be a problem with file retrieval on the verbal authorizations.”

  Ah ha. “Play my verbal’s … for all other authorizations …” he ran out of air, gasping through a shallow tightening in his chest. After struggling for a minute or so, Crown finished his sentence. “… during the same time period.”

  His own voice echoed through the room, reeling off names, dates, numbers, payees. It was an audio collage of Crown’s business decisions, as clear a set of tracks as left by any prey in the woods.

  When the last recording ended, he asked, “How many transactions?”

  “One hundred and six, exclusive of the seventeen originally under discussion.”

  “How many of them … had file retrieval … problems?”

  “None, sir.” If Kornbluth had been human, it would have been sweating bullets right now. Crown was virtually certain he heard a tension in the expert system’s voice, though he figured he was anthropomorphizing again.

  “We’ve been hacked,” he said.

  Deep breath. Crown kept protocols even for this. Especially for this. He’d switched to expert systems after his primary assistant and several of his staff had betrayed him to an assassination plot back at the time of the Cascadiopolis bombing. Crown had had a long time to consider security risks.

  “Kornbluth. Hubbard. Heinlein.” Another deep breath. Voice recognition was part of this trigger. He had to get the key phrase out in a single pass, without coughing or choking or trailing off. “I tell you three times, initiate Protocol Beria, on my personal authority.”

  A profound silence followed. Expert systems, even of the class he employed running on quantum hardware with obscene amounts of both processor capacity and storage, were not considered truly self-aware by the people who worked in computer science departments, or the people who worked in psychology departments. Crown knew from conversation that, put in so many words, the high-end expert systems had their own view of the question.

  He’d just hit the big, red reset button on all three of his expert systems, and put each of them to auditing one of the others. It was something between a mindrape and a killing insult, from their point of view.

  Which was too god-damned bad, because someone had misdirected six million Euros of his money through a hack so good that it had subverted his staff of expert systems, either directly or indirectly. His best hope was that only one of them had betrayed him.

  Crown would have gotten up out of the bed right then and walked out, trailing IVs and monitors, if he’d anywhere to go, anyone to go to.

  Who? Why?

  His money had been used for tasks similar to the Patriot, Inc. contract. Twisting his own intents and long-term goals in favor of a certain conservative, anti-Green bent that was close to Crown’s own views. He had long described himself as “not pro-Green”, a rather different thing than active opposition. Such relatively subtle distortions had avoided calling immediate attention to the spending items. Crown was rich, very rich, and the money absolutely had a life of its own that half a dozen full-time accountants were employed to manage and maintain. Six million Euros wasn’t even a significant portion of his fortune, ultimately, or even his cash reserves.

  The sting wasn’t in the loss of the money, it was in the betrayal.

  His first instinct was to blame Edgewater, or its subsidiary, Patriot, but neither the security company nor the political consultants needed Crown’s money, and neither of them had sufficient motive to compromise him so deeply. Not that he was aware of. Not such as to merit the risk of unleashing the wrath that would descend once he found the appropriate target.

  Besides, that was too easy. This was a subtle attack, one that would have ultimately undermined his personal credibility. He was up against a subtle actor. Someone who left very few traces.

  “Sir.” It was Heinlein, the expert system’s voice stripped of the verbal eccentricities that had characterized it for so many years. “Protocol Beria has been concluded.”

  “What have we discovered?” Crown asked, his voice set tight.

  * * *

  The gravestone was almost invisible. Local basalt, ash-blackened and covered with cr
eepers, it could have been a very small, oddly regular boulder propped beneath the young trees at the foot of the rocky ridge. A hot wind eddied around them, as if seeking a place to lay its fingers. It carried the flinty scent of rock exposed to sun, and dirt with too little moisture. The death of forests, in other words.

  Bashar knelt, his knees popping so loudly that Mindy winced at the sound. He tugged the creepers away from the gravestone so she could see the whole face.

  The edges were irregular, still shaped as they had come from the quarry, so the whole thing possessed an asymmetrical silhouette. The face had been cut down smooth and even, and likely polished, though blast ash and forty years of standing in the wilderness made that hard to be sure of.

  What puzzled Mindy was that the headstone was blank, except for an elegantly carved flame inset in the top quarter of it.

  “No name or dates,” she said.

  Bashar looked up at her with tears in his ageing eyes. “If you have to ask whose grave this is, you don’t need to know.” His fingers brushed across the bas-relief flame. “He burned bright in the forests of our night.” The old man stood up. “So long as you’re being a cop, you might as well know there’s three bodies in that grave. Two young women died with him.”

  “Not from the bombing?” She knew it was a stupid question as soon as the words left her lips. No one was up here burying after the bombing. And besides, the headstone had obviously been here already when the flames had come.

  “Bullets had to be used on him,” Bashar said distantly, obviously lost in memory. “No one would do it up close and personal. The girls died of knife wounds.”

  Mindy had conducted enough interrogations to recognize the significance of Bashar’s transition to passive voice. There was a notable lack of agency in his description of the deaths.

  “You killed him, didn’t you?” she asked, finding an unexpected well of sympathy for this man who was a few words away from being a self-confessed murderer.

  “No one else would, and it had to be done.” Still, Bashar was far away. “He practically made us do it.”

  “And not even thirty pieces of silver for your fee.”

  The old man gave her an odd look. Then: “No, our fee was life. Expansion. He gave us courage and purpose. There are over three dozen daughter-cities of Cascadiopolis now. We never would have moved so swiftly, expanded so widely, if Tygre hadn’t pushed us out.”

  “No,” Mindy said drily, “you would have all died in the bombing.”

  Bashar looked back at the gravestone, his hand still touching the carved flame. “Well, yes. Tygre saved us from that, too.”

  He seemed almost mystical now, so close to his dead hero, and honest in a fashion she doubted she’d hear from him again. Not this canny old fighter. “Who did it?” She kept her voice soft, safe, trying not to rouse him from this state. “Who did the bombing?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question every day for forty years.” He stood, grunting, and seemed to come back into himself. Bashar’s stance now signaled wariness, alertness, danger. To her surprise, he continued talking. “I may even have found some answers, though I doubt anyone will believe me.”

  “It’s a cold case, too. I’ll drop the murder investigation—” Now that I have a murderer in hand. “—if you’ll give me some help on the bombing.”

  “Trade three corpses for forty-six?” He laughed, utterly without humor.

  “Is that a precise death toll? Cascadia LEC never did pin it down.”

  “Per our census, yes. There may have been a handful unaccounted for otherwise, since Cascadiopolis never performed the sort of tracking and registration that the Cities do.”

  “Listen, I’m a cop and I don’t like ubiquitous surveillance.” She snorted. “Now they’re banding birds and seeding dust-cams across farmland. Give it another ten years and nothing will be able to fart between Anchorage and Yreka without somebody official knowing about it.”

  “And people say the world’s ended.” Bashar managed that comment without a trace of irony in his voice.

  This was the point you sometimes reached in a good interrogation when the suspect really wanted to tell their story. A cop had to be delicate, allow the perp to speak freely, not remind the them of legal jeopardy or anything else that might come next, like a boot to the groin. “So what do you know? Or suspect?”

  Bashar looked at her coldly, dropping naturally to a lotus position next to the gravestone. “I don’t care about your cold cases, Ms. Cascadia LEC. I’m not rolling over to beat a murder rap. I’m just going to tell you because I want to tell someone before I die. You might even be able to do something with the information. I only know one other person who could.”

  Mindy was growing fascinated. This man had absolutely no sense of perp fear. Whatever he’d done had been right and just in his mind. She recognized that mentality, saw it most often in Christianist terrorists. Most perps knew what they were. Bashar saw himself very differently than any cop would. How had he stayed free all these decades?

  “Me and who?” she asked.

  “Man name of William Silas Crown.”

  Crown. A familiar name, of course. Everybody in Cascadia LEC had heard it. Near the top of the “don’t touch” list, along with most of Cascadia’s senior politicians, a few sports stars, some legal eagles. You find one of them involved in a case, you drop-kicked that case far, far up the ladder and never thought about it again. Otherwise you became a very unlucky cop, very quickly.

  “He pull the bombings?” she asked, her fascination suddenly tinged with that special brand of political horror that only cops and prosecutors normally experienced.

  “No, no.” Bashar waved the thought away. “But he came out here the day after we buried Tygre. A day before the bombing. Man’s got a net worth that could buy out most of the towns in Cascadia and even some of the cities, walks up our trails like any tourist. No security. Just came looking to see what was. I don’t know why, but something about Tygre and Cascadiopolis had hooked him.”

  “Crown’s a Restorationist, not a Green,” Mindy objected. “New money trying to bring the old days back.”

  “Think I don’t know my social politics?” Bashar snorted again. “Teach your grandmother to fuck eggs. I don’t know why he came. We didn’t talk much. I just know that he came. And Crown, who could have bought and sold us all a hundred times over, paid respect to Tygre, who didn’t give a tinker’s damn about money. That’s good enough for me.”

  Interesting attitude. “So Crown’s not a suspect in the bombing.” She breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She didn’t need that kind of heat.

  Franklin, her supervisor, would be relieved as well. Even better, Mindy would lay good odds that Crown was the “Big Money” that Franklin had wondered about. And if the man had come up here in the very narrow time window between Tygre’s death and the bombing, he was involved.

  “Not Crown, no. Nobody obvious.” Bashar paused. “You know what ‘ghost hardware’ is?”

  “Sure,” Mindy said. “Unregistered equipment. Usually a military term, referring to heavy weapons or other high-value assets that don’t formally exist.” Dad would definitely have liked this man.

  “Well, yes. But specifically, I mean orbital assets. Lofted into space on unregistered launches, usually stealthed. The bombings at Three Fingered Jack and here at Cascadiopolis were done with satellite-based kinetics. Deployed from ghost hardware.”

  Mindy shook her head. “Not my kind of politics. That stuff is way over my pay grade. I’m more the ‘why has this dead guy been locked in the wardrobe for two years’ sort of girl.”

  Bashar grinned at her. She realized he must have taught a lot of people over the years. “You want to re-open the cold case on the bombings, you’d better make it your kind of politics.”

  Method, motive and opportunity. Opportunity was a null issue here. Orbital assets made their own opportunities. Motive had been completely obscure for four decades. But the more Bashar could tell her about
method, the more she could infer about motive. “Whose ghost hardware? And why?”

  “That would be the question.” He paused, searching his thoughts.

  For what, Mindy wondered. Trust, maybe? She didn’t think this was a man who lost track of details easily.

  “You’re familiar with the concept of virtual nations? Sanotica, for example?”

  “Or the Cascadiopolis daughter-cities,” she said, trying to avoid her own brand of sarcasm. Mindy found, unexpectedly, that she wanted this man to like her.

  “No. The daughter-cities are real enough. Physical people living in physical places. We’re virtual in the sense that we overlay political boundaries with our own continuum, but we’re definitely in meatspace.”

  She didn’t miss the ‘we’ in Bashar’s words. “You mean like the online worlds. Gamer tribes and whatnot.”

  “More or less. My example of Sanotica is a metastasized gaming tribe, basically. But virtual nations existed long before there was an Internet.”

  “Really?”

  “Education is the failing of our times,” Bashar said sadly. “The Catholic Church, though they are virtual in the sense that Cascadiopolis is. Identifiable leadership, citizens and infrastructure. The Freemasons would be a better example. Any of the Illuminated Orders. Or the mystery cults from Classical times. Mithraists. Bear-slayers. Organizations commanding loyalty across state boundaries, across economic or social loyalties. The first multinationals, long before the Dutch invented the joint stock company as a way of distributing risk. In other words, not bound by capital or economic interest, but by other ties. Often spiritual. They tended to be very goal-oriented long term thinkers.”

  “Okay.” All of this was half-familiar to Mindy, though she would be ashamed to admit more from popular movies than from any educational efforts. “I think I get it.”