We reached the Antarctic Royale nearly twenty minutes later. It was close to the other tall tower I had spotted when we had stepped off the shuttle from the spaceport.
No rubbish drifted up against the base of walls, here. No glaring billboards. Trees with drooping branches heavy with leaves and blooms lined the avenue.
I could feel my guard relaxing and pushed myself into a more upright and alert posture. “You’re up. Can you manage it?” I asked Ninety-Nine.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
I fell back half a pace behind him, and took most of his bags from him.
The check-in process went smoothly from the moment Ninety-Nine rested the flat of his hand on the smooth faux-wood counter. The hotel manager standing behind the counter clerk was almost certainly a serial, and probably an executive, but I didn’t know him. He likely would not recognize me, either.
Ninety-Nine was relieved of his bag, and mine were also deposited on the hovering platform. We were escorted to the suite Ninety-Nine had requested. I’d wanted merely a room with two beds, but I couldn’t argue with Ninety-Nine in front of serials who wouldn’t like the way I was speaking to a human of a significant family.
As soon as we had the door closed, I sterilized the room’s terminal, which had three viruses and a listening bug. I killed the video feed—and the hidden one. Relatively certain I had uncovered all spying apps and tools, I turned to assess Ninety-Nine, who sat motionless on the front edge of the sofa, his gaze on nothing. Exhaustion pulled at his shoulders.
“You can contact the family now, and find out how bad the news is from Luna City,” I told him. “Or you can eat, sleep and feel more human tomorrow morning, when the news will still be waiting for you. Your choice.”
Ninety-Nine didn’t appear to have heard me. He sat for a long minute, unmoving. Then he said, “I checked messages in the taxi. No one has thought to reach out to me. So the news is either trivial…or so bad, they haven’t got around to day-to-day stuff yet.” He looked at me. “If we were on Abbatangelo, I wouldn’t have heard about this at all. I can wait twelve hours.”
From his drained features, I suspected it would be longer than twelve hours. But I said nothing. Instead, I went to the terminal and ordered a meal for both of us, with good quality protein, which would help us sleep.
Only it didn’t. Not me, at least. I tossed most of the night, listening to Ninety-Nine snore in the other room.
Like him, I was out of my element. I had expected Earth to have changed, but the degree of change shocked me.
A woman killed in plain sight of everyone, who didn’t even notice it happening?
Yes, she was possibly a brood mother. But that set up a pattern I didn’t like. How had brood mothers gone from family stabilizers and rearers of children, to conducting acts of espionage, sabotage, and attempts to flee the planet?
Why?
And why had everyone pretended to not see it? They must have seen it, of course. It had happened right in front of them. The security guards had been serials. The pregnant victim most likely a serial. But humans had never treated me or any serials as though we weren’t there.
True, they had needed us. Particularly the executives, who could plan and operate their war for them, and keep Earth running in the meantime.
But even normal serials who were not sent to fight the war had provided valuable services and most humans had interacted with them as though they were human, when they had interacted with them at all. Lesser humans, but human. Staff and servants, but still human.
Was Georgina more than right? Had we stepped into the crumbling ruins of a civilization just in time to watch its death throes?
The collapse of the dome in Luna City suggested that the violence had extended off-world. How soon before Mars was hit? The belt cities, which were still nominally Earth territories? Should I warn Toma? Was he watching the newsfeeds?
Was information even reaching off-world?
That was a question that tugged at me all night, too. Was the reason no one had reached out to Ninety-Nine with news about Luna City because someone else had shunted all communications? No one in his family knew he was here on Earth. They all thought he was still on Abbatangelo.
How severed were Terran communications?
Shutting down communications was what an enemy did, just before launching a strike.
The next day, I stuffed us both full of complex carbs and more protein. We would need it, I suspected.
I also scratched an itch by sending a routine message to Georgina, telling her we had arrived. I requested a confirmation of receipt.
It would take a few hours for the receipt to ping back. Its arrival—or non-arrival—would tell me something.
Then I sat back at the table where we had breakfasted and laid it out for Ninety-Nine. “It’s polite to call ahead and let the family know you’re about to arrive. But I think you should just arrive, with no warning. You’ll learn a lot, that way.”
“That’s guerilla strategy,” Ninety-Nine pointed out.
“I’m not saying your family is the enemy, but they might try to close ranks on you, as you’re the prodigal son who abandoned them.”
Ninety-Nine’s jaw flexed. “Scipio is the prodigal son. I am…a disappointment.”
I had forgotten that Scipio was the elder son. “Even more reason to arrive without warning,” I told him. “Catch them off-guard.”
“If the news from Luna is as bad as I think it is,” Ninety-Nine said, “then they will be too distracted to be surprised. But if we don’t go there and stand in the same room as them, we might as well have stayed home and called, instead.”
He had a point, even though no one could afford calls to Earth, not even Georgina.
The hotel arranged a taxi for us, and took only two percent of the fare, on top of the fare. As the hotel wouldn’t stand for fare hiking, we got the fare for less than I would have had to pay if I’d dickered myself. The two percent was well spent.
The taxis were all purely ground cars, although the hotel could have offered us an air car for quite a bit more money. I didn’t want to be in the air, though. I wanted to see this city from ground level.
The streets we drove through looked as ordinary as Georgina had warned us they might, which reflected the status of the neighborhood. We didn’t pass through any areas that looked any worse than upper middle class, even though the journey took forty minutes.
It was late morning on a weekday, when most humans would be at their place of employment, or otherwise going about their affairs. The streets were quiet, the traffic tolerable.
The Sinagra family mansion was on the outskirts of the city, where there was room to sprawl. The estate itself was about fifteen hectares, through which a lively river ran, passing under the walls and through wide-set grates.
The taxi driver wouldn’t take us through the main gates, which stood open, until Ninety-Nine pressed his hand against the viewscreen with an impatient tsking sound. The driver straightened and seemed to grow taller in response. He wheeled the vehicle through the gates and up the wide driveway, coming to a halt in front of a mansion of impeccable taste, made of white marble and stone, with multiple levels and many windows.
Ninety-Nine peered through the side window, making no move to open the door.
No one came out to inspect the new arrivals and send them on their way.
“Strange,” Ninety-Nine murmured and opened the door. I followed suit and tried to look over my shoulder and around, to spot any line-of-sight weaknesses, any direction that a potential attack might come from, including overhead.
We hauled the bags and packs to the top of the broad steps in front of the wide door, and dumped them against the wall to one side of the door. Then Ninety-Nine touched the paging button.
We waited.
Ninety-Nine touched the page button two more times before someone came to the door. The man who answered had a pleasant face and solid physique. He held the door open, an astonished expression on his face. “Mr. Hyland, sir!”
That slotted him into the hierarchy of the family for me. A butler of some type, possibly human.
“Let me in, Ishmael,” Ninety-Nine said. “I need to speak to my parents.”
Ishmael made a movement. It was subtle. A shift of the hips. A flinch, perhaps? But his pleased expression remained in place. “Mr. Adam is at home, sir. I can bring you to where he is right now?”
Ninety-Nine looked puzzled. “Sure…?” His hesitant tone made it a question.
Ishmael glanced at me. “Sir.” He held the door open for both of us.
We passed into a foyer with an appearance matching those in history, with twin spiraling stairs and a massive chandelier hanging between them. Various doors and archways opened off the foyer, providing glimpses of comfortable, well-appointed rooms, rich décor and old-fashioned luxury.
I wondered how old the house was. It reeked of centuries.
Ishmael took us up the stairs. Halfway up, I spotted an elevator in the far corner of the foyer, beside discreet service doors.
The second-floor rooms seemed to be no less larger than those downstairs, but without elegant archways for access.
Ishmael headed for a double door at one end of a corridor. The corridor was so wide it was almost a foyer.
He pushed open the doors and let us in.
I stepped into the room just behind Ninety-Nine. The room took up the entire width of the house at this end, for windows were on three sides. It was an office and sitting room, and possibly a reading room, for the fourth wall without windows was lined with bookshelves upon which sat actual books.
A man who immediately reminded me of Ninety-Nine, except for the gray in his hair and the fine wrinkles set about his mouth, was standing and working on a screen emitted from a caster sitting on the coffee table in front of him. He glanced at Ninety-Nine through the screen, and dismissed it. “Hyland! What the hell…where did you come from?”
“The fringes,” Ninety-Nine said dryly. “Why are you working in my father’s office, Adam?”
Adam. A brother? Cousin? But he was too old to be a brother. That left cousin, or possibly, uncle.
I didn’t know enough about Ninety-Nine’s family. It was hampering.
Adam looked surprised, then concerned. “That’s why you’re here? Because of Luna?”
“What about Luna? The dome?”
“It’s not even confirmed yet,” Adam replied. “I’m just holding the fort.” He came closer. “It is good to see you.”
“What’s not confirmed?” Ninety-Nine pressed. “Why are you in here?”
Adam stopped a few feet away. “I live here now,” he said, as if that was self-evident.
“Yes, but why?”
“Who else should be here? You were gone. And Scipio…well…”
Ninety-Nine pressed his fingers to his temples. “Stop.”
The tone was peremptory, as good as any I would use and Adam took a half step back, astonishment rippling over his face. “Excuse me?”
Ninety-Nine dropped his hands. “Pretend I’ve had no news of the family for over a year. First, where are my parents?”
“No news!” Adam spoke with a tone of complete disbelief, as if Ninety-Nine had been living next door for six years, not out in the fringes were communications were ship to ship and slow, or ansible-belayed, and sketchy. Then he gathered himself together. “Hyland…I’m sorry, but…your parents are dead.”
I had been braced for this. Ninety-Nine had been, too. I could tell because he only flinched a little. His hand curled into a fist. “When?”
“A year ago, now. Their air car exploded. They say it was an accident, and none of us have found any proof to the contrary.”
I gripped Ninety-Nine’s shoulder and squeezed.
Ninety-Nine didn’t try to remove my hand. “And Scipio? Why isn’t he here? When I left, he was expecting his first child, a son.”
Adam laughed. “My goodness, your memory has warped while you were away. There is no son.”
“There was. Gilda was pregnant. Scipio and Oliver announced a son, a week before I left.”
It took me a second to unravel that. Scipio and Oliver were spouses and had made the official announcement. Gilda had to be the brood mother. The serial.
Adam’s smile faded. “You’re remembering it wrong. There was no son. They have no children. They don’t want them.”
“I am not remembering it wrong,” Ninety-Nine persisted. “Where is Scipio? I will talk to him myself.”
“That might be a bit difficult,” Adam said, his tone regretful. “He and Oliver moved to Luna City four years ago. Scipio has been running the family’s branch up there. Since the collapse of the dome, no one has seen either of them alive in Luna City. I was just speaking to the port authority, who is clearing out the remains of the dome. They won’t reach the estate for another twelve hours…but it doesn’t look good. The interior lost all its atmosphere when the dome was holed.”
Explosive decompression would have done the rest of the damage.
I squeezed Ninety-Nine’s shoulder, and let it go. He had withdrawn into himself.
“Was it an accident?” I asked.
Adam frowned. “I don’t know you.”
“This is Jovan,” Ninety-Nine said, his tone distant. “You can speak freely.”
“Not without credentials,” Adam said mulishly.
“Since when has my word not been enough?” Ninety-Nine demanded. “I said you can speak freely. Answer his question!”
Adam took another a little step back, his eyes widening. Then he got control of himself once more. “Yes, well…” He gave me a nervous smile. “Um…well, Luna port authority isn’t certain.”
“Which means it wasn’t an accident,” I told Ninety-Nine. “or they would just come out and say that. The reluctance to speak of the cause means they’re being carefully about political ramifications.” I looked at Adam again. “Who is the most likely family to have done this?”
Adam stared at me for a moment, his throat working. Then he said, with a whine in his voice, “Really, Hyland, I do not know this man. I can’t just blurt out…everything.”
“You know me,” Ninety-Nine replied, his tone stoic. “Answer his question.”
The chill in his voice made me blink. It disconcerted Adam, too, for he looked at his nephew, his eyes narrowed. “I’m starting to think I do not know you nearly as well as I thought. The fringes have changed you.”
“For the better,” Ninety-Nine confirmed. “Now. Who did this?”
Adam drummed his fingers against the backs of his hands, as he had his hands threaded together. He weighed and considered. “It could be anyone,” he said. “The McDonalds tried to outbid Peyton for the rights to build the dome, originally.”
“What about Zhuan-Peng?” I asked. “Have you had any interesting conversations with him, lately?”
Adam blinked. “Zhuan-Peng? I’ve been too busy to network socially. Why would I speak to him?”
“You probably shouldn’t,” I said. “He assassinated Clara and he controlled Petyon for years. Scipio heading for the moon prevented him from putting the screws on Scipio after Peyton died. If you’re head of the family now, he’ll come after you sooner or later, unless we stop him.”
Adam’s eyes bulged as he looked from me to Ninety-Nine and back. “Who are you?” he said at last. “Where are you getting this…preposterous story from?”
“It isn’t a story,” Ninety-Nine said. “We have proof.” He looked at me.
Oh, right. I was the help. I pulled out my pad and ran the pupil cam video.
Adam watched it from beginning to end. He looked pale, and licked his lips when it had finished. “I want…this has to be verified…” His voice was weak.
“I’ll give you a copy,” Ninety-Nine said. “But for obvious reasons, you should keep this to yourself.” He reached over to my pad, picked up the holo of the file and tossed it toward Adam.
“There are no reasons I can think of that make it obvious this should not be made public,” Adam said, his tone that of the righteous.
“Try this,” I told him. “As soon as you make any move against Zhuan-Peng, he’ll kill you.”
Adam’s jaw sagged. “This is…ridiculous. The man is a pillar of society.”
“His family were not high profile when I left,” Ninety-Nine said. “Are they now?”
Adam smoothed down his hair, as if the question was not in good taste, and he was embarrassed by it. “Well, the public does seem to be interested in the family’s affairs, I suppose. Not that I measure such things….”
I rolled my eyes. Every family would have marketing teams recording every statistic that would measure public interest and influence. “You haven’t been in this job long, have you?”
Ninety-Nine smiled.
Adam smoothed down his shirt once more. “That…I did mention I was merely holding the fort.”
“For how long?” Ninety-Nine asked. “How long since Scipio and Oliver moved to the moon?”
Adam cleared his throat. “A few months,” he said diffidently. “Arranging a board meeting takes time…”
I looked at Ninety-Nine. “Scipio left because Zhuan-Peng was trying to put on the screws. He got out, instead of buckling under. So Zhuan-Peng dealt with him, because once you try to squeeze, if the subject doesn’t cooperate, you can’t leave them hanging around to tell tales.” I looked at Adam, who had clearly followed the conversation, for he looked horrified. “Direct the investigators on Luna to look into any Zhuan-Peng family connections to the dome collapse.”
Adam looked as though he was on the verge of protesting again. Then his jaw tightened and he nodded. “I will. But if this is to remain secret, it limits what I can do.”
“Don’t do anything except suggest to the investigators about Zhuan-Peng,” I said. “We’ll do the rest.”
“You?” Adam looked at Ninety-Nine once more. “Really, nephew, I need more from you than ‘just trust me’ before I do anything else this man suggests.”
Ninety-Nine turned and headed for the door. “Look up Ptolemy Jovan Lane,” he said over his shoulder. “Look up his war record. I’ll be in my office.”
Startled, I strode after Ninety-Nine and got ahead of him just in time to open the door.
He nodded at me with the perfect oblivious expression on his face.
I closed the door behind us, and caught a glimpse of Adam’s expression as he stared after us, and wished that Ninety-Nine could see it.