“By the way,” Thales says, “I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”
He waits a beat, then another, but Irina doesn’t respond.
The flow of information between Irina and the central node has spiked, become torrential.
Her other memory had been legible, but now, looking into it, he only sees turbulence—she seems to be undergoing some catastrophic change of phase. It’s the fifth time this has happened—she’s always come back before, he tells himself, so he need not worry.
While she’s away, it falls to him to tend her body; her blood oxygen has dipped, so he deepens her breathing, then nudges up her heart rate, levels off her dopamine. He feels like the caretaker of a recently vacated house. It’s a deeper intimacy than he’d ever expected to have with a living human being.
Motion on the node draws his attention—there’s another thread of communication, distinct from Irina’s, going out into the world. Is it the mathematician? He tries to find the thread’s point of origin—it’s from the vicinity of the apex of the tower, but beyond that he can’t tell. He follows the thread out into the net and then to Water and Power’s servers, where it weaves elegantly around their firewalls and into W&P’s in-house lab, where it’s disconnecting before his eyes from a viral synthesizer. He rides the thread in as it dissolves, sees that the synthesizer’s last job ran ten minutes ago.
He zooms out, looks into W&P’s security system, sees that Cromwell’s troops have left, which means Irina’s ruse worked. He gets access to W&P’s cameras, sees a trail of sprawled bodies and then links to the helmet cam of Irina’s hired soldier as he walks into Cromwell’s office.
Fast pan over bookshelves, fossils, the grey glass of the far wall’s windows. Cromwell is at his desk with a laptop, Magda peering over his shoulder. There’s a laboratory beaker on his desk, empty except for a few drops of water. They look up at the same moment—Magda’s surprise turns instantly to fury but Cromwell seems to sink into his own calm.
“James Cromwell, your hour has come,” the soldier says as his rifle acquires Cromwell as a target.
“Real wealth,” says Cromwell, folding his hands on the table before him. “That’s what I’m offering if you sign on with me right now. If you got this far you’re an expert, and expensive, but compared to what I’m going to give you all the money you’ve ever seen in your life amounts to loose change. Why do I want you? Because I’m to rule, you see, if I survive today, and I need the best warriors. But how can you be sure I won’t have you killed the moment you let your guard down? Because, as you may or may not know, I plan to live for a very long time, and it’s inevitable that assassins will sometimes get through to me, and I would have it widely known it’s by far in their best interest to take service with me instead of pulling the trigger. We’ll put a video on the web right now in which I formally retain you, and then I’ll be truly committed. So you have a choice. You can have honor, and command, and wealth beyond reckoning, and stand at my right hand as I claim my empire, or you can have the dead body of an old man and, forgive me, remain expendable. I realize it’s a leap of faith but this is the one time in your entire life you’ll ever have this opportunity. Come, my friend. This is a beginning. Sometimes fate extends a hand.”
That’s a good offer, Thales thinks, and unanticipated, and Cromwell might just have bought his life back, but the soldier says, “Sorry, boss. I abide by my contract. That’s the rule.”
Magda flings the beaker at his head but he ducks fluidly and stands again without the crosshairs leaving Cromwell’s head.
The beaker holds Thales’ gaze as it clatters off the wall, rolls on the ground. He finds the records surrounding it, sees it contained the retrovirus sent from the encrypted server.
Thales brings the retrovirus into focus, sees its functional architecture, how it was modified while it was being synthesized—there’s an altered region designed to hijack Cromwell’s thyroid and make it produce a protein that will dissolve the myelin sheaths of his neurons over the course of the next five minutes, which means the mathematician has already killed Cromwell, and Thales wonders why he changed his mind.
He tries to seize control of the soldier’s rifle but can’t get it and resorts to scrolling a message down the soldier’s heads-up display. Wait! I’m a friend of Irina’s, he writes; to his credit, the soldier doesn’t jump. Cromwell just infected himself with a medical retrovirus. He thought it would help him, but it was tainted—he’ll be dead in five minutes. Let him have his time.
His words seem empty and sure to change nothing.
“Change of plan,” says the soldier, lowering his rifle a little. “It looks like they shopped you, boss. The retrovirus was tainted. You’ve got about five minutes to live, and they’re yours to use as long as you sit tight.”
“And the cure for Magda’s illness?” asks Cromwell, for the first time sounding really worried.
A ruse, Thales writes.
“Just a ruse, boss,” says her soldier, sounding genuinely regretful.
Thales regards Cromwell with interest; he’s lost his lover, his empire and an unbounded future in the space of less than a minute. For a moment he seems to waver, then collects himself and with the utmost formality says, “You strike me as a man who has held officer rank. As such, tell me, are you empowered to perform weddings?”
No, Thales thinks. That’s just the captains of ships.
“Yes,” says the soldier. “As a matter of fact, I am. How may I oblige you?”
Thales leaves them then, because Irina’s back, and just reaching the top.