Three
It was just as we had been checked out of the final gate and were about to follow Edgecomb and his tag code detector along the dirt track that the ground started shaking. He yelled, "Run!" So we ran along the track between the stone hovels until we reached a junction. The section of road right behind us buckled and collapsed. The nearest two huts slid and crashed into the newly-formed chasm. It was like an earthquake, only very localised. Then it was quiet.
We pestered Edgecomb until he gave some explanations. He wouldn't be flustered, but gave us one of his long, almost pitying looks. He claimed that every branefold still linked to Earth was inherently unstable, because of the way that gravitons can cross from one branefold to another, and because the physical constants of these artificial universes were neither stable nor accurately set. So now and again, a chunk of matter inside New Australia's crust would crumble, or explode, or disappear. But he claimed it was all settling down now.
He wouldn't tell us about the leaflet barrage. He just glanced around at the gathering crowd of curious residents, wearing that deadpan face that said nothing.
I was worried about him. Of course, I had come to know more than I wanted to about Adam Werth, and how he had done away with all the other possible witnesses to Junot Jaar's murder. I knew enough about his mutation of the umrix software, the Mind Trojan, to keep my abdominal muscles in an almost constant clench, just waiting for something like that to breach my own defences and take over. No matter that I'd downloaded all the security patches and neural scripts I could find. I fought to keep my mind away from the warehouse scene. Every time I met someone odd - Edgecomb, say - I would wonder. The stiff way he talked, his minimal body language, that blank stare: it made me think of a puppet. Maybe Werth's puppet. I glanced at Szychter, and that wasn't exactly reassuring either. Have you seen those zombie movies? It felt like that. But I shook it off and got on with the hunt for Sabri Jek Nisr for the time being.
He did ask us why we needed this Hamdani so badly, as he tapped his tag detector with a quick frown that hinted of frustration. It was Miss Szychter who replied, or almost spat, that he was the only surviving witness to a bloody murder. Her vehemence raised Edgecomb's eyebrow.
Most of the men and women coming forward didn't seem like the homicidal thugs you hear about on Orient News. They looked curious, bored and hungry, in that order. I asked one tall, pock-faced man where the newcomers usually went, and he pointed us to a low, square building along the left-hand track. Then he tried to sell us some roll-ups. I waved him off.
We pushed our way in through the door that was set on jamming itself into the dirt as I opened it. Miss Szychter and Edgecomb let me do the talking. I came up empty-handed. The volunteer reception staff had not met Nisr, though they'd received a list of newcomers' names that included his. So I told my two companions to wait and I went outside. Pock-face was hanging around. I beckoned to him and squatted down by the wall to haggle over the price of a few roll-ups.
I don't smoke anymore, since I downloaded that Nico-Wipe patch, but I wanted to chat. After a while we got into talking about how he had arrived there, a few months ago. I asked casual-but-intrigued questions while rubbing a strand of his baccy between my fingers judiciously. When the guards had pushed him out of the gates into the town, a couple of the towners, that's what the convicts call themselves, had been waiting. They'd stopped Pock-face, whose name I discovered was Jeff, and asked him if he'd be interested in joining a social club. He'd joined, and discovered within it an underground movement. All the towners knew about the movement, but only a few dozen were members. It was a black market, a network of resistance, and an embryonic governing body. Jeff hadn't joined, but he thought our Nisr man, aka Ali Hamdani, might have been diverted that way and never reached the official reception committee. It seemed to happen a lot, said Jeff. He gave me a vague idea of how I could find this underground, but he was constantly peering about nervously. His last comment was about how they were aiming to get their branefold disconnected. Suddenly he jumped up and walked away without another word, leaving me with all his thirty roll-ups I'd bought for one earring of the gold that I'd heard was their main informal currency.
I squatted a while longer, pulling from my pocket the pen, emptying the bits and pieces from it onto my palm, which I noticed was shaking with a life of its own. I thought, this had better work. Coming prepared was good; dropping a piece into the thick dust and losing it would be teeth-grindingly bad.
Before I could assemble the pieces, though, I heard someone emerging from the building. I jumped up and shoved the pieces into my jacket pocket. I felt that much closer to my goal that I think I actually smiled at Edgecomb.
I asked him where we'd find the water tower. He turned and began striding along the track without a word. Helena fell into step beside me. She wanted to know what I'd found out. I shrugged and told her, then asked her if she smoked. It was like she hadn't even heard the question.
We stared at Edgecomb's back. I asked her what she thought of him. She shrugged and wouldn't commit herself. I asked her what she knew of Werth's Trojans. She gave me a sharp look, then glanced at Edgecomb again, and shook her head, said she didn't think that very likely. Could Werth do such a thing?
I muttered that she was pretty naïve. "Pre-frontal cortex control is out there in the cloud. PFC has been a known technology for a while," I said. "These days, the territory between implants and neurons is blurred to blazes. There are tailor-scripted pseudo-rootkits, they can hook the mind's control patterns, and the only way out is to -"
But I caught myself. She scowled at me long and hard anyway. I shouldn't have talked so much. P.I.s are meant to be smarter than that, but not smart enough to know all that stuff.
She would have started grilling me over how I knew so much, but right then as the water tower raised its head above the rooftops, a percussion of small-arms fire erupted from the environs of the hill, not far behind us.
Edgecomb stopped dead and ducked his head, linking to his people back at the portal. Finally he looked back at us and claimed the towners had slapped together some muzzle-loading firearms that were no threat to anyone except their users. Now that he said it that way, I could discern some single shots that sounded distinctly under-powered and gruff, while the answering chatter had the efficient rippling crack of modern automatic fire.
So we headed onwards to the base of the tower. From ahead there came a repetitive, dull gonging.
I asked Miss Szychter more about Ali Hamdani, as if I didn't know already. She went over the facts of Junot Jaar's abduction and murder, and how Hamdani had apparently seen it all, being a clan member himself, and his testimony in court could sink Werth and his network for good, after so many years raising the finger at the Euro legal system, on a rampaging campaign of blood-letting and racketeering. He more or less ruled London and the outlying provinces, but with so little by way of saner alternatives, perhaps Europol had shrugged it off until now.
She spoke with some heat. I couldn't get her to divulge any personal interest in finding Hamdani and seeing Werth go down, though, beyond her fee from Jaar.
I looked up and we'd reached the legs of a spindly, rusty tower with a bulbous head. All the houses there leaned together in a conspiracy of emptiness. Just seeing a tin door swinging open against a stone wall, clanging, again and again, and the eddies of wind picking up the dust, was enough to infect my mind with a viral uncertainty I couldn't shift. We'd lost him. We checked inside each house: there wasn't a soul around.