“Which friends, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t know any of them.”
“Okay. Never mind, we’ll look into it.” Renne stood up and gestured to Warren, who nodded. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Trisha. I apologize for putting you through this, but you have been helpful.”
The girl simply nodded, not looking up. Renne regarded her with a touch of concern before walking back to the VTOL.
“So who was the reporter?” Warren asked as the hatch shut behind them.
Renne settled herself into the deep leather cushioning of the chair. “It could be Bradley Johansson himself. The description is about right, and he’s posed as a reporter before using that company name.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Yeah.” She watched through the oval window as the plane took off. The light green patch of meadow shrank away quickly behind them as the acceleration pressed her down.
“But that makes no sense,” Warren said. “What would Johansson need to see Trisha for? The operation was over.”
“Good question. And he took a hell of a risk going to see her, too, he even used Earl News as a cover, which we knew about. It’s not like him to be that sloppy. Those questions were clearly important to him.”
“Why?”
Renne shook her head. She didn’t quite trust herself to look directly at Warren. Unlike Trisha, he wasn’t stupid. There was one explanation that fitted all too easily. An explanation that had implications she really didn’t enjoy. It would also mean she’d been quite right about the whole shotgun setup from the very start. It wasn’t the Guardians after all. And I don’t think it was the Halgarths. Christabel had no reason to lie to me. That doesn’t leave many options.
***
Mark Vernon sat in his rented Ford Lapanto as the drive array steered it along the six-lane highway down through the northern tail of the Chunata hills that formed the back of New Costa’s Trinity district. The slopes with their brown native scrub bushes and desert palms were decorated with large white houses encased behind tall walls and hedges like precious artworks in an exclusive store. It was an area favored by financial management types, who never liked to stray far from the office. A line of composite and glass skyscrapers marked out Trinity’s eastern boundary, winding along the base of the hills. They were home to various banks, credit houses, brokers, venture capitalists, and offworld currency exchanges.
The Lapanto’s drive array turned the car off the highway. There was a junction at the bottom of the ramp, where an ancient road began its lazy curve around the hill. A dilapidated sign called it Bright Light Canyon. Mark switched off the drive array, and started driving the car himself. Gritty yellow-brown soil had almost completely covered the thin layer of asphalt, turning the road into little more than a dirt track. Dead-looking scrub bushes were scattered over the slope below and above, their lower trunks buttressed by the conical mounds of nipbug nests. Behind the swathe of arid vegetation were crumbling white walls of enzyme-bonded concrete, scaled by ivy and climbing cacti. Various private roads led off the main track, looping around to gates.
For a moment Mark’s imagination painted over the image with the long straight driveways of the Highmarsh Valley branching off the main road. It was silent in the Chunatas, the noise of the megacity deflected by the foothills, a condition matching the land behind Randtown. Even the drab brown of the native plants was similar to the weak ocher shadings of boltgrass. But the air here was dryer, tinged with chemicals from the refinery sector sixteen kilometers away to the west. And Regulus was a too-bright point of blue-white light in the cloudless sky, still emitting a fierce heat in the late afternoon. Even in his daydreams, Mark could never pretend to reclaim all they’d lost. Fantasizing about it was stupid, the sign of a complete loser.
It was his fault. He’d taken his family to Elan. He’d built up their hopes. He’d shown them a decent, clean life. His dream had died in fire and pain. It was a knowledge that prevented him from sleeping every night. Self-recrimination that made it impossible to talk properly to Liz. Misery at having to bring his lovely children back to this vile world that held him back from playing with them.
He was so wrapped up in self-pity he almost missed the turn. A fast pull on the wheel sent the Lapanto skidding around the sharp bend and down the little trail. Dusty soil puffed up from the back wheels as they spun. “Idiot,” he told himself.
After a couple of hundred meters the trail ended at an iron gate in a wall of terracotta-red concrete. Mark’s e-butler gave the gates his code, and they swung open. There was an oasis of lush emerald grass inside the wall. At the center was a long lime-green bungalow with red composite roof panels molded to resemble clay tiles. Several gardening bots trundled about, tending to the lawns and herbaceous borders, keeping them as neat as the building they surrounded. Mark always enjoyed the view from here; with the bungalow perched halfway up the hill they could sit on the patio and look across New Costa’s urban expanse as it rolled away into the horizon. From this vantage point it never seemed quite so objectionable as when he was down among the factories and the strip malls. All very different from his old house in Santa Hydra.
Kyle, Mark’s brother, leased the bungalow from the Augusta Engineering Corp; he could afford to with his high-paying job at the StVincent Loan & Trust. Everybody in Mark’s immediate family had offered to put them up when they got back from Elan. He’d accepted Kyle’s offer because he couldn’t stand the thought of having to move in with Marty, his father. Besides, he’d always got on well with Kyle, who at least was sincere in wanting to help, and the kids really liked their uncle.
He braked the Lapanto on the drive outside the front door, and went inside. All the reception rooms had glass doors, allowing him to look along the hall to locate his small family. Nobody was in sight, but he heard happy shouting coming from the patio outside the main lounge. Both Sandy and Barry were in the pool, with a suspiciously wet Panda lying on the sun-soaked slabs beside the pool. The dog looked up at him, but didn’t move.
“Daddy!” both kids yelled.
Mark waved at them. “Has Panda been in the pool?”
“No,” they chorused.
He gave them a fearsome disapproving look, and they both started giggling. Liz was lying on a sunlounger on the terrace below the pool. Antonio, Kyle’s boyfriend, was beside her. The terrace faced west, allowing them both to catch the last of the afternoon sunlight.
“Hi, baby,” Liz called. A maidbot was standing between her and Antonio, a wine bottle held in one of its arms. When he got closer, he realized both of them were naked. His throat tightened automatically. He didn’t say anything, because that would just show how small-minded and conservative he was.
Liz hadn’t got a job yet; the agreement was she would stay home to look after the kids. They weren’t in school, and Mark really didn’t want them to go to an Augusta school; he had too many bad memories of his own time at Faraday High. In fact, returning to Augusta was only ever supposed to be temporary; they arrived here purely because it was the first stop after Ozzie Isaac’s asteroid. He wanted them to move on soon, hopefully to somewhere like Gralmond, which was about as far away from Dyson Alpha as it was possible to get. But that took money, and the invasion had wiped them out financially, taking away their entire equity, and he knew damn well that even after the navy beat the Primes back into their own space Elan was ruined beyond reclamation. The mortgage he’d taken to buy their little vineyard and the Ables Motor franchise had left him massively in debt. If the insurance didn’t take care of it, he’d need a couple of lifetimes to pay it off. And the insurance company was based in Runwich, Elan’s capital. Nobody knew if the Commonwealth government would pay compensation to everyone from the Lost23, and even if they did it would take years if not decades for such a bill to work its way through the Senate. Right now tax money was being poured into building up the navy.