She looked for a character that might be a word delimiter. Alphabetically, the first likely candidate was B, occurring at reasonable intervals in the message, giving a three-character initial word. So what might a message begin with?
Der. Die. Das. Wer.
They were likely candidates. Setting the first word to der was unpromising, so she tried again:
DIE D F96 E Y0 EI 2 6WRRQ9 DIE 72 D QU U IE U I 40 FR LG F07 DIE 9U2QT I 9 27QVQYTQ7DYQ2H R I 2 DE 9 Q D Y E 7 27 E VV E 9 RF E UU E 9
It was about the darkness. Her skin crawled as Dunkelheit floated and billowed like a spectre in her mind’s eye. And if the fifth word were Sie, she now had nine entries – her lucky number – in her decrypt table; so this was progress.
0→H 1→E 2→T 5→D 9→N F→U N→I U→S Y→L
The next stage was fast, since d-something-s gave das, then she had sich and um. Two more words popped out: Dienstag and muessen.
DIE DUNKELHEIT6WMMANDIE7T DAS SIE SICHUMLGUH7DIENSTAG IN T7AVALGA7DLATHMIT DEN ADLE7T7EVVEN MUESSEN
Now Adler – meaning eagle – was inevitable, along with Trafalgarplatz and treffen.
THE DARKNESS COMMMANDS THAT YOU MEET THE EAGLE AT?? O’CLOCK THURSDAY IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE
She stared at it for a long time. Most of the intercepts were weeks old, but this had been sent last Friday.
I’m scared.
Because the pictures in her mind no longer featured code but two dangerous figures in shadow, meeting in secret while unknowable darkness watched from wherever it manifested; and if she had learned anything in Bletchley Park it was that a handful of people could change the world.
The rendezvous must not happen.
ELEVEN
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
Roger opened his eyes, still tangled in Leeja’s nakedness, warm and satisfied and drowsy. So much tension was gone that his muscles felt too soft to allow him to stand. He had no desire to shift, save for the bladder-pressure that forced the matter.
‘Sorry, Hei— Leeja.’
‘Mm?’
‘I’ve got to get up.’
He had been going to call her Heithrún, which made no sense: the name belonged to no one he knew. Pulling on his trousers, he looked around for the bathroom facilities, saw nothing obvious, and called up his tu-ring menu with its quickglass commands.
‘You want the bathroom?’ said Leeja. ‘Look.’
She pointed and the wall puckered and opened back. Smiling, Roger went inside, and waited for her to command it shut. When he came back out, his skin was tingling and smelling of pine – he had used full cleansing facilities – but some of his warmth was gone.
‘My tu-ring can’t ping external services,’ he said.
‘That’s the privacy shield.’ Leeja smiled as she pulled back the covers. ‘We don’t want to shock the neighbours, do we?’
Her entire body was an invitation, soft and glorious.
‘Yeah, but … Sorry. My … friend’s in the med-hall and I was waiting for news.’
Leeja blinked, then pulled the cover up around herself.
‘If you need me to drop the shield, then— There you are.’
The message cache glowed scarlet: a single message, priority-one urgent.
Alisha?
But the sender ID was Jed Goran, and the message playing out in Roger’s smartlenses, accompanied by collimated audio, said nothing about the fate of one traumatized refugee among so many.
‘We’re holding off in mu-space,’ Jed said. ‘Me and the seven ships that have turned up, none of which have offloaded their refugees. Investigations are ongoing, so I’ve been told. At twenty-seven hundred your local, I’ll perform a realspace insertion. Meaning, I’ll be available to take your call, my friend.’
Not promising to come back to Molsin and take him away.
‘Shit.’
‘What is it, lover?’
There were no addenda to the message, no smart-query facilities to allow follow-up questions with best-heuristic generated answers. Two-and-a-bit standard hours before he could talk to Jed again.
‘I’ve got stuff … happening.’
What ongoing investigations could Jed have meant? If the ships were waiting in mu-space, then who was doing the investigating? On Fulgor, a dispersed army of roving in-Skein netAgents would have been ideal; but Molsin was clearly a different world.
‘Privacy is important here, isn’t it?’ he added.
‘I’ll share everything about my life with you,’ said Leeja. ‘Any detail at all you want to ask about, I’ll tell you.’
There was a wondering note in her voice, as if surprised by her own offer. Older than he was, with years of additional experience, still she seemed lost in something new, just as he was.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
It was a unilateral response – implying no obligation on his part to divulge his innermost thoughts, for example about Alisha – but Leeja smiled, accepting his answer.
He kissed her bare shoulder.
‘I … I get lost in you,’ he said. ‘You know?’
‘My world has been simplifying,’ said Leeja, ‘since I met you.’
This was not helping him do what he needed to do.
‘I’m going to have to go back to the med-hall,’ he said. ‘To check on my friend. All right?’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Girl and friend, who might have become my girlfriend. But it didn’t happen, and now everything has changed.’
Leeja smiled, though she was not the only change he had been thinking of.
‘You’ll come right back to me, then?’
Roger pulled back the cover, leaned over and kissed one cherry nipple, then the other.
‘Of course I will.’
Her stomach was smooth-skinned, so kissable; and so he did. Then his lips were murmuring and kissing and travelling lower. Her inner thighs were ultimately soft; and her core was sensitive and wonderful.
Some time later, entangled and spent, they smiled and kissed each other.
‘You’re really going now?’ said Leeja.
‘Only if you’ll wait for me to return.’
‘Do you have any doubts?’
‘Not about that.’
He dressed, then blew her a kiss as she commanded an opening in the wall. She made it a double affair, with inner and outer doors. He stepped into the airlock-like passage, blew her another kiss, then waited for the inner door to flow back into place and the outer to melt.
Then he was out in a main corridor and the wall was sealing up. Complex patterns whirled inside the quickglass: art-forms he did not know how to read, not yet.
A new world.
Despite all previous trauma, he was smiling as he queried his tu-ring for directions to the med-hall and Alisha Spalding.
Roger and Dr Keele sat in a small consulting-room. One wall was either a one-way transparent window or a full-function holo displaying a private ward. Beyond, Alisha was sitting up in a green quickglass chair next to her bed, while a male physician talked to her.
‘Your eyes are different.’ Dr Keele placed a fingertip on her own cheekbone. ‘It changes your appearance rather a lot.’
‘I’ll take the lenses out, if you like.’
‘Not at all. I wouldn’t dream of violating your privacy by suggesting it.’
‘Oh.’ Roger glanced out at Alisha. ‘But we’re spying on her, aren’t we?’
Dr Keele smiled and nodded. ‘Very good.’
As if he had passed a test.
‘Because medical ethics change behavioural standards,’ he said. ‘For her own good, sort of thing.’
‘Something like that.’ Her voice was neutral. ‘And I think that’s enough.’