CHAPTER 4
Lily was waiting for us back at the office. I called ahead, telling her what we found, and she was excited to see what we would bring her. She loved this kind of stuff.
“Here’s what we found,” I said, handing her the drive. “Like I said, I thought it would be best if you did your thing with it instead of just plugging it into my handheld.”
Lily’s workstation was made up of two computer consoles, two large, translucent screens, one smaller screen, and several different peripheral attachments. The second console was what she called her quarantine machine, the one not connected to the planetary network. It’s where we kept our case files. “I’m glad to see my wisdom is finally rubbing off on you, Boss,” she said, flashing me a smile as she plugged the drive into an access port on the portable computer. “Now, let’s see what’s on this bad boy.” She tapped the touchpad a few times, staring at the screen as if it were a particularly interesting book.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s encrypted,” she said. “It says it needs facial recognition and voice-match data from an authorized user.” She looked up at me. “Who’s the authorized user? Do you know?”
I looked at my client. “It’s got to be you. She gave you the key.”
“I guess. What do I do?”
Lily flipped the smaller screen around so that it was facing Dagny. There was a window open on the screen, displaying a feed from its internal camera. “Center your face on the screen. Then say something.”
Dagny did as she was told, leaning forward so the camera could see her face clearly. “What do I say?” Before Lily could answer, a message popped up saying that the drive was granting access to an authorized user.
“Perfect!” Lily said, turning the screen back around. “Now, just give me a moment.” She was quiet for a bit. “Okay, so far so good. Initial malware scan is negative. I’ll have to do a deep analysis of every file before I’m willing to say it’s all clean, but I think it’s safe to start opening files.”
“Where do we start?”
Lily squinted at the screen for a second. “There’s a video file named ‘For Dagny.’”
Dagny perked up at that. “What? She left me a note?”
“Seems that way,” Lily said with a half shrug. “Here.” She stood up, came around the desk, and turned the screen around again so that we could all see it. “You ready?” Dagny nodded. Lily played the video.
A woman’s face appeared on the screen. She bore a striking resemblance to Dagny but was maybe a couple years younger. Her dark brown hair was short, not even shoulder length. She looked exhausted, too, like she hadn’t slept in days. “My name is Cassandra Carmichael,” she said. “This message is for my sister, Dagny.”
Dagny’s face was a mask. She didn’t say anything.
The video continued. “I’m leaving this message on an encrypted drive in my safe deposit box. I’ve moved everything I have onto this drive and have a fail-safe in place to wipe everything else.”
Cassandra paused for a moment. “I know we haven’t always gotten along. I regret that. I regret wasting so many years of my life not speaking to my sister. It’s not what Mom or Dad would have wanted. This past year, when we’ve gotten to know each other again? It’s been wonderful. I didn’t even realize how much I missed you.”
I glanced over at Dagny. Her expression had softened, but only a little. She was the type who was used to controlling her emotions.
“I wish I would have told you about this sooner,” the video continued. “I could have used your help, but I was afraid I’d drag you into something that wasn’t your mess to clean up. You’ve had enough trouble without me bringing you more.”
The woman in the video paused again, briefly looking down. She looked like she was having trouble deciding what to say. It seemed to me she’d recorded this in one take and didn’t have a script she was going off of. “But . . . I think this is big. The company found something at a dig site in southwestern Hyperborea. I don’t know what they discovered, exactly, but they believe it’s of alien origin, and it’s old. They’ve codenamed it the Seraph.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said quietly. The case had just gotten much more interesting.
The recording continued. “There are protocols in place for the discovery of alien technology. An immediate stop-work is supposed to be put into effect. Both the Colonial government and the Terran Confederation are supposed to be notified, their teams brought in to inspect the find and determine a course of action. That didn’t happen, at least not as far as I know. Instead, the whole thing got moved into the Advanced Research Division’s black budget. Everything about the find is being kept secret. That’s illegal. There are rumors that Xavier Taranis himself is overseeing the whole thing.”
“Xavier Taranis?” I asked aloud. “You don’t say.” I rubbed my chin. “Lily, pause the video.”
She stopped the playback and looked up at me. “He’s been retired for decades now.”
“Wait,” Dagny said. “Xavier Taranis? That Xavier Taranis, the son of Rafael Taranis?”
“That’s the only one I know of,” I said. The younger Taranis took over the Ascension Planetary Holdings Group decades ago, after his father died unexpectedly. “The man’s got to be old as dirt by now.”
Lily did a quick search on her computer. “He was born on Earth not long after the founding of Nova Columbia. He’s a hundred and thirty-one local years old now.”
“Practically one foot in the grave. Interesting.” Even with the miracles of modern medicine and all the money in the world, time catches up with everyone eventually. “What could be so damned important that the richest man on the planet, in the final years of his life, would come out of retirement to manage it?”
“He wasn’t exactly sedentary, even after he retired,” Lily said, looking at her screen again. “He made a big splash seventy-five years ago when he joined the Cosmic Ontological Foundation. It was a big scandal at the time. His father practically disowned him. Since retiring from Ascension, he spent a lot of time off-world. He financed a couple survey expeditions, looking for aliens. Never found any, so far as anyone knows.”
“Interesting. Resume the video, please.”
Lily tapped play and the video continued. “The excavation at Site 471 has continued under designation Project Isaiah. They’re using top-of-the-line excavation and construction robotics to minimize the number of personnel who have access to the site. It’s all under high security, too. They’re trying to keep it quiet.”
I pondered that for a moment. The problem with grand conspiracies is that it’s almost impossible to keep people from blabbing about things. The bigger the secret and the more people are involved, the more likely it is information will leak. The larger the project, the larger its logistical requirements will be, and that makes it all the more difficult to hide.
“Everyone who’s been up there has been made to sign a nondisclosure agreement,” Cassandra continued, “but I think it’s more than the fear of being sued that’s keeping everyone quiet. Xavier Taranis handpicked a lot of people for the project and a lot of them are members of the Cosmic Ontological Foundation. When I started looking into this myself, things got strange. I never said a single word about it to anyone at work, but I think they know. People are . . . people are following me, I think. Listening to me. Stalking me. Th-there are at least three or four of them. Everywhere I go, there they are, watching me. I disabled my neural implant but I worry that they’ve got my apartment bugged. I’m recording this while locked in a restroom at a public library because it’s the only place I can be sure isn’t monitored. They’re . . . um . . .”
The recording of Cassandra trailed off and she paused to rub her eyes. “I’m sorry. I should have made notes or something. I’ve gotten maybe four hours of sleep in the past few days. People keep banging on my apartment door at night. I think they’re trying to scare me.” She looked into the camera with a determined face. “It’s working. I’m scared . . . but I’m not going to quit.”
Dagny’s eyes narrowed and she folded arms across her chest.
“I’ve learned that Arthur is involved in this. He’s been tapped to be the assistant security manager for Project Isaiah. I know you and he never got along, but he’s a good man, and he’s not a member of the COF. I don’t believe he would sanction anything that was unethical or unsafe. He wouldn’t. I’m going to bring this up with him. Maybe he’s doing the same thing I’m doing, trying to figure out what’s going on up there.
“But . . .” Cassandra trailed off again and looked down, like she was trying to figure out what to say next. “If you’re watching this, it probably means that my plan didn’t work. Maybe they really did get to Arthur, or maybe something happened to the both of us. I’m not as naïve as you think, though—I have a backup plan. I’ve been talking to Arcanum. They’ve agreed to help me. So, I guess if you’re seeing this, and you haven’t heard from me, that’s where you should start.” She looked up and over her shoulder suddenly, as if something startled her, before turning back toward the camera. “I have to go now. Dagny, I’m sorry. You might have to finish this for me. I love you.”
The video ended. I didn’t say anything for a few moments. My client looked like she needed a minute to process everything she’d just heard. It was a lot to take in. She shook her head, slowly, then looked at me.
“You look like you could use a drink,” I said.
She nodded. “A cigarette, too, if you don’t mind.”
“It’s no trouble. Come on into my office. We’ll have a sit-down, a drink, and talk about what our next steps will be.”
Lily piped up. “Ms. Blake, with your permission, I’d like to start going through the files on this drive. There’s a lot here, and it looks like she copied it in a hurry. It’s not very well organized. It’ll take some time to figure out what’s relevant and what isn’t.”
“Lily is very good at this sort of thing. If you have any privacy concerns, don’t worry. She’s a professional and she takes data security very seriously.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Dagny said to Lily. “Please. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” She looked up at me. “Mind if we head into your office now? I really need to sit down.”
It had begun to rain outside as Dagny seated herself in front of my desk and lit up a cigarette. “I should really quit these things.” The way she said it told me she had no intention of giving up the habit just yet.
“It’s not a world for smokers anymore,” I said, turning on the ventilation fan. I walked over to my liquor cabinet and opened it.
“That’s quite a selection you’ve got there. Do you invite a lot of women up for drinks?”
I looked back at her, grinning. “Sure. They love the ambiance of a soulless corporate office tower. What’s your poison?”
“What are you having?”
I grabbed the bottle of Darwin Ducote, the same one I’d shared with Dwight Cullender a couple days earlier. “How’s bourbon sound?”
Dagny exhaled a puff of smoke. “That sounds good. Do you have ice?”
“Bourbon on the rocks, coming right up.” I retrieved two glasses, dropped an ice cube in each, and poured a stiff shot in each. I placed one in front of my client before sitting down opposite her, behind my desk.
Placing her cigarette in an ashtray, Dagny lifted the glass to her lips and took a sip. “Wow,” she said, setting the glass back down. “That’s stiff.”
“One hundred proof,” I said, pausing to take a sip myself.
“What’s our next move?” she asked.
I took another sip then set my glass down. I had some concerns that I needed to address. “How would you judge your sister’s mental state, overall? Not just the last time you saw her, but before that. Did she seem okay?”
“She did. What are you getting at, Mr. Novak?”
“I’m just trying to assess the situation as best I can. Before that last meeting with her, did your sister seem nervous at all? Paranoid?”
“Not that I noticed. Are you trying to say that she’s just crazy? Even if that were true, she’s still missing!”
“I understand that. It’s just, what she described, being followed and harassed by multiple people? That’s called gang-stalking. Now, sometimes you do run across an organized effort to intimidate someone like that, but nine times out of ten gang-stalking is a symptom of mental illness. You also told me that your stepfather said your sister is fine. One possibility that we have to consider is that she had some kind of mental breakdown, and he checked her into a mental health clinic.”
“You really think she’d make up a story so elaborate? Invent project names, places, all that?”
“Ms. Blake, I once had a prospective client try to hire me to find her missing son, a boy named Stanley. She told me all about him, even showed me pictures. It turned out that not only was her son not missing, but she never had a son at all. I contacted her family and they told me she was having an episode. It was cyber-psychosis.”
“Really? I’ve never heard of a case that bad.”
“Neither had I, until then. Her family told me she was quite the tech-head when she was younger, had to have all the latest cybernetic implants and upgrades, but couldn’t always afford the best quality doctors for the procedure. She suffered neural burnout, which resulted in severe chemical imbalances in her brain. The pictures she showed me, the boy? He was a character in an augmented reality game. They couldn’t remove all of her wetware. She was having false memories triggered by residual code from a corrupted neural implant.”
“Holy shit,” Dagny said. “If that were the case with Cassie, why wouldn’t Arthur just tell me?”
“That’s a good question. I can think of some reasons, but I’d only be speculating. It may be that Lily finds evidence on that drive that corroborates your sister’s story. We also need to keep in mind that even if the story your sister told you, about Ascension uncovering buried alien technology, isn’t true, she might have believed it was true, and acted accordingly. She said she’d been working with Arcanum. Are you familiar with that organization?”
“Only by reputation. The circles I used to run in didn’t exactly get along with the likes of Arcanum.”
“I’ve read up on them,” I said. “They’re a tough organization to pin down. Some people think they’re just a hacker group, and while they have hackers and net-divers that isn’t their whole deal. They have a network of informants and whistleblowers, too. They engage in corporate espionage and data theft. They routinely leak damaging or embarrassing information about public officials, corporations, the government, the Security Forces, banks, anyone in a position of power, but they never target regular people. In the past few years, every exposé they’ve done has been proven to be true. Every document they’ve leaked turned out to be genuine.”
“Are you a fan?”
I shrugged. “Some of what they do is illegal. Politicians like to say they spread disinformation, but nothing they’ve published has been debunked as far as I know. They seem to have their own code and I can respect that. What they do isn’t that different from what we’re doing now. In any case, that’s our best lead, so that’s where I’ll start.”
“Do you have a way of contacting Arcanum?”
“Not directly. If I were them, I’d make it a point to avoid private investigators, too. I’ll get Lily to do some digging. She comes from that world. If she doesn’t know somebody, maybe she knows somebody who knows somebody, if you follow me.”
“I hope she does.”
“If I can’t contact Arcanum, or if they won’t talk to me, that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. It just means I have to pursue other angles.” I paused and took another sip of bourbon. I had questions for my client and some of them were going to be personal. “Dagny, I need to ask you about some things, but before I do, I want you to understand that I’m not trying to be nosy. I know that sounds funny coming from a guy who makes a living off of being nosy, but it’s true. Snooping on people professionally gives me a pretty good appreciation for their privacy. Of course, you don’t have to tell me anything, and anything you do tell me will be kept confidential.”
She knocked back the remainder of her bourbon in one swig, grimacing as she set the glass down. “I think I know what you’re going to ask. It was bound to come up sooner or later.”
“You and your sister both have alluded to your past. Your stepfather is apparently involved in this. I think it’s time we talked about it.”
“I’m surprised that you haven’t looked into me already.”
“Like I said, I appreciate the value of a person’s privacy.”
“Okay, then. My past. Where to start?”
“You said that you and your sister had some kind of falling out. Let’s start with that. Can you tell me what happened?”
“I guess it all started when we were little. We grew up in Epsilon City. Our father died of Kellerman’s Syndrome. Cassie was just a toddler at the time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. My grandparents died from Kellerman’s when I was a kid. It’s bad business.”
“Our mother remarried five years later.”
“To Arthur?”
“Yes.”
“I see. How would you describe your childhood, your home life?”
“It was good, for the most part. Arthur and Mom tried their best. He had a good job with Ascension, so we never had to do without. We weren’t rich, but we were well-off, and our situation only got better as the years went by and he got promoted. We got along fine until I was a teenager. I would, I don’t know, act out just to try and shock Arthur. He was so straightlaced, such an uptight company man. He was sending us to an in-person, private primary school, so naturally I started skipping class just to spite him. Before long smoking, going to parties, joyriding with my friends, you know, all the usual trouble kids can get into.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Rebellious youth, I see.”
“Cassie looked up to me and all I did was set a bad example. Some big sister I was. I didn’t mean to push her away, too, but I did anyway. Maybe it was for the best. She was getting straight-As in school while I was a juvenile delinquent. If she’d have been hanging out with me, she might’ve done all the stupid things I did and screwed up her life, too.”
“I get that you were a wild child when you were a teenager, but how did that screw up your life?”
“It didn’t, not until we got older. Cassie got a scholarship to the Nova Columbia Colonial University, Epsilon City North School of Business. Arthur, despite all the trouble I’d caused, wanted me to go to university, too.”
“You were still living at home after high school?”
“Technically. I spent a lot of time staying with friends. I went through a few different entry-level jobs, just enough to keep me from going hungry, but I didn’t have a plan for my life, or, really, any goals. Cassie was two years behind me. When it was time for her to go off to university, Arthur and Mom talked me into going with her. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t have to twist my arm. I thought it would be fun. You know, go to a real school, not remote learning. I was going to get to live on campus, make friends, go to parties, all that.”
NCCU-ECN is an expensive school, but with the exception of the Colleges of Business, Astronautics, and Planetary Engineering, isn’t exactly prestigious. A lot of Epsilon City’s upper crust use it as a daycare for their spoiled kids and it has a reputation as a party school. “Did you have fun?”
Dagny grinned. “I’m not going to lie, I did. I don’t know how many classes I showed up to hungover. Cassie made the dean’s list every year and I was a C-student, but I stuck with it for a couple of years.”
“You didn’t graduate?”
“No. I, you know, dropped out.”
“What made you do that?”
She was quiet for a few seconds. She picked up her cigarette and took a drag off it. “I was in the political science program. I never had much of an interest in politics or anything, but the curriculum didn’t require any math and there were a lot of interesting people there, even the professors. In my first year I met a boy named Reza.”
“Oh, boy.”
She chuckled, but there was a bitterness to her laugh. “He was handsome, and sweet, and funny. He was confident, too, a smooth talker.”
“Sounds like a real dreamboat.”
“I thought so at the time. So did a bunch of other girls he knew. But we went out a few times and the next thing you know we were a couple. He was . . . exciting. Smart without being pedantic. Clever without being mean. He knew so many interesting people, too—artists, activists, musicians, counterculture types. You know how it is.”
I didn’t, actually, at least not from personal experience. I never went to university. I’m a proud graduate of the Delta City College of Technology and Trades. All of one semester in person for hands-on training, the rest virtual. My Autonomous Systems Technician certificate is framed and hanging on my office wall. Like most schools, the course of study is built around remote learning. There wasn’t much time for partying, especially since I also had a day job at the time. I nodded along anyway, to keep Dagny talking.
“Toward the end of that year, Reza and I got pretty serious as an item, and he started to get pretty serious with his activism. He would always talk about the injustices of society. He was so passionate about it, when he’d talk about the inequity built into the system of Nova Columbia, how the people are ruled over by corporations and the system. His academic advisor, Dr. Ruthenberg, was a hard-core Neo-Corbynite. He invited us to attend a meeting of the local chapter of GLF—the Global Liberation Front,” she said, pronouncing the abbreviaton as Gliff.
It now made sense what Dagny had said previously, about the people she used to run with not getting along with Arcanum. I wasn’t well-versed on the GLF or their radical Corbynite ideology, but I knew that it clashed with Arcanum’s philosophy of nonviolence. The GLF didn’t want to reform the system, they wanted to tear it down and replace it with their own regime. “The professor talked you into that, huh? Doesn’t sound like he had the best interests of his students at heart.”
“The revolution needs soldiers,” Dagny said, darkly. “Young, idealistic idiots to go do the dirty work while the academics and scholars wax poetic about political theory and social inequity. Anyway, that’s how it started. I got more and more involved with the GLF during my second year. They were my friends. I thought of them as my family after a while. I stopped associating with my nonmember friends and grew distant from my real family. The tenets of the traditional family were a tool of the oppressor, used for indoctrination, violence, and abuse.” She made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “They were the ones doing the indoctrinating.”
“Sure sounds that way to me.”
“I dropped out of university before my third year began. Reza and I had been convinced to go off-grid and join the GLF as full-time members. Arthur was furious with me. Mom was heartbroken. They tried to convince me to come back but I wouldn’t listen. I came home one last time to get some stuff and we had a huge fight. I called Arthur a greedy, corporate pig. I accused Mom of replacing Dad with a rich man. I . . . Jesus, I called my mother a gold-digging whore. I screamed at Cassie.” She looked up at me, the pain obvious in her eyes. “I screamed at my baby sister and told her that people like her would go up against the wall during the revolution.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Mom and Arthur kicked me out of the house and banned me from having any contact with Cassie. It was . . . well, I suppose it was better that way. It protected her from my mistakes.”
“What kind of mistakes are we talking about here? Aside from turning on your family, I mean.” She visibly winced at that, so I softened my tone. “Dagny, it’s not my place to judge. It would be some serious hypocrisy for me for me to sit here and look down on other people for being stupid when they were young. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”
She took another long drag off her cigarette. “They don’t trust new members with serious stuff. You have to prove yourself and your loyalty. We were usually tasked with doing minor things that they claimed would benefit the cause. It started off with attending protests and vandalism. Then they’d have you commit petty crimes, like knocking over bank kiosks for the cash or stealing from warehouses. You had to prove you were willing to fight the system by being a criminal.”
“Makes sense. Gangs operate the same way. Makes them harder to infiltrate. They start you off with small, easy stuff, then up the stakes and the risk as you prove yourself. After a certain point, you’ve amassed such a criminal record that you couldn’t back out if you wanted to.”
“That’s what it felt like. They also handed out drugs like candy at a kids’ party. Not just the lightweight stuff, either. Illegal stuff. Dangerous stuff. Before long I was addicted to Crush because we’d huff it before every operation.”
“Crush?” I said. “That’s not good.” If you’re not from Nova Columbia you might not have heard of Crush. It’s been making its way through the entire Confederation for the past few years but it originated here. It’s a chemical concoction that boosts adrenaline, dulls sensations of pain, and increases physical strength to the body’s maximum biological capability.
The biggest effect it has, though, is the suppression of fear. A person hopped up on enough Crush literally isn’t afraid of anything, not even death. The drug gets its name because it comes in an aerosolized form, in little pressurized ampules. You load these capsules into an inhaler, crush the ampule, and inhale the fumes. Chronic users become addicts who, without the drug, often find themselves struggling with crippling anxiety.
“It was another way of keeping us under control,” she explained. “Crush is expensive. None of us had jobs, or money of our own. You had to keep working for the GLF to get your fix.” She took another puff off her cigarette. “Do you remember the Summer of Rage?”
“I do. Made quite a mess down in Epsilon City, if I recall.” The city was rocked by riots, arson, and bombings after a series of law enforcement crackdowns. “I assume you were involved in that?”
“That’s how I got this,” she said, pointing to the scar on her face. “We made small explosive devices that we would throw at the riot troops. One blew up before it was supposed to and I caught a piece of it with my face. I’m lucky it didn’t hit me in the eye.”
“I’ll say. I caught some frag myself, back in the war. Got some mean scars on my legs.”
“It didn’t stop there. Reza had big plans. He wanted to make a name for himself.” She paused for a second. “You know, I don’t even know if he really believed the GLF dogma. I think he wanted to be respected and feared more than anything else. He wanted to feel powerful. He came up with this plan to bomb a SecFor barracks downtown.”
I let out a low whistle. “There were quite a few bombings that year, if I remember right, but I don’t recall a Security Forces post being hit.”
Dagny took another drag and exhaled smoke upward toward the vent, then looked me in the eye again. “It didn’t happen, but it almost did. SecFor did a few big raids and arrested a bunch of GLF members, and Reza came up with his plan for revenge. I didn’t know all the details. I don’t think he even wanted to bring me in on it, but between the arrests and people getting scared and quitting, we were short on people. I don’t even know if it would have worked, but . . .” She trailed off.
“Go on.”
“Reza had gotten ahold of a bomb. An industrial mining charge, I think, something like two thousand pounds of high explosive.”
“Wow,” I said. “That could do some damage.”
“He was still really worried that the bomb wouldn’t destroy the SecFor post unless it was detonated on the inside. He was adamant that he wanted to kill as many troopers as he possibly could. I’d never seen him so . . . so vicious, so driven. He didn’t want to make a statement, he wanted a bloodbath. He was even talking about getting a second bomb and placing it to blow up the firefighters and ambulances when they arrived. It scared me. I was even more scared because we’d run out of Crush, so I was going through withdrawal anxiety and could barely hold it together.”
“What did you do?”
“Reza wanted to get the bomb into the underground parking garage. He sent me to do reconnaissance on the place, see what security was like. I walked in the public entrance, turned off the hidden camera he’d put on me, and turned myself in.”
I nodded. “That took guts. What happened after that?”
“I told them everything. Reza was killed in a shoot-out with SecFor when they tried to arrest him. I went to prison for two years for the crimes I’d confessed to, but got a reduced sentence for my cooperation. I was on the drug rehab program while in prison. I’ve been clean since I got out.”
“I suppose your ex-comrades in the GLF weren’t too happy with you.”
“I’m a traitor. If I ever set foot in Epsilon City again they’ll probably try to kill me. They just don’t have much of a presence here in Delta, and I’ve kept a low profile ever since. I even changed my name.”
That explained why she had a different family name from her missing sister’s. There were a few more things I needed to know about the situation, though, so I had to keep prying. “Seems to me you made some mistakes, but you did the right thing when it counted. Did your family ever come back around? Did you try to get back in touch with them?”
“Arthur wouldn’t talk to me. Mom did, though. She stayed in touch with me when I was in prison and helped me move out of Epsilon City when I got out. Cassie was a different story. I put the family through hell. I didn’t have to see the results of it but she did. She wanted nothing to do with me, despite Mom’s best efforts. I thought it was a lost cause, and it was, until a few years ago when Mom got sick.”
“First your father and then your mother. That’s a tough break. Did she contract Kellerman’s, too?”
“No. She developed an aggressive brain cancer. They did everything they could, but, you know, it’s not as if they can replace the brain like they can a heart or liver. Her dying wish was that Cassie and I reconcile, and as angry as she was at me, she loved Mom more, so she was willing to try. It took years, but we got through it. We became a family again.”
“I assume that Arthur was less receptive to your attempts to make peace.”
“He wanted nothing to do with me. I found out later that my actions cost him a big promotion at work. The GLF targeted Ascension a lot, you know. He works in corporate security, and my behavior made them think he was less trustworthy, even though he disowned me and kicked me out. Cassie told me that he’s angry that I wasn’t there for the final years of Mom’s life.”
“That’s a tough break.”
“That’s why we have to find her. I let my sister down before. She’s counting on me now.”
“I will do everything I can to find her, I promise you that. For right now, though, I think the best thing you can do is go home. We’ve had a hell of a day and you look exhausted. Get some rest. Lily and I will be going through the files your sister left us. We will keep you updated on the situation.”
“Just like that? Just sit at home and wait?”
“I’m afraid so. There isn’t much you can do. I’ll work as quickly as I can.”
She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Would you mind calling me a taxi?”
“Sure, no problem.”
I forwarded Lily the automatically generated transcript of my conversation with Dagny and asked her to call the client a taxi. I then walked Dagny down to street level. The car was waiting for her when we got there.
“You’ll let me know as soon as you know something?” she asked as she climbed in.
“I will. If you think of anything or hear anything that might be useful, don’t hesitate to give me a call. Try to get some rest.”
“Thank you, Easy, for everything.” She flashed me a sad smile before closing the car door. I watched the taxi for a moment as it drove off, merging into afternoon traffic.
Lily was waiting for me back in the office. “So Cassandra Carmichael was working with Arcanum,” she said.
“So she claims.”
“You don’t believe what she said in the video?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Is there anything you’ve found in her files that corroborates anything she said?”
“Not really. It’s mostly financial and logistical reports and I haven’t had time to get into them. There is a big Ascension project in southwestern Hyperborea, though, at the base of Mount Gilead.”
“Mount Gilead,” I repeated. “The volcano?”
“The same. It’s going to be the biggest terraforming plant in the northern hemisphere. The estimated completion date isn’t for another two years, though.”
“You think that’s the location of Site 471?”
“Could be. The location is pretty remote. That whole region is sparsely populated. The closest settlement is a town of twelve thousand called Freedom’s Prospect, but that’s still almost a hundred miles from Mount Gilead. The closest actual city is New Fargo, but that’s even farther away. They still have a claim on a huge tract of land up there, millions of acres.”
“Our best bet right now is to see if she actually was in contact with Arcanum.” I looked down at my assistant. “Lily, you used to run in those circles. Do you know anybody who would be willing to talk to us?”
Lily rubbed the side of her head. “I knew you were going to ask me that. I do know somebody, but I don’t know if he’ll be willing to tell us anything.”
“I can tell you’re not thrilled with this. Is there something I need to be concerned with?”
“It’s not like that,” Lily said, shaking her head. “It’s just . . . he’s my ex. We, uh, haven’t spoken in a while.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. I’m perfectly willing to go through someone else if you have another contact. There’s no reason to drag your personal life into this.”
“No. If we’re going to do this, we need to talk to him. I don’t know anybody else who would be willing to vouch for me, and that’s the only way we’re going to get any useful information out of them. It’s just going to be awkward as hell.”
“Thank you for being willing to do this, even if it’s awkward. Say, did you look over the transcript of my conversation with the client?”
“I did. I looked up a couple articles about the Global Liberation Front and Corbynite ideology while you walked her down to the taxi. The GLF was basically gutted after the Summer of Rage and never recovered. They’re still around, but they’re not as open or brazen as they used to be. That college professor she mentioned, the one who recruited her? His name is Dr. Emil Ruthenberg. He’s now the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Nova Columbia Colonial University, Epsilon City North. He was censured for his role in recruiting students for the GLF, but they couldn’t prove that he directly incited violence, and he has tenure, so nothing really happened to him.”
I shook my head. “Of course. Did you find anything else?”
“I did. Take a look at this.”
I shuffled behind Lily’s desk so I could see her computer screens. She had a document pulled up, another page of the missing woman’s extensive notes. A quick skim of the text revealed she was researching finds of ancient alien artifacts and their significance.
“The first evidence of an ancient, advanced alien species was discovered in the Trappist-1 system in 2183,” she said. “They found what was believed to be the wreckage of a large spacecraft in a solar orbit, estimated to be between sixty and seventy million years old.”
“That’s the First Antecessor Race, right?”
“Yeah.” She tapped the touchpad and brought up a picture of one of them, a reconstruction based on fossil evidence. It had six limbs, like an insect, but stood with an upright posture. They walked on their four hind limbs, with the front two serving as arms. The head had two eyes, each on the end of a stalk. “They’ve found more evidence of their presence in this part of the galaxy, all estimated to be from approximately the same time frame. It is unknown if they departed this region of space or if they went extinct. Most of what remains is so old that it’s decayed beyond repair, but every so often they find something more intact. Did you ever read about the incident at the Medusae Fossae Colony on Mars?”
“Sounds familiar. The colony blew up, didn’t it? Some kind of accident?”
“It happened a hundred and fifty years ago. They found some First Antecessor Race artifact in deep space and brought it there for testing, in secret. Then the explosion happened, a five-hundred-megaton blast. All one hundred thousand colonists died instantly. It left a crater that you can see from space.”
“Damn. What the hell did they do?”
“Nobody really knows. The responsible parties, including the Martian government, scrubbed all their records after the incident to cover their tracks. The best theory is that they were trying to reactivate an ancient vacuum-energy engine. If Ascension really did find some alien artifact up there and is experimenting on it, they could be putting us all in danger.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“And if they didn’t notify the government, all the money and lawyers in the world won’t save them from the fallout if they’re found out. They might have finally gone too far, Easy.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “Good work. Keep on it. I’m going to make some calls myself.”