I wanted to talk to to Ben. I didn’t know if she’d have any new information, but that was the excuse I used. In reality, I probably was just tired of being stared at by typpies and trying not to glance around in that way that made them nervous. Incurious, one of my more prejudiced nodes spat in contempt. I quashed that. Part of my job as a cred op was to protect these typpies.
As the waiter gathered my cash—most reg businesses outside big cities couldn’t process debit—I bluntly asked him how old he was. His reaction was unemotional, inquisitive. A good sign. He told me he was eighteen. I pulled two professional cards from a sleeve on the back of my minipad and told him to write his full name on the back of one. He shrugged, grinned, and pulled a pencil from his apron. While he did that, I wrote on the back of the other card: “REASSESSMENT AUTHORIZED.”
We exchanged cards.
“If you want to be reassessed for neurospecialty,” I said, standing from my chair, “take that card to an Accord school. Give me a month or so to put your name in the system.”
“Seriously?” He flipped the card and looked at my professional info.
“Don’t contact me,” I said. He shrugged casually and nodded, not taking it personally. That was another good sign. I pointed at the card. “Just give that to the registrar.”
He shrugged again and tucked the card into his apron. His face tightened. He was working out what to say. Yeah, he was Type II.
“Thanks?”
I chuckled at the interrogative. “Give me at least a month. Have a good day.” And that was that. We both just walked away.
I didn’t have secure call access (that took some serious bandwidth) but Ben Gallus did. Let the Accord eat the cost. I sent her the request before leaving Beaufort, telling her I would settle somewhere in a few minutes and wait for her to ping me. Type II’s hate unexpected social interaction. I was doing her a courtesy. She would appreciate that, I hoped. She pinged me affirmative, literally that single word.
I hand-drove the hover into the water at the end of Ann Street, pushed the hover north under a couple of bridges that looked like their understructure was about to collapse. I was keeping the speed low, so the noise and spray didn’t upset the fishermen sailing by toward the sea. Young boys leaned against the rails, waving at me. None of them could have been more than thirteen. One of them shook his hand in the air in a bell-clanging gesture. That’s how sailboats signaled each other, I knew from my obsession.
Although I didn’t have a bell, I knew what he wanted to hear. My hind-tech horn. A cost-benefit node sent me a Whatever. I double-thumbed the plate in the center of the wheel. Beep-beep, the hover beep-beeped. The young boys cheered. I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them through the hover cabin.
As I drove into Gallants Channel (the descon told me), I immediately saw a large sandbar about 150 meters off Gallants Point that wasn’t on the descon’s map. A new island, built up by the hydrodynamics of the river fighting the tides. It was about the size of the Pirates’ Ordinary parking lot. Perfect.
I settled the hover onto the sand, sending a small flock of seagulls flying off toward Beaufort. The boats were thinning out in the channel, only late-starters sailing by then.
Waiting for the ping, I set the descon to take me to Harlowe. It calculated and pinged a solution. It was quick. I was alone on the sandbar. I punched the button to retract the roof, and enjoyed the sound of the machinery as it slid backward and let the warm summer air pour into the cabin. A seagull landed on the green hover hood and peered at the open roof as if it wanted to fly inside. Please don’t.
My nodes were wasting energy trying to figure out how long it would take Ben to contact me. Futile. I told them to think about something else. How long before the bridges we’d passed under would fail? What was the chance the Accord would repair them first? Who was in the hover that passed me on the North River Bridge?
They weren’t hitting my lures. That’s a risk of going nodular. My executive node had to deal with an obstructionist congress of nodes each with their own interests. I wondered if the president in Augusta felt this way. I considered dragging a book from the hover library to give my nodes something else to process.
I was saved by the ping. Ben’s face appeared on the minipad, her ID image. She was unnaturally white, probably a combination of genetics and an office job staring at a dual terminal desk all day. Her eyes were dark and looking slightly up, not at the camera. Her over-large lips were pursed. I would peg her as high-spectrum autistic even if I didn’t know her. I had seen this image dozens of times, but I couldn’t help analyzing it. Black curls hung barely over her ears in a reckless style that said she didn’t care as much about her looks as typpies do. Her expression was Get This Over With.
I wondered if she were analyzing my ID image.
I had let it ping three times. Was I stalling? Was I stalling by asking myself if I were stalling? I was annoyed with myself. I knew she was getting annoyed with me. I took a deep breath and tapped the minipad.
“Scuttle here.”
Ben was quiet for a moment. I could hear papers shuffling.
“Good morning, Ben.”
Jesus Christ. I hated it when she reminded me we had nearly the same first name. It came off flirty, even though I knew it wasn’t.
“Good morning, Gallus,” I countered. My nodes applauded.
“You wanted to talk?” Type II abruptness. We were back home.
“Anything you can give me would help,” I said. “I have my take, but I’d like to know what the Security Office has.”
She was quiet.
“Within my cred,” I added.
“Your cred on this one,” she searched for the right word, “is substantial.”
That was either a good sign about me or a bad sign about the implications of the cred.
“I just don’t want to go shooting in the dark.”
“Okay.” She was resolving herself to a revelation. My nodes were all atwitter. “The Office suspected there was something off about the Browns Island situation, but the analysts were focused on the Secondaries’ motivation for setting up just across the border.”
“They hadn’t figured in the suspicious immigration of Highlighter’s family.”
“No. They pegged him as a Tidewater asset and boxed themselves into the local politics.”
I nodded. Most of the analysts were typpies. Somewhere between the concrete thinking of Type I and the abstract thinking of Types II and III. Which meant they were obsessed with mid-level dynamics.
“They wondered what the Secondaries were trying to stir up between Tidewater and the Accord.”
“Exactly. You exposed a larger angle. Now the question is why all of these people moved east so soon after the Secondaries were discredited.”
She had seen what I had seen. Or one of the analysts had. I was vindicated.
“So,” she said, “I’m basically telling you what you already know.”
She was annoyed by the call. I got it, but I needed the layer of justification. Self-correction.
“I didn’t know that you agreed and that the SecO agreed. I wanted the external confirmation.”
“That’s fair. I think you’re on the right track. Which is why I secured your new cred instead of leaving it to Sidewinder. Sorry about that.”
“I could use the free time, after it’s done. I have reading to do.”
“I get that,” she said in a blank way that, ironically, told me that she really got it. “Go get the intel. I’ll send you the access info.”
The minipad pinged abruptly. Call over. There were three seagulls on my hood.
∈•∋
Ben fed my minipad the address to the Harlowe black site—forcing me to update the descon—and the code image to get inside. I’d need to show the guard my minipad. The image was some kind of big cat with stripes, lunging from a grassy field at a man sitting atop an elephant. There were elephants in the Georgia Accord, released from zoos during the war, but the image looked foreign, maybe pre-war. I certainly had never seen a cat like that. It looked like a huge lioness with a tabby cat’s face. But, with way larger teeth.
Was I the cat? Was I the elephant? Was I the man freaking out atop the elephant?
I enjoyed the over-water route up the inlet to Harlowe, hovering over the broad coastal waters, all the fishing boats gone, dolphins swarming in my wake to play and jump in the spray. When it came time to leave the narrowing stream for a side road, I felt a sense of resentment. My nodes awakened to start up new debates. The first and easiest was settled by a quick check of my bank account. Sidewinder had assessed my cred at 1.75, which was more than any of my nodes expected.
The rest of the debates were preparatory to the interviews. Prioritizing questions for Highlighter’s family. Who they were, where they worked, when they had moved. Working out timelines, relationships, potential motivations. One node resolved that I would be the cat, no matter what Ben had meant by the code image.
Here’s the dumb part. Harlowe was a small town, just a couple of market squares among a cluster of pre-war buildings. No police presence that I saw. They probably rode horses. They might not even have uniforms. Any of the horsemen I’d seen on the road could’ve been police. Three black action group hovers were parked around the black site building, marking it in a ridiculously obvious way. My forest green hover slid into parallel beside one of the hovers and settled into place.
There’s no way the locals didn’t know this building was a secret govvie facility. Secret, a linguistic node sneered needlessly.
I resisted getting annoyed at this stupidity, in opposition to several nodes, while I walked from the hover to the door. I readied the code image on my minipad, knocked on the door, and waited. The slide-shutter moved aside, replaced with a pair of suspicious brown eyes. I lifted the minipad into their view. The slide-shutter closed and the door clicked, then opened.
“Code name?” He was trying to look tough, and failed. Despite his rifle and body armor.
“None of your business. I showed you the code image. Is Sidewinder here?”
That knocked him back. He was considering his authority.
“I’m going to ask you again, is Sidewinder here?”
He nodded and gestured me down the hallway. Another guard at the end of the hallway nodded, accepting responsibility for me.
The second guard handed me off to a door guard, who opened the door and handed me off to Tran. Tran did not seem surprised to see me again, which meant he was inside a read-in the guards were not. I stepped into the room to see Sidewinder, looking sulky in a chair in the opposite corner of the room (the power spot), and a pair of couches with the four hostages sitting two-by-two with their wrists and ankles bound with goatsilk cord.
“That’s Loliola Temple,” Sidewinder said, thrusting a finger at the redhead at the far end of the far couch. He was telling me stuff I already knew, but I indulged him. I was a cred op invading his action group territory.
Loliola smiled at me sheepishly. I nodded back.
“My condolences,” I said. Her smile vanished. She was Catter’s daughter. I had dragged her back to that reality on purpose. I felt guilty about it, but I knew where that smile told me she was. Trying to hold it together. I needed her not to hold it together. I needed her emotional.
Sidewinder said: “The next one is Varta Appletree.”
I didn’t look, but I knew he was pointing at the blonde sitting next on the first couch. She was staring grimly at her wrists. She was Highlighter’s daughter. Apparently losing an aunt had just made her angry. Angrier, one of my nodes proposed. That confirmed some suspicions I had about her.
I took a step toward the second couch.
“That’s Roger Appletree,” Sidewinder said, with an affected tone of weariness. I was already annoyed with him.
The man tried to stare me down. He was older than the first two women, their uncle. Highlighter’s brother. I shook my head at his invitation to a staring contest and turned to the last hostage. An older woman, maybe forty. The same generation as Highlighter. So, she’d lost a sister. She looked sad and was eyeing the floor blankly.
“And that’s Agla Appletree.”
I looked at Sidewinder. He waved his hand at a rolling chair near the door. Tran grabbed its back and shoved it into the center of the room. He didn’t look happy with me, either.
I sat and looked at the hostages. Nobody was happy with me. I needed the hostages to be somewhat happy with me.
“I was on my way home,” I said, “just like you.”
That made Highlighter’s family look at me. They still weren’t happy, but they were listening.
“I’m stuck here because the Accord wants me here. Just like you.”
Loliola and Agla were sympathetic, my face-watching nodes told me. Varta and Roger just tightened their jaws. They were already telling me stuff, even though they might not have realized it.
“These two guys,” I nodded over my shoulder, “are permacred. They’ve got nothing better to do. But, maybe they should.”
Before the hostages could react, I turned to Sidewinder and grinned victoriously. He was not grinning. He huffed and pushed off his knees to stand. Then, he did what I hoped he’d do. What I’d planned. He got resentful and sat back down. He shook his head at me, then glared a silent Stay Put at Tran.
“Alright,” I said. “Fuck it. I’ll tune you out.”
That was my sympathy ploy. Now, the hostages and I were annoyed by the same thing: the continued presence of Sidewinder and Tran. By extension the Georgia Accord’s Security Office and the fact that they were keeping us from just getting back to our reg lives.
Varta put her elbows on her knees. Roger glanced a warning at her, but she didn’t see it. She was locked on me. She really didn’t like me now.
“If you hadn’t showed up,” she said, “the Secondaries would’ve got their payment and we’d be home.”
I tried to look contrite. I wasn’t sure I pulled it off, but I doubled-down with a shake of my head.
“The Champions were right behind me. They took the control chamber before I could get there. The guys guarding you—”
I sighed, pretending I was thinking things through. In fact, I was letting them think it through. They’d witnessed me killing the guards. Varta sat back. Roger squinted at me.
“If,” I pursed my lips. “If those guys had realized what Highlighter and his team were doing in the control chamber, things could have gone badly.”
Roger’s squint sagged. He saw the logic. He still didn’t like me, but he realized I had probably saved them from getting wiped.
“He’s an idiot,” he said to Agla. Her mouth scrunched. This was a conversation about Highlighter they’d had before.
Against my nodular concurrence, my executive node decided to play nice. I asserted my presidential privilege.
“He was doing his best to save you. But, he missed a few things.”
“He was never up to it,” Varta sneered. Up to what, a node pinged. “Catter dragged him into it. He didn’t even want to come here.”
Roger and Agla glared at her. She deflected it like a professional. Loliola shook, on the verge of tears.
“Mom didn’t want to come, either!”
This was about to turn into family drama I did not want. I saw a counter-punch preparing in Varta’s face, so I stepped in.
“We’d all rather be somewhere else,” I said definitively. They all turned to me. I needed to pull them up out of typpie thinking into Type II territory, where I’d be playing to my strengths. “Events drive us in all kinds of directions, but let’s step back and look at the big picture.”
They were quiet again, family drama set aside to hear me out.
“Ultimately, everybody wants to get back to what we were doing before all this.” I settled my eyes on Loliola and waited uncomfortably until she met my gaze. I could see Varta glaring at me, boiling, which is what I wanted. “Miss Temple, where do you want to get back to?”
She sniffed and sighed.
“I guess I have a funeral to organize.”
“Your mom nearly got us killed,” Varta snapped.
Agla gasped. “Varta!”
“Fuck,” Roger said with an exhausted sigh.
Loliola just stared at her knees, face quivering. I regretted causing that, but I needed it. Time to draw a line.
“Catter’s dead,” I said to Varta with a practiced solemnity. “Show some respect.”
She leaned toward me violently. “She was my aunt. You shut the fuck up!”
“She’s a plant,” I said over my shoulder to Tran. “Isolate her.”
Roger growled. Agla sat back in shock. Loliola was just confused and weeping. Sidewinder was blinking.
Tran stepped around me toward Varta.
Roger put his hands on his knees. Tran swung the rifle toward him.
I put my hands out to stop that from escalating, but my eyes were fixed on Varta. Hers were fixed on me. I accepted the staring contest.
“She doesn’t care that Catter is dead. She’s just pissed that whatever was really going on at Browns Island didn’t work as planned.”
Roger jerked his head at his niece. Agla and Loliola were still staring at me. A datum I had shelved from my research suddenly became the corner piece of the puzzle I was putting together. Time to share it.
“She was the first to move,” I said.
That got Roger’s eyes on me. Now I had everyone’s attention. Tran took the opportunity to swing his rifle toward Varta.
I followed up: “She lured the rest of the family here.”
That made Roger, Agla, and Loliola sit back with blank eyes.
“Let me clarify,” I said. “She’s a Secondary plant. That’s why she’s here. Maybe why all of you are here, ultimately.” It was time to bring the family drama back into play.
I turned to Sidewinder, whose mouth hung open like a distracted bulldog.
“Look up what she’s doing now in the Accord. I bet it weaves toward politics.” I already knew, but I needed it to look like a guess.
Sidewinder huffed and tapped at his minipad. I could tell from the faces of the hostages that they already knew. Sidewinder huffed again.
“She’s an executive assistant to a delegate in Laurinburg.”
Tran took a step back, then squared himself. He gestured with the rifle for Varta to stand. She sank in the couch, then stood.
“Fuck you,” she sneered.
“That’s fair,” I said. It only enraged her more, but I said it for the other hostages to hear. I wanted to see if any of them were still angry at me.
Tran led her toward the door. He handed her off to the guard outside and closed the door.
The remaining hostages were staring at their wrists, processing. None of them were in on it with Varta. Or, they were really good at hiding it. My eyes darted back-and-forth between them, but my nodes were focused on Roger. The consensus was that he wasn’t faking.
“I’m guessing you guys are heading home soon.”
They looked up at me. Their eyes were empty. They probably needed, maybe even deserved, a drop from my analytical nodes. I sighed and the contriteness was natural this time.
“Whatever reason she gave you for starting a new life here in the Accord, the real reason was that she was recruited by the Secondaries.”
“But,” Roger said. He was clearly impressed but still confused. “Why the abduction?”
“As a victim of a Secondary plot, particularly as the daughter of a Tidewater op who intervened, her diplomatic cred in the Accord goes through the roof.” I could see he was getting it, but I couldn’t help going on. I really enjoyed sharing my strategic thinking, particularly with typpies. A prideful flaw.
“She climbs the ladder. Gets a job in Augusta, working closely with a congress member. Or with the president. High-level accesses. Policy influence.”
Agla’s face suddenly turned bitter.
“Fucking Secondaries.”
Roger leaned toward her, touched shoulders, and gave her a sympathetic look.
I could see that Loliola was not having a good time processing all this information. Her happiness was not part of my cred, but I felt the need to add it as collateral.
I leaned toward her until she looked up.
“I’ll put in with the Accord for special honors for your mother. A diplomatic reward between Tidewater and Georgia if I can swing it.”
She forced a smile.
“Will they pay for it? I’m just a market cashier. I sell vegetables.”
Again, the contriteness was not fake. I felt the need to make this right. To make something right. I had just laid her mother’s death at the foot of her cousin.
“I’ll make that the priority, over the honors, if you want.”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said. I turned to Sidewinder. “These folks have someplace to go, and so do we.”
He nodded with a grunt.
“Let’s go, folks.” He rolled his eyes at me on the repetition of my word.
Tran gestured them toward the door and handed them off to the guard outside. I wasn’t sure if it was the same guard or a replacement. While Tran was guiding the remaining hostages out of the room, I was tapping my minipad to send the audio of the interrogation to Ben. I wanted my cred. I wanted my free time. I wanted weeks to dig into my library and into the GA intranet’s library. Coffee and eggs and bacon at the shop next door. Casual shopping for new bookshelves in the antiques shops of Old Town Burgaw.
With a click of the door, I was alone with the two action group ops. I had completed my cred. But, as usual, I was entangled in the bigger picture. One of the risks of being Type II. My reg-life nodes protested at what I was about to say. I ignored them.
“Where’s Highlighter?” I asked Sidewinder. He looked annoyed.
“He was released. On orders from the Diplomatic Office. He took his team hover.”
“No team in it,” Tran sneered.
I voiced what one of my more suspicious nodes wondered: “Which way did he go?”
Tran and Sidewinder shared a look. There was a weird datum they were both only just then processing. Fucking typpies.
Tran cocked his head. “He took the deepwater route back.”
I groaned. My suspicious node was doing the nodular equivalent of a happy dance.
“So,” I tried not to look superior as I unpacked the information, “he took a hover, allegedly back to Tidewater, outside the intracoastal waterway, out on the open sea?”
Sidewinder closed his eyes, shook his head, and waved a hand in the air.
“It’s a team hover. It can handle—” His own suspicions took over, mid-sentence.
“Sure,” Tran filled in the gap, “it can handle the open sea. But why?”
I let my suspicious node talk out loud. That often backfired. Rarely, it paid off.
“He didn’t go back to Tidewater. He went to the Bahamas. Or Bermuda.”
That sank into their faces like a heavy weight. They realized they’d been played somehow. Highlighter knew something we didn’t know, certainly knew more about the Secondaries’ bigger plot than he let on. Maybe he knew Varta’s plan. Maybe he figured out the plot in PNW and that’s why he moved to Tidewater, to secretly work against it. Maybe Catter also knew what Varta was up to.
For whatever reason, Highlighter was on the lam.
I could see Sidewinder and Tran racing through the same information I was. Bermuda was a thriving, independent port for cross-Atlantic trade. A stopping off place for sailing ships heading to Europe. But, it was hard to return to North America from there. Except with a hover. Highlighter could hide out there for a while, maybe, but the obvious end-game was a return to Tidewater. So, why the interim?
Maybe because Highlighter was dumb. But, maybe not.
The Bahamas were a no man’s land like mid-Florida. They had resisted domination by the Georgia and Cubano Accords, but (unlike the violent cracker militias in Florida with their ranches and weird alligator cult) the Bahamas maintained trading ties with both. It wasn’t as isolated in reg commerce as Bermuda. Highlighter could tap into a relatively vibrant intraweb to get clues about what happened after the Browns Island raid.
Bermuda had no intraweb to speak of. There, Highlighter would be restricted to word-of-mouth from sailors.
“He went to Nassau,” Tran said. I was impressed. Sidewinder was, as usual, just annoyed.
∈•∋
After Sidewinder and Tran left me alone in the interrogation room, I realized that I hadn’t shut off the audio feed when the hostages were led out. I punched the end-record icon and sighed. That sent Ben Gallus the entire discussion about Highlighter I’d had with the action group ops. And, that sent alarms through all of my nodes.
My linguistic node sent a minced oath into the debate. Futter! That made me laugh, and calmed the buzz down a bit. One of my nodes asked where lunch would be. The cost-benefit node fantasized about the huge cred that might result.
I was oddly unconcerned about the possibility of being diverted from home by a third cred. In the calm aftermath, I tapped the minipad to find a restaurant in Harlowe. There were none. The nearest was back in Beaufort. I was betting the nearest hotel was also there.
I left the room. There was no longer a door guard. I walked toward the main door, passing a couple of bored guards who did not make eye contact. That was appreciated. The last guard didn’t say anything. He just opened the main door and let me pass.
One of the black hovers was gone. A few nodes argued whether that was Sidewinder or Tran or some unknown third action group op. Who cares. Maybe someone had SecO clearance to take some of the hostages home. That would be nice.
My hover powered up when my minipad got within ten meters. That would mean air conditioning. The summer air of Harlowe was growing hot and wet. Two horsemen rode by in the street, not even glancing at the parked hovers. They were used to it, I deduced.
I stepped into the hover and set the minipad in the passenger seat. The descon pinged its usual question. Where are we going?
“Lunch in Beaufort?” it guessed correctly.
“One moment,” I said. The descon pinged acknowledgement.
I was in a world of data and opportunities. My nodes were buzzing under the surface, debating without talking to my executive node, but I could feel them shunting information back and forth. Like animals playing under a blanket.
This was like Practice training all over again. Learning to trust my distributed cognition. My Type II strategic intelligence. It gave me a pleasant sense of expectation. Something interesting was about to happen.
The third, unknown action group guy had been let go, one of my nodes told me. The hostages were being processed, the extra op wasn’t needed. Sidewinder and Tran were staying behind to do the after-action stuff. At least one of us was going home.
What was I waiting for? I could wait for Ben’s reaction while hovering back to Beaufort. The cost-benefit node told me I could go ahead and set out for lunch, but I really wanted to know how Ben would react to the audio. The cost-benefit node was right, I knew.
There was a sense of community to being nodular. It often made Type II’s even more introverted than Type I’s. We had the same latent desire for socializing, but Type II’s in the Practice could satisfy it by socializing with our distributed nodes. It was like having a group house of friends living in your head.
“Pick a restaurant for lunch,” I said out loud. After a moment, the descon pinged.
“Seven options,” it said. “Preferences?”
“Seafood,” I said. Then, I realized that was not restrictive enough for a port city like Beaufort. “And low traffic.”
A double-ping. “The Spouter Inn. A local historical restaurant where mostly locals go.”
That was a dumb criterion. In a city like Beaufort, most places would attract mostly locals. What the descon meant was that no Accord govvies had gone there for a while. That could attract more attention than I intended. But, I could park in town and walk to the place without my minipad. Whatever, said the cost-benefit node.
“Fix it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The hover rose up, turned, and moved toward the road. A half-dozen pedestrians stopped to look, but their faces were more annoyed than surprised. Oh, yeah, they knew this was a govvie black site.
∈•∋
As the hover slid onto the water-access road, my minipad pinged. The icon was Ben’s ID image. The intro text was New Cred. Well, here we go.
I tapped the notification. It unfolded.
“Analysts concur with assessment that Highlighter is PROB headed to Nassau. New cred to intercept. Accompanied by Sidewinder, Tran, and Marina who is en route to police-administered Accord site in Beaufort to garage personal hover. A team hover on-site is authorized.”
The comfortable abruptness did not buffer me from the implications. I would be… A normally quiet volition node interrupted. If I accepted the cred, the node modified, I would be on a mission with two action group ops I did not like, plus a third op I did not know. At least I had an explanation for the missing hover from the black site.
I knew I had some time to accept or reject. My cost-benefit node chuckled at that. Fuck you, my executive node sent back.
The hover slid onto Harlowe creek, sending a flock of ducks into the air. An alligator thrashed its tail. I saw monkeys watching me from the trees along the shore. That would have been weird, pre-war, one of my shelving nodes noted. Monkeys weren’t native to North America. They were zoo releases, just like elephants and lions and hippos and maned wolves.
I had decided on oysters for lunch when the minipad pinged again. This time, my nodes groaned. There was no new information from Ben I was going to like.
I tapped the notification.
“DiplO refuses to concur without involvement of non-detained hostages, who volunteered assistance during out-processing. Please, send affirmation ASAP.”
Fuck. So, here was the politics between the Security Office and the Diplomatic Office. Clearly, my work on the hostages had worked too well. Roger, Agla, and Loliola were pissed at Varta. Enough to offer help bringing Highlighter in. I could do that on my own. Without the help of the hostages. Without the help of Sidewinder, Tran, and this unknown Marina.
I wanted to go home. My nodes debated that. I also wanted to know what the hell was going on. I wanted to confirm my suspicions and fill in my lacunae. One of my inquisitive nodes reminded me that this was the only reason I wanted to go home. To study, to learn, to understand.
The new cred was an arel library I could dig into. Real-life digging. Like the stripy cat digging into the man atop the elephant.
I suspected Ben was playing me. Oddly, that made me trust her more.
I pulled the waiter’s card from the sleeve on the back of the minipad. I took a photo of his scribbled name and sent it to Ben with the text: REASSESSMENT AUTHORIZED. Then I sent a second text: CRED ACCEPTED.
As the hover passed the new island, a flock of gulls watched my passing. I set the minipad to investigating the action group op code-named Marina.