As soon as she stepped into the auditorium, she could tel that any extenuating evidence she had to offer would fal on deaf ears. The lowest ring in the auditorium was packed with the twenty-nine Committee members, some fifty staffers, and at least twenty private security teams. No drudges, no spectators, no Defense and Wel ness Council guards, no libertarians to be found.

The members of the Prime Committee were furious. Their stares fixed on Jara like searchlights, and their questions stabbed at her like bayonets. She was asked at least a dozen times if she knew what had happened to Natch, who the people in black robes were, and why the infoquake struck when it did. Al Jara could do was politely disclaim al knowledge. Even the libertarian members who had reacted enthusiastical y to Serr Vigal's speech had little to say; their sights were on history now as they struggled to find pretty, perfumed words of demurral for the official record. Two hours after Jara walked into the auditorium, the Prime Committee dismissed her without al owing her to speak a single word of substance. She promptly returned to the Creed Elan hostel, turned off her alcohol-metabolizing OCHREs, and drank herself into a stupor.

Benyamin approached her in the common room early the next day. He had spent most of the time since the Tul Jabbor Complex fortified in the hostel, along with Vigal, Merri, and Horvil. Jara didn't bother to find out where Robby Robby had gotten off to.

"I know it's not my decision," said the young apprentice, "but I think we should go home."

Jara took a swal ow of nitro and tilted her head in thought. He was acting unusual y deferential. "Why?"

Ben shrugged. "It could take days for the Prime Committee to make up their mind.

Weeks even. You've already testified, and they probably won't cal on any of the rest of us. With these infoquakes happening left and right ... wel , I'd rather be at home when they come."

The a.n.a.lyst nodded. She had already reached the same conclusion last night after her third vodka banzai, but she wasn't about to pa.s.s up the opportunity to improve her rapport with Benyamin. "Good idea, Ben," she said. "I think you're right. Tel the others to go home and get some rest. We'l al touch base in a day or two."

Jara packed up the few toiletries she had brought and was on her way to the tube station in twenty minutes, pausing only to pay her respects to the Elan facility administrators. She didn't even try to coordinate the ride home with any of the other fiefcorpers.

Seascapes. A light storm off Cape Town. The whisper of the tube engines. Home.

Jara spent the next twenty-four hours lying on the floor of her stil undecorated apartment, trading reminiscences with her sister. The aftershocks from the last infoquake were sending cyclones of chaos around the globe and out to the orbital colonies. Such was the mood of panic that Jara and her sister actual y resorted to text messaging in order to save bandwidth. They talked about their father, who had joined the Prepared fifteen years ago, and their mother, who was long overdue to join him. They talked about the ramshackle apartment in Sao Paulo where they had lived during the Economic Plunge.

They reenacted some of their old whimsical bedtime stories, al about puckish elves and hidden cauldrons of gold and ordinary princesses propel ed into adventure by simply keeping an eye open for the possibilities.

Jara moped for another eighteen hours, staring at the virginal plaster of her blank wal s.

What to do now? Where to turn? What if Natch real y was gone for good this time? Was that simply ... it for the fiefcorp?

Strange territory, this blank existence. It occurred to Jara that this was the first real idle time she had had since joining up with Natch's fiefcorp three and a half years ago. There had always been some project that needed attention, some cracked scheme Natch wanted her to map out. She couldn't remember when-or if-she had taken a single day off in al that time. And now? Now she felt like al of the obsessions that had been crammed inside her skul had been simultaneously erased-Natch, MultiReal, the fiefcorp, Geronimo. What remained?

Horvil answered her Confidential Whisper mere nanoseconds after she sent the request.

"Process' preservation, woman," he said, exasperated, "I've been trying to reach you for, like, a day and a half now."

"I know," said Jara. "I'm sorry."

"So ... what's next?"

"You mean, what's next for the company? Or what's next for you and me?"

The engineer let out a ruminating hum. "Both, I guess."

"We're going to have a fiefcorp meeting tomorrow. Ten o'clock sharp London time, at the Surina Enterprise Facility."

"And ... ?"

"You and me? Wel ... can you be here in twenty minutes?"

"I can be there in fifteen."

43.

Len Borda stood at the porthole of his ship and surveyed the choppy seas. Waves leapt up some fifteen meters high, tossing algorithmical y generated sailors around with kraken glee and threatening to drag the fragile ship down to a watery doom. He had lost two of the best in the armada, and the remaining two were only being held together by rope and pitch. But the six French juggernauts that had been cutting off his supply lines were now nothing but driftwood.

The high executive sent lifeboats out to pick up the wounded and the dying. The death of a virtual sailor was nothing to mourn, of course. But Borda had learned years ago that prisoners made good bargaining tools, and they could be chained to the oars in a pinch.

"Wel played," said Magan Kai Lee.

Borda knew better than to betray his surprise at the sudden voice behind him. He had predicted that the lieutenant executive would try to make contact today, even if he couldn't pinpoint the exact time or the method Magan would use. The fact that the lieutenant was forbidden from walking DWCR's corridors-under penalty of deathwouldn't deter him.

"I could have your multi transmission traced," said Borda, without averting his gaze from the porthole.

"You know as wel as I do how unreliable that technology is," replied Magan, unperturbed. "And even if you could trace the transmission, you'd need a hundred thousand officers to get to me here."

"I have a hundred thousand officers, many times over."

Pause. "Are you sure?"

The high executive sighed. He didn't doubt that he stil commanded enough troops to pry Magan's stray contingents out of whatever hole they were skulking in. But the point was wel taken. An era of steady loyalties had come to a messy demise in the Tul Jabbor Complex last week. Now n.o.body wearing the white robe and the yel ow star could look at his fel ow officers without second-guessing. These days, justice had many masks. It was remarkable that none of the drudges had picked up on the schism between Magan and Borda yet, but that could only last for so long. Once the story broke-wel , things would only get murkier.

Borda turned around to face Magan Kai Lee. His subordinate looked wel rested and comfortable, hardly like a man on the run from the most powerful military force in the history of the world. He had kept the white robe but abandoned the gray smock of his position.

"So tel me, Magan," said the high executive, voice devolving into a sneer. "You're the one with al the elaborate plans. Short-term plans, long-term problems, isn't that right? Wel , you've led us to this state of affairs. Use your wisdom and tel me what you have in store for the Council now."

Magan pul ed out a chair at Borda's ornately carved planning table, setting aside yel owed maps and letters of marque before taking a seat. "I'm not the man who ordered two a.s.sa.s.sinations on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex. My plans wil depend on his."

"Spare me your soliloquies," muttered Borda. "I gave you a chance to prove yourself.

You failed. You brought riots and chaos. You reminded the world that the Defense and Wel ness Council is subject to the whims of the Prime Committee."

Borda looked down and noticed that he was repeatedly thumping one bony fist against the cabin wal . He stopped, perhaps a second too soon to persuade Magan it had been intentional. "We should have brought Natch to the bargaining table, by force. That would have ended it."

The lieutenant executive's face was impa.s.sive. "You would have coerced him into handing over MultiReal. You would have tortured him."

"It wouldn't have come to that. The fiefcorp master's not stupidhe would have made a deal."

"And if he hadn't ..." Magan sliced his hand through the air with an almost irreverent manner. "You would have done to him what you did to Marcus Surina."

"I told you, it wouldn't have come to that!" thundered Borda. Outside, the winds surged to hurricane strength. From the corner of his eye, the high executive could see the ship's boatswain dangling over the railing by a frayed rope. None of the other virtual sailors were rushing to his aid.

But Magan Kai Lee was not intimidated by his master's wrath. He sat and watched the high executive with that same inscrutable look on his face. If control ing one's emotions were the only skil necessary to lead the world's security and military forces, then Magan would make a fine high executive indeed. But that's not al it takes, thought Borda. You need to be able to think on your feet.

You need to be able to win votes on the Prime Committee, and sometimes to manipulate them. You need to be able to sign the order to terminate a life-even if that life is a Surina's.

"I didn't come here to discuss Marcus Surina," said the lieutenant, shattering the high executive's moment of reflection. "I came because I have something to show you."

"What?" Borda scowled.

Magan gestured at the side of the cabin. The water-worn planks of the SeeNaRee wal dissolved to reveal one of several office windows. During the evenings, these windows provided Borda a peerless view of the cloud-covered globe he had taken an oath to protect. The high executive folded his arms across his chest and retreated back to the porthole as his lieutenant gave the window a silent command.

The prerecorded footage that appeared on the screen might have been taken at any of a hundred anonymous outposts lurking on the edge of Pharisee Territory. The fort was dome-shaped and sandcolored, a camouflaged wart that kept watch on the enemies of civilization. Borda sent a quick ping to the Data Sea and verified that the rivers flowing in the background were indeed the White Nile and the Blue Nile. Which made the rubble-strewn city in the distance Khartoum-or what remained of it.

Corpses lay sprawled around the outpost. Council officers, for the most part, with a few rustical y garbed Pharisees thrown into the mix. An ambush.

"Where did you find this?" demanded the high executive.

"You'l see it come across the transom shortly," said Magan. "My officers stumbled across it first, that's al . We believe that the Pharisees made at least a dozen such attacks this morning."

The anonymous Council soldier whose eyes were recording the video stepped closer to the carnage and focused on the wheezing body of an officer who looked hardly a day over nineteen. A knife with a wicked serrated edge had made rough work of the boy's face, while black code did the rest.

OCHREs could do little here but buy him some time and nul ify the pain. Several triage teams were working this side of the battlefield, but whether they would make it back to this soldier in time was unclear.

Hot fury pulsed through the vein in Borda's forehead as the videographer walked slowly along the line of the fal en. Not only had these savages dared to openly attack a Council outpost, but the timing suggested that the Pharisees had done so under cover of the last major infoquake. The videographer approached one of the enemy corpses and used the tip of his boot to turn the woman over on her back. The woman's face was obscured by blood, but beneath her scraggly black hair a glint of copper was visible. The soldier reached down and plucked a smal , coin-shaped object off the dead woman's lapel.

"What's that?" snapped Len Borda, hesitant to reveal his ignorance but also afraid of missing something crucial.

"They al ow the unconnectibles to interact with the Data Sea," replied Magan.

"A connectible col ar without the connectible col ar," grumbled Borda.

He was about to ask Magan who this woman was to have engi neered something so clever, when another Council officer stepped up to the videographer with an upside-down field soldier's helmet in his hand. There were perhaps two dozen of the connectible coins piled there, along with a single copper col ar.

"Islanders," said the high executive.

So it appeared that the Islanders and the Pharisees had temporarily put aside their differences for a common goal. And why wouldn't they? The Defense and Wel ness Council was being rocked by internal strife, the centralized government was suffering from labor unrest, and al of connectible society was reeling from the infoquakes. It was the perfect storm both groups had been awaiting for years.

But how had the Islanders managed to slip troops into Pharisee Territory without the Council noticing? Borda pondered the question silently for a moment until his gaze drifted off to the river. Of course: underwater. From the Pacific Islands along the equator ... with a detour provided by friendly dissidents in Andra Pradesh ... down through the deserted bubble colonies on the base of the Arabian Sea, which had once been the height of luxury for vacationing Indians ... and then to Khartoum. Borda frowned. Such tactics displayed a degree of sophistication unheard of in this part of the world. He supposed there must be plenty of information on submarine warfare in the Council archives, but no one had practiced it in modern times.

Magan remained seated in his chair, impossibly unemotional. "It gets worse," he said.

"We suspect the Islanders are getting logistical support from the libertarians. Maybe even black code."

Borda's head snapped around. "Khann Frejohr?"

Lee didn't answer. Instead, he waved his hand at the window and summoned another scene just as the anonymous Council officer with the grisly face emitted one last gurgle and succ.u.mbed to the Nul Current.

This new video clip showed a factory a.s.sembly line-a real a.s.sembly line, not a throng of programmers swaying to their detestable Jamm music.

Dozens of connectible coins were rol ing off a series of mechanized conveyor belts. The group eagerly pawing through the pile of coins included several Islanders, a pair of what looked like Lunar tyc.o.o.ns-and a man with the symbol of the rising sun embroidered on his robe. Borda had seen that infernal logo too many times during the recent labor troubles to forget who it belonged to: Creed Libertas. Speaker Frejohr's puppets.

"Rey Gonerev's not sure if Frejohr is involved in this or not," added Magan Kai Lee. "But whoever they are, they're setting up distribution channels throughout the Islands. Which means-"

"I know what it means," snapped the high executive. It meant, in a best-case scenario, that the Islanders were preparing a ma.s.sive act of civil disobedience by refusing to wear the standard connectible col ars. Worst case, it could be the sign of a more sophisticated espionage operation or the prelude to another large-scale rebel ion.

He had seen enough. Incensed, Len Borda strode across the cabin in five long strides and threw open the door to the foredeck. He was immediately a.s.saulted by the rage of the SeeNaRee storm, which lashed out at him like a demon with a whip of hailstones. There was a dark cloud out there with a terrible face at its center, howling Borda's name. But the high executive refused to turn away. He planted his feet firmly on the deck and stood his ground.

He knew that face. He had seen it forty-seven years ago, staring up at him with deathless hatred even then. The body it belonged to had been little more than a charred lump, with lungs stil clinging to a hoa.r.s.e parody of breath through the stubbornness of OCHREs alone. As he watched, the man had slid into a long, incoherent monologue of babbles and moans, punctuated by the occasional scream. Please! Please, let me ... let me see my daughter one last time.... Anything! I'l give you ... anything ... al the money in the world, please....

And then, in one last moment of lucidity, the ruined man had turned his eyes to the soldier recording the video-through the soldier, to the high executive he must have known would be watching. And he had cursed Len Borda.

But Marcus Surina hadn't cursed Borda to die. He'd cursed him to live. May you see many more decades, Surina had said, that stilted manner of his persisting to the very end. May you live long enough to see exactly what you've done to the world.

And Len Borda did. No sane person believed in curses, of course, but Borda had survived longer than any other high executive in the history of the Council. For decades, Borda thought he had the last laugh. He survived the Economic Plunge of the 310s that was the direct result of his actions against the TeleCo board. More than survived, he fixed it, wielding the power of the free market as both hammer and nails. Then came many years of economic prosperity that rivaled even the Great Boom he had witnessed in his youth. During those heady times, entire months would go by when Borda didn't feel the need to replay that video, to stare into the horrid, defiant face of his enemy, the man who would not yield.

But one of the planks in Borda's economic recovery was Margaret Surina, daughter of the man who had thwarted him. Why had he funded the resurgence of the Surinas when he could have let the family languish into obscurity? Why had he paid for Margaret to develop MultiReal? Yes, she had been useful at the time-but was it also an attempt to appease the ghost that tormented him?

May you live long enough to see exactly what you've done to the world, he had said. It was hardly an exaggeration to state that everything happening today was a direct result of Borda's actions. Everything: the libertarian unrest, Magan's rebel ion, the Pharisee and Islander attacks, the debacle at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the deranged fiefcorp master hiding somewhere in the wild with an apocalyptic weapon in his hands.

Was the curse of Marcus Surina claiming its retribution?

Borda opened his eyes. Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee had come to stand beside him when he was not paying attention. He too had his feet planted firmly on the ship's deck, despite the maelstrom. His hands were clasped behind his back and his expression was calm, even thoughtful.

"This is no time for a government in conflict," said Magan. "This is no time for a divided Defense and Wel ness Council. Abide by the agreements we made. You know it's the right thing to do. Step down from the high executive's seat while you stil can."

Len Borda turned back to face the clouds, to that burned and twisted visage stil staring at him from beyond the grave.

You think you've won? he howled at the shade of Marcus Surina. You think I've reached the breaking point? You underestimated me once, and now you're making the same mistake again. There wil be no bargains. There wil be no accommodations. I swear that I'l live to see MultiReal destroyed or under the Council's control. I won't bow down to you. Not now, not ever.

The high executive closed his eyes again and drew himself up to his ful height, which was considerable. He inhaled the mist and rain for a moment and tried to clear his head.

"Magan Kai Lee," said Borda, "I hereby relieve you of your duties as an officer of the Defense and Wel ness Council. You and your subordinates wil be given twenty-four hours to surrender to the authorities and submit to the judgment of the Prime Committee on the charge of treason. Should you fail to turn yourself in, you wil be declared a traitor and pursued with al the strength and vigor of the centralized government. Do I make myself clear?"

He waited a ful ten seconds before opening his eyes, but Magan Kai Lee was gone.

High Executive Len Borda walked slowly back into his cabin and shut the door behind him. Then he lowered himself gingerly into his chair and glowered at his hands for a few moments. He yel ed for the first mate. A SeeNaRee sailor stepped through the cabin door, saluted crisply, and informed Borda that the first mate had been lost overboard during the last sortie with the French.

Borda nodded and ordered the sailor to set a new course. Due east, ful speed ahead.

44.

There was some talk about arriving separately at the fiefcorp meeting to al ay suspicions, but Jara and Horvil both nixed it in the end. As Horvil succinctly summed up the issue: "Who the f.u.c.k cares?"

They showed up at the Surina Enterprise Facility at five minutes before ten. Jara stepped through the meeting room door and was surprised to find the place devoid of SeeNaRee. She had a moment of whiteknuckled panic. Had the infoquakes undermined so much of the computational infrastructure that even SeeNaRee wasn't safe? Then the a.n.a.lyst took a closer look and realized that this unimaginative committeedesigned conference room was SeeNaRee. Even worse, since Jara had been the first one in the door, it was her mood that had summoned it.

Vigal, Merri, and Benyamin stumbled in over the next fifteen minutes, glum as witnesses to an execution. Jara cal ed the meeting to order.

"So it seems like we're in a depressingly familiar situation," she said. "Natch has vanished. The drudges are cal ing for his head. We've got the Meme Cooperative and the Defense and Wel ness Council riding on our backs. One of our chief engineers is rotting in an orbital prison somewhere, and the founder of the company is dead."