Vecher stopped trying, let the terrible, omnipresent weight press him into inactivity. Time seemed to stretch, plodding without any change or frame of reference. With his breathing utterly stilled, he only had his heartbeat to mark the passing seconds. And with sealed ears, even that rhythm was a dulled, barely felt through the heavy injections that reinforced his rib cage.
Dr. Vecher waited for the launch, wanting something, anything to happen, dreading that something would.
COMPOUND MIND
Alexander had found something very interesting. By now, the tendrils of its spreading consciousness reached every networked device on the planet. Datebooks and traffic monitors, power stations and weather satellites, the theft-control threads in clothing awaiting purchase. The compound mind had even conquered the earplugs through which aides prompted politicians as they debated this crisis on the local diet's floor. Only the equipment carried by the Rix troopers, which was incompatible with imperial datalinks, remained out of Alexander's grasp.
But, somehow, the compound mind felt an absence in itself, as if one lone device had managed to escape its propagation. Alexander contemplated this vacuum, as subtle as the passing cold from a cloud's shadow. Was it some sort of Imperial countermeasure? Trojan data designed to stay in hiding until the hostage situation was resolved, and then attack?
The mind searched itself, trying to pin down the feeling. In the shadow-time, there had been nothing like this, no ambiguities or ghosts. The missing something began to irritate Alexander. Like the itch in a phantom limb, it was both incorporeal and profoundly disturbing.
The ghost device must have been shielded from normal communication channels, perhaps incorporated into some innocent appliance, woven into the complex structure of a narrowcast antenna or solar cell. Or perhaps the ghost was hidden within the newly emergent structure of the compound mind itself, half parasite and half primitive cousin of Alexander: a metapresence, invisible and supervalent.
Alexander constructed a quick automodel, stepped outside itself and looked down into its own structure. Nothing there to suggest that some sort of superego had arisen atop its own mind. Alexander ransacked the data reservoirs of libraries, currency exchanges, stock markets, searching for an innocuous packet of data that might be ready to decompress and attack. Still nothing. Then it opened its ears, watching the flow of sensory data from surveillance cams and early warning radar and motion sensors.
And suddenly, there it was, as obvious as a purloined letter.
In the throne wing of the palace, in the council chamber itself: a clever little AI hidden in the hostage Child Empress's body (of all places). Alexander extended its awareness to the sensors built into the council chamber table. These devices were sophisticated enough to read the blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and eye movements of courtiers and supplicants, in search of duplicity and hidden motives. The Empress was very paranoid, it seemed. Alexander found that it could see very well in this particular room.
The ghost presence was distributed throughout the Empress's body, woven into her nervous system and terminated in the audio portion of her brain. Obviously an invisible friend. The device was incompatible with standard Imperial networks, only passively connected to the infostructure. It was clearly meant to be undetectable, a secret confidant.
But there could be no secrets here on Legis XV. Not from Alexander, whose mind now stretched to every retina-locked diary, every digital will and testament, every electronic pal or pleasuremate on this world. The secret device belonged, by rights, to Alexander. The mind wanted it. And how perfect, to strike at something so intimately close to the Risen Emperor.
The compound mind moved suddenly and with the force of an entire living planet against the Empress's confidant. CHILD EMPRESS
The Child Empress heard something, just for a moment.
A kind of distant buzzing, like the interference that consumes a personal phone too near a broadcast array, the sort of brief static that contains a phantom voice or voices. It had an echo to it, a phase-shifted whoosh like a passing aircar. There was just a hint of a shriek deep inside it, something giving up the ghost.
The Child Empress looked about the room, and saw that no one else had heard it. The sound had come from her confidant.
"What was that?" she subvocalized to the machine.
For the first time in fifty years, there was no answer.
"Where are you?" the Empress whispered, almost out loud. The Rix commando peered at her quizzically again, but there was no answer from the confidant.
The Empress repeated the question, this time dutifully subvocalizing. Still nothing. She pressed her thumbs to her ring fingers and blinked, a gesture which called up the confidant's utility menus in synesthesia. The confidant's voice volume was set at normal, its cutout was inactive, everything functioned. The device's internal diagnostics detected no problems--except for the Empress's own heartbeat, which it constantly monitored, and whose rate was crawling upward even as the Empress sat open-mouthed. The rate incremented past 160, where the letters grew red and the confidant always made her take a pill or stick on a patch.
But the confidant didn't breathe a word.
"Where the hell are you?" the Child Empress said aloud.
Through the eyescreen debris overlaying her vision, the Empress saw the other hostages and their captors turn to look at her. A heat grew in her face, and her heart was pounding like a trapped animal in her chest. She tried to will away the eyescreen, but her hands were shaking too hard to work the gestural codes.
The Empress tried to smile. She was very good at reassuring everyone that she was healthy and comfortable, regardless of what the last fifty years had brought. She was after all, the sister of the Risen Emperor, whose symbiant kept her in perfect health. Who was immortal. But the smile felt wrong even to her. There was a metal taste in the Empress's mouth, as if she'd bitten her tongue.
More out of force of habit than anything else, the Empress reached for the glass of water by her side. That's what the confidant would have suggested.
She was still smiling when her shaking hand knocked it over.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
A sudden noise rang out in Katherie Hobbes's head.
She raised a combination of fingers, separating into source categories the audio channels she was monitoring. When on duty, her mind's ear was spread like a driftnet across the ship's activities. The clutter of thirty-two decks of activity was routed to the various audio channels in her head; she surfed among them, darting like a spirit among the ship's operational centers. Over the past few seconds, she had listened to the banter of jump marines as they prepped, the snapped orders of rail gunners targeting the Rix below, the curses of Intelligencer pilots as they fought to fly backup small craft toward the council chamber. On board the Lynx she was as famed for her omniscience as for her exotic Utopian appearance; no conversation was safe from Katherie Hobbes. Eavesdropping was the only real way to take the manifold pulse of a starship at its highest state of alert.