“Aleph.” Hagin flicked the display to the report’s next page. “What can I do for you?”
“Hagin, there are records I want you to see. I am concerned about some aspect of my adjustments.”
“Of course. Show me what is wrong.”
Aleph saved the report and closed its file. Then she showed him all that she had showed the other city-minds.
While Hagin watched her records flow across his workstation screen, Aleph found Basante in Imaging Room Four, standing in the middle of three different fate maps, comparative readouts flashing across the walls.
“Basante.”
“Aleph?” He did not take his eyes off the data. He lifted his hand to touch one minute line, adjusting its length a few centimeters.
“Aleph, I was hoping that you might speak with Dionte. You are her friend and an adviser to her, and I fear she has become distressed. I do not want to have to alert her committee yet. She may just need a friend.”
Basante lowered his hand and blinked. “Of course, Aleph. If you think so.”
“I do,” Aleph said firmly.
“I’ll go as soon as I’m done here.”
“Thank you.”
Aleph felt secure. This was what she should have done in the first place. She should have alerted the family, and not gone to Gem in hysterics. Dionte was troubled, that much was clear. Now her family knew. The family would take care of both her and Tam, as was right.
All would soon be well. This time, at least, she had done the right thing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Under Cover
Chena peered between the reeds at the great white bubbles that made up the Alpha Complex. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed around her, seeking a crack in her camouflage suit. Despite its protection, the chill from the hip-deep water soaked in. She shivered hard for a moment, from cold, but also from mounting hope. No one had come to get her. She had been standing here in a direct line of sight of the complex for an hour, after a long trek through the marshes, and no one, human or animal, had been sent out to grab her.
It’s working. This time I got it right, she thought toward the shadow presence of Nan Elle hovering in the back of her mind.
“They find you by scent,” she’d said to Nan Elle. “That’s how the bugs found me. It’s got to be.” Ever since she got back from Peristeria, she’d been delving into the whys and hows of the hothousers’ monitoring systems, looking for what she’d missed. They shouldn’t have found her, but they did. So, even though she’d gotten away, she’d missed something. They still knew something she didn’t, and that was no good. She didn’t know how long it would take her to figure out what had gone wrong, but she was going to try. If nothing else, it kept her from wondering what was happening to Teal, wherever she had gone.
Chena combed through Nan Elle’s books and all the library disks and databases in both Stem and Offshoot. She was not surprised that there was next to no information. The hothousers certainly didn’t want their secrets to get out. But there were enough hints for her to see that the cyborged insects that patrolled Pandora did not really use cameras. They used transmitters that coded the responses of the cy-bugs’ tiny brains, which meant the hothousers’ computers received information from normal insect sensory impressions. Since insects relied primarily on scent, most of the analysis would have to be of suspicious chemical traces. Mask those chemical traces, mask your human scent, and you could walk unseen.
But Nan Elle was not ready to hear any of this. “You don’t know that. We have no direct information on the mote cameras.” Not even Administrator Tam could be induced to give away so much.
“We know they are using real bugs,” Chena persisted. She was right about this. She knew it. She might have been wrong about everything else, she might have been completely wrong about Teal, but she was right about this. “We know they are not supposed to interfere with anything in the natural order. Who knows what it would do to the local insect populations if there were a few hundred fake bugs flying around in formation?”
Nan Elle had straightened her neck, like she always did when she was particularly disapproving. “It’s a bad gamble, Chena. You should have learned that in Peristeria. You have your route into the hothouse. Let that be enough.” A week ago, Farin had been passed a message from a man in Stem. It had come from someone inside the hothouse who wanted access to a certain narcotic compound that Nan Elle used for surgeries. Nan Elle had wanted to just send back a sample of the stuff via the connections she and Administrator Tam had set up, but Chena had convinced her that it would be useful to have more than one reliable contact in the hothouse. It had taken Nan Elle all of three seconds to guess what Chena really wanted—a way back into the hot-house, a chance to get to the hothouser computers, where she might be able to find out what had really happened to her mother. She also knew that Chena would never give up until she had gotten what she wanted, so she had reluctantly agreed.