“What?” Veppers shouted at Jasken, exasperated. A near miss from one of Pleur’s hands skiffed one cheek and splashed water into his eyes. “Not on the nose, you dumb bitch!”
“It’s Sulbazghi,” Jasken told him. “Highest urgency.”
Veppers was much bigger and stronger than Pleur. He gripped her, turned her round and held her tightly while she cursed at both him and Jasken, coughing and spitting water all the while. “What? Something happening in Ubruater?” Veppers asked.
“No, he’s in a flier, on his way here. Four minutes out. Won’t say what, but insists it’s highest urgency. Shall I tell Bousser to summit the landing platform?”
Veppers sighed. “I suppose.” He got Pleur’s robe off at last. She had mostly stopped struggling and coughing. “Go and meet them,” he told Jasken, who nodded once and walked off.
Veppers pushed the naked girl towards the side of the pool. “As for you, young lady,” he said, biting her neck hard enough to produce a yelp, “you’ve been terribly ill-mannered.”
“I have, haven’t I?” Pleur agreed. She knew just what Veppers liked to hear. “I need to be taught a lesson, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes I would. Assume the position.” He shoved the floating weight of the robe out of the way as Pleur braced herself against the edge of the pool with both hands. “Won’t be long!” he called after Jasken’s retreating back.
Still a little breathless, still with the pleasant glow of satiation about him and still dripping from inside his fluffy robe, Veppers sat forward and looked at the thing lying in Dr. Sulbazghi’s broad, pale yellow palm. He, Sulbazghi – still wearing his lab coat, which was an unusual sight – Jasken and Astil, Veppers’ butler, were the only people in the lavishly furnished lounge. Outside, beyond plump brocade bolsters, waggling tassels, gently clinking chandeliers and trembling gold-thread window fringes, the view was of the slowly clearing mists before and behind the Wheel as it continued on its journey through the spreading pastel light of dawn.
“Thank you, Astil,” Veppers said, accepting a cup of chilled infusion from his butler. “That’s all.”
“Sir,” Astil said, bowing and exiting.
Veppers waited until he
Whatever it was, it looked like a small bunch of very fine wires, their colour a sort of dull matt silver with a hint of blue. Scrunch it up, he thought, and you’d have something like a pebble; something so small you could probably swallow it.
Sulbazghi looked tired, frazzled, almost ill. “It was found in the furnace,” he told Veppers, and ran a hand through his thin, unkempt hair.
“What furnace?” he asked. He’d come into this thinking it was going to prove to be one of those matters that seemed terribly important and momentous to those around him but which he could, having cast his eye over it, happily leave for them to worry about and sort out if possible. That was, after all, what he paid them for. Now, just from the feel in the room, he was starting to think there might be a real problem here.
“There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “What temperature—?”
“The furnace in the Veppers Memorial Hospital,” Sulbazghi said, rubbing his face with his hands, not looking Veppers in the eye. “Our little friend, from the other night.”
Great God, the girl, Veppers realised, with a disturbing feeling in his belly. Now what? Was the fractious bitch to pursue him from beyond the grave? “Okay,” he said slowly. “And all very unfortunate, I’m sure we can agree. But what has …?” He waved at the silvery-blue wires still displayed in Sulbazghi’s hand. “What has whatever this is got to do with that?”
“It’s what was left of her body,” Sulbazghi said.
“There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “Not if the furnace was—”
“The fucking furnace was at the right fucking temperature!” Sulbazghi shouted shrilly.
Jasken whipped off his Oculenses, his expression furious. He looked ready to start a fight.
“Gentlemen, please,” Veppers said calmly, before Jasken could reply. He looked at the doctor. “As simply as you can, Sulbazghi, for the non-technically minded; what the hell is this thing?”
“It’s a neural lace,” the doctor said, sounding exhausted.
“A neural lace,” Veppers repeated.
He’d heard of these things. They were the sort of device that highly advanced aliens who’d started out squidgy and biochemical – as squidgy and biochemical as Sichultians, for example – and who had not wanted to upload themselves into nirvana or oblivion or wherever, used when they wanted to interface with machine minds or record their thoughts, or even when they wanted to save their souls, their mind-states.