Polity Agent

The message obviously got through because the front doors opened and people began emerging. The two other aircars landed in the street behind Thorn’s vehicle, but the two telefactors held station up in the sky. Four monitors came past the car and headed towards the growing crowd before the hotel. There followed some gesticulation and shouting, but the evacuated people began moving on down the street.

‘Jack, Fethan gave me a little gift before I departed Cull: one of Jerusalem’s HK programs.’

‘Yes, I know,’ the AI replied.

Thorn tilted his head and asked, ‘Aphran, if you yourself planted an explosive device here, in this situation, how would you detonate it?’

‘Net feed. I’d connect it to some com system. The signal would be untraceable. Or I would have assumed so.’

‘But you would need a spotter of some kind, otherwise how would you know when to detonate?’

‘I would either connect the device to something only an ECS agent might try to access—secure storage or something locked like a safe—or I would use a cam system, probably activated by movement, and routed through the same net feed.’

‘Jack, through your telefactors can you scan for a cam inside the hotel?’

‘I have already done so,’ the AI replied. ‘There are two holocameras located in the suspect’s room, linked by optic cables into the room’s netlink.’

‘Presumably there are other optic cables in the room too?’

‘No, our suspect has been much smarter than that: planar explosives packed into a standard lamp—the lamp itself to be activated by an infrared signal from the netlink rather than an optic cable. The lamp has been deliberately raised to head height, the intention being to not only kill, but to destroy any cerebral hardware designed to save anything of the victim’s mind—a subtle touch.’

Thorn reached into his pocket and took out the memstore. ‘Would this HK be able to track the cam signals?’

‘Why not ask it?’ Jack suggested.

Thorn then remembered Fethan saying the hunter-killer program did not talk much. So it could talk, then.

‘Can you hear me?’

The device vibrated in his hand.

‘I hear,’ replied a flat inflection-free voice. Scar peered at the memstore for a moment, then sniffed dismissively.

‘Then you heard what we were discussing. Can you track cam signals through a netlink?’

‘I can.’

Thorn detached his palm-com from the dash and rested it in his lap. He tapped an icon to open its netlink, and with a brief local search closed the connection to the Parliament Hotel. He then pulled out the strip along the lower edge of the touch-console to reveal multiple sockets: optic, nano-tube optic, s-con whiskered, crystal interface, and even a socket that could adapt itself to primitive electrical connections. As he picked it up, the memstore, like a clam sliding out its foot, immediately extruded an optic plug from one of its end ports. Thorn inserted this into the requisite socket.

‘Of course, we need a way to activate the cameras,’ Thorn commented, while watching the hotel’s web display flickering, then breaking up into squares, before blanking out totally.

‘Copy loaded,’ said the box.

‘Are you volunteering?’ Jack enquired of Thorn.

‘Not likely,’ said Thorn. ‘The cam signal might not be enough, but the program should certainly be able to follow the detonation signal.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Erm… HK, have you wrecked this palm-com?’

The com screen came back on, displaying the city map Thorn had used before landing.

‘Can you display where you track the source to?’

‘I can,’ HK replied.

‘Jack,’ said Thorn, ‘send in a telefactor. The watcher will know he’s been blown and won’t be able to get a human target with his bomb, but he won’t be able to resist taking out such a costly piece of Polity hardware instead.’

Even as Thorn spoke, one of the telefactors dropped down in front of the hotel. After a moment he observed something shoot out from it to hit a chainglass bubble window.

Decoder mine.

The missile stuck for a second, then the window abruptly collapsed into dust. As the telefactor cruised inside, immediately the walls either side of the window blew outwards, ahead of a disc of flame. Rubble crashed down into the street, followed by the top half of the telefactor itself.

‘My supply of telefactors is limited,’ Jack observed.

Thorn glanced down at the palm-com, just as the HK grated, ‘Located.’

On the map displayed, a square frame shrank down to a dot. It took half a second for Thorn to realize it lay right next to where he was parked.

‘Out!’ he shouted, grabbing up his pulse-rifle from the passenger foot-well below Scar’s legs. He and the dracoman piled out just as shots slammed into the car roof.