A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe (28 page)

Anton stopped himself from reacting
foolishly. “In answer to your rhetorical question — and correct me
if I'm wrong — I feel that the Spec Force Unit is more than
adequate for protection, especially if they are joined by the ARU
Sentinel teams. The two were designed to complement each other in
just this type of situation, emha Mirades. Past events will prove
that.”

Nandahya nodded in agreement. “I understand
that, Governor, but that was twenty-five years ago. Are the two
still in sync?”

Anton glanced at General Phillips, who gave
him a proud and emphatic nod. He next turned to the gray-haired man
sitting a few seats away. Allen Tatreaux, the Commissioner for the
Alien Relations Unit of the BMPD, had been sitting silently and
impatiently with arms crossed and a deep scowl crossing his face
throughout the whole meeting. Anton regretted having to ask.
“Commissioner Tatreaux, do you wish to add to that?”

The man nodded and finally unraveled his
arms. There were sweat stains against his shirt, he was so wound
up. “The connection between the SFG and the Alien Relations Unit is
as strong as it’s ever been, sir,” he grumbled, a touch of cynicism
in his voice. “I’m surprised that we’re even being questioned about
it.”

“Yes,” emha Mirades said.
“But being linked and being
in sync
are two separate things, especially if we're
dealing with the Shenaihu and the Mendaihu.”

“Excuse me?”

“Forgive me for being blunt,” she said. “But
are you absolutely sure the two can still work together with
precision? I’ve personally heard evidence to the contrary…but I was
hoping you could prove me wrong.”

Anton winced…that was indeed a low blow.
Commissioner Tatreaux seemed to wilt a little under that statement,
but refused to back down. This was not the first time the ARU had
been laughed at. He leaned across the table towards the woman and
pointed an accusatory finger at her. “Your personal opinions about
the ARU and the Special Forces Guard should not enter into this,
emha Mirades.”

The corner of her mouth curled up into a
smirk. “I should say the same to you, Commissioner.”

A bunch of
idiots
, Anton thought, disgusted.
A bunch of blessed idiots here. It’s a damned
comedy.
The only person not joining in
this argument was the one who should have been keeping this from
happening: Mancka Udéma, the sole representative for the Mendaihu
collective. She chose not to bicker or break it up, instead
watching all parties intently, as a well-trained Mendaihu would
before going for the strike. Eventually she glanced at him, shook
her head, and pushed herself ever so slightly away from the
table.

She was losing patience, and so was he.

“Please! A little civility
here, people,” he warned. “As it stands, Spec Force units
will
be stationed in the
Waterfront District,
away
from the action but close enough for immediate
response. An ARU Sentinel Team will be on call until further
notice. I am considering this a Level Two spiritual event involving
both Mendaihu and Shenaihu, but not on the scale of the Eighth
Embodiment and its aftermath. And as Governor of Bridgetown
Province, I am refusing to let it get that far.”

Nandahya Mirades gave him a flash of a
Meraladian smile. “…and if it does,” she said, “leave that to the
Mendaihu, Governor.”

*

“Shirai.”

Governor Rieflin sat at the corner of his
desk, arms crossed and brows furrowed deep. He stared hard at the
emptiness between himself and the floor, as if trying to will the
Mirades Tower AI into existence before him, as if he had any
control of her whereabouts. He sounded out her name again, this
time less of a beckoning and more of a musing, as if searching for
the meaning behind it.

Shirai
, he thought.
Who are
you?
Shirai, the shimmering and vigilant angel of the Mirades
Tower, omniscient and impartial. She was perfection. She was
protector. She was science. She was philosophy. She was
reason
. And she’d been curiously absent all day.

He pushed himself off the desk, returning to
the seat behind it. Several messages were open on the desk vidmat,
all tagged different shades of bright colors for various levels of
importance. Whose importance was up to question, as he hadn’t
touched any of them all day.

Urgent: Please discuss future economic
outlook anent today’s events
, the top one read, its author D.D.
Hazeley and Associates. He frowned, utterly baffled by that memo.
Hazeley represented trade stocks on Hallera and had nothing to do
with Bridgetown! Another, from Borland & Lifeson:
Governor:
please pass on to Priestley as soon as possible. Would like to know
fiscal repercussions post-‘ritual’ in Bridgetown center.
Another, from Kozelek Futures:
Need update on ritual and St.
Patrick’s. When will we see new budget post-event?

And quite the pile from EdenTree, right here
in the Tower:
We need information ASAP. Please forward all
available information regarding awakening ritual to our contacts at
your earliest convenience.
And a follow up a half hour later:
Have not heard response to above query. Please respond
urgently.
And twenty minutes after that:
Governor, we
understand that you are already working on the situation. We are in
need of any updates as soon as possible to ensure that our clients
are not adversely affected.
And finally, six minutes ago:
Please respond ASAP with any updates you may have at this time.
We would prefer not to escalate this request to the Crimson-Null
Foundation.

Anton winced, feeling physically ill, and
wiped the messages off the screen with a brush of his arm. Goddess
knew how many people had been affected in the ritual and the
attacks…and the lawyers and financial institutions were tripping
all over themselves wondering who stood to lose money from it. And
they threw the word ‘ritual’ around recklessly, as if it were an
unfortunate dip in the economy and not the historical event it
actually was. He’d expected as much from these people since the
night it happened, but still it disgusted him.

He’d also read the NewsComm feeds. He found
himself profoundly impressed by the citizens of Bridgetown and
their resilience; the horrors of the war during the Eighth
Embodiment still hung fresh in their minds, and the recent attacks
were a stark reminder that it could happen again. There had been
many terrorist attacks both attempted and committed since then, but
none had come close to the level of that catastrophe. His citizens
had learned to channel their fears into a guarded readiness and a
well-tempered anger. Pockets of dissenters lurked here and there,
but their small sizes kept them from causing any lasting damage. He
still needed to be a visible presence in the city, but they did not
need coddling. They would rise with him if asked.

He also thought of the fringe groups — the
anarchists and the jackers in particular. They’d been curiously
quiet. During that dark time in the past, petty street crime had
become virtually nonexistent, aside from random but infrequent
small scale looting. The street gangs knew well enough to steer
clear of the high-level situations and generally kept their mayhem
to their own sector. However, the hackers had taken free reign of
the network at the time, disrupting securities and business in
general and taking it to the point of a strange, structured
anarchy. It would take nearly three years before Shirai would have
the net completely under control again.

Shirai…she had been created soon after to
create order out of the virtual chaos within the Mirades Tower, to
great effect. She led the engineering brigade in putting up the
firewalls and releasing the retroviruses, cutting down nearly all
of the hackers in their prime. Some clusters survived to this day,
though in smaller numbers and with less damage done. Only one
group, Vigil, had eluded the killing grasp of Shirai.

Vigil was perhaps the most dangerous of them
all, because they were not terrorists. They were not aiming to
destroy democracy or the economy, nor were they out to cause chaos
and destruction. They were there ‘to bring things into a wider
perspective by leveling the playing fields’, according to their
manifesto. They messed with systems not to ruin them, but to keep
them from overrunning humanity. They rewrote the existing rules
before anyone had a chance to stop them. They vanished without a
trace soon after Shirai’s successful rebuilding of the city’s
economic infrastructure, apparently no longer anticipating any
major events, and only surfaced briefly every couple of years or
so, just to shake things up. They’d never completely gone away,
they only moved further underground, out of everyone’s reach.

It wasn’t until five years ago that he had
learned of their current reemergence. They had not bugged the
Tower’s system, nor had they laid any businesses to waste…they had
no qualms with the way the province ran then, and left it alone.
This time, they had worked on a more personal level. They had
helped a young Alien Relations Unit officer find out what had
happened to her recently slain parents, who had also been on the
ARU. They had been victims of the first Shenaihu-related homicides
in years, taking all the security forces by surprise. They did not
want this event to become public at all, and after a thorough
investigation, they closed the case and refused access to nearly
everyone. However, six months later, a small but significant amount
of high-level restricted information had been leaked in her
direction. Information that she had initially been denied. Anton
had learned about all this after the fact, once the BMPD had
unsuccessfully requested a warrant for Vigil’s arrest. Countering
that she had more than earned the right to hear the truth, he
denied the request and let it drop. The ARU officer had been given
the true story of her parents, even given a recommendation later
that year, and Vigil shrank once more into the shadows. No harm, no
foul.

And now, here they were again, making
themselves known with a memo he had received extremely late last
night, with just four words:
Leave them in peace.

“Peace?” he had laughed bitterly, knowing
exactly whom they were referring to. “I don’t think it exists
anymore. It’s not economically viable.”

Hoping to shake off some tension, Anton
finally requested Shirai’s presence. The hologram of the young
virtual woman arrived within seconds, again sitting in the chair in
front of his desk. She gave him a polite smile and a singsong
greeting meant to be endearing towards those she dealt with. Anton
smiled back, nodding at the hologram.

“Greetings, Shirai,” he said. “I would like
to ask you a few questions regarding the events of the past few
days. I would also like to have this conversation as private as
possible.”

She nodded. “Of course, sir. That can be
arranged immediately. Commencing select private recording now.”

He nodded in appreciation. “Shirai, I need
to know what is happening on the
outside
. Do you have any
idea how the citizens of Bridgetown are handling the awakening
ritual and yesterday’s events?”

“Would you like the numbers or the general
consensus, Governor?”

“The less numbers the better, please.”

“Well, sir…” she trailed off as her image
looked away in blank contemplation. In the space of that second or
so, her lack of any facial gesture could have been read any number
of ways to anyone, and Anton read it as a reflection of the
sprawl’s general mood. He bit his lower lip and frowned.

“Sir,” she continued. “I have gathered that
a majority of the people are afraid, but not overly so. The older
citizens have lived through such attacks, some have even taken part
in them; they have faith in you, and believe you have it under
control.”

Anton nodded. “And the younger
citizens?”

“They fall under the wing of the elders,
sir. A good many of them are well informed and well protected. They
do not want another war.”

“That’s good to hear, Shirai. I’m glad the
citizens are taking such responsibility with their children.”
But not enough,
he thought, keeping those words and worries
to himself.
Not enough are protected. Not from this.

“Next question…about the Mendaihu. I
understand that they do not advocate violence, and make every
effort to keep any situation from resorting to it. Are the Mendaihu
reacting to the last few days’ events in any way? That is, other
than contributing to the injured and helping with the
reconstruction?”

Shirai’s image almost brightened at the
mention of Mendaihu. “Sir, I am glad to report that there has been
quite an influx of Mendaihu activity within the last day or so.
Many of them are aiding in the search for Nehalé Usarai. Before the
awakening ritual, he was most frequently seen in the Waterfront
District as a volunteer for St. Paul’s Church on Haden Street.
There have been unconfirmed reports of his presence there at this
point. Other than that, the Mendaihu have done well to quell the
fears of many. Civilian Mendaihu with no official connections to
the ARU, the BMPD, the Council of Elders, or any other agency have
opted to become watchers for their neighborhoods. The BMPD and the
ARU are both sanctioning this action.”

Anton nodded again, but still he found
himself fearing the worst. The tension in his shoulders tightened,
a knot of pain welling up. Nausea constricted his throat, but not
enough to make him feel physically sick. He tried another tack. He
was sure this would be a dead end, but he wanted to ask anyway.
“Next question. I’ve been hearing about the nuhm’ndah. Not
widespread, but enough to cause me concern. Can you confirm if they
are involved?”