Night Sessions, The (19 page)

She looked around. “Let's walk,” she said.

They walked back to the main path and turned toward the upper corner. The shadow of an artificial eclipse passed over; Ferguson glanced at his watch, frowned, but didn't break his attention or his stride. The full sun came back like a light coming on, and made him blink.

“So,” Mazvabo continued, “we accept the situation. But it's not a good situation, and it's not one we like. It's a situation now written in the constitution of the Republic, but it's certainly not the one that's written in the
constitution of the Church of Scotland. It rankles even with me. With some it must rankle far more. They look for inspiration, for justification for their anger, and it isn't far to find. Because, as you say, right in our own church's heritage, literally carved in stone, there's the memory of men and women who were willing to die rather than acknowledge the state's authority over the Church. And that was an established Church—almost everyone agreed on that. What would the old Covenanters have felt about a Church that is content to live under the boot of a state that despises it, just because the boot isn't pressed down hard? And what would they think of the state that keeps the boot resting on the Church's neck?”

“I could almost suspect you sympathise.”

“No, no,” said Mazvabo, sounding flustered. “That's my point. If someone like me, a liberal, a moderate, can feel…some anger about the position of the Church, what must it be like for fundamentalists?”

“No,” said Ferguson, as they cut across the grass to another path, parallel to the Flodden Wall. “That's not enough. There must be more behind this.” He clenched an upturned fist and punched forward. “Something more powerful than religious resentment. Yes, faith is a force in itself, I've always known that, but I also remember the Faith Wars weren't about faith. They were about oil.”

Mazvabo laughed. “You think this is about oil?”

“No, not oil, but something that isn't talked about in the tracts. It could be something personal, some really warped individual psychology. We can't rule that out yet, but if it isn't something smaller like that, then it's something bigger. I don't know what it might be. But yes, if it's more than one person it's probably some religious group in the first instance, whatever may be behind them. Do you know of any sects, cults, whatever, that even
sound
like this Third Covenant lot?”

“Oh, sure!” said Mazvabo. “Plenty.”

“What?” cried Ferguson. “And you never said?”

Mazvabo stopped. “I know you were joking earlier, about my sympathising, but I know you're not now. You're accusing me of not telling you about these sects. Inspector Ferguson, the only reason I didn't tell you was that I assumed you knew. It's your job to know about these kinds of things.”

“No, it is not,” said Ferguson, angry at being accused himself. “The Special Branch, as you well know, monitors groups with known violent associations, even when those associations are in the past. If some shack in Pilton is the meeting place of something calling itself the Ulster Presbyterian Reformed Apostolic Church and most of its congregation happen to be ex-members of the UDA
and their families, you can bet your boots the SB keeps an eye on them. We don't keep an eye on sects, or Churches for that matter, for three reasons. One is that we don't have the resources, another is that there's nothing to see, and the third is that unless we have verifiable reasons for suspicion we are legally obliged to ignore them under the principle of non-cognisance. And that, Professor Mazvabo, is why I'm so annoyed to hear you complaining about the condition of the Churches. The Republic of Scotland does not oppress the Church of Scotland, or any other. It ignores it—except of course when it has to put its own men and women at risk protecting the congregations and clergy from believers more fanatical than themselves. So do please enlighten me about these sects.”

“All right,” said Grace Mazvabo. “I take your point. I apologise.”

Ferguson nodded, and resumed the walk.

“I know them through my research,” Mazvabo said. “Not through the Church. Over the years, I've been able to track down books, letters, records, traditions through getting to know people in small sects. There are in fact quite a few around Edinburgh—people displaced from the farms, or the coast. There were once entire villages along the east coast dominated by Brethren churches, for instance—all gone now, of course, but the people haven't disappeared. Different tradition, but with the displacements they get thrown in the mix. Then you get new Pentecostal congregations, house churches—they stepped in with new social support, welfare, charities and so on during the post-war upheavals. You'll find a surprising number in West Lothian—in the Turnhouse schemes, obviously, but also in the Carbon Glen boom towns, Livingston and Linlithgow and Falkirk and on west. There you get other twists and remixes, people highly religious and technologically sophisticated.” She laughed suddenly. “Engineers are still easy prey for creationists. It's a hazard of the job, when your job
is
intelligent design.”

“Engineers, eh? Very interesting indeed,” said Ferguson. He took a deep breath. “You asked if there was anything you could do to help, Dr. Mazvabo. Well, there is. Something that would help a lot, and that if successful would get the cops out of your Church.”

Mazvabo lifted her hat off and let her hair spring out.

“Go on,” she said.

“Before I go on,” Ferguson said, “I have to warn you it's risky. And it isn't official. I want to be absolutely sure it's secret. Not that I mistrust anyone in the force, it's just that…” He tilted his spread hand one way and another. “I don't want it to come out even accidentally. But you'd have very fast back-up if necessary, I can guarantee that.”

“I'm still interested,” said Mazvabo.

“OK,” said Ferguson. “I want you to visit as many of these new Churches and sects as you can, and report back to me any where you hear rhetoric that reminds you of the rants of the Third Covenant. It's a huge job, I know, and perhaps dangerous, as I said.”

“Oh, I won't worry about danger,” said Mazvabo, with a dismissive flap of her hat. “And I know enough about the sects to narrow it down. Yes, inspector, I'd be delighted.” She looked down at herself, then looked up and smiled. “I'll just go home and change into something a little more plain, and make a start this evening.”

Ferguson gave her a surprised look. “Really? You're sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. I'm so happy to be able to do something that might catch these—these—
heretics
who dare to use religion to justify murder.”

“Well,” said Ferguson. “Thank you, Professor Mazvabo.”

What a strange woman, he thought.

Ferguson had had a busy morning before he'd gone to the church. He'd checked the latest from the Leith site: in the middle of the night the Bomb Squad had finally concluded there were no booby traps, gone in, and removed a half-kilo of RDX along with its precursor components and manufacturing paraphernalia. They'd then pulled out, leaving Tony Newman's forensics team to take over the scene. The first thing Forensics had confirmed was what had been the subject of Ferguson's sarcastic remarks: the paper and ink for the hand-operated printing press were identical to those of the Covenanter broadsides. Just to clinch the identification, the last one—the one Skulk had found in the Grassmarket—was still set in type on the plate in the press. An IT specialist had arrived in the small hours to attempt to crack the privacy protection on the desk computer.

Ferguson had then caught a bus across town to St. Leonard's, the police station in Newington, a district between the University and Arthur's Seat. He'd found the police sergeant in charge of the case of the two Gnostic students, and had sat beside him in the interview room. Carl and Will had been interviewed one after the other, and had been severely shaken by the evidence that Ferguson had printed out for them.

They'd each, separately, admitted having on several occasions over the summer picked up the leaflets and surreptitiously placed them in Greyfriars. They'd been put up to it by Hardcastle, whom they'd met at a Dave Warsaw gig. Hardcastle had overheard them badmouthing Christianity and had approached them. The security robot had told them it was itself hostile to the mainstream Christian Churches, for reasons quite different from theirs, and had asked them to place some leaflets in Greyfriars as part of what it said was to be a campaign of psychological warfare. They were not to investigate the leaflets or Ogle their contents. Partly from malice, and partly from mischief, they'd agreed. They hadn't paid much attention to the contents of the broadsides, had barely understood what little they had read, and had had no idea that they were in any way connected to the bombing of Father Murphy. Being told that they were had come as a shock.

The leki in attendance had later confirmed that, as far as it could tell, the two lads were telling the truth. Ferguson, well satisfied, had left it at that.

Ferguson walked from Greyfriars to Greensides, arriving at about 1:30. He picked up his bike at the shelter and cycled down Leith Walk and Constitution Street to the container blocks. He steered through the narrow streets, and dismounted at the yellow tape across the alley where they'd found the workshop. A leki and a constable were guarding the barrier.

“Clear to go through?” Ferguson asked.

The PC nodded. Ferguson ducked under the tape, then lifted his bike over. He propped it against the wall and walked down the alley. A positive-pressure buckysheet tent had been erected around the doorway. Mukhtar stood outside, smoking.

“Good work on the confessions,” he said.

“If they're complete,” said Ferguson.

“Oh, I reckon they are,” said Mukhtar. “I know useful idiots when I see them.”

“Uh-huh,” Ferguson grunted. “What brings you down here?”

Mukhtar ground out his cigarette end with the heel of his boot. “For a sniff of the air,” he said. “Not even Paranoia is making anything of the esteemed Mr. Ilyanov's stated distant acquaintance with Hardcastle. It gives me a funny feeling in my old bones, though.”

“Hmm,” said Ferguson. “Your call. Well, I better have a look inside.”

Mukhtar jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “No need to go in, unless you really want to suit up. There's a perfectly good view through the midge headspace. Brighter than the real thing.”

It was like looking through the wall, on a scene in full daylight. Ferguson had a childish sense of invisibility as he glided the pov around, watching in turn Newman and his assistant sifting and bagging, the IT guy with his arcane kit and intent look, and Skulk poking into odd corners with his tentacles. Skulk and the IT guy, at least, were well aware of Ferguson's physical location and virtual presence. The IT guy made a point of turning from the desk slate's innards and looking straight at Ferguson's pov, a mildly unnerving experience.

“Afternoon, DI Ferguson,” he said, startling Newman, who looked up and saw nobody. “You'll be glad to know I've cracked the encryption on this. It's a standard commercial job, nothing fancy. The only problem is the sheer amount of information on it, and the lack of organisation. If you're a robot, of course, you can keep track of everything in your own memory.”

“Can you hear me?” Ferguson asked.

“Yup, loud and clear.”

“What have you found so far?”

“There's an amazing amount of religious crap,” said the IT guy. “Theology, Church history, philosophy, apologetics, creationism, Catholicism, all kinds of stuff.”

“Throw the lot to Paranoia,” said Ferguson, mentally tagging “creationism” because Mazvabo had mentioned it. “Let's see if it finds any patterns. Anything else?”

“Nothing about making bombs. Imagine my surprise. Lots of business records, time sheets and stuff, receipts…”

“Ace!” said Ferguson. “Concentrate on that, plug every name and number into searches, dredge up everything.”

“Got you, boss.” The technician hesitated before turning back to his work. “Speaking of IT matters, the team going through the Hired Muscle data have got a result on tracing that KI mind back-up.” He tipped his work stool on one leg, balancing perilously, looking smug.

“And?” said Ferguson.

“Gone to soldiers. Specifically, the trace shows a Move, not a Copy. Well, Move is Copy and Delete, but you know what I mean. The point is, the back-up file was Moved to an IP address that's heavily firewalled, so we can't see past it, but we do have its physical location. Took a while to track it down. You'll never guess where it is.”

“No, I never will,” said Ferguson. He was used to this sort of thing from IT specialists, but that didn't make it any less wearing. “So tell me.”

“Only a maintenance shack on the Atlantic Space Elevator.”

Ferguson, outside the room, almost stumbled. The pov lurched.

“The space elevator? Jeez. That's…”

“Unexpected? Hah! It gets worse. The elevator isn't just outside our jurisdiction, it's Gazprom property, and furthermore the maintenance is subcontracted, and sub-subcontracted, and the ownership of these companies is traded and speculated on—it's part of how the whole contraption is financed, typical Russian-capitalist scam—so we're talking some serious legal and, ah, information-processing constraints on finding out who even owns that particular chunk of real estate.”

“Oh, Christ!” said Ferguson. “There must be
some
way of tracing how that stunt was pulled. Presumably a backed-up KI or AI can't just do that on its own. Or are there AIs roaming the nets already?”

“If it was that easy, we'd know about it. There are fairly robust protocols
in place to stop it, and in any case it's about as technically feasible as a music file taking over your dishwasher. Nah, this was set up, maybe by Hardcastle itself. Anyway. I'll get back to work.”

“Sure,” Ferguson said. “Pass me any business documents you find—actually, just stick them on the headspace as you go along, I'll tab you a location.”

“Cheers.”

Ferguson set up the location, blinked out and returned to the alley.

“You follow that?” he said to Mukhtar.

“Oh, yes,” said Mukhtar.

“Sounds like you might be right about a Gazprom connection.”

“My nose is twitching, for sure,” said Mukhtar. “Time I took a wander, I think.”

“The local people-of-interest know who you are,” said Ferguson.

“Uh-huh,” said Mukhtar. “I'm counting on it.”

Ferguson stood in the alleyway and stared into space. The Atlantic elevator was below the horizon. The sky to the south was pricked with geostats, strung with a skein of orbital paths. There was more up there than Ogle Sky showed: secret military installations and commercially confidential operations could all enforce or buy their omission from the open release. Even thus incomplete, the display of Near-Earth Orbit showed a busy and cluttered place. Tens of thousands of objects, from the three Space Stations through the manufacturing installations on down to microsatellites, and not counting the junk. A few hundred long-term residents; thousands of day-trippers, space-divers, tourists. And then there were the stations farther out: the elevators, the soletas, the Gore Observatory, the multiple components of the Hoyle Telescope, the bases on the Moon and Mars, the Europa Lab, all with human crews. The number of people in space was large and, for all practical purposes, impossible to establish with precision, but it wasn't the problem. That number was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the number of autonomous machines, some of them self-aware.

Of that self-aware minority, a small—and surely in principle knowable—number were humanoid robots. Seriously screwed-up tin men. It was, Ferguson guessed, possible that the fugitive copy of Hardcastle's mind would find one of these to download into, if its current occupant had decided to migrate to a more functional body. More likely, the copy itself would find a nonhumanoid robot body—probably one without a self-aware KI inhabiting it—and possess that. It didn't even have to be on the elevator—the copy could by now have been transmitted further. It could also, of course, remain stashed in storage
indefinitely, to await download at some future date. But, as the IT guy had pointed out, it couldn't do any of that on its own.

Which meant that Hardcastle had managed to hack a space-based computer, or had one or more collaborators in space already. The latter, in one sense, would be preferable, because tracing a conspiracy would be something to go on. Whereas trying to trace a missing back-up in that clutter overhead would be like searching for an iron filing on a prairie, never mind a needle in a haystack.

A conspiracy in space. A robot conspiracy. A humanoid robot religious conspiracy. Did robots get religion? One at least apparently had. Why not more? Ferguson shook his head. His own thoughts were becoming like those of Paranoia on one of its bad days. He found himself pacing in the alley, head down, half-seeing the rough ground and litter and weeds at his feet and half-seeing the Ogle Sky overlay, which was still running in background on his contacts: below him was the sky in the Southern Hemisphere, the bright line of the Pacific Space Elevator, tagged with the participant company names of its Chinese-Japanese-Indian consortium owners and investors in a rainbow of virtual neon. Ferguson swivelled his gaze, looking through the curve of the Earth. The Atlantic Space Elevator had a much less colourful and varied display: just the logos of Exxon-Mobil, Gazprom, Honeywell, and Rosoboroneksport, and the flags of the Russian Federation and the United States.

Stay with it, stay with it. What would a humanoid robot religious conspiracy in space do? There was already the mind, at least, of one robot linked to the Third Covenant sect in space. What if there were others? The speculation wasn't insane at all. Ferguson paced back to the tent, swinging his gaze idly back and forth between the two elevators, commercial and political rivals but both of them pillars of the human and machine presence in space.

Pillars. That word snagged something in his memory. He'd seen it recently somewhere, read it in—

In the Bible. He'd looked it up when he'd been trying to figure out the reference in the last Covenanter broadside to “Samson in Gaza of the Philistines.”

Ferguson blinked the text back. Judges, chapter seventeen. Samson, already blinded, shorn of his hair and strength, and now made sport of by his enemies, was standing amidst the pillars of a building with three thousand of his enemies on its roof. He'd asked the boy beside him to let him lean his hands against the pillars.

And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

“Boss? DI Ferguson? Adam?”

Skulk's voice, insistent in his ear. Ferguson opened his eyes and took his hands away from the wall. He brushed fragments of rough-cast off his palms, stared for a moment at the reddened and indented skin, and turned to the leki. Ferguson didn't know how long he'd been leaning on the wall—one minute, two, five? Something about the story's elements—mutilation, revenge, religion, suicide, massacre—had resonated with his deepest disgust at what he was having to deal with.

“Are you all right?” Skulk asked. “You look somewhat faint and nauseous.”

“I just had a very troubling thought,” Ferguson said. “This tiny, insignificant band of religious nutters we're after might just be planning the biggest terrorist spectacular of all time. Bringing down one or both of the space elevators.”