Brute-force calculation was what the AI platforms did best. Unable to resist making suggestions, Aristide and the others probably got in the way.
Many of the miracles Bitsy had suggested in her scenario proved unworkable. Force fields seemed impractical on the scale required. Though it proved possible to create a black hole that would swallow Courtland, Pablo, and all his works, it might also outwear its welcome and swallow other nearby objects, such as the Sun. Aristide's idea of throwing a loop of cosmic string around Courtland and hauling it into the sun, like a cowboy dragging a balky calf, was imaginative but, for complex reasons that were beyond Aristide's understanding, unfeasible.
As for convincing the universe that Courtland and its contents had never existed, Bitsy simply replied, "We'll work on that."
"How about we just open a wormhole and stuff Courtland into it?"
"There are scaling problems," Bitsy said. "Cloud Swallowing is in charge of that approach, we'll let you know."
Aristide had to trust that the specialists and the platforms would do the job without his help. It was frustrating. His new uselessness gnawed at him.
Tension continued. The United Powers' discussions with Pablo petered out, but no immediate second shot was fired from Pablo's mass driver. This was seen as conclusive evidence that the driver was solar-powered—the weapon hadn't enough charge for another shot. Out in the Kuiper Belt, where Sol seemed little more than a bright star, it would take a long time for the capacitors to recharge. The AIs' undignified scurry to the far side of the sun began to seem likely to succeed.
At this point, when public terror had been replaced by maximum public suspense, Aristide was summoned to a meeting of the Standing Committee in the early hours of the morning. Aristide dragged himself into his vehicle along with a cup of coffee handed him by one of his bodyguard, and Bitsy hopped in after him. As the Destiny pulled away from the hotel, Aristide looked at the cat.
"You know what this is about, of course."
"I do. But it would be unfair to tell you before the others."
"Why are we caring about what's fair at three in the morning?"
Bitsy said nothing. Aristide scanned the news channels and saw no disasters.
"Can I take it that the news is good?" he asked.
"You may."
Aristide took a gulp of coffee. "Fine," he said. "For good news I will employ patience."
A few moments later he was trudging up the gangway of Golden Treasure IV, Bitsy trotting ahead with her tail held high. Someone had put a tray of pastry on the bar, and Aristide helped himself while he waited for the others. By the time the entire committee was assembled, he was probably as awake as any of them. Bitsy took a chair at the table, and sat with her head barely above the surface, looking at the committee with interested green eyes.
"I want to pass on a message from Cloud Swallowing," Bitsy reported. "He was working on the implications of Doctor Monagas' revelation specifically on wormhole theory—as some of you know, that is one of his specialties. We were hoping for a method of producing a wormhole that could engulf Courtland, but it seemed there was a scaling problem."
"The problem's been solved?" Shenai asked.
"No," Bitsy said. "The problem has been discovered to be unsolvable." The cat looked at the suddenly discouraged faces. "But," she said, "that discovery has some interesting corollaries. It seems there are certain problems with scale analogous to those displayed by quantum tunneling—either there's enough energy for the particle to leap the barrier, or there isn't, and there's no between."
"So," said the woman from the Advisory Committee, "what you're telling us is that we can create small wormholes, as we've been doing, or very, very large ones, but nothing in between."
"Indeed."
Shenai looked at Bitsy. "How big?"
Bitsy showed her white needle teeth in what seemed to be a smile. "Cloud Swallowing seems to think we could generate a wormhole on the order of point three AU, enough to encapsulate the sun and its orbiting platforms."
"Which would completely cut us off from the enemy mass driver," Aristide said.
"Indeed yes. Though if we take this approach, I suggest that we make the wormhole somewhat larger and take Earth and its satellite with us. I surmise you don't want your homeland flying off into space.
"Is this reversible?" Shenai asked.
"Yes. We can collapse the wormhole at any point—or expand it to a larger size. Once the wormhole is created, a rather trivial amount of energy would be required for any changes."
"Can we take the other major planets as well?"
"That's uncertain. There may be another seemingly arbitrary scaling problem after about three AU, but Cloud Swallowing is working on it." Bitsy licked her chops. "On the other hand, if we disappear from the universe containing Jupiter and Uranus for a few weeks, we will recapture them when we reappear, and the orbits will eventually stabilize again, even without our help. Any long-term problems are likely to arise in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, where our sun's absence may induce perturbations that may eventually result in comets or rocky asteroids falling into the inner solar system."
"Are other heads of government receiving this briefing now?" Shenai asked.
"Yes."
"Inform them that I vote to proceed."
"Done."
Shenai leaned back in her chair and placed her hands carefully atop the table.
"Assuming that we vote to proceed, how long will the preparations take?"
"Approximately nine days. Calculations must be checked, certain apparatus modified. I would advise against haste: a mistake could be catastrophic."
In the brief silence that followed, Aristide could see the calculations behind Shenai's eyes.
"Very good," she said finally. She looked at the other members of the committee. "Friends," she said, "would you all join me for breakfast at Polity House? I will send to the cellar for champagne."
Aristide left the breakfast with the taste of caviar on his lips and champagne singing in his head and his heart. The euphoria lasted for two days, and then Pablo's new hammer fell.
The platforms' undignified dodging saved Gemma from complete destruction: she was struck off-center and lost about thirty percent of her mass and calculating power. As before, the bolt from the Kuiper Belt traveled so quickly that the Rogue Comet Detection Array had given less than thirty seconds' warning. One pocket was lost: Midgarth. But the strange pocket, with its orcs and trolls, was not destroyed—the record showed that the wormhole had not been flooded with plasma, but had snapped shut when its controlling mechanism had been destroyed.
Midgarth was on its own. Its inhabitants could survive reasonably well, but the pocket was doomed to extinction when its little sun ran out of fuel. Unlike the pockets where high technology was possible, in Midgarth there was no way to build a wormhole and tunnel away to another world.
In the wake of Pablo's strike, panic struck the worlds yet again. Governments tottered, governments fell. One royal family was chased from its palace, never to return.
Shenai fell from power, after one of her deputy prime ministers—Kiernan, the one with the curly hair—called for a vote of confidence within the executive committee of the Constitutional Party.
She was a victim of her own caution. Topaz was a world that had opted for transparency, where very little information could actually be hidden. The United Powers had kept their plans a secret, even though it cost them. The inhabitants of Topaz had been driven into a frenzy by the absence of their usual omniscience, and their own ruling party had panicked and wrecked itself.
Aristide called Shenai to offer condolences.
"If the wormhole trick works," she said, "we've won the war, and who sits in the Polity House isn't going to matter."
"It will matter to you," Aristide said, "and your aspirations. And," he nodded, "to your friends."
She gave a graceful nod. "Thank you for that," she said.
Shenai was in an anonymous-looking room, with utilitarian furniture and pastel paintings broadcast on the walls: Aristide concluded that she was in a hotel room, or possibly a safe house hidden from any hypothetical rampaging mobs.
There was a half-empty bottle of wine on a counter behind her.
"I hope you haven't been drinking alone," he said.
"A dismissed politician is always alone," Shenai said. She bent to straighten a stocking, her straw-colored hair falling over her face. She lifted her head and tossed her hair back.
"Kiernan won't last," she said. "He's too young to know the ropes—he's only fifty-seven, do you know that? In our civilization people have thousand-year-long memories, particularly for treachery. When he tries to take credit for winning the war, and the truth comes out concerning what decision was made when, he'll be laughed out of his job."
"Will you try to come back?"
She gave a half-smile. "Running Topaz in peacetime isn't going to be nearly as interesting as trying to manage the war. Perhaps I'll find something else to do with my life."
"Do you have any ideas what course you'll take?"
"Make sure Kiernan falls, for one thing," Shenai said. "Which isn't just vengeance-for-fun, it's maintaining my own credibility. After that, I don't know. P'raps I'll emigrate."
She straightened, her eyes suddenly abstract.
"I have a call from Shekure."
"Give her my love."
"I will."
The wall screen blanked. Aristide told the walls to turn a softer shade of green, ordered the lamp to swing away on its boom, and then contemplated the rest of his own day.
The Loyal Nine, the vast incomprehensible scaffolds of quantum calculation that he, more than anyone, had caused to be brought into being, were all busy confirming, for the second time, his insight as to the nature of the structure of the universe. Assuming he was proven right—again—he would have saved civilization.
Which, he reflected in sadness, meant that he, too, was out of a job.
At the moment the wormhole encapsulated the inner solar system, Aristide was in the Golden Treasure's First Class ballroom with the Standing Committee, Kiernan, the elite committee of astrophysicists studying Pablo's astronomical data, the entire diplomatic corps including a grumpy-looking Fred as well as emissaries from Earth and Luna, a former King and his current mistress, a select group of elite journalists, and assorted military, political, and scientific hangers-on.
It was a fact of modern life that any damn place could be a Secret Headquarters provided that it had large enough video walls.
Onscreen, an assortment of officials, scientists, and techs went through a lengthy series of checklists. In the ballroom—a vast emptiness surrounded by a lacy gallery of white pillars and Romanesque arches—people mingled in a near-party atmosphere. Only the lack of music and alcohol distinguished this from one of the ship's normal cruises of the damned.
The woman from the Advisory Committee on Science spoke earnestly into Aristide's ear. "So one of my aides came up with a new weapon."
He looked at her. "Can we suppress it in time?"
It took a moment for her to realize that he was joking. She gave a mirthless laugh and plowed ahead.
"Thanks to all this," she said, waving an arm at the ballroom, the video screens, the war itself, "we're becoming experts at creating small pocket universes for specific functions. In this case we create a pocket with its own sun, surrounded by a Dyson sphere packed with solar collectors, and enough raw materials for robot workers to build a mass driver fifty-three kilometers long. We don't have to give the pocket an atmosphere or much gravity, so our projectile would have neither weight nor atmospheric resistance to overcome, but the principal advantage is that Vindex wouldn't be able to see us build it." She laughed aloud. "The first thing he'd know would be when we rolled back the roof and fired a relativistic iron meteor straight at his head. The farthest Courtland would be is on the other side of the sun—there's no way it could dodge the blow at that range."
"How soon could we build one?"
"Between two and three weeks." She smiled. "And the best part," she said, "is that we can build a driver on each of the Loyal Nine. We can hit him with nine shots simultaneously—no chance for survival."
Aristide considered the scheme. "I approve," he said, "assuming that my approval is necessary. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister?"
"Not yet. All this—" Again she waved an arm. "—seemed a little distracting."
"Yes." Aristide frowned. "Let's hope that Vindex hasn't already anticipated this plan, the way he has everything else."
The cold emptiness of space touched her eyes for a moment, and then she nodded.
"Yes," she said. "Let's hope."
Maybe Bad Pablo won't have thought of this one, Aristide thought, because it isn't my idea.
Overhead, the great polarized skylight dimmed, and then switched over to a feed from outside Topaz, a starfield with Earth and its satellites gleaming diamond-bright in one corner. The guests turned their attention to the brighter video walls, where a countdown was in progress.
Aristide found himself holding his breath as the countdown dropped to under ten seconds. He made himself exhale, then take in a breath.
Two. One. Zero.
People on the video walls began jumping up and down and congratulating each other. Aristide turned to look overhead. The starfield hadn't changed.
He looked at the walls again. A countup had started, and they were six seconds into it.
Earth was 8.317 light-minutes from the sun, and the new pocket universe—the term "overpocket" had been proposed—had a radius of slightly over three AU, so over twenty-five minutes would have to pass before it became clear whether or not the trick had actually worked. A glance in the direction of the new Prime Minister showed that—smile flashing, curly head bobbing—he was accepting congratulations from a circle of his guests before anyone properly knew whether, like a tricksy cartoon rabbit hopping into his hole and pulling it in after him, the whole of local space had just jumped into its own private universe.
Time ticked by. The volume of conversation gradually rose. Aristide found himself disinclined to chat, and found a chair in one of the side galleries and sat there with a cup of coffee growing cold in his hand. He watched the crowd, the nervous smiles, the wet mouths laughing.
A roomful of frightened people, he realized, trying to work out whether or not they should remain terrified.
As the moment of confirmation approached, the nervous chatter began to fade. Aristide stood, walked into the ballroom, and looked up at the starfield again.
And then, right on schedule, the starfield vanished, all save bright Earth and its satellite, gleaming in a corner of the image.
Seconds pass, he thought, drop by slow drop.
As the universe fades, before the applause,
A long, universal sigh.
Nothing was heard from Vindex. For once he made no demands, he embarked on no lectures.
From this fact Aristide knew that Vindex was helpless, and that Vindex knew it.
He fired a barrage of missiles, each containing a hostile antimatter universe, but these were dealt with by antiproton weapons.
The worlds sensed victory. Threats against Aristide's well-being faded, and the bodyguards were reassigned. Grax the Troll gave him a rib-crushing hug before going on to his next job.
Twenty-four days after the overpocket had swallowed near space and set the outer solar system sailing on in straight Euclidian lines, Aristide returned to the same ballroom and the same glittering company. He no longer sensed fear in the room; now he saw gleeful smiles and glittering eyes that anticipated a vast, triumphant catastrophe.
The eyes of those who, safe at home, now watched with intense pleasure as their most violent fantasies were brought to reality.
He wondered if he were the only person in the room who saw the destruction of Courtland as a defeat. It was only because everything tried before this had failed that the war could be considered anything less than a rout.
It wasn't only Pablo's dream that died this day.
Aristide wondered what Vindex thought as he saw the nine surviving AI platforms mounting over the sun's disk like a series of black dawns, rotating to expose the caverns, black-on-black, that were the exits for the mass drivers built in accordance with the plans from the Advisory Committee on Science.
Courtland began a slow curving shift in its trajectory in a useless, last-minute effort to evade whatever Vindex imagined the United Powers might be about to hurl at him.
The mass drivers fired in absolute silence. Bad Pablo's detectors would have had a few seconds to observe the blue-shifted trajectories of the vast iron missiles heading straight for him, would see the brilliant ionized tails as they skimmed through the sun's corona; and Pablo might have just enough time to realize he was about to become one of history's most spectacular and miserable failures.
On the video screens Aristide saw Courtland's end, the neatly spaced flares as the missiles struck home. Brilliant spheres of plasma expanded from the impacts, their glow picking out the cracks that had spiderwebbed across Courtland's structure.
What was left of Courtland came apart like a polished black china plate striking a black marble floor.
The audience in the ballroom cheered, as if the home team had just scored a winning goal.
The flying bits of Courtland, now defenseless, would be rounded up, rendered inert, and used to rebuild Gemma, Aloysius, and eventually a new Courtland—a Courtland neutered, deprived of Pablo, and probably having been granted a name change.
Analysts reported that none of Courtland's pockets survived, at least in this universe.
The great disk-shaped bodies of the Loyal Nine began to swing, the mass drivers now pointed away from the sun.
A volley of projectiles was fired, and then another and another. Smaller antimatter-powered drones launched into the darkness like whole migrations of birds.
After calculating the trajectories of its two shots, the location of Bad Pablo's mass driver was pretty well known. What wasn't known were the driver's instructions—would it fire on its own, without orders from Pablo? Or did Pablo's Kuiper Belt headquarters contain a pool of life, that would resurrect him should Courtland fail?
These last shots were designed to solve these problems. The planetoid where the mass driver was housed would be hit repeatedly until it was turned into a ball of molten lava. Anything left would be targeted by antimatter missiles. And then a third wave would arrive, robots that would construct a new presence in the Kuiper Belt, a base that would house uploaded humans who would be in charge of the effort to eradicate Bad Pablo completely from the outer reaches of the solar system.
Relieved chatter sounded in the galleries. The Prime Minister was surrounded by a circle of well-wishers. Sous-chefs in white coats marched into the great room, pushing buffet tables gleaming with chafing dishes and loaded with tubs of snow, the necks of champagne bottles protruding from the drifts of white like the barrels of triumphant artillery.
"Damn chatter." Aristide overheard the sour remarks of the Ambassador from Fred. "Damn people. To hell with this."
The ambassador grumped out, hands in his pockets. Aristide stayed until the overpocket was shrunk down and the star field came back on, the familiar constellations reappearing to great applause from the audience. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the hundreds of Tombaugh Objects, lots of dirty ice, and many smaller objects would now abandon their straight trajectories and swing again into gentle curves as the sun's gravity once again embraced them.
Orbits twenty-four days farther out. The war had altered even the shape of the solar system.
The overpocket had not been dissipated, but shrunk down to microscopic size, and was now held ready in the Physics Annex of the Nanjing Institute in Nanjing, the Western Paradise, Swallowing Clouds. In the event of any more hostile projectiles from the Kuiper Belt, the handy little universe could be instantly inflated until the menace had passed.
For a few moments Aristide absorbed the starlight, and then he made his way out. When he stepped through the hatch to the outside promenade, he had to pause to let his eyes adjust. The dim starlit ballroom had obscured the fact that here on Topaz, it was bright morning.
He had an appointment to keep.
He was going to a Celebration of the Recently Unemployed.
Bitsy waited in Aristide's car; together they drove to the Tellurian House restaurant, where they were taken to the chef's table. The walls were covered in fountains that used not water, but a superfluid that flowed upward from floor-level pools, moving in an uneasy, creeping fashion that Aristide didn't find entirely comfortable.
The table was covered in hammered copper. The chairs were an authentic re-creation of Mission Style, and therefore uncomfortable.
Aristide greeted Shenai, who headed the table as if chairing a meeting of her shadow cabinet. Flanking her were former members of the Standing Committee who had fallen from power along with their leader: there were the ex-Ministers of Industry and Biological Sciences, the erstwhile Chancellor, and her onetime deputy prime minister.
Commissar Lin attended as well. He hadn't lost his job exactly, but would be returned to his former duties once the Domus began to downsize and resumed its search for criminals instead of hidden networks of pod people.
Tumusok would have been invited, had he not already followed his new job to another pocket.
"Barring a few hundred more explosions," Aristide said, "the war seems to be over."
"We heard," said Shenai.
Aristide seated himself. A menu appeared in the air before him, and he banished it with a wave of his hand.
Bitsy jumped onto the empty end of the table, opposite Shenai, and sat on her haunches, directing her green-eyed stare down the table.
"We were discussing," Shenai said, "how the war has altered our perceptions of . . . well, everything."
"Beginning at the foundations of the universe," said Aristide, "and stretching onward from there."
"The last time our civilization had this comprehensive a scare," Lin said, "we built all this." With a wave of his pipe that encompassed a good deal more than the copper table and the reverse waterfalls. "We've lost two-elevenths of everything . . . worlds, people . . . you can rebuild both worlds and people, but what of the society they belonged to?"
"Speaking as someone who had as much to do with building that society as anyone," Aristide said, "I'd be sad to see it go."
"Yet it may be wounded severely, if not mortally. It was based on a sense of security that no longer exists." Lin opened an envelope of tobacco and began packing his pipe. "People may demand leaders who promise them absolute security—and the sort of leaders who promise absolutes are not, historically speaking, the kind you actually want running your nation."
He struck a match, puffed, blew smoke.
"A related problem," Shenai began. "Over the last months we've constructed a vast military and security apparatus, which may be reluctant to disperse. Or which the leadership may find too useful to disperse."
Aristide looked down the table with a grim smile. "Solve one problem with mass drivers," he said, "and all problems begin to seem solvable by mass drivers."
"We want all that stuff under control!" said the onetime Minister of Industry, his eyes wide. "Mass drivers, homicidal robots, biological weaponry . . . we've got to work out ways of decommissioning it all before we get too used to it being there, looking over our shoulders."
"Indeed," said Shenai. She ran her fingertips through her yellow hair. "Well, I have done my bit for the open society." She lifted her eyes to Bitsy. "Or so I believe, yes?"
"Endora," said Bitsy, "has carried out your instructions."
Shenai gave a tightlipped smile. "Excellent." And at the sight of the others' wondering looks, she said, "Before I returned my keys of office to the President, I ordered that all official war deliberations were to be released by Endora into the public record as soon as the menace from Courtland was ended. Which was—what?—ninety minutes ago?"
Aristide looked at her in admiration. "Brilliant!" he said.
"Of course it only deals with my own administration, here on Topaz. But within those limits, all that was classified secret will now be revealed. Who said what at which meeting, and," she smiled grimly, "what heads of other governments counseled what course of action, including surrender." She nodded. "I expect some heads will roll," she said. "Metaphorically speaking, of course."
Her former deputy prime minister looked at her in shock.
"Kiernan can't stop it?" he said.
Shenai's little smile grew smug. "If he had known about my orders to Endora, and if he had countermanded them, then of course all the records would still be under seal. But he didn't, and he hasn't, and so . . ." She waved her glass. "There's a good deal that Kiernan still has to learn about politics, and he just got a big lesson."
The former Biological Sciences Minister looked at her with admiration.
"Will you be opposing Kiernan in caucus?"
She shook her head. "I'll stick around long enough to help choose his successor. But I don't want to stay long enough to become a complete political creature. Look at du Barry or Shu Meng—they've been in politics for four or five hundred years, and they look at everything in terms of political relationships, networks of power, architectures of prerogative and authority . . . Half the relationships they see don't even exist, and most of the remainder don't matter."
She shook her head. "I don't want to turn into that. Best to walk away while I can. End on a high note."
"What shall you do, then?" asked Lin.
"I told Pablo," she said, looking at Aristide, "that I might emigrate."
"A worthy choice," Aristide said. "Though given recent events you may discover that you're more popular than you think you are, and that will make it difficult to leave."
Her lips quirked in a skeptical smile. "An agreeable fantasy," she said. "If true."
"For myself," said Aristide, "I think I shall adopt the ultimate aim of the Venger's program, and carry it forward past his death. I propose to storm Heaven."
The others stared at him. He shrugged.
"Well, why not? It's a worthy goal—to find out who made us, and why. And unlike my late double, I won't insist that you all accompany me."
"Possibly," Lin ventured. "But if you announce that goal now . . ." He shook his head. "Speaking strictly from the professional point of view, I would not care to guarantee your security."
"People are going to wonder," Shenai said, "if the right Pablo returned from Courtland."
"Admittedly," Aristide said, "the public mind may have to mature a bit before I make the announcement." He nodded at Shenai. "I'll take the advice of political professionals on the timing."
"Besides," said Bitsy, breaking in, "the technology isn't quite there yet. We can project a wormhole into a universe we create, and now—as with the overpocket—we can now project one anywhere in our universe, but to project one into a pre-existing universe, like Heaven, will require some work."
"And we'll want to rescue our lost pockets first," Shenai said. "We'll want to reconnect Midgarth and Hawaiki and the others—and if we can send a hypertube to New Qom or any of the Venger's other strongholds, we'll still have to invade and occupy them."
"Before they do it to us," said the deputy prime minister.
There was a moment's uncomfortable silence.
"The ability to project a wormhole within our own universe will create enough changes as it is," said the quondam Minister of Industry. "Instead of uploading ourselves into a projectile and firing ourselves across light-years to reach another star, we'll be able to walk there with a single step. Everything will be open to us—stars, clusters, other galaxies."
"And other times," Aristide said. "Though apparently the math won't let us violate causality—a restriction for which, on mature consideration, I am thankful."
Shenai leaned forward, a frown on her face. "But getting back to your project, Pablo. How are you going to get political agreement on this? Half the religious pockets are going to be against it, right from the start."
Aristide looked ceilingward in calculation. "There are how many political entities now, in the various pockets? A hundred and fifty-something?"
"Something like that."
"All I need is for one to agree with me," Aristide said. "We're all experts in creating wormholes now—it shouldn't be that hard, once the basic theory is done. And besides, now that the idea of its possibility has escaped into our universe, the act itself has become inevitable—so why shouldn't it be me who does it?"
Shenai laughed, and raised her glass.
"Your logic is irrefutable."
"You said you might emigrate," Aristide said. "Why don't you come with me—to Heaven?"
She shook her head. "I'll need another demi-bottle before I consider that."
"Well," said Aristide, "shall we order?"
More bottles and demi-bottles arrived, and food as well. As the party broke up, Aristide offered Shenai a ride, and she accepted.
"Where shall I take you?"
Her face turned doleful. "Anywhere but the miserable little apartment Kiernan gave me," she said.
"I have only a suite in a hotel."
She smiled. "Does it have a view?"
"It does."
"Of Heaven?"
"Perhaps," he said, "a distant prospect."
The Destiny took them to the pink-and-white hotel. The desk clerk looked at him with surprise as he walked past—it wasn't every day, Aristide supposed, that he entered with a drunken Prime Minister on his arm.
In the elevator, she rested her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her and kissed her. She smiled, and kissed him back.
Perhaps, he thought distantly, one would have preferred to kiss another. But that longing was not sufficient to keep him from kissing this one. And in any case, if one lived long enough, one would meet the other again.
The limbic system, he reminded himself, was what kept one human.
The elevator doors opened. Bitsy walked ahead, too obvious in the way she was not paying attention to the couple.
Aristide's biometrics opened the door. They followed Bitsy inside, he closed the door, and embraced Shenai. Her perfume swirled in his senses.
He frowned, straightened. Something was different.
A man came through the bedroom door. Tecmessa gleamed in his hand. Looking in his face was like looking in a mirror.
"Uh-oh," said Aristide.