Free Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Page B

planet to undermine Ayo’s authority, and that the rest of the council had turned on her when it became clear that the enterprise had exposed them to unacceptable risk.
    ‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ he said. ‘I must convey this bad news to the wizards at once. They deserve no less.’
    Opeyemi opened a window in the air, prodded at something inside it. ‘There is something else,’ he said. ‘It has been decided that the family would benefit if
Abalunam’s Pride
was redeployed. Returned, that is, to its former duties.’
    ‘Running cargo? But we already have ships doing that,’ Tony said.
    ‘It is good steady work,’ Socrates said.
    ‘Necessary work,’ Felicia said.
    ‘It is in your best interests,’ Ayo said.
    ‘It is in the best interests of the family,’ Opeyemi said. ‘You have had a narrow escape, nephew. A
lucky
escape. One that highlights the risks this freebooting nonsense has exposed us to. We could have lost a valuable asset.’
    ‘Thank you for your concern, uncle.’
    ‘I meant the ship,’ Opeyemi said, and skimmed the window across the table to Ayo.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Tony.
    ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What’s in that window?’
    ‘An executive override,’ Opeyemi said. ‘Ayo, if you please.’
    Ayo set her palm against the window’s glow, and there was a sudden empty silence in Tony’s head. The ship’s feed had been cut off.

9. Love And Marriage
    Felony Flats was a low-rise clutter of light industry, bungalows, apartment buildings and public housing spread across reclaimed marshland east of the city. Boxbuilder ruins and patches of local vegetation on scattered low hills that had once been islands. Wind-turbine farms. Smallholdings and compounds fenced with corrugated iron. A threadbare grid of paved streets and dusty tracks where Lisa had lived during her nadir, amongst the poor and the dispossessed.
    She overtook an ancient bus crowded with people inside and out. She drove past a young boy leading a beautiful chestnut horse along the edge of the road. She drove past a cement factory, past a muddy channel where clinker-built fishing boats lay on their sides, waiting for the afternoon tide.
    The motel where Willie had pitched camp for the past three years was in a flyblown commercial strip near the shore: a two-storey string of rooms, an empty swimming pool painted sky-blue, and a sign advertising air conditioning, clean rooms and free adult movies. The manager, a skinny young Sikh with pockmarked cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple, remembered Lisa from the time she’d covered Willie’s back rent after he’d got in a hole over a gambling debt. He folded away the fifty-dollar bill she slipped him, told her that Brittany Odenkirk worked in a bar a couple of blocks down the street, and asked if this was about the trouble yesterday.
    ‘That depends on the trouble.’
    ‘Police trouble.’
    ‘The police police, or the geek police?’ Lisa said.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘The UN Technology Control Unit. A guy name of Adam Nevers.’
    ‘Yes, that was the man in charge,’ the manager said. ‘He sealed Mr Willie’s room with tape and told me I couldn’t rent it out again until his investigation was finished. What investigation this was he would not tell me.’
    ‘He’s chasing ghosts,’ Lisa said, and held up another fifty and asked if she could check out Willie’s room.
    ‘If the police find you there,’ the manager said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
    The room was pretty much as Lisa remembered it, apart from the women’s clothing in the chipboard chifferobe and the make-up and box of tampons in the bathroom. Hard to tell if it had been tossed by the police or not, but she bet that if Willie had left any souvenirs behind, Nevers and his Jackaroo pal probably had them now.
    Feeling like a detective, she drove the two blocks to the bar, a low flat-roofed shack islanded in a big dirt lot. A neon sign over the door flickered weakly in the sunlight. Chillies