Ada had asked her friends Rhys and Veronica to keep their ears open. Rhys was a smuggler and Veronica had been a fence before she fled her home, so both had connections in the shady underbelly of polite society that might come in handy.
I opened my official House account, just in case. Ferdinand wouldn’t message me there unless it was his last resort, but I would never forgive myself if he had and I’d ignored it.
My official account had scores of messages, but nothing from Ferdinand. However, Lynn Segura, the young woman I’d chatted with yesterday, had messaged me late last night. I opened her message as I entered my rooms.
Lynn had seen Ferdinand with three other men in Sector Eight of the Yamado quarter while she was on her way to a party last night. By the descriptions, the three men were his bodyguards. She said she hadn’t thought anything about it until the news came out that he was missing.
I sent her a response, thanking her. I had no doubt that Ian knew exactly where Ferdinand had been, thanks to the trackers on the transports, but I sent him the time and location anyway. If he was looking for footage, it was another place to look.
I stepped into my study and shut the door behind me. I nearly sighed in relief as the wireless signals winked out. While isolated, only wired devices like the terminal in my desk would be able to make outside connections, but the signal isolation didn’t block wireless transfer within the room.
I copied Evelyn’s file to a secure partition on my terminal, turned on process scanning, and then opened it. The scan didn’t flag anything suspicious. The file was a flat list of messages, and Evelyn had left the message headers intact. I recognized one of Ferdinand’s private addresses.
Even with the private address, the messages were obliquely worded, but I was familiar enough with Ferdinand’s style to recognize his voice. If this was a fake, then it was an excellent one.
The messages went back months, though some had been redacted to little more than a greeting and closing. It felt strange to poke through my brother’s personal correspondence. I had no trouble snooping through strangers’ information, but I’d always tried to give my family a bit more privacy.
For now, I would assume that House Rockhurst did not order the attack. So who did that leave?
Unfortunately, the list was a long one.
Ferdinand’s kidnapping was a blow to House von Hasenberg, but far from a fatal one. Father would bring the full might of the House down on whoever was stupid enough to do it, and even threats on Ferdinand’s life wouldn’t be sufficient to stop him.
Someone either had nothing to lose or they thought they’d get away with it, which meant hiring professionals and not leaving any loose ends—such as a kidnapped heir who could escape and point fingers.
I’d been working from the kidnapping angle because I didn’t want to contemplate the alternative, but I had to at least consider that this was an assassination. Taking the body would be unusual for an assassination, but not unheard of in the name of absolute secrecy. Still, as long as Ferdinand’s death folder remained unreleased, I would work under the assumption that my brother was alive.
I closed Evelyn’s file and brought up my highest-level personal firewalls. My connections were normally encrypted, but I added several layers of additional protection, including bouncing the connection through a multitude of servers, both my own and public. Finally, I kicked off a script that made a lot of connections and requests to help hide my real traffic in the noise.
I was about to do a deep dive into the dark part of the Net and I didn’t want anyone to be able to follow my trail, in either direction.
I’d been gathering information for years under various anonymous online personas, so I started there. I checked my digital drop boxes one at a time. For each one, I went through the whole procedure again, just with different servers. It was paranoid, but it also kept me safe.
There were a few interesting messages that I flagged for follow-up, but most of the messages I got were worthless—common rumors, wild speculation, or lewd suggestions. My various identities were well known in their circles, and I paid generously for good information.
I saved the most likely account for last. This identity was known to want Consortium gossip. Almost all gossip was worthless by the time it was sent, so it was a badge of honor in some circles just to have produced a piece of information worth payment.
I had a dozen messages and nearly all of them pertained to the attack on me or Ferdinand’s disappearance. I started with the messages about Ferdinand. The first two messages were from unknown contacts and didn’t offer anything I didn’t already know. The third message was from someone I’d worked with before. It hinted about Ferdinand’s dinner with Evelyn, which wasn’t public info as far as I knew. I sent them a small payment and a request for more info. They probably didn’t know anything more than I did, but double-checking was worth the expense.
None of the other messages about Ferdinand were useful, so I moved on to the messages about the attack on me. Only one message seemed like it might be useful. The sender claimed to have information about the shooter. The contact was one of my regulars, so I went ahead and made the good-faith payment and requested more information.
I posted an oblique request for information about House von Hasenberg and House Rockhurst on a couple of the boards buried deep in the underbelly of the respectable Internet. Making a semipublic request meant I would get a lot of spurious messages, but it also meant anyone with real knowledge would know I was looking.
Unfortunately, my usual passive information gathering hadn’t turned up any useful information, at least not yet, so I had to switch to active looking. The risk was higher, but so was the potential reward.
I refreshed my security protections, then stood and pressed a switch on my desk. The lights in the room died and the walls disappeared. welcome to hive hovered in front of me, formed by one of the projectors in the room. Below the text, a red virtual connect button glowed softly.
I passed my hand through the button and held for a count of five. It was a safety measure to ensure I didn’t connect accidentally. The button winked out, replaced by a bustling projected street in a gleaming virtual city. I rested my fingers on top of my desk as I waited for the initial vertigo to dissipate.
HIVE stood for High Impact Virtual Environment, though few remembered the name was actually an acronym. It was the largest virtual reality zone in the ’verse, and one of a handful of communication protocols allowed to use the FTL communication network. Every few years another new zone popped up to try to derail HIVE’s dominance, but so far, none had succeeded, in part because HIVE was backed by the three High Houses.
On the low end, users could enter HIVE with just a set of cheap smart glasses. At the other extreme, some users had dedicated rooms with treadmill floors and force suits that made interacting with the virtual world feel real. Originally designed as a game, HIVE was now used for everything from business to pleasure, though both the Consortium and the syndicates tended to eschew it for more traditional face-to-face meetings—there were fewer hidden eyes in the real world, after all.
Although the Consortium rarely conducted internal business in HIVE, they still wanted everyone to know that the zone flourished because of their benevolence. Each High House owned a prime block of the main street where entering users landed. Users could bank with the Houses, shop for virtual items like synthesizer recipes, or deal with various administrative issues like taxes and fines.