Meyer Lansky’s code farm had been licensed, regulated, and entirely legitimate until he’d run up huge gambling debts and sold control of his business to a shell company owned by a family of Korean gangsters. Now, its legitimate work was a front for black market trade in chunks of viable code too hot and dangerous to ever win a research and development license, and for wholesaling viral fragments to dealers who supplied codeheads with tickets to strange places of the mind, a trade that was growing to be as troublesome as crack cocaine.

  Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton had been working in Meyer Lansky’s code farm until they’d suddenly quit without warning and dropped clean out of sight. Ten days later, everything blew up at the motel room. We’d been researching the farm for three months, patiently accumulating dossiers on everyone who worked there, but the grisly double murder ripped our clandestine investigation wide open. We shut down the place before Lansky or the Koreans could destroy evidence of wrongdoing, and brought Singleton’s and Hughes’s co-workers in for interview. Towards the end, I knew more about the two young men than I did about some of my friends. Singleton was from my home town, London, England; Hughes was from Anchorage, Alaska; both were young, white, English-speaking males who were serious computer freaks. They’d bonded when they’d met on the shuttle, stuck together after the shuttle touched down and they were set adrift in the raw hypercapitalism of Port of Plenty. Neither had much in the way of stake money, or any kind of plan. They were flying by the seats of their pants, driven by a mix of arrogant optimism and naivete, confident that because they were young and energetic and talented they were bound to spot some opportunity ripe for exploitation.

  At first, they did agency work in the IT department of one of the big multinationals that had set up in Port of Plenty, but the pay was rotten, with no benefits whatsoever apart from vouchers for the subsidised canteen, and it was the kind of boring and frustrating work they’d both been doing back on Earth—Singleton in a university; Hughes for the Russian company that had purchased Alaska from the US government after a failed attempt at secession. In short, it was everything they’d hoped to escape, and after only four weeks they quit and went to work on Meyer Lansky’s code farm.

  The pay wasn’t much better than the agency work and the benefits were equally exiguous, but as far as Singleton and Hughes were concerned it was far more romantic than writing object location routines for suits who didn’t really know what they wanted. And his fellow coders agreed that Everett Hughes had a talent for the work. A weird ability to instantly assess the viability of any kind of code, the way some people saw colours in words, or music in numbers. Either it looked good or it didn’t, he said. Meaning that the code should conform to a kind of symmetry or beauty, although he found it hard to explain exactly what that was, and if pressed he would grow surly, hunch his shoulders, sneer that it wasn’t worth trying to explain it because either you had the righteous gift or you didn’t. He had the gift, and he was usually right. Jay Singleton got by through determination and hard work, but Everett Hughes flew.

  Apparently, they had been planning to stash away a good percentage of their pay until they had accumulated enough to buy themselves berths on a code-hunting jaunt. They’d have to buy their own equipment, and front the gangmaster fees for transport plus a thirty per cent kickback on anything they made, but they were confident that they would strike a hot lode that would set them up for life. But it seemed that the two of them had grown bored with working and saving and saving and working, and had taken a short-cut. They’d stolen something from Meyer Lansky, and either Lansky or the Koreans had found them and killed them and taken the stuff back, or they’d tried to sell it to the wrong people. Those were my working hypotheses, but I was worried that the code itself might have had something to do with the two bodies in the burnt-out motel room—we were running a pool in the TCU on when someone would stumble across true AI, and who knew what else someone might find out there? In any case, Hughes and Singleton must have stolen the code because they’d though it valuable. And if it was valuable, it must be functional: unknown code with unknown capabilities, out there in the world. Recapturing it was suddenly my main priority, and the first thing I needed to do was to shut down Meyer Lansky’s operation and find out what Hughes and Singleton had been working on before they’d bugged out.

  Like all the ships we humans use, the reef farmers’ ship is a shell retrieved from one of the vast Sargassos that orbit almost every one of the fifteen stars. Many ships are frozen relics no more functional or repairable than a watch that’s spent a thousand years at the bottom of the ocean; others are merely quiescent, systems ticking over in a sleep deeper than any hibernation, but fully functional once awakened: all are ancient, handed down from Elder Culture to Elder Culture, modified and rebuilt and modified again until scarcely a trace of the original remains.

  The farmers bolted the usual translation interface to the ship’s control systems, but weren’t able to customise the lifesystem for human occupation because the ship possesses fierce self-repairing mechanisms that resist any alterations (which was why the farmers could buy it at a knock-down price: few people want a ship with a mind of its own). The lifesystem supplies food that is both unpalatable and toxic to humans, the light is actinic, and the air like the air of a high altitude steel refinery: not enough oxygen or water, desert-dry and hot, stinking of tholines and sulphur dioxide.

  The ships’ crew and its single passenger—me—live in a series of pressure tents bolted to the bulkhead near the pool of nannodust that serves as an airlock. The maintenance system treates us as cargo and leaves us alone as long as we do not interfere with other areas of the ship. There is a large commons and a series of smaller rooms, including sleeping niches partioned by fibreboard like the cells of a wasp’s nest, a communal bathroom, and the small red-lit space, crowded with racks of electronic gear, that serves as the bridge. The commons is cozy enough, carpeted with overlapping rugs and cushions and beanbags and lit by small lamps and strings of fairylights, but even so we live like refugees, the rest of the ship’s chambers looming above us like so many chimney shafts, walls pitted with cells of various sizes, lit by the pitless glare of the lights, scoured by hot, random winds.

  It’s a perfect example of the human experience after First Contact—men and women living like mice in the walls of worlds they barely understand. The ship’s fusion motors, for instance, are sealed mysteries. Very simple things that have been working for a hundred times longer than the existence of human agriculture on Earth, fuelled by deuterium and tritium mined by ancient ramscoop factories that swim through the atmospheres of certain ice giants.

  Fuel is the key to the end of the chase.

  Ours is a big ship, as ships go: an A3-Class heavy lifter. Even so, it can’t carry enough fuel for a round trip out to Terminus’s neighbouring star, so a drone has been sent after us, loaded with a cargo of deuterium and tritium. A major investment by the farmers that I hope the UN will defray, although the chair of the farmers’ council, Rajo Hiranand, is sanguine about it. Telling me that her people made a huge gamble when they settled the worldlets of Terminus’s inner belt, and so far it has paid off more handsomely than they ever expected. They’ve laid claim to several hundred planoformed rocks where they grow crops and ranch sky sheep, and share the profits from exploitation of artifacts and code unearthed by prospectors—the abundance and variety of artifacts found on Terminus’s worldlets is second only to that of the fifteen stars’ the solitary habitable planet, First Foot. And now they have invested in this, a prospecting expedition of their own.

  Rajo and I agree that Niles Sarkka may be crazy, but he is not stupid. That he must have good and convincing reasons for heading out Terminus’s neighbour. It isn’t likely that he will find what he expects to find there, of course. But the fact that the navigation code points to a location close to the star must mean something is there, or was once there, in the long ago when the Ghajar were the tenants of the fifteen stars.

  The rational part of me hopes that Niles Sarkka won’t find anything useful, let alone prove that his wild idea is right. But I’m also caught up in this crazy chase: I want to believe—I have to believe—that there’s a pot of gold around that star, something that will justify my refusal to obey a direct order. Something that will redeem me.

  Now that we are slowly but surely catching up with Sarkka, I’ve told him several times that we are prepared to rescue him as long as he cooperates. I’m trying to get him used to the idea that, after he reaches his goal, we’ll come alongside his ship and take him off and bring him home. So far, though, he’s having none of it. Sometimes he rants at me; sometimes he’s cool and reasonable, like a patient teacher correcting the error of a particularly stupid but wilful pupil.

  He has no intention of returning, he says. He will spend the rest of his life with the Elder Culture that lurks somewhere around that star. Either they’ll take him in, or he’ll settle close by and found an institute or research centre.

  “And if you’re wrong?” I say.

  “I am not wrong,” he says.

  “If there’s nothing there. Just suppose.”

  “I do not intend to return.”

  And meanwhile the star grows brighter as both ships fall towards it, fusion motors blazing with a pull of a shade over 1.6 g, the maximum acceleration of every ship so far reburbished.

  It is the brightest star in the sky now. Blue-white as a chip of ice. There’s a thin ring of rocks close in, but none of them are cased in an atmosphere or are more massive that they should be, and in any case all of them are far too hot to be habitable. And there’s a single planet, a gas giant about the size of Saturn, orbiting beyond the star’s snowline. A somber world whose atmosphere is darkened by vast belts of carbon dust, as if polluted by some vast industrial process. It has multiple rings of sooty ice, and a retinue of moons, the larger ones balls of ice wrapped around silicate cores, the smaller ones captured chunks of carbonaceous chondrite in eccentric and mostly retrograde orbits. Somewhere amongst them, Niles Sarkka believes, is proof that his theory is correct, vindication for every bad thing he’s ever done. Somewhere out there, he thinks, aliens have been hiding for tens of thousands of years.

  Although Marc and I did our very best, it wasn’t possible to make Meyer Lansky understand that we were prepared to do a deal with him rather than throw him in jail. Or maybe he understood, and didn’t care. He was angry that his business had been shut down, and he was scared that his boss, Pak Young-Min, would find out that he’d been rolled by a couple of his code monkeys and conclude that he wasn’t up to the job—the usual retirement plan for the Pak family’s gangland employees and associates was a bullet in the back of the head and a short ride down the river to the sea. So Lansky refused my offer of protection when I served papers on him at his house around midnight, and he refused again when he was brought in for questioning. A broad-shouldered man dressed in a white suit, neatly barbered hair dyed the colour of tarnished aluminium, he sat in my office with a grim, shuttered expression and his arms folded across his chest, giving Marc and me the dead eye while his lawyer explained why he couldn’t answer any of our questions.

  One of the assistant city attorneys was there, too, and Marc and I knew things had taken a turn for the worse when she asked for a break and stepped out of the interrogation room with Lansky’s lawyer. Marc took the opportunity to tell Lansky all over again why he would be doing the city and the UN a service by telling us where the stolen code was and what had happened to the two coders, repeating the scenario he’d already painted, with Lansky as the innocent party, first robbed by two of his employees, and then involuntarily involved in their murder by his boss.

  “You had to tell Pak Young-Min about the theft because otherwise it would come down on your head. I understand that. But after that it was out of your hands and things got out of control,” Marc said. He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair at the beginning of the session; now, in white shirt and red braces, he leaned forward and stared straight at Lansky. “You are a smart man. You know how much trouble you are in. And you know what Pak Young-Min is capable of. But we’re here to help. We can make your troubles disappear. All you have to do is tell us exactly what happened. What was stolen. What happened to the two foolish kids who stole it. Where it is now.”

  Meyer Lansky shook his head, eyes half-closed, lips pressed tight. He looked as if he was trying by sheer mental effort to teleport himself to some more congenial place.

  Marc looked up at me, and I told Lansky that the UN would settle him anywhere he chose. That we’d even take him back to Earth, if he cooperated with us. That he would have a chance to start over, and meanwhile the men he feared would be put away for the rest of their lives.

  Lansky shook his head. “Nothing was stolen. Those two kids, they just left. It happens all the time.”

  “It’s time to tell the truth,” Marc said. “Lying about what Pak Young-Min did won’t save you. He’ll go down anyway, and you’ll go with him. But you can save yourself. All you have to do is tell the truth. It seems hard, I know. But once you start, you will feel so much better. It will be like a great weight lifting from your back.”

  Marc was good, and I did my best to back him up, but we couldn’t get through to Lansky. “Talk to my lawyer,” he said, and wouldn’t say anything else.

  At last his lawyer and the assistant CA came back. The assistant shaking her head, the lawyer telling Lansky that he was good to go.

  “Hardshelled son of bitch,” Marc said, after they had left.

  “He’s scared.”

  “Of course. But not of us, unfortunately.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to wait for the forensic results,” I said. I was tired and empty. It was two in the morning, my investigation had been broken open, and I had nothing to show for it.

  “We will rest and tomorrow begin again,” Marc said, as he shrugged into his jacket. “You are my best investigator, Emma. I trust you to deliver what we need.”

  But our first break wasn’t anything to do with me, or with Varneek Sehra’s forensic crew, either. It was all due to one of our technical staff, Prem Gurung.

  Prem was a modest young man who attributed his find to luck, but I knew better. His cubicle was as messy the bedroom of as an undisciplined teenager—desk stacked with folders, papers, fabbed trinkets, and littered with every kind of electronic junk, walls tiled with photographs, postcards, print-outs, cartoons and coasters in defiance of every regulation—but he was a skilled, intelligent, and hard-working investigator. He had been examining the work logs of Everett and Singleton, and chunks of the mirrored code they had been working on, and had quickly found something of interest in one particular piece, an incomplete variant of the navigation package used to control refurbished ships retrieved from the Sargassos.

  “It isn’t is so much what’s there as what isn’t,” Prem said.

  He was eager to show me, and I reluctantly agreed to take a look. Code is usually explored and manipulated via virtual simulations disneyed up by interface ware: dreamscapes that look a little like coral reefs, their exotic beauty haunted by sharks and moray eels and riptides that can fry synapses or burn permanent hallucinations in optic nerves. Coders, exposed to the stuff eight or ten hours a day, commonly suffer all kinds of transient hallucinations and risk permanent neurological damage—psychosis, blindsight, loss of motor control, death. But they are like deep sea divers working in the chthonic depths, while I was a snorkelling tourist dipping in for a brief peek, gliding over a garden of colourful geometric shapes, complex fractal packages of self-engulfing information that branched like bushes or were packed as tightly as human brains or formed shelves or fans or spires, everything receding into deep shadow in every direction, under a flexing silvery sky. Still, I couldn’t shake off the sense of things unseen and fey lurking at the edges, where steep cliffs plunged into the unknown.

  Prem guided me to a spot carpeted with intricate spires, and asked me if I saw it.

  “I’m not very technical, Prem.”

  “It’s a patch, copied from another part of the code,” he said, turning the viewpoint through three hundred and sixty degrees. Spires of every size and shape, glowing with purples and greens and golds, flowed around us in a three-dimensional tapestry. “It isn’t easy to see at first, which is of course the point. But when you do see it, it’s obvious. I have written a little executable. Here . . . ”

  A ghostly scape descended from the silvery sky, spires in wirework outline sitting askew the spires that stood around us.

  “It does not seem to match at all, until you perform a simple geometric transformation,” Prem said.

  The wirework outline spun and stretched and merged with every contour of the spires around us, gleaming like frost on their complex and colourful surfaces.

  “I think someone deleted something and wanted to cover it up,” Prem said. “Fortunately for us, he was skilled, but lazy. Instead of designing something from scratch, he copied and distorted another part of the code and stitched it in. It is on the surface a seamless illusion. It even runs several processing cycles, although they are of course all futile. Like code that has gone bad, as much code does.”

  The strange shapes and colours of the code reef, hallucinatory bright, crammed with thorny details that repeated at every level of magnification, were aggravating my headache. I hadn’t had much sleep and was running on coffee and fumes. I stripped off my VR and asked Prem if he had any idea about what had been deleted; he told me that despite the fractal nature of the code, little or nothing of the excised portion could be reconstructed. He started to witter on about working up a rough contour grid by extrapolation from the boundaries, using edge-crossing-detection, random-walk searches, and vertex-pruning mutators, blah blah blah. Like every tech, he was more interested in playing with a problem than actually solving it. I cut him off and said, “Bottom line, you don’t know what it is, and there’s no way of finding out.”