Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two Read Online Free Page A

the word
bureaucrat
, and you’ll understand what I mean.’ In Aeternum, it held none of the emotionless or parasitical overtones the words conveyed in three out of the four other languages that Roger knew. The Aeternal term resonated with warmth and selflessness. ‘So come on. If you’re done, we’ll walk to the Admiralty.’
    ‘All right.’ Roger stared at the dishes sinking back inside the table. ‘We don’t pay for this, right?’
    ‘Of course n— No.’
    Some meals were free; others were not.
    ‘On Fulgor,’ said Roger, ‘every financial transaction involved a vector in a two-hundred-dimensional phase-space. After twenty years of living there, my parents still had to concentrate when buying anything. For me it was natural.’
    The concept of currency was simpler here; but it applied in fewer contexts than he was used to. The complexity lay in figuring out when payment was relevant.
    ‘I’ve operated on Durston IV,’ said Jed. ‘Four continents, two where bribery is everywhere, and you can’t do business without knowing how to offer payment to an official but not spelling it out, because
that
would be illegal.’
    They stood and walked onto the Promenade.
    ‘I should grow up,’ said Roger, ‘because everyone learns to adapt. Is that what you’re saying?’
    ‘Seems to me,’ said Jed, ‘you’d grown up already when I met you.’
    That was after Roger had rescued Alisha from the brothel, having first committed violence on a large, thuggish bartender, forcing the man to tell what he knew. Perhaps that was the moment when the hesitant schoolboy Roger dissolved, replaced by whoever he was now. Or perhaps it happened when he turned away from his parents, letting them flee Fulgor while he stayed behind, imagining that he was the one at risk, not them.
    ‘So which way do we go?’
    Jed indicated a spiralling route.
    ‘We follow Heisenberg Helix, take the Bessel Boulevard exit, follow it as far as Archimedes Avenue—’
    ‘Or we could just fastpath.’
    ‘Right.’ Jed grinned. ‘If you don’t mind me doing the business.’
    ‘Summon it slowly, if you can.’
    Jed let out a breath, then raised his hands. Tiny sparks glittered inside his eyes of jet: fluorescent overspill from the satanase/satanin reaction inside the inductive neurons. Roger felt the air grow chill and prickling. Then reality flowed, pulled into a vortex, and a pane of nothingness rotated, just beyond the edge of what Roger could grasp.
    ‘Come on.’ Jed’s voice was tight, for this was hard work, slowing the rotation. ‘Step in.’
    So Roger did, with Jed beside him, and the universe whirled.
    I still can’t—
    They stepped out into a reception chamber, vast as a cathedral, cemetery-cold.
    When Max had finished screaming, the interrogator introduced himself as Fleming, his voice as pleasant as if they were meeting at a picnic. Then he added:
    ‘We
are
on the same side, you know.’
    Sagging against the tendrils that held him, Max coughed, the nearest to laughter he could manage. Tears were chilling his face, while pain was washing everywhere, an ebb after furious surges.
    ‘Bastard. I did
not
kill her.’
    Something in Max’s words, some rhythm, matched Fleming’s style of speech. So here was the danger: to be seduced by the torturer, to believe they cared because the entire world was here, defined by their words, their facial expression, and the pain they induced: magnificently skilled, the architecture of agony, the pulling-apart of personality.
    Schenck, you bastard
.
    It had to be him, but there was no point in laying accusations. Stick to what he had seen and heard.
    ‘Admiral … Kaltberg.’ Max licked salt and blood from his mashed lip. ‘She was under … compulsion. I told you … She had a graser, set to auto-destruct.’
    ‘Hardly the suicidal type. A prominent admiral on the verge of well-deserved retirement?’
    ‘Not suicide. Murder. It was compulsion.’
    ‘But you escaped through your bolt-hole.