RVR4|Chapter 6: Patience (Patreon)

"He is in the second receiving room," Bee said through the workshop speakers. "The Duke is showing him the restorations."

Nobody had asked her to track him through the house. Nobody told her to stop, either.

Tess stayed on the bench where she'd sat down, hands flat on her thighs. She'd put them there when the tremor started. The floor dust had dried into the creases of her knuckles. Everyone else had washed on the lift and she hadn't bothered. The lift was under the floor of storage room three, the auditor was somewhere between here and the front gate, and the whole evening was pinned to the walking speed of one man being shown a house.

Petra paced the length of the north bench, turned, paced it back. Her forearm was bare, the burn sealed in a red line she hadn't looked at once. Mikhail stood near the garden door with his kit bag packed, wearing his 'going-home' expression. Yuki had folded herself onto the equipment rack. Asha sat on her stool doing an impression of a woman relaxing, except that her eyes came back to Tess's face on a slow rotation, checking her pupils from across the room.

Cici lay in the middle of the floor with her chin on her paws.

"This is the most boring emergency I have ever been part of," she said.

"It's not an emergency," Marcus said from the window.

"Then may I go outside?"

"No," said four people at once.

Twenty minutes in, Mikhail picked up his bag, said, "I have a tram," and made it as far as putting his hand on the garden door.

"The path to the east gate is visible from the hall windows," Bee said, pleasantly. "They have just entered the hall."

Mikhail took his hand off the door. He came back to the bench, set the bag down, and rested his thumb on the MK-IX's emitter housing.

"Forty minutes," Petra said. "How long does it take to leave a house?"

"They are now sharing tea. I believe this is the second time."

Petra stopped pacing. "He's drinking tea?"

"The Duke poured it. There are social mechanics involved that I really do not have to model to understand."

Yuki hadn't moved from the rack in a while. When she finally spoke, it wasn't about the tea.

"Are we going to talk about that," she said, and tipped her chin at the bench.

The gray tab sat where Vex had set it down, next to Tess's loupe, about as remarkable as a spare washer. It was also the only object in the room that could talk to a System Manager, and everyone had been not looking at it with great discipline for three quarters of an hour.

Tess picked it up. It weighed nothing. She turned it over once and let [EVALUATE] have it.

[Contact Tab — Standby]Function: Direct-Signal · Single ChannelTransmit: Idle · Receive: IdleLast Error: None

"Bee?"

"I have been examining it since he set it down," Bee said. "It is what he said it is. One channel, one recipient, contact-activated. It has no microphone, no locator, and no storage. At this moment it is doing nothing at all."

"So it's clean," Petra said.

"It is exemplary."

"Melt it," Petra said.

"Then he knows it bothered us." Marcus turned from the window at last. "A man doesn't leave a clean line behind because he's careless. He leaves it because he's not worried about what we say when he's gone. He's waiting for her to want to talk." He looked at the tab in Tess's hand, and then at Tess, and didn't say the rest of it.

Tess opened the drawer under the north bench, set the tab inside between a box of taps and a coil of solder she'd been meaning to re-spool, and slid the drawer shut. She was aware of exactly how not far away it was.

"He asked about the drill and let it go," Marcus said. "Asked about Meridian and let it go. Watched her activate a Tech twelve skill crystal and let that go too." He put his hands in his pockets. "A man who lets that many things go already has what he came for."

Tess realized that her father was talking about her.

The garden door opened and Sara came in out of the dusk, unhurried. She'd changed out of her formal clothes, and took the room's temperature in one pass without appearing to look at anyone.

"He's charmed," she said. "Or he's doing an excellent impression of being charmed, which from a Nexaran is the same amount of work. Amos has offered to show him the restorations in the east wing tomorrow, and there is talk of the cellars." She said the cellars the way other people said the mines. "Protocol lets us fill an auditor's calendar with hospitality and he is letting us fill it. That buys hours. It does not buy days, and I want nobody in this room mistaking the difference."

"Hours." Petra's thumb found the sealed line on her forearm.

"He came here for a look at Tess." Sara said it evenly, the way she priced a restoration. "Everything my husband shows him is a thing that isn't her. The entire strategy revolves around buying you a few days—at most—to get that Aether node online."

"They have left the house," Bee said. "The Duke is walking him out through the garden front. I lose coverage at the wall."

The room breathed out by degrees. It wasn't relief. It was the next thing down from it, the one where you're allowed to move again but not to stop counting.

"Right," Sara said. "Dinner. All of you. If a House can't feed its people after a Network courtesy call, the Network has already won."

The dining room hadn't changed much since the first time Tess ate in it.

It was still the small room with the tall windows, still the table that sat maybe eight if the eight liked each other, and there were more of them than it had ever been asked to hold, counting Cici, who counted herself. Chairs had been brought in from somewhere with no two matching. Sara took the head because the room didn't work any other way, and the rest of them fit themselves around the table with the practiced elbow-management of people who had done this before.

Nobody stood at parade rest by the door. Tess remembered not long ago when Mikhail refused to sit.

Asha had claimed the kitchen next door within ninety seconds of walking into it, and dishes were arriving in her wake in waves, carried by whoever she'd conscripted on each pass. Fried protein in a batter that shimmered wrong. Tubers under a spice crust that made the air above them ripple with heat. A communal bowl of amber sauce that Tess's sinuses classified as a solvent before her eyes had finished focusing on it.

"Dip everything," Asha said, setting it down. "You know the rules."

Amos arrived when the first wave was half gone, still in his house clothes: the auditor was off the property and the Duke had walked him the whole way out. He dropped into the chair beside Sara with the sigh of a big man reclaiming his own furniture.

"That," he said, "is a man with opinions about lintels. I showed him mine and he told me the load path was, and I'm quoting, adequate." He reached for the protein. "It's held that wall up for a hundred and fifty years!"

"You were proud of it at breakfast," Sara said.

"And now I'm wounded at dinner. That's a full day." He caught Tess's eye down the table, and under the performance there was a level look, brief, that said he's gone, you did well.

They worked the problem over the food.

"Eleven percent to level ten," Petra said. "Three of us. And the evolutions before the Node, that part doesn't move."

"And grinding is the one thing we can't be seen doing," Marcus said. "An auditor on the ground changes what a dungeon run costs. It was risk before. Now it's signal. You can be sure he knows we're accessing the dungeon. He doesn't care how."

Yuki set her fork down. She'd been quiet through the first wave, eating and watching the table the way she watched a corridor, and when she came in, she came in level.

"We can't all just disappear, either," she said. "That's the mistake. Too many eyes on us now. If this whole team drops out of sight for a few days, that's a pattern, and he's a man who eats patterns." She looked around the table. "We definitely felt him scan us. In that workshop, standing right there. He's got our levels and classes, and if Petra and Mikhail show at Ten with the registry saying none of us went near the dungeon..." She shrugged. "That's evidence."

"So we go in the front doors," Tess said.

"A time or two. Sign the ledger, pay the entry, take the eight-hour lock-in like honest people." Yuki tipped her head at Petra and Mikhail. "The registry already has the three of us running Floor One together. We keep telling the story it's already telling. Eight hours on Floor One won't move anybody eleven percent, and it doesn't have to. It has to make the paper look the way he expects paper to look."

"And the eleven percent happens where the paper can't see," Marcus said.

"Elevator, pairs advance faster anyways. Never the whole team, never the same pattern twice." Yuki picked her fork back up. "We need to think like he does. He's not going to catch us in the dungeon. He's going to catch us in the records, or he's not going to catch us."

"It's worth noting that I... may have gained access to the Delver's Guild registry," Bee said from Tess's communicator on the table, conversationally.

"Wait, what!?" Asha said, dropping a plate as she came in with the second wave.

"It was not difficult to connect to," Bee continued. "It was a simple four-digit passkey on a terminal facing a city infrastructure camera."

The room went silent for several seconds.

Yuki leaned forward in her chair. "Well that makes things a lot easier. We're just going to pretend that doesn't sound kind of like..." She shot a look at Tess who groaned. "Techno Tess?!"

"It would be rather trivial to lift Asha's ban," Bee continued. "But I suspect it would be noted by the Network."

"It is also useful," Sara said. "Her retainer has her training this team at the estate. On file." Nobody at the table looked at anybody, and the subject moved on with its paperwork intact.

"Evening runs are with me on floor 2," Asha said. "I need the levels least, and on paper I'm supposed to be here anyways. Documentation yeah?"

Cici's head came up over the table edge beside Marcus, her two paws barely holding her up.

"I have points to raise," she announced. "In order of severity. One: nobody has assigned me a role in this plan, which is a grave oversight. Two: the maintenance drones do not report me, which makes me the only member of this team that can move freely on Floor Two. Three: I was in the dungeon for one afternoon today and I want to go again, and I am told that this is not a valid grievance, but I am raising it anyway."

"Okay, you scout," Yuki laughed. "Ahead of the floor 2 runs. Routes, drone positions, anything the cameras don't cover."

Cici's tail went sideways, banging off the edge of the chair Marcus wasn't using. "Accepted! I withdraw my grievances."

"We have to do this right," Yuki said, and she didn't dress it up. She looked at Petra. "You have to be last to get your level. I can take Mikhail through the front door as much as we need to, we can be ten by tomorrow night if we start now. You're here training with Asha, which is going to floor two and getting as close as you can to ten without going over. Then we go in together, you level up, and we meet Tess and Asha on the way to the TK-11."

The table went quiet again.

"You think we can do this in two days?" Petra asked.

"We may not have much of a choice," Sara said, her fingers resting lightly against her glass. "Amos and I can tie him up with hospitality for a few days, but that clock is running. And if the power jump from that distribution node is anything like the first one..." She met Tess's eyes down the table, level and unhurried. "...it brings several of our older defensive systems back into operational range. Which would make any sudden moves on the Network's part considerably more expensive."

That sat with everyone for a moment before Mikhail spoke up, looking to Tess.

"The signature, the name on the node."

"One moment," Bee said. A pause, the length of a record being pulled and a screen on the table lighting up. "// - pwnd_lol_1 wuz here."

"There's a one on the end of that," Yuki said. "Think there's a pwnd_lol_2? I wonder if—"

Then Asha brought out dessert.

It arrived already steaming, in a clay bowl, and the smell crossed the room like a change in government. Yuki, who had been mid-sentence, stopped being mid-sentence. Mikhail rose without a word, collected his plate and Petra's, and carried them to the kitchen like it was a posting. Amos looked into the bowl with the frank interest of a man who had eaten worse at state functions and was counting on never having to prove it.

"Out," Petra managed. Her eyes had gone to water. She got up, groped for the window latch, and turned at the door for her exit line. "Or I'll have you considered for war crimes legislation."

"Pfft. Written by people who've never eaten properly," Asha said, and spooned some into her own bowl with love.

It was in the middle of that, that Jeremy appeared at the corridor door. He had a decanter in one hand for the study, or the cellar, or wherever decanters went at that hour. He stopped. He took one long breath through his nose, the whole room's air, dessert and all.

Then his eye twitched subtly, his head moving a fraction to the side, and withdrew. His footsteps went away down the corridor at exactly the pace they'd arrived at.

Tess watched the empty doorway a moment longer than she needed to. The wrong block sat behind her eyes where she'd filed it that afternoon, black slabs where a person should have been, and she put her spoon down and said nothing at all.

She went out through the garden front afterward because she wanted the air.

The grounds ran dark and orderly away from the house lights. Gravel, then grass, the glasshouse throwing back a smear of the kitchen windows, the boundary wall a long low line against the city glow. Tess walked out into the middle of it, alone for the first time all day.

Standing in the dark on cut grass, she turned to look back at the estate itself, deliberately, and [EVALUATE] went off so suddenly she nearly fell backwards. The grounds opened up in her vision like a chassis with the cover off.

·········································FIELD PROJECTION ARRAY — EMPLACEMENT ■■Designation: Area Defense · Field ProjectionManufacture: Atlas Defense LogisticsLoot Seed: 0x91C4, ■■■■■Status: Standby — Readiness ProtocolTracking: ■ Orbital ContactsHardware: PristinePower: 399 / 1,720 AWUser Tech Skill: 12·········································Emitter Diagnostics .......... Available [Tech 10]Coolant Loop ................. Available [Tech 12]Field Envelope ............... Locked [Tech 19]Threat Discrimination ........ Locked [Tech 22]Harmonic Layering ............ Locked [Tech 28]Linked Emplacements .......... ■■[■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ .............. Offline][■■■■■■■■■■ .................. Off]·········································

Tess stood still on the grass and blinked at it first, because it was beautiful. A bordered read, dungeon skills, loot-seeded, sitting under a garden she had crossed a hundred times. She let herself have it for a moment before she did the math.

Asha's drill pulled twenty-four aetherwatts and was outside the legal spec. This thing held seventeen hundred and twenty. She could read two rows of it: the diagnostics, and the coolant loop, the one part of the thing a repair tech was rated to touch. After that the gates climbed past her, nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-eight, every one of them Locked. She had never seen a number that high. And pristine? That was something that took effort.

It was standing ready. Somewhere over the house a Network ship sat in its assigned orbit with the escort that came in with it, and this quiet garden had been counting them since they arrived, the way you watch a stranger's hands.

Whatever it was, somebody had turned it off—and everything around it was on.

BEE: I have started going through the archives. Floor Two's, now that I hold them. I am looking for anything CORE-A might have left behind, but several nodes are distinctly offline due to lack of power.

Tess looked up at the sky she couldn't read. There was a whole question attached to that, and she didn't ask it.

"Okay," she said. "We're working on that."

Petra was waiting at the workshop, leaning on the doorframe with her arms crossed, and Tess braced for the question about where she'd been. It didn't come.

"Come on," Petra said. "I want to show you something."

Inside, past the benches, the workshop's back hall ran toward storage with its one bad light doing its best. Petra stopped at a stretch of paneling Tess could have sworn she knew, felt along the seam, and pushed. A section of wall swung in on hinges that had been kept quiet, and behind it a steel ladder went straight up into the dark.

[Concealed Access Panel — Operational]Hinge Pin: Serviced · Latch: Original

"You have got to be kidding me," Tess said, with feeling. "I've inventoried this place twice."

"It's a maintenance access." Petra was already climbing. "Technically."

"Technically for what?"

"For me."

The roof of the workshop was flat and old, walled at the edge to knee height, and the night moved over it with the whole city underneath. Tess came up out of the hatch and stopped where she stood.

The sectors fell away from the estate in stacked terraces of light, five down through seven, down through nine, the tram lines drawing slow bright beads between them, and out at the bottom edge Sector Eleven lay mostly dark, holding its handful of lit windows like coals in a grate. She'd seen the city like this exactly once before, through a skipper's window with Petra in the seat across from her, both of them too tired to talk. It stopped her all over again.

They sat on the parapet. Below and to the left, the estate's east gate let Mikhail out, his silhouette unmistakable at any distance, and a minute later a tram slid away with him in it. Going home to his own bed like a man establishing a pattern was now literally his job.

"Yuki gone?" Tess asked.

"An hour ago. Maybe more." Petra frowned. "Did anyone actually see her leave?"

"I do not have her on any estate camera," Bee said, in both their ears. "I am choosing to find this professionally impressive rather than concerning."

Asha had lost the argument about the concussion and won the war. Tess was going home to the Reprieve tonight, and Marcus was under instructions to wake her twice before morning and shine a light in her eyes. Asha would be staying at the estate, where the paper put her. Five people scattering to four beds, nobody sleeping over, nothing to see.

Petra looked at the city for a while. When she spoke, she wasn't looking at Tess.

"You're different since your class evolution, I can't quite place it."

Tess turned that over, the way she'd turn a part with a hairline in it.

"I see more," she said. "I didn't ask for it... but I don't hate it."

Petra nodded, like that squared with something she'd been carrying. Down in Sector Six a grid section flickered and caught again.

"We're fixing our city," Petra said. "The world, even."

"Yeah."

"There's a Network System Manager on our world now."

"Yeah."

Petra didn't say anything right away. After a few moments, she sighed. "And you're the whole reason why."

Tess let that sit for a minute before text came up in Tess's vision, quiet, and Petra's hand went to her earpiece in the same second.

BEE: Yuki and Mikhail have registered for entry in seven hours.

"So dawn, then," Petra said finally, getting up. "Get some sleep, Tess. You look like a woman with a concussion."

She went down the ladder first.

Marcus was waiting at the gate with his collar up. He and Tess took the tram, and then the elevator down through the sectors without talking much, and Tess watched the city come up at the window, unevenly lit, and kept her hands still in her lap.