Now when he looked to the west, he could see a thick, oddly stable bank of cloud rising from the strata of ice that lay over the red sand. The chunks already covered an area more than two kilometers across, and that was with only five of the big airships on station. Another three were scheduled to join the squadron before the end of the month, with a further fifteen planned within a year. Melt water was now trickling along the waiting canals, soaking into the arid sand, but creeping a little farther every day. While in the air above, the freezing vapor was creating a microclimate alteration to the desert’s ancient, lethargic wind patterns. Regular breezes had started to blow down Kintore’s streets as the cold-sink drew in air from the coast to the north. For now all they brought was more dust, but within six months, Water Desert’s climatologists were predicting, clouds would be lured inward across the continent, accelerating change. Within a couple of years, Kintore would become the newest, most exciting oasis on the planet. Money would flow in with the new rains, and speculators were already buying up plots along the canals.
But for now, Kintore retained its frontier atmosphere—a convenient home for its tough workforce, and scattered with the commercial establishments that supplied them with whatever they needed. Callum eyed the neon and hologram signs above the plethora of small thriving enterprises. He stopped outside the Granite Shelf, seeing just another prefab with long windows and three big air-con cabinets barnacled to the wall at one end. The glowing blue sign was younger than the prefab that it crowned.
Raina had found it for him, of course. After Yuri Alster had stonewalled him, he’d confided in his crew that he’d actually gone and made a commitment to a woman. That she was Security. Undercover. That she was missing, and he suspected the company was busy pulling together some kind of whitewash.
“Fucking typical,” Raina had grunted.
They were all on board, all wanting to help. “Whatever it takes, chief. Whatever you need.”
He’d nearly got emotional at that. But so far it was only Raina’s expertise he’d needed.
Savi’s mInet, Nelson, might have been taken offline, but that didn’t leave her totally isolated, Raina explained. If she was undercover, she was going to be using a different mInet identity. They didn’t have its universal address code; however, Savi’s dermal grains would be networked with it. They all had a unique interface code, which would be incorporated into the mInet metadata. It took Raina less than an hour to track down the codes, extracting the data from the Mumbai clinic that had implanted them five years ago. It was the kind of webhead skill that both impressed and troubled Callum, that so much of a life could be accessed so easily.
If Savi had used a mInet connection to call anyone or access the internet, it would be logged in the local server, Raina told him. All she needed was a probable location; then she could hack into the servers. A search engine would be able to find the data.
Callum’s only suggestion for a location was Kintore. It made sense to him when he confronted her boss, Yuri. Icefall had been the center of the biggest anti-Connexion protests for more than a year—just the kind of thing student wannabe radicals would join (or be manipulated into joining). Which was what Savi was investigating.
Perhaps Parvati had chosen to smile on his quest. Whatever. He’d been right about Kintore. It’d taken Raina just ninety-seven minutes to track down Savi’s grains; they were interfaced with a mInet tagged Misra, which had authorized payment for meals at the Granite Shelf. The last had been a croissant and green tea the morning Icefall started, a few hours before the protests. After that, there was nothing.
Callum walked into the café and sat down. He asked the waitress for orange juice and a croissant. When she brought it, he showed her the picture of Savi and asked if she recognized her.
No.
There were three other waitresses on that shift. He asked each of them. Two said no, one hesitated and said maybe. The Granite Shelf was a busy place, she said, we get a couple of hundred people every day. Your girl, she might have been in a few times, not dressed as smart as the photo, but it was a while ago now.
The rush of relief was so strong Callum had to go and sit down for a while. Apollo called Raina for him.
“One of the waitresses thinks she recognizes her,” he said.
“So she should,” Raina replied. “I’ve hacked the café’s main server. It’s got the internal surveillance video files. I accessed them at the time she made her last payment. Downloading it to you now.”
Callum watched the image playing on his screen sunglasses, not knowing the Savi he was seeing, the shabby clothes, sun hat, and backpack.