He found her working in what used to be his great-uncle's study, analyzing the diagnostics.
“I've got bad news,” he announced.
“So do I,” she replied grimly. “Someone's placed a bug in the systems. I've been spending the last hour wiping up the damage and shoring up the defenses. I need a drink.”
“Well, considering that Uncle Jorge held a sizable chunk of Helado Wineries when he was still alive, he's kept this place pretty well stocked.”
She finally looked up from the monitor she had been studying and rubbed her eyes. “Stocked? I seem to recall something to that effect. Did all the stocks go to you to?”
“Yeah. And I thank my lucky stars that Uncle Grim hasn't yet called me to demand that I hand those stocks over to the legitimate side of the family.”
“Uncle Grim? Who's he? I don't think Jorge ever mentioned him to me.”
“Grimaldo Helado. You wouldn't have wanted to hear about him anyway. He's boring and straight-laced. He doesn't know anything about making wine—he leaves that to the experts that my grandfather and great-uncle had personally trained—but he is a shrewd businessman. He's my mother's brother. When my grandfather disinherited her, his half of the company was willed to him.”
“Surely your uncle would have the sense to see that Jorge's will is legally binding. He can't just force you to give him what is legally yours.”
“That's right. But Uncle Grim is a persistent shark with a sense of tactics. He's probably waiting for a couple more days so I can become a bit more complacent.”
“I don't see you becoming complacent. Now where's that wine cellar?”
“I think it's on the third level.” Banner headed out, with Minestrone at his heels. He turned toward the lift. “To be honest, I'm kind of nervous about raiding it.”
“What, you're scared of getting drunk?”
“The last time I sampled the wine in this place was pretty memorable,” he replied as she got into the lift and he directed it to the desired level. “It went down pretty smoothly. But I was ill two hours later.”
“Ah.” She looked sage. “You were puking like a dog. Then again, after that something changed. Jorge seemed quite pleased about it all. I told him it was cruel of him to do that to you, but he waved it off and told me you simply needed fortification for your life ahead.”
“I didn't asked to be drugged!” The lift arrived on the third level and they exited to a corridor and turned right. “Or at least I thought Uncle Jorge had put some sort of drug in there that reacted badly with my system. After that, to be honest, I wasn't quite the same. You knew what he put in that wine during my new job celebration?”
“I have some suspicions, but I'm not quite sure. When was the last time you had an in depth medical scan?”
“When I left Tartaros. But I think it was only a physical. Maybe it was when I took that job at New Caledonia. The doctors didn't find anything unusual though.”
“Maybe they didn't know where to look.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I'll tell you later once I've had that drink.” They arrived at a long cavernous hall lined with rows upon rows of bottles. Each shelf was labeled by year. “I doubt any of these bottles have been 'modified' though.”
“I certainly hope not!” Banner randomly picked an aisle and pulled out an old vintage from Luna. “I have no desire for vomiting when I just want to relax.”
“Well, if it helps to ease your mind any, if what I suspect what Jorge did to you back then is true, then you wouldn't be getting sick even if that bottle was altered.”
“What about you?”
She gave him a strange smile. “Oh, you don't have to worry about me. I'm just weird that way.”
“So do you think anyone will try to hack into the house systems once they've discovered that their spying software has been disabled?” Near the front of the cellar were a rack of wine goblets. Banner took two of them down and scrounged in a drawer and came out with an old fashioned corkscrew. He started to pop the cork.
Cimarron watched him pour the light red alcoholic beverage into the glasses and took one to cradle in her hands. “Oh, I'm sure they'll try. But they'll find themselves tangled in an almost impenetrable jungle of booby traps. That will be the trip wire which will disconnect the network from any kind of outside connections. There will be a blackout for perhaps a second, which the traps reconfigure themselves.”
He sipped his own glass as he watched the pard-synth prowl in curiosity along the racks of bottles. “Wouldn't that second be a vulnerability?”
“That second will be staggered among different parts of the network in a random array,” she replied. “Even if the spies are very good decrypters, it'll take them about a day to figure things out. And that will give me enough time to come up with something different. Besides, judging from the damage that they have already done, it was a pretty crude job that even a not particularly bright child could have done with enough motivation.”
“So whoever was tapping into the system are probably not expert computer hackers.”
“Nope.” She finally took a sip and looked over her glass at him. “So what was your bad news?”
“Someone has managed to quant into the house.”
Her facial expression didn't change, but she slightly shifted her stance so that she was also observing the antics of the pard-synth. “You discovered a quant pad in the lower level? That means that I can go home early.”
“It's not so easy as that. I discovered a signature for teleportation, but there are no quant pads in this place. It seems impossible. Unless someone has finally developed a portable quant device.”
“The physicists say that it's quite possible to develop one,” Cimarron said, tapping her glass, “but there are a lot of practical and technical hurdles that aren't so easy to overcome. If they were, we would have had portable quant devices only a few years after the quant pad was developed. There's some danger in transporting quant devices through quantum tunneling—something about molecular, temporal, and dimensional distortion. I'm not quite sure of the details since I'm no physicist. But I seem to recall stories of scientists attempting to create portable quant devices which resulted in spectacular failures like explosions and worse things which have been hushed up.”
“I've heard about the explosions. But what can be worse than an explosion?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? But if someone has indeed created a portable device and used it to get into this house...there's something about this house, isn't there?”
“How much of the house have you swept for bugs?” he asked lowly.
“Only,” she pointed toward the upper level.
“How much did we reveal while we were standing around here?” he said, thinking back to what she said about the booby traps that she had put into the house systems.
“Only the obvious.” She shrugged. “Let's go to the conservatory. It's facing east and we can see the sun set from there.”
Banner grabbed the opened wine bottle and headed back to the lift with Cimarron and Minestrone following. Once they were back up on the first level and ensconced in the conservatory—a wide glassed-in room filled with ferns and small trees in ceramic pots that faced the rest of the icy wastes of the moon—he set his goblet and the wine bottle on a small table and slumped into one of the padded chairs nearby. The smallish sun lingered on the horizon, casting wan rays across a blue-gray expanse.
Cimarron took another chair next to him and placed her glass on the table before curling her legs underneath her. Minestrone disappeared on one of his expeditions into the greenery. “Oh, there are booby traps in the system now,” she finally said. “They'll expect them. But that will make them feel complacent. That's when we can outsmart them. I have other traps and triggers of my own design in place that are almost impossible to detect. So about quanting. Is it true, that you did find traces?”
“Yes. But I've found other evidence that may complicate things.”
“What evidence?”
He pulled out the scanner he had tucked in a pocket and handed it to her. She glanced at the readings. She narrowed her brows in thought. “That's really strange.”
“Yeah. What do you think it is?”
“I have no idea. But Jorge might, since he was the microbiologist.”
“But he isn't around any more.”
“No.” She bit her bottom lip, thinking. “He might have left some clues that might help us though. It involves the house.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He did experiments here too, you know. He had a lab set up close to the cellar, probably. I'm sure if we can find any copy of his notes, it might tell us something.”
“You didn't come across any of his files when you were perusing the computer database or when you were searching his study?”
She shook her head. “But just think of it. If it was of any importance, he wouldn't just leave it lying around, would he?”
“I'm not sure. Even when I was in regular communication with him, Uncle Jorge rarely talked about his own work. All I knew was that he worked on new formulations for the wine company when he was home. And when he wasn't, he was off in the outer reaches somewhere doing research with a xenobiology team. I wouldn't be surprised either way if he had hidden his notes in some secret place or put it in some place so obvious we're overlooking it as we speak.”
“I can see your point. Jorge taught me much of the basics, but talked little about his own stuff, unless it pertained to me directly.”
“Pertained to you directly?”
“Hm. I see he didn't tell you everything about me. He never told you that I was also one of his experiments?”
“You are?” He turned to look at her. In the fading light, she looked like a mysterious sprite contemplating a disappearance. “I knew that your mother had Uncle Jorge at a mentor at one time, but I didn't think that he ever dabbled in genetics.”
“You're half right. He never dabbled much in eukaryotic genetics.”
The word 'much' sent off alarms in his brain. “But?”
“These readings are certainly weird,” she said, deflecting the conversation off of herself. “But the residues certainly aren't alive. Something else left them there. What, I cannot say. I don't have the background to.”
“But do you have any wild guesses?”
“Do you?” she countered.
At that moment, the sun disappeared below the horizon, plunging the moon into a darkness, punctuated by few stars. In the early night, her question echoed in his mind. And his thoughts turned to things that disturbed sleep.
