Who Pulls the Strings?

Scorpius 24, m0039, continued


Vajra appears to be back online, and all the tests that the team, Samadhi, or Quentin have available suggest that this is indeed him, without major modifications or corruptions; Jianwei suggests that he performs a backup point immediately, before anything happens that might cause more permanent problems. The team had left him locked out of motor control on his shell, but now they cautiously return it. It does appear that Vajra is back, with no memories of the interruption; Quentin is evidently pleased to see him restored to function.

The team is continuing to play with theories about this whole series of incidents, including Jianwei's opinion that the airship crash was likely the result of two technically unconnected problems - the gasbag failure immediately followed by the software problem. Why these might happen together, other than sheer extreme coincidence, is still unclear, though. They wonder if Vajra and the airship computer could have suffered essentially the same problem; it's not inconceivable, but why just these two entities? There's no trace of anything similar showing up on Web reports. One clue, perhaps, is that Vajra's internal logs show that he received, presumably processed, and then immediately wiped a small packet - a kilobyte or two - of unidentifiable data immediately before his shut-down. Unfortunately, he can't determine its origins, although it evidently came through the hotel's standard Web channels; he doesn't seem to have made any non-routine comms connections at that time.

Jianwei authorises Aunty to continue tracking the news for similar incidents, allowing her to purchase a news-scanning skill set for the purpose (although she seems to have some trouble integrating it at first), and the team set up logging processes on as many comms ports on their assorted systems as possible, so they'll at least have records of any more trigger packet after the fact. Then, the team contact Captain Brooks-Carter and suggest a personal meeting; he is happy for them to come in.

So they don vacc suits and set out by tram again. Brooks-Carter turns out to have called in a couple of colleagues, apparently feeling that these problems are going beyond his domain of accident investigation; Captain Ping, of the Nix Olympica Serious Crimes Unit, whose job is mostly to keep Triad activities on the mountain to some kind of minimum, and Officer Lau, the small police force's computer problems specialist. When the team talk about possible systematic software problems, Lau pays attention, but his assessment is that there isn't much resemblance between Vajra and the airship's systems - not that Vajra is exactly an overly well-documented unit, he notes.

So he offers to pass more of the raw data he has available on the topic to Vajra, who accepts - and a few seconds later, alarms sound throughout the police/rescue installation, which goes into some kind of lockdown. Its security systems are apparently showing the presence of various software configurations and signatures which they have been instructed to treat as a threat, physically within its firewalls. A little nervous testing suggests that Vajra is indeed being treated as a potentially hostile software entity.

The team request a low-bandwidth channel out of the installation, place a call to Quentin to explain something of the situation, and then allow Vajra to be taken down to the installation's computer crimes office, accompanied by Ping and Lau - Brooks-Carter is beginning to look like a man who wants some problems off his hands. A few minutes later, a local high-end LAI is asking questions about Vajra's origins, which of course has to bring in the words "presumed former TSA military asset".

It appears that Vajra's peripheral software generates various signatures that approximately correspond to those produced by an unidentified, elusive entity which has recently been detected on the Nix Olympica Web. The match isn't exact, and with the E.U. embassy vouching for Vajra, local security is prepared to trust him, rather conditionally - but that suggests that the mystery entity was similar to him. Which in turn implies that this intruder was connected to the TSA. This might be considered odd, and also worrying.

It also cuts across the previous evidence of Triad involvement. On that subject, Ping has a brief conversation with the team - noting Florence's known personal history. The team is gaining an odd image with this security and rescue organisation.

So they withdraw politely, and discuss matters further on the tram back to their hotel. Could the Triads be using TSA-designed software agents? That's not entirely their style... Meanwhile, Aunty is scanning local news channels, and picking up a fair amount of discussion on academic boards. The team run further surveys of the local Web, and Vajra soon notes an area of free resources that seem more or less optimised for his use. Not being foolish, he knows a honey trap when he sees one; rather than being caught, he ends up in conversation with the currently-anonymous operator responsible. It's clear that this is someone at the University of Mars - the kind of academic computer specialist who reflexively sneers at that mention of police computer security specialists. He's prepared to trade more data on recent Web events, but what he has would require more technical skills than the team can offer.

However, they can point him at the probably-subverted version control software at the airship tours company, which he didn't know about, while they ask Quentin to look for some software problems consultancy expertise. He may have to go to Earth to find anyone appropriate (he'd normally often call on University of Mars experts for such things, after all). Then, after a few minutes, the anonymous academic calls back to say that he does indeed think that the mystery entity ran some kind of assault on the tour company. Given its efficiency, he wonders if the company was in fact subverted in advance.

Just on principle, Vajra puts a little work in and, mostly by a stroke of luck, identifies this caller as one Dr Rodrigo Manos. He decides that it's more polite not to tell Dr Manos so.

The team are settled back in at their hotel by now, with no specific duties to perform, so they relax a little; Florence looks at local dojo facilities, goes to the hotel gym, and plans a break on Olympus Mons when this mission is done, while Jianwei handles some public relations issues related to the crash and generally looks after consular duties. Then, Quentin gets in touch again, with word from E.U. experts on Earth.

Their belief is that there are indeed signs of SAI-level Web intrusions here. If it's a TSA operation - which seems very possible - it must be a major one. Well, the E.U. isn't aware of any major TSA operations on Mars, with one possible exception of which the team should be aware.

"Quipu" someone says. Vajra admits to being a little scared now.

Jianwei takes this as a cue to look at the memetics of the situation again, and decides that there are subtle but, when one knows where to look, clear similarities in the campaign signatures to the memetics around the Nova Iquitos incident. If "Quipu" is running a broad TSA memetics campaign, this crash may have somehow been involved in that too. It's possible that the Triads have been played by Quipu, while the recent intrusion at the tour company - indeed, all the peculiar events on the local Web since the crash - are beginning to look like a clean-up operation. As a part of that, maybe, Quipu decided to take Vajra off-line for a while - although it's not clear why.

Jianwei sends a message to the ambassador. He wants to request another meeting with "Mr Grey", who appears to be the sort of person who's in the right sort of position to decide how this should all be handled.

Software Controls Hardware

Scorpius 23, m0039, continued

As the team's vehicle approaches the Zeus Tourist Resort, it becomes clear from Web traffic that the press have picked up on both their presence and that of Giovanna D'Aquila, the first survivor of the airship crash to return to civilisation. They promptly offer her assistance in dealing with what will follow - that's their job, after all - and she accepts the offer. She's evidently smart enough to be careful about what she says, and the team help her to prepare a response to the obvious first questions ("I cannot say very much while the investigation is still underway..."), and work up a press release to appear over her name. They also offer to see her back to the hotel room which her wearable has already chosen for her, and she accepts that offer too. Her wearable is also already handling matters such as getting some of her possessions out of storage while her luggage on the airship is being identified, extracted, and flown back. The team are being cautious enough that everything that arrives for her will be scanned for bugs...

When the rover reaches the airlock and the travellers disembark, they discover a couple of enterprising reporters already waiting. Both Jianwei's and Florence's instincts for practical tactics desert them, and the group is brought to a halt by the importunate reporters. However, Giovanna keeps her head and remains bland, and Jianwei does some smooth talking, giving the others a chance to get away

However, as the group is entering the lobby of Giovanna's hotel (her personal AI automatically checking her in), Vajra's cybershell suddenly locks up and falls over. The other two team members move quickly to assist, trying to determine what has happened; Aunty establishes contact with Samadhi, first carefully validating his ID codes, and Samadhi reports that Vajra is still running on the shell's systems, but isn't responding at all to external stimuli. Jianwei invokes his director status with the company that nominally "owns" Vajra for legal purposes in some jurisdictions to authorise Samadhi to take control of the cybershell. Once Samadhi has the shell back on its feet, if a little unsteadily, the group quickly heads up to Giovanna's room for privacy as they run more basic checks. First, though, Jianwei borrows Vajra's electronic gear and sweeps the room for surveillance devices, finding nothing. After a short while, with no signs of Vajra returning to "consciousness", they ask Giovanna (who's understandably a little perturbed by this turn of events) not to discuss it with anyone, and head back toward their own rooms.

On the way, they contact Quentin at the embassy, first reporting their successes, then describing what has happened to Vajra. Quentin "talks" to Samadhi, then leaves him to walk the shell home. Quentin is evidently perturbed by this turn of events, but has no idea yet of its causes. Aunty is monitoring the technical news channels for any evidence of anything similar, but nothing has shown up, so Jianwei calls the Emergency Response Service, and leaves a message, and after a few minutes, Captain Brooks-Carter calls back. He notes their concern, but this seems to be an isolated incident at present; he comments that it may well remain so, as far as he can tell - he understands that Vajra is a rather non-standard sort of AI...

Quentin too gets back in touch; he's been probing Vajra's systems, and his conclusion is that Vajra's low-level processes are, essentially, looping. What they're processing remains unclear - he's not taking any large data input streams - but this has evidently locked up his higher personality functions. ("Oh my God, he's garbage collecting!" someone mutters.) It's quite possible he'll come back on line when this process is complete, so there's no question of restoring him from backup yet.

The team get back to their own rooms, Samadhi lies the cybershell body down, and the team plugs him into a high-speed fibre-optic port while Quentin gets in touch with some experts. As there's little they can do themselves, the two organic beings decide that, rather than ordering dinner in, they might as well go and get the feel of what pass for streets in this place. So they head out to a restaurant and bar to do some listening.

There's only so much to listen to, in fact - perhaps the most interesting thing they hear during the evening is a news report on the Web, which suggests that Peng Chiang-Kwan was put in nanostasis as soon as the rescue teams reached the crash site, but that was longer than anyone would like, and now a lot of specialist human doctors, AI experts, and advanced cybershells are being mustered to attempts a prolonged and careful uploading exercise on him; it'll be a while before its success or otherwise becomes clear. There are no reports of misbehaving AIs.

Then, in the bar, the pair are approached by a well-dressed man, ethnic Chinese in appearance, who identifies himself as Kai Ssung-So, the insurance company agent. He's blandly polite, and still seems to be looking to exchange information quite openly; he seems convinced - or determined to convey the belief - that software problems are the key to this mystery. Smooth as he is, Jianwei senses that he's seriously worried about something. Meanwhile, Florence remains reticent, just reining in her distaste for anyone Triad-connected - and noting that Ssung-So is accompanied at a distance of a few yards by another man, also Chinese to go by his features, well-built and self-contained - not exactly a disguised bodyguard...

As the pair are returning to their hotel, they take another call from Captain Brooks-Carter. His own people have been looking at the airship tour company's computer systems, and they think that someone has been tinkering with the logging components. They believe that there's something highly capable loose on the local Web, and he reckons that the Europeans might want to know that. In response, Florence mentions that there may be Triad agents currently operating in the resort; the captain takes a note of that, but isn't immediately concerned - detecting a Triad presence somewhere on Mars is rarely news.

Back at their rooms, the pair talk to Quentin again. He notes that one problem in trying to diagnose software problems with Vajra is his status as, well, probably a former TSA military asset; he's hardly well-documented. But Quentin and his advisers are convinced that Vajra is in that shell somewhere; hopefully, the loop will eventually terminate. They're bemused, though, and worried. Still, all the biosapients can do for now is get some sleep, leaving Dougal and Aunty to learn how to play Robo Rally. Before they settle in, they do get some assurances from Quentin that, if Vajra awakens in "kill the squishy things" mode, he'll warn them, or something.

Scorpius 24, m0039

Jianwei wakes first, and reviews the news channels over breakfast. As a trained memeticist, he concludes that this whole incident is maybe being exploited to raise general fear-uncertainty-doubt levels across the planet. He looks deeper, but if his first guess is right, this is a well-engineered campaign, and not easily traced. He mentions the theory to Florence when she wakes, and they wonder who could be responsible - Negative Growth or other such preservationists might have an interest in spreading such memes, as might the various Martian Independence groups; it's certainly a challenge to the current power structures.

As they finish breakfast, another call comes in from Captain Brooks-Carter. By then, Jianwei has assembled a quick presentation analysing this possible campaign, and he takes the opportunity to pass it over; the Captain in his turn says that he has been asking questions, and he believes that the team may have a point about the Triads; his own team's best guess is that they were looking to muscle in on the tour company, although nobody is admitting anything. But this doesn't explain the airship crash; reducing share values and intimidating managers would be one thing, but destroying the company's image and profitability would surely just be foolish and inefficient.

Then, in Florence's room, another voice speaks.

"Where am I?"

On Site and Back Again

Scorpius 22, m0039, continued

Along with civilian-model vacc suits, the team have hired a heavy rover, which is now available to them - although they do spend a few moments discussing whether they need to head out to the crash site. It's a couple of hundred miles from the Zeus Resort - they should be able to make the run inside a day, if it looks like good use of their time. The rover really is the only option; at this altitude, the only flying vehicles capable of operating and of landing in the wilderness are a few specialised, fuel-hungry, and expensive vectored-thrust flyers with very little carrying capacity.

So they review more data. Quentin has now pulled some strings and acquired some imagery of the incident from weather satellites; it's not great for resolution, but it's usable. It shows the Zeppelin's gasbag failing - perhaps quite rapidly - and a descent that looks, at least to a trained pilot like Florence, to be fairly controlled at first, but with rapidly increasing instability. However, Florence can't say much for certain; she's not qualified on airships.

Jianwei decides that a personal visit to the Emergency Response Team's HQ is in order, and the rest of the team might as well come along. He talks his way quickly past the receptionist - avoiding "crank" or "time-waster" tags on support NAI displays really isn't very hard - and gains a brief interview with Captain Brooks-Carter, who is polite, though clearly busily engaged with multiple VR displays even while he's talking to them. Jianwei says that the team would like to visit the crash site, and while the Captain is a little cautious about the possibility of them getting underfoot, he doesn't ask them to refrain. They offer to transport any small items that might be useful on the site; while the Captain doesn't come up with much, he does say that they might take a shipping box of additional rescue gear.

So the team set out. Samadhi plots a route and Florence drives (breaking for lunch on a relatively flat stretch where she trusts the supplied vehicle NAI to manage safely enough). Meanwhile, Jianwei mostly naps, and Vajra and the team's support AIs collect and collate information on the crash as it appears on the Web. It seems that there were ten organic beings on the airship: the three European citizens, two Chinese tourists - Peng Chiang-Kwan, now reported deceased in the crash, and Teng Sui-P'ing - three American citizen passengers - Alan Becovani, a resident of Mars, and Sarah Louise-Smith and Ira Solway-Cortez, both up from Earth - and two crew with Nix Olympica citizenship - Carl Davidson, the captain/pilot, and Eugene Marquez, the steward.

After a few hours, the rover is approaching the crash site, and Jianwei wakes up and begins checking local data feeds and streams. He calls the E.U. citizens, who are still here receiving medical attention; they are still recovering from the stress of the accident, but are currently feeling relatively comfortable, with no immediate special requirements.Actually, it soon turns out that the medical personnel on site feel that it's about time to transfer the crash survivors to better, static, medical facilities; the ambulance rovers will be leaving shortly - before the team have actually quite reached the site, in fact.

Still, the team do reach the site, hand off the case of rescue gear to a robot which says a polite thank-you, then start moving around the area, avoiding getting in anyone's way while taking visual images from multiple viewpoints for future reference and recording all the v-tags that they can identify. After a while, when they pause a couple of medical personnel and another rescue worker wander over for a chat and to accept the team's open offer of tea. This lets the team pick up some more knowledgeable gossip about the crash; it seems that everyone involved is finding the details a little odd. Eventually, the team ask if they can give anyone from the rescue teams a lift back to civilisation, and some of the techs consider this.

After a while longer, a call comes in via satellite relay. The caller identifies himself as Kai Ssung-So, an agent of the insurance company which was providing medical cover for the Chinese passengers on the airship. He seems smoothly courteous; the team get the impression from various details that there may be another person present and monitoring the call at his end, but can't pick up any other details. Ssung-So too has an obvious interest in the incident, and understands that the team is picking up independent information; he would appreciate access to anything which they are prepared to release. He is evidently far too sophisticated to offer payment, but he can promise future favours, should anything the E.U. embassy need fall within his capacity...

Jianwei, knowing the value of favours on Mars, takes the time to contact Ambassador Schmidt, obtains clearance, and agrees to Ssung-So's request. He'll be sending checked and, where necessary, edited information, of course, but Ssung-So is smoothly grateful.

Although the site is currently being illuminated by an orbital mirror or two, sunset is still noticeable, and the team feel that they've done what they can for the day, and settle down in their vehicle for the night.

Scorpius 23, m0039

Waking and rising fairly early, the Europeans set out. The injured tourists have been taken to a scientific station with good medical facilities about half-way back to Nix Olympica, a little way off the direct route, and the team have decided to detour that way to check how things stand; two of the rescue team decide to accept a lift there. As Florence drives a little too fast over the rocky ground (but recovers from her mistakes quickly enough to avoid accidents) and everyone talks to the two techs about what they saw at the site, Vajra receives an anonymous Web message, suggesting that he might like to check the ownership of that Chinese insurance company, or its agent's past employment records. With little else to do with their time for an hour or two, the team quietly take up the suggestion, digging through financial records and personal pages on the Web.

These don't turn up any obvious dirt, but the company's ownership is dispersed and only lightly documented. There's no proof, but on Mars, this kind of paper trail might well hint at Triad ownership or strong Triad influence. As for Ssung-So - his consultancy work has involved a number of companies, all culturally Chinese, but is only lightly defined - and the companies are almost all in the import-export business, which hints at Triad smuggling operations. Is he somebody the Triads might want to use as a consultant whenever possible, for some reason? Or could he actually be some kind of Triad troubleshooter? And who might have sent this tip-off, if he is?

Florence, who doesn't like the Triads at all, is muttering under her breath.

The team stop for lunch at the medical  facility, where their passengers leave them with polite thanks. They've determined that Mahler and Melk are happiest to stay there for now - Melk seems not to want to travel too much yet, and there's no good reason for her husband to leave her - but Giovanna D'Aquila would like to get back to civilisation and has been well patched up. As they have spare space in their rover and are supposed to be offering what help they can to E.U. citizens, the team are more than happy to give her a lift. Indeed, this gives them a good chance to chat with her about the crash, and she's happy to cooperate and to give them access to her wearable's recordings of the period in question.

Apparently, she had recently retired for the night when the airship's emergency alarms sounded, and within seconds she, the other passengers, and the steward were following the standard emergency procedures which were being quoted at them by their AIs, including suiting up for vacuum, while the pilot attempted to manage things from the control compartment. To judge by the mounting verbal responses from there, the airship's behaviour degraded progressively and unexpectedly as it went down, until it hit the Martian surface painfully hard. As the team had already gathered from other sources, Peng Chiang-Kwan was simply horribly unlucky, getting in the way of a shattering structural member during the impact; it apparently punctured his suit and his torso. Whether the medical services can restore him, as an organic individual or as software, remains to be seen.

The team take another look at technical issues. The pilot blew the second, undamaged gasbag immediately after impact, very correctly; could the mechanism intended for that purpose on the first gasbag somehow have been triggered? After all, that would reduce the entire incident to a single cause - massive software malfunction, possibly malicious. (Although it would have to be an implausibly broad failure that both blew a gasbag and scrambled the airship guidance controls.) Unfortunately, everything says that the emergency gas release mechanism really shouldn't be that easy to trigger. Anyway, software sabotage that blew one gasbag could surely almost as easily blow both, producing a more guaranteed catastrophe that would be easier to pass off as an accident than this pair of problems without a close connection...

Meanwhile, Florence has engineered a detour for the rover. She hasn't seen the edge of the Olympica escarpment before, and it's not far out of their way. Unfortunately, the team's AIs do an unusually poor job of route planning, and Florence finds that she's having to compensate for a twenty-degree slope for some distance. Fortunately, her skills are up to the task.

Dogs and Cats and Zeppelins

Scorpius 18, m0039, continued

In the aftermath of that last incident, Jianwei gets a call, routed through one of the mini-dirigible camera cybershells that showed up to see what the excitement was about. It's "DD", the freelance bartender-reporter, and while Jianwei is politely fobbing her off with a few snippets of harmless information, the team's AIs check the traffic incoming from her, and decide that the lag time is low enough that she's probably in Port Lowell.

Florence picks up on this, and asks her if she'd like to go out for a drink that evening. DD presumably decides that this is an opportunity to work on developing these interesting contacts, and accepts the invitation; they agree on a bar, and the other members of the team politely decline any invitations to come along. Florence claims that this is partly an attempt to find out more about shadier parts of Port Lowell by discussing bar options with the well-informed DD, but DD never does come up with anything interesting on that score. Well, there are distractions.

Of course, what happens is, come the evening, a female Felicia and an Ishtar woman walk into a bar, unaccompanied, with predictable results in terms of male attention. One of the males - a rather ugly but charismatic fellow - is notably charming at Florence, but she, with her conditioning for omnivorous tastes in these things (something that the EU psychologists decided it would unduly intrusive to try and "correct"), has decided that DD is the most interesting ... prospect ... this evening. DD, on the other hand, has generally conventional tastes; then again, she is an Ishtar, which means a high level of instinctive competitiveness, and the sense that she and Florence are attracting roughly equal amounts of male attention sets that off, especially after a drink or two.

The psychosocial dynamics of the next couple of hours get a little complex and probably beyond the grasp of anyone who wasn't there. Suffice it to say that Florence and DD end up back in Florence's apartment, along with two of the men from the bar, who presumably think either that this is their lucky evening, or that they've been drawn into a vortex of female competition. Or, probably, both. Everyone's recollections may be a little muzzy, but that's what personal wearable or implant computers are for. (It may in fact be just as well that everyone knows that certain classes of posting to MarsTube just lead to complicated, messy, and expensive multi-jurisdictional civil law suits.) DD does manage to extract a very little pillow talk out Florence during a lull in proceedings, but probably nothing too unfortunate, so far as Florence's memories or Dougal's recordings show.

Scorpius 19, m0039

The next morning, after Florence has briefly cornered DD in the bathroom for some reason that isn't anyone else's business, all four participants head out for breakfast. One of the men is evidently still recovering his equilibrium, as he takes a deep breath as he steps out of the building front door without putting his air mask on first, but he suffers no permanent ill-effects, and once he's finished coughing and gasping, they locate a rather indifferent coffee bar that's the best that Florence can suggest just now. The two women are quieter and more reflective than a few hours previously; DD isn't sure what she's learned about herself, except perhaps that she really shouldn't drink that fast and that she can find Florence quite charming, but she does now know a bit more about Florence's work; Florence hasn't learned much at all, but she feels happy enough about the process.

But anyway, DD gets onto the Web and contacts a friend who needs an extra hand on a land convoy heading back towards New Shanghai. So she now has authentic excuses to make when she disappears after breakfast. She's moving on, if as erratically as is her style.

Scorpius 20-21, m0039

And, again, things go quiet for a couple of days. Vajra, though, is making connections in the local AI citizen community, which he thinks should be interesting, and maybe even useful.

Scorpius 22, m0039

It's the small hours of the morning when the next important incident arises, and the two organic team members are fast asleep when Quentin calls. (Vajra is presumably engaging in whatever counts as hobbies for an AI.) Quentin apologises, but time is somewhat of the essence in this case; anyway, he tells the team, he's got a courier buzzbot on its way to the apartment building with a delivery of wake-up nanodrugs.

Next time, Florence tells him, he should simply tell Dougal, "and he'll drool all over me."

"That's the kind of thing you organic life-forms enjoy, isn't it?" replies Quentin, who has made some study of the classics.

"Anyway, lady, gentleman, and AI," Quentin goes on, "the word for today is 'zeppelin'. One of the tourist airships operating out of the Zeus Tourist Resort has apparently gone down over Olympus Mons - and gone down hard enough for there to be casualties."

This triggers some raised eyebrows among the team, who know enough about modern technology and the sort of safety factors applied to tourist craft - even on Mars - to reckon that this sort of thing should not happen. But happen it has, and it's going to rate as a newsworthy event. And yes, Quentin can tell them that there's an E.U. interest in the case; three of the eight passengers on the airship are European citizens. A fast response is indicated, if only to show that the embassy takes these things seriously, and this time, the team are going to be based in or near a community with such civilised facilities as an aerospace port.

Which is why things are so urgent. Quentin has received budget clearance and arranged them passage on a ballistic ramjet, which will get them to that port - which serves both Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort - in bare hours. The scheduling system triggered when bookings pass a critical threshold means that the ramjet will be taking off very soon indeed. A taxi is on its way.

After a whirl of packing (or at least bag-grabbing) and quick use of that taxi, the team board the ramjet, and once it's in flight, they - especially Jianwei - start making calls and collating information. It appears that there were eight passengers aboard the airship, of whom three were European citizens: Hans-Christian Mahler and Juta Melk, a married couple who appear to be tourists from Earth, and Giovanna D'Aquila, a resident of Mars who was presumably taking a break. There's little publicly-available data about the incident so far, so Jianwei pushes through the bureaucracy and makes contact with Captain Yinghuo Brooks-Carter, of the Olympus Mons Emergency Response Service, who seems to be managing the response, establishing good businesslike relations with him. Brooks-Carter gives the team access to a package of standard data feeds from his people, and suggests that they base themselves at Zeus when they arrive.

Meanwhile, Vajra has been looking for meteorological data on the area around the crash site, on the grounds that this might well be relevant to understanding what has happened. However, this doesn't turn up much; although the airship was flying low enough for there to be an atmosphere in which a lighter-than-air vehicle could function, it was above a lot of Martian weather - anyway, there was nothing that would rate as a storm in the area at the time of the crash. So Vajra moves on to data feeds from the airship itself, but discovers that those are being somewhat strangled back; it looks as though there might be something interesting there that someone doesn't want getting out straight away.

So the team resort to the airship builders' published information to find out more about the vessel. They determine that it consisted mostly of just two gasbags, linked by a rather minimal framework of very advanced, very lightweight materials. This sounds hopelessly flimsy when compared to older airship designs, but it's light, which is important in a Martian atmosphere, and it was built to modern standards and subject to modern continuous safety monitoring; it really should be very safe. Unforeseen events might conceivably lead to the loss of one gasbag, but the craft would still be capable of a controlled landing in that case. What the team has available from the data feeds in this case, though, suggests a faster - dangerously fast - descent.

The team do now have a location for this incident, though, along with data streams showing that units of the Emergency Response Service are closing on the site as rapidly as possible - in rovers, as nothing that can fly fast at that altitude can hope to land there. They have a bright idea, and Jianwei speaks with the ramjet's pilot, points out the situation - and convinces him to direct the ramjet's sensor array towards the crash site. This shows that this isn't the sort of complete disaster that leaves wreckage scattered across the countryside; the airship is recognisable, if not exactly airworthy at present. It's clear that the crew or control systems have, very sensibly, deflated the gasbag after landing, as per protocols. The data feed shows that the rescue services are now closing in.

By now, the ramjet is on its approach trajectory to the Olympus Mons landing ground, but before external comms shut down entirely, as they will for a few minutes, Jianwei receives another call over low-bandwidth channels. A low-res cartoon avatar of a humanoid dog pops into his field of view in the empty seat next to him, and DD asks what he can say about this situation. DD herself is still on that ground-level caravan, but knows an interesting story when she sees one on the feeds. Jianwei says that the E.U. are still assessing the situation, and then asks casually if DD had a good evening out with Florence. DD plays back a library of "No Comment" responses.

Then the ramjet makes its approach run, lands, and disgorges its passengers. The aerospace port is equidistant from Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort, and the team have accommodation arranged in a hotel in the latter complex. So they use the standard public transport system, completing their journey by tram. Once they get there, they find that the rented vacc suits that they'll need at this altitude have been delivered to their rooms; Florence and some of the team's AIs check these over, and conclude that they are fine.

By now, the first news is starting to come back from emergency teams arriving on the crash site. Nine of the ten organic beings which were aboard the airship are alive...

Shapes Shifted

Scorpius 15-17, m0039

And, yet again, things turn quiet for a while for the team, as diplomatic activity continues frenziedly behind the scenes.The E.U., however, can afford to stand back, look politely neutral - and work out how to exploit its new knowledge of the identity of a couple of great power agents and a US Air Force orbital weapons platform. Lipinski is politely persuaded to play along with all this, while the insurance company eventually accepts the evidence filed by the team and re-instantiates Prof. Zajdel - in various artificial environments and rented cybershells at first, as her explorer-research shell is a bespoke model and getting a new one built will take a few days.

Scorpius 18, m0039

Indeed, this is what leads to the next interesting call on the team's time, as late one morning, the embassy's NAIs inform Jianwei that they have a report that may be of interest; it looks like a routine commercial dispute, but the name attached has links to himself.

It is indeed Prof. Zajdel, who is happy to speak to Jianwei - she's only had brief conversations with him before now, and she's politely grateful for his part in sorting out what happened to her recently. However, this call is about business. She has in fact recently visited Port Lowell, and rented a cybershell for the purpose - a standard-model polypede. Her visit ended a few hours since, and she returned the cybershell to the rental company office. However, a little later, her AI aide reported that the company, Cruz & Cruzcampo Shell Hire, was continuing to bill her account for the rental; its systems insist that it hasn't been returned.

There's obviously an anomaly here, and a curious one - management systems are usually more reliable than this - so Jianwei calls up the other two team members, and they decide that a personal visit to Cruz & Cruzcampo would be indicated. Florence extracts herself from the dojo where she's keeping her martial arts training honed, and goes home to change, while Vajra simply disconnects from the Web work that he's performing. They all meet up a couple of blocks from the hire company office, and approach the place together. It's essentially a warehouse-garage with a small front office, and a group including two biomorphs showing up in person causes the management systems to escalate matters promptly to their human manager, who is polite but insistent - despite what Zajdel's logs may say, their records show no sign of the polypede being returned.

The team get in touch with Zajdel, and she authorises the hire company to activate the polypede's transponder - something covered by the hire contract's privacy clauses. However, the attempt doesn't actually work; whatever is running the cybershell currently is evidently exploiting its built-in privacy controls. The Cruz & Cruzcampo manager admits to being a little concerned at all this, and pulls some imagery off the building cameras, which does indeed show the polypede arriving when Zajdel claims to have returned it - and leaving very soon afterwards. It's a modular, reconfigurable, multi-purpose unit, but it appears to be using its standard mobile configuration - basically, that of a large spider. Attempts to pull more relevant data off the company systems run into problems, however; privacy laws and agreements can be a nuisance sometimes.

So the team wonder how to track the unit. It's not an unusual design - a rugged multi-purpose industrial model, but that sort of thing is not overly rare on Mars - but it does have a moderately distinctive finish. (Florence comments that Prof. Zajdel seems to have a taste for heavy-duty shells; the others point out that she is a geologist.) The team dives into the Web.

They make an inspired guess and go looking for hobbyist bot-spotters. Yes, the breed exists, and it soon becomes clear that there is some serious snobbery about the difference between personal observation and mere NAI-monitored camera logging. Aunty fails to locate many of their Web sites, though. Meanwhile, Dougal has been searching through recent MarsTube posts, but not finding anything relevant here; it doesn't seem that the polypede can have been doing anything very odd in public. So he takes over Aunty's search, and tracks down the hobbyist discussions, then hands the addresses off to Jianwei. Jianwei in turn assesses the memetics of this subculture, and begins posting as a new enthusiast.

And Vajra has been working through a list of E.U.-owned businesses in this neighbourhood, politely requesting recordings from their external security cameras. Collating these, he's able to track the polypede as it made its way through the industrial-commercial quarter of Port Lowell - up until a point when it simply stops showing up, an hour or so ago. The team heads for the area where it was last observed. As they go, Jianwei's probing around the bot-spotter sites, with careful mentions of an "interesting polypede" dropped as bait, elicits more imagery. Once they are in the right area, the team are able to narrow their tracking efforts down to one building - a warehouse and shipping centre owned by a company called Thorium Logistics.

Thorium are in the industrial equipment supply business; essentially, they hold stocks of assorted industrial components for purchase by local users who discover more or less urgent needs. Thus, their building has a front office open to personal visits - a sales counter, in fact.

First, Jianwei talks to the NAI on the door, which quickly decides that there is some kind of issue here ("stolen property?") beyond its authority, and escalates matters to a human supervisor. Meanwhile, Vajra probes local Web space, looking for a ping response from the polypede; he gets a brief response, but a moment later, that address no longer shows any reaction. He decides that they are closing in on their search subject, and heads round the back of the Thorium building to monitor the fire exit door there, while putting a swarm of observation microbots into the air.

The Thorium management become uncomfortable when confronted with Jianwei's questions and Vajra's Web traffic logs, which seem to indicate some kind of anomaly in their building management systems, and shift the problem over to a legal advisor, one Joseph Kwak. Jianwei explains the situation yet again, and persuades Kwak to get Thorium to let himself and Florence into the building. As they glance around, Aunty analyses the imagery that she's getting off Jianwei's optic nerve, and identifies a relevant anomaly, which she highlights obligingly in Jianwei's vision. It appears that the polypede has got into the depths of the warehouse, reconfigured itself into work arm configuration and locked onto one of the shelving units, and is accumulating a small stack of shipping boxes and modules.

Jianwei relays this instantly to Kwak, who swears audibly and relays the problem to the Thorium management team. Their technical advisor instantly sets the warehouse management systems to restart themselves, and the polypede appears to notice that; it detaches itself from the shelving unit and begins shifting into its spider configuration.

Jianwei and Florence decide that things are turning dangerous. Jianwei backs rapidly out of the building while Florence drops down below the level of the counter, draws her pistol, and begins taking careful aim. She's determined enough about the polypede design to realise that, unfortunately, the sort of ammunition she can employ legally in this area won't penetrate its outer casing - but that its camera systems aren't especially protected.

The polypede rushes for the counter (and the doorway beyond), and Florence lets it come quite close; she's only going to get one chance here, after all. Then she opens fire. Her Felicia precision and trained skill serves her well, as one of her first three bullets slams through one of the polypede's camera lenses, and two more go into the other. The cybershell careens into the other side of the counter, and Florence vaults over it and lands on the polypede's back - but this second part of her plan proves superfluous, as her fire has taken out one of the modular machine's local processing nodes - the one assigned to sensory processing - and it has shut down completely.

Her two team-mates cautiously enter the building, as other observers appear on the scene - including a dirigible flying camera which, it turns out, is being teleoperated by "DD", who is evidently continuing to watch the team's career with interest. Vajra carefully links his own shell up to the damaged polypede, and manages to gain access to some of its memory stores; actually, a non-sentient process in one of its subsidiary processors makes a rather crude attempt to copy and run an executable process to his systems. His firewalls block that with trivial ease, and he takes a copy of the program.

At about this time, more cybershells show up; Marshall Kirkowicz is responding to reports of gunfire, and for that matter suggestions of some kind of rogue AI, and her remote cybershells are quickly on the scene. She's feeling a little jaundiced today, and she's also alert enough to note that Vajra has been interfacing with the disabled cybershell; she instantly warns him to be careful with the data copies that she guesses he's acquired. Then, as she acquires more information on the likely nature of the problem from somewhere, she becomes increasingly terse and firm on the topic; in the end, Vajra and Jianwei undertake to retain only encrypted copies of the data, in secured storage.

In fact, the nature of this incident becomes clear over the next few hours, as everyone talks to everyone else and some people insist on openness. It appears that this problem originated in the Belt, where an enterprise called Skyward Mining attempted to develop a Von Neumann-style mining system - a set of modules with self-replicating capability. Unfortunately, they neglected to include enough safety interlocks into the code, and the design went rogue. It's not actively malicious, and the software involved is non-sapient, although that in itself might make it more dangerous in some circumstances; it simply seeks to replicate itself at every opportunity. Unfortunately, it was designed to interface with Thorium Logistics inventory and shipping systems, and it still seems to have extensive backdoor access to that software. The polypede was, it turns out, rented for short-term use by Skyward before their problems were detected and their R&D site in the Belt was sterilised, and the rogue code managed to secrete itself in one of the thing's modular, distributed control system modules. Prof. Zajdel returning the thing happened to give it the chance to boot itself into a control module, and it set to work trying to build more mining complexes on Mars.

This isn't, so far as anyone can tell, a major threat to life and limb - more of a nuisance, and enough of an embarrassment to a lot of people that they've gone to the trouble of keeping it relatively quiet. Well, talk of rogue self-replicating AIs does tend to get humans all nervous and panicky...

Political Analysis

Scorpius 14, m0039, continued

Their assailant has chosen his ground well; the trio are in a steep-sided gully, and would have to make ten or fifteen feet of height to get out of it and clear of the rocks, while there are few buttresses or projections to screen them. Florence, who is in the lead, decides on a simple solution; she takes a run straight at the oncoming rocks, then jumps, passing clear over them. The other two, lacking her training, opt to move more laterally; Jianwei jumps well up the side wall of the gully, but then finds himself hanging on by his fingertips, while Vajra finds himself falling back into the path of the rocks.

Florence makes a graceful landing despite the very uneven ground as Jianwei clambers laboriously onto a more level spot and Vajra's cybershell suffers a bruising impact from the first, smallest oncoming rocks. Florence charges the attacker, and is pleased not to find herself facing any kind of weapons fire; Jianwei twists around to watch, but can't do much else; Vajra scrabbles aside from the rockfall and begins desperately scrambling up the side of the gully, barely clinging on as the rocks pass below his feet.

Covering the last few yards of the distance with a leap, Florence aims a flying kick at her opponent, but he seems to have a little martial arts training (not unusual on Mars); he twists aside and hits her with a rock that he's gathered up. Fortunately, her protective environment suit absorbs the blow. They face off, and then Florence hears Jianwei; he's calling on the man to surrender, but the man evidently lacks her Felicia ears, and the call didn't carry well over the distance in the thin Martian air. She takes up the idea, echoing Jianwei in identifying the team as EU consular services employees - and faced with a skilled and aggressive catgirl fighter at close quarters, the man deflates and gives up. Jianwei and Vajra clamber back down to join Florence; fortunately, the damage to Vajra's cybershell is light.

The attacker is, as expected, Piotr Lipinski. Confronted with an accusation of foul play against his partner by people who identify themselves as EU agents, Lipinski defends himself; so far as he was concerned, he and Professor Zajdel were attacked, together - with orbital weapons! - and he didn't know who to trust. So he fled, and hoped to drive off anyone who came after him. He had ideas of contacting unspecified friends when he'd got far enough.

It sounds an odd story, but the team escorts Lipinski back down the slope to their rover, listening to him as they go. He is able to illustrate his claims; as he describes things, he and Zajdel were camping out, and her physiological software model was still on Mars University time, so she took a late-night "stroll" down to look at the site which they were set to study while he watched before retiring for the night.

His NAI wearable's video recording of that scene for the important few seconds show a single glowing line suddenly appearing from above to strike the rock face, which trembles and then collapses onto Zajdel's exploration shell before she can get away. The image certainly looks like a hypersonic kinetic strike arriving from orbital altitudes - although the frame rate of the recording limits the details that can be derived. Of course, it would be trivial to fake such imagery, given modern video editing technology - Lipinski's wearable doesn't have any kind of secure evidence-bonded encrypted storage, and this really wouldn't stand up in court - but arranging such fakery would have been tricky in the circumstances, and overall, the team start to trust Lipinski's account. His actions of the last few days may have been unwise, but they were quite understandable, given what he says and shows them. On the other hand, as murder attempts go, this one was both bizarre - no one would even have known that Zajdel's cybershell was where it was, unless they used some quite intensive satellite imagery analysis - and wildly excessive - an orbital weapon against one or two civilians?

The group reaches the rover, and they remember the other puzzle; the mass of accounting data that reached them recently from an anonymous source. They briefly wonder if this was some kind of distraction attack, but decide that the timing was probably pure coincidence. (Lipinski denies all knowledge of this stuff.) So they and their companion AIs review the data. A quick check suggests that it's apparently all valid and mostly public material, but it's been carefully examined by someone, and a number of seemingly innocuous entries have been neatly highlighted for attention. Looking at these, the team are driven to conclude that Chen's business, while well enough run over the decades, received a fair amount of very subtle assistance from various other enterprises - most of them Chinese, and some known to be either government-run or closely associated with the government. In other words, the Singaporean Chen was in cahoots with the Chinese authorities, or had otherwise given them good cause to support him over the years. The likeliest guess would be that he was an agent of influence within the Singaporean business community.

As the rover moves off, the team also download some analysis software and run it against Lipinksi's image of the orbital strike. This contains enough information that they can project the glowing line up to orbit, and then cross-reference with standard navigational databases. The likely candidate for a point of origin of the attack is an unmanned US-owned satellite, marked as a non-functional meteorological survey unit - which, strangely enough, showed a very small "undocumented orbital trajectory change" at the time of the strike. This was small enough that anyone who noticed it would put it down to a micrometeorite impact or a bit of out-gassing - but it could also reflect a projectile launch.

So this looks like a US attack, from one of the military units that no one admits to having in Mars orbit but everyone assumes that other people have. But what was it for? Lipinski has no idea, and as murder attempts go, it was imprecise and expensive. It's conceivable that the Americans didn't even know that Zajdel was near the strike zone. The team confer as the rover drives itself southwards; they decide that Maria Vega almost certainly is an SIA agent, but what's her mission? And what was Hua's call of earlier in the day about? Why was he concerned?

Jianwei makes a decision. He writes up events so far, and files his report with the embassy, marked for prompt attention. Within minutes, Colette Schmidt responds, agreeing with his provisional analysis and offering support; she authorises hire of a four-seat hopper, which will meet the team at an arbitrary point in the wilderness and bring them back to Port Lowell, hopefully before anyone hostile with orbital weapons to use can locate them.

And so the rover changes course slightly as the embassy makes arrangements. As they travel, the team talk more, and Lipinski kills time by asking for access to the geological data that the team accumulated from various sources concerning the landslip site; he wants to know what may have provoked the attack. By the time they reach the rendezvous site, he's drawn a provisional conclusion; the landslip exposed geological materials that suggest significant deposits of rare earths - quite valuable stuff, in fact. This is news to him, and he isn't sure if anyone else could have known about it; like most of Mars, that area has been surveyed a little, but so far as he knows, only cursorily and from a distance. Still, it's possible that someone could have put enough information together to guess at the possibility.

So - intentionally or otherwise - the strike exposed this fact, right in front of a pair of trained geologists, in fact. But the team can't work out why anyone would have taken this approach. However, reviewing recent communications traffic from the site, they realise that although Maria Vega has now flown away, she's left some kind of active communications node there. One likely guess would be that it's the snakebot that was riding in her hopper. If she knows about the rare earths deposit, it could act as a claim marker, although it's not doing so at this point.

At the rendezvous site, everyone transfers to the hired hopper, and Vajra uses a microbot swarm to sanitise the rover, seeking to eliminate any evidence of Lipinski having been on board. Then, they send the unmanned rover back towards New Buffalo, and take off towards Port Lowell. There'll necessarily be some refuelling stops along the way, but before the first of those, Jianwei receives a call - from Maria Vega. She's pretty clearly fishing for information about the EU's position and intentions - albeit politely - and he straight-faces in response. He does mention the snakebot, and Vega confirms when asked that it might serve as a marker on a geological claim. So when that call ends, Jianwei calls Hua to ask about his current situation, letting slip more or less deliberately in the process that they believe that Mr Chen may be intending to change his national allegiance in the near future.

The hopper lands at a field outside Port Lowell, and the team take a taxi back to town, from which they intend to call the ambassador - except that she calls first, to tell them that, well, whether through their efforts or otherwise, a large cat now seems to be out of the bag. Mr Chen has declared the intention to apply for Chinese citizenship, and the Chinese have responded favourably - which will mean that a Chinese citizen's residence is deep in the middle of American territory, with a good claim to much of the surrounding area under "fair use" conventions. The Americans have responded by registering a formal claim to the mineral deposits on and around the landslip site (with, yes, that cybershell acting as their claim marker). Everyone is doubtless scowling at everyone else.

The team admit that they're still not sure what happened, but Schmidt, the long-time career diplomat with experience of the politics of Mars, is able to make some educated guesses. Her guess is that the Chinese identified the mineral deposits first, from some previous survey or whatever, and decided to use their agent of influence to move into that area. However, the SIA must have identified Chen as a Chinese patsy, worked out what was going on, spotted the deposits themselves once they had cause to look at that area, and decided to do something about it. Schmidt doubts that the kinetic strike was meant to be homicidal - the Americans probably honestly didn't know that Zajdel was in the danger zone. Rather, the intention was probably to expose the rare earth deposits to the geologists when they came to examine the site the next day, on the plausible (and correct) assumption that, although they had been hired by Chen, they were neutral parties - giving the American Commonwealth an excuse to move in.

However, after Zajdel's late-night excursion got her temporarily killed and thus drew so much attention, everyone had to scramble and improvise. Vega was doubtless sent in to try and salvage the situation, and Chen and his handlers have been forced to show their hand in response. So both sides were trying to exploit the E.U.'s neutrality to their own ends, and will doubtless continue to do so - which may turn out to be beneficial, or just annoying. Coming out of this with provisional identification of Hua and Vega as, respectively, Chinese and US agents, and with that "dead" satellite identified as a clandestine American orbital weapons platform, is all bonus.

Anyway, Schmidt tells the team to bring Lipinski into the embassy for personal debriefing, and he's willing to go along. They assure him that, even if they weren't pretty sure that no one is aiming orbital weapons now, this is a safe place - the effect of which is only spoilt when he meets a cluster of maintenance cybershells, and is told that they are just completing the repairs occasioned by the last armed assault on the place.

Geological Research

 Scorpius 13, m0039, continued

Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.

Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.

So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.

This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...

Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.

So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way  of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.

Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.

 Scorpius 14, m0039

Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.

Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.

Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.

Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.

The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.

They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.

As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.

Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...