Roshan followed Natalie out of Hannah's office, then waited for the door to click shut again, making sure that they were out of earshot. "Is that all she's offering us? Lawyers? I have lawyers of my own, Natalie. Expensive lawyers. Ahriman could go full Bleak House on Ennead in court. But Magnus owns that space station, it's private property. All he has to do is snap his fucking fingers and his security team will shoot us in the face."

"A man's home is his castle," Murdoch agreed dryly, from her chair in Hannah's waiting room. Being a lowly engineer, not involved in the affairs of kings, she didn't attend these meetings unless Roshan insisted, loudly, at high pitch for an hour. "Or his lair, whatever."

"You don't do that in business, Roshan," said Natalie, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. She usually tried to avoid talking to these two as if she were a mean ex-girlfriend—it was beneath her, as Hannah would have said. But she had too many things to think about right now, and busting a dumb stereotype was low on her list of priorities. "He could shoot normal civilians, sure. He can't do that to business rivals without starting a goddamn war."

"Ezra and Jacob were business rivals too," said Murdoch as they headed for the elevator.

Natalie punched the button. "Were."

"They still are," said Roshan. "The data exists, the company exists—we're obviously going to take Ezra and Jacob back. Magnus must know that, he must be expecting it. Ezra would've gloated to him about pulling that stunt with Ahriman and the ansible, you know he would."

"Of course he would." Natalie had her cigarettes out, tapping one against the package impatiently as the elevator took them down. Hannah's building had glass elevators, taking full advantage of the view: below, the flat rooftops of Portland were all planted with sagebrush and agave, blocks of desert gardens outlined by their white walls, sometimes interrupted by fields of black solar panels. "When has Ezra ever had a good idea that he didn't immediately fuck up?"

"Great, this is good, we're agreeing," said Roshan. "Now if you could...explain why we're walking right into this with nothing but legal threats to defend ourselves with?"

Natalie snorted. "What do you want, an army?"

"I mean, ideally. Magnus has one."

"Roshan, you're always telling me that Ahriman can stand up to the big boys," said Natalie as the elevator doors opened onto the spaceport level. She lit up on the moving walkway, knowing that she had fifteen minutes to get rid of it before anyone would stop her. "If you think you need a private army then hire one, okay? But I don't. All we're doing is walking in to collect our people. Magnus won't shoot us in the face, because that commits him to a course of action that he doesn't want to take, and it tanks his reputation. Ennead has allies, and the allies have allies. It would make a mess, and Magnus doesn't want that."

Murdoch was watching Natalie in her sidelong way, with no change of expression. "He doesn't have to shoot us in the face, as my excitable colleague said. He can still just lock his doors. Why would he let us dock at his station at all?"

"The same reason he usually lets strangers in to ogle the place," said Natalie, her free hand thrust in her jacket pocket as the chill set in. The spaceport was vast and echoing, smelling of wet concrete and rubber. "He wants to look like Francis of Assisi in front of a camera. So we'll bring cameras—I'll hire a crew to follow us to Siddhartha."

"A camera crew?" Roshan repeated.

"Yeah. We tell them we're making a documentary about...about the Bonaventure rescue," said Natalie, getting her phone out to skim through her contacts as she smoked. "We say it's part of the planned relaunch for Taltos under Ahriman's aegis. Telling the company's story, incorporating it into the brand, all that marketing junk. It's not even a lie, because that's exactly what you should do with any useful footage we get."

"I don't think it's legal to use snuff films as part of a marketing campaign," said Liz.

Roshan ignored the jibe, as he was warming up to the idea. "That actually...that would be a sweet thing to have in our back pocket as we're rebuilding. We could really leverage the disaster if we tug on the heartstrings, play up the underdog stuff. Can we get the girl from Bonaventure, the coder?"

Natalie shrugged as she scrolled through her contact list. "I think you'd be promising her a job if she did that for you. A good one."

"C'mon, I was going to anyway," said Roshan, taking umbrage at the implication. "If Ezra and Jacob were thinking of hiring her from the start, then obviously we can find something for her. Shruti's young, we can sponsor her education, do the mentor thing."

Natalie looked up at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. It was surprisingly high. "Really?"

"Yeah. I always wanted to be someone's mentor."

"It would be a crime if you didn't," Liz drawled. "You have so much to offer."

Natalie intervened before they could get into an actual slap fight. "Then get her info and call her." She took another drag, exhaling sharply as she hit her assistant's number on her phone. "It's a good angle, if she's down for it. —Hi, Emily, change of plans for today. I'm on my way to Siddhartha Station, can you make arrangements to send a camera crew with us? Like documentary stuff, yeah. Small is fine..."

"Is Shruti even a good coder?" Liz asked Roshan.

"Probably good enough," Roshan said, leaning back against the handrail of the walkway, his own phone in his hand. "There's no way she could be worse than, like, Marty."

"The bar is low, I see."

Roshan didn't argue, for once. "Yup. AI still creeps people out—not you, obviously, but normal people. Taking care of Taltos shows that we're about human compassion and connectivity, not just machines. It's the right thing to do, and coincidentally, it's really useful."

Murdoch raised an eyebrow. "Or the other way around?"

"Oh my God, you're so funny," Roshan said in leaden tones. "Just stop. Speaking of Marty, where does he even work in Bijaspace? Not the Earth HQ, right? If he's on Siddhartha, maybe he can help get us inside."

"It'd solve a lot of security issues," Murdoch admitted, unfolding her tablet to check up on Marty's illustrious career. "If he has any kind of system access, I can use Ahriman to throttle them."

"Even better."

"Of course, that could implicate Marty. If Magnus gets upset and decides he wants somebody's head on a platter."

Roshan rolled his eyes. "Granted, but if we get in there and try this and fail at it, Marty's going down anyway. He used to work with us. Magnus would accuse him of being a Taltos collaborator whether it's true or not."

Liz didn't look up from her tablet. "You're right, that is an enormous flaw in your plan."

"You haven't pointed out a flaw." Roshan had to lean in to whisper-yell at Liz, trying to keep it quiet. This was why things never worked between them, but it was also why they never fully broke up. They kept swearing off each other, but they liked to fight, and inevitably the distances began to close as time went by. "You didn't even specify what you think will go wrong. You just made a dark prediction, and hoped we'd all think that cynicism is the same thing as intelligence. Well, it's not. If you think there's a problem, fucking spell it out. How would we fail? What would go wrong?"

Murdoch eyed him speculatively, but all she said was, "I guess we'll find out."  

Roshan knew it was as close as she would come to saying she liked the plan, because she very obviously didn't; it was also as close as she would come to saying she didn't have a better idea.

* * *

At the hangar, Roshan found a quietish side corridor to talk to Shruti. Storage rooms, equipment lockers, weird pools of condensation wetting the concrete, wisps of M-fuel fumes in the air. "Hi, is this Shruti? Roshan Tehrani. CEO of Ahriman Technologies—"

"I know who you are," she said. Video chat was off, and he could only hear her surroundings: she was sitting on something that creaked, maybe a staircase or an old guestroom bed, and there were voices nearby, like a family gathering that she was trying to escape. Except she doesn't have a family anymore, moron. Distant relatives and well-wishers, at best. "Is this about Taltos?"

"Yeah—yeah, definitely," said Roshan, gingerly lowering himself down to rest on his haunches, trying not to sit in or lean against any of the mysterious wet spots. "We're having some trouble with—um, Ezra and Jacob have been incommunicado since Magnus rescued them. 'Rescued' in inverted commas, maybe, ha." Instinctively trying to make a joke even though this situation wasn't funny, not even to him. "Taltos' VC firm wants them back, and legal wants to get the sale of the company data finalised. So we're going to head for Bijaspace to pick them up."

"Is Bija just gonna let you do that?"

"Probably...nooot," said Roshan, drawing the syllable out while he tried to think of a better plan than the one they had. It wasn't working. "Ezra's not exactly reliable, but Jacob would've called us right away if he was allowed to place a longsat call. He just would. The fact that he hasn't suggests that Bija's in a hostile mood. The radio silence worries me."

"Huh." Shruti sounded worried too. "What're you guys planning to do?"

"Natalie Cope, our investor from Ennead—she's gonna get a camera crew to follow us, as if we're making a documentary. Magnus can get away with a lot on his own turf, but he'll try to behave if he's on camera, she thinks. We thought it might really help to have you there as a—"

"As a prop, yeah."

"I did not say prop. You didn't let me finish."

"Fine, so finish. You want me there as a what?"

Roshan was now throwing darts with his eyes closed. "As—as a symbol of Taltos' past. And future. As well as...I mean, we're very interested in, um, investing in your career. Your education. Ahriman would pick up the tab for university, free ride if you want it."

"Yeah?"

"Uh—assuming you still want to be a coder, absolutely. We'd have a harder time justifying it if you want to leave the tech world forever and study Russian literature or something. You don't, right?"

"I haven't had a lot of time to think about it, but if I'm going to be a symbol of the past and future..."

"Oh no."

"I'm just saying I might need a few years to find myself in college," Shruti said. "Ivy League, right?"

"You know, some of the best places for STEM aren't traditional ivies—"

"I'm just really feeling the aesthetic, you know? Quads, cricket fields, sweaters, oak panelling, club ties, racism—"

Roshan caved. "Okay, fine, study wherever you want. Oxford, the Sorbonne, Wittenberg, who cares, it's on the house." He could afford it, if he got Ezra's data. "Just help us get Jacob and Ezra back, before Magnus breaks them psychologically and they end up with Stockholm Syndrome."

"I'm taking the piss, man, it's okay. You could've just asked me to help them, you know," said Shruti, more quietly. "Ezra and Jacob put their asses on the line to get us off Perdigon. I'll return the favour—bribes appreciated but not necessary."

"It wasn't a bribe. Just...your whole world was demolished, just when you were getting ready to leave it," said Roshan. He knew what it was like, building model rockets in his backyard as a kid, launching them at the moon on summer evenings, wishing he could make something big enough for escape velocity. Afraid he might never do it, afraid the little rockets would go further than he ever would. "It wasn't your fault. You deserve a clean shot."

"Everyone does, I guess. Thanks." Shruti sniffed sharply, once, and said, "I'm in Toronto right now with my chaachi and her kids, but I can take the train out to the spaceport in Hamilton tonight. Is that too soon?"

"It's perfect." Roshan felt about four different muscles loosen up in his neck. "Perfect. Hey. I like your hustle."