Casting her mind out to the Surina facilities, Jara discovered that the spectators were indeed staying put in spite of Len Borda's little incursion. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was scheduled to hit the stage in little more than an hour, and the auditorium already held almost 400 million multi projections. If these numbers kept up, this would be an even larger crowd than the one Margaret had garnered last week-maybe even large enough to rival the 1.3 billion who had attended Marcus Surina's funeral forty-six years ago.
When the tromp of the troops became deafening, Jara put her hands over her ears and slithered even farther into the shadows. Still feeling exposed and vulnerable, she reached into her bio/logic bag of tricks and turned on Cocoon 32, a Lucas Sentinel program that had helped calm her down many times in the past.
Jara could instantly feel the tumult from the outside world fading away as her OCHREs filtered out the sounds around her and dimmed her sight until everything had faded to a dull gray. No ConfidentialWhispers, no incoming messages. No background chatter from the Data Sea.
Could she really stand up in front of a billion people and demonstrate a technology she barely understood herself? And not just any technology-perhaps the most radical invention in the history of humanity, and one that was almost completely untested.
There were a million reasons why she couldn't deliver the presentation. Jara had no experience speaking in front of large crowds. She had a bad reputation in the bio/logics industry. She hadn't swung a baseball bat in nearly twenty years.
But what other options did she have at this point? Slink off to a tube station and go home? Wait for the hubbub to die down and then drop a groveling Confidential Whisper to Lucas Sentinel asking for her old job back?
Face it, Jara, she told herself. You want to fail.
The thought surprised and angered her. She wanted to fail. She wanted Natch's latest business venture to go down in flames. The analyst conjured a mental picture of herself: a small, fluttering, frightened thing, cowering at the feet of marble goliaths, men and women with minds and hearts and wills of stone.
And suddenly something inside of her rebelled. That's not me, she thought. I can't be like that. To settle for failure-that's like accepting death. If I just sit back and let things happen, I might as well have never lived in the first place.
Jara took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and flipped off the Cocoon. She had made her decision.
At just that moment, a familiar figure came barreling around the corner. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the room as soon as he saw the analyst, but the tub of jelly around his gut obeyed the laws of inertia and kept going. The statue of Isaac Newton looked on with amusement as Horvil toppled to the ground in accordance with the good scientist's theories.
'Oh, thank goodness!' bellowed the engineer, crawling his way across the floor to Jara's side. 'I've been looking all over for you.'
Jara gave her fellow apprentice a look of steely determination. 'Horv, I'm going to deliver the presentation.'
Horvil's mouth gaped open. 'No luck with Margaret?'
She shook her head. 'Quell was right. Margaret's gone totally offline. She ran to the Revelation Spire with a dartgun. I think she's going to make some kind of last stand up there. So with Natch gone and Margaret out of the picture, I guess it's up to me.'
The engineer's face turned white. 'Jara, there are Council officers out there. Thousands of 'em.'
'I don't care. I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing.'
'Before they let you set foot on that stage, they'll stick you with black code darts like a pincushion.'
'Then they'll have to do it in front of a billion people.'
Horvil's face took on a look of panic. His eyes tilted upwards as if beseeching the Father of Bio/Logics for an infusion of sanity. 'Listen to me,' he said, grabbing Jara's tiny hands and clutching them tightly within his own. 'We can delay the presentation. Nothing says we have to do ours before the Patel Brothers do theirs. We can just lay low and do the whole show some other time.'
'Are you completely deranged? If we put this off, the Patel Brothers will eat us for lunch. They'll pounce on us, and we'll have to spend the next month digging ourselves out.'
'So what? Is it really worth it, Jara? Maybe Margaret's right. Just let it go.'
'Horvil, these are our lives we're talking about here. This is our business. Don't you care about the fiefcorp and MultiReal and-and everything we've worked for in the past five years?'
'No.'
Jara blanched, momentarily struck dumb. 'No?'
The engineer's face blossomed into a shy smile completely devoid of irony. 'All I care about is not losing you.'
Jara sat stunned, unsure what to say. Was he trying to put her off her guard? Or maybe this had something to do with their unspoken rivalry for Natch's favor? Certainly the big lummox couldn't be sincere. In the three years she had known him, Horvil had barely uttered a single word that wasn't laced with sarcasm. Jara sighed. Why was it that as soon as she found her own moment of mental clarity, everything else had to slide out of focus?
'Horvil,' she said gently, bundling her hands inside the warm nest of the engineer's palms. 'I hope you can understand this. But I have to make that presentation. I just have to. This isn't about the fief corp or Natch, or-or product release schedules. It's about me. It's about ... not backing down. Not failing.'
The engineer considered this for a moment. Jara couldn't imagine what thoughts were running through his head. Could a rich boy from the other side of London who had never had a moment of financial instability in his entire life still understand a crisis of conscience? 'You have to promise me you'll be all right,' he said.
Jara smiled sadly. 'I'm afraid that's not up to me.'
There was no burst of comprehension, no sudden epiphany behind Horvil's eyes. But finally he nodded and clenched the analyst's hands tightly. 'Okay,' he said. 'So how can I help?'
'You can help me navigate. Do you know if there's a back entrance to the arena?' She gestured through the window at the now-familiar sight of Council officers roaming freely around the Surina courtyard. Their ranks ringed the Revelation Spire like a white crown, and lined the boulevard to the arena's front doors as well. The Surina security guards were nowhere to be found. 'Obviously, we can't go that way.'
Horvil jutted his chin out with determination, and the two of them rose to their feet. 'As a matter of fact,' he said, 'there's a side entrance, through the museum here. Quell took me past it yesterday.'
Jara brushed off her trousers and gave the Surina statue a respectful nod. 'Let's go then.'
The fiefcorp apprentices zipped past the statue of Tobi Jae Witt and down the hall. They dodged their way through a warren of curio tables and around a variety of large metal contraptions that had once housed Witt's experiments in artificial intelligence. The halls were now mostly empty of people. The few stragglers they did see were either terrified tourists looking for an escape route or Surina security forces hustling back towards the square.
Something about the conversation in the atrium had completely changed Horvil's demeanor. Minutes ago, he had been fearful for Jara's safety. But now he was taking the lead, lumbering into corridor inter sections as if preparing to use his belly to shield her from a barrage of darts. Jara looked at the engineer with a broad smile on her face. She wondered whether Horvil planned on taking the stage with her, and whether she would try to stop him if he did.
Horvil and Jara crossed over a walkway that bridged the Center for Historic Appreciation with the auditorium. They tried to keep low to avoid attention, but most of the soldiers below were fixated on the Revelation Spire anyway. Hundreds of dart-rifle barrels poked from the notches in the Spire walls, daring the Council troops to come any closer.
'The arena's just past that door,' said Horvil. 'The stage entrance is down the stairs.'
Jara opened the door to the arena and found herself confronted with a sea of white robes.
The gathering crowd still stood at half a billion strong, but their ranks now included a large number of Defense and Wellness Council troops. The officers surrounded the stage and lined every aisle in the place. Just like last time, they silently shouldered their dartguns, their faces sculpted of stone.
Horvil gulped. 'You ready?'
'As I'll ever be.'
They galloped down the stairs, opting now for speed rather than stealth. The two reached the bottom and
