Текст книги "The Abyss Beyond Dreams"

Автор книги: Peter F. Hamilton

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

‘No way,’ Laura said, too stunned to move. Out of an entire planet, it lands on top of my exopod. Precisely on top! ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ she yelled into the empty sky.

She started crawling back to the two exopods, snarling as the grainy sand scratched her knees and wrists raw. She didn’t care. She had to get to the exopod, to face down whatever fresh horror the Void was taunting her with.

The newly arrived exopod was lying on its side. Laura picked up the axe from the planetary survival kit and clawed her way up to the hatch which was at shoulder height. Putting all her weight on her good foot, she pulled the lever. There was a hiss of pressure equalling, and she swung the hatch back. She raised the axe, expecting to see the copy-Rojas or the copy-Ibu – most probably both. But it wasn’t them.

A perfect Laura Brandt hung in the webbing straps, squinting against the brilliant sunlight flooding in. She was flawless, even down to the discoloured, badly swollen ankle and slit shipsuit trouser leg.

Laura screamed long and hard.

The other Laura screamed back at her.

Laura brought the axe down with manic strength, burying the edge in her doppelganger’s skull.

BOOK TWO

Dreams from the Void

July 9th 3326

Nigel Sheldon woke up. He was immediately aware of feeling warm and cosy, exactly how it should be after a good night’s sleep. Then he remembered the last thing that had happened—

His eyes snapped open. There was a face looking down at him. It was his own.

‘Welcome to the world,’ said the grinning Nigel at the side of the bed.

‘Oh, hell,’ Nigel groaned.

‘Yeah. ’Fraid so.’

Two Months Earlier:

May 17th 3326

New Costa: a megacity that once sprawled for more than four hundred miles along the coastline of Augusta’s Sinebar continent, then extended almost as far inland. At its peak, home to a billion people, all of them devoted to one ideal: making money. In those days, the city boasted over a million factories, producing every consumer product the human race had ever dreamt up. The heavy industrial plants consumed the minerals ruthlessly strip-mined from Augusta’s other continents, spewing their contaminated effluent out into the oceans. Its wormhole station, New Costa Junction, with its strategic connection back to Earth, boasted fifty wormhole generators creating permanent gateways to the thriving, ambitious new H-congruous planets still further away from the old homeworld. Gateways that were the perfect export routes, enabling those Halcion worlds to develop cleaner greener societies by transferring their industrial pollution debt to Augusta, where no one cared. Multiplanetary corporations, entrepreneurs, financiers – all of them spent their work-addict life in New Costa’s endless, centreless chequerboard of industrial districts and residential zones. And when it was all over, when they were burnt out and prematurely aged, they’d re-life and do it all over again – and again – forcing themselves a little further up the corporate ladder each time in a way that would have made Darwin shudder.

Augusta’s commercial expansion was performed with a ruthless imperial nonchalance, conquering all it reached out to. That was back in the era of the Starflyer War, nine hundred years ago: the Commonwealth’s first and, to-date, only interstellar conflict. Victory came in no small part thanks to the terrible and sophisticated weapons developed, then mass-produced on Augusta.

All of which made New Costa as rich in history as it was poor in culture. If you looked down on the ramshackle old road grid and chaotic layout of neighbourhoods, it was a history that could be read like the rings of a terrestrial tree.

Flying away from New Costa Junction, Nigel Sheldon had a perfect view of all that living archaeology as he turned his capsule’s forward fuselage transparent. For all that the megacity was in a period of drastic reduction, the old CST (Compression Space Transport) station was still as busy as ever. The three ancient terminus buildings were still standing, each one with a roof that spanned a square mile. Today it was mainly people who used the wormholes that knitted the Central worlds together. When he’d started the company, it was trains that zipped through the wormholes, carrying freight and passengers between disparate planets. Nowadays, with fabricators and replicators reproducing most things, including themselves, consumerism was effectively dead on the Central worlds. Anybody could assemble whatever they wanted in their own home. In practice, though, there were limits. Large or sophisticated machines were still built in New Costa. The megacity had even held on to its lead in starship manufacture, accounting for nearly thirty per cent of the Commonwealth’s total.

The capsule headed north, keeping parallel to the coast, its ellipsoid shape pushing through the air at just below subsonic speed. Right on the shore he could see the big airbarges hovering above the waves, with dozens of smaller earthmover bots loading them up with soil. It was the Port Klye peninsula – now crater, he acknowledged wryly. In the good old days there had been thirty-five massive nuclear fission reactors sited there, providing cheap energy to almost ten per cent of the city. Today the clean-up was almost complete. Before long, the giant hole would be filled in and turned into a wildlife park. Not that Augusta had much native vegetation or animal life, which was one reason he’d chosen it as the ideal location to build his corporate fiefdom.

His u-shadow told him he had a call from his wife. ‘I’m not going to make it tonight,’ she told him.

‘Why not?’ He tried not to make it sound petulant. He and Anine Saleeb had been married for eighty years now, a record – for both of them. She was only four hundred and thirty, while he was now close to his one thousand three hundredth birthday. That meant that being together all of the time wasn’t as important as it had been even six hundred years ago, back when he still had a harem and lived a ridiculously lavish multi-trillionaire’s lifestyle to the full. But they had been apart for a month now. He missed her.

‘There’s been some hanky-panky going on at our McLeod facility,’ she told him.

Nigel blinked in surprise. ‘Hanky-panky?’

‘The managers think the smartcore has been compromised.’

‘Why?’ he asked in genuine puzzlement. The Sheldon Dynasty’s McLeod facility had been tasked with building a hundred and fifty huge exospheric stations that would float just outside Earth’s atmosphere, ultimately providing the entire planet with a T-sphere, allowing practical teleportation anywhere on the surface. It wasn’t a controversial project; ANA: Governance had only commissioned it after a long and no doubt tediously parochial debate amid the many political factions that flourished within humanity’s downloaded personalities.

‘Production hasn’t been disrupted, so it wasn’t sabotage,’ Anine said. ‘Admiral Kazimir believes it may be the Knights Guardians movement.’

One thousand two hundred and ninety-six years old he might have been, and possessing all the phenomenal emotional control only a life so long could bring, but Nigel still let out a sigh of dismay. ‘Not Far Away again? Will that planet never stop being a problem?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘What do they want with the McLeod smartcore?’

‘Navy Intelligence suggests the Knights Guardians want to build their own T-sphere.’

‘Why don’t they just ask us for one? ANA hasn’t restricted the technology to the Central worlds. It’s just horribly complex. I can barely understand the operational theories myself.’

‘Probably because we wouldn’t give them one that’s weaponized.’

‘Oh, that goddamn psycho woman. She’s been in suspension for six hundred years already, and she’s still casting a paranoid shadow.’

‘Never mind, darling. Three more years and our colony ships will be ready.’

‘Yeah.’ It had taken him long enough, but five years ago Nigel had finally decided to do what so many others had done, and leave the Commonwealth behind to start a fresh civilization a long, long way away. The Sheldon Dynasty had sent out transgalactic colonies before, and Nigel had almost gone with them. But there was always one more problem to deal with, one more political fight, one more . . . Until now. Now he was finally going to turn his back on it all for good and find time for himself. This time . . .

‘I’ll see you in a few days,’ Anine said.

‘Good.’

Nigel’s u-shadow ended the link. As the capsule raced away from Port Klye, he saw one of the airbarges lumber up into the sky and fly towards New Costa Junction. It would be using the zero-end wormhole at the station, which opened in deep space, the most convenient and safest place to dump radioactive waste, or some other industrial contaminate material. These days it was used almost exclusively to dump Augusta’s toxic legacy where it would do no harm. That hadn’t always been the case. The zero-end was originally built for discreet disposal to assist the commodities market. Back in the day, surplus harvests or an excess of rare minerals had been quietly shoved out into oblivion, assisting the market price, reaping bigger profits for the financial sectors at the expense of the consumer.

‘What were we doing?’ Nigel murmured as he visualized millions of tonnes of golden grain streaming off into the interstellar night. Cheap food that could have made ordinary people’s lives just that little bit easier and reduced the wealth of people like himself by micro-percentage points.

Those economics were thankfully over. At least in the Central worlds, almost all of which had switched to Higher culture. So many of the External worlds continued to follow the old-style economic and financial patterns. Their politicians claimed it gave them freedom – which Nigel just laughed at. Fortunately, there was a steady migration of citizens inwards, firstly to lead calm and easy lives on the Central worlds before inevitably downloading their minds into ANA, which was the closest the human race had come to a technological version of heaven. So maybe those conniving politicians did have a point. He was too much of an individualist to contemplate a download. It was interesting that most people retreated into ANA after three or four centuries knocking about the Commonwealth, whereas those who pressed on over six or seven hundred years tended to stay in their (heavily modified and enriched) bodies, almost as if ANA was some kind of illicit temptation and if you avoided it you could reach true maturity.

The capsule curved inland, following the main airborne traffic stream for the Cromarty Hills. Other capsules formed a fluid matrix around him, shiny metallic ellipsoids ploughing through the hot clear air, shining so brightly under the star’s blue-white glare that they appeared to have their own halos. Beneath him was the long serpentine ribbon of the ten-lane Medani freeway, standing above the slender river on thick pillars as it followed the floor of the shallow meandering valley all the way back to the hinterlands. Most of the road had been converted now, mutating from a sturdy grey and black ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete to a weird botanical symbiot colony. With the advent of regrav capsules, New Costa had been quick to abandon its roads. Roads needed annual maintenance dollars spent on them. Air traffic only needed a smartcore controller.

Now bots crawled along the Medani freeway, laying a complex weave of biological arteries around the concrete. More bots tunnelled into the ground below the support pillars, creating a root network to feed the modified freeway. Nutrients pulsed along the new arterial plexus, supporting an incredible diversity of vegetation. The native plants from hundreds of worlds had been genetically adapted so that they could all be sustained by the same nutrient fluid. The end creation was a wild river of jungle winding its way through the shrinking city, curving down to parks along the old off-ramps and intersections in a strangely exotic three-dimensional growth curve that nature could never produce.

Nigel could still remember meeting with the bunch of crazy artists who’d begged him for the opportunity to do something other than the standard flatten-and-replant policy that gripped so many of the Central worlds’ shrinking cities. He’d agreed, not just because such a revamp might well be a truly spectacular art statement, but as a kind of acknowledgement of how different their environment could become. It was also an oblique tip of the hat to the enigmatic Planters, who had left behind truly huge hybrid organic constructs on the worlds they’d visited. Nigel’s Dynasty had finally cracked their nanotech inheritance, adapting it into the biononics which the Commonwealth knew. Biononics gave any and every user command of the very molecules which made up their own bodies, as well as making new generations of replicators possible. Ironically, the technology incorporated within the bots was now also rendering whole swathes of New Costa obsolete.

Yet, for all its population was reducing on a daily basis, New Costa was still home to over a hundred million people. The residential districts with smaller mass-grown drycoral homes where all the low-level company workers used to live had been reduced and turned to parkland connected to the synergistic freeways. But the districts with the larger mansions and elegant condos – those round the fringes of the city, away from the worst industrial excesses – still remained. That was where the majority of people lived now.

Nigel had an estate in the heart of the Cromarty Hills, two hundred square miles of manicured gardens and immaculate old-style parkland on the edge of the megacity. The palace in the very middle was a ludicrous anachronism now, effectively a single-building town that had been capable of accommodating his entire household. That was back when he had a vast immediate family and an entourage of managers and lawyers – all of whom had their own staff – who would travel between his lordly residences on many planets, settling for a few months in one then moving on like some royal procession in medieval times. A life lived in a fashion which made the old French Sun King seem cheap and small.

The estate’s smartcore ran a final check on the capsule and its solitary passenger as it decelerated across the threshold. Enlightened he might be – relatively speaking – but Nigel was still quite assiduous about his privacy. Especially on this day.

His u-shadow directed the capsule to land outside the lake house. A lake three miles long and two wide, with islands of rock pinnacles whose crests were covered in a thatch of verdant vegetation. They’d taken years to craft and carve from local rock, and as far as cost was concerned, it was trivial compared to the sum his CST co-owner Ozzie had spent converting an asteroid into his habitat home. The only normal, flattish island was in the middle, with a semi-circular white marble pavilion structure above the shore. Most of the island was well-tended forest, but it had a lush verdant lawn stretching between the water and the building. That was where the capsule came down.

‘Who’s here?’ he asked the smartcore as he stepped out onto the lawn. Weeping willow leaves rustled softly in the warm El Iopi wind that blew out of the heart of the continent. The humidity was as strong as always. He started to perspire almost at once.

‘There are forty-two Dynasty members currently in residence, along with a hundred and seventeen associates and estate personnel. They are occupying twenty-six buildings. As requested, the lake house is empty, as are all buildings around the shore.’

‘Good.’ Nigel put on a pair of mirrorshades and squinted up into the sky. The glare point that was Regulus was poised above the rolling mountain crests and sinking slowly. It would be night in a couple of hours. ‘I will be having a visitor in three hours. Their starship will be diplomatic coded. Let them through the security screen on my authority. Do not inform anyone else of their arrival.’

‘Understood.’

Nigel hurried inside where the aircon would be on and he could get ready.

*

Five hours previously, Nigel had been on Nova Zealand, a Central world that just about qualified as H-congruous. Recella, one of his great-great-great-granddaughters, was getting married for the first time. As Nigel had two hundred and thirty-eight children (that he knew of), it wasn’t exactly a rare event. But her mother, Koloza, was on the Dynasty board and had also signed up for the latest colony project. Family obligation . . .

It wasn’t unknown to receive a call from the High Angel, just extremely rare. CST had discovered the alien arkship in orbit around the gas giant Icalanise back in 2163. It looked like an unusually regular asteroid, except for the twelve giant crystal-roofed domes on stalks sticking out from the rocky surface. Closer inspection of the transparent domes revealed that they contained cities. It was a Raiel ship, though there were other species living in the domes. At the time, the Raiel didn’t reveal what the High Angel’s purpose was; that only became clear four hundred years later, once the Endeavour was turned away from the Wall stars around the Void. The Raiel had built High Angel, and countless other arkships, to evacuate representative populations of sentient species from the galaxy should the Void begin its terminal expansion phase.

Ever since first contact, the Raiel had enjoyed excellent diplomatic relations with the Commonwealth, even propagating New Glasgow, a dome city on High Angel for humans to live in. Then, after the Endeavour encounter, the Navy had been invited to join their observation of the Void. The Raiel didn’t release any of their advanced technology, despite numerous requests, claiming they didn’t want to disrupt the Commonwealth’s natural sociotechnological development. Even with constant contact, they remained an enigma.

‘Accept the call,’ Nigel told his u-shadow. The wedding ceremony itself was over by then, and the relatively modest reception had just begun. Koloza had hired an entire resort village in the Fire Plain, a crater in the arctic surrounded by active volcanoes that heated the land to tropical levels.

‘Thank you for talking to me,’ the High Angel said courteously in a smooth male voice.

Nigel grinned as Recella and her new wife took to the open-air dance floor; both girls looked blissfully happy. Somewhere beyond the resort’s armed perimeter, the cries of mighty dinosaur-equivalent creatures rolled across the swamps. ‘You knew I would. Who refuses a call from you?’

‘Ozzie has been known to.’

‘Of course he has. What can I do for you?’

‘I would like you to meet a Raiel representative. She wishes to discuss an important topic with you.’

‘Interesting. Why didn’t she just call me direct?’

‘Your unisphere is relatively secure. However, I would expect the Commonwealth Navy Intelligence office to monitor all calls originating from me, especially one from a Raiel.’

‘Fair point. All right, I’ll meet her. Where?’

‘We would suggest somewhere that affords some privacy.’

‘I know just the place.’

*

After he’d taken a spore shower, Nigel got dressed in the lake house’s master bedroom, choosing a simple pale brown silk suit with a semiorganic lining that contracted snugly round him. Check the mirrors to see blond hair that was still pleasingly thick, though he could do with a cut. Jaw nicely flat, cheeks not too rounded. His one concession to cosmetic sequencing was green eyes; otherwise he’d kept his own features. Unlike everyone else these days, he didn’t hold his biological appearance in his twenties, preferring mid-thirties to give a touch of maturity. Even today people passed judgement on purely visual clues. It mattered not that his brain was genetically and biononically enhanced beyond anything nature could ever achieve, and the ancillary lacuna now stored every memory from his life; before such advances he’d had to edit entire decades from his mind each time he underwent rejuvenation to avoid the inevitable clutter confusion such an excessive accumulation of experience produced. But today, with secondary routines handling recollection, every day of those thirteen hundred years was instantly available – every mistake, triumph, love, heartbreak, political manoeuvre, discovery, disappointment, wonder and grubby deal that made his personality what it was.

‘The Raiel ship has entered Augusta’s atmosphere,’ the estate’s smartcore told him.

‘Thank you. Let it land, then shield and screen the estate. No exceptions.’

‘Understood.’

The interior of the marble lake house always made Nigel think of some Scandinavian church. It was all down to the high vaulting ceilings and plain lines, complemented by simple curving furniture in white and grey. It was as if the place wasn’t quite finished, but they’d started using it anyway. The principal lounge had a big arched window wall looking out across the dark water beyond the shore. The centre of the glass parted to allow Nigel out onto the lawn.

Trees from Illuminatus had been planted on the rock pinnacle islands; at night, after Regulus had departed the sky, their bioluminescence came alive, crowning the islands in a soft blue and purple phosphorescence. Long reflection ribbons shimmered across the water like icy flames, the only visual beacons guiding visitors down.

Nigel’s enriched vision showed him the Raiel craft while it was still fifteen miles high. He fed the estate’s sensor data into his sight, amplifying the image.

The craft was a twenty-metre sphere with a flat base. It was emitting gravitational distortions similar to a Commonwealth regrav drive.

Nigel watched it land in the centre of the lawn. His biononic fieldscan function caught a T-sphere expanding, and a Raiel was teleported onto the grass in front of him.

He arched an eyebrow. Very dramatic. Overuse of technology, though. What’s wrong with a simple malmetal hatch? ‘Welcome to Augusta,’ he said out loud.

The Raiel was larger than a terrestrial elephant, with a tough looking grey-green hide. That was where any equivalence died. For Nigel, standing directly in front of the alien, it was like looking at the crown of an octopus. The wide rounded head was surrounded by tentacles that varied from the pair closest to the ground, which were long and strong, clearly evolved for heavy work, up to clusters of smaller, more agile, appendages. Behind the array of tentacles, odd ropes of flesh dangled down like flaccid feelers, weighted by heavy knobs of technology – or maybe just jewellery, he conceded.

‘Thank you for receiving me,’ the Raiel said from a mouth that was all damp folds. ‘I am Vallar, High Angel’s designated liaison with the warrior Raiel.’

‘Indeed? Please come in. I am delighted to grant you the freedom of my house.’

‘You are most kind.’

Vallar walked over to the lake house. She had eight short legs along each side of her body; devoid of joints, they moved in pairs, tilting up and forwards to move her along in an elegant undulation. Nigel had to lengthen his stride to keep up.

The entrance in the window wall widened further to accommodate Vallar, then closed behind her. Nigel ordered the smartcore to activate another layer of privacy shielding around the building.

‘I hope we are secure enough now?’ Nigel asked. He remained standing. Somehow flopping back into a chair in front of the imposing alien would have seemed vaguely rude.

Her eyes were clusters of five separate small hemispheres that swivelled round in unison to focus on him. ‘Completely. I thank you for the courtesy.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

‘We are extremely interested in the latest development in the Commonwealth concerning the Void.’

‘Ah,’ Nigel murmured, and started to relax. ‘Of course. Inigo.’

Inigo was a human who had allegedly started to have dreams about a life lived by an adolescent named Edeard, living on a planet called Querencia inside the Void. Edeard’s story was of an idealist making his way through some quasi-medieval society but with telepathic powers thrown in. So far Inigo had released four of these astonishingly detailed dreams through the gaiafield and was just starting the fifth. A lot of people thought they were perfect forgeries, fantasy dramas produced by some External world company who were enacting the mother of all product placements. But a lot more people – tens of millions already, and increasing daily – were utterly convinced by the visions Inigo alone had been mystically granted. Living Dream was a growing movement that wanted to live the same life as Edeard, and people flocked to Inigo to await further revelations. He was rapidly turning into the human race’s latest unnervingly plausible messiah, offering a glimpse into a very strange universe indeed, where you lived a simpler, yet very different life.

Nigel looked up at the Raiel’s eyeclusters. ‘I can’t vouch that those dreams are real. Humans are capable of very ingenious deceptions, for a variety of reasons, not all of which make sense.’

‘The fourth dream shows Edeard travelling to the city of Makkathran.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Nigel didn’t quite blush, but he felt a mild embarrassment at admitting he’d accessed all the dreams – a twelve-year-old caught sipping his father’s beer. ‘It was an odd city. Built by aliens.’

‘It is one of ours.’

‘What?’

‘Makkathran is one of the warships that formed our armada. It was part of the invasion we sent into the Void a million years ago.’

‘You’re shitting me!’ Nigel blurted.

‘I am not.’

‘No. Of course. Sorry. But . . . are you sure?’

‘Yes. It is what convinced us that the dreams are genuine, that Inigo is somehow connected to Edeard. And that Edeard himself is real. How else would he know that name? Even we had almost forgotten it. And then there is the shape of the city, as well as its crystal wall.’

Nigel flinched, angry with himself for not seeing the obvious. Makkathran was circular, with a crystal wall running round it. ‘Sonofabitch. It’s perfectly circular, and the city wall is the base of a dome. How obvious. Then the rest of the ship must be buried underneath. I didn’t know you had canals in your cities.’

‘We don’t. Our ships have an integral mattershift ability. Your species witnessed High Angel shape New Glasgow to suit you. This is what has happened here. Some other species lived in Makkathran, and the ship crafted itself to their needs.’

Nigel sat down in one of the lounge’s oversized couches. ‘And then they all got carried off by Skylords to live in the Heart of the Void, isn’t that the local religion?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow. So that’s what’s inside the Void? A spacetime continuum that permits mental powers? How the hell does it do that?’

‘We do not know. Nigel, this is the first glimpse we have ever been granted into the Void. Our armada failed. No ship ever returned. We thought they were all dead, that the Void had defeated them. Now it seems at least one has survived.’

‘Okay,’ he said, becoming wary. ‘So what do you want?’

‘I have come to you because you are the leader of the Commonwealth.’

Nigel held up a hand, palm outwards. ‘Hardly. I drove a lot of its development and policy at the start, back when wealth mattered. But that was a long time ago. ANA: Governance bosses the Central worlds around now; as for the External worlds, hell, they’ve got political parties to pounce on every grudge. And as a species, we’re prolifically inventive when it comes to grudges.’

Vallar didn’t move. ‘Nonetheless, you remain the single most powerful individual alive in the Commonwealth today.’

‘I have influence outside the norm, yeah.’

‘We need to investigate Inigo’s dreams. It is urgent.’

‘There are certain resources available to me,’ he admitted slowly. ‘But . . . You turn back every ship from the Wall stars. I know this. I accessed the Navy reports on the stealth ships Admiral Kazimir has tried to slip past you. So how did humans wind up in there? And that civilization Edeard lives in is – what, a couple of thousand years old? Was the Void snatching people from Earth back in medieval times? No, wait; don’t Edeard and Salrana talk about ships falling onto Querencia?’

‘We do not know how humans got into the Void. This lack is greatly disturbing to us. However, one of your inter-galactic colony fleets disappeared two hundred years ago.’

‘Disappeared?’ Nigel barked. ‘What do you mean, disappeared? And if you knew that, why haven’t you informed us?’

‘It was the second Brandt fleet, consisting of seven starships. The warrior Raiel who guard the Wall stars monitored it flying past the galactic core at considerable distance. Then they lost track of it. Please understand the monitoring was not constant. The warrior Raiel are only concerned with starships that venture close. It is possible that the fleet changed course, or decided to settle a pleasant world they found in this galaxy – and we are looking for that right now. However, it is equally possible they were somehow taken inside the Void.’

‘If that’s right, then time inside the Void is different – faster,’ he mused. ‘Well, why not? Giving people telepathic powers is a lot weirder. Temporal flow is a much simpler manipulation of spacetime; we’ve done it enough inside wormholes.’

‘The method by which humans got inside the Void is possibly a higher concern to us than even the existence of Makkathran.’

‘How so?’

‘A fleet of starships two hundred years ago, or a pre-technology civilization on Earth. Either would mean the Void has an ability to bring sentient species inside that we did not know about, and cannot detect. Frankly, we are very worried. Our million-year vigil may have been for nothing.’

‘Huh, yeah, I see that.’ Nigel took a breath and stood up again. ‘Vallar, I will be happy to help you investigate Inigo as thoroughly as needed. And you were right to come to me; playing by the rules would mean Inigo could stall any normal government disclosure request for decades in the courts if he wanted.’