There was silence for a moment.
'Psullus/ said Ravenor quickly, changing the subject with a diplomat's deftness, 'I have a number of works for you that I collected on Lethe, including a palimpsest of the Analecta Phaenomena…'
Psullus engaged the young interrogator eagerly. Aemos, von Baigg and Nayl continued to debate the Imperial intrigue. Bequin and Surskova made their goodnights and withdrew. I took my crystal balloon of amasec to the glass wall and looked out into the oceanic depths. Kircher joined me after a moment. He smoothed the front of his navy blue jacket and put on his black gloves before speaking.
'We had intruders last month/ he said quietly.
I looked round at him. "When?'
Three times, in fact/ he said, 'though I didn't realise that until the third occasion. During night cycle about six weeks ago, I had what seemed to be a persistent fault on the alarms covering the seawall vents. There was no further sign, and the servitors replaced that section of the system. Then again, a week later, on the service entrance to the food stores, and the outer doors of the Distaff annex, both on the same night. I suspected a system corruption, and planned an overhaul of the entire alarm net. The following week, I found the security code on the outer locks of the main door had been defaulted to zero. Someone had been in and left again. I scoured the building and found vox-thieves buried in the walls of six rooms, including your inner chambers, and discreet farcoders wired into three communication junction nodes, spliced to vox and pict lines. Someone had also tried, and failed, to force their way into your void-vault, but they didn't know the shield codes/
'And there were no traces?'
'No prints, no microspores, no follicles. I washed the air itself through the particle scrubber. The in-house pict recorders show nothing… except a beautifully disguised time-jump of thirty-four seconds. The astropaths sensed nothing. In one place, the intruder must have walked across four metres of under-floor pressure pads without setting them off. In retrospect, I realised the two prior incidents, far from being system faults, were experimental tests to probe, gauge and estimate our security net. Trial runs before the actual intrusion. For that, they used a code scrambler on the main doors. If they'd actually been able to crack it, they could have reset the code and I'd never have known they'd been in/
'You've double-checked everything? No more bugs to be found?'
He shook his head. 'Lord, I can only apologise for-'
I held tip a hand. 'No need, Kircher. You've done your job. Show me what they left/
Kircher unrolled a red felt cloth across the top of a table in the quiet of the inner library. He was nervous, and beads of sweat were trickling down from his crest-like shock of white hair.
I hadn't wanted to alarm anyone, so I had asked only Ravenor and Aemos to join us. The room smelled of teak from the shelves, must from the books, and ozone from the suspension fields sustaining especially frail manuscripts.
The felt was laid out. On it lay nine tiny devices, six vox-thieves and three farcoders, each one set in a pearl of solid plastic.
'Once I'd stripped them out, I sealed them in inert gel to make sure they were dead. None were booby trapped/
Gideon Ravenor stepped in and picked up one of the sealed vox-thieves, holding it up to the light.
'Imperial/ he said. 'Unmarked, but Imperial. Very high grade and advanced/
'I thought so too/ said Kircher.
'Military? Secular?' I asked.
Ravenor shrugged. ^Ve could source them to likely manufacturers, but they likely supply all arms of the Imperium/
Aemos's augmetic optics clicked and turned as he peered down at the objects on the cloth. The farcoders/ he began, 'similarly advanced. It takes singular skill to patch one of these successfully into a comm-node/
'It takes singular skill to break in like they did/ I countered.
They have no maker markings, but they're clearly refined models from the Amplox series. Much more refined than the heavy-duty units the military use. It's just conjecture, but I'd say this was beyond the Ministorum too. They're notoriously behind when it comes to tech advancements.'
