Blue Remembered Earth (22 page)

‘I don’t think so, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said. Whatever trouble she was in now, she reckoned, couldn’t be made much worse by trying to keep up with Chama.

She made another effort to slip past the drone.

‘I must insist,’ Mister Pei said. His voice was firm but pleasant, his words tempered with a regretful smile.

‘Please let me past.’

Mister Pei still had his hands behind his back. ‘I must ask you not to compound matters by disobeying a perfectly reasonable request. As I said, the border officials will be here very shortly, and then processing and debriefing may commence. Would you be so good as to give me your name and location? At the moment we can’t localise you more precisely than the Descrutinised Zone.’

‘Then I don’t think I’ll bother, thanks.’

‘It would be in your ultimate interests. Your accomplice will be detained shortly. Any assistance you can give us now will be taken into consideration when we evaluate the penalties for your trespass.’ He smiled again, bringing his hands around to beckon for her cooperation. ‘Who are you, though, and where are you chinging from? We will discover these things in due course, so you may as well tell us now.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to join the dots yourself, Mister Pei.’

‘Is that an unequivocal statement of non-cooperation?’

‘It sounded like one, didn’t it?’

‘Very well.’ Mister Pei looked over his shoulder and nodded. The drone shot through him, straight at the golem. It tore off an arm and blasted the rest of the golem into the soil, where it lay twitching and useless. There was no pain, just an abrupt curtailment of sensory feedback. For a moment Sunday was looking up at the sky, until Mister Pei loomed into view again, bowing over her.

‘I regret that it was necessary to take this action, but you gave us no choice.’

The drone pushed through him and spun until its gun barrel was pointed straight down at her useless body. The muzzle flashed, then everything went black.

She expected to return to the stack-module. Instead her point of view shifted to Chama’s, looking down at a pair of gauntleted hands scooping aside Lunar soil with the plastic-handled garden spade. Chama was kneeling, breathing heavily. He had commenced his excavation in the middle of the area of disturbed ground and had already cut a trench big enough for a body. The suit would be assisting him, but it was still costing Chama much effort.

A duplicate Mister Pei was standing by the dig, remonstrating with Chama as another drone loitered nearby. ‘I must ask you to desist. You have already brought trouble on yourself by trespassing on our territory, and by refusing to cooperate in your detention. Please do not compound matters by performing this unauthorised excavation of Chinese soil.’

Chama dumped a pile of dirt on the side of the trench. ‘Or what, Mister Pei? You’ll shoot me, like you shot the golems? I don’t think so. I’m being observed, you know. There are witnesses.’

‘We are well aware that others are participating in this severe breach of interplanetary law,’ Mister Pei said. ‘Rest assured that the full weight of judicial process will be brought to bear on all offenders. Now please desist from this activity.’

‘I’m still here,’ Gleb said.

‘Me too,’ Sunday added.

‘So am I,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Present,’ Jitendra said enthusiastically. ‘Cosy, isn’t it, inside Chama’s helmet?’

Mister Pei looked aside as the two other drones caught up with the third and triangulated themselves around the digging man. There was only one Mister Pei now: the other figments must have been deemed surplus to requirements. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The border officials.’

A dragon approached, snaking its way through the vacuum as if following the contours of invisible topography. It was crimson and serpentine and abundantly winged and clawed, its face whiskered and vulpine. It belched flames. Some kind of suborbital carrier lodged inside it, a rectangular vehicle with six landing legs and downward-pointing belly-thrusters.

‘Very melodramatic, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said.

‘Think nothing of it. It is the very least we can do for our honoured foreign guests.’

‘It might be an idea to dig a bit faster,’ Sunday said.

A moment later she really was back in the apartment, transfixed by a bar of sunlight cutting across the coffee table. Geoffrey, Gleb and Jitendra were standing there like sleepwalkers, their minds elsewhere. The interlude lasted a second, and then she was back with Chama.

‘I dropped out for a moment there,’ she said. ‘I think they’re squeezing bandwidth again. Did anyone else feel it?’

‘For a second,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I guess we shouldn’t count—’

And then he was gone.

‘Gleb and Jitendra have disappeared as well, so it’s just you and me now,’ Chama said. ‘For as long as the quangle holds.’

‘They’re taking this more seriously than I expected. Have you hit anything yet?’

Chama didn’t answer, too preoccupied with his digging. Mister Pei looked on, shaking his head disappointedly, as if he could envisage a million more favourable ways that this sequence of events could have unfolded, if only everyone had been reasonable and prepared to bend to the iron will of state authority.

The dragon gusted overhead, a slow-motion whip-crack. Its wings were leathery and batlike and flapped too slowly for such an absurdly vast creature. It arched its neck and roared cartoon flames. Stretching out multiple claws, it landed and quickly gathered itself into a coiled python-like mass. The dragon-cloak held for a few seconds and then dissipated as a ramp lowered down from the angled front of the border-enforcement vehicle. Suited figures ducked out, each of them with a rifle-sized weapon gripped two-handed and close to the chest. They came down the ramp in perfect lock step, like a well-drilled ballet troupe.

‘I think we’ve made our point here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now might be a good time to consider surrendering.’

Chama’s spade clanged against something. Sunday felt the jolt all the way through the suit, back through the tangle of ching threads linking the sensorium to her body in the Zone.

‘My god,’ she said.

‘Why are you surprised?’

‘I just am.’

‘What is discovered on or beneath Chinese soil remains Chinese state property,’ Mister Pei said helpfully.

Chama worked feverishly. He began to uncover whatever it was the spade had hit, even as the enforcement agents bounded overland from the transporter. They were not cloaked. Their armoured suits and weapons were intimidating enough.

‘Again, I must ask you to desist,’ Mister Pei said.

Chama kept working. The object, whatever it was, was coming into view. It was a rectangular box, lying lengthwise. The drones had moved forward of Mister Pei, peering down to get a better view. Chama hauled the object out of the trench and set it on the ground, between two piles of excavated soil. It was about the size of a big shoebox, plain metal in construction. Chama’s thick-fingered gloves found an opening mechanism with surprising ease and the lid sprang wide. There was something inside the box, lying loose.

Mechanical junk, all gristle and wires.

‘I must ask you to stand up now,’ Mister Pei said as his officials gathered around Chama.

Chama looked up, taking Sunday’s point of view with him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can arrest me now.’

‘Please relinquish the item,’ Mister Pei said. But Chama was already obeying. He pushed up from his kneeling position, leaving the box and its contents at his feet.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘Curtail the bind, please. Until you have been debriefed.’

‘Curtail it yourself,’ Chama said.

Mister Pei beckoned to one of the enforcement guards. The faceless guard brought his rifle around with the stock facing away from his body and went behind Chama’s back. Sunday saw the guard loom on the helmet’s rear-facing head-up, saw the stock swinging in like a mallet. The blow knocked Chama to the ground, stealing the breath from his lungs.

‘I am afraid it will now prove necessary to apply administrative restraint,’ Mister Pei said.

Chama pushed back into a kneeling position. Another of the guards came forward, unclipping a device like a miniature fire extinguisher from his belt. The guard aimed the device at Chama, then lowered the muzzle slightly, correcting aim so as not to impact any vulnerable areas of his suit. A silver-white stream hosed against Chama’s chest, where the material organised itself into an obscene flattened starfish shape and began to push exploratory tentacles away from its centre of mass, searching for entry points into the suit’s inner workings.

Chama strove to paw the substance away, but it globbed itself around his fingers and quickly set about working its way up the wrist, moving with a vile amoeboid eagerness.

‘Looks like it’s going to be lights out for me in moment or two,’ Chama said. ‘You’ll all be good boys and girls until I’m back, won’t you?’

There was just time for one of Mister Pei’s guards to bend down and pick up the box. The guard took out the object that had been inside it and held it up for inspection, dangling it between two gloved fingers. Sunday had a second look at it then. She’d been wondering if her eyes had fooled her the first time.

But it still looked like junk.

And then the ching bind broke and she was back in the Zone.

They were all shaking. Sunday glanced at her friends and wondered why they couldn’t keep it together, not look so visibly nervous in front of Gleb. Then she caught the adrenalin tremor in her own hands and knew she was just as culpable.

‘It won’t take them long to find out who he is,’ Gleb said. ‘Chama’s not one for rules, but he’d still have had to file some kind of flight plan before taking out that hopper.’

Sunday exhaled heavily. ‘I feel terrible. We should never have got you mixed up in all this.’

‘Chama took this initiative on his own; you weren’t holding a gun to his head. And it’s not as if there wasn’t some self-interest involved as well.’

‘None of which we signed up to,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Shut it, brother. Now is emphatically
not
the time.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and for a moment appeared willing to hold his tongue. ‘But look,’ he went on doggedly, ‘we didn’t ask Chama to put his neck on the line, and now we’re worse off than we were before. We still don’t know what Eunice buried, and in all likelihood we never will. And mark my words: this will break system-wide. Exactly how long do you think it’ll be before the cousins put two and two together?’

Jitendra’s eyes were glazed. ‘I’m scrolling newsfeeds. Nothing’s breaking yet.’

‘Because it only happened five fucking minutes ago,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Maybe it won’t break,’ Sunday said. ‘The Chinese don’t publicise every incursion. They don’t want to give the impression they can’t police the Ghost Wall.’

‘The policing looked pretty effective from where I was sitting,’ Geoffrey countered. ‘And what’s this with you being an expert on international affairs all of a sudden?’

‘No need to be snide, brother. I’m just saying things may not be as bad as you want to make them.’

‘Let’s hope they aren’t,’ Gleb said.

‘Did you get a good look at whatever was in the box?’ Jitendra asked brightly, as if they’d just turned the conversational page onto a happy new chapter.

Sunday shook her head. ‘Not really. Just a glimpse. Looked like junk, to be honest. Some mechanical thing, like a component from a bigger machine. Could’ve been one of your robot parts, for all I know.’

‘That’s not going to get us very far,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Chama saw more than I did. Maybe it was enough.’

Geoffrey put his hands on the table, fingers spread as if he was about to play piano. ‘OK. Let’s take stock here. We just participated in a
crime
.’

Sunday had to admit that the very word had a seductive glamour. To have succeeded in committing a crime, even in the Descrutinised Zone – or from within it, at least – was a rare achievement.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did. A crime. That makes us
criminals
.’ The word tasted odd in her mouth, like an obscure oath. ‘But it was a small crime, in the scheme of things. No one was hurt. Nothing was damaged. There was no malintent. We just wanted to . . . retrieve something that belonged to us.’

‘Are we definitely safe here, or will the Chinese be able to backtrack the ching packets?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘They’re good,’ Sunday said, ‘but our blind gateways should keep us anonymous. At international level they could apply for a retroactive data injunction, but I don’t think it’ll come to that – we trespassed, that’s all; it’s not like we were trying to bring down the state.’ She paused and swallowed. ‘Of course, they could simply
ask
Chama . . .’

‘I wonder how long he’d hold out against interrogation,’ Geoffrey mused.

Gleb shot him a look. ‘Please.’

‘Sorry. But I think we have to ask that question.’

‘Unfortunately my brother’s right,’ Sunday said. ‘Chama might not be put through anything unpleasant, but there’s not much he’ll be able to keep from them if they go for full neural intervention. Still, it might not come to that. The Chinese aren’t idiots. They won’t want to make any more of this than they absolutely have to.’