Things might have gone differently for him if this punitive expedition had failed, but he’d proven himself too good a commander and showed every sign of growing too independent. Doomed by his own success, he’d been brought to heel by Armand Nabuco, and now Loc and everyone else in the Brazilian occupation force were wondering what would happen to them when Euclides Peixoto assumed power. It was generally expected that he would remove all those suspected of remaining loyal to the deposed general, but no one knew how deep or extensive the cuts would be, or what would happen to those deemed unworthy of his trust.
Loc was glad, now, that the general had not rewarded him for the capture of Avernus’s daughter; glad that it had ended badly and he’d been forced to return to his obscure and humiliating position; glad that after he’d first been slighted by the general he’d had the foresight to reach out to Euclides Peixoto, pass on some tidbits of gossip, and do the man a few small favours.
All in all, Loc believed that he might win considerable advantage from the president’s death. Like everyone else, he signed a declaration of loyalty to both the president pro-tem and Euclides Peixoto, and could do nothing else but hope that he had not attracted the attention of the OSS. He sent word to his various Outer contacts that they should keep quiet until things had shaken out, and decided that he would keep a low profile too, stay away from Paris, bide his time. Discretion was all.
But then, a week before the ships from Earth were due to arrive, he received a summons from Arvam Peixoto.
Loc decided that ignoring it would be worse than obeying, and besides, it would give him the chance to observe the general’s plight at first hand. He might learn something useful. Nevertheless, he was gripped by a chilly dread when he travelled down to the garden habitat once owned by the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, now a prison in all but name. As if he was stepping into the jaws of a beast that could swallow him whole, and spit out his bones.
He arrived at the mansion at the centre of the habitat precisely on time, but was kept waiting in an antechamber for more than an hour. He watched military and civilian personnel come and go in the big room until at last a captain of the OSS, a severe young woman dressed in trim grey uniform tunic and breeches and knee-length black leather boots polished to a mirror finish, came up and told him that she’d take him to the general. Loc didn’t dare ask any questions as she led him out of the mansion and they crossed the patchwork of lawns and gardens and orchards. She clumsily hauled herself along the network of tethers, clearly unused to Dione’s microgravity; he ankled along beside her like a native, anticipation hollowing his stomach.
They found the general at the edge of the rim forest that circled the perimeter of the habitat, accompanied by a handful of Air Defence Force officers and Sri Hong-Owen’s son, Berry. Loc recognised one of the officers: Captain Neves, the woman who’d helped him capture Avernus’s daughter, since promoted to the general’s staff. Beyond this little party, a handful of dwarfed cattle were grazing in the long grass under a stand of giant chestnut trees. They were the size of large dogs, with shaggy auburn coats and horns that bent at right angles.
Arvam Peixoto seemed to be in a good mood, telling Loc that he was late and had nearly missed all the fun, calling for his gun. One of the officers presented him with an ancient ball-and-powder rifle with a long barrel and ornate chasings on its side plates. He went down on one knee and showed Berry how to load it - an elaborate ceremony that involved blowing into the barrel to moisten it, pouring black powder through a drop tube and tamping it down with a rod, sliding in a round ball seated on a scrap of cloth, tamping again, and finally cocking the hammer and placing a percussion cap on its nipple - and then asked the boy to choose a target. Berry played up to the moment, pointing to one animal and then another, frowning with concentration, finally settling on a cow on the far side of the little herd. He’d grown since Loc had last seen him, was about ten centimetres taller and at least twenty kilogrammes heavier, but still possessed the same sulky and obdurate demeanour, the same loutish slyness.
The general shaded his eyes, studying the animal. ‘Did you choose it because it’s the best, or because it’s the furthest away?’ he said.
‘I know you can do it,’ Berry said.
The two of them smiling at each other. The general happy to show off his prowess; the boy excited. Both were dressed in sky-blue fatigues.
The general allowed Berry to hold the rifle, and took a long swig from his flask. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, capped the flask and fastened it to his belt, and took back the rifle and braced himself against the trunk of one of the trees. Glancing over at Loc, explaining that recoil was a serious problem in low gravity: it could knock you onto your back or send you flying, either way you’d miss your mark by a mile.
‘And that wouldn’t do, would it? Who knows what or who I might hit,’ the general said. He fitted the stock of the rifle against his shoulder and sighted along its barrel, taking his time. Berry stood close to him, his lower lip caught between his teeth and his dark eyes shining as he studied with grave concentration the shaggy little cow that was obliviously ripping up mouthfuls of grass, neatly spotlighted by a shaft of chandelier light that pierced the canopy of the big trees. When the shot came, it was absurdly loud. Birds flared from the trees all around and cattle jinked away, bounding with surprising grace into a deeper part of the wood, leaving behind the one that Berry had pointed out, lying heartshot in the long grass.
Berry laughed, a hoarse bark, and clapped in delight. ‘You killed it!’
‘Let’s go see,’ the general said.
He handed the rifle to one of the officers and Loc and everyone else followed him through the long grass, ankling heel-and-toe, while Berry skipped ahead, circling the stricken cow, daring to touch its flank, skipping back when it shuddered and gave a profound sigh.
‘It isn’t dead!’
‘Yes, it is,’ the general said. ‘It just doesn’t know it yet. A bit like the Outers, eh, Mr Ifrahim?’
‘Indeed, sir.’
The cow’s wet brown eye, half-hidden by an auburn fringe, rolled to look up at Arvam Peixoto when he straddled its neck. The general snapped the button on the sheath at his hip and pulled out a knife with a bone handle and a hooked blade. He kissed the blade, caught hold of one of the animal’s crooked horns and jerked up its head, and sawed through the taut skin of its throat. Blood welled along the cut, a rich red flood running out across the trampled grass, darkening the knees of Berry’s fatigue pants as he knelt beside the animal, leaning close and staring into its eye as if trying to look down the fixed and unfocused well of its pupil to the seat of its little mind and scry the moment when it let go of life. The general dipped his forefinger in the puddling blood, caught hold of Berry’s arm, drew him close, swiped his bloody forefinger down the boy’s forehead to the bridge of his nose and told him that he would have the honour of making the kill the next time. The two of them gilded in the shaft of chandelier light like heroes of a tale from the long ago.
Loc couldn’t help wondering if this little moment was for the benefit of the boy or for him. Then Berry barked a short raspy laugh, broke free and bounded away, chasing after the cattle which had scattered amongst the trees, his gleeful whoops rising towards the great panes of the dome’s roof that slanted close above the treetops.
Captain Neves went after him, moving with a steady and purposeful gait, while the general told Loc that he was determined to wipe out the herd before he left.
‘Denying Euclides a source of succulent steaks is a small pleasure, but I confess that I relish it. We did good work here, Mr Ifrahim. We might have done much more but for circumstances, eh?’
‘I’m sure you’re right, sir.’
‘What do you think of Berry?’
The general’s mismatched gaze, one eye dark brown, the other pale blue, was unsettling. The odour of brandy floated on his breath.
‘He’s growing up,’ Loc said.
‘He has had a difficult childhood. Professor Doctor Hong-Owen may be a genius, but she’s about as maternal as a scorpion. I’ve tried to do my best, but I can no longer take care of him. Nor can I protect him from Euclides, should Euclides decide to use him as a pawn to keep the Professor Doctor under control.’
Loc could not point out that the general had been keeping Berry in the garden habitat for precisely that reason.
‘So I have a last favour to ask of you, Mr Ifrahim,’ the general said. ‘I want you to take Berry to his mother. Think you can do that?’
‘I am always at the service of the TPA,’ Loc said, trying his best to ignore the OSS officer’s speculative gaze, keeping his expression neutral, showing nothing of the anger he felt at having been sandbagged like this. He had more than enough to do without looking after the gene wizard’s weird brat, and doing a favour for the general would almost certainly taint him, too. But he couldn’t refuse it. Arvam Peixoto was still a power, and he knew enough to ruin Loc if he cared to.
‘Captain Neves will accompany you,’ the general said. ‘She is Berry’s aide, and has proven herself extremely capable. I trust you have no objections.’
‘Of course not,’ Loc said, although he had every objection conceivable. Not to Captain Neves; he liked the woman, and hadn’t been in any way jealous when she’d been appointed to the general’s staff. But it was clear that the general was paying off old scores in his usual sly fashion. Raising Loc’s profile, tying him to Sri Hong-Owen . . .
‘Professor Doctor Hong-Owen is on Mimas, with that crew of hers. Looking into yet another of those strange gardens. I’m sure that she’ll be happy to be reunited with her son, and it will be a considerable relief to know that Berry is in safe hands,’ the general said. ‘I would ask you to stay to dinner, Mr Ifrahim, but I think you should set out as soon as you can. Goodbye. Oh, and the best of luck.’
‘Watch and learn,’ Loc Ifrahim told Captain Neves, six days later. ‘This is what happens when the Outers are allowed to keep their so-called democracy.’
They were standing in front of one of the big sheets of transparent plastic welded to the external framing of the Caucus House of Camelot, Mimas. It was one of the biggest buildings in the city, an open sphere housing six storeys of platforms and capsule rooms, slung from and interpenetrated by the branches of a huge banyan tree. Before the war, it had been the venue where citizens had met to discuss problems and thrash out policies; now it was the administrative headquarters of the transitional government. The occupying force had wrapped it with a plastic skin, cleared foliage and hanging houses and shops and workshops around it, and laid fullerene mesh on the ground between the multiple trunks of the banyan, ringing it with a plaza a hundred metres wide.
At the eastern edge of this open space, Outers were clustered on rising tiers of branches, banners strung amongst them and clouds of light projected into the air - slogans, long texts detailing the latest affronts to their so-called social democracy, video art packed with strobing, incomprehensible but no doubt highly significant images. Someone was shouting through a bullhorn; others were drumming up a storm. Down on the plaza, a number of protesters had shackled themselves in a circle around one of the banyan’s trunks, and a contingent of military police in white coveralls and white helmets with mirrored visors were busy amongst them, cutting their shackles with welding pistols and hauling them away.
As Loc Ifrahim and Captain Neves studied this circus, something bird-sized flew through the air above the plaza and suckered itself head-first to the plastic right in front of them. Loc flinched and stepped back before he realised what it was; Captain Neves hardly blinked, studying the thing with a narrow and intently serious expression as it began to chant slogans about peace and love in a raucous screech that rattled and shook the huge pane of plastic. Then a drone stooped down like a hawk on a sparrow, plucked the little machine from the plastic, and dropped away towards its handler on the plaza below, where the police had freed the last of the shackled protesters and were towing them away towards a rolligon while the ragged crowd up in the trees jeered and clapped.
‘One of the security people told me they do this shit each and every day,’ Captain Neves said. She had put on her dress blues for the meeting with the city’s military governor and stood straight-backed with her hat tucked under her left arm, her buzz-cut freshly trimmed, her coffee-coloured face sternly composed. She looked as if she were posing for a recruiting poster. ‘I don’t get it. Why aren’t they all locked up?’
‘What would be illegal in Paris is a legitimate peaceful protest here,’ Loc said. ‘Sanctioned by the city council and the elusive Colonel Malarte.’
‘It’s disrespectful,’ Captain Neves said. ‘And doing nothing about it makes us look weak.’
‘What would you do, if you were in command?’
‘I’d disrespect them right back,’ Captain Neves said.
‘That would certainly get their attention. Of course, it might also create martyrs. And martyrs are very effective recruiting tools for causes like this.’
‘When someone in a squad breaks regs or screws up, no one rats him out. Which is exactly how it should be if the squad is going to hang together. You deal with it by punishing the whole squad. So if a few tweaks choose to misbehave, you should punish all of them. Make them all martyrs. And because I bet they don’t have the stones for that, pretty soon they’ll start policing themselves.’
‘If anyone could punish an entire city, it’s you,’ Loc said.
Captain Bethany Neves was several years younger than Loc. Her parents had both been in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps, and she’d led a grim, gypsy life as they worked to rewild section by section the vast ruined desert in the heart of the former United States of America. She didn’t share her parents’ belief that the world could be healed by ripping up the remains of old towns and suburbs, cleaning up rivers and lakes, and laboriously restoring topsoil and planting catch grass and willows. No, she’d wanted to get away from all that, so she’d joined the Air Defence Force and worked her way up through the ranks. She wasn’t bright or especially talented, and she didn’t know how the first thing about playing service politics, but she was a determined and avid student. Loc was amused and flattered by her intense manner and eager questions, and admired the way she dealt with Berry’s stygian sulks and volcanic bouts of bad temper. At their first breakfast together, Berry had squirted a bulb of pomegranate juice at Loc. Captain Neves had snatched the bulb from the boy and slapped him hard in one quick motion, and when he’d lashed out at her she’d pinned him down, pulled off her belt and doubled it, and beaten him mercilessly. Later, she’d told Loc that she’d often been left in charge of smaller kids when she’d been growing up, and had quickly learned that swift justice and strict discipline was the easiest option. The trick was to leave welts rather than bruises, she said. Welts faded in a few days, but bruises took much longer to disappear.