He knew that Amy Ma Coulibaly would think he had killed Edz Jealott out of revenge, but he’d done it for her. To help her realise her dream of securing the prison until the revolutionaries came and freed everyone.
Zhang Hilton and several others had managed to get to their feet. Zhang Hilton spat a mouthful of blood, wiped his chin with a shaking hand, and told Felice that he was a dead man.
‘I’m a ghost,’ Felice said.
He turned his back to the man and walked away down the tunnel. Ten minutes later he was outside, riding a trike down the switchback road to the vacuum-organism fields.
The grid reference was at the centre of a small eroded crater close to the edge of the tent, four kilometres south of Trusty Town. Felice felt foolishly confident, his head filled with a fat, contented hum, as he drove along the perimeter road. He was free, just for a little while. Off the grid. Bel Glise had explained that it was a little like blind sight. The drones and cameras of the surveillance system saw him but the tracking AIs didn’t register his presence, and a demon painted him out of every visual feed, so the guards couldn’t see him either.
It wouldn’t last, of course. The guards must have discovered that their system had been hacked by now, and despite Bel Glise’s reassurances they might set up a work-around at any moment. Or armed squads might be sent into the tent to search for the trusty who had killed a man, then walked into the airlock complex and apparently vanished. And even if they didn’t find him, he couldn’t return to Trusty Town unless it was to surrender to the prison administration. His only hope was to try to live out on the farm. A ghost. An invisible man. Sneaking into the barracks for food and water and fresh air tanks every night; hiding out along the cliffs and rock slides of the rim for the rest of the time, hoping that the revolution would come good. But it was a pretty threadbare hope, and Felice didn’t have much faith in it.
Meanwhile, it was good to be in action, doing what he had been trained to do. If the killer hadn’t lied about the rendezvous he would have plenty of time to familiarise himself with the terrain and make his preparations.
It was almost one a.m. by the clock, but the sun was above the western horizon and laid a hazy golden glow across the wide expanse of the brown and black and deep purple fields that stretched under the tent. The road ran across flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust and pitted everywhere with craters from the size of pinpricks to plates and littered with stony ejecta eroded into soft shapes by aeons of micrometeoritic impacts. The bare slope of the crater rim to Felice’s left, steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringing its base; rough ground sloping away to his right to the boundary with one of the huge vacuum-organism fields.
He was less than a klick from the rendezvous point, the road dropping steeply to meet a gap cut into a slump of mass-wasted material, when he glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of his vision. Before he could react, a taser dart struck his trike and shorted its motor. A second later, a catch net fell on him, slithering over his torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around his arms and chest. He struggled to free himself as the trike piddled to a halt, but his arms were pinned to his sides by the net and he couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. He could only sit and watch as a figure in the black body suit and black face mask of a prison guard - a woman, slim enough to be an Outer but only a hundred and seventy centimetres tall - descended the steep side of the gap in three huge bounds, reached him in two more.
The guard ripped the shock stick and the cosh and the comms pack and keypad from Felice’s utility belt, then punched the release of his harness, dragged him out of the low-slung seat, and hauled him off the road.
He was dumped on his back near a trike parked in the shadow of a house-sized block. There was an explosive hiss at his back as most of his air supply was vented; then the guard stepped away, aiming a rail pistol at him, and said, ‘Are you alone?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Don’t hope for rescue. We’re in a dead zone here. No one can see us. Who are you?’
The guard’s voice was muffled by her face mask and the low atmospheric pressure, but Felice could hear the lilt, half-amusement, half-eagerness, that coloured it. She was excited. Aroused. Ready to kill. And she felt that she was completely in control, which meant that she might be careless - that he might survive this.
Felice said, ‘I was born here, on the Moon, and given a number rather than a name. I was trained here, and inserted in Paris, Dione, before the beginning of the Quiet War. I defected afterwards, and then I killed someone in Xamba, Rhea. One of my brothers. I killed him because he found me and wanted to bring me back. I was arrested and put in prison by the Europeans. And then I came here, as a trusty, to guard the political prisoners. Why am I telling you this? Because I think you are much like me. Because I don’t want you to make the mistakes I made.’
‘You’re one of the Peixotos’ vat creatures. A spy cut to look like an Outer.’
‘Yes.’
‘And after all these years living amongst them, you miss your own kind. You think I’m like you. You want to be my friend.’
‘You knew what my message meant.’
‘The Peixotos weren’t the only family to make spies. You’re old and used-up. And I’m the latest model, faster and stronger than you and your brothers ever were.’
‘You work for another family, then.’
‘Didn’t I just say that? But don’t expect me to tell you anything else, old man. What’s so funny?’
‘I thought the revolution would have no chance of succeeding, but I was wrong. Because the great families aren’t united. Because they’re squabbling over the spoils of war instead of doing what’s right by their country. Are you here to assassinate key workers, or to kidnap them?’
The guard stared at him through the round lenses of her face mask. Dark brown eyes, an unflinching and unforgiving gaze.
Felice dropped his own gaze, as if submitting to her dominance. ‘Let me ask you this, then. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You disobeyed them when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.’
‘Do you really think you can talk your way out of this?’
‘I’m telling you what you can do, if you choose to do it. I’ve lived amongst ordinary people a long time. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them that they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re their dark half. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.’
‘It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,’ the guard said. ‘Besides, I have a job to finish. Which reminds me.’
She took a long step sideways to her trike, lifted something the size of a basketball from the box behind its seat, bowled it towards the spy.
It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and he recognised it and scrambled to his feet, struggling against the net that bound his arms, crying out in horror and despair. It was the severed head of Amy Ma Coulibaly.
‘I left the body in her clinic,’ the guard said. ‘With an amusing little message written on a wall in her blood.’
‘You didn’t have to kill her. I already know what you can do.’
‘No. No, you don’t. And you won’t live to find out, either.’
Felice was finding it hard to think clearly. Great waves of raw emotion were crashing through his head. Hate and sorrow and pity and anger. He was staring straight at the guard, forgetting to pretend to be cowed by her, stepping hard on the impulse to simply run at her and end it all there and then. But at the same time some cold part of him that was never touched by any emotion, the last of what he had once been, was studying the ground and the walls of the gap on either side, making a crucial triangulation.
He said as calmly as he could, ‘Your mission has failed.’
The guard shook her head. ‘Not from where I’m standing.’
‘You failed when you killed my friend. You didn’t kill her because it was necessary for the success of your mission. No, you killed her to show me that you were better than me, to prove that I couldn’t protect her from you.’
‘Well, you couldn’t,’ the guard said.
Raw red anger surged through Felice then, stronger than anything he had ever felt before. As if he was being born all over again. His pulse thumped like a drum in his skull. The effort to keep still left him trembling and soaked in sweat.
‘You did not have to kill Amy and you did not have to kill Goether Lyle or Jael Li Lee either. Goether Lyle didn’t know who you were; neither did Jael Li Lee. And even if they had uncovered your identity, they would not have been able to tell the prison administration. You made a mistake when you murdered Goether and you compounded that mistake when you murdered Jael. It led me directly to you, and it convinced the prisoners that it was time to free themselves.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I know you know my implant isn’t online - you will have tried to use it against me. And if you take a look, you’ll see that the implants of all the other prisoners aren’t online either.’
The guard didn’t reply, but Felice saw a subtle change in the tilt of her head and knew that she was accessing the surveillance system. She was smart and quick, it would only take her a couple of seconds, but it was all he needed.
He sprang sideways and at the same time discharged the superconducting loop he’d extracted from the battery of one of the shock sticks and glued to the palm of one of his gloves. He’d been intending to use it against the guard; instead, with a sharp snap that left his whole skin numb, it shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound his arms. He shrugged free of the net as he came down and kicked off again, a grasshopper leap to the top of the cut’s wall. And then he was pelting along up the slope towards the bulging face of a cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of grey rock.
Felice was halfway there when a kinetic round smashed into his left leg and knocked him tumbling head over heels across the dusty ground. He tried to get to his feet, but his femur was broken and he fell flat on his face. It saved his life: a second round whooped past his head and smashed a spray of shards from a pitted block of stone. Like a crippled ape he scuttled on knuckles and his one good leg into the shelter of the chimney, and started to climb.
The chimney lay back at a sharp angle within the folds of rock. When the guard reached the base and tried to shoot him, she succeeded only in knocking splinters from a fold of rock below him. Despite his broken leg he soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after a couple of hundred metres and he flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.
Above him the ground sloped gently up to the skirt of the tent and a massive abutment that was the baseplate of one of the huge struts that supported the tent’s canopy. The strut itself arched up and out in a massive parabola and big panes stretched away on either side of it, burning with the sun’s golden glow, looming over bare pockmarked slopes with no hiding place that he could see.
Felice’s left leg was slick with blood, swollen and blackened around the bloody crater that the round had punched into his thigh. He blocked off the pain and pushed up, balanced on his right foot and the knuckles of his hands, his broken leg skewed so that his left foot lay sideways on the ground, yes, just like a crippled ape, swaying slightly, waiting with patience and stillness learned long ago under the discipline of Father Solomon’s shock stick.
He saw the shadows at the top of the chimney shift fractionally and threw himself forward as the guard launched herself upwards in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail pistol in the other. He corkscrewed into her and locked his arms around her thighs, and then they were tumbling down the chimney’s steep chute. He almost lost his grip when his back smashed against an outcrop of rock; then, as they spun out into thin air, he managed to hook his fingers around her utility belt and jack himself up so that in the scant moments of their fall they were locked face to face. The guard had lost her pistol but was trying to jam her taser against Felice’s side. He chopped the blade of his palm into the nerve cluster at her elbow and the taser dropped from her numbed grip, and as the broken ground rushed up at them he clamped the glove of his left hand over the diagnostic port of her lifepack and discharged his second and last battery.
Enough current passed through the port to stun her for a moment. And then they smashed into the ground and tumbled away from each other in commingling clouds of dust. Felice curled in a ball and let himself roll and bounce, arms wrapped tight around his knees, head tucked in and down. Something hard and fist-sized clouted him in the ribs and drove breath from his lungs; smaller stones rattled and bounced down through curdy clouds of dust settling around him as he pushed to knuckles and his good knee. His left leg was a distant country under siege. His right ankle throbbed steadily - he’d twisted it somehow in the smashing tumble of the fall. A knife slid under his bruised ribs every time he took a breath. Under his body suit every square centimetre of his skin felt bruised and pummelled.
The guard lay in an untidy tangle at the base of the slope. When Felice tried to put weight on his right ankle it gave way and pain speared his leg to the hip, so he sat down and slid down on his behind towards her. One of the lenses of her face mask had cracked and there was a puffy black mass of swollen pressure-bruised flesh behind it. Her good eye tracked him, and she tried to strike him with a fist-sized stone when he reached her, but she had no strength left and he caught her wrist and prised the stone free and tossed it away. He pinned her arms with one hand and with the other unlatched and stripped off her face mask. She coughed and writhed and tried to hold her breath, lips going blue, her face blackening, blood and mucus frothing from her nostrils. He held her wrists and met her furious gaze, and then she drew in a gasping gulp of the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and shuddered and lay still.