“Genetically encoded insurgency.” I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm descending. “Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great-grandchildren and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?”
“I don’t know.” She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had loaned her. “Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I . . . After it ended. Maybe no one was left.”
I nodded again. “Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.”
She shot me a weary look.
“It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporized because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns leveled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed by the hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock, and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor?”
“You’re talking about conditions that haven’t existed for three hundred years,” I said mildly. “But that’s not the point. It’s not the Harlan family I feel bad about. It’s the poor fucks whose Black Brigade ancestors decided their political commitment at a cellular level generations before they were even born. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about whom I murder and why.” I held back a moment, then drove the blade home anyway. “And so, from what I’ve read, did Quellcrist Falconer.”
A kilometer of whitecapped blue whipped past beneath us. Barely audible, the grav drive in the left-hand pod murmured to itself.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she whispered at last.
I shrugged. “You triggered this thing.”
“It was a Quellist weapon.” I thought I could hear an edge of desperation in her words. “It was all I had to work with. You think it’s worse than a conscript army? Worse than the clone-enhanced combat sleeves the Protectorate decants its soldiers into so they’ll kill without empathy or regret?”
“No. But I think as a concept it contradicts the words
I will not ask you to fight, to live, or to die for a cause you have not first understood and embraced of your own free will.
”
“I know that!” Now it was clearly audible, a jagged flaw line running through her voice. “Don’t you think I know that? But what choice did I have? I was alone. Hallucinating half the time, dreaming Oshima’s life and . . .” She shivered. “Other things. I was never sure when I’d next wake up and what I’d find around me when I did, not sure sometimes
if
I’d wake up again. I didn’t know how much time I had, sometimes, I didn’t even know if I was
real.
Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
I shook my head. Envoy deployments had put me through a variety of nightmarish experiences, but you never doubt at any moment that it’s absolutely real. The conditioning won’t let you.
Her hands were tight on the gantry rail again, knuckles whitening. She was looking out at the ocean, but I don’t think she could see it.
“Why go back to war with the Harlan family?” I asked her gently.
She jerked a glance at me. “You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into Settlement-years poverty again? This isn’t an enemy that goes away.”
“Yeah,
this enemy you cannot kill.
I read that speech back when I was a kid. The strange thing is, for someone who’s only been awake for a few weeks on and off, you’re remarkably well informed.”
“That’s not what it’s like,” she said, eyes on the hurrying sea again. “The first time I woke up for real, I’d already been dreaming Oshima for months. It was like being in a hospital bed, paralyzed, watching someone you think might be your doctor on a badly tuned monitor. I didn’t understand who she was, only that she was important to me. Half the time, I knew what she knew. Sometimes, it felt like I was floating up inside her. Like I could put my mouth on hers and speak through her.”
She wasn’t, I realized, talking to me anymore; the words were just coming up out of her like lava, relieving a pressure inside whose form I could only make guesses at.
“The first time I woke up for real, I thought I’d die from the shock. I was dreaming
she
was dreaming, something about a guy she’d slept with when she was younger. I opened my eyes on a bed in some shithole Tek’to flophouse and I could move. I had a hangover, but I was alive. I knew where I was, the street and the name of the place, but I didn’t know who I was. I went outside, I walked down to the waterfront in the sun and people were looking at me and I realized I was crying.”
“What about the others? Orr and the rest of the team?”
She shook her head. “No, I’d left them somewhere at the other end of town.
She
’d left them, but I think I had something to do with it. I think she could feel me coming up and she went away to be alone while it happened. Or maybe I made her do it. I don’t know.”
A shudder ran through her.
“When I talked to her. Down there in the cells, when I told her that, she called it seepage. I asked her if she lets me through sometimes, and she wouldn’t tell me. I. I know certain things unlock the bulkheads. Sex. Grief. Rage. But sometimes I just swim up for no reason and she gives me control.” She paused, shook her head again. “Maybe we’re just negotiating.”
I nodded. “Which of you made the connection with Plex?”
“I don’t know.” She was looking at her hands, flexing and unflexing them like some mechanical system she hadn’t gotten the hang of yet. “I don’t remember. I think, yeah, it was her, I think she knew him already. Peripherally, part of the crimescape. Tek’to’s a small pond, and the deComs are always at the fringes of legal. Cheap black-market deCom gear’s a part of what Plex does up there. Don’t think they ever did business, but she knew his face, knew what he was. I dug him out of her memory when I knew I was going to activate the Qualgrist system.”
“Do you remember Tanaseda?”
She nodded, more controlled now. “Yeah. High-level yak patriarch. They brought him in behind Yukio, when Plex told them the preliminary codes checked out. Yukio didn’t have enough seniority to swing what they needed.”
“And what was that?”
A repeat of the searching gaze she’d fired at me when I first mentioned the weapon. I spread my arms in the whipping wind.
“Come on, Nadia. I brought you a revolutionary army. I climbed Rila Crags to get you out. That’s got to buy something, right?”
Her gaze flinched away again. I waited.
“It’s viral,” she said finally. “High contagion, symptomless flu variant. Everyone catches it, everyone passes it on, but only the genetically modified react. It triggers a shift in the way their hormonal system responds to a match with Harlan pheromones. The carrier sleeves were buried in sealed storage at covert sites. In the event that they were to be triggered, an assigned group would dig up the storage facility, sleeve into one of the bodies, and go walkabout. The virus would do the rest.”
Sleeve into one of the bodies.
The words ticked in my head, like water trickling into a crack. The Envoy harbinger of understanding hovered just out of reach. Interlocking mechanisms of intuition spun tiny wheels in the buildup to knowledge.
“These sites. Where were they?”
She shrugged. “Mainly in New Hokkaido, but there were some on the north end of the Saffron Archipelago, too.”
“And you took Tanaseda to?”
“Sanshin Point.”
The mechanism locked solid, and doors opened. Recollection and understanding poured through the gap like morning light. Lazlo and Sylvie bickering as the
Guns for Guevara
slid into dock at Drava.
Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—
I did hear that one. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.
And my own conversation with Plex in Tokyo Crow the morning before.
So how come they needed your de- and regear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.
Some kind of fuckup. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Seawater in the gel feeds.
Organized crime, huh.
“Something amusing you, Kovacs?”
I shook my head. “Micky Serendipity. Think I’m going to have to keep that name.”
She gave me an odd look. I sighed.
“Doesn’t matter. So what was Tanaseda’s end of this? What does he get out of a weapon like that?”
Her mouth crimped in one corner. Her eyes seemed to glitter in the light reflecting off the waves. “A criminal is a criminal, no matter what their political class. In the end, Tanaseda’s no different to some cut-rate wharf thug from Karlovy. And what have the yakuza always been good at? Blackmail. Influence. Leverage to get government concessions. Blind eyes turned to the right activities, shares in the right ongoing state enterprises. Collaboration at repression for a price. All very genteel.”
“But you suckered them.”
She nodded bleakly. “I showed them the site, gave them the codes. Told them the virus transmitted sexually, so they’d think they had control. It does that, too, in fact, and Plex was too sloppy with the biocodes to dig any deeper than he did. I knew I could trust him to screw up to that extent.”
I felt another faint smile flicker across my own face. “Yeah, he has a talent for that. Must be the aristo lineage.”
“Must be.”
“And with the grip the yakuza have on the sex industry in Millsport, you called it just right.” The intrinsic joy of the scam sank into me like a shiver rush—there was a smooth, machined rightness to it worthy of Envoy planning. “You gave them a threat to hold over the Harlanites that they already had the perfect delivery system for.”
“Yes, so it seems.” Her voice was blurring again as she dropped away into her memories. “They were going to sleeve some yak soldier or other in one of the Sanshin bodies and take it to Millsport to demonstrate what they had. I don’t know if he ever got that far.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. The yakuza are pretty meticulous about their leverage schemes. Man, I’d have given a lot to see Tanaseda’s face when he showed up at Rila with that package and the Harlan gene specialists told him what he really had on his hands. I’m surprised Aiura didn’t have him executed on the spot. Shows remarkable restraint.”
“Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it? By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.” She shrugged. “You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked around at me again, and her face was miserable with contained anger.
“All right, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?”
I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’re right, I wasn’t there.”
And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.
Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters toward the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up.
Angelfire Flirt
descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft
Pictures of the Floating World,
and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.
Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.
I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.
“Tres?” he asked us quietly.
Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. “Still mending. We left her with. With Her.”
“Right. Good.”
The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The seawind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.
“We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?”
Koi shook his head. “Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.”
“Mari Ado?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all—they traded gruff arm’s-length grippings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off toward the harbormaster’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.
“They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances. Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.”
I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniper fire.
“Can we trust these people?”
Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. “The very large majority, yes.
Pictures
is Drava-built; most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original cooperative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.”
“Yeah? Sounds a little utopian to me. What about casual crew?”
Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. “Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for.
Pictures
has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.”
Brasil cleared his throat. “How many of them know what’s going on?”
“Know that we’re here? About a dozen. Know
why
we’re here? Two, both ex–Black Brigade.” Koi looked up at the rayhunter, searchingly. “They’ll both want to be there for Ascertainment. We’ve got a safe house set up in the stern lowers where we can do it.”
“Koi.” I slotted myself into his field of vision. “We need to talk first. There are a couple of things you should know.”
He regarded me for a long moment, lined face unreadable. But there was a hunger in his eyes that I knew I wasn’t going to get past.
“It’ll have to wait,” he told me. “Our primary concern here is to confirm Her identity. I’d appreciate it if none of you call me by name until that’s done.”
“Ascertain,” I said sharply. The audible capitalization of
her
was starting to piss me off. “You mean
Ascertain,
right, Koi?”
His gaze skipped off my shoulder and back to the rayhunter’s side.
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” he said.
• • •
A lot has been made of Quellism’s underclass roots, particularly over the centuries since its principal architect died and passed conveniently beyond the realm of political debate. The fact that Quellcrist Falconer chose to build a power base among the poorest of Harlan’s World’s labor force has led to a curious conviction among a lot of neoQuellists that the intention during the Unsettlement was to create a leadership drawn exclusively from this base. That Nadia Makita was herself the product of a relatively privileged middle-class background goes carefully unremarked, and since she never rose to a position of political governance, the central issue of
who’s going to run things after all this blows over
never had to be faced. But the intrinsic contradiction at the heart of modern Quellist thought remains, and in neoQuellist company it’s not considered polite to draw attention to it.
So I didn’t remark on the fact that the safe house in the stern lowers of
Pictures of the Floating World
clearly didn’t belong to the elegantly spoken ex–Black Brigade man and woman who were waiting in it for us. Stern lowers is the cheapest, harshest neighborhood on any urbraft or seafactory, and no one who has a choice about it chooses to live there. I could feel the vibration from
Floating World
’s drives intensifying as we took a companionway down from the more desirable crew residences at superstructure levels over the stern, and by the time we got inside the apartment it was a constant background grind. Utilitarian furniture, scuffed and scraped walls, and a minimum of decoration made it clear that whoever did quarter here didn’t spend much time at home.
“Forgive the surroundings,” said the woman urbanely as she let us into the apartment. “It will only be for the night. And our proximity to the drives makes surveillance a near impossibility.”
Her partner ushered us to chairs set around a cheap plastic table laid with refreshments. Tea in a heated pot, assorted sushi. Very formal. He talked as he got us seated.
“Yeah, we’re also less than a hundred meters from the nearest hull maintenance hatch, which is where you’ll all be collected from tomorrow morning. They’ll drive the skimmer right in under the load-bearing girders between keels six and seven. You can climb straight down.” He gestured at Sierra Tres. “Even injured, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”
There was a rehearsed competence to it all, but as he talked, his gaze kept creeping toward the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s body, then skidding abruptly away. Koi had been doing much the same thing since we brought her off the
Angelfire Flirt.
Only the female Brigade member seemed to have her eyes and hopes under real control.
“So,” she said smoothly. “I’m Sto Delia. This is Kiyoshi Tan. Shall we begin?”
Ascertainment.
In today’s society, it’s as common a ritual as parental acknowledgment parties to celebrate a birth, or reweddings to cement newly resleeved couples in their old relationship. Part stylized ceremony, part maudlin
what about that time when
session, Ascertainment varies in its form and formality from world to world and culture to culture. But on every planet I’ve ever been, it exists as a deeply respected underlying aspect of social relations. Outside expensive high-tech psychographic procedures, it’s the only way we have to prove to our friends and family that, regardless of what flesh we may be wearing, we are who we say we are. Ascertainment is the core social function that defines ongoing identity in the modern age, as vital to us now as primitive functions like signature and fingerprint databasing were to our premillennial ancestors.
And that’s where an ordinary citizen is concerned.
For semi-mythical heroic figures, back—perhaps—from the dead, it’s a hundred times more meaningful again. Soseki Koi was trembling visibly as he took his seat. His colleagues were both wearing younger sleeves and they showed it less, but if you looked with Envoy eyes the same tension was there in unconfident, overdone gestures, laughter too readily coughed out, the occasional tremor in a voice as it started up again in a dried throat. These men and this woman, who had once belonged to the most feared counterinsurgency force in planetary history, had suddenly been granted a glimpse of hope among the ashes of their past. They faced the woman who claimed to be Nadia Makita with everything that had ever mattered to them hanging clearly visible in the balance behind their eyes.
“It is an honor,” Koi began, and then stopped to clear his throat. “It is an honor to speak of these things . . .”
Across the table, the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve looked back at him steadily as he spoke. She answered one of his oblique questions with crisp assent, ignored another. The other two Brigade members weighed in, and she turned slightly in her seat toward each of them, offered an antique gesture of inclusion each time. I felt myself receding to the status of spectator as the initial round of pleasantries peeled away and the Ascertainment gathered momentum. The conversation picked up, moved rapidly from matters of the last few days across a long and somber political retrospective, and then into talk of the Unsettlement and the years that preceded it. The language shifted just as rapidly, from contemporary Amanglic into an unfamiliar old-time Japanese dialect with occasional gusts of Stripjap. I glanced across at Brasil and shrugged as subject matter and syntax both accelerated away from us.
It went on for hours. The laboring motors of the urbraft made dim thunder in the walls around us.
Pictures of the Floating World
plowed on her way. We sat and listened.
“. . . makes you think. A fall from any of those ledges and you’re offal splattered across >>
the outgoing tide?
<<. No recovery scheme, no resleeve policy, not even family death benefits. It’s a >>
rage?
<< that starts in your bones and . . .”
“. . . remember when you first realized that was the case?”
“. . . one of my father’s articles on colonial theory . . .”
“. . . playing >>
?????
<< on the streets of Danchi. We all did. I remember one time the >>
street police?
<< tried to . . .”
“. . . reaction?”
“Family are like that—or at least my family were always >>
?????ing
<< in a slictopus >>
plague?
<< . . .”
“. . . even when you were young, right?”
“I wrote that stuff when I was barely out of my teens. Can’t believe they printed it. Can’t believe there were people who >>
paid good money for/devoted seriousness to?
<< so much >>
?????
<<”
“But—”
“Is it?” A shrug. “Didn’t feel that way when I >>
looked back/reconsidered?
<< from the >>
blood on my hands?
<< basis in the >>
?????
<<.”
From time to time Brasil or I would rise and make fresh tea in the kitchen. The Black Brigade veterans barely noticed. They were locked on, lost in the wash and detail of a past made suddenly real again just across the table.
“. . . recall whose decison that was?”
“Obviously not—you guys didn’t have a >>
chain of command/respect?
<< worth a fucking . . .”
Sudden, explosive laughter around the table. But you could see the tear sheen on their eyes.
“. . . and it was getting too cold for a stealth campaign up there. Infrared would have shown us up like . . .”
“Yes, it was almost . . .”
“. . . Millsport . . .”
“. . . better to lie to them that we had a good chance? I don’t think so.”
“Would have been a hundred fucking kilometers before . . .”
“. . . and supplies.”
“. . . Odisej, as far as I remember. He would have run a >>
?????
<< standoff right up to the . . .”
“. . . about Alabardos?”
Long pause.
“It’s not clear, it feels >>
?????
<<. I remember something about a helicopter? We were going to the helicopter?”
She was trembling slightly. Not for the first time, they sheared away from the subject matter like ripwings from a rifleshot.
“. . . something about . . .”
“. . . essentially a
reactive
theory . . .”
“No, probably not. If I examined other >>
models?
<< . . .”
“But isn’t it axiomatic that >>
the struggle?
<< for control of >>
?????
<< would cause . . .”
“Is it? Who says that?”
“Well.” An embarrassed hesitation, glances exchanged. “
You
did. At least, you >>
argued?/admitted?
<< that . . .”
“That’s
crabshit!
I never said convulsive policy shift was the >>
key?
<< to a better . . .”
“But Spaventa claims you advocated—”
“
Spaventa?
That fucking fraud. Is he still breathing?”
“. . . and your writings on demodynamics show . . .”
“Look, I’m not a fucking ideologue, all right. We were faced with >>
a bottleback in the surf?
<< and we had to . . .”
“So you’re saying >>
?????
<< isn’t the solution to >>
?????
<< and reducing >>
poverty/ignorance?
<< would mean . . .”
“Of course it would. I never claimed anything different. What happened to Spaventa, anyway?”
“Umm, well—he teaches at Millsport University these—”
“
Does
he? The little fuck.”
“Ahem. Perhaps we could discuss a >>
version?/view?
<< of those events that pivots less on >>
?????
<< than >>
recoil?/slingshot?
<< theories of . . .”