Weapons are an extension.
You
are the killer and destroyer.
Kill quickly and be gone.
It won’t bring Sarah
back.
When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone.
I frowned a little at that one. It’s not good when your formative icons start getting inconsistent on you. When you find out they’re just as human as you.
The door wittered to itself and began to open.
Thought vanished like shreds in the slipstream of enabled force. I came out of the capsule, around the edge of its door, and stood braced with the knife, ready to reach and stab.
He wasn’t what I’d imagined. The skimmer pilot and the girl downstairs had both remarked on his poise, and it showed in the way he spun at the tiny sounds of my clothing, the shift of air in the narrow room. But he was slim and slight, shaven skull delicate, beard an out-of-place idiocy on the fine features.
“You looking for me, holy man?”
For a moment we locked gazes and the knife in my hand seemed to tremble of its own accord.
Then he reached up and tugged at his beard, and it came away with a short static crackle.
“Of course I’m looking for you, Micky,” said Jadwiga tiredly. “Been chasing you for nearly a month.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Yeah, twice at least.” Jad picked morosely at the beard prosthesis in her hands. We sat together at the cheap plastic table, not looking at each other. “Only reason I’m here, I guess. They weren’t looking for me when they came for the others.”
I saw Drava again as she told it, a mind’s-eye view of swirling snow on nighttime black, the frosted constellations of camp lights and infrequent figures moving between buildings, hunched up against the weather. They’d come the following evening, unannounced. It wasn’t clear if Kurumaya had been bought off, threatened with higher authority, or simply murdered. Behind the funneled force of Anton’s command software on max override, Kovacs and his team located Sylvie’s team by net signature. They kicked in doors, demanded submission.
Apparently didn’t get it.
“I saw Orr take someone down,” Jad went on, talking mechanically as she stared into her own memories. “Just the flash. He was yelling for everyone to get out. I was bringing carryout back from the bar. I didn’t even.”
She stopped.
“It’s okay,” I told her.
“No, it’s not fucking okay, Micky. I ran away.”
“You’d be dead if you hadn’t. Really Dead.”
“I heard Kiyoka screaming.” She swallowed. “I knew it was too late, but I.”
I hurried her past it. “Did anyone see you?”
A jerky nod. “Traded shots with a couple of them on the way across to the vehicle sheds. Fuckers were everywhere, seemed like. But they didn’t come after me. I think they thought I was just a stroppy bystander.” She gestured at the Eishundo sleeve she wore. “No trace on the net search, see. Far as that fucker Anton’s concerned, I was invisible.”
She’d lifted one of the Dracul bugs, powered it up, and driven right off the side of the dock.
“Had a squabble with the autosub systems getting up the estuary,” she said, and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re not supposed to do that, put vehicles in the water without authorization. But the clear tags worked in the end.”
And out onto the Andrassy Sea.
I nodded mechanically, exact inverse of my near disbelief. She’d ridden the bug without resting, nearly a thousand kilometers back to Tekitomura and a quiet nighttime landing in a cove out of town to the east.
She shrugged it off.
“I had food and water in the panniers. Meth to stay awake. The Dracul’s got Nuhanovic guidance. Main thing I worried about was keeping low enough to the water to look like a boat, not a flying machine, trying not to upset the angelfire.”
“And you found me how?”
“Yeah, that’s some weird shit.” For the first time, something bloomed in her voice that wasn’t weariness and rancid rage. “I sold the bug for quick cash at Soroban wharf, I was walking back up toward Kompcho. Coming down from the meth. And it’s like I could smell you or something. Like the smell of this old family hammock we had when I was a kid. I just followed it, like I said I was coming down, running on autopilot. I saw you on the wharf, going aboard this piece-of-shit freighter.
Haiduci’s Daughter.
”
I nodded again, this time in sudden comprehension as large chunks of the puzzle fell into place. The dizzying, unaccustomed sense of family longing swam back over me. We were twins, after all. Close scions from the long-dead house of Eishundo.
“You stowed away, then. It was you trying to get inside that pod when the storm hit.”
She grimaced. “Yeah, creeping around on deck’s fine when the sun’s shining. Not something you want to try when there’s heavy weather coming in. I should have guessed they’d have it alarmed up the ass. Fucking webjelly oil, you’d think it was Khumalo wetware the price they get for it.”
“You stole the food out of communal storage, too, second day out.”
“Hey, your ride was flying departure lights when I saw you go aboard. Left inside an hour. Didn’t exactly leave me much time to go stock up on provisions. I went a day without food before I figured you weren’t getting off at Erkezes, you were in for the long haul. I was fucking hungry.”
“You know there was nearly a fight over that. One of your deCom colleagues wanted to brain someone for stealing it.”
“Yeah, heard them talking. Fucking burnouts.” Her voice took on a kind of automated distaste, a macro of opinion over old ground. “Kind of sad-case losers get the trade a bad name.”
“So you tracked me across Newpest and the Expanse as well.”
Another humorless smile. “My home turf, Micky. And besides, that skimmer you took left a soup wake I could have followed blindfolded. Guy I hired got your ride on the radar pulling into Kem Point. I was there by nightfall, but you’d gone.”
“Yeah. So why the fuck didn’t you come knock on my cabin door while you had the chance, aboard
Haiduci’s Daughter
?”
She scowled. “How about because I didn’t trust you?”
“All right.”
“Yeah, and while we’re on the subject how about I still don’t? How about you explain what the fuck you’ve done with Sylvie?”
I sighed.
“Got anything to drink?”
“You tell me. You’re the one broke into my room.”
Somewhere inside me something shifted, and I suddenly understood how happy I was to see her. I couldn’t work out if it was the biological tie of the Eishundo sleeves, remembrance of the month’s snappish-ironic camaraderie in New Hok, or just the change from Brasil’s suddenly serious born-again revolutionaries. I looked at her standing there and it was like the gust of an Andrassy Sea breeze through the room.
“Good to see you again, Jad.”
“Yeah, you, too,” she admitted.
• • •
When I’d laid it all out for her, it was dark outside. Jad got up and squeezed past me in the narrow space, stood by the variable-transparency window staring out. Street lighting frosted dimly in the gloomed glass. Raised voices floated up, some kind of drunken argument.
“You sure it was her you talked to?”
“Pretty sure. I don’t think this Nadia, whoever she is,
what
ever she is, I don’t think she could run the command software. Certainly not well enough to generate an illusion that coherent.”
Jad nodded to herself.
“Yeah, that Renouncer shit was always going to catch up with Sylvie someday. Fuckers get you that young, you never really shake it off. So what about this Nadia thing? You really think she’s a personality mine? ’Cause I got to say, Micky, in nearly three years of tracking around New Hok, I never saw or heard of a datamine that carried that much detail, that much depth.”
I hesitated, feeling around the edges of Envoy-intuited awareness for a gist that could be stamped into something as crude as words.
“I don’t know. I think she’s, I don’t know, some kind of spec designation weapon. Everything points to Sylvie getting infected in the Uncleared. You were there for Iyamon Canyon, right?”
“Yeah. She flaked in an engagement. She was sick for weeks after. Orr tried to pretend it was just postop blues, but anyone could see different.”
“And before that, she was fine?”
“Well, she was a deCom head, that’s not a job that leans toward
fine.
But all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up at sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon, yeah.”
“Sites someone else had worked?”
“Yeah, you know.” In the reflection of the window, the irritation flared on her face like matchglow, then guttered out as suddenly. “No, come to think of it, you don’t, you weren’t around for any of those.”
“Any of what?”
“Ah, handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other.”
Something from my first meeting with Kurumaya snapped into focus. Sylvie wheedling, the camp commander’s impassive responses.
Oshima-san, the last time I ramped you ahead of schedule, you neglected your assigned duties and disappeared north. How do I know you won’t do the same thing this time?
Shig, you sent me to look at
wreckage.
Someone got there before us, there was nothing left. I told you that.
When you finally resurfaced, yes.
Oh be reasonable. How was I supposed to deCom what had already been trashed? We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.
I frowned as the new fragment slid into place. Smooth and snug, like a fucking splinter. Distress radiated out through the theories I was building. It didn’t fit with any of what I was starting to believe.
“Sylvie said something about it when we went to get the cleanup duty. Kurumaya ramped you and when you got to the assigned location, there was nothing but wreckage.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Wasn’t the only time it happened, either. We ran across the same thing in the Uncleared a few times.”
“You never talked about this when I was around.”
“Yeah, well, deCom.” Jad pulled a sour face at herself in the window. “For people with heads full of state-of-the-art tech, we’re a superstitious bunch of fuckers. Not considered cool to talk about stuff like that. Brings bad luck.”
“So let me get this straight. This mimint suicide stuff, that dated from after Iyamon as well.”
“Near as I remember, yeah. So you going to tell me about this spec weapon theory of yours?”
I shook my head, juggling the new data. “I’m not sure. I think she was designed to trigger this genetic Harlan killer. I don’t think the Black Brigades abandoned their weapon, I don’t think they got exterminated before they could set it off. I think they built this thing as the initial trigger and hid it in New Hok, a personality casing with a programmed will to set off the weapon. She believes she’s Quellcrist Falconer, because that gives her the drive. But that’s all it is, a propulsion system. When it comes to the crunch, setting off a genetic curse in people who weren’t even born when it was conceived, she behaves like a completely different person, because in the end it’s the target that matters.”
Jad shrugged. “Sounds exactly like every political leader I ever heard of anyway. Ends and means, you know. Why should Quellcrist Falconer be any fucking different?”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” A curious, unlooked-for resistance to her cynicism dragging through me. I looked at my hands. “You look at Quell’s life, most of what she did bears out her philosophy, you know. Even this copy of her, or whatever it is, even she can’t make her own actions fit with what she thinks she is. She’s confused about her own motivations.”
“So? Welcome to the human fucking race.”
There was a bitter edge on the words that made me glance up. Jad was still at the window, staring at her reflected face.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said gently.
She didn’t look at me, didn’t look away. “Maybe not. But I know what I
felt,
and it wasn’t enough. This fucking sleeve has changed me. It cut me out of the net loop—”
“Which saved your life.”
An impatient shake of her shaven head. “It stopped me feeling with the others, Micky. It locked me out. It even changed things with Ki, you know. We never felt the same about each other that last month.”
“That’s quite common with resleeving. People learn to—”
“Oh, yeah, I know.” Now she turned away from the image of herself and stared at me. “A relationship is not easy, a relationship is work. We both tried, tried harder than we ever had before. Harder than we ever
had
to before. That’s the problem. Before, we didn’t
have
to try. I was wet for her just looking at her sometimes. It was all either of us needed, a touch, a look. That fucking went, all of it.”
I said nothing. There are times when there is nothing you can usefully say. All you can do is listen, wait, and watch as this stuff comes out. Hope that it’s a purge.
“When I heard her scream,” Jad said, with difficulty. “It was like, it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter enough. I didn’t feel it enough to stay and fight. In my own body, I would have stayed and fought.”
“Stayed and died, you mean.”
A careless shrug, a flinching away like tears.
“This is crabshit, Jad. It’s the guilt talking because you survived. You tell yourself this but there’s nothing you could have done, and you know it.”
She looked at me then, and she was crying, quiet ribbons of tears and a smeared grimace.
“What the fuck do you know about it, Micky? It’s just another fucking version of you that did this to us. You’re a fucking destroyer, an ex-Envoy burnout. You were never deCom. You never belonged, you don’t know what it was like to be a part of that. How close it was. You don’t know what it feels like to lose that.”
Briefly, my mind fled back to the Corps and Virginia Vidaura. The rage after Innenin. It was the last time I’d really belonged to anything, well over a century gone. I’d felt twinges of the same thing after, the fresh growth of comradeship and united purpose—and I’d ripped it up by the roots every time. That shit will get you killed. Get you used.
“So,” I said, brutally casual. “Now you’ve tracked me down. Now you know. What are you going to do about it?”
She wiped tears from her face with hard strokes that were almost blows.
“I want to see her,” she said.