Time seemed to slam to a halt. Seconds turned into ponderous slabs of perception; everything moved with the lazy calm of motion underwater.
—Liebeck, spinning away from the water’s edge, lit spliff tumbling from her open mouth, bouncing off the upper slope of her breast in a brief splutter of embers—
—Murakami, yelling at my ear, moving past me toward the grav sled—
—The monitor system built into the sled screaming, a whole rack of datacoil systems flaring to life like candles along one side of Sylvie Oshima’s suddenly twitching body—
—Sylvie’s eyes, wide open and fixed on mine as the gravity of her stare drags my own gaze in—
—The alarm, unfamiliar as the new Tseng hardware, but only one possible meaning behind it—
—And Murakami’s arm, raised, hand filled with the Kalashnikov as he clears it from his belt—
—My own yell, stretching out and blending with his as I throw myself forward to block him, hands still bound, hopelessly slow—
And then the clouds ripped open in the east, and vomited angelfire.
And the dock lit up with light and fury.
And the sky fell in.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Afterward, it took me a while to realize I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colors seemed bleached out of the surroundings. The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few meters out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames. Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look around.
It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelled scorched.
I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.
“Grigori fucking Ishii,” she said, still without looking at me.
“Sylvie?”
Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.
“This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths
she
came in on, too, once I started looking.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. “I opened the way.”
“You’re losing me. Who
is
Grigori Ishii?”
“You really don’t remember? Kids’ history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?”
“My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.”
“Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fallback detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.”
“Then . . .”
“Yeah.” She laughed, barely, a single small sound. “She is who she says she is.”
“Did?” I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. “Did she do this?”
“No, I did.” A shrugged correction. “They did, I asked them to.”
“You
called down
the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?”
A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. “Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
I pressed a hand hard against my face. “Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?”
“Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.” She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporized
Impaler
and the four meters of water beneath. “It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device, too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterward. Nothing’s ever lost.”
I coughed, laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?”
“She was lost at first,” she murmured. “She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking
strong.
”
I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.
“So how did she get out?”
Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. “The orbital sent her.”
“Oh please.”
“No, it’s.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behavior in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burned out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii—he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.”
“Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.”
“Not me.
She
knew it, she recognized something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.” She shivered. “There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells; it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him, and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, and she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.
“But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?”
“I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years; that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.”
I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angel-fire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outside their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.
Pilot error?
“Sylvie?”
“What?” She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.
“Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?”
“Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?”
“There was a firefight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think . . . ?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.” She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. “I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.”
Todor Murakami, vaporized. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armored body of the
Impaler
and the hundreds of cubic meters of water she floated on, even—I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each—the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands. All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.
I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.
“What does it feel like?” I asked her gently. “Talking to them?”
She snorted. “What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.” She gestured. “Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the . . . Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.” She grinned sourly. “Union with the godhead. Except people like my mother would have run screaming out of the Upload center rather than
really
face something like that. It’s a dark path, Micky, I opened the door and the software knew what to do next, it
wanted
to take me there, it’s what it’s for. But it’s dark and it’s cold, it leaves you. Naked. Stripped down. There are things like wings to cover you, but they’re cold, Micky. Cold and rough and they smell of cherries and mustard.”
“But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, running it?”
Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?”
For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousands and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.
I shook my head. Borrowed imagery from the Renouncer school, and some trace element of perverse Christian sacrifice myth. It’s the first thing they teach cub archaeologues. Don’t try to transfer your anthropomorphic baggage onto what is nothing like human.
“Too easy,” I said.
“Yeah. What I thought. Anyway, it’s the orbital that’s talking, it feels like a machine the same way the mimints do, the same way the software does. But yes, there are still Martians in there. Grigori Ishii, what’s left of him, gibbers about them when you can get any verbal sense out of him at all. And I think Nadia’s going to remember something similar when she gets enough distance on it. I think when she does that, when she finally remembers how she walked out of their database and into my head, she’s going to be able to
really
talk to them. And it’s going to make the link I’ve got look like Morse code on tom-toms by comparison.”
“I thought she didn’t know how to use the command software.”
“She doesn’t. Not yet. But I can teach her, Micky.”
There was a peculiar tranquility on Sylvie Oshima’s face as she spoke. It was something I’d never seen there before, in all the time we spent together in the Uncleared and after. It reminded me of Nikolai Natsume’s face in the Renouncer monastery, before we came and spoiled it all for him—sense of purpose, confirmed beyond human doubt. A belonging to what you did that I hadn’t known since Innenin, and that I didn’t expect to feel again. I felt a wry envy curl through me instead.
“Going to be a deCom
sensei,
Sylvie? That the plan?”
She gestured impatiently. “I’m not talking about teaching in the real world, I’m talking about
her.
Down in the capacity vault, I can crank up the real-time ratio so we get months out of every minute, and I can show her
how to do this.
It’s not like hunting the mimints, that’s not what this stuff is for. It’s only now I realize that. All the time I spent in the Uncleared, it feels like I was half asleep by comparison with this.
This,
it feels like I was born for.”
“That’s the software talking, Sylvie.”
“Yeah, maybe. So what?”
I couldn’t think of any answer to that. Instead, I looked across at the grav sled where Virginia Vidaura lay in place of Sylvie. I moved closer, and it felt like something was tugging me there by a cable wired into my guts.
“She going to be okay?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Sylvie pushed herself wearily off the mooring post. “Friend of yours, huh?”
“Er—something like that.”
“Yeah, well, that bruising on her face looks bad. Think the bone might be cracked. I stuck her in there as gently as I could, kicked the system on, but all it’s done so far is sedate her, on general principles I think. Haven’t gotten a diagnosis out of it yet. It’ll need re—”
“Hmm?”
I turned to prompt her and saw the gray-cased canister at the top of its arc. There was no time to get to Sylvie, no time to do anything except fling myself, tumbling, over the grav sled and into the scant shadow its covered length offered. Tseng military custom—at a minimum it had to be battlefield-hardened. I hit the ground on the other side and flattened myself to the dock, arms wrapped over my head.
The grenade blew with a curiously muffled crump, and something in my head screamed with the sound. A muted shock wave slapped me, dented my hearing. I was on my feet in the blurred humming it left, no time to check for shrapnel injuries, snarling, spinning to face him as he climbed out of the water at the edge of the dock. I had no weapons, but I came around the end of the grav sled as if my hands were filled with them.
“That was fast,” he called. “Thought I’d get you both there.”
His clothes were drenched from his swim, and there was a long gash across his forehead that the water had leached pink and bloodless, but the poise in the amber-skinned sleeve hadn’t gone anywhere. The black hair was still long, tangled messily to his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be armed, but he grinned at me just the same.
Sylvie lay crumpled, halfway between the water and the sled. I couldn’t see her face.
“I’m going to fucking kill you now,” I said coldly.
“Yeah, you’re going to try, old man.”
“Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any fucking idea who you just killed?”