The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred

by Greg Egan

  “It’s out of your hands,” Camille said. “And mine. We planned one tiny action, but no one’s put us in charge of the whole show.”

  “I never assumed we were in charge of anything. I’m just trying to have a rational discussion about the things I think we ought to be advocating.” He sounded puzzled, and even a bit hurt.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” Camille admitted. “They wouldn’t let me, because you’re still being vetted. So you have to keep this between us.”

  Olivier stared back at her. “Vetted? By whom?”

  She looked around; there was no one in earshot, for whatever that was worth. “There’s a much larger group than ours; they’ve been organising since the referendum. They know we’re behind the virus…and one of their recruiters approached me last week.”

  “So you’re part of this group now? But you weren’t meant to tell me?” Olivier emitted a curt laugh of disbelief that choked as it turned to anger.

  Camille could think of no pleasant way to explain the situation. “Because you’re not descended from any Sivadiers, they’re a bit paranoid that you might be some sort of…”

  “Spy?”

  “Yes. I told them that was absurd, but they said I could hardly be objective.”

  Olivier replied icily, “So how, exactly, are they going to determine whether I’m truly against the Sivadier Tax, or whether I cleverly started screwing a Sivadier two years before there was any such thing, just so I could infiltrate their then-nonexistent movement and sabotage it from within?”

  Camille shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  Olivier said, “Maybe I’m the one who should be vetting them. Even if they’re not spies themselves, I might not actually want to get involved with their grand plans.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Camille declared forlornly. “They have their procedures, and they have to be satisfied with everyone. For all I know, they might have spent twice as long investigating me.”

  Olivier’s expression softened. “Yeah. Maybe my ego’s just a little bruised.” He glanced back down the corridor. “We should keep moving, or we’re going to bump into someone we know and get caught out as lying deserters. And who knows what our new commander-in-chief would do to people like that?”

  10

  “You heard about the warship leaving Vesta?” Chloe asked as Anna came through the door.

  “Yes.” Anna had been told the news at least a dozen times already—and she’d given up trying to persuade people to stop using the word “warship”. The Scylla had started life as a ferry on the Mars-Vesta-Ceres run, but it had been out of service for a decade. That it had actually been repaired and refurbished was a surprise even to the people who paid attention to such things, and no one really knew what its current capabilities were. “But there’s no reason to assume that it can catch up with the Arcas, or get close enough to do any damage.”

  “Maybe not,” Chloe conceded. “But if it can’t catch them in mid-flight, that could mean the Scylla asking to dock here.”

  Anna had been thinking of nothing else all day. “Anyone’s free to enter, so long as we can be confident that they’re not bringing in weapons.” That was the official policy; all the leeway, of course, was in the word confident. “If they want to make their case in court, if they’re carrying some warrant with Tavernier’s name on it…”

  Chloe laughed. “What about a virus with Tavernier’s name on it?”

  “You think they’d be that brazen?” Anna flopped onto the couch and felt the oobleck beneath the skin yield then stiffen. “They’d just come here and murder him?”

  “If they could get away with it, why not?”

  “Vestan security agents running around Ceres wouldn’t have much chance of keeping a low profile. If they were so keen to assassinate him, they’d be better off paying someone who was already here.”

  “True.” Chloe brought up an overlay from an astronautics specialist who’d been tracking the two ships. “So maybe they really are counting on an interception. It’s not impossible.” There were still big error bars on all the projections.

  Anna felt sick. “You do know there’s no prospect of them boarding the Arcas by force?” That wasn’t just her own, amateur assessment; the same specialist had spelled out the kinds of spoiling manoeuvres that would render it impossible even for a robot to gain entry. “If there’s any kind of ‘interception’, it will mean destroying the whole ship.”

  Chloe pondered this. “Unless the people they’re after choose to give themselves up. If I had a choice between being arrested and being slaughtered along with eight hundred other passengers, I think I’d try to minimise the bloodshed. Not to mention clutching at a slim chance of surviving, myself.”

  “Of course.” Short of a clean escape, it was the best outcome Anna could envision. “But the question is whether they get a chance to see it that way. The Scylla would have to make the offer at a time when the people on the Arcas would accept that those really were the only two choices.”

  Chloe smiled grimly. “Which people on the Arcas, though? Vesta’s most wanted, the crew who chose to take the risk of picking them up, or the other passengers—who probably didn’t even know what they’d be in for? Because if it’s up to the last group, they might just want to stop and hand over the war criminals sooner rather than later.”

  11

  “If we succeed in taking out both collectors, that will mean thirty percent power cuts.” Nicolas paused, as if he was expecting a round of rousing cheers at this point, but his team of would-be saboteurs just stared back at him anxiously.

  “But that success will only come from discipline,” he continued. “Nothing is to be written down. Nothing is to be stored in any device. All navigation will be by eye and hand only. Whatever equipment is captured, there must be no data trail.”

  Camille lost patience; the man had been talking for fifteen minutes and he still hadn’t addressed the most important issue. “The collectors aren’t going to be sitting there undefended,” she said.

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Nicolas regarded her with a mixture of irritation and pity. “You need to focus on your own instructions, nothing else. Your part of the mission will be made crystal clear to you, but if you start speculating about other matters that’s only going to distract you.”

  “Getting caught or killed might distract me too, don’t you think?”

  Olivier glanced at her, a look half supportive, half imploring her to tone it down.

  Their cell commander rose from his seat and geckoed a few steps across the circle. “What you did with the ice was a nice little calling card. No one’s forgotten your initiative there. But we don’t have room in the movement for prima donnas with mixed consciousness. You need to concentrate on the job you’ve been given, and stop expecting to know the whole plan.”

  Camille felt her cheeks burning. Mixed consciousness? She’d have gladly paid triple the tax for the right to laugh in the face of every buffoon who spoke that way. But this was how it worked now. She avoided the gaze of her embarrassed comrades and stared evenly back at Code Name Nicolas.

  “I understand,” she said. “I know how to follow orders.”

  Three days later, lying in bed in Olivier’s apartment, they compared roles. Camille’s task was to sever a data cable that she assumed was part of the new radar system; she wouldn’t even need to go up to the surface. Olivier was being sent out to one of the dishes, carrying some kind of device that he’d yet to lay eyes on. It was hard to imagine how a bomb could do much damage to such a large structure, with no air to carry shock waves and the dish itself so insubstantial that any localised force would tear it in one spot rather than shatter it in its entirety. But after debating the question for a while—and resisting the urge to perform any incriminating online searches—Olivier guessed that his payload might be some kind of electromagnetic pulse generator. A strong enough induced current c
ould melt the fine mesh that supported the collector’s membrane, turning it into a gossamer rag that the solar wind alone could blow out of shape.

  “It’s not fair,” Camille said. “You’re the one who’ll be taking all the risks.”

  “As you did, with the virus.”

  “It’s different now.”

  Olivier laughed. “Come on, don’t be greedy! Share the fun!”

  Camille put a hand on his cheek. “If I’d been caught, I could have passed as a joyrider. No one was going to harm me. Those days are gone, my love.”

  Olivier was silent for a while. Then he said, “This will prove it, though.”

  “Prove what?”

  “That I’m committed, whatever my ancestral deficiencies.”

  Camille scowled. “Fuck that! And fuck every last idiot on this rock who can’t stop thinking about people’s pedigree.”

  Olivier just smiled and ignored her outburst. “The target is fair,” he mused. “No one’s going to die from thirty percent power cuts. They’ll just be mightily pissed off, and finally understand that they have to take this seriously.” A month before he’d been talking about de-escalating; now he sounded as if he was trying to psych himself into his new role.

  Camille said, “The real question is what taking this seriously entails: dropping the tax, or digging their heels in.”

  “Digging their heels in over one percent of general income?”

  “It’s not about the money,” she said. “It’s about how attached they’ve grown to Denison’s story. Their families were cheated into carrying the Freeloaders, and for a century no one was punished for that crime. Now that justice is finally being done, how can they go back to the old order?”

  “Who cares about justice if the game-world servers can’t run?”

  Camille prodded him, mock-reprovingly. “You’re such a cynic!”

  “And you’re such a prima donna.”

  She punched him on the arm, hard enough to make him flinch. “My consciousness is more conscious than your consciousness.”

  “Ah, but how many conches could a consciousness conch if a consciousness could conch conches?”

  Camille said, “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars to shout that out at the next cell meeting, the first time Nicolas uses the C word.”

  Olivier considered the offer, and came back with a counter-proposal. “A thousand dollars—and I only have to do it if he says the word three times.”

  “Coward.”

  “Miser.”

  Camille said, “All right: a thousand dollars. You’re on.”

  12

  “Gustave is on the Arcas!” Olivier announced elatedly. “Gustave!” He took Anna by the shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Wonderful,” she replied. She had no idea who he was talking about, but it seemed like a safe bet that this wasn’t bad news. She followed Olivier into the apartment; half a dozen of his friends were gathered in the living room, and they all appeared equally delighted.

  “Gustave Bodel is the reason most of us got away,” Olivier explained. “He smuggled hundreds of people up to the surface and out onto the cargo blocks. Maybe thousands, if you count everyone still in transit.”

  “We’ve only just heard,” Laurent added. “Vestan security didn’t have him on the list of ‘criminals’ they were demanding to be returned, so the other passengers were keeping quiet about his presence.”

  “Right.” Anna didn’t know quite what to say. “I’m glad to hear that your friend is almost out of danger.”

  “Almost?” Stéphane was having none of this cautious language. “The only way the Arcas isn’t going to make it is if the Scylla is packed with engineers who’ve been frantically designing a new super-weapon…which will be ready for deployment in the next three days.”

  Anna wasn’t going to argue the point and dampen the spirits of the gathering. The Arcas had started to decelerate in preparation for its rendezvous with Ceres, but the Scylla was continuing to power ahead—and that strategy alone was rapidly narrowing the gap between the ships. The pursuers hadn’t literally forfeited their chance to dock at Ceres themselves; they could always double back later, at great expense in time and energy. But it proved that they hadn’t given up hope of drawing close enough for a destructive encounter.

  “Gustave will make it,” Monique insisted, as if the man’s skills that brought so many of his comrades safely to Ceres could somehow work in his own favour now.

  “There’s one thing about the riders that always puzzled me,” Anna confessed. “Once the authorities knew what was happening, why didn’t they start monitoring the cargo more closely?”

  Céline said, “Because they were never serious about stopping the riders. If Sivadiers wanted to leave, good riddance to them.”

  “But I thought they wanted to arrest the riders.”

  “If we’d shown up trying to board a ferry, they would have,” Laurent explained. “And if they’d heard that anyone high up in the resistance was heading for a cargo block, they’d stake it out. But minor foot soldiers were allowed to slip away. That was the choice: exile by the slowest, most dangerous route, or risk whatever happened when they came for you.”

  Anna was about to observe that perhaps the sainted Gustave had never faced much risk himself if the authorities had wanted him to keep shepherding Sivadiers into exile, but she caught herself in time. Regardless of the demands of tact, humility alone should have silenced her. What risks would she have borne, if she’d found herself at Gustave’s end of the stone river?

  “So in three days,” she said, “I think I can guess who’s going to be the guest of honour at your welcoming party.”

  13

  Camille glided homewards from the clinic by her usual route, recognising none of the people she passed but wondering if any of them might be a little more attentive than she was. Perhaps she’d left a faint impression as someone who often came this way, at this time. The question, then, was whether that skein of casual observers was woven tightly enough to pin down her movements.

  When the moment arrived, she had no way to be certain that the cameras around her were jammed; she’d been told that the interference would be device-specific, leaving personal links unimpaired. But it would encompass a wide enough area to avoid bringing security drones down upon her immediately; with dozens of kilometres of corridors disappearing from the surveillance system, the black-out zone would offer no immediate clue as to the site of actual mischief.

  She waited until she was alone before she grabbed the guide rope and boosted her speed, propelling herself forward repeatedly. She passed the turnoff to her home, and continued on for another hundred metres or so until she reached the entrance to a maintenance tunnel. A sign in red letters warned that only authorised personnel should enter, but there were thousands of these tunnels across the whole warren—and not even the graffiti virus had been enough to prompt the engineering department to fit them all with biometrically secured hatches. All she had to do was slip between two chains, parting them wearing a pair of latex gloves that she’d pocketed at the clinic.

  The tunnel was about three metres wide, with no guide rope down the centre, and no lighting at all. Maintenance robots, or the rare human worker, would bring their own illumination, but Camille switched to passive thermal vision as the light from the corridor behind her faded away. In infrared the scene was like an endoscopic scan, with opalescent walls revealing hints of the city’s pulsing vasculature. She let herself descend until she could push herself up from the hand rails spaced evenly along the floor—cool silhouettes against the heat behind them—but the same kind of rails appeared on all eight surfaces of the tunnel’s octagonal cross-section. With the architecture so symmetrical, her sense of the vertical wavered, and a part of her brain started labelling the axis of the tunnel as “up”.

  Forbidden to use her inertial navigation chip, she had nothing to guide her but the count of hatches she passed. None of them would open up on anything more
strategic than a heating pipe; the cable that carried data from the radar system was far from the reach of prying hands in any unprotected space like this. But when she counted hatch seventy-three on her lower right, she grabbed a rail, brought herself to a halt, and yanked the flap open.

  Camille surveyed the glowing pipes and dimmer crevices in the rock in front of her, bringing back Nicolas’s verbal description of the correct cranny: “a triangular aperture to the upper left, well above ambient temperature.” The natural rock in which these pipes had been laid did not enclose them all snugly, as if it had been poured around them like concrete; however precise the tunnelling robots had been, there were endless flaws and unplanned interstices in the space they had opened up, as pieces of rock had crumbled or fallen away rather than staying put to be diamond-carved into perfect geometrical forms. Camille had no idea who had first mapped this maze of micro-caves and tunnels—or how the map had been acquired by her superiors—but it wasn’t her role to fret over those details. She had exactly one purpose: to get her job right, so Olivier could do his own in safety.

  The mole she coughed up from its hiding place was less than a centimetre long. It would have no option but to use inertial guidance and stored coordinates, but it was fitted with a melt-on-tamper device that wouldn’t have been too congenial inside her own skull. She fought back a fresh set of qualms: Could the person who’d printed the thing be identified? Though it hadn’t been put together from factory components, its raw materials would still comprise a kind of signature. But that wasn’t her problem.

  She pinched the mole’s midriff to wake it, and waited for it to squirm a little as proof of a successful boot. Then she slid it into the crevice. For a moment it remained where she’d lodged it, merely undulating slightly, then it vanished from sight.