by Gary Gibson
Saul nodded tightly and placed the briefcase on one end of the conference table, clicked it open and turned it around so all the others could see what was inside. He lifted out a couple of bundles of cash, as well as the box containing the arbitration unit. Kwan pushed him to one side, none too gently, and began expertly riffling the notes between his fingers, peering at them closely.
Hsiu-Chuan finally stepped away from the TriView and picked up the box containing the arbitration unit. Nothing else, Saul knew, would have been sufficient to make him risk showing up here.
‘This is a clone, correct?’ Hsiu-Chuan asked, finally acknowledging Saul’s existence. His English was only lightly accented.
‘Of one of the most successful predictive AIs currently operating in the Coalition share markets, yes,’ Saul agreed. ‘It was . . . difficult to obtain.’
‘And you understand,’ Hsiu-Chuan continued, his manner still offhand, ‘what will happen to you personally if it’s a fake or if it fails to live up to expectations?’
‘I do,’ Saul replied levelly.
Hsiu-Chuan nodded, pocketing the unit, then snapped his fingers at Kwan. Kwan responded by tossing a single bundle of cash underhand to one of the two street soldiers. Without another word to Saul or anyone else, Hsiu-Chuan drted the room, followed by the same street soldier.
‘Where have they gone?’ Saul demanded, turning to glare at Tanner.
‘Just making sure everything’s legitimate,’ Tanner replied with an easy shrug. ‘They’ll run some tests, won’t take more than a minute or two. Have a drink while we wait.’
Tanner stepped back over to the couch and fetched a half-bottle of whisky and four glasses. He placed the glasses on the conference table and poured a hefty measure into each. He then put the bottle down and withdrew a pykrete gun from inside his voluminous coat, placing it next to the bottle.
‘What the fuck is that for?’ asked Saul, staring at the gun.
‘That?’ Tanner pretended to be surprised by the question. ‘That is in case your sample of money or your arbitration unit aren’t up to scratch.’ Tanner picked up his whisky, full to the brim, and drank it in one swallow, before slamming down the empty glass. ‘I hope that’s not a problem for you,’ he added, with a thin smile.
‘Not at all,’ Saul muttered, picking up his own glass to try and hide his agitation. He noticed that neither Jacob nor Hsingyun had made any move yet towards their own drinks.
There was just enough loup-garou still left circulating through Saul’s bloodstream to ratchet up his fight-or-flight responses, but he felt his nerves settle a bit as the whisky slithered down his throat. It had a pleasant, slightly honeyed texture.
‘Sometimes,’ said Tanner, refilling his own glass before raising it, as if in salute, ‘I wonder how it ever got to the point where good honest criminals were forced to print their own money.’
‘At least it’s real money,’ muttered Hsingyun, finally picking up his glass and taking a sip. ‘And not just numbers encoded on some fucking computer’s memory.’
‘Ah,’ Tanner nodded, ‘that’s why I came here, to Kepler.’
‘For black-market cash?’ asked Saul.
‘That and freedom, too. Back there,’ he said, waving one hand towards the opposite wall, as if the entire planet Earth were lurking just on the other side of it, ‘there’s none. Back there it’s all invisible credit. But that,’ he gestured with his glass at Saul’s briefcase, ‘that’s real, tangible. You can hold it in your hands. Walk around the street stalls back in the city, you’ll see that stuff getting used. People here trust it more than they ever did UP-linked credit.’
Saul nodded. The cash in the briefcase had been printed on black-market presses that had been impounded long ago by the ASI. They had been obliged to print their own or they’d never have been able to pay the network of informants they maintained throughout a dozen worlds. Tanner was right, of course: back on nd Luna, where the only legal currency had a purely virtual existence, you couldn’t do anything without leaving a trail of information behind you. The underground economy had no choice but to develop its own secret banking and credit system, replete with its very own currency.
Tanner paused, as if about to say something, then withdrew a slim device, placing it against his ear and nodding after a few moments. A telephone, Saul realized with a shock; the kind normally relegated to museums. Tanner really was serious, it seemed, about leaving the old world behind.
‘Verdict’s in,’ said Tanner, returning the device to his pocket. ‘Your arbitration unit is good, and your money is real.’
Saul nodded, fingering the lid of his briefcase as if to close it again. ‘Then we can get started on working out schedules and delivery dates. That means—’
‘Not quite.’ Tanner nudged the gun closer to Saul. ‘Pick it up,’ he said.
Saul stood absolutely stock-still. He could see Hsingyun and Jacob to his left, around the other side of the table, while the remaining street soldier had moved to stand by the wall directly behind Tanner. Kwan stood to Saul’s right, and nobody was paying any attention to the TriView.
‘Why the hell should I?’ asked Saul.
Tanner glanced over his shoulder at the street soldier, and said something to him in rapid Mandarin. The man stepped up behind Jacob, grabbing him by both arms just above the elbow, while Kwan crossed the room in a couple of steps, and pulled one arm right back before punching Jacob hard in the stomach.
Jacob crumpled, wheezing. The street soldier and Kwan took a shoulder each and quickly manoeuvred him into one of the chairs by the table. Saul watched, rooted to the spot, as Kwan pulled plastic restraints from a pocket before expertly securing Jacob’s hands and feet to the chair.
‘Ben,’ Jacob’s voice was cracking, ‘I don’t know why you’re—’
‘Shut up,’ snarled Tanner.
Jacob tried to say something else, but Kwan punched him in the jaw before he could get it out. Jacob’s head snapped back, and he fell silent, although Saul could see he was still just about conscious. A thin trickle of blood emerged from one corner of his mouth.
The seconds seemed to trickle by at an infinitely slow pace. Hsingyun appeared unperturbed by the sudden violence. His eyes met Saul’s, who realized in that moment that they had been compromised since long before he had even arrived on Kepler.
A second weapon had appeared in Tanner’s hand, a Koch flechette pistol. He levelled it at Saul’s chest, and waggled its barrel towards the table.
‘Now pick up the gun, Mr Lassen,’ he said, using Saul’s false identity.
Saul took a deep breath and slowly laid one hand across the pykrete gun’s bulbous coolant chamber, without picking it up. He realized, with a sinking feeling, that the wooden panels on the far wall were rippling gently. That meant the psycho-actives were starting to kick in, and were clearly much more powerful than Jacob had claimed. Everything felt slightly unreal, as if at one remove.
‘Why,’ he asked Tanner, ‘are you doing this?’
‘You say your name is Lassen,’ Tanner replied, then nodded towards Jacob, ‘but I have it on good authority that Mr Cowles here is in fact employed by the ASI. And if he’s ASI, that means you probably are, too. In fact, everything we know about you comes through Cowles, or whatever his fucking name is. That means, if you want to prove yourself, by which I mean, show me you’re legitimate and serious about doing business with the Tian Di Hui, and not just some undercover cocksucker, then you’re going to have to walk the extra mile. Kill Cowles and I’ll believe you really are who you say you are.’
‘If that’s what you think, why not just kill me instead?’ asked Saul, struggling to keep his tone even. ‘Why hand me a gun?’
‘The Tian Di Hui have rules when it comes to dealing with new clients,’ explained Tanner, the barrel of his Koch dipping until it pointed at Saul’s crotch. Saul did his best to ignore the unpleasant tingling suddenly radiating through his loins. ‘We like to know if they’re genuinely committed to a w
orking relationship with us. Now – let’s suppose my information isn’t correct, and you really are who you say you are. Even if that’s the case, the Tian Di Hui will only deal with one person at a time. That means either we deal with Cowles here,’ Tanner nodded over his shoulder towards Jacob, ‘or we deal with you.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘But not both.’
‘So you want me to kill him?’ said Saul. The gun felt solid and heavy beneath his fingers as it rested on the polished wood.
‘If you don’t,’ said Tanner, ‘we very definitely will kill you.’
Saul stared down at the weapon with the fascination of a rabbit confronted by a hungry lion. ‘Is it loaded?’
Tanner shrugged. ‘One way to find out.’
Saul glanced back at Hsingyun, and wondered just how long he had known. It wasn’t too hard to picture Jacob, stoned out of his mind while crammed into a bar much like the one they’d left barely more than half an hour before, letting slip some clue that he was something other than what he seemed. Maybe the answer really was that simple.
Moving slowly, Saul picked up the pykrete gun, feeling the balanced weight of it in his hands. He then considered his options. Terror and fury waged a war inside his head and heart, while sparks of light like fireflies swam at the edges of his vision, leaving phosphorescent blue trails.
Or maybe, he thought, the whole thing was really a kind of carefully staged test. The gun in his hand might, in fact, not be loaded at all. Maybe neither Tanner nor Hsingyun nor anyone else had any idea that he and Jacob were anything other than who they claimed to be. But the surest way to reveal they were ASI would be to refuse to play along.
The knife-edge sharpness from the loup-garou reasserted itself, through the fug of alcohol and hallucinogens. He felt suddenly, supremely confident that everything was going to be just fine; Tanner would never have given him a loaded gun if he really believed he was a cop. Wasn’t that how it always played out in the TriView dramas? The gun was never loaded. Never.
Saul aimed the gun at Jacob’s chest, deliberately fumbling with it to create the impression this was the first time he’d ever held such a weapon.
Jacob tried to struggle out of his chair, and Saul noticed a curious look on Tanner’s face. The street soldier moved to one side of Jacob, while keeping one meaty hand firmly clamped over his mouth.
‘It’s cool,’ Saul said to Jacob, the wood panelling on the walls writhing furiously, like wheat in an autumn gale. ‘They’re just testing us.’
Saul pulled the trigger. The gun made a loud popping sound and a lozenge-sized chunk of pykrete punched a hole through Jacob’s chest. It sounded, thought Saul, not unlike a cork being pulled from a champagne bottle. Jacob jerked back with sufficient violence to tip his chair sideways on to the floor, dead before his cheek touched the carpet.
The sound of the gunshot seemed to resonate through every cell in Saul’s body, startling him into something more closely resembling sobriety.
After a few moments’ prolonged silence, Tanner turned to Kwan with a delighted grin. ‘Well, fuck me, you won that fair and square.’ He turned back to Saul. ‘I’m seriously fucking taken aback. I really, really didn’t think you were going to do it.’
‘Why not?’ Saul managed to croak, his tongue suddenly thick and heavy. He stared down at Jacob’s slumped form in horrified fascination, then noticed, as he brought his gaze back up, that Tanner had momentarily lowered his own weapon until it pointed at the floor.
‘Because we already knew the both of you were fucking cops,’ Tanner replied, levelling his Koch at Saul once more.
Saul reached down with his free hand and grabbed one corner of the open briefcase beside him, whipping it around and up with as much force as he could muster. The briefcase struck Tanner on the side of the head. He dodged back with a yell, arms raised in defence, nearly stumbling over Jacob’s body as loose banknotes went scattering through the air.
Already moving forward, Saul grabbed Tanner by the shoulder, pulling him close and twisting him around before the street soldier, who had been standing directly behind the pharm manager, could get a clear shot at him. He reached down and clasped his hand around Tanner’s fist, where it held the pykrete gun, aiming the weapon at the street soldier and squeezing. As if by magic, a line of fine red dots appeared across the soldier’s neck and chest, and he dropped to his knees with a gurgling sound.
Saul tore the flechette pistol from Tanner’s grasp, then ducked beneath the table before Kwan had a chance to fix him in his sights. He could hear the sound of chunks of compacted cellulose and ice water thudding into the wood a second later.
Kwan dropped on to all fours, to try and take aim a second time. His head flowered red as Saul fired, the flechettes tearing into his vulnerable flesh. Kwan collapsed, his legs and arms twitching spastically.
Tanner stumbled away to hide behind the couch. Saul looked around and saw Hsingyun fumbling desperately with the door, cursing in his panic to get out. Saul fired a stream of flechettes towards his ankles. Two intervening chairs spun away from the side of the table, as if shoved aside by invisible hands, and Hsingyun went down screaming.
Saul darted back out from under the table, and meanwhile glanced towards the couch. Several bottles previously standing on the table next to the TriView rolled noisily across the tiled floor.
‘Tanner,’ Saul shouted hoarsely, ‘if you so much as twitch from where you are, I swear I’ll blow your fucking head off. Do you understand me?’
There was a muffled reply, just audible over the sound of the chainsaw and the combined shrieks of both the torture-doll and Hsingyun.
Saul backed towards the door, and Hsingyun, and a moment later Tanner’s head popped back up over the top of the couch. Saul fired without thinking, the flechettes ripping gouts of foam out of the couch. Tanner made a strangled sound and fell backwards, crashing into the TriView, its sounds of carnage cutting off instantly.
He turned back to Hsingyun and found him slumped half-conscious against the door in an ever-widening pool of blood, his lower legs now a mess of pulverized meat. Saul kept a tight grip on the Koch, and used his free hand to rifle through Hsingyun’s pockets until he located the device that could get him past the minefield.
Now all he needed to do was get to the surface alive – and pray the ’copter was still parked where they’d left it.
And if it wasn’t, he was totally, irretrievably, fucked.
He dragged Hsingyun out of the way and cautiously pulled the door open. When he leaned out, he could see no one bar the distant figures of white-suited workers going about their business.
There was so much noise out there that no one had even heard the fighting.
Saul had got most of the way back to the spiral staircase before someone finally raised the alarm.
A high-pitched whine filled the air, followed by a muffled shout from somewhere nearby. Saul started to rn, and heard shots echoing through the cavernous space behind him. In that moment he remembered that his parka was still back there in the conference room. That was going to be a problem once he got outside.
He reached the stairs and clanged his way up them as fast as he could go: three, four, five steps at a time. There came more shots, one ricocheting off a step ahead of him as he climbed higher. He glanced back to see the street soldier who had departed with Hsiu-Chuan, waving his hands as he yelled at two other men in white worker gear, both with pykrete rifles gripped in their hands.
Saul reached the dome and burst through the outer door and on to the ice. The cold came as a brute physical shock that brought him to a sudden halt, gasping as he filled his lungs with freezing air. Saul was wearing nothing more than a light business suit, barely sufficient to keep him warm on a January afternoon in New York or London, let alone amid Kepler’s half-frozen oceans.
Hands shaking and teeth chattering, he fumbled Hsingyun’s mine detector out of a pocket. Peering across the ice, he felt a surge of overwhelming relief when he saw the ’copter was still exac
tly where they had left it. He tried to estimate how long it would take him to work his way past the minefield, and how long it would take the men chasing him to catch up. Then he decided to think of something else.
Hsingyun, he remembered, had pressed a red button . . . here.
Ah, thought Saul, as a screen blinked into life on the device, accompanied by a beep. He saw a grid of dots appear on the screen, a blinking zigzag line superimposed over it. A circle at the centre of the grid clearly represented the dome.
He walked a few metres forward, and the zigzag line began to blink faster, finally changing colour as he found himself standing almost directly on top of a buried mine, its dark shape visible just millimetres beneath the ice.
Still grasping the Koch in his other hand, he stepped forward, half convinced he was about to get blown to bits – but nothing happened. He walked faster, then began to run, stopping only when the screen began to blink again.
Hearing shouts from behind, he turned and fired in the direction of the dome, but wide of the mark. Two figures that had just emerged from the dome’s entrance ducked back inside.
It occurred to Saul that if one of his pursuers thought to shoot at the mines to either side of him, that it might just set them off. He crouched low as he ran, filled with an overwhelming sense of urgency, keenly aware of just how good a target his dark suit made him against the ice.
More shots came, and Saul stumbled forward, landing on his knees. For a moment he thought he’d only slipped on the ice, then realized with numb shock that he had been hit in the shoulder. He twisted around, raised the pistol and once again fired towards the dome, but his hands were shaking too badly for him to be able to take proper aim.
Get to the ’copter, you fucking idiot.
T worst thing – the nasty thing – about pykrete bullets was that they melted, leaving a mass of difficult-to-extract and potentially poisonous cellulose fibres buried deep in the tissue of your body. You didn’t need a fatal wound to be in serious trouble.
He pushed himself back upright, ignoring a sudden spell of dizziness that threatened to overcome him. He checked the screen on Hsingyun’s gadget: all he had to do was move three mines to the right, and then it was a straight run all the way to the ’copter.