‘Bastards…’ She raised her glass to her lips, then set it down on the table. ‘OK – that’s not why we’re here, though, is it? Like I said, I’ve seen the vid, so I’ve got more of an idea as to who you are – I think. But you wanted to talk to me after I’d seen the vid, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘About what?’
Vinter paused for a moment, summoning his thoughts, then said, ‘I need to know whose side you’re on in all this.’
‘If you mean out of New Dawn and EarthCorp – I’m not on either side, not now.’ She seemed to sit up a little straighter in her seat. ‘I’m sworn to protect UN personnel. It might sound pompous, but that’s what I’m going to try and do.’
‘That’s what I was hoping you’d say. The thing is that there’s a very real risk that this present situation could end in New Dawn and EarthCorp shooting it out and that both ships will be destroyed as a result.’ He shrugged. ‘If I can, I want to try and prevent that happening.’
‘Because you believe you’re now in control of your actions – that you’re not under Ferreira’s control any more?’
‘I hope I’m not, put it that way.’
Now, she was staring thoughtfully at him. Eventually, she said, ‘So it’s occurred to you that the memories you’ve got now might also have been tampered with? Or that Ferreira might have another trigger phrase he can use to get you back?’
‘It’s occurred to me all right.’
‘And?’
‘There’s damn all I can do about it except press on with the personality I’ve got – while I’ve still got it.’
‘Je-sus… I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, superhuman powers or not.’ She looked away from him for several seconds, then said, ‘OK.’ She drew in her breath and turned back to him. ‘So… what is it you want me for? I’m not saying I’ll go along with it – you’re going to have to sell it to me, because I don’t know if I can trust you. Hell, I don’t suppose even you know that for sure.’
‘You could say that, yes.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘OK, here’s the deal. I don’t want New Dawn and EarthCorp deciding to go head to head in a combined death or glory stunt that could take us – and the two thousand others in the cryo chambers – with them. I want to find some way of intervening.’
‘Even if it means one of them winning out and ruling the rest of us?’
‘Ideally, no, but if that is all that’s on offer, I’ll take it. Maybe we can sort something out at PlanetFall if that happens, I don’t know, but we’ve got to make sure we damn well do get there in the first place.’
She nodded. ‘Agreed. And you need to know if I’m going to be behind you if it comes to the crunch, is that it?’
‘Pretty much, yes.’
‘But you don’t know if you really have broken Ferreira’s hold over you, do you? Have you tested it out yet?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Just because you know what the trigger phrase is doesn’t mean it’s not going to affect you next time he uses it, does it? For all we know, you could be just as much under his control as before.’
‘All I can say is that I feel different, which isn’t much use, really.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she agreed bluntly. ‘And, if it’s all the same to you, I’m not about to try the phrase out on you to see if it really doesn’t work any more, because I could end up very dead long before I can countermand it. In any case, it could be geared to Ferreira’s voice anyway, so it wouldn’t prove anything – and you’ve thought of all this already, haven’t you? I imagine you want to know even more than I do…’ She stared down at the table, then said, very softly, so that he had to lean forward to hear her: ‘I need to know that if I’m going to go out on a limb for you, I won’t be left dangling because you’ve been taken over by Ferreira when I most need you.’ Her eyes came up and met his. ‘Believe me, sir, I would love to be able to trust you if you’re really who – or what – you say you are, but…’ She shrugged helplessly.
‘You’re looking for a reason to believe,’ he said gently.
‘I guess I am, yes.’
‘Me too…’ He sighed. ‘OK. I’ll see if I can come up with something that will give you that reason. And me, come to that.’ There was a pause that lasted for several seconds, then he said, his voice deliberately business-like, ‘Anyway, I have a present for you.’ He reached into his pocket and passed what appeared to be an in-ear comm device over to her.
She stared at it, then said, in sudden realisation, ‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘Depends what you think it is, really.’
‘A Persephone link?’
‘Got it in one.’
‘Cool… I didn’t think it had got beyond the prototype stage.’
‘It didn’t,’ he admitted. ‘However, Vinter – the original Vinter, that is – must have realised we might need to use the system, so he included a pair in the equipment stores. They were simply included with the standard comm devices, but he told me what ID number to look for. And here they are – well, one of the pair anyway.’
‘And where’s the other?’
He tapped his ear. ‘Already installed.’
‘OK… what exactly does it do? My security clearance wasn’t high enough to know any details. All I’d heard was that it was a virtually undetectable two-way comm system.’
‘Which is what it is. It simply replaces your existing in-ear device and, when the cloaking system isn’t activated, it works on a straightforward comms basis. However, simply subvocalise “Persephone” and it also acts as a direct shielded link to its other half.’ He tapped his ear again. ‘Here. It goes through the ship’s comms system, same as your usual UNSEC protocol, only anything you say doesn’t get logged or recorded – as far as the system is concerned, there is no signal. The only person who will ever hear what you’ve said will be whoever is at the other end – there’s no possibility of eavesdropping.’
‘How do I know when you’re trying to contact me?’
‘You’ll hear a chime – but not the standard one.’
‘And all I have to do to contact you is to use the magic word?’
‘Yup.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Sounds good to me… but is it a hundred per cent safe?’
‘Now that’s the key question – I don’t know. There was some field testing, but only on a limited basis, and it held up OK with that, but it doesn’t come with a guarantee. On the other hand, New Dawn would have to work pretty hard to pierce the various protection routines this system has and that would take time.’
‘So, if we’re going to use it, we’ll have to keep it to a minimum?’
‘Exactly.’
‘There’s still a risk, though?’
‘I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t, but we’re probably not going to get another chance of talking face to face in private – Ferreira’s going to wonder about this meeting as it is, so we can’t make a habit of it – so, apart from that, it’s the only way we’ve got of communicating with each other without being monitored.’ He shrugged. ‘Assuming you want to communicate with me, that is.’
‘True. How do I switch the mode off?’
‘Subvocalise “Proserpina”.’ He gave a wry grimace. ‘Whoever thought these up wasn’t exactly using their imagination much.’
‘OK,’ she said, nodding slowly. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
‘Thanks.’ He stared distantly down at the table top, then said briskly, ‘OK, we’d better sort out what we’ve been talking about for when Ferreira asks us.’
‘OK,’ she said, absently, then seemed to hesitate, evidently about to say something but not quite sure how to phrase it – or even to say it at all.
‘Yes?’ he asked, gently, prompting her.
She stared at him, then nodded slowly. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course you can. I don’t guarantee an answer, though.’
‘Fair enough. That message from your… I don’t know
what to call him.’
‘The original Vinter, you mean? I kind of call him Vinter Prime, or V-One, in my head.’
She leaned forward to put more wine into his almost empty glass. ‘Is he actually you?’
He let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘Phew… starting with the easy ones, are you?’ He thought for a moment, staring down at his glass before sipping from it. ‘OK – purely pragmatic answer – no, he isn’t. He’s on Earth – or was – and I’m not. I’m a construct, really. I’ve been given a set of memories that have been edited to a greater or lesser extent, but he’s – he was – at least fifteen years older than I am, never mind the fact that I was never this physically fit when I was in my twenties anyway. According to the records, I’m five centimetres taller than him and I’ve been made more intelligent, apparently by a fairly significant factor – I know things that he never did. Shit, I even understand calculus now.’
‘And the non-pragmatic answer?’
‘You mean, the essential Vinter – the one in the vid? I don’t know. I’ve got no way of knowing if they’ve given me all his memories, or if they’ve changed anything to suit themselves. All I do know is that the memories aren’t real – they didn’t happen to me. I’ve only been alive for a few weeks, when it comes down to it – everything I remember happened to someone else, to… well, the real Chris Vinter. Not to me.’
‘But you still remember them.’
‘Vividly. Only now I’ve got two sets of memories in my head – the ones given me by New Dawn and the original ones that I should have had all along – and they’re just as real in that respect as each other. Well, actually, no they’re not, to be honest. The New Dawn memories are nowhere near as detailed as the originals. Now I’ve got them, I have difficulty understanding how I ever accepted the New Dawn ones as being real, but I suppose that’s because I now know how much was missed out. But if you don’t know you’ve got gaps in your memory, how do you question them? How do you realise that there ought to be more detail, more depth to them?’
He paused, staring down at his drink, then continued, ‘In the New Dawn set of memories is a woman called Livvy – well, Olivia, really. I know I – well, Vinter – never knew a Livvy like the one in those memories, but I still remember her as someone who was part of my life for eight years. Only she wasn’t… Those memories never happened – but they keep getting in the way.’ Making love to Anji, but with Livvy’s face and body intruding because they’d often used the same memory for both sets… He shook his head, impatiently. ‘And it’s all bollocks, because none of it – Livvy, Anji, Emma – ever happened to me anyway. Before I woke up in the Med area, there was no me.’ He fell silent, staring down at his glass for almost half a minute before he looked up at her, a slow smile crossing his face. ‘Bloody hell… You really are a damn good interrogator, Lieutenant Sondgren.’
She gave a small moue of chagrin, as if he had caught her out, then tilted her head forward, acknowledging the compliment. ‘They didn’t promote me this far for nothing, sir.’
‘So I see.’
‘I wanted to find out more about you if I’m going to risk my neck for you.’
‘That’s fair enough – and quite reassuring, actually.’
‘It’s just that… I need to be sure I can trust you.’
‘So you were trying to get beyond the façade?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, I think you managed that pretty well.’ He shook his head disbelievingly. Did I really say all that to her? ‘So can you? Trust me, that is.’
She stared thoughtfully at him, then nodded. ‘I think I can, but…’ She broke off, waiting for him to pick up the thread.
‘But only if you know I’m not under Ferreira’s control, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So, if I can give you that reason to believe?’
She hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
*****
‘A word with you, Major Vinter,’ said Ferreira curtly, the following morning. ‘In private, please.’
That was quick, Vinter thought to himself, as he followed Ferreira into his office and was confronted with a still of him outside Kari’s quarters that the other man had waiting on his desk comp. ‘Explain.’
Vinter gave him a quizzical look. ‘Explain what?’
‘What you were doing last night with Lieutenant Sondgren. And before you claim it is none of my business, I am going to say that when you and your assistant meet in private, with no record of your conversation, it becomes my business – is that clear?’
‘As crystal. So you want to know what we were talking about? I sent you an e-memo summarising the meeting fifteen minutes ago.’
‘I do have other things on my plate, Vinter.’
‘I can imagine… OK, this was very much a clear the air meeting. We have to work together, but, like you, she trusts me as far as she can throw me, so we had to negotiate some sort of working procedure, make the best of a bad job, that sort of thing.’
‘So why couldn’t it be discussed in your office?’
‘What, so that you could listen in? This was a cards on the table discussion –’ Seeing the blank expression on Ferreira’s face, he continued, ‘A full and frank discussion, OK?’ Nearly slipped up there – that was a TwentyCee expression, the sort that Vinter Prime would use; I’m not supposed to have access to them… ‘She had some pretty blunt statements to make about me – traitor, murderer, betrayer, that sort of thing, but also about you – the kind of things she wouldn’t have wanted you to hear.’
‘Like what?’
‘As I said, the kind of things she wouldn’t have wanted you to hear.’ Vinter stared levelly at Ferreira. ‘And you’re not going to – not from me, anyway. But I imagine you can probably guess the general drift of them.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, it was the kind of discussion you can’t have if anyone’s listening, especially when a lot of it was about the listener. It needed to be brought out into the open, so we did.’
Ferreira stared levelly at him for several seconds, then said, ‘You were in there for over an hour. Is that all that happened, this “clear the air” discussion?’
Vinter shook his head, chuckling. ‘You mean was I fucking her?’ He saw Ferreira visibly recoil at the obscenity; it wasn’t the first time that he had shown an unexpected degree of disapproval of coarse language. ‘You must be joking, Colonel. I can’t say I’d object, but she sure as hell would – I’m the last person she’d want. No, we were talking about the overall situation, how neither of us was happy with it, but the best way forward was to co-operate.’
‘And she accepted that?’
‘Not immediately, no, but she’s a pragmatist when all’s said and done and knows damn well that there’s nothing either of us can do to change the situation, so we decided to work something out.’
‘Which was?’
Vinter gestured at Ferreira’s desktop. ‘It’s all in the memo.’ Stifling a smile at Ferreira’s evident impatience, he continued, ‘Basically, she takes over the day to day running of UNSEC, because none of the Team trust me at all, and reports to me on a daily basis or if anything important comes up. They’re keeping me at a distance and I can’t say I blame them one little bit.’
‘I’m not sure I like that arrangement.’
Vinter shrugged. ‘It’s the best you’re going to get, I’m afraid. They really don’t want to work for me – actually they don’t want to work for you either, but I don’t suppose that comes as any surprise – but they’ll work for Lieutenant Sondgren. Take it or leave it – if you want any investigation into EarthCorp agents to continue, that’s the way it’ll have to be.’
Ferreira sighed, then shook his head. ‘I’m still not convinced you’ve been entirely truthful with me.’
Vinter sighed and shook his head. ‘Do you really think we were concocting some plot to overthrow you – just the two of us, when she wouldn’t even trust me with the time of day? Wha
t would be the point – all you have to do is use a trigger phrase for Conditioned Debriefing Mode or whatever it’s called and I’d have to reveal the plot immediately, wouldn’t I?’
‘I may yet decide to do that.’
Vinter shrugged. ‘Go ahead, if it makes you feel better.’ And it would be one way of finding out if he really had escaped Ferreira’s control…
Ferreira continued to stare at Vinter for almost half a minute, as if trying to read the truth in his face, before he sat back, shaking his head slowly. ‘This will not happen again, you will not meet in secret, understood?’
‘In private,’ Vinter corrected him. ‘It’s an inalienable right of the UN constitution, actually.’
‘Understood?’ There was an edge of barely controlled anger in Ferreira’s voice now.
‘Understood,’ Vinter echoed resignedly.
‘I hope so. Very well, Captain. Dismiss.’
Vinter rose to his feet, then paused, as a further thought struck him. ‘Colonel?’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while. What happened to Ilona Novaska?’
Ferreira stared blankly at him, taken aback by the sudden change of subject. ‘Who?’
‘Ilona Novaska – the revival specialist that you had arrested during your coup.’
‘How the hell should I know? Why do you want to know?’
‘Because she tried to help me, that’s why.’
Ferreira glared at him, then typed in a series of instructions on his deskcomp. He studied the display for several seconds, then said, ‘She went back into the cryosleep chambers a week ago – once we’d finished reviving our own personnel.’ He looked quizzically up at Vinter. ‘Did you think I’d had her killed?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you.’
Surprisingly, Ferreira seemed to be genuinely offended by this. ‘I’m not a barbarian, no matter what you think, Vinter. Why would we kill her – to cover up what she knows? Whatever information she had is out of date, now, isn’t it? And it will be even less relevant when she is revived at PlanetFall – when we will be needing her skills again, won’t we?’
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