His first inhalation got him nothing. He started to see black spots.
The air flow increased, compensating for the lack of atmosphere in the suit. He inhaled greedily as the suit reinflated to its former quilt-like size.
“I did it,” he said to the MI.
Was he expecting congratulations? Praise?
He got only silence. The stupid MI had stopped working again.
He was still hanging by one boot from the jackstand, a hundred meters above the ground. He swung himself very gently until he could hook his fingers through the nearest weight-reduction hole. Then he released his gecko grips—there was a chin-toggle pattern for that, too—and flipped right way up. Boy, did that feel good.
Carefully, he climbed back down.
He turned his back on the Salvation. Without a second glance at the giant ship, he set out walking towards the distant lights of InSec Center. Dead ships loomed out of the dark at him like monsters, but he wasn’t afraid of them now.
He had the idea that he had maybe met one of Stepmom No. 3’s ghosts.
And it had saved his life.
So—nope. Nothing to be scared of out here.
He had got about halfway to InSec when a convoy of vehicles overtook him. Their headlights drenched the terrain, turning it the colors of jewelry. Michael turned to face the headlights.
A bus-sized eighteen-wheeler stopped in front of him. “Need a lift?” crackled a familiar voice.
Steps unreeled. Michael scrambled up them and stuffed himself into an airlock on the roof. He fell into a cabin full of people with bows and guns. The man in the driver’s seat had a long ginger beard. The man in the passenger seat was Father Lynch.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s Michael Kharbage.” The priest rose, holding onto the overhead racks as the bus bumped along. He helped Michael out of his suit. “You’re soaked to the skin. Do I even want to know how that happened?”
Michael’s teeth chattered. “Sure,” he said happily. “I’ve been outside. And now I’m back. Where are we going?”
xxxi.
Kiyoshi had forgotten most of the karate he once knew. But being invisible from the neck down made up for it, as did the fact that he was taller than Legacy, twenty years younger, and tweaking. He punched Legacy in the stomach and felled him with an unseen kick to the kneecap. The knife flew out of Legacy’s hand. Legacy crashed into the wall, rolled over, and sat up, glaring.
Kiyoshi scooped up the knife. Then he remembered about the compact laser pistol he’d taken from under Legacy’s desk. He aimed it at Legacy’s head. The nannyware shocked him again. He staggered in agony.
“You’re just not getting the message, are you?” said a flat, robotic voice.
Kiyoshi hadn’t known the nannyware could talk. “Get out of my fucking head!” he yelled. At the same time, Legacy’s gaze slewed past him. A reaction to the voice. It had not been in Kiyoshi’s head.
Kiyoshi stared suspiciously at the computer in the Faraday cage.
“Don’t kill him before you get his number, dumbass,” the computer said from a tinny, poor-quality speaker.
“Number?” Kiyoshi said.
“Executive-level access number. You need it to get out of here alive.”
“It’s all biometric,” Legacy spat.
“Oh no, it isn’t,” the computer said. “You can bypass the biometrics with your personal alphanumeric key to the InSec consensus channel. It’s quantum-encrypted. It would take me so long to crack it by brute force, the universe would die of entropy while I was trying. However, there are back doors, and one of them is in your head. Let’s have it.”
Legacy uttered a string of numbers, letters, Chinese characters (he explained them by enumerating their components), and punctuation marks.
“Memorize that,” the computer said to Kiyoshi.
“Uh … gimme it one more time.”
This time Kiyoshi wrote it on the back of his hand with a gel pen he found on Legacy’s desk. Legacy watched this calamitous breach of ISA security with an indifferent stare. Something in the last few seconds had given him a horrible shock, pulverizing his defiance.
“Aaaand disabling the other executive-level access codes,” the computer said. “Indexing permissions hierarchy … hmmm. Wow.”
Kiyoshi squatted in front of the Faraday cage. He tapped the mesh with the gel pen.
“Hey, don’t distract me,” said the thing inside.
Its voice was uninflected, computer-generated, accentless. But every time it spoke, it felt like a little bomb of familiarity going off in Kiyoshi’s mind. “What are you?” he whispered.
★
“Oh honey, it’s all right.” The thin, fortyish woman stroked Andrea’s hand.
Andrea pushed the woman away. She was sitting on the woman’s desk. There weren’t many places to sit in Room Seven. Stacks of paper took up every surface in the room that wasn’t a screen, and some that were. The top influencers of the ISA employed old-fashioned composition methods as well as new ones.
A giant virtual corkboard stretched the length of one wall. Hundreds of news items were pinned to it, illustrating the failure of the ISA’s narrative control strategy. In orbit around Ceres, the Flattop UNSF Badfinger and its escorts targeted Nawish Spaceport with their kinetics. Down on the ground, professional media curators and amateur vloggers cheerleaded for the locals, who were threatening to blow up the first landing craft that touched down on ‘their’ planet.
“Can’t you do anything?” Andrea demanded, for the twentieth time.
The people in Room Seven were supposed to be capable of fixing this. She’d threatened to shoot them if they didn’t do it. They were not being brave. One of them had pissed his pants to prove it. They just … couldn’t.
Hopelessly, she protested, “You’re the writers, aren’t you?”
In previous centuries, ‘writers’ had been people who crafted stories for little pay and less recognition. Their place in the entertainment industry had long since been usurped by immersion designers and moviemakers. However, there was still a need for writers. The ISA purposely recruited those rare individuals who, born in a different age, might have been literary giants, and used their storytelling talents to shape reality through the media.
The thin woman said, “Honey, this is the science fiction department.”
“I know that. Which makes you responsible for shit no one thought would ever happen, such as a Martian invasion of Ceres. So change the bloody story!”
A fat, bearded writer said tiredly, “As several people have already explained to you in words of one syllable, we have lost control of the narrative. Our influence is gone. InSec is broken.”
Yes, Andrea had known that. But she hadn’t really believed it, and nor had any of her colleagues. In their hearts, they’d continued to believe the ISA was all-powerful … until now.
“Obviously, this Ceres story bombed big-time,” Fat & Beardy said. “We’ve been busting our asses to change it for a week. But there’s only so much you can do when the UN is blowing up civilian ships in freaking Earth orbit. And that was before you came charging in here to take us hostage, and they cut off our outgoing comms.”
“It all went wrong,” Andrea muttered. “There were supposed to be more of us. Not just me.”
“Have a coffee,” the thin woman suggested. “At least we’ve got plenty of that. Although I do wonder how long this, cough, hostage situation is going to go on for …?”
Andrea laughed. She didn’t feel so much like a hostage-taker as a hostage, although they were all being nice.
A writer on the far side of the room suddenly exclaimed, “Heads up, guys! We’ve got comms!”
All the writers dived for their input devices. The murmur of dictation filled the room.
Andrea shook the thin woman’s shoulder. “Eris! Tell them to send the Martians to Eris!”
“That’s so obvious,” the woman said. “We were thinking more along the lines of an unexpected twist, budget p
ermitting.”
Andrea grinned humorlessly. “A twist? OK, how’s this? Dispatch the QRF to Ceres. Narrative control by other means.”
Her words landed in an odd silence.
“Not happening,” said Fat & Beardy.
“What’s not happening?” Andrea demanded.
“The QRF? It appears we’ve lost them.”
“How do you lose three squadrons of decommissioned Gravesfighters and Heavypickets?”
“You tell me. Their data feeds stopped updating three minutes ago.”
“At the same time as you got your comms back,” Andrea said. “Oh crap, what is going on here?”
★
“What are you?” Kiyoshi whispered to the computer in the Faraday cage.
Legacy answered from behind him, “It’s the guts of a fridge. Your fridge, actually.”
“You’re kidding. Do you know what was in there?”
Legacy pushed himself painfully upright. “A year’s supply of mochaccino, several packets of freeze-dried minestrone, and a simulated quantum computer. Worth interrogating, no?”
“It was the fucking Heidegger program!”
“Which is why no one else wanted it. Yesterday’s news.”
“Yesterday’s news can still eat you alive,” Kiyoshi said, grinding his teeth.
“Not if it is in a Faraday cage. Admittedly, it seems to have escaped.” Legacy eased Kiyoshi aside. He got down on the floor and waved his hand around under the cage. He pulled back with a stifled curse.
A green snake, like the one Andrea Miller had used to handcuff Kiyoshi in the rover, slithered out through the mesh on the bottom of the Faraday cage. It wriggled across the floor, looking eerily alive.
“Would those snakes be connected to your network?” Kiyoshi enquired.
“Of course they are,” Legacy said.
“There you go, then.”
“It may have been loose for a while, but been unable to break into our comms programs. That’s now changed.” Legacy glanced at the screens on his desk. “In the last three minutes, it’s used my key to give itself executive-level access. It’s disabled our perimeter defenses. It’s taken control of our satellites. And it also seems to have done something to the QRF. Such as, perhaps, oh, taken control of them, too.” Legacy reached into the breast pocket of his rumpled three-piece suit. Kiyoshi tensed, but all Legacy took out was a cigarette. “I don’t vape often, but the occasion seems to call for it. Want one?”
“Can’t,” Kiyoshi said, thinking of the nannyware. Events were moving too fast for him.
The voice of the computer interrupted. It no longer came from the tinny little speaker inside the Faraday cage. It resonated from high-quality intercom speakers on Legacy’s desk. “Don’t sweat the nannyware,” it said. “I’ve disabled it.”
Kiyoshi’s fists clenched on empty air. A lump formed in his throat. “Jun?”
“That took you long enough.”
Kiyoshi laughed out loud. “Yes! Yessss!” A niggling feeling that something was wrong tainted his delight. Now that he had proper speakers to talk through, Jun sounded like himself, but he still didn’t sound quite right. He didn’t sound happy.
Well, you wouldn’t, would you, after what he had been through?
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Kiyoshi chortled. “Mmm … actually, wait a minute.” He levelled the laser pistol and lined up the crosshairs on Legacy’s forehead. The nannyware didn’t shock him. That monkey was off his back, thanks to Jun.
“Is that really what you want to do?” Jun said.
“Any reason I shouldn’t?” Kiyoshi lunged at Legacy, got him in a headlock, and rested the pistol’s muzzle against the side of his head. He smelled the man’s expensive cologne. Legacy wasn’t trembling, wasn’t shitting himself. He stared straight ahead with a stony expression. Maybe he’d have welcomed death, at this point.
“Just busting your balls.” Kiyoshi laughed, plucked Legacy’s cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, and pushed him away.
“Look out the window,” Jun said. “Wow. That didn’t take long.”
Kiyoshi glanced down into the park. Employees ran every which way. From up here, their attempts to hide in the shrubbery looked comically futile. Kiyoshi laughed again. “Asshats.” He noted a peculiar phenomenon: people were bouncing off thin air. At a guess, more of Andrea Miller’s colleagues had broken into the dome when Jun disabled the perimeter defences.
Watching the show, Kiyoshi sparked up one of Legacy’s cigarettes. It tasted like nicotine and stim. Just what the doctor ordered.
“They never caught me,” Jun said. Legacy didn’t react, so Kiyoshi knew Jun was now speaking into his cochlear implants, just like in the old days. “When they boarded the Monster, I suspected they’d come to bust me, so I escaped into their ship’s hub. That turned out to be a good call. They arrested Mendoza and blew up my data center. That ship was called the Creed. It towed the hulk of the Monster back to Pallas. I used to peek at the optical feed and see the Monster trailing behind us. It was the strangest feeling …”
~Wait a minute, Kiyoshi subvocalized. ~You infiltrated the hub of an ISA cruiser?!?
“Kiyoshi, it was trivially easy,” Jun said flatly. “Remember who I am. I’ve fought the Heidegger program and beaten it. I designed a virus that knocked out the PLAN’s distributed processing network. And victimized millions of innocent Martians, but never mind that. Basically, if not for those goofballs who smashed up Phobos, I would have defeated the PLAN on my own. Sneaking on board an ISA cruiser was not a problem for me.”
~Heh, heh. Gotcha.
The chaos in the park died down. The InSec employees squeezed into a weeping, docile crowd. One by one, outdoorsy-looking individuals appeared out of thin air, aiming bows and arrows at them. Kiyoshi remembered that he too was still wearing an invisible coverall. He clenched his cigarette in his teeth and stripped it off.
“Oh yeah, I was going to do something here,” Jun said. “OK. It’ll take one minute … So when we reached Pallas, I hopped from the Creed to InSec Center. There’s a supercomputer in the basement with yottabytes of memory. That’s where the bodies are buried: all the stuff they’ve covered up and twisted to fit the UN’s needs, going back to the twentieth century. I scootched right in there among all the other lost stories. But then I was stuck.”
~So what have you been doing all this time? Reading the ISA’s secret archives?
“That only took about five minutes. It was mostly political shit. Not very interesting. I’ve been bored out of my mind, actually,” Jun said. “Rattling around in the secondary systems. Messing with their heads.”
~If you weren’t in there, what was? Kiyoshi jerked his chin at the Faraday cage.
“Oh, it really is the Heidegger program. I used the snake to borrow its audio speaker from time to time. But that reminds me.”
~What?
“Stand back.”
Inside the Faraday cage, something shorted out with a loud crack. Legacy jumped violently. Smoke dribbled from the cage. Kiyoshi smelled burning plastic.
“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Jun said in satisfaction.
Suddenly, the light dimmed. Legacy flinched back from the window. Outside, Paris had vanished from the smart wallpaper. In its place floated Ceres.
The dwarf planet appeared to hover right outside the park, a bright hole in a black cliff of sky. The people in the park cowered. That was understandable. It looked like Ceres was about to fall on them.
Kiyoshi smirked. “Why Ceres?” he said, forgetting to subvocalize.
“Oh, I just thought it would be good for them to reflect on what they’ve done.”
Legacy, unable to hear Jun, assumed Kiyoshi had been speaking to him. He raised an eyebrow. “Why Ceres? Why not? It could have been anywhere. The fall of the Roman Empire started in Germania. The fall of the American empire started in Iraq. A hundred years from now, people will look back on the collapse of the UN and wonder what we were smoking. We had t
he stars in our grasp, and we threw it all away.”
“I dunno about that.” Kiyoshi took a last drag on his cigarette and moved towards the door. “My advice to you: Get out of here. Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling things’ll start blowing up soon.”
“Why did you say that?” Jun said, outside the office. “I’m in control. Nothing’s going to blow up.”
“Those people down there? The prison wardens? You’re not in control of them. And if they’re not in a destructive mood, there are forty thousand people up north who are. Brian O’Shaughnessy once told me how to make a fertilizer bomb. Low tech, Jun. It kills people just as dead as high tech, and even you can’t switch it off.”
All the employees from this sector had been rounded up. The corridor was empty. Kiyoshi hesitated, wondering which way to go.
“What are you waiting for?” Jun said.
“Just wondering if I should go back and look for Michael.”
“Don’t you have something else to do?”
Oh, yeah. It came back like a dream. The boss-man. He grinned into the empty corridor. “But he’s on 5222 Ioffe,” he recalled, energy fading.
“I can get us a ship.”
“A ship? Now you’re talking.”
“Go downstairs.”
Kiyoshi ran down the stairs. At the exit to the park, he spotted Michael. He was standing with Father Lynch, hopping around in excitement as he talked. That was a relief. Kiyoshi edged back into the corridor. He didn’t want them to see him. Didn’t want to waste time on explanations.
The six-storey representation of Ceres, which wrapped around the ceiling and most of one wall, vanished, suddenly plunging the park into darkness. Frightened people yelped aloud.
A fleet of buses stood at an apparent distance of fifty meters from the park. Kiyoshi realized the smart wallpaper now displayed an ordinary optical feed. They were looking at the landscape outside the dome.
A blaze of light splashed the terrain. A ship descended to the ground, backthrusting profligately. Twin energy weapons jutted from its forward radome like tusks. Point defense turrets warted its narrow, radar-stealthed fuselage. Streamlined wings identified it as a dual-use ship, capable of flying in-atmosphere. But Pallas didn’t have an atmosphere, so the ship landed butt-first. White-hot plasma baked the rock inside a filigree cone of jackstands, and faded.
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