Windswept

by Adam Rakunas

  Even though the water slowed me down, I got in a good punch to Nariel’s jaw. She screamed and let go, giving me enough time to kick free. She kept sinking, and, God help me, I thought about letting her. If there’s anything worse than being killed by a Ghost, it’s not letting one get reamed by a Union court. I reached for her waistband and prayed she never got upgraded armor. The two emergency tabs were there, and I pulled with all my might. Her armor blew away from her, and I grabbed her by the hair and fought to the surface. I didn’t stop until we both exploded into the daylight.

  My lungs burned and my head rang as oxygen got back into my blood. I had just gotten the fuzz out of my brain when Nariel pounced on me again. She got her hands around my throat, and I went back under the water. I clawed at her, my hands slapping at nothing. It got black, the water filling my nose as her hands grew tighter. I felt something soft, and all I could do was push it with my thumb. Nariel let go, and I swam away as hard as I could, coughing water out of my lungs.

  Nariel yowled, grabbing her scarred and puckered face. The eyepatch no longer sat on her face; I had jammed it into her eyesocket. “Augh ew,” she said, then texted, Fuck you. She glared at me with her good eye as the waves splashed the blood away from her face.

  “No, Nariel, fuck you,” I said, treading water as we bobbed along. “The only reason you’re not sinking to the bottom of the ocean is because I was there, and the only reason I was there is because you kidnaped me. You owe me twice over.”

  I do not owe you a damn thing, she sent. I loved how her pai still followed WalWa protocol and made sure her texts followed correct business letter grammar.

  “You think your life is worth that little?”

  Nariel made a horrible coughing sound, like she was hacking up a hedgehog. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was laughter. That is funny. We are drifting in the middle of the ocean, and you are still trying to recruit me. I wish you could see the look of desperation on your face.

  “I can see us getting eaten by squid if we don’t get picked up soon,” I said, but she just kept up with her coughing laugh as we both floated. I turned away and tried to flag down a passing barge, but my voice couldn’t carry over the water. My pai was completely useless, too; it couldn’t pick up a network, even though I knew there should have been plenty of signal bouncing around.

  “Is it your fault I can’t call anyone but you?” I said.

  Your broken head is a pre-existing condition, Nariel texted, followed by another coughing laugh.

  “Funny,” I said. “So, you’re probably not going to be any help, right?”

  She just kept laughing.

  “Too bad,” I said, kicking off my boots and letting them sink. “Because I have something you’re going to want pretty soon.”

  Her coughing laugh turned to real coughing as a swell hit her in the face. Do you have more pithy advice?

  I slipped off my pants, thankful that I’d dressed from the practical drawers in my wardrobe. The thin weave meant it was easy to knot the legs shut. I whipped my pants over my head, and they filled with air. Another quick knot in the waistband, and I let my pants hit the water with a wet slap.

  “Nope,” I said, tucking my pant legs around my shoulders and kicking away. “Just flotation.”

  Nariel stopped laughing.

  “I still have a shirt,” I said. “Not as buoyant as this baby, but it’s better than nothing.”

  I would rather die.

  “Another hour, and you just might get your wish.”

  I did a lazy scissor kick, easing back and letting my lungs and my pants do all the lifting for me. Another swell rolled through us. I bobbled over the wave, but Nariel got water right in her gaping mouth. She coughed, hard and wet, and I said, “You can use a hand to keep your mouth shut, or you can use it to stay afloat. Tough choice.”

  I am not giving you anything.

  “I haven’t even asked,” I said. “I just want to help.”

  Go to hell.

  Another swell, bigger than the previous one, lifted us into the air for a moment. “I think the tides are shifting,” I said after we’d settled. “We’re going to get some serious whitecaps. Think you can handle that?”

  This time, Nariel flailed to keep her head above water. She gulped another mouthful, then texted, Please help me.

  “Oh, changing our tune?” I said. “Isn’t your magical Ghost training going to save you?”

  Please help me.

  “You gonna tell me what you know?” I said, pulling off my shirt and tying the sleeves shut.

  The next swell was about a meter high, enough to drop us both with stomach-churning speed. I inflated my shirt, while Nariel choked and thrashed until she yelled “YEAH! YEAH!”

  I swam over and handed her my pants. She grabbed onto them, and I hugged the shirt. “Of course, that was under duress, so it’s probably bullshit, but at least I have a recording of you wailing for help. That’ll probably come in handy.”

  Nariel just sniffed. You are still a bitch.

  “You know, I’m just trying to get by,” I said. “You’re the one who brought an armed kill squad here. Doesn’t that make you a little overzealous?”

  You have no idea what is happening here, do you?

  “I know that your goons carted away a lab full of very nasty fungus,” I said. “I know that the creator of that fungus was working with a guy who’s growing a new variety of cane that’s probably resistant to that fungus. I know that guy has a new refinery inside his old one, and that a bunch of people who were supposed to be dead aren’t. You have anything to do with that?”

  Nariel snorted. You should have gotten me to talk before you gave me this float. That was the first thing we learned in business school: money on the table before anything gets signed.

  “True, but we also learned not to waste our time dealing with cranky suppliers when you could go to another one with less effort,” I said.

  What is that supposed to mean?

  “It means that one of your team is going to Breach for real, which means I’ll find out what I need to know.”

  She snorted. Are you talking about Banks? Do you really believe him? He is trained to deceive.

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

  There was a sudden blast of a horn behind us, and I looked to see a fleet of police cruisers chopping toward us. For a brief second, I tensed, but then I saw Soni, Jilly, Banks standing on the prow of the lead craft.

  The boats slowed and turned, and two life rings flew over the side. I helped Nariel into hers, and they hauled us out of the water and onto the heaving deck. Jilly threw herself around me, and Soni and Banks stood nearby, both wearing shit-eating grins.

  “Jesus, boss, you are so badass,” said Jilly.

  “Please promise me you won’t try to follow in my footsteps,” I said. “It’s just not worth it.” I looked at Soni. “I am so glad to see you that I just might start crying, so let’s get going.”

  “Where did she come from?” asked Soni, pointing at Nariel as a cop wrapped her in a blanket.

  I shrugged. “Y’know, some people just come along for the ride.” Despite her bulk, Nariel looked small and sad.

  Soni looked at the half-naked woman, then at me and said, “Padma, what the hell is going on?”

  I shivered. “You got any extra trousers on this tub?”

  Chapter 24

  “Let me get this straight,” said Soni, her armor clacking as she sat back in her chair. “Vytai Bloombeck... was a genius?”

  Soni, Banks, Jilly, and I were in a spartan cabin belowdecks. There were the standard office table, chairs, and brain-fuzzing fluorescent lighting. Banks leaned against the bulkhead, looking out the porthole at the blue-grey ocean. Jilly bounced in her seat. Soni sat opposite me at the table, fiddling with a pad. Except for the thrum of the engines and the roll of the boat, we could have been back at a precinct house.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, scratching my leg t
hrough the spare tactical uniform Soni had loaned me. “But the man certainly had a talent for growing mold.”

  “I know,” said Soni. “I’ve seen him.”

  “Not the kind on him,” I said. “Well, not just that kind. Look, just watch the footage I shot over the past twelve hours, and everything will become clear.”

  “We tried,” said Soni, showing me the pad. There was nothing but static. “Your head’s a bit messed up.”

  “Well, you’re the one who waved that lightstick at me,” I said.

  “That had nothing to do with your pai’s ability to record,” said Soni. “It just set up the travel tags. Which you disobeyed.”

  “Because of the important shit, remember?” I said, blinking back into my buffer. Nothing there. “Great, even I can’t see anything.”

  “Oh, that’s probably my fault,” said Banks, looking up from the porthole. “Your pai hasn’t been able to record anything for a bit.”

  I blinked, trying to keep from punching him. “Since when?”

  “Two days ago. When we first met. On the boat.”

  “So, that means everything I’ve seen...”

  Banks swallowed and flicked his fingers in the air. “Poof.”

  “Why in hell did you do that?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t do me much good as a covert operative if you could go and show people my face, would it?” said Banks. “It’s standard procedure for us.”

  I took a deep breath, then looked at Soni. “Well, it seems that everything I’ve said will sound pretty insane now.”

  Soni nodded. “Lucky for you, Banks was able to corroborate a lot of what you said.”

  “Thank God.”

  “But you’re still under arrest for Saarien’s murder.”

  “But he’s not dead!” I yelled. “The three of us saw him! He yelled at me! Twice!”

  “Maybe,” said Soni, “but I still have a body that matches his DNA tags. So, unless you can produce the real, live Saarien–”

  “He’s in Sou’s Reach! In his giant, secret refinery! Along with Jordan Blanton and–”

  “–and now you’re starting to sound like a crazy person,” she said. “But we will deal with that, after we deal with this little issue of the Ghosts running around and killing people.”

  “Only Vytai Bloombeck,” said Banks. “He was the only one we were permitted to deal with.”

  “–which puts you on the hook for his murder,” said Soni. “And for screwing with Padma’s pai.”

  “And yours, too,” said Banks. “Actually, just about everyone I’ve been in contact with. Sorry, it’s part of my own pai’s protocols. Special Ghosty stuff.”

  Soni held up the pad. “This, too?”

  Banks nodded.

  “Right,” said Soni, tossing the pad aside and pulling a stack of paper and a pen from under the table. “Looks like we’ll have to start at the beginning. Name.”

  “Come on, Soni, can’t we just sail to Sou’s Reach, bust Saarien’s little cane deal, and be done with it?”

  Soni put down the pen and gave me her hardest Cop Stare. “When you were leading the strike at the brush factory, did I tell you how to do your job?”

  “You might have said a few words.”

  “I seem to remember telling you to stick to your guns, because what you were doing was important,” said Soni. “I respected your work, both as a professional and as someone who knew how important it was to stand up to WalWa or anyone else who tried to screw with the Union. You had your role to play, your rules to follow. And now I have mine, and that means dealing with a stack of dead bodies in the wake of an incursion by agents of our former employer. Don’t you think that’s important?”

  I sighed. “Yes, Captain Baghram.”

  “Goddamn right,” said Soni, snatching the pen and pointing it at Banks. “Now. Name.”

  “Banks.”

  “Full name.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “I only have the one name. Easier that way.”

  “Fine,” said Soni, scratching on the paper. She got a few letters written before the pen gave out. “Jesus Christ, you’d think someone would check if there were enough ink on this boat.” She stood up and pointed the pen at both of us. “Stay here.”

  “Like we have anywhere to go,” I said.

  “Didn’t stop you before,” she said, and left the room. The door clacked shut behind her.

  Banks and I looked at each other for a moment. “Any chance of you fixing my pai?” I said.

  “It’ll fix itself after I leave,” he said. “Part of the protocol. Makes people think their pais are screwing up themselves. It’s a bit easier to pull off on Union-controlled planets because of all the firmware patches.”

  “We reburn every pai’s firmware when someone signs up.”

  “I don’t have to get one, do I?” said Jilly.

  “We don’t have the capability to make them,” I said. “You’re safe. Unless there’s someone here who does know how to fix nanometer-wide circuits. Now that I’ve seen what Bloombeck could do, I’m wondering how many other people there are like him here.”

  “Not many,” said Banks. “The Big Three really does keep a close eye on the people who Breach. Some of them just fell through the cracks.”

  “Bloombeck’s been here for twenty years.”

  “Sometimes the cracks are really big.”

  “So that’s why you killed him?” I said. “Just to clean up someone’s mistake?”

  “He’s dead?” said Jilly. “The fat guy?”

  “Thanks to him,” I said, nodding at Banks. Jilly gave him a once-over, then scooted to the other side of the room.

  “Look,” said Banks, “Mimi shot him because he was dangerous to you, to me, and to everyone in Occupied Space. He took a garden variety crop pest and turned it into something that could wipe out every last bit of cane on this planet. Imagine what that would do if it got offworld? We’d be thrown back to the Stone Age inside of a decade.”

  “I think that’s exaggerating a bit.”

  “Is it?” said Banks. “The annual harvest from Santee Anchorage, in a bad year, is enough to power four other worlds. A bad year. When things are humming, you can power a dozen worlds. Start multiplying that effect by hundreds of other colonies, start thinking about the trillions of people who rely on industrial cane for fuel, for plastics, for everything that makes our civilization run. Even our star drives need a jump start from a cane-derived fuel cell. If the black stripe spread, all of that would be gone.”

  “Hooray for our corporate saviors,” I said.

  “You think you guys can come up with an antifungal treatment or put some kind of terminator genes in Bloombeck’s strain?” said Banks. “We can. It’ll stop here.”

  “But you still killed him,” I said. “You acted on behalf of WalWa. You could have dimed him to Soni, you could have exposed him on the Public, you could have done all sorts of things, but you killed him. He was in the way of some Big Three business, and we can’t have that.”

  “You know, up until now, I thought you hated him.”

  “I did,” I said. “But he was still Union, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him. Same with Jordan, and Tonggow, and–”

  “And Saarien?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “What were we talking about?”

  “You and your buddies killing Union people.”

  “But Jordan and her buddies are alive,” said Banks. “And I had nothing to do with them.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tonggow’s gone, so the Co-Op will take over her distillery and probably do something to screw it up, which is just as well since it seems like every stick of cane on this planet is going to turn to goo or distill into skunked rum. But that’s OK, because I’m going to get tossed in prison or my brain’s gonna go pop anyway. Fuck. Fuck!” I kicked the wall and slammed the porthole shut. It just bounced off its frame and swung back into place. I leaned back against the bulkhead an
d stared up at the ceiling.

  “You know,” I said, “the thing of it is that I still didn’t get you guys signed up. You’re all going to bounce away, and I didn’t seal the deal.”

  “Well, I still want to Breach.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “That’ll go over really well. ‘Hi, guys, this is Banks. He used to be a Ghost, but now he’s totally on our side. Also, he had nothing to do with that bunch of corpses we had over the past few days.’”

  “Well, I didn’t,” said Banks. “None of us did. Look, Padma, I know you’re angry, but, just for one moment, please look at my situation from a management position.”

  “Oh, that is nowhere near funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” said Banks. “Listen, our gig was to get in and out as fast as possible with the minimum amount of fuss. That’s why our pais futz with everyone else’s: by the time we’ve left and people realize something’s wrong, they’ll rewind their buffers and just see static. They’ll only have their memories, which are prone to mistakes, especially if we ourselves are unmemorable.”

  “Executing someone in his home and then tearing up a stack of houses is going to be hard to forget.”

  “And that’s because this whole thing has gone wrong,” said Banks. “We should have gotten in and out, and no one would have known or cared that we were here. Instead, there’s a string of bodies, a gun battle, airships–”

  “And don’t forget the crane chase.”

  “Exactly!” said Banks. “None of this crap was supposed to happen. None of it is what I signed up for all those years ago.” He snorted.

  “Why did you?” said Jilly.

  “Would you believe it was because I was too good at my job?” he said. “I’d get assigned to a case, and I’d start digging under all the layers of legal weirdness because I wanted to see where it all went. It was great for a while, and then I got assigned to this class-action lawsuit.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jilly.

  “A bunch of people working together to sue some asshole,” I said.

  Banks gave me a look. “It was on a shared world, one split between WalWa and MacDonald Heavy. Some colonists sued WalWa for not following through on contractual relief efforts during a ricewheat blight. I started studying the whole thing, reading through transcripts and field interviews, even digging up documentaries about the place, and then I saw that none of it fit. The place was run by respected agronomists and botanists, and they had a record of careful land management for generations.