by Paul McAuley
He said as calmly as he could, ‘Your mission has failed.’
The guard shook her head. ‘Not from where I’m standing.’
‘You failed when you killed my friend. You didn’t kill her because it was necessary for the success of your mission. No, you killed her to show me that you were better than me, to prove that I couldn’t protect her from you.’
‘Well, you couldn’t,’ the guard said.
Raw red anger surged through Felice then, stronger than anything he had ever felt before. As if he was being born all over again. His pulse thumped like a drum in his skull. The effort to keep still left him trembling and soaked in sweat.
‘You did not have to kill Amy and you did not have to kill Goether Lyle or Jael Li Lee either. Goether Lyle didn’t know who you were; neither did Jael Li Lee. And even if they had uncovered your identity, they would not have been able to tell the prison administration. You made a mistake when you murdered Goether and you compounded that mistake when you murdered Jael. It led me directly to you, and it convinced the prisoners that it was time to free themselves.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I know you know my implant isn’t online - you will have tried to use it against me. And if you take a look, you’ll see that the implants of all the other prisoners aren’t online either.’
The guard didn’t reply, but Felice saw a subtle change in the tilt of her head and knew that she was accessing the surveillance system. She was smart and quick, it would only take her a couple of seconds, but it was all he needed.
He sprang sideways and at the same time discharged the superconducting loop he’d extracted from the battery of one of the shock sticks and glued to the palm of one of his gloves. He’d been intending to use it against the guard; instead, with a sharp snap that left his whole skin numb, it shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound his arms. He shrugged free of the net as he came down and kicked off again, a grasshopper leap to the top of the cut’s wall. And then he was pelting along up the slope towards the bulging face of a cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of grey rock.
Felice was halfway there when a kinetic round smashed into his left leg and knocked him tumbling head over heels across the dusty ground. He tried to get to his feet, but his femur was broken and he fell flat on his face. It saved his life: a second round whooped past his head and smashed a spray of shards from a pitted block of stone. Like a crippled ape he scuttled on knuckles and his one good leg into the shelter of the chimney, and started to climb.
The chimney lay back at a sharp angle within the folds of rock. When the guard reached the base and tried to shoot him, she succeeded only in knocking splinters from a fold of rock below him. Despite his broken leg he soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after a couple of hundred metres and he flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.
Above him the ground sloped gently up to the skirt of the tent and a massive abutment that was the baseplate of one of the huge struts that supported the tent’s canopy. The strut itself arched up and out in a massive parabola and big panes stretched away on either side of it, burning with the sun’s golden glow, looming over bare pockmarked slopes with no hiding place that he could see.
Felice’s left leg was slick with blood, swollen and blackened around the bloody crater that the round had punched into his thigh. He blocked off the pain and pushed up, balanced on his right foot and the knuckles of his hands, his broken leg skewed so that his left foot lay sideways on the ground, yes, just like a crippled ape, swaying slightly, waiting with patience and stillness learned long ago under the discipline of Father Solomon’s shock stick.
He saw the shadows at the top of the chimney shift fractionally and threw himself forward as the guard launched herself upwards in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail pistol in the other. He corkscrewed into her and locked his arms around her thighs, and then they were tumbling down the chimney’s steep chute. He almost lost his grip when his back smashed against an outcrop of rock; then, as they spun out into thin air, he managed to hook his fingers around her utility belt and jack himself up so that in the scant moments of their fall they were locked face to face. The guard had lost her pistol but was trying to jam her taser against Felice’s side. He chopped the blade of his palm into the nerve cluster at her elbow and the taser dropped from her numbed grip, and as the broken ground rushed up at them he clamped the glove of his left hand over the diagnostic port of her lifepack and discharged his second and last battery.
Enough current passed through the port to stun her for a moment. And then they smashed into the ground and tumbled away from each other in commingling clouds of dust. Felice curled in a ball and let himself roll and bounce, arms wrapped tight around his knees, head tucked in and down. Something hard and fist-sized clouted him in the ribs and drove breath from his lungs; smaller stones rattled and bounced down through curdy clouds of dust settling around him as he pushed to knuckles and his good knee. His left leg was a distant country under siege. His right ankle throbbed steadily - he’d twisted it somehow in the smashing tumble of the fall. A knife slid under his bruised ribs every time he took a breath. Under his body suit every square centimetre of his skin felt bruised and pummelled.
The guard lay in an untidy tangle at the base of the slope. When Felice tried to put weight on his right ankle it gave way and pain speared his leg to the hip, so he sat down and slid down on his behind towards her. One of the lenses of her face mask had cracked and there was a puffy black mass of swollen pressure-bruised flesh behind it. Her good eye tracked him, and she tried to strike him with a fist-sized stone when he reached her, but she had no strength left and he caught her wrist and prised the stone free and tossed it away. He pinned her arms with one hand and with the other unlatched and stripped off her face mask. She coughed and writhed and tried to hold her breath, lips going blue, her face blackening, blood and mucus frothing from her nostrils. He held her wrists and met her furious gaze, and then she drew in a gasping gulp of the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and shuddered and lay still.
Felice rolled the guard’s body on its side and switched off the manifold valve that was bleeding air through the face mask; she had vented most of his own supply, but he reckoned that he would be able to survive on what was left in her tank. He tried to stand up again but his ankle gave way and he sat straight down. He wondered if he could crawl to the trike, wondered if he could climb onto it, wondered if the killer had disabled it . . .
However it fell out, there was only a slender chance that Bel Glise or one of her friends would think to search for him. Yet he wasn’t ready to die. He had enough air for six hours if he stayed awake; much longer if he willed himself into the deep sleep that slowed his metabolism to a crawl. And if he was never found, at least his death would be more merciful than he deserved.
7
Newt and the other members of the motor crew had built from spare and scavenged parts a couple of dozen small satellites equipped with optical and radio arrays, and had strung them in orbit around Nephele’s trailing Lagrangian point so that they could keep watch on Neptune and Saturn. The bubble habitat was more or less complete, but everyone slept on board the ships and took part in weekly evacuation drills. When war came they’d be a soft target for either the Ghosts or the TPA; they had to be ready to bug out at a moment’s notice. But for a long time nothing happened. The Ghosts broadcast messages warning the TPA to quit the Saturn and Jupiter systems or face the consequences, but did not appear in any hurry to carry out their threat of mounting a war of liberation, while the TPA had not yet launched a counterstrike against the Ghosts to avenge the loss of its ship.
Loc Ifrahim said that this wasn’t surprising: it look a long time to organise a long-range campaign, and required detailed planning and the accumulation of a great deal of intelligence. Not only that, but relationships between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community had greatly deteriorated and it was widely expected that war would break out between them bef
ore too long. And that meant that Greater Brazil could not spare any ships of the line, especially as the Pacific Community had built up a considerable presence on Iapetus since the end of the Quiet War.
Few of the Free Outers took any notice of Loc’s opinions. After all, not only was he Brazilian, but he’d also been some kind of spy before the Quiet War. He was their guest, so they treated him with consideration and courtesy, but they also made it clear that he wasn’t especially welcome and couldn’t be trusted. Several people suggested that he ought to be exiled to a tent on Nephele, but the majority thought this was a repugnant and barbaric idea, and so it fell to Macy Minnot to take care of him. She had insisted on rescuing him, so she was responsible for his welfare.
She almost felt sorry for the poor guy. He was homesick and heart-sick. He’d lost the woman he loved and couldn’t even mourn her properly. The bodies of the two Free Outers who’d been killed during the breakout from the habitat at Neso, and that of a grievously wounded marine who’d died before he could be placed in hibernation, had been resomated with due and proper ceremony, and their nutrients had been incorporated into the hydroponic gardens of the bubble habitat, but Loc Ifrahim refused to give up Captain Neves’s body: it was still in deep-freeze, waiting to be somehow returned to Earth. Which almost certainly would never happen. And meanwhile Loc was marooned in the outer reaches of the Solar System with a bunch of Outer refugees, and he refused to take part in housekeeping chores and other communal activities because, according to him, he was a prisoner of war, with rights that he expected his captors to respect.
‘You can’t be a prisoner of war,’ Macy told him. ‘Because we aren’t at war.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘If you really want to be a prisoner of war, we could send you back to Neptune, let the Ghosts take care of you.’
‘Or you could send me home.’
‘I’d do it, if it was possible. I’d do it in an instant, just to get rid of you.’
That was mostly how their conversations went. At least Loc was much calmer now. Immediately after he’d been rescued, he’d alternated between sulky silences, flights of self-hating sarcasm, and rages at everything and nothing. Now he skulked around like a ghost, spending most of his time on his own, watching the panoramas transmitted by Newt’s array of surveillance satellites or studying the Ghosts’ crude propaganda.
Macy, who knew all about the deep ache of homesickness, had some sympathy for Loc’s plight, and was pleased when one day he volunteered to help with the hydroponic gardens. She believed that he might be coming to terms with his situation, as she had long ago come to terms with hers. That he was finally showing some backbone.
She taught him how to prick out seedlings. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, spinach: strains cut to grow quickly and crop within a couple of weeks. He wasn’t much good at it, but he persisted, working alone, slowly and clumsily, while the children and the rest of the farm crew made a game of their work. After a few days he began to unbend a little, and told Macy that he had been thinking about how the Free Outers could make the best of their situation.
‘I was listening to your partner and his friends discuss how to stealth habitats like this with shells of water ice and radar-reflective skins,’ Loc said. ‘I admire their ingenuity, but it seems to me that it would be a dismal and desperate kind of life. And in any case, it hasn’t worked very well for you so far, has it? You were driven from the Uranus System, and then from the Neptune System, and now, in greatly reduced circumstances and numbers, you are huddled around a frozen chunk of debris, living hand to mouth and hoping that somehow history will pass you by.’
‘We know that it won’t,’ Macy said. ‘That’s why we’re making plans. Some of us, anyhow.’
They were resting side by side at the root of one of the main spars, just above the big bubble of the central nucleus. An array of hydroponic platforms dwindled away down the length of the spar, orientated towards lights fixed to the habitat’s equatorial girdle. Other spars were splayed at different angles above and below and all around, nets strung here and there like cobwebs in an attic, arenas where the Free Outers played or held meetings, or simply basked in warmth and light. A flock of children were chasing each other through this maze, screaming with laughter and delight as they swung from spar to spar like a troop of monkeys, Han and Hannah amongst them.
‘I know all about your plans,’ Loc said. He wore a suit-liner like everyone else, had taken all the beads out of his hair and cut it back to a thin stubble, and seemed to have aged about ten years. ‘Some of you think that you can hide out here, replenish your strength, and move on to some other godforsaken snowball. Others hope that the Ghosts will make good their promise to drive the TPA from the Jupiter and Saturn Systems. And that simply isn’t going to happen.’
‘Or maybe the TPA will tear itself apart first,’ Macy said.
‘Greater Brazil goes to war with the Pacific Community, and the winner of that mighty conflict is so weakened that the Ghosts can easily defeat it.’
‘Or it sues for peace.’
‘A pretty little fantasy, spun by people with no experience of war. You see, Macy, war is never entered into lightly. A nation preparing for war builds manufactories to stamp out weapons and tanks and planes. It builds fleets of ships and spaceships. It drafts and trains tens of thousands of people to serve in its armed forces, and many times that number are indirectly involved. Its scientists and technicians are drafted, too, and spend every waking hour devising ingenious methods of mass destruction. All its resources, every gram of its political will, is poured into the war effort. So if there is a war between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community, the victor will be stronger at the end of it, not weaker. And besides, how many Ghosts are there? Five thousand? Ten thousand? There are more than two billion people in Greater Brazil. Twice that number in the Pacific Community. I’d say that those were pretty hopeless odds, however you cut it.’
Macy said, because she knew otherwise he would take for ever to come to the point, ‘If we can’t hide, if we can’t rely on the Ghosts, what should we do?’
‘Why did Greater Brazil send a diplomatic mission to Neptune?’
‘You’re going to tell me it wasn’t anything to do with negotiating a peace treaty.’
‘The negotiations were important, inasmuch as the possibility of a peace treaty with Greater Brazil would have compromised the Ghosts’ dealings with the Pacific Community. But it was also an intelligence-gathering operation. It’s always useful to know as much as possible about your enemies. Even if they are as insignificant as the Ghosts.’
Macy thought about that for a moment. ‘You think we should tell the Brazilians everything we know about the Ghosts? Then what? They’ll be so grateful that they’ll leave us alone?’
‘No, Macy, I do not think that you should talk to the Brazilians,’ Loc said, as if to a small child. ‘It would mean trying to strike a bargain with Euclides Peixoto, and I know very well that he cannot be trusted. But haven’t you ever thought that the Pacific Community might be of some help to us?’
‘You have to admit, it’s a good point,’ Macy told Newt. ‘We even have someone we could contact. Tommy Tabagee wasn’t such a bad guy, for a diplomat. A straight-talker. Plus, if even half of what he told me about Pacific Community’s dealings with the people of Iapetus is true, it will give us a fair hearing.’
‘I see all that,’ Newt said. ‘But what can we tell this guy that he doesn’t already know? After all, he and his crew visited with the Ghosts. He spent more time on Triton than I ever did.’
They were sitting in the control blister of Elephant. They’d put the twins to bed and were sharing a pouch of vodka that someone had distilled from fermented CHON and flavoured with a cocktail of congeners, passing it back and forth over the memo space, which was displaying a fuzzily enlarged view of the Saturn System.
‘He probably doesn’t know very much about the attack on the Brazilian ship. And he doesn�
�t know what the Ghosts did to us, either. And we lived next door to the Ghosts for five years,’ Macy said. ‘We know how they think, what they want . . .’
‘They aren’t making any secret of what they want,’ Newt said, holding out the pouch. ‘There’s just a sip left.’
‘You can finish it for me. Loc says that it doesn’t matter what we know as long as the Pacific Community believes we know stuff that will be useful to them.’
Newt sucked the pouch flat and said, ‘So this is Mr Loc Ifrahim’s big idea. We rat out the Ghosts to the Pacific Community, and hope that buys us some protection.’
‘That’s putting it crudely.’
‘It’s how everyone will see it,’ Newt said.
‘Including you?’ Macy said.
‘What I don’t get,’ Newt said, sidestepping her question, ‘is why he wants to help the Pacific Community. Wouldn’t that make him a traitor? Especially as the Pacific Community is about to go to war against Greater Brazil.’
‘He says that he can’t go back to Greater Brazil because no one would believe that he isn’t a traitor or a double agent, after he survived the Ghosts’ attack,’ Macy said. ‘If he ever returns, he says, there’ll be a show trial and afterwards he’ll be hung in front of the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas in the Eixo Monumental, the big park in the centre of Brasília. That’s what they do to people they don’t like, in Greater Brazil. Kill them and leave their bodies for the crows and vultures, so they are returned to Gaia in the worst possible way.’
‘He wants to save his skin by trading information with the enemy.’
‘I know it sounds bad. But I think it would help us, too.’
‘And how would he trade this information? We can’t aim transmissions at Saturn. It would give us away to the TPA.’