by Alec Saracen
“Well, not everything. Most of it, though. Sekkanen knows you’ve been fading for years. You should see the psych profile she's got on you, boss.” Sam tipped his head to the side and started quoting. “'Has allowed guilt over Naro incident to fester, impairing his judgement.' 'Still potentially extremely useful if deployed correctly.' 'Predictable.'”
“Fuck you,” Zhai said softly. The shock had given way to anger, a raw boiling fury that vibrated at the burning core of every bone in his body. “You're a fucking maniac, Sam.”
“I wondered about that,” Sam said. His expression was incomprehensibly normal, as if he was talking about Zhai's meeting schedule. There was no unhinged glint in his eyes, no telltale hint of madness. He was just Sam. “I thought about it for a very long time. Lots of sleepless nights. You know what it’s like, I’ve seen your hypnotics prescriptions. But in the end, I realised – if I don't do it, that's when I'm a maniac. Peace relies on this, boss. You know it does. It's just – mathematics. A Consolidationist majority equals no war with the Confederation equals millions of lives saved. The lives lost at Landing will be repaid a hundred times over.”
Zhai shook his head in disbelief. “What are you, Sam?”
Sam's gun had never wavered, but now it dipped slightly. “Rational.”
“You call this reason? Mass murder in the name of saving lives?”
“Yes. And you'd have called it the same, in your prime.”
“I would never have done what you've done,” Zhai said, with a certainty that surprised even him. His anger had condensed into a hard singularity within him, hot and dense as the core of a star. “Never.”
“Believe what you want,” Sam said. “You're done with the Coalition, and we're done with you.”
“So what happens now? You going to kill us all too?”
Sam shook his head. “We'll wait out the night here, until that broadcast has repeated a few hundred times, then you're free to go. Work for Hactaur if you want. Join her government, if it makes you feel better.”
“And if I expose what you and Sekkanen did here? If I tell the galaxy the truth?”
“You won't,” Sam said. “You wouldn't jeopardise peace just for your own satisfaction. Not after the price we paid for it.”
“'We' paid? You paid nothing! Landing paid! Did the lives of all those people mean anything to you?”
“How can you say that?” Sam said, a wave of anguished fury sudden breaking across his face. “How can you say that to me?” His gun trembled in Zhai's face, an inch from his eye. “They mean everything, boss. Everything! That's why we did this. To save lives! A hundred thousand dead on Tor to save a million on Armenaiakon or High Summer? I'll take that deal, boss! I'll make that sacrifice!”
“It wasn't your sacrifice to make!” Zhai shouted back. If not for the gun, he'd have shaken Sam by the shoulders. “You didn't have the right!”
“Everyone has the right to do the right thing, boss,” Sam said, his voice almost a whisper, low and hoarse. “No matter the cost.”
And that was the worst part, Zhai realised. The soft-spoken, polite, intelligent young man before him really, truly believed he'd done his moral duty, and couldn't understand why it had made his soul writhe in agony. If Zhai could just make him see...
“Sam,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “there's a way back. What's done is done, but you can–”
Sam shook his head. “Keep your redemption, boss. I don’t need it. I'm at peace with this. Just like you would have been, once.”
Zhai saw the jumble of conflicting emotions on Sam's face, and a terrible weight settled on his heart. “Oh, Sam,” he said softly. “What have I done to you?”
Sam's eyes hardened again. “You showed me the way.”
“I turned back. You don't want to follow that path, Sam. It leads nowhere good.”
“You turned back, but the way is still there,” Sam said. Behind him, something moved, and Zhai's tongue caught in his throat. Sam was too caught up in the moment to notice his expression, tripping over his own words, snared between righteousness and crippling guilt. “And I'll, I'll follow it, boss, further than you ever did. I'll do what I have to. I'll–”
Behind him, with blood and brain leaking over the gel packs masking her face, the revenant shape of Grey Hawk loomed, and Sam turned.
Grey Hawk's hand flashed out and caught hold of his pistol. Slowly, inexorably, she forced his hand up and back, her eyes painted with intense concentration, until Sam's pistol was at his own head. Bone cracked.
“Don't–” Zhai started to say, too late.
He would often think back on that moment in the days to come.
Either Grey Hawk had rammed her finger into the trigger guard and forced Sam to fire, or he had done it himself. Zhai, his vision still impaired, hadn't seen which. Sometimes, his memory told him it had been an execution, and sometimes it seemed that it could only have been suicide. The truth was known only to Grey Hawk.
But no matter who had pulled the trigger, Sam fell dead all the same.
Zhai looked up at Grey Hawk.
“You should be dead,” was all he could say. He was drained dry now. There was nothing left in him to feel anything.
Grey Hawk looked at him with a curious expression, as if she was experiencing jarring déjà vu. Something about her reaction was off. All the right movements were there, but slightly out of sync.
“Neural dispersal,” she said after a couple of seconds, audibly slurring her words. She pointed at her head wound after she'd finished speaking, like she couldn't do both at once.
Zhai looked closer, peering at her eyes. “Grey Hawk? Is that still you in there?”
Grey Hawk seemed to consider the question.
“Yes,” she said eventually. Something indescribable flickered behind her eyes. “I feel – strange...”
“Boss,” Ceq said. “The video.”
Perturbed, Zhai turned away from what he was no longer sure was Grey Hawk. “Right,” he muttered. “The video.”
He looked up at the screens. A multitude of Zhais looked back, all utterly convinced that the lie they were telling the world was true.
He could stop it right now. He could record a new video, broadcast that instead, reveal the truth. Undo his mistake. It would be just as effective – even more so, probably. It didn't matter to Tor which Coalition faction had bombed Landing. He could expose Sekkanen.
It would cost the Consolidationists dearly. Whatever political damage the existing video would do to the Revvies and Devvies, the truth would be far worse for the Consolidationists if it came from the mouth of Gumeigo Zhai. It would be catastrophic, unsurvivable. He would be guaranteeing Developist and Revanchist hegemony for generations, and that would send the galaxy sliding irrevocably into war.
It would kill millions.
But it was the truth.
He reached out to stop the recording, and hesitated.
And, in that moment of doubt, Zhai knew with bleak certainty that he had reached the end of his strength. This was a truth he didn't have the courage to tell. Sam had been right. He couldn't do it. He couldn't plunge the whole human race into war.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, opened them again. Stared at Sam's body. Looked up.
“Let it play,” he said.
Ceq looked at him, and he looked back, willing to accept the rejection he knew was coming.
But it didn't come. Instead, Ceq's eyes carried a sad, distant understanding.
The only words in the blood-soaked command centre were those of Zhai's duplicates. They spoke on with conviction for the rest of the night and into the morning, endlessly repeating the greatest lie they'd ever told.
31
Grey Hawk had no recollection of regaining consciousness. She experienced a brief sensation of returning to the surface of some deep ocean, light swimming into darkness, and an instant later she found herself sitting up in bed in a sparse white room.
Time ran oddly for a little while. Her
observations trickled in over what could have been seconds or minutes. Her vision was set to the most basic display possible, not even showing her the time, and there was nothing else to inform her. It was a hospital room, but a specialised one. All the usual medical equipment was absent. All there was apart from the bed were a couple of chairs, both empty, and a table which contained only a single empty glass.
The room looked out over a grey, indistinct city. Judging by the driving rain lashing at the window, it was Macard. She was still on Tor.
More than once she ran her hands – her fingers had been repaired – over her head. There was no pain. There were no gel packs, either, though there were thick bandages covering everything but her eyes and mouth. Her hands reached the place where the bullet had entered her skull, and found nothing to even hint at what had happened, just more smooth bandage.
The events of that night replayed patchily in her mind. They seemed very distant, as if she were recalling them months or years later.
She called up her HUD. It had been seven days.
She remembered waking up on the bloody floor of the command centre, twitching back to life with her mind in tatters, forcing the gun to Sam's head, looking down at his body. She remembered the look of abject defeat in Zhai's eyes. That was the last thing of any substance she could recall.
Her thoughts were lighter than usual, floating delicately from topic to topic like a butterfly between flowers, alighting and then flickering away before their full weight could settle. Apprehensively, she began to test herself. She quoted Yustrid aloud, forcing clumsy, constricted lips to form the words. She retraced a mental timeline of her life, from her earliest memories to the disastrous events of Tor, and found that it was as complete as it could be. She recalled the deaths of Red Wolf and Blue Bull and Blue Wasp, and saw that she could still experience grief and anger, though they were faint and muffled, echoes of echoes. She thought about Zhai, and her thoughts jarred into ambivalent emotional stalemate. No change there.
She was still Grey Hawk, she told herself. The bullet had changed nothing. Whatever damage it had done had been compensated for, what it had destroyed rebuilt elsewhere in her brain. And yet – something sat maddeningly beyond the boundary of her perception, taunting her, unreachable and ineffable. She was different in some way, and she had no idea how.
After a time, the door opened, and Lake came in, with a steaming mug of something in his hand, talking over his shoulder to someone behind him. He stopped abruptly mid-sentence when he saw that Grey Hawk was awake.
Black Horse followed him into the room.
For a moment, none of them spoke.
“What are you doing here?” Grey Hawk asked eventually. “How–”
“We were invited,” Black Horse said. “By a friend of yours, in fact.”
Grey Hawk stared at him blankly. She didn’t have friends. “Wait, Zhai?”
Lake nodded, pulling up a chair and sitting by the bed. “A data runner hit Plenty six days ago with the message that you were in an induced coma on Tor, in desperate need of brain surgery by someone who knew their way around a Liberator.” He smiled sheepishly. “So they sent me. I don't mind telling you, it was touch and go at times. How do you feel?”
“Strange,” Grey Hawk said.
“No doubt,” Lake said, and a familiar enthusiastic glint came into his eye. “A decent chunk of your brain had to recreate itself as a nanonic network. I patched things up as best as I could, but truth be told, there wasn't much to do besides tidy up and let the neural dispersal implants do their work. You were lucky the bullet was such a low calibre. If it had been two millimetres bigger, you'd have died then and there.”
Grey Hawk saw Black Horse glance disapprovingly at Lake. His bedside manner could definitely have used some work. “How much of my brain is... dispersed... now?” she asked.
Lake cocked his head in thought. “Interesting question. In terms of volume? About fifteen percent. In terms of function? Impossible to quantify. Anywhere between 'zero' and 'some'. The brain's a radically complex organ. The trick of neural dispersal is to mimic the form as closely as possible with the nanonic network, and hope that function follows. We'll follow up on our initial scans soon, once you're recovered a little.” He paused. “I also stripped off your skin above the neck. It was too badly damaged. The artificial stuff should be just as good, and you won't feel any pain...”
Grey Hawk listened to him without much interest. In that moment, it didn't seem to matter very much. She was mostly machine already. What was a couple more percent? So her brain was being slowly converted into a mechanical simulacrum of itself, and her last surviving natural flesh had been replaced. What did it matter?
Eventually Lake shut up, and the room descended into awkward silence.
“We're here to take you home, Grey Hawk,” Black Horse said gently, after a few seconds. “Your mission's complete.”
Grey Hawk closed her eyes for a moment. “The others,” she said, in a small, strained voice.
Black Horse nodded sympathetically, in a way that somehow told Grey Hawk he was intimately familiar with that pain. “We know. We pulled your data.”
“So you know everything,” Grey Hawk said. She tried to resent their plundering of her experiences, but she couldn’t make herself feel anything about it. It was just something that had happened.
“More or less.”
“I stand by my actions,” she said truthfully.
Black Horse nodded, as if he’d expected her to say that. “Glad to hear it, but I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“Grey Hawk,” Lake said, leaning forward, “I'm sorry to push you so soon, but we need to examine your head. The neural dispersal functionality was only ever theoretical until now – we had no idea if it would even work, let alone what it would do to a person. With you, we finally have a subject–”
“Lake,” Black Horse said sharply, and Lake closed his mouth. “Go and get some coffee or something, hm?”
Lake looked up at him in indignation, but his complaint died on his lips at the sight of Black Horse's stern face.
“Sure,” he said, standing up quickly. “Always wanted to try the imperialists’ coffee.”
Black Horse shook his head as he watched him leave the room, then turned back to Grey Hawk. He began to say something, thought better of it, and took Lake's place in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees.
“You did well, kid,” he said at last, without making eye contact. “Very well. Yustrid herself would have been proud of how you held things together.”
“What's happening out there?” Grey Hawk said, jerking her head towards the window. The compliment would have meant everything to her once, but now, it seemed hollow to her. Perhaps she had done the right things, but she knew damn well she hadn’t thought the right things. “The coups–?”
“Over now. Marshal Hactaur – or, should I say, Interim President Hactaur – won out. Tor's staying independent. It's not the ideal outcome, but it's a damn sight closer than anyone at home thought we'd get. All in all, we can chalk this one up as a success.”
Grey Hawk looked at him with heavy eyes. “Three Liberators died.”
“That's what we do,” Black Horse said. “We die.”
“You didn't. I didn't.”
A distant, inscrutable look came into Black Horse's eyes. “No. We didn't, did we? We survived. But Tor's free.”
Grey Hawk looked out over Macard. Indistinct dark shapes loomed from the grey fog of rain. All that had changed since she'd arrived was the weather. “When do we go home?”
“Tomorrow,” Black Horse said, “now that you're awake. There'll be time to recover and rest before the debrief.”
“I want to go back into the field,” Grey Hawk said. “There must be a need for Grade Eights somewhere.”
Black Horse looked at her as if she'd gone mad. “What, immediately?”
“As soon as I can.”
“No,” he said shortly. “Not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
He rolled his eyes. “Why not, she asks. Because you've been shot in the head! Your brain is held together by nanomachines, and we've got no idea what that's done to you!” Black Horse sat back, shaking his head. “No. You're not going back out for a long time. That's not just my opinion, that's common sense.”
“You don't trust me,” Grey Hawk said.
Black Horse didn't speak for five seconds or more. “No,” he said at last. “I don't. I hope that doesn't offend you.”
Grey Hawk smiled. The motion felt strange, and she was suddenly aware of the intricate organic machinery behind her false skin, working to haul her muscles into place for every expression. “Don't worry. I don't trust me either.”
“Then why would you want to go back into the field?”
“It's what I'm for,” Grey Hawk said. “I want to be a Liberator. It's all I want.”
Black Horse let out a quiet, bitter laugh. “Oh, I know. I was the same.”
Grey Hawk sat in silence, hunting for the words that would make Black Horse see the visceral need within her to return to the field, to burn away her doubts in the purifying fire of fighting for the cause, to harden her damaged ideals in the forge of battle. If they kept her away from the field, the doubts and failures and flaws, all the myriad things she'd done wrong, would boil up and consume her. She had to fight. It was the only way.
In the end, her own words weren't enough. She needed Yustrid's.
“'Though the path of truth is long and arduous, and though so many of us fall by the wayside, it leads us to sunlit meadows, and lands of plenty',” she said. “I’ll walk that path, Black Horse, with Liberation or without it.”
Black Horse had mouthed the last ten words of the quote along with her, his eyes fixed on his hands.
“So that's how it is,” he said quietly.
“That's how it is.”
Late that evening, when Black Horse and Lake had been absent for a couple of hours, Grey Hawk stood at the window, watching through her own first-person recordings. She repeatedly watched her tiny moment of hesitation when she had considered letting soldiers execute a kid in the street for the propaganda value of the video. With every repetition, the hesitation seemed to grow longer and longer.