The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘I don’t doubt it. I was just admiring your handiwork.’

  She did look up then, sharply, pushing the goggles up on her forehead to see if I was laughing at her. When she saw I wasn’t, she lowered the goggles again, made a couple of adjustments to something on the handset then sat back. The violet light went out.

  ‘It’s done.’ She reached into the machine and removed the stack, holding it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Incidentally, this isn’t great equipment. In fact it’s the sort of thing Scratchers buy for their thesis work. The sensors are pretty crude. I’m going to need a lot better than this up on the Rim.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. ‘If this works out, they’ll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we’re going to assume he is. That means we’ve got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a casualty ID&A, but cranked up we’ll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.’

  ‘What are you going to do to him?’ This was Wardani, looking unhappy.

  I reached for the skullcap. ‘Nothing. There isn’t time. I’m just going to talk to him.’

  ‘Talk?’ There was a strange light in her eyes.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I told her. ‘That’s all it takes.’

  It was a rough ride in.

  Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn’t have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn’t appear until after I’d bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren’t ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we’d liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.

  I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to, a single-storey wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an AI with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock, and that’s probably exactly what it was.

  Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

  Time to Identify and Assess.

  It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth re-sleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Barcoding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it’s chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.

  Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for re-sleeving. How you die - fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony or numb - is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So too does your re-sleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Re-sleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want any more.

  Oops.

  The point is there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties, but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.

  I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiselled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: Deng Zhao Jun. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.

  He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realise where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.

  I coughed gently.

  ‘Good evening, Deng.’

  He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.

  ‘We were set up man, it was a fucking set-up. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—’

  His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognised me.

  ‘Yes.’

  He jerked to his feet. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘That’s not really important. Look—’

  But it was too late, he was up and coming for me round the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.

  ‘Look, there’s no point—’

  He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and mid-level punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet, and came at me again.

  This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knee and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut-deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.

  ‘Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.’ I got my breath back and lowered my voice. ‘Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?’

  He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.

  ‘Alright.’ I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. ‘Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilised fashion. I want to ask you some ques
tions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.’

  I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.

  ‘You wired for virtual trace?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re running a mirror-code scrambler. Now, I want to know who your controller is.’

  He stared at me. ‘Why should I tell you a fucking thing?’

  ‘Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably re-sleeve you.’ I leaned forward in the chair. ‘That’s a one-time special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.’

  ‘If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.’

  Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.

  I deployed one from the manual.

  ‘They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hardline outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.’ I gestured with one open hand. ‘But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?’

  I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.

  Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.

  But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.

  Try it again.

  ‘Something like that, Deng?’

  ‘You’d better go ahead and kill me,’ he said tautly.

  I let the smile come out slow -

  ‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng.’

  - and waited.

  As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.

  All the time in the universe.

  ‘You’re—?’ he said, finally.

  ‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said. I’m. Not. Going to kill you.’ I shrugged. ‘Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don’t get to be a corporate hero that easy.’

  I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.

  ‘Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a one-time special offer. Answer the questions now, while you’ve still got the chance.’

  ‘Or what?’ Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume thin, but rising.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Or I’ll leave you here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometres of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.’

  He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.

  ‘You’re in a Casualty ID&A system. Runs off a battlefield powerpack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.’

  I sat back again. Let it sink into him.

  ‘Or you can answer my questions. One-time offer. What’s it going to be?’

  The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.

  ‘You had your chance.’

  I got almost to the door before he cracked.

  ‘Alright!’ There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. ‘Alright, you got it. You got it.’

  I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.

  ‘I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop man. I’ll tell you.’

  Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.

  ‘Hand?’

  He nodded jerkily.

  ‘Matthias Hand?’

  He looked up, something broken in his face. ‘I got your word?’

  ‘For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.’

  ‘Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.’

  ‘He’s your controller?’ I frowned. ‘A divisional exec?’

  ‘He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the Chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  ‘Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?’

  He hesitated. ‘They say it was Hand.’

  ‘How long’s he been with Mandrake?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He saw the expression on my face. ‘I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.’

  ‘What’s his rep?’

  ‘Tough. You don’t cross him.’

  ‘Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.’

  ‘It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R&D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—’

  ‘Company what?’

  ‘Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  Deng shook his head. ‘Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.’

  ‘All that voodoo shit,’ I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand were ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. ‘So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?’

  Deng shrugged. ‘That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cart
el by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.’

  ‘Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—’

  Falling.

  Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.

  ‘You OK, Kovacs?’

  Schneider.

  I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.

  ‘Kovacs?’ This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-moulded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.

  ‘Well?’ Wardani drew back a little. ‘Don’t just sit there grinning. What did you get?’

  ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I think we’re ready to deal now.’

  PART TWO

  Commercial Considerations

  In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

  Quellcrist Falconer Things I Should Have Learnt By Now Vol II