The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.’

  ‘Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.’

  ‘Not really.’ Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. ‘They’re not overly perceptive, these meth-head guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag. ’ He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. ‘Bye bye head, bye bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after. Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!’ Murakami slapped fist into palm. ‘That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and re-sleeve in a hotel bathroom.’

  Sourcetown.

  ‘You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?’

  ‘Among others.’ Another shrug. ‘The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.’

  ‘Hence Tanaseda.’

  ‘Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the haiduci, well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate notable-manners version of the same disease. By the way, did you get your pal Segesvar? Forgot to ask before I dented you out there.’

  ‘Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.’

  Murakami chuckled. ‘Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?’

  I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse. ‘What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?’

  ‘Ah - no, not yet.’

  I opened my eyes again, surprised.

  ‘He’s still walking around somewhere?’

  Murakami made an embarrassed gesture. ‘Apparently. Looks like you were hard to kill, even at that age. We’ll get him, though.’

  ‘Will you,’ I said sombrely.

  ‘Yeah, we will. With Aiura down, he’s got no handler, nowhere to run. And sure as fucking lightspeed no one else in the First Families is going to want to pick up where she left off. Not if they want the Protectorate to stay home and let them keep their oligarch toys.’

  ‘Or,’ I said casually, ‘you could just kill me now you’ve got me, then let him come in and cut a deal.’

  Murakami frowned. ‘That’s not funny, Tak.’

  ‘Wasn’t meant to be. He’s still calling himself an Envoy, you know. He’d probably jump at the chance to get back in the Corps if you offered.’

  ‘I don’t fucking care.’ There was anger in his tone now. ‘I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.’

  ‘My life’s easy enough,’ he growled. ‘Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.’

  ‘You get a stack out of Aiura?’

  ‘Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’ I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. ‘You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.’

  He grinned unpleasantly. ‘Everybody cracks in the end, Tak. You know that. Virtual interrogation, it’s crack or go insane, and these days we can even bring them back from that.’ The grin faded out to something harder and no less unpleasant. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Our beloved leader-in-perpetuity Konrad will never know what we do or don’t get out of her. He’ll just assume the worst and cringe to heel. Or I’ll call in an assault force, torch Rila Crags around him and then feed him and his whole fucking family to the EMP.’

  I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. ‘You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.’ Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sorry?’ But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been running for about four years, which ties in rather too neatly with the start of the Mecsek initiative. You’re not here for the Quellists, you’re here to keep an eye on the deCom technology.’

  The grin crept out. ‘Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.’

  ‘The orbitals?’ I blinked at him. ‘What have the orbitals got to do with it?’

  ‘At the moment, nothing. And that’s the way we’d like it to stay. But with deCom tech, there’s just no way to be sure of that any more.’

  I shook my head, trying to dislodge the numbness. ‘Wha—? Why?’

  ‘Because,’ he said seriously. ‘The fucking stuff appears to work.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  They brought Sylvie Oshima’s body out of the baling station on a bulky grey grav sled with Tseng markings and a curving plastic shield to keep the rain off. Liebeck steered the sled with a hand-held remote, and another woman I assumed was Tomaselli brought up the rear with a shoulder-borne monitor system, also Tseng-logo’d. I’d managed to lever myself to my feet as they came out, and oddly Murakami seemed content to let me stay that way. We stood side by side in silence, like mourners at some premillennial funeral procession, watching the grav bed and its burden arrive. Looking down at Oshima’s face, I remembered the ornate stone garden at the top of Rila Crags, the stretcher there, and it struck me that, for the crucible of a new revolutionary era, this woman was spending a lot of time strapped unconscious to conveyances for invalids. This time, under the transparent cover, her eyes were open but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. If it hadn’t been for the vital signs display on a built-in screen beside her head, you could have believed you were looking at a corpse.

  You are, Tak. You’re looking at the corpse of the Quellist revolution there. This was all they had, and with Koi and the others gone, there’s no one going to bring it back to life.

  It wasn’t really a shock that Murakami had executed Koi, Brasil and Tres, I’d been expecting it at some level from the moment I woke up. I’d seen it in Virginia Vidaura’s face as she slumped against the mooring post; when she spat out the words, it was no more than confirmation. And when Murakami nodded matter-of-factly and showed me the fistful of freshly excised cortical stacks, all I had was the sickening sensation of staring into a mirror at some kind of terminal damage to myself.

  ‘Come on, Tak.’ He’d stuffed the stacks back in a pocket of his stealth suit and wiped his hands together dismissively, grimacing. ‘I had no choice, you can see that. I already told you we can’t afford a rerun of the Unsettlement. Not least because these guys were always going to lose, and then the Protectorate boot comes down, and who wants that?’

&
nbsp; Virginia Vidaura spat at him. It was a good effort, considering she was still slumped against the mooring post three or four metres away. Murakami sighed.

  ‘Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if it takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she snapped. ‘And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.’

  Murakami shrugged again. ‘I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.’

  ‘And why is it gone?’ Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. ‘You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.’

  Murakami made an exasperated gesture. ‘Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.’

  ‘That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.’ But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. ‘Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.’

  Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

  ‘Yeah, thing is, Virginia,’ he said when she’d finished, ‘they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me - you trained me, in fact - to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.’

  Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.

  ‘Fucking Mecsek,’ Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. ‘If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.’

  ‘Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?’

  He nodded glumly. ‘Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.’

  ‘Thought that was what you wanted,’ Virginia Vidaura said faintly. ‘Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?’

  He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/ Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.

  ‘What’s this about making history, Tod?’ I asked tonelessly. ‘What’s going on with deCom?’

  He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before. He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.

  ‘What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.’

  Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.

  ‘Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,’ I said mildly.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. ‘What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.’ He choked a laugh. ‘And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.’

  I felt suddenly like sitting down again. The trembling from the stunblast came rolling back over me, up from the guts and through my head, leaving it light. I swallowed the nausea and tried to think straight over a clamour of suddenly recalled detail. Sylvie’s Slipins in laconic, murderous action against the scorpion gun cluster.

  Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.

  Yeah. And besides which, we want the fucking land.

  Orr and his wrecking bar, stood over the dysfunctional karakuri in the tunnel under Drava. So we going to switch it off or what?

  DeCom bravado aboard Guns for Guevara, vaguely amusing for its ludicrous presumption, until you gave it a context that might mean something.

  Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.

  Yeah, count me in. Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.

  Oh fuck.

  ‘You really think she could do that,’ I asked numbly. ‘You think she’s capable of talking to the orbitals?’

  He bared his teeth. It was anything but a grin. ‘Tak, for all I know she already has been talking to them. We’ve got her sedated right now, and the Tseng gear is monitoring her for transmissions, that’s part of the brief, but there’s no telling what she’s already done.’

  ‘And if she starts?’

  He shrugged and looked away. ‘Then I’ve got my orders.’

  ‘Oh, great. Very constructive.’

  ‘Tak, what fucking choice do we have?’ Desperation edged his voice. ‘You know the weird shit that’s been going down in New Hok. Mimints doing things they’re not supposed to, mimints built to specs no one remembers from the Unsettlement. Everyone thinks that’s some kind of machine evolution, basic nanotech all grown up, but what if it’s not? What if it’s deCom that’s triggering this? What if the orbitals are waking up because they’ve got a whiff of the command software, and they’re doing something to the mimints in response? That stuff was designed to appeal to Martian machine systems, as near as we understand them, and the word out of Latimer is that it works. So why wouldn’t it work here?’

  I stared at Sylvie Oshima and Jad’s voice echoed back through my head.


  —all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon—

  —handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other—

  My mind went spinning off down the avenues Murakami’s own Envoy intuition had opened for me. What if they hadn’t been fighting each other? Or what if—

  Sylvie, semi-conscious on a bunk in Drava, muttering. It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—

  The woman who called herself Nadia Makita, lying in another bunk aboard Boubin Islander.

  Grigori. There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.

  ‘Those people you’ve got in your pocket,’ I said quietly to Murakami. ‘The ones you murdered for the sake of a more stable tomorrow for us all. They all believed this was Quellcrist Falconer.’

  ‘Well, belief is a funny thing, Tak.’ He was staring away past the grav sled and there was no humour in his tone at all. ‘You’re an Envoy, you know that.’

  ‘Yeah. So what do you believe?’

  For a couple of moments he was silent. Then he shook his head and looked at me directly.

  ‘What do I believe, Tak? I believe that if we’re about to decode the keys to Martian civilisation, then the Really Dead coming back to life is going to seem like a small and relatively unremarkable event.’

  ‘You think it’s her?’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s her. It doesn’t change a thing.’

  A shout from Tomaselli. Impaler came forging round the side of Segesvar’s devastated farm like some huge thuggish cyborg elephant ray. At the risk of throwing up again, I worked the neurachem gingerly and made out Mallory standing in the conning tower with his coms officer and a couple of other pirates I didn’t recognise. I stood closer to Murakami.

  ‘I’ve got one other question, Tod. What are you planning to do with us? Virginia and me?’