“That is going to be a pretty little scar.”
“Are you done?”
“Just admiring my handiwork, lass. All done.”
“Then stop pawing me.”
He released his grip on her right breast and looked briefly at the offending hand.
“Sorry, lass, no insult to your maidenly virtue was intended. Just trying to get some light on the site of interest.”
“Sorry if my tits overshadowed your ‘site of interest.’”
“Nothin’ ye’ll need worry about, Lieutenant. Nae yer fault,” said the old man, moving to help her dress.
Malila smacked his hands away when he tried.
The following morning, the old man shoved a rucksack into her arms, containing her sleeping skins, a water flask, and some of the food.
“This is yours, lass. Time you started lifting your weight around here, doncha think?”
With a defiant look, Malila let the pack fall to the ground, folding her arms. Her duty was clear; to cooperate with the enemy was to betray the Unity.
“No matter. It’s your stuff. Carry it or leave it … all the same to me.”
Malila glared at him. His face was unreadable behind its alien bush of white beard and blue tattoos. When she did not pick up the pack, he shouldered his own, bound Malila’s wrists in front of her, and walked off. They had passed out of view of the campsite by the time she fathomed her mistake. They were a few hundred meters beyond that before her defiance crumbled.
“I get it. I get it, old man. You can turn around now,” she demanded.
Jesse’s pack advanced ahead of her, his legs churning underneath, as if she did not exist. After a few more moments, Malila dug in her heels and pulled on the lead, throwing her full weight into it. She toppled over and was dragged for a meter or so before Jesse stopped.
“Sorry, lass. Did you say something?”
“I understand. Let me get the pack.”
“Well, now, lass, that’s a problem. If I walk back for your pack, I carry my bag three times over the same ground, don’t you see? It only seems fair that we share the load. You walk it back, and I’ll take it once we get to yours. Sound fair?”
“Not really. Will you let me go back if I don’t carry your pack?”
“No.” And Jesse smiled his toothy smile.
“Okay, if you are going to be like that.”
“I’m going to be just like that.”
Malila grunted under the impossible weight of the old man’s pack, the distance expanding in front of her with each step. Her sides burned, her legs ached, and her breath came in dry rasps. She got about halfway back before she stumbled and fell to her knees. Jesse leaned over and offered her a hand.
“Nice try, lass. You can leave it there. Stand up, and we can go back without it.”
Malila followed him in silence and let the old man help her into the smaller pack before they started again.
“Lesson learned, lass?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Don’t piss off the Sisi.”
Jesse laughed before yanking on Malila’s leash and making her stumble.
“Watch your language, Lieutenant, but you were close. ‘Accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom.’ Perhaps with contemplation, you might come up with a more philosophical answer.”
“You aren’t making any sense, old man.”
Jesse laughed and walked on. For a Sisi, the man seemed to have too many layers.
They passed derelict buildings and rusted devastations that she took for bridges. Many of these last stretched over mere streams, suggesting destroyed dams or a more hostile climate.
During the late afternoon, the old man slowed his pace to investigate bivouac sites. Once camped, their main meal was various combinations of hard bread, jerky, dried berries, and the luck of the snares. If there was still sufficient light, the old man did small tasks. His movements were delicate and dexterous while repairing clothes or working on the small patches of leather that he kept in a buckskin roll in his pack. At other times, he soaked the pieces in a malodorous solution that he kept in a thick plastic satchel. Unidentifiable gray objects swam in the turbid yellow liquid.
Before turning in each night, Jesse performed three rituals. Malila understood the elderly liked their little rituals. He first brewed up an effusion from the contents of a leather pouch, bitter and tasting of some unidentifiable dried berry. It made her teeth feel furry. He drank it as well. She surreptitiously discarded it until Jesse caught her doing so. His blow stung. She had to drink it down in front of him thereafter.
Jesse’s second ritual was odd. He sang, recited passages from memory, and told improbable stories. It mystified her as he did not seem to care whether she listened or not. All his speeches were odd, but the long passages of cadenced words he called “poems” bewildered her completely. She heard about Horatio defending his father, who was also a river; a man loitering among some yellow flowers; another talking to a skin parasite; another watching for a flag; another about someone named MacPherson holding up a floor with pipes; and an academic railing against the arrival of a pool in a table. It was all very silly.
The last ritual before retiring was bathing. Jesse had some excuse, but Malila could see it was just to humiliate her on a daily basis. She would have to strip, soap up, and sluice off before Jesse would allow her to dive shivering under the sleeping skins. He followed suit, damp and shivering under the furs as well. When Malila understood that the old man did not expect her to service him, she welcomed the warmth of the sleeping arrangements and slept well … except for the dream.
During the interim of fatigue, while she warmed the bed to allow her body to sag into slumber, Malila was able to think. The old savage acted as if her abduction was a clever prank. She knew better. She was disgraced. The Unity boasted it had never lost a war or suffered an officer captured in the seventy-four years of its glorious history. If she were part of history at all, Malila would star in a great cautionary tale told to new recruits.
Malila ran through the great narratives she had known as a recruit. The Unity immortalized sagas in which the individual sacrificed for the glory of the country. Dying soldiers praised the Unity with their cooling lips. Martyrs succumbed only after striking a courageous blow to confound the enemies of freedom and democracy. Not one heroine had been caught in her underwear by a demented Sisi.
The Sisis were vile, worn-out, incompetent, incontinent, selfish, and dim-witted. They were beneath notice or contempt. She must be an unknowing fraud to have let herself be captured. She was a failure with each kilometer she walked, each kilogram she carried, and each meal she accepted.
Malila imagined how she might become a martyr for the Unity before this lunatic Sisi could show her off as a trophy. After her glorious death, her friends would mourn her and count themselves blessed to have known her. Her patrons would gain heroic cachet that their fellow officers would covet. Her crèche would have a tasteful brass plaque placed on her old bunk. However, as each of her imagined exploits to martyrdom played out in her mind, Malila returned to the same dilemma: as far as the Unity would ever know, she was alive, swimming around some muddy river of the outlands. She would waste her last words on the dementia of an old man. It was just too grotesque.
One night, after she stopped shivering, Malila asked, “Why are you doing this to me, old man?”
“I am a man under authority, and I have men under authority to me. To one I say ‘Come’ and he comes, and to another I say ‘Go’ and he goes.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No, it isn’t. When I start answering those questions, lass, it means that I no longer think you are going back to your damned Union alive. Do you want me to answer your questions?”
“No!”
“Good … Sleep.”
She slept, somehow comforted.
CHAP
TER 18
TRIP WIRE, SPRING, TRIGGER, JAWS
Nyork, Unity
19.51.31.local_19_10_AU76
Monee’k is different from the other girls, Iain thought. That would be obvious to anyone who bothered to really look. Her body floated, while all the other girls merely danced. He knew his attraction, his addiction, for her was getting out of hand. All his spare pay, not that there was a lot, went to buy time with Monee’k at the Night Lite Ballroom. If he got there early enough, he could dance with her the entire night … or until his money ran out. She smiled at him as they shared a few words dancing, his hands caressing her warm skin as they moved. He shivered.
He had seen her arrive at the club once before. Even with her clothes on, she had been easy to spot. She had a bounce in her stride that he would know anywhere. Iain had been waiting across the alley from the stage door in the rain, his service coat buttoned and his collar turned up. He hunkered down into the coat, trying to warm himself against the wind coming in from the river.
A group of women started down the alley to enter the stage door, the lights from the street making them unrecognizable silhouettes. It was only when the others turned to go in that Iain saw Monee’k at the back of the group. She stopped. When she smiled, Iain felt himself breathe again. He waved, stopped, his hand still up. She walked across the alley, smiled again, and took his hand. She held it as they talked. She was special.
“Nice to see you, Sergeant.”
“Call me Iain. Can I call you Monee’k? That is a pretty name.”
“My name’s really Heather. Monee’k is like a stage name … Iain. You’ve been coming here a lot lately.”
“I’ve been here before, but I started coming back when I noticed you.”
Heather had laughed, and it had made his heart skip. Once inside they had danced until closing. Heather had paid for their last three dances.
To Hecate, Malila’s disappearance had been wrenching. At the museum, Hecate had been too brusque with her, the memory of their abrupt parting haunting her even before she’d learned of Malila’s disappearance. Then, Malila’s apartment vacant and O-A terminated, Hecate had imagined a purge inside the DUFS. Malila would never have seen it coming. Even as she was bending the rules in unimagined ways, Malila could be blindsided after a not-quite-agile-enough maneuver. Someone would find it so easy to denounce her.
Hecate had made judicious inquiries through the governmental back channels, but to no avail. Malila had just evaporated.
Then Victor had been denounced. To watch his slow, public evisceration at the hands of lesser creatures had been agony. It had been a mercy when he killed himself.
Since then, the one remaining bright spot for her was the book warehouse. To her surprise, Victor’s suicide had not canceled her access. She was spending more and more time within its high dusty walls, staying all night before returning to the ministry.
She found and inhabited worlds of hope, despair, joy, sorrow, and delight. Eventually, it scared her, thinking she might lose herself to the books. There was so little to keep her here otherwise.
“Doggy, I can beat Khama’s last jag!” said a grinning Jasun Ciszek as Iain arrived.
“Given up on loser lieutenants, has the old man?”
“Seems he has changed from looies to loos,” said Jasun.
“Makes sense when you think about it, Gunny. Whata we gotta do now?”
Jasun slipped into official bureaucratese. “Our section is to direct all resources to evaluating and revising policies and procedures for the care and maintenance of all sanitary facilities in the command.”
“You’re kidding me, yeah? We are supposed to feck off everything to make sure the toilets flush?”
“By the authority bestowed by rank and custom … yes.”
“So what do I do with the Chiu data?”
Ciszek was ready for him and passed over a small scrap of actual paper.
“Just post it to this address, Doggy, just the raw data. Let’s get a move on. I need to get this new shit started before my ThiZ break. We gotta have something to show by retreat today.”
Iain gave a smart salute before slouching into the seat at his console. “Ours is not to wonder, Sarge, why these bizzles are in charge.”
Jourdaine smiled his bodiless smile as the Presence. He supervised Khama, unbeknownst to the man or his sergeants. In the CORE of the Unity, secrets of state, encrypted industrial correspondence, and even a low-level data stream were free for the taking … to Jourdaine. The best security procedures were no match for a Presence that could move outside the mirrored corridors of the ’net. With little danger to himself, he had been able to have Khama not only initiate but now disassociate himself from the first step of his trap for Chiu. He had his trip wire—the auto ping.
It was a start. Unlike any usual trap, however, this one possessed parts that never would appear to connect with any other part. It would never look like a trap. Anyone climbing up the data stream would find people ignorant of any connection they might have with each other. It was not complete yet. He still needed a spring to energize it, a trigger to set off the capture, and the jaws to seize his prey.
With that thought, the next item on his scavenger hunt would be a spring, to magnify the tentative vibrations of the trip wire. In the vast landscape of the CORE, if you could view it from Jourdaine’s perspective, there existed all sorts of oddities and back alleys with bits of program or personality that had gotten lost or corrupted. Becoming cumbersome over time, the CORE techs had found it easier to assign a distant and silent block of memory to them, letting the bits fight it out among themselves.
The n-dimensioned space assigned to them frothed with danger, of course, but it was always worth a look. Sometimes, the bits of program acted like rats, burrowing into otherwise protected file dumps to retrieve a datum or two. However, there were some things you could not get rats to do.
For those jobs, you needed graduate students.
Dr. Waylan Swartzbender, the Rodman professor of the Heidegger School of Practical Theology of Columbia University of the People connected with Jourdaine via a video interview. Jourdaine needed no O-A for this. Everyday coercion, fear, and duplicity were quite sufficient for academics.
“Colonel Jourdaine, I must say I am a bit surprised. My meeting was with a … Undersecretary Chilton … about the funding?” said the E30 S30 man in the rolled-sleeves, red-shirted uniform of a tenured professor.
“Yes, Professor Swartzbender, it is about that we need to speak.”
Jourdaine was pleased with the several beats of eye blinking that his words provoked. Good start.
“Is there any problem, Colonel Jourdaine?”
“I do hope not, Doctor. That is why this interview is what we must consider … informal. It would be unwise to make known this conversation outside ourselves. It would look like … favoritism.”
The academic smiled on cue. Sometimes it’s too easy.
“Well, then, Colonel. The funding proposal was in order, surely? It is almost the same as last year, plus COLA, capital fund, pedagogical allowances, the usual … isn’t it?”
“Yes …”
Jourdaine waited for the professor to blink. He blinked.
“Who is BethanE Winters, Professor Swartzbender?”
The professor’s eyebrows flicked up in surprise, and he looked down, rather than up, recalling her. The man was working from notes.
“Why, I was unaware there was this level of inspection into the academic process, Colonel.”
“Who is she, Doctor?”
“Just a graduate student.”
“Indeed, a graduate student … just. What is her area of study then?”
A hurried number of keystrokes later, the professor said, “The superiority of ethical immanence to the concept of transcendent ethicality with the deconstruction of the modern city-s
tate as text.”
“Now, Professor, I am hardly a man of your learning or insight, but I had thought that concept a bit played out?”
“Indeed, indeed. Rather hackneyed, expected more, distracted, don’t you know … government contracts. But … why is this important?”
The professor looked up into Jourdaine’s eyes. His chin came up; his lips thinned.
Excellent, Jourdaine thought. We finally come to what he thinks important. Time to set him up.
“Are you familiar with The Vital Realism, by John Baudrillard, Professor?”
The older man’s eyes dilated, and there was a slight intake of breath. Jackpot, thought Jourdaine.
“I was a very young scholar at the time, Colonel. The book was on the Correct Readings for Consumers list then …”
The professor subsided as Jourdaine raised his hand and shook his head. Take your foot off the accelerator briefly; makes the turning easier.
“It is not your … reading habits … we are questioning, Professor. Citizen Winters seems to have acquired a copy from her current liaison with a Malik Mafee. What is your opinion of the work, since you admit to having read it?” Now let him hear the trap snap shut. It will focus his efforts wonderfully.
“Oh, derivative, totally derivative. Old-fashioned. Knew it at the time, of course,” the professor said, rather too fast.
Just a little frenzy, as expected, of course.
“So glad to hear you say that—and, of course, your loyalty and … orthodoxy … have never been in serious question. But this Citizen Winters … another issue entirely. I think I would feel very much better about her advancement if we could judge how loyal and cooperative she is,” Jourdaine added, waiting for the response. Open a gate and see how fast he rushes to it, he thought.
“Yes, assuredly, Colonel. I could have her do some of my classes,” the professor said and actually looked away to write something.
“Hardly, Professor.” Jourdaine laughed but did not smile.
The man looked up, startled. The man needed his priorities rectified.
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