“Why? Is it reversible?”
She grew very still.
“I don’t think so.” I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. “I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.”
“So what is it?”
Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.
“It’s a genetic weapon,” she said clearly. “In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones that survived, would pass it on to their children and those children would pass it on to theirs.”
“Nice.”
“It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?”
“Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.”
“Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?”
I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.
“Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,” I said flatly.
The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. “I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal make-up that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality—in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything to hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.”
“Genetically encoded insurgency.” I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm, descending. “Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great grandchildren and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?”
“I don’t know.” She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had lent her. “Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I … After it ended. Maybe no one was left.”
I nodded again. “Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.”
She shot me a weary look.
“It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporised because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns levelled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed in their hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor.”
“You’re talking about conditions that haven’t existed for three hundred years,” I said mildly. “But that’s not the point. It’s not the Harlan family I feel bad about. It’s the poor fucks whose Black Brigade ancestors decided their political commitment at a cellular level generations before they were even born. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about who I murder and why.” I held back a moment, then drove the blade home anyway. “And so, from what I’ve read, did Quellcrist Falconer.”
A kilometre of white-capped blue whipped past beneath us. Barely audible, the grav drive in the left-hand pod murmured to itself.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she whispered at last.
I shrugged. “You triggered this thing.”
“It was a Quellist weapon.” I thought I could hear an edge of desperation in her words. “It was all I had to work with. You think it’s worse than a conscript army? Worse than the clone-enhanced combat sleeves the Protectorate decants its soldiers into so they’ll kill without empathy or regret?”
“No. But I think as a concept it contradicts the words I will not ask you to fight, to live or to die for a cause you have not first understood and embraced of your own free will.”
“I know that!” Now it was clearly audible, a jagged flawline running through her voice. “Don’t you think I know that? But what choice did I have? I was alone. Hallucinating half the time, dreaming Oshima’s life and…” She shivered. “Other things. I was never sure when I’d next wake up and what I’d find around me when I did, not sure sometimes if I’d wake up again. I didn’t know how much time I had, sometimes, I didn’t even know if I was real. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
I shook my head. Envoy deployments had put me through a variety of nightmarish experiences, but you never doubt at any moment that it’s absolutely real. The conditioning won’t let you.
Her hands were tight on the gantry rail again, knuckles whitening. She was looking out at the ocean, but I don’t think she could see it.
“Why go back to war with the Harlan family?” I asked her gently.
She jerked a glance at me. “You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into Settlement-Years poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away.”
“Yeah, this enemy you cannot kill. I read that speech back when I was a kid. The strange thing is, for someone who’s only been awake for a few weeks on and off, you’re remarkably well informed.”
“That’s not what it’s like,” she said, eyes on the hurrying sea again. “The first time I woke up for real, I’d already been dreaming Oshima for months. It was like being in a hospital bed, paralysed, watching someone you think might be your doctor on a badly-tuned monitor. I didn’t understand who she was, only that she was important to me. Half the time, I knew what she knew. Sometimes, it felt like I was floating up inside her. Like I could put my mouth on hers and speak through her.”
She wasn’t, I realised, talking to me any more, the words were just coming up out of her like lava, relieving a pressure inside whose form I could only make guesses at.
“The first time I woke up for real, I thought I’d die from the shock. I was dreaming she was dreaming, something about a guy she’d slept with when she was younger. I opened my eyes on a bed in some shithole Tek’to flophouse and I could move. I had a hangover, but I was alive. I knew where I was, the street and the name of the place, but I didn’t know who I was. I went outside, I walked down to the waterfront in the sun and people were looking at me and I realised I was crying.”
“What about the others? Orr and the rest of the team?”
She shook her head. “No, I’d left them somewhere at the other end of town. She’d left them, but I think I had something to do with it. I think she could feel me coming up and she went
away to be alone while it happened. Or maybe I made her do it. I don’t know.”
A shudder ran through her.
“When I talked to her. Down there in the cells, when I told her that, she called it seepage. I asked her if she lets me through sometimes, and she wouldn’t tell me. I know certain things unlock the bulkheads. Sex. Grief. Rage. But sometimes I just swim up for no reason and she gives me control.” She paused, shook her head again. “Maybe we’re just negotiating.”
I nodded. “Which of you made the connection with Plex?”
“I don’t know.” She was looking at her hands, flexing and unflexing them like some mechanical system she hadn’t got the hang of yet. “I don’t remember. I think, yeah, it was her, I think she knew him already. Peripherally, part of the crimescape. Tek’to’s a small pond, and the deComs are always at the fringes of legal. Cheap black-market deCom gear’s a part of what Plex does up there. Don’t think they ever did business, but she knew his face, knew what he was. I dug him out of her memory when I knew I was going to activate the Qualgrist system.”
“Do you remember Tanaseda?”
She nodded, more controlled now. “Yeah. High-level yak patriarch. They brought him in behind Yukio, when Plex told them the preliminary codes checked out. Yukio didn’t have enough seniority to swing what they needed.”
“And what was that?”
A repeat of the searching gaze she’d fired at me when I first mentioned the weapon. I spread my arms in the whipping wind.
“Come on, Nadia. I brought you a revolutionary army. I climbed Rila Crags to get you out. That’s got to buy something, right?”
Her gaze flinched away again. I waited.
“It’s viral,” she said finally. “High contagion, symptomless flu variant. Everyone catches it, everyone passes it on, but only the genetically modified react. It triggers a shift in the way their hormonal system responds to a match with Harlan pheromones. The carrier sleeves were buried in sealed storage at covert sites. In the event that they were to be triggered, an assigned group would dig up the storage facility, sleeve into one of the bodies and go walkabout. The virus would do the rest.”
Sleeve into one of the bodies. The words ticked in my head, like water trickling into a crack. The Envoy harbinger of understanding hovered just out of reach. Interlocking mechanisms of intuition spun tiny wheels in the build-up to knowledge.
“These sites. Where were they?”
She shrugged. “Mainly in New Hokkaido, but there were some on the north end of the Saffron Archipelago too.”
“And you took Tanaseda to?”
“Sanshin Point.”
The mechanism locked solid, and doors opened. Recollection and understanding poured through the gap like morning light. Lazlo and Sylvie bickering as the Guns for Guevara slid into dock at Drava.
Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—
I did hear that one. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.
And my own conversation with Plex in Tokyo Crow the morning before. So how come they needed your de- and re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.
Some kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.
Organised crime, huh.
“Something amusing you, Kovacs?”
I shook my head. “Micky Serendipity. Think I’m going to have to keep that name.”
She gave me an odd look. I sighed.
“Doesn’t matter. So what was Tanaseda’s end of this? What does he get out of a weapon like that?”
Her mouth crimped in one corner. Her eyes seemed to glitter in the light reflecting off the waves. “A criminal is a criminal, no matter what their political class. In the end, Tanaseda’s no different to some cut-rate wharf thug from Karlovy. And what have the yakuza always been good at?
Blackmail. Influence. Leverage to get government concessions. Blind eyes turned to the right activities, shares in the right ongoing state enterprises. Collaboration at repression for a price. All very genteel.”
“But you suckered them.”
She nodded bleakly. “I showed them the site, gave them the codes. Told them the virus transmitted sexually, so they’d think they had control. It does that too, in fact, and Plex was too sloppy with the biocodes to dig any deeper than he did. I knew I could trust him to screw up to that extent.”
I felt another faint smile flicker across my own face. “Yeah, he has a talent for that. Must be the aristo lineage.”
“Must be.”
“And with the grip the yakuza have on the sex industry in Millsport, you called it just right.” The intrinsic joy of the scam sank into me like a shiver rush—there was a smooth, machined Tightness to it worthy of Envoy planning. “You gave them a threat to hold over the Harlanites that they already had the perfect delivery system for.”
“Yes, so it seems.” Her voice was blurring again as she dropped away into her memories. “They were going to sleeve some yak soldier or other in one of the Sanshin bodies and take it to Millsport to demonstrate what they had. I don’t know if he ever got that far.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. The yakuza are pretty meticulous about their leverage schemes. Man, I’d have given a lot to see Tanaseda’s face when he showed up at Rila with that package and the Harlan gene specialists told him what he’d really got on his hands. I’m surprised Aiura didn’t have him executed on the spot. Shows remarkable restraint.”
“Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it. By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.” She shrugged. “You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked round at me again and her face was miserable with contained anger.
“Alright, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?”
I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’re right, I wasn’t there.”
And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.
Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.
Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.
I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.
“Tres?” he asked us quietly.
Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. “Still mending. We left her with. With Her.”
“Right. Good.”
The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.
Koi shook his head. “Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.”
“Mari Ado?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all—they traded gruff arm’s-length grippings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off towards the harbour master’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.
“They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances.
Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.”
I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniperfire.
“Can we trust these people?”
Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. “The very large majority, yes. Pictures is Drava-built, most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original co-operative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.”
“Yeah? Sounds a little Utopian to me. What about casual crew?”
Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. “Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for. Pictures has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.”
Brasil cleared his throat. “How many of them know what’s going on?”
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