“No, it wasn’t.” For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. “None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?”
“Then,” I said evenly. “You should have planned it better.”
“Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.”
Silence.
I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and Angelfire Flirt flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.
But not about this conversation.
That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.
“Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking funny,” the woman at my side said sourly.
I shook my head. “Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshipers.”
“Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.”
“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”
She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:
They come to me with
>Progress Reports<
But all I see is change and bodies burned;
They come to me with
>Targets Achieved<
But all I see is blood and chances lost;
They come to me with
Choral fucking approval of every thing I do
But all I see is cost.
Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer Real Death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget, either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.
“So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,” I said after a while. “This weapon you sold the yakuza.”
She twitched. Didn’t look at me. “You know about that, huh?”
“I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?”
She stared down at the water for a while.
“It’s taking a lot for granted,” she said slowly. “Thinking I should trust you with this.”
“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 who 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 makeup 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 at 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 loaned 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 vaporized because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns leveled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed by the 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-fa
shioned, but I like to make my own decisions about whom 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 kilometer of whitecapped 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 flaw line 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, paralyzed, 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 realized, talking to me anymore; 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 realized 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. 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 gotten 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 buildup 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 regear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.
Some kind of fuckup. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Seawater in the gel feeds.
Organized 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 rightness 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 really had 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 around at me again, and her face was miserable with contained anger.
“All right, 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.
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