“Whose idea was it to go into business together?”
“Mine. Mace would have done it by himself. He would have tried to, anyway. As much as he wanted to be an Aean, he was more Martian. He really didn’t know his way around, not like he does now. PolyCarb had granted him citizenship but the job had kept him moving around Signatory Space most of the time.”
“You wanted more.”
Cambel nodded. “Maybe it was guilt. Certainly I felt responsible. I did literally take care of him for that first year. So, yes. I thought—I hoped—it would become more.”
“You’re very good friends.”
She grunted. “Very good friends. Like brother and sister.” She shook herself as if suddenly cold. “So now we find out that one of the survivors from Hellas Planitia, possibly the only one, was Toler. That makes it look even worse for Helen, especially with her name on Toler’s immigration petition as sponsor. Working with Lunase.”
“Do you think she was?”
“No. I think she was hunting Toler. Maybe not him specifically, but the thing that he was—is: a saboteur, if our guess is right.”
“You said one of the survivors. There are others?”
“It’s not clear. A few people got into the tunnel on Hellas Planitia. We found two, dead. One was a CAP, by the way. There were enough footprints to suggest more people, possibly two or three. But we couldn’t be certain. Still, before that, someone had to clear Toler to get him on the site to begin with. He had an accomplice. We just don’t know who. The trail is covered too well.”
“You don’t even have a possibility?”
“Oh, we have a very good one, as it happens, but we’re going to be very, very certain before—”
The comm chimed. Cambel excused herself and left the room. A minute later, she hurried back in, carrying a change of clothes in her left hand.
“Time for you to go home.”
“What—?”
“That was Mace. He wants me to meet him. But he wants me to escort you back to his dom.”
Nemily stood. “He didn’t want to talk to me?”
“In the worst way. But it’ll wait. His words.” Cambel peeled off her robe and pulled on the loose singlepiece. “Come on.”
“I need to go by my dom first. There are things I need.”
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t. I left my augments in the Temple. I need my spare set. Please. It’s actually not far from here, just a dozen arcs.”
“Fine. But in and out and don’t bring the whole wardrobe.”
Cambel refused to tell her where she was to meet Mace. After the third attempt, Cambel simply stopped talking. Nemily now stood before her door feeling suddenly exhausted. She had, she realized, been on the run for almost a day. The collations had been insufficient time for recovery, especially when they released her back into a feeling of being pursued and watched. It would be good to simply lock her own door and go to sleep.
“I used to live in one of these,” Cambel said as Nemily tapped in her personal code. “Not as nice a one, though. Segment four.”
“Yes, well—”
She pushed open the door and led the way in to her apartment. It seemed as if she had not been here in a week. She stood in the middle of the small living room and tried to think what she needed to take.
The sound of a dull thud and the impact of a weight hitting the floor brought her around.
“Imagine my surprise that you could live in a place like this.”
Nemily stared at Toler’s grinning face, marred now by a bruise on his left cheek. On the floor at his feet sprawled Cambel, her face hidden by her hair. Toler held a thick, black handgun.
“Let’s talk, Nem.”
He stepped forward and shoved her toward the couch. She caught herself before she sat down.
“I expect I’ll be taken into custody soon enough,” he said. “But I wanted to see you again. I wanted to tell you a few things. I wanted you to know what’s happening.” He sat down in the chair opposite the couch. “Sit, please.” He glanced back at the door. “The security measures here are pathetic, you know.”
She continued to stand. After a few seconds, Toler rose smoothly to his feet, stepped up to her, and shoved her hard in the chest. She stumbled back against the sofa and sat.
“I’ve had adapt treatments, too,” he said. “Otherwise I couldn’t even walk here. Good thing, too, or that little maneuver you pulled on me might have left me in pathic for a month. That was good, you know. I always thought you had a good head for a crisis.”
Nemily looked toward Cambel. “You hurt her.”
“Not bad. She’ll come around.” He rubbed his bruise gingerly. “This isn’t my first treatment, though. I’ve been through adapt before. Just never for a full Gaian gravity.” He rolled his shoulders. “Now that I’m getting used to it, I can see the appeal. There’s something... natural... to the way it feels. I can’t wait to get home. Six times stronger than everybody else. The possibilities are staggering.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked wryly. He shook his head. “Never mind. Things have gone all wrong. I’m trying to get off this thing now and someone keeps closing exits on me. You wouldn’t happen to know who, would you?”
“No.”
He frowned. “I’m not here to hurt you—”
“You hurt me just showing up. You hurt Patri Simity. You hurt Cambel. My life was good before you came here. Why?”
“Your life was never yours. If it was good it was because we didn’t need you.” He glanced back at Cambel. “I never hurt Patri Simity. I liked her. She was going to help me get back to Lunase. Why would I hurt her?”
“Because you don’t know any better. It’s what you do.”
“You wouldn’t even be living here if it weren’t for me, Nem, haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“You damn near got me expelled before I even had a chance!”
Toler looked confused for a moment, then grinned. “The vacuum? That went wrong, didn’t it? All that was supposed to do was introduce you to your operator, but you ended up losing it before he made contact.”
“What did you do to me?”
“On Lunase? Nothing much. A little block to keep you from finding the vacuum before you got here. Another little bit of code to make you useful. Eventually.”
“Am I... am I a weapon?”
Toler laughed. “Hardly You’re just an observer. Not even consciously. You did just what you were supposed to do. Snoop, look, record. If we’d needed it.. .well, no matter. We didn’t need it. Nothing I did compromised your life here.”
“You show up and suddenly I’m being questioned by security and my friends are in trouble and now—”
“Who questioned you?”
“PolyCarb security”
“PolyCarb? Not SA?”
“I’m sure they’re about to get around to it.”
“Nem, I didn’t come here to mess up your life. At least, that’s not why I came here in the first place. Things have gone wrong, do you understand? None of this was supposed to happen.”
“What was supposed to happen?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You thought you’d come in, drop off a package, set things in motion and leave before Aea fell apart.”
He looked surprised and Nemily felt an instant of gratification.
“Were you the one I ghosted for the other night?” she asked.
“No. I was there, but I didn’t need that information.”
“Who was it?”
Glim shook his head absently. “I need to get out. I have one more way. I want you to take me there.”
“Why? If it’s your contact—”
“Things have gotten complex. Believe me, if I could go there alone, I would.” He grinned. “Of course, I could do worse in travelling companions.”
“Where is it?”
“I’ll come to that. I ne
ed to explain, though, that none of what’s happened was my fault.”
“How would you define ‘fault? You set me up when I came here to get rejected and sent back to Lunase. You hid vacuum in my gear, you planted something in my head, you—”
“I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about everything that has happened since I got here! Damn it, Nem, someone’s trying to kill me!”
“I’d kill you myself if I thought I could.”
She had said it calmly, with almost no inflection. The effect on Glim was startling. Color leached from his face and his expression went slack. For several seconds he stared at her blankly
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m a soldier. That’s all. I do what I’m told, for a cause. I work toward a purpose. I’ve been a good soldier. Now my own people—our people—are trying to kill me. Policy has changed. Do you understand? I’ve been betrayed.”
“I understand betrayal.”
Glim Toler looked away from her, afraid.
“What do you want, Glim?”
“I want to get out of here. I do not want to be picked up by SA, although the only thing they can really do to me is expel me. They don’t have the juice for anything more. But if they arrest me, then my usefulness is over. I’ll be known. I’ll be a file in a Signatory database. Worthless.”
“You don’t think you are already?”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you know?”
“Nothing. But if someone’s trying to kill you—one of your people— how much worth are you to them? They must think you’ve already been compromised.”
“I can clear that up when I get back. But I have to get back. Once I’m back they can’t deny me. If they kill me here...”
“Why come to me? I can’t get you out.”
“No, but you can get me to someone who can.”
“Why should I?”
“Oh, because I’ll kill you if you don’t.” He waved his blockish, black handgun. “Or I’ll kill your friend here. Nothing personal. It’s war.”
“War?”
“Yes. That’s what you were. A missile, sent to hit a target. Something went wrong, though, so they sent me to fix it. Now it’s fixed. Now I get to go home.”
“It doesn’t sound like they want you.”
“It’s not Lunase that set me up. It’s the people here. They turned. Especially that gutless wonder who’s going to get me out. He likes it here. He doesn’t agree with the program anymore. That’s why I had to come here.” He nodded, desperation infusing his voice. “It makes sense now. He set me up. He’s the one trying to kill me before I go back and report. Thank you, Nem. You’ve helped me think it through.”
“I’m not going to help you, Glim. I have a life here.”
“Maybe you don’t understand. You’re going to be expelled anyway. Or die. You take me to my contact and there may be a way to save your precious citizenship. He’s the only one likely to be able to do it for you.”
“Not if you kill him.’’
“How can I? I need him to get me off Aea.”
Nemily could see no way around it. She felt more trapped than when he had grabbed her in the Temple. She knew he held out false hope, but when there is no other, even false hope convinced her.
“All right,” she said finally. “Where?”
No one paid them any special attention while they waited for a shunt. Glim guided her to a rear seat on the nearly empty car; he sat on the aisle side. The nearest passenger was several seats away
“So what was it I ran the other night?” she asked.
At first, she did not think he heard her. Then he glanced at her and shrugged. “A dead woman’s persona.”
Nemily felt a crawling sensation over her scalp and down her back. “Helen Croslo?”
Glim frowned. “How—?” His lips pressed into a thin line and he stared the length of the car. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“You killed her on Mars.”
“I killed a lot of people on Mars. You’re full of surprises today. That ghost was supposed to be fully occluded. Reese promised.”
“You never know about CAPs. Sometimes the damnedest things refuse to erase.” When he said nothing for a time, she pressed. “So did you?”
“What?”
“Kill her on Mars?”
He nodded. “Out on the sands. She was one tenacious bitch. But it wasn’t murder. She was trying to kill me. But.. .be quiet, Nem. This is much too public a place for this talk.”
“So who was I ghosting it for? Where did it come from?”
“Shut up.”
“I have to assume you took it from her after you killed her, so it went back to Lunase with you. But you could have run it there, then. Unless you didn’t take it back to Lunase. Unless you delivered it to someone on Mars—”
Glim closed his hand around Nemily’s knee and squeezed, hard. Pain lanced up from her old surgery scar and she nearly doubled over. “I said enough. It’s time to shut up.”
“I haven’t collated in a long time, Glim. It’s like my brain is too busy, trying to sort things out. I can’t get calm.”
He gave her a thoughtful look and released her knee. “How long do they take?”
“A couple of minutes... but I don’t have my augments...”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out her battered case. “These? You left them behind at the Temple.”
She snatched the case from his hands and he chuckled. The few other people in the car glanced their way, one or two of them frowning, but no one moved. In a few seconds everyone had lost interest.
“And you thought I didn’t care,” Glim said.
She pried open the case, her hands shaking. She nearly dropped the collator-recorder, then fumbled at the back of her neck and swapped augments.
“Now if you aren’t done by the time we stop, I’ll rip that out of you,” Glim said, but the words jumbled together, lost in the opening of her mind—
—and her entry into the sensorem. She descended the stairs to the storeroom and opened the door. The shelves were all still neatly stacked, the packages in undisturbed rows. She began going from one to the next, looking for a particular label. She knew it when she found it because she could not read it. The occlusion from the overlay masked it. The masking itself was like a beacon.
She pulled the package down and peeled the lid off.
“Something I can help you find?”
A woman stood beside her. Tall, very blonde, smiling quizzically as if she had never before seen such a thing as Nemily was doing. Nemily straightened.
“I just found it.”
“Oh?”
“You.”
“Me. You were looking for me in a box?”
“Silly idea, isn’t it? But you see, that’s where the occlusion put you. I would only have known to look for you there if I had known exactly who it was I had ghosted. It required outside verification—I couldn’t just guess—someone had to tell me before I could find you—”
“Whoa, wait, you’re going too fast. You’re saying I’m a ghost?”
“Yes. This is my sensorem. I’m Nemily Dollard.”
“I don’t know you.”
“We have a mutual acquaintance,” Nemily said. “Mace.”
Helen’s ghost frowned. “And how do you know Mace?”
“We just met.”
“Just met.”
“We’re seeing each other.”
“Uh-huh. My husband—”
“Helen, you’ve been dead for nearly three years.”
It took the ghost a moment to absorb that. She nodded. “Then it would be time. I hope you’re not the first. Three years is quite a dry spell.”
“A what?”
“A dry spell—old Earth metaphor—long time to go without water— a weather thing.”
“Oh.”
“All right, then,” Helen said, folding her arms. “You’re seeing my husband—my former husband—and you ghosted me? But it was an occluded ghost, so
you wouldn’t have remembered. Did Mace—?”
“No. Do you know Glim Toler?”
“I don’t think so.”
Nemily thought for a moment, then produced a reconstructed image of Toler. “Him,” she said.
Helen’s face hardened. “Cru Mills. Yes. Not well, but we’ve met. What do you have to do with him?”
“He ran you through me.”
“What in hell for?”
“I don’t know. Someone he knows wanted him to. I hoped—”
“Those bastards. So you’re telling me that I died three years ago, but that they’re still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Then I failed.” Suddenly she sat down on the floor beside her box. “They never found the data packet I left...” She shook her head. “I hate failing.”
“Maybe you didn’t, not entirely,” Nemily said. “If you can help me.”
Helen looked up at her. “What do you need?”
Nemily laughed sharply. “What do I need? Oh, everything. Answers to start. What data packet? Where did you leave it?”
“It was an augment. When the storm began tearing the cover off the site, I was chasing Cru Mills. I followed him into the tunnel. He’d killed his accomplice, a CAP, and removed her augment. I never figured out what he needed a CAP for, but I left my update recorder/collator in her jack. I figure the company would run it and find my report, if I didn’t survive.”
“I see. It disappeared.”
“Then there was another. Inside.” She looked up at Nemily. “You want answers?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Give me your hand.”
Hesitantly, Nemily reached for Helen’s outstretched hand. Then she stopped.
“I need one straight answer first,” Nemily said.
“To...?”
“Do you love Mace?”
Helen smiled. “What do you think?”
Nemily nodded once and grasped Helen’s hand—
—and removed the collator. She quickly inserted the synthesist and blinked.
“Feel better?” Glim asked.
Remains Page 34
