About fifty megs after the official end of hostilities, I receive a summons to the Polity of the Jade Sunrise. It’s a strictly tech-limiting polity, and I’m in ortho drag, my cover being a walkabout sword-fighting instructor. I’ve got access to enough gray-market military wetware that I can walk the walk as well as slice the floating hair, and my second-level cover is as a demilitarized fugitive from summary justice somewhere that isn’t tech-limited—which sets me up for the Odessa Introduction if I see a target of opportunity and need to run a Spanish Prisoner scam on them. I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of job lately, but I’m not sure what this particular one is about.
The designated rendezvous is the public bathhouse on the Street of Orange Leaves. It’s a narrow, cobbled, mountainside road, running from near the main drag with the silversmith’s district down toward the harbor. It’s a fine spring afternoon, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle. A gang of kids are playing throw-stick loudly outside the drunkenly leaning apartment buildings, and the usual light foot traffic is laboriously winding its way up and down the middle of the road, porters yelling insults at rickshaw drivers and both groups venting their spleen on the shepherd who’s trying to drive a small flock of spidergoats uphill.
I’ve been here long enough to know what I’m doing, more or less. I spot a boy who’s hanging back on the sidelines and snap my fingers. He comes over, not so much walking as slithering so that his friends don’t see him. Grubby, half-starved, his clothes faded and patched: perfect. A coin appears between two of my fingers. “Want another?” I ask.
He nods. “I don’t do thex,” he lisps. I look closer and realize he’s got a cleft palate.
“Not asking you to.” I make another coin appear, this time out of reach. “The teahouse. I want you to look round the back alley and see if there are any men waiting there. If there are, come and tell me. If not, go in and find Mistress Sanni. Tell her that the Tank says hello, then come and tell me.”
“Two coin.” He holds up a couple of fingers.
“Okay, two coin.” I glare at him, and he does the disappearing trick again. The kid’s got talent, I realize, he does that like a pro. Sharp doubts intrude: Maybe he is a pro? We rounded up the easy targets a long time ago—the ones who’re still running ahead of us tend to be a lot harder to nail.
I don’t have long to wait. A cent or so passes, then lisp-boy is back. “Mithreth Thanni thay, the honeypot ith overflowing. I take you to her.”
The honeypot is overflowing: doesn’t sound good. I pass him the two coins. “Okay, which way?”
He does a quick fade in front of me, but not too fast for me to follow. We’re round the back of a dubious alleyway, then into a maze of anonymous backyards in a matter of seconds. Then he goes over a rickety wooden fence and along another alley—this one full of compost, the stink unbelievable—and up to an anonymous-looking back door. “The’th here.”
My hand goes to my sword hilt. “Really?” I stare at the kid, then at the two dead thugs leaning against each other beside the back step. The kid flashes a lightning grin at me.
“You did thay to check the back alley for muggerth, Robin.”
“Sanni?”
He sketches a bow, urchin-cool. I raise an eyebrow. The muggers look as if they’re sleeping, if you ignore the blood leaking from their noses. Very good work, for an intel type who isn’t a wet ops specialist. “We don’t have long. Authenticate me.”
We do the routine, something shared, something do, something secret, something you—all the stuff the Republic of Is used to do for us. “Okay, boss, why did you call me?” Sanni isn’t my boss these days, but old habits die hard.
“The honeypot is leaking.” He drops the lisp and stands tall, Sanni’s natural presence shining through the bottleneck of his three-hundred-meg body. “We—Vera Six, that is—got word about twenty megs ago that a bunch of familiar spooks were haunting the Invisible Republic. It all snowballed really fast. Looks like several of the memory laundries have been infiltrated and the glasshouse has been taken over.”
I lean against the wall. “The glasshouse?”
Sanni nods. “Someone’s going to have to go in and polish the mirrors. Someone else. I forked an instance five megs ago, and she hasn’t reported back yet. It’s going to be deep cover, I’m afraid.”
“Shit and pig-fucking shit.” I glare at the dead muggers as if it’s their fault.
The glasshouse is a rehab center for prisoners of war. The setup is designed to encourage resocialization, to help integrate them back into something vaguely resembling postwar society; it’s a former MASucker configured as a compact polity with with just one T-gate in or out. Bad guys go in, civilians come out. At least, that was the original theory.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I think someone’s broken our operational security,” says Sanni. I shudder and stare at the muggers. “Yes,” he says, seeing the direction of my gaze. “I said we don’t have long. A group drawn from several of our operational rivals have infiltrated the Strategic Amnesia Commissariat of the Invisible Republic and taken over the funding and operational control of the glasshouse. They discharged all the current inmates, and we no longer know what’s going on inside. The glasshouse is under new management.”
“I’m the wrong person, and in the wrong place. Can’t you send Magnus? Or the Synthesist? Do an uplevel callback to descendant coordination and the veterans’ association and see if anybody—”
“I don’t exist anymore,” Sanni says calmly. “After my delta went in and didn’t report back, the bad guys came after my primary and killed me repeatedly until I was almost entirely dead. This”—he taps his skinny chest—“is just a partial. I’m a ghost, Robin.”
“But.” I lick my lips, my heart pounding with shock. “Won’t they simply kill me, too?”
“Not if you’re identity-dead first.” Sanni-ghost grins at me. “Here’s what you’re going to have to do . . .”
18
Connections
I am me. Joints creak, heart pumps. It’s warm and dark, and I’m sleepy. It slowly comes to me that I’m squatting with my arms wrapped around my knees and my chin—oh. So I’m not passing as Fiore? Right. That’s satisfying to know. One more fact to add to the pile. Roll the dice, see what comes up on top.
I’ve been in two places at once for most of the past two weeks. I’ve been in hospital, recovering at home. Talking to Dr. Hanta, being horrified in the bell tower, trying to tell the Reverend about Janis. And another me has been living in the library, sleeping in the staff room, cautiously exploring off-limits sections of the habitat, and latterly conspiring with Janis. Sanni. A doubled moment of eternal jarring shock—meeting her head-on up the stairs with a gun in her hand, just as startled as a week ago, stumbling across her in the basement with a knife. She broke down and cried, then, when she realized she wasn’t the only one anymore. I wouldn’t have credited it if I hadn’t been there myself. Hard-as-diamonds Sanni, reduced to this? Isolation does strange things to people . . .
“Come on, Reeve. Talk to me! Please. Are you all right in there?” There’s a note of desperation in her voice. “Say something!” She leans over me anxiously. “How does it feel?”
“Let’s see.” I blink some more then unwrap my arms and push myself upright. I’m Reeve again. Damn, but I feel so light! After being tied down by the centripetal chains fastened to Fiore’s flesh for more than a tenday, it’s an amazing sensation. I could drift away on a light breeze. I find myself grinning with delight, then I look up at her and my face freezes. “I—she—nearly shopped you to Fiore.”
Janis blanches. “When?”
“After we disposed of Mick. Let me think.” I close my eyes. I need to get rid of the sudden storm surge of adrenaline. “Low risk. I—she—was uncertain, and she misjudged her timing. She didn’t know who you are, she just thought you were up to no good, so she tried to shop you for your own protection. Fiore was preoccupied and told her to get lost. As
long as nothing reminds him, you’re clear.”
“Shit.” Janis takes a step back, and I see that she’s still holding the stunner, but she’s got it pointed at the floor. She’s swaying slightly, with relief or shock. “That was close.”
I take a deep breath. “I’ve never been brainwashed before.” A little part of me still thinks Dr. Hanta is a sympathetic and friendly practitioner who only means the best for me, but it’s outvoted by the much larger part of me that is eager to use her intestines as a skipping rope. “I am”—breathing too fast, slow down—“not amused.”
“Let’s try a ping test.” Janis hesitates for a moment. “Do you love me?”
“I love you.” My heart speeds up again. “Hey, I heard that!”
“Yes.” Janis nods. “I didn’t, though. You know what? I think the diffmerge must have scribbled over part of the CY load in your netlink.”
“No.” I step out of the assembler and carefully close the door. “It happened earlier. I heard it earlier”—I frown—“talking to Sam, after I got out of hospital. I mean, she heard it.”
“Curious.” She cocks her head to one side, a very Sanni-like gesture that looks totally out of place on the Janis I’ve gotten to know over the past few months. “Maybe if she—” Janis snaps her fingers. “They’ve repurposed CY, haven’t they? The bit we’re carrying around in here, it’s used for loading behavior scorefiles and such, but if Hanta’s been modifying it to work as a general-purpose boot loader . . .”
I shudder. The consequences are clear enough. The original Curious Yellow used humans as an infective vector, but only really ran inside A-gates that it had infected. A modified CY that can actually run and do useful stuff inside a host’s netlink, and which doesn’t trigger the detection patch, is a whole lot scarier. You can do things with it like—“The zombies?”
“Yes.” Janis looks as if she’s seen a ghost. “Are we still in the glasshouse? Or have they relocated us?”
“We’re still in the glasshouse,” I reassure her. It’s the first bit of good news I’ve been able to piece together so far. “MASucker Harvest Lore, if what she remembers seeing upstairs is anything to go by. I mean, we might have been on a different MASucker, but I thought you accounted for them all?”
“I think so.” She nods, increasingly animated. “So that locked area you found in City Hall”—when I was being Fiore—“is probably the only T-gate on-site. Right?”
“There are the short-range gates to the individual residences.” I shiver again: Getting into City Hall and out again without being identified was a matter of sheer brazen luck. Ten minutes later I’d have run into the real Fiore. “They’re definitely switched off a hub at City Hall; I found the conference suite they inducted us through. As I recall, on the Grateful for Duration the longjump T-gate was connected to the flight control deck by a direct short-range gate, but was itself stored in a heavily armored pod outside the main pressure hull, in case someone tried to throw a nuke through. So, if we assume they haven’t rebuilt the Harvest Lore in flight, there’s going to be a way to get to the longjump node from either City Hall or the cathedral, which is just over the road.”
“Right.” She nods. “So. If this is the Harvest Lore, we’re about two hundred years from next landfall. If we assume exponentiation at, say, five infants per family, there’s time for ten generations . . . right, they’re looking to breed up about twenty thousand unauthenticated human vectors. Hanta’s got time to implant netlinks in them all. So when we arrive, she can flood the network with this new population of carriers—”
“That’s not going to happen.” I smile, baring my teeth. “Never doubt that. They think they’ve got us trapped. But the right way to view it is, we can’t retreat.”
“You think we can take them on directly?” Sanni asks, and for a moment she’s entirely Janis—isolated, damaged, frightened.
“Watch me,” I tell her.
THE rest of the day passes uneventfully. I say goodbye to Janis and go home as usual. At least, that’s what it must look like to anyone who’s watching me. I’ve spent the past few hours in an absentminded reverie, rolling around irreconcilable memories and trying to work out where I stand. It’s most peculiar. On the one hand, I’ve got Reeve’s horror at finding Mick dead, her apprehensive fear that Janis might be “untrustworthy” and a hazard to the friendly and open Dr. Hanta. And on the other hand, I’ve got Robin’s experiences. Sneaking around City Hall on tiptoe, finding locked areas and avoiding Fiore by the skin of my teeth. Coming across Mick in the hospital, with Cass. Dropping in on Janis in the library, her initial guilty fear and the slowly growing conviction—on my part—that she wasn’t just a bystander but an ally. Recognition protocols and the shock of mutual recognition.
Janis has been on her own in here for almost half a year longer than I have. When she realized she wasn’t alone, she broke down and cried. She’d been certain it was only a matter of time before Dr. Hanta got around to her. Terror, isolation, fear of the midnight knock on the door: They wear you down after a while. She got pregnant before anyone had figured out that part of the scheme. I’m surprised she’s still functioning at all.
The score system and the experimental protocols are a real obstacle to us: For all we know, half the population of YFH-polity could be cell members of one faction or another, blundering around in the dark, unwilling to risk revealing themselves. But unless we can somehow kick over the superstructure of artifice that the cabal have established, we won’t be able to link up with our potential allies and identify our real enemies. Divide and conquer: You know it makes sense.
I get home in due course, by way of the hardware store. Sam is absent, so I go straight into the garage to see what I can do. This isn’t the time for recrimination, but I’m really pissed at myself. I was going to get rid of this stuff! If nothing else, I found making historic weapons fascinating. I may end up doing it as a hobby, when all this is over, if there’s scope for such luxuries.
Still, I guess I won’t be needing the crossbow now. Or the sword I was trying to temper. Sanni and I have got a sterile assembler with full military scope. We left it cooking last night, slowly and laboriously building a stockpile of polynitrohexose bricks. Making weapons by A-gate is a slow process, and the higher the energy density the longer it takes, so we compromised and opted for chempowered weapons. The first batch of machine pistols will be ready when we go in to work tomorrow. Which leads to the next logical question—where’s my Faraday cage bag gotten to in this pile?
I’m hopping around on top of a pile of scattered steel bar stock and spilled screwdrivers, cursing up a blue streak and clutching my left foot when some change in the light alerts me to the fact that the garage door is open. “What the fuck—”
“Reeve?”
“Fuck!” I howl. “Shit. Dropped my hammer and—”
“Reeve? What’s going on?”
I force myself to calm down. “I dropped my hammer and it landed on this pile of bar stock and it bounced on my toe.” I hop some more. The pain is beginning to subside. “The hammer is evil and must be punished.”
“The hammer?” He pauses. “Have you been drinking?”
“Not yet.” I lean against the wall and experimentally put my foot on the floor. “Ouch. I just decided to turn over a new—heh—leaf again. A girl needs a hobby and all that.” I raise an eyebrow.
He looks at me skeptically. “Bad day at the office?”
“It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”
He frowns. “What’s this about a hobby?”
“Extreme metalworking, or something like that. Have you seen my copy of The Swordsmith’s Assistant? I was going to throw it out when I wasn’t feeling myself, but I never got round to it.”
You can almost see the light come on above his head. “Reeve? Is that you?”
“I had a crap day at the office, too. Reading poetry out of boredom, you know? ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a bi
g fat man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today: inside my head he’ll have to stay.’ Ogden Nashville. Apparently, the ancients seem to have liked him for some reason. C’mon, let’s go and round up some supper.”
Sam retreats back into the house ahead of me, lips moving soundlessly as he turns it over in his head. I have been reading poetry at work, I just hope my improvised doggerel gets through. (Poetry really gums up conversational monitoring systems. Parsing metaphor and emotional states is an AI-complete problem.)
We end up in the kitchen. “Were you thinking about cooking again?” Sam asks cautiously. Thinking back to days past, I suspect he wasn’t too enthusiastic about being subjected to some of my experiments.
“Let’s just order a pizza instead, hmm? And a flask of wine.”
“Why?” He stares at me.
“Do you have to turn every suggestion for what to do of an evening into an impromptu therapy session?”
He shrugs. “Just asking.” He begins to turn away.
I grab his shoulder. “Don’t do that.”
He turns back sharply, looking surprised. “What?”
“ ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today: inside my head he’ll have to stay’ . . . I haven’t been myself lately, Sam, but I’m feeling a lot better today.” I frown at him, willing the words to sink in.
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