Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  “What about Tower 7? We achieved our objectives.”

  “Exactly. Your objectives didn’t include saving lives. Section 9 could have intervened sooner and saved thousands, but you held back and those people died. Ophelia Emmet is dead because she wasn’t an objective.”

  “We didn’t do anything sooner because it could have jeopardized the mission, and the mission was just too important for us to take that risk. Don’t even try to put all those deaths on us. That was August Marcenn’s work.”

  “Intervening wouldn’t have jeopardized the mission. That’s what I’m saying. Your idea of what the mission requires is too narrow. You decided on your timeline and you stuck to it, no matter what was going on around you. It was the same thing on Earth. When I was being hunted by Augmen, you were right there, but you didn’t do anything. Not until the last possible moment. If I’d been unlucky down by the river, I would have died before you even decided to act.”

  “Is that what this is about? Are you mad because I didn’t help you sooner when you were getting chased by bad guys?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s about Section 9 policy. We could act sooner. We could go further. We could save lives.”

  She stopped again, so Bray stopped as well.

  “There’s something you need to understand here, Barrett.” Andrea’s voice was angry, but she held it in check. “I know you used to be an Arbiter, but those days are over. You have to stop thinking that way. The Arbiter Force is a blunt tool. Section 9 is a nano scalpel. You can’t save everyone, and it is sisyphean to try.

  “Even with the strength and speed of an old god, you couldn’t come close to stopping every needless death around you. That’s not a failure on your part; that’s a failure of humanity. The failure of an imperfect society. What we do is part of the effort to push past that, to get the system to a place where the things we deal with never happen in the first place. Every successful mission moves the needle a little closer. Every failure dials it back. That’s the job. That’s the job. If you want to do well in this unit—if you want to continue—you need to start thinking more like a nano scalpel and less like a blunt instrument.”

  With those words, Andrea Capanelli turned away from me and started walking again. I didn’t know what to say. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead and didn’t speak again until we’d reached the end of the tunnel. I followed in silence, uncertain about whether I would ever really belong in Section 9.

  16

  The rest of the walk through the smuggling tunnel was made in awkward silence. Andrea was angry with me for putting my own instincts above the success of our mission, but I was equally incensed about Section 9’s hands-off approach. There was nothing more to say, at least for now. The tension was unresolved, and as far as I could tell the only benefit of the conversation we’d just had was that it got everything out in the open.

  “This is it.” Bray stopped at a door, accessed another maintenance panel built into the wall, and keyed in a command. The door slid open, and we emerged single file into an open space inside a larger structure. It was mostly dark, but light filtered in through a few windows somewhere inside. The shadows danced, and I realized the light must be fires burning outside, where the crowds still fought in memory of Bensouda Hafidi.

  The white walls of a large dome soared up above my head. “What is this place?”

  Andrea looked up. “It’s a Buddhist stupa. They would have kept some relics here, a bodhisattva’s finger or something like that.”

  “Would have? They don’t anymore?”

  “I’m not sure, but probably not.”

  Thomas Young’s voice echoed across the room. “The Martian colony is old enough to have a history. The stupa was abandoned a hundred years ago as the Buddhists left this district and Hafidi’s sect came in.”

  How typical of Thomas, to just launch straight into whatever topic he wanted to talk about without any acknowledgement of the fact that we were both still alive somehow. No Hi Tycho, glad to see you made it. Just a few interesting facts about local history.

  In the center of the open space there was an enormous graphene statue. It depicted a Buddha seated on some kind of throne, with a flowing tunic and a peaked crown. One hand was raised with the palm open and turned up, the other held up three fingers in front of it in what I presume was some kind of gesture of prayer. I walked up to the statue and read the plaque at its base. It read East Hellas Maitreya.

  I couldn’t see where Thomas was at first, so I just played along. “They didn’t knock it down?”

  “You surprise me, Tycho. I should think you could see for yourself that they didn’t knock it down, since you are standing inside it. No, they built another structure around it and left it standing as a historical curiosity. Buddhists from other districts still come here on pilgrimage every now and then. It’s a perfect spot for the smugglers, because hardly anyone ever comes in here.”

  I looked around, imagining the centuries of Buddhists that had come to this place to pray and meditate. I didn’t know much about Martian Buddhism, except that it had evolved away from any of the traditional Terran sects. As far as I knew, Buddhists didn’t kill each other over accusations of heresy, but it did make for a strained relationship between the temples on Earth and those on Mars. Perhaps that was why they had given up on the old stupa, because it represented an older version of the faith they had left behind.

  “Where are you, Thomas?”

  “I’m over here.” Distorted by echoes, his voice could have come from anywhere in that enormous structure. I kept walking along the curving wall, and eventually saw the familiar figure of Vincenzo Veraldi peering out a window up ahead.

  He glanced in my direction. “Barrett. That was quite a stunt you pulled.”

  “I heard all about it from Andrea already. I thought you guys were way above us.”

  He shrugged. “We were, but this was the rendezvous point. I’d stay away from Jones if I were you. He’s kind of pissed at you.”

  “Everyone in this place is kind of pissed at me.”

  “Not Ivanovich. He just thinks you’re funny.”

  I walked on past him and found Sasha leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. As he heard me approach, he opened one eye for just a moment to confirm my identity. “Ah, shit.” He closed his eye again. “I guess I lose that bet.”

  A few feet past him, I found Thomas Young. He was seated on the floor behind the Maitreya statue, fiddling with a piece of equipment I didn’t recognize. Completely absorbed by the device he was holding, he didn’t even look up at my approach.

  I stopped in front of him. “Glad to see you made it, Thomas.”

  “Hmm? Why is that?”

  I couldn’t think of a response to that one. Why indeed? I turned away and kept walking along the back wall until I reached another window. Andrew Jones was there, staring out at the streets outside. A floodlight lit his face, and he pulled back into the shadows of the stupa. “Barrett. You just won me a bet, otherwise I’d be punching you in the face right now.”

  “Yeah, everyone’s mad at me. What can I say?”

  “Don’t say a thing, just don’t go running off like that again. Some of us are trying to survive this mission.”

  “I have my reasons. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No, I understand you perfectly, Tycho. It’s just that you’re wrong.”

  “I’ve heard this song, so let’s change the beat. What’s Thomas doing back there?”

  Andrew looked briefly in Thomas’s direction. “He’s hacking their systems. With that device, he can monitor data throughout the entire city. If he needs to, he can even interrupt or alter the stream. I don’t know the specifics of what he’s up to, but if you leave that guy alone for ten minutes, he’ll be in someone’s computer system.”

  He looked at me straight on then sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know about you, Tycho. You don’t act like Section 9, but I can’t say you haven’t been an asset.
Even back there on Venus, you got things done in your own way. You’re good at what you do, but are you ever going to try to be a team player?”

  “I don’t know. I do know I can’t stand by and watch.”

  “I get it, but there’s another solution.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You turn away. You keep moving forward. If we can take down Ares Terrestrial, we’ll save a lot more lives than we could ever do by getting involved in these riots.”

  “It’s looking more like a revolution at this point.”

  “Even worse. Do you think for one minute that the Sol Federation is going to tolerate the existence of a revolutionary government here in East Hellas? If it came to that, they’d be just as happy to invade and occupy the place. It would be less hassle to them than dealing with revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are people who cannot be reasoned with.”

  “Like myself.” I grinned.

  “That’s right, like you. So, you fought the Erinyes?”

  “I shot at the Erinyes, but all I was really doing was putting little holes in their armor. Until Bray showed up with that massive cannon of his, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go against that ape-cyborg.”

  “It does help to have a plan in life. Were you going to have him rip off your head?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It was more of a squeezing-me-into-a-pulp situation. Bray smashed the thing’s chest in with a shot from his cannon, then Andrea handed me this squad rifle and I was finally able to really fight.”

  Andrew suddenly looked confused, then he glanced back toward the door to the shaft. “Hey, wait a second. You used the smuggler’s shaft?”

  “We did.”

  He started laughing quietly. “Holy shit. You mean to tell me Bray had to lug that thing through the shaft… by hand?”

  “It wasn’t really lugging. It was more like waddling sideways. He was almost hyperventilating.”

  “I’ll bet he was. That guy’s claustrophobic! I can’t believe he did that…”

  “Yeah I think he just about lost his shit.”

  “If he actually had, you wouldn’t be alive to tell the tale. Where is he now?”

  I looked around, but I couldn’t see him. The way that place was set up, a person on the other side of the big Maitreya statue couldn’t be seen at all. “I’d better go check on him.”

  Jones raised an eyebrow. “Good luck with that. I’m not sure that’s any safer than when you decided to run off and fight all those Erinyes.”

  As irritated as he was, it looked like Jones was mostly over it. I walked on until I reached Bray, who was standing in front of the Maitreya and staring up at it grimly. His giant gun was cradled in his arms, and his facial expression was one of belligerent incomprehension.

  “You got a problem with the Buddha, Jonathan?”

  “Huh?”

  He went right on glaring at it, but I didn’t get the opportunity to find out what his issue was with the statue.

  Andrea came around from the other side with Veraldi in tow, and Thomas following a few paces behind. “Has anyone seen Andrew?”

  “He’s back at the window.” I pointed. “Want me to get him?”

  “I’m not back anywhere, I’m right here.” He walked over to join us and was soon staring at Bray and then back at the statue. Then he looked back and forth between the two again. “Did the statue do something to piss you off, Jonathan?”

  Bray glanced at him. “Huh?”

  Andrea stepped forward. “We’re all in the same place for the first time since that bomb went off. Reports?”

  Veraldi went first. “I gathered up everyone I could find, then we made our way through Pretorius toward Great Wall to rendezvous with our Black Kuei contact. Along the way, we were attacked by a hit team from the Geneicide Syndicate but succeeded in recovering their dataspikes. Well, some of their dataspikes. Andrew analyzed the data they contained, and we discovered the existence of a citywide contract on our lives. We sought out Madam Shih to obtain some weapons—”

  “And a first-rate memory experience,” added Sasha Ivanovich, who had wandered over to see what we were talking about.

  Veraldi ignored him. “When we reached the train, we were attacked by Erinyes, but Tycho came up with an effective escape plan.”

  Andrea looked surprised, as I had left this out of our conversation. “Tycho did?”

  Veraldi nodded. “He got us to retreat into another train car and then disconnected the one the Erinyes were in. After they fell behind, he hacked the train’s onboard control system with a skeleton key and ordered it to stop. We jumped off onto a rooftop in Fuji Section.”

  Bray frowned. “Why didn’t he just, you know, kill all the cyborgs?”

  “I don’t know, Jonathan,” Vincenzo replied. “Maybe because he wasn’t carrying an anti-vehicular cannon?”

  “That was innovative thinking on Tycho’s part,” Andrew acknowledged. “Shortly after that we were attacked by the Kagebushin.”

  Veraldi nodded. “Yes. In the course of that attack, Tycho discovered their use of an experimental holography device.”

  Andrea noticed what he was up to. “Point taken, Vincenzo. We’ll leave the matter where it is, as long as Tycho doesn’t go off on any other private adventures. Are we agreed?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, as I wasn’t really sure I could make that kind of promise. She was staring right at me, so I finally gave her a nod. “Okay, we’re agreed.”

  She turned toward the group again. “I just checked my dataspike, and the local news is reporting a major shift in the rioters’ tactics. They’re starting a push against the border wall, trying to breach it and reunite with West Hellas.”

  Bray shook his head. “What the hell? I don’t get it. I thought they were all about Bensouda Hafidi.”

  “It’s right there in his sermons,” Jones replied. “He told his followers many times that the Wall was the sign of a corrupt society, and that it would have to fall someday to build a better world.”

  Andrea nodded, biting her lip. “And now they’re acting on his words. Ares Terrestrial is blaming the whole thing on outside agitators. To that end, they’re ordering the immediate deportation of all non-citizens. From what they’re saying on the news, they’re basically emptying out the jails and prisons, throwing in anyone else they don’t really want to deal with, and sending them all for the West Hellas border.”

  “That sounds like a desperation move to me,” said Jones. “I mean, a crowd filled with criminals? Criminals bad enough to get locked up in this city? How the hell are they planning to control that?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Capanelli replied. “It’s not like they can spare a lot of StateSec officers either. They’ve mobilized every officer in every district, and it’s all they can do to defend company assets. When they open those gates to let the deportees through, they won’t have any hope of controlling what happens.”

  “Maybe they won’t even try to,” Veraldi mused.

  “What do you mean?” asked Andrea.

  “It’s not the point of the exercise. We saw what they were doing. They sent their Erinyes against the crowd. When you’re killing people indiscriminately, what you’re trying to do is to spread terror.”

  Jones started drumming his leg with his fingers as he talked, a sign that he was thinking out all the angles. “So they hit the rebels hard, get the dissidents thinking there’s no longer any hope and that they’ll be hunted down and killed. Then they open the gates for just a couple of hours and let all the troublemakers through at once. When they close them again, they’ll be able to get back to normal.”

  Veraldi shrugged. “Why not just do something about the city’s problems? It’s stupid. But I suppose it could work. From their perspective, Hafidi’s followers would be much less of a problem as a bunch of rootless exiles on the other side of the Wall. Especially with a lot of criminals mixed in with them to ensure that the West Hellans see the refugees as trouble and treat them accordingly. B
ut if that’s their strategy, the Erinyes won’t be enough on their own. There just aren’t enough of them.”

  He gave Andrea a look, and she took that as a sign that he was looking for more information from her. “It’s not just the Erinyes, but the syndicates too. Bounties are being awarded to syndicates for suppressing blocks of the city. They have carte blanche, so the gangsters in some districts are just going around and slaughtering Hafidi’s people. In other districts they’re with the rioters, but for the most part the gang bosses are only too happy to turn on their own people.”

  I jumped into the conversation. “That matches what Veraldi was saying. If the gangsters kill all the rioters, it’s no problem for the company. If some of the rioters get away, they’ll have to join the refugees waiting to be deported. They won’t have any choice, because they can’t go to some neighborhood where nobody knows them—not in a city like this—and they can’t go home, not with the gangsters looking for any protesters they can get their hands on.”

  “You know, this presents an opportunity,” said Jones.

  “I’m glad you can see that,” Andrea replied. “It’s our best chance by far. With so many people at the gates and with StateSec overwhelmed, they can't possibly be checking anything all that thoroughly. We get across the city and into the territory of the Black Kuei. We get what we need so we can cross the border. Then we join in with the refugees and slip across when the gates come open.”

  “I don't know about this.” Bray was shaking his head. “I can see what you’re saying, but I just don’t know about this.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Andrea.

  “They’ll be overwhelmed by the crowd. Not checking IDs? Okay, I can see that. So overwhelmed that they don’t spot a group of wanted fugitives? No way, chief. Their guys will be looking out for us, and anything we do to avoid being noticed will only make them want to pay that much more attention to us. There’s not a chance in hell we’re just walking through that gate without getting spotted.”

  “Maybe not, but we still have a much better chance of making it through with this plan than with any other. If we do get spotted, they’ll have to pull us out of a huge and already angry crowd. What do you think is likely to happen?”