The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  I popped a fig in my mouth and considered how insulting I felt like being. I opted with honest. “You have at best a fifty-fifty chance of killing me at any given time and you keep passing up your chances. Then there’s this whole threat of death thing. I’m not a parlor pink. I grew up under daily torture and death sentence. When I was eleven, Hans took us up in an airplane, strapped a bomb with a timer to the cargo bay, and pointed to a pile of ten parachutes. Then he jumped out.”

  She leaned on the table, rapt. “How many of there were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  She frowned. “None of this is in your files. Any of the Section Two Two files. How many died?”

  I held up a single finger. “Just one.” She took a sip of coffee and motioned me to continue. “Gregor Ivanovich had been trying to slip into Magda’s sleeping bag for months and I’d had it with trying to reason with him. He was fourteen and the largest of us. So I threw him out of the plane, knocked four dimwits cold who were going to try for the chutes, then tossed the bomb out after Grisha.”

  “You didn’t know how to fly a plane did you?”

  “Nope. But I knew that Ute did. She landed us safely and we all got ice cream that day.”

  Pina might not have fully grasped the import of the story. But I knew better than to underestimate her. She might also have intuited more than I meant to reveal. With her, it was always dangerous to reveal anything. She had the perceptions of King Solomon. She toyed with the last fig and then, puncturing it with her sharp teeth, she looked me eye to eye. “You killed Ute in Las Vegas.”

  I sighed. “Not on purpose but if I had to do it again, maybe yes, I’d have pulled the trigger on her face to face. It’s hard to plan. To cope with the losses.”

  “Your file says you will kill women, which I find intriguing.”

  “Because it’s a major taboo?” Where was Pina driving us? Certainly not where I had wanted to take the conversation. But with her, that was a given. I’d known that about her before I’d even taken her invitation the first time. Truthfully, I despised killing anyone.

  “Because, Spetz, you really think women are people.”

  “Of course they are Pina. What are you talking about? You can’t possibly be trying to inject something as petty as moralism or cultural values into this conversation?”

  “Darcy and I have discussed this often. Frankly, Ace and I debate it now and again too.

  “I’m not sure I follow you. Discuss what? Whether women are people?”

  She laughed and the china cabinet rattled. “God, no. Whether given our positions outside the culture we can presume to affect it.”

  “The war left hundreds of thousands wounded, tens of thousands dead. How outside the culture can you be?” I took a sip of coffee and tried to parse what Pina was implying. With her nothing could be simple. When that failed, I took another sip and waited.

  “Did you mind working for me the last month? Or, for that matter, that Ute could land the plane and you couldn’t?”

  “I was eleven and she was fifteen. Even if I could fly that plane, not even a fool would land an aircraft if Ute was available.”

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  Flummoxed, I got up, went to the kitchen, reheated the milk and refreshed our coffees. It gave me a few minutes pause.

  “Why are we talking about this and not Wickham?”

  “But we are talking about him. Do you know what the Bechdel test is?”

  I did actually. When we’d programmed Jeeves it had been a particular pet project of Chepovsky to have the system assess cinema and literature, then aggregate the data. I knew how to find out what percentage of books, films, television shows, internet videos, even comic books, passed a series of tests: Bechdel, Finkbeiner, Russo, plus a set of conditional assessment worthy of Irigaray or Dworkin. Darcy had not explained that to Pina or she would not have bothered asking me. Or she knew and was trying to goad me into some reaction. Ugh, more chess.

  “In film or literature, two women with names and full identities need to be able to have a conversation unrelated to men or, in some later versions, male power. True independent life, outside of men.”

  “Wickham resented that potential. Women’s agency.”

  “So it wasn’t your save the world agenda that pissed him off?”

  “Just so. Cranbrook helped me with that for years, was a true believer as much as I.”

  The pieces tumbled slowly into place. Where she had led me. “Then along comes the Abschnitt’s man dressed up as a scion of the Ring and he starts whispering. About your other true believers, about women you talk to outside his…male gaze.”

  She sipped some coffee and took a bit of some orange rind dark chocolate. “And it worked. In a way, nothing else had. Because deep down most men, almost all men, are insecure when it comes to things like that. Hell, Bernard certainly is and he knows me through and through.”

  I sat back and cracked my neck absently. Then realized I’d let down my guard some and shrugged. She’d already told me she wasn’t killing me today, why not enjoy the house and the meal? “I find it hard to believe that he’d betray you out of what, diffidence, misogyny, penis anxiety?”

  “Of course you find it hard. You took down Mika French.”

  “Who killed my family personally. And yes, she was one of the world’s most dangerous people, never to be underestimated. Much like you.”

  “Exactly.”

  Could it all been so simple? That Hans, Zeus, and Wickham had simply not seen the truth: Pina Karthago and her kind were every inch the danger to the world that they were? Perhaps so. Fact: The Syndicate was run almost exclusively by men and through men. It would fail the Bechdel test ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Fact: Section 22 had no female leaders; Cassandra had run the labs and reported to Hans, slept with Hans, and had been Mother, but not Fuhrer to her people. Fact: my own organization had been roughly half women; that made statistical sense. The world is 51% female and so it would follow that with a standard distribution of skill, capabilities, and intelligence, half of the world’s best of everything including assassins, pilots and hackers would have to be women.

  Oslo had been recruiting women. At some point Cranbrook—whose name did not register as anyone I knew—had seen the pattern. He’d been vulnerable. To the whispers of a very sharp profiler who’d know how to exploit even the smallest weakness. It didn’t matter what it had started as. It became a way to pry them apart and all those women, talking outside of the men, discussing things unrelated to men, it disturbed Cranbrook and, if Pina was to be believed, it disturbed men in general. How odd.

  “Are you telling me the feminist literature is actually based on something?”

  She laughed. “What did you think it was?”

  “Overreaction to cruelty. There’s a dozen screeds out there explaining why men enslave other men. Man’s inhumanity to man is legendary. In the Soviet Union, they forced that stuff down our throats. I’ve read a lot of wild stuff. It all seemed pretty farfetched.” But I had also seen the rape camps officiated by operations and agents from the The Web; the string of human misery from slavery and drug trades; the pits of murdered civilians who stumbled upon some clandestine operation or facility.

  “And now, now what do you think, Spetz?”

  I mulled it over. “I think Darcy found the programs we left running inside Jeeves and got curious. She hadn’t seen anything like it, the humor protocol, the feminist research, Slater’s little investigation of Christian miracles. Intrigued, she dug in and made a mistake of sorts, discovered something. Maybe asked a question that produced the wrong reply, or one so unexpected, she expanded the query.” Of course, she had asked questions. And questions had led to answers. Ugly answers. Perfectly aggregated, statistically flawless answers backed by multiple super computers. “She realized the impact of the Web was not just disproportionate, but rigged. Is that the right way to put it, systemically imbalanced?”

  “We usually term it Superstructur
e when we meet.”

  That sounded like a multiple We. Right. So Pina, Darcy, perhaps the Karkovas, other women with intelligence and power like Sasha O’Brian and Ace, met online and discussed. There had been a Cabal, but not one I’d even thought to look for, a silent majority colluding from the beginning, running the war across the globe and under everyone’s noses. Mediated via the BBW perhaps and using Gay Eddie’s resources. Which is how they found Darcy. Who confirmed their suspicions and gave them unprecedented access to more of The Web.

  “Wickham was right then. You were going to betray him and the vaunted cause. You are after the infrastructure of The Web itself. Not to moralize the system, to dismantle it.”

  “Oslo runs her own independent network.”

  “Don’t be coy now. You’re Oslo and…” Oh. That was sheer genius. She’d conned Bernard without him even seeing it. Oslo must have had nearly as much power as The Syndicate but never advertised. She’d shown Bernard a weaker, smaller organization, and he’d co-opted Pina’s power into his own. But like Hans and all the other men, he’d not thought it through. With Pina, it would have been smarter to kill her. She was, for all intents and purposes, simply the most dangerous person alive.

  Who remembered the Mongols or Manchurians? Over time the vast numbers of Han simply absorbed them into the greater culture and diluted their power, their identity, until all that was left was China as it had always been. Oslo’s network would sit inside The Syndicate and gain power through her. She would continue to function in two roles, Bernard having blessed Oslo’s independent network as way to bring hostile third parties under his heel without spending resources. He all but guaranteed her success, and she his. The Autumn War had demolished the last significant opposition to her little revolution. If Pina lived—Harv seemed determined that she should—she would be Bernard’s successor, able to put key people into place, controlling two of the largest Powers in The Web.

  Oslo was already the undisputed leader of a Power. I’d met that network in my travels, had likely donated large pieces of that network to her after I retired. Or more likely still, had been working with Oslo through proxies for years, been groomed and shaped from behind, pushed subtly by the grand master to a certain place.

  “I resist pushing.” It wasn’t where we’d started but her eyes told me she’d followed my train of thought. Damn and damn again, thrice be damned but she had me in a corner. Again.

  “But you’re not afraid of me, even now?”

  “You’d never pull that crap with parachutes.”

  “True, but still you don’t understand. I’ve had decades to accumulate my power base. And I worked in places you have never seen.”

  Which could mean any number of things. I sat there and contemplated. “Will you answer a few simple questions, Pina?”

  Her demon smile. “Certainly.”

  “Okay. How long did it take to figure out who Wickham was?”

  “Ten minutes after your call we had him. I laid a simple trap. I told nine of my most valued subordinates the identity and location of Darcy.”

  “All different places and people?”

  “Yes. All people Oslo has been targeting for some time. Had been. Five were killed within minutes. Darcy, such a dear, traced the calls for me and we had Cranbrook.” He’d been thorough and wiped out his own suspects, all of them at once. As Wickham, he’d have certainly sensed an accomplice like Darcy working on the other end of things, had to have been trying to eliminate her. My potential collusion likely helped determine which of the targets were killed, and it also allowed Pina to see how her network had betrayed her. It had destroyed him.

  I nodded and stirred the coffee with my finger. Uncouth, but it helped me think. The sensation prompted me to think about pressure. My nanites kept me from feeling the intensity of the heat. Ah. “How was Cranbrook killed? He was a formidable operative was he not?”

  “One of the very best. Invisible to The Web and as good as Mika in some ways.” She sipped her coffee and rubbed at the lipstick. Something was bothering her. “I killed him myself, with my bare hands.” That sealed it.

  “Okay, last question. Are you the original Pina Karthago?”

  She gave me a smile that blazed like a supernova and I felt it down to my toes. Her eyes danced with a rare fire. “Yes, finally. Someone sees. No, Spetz. I am not.”

  “You have nanites. Like mine or better than mine. You ran the wetworks. And no one put it together, saw that you could move faster, shoot better, fight harder?

  “I’ve been careful and men are blind.”

  “Not Cranbrook. He saw you and it’s what made him freelance. But did he tell Zeus or Hans?”

  She shrugged and her electric smile vanished. “Darcy thinks not and Nadya has confirmed that the dead drop traffic were very simple coded meet times. So, unless it came up during their short meetings, no. But we have no assurances.”

  “Is there another Abschnitt out there?”

  “Many who don’t advertise and whose work runs in different circles. More to do with cybernetic interfaces; remote sensing; artificial glial agents. Brainiac things. We destroyed a few of those in the last raids.” The Syndicate had the perfect excuse. Section 22 had been declared persona non grata in The Web and their labs subjected to unceremonious obliteration by whomever was closest.

  We’d finished our coffee. I stood up and gathered the dishes, then walked to the kitchen. She followed, her heels echoing on the tile. Pina as we knew her had been two people. Before this life she’d been someone from a secret organization outside the purview of The Web. Someone who felt she could take me in a hand to hand fight. Who might be able to, which bore consideration given our differential masses. Why then did she need me? Or want me?

  She brushed my hand with hers and the caress left me feeling chilled. “We can discuss this further some other time. You’ll have more questions once you’ve sat and thought about it.” Which sounded right, given my predilections and habits. I found the hidden dishwasher, which was not just empty but dry. After loading the dishes, I sat in one of the bar stools and tried to focus my thoughts. Pina had been trying to bring me to a point, an idea. I ran my fingers along the bar and felt a recessed carving. On the marble inlaid with by a subtly different color of stone was a simple Kutzk mark: Plenty. I walked to the study and found a similar one over the fireplace mantle near Hippo. Solace.

  “Who lives here, Pina?” I found her sitting behind me in the study ostensibly reading the book, though I suspected it was a chance to watch me carefully.

  “That is the question, isn’t it?” Oho, that got my attention and pieces fell into place. She watched my face run through a gamut of micro-movements. “You aced the interview after all.”

  “There was no interview. There was no job. You set it up to trap Roger.”

  She gave me a tired look. “Wasn’t there?” Could she have thought that far in advance, been that on top of the Great Game? Her eyes were dark motes full of cold space.

  “This is Baker Street?” She nodded and looked amused. “You named it Baker Street? That’s worse than Zero Cool.”

  She shrugged. “My concierge is The Baker. Hence the locale and the code names.” Which meant that Oslo’s concierge was also the Baker. It was a dual role, one more powerful than the other; ditto Nadya as the Mystery Shopper.

  “Which makes the patissier his chef de cuisine?” She was offering me Pierre as a chief of staff and security rolled into one. And the apartment. Which meant that they had outfitted it for me. That the kendo armor would fit me, the suits were my size, the bathtub installed to accommodate my frame. They had built me a serious kitchen.

  Pina put down the book and rose, taking a moment to pet the cat. His green eyes followed our movements but he seemed wholly unconcerned. “Take the job, Spetz. I want you to work for me.” For just a moment I saw a flicker of need in that dark constellation, a fraction of a moment. Not so much weakness as potential humanity.

  “What about the cat?”r />
  She winked at me and started walking towards the security station. “You named it, so you have to keep it.”

  “Him. Hippo’s not an it, he’s a cat.” Hippo rubbed his nose in approval and went back to sleep.

  She kept walking. “See. You’re already attached.” She had me there. Maybe she had me all along. She knew she had something I wanted.

  “It’s an awful lot of men all in one place. Aren’t you worried about a repeat of Wickham?”

  This seemed to amuse her fiercely. I could swear she giggled. “You’re only male in shape, Spetz.” She spoke in thick accented Kutzk. I’d have to think about that for a long while.

  The door swung open for her and some of her own team, men in immaculate suits with empty eyes, waited with Harv. My own men, including my Chef stood nearby, on guard and taking no chances. Not even within the inner sanctum of The Syndicate. I raised my left hand a fraction and heard my voice: “At ease.” The room relaxed as my men stood down and let Pina’s men take possession of her. Harv gave me a quiet look and smiled. I smiled back. Why hide that we liked one another? Then I turned back to Pina, blocking her exit.

  I looked her in the eye, taller than her despite her heels. “Let’s be clear, Boss. You have something I want. But I have something you want too.”

  She regarded me with cool amusement. “What’s that, Spetz?”

  “Significance.” I let that sink in and watched as her face played a tiny storm of reactions as finely controlled as any I’d ever seen.

  “The world would be more boring without you.” She patted me lightly in the chest and flashed me her real smile, the demon’s smile.

  “The whole point being, it would be equally boring without you too.” She got it then. That I saw her, understood, and appreciated her. Whatever purpose I served, whatever utilitarian capabilities she might tell herself I fulfilled, deep down Pina Karthago had made an emotional choice. She was attached to her new pet cat. She’d already given me a name.

  As if it were an afterthought, she pulled a small white card with a hint of perfume clinging to it. “From Sasha. She sent the flowers.”