‘What’s the noise?’ Jack shouted back.
‘Drilling. Harry’s trying to break in.’
‘How long have we got?’
‘A few minutes. It’ll be enough.’
‘Enough for what?’
‘I’m sorry, Jack, I’ve got no choice.’
‘No choice but what, Fist?’
‘I have to do it. I’m not letting that cunt get his hands on my weapon systems.’
‘What are you talking about?’
The drilling noise was getting even louder.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Fist yelled. ‘It won’t hurt for long.’
He leant forward and clamped his little wooden hands over Jack’s nose and mouth. It took Jack a moment to realise what he was doing. He thrashed and flailed and tried to breathe, but the coffin was tight about him and Fist’s grip was firm. At last he had to give up.
Darkness shimmered and he could no longer feel the coffin’s wooden walls. He was hanging in infinite space. He thought of East’s cathedral. A great, soft rhythm surrounded him, the beating of mighty wings.
Then Jack died.
Chapter 45
The first thing that Jack felt was the cold. A bleak wind scythed through his wet clothes. There was a roaring sound. He remembered drills and a feeling that it was very important someone shouldn’t reach him. This noise was softer and more organic. He was lying on a yielding, frigid surface. The breeze gusted and a shiver shook him. Then something even colder splashed over and rolled around him, dragging him back to full consciousness. He opened his eyes.
Black sand stretched away. White foam danced up it, the sea’s softest touch. The beach seemed to carry on forever, curving away to left and to right. Water rushed back down it as the wave broke, then died back into the sea. Jack was soaked. He rolled over and sat up. Memories of the coffin’s hot closeness made the cold feel like a blessing. The grey sea stretched away to touch grey clouds at the horizon. Another wave rolled in. Jack scrambled to his feet, looking round for a little wooden body lying on the shore or bobbing in the waves. But there was no sign of Fist. The wind shook him again as he remembered an educational film he’d seen as a child, and realised where he was. ‘Fuck,’ he breathed. Fist had brought him to the outer edges of the Coffin Drives.
It took Jack a good ten minutes to reach the dunes that shadowed the beach’s edge. Every so often small gaps would open in the clouds. Bright beams of sunlight lanced through, some flickering briefly then disappearing, others burning softly on. He wondered if the clouds ever lifted. He couldn’t imagine clear skies opening up over this gloomy landscape. Thick clumps of scrubby green grass danced in the wind. Jack shivered as he walked. He hoped that his clothes would dry soon, or at least that the dunes would offer some shelter. The land of the dead lay beyond them, but no fetch was allowed to speak of it. Station people did their best to ignore everything but its most basic details, not wanting to imagine where their dataselves would spend eternity.
A shrill whistling danced towards him. At first he thought it was just the wind, but then he heard notes sketching out a simple melody. He wondered who was playing. Perhaps it was some kind of digital psychopomp, waiting to conduct him into the lands of the dead. But he’d arrived in such an unusual way. Fetches were normally very carefully constructed over a period of months. He’d broken in, a direct copy of a living mind. He wasn’t sure if the Coffin Drives would even recognise him as a functioning consciousness, if he’d be able to communicate with those others who lived within them. The thought of an eternity alone stretched out before him, and he shuddered.
At last he reached the dunes. He climbed towards the whistling, sand slipping away beneath his feet. He lost his footing and tumbled down the other side of the dune, swearing loudly. The fall winded him and it took a moment to recover. There was chuckling. A voice he never thought he’d be so happy to hear spoke.
‘That was quite some entry, Jacky boy!’
Fist was leaning back against black sand. He was dressed in white shorts and a rough, canvas smock. He held a tin whistle in one hand.
‘I knew you’d find me sooner or later. I pulled you out of the sea as far as I could, but I couldn’t wake you. And it’s cold down there.’
‘You left me?’
‘I wanted to look around! And what are you going to do, Jack? Die again?’ He tootled out a few more notes. ‘The waves were going to wake you sooner or later. And if I kept playing this, I knew you’d hear me.’
Jack sat down next to him. ‘So we’re dead now?’
‘Out there, we are. I wiped your mind and then deleted myself. There’s no thought left in that body of yours, no memories, nothing.’
‘And we’re just copies—’
‘You’ve never been software, have you? It’s how things travel when they’re digital. New copy here, old copy erased. Are you Jack? Are you just a copy of Jack? Is there a difference?’ Fist waved his hands around mesmerically. ‘Spoooooky! When you were alive, you were flesh, but you were also a pattern of mind carved into that flesh. Now the flesh has gone, but the pattern remains, unchanged.’
‘Very metaphysical, Fist.’
Fist raised an eyebrow at Jack. ‘Dying does that to you.’
‘How long have we been down here?’
‘In real time? A few hours, at most.’
‘Shouldn’t it take months to reassemble us?’
‘No, Jack. Think about it. We’re totally different from fetches. They’re built from scratch out of a lifetime’s worth of data. We’re two living consciousnesses cut and pasted directly down here. No reassembly needed, we’re already complete. And the Coffin Drives’ bandwidth is vast, so the transfer’s pretty zippy. Dying’s much easier than you’d think. Who knew?’
‘We didn’t just die – we were killed.’
Fist looked away for a moment, suddenly less cheerful. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I had to do it.’
‘Not your responsibility. Harry forced you. He killed us just as surely as he killed Yamata.’
‘That bastard. I always told you not to trust him.’
Jack sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Fist. You were right. But we did need him. And we wouldn’t have got as far without him.’
Fist waved a wooden hand at the barren space around them. ‘We wouldn’t be here without him, either.’
Jack laughed. ‘You’ve got a point.’
‘And he’s still got our body.’
‘Can he do anything with it?’
‘No. All my hardware’s wrapped around your spine, but there’s nothing left to bring it to life. It’s like having a gun without any bullets.’
‘So he can’t fire up your weapon systems?’
‘No. He’d need us, and we’re out of his reach now. Even if he did catch us, he can’t force us to do anything we don’t want to. Even if he could, my countermeasures would break him first.’
‘I thought they didn’t work?’
‘Plan A was the coffin. It protected us for long enough to get down here. And there’s a Plan B too. Ooh, It’s a beauty!’
‘Tell me.’
‘I couldn’t stop Harry from using me as a bridge to Yamata, but when he did key parts of him were inside me. In my memory. Accessible. Lots of security there, but—’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s some ninja code working its way into him. A few hours, it’ll have gone as deep as it can, and we can trigger it. It’ll cripple him, at least for a bit – and it’ll also ping us with a precise fix on his core servers. We’ll know where he is, and we’ll be able to go after him physically.’
‘Once we’re back in the land of the living.’
‘Well, yes, there is that, but it’s just a detail. I’ll get us out of here somehow.’ Jack found himself starting to feel irritated by Fist’s breezy overconfidence. ‘In the meantime,’ Fist continued heedlessly, ‘we’ve got Harry right where we want him!’