‘Don’t worry.’ I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. ‘If this works out, they’ll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we’re going to assume he is. That means we’ve got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a casualty ID&A, but cranked up we’ll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.’
‘What are you going to do to him?’ This was Wardani, looking unhappy.
I reached for the skullcap. ‘Nothing. There isn’t time. I’m just going to talk to him.’
‘Talk?’ There was a strange light in her eyes.
‘Sometimes,’ I told her. ‘That’s all it takes.’
It was a rough ride in.
Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn’t have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn’t appear until after I’d bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren’t ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we’d liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.
I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to, a single-storey wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an AI with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock, and that’s probably exactly what it was.
Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.
Time to Identify and Assess.
It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth re-sleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Barcoding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it’s chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.
Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for re-sleeving. How you die – fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony or numb – is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So too does your re-sleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Re-sleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want any more.
Oops.
The point is there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties, but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.
I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiselled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: Deng Zhao Jun. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.
He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realise where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.
I coughed gently.
‘Good evening, Deng.’
He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.
‘We were set up man, it was a fucking set-up. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—’
His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognised me.
‘Yes.’
He jerked to his feet. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘That’s not really important. Look—’
But it was too late, he was up and coming for me round the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.
‘Look, there’s no point—’
He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and mid-level punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet, and came at me again.
This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knee and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut-deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.
‘Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.’ I got my breath back and lowered my voice. ‘Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?’
He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.
‘Alright.’ I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. ‘Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilised fashion. I want to ask you some questions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.’