I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.
‘You wired for virtual trace?’
He shook his head.
‘Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re running a mirror-code scrambler. Now, I want to know who your controller is.’
He stared at me. ‘Why should I tell you a fucking thing?’
‘Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably re-sleeve you.’ I leaned forward in the chair. ‘That’s a one-time special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.’
‘If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.’
Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.
I deployed one from the manual.
‘They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hardline outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.’ I gestured with one open hand. ‘But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?’
I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.
Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.
But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.
Try it again.
‘Something like that, Deng?’
‘You’d better go ahead and kill me,’ he said tautly.
I let the smile come out slow –
‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng.’
- and waited.
As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.
All the time in the universe.
‘You’re—?’ he said, finally.
‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said. I’m. Not. Going to kill you.’ I shrugged. ‘Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don’t get to be a corporate hero that easy.’
I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.
‘Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a one-time special offer. Answer the questions now, while you’ve still got the chance.’
‘Or what?’ Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume thin, but rising.
I shrugged.
‘Or I’ll leave you here.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometres of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.’
He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.
‘You’re in a Casualty ID&A system. Runs off a battlefield powerpack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.’
I sat back again. Let it sink into him.
‘Or you can answer my questions. One-time offer. What’s it going to be?’
The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.
‘You had your chance.’
I got almost to the door before he cracked.
‘Alright!’ There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. ‘Alright, you got it. You got it.’
I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.
‘I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop man. I’ll tell you.’
Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.
‘Hand?’
He nodded jerkily.
‘Matthias Hand?’
He looked up, something broken in his face. ‘I got your word?’
‘For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.’
‘Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.’
‘He’s your controller?’ I frowned. ‘A divisional exec?’
‘He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the Chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.’
‘Why?’
‘How the fuck would I know?’
‘Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?’
He hesitated. ‘They say it was Hand.’
‘How long’s he been with Mandrake?’
‘I don’t know.’ He saw the expression on my face. ‘I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.’
‘What’s his rep?’
‘Tough. You don’t cross him.’
‘Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.’
‘It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R&D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—’
‘Company what?’
‘Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.’
‘But it didn’t.’
Deng shook his head. ‘Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.’
‘All that voodoo shit,’ I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand were ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. ‘So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?’