More movement at the door – Orr and Jadwiga, come to see what all the shouting was about. The giant shook his head.
‘Las, you really got to buy yourself that turtle farm down in Newpest you’re always talking about. Go barricade yourself in there and talk to the eggs.’
‘Fuck you, Orr.’
‘No, fuck you, Las. This is serious.’
‘She no better, Ki?’ Jadwiga crossed to the monitor and dropped a hand on Kiyoka’s shoulder. Like mine, her new sleeve was grown on a standard Harlan’s World chassis. Mingled Slavic and Japanese ancestry made for savagely beautiful cheekbones, epicanthic folds to the pale jade eyes and a wide slash of a mouth. Combat biotech requirements hauled the body towards long-limbed and muscular, but the original gene stock brought it out at a curiously delicate ranginess. Skin tone was brown, faded out with tank pallor and five weeks of miserable New Hok weather.
Watching her cross the room was almost like walking past a mirror. We could have been brother and sister. Physically, we were brother and sister – the clone bank in the bunker ran to five different modules, a dozen sleeves grown off the same genetic stem in each. It had turned out easiest for Sylvie to hotwire only the one module.
Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with re-sleeves. The pheremonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.
‘She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. ‘I just don’t know what’s going on in there.’
Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of colour in the coil.
‘Ki.’ I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister. I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. ‘Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?’
‘What?’ Orr, predictably.
Kiyoka looked unhappy. ‘I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—’
‘You are not fucking taking her hair.’
I got up from the bed and faced the giant. ‘And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?’
‘You shut your fucking m—’
‘Orr, he’s got a point.’ Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. ‘If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op, and her own anti-virals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?’
Lazlo nodded vigorously. ‘Might be her only hope, man.’
‘She’s been like this before,’ said Orr stubbornly. ‘That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up fine.’
I saw the look swoop among them. No. Not fine exactly.
‘If I induce the decoupler,’ said Kiyoka slowly, ‘I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever – she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.’
‘Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.’ Orr glared around at us. ‘She’s a fucking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.’
‘Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.’ I turned back to the bed. ‘Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?’
‘Yeah, it’s security-buffered.’
‘And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?’
‘Uh, yeah, but…’
‘Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?’
Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. ‘I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.’
‘Then—’
‘Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.’ Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?’
‘That’s not really the issue here,’ I said mildly. ‘All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—’
He swayed towards me. ‘You’re talking about fucking killing her.’
Jadwiga pushed him back. ‘He’s talking about saving her, Orr.’
‘And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up? Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?’
I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. ‘Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.’
‘We can’t do it anyway, Mick.’ Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again. ‘If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.’
You could kill this sleeve, anyway, I didn’t say. Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—
I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.
Maybe Orr was right.
‘One thing’s sure,’ said Jadwiga sombrely. ‘We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.’
More silence, while the idea settled in.
‘Can she be moved?’ I asked.
Kiyoka made a face. ‘She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.’
‘Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,’ muttered Lazlo. ‘It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route. I know it’s a risk.’
A slow nod from Jadwiga. ‘But probably worth it.’
‘Going to be the whole night,’ said Lazlo. ‘You got any meth?’
‘Is Mitzi Harlan straight?’
She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to businesslike clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.
‘You don’t fucking touch her,’ he warned me.
From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old Alain Marriott experia flics like Polar Quarry and The Deep Chase. It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.